The Good and Bad About Working from Home
By · CommentsThe funniest comic strip ever about the good and bad about working from home compared to commuting to the office. Made me laugh!
Selling Digital Downloads
By · CommentsI have used 3rd party shopping carts such as 1shoppingcart in the past and they’ve been great to get you up and running really quickly. They handle all the technical details without you having to install anything and many sites like 1shoppingcart handle digital downloads.
Others prefer to use websites that allow you to sell downloads but you have to send them to their site, or possible add a widget to your site. They usually take a cut of each transaction. This is also an option but keep it mind many of these sites go out of business and you end up losing all your transactions (and often email addresses of those who bought). Some sites are even file specific – like music sites allowing you to sell mp3s (but not zip files, videos, PDFs, etc).
One of the concerns with digital downloads is that somebody can pass the URL around to others. So many people try to provide a unique and temporary URL to the buyer to avoid this problem. While this is a good idea, there’s nothing stopping from people from sharing the actual digital file!
Over time and with the continuing advancements in open source software, I’ve opted to set up my own shopping cart. You can also avoid many ongoing monthly fees this way. This is pretty easy thanks to Wordpress and the e-shop plugin for wordpress. Free plugins are now installable right from the Wordpress admin panel so you don’t even have to download anything! If you like the plugin you should consider donating to the creator.
After I set up the shopping cart settings (paypal email address, ‘from’ email, etc) I was looking around to find out where I set up my products. It turns out that is done on a new Wordpress page. So upload your file (that will be purchased) first, so that it is available on your new Wordpress page (there’s a Product Entry section under the blank page area). A dropdown will be available showing all your downloadable files. If you want to give customers a few files at once, I suggest putting them in a zip file.
Here’s a tutorial on setting it up. Note some possible issues with conflicting plugins. I offer consulting services so feel free to contact me if you need help!
I offer consulting services so feel free to contact me if you need help!
Better Tracking of Your Affiliate Sales Efforts
By · CommentsI’ve been selling affiliate products for a few years now as well as my own products. If you sell affiliate products as well, you know that you probably should be testing and tracking more than you do. If you get a sale do you know which of your links got the sale and on what specific page?
We know we should create a specific link for every page, video, social network but we often don’t do it. So we don’t know which links are producing better results so we can do more of that. I recently reached out to some of the affiliate managers and they were quite helpful.
Link Tracking
With the ShareASale affiliate network you can add a special parameter to your link namely afftrack=xxx. So instead of using the same link all over the place you might put afftrack=youtube for a link in your youtube video (or more specifically the exact video if you have more than one). Or for a blog post afftrack=blogTop10TwitterTools.
Deep Linking
Another thing many of us don’t do is link to a specific page on the product website. Many of us send people to the order now page or the home page, making it difficult for people to find the product at times or coming off as too salesy. Why not send them to a content rich page? Many times we don’t have this link or we waste time looking for a specific link that’s been created for us. With the ShareASale affiliate network you can pick any page you want at the vendor site (a blog post for example) then create your own custom link. That way you can send people to those pages from your social networks and not come across as spammy. The way this works is through cookies being stored on the users machine, even though they don’t go right to the order page, the cookie tracks the sites domain so you are credited for the eventual sale.
The amazing thing is that you could even link to a site totally separate from the product website, create your own custom link and as long as the person finds the product page (through that separate website link) you will be credited for the sale! So you could create a custom link to a youtube video if the video description has a link to the product page (so that the user can hopefully click it and buy). Of course this is a more indirect method. You would want to test both sending them direct to buy page (so no distractions) or to less sales-oriented pages.
Adding the Facebook Like Button to your Wordpress Blog
By · Comments
photo credit: rafeejewell
If you have a blog, you should make sure it is easily shareable. As a person who likes to share content on Twitter and other social networks, it’s amazing how many blogs don’t have this. So it requires me to cut and paste link as well as the title and then tweet it. Make it easy for your readers to share!
If you have Wordpress this is pretty easy as there is a Facebook social plugin (and others). Facebook explains the Like button on their website. More and more actions around the web will be tied into social networking, what your friends like, are doing and even has e-commerce implications as 3rd party websites will know what you ‘like’. A very powerful trend that you need to be on top of.
I offer consulting services so feel free to contact me if you need help!
Cool Free Viral Marketing Tool
By · CommentsIf you’re an entpreneur, author or other type of expert instead of giving away all your content for free why not make one or more files (PDF, video, audio, etc) available for free if someone tweets about it? There’s a cool free tool called Tweet for Track by our good friends at cashmusic.org. This can give you a viral marketing effect as others see the tweet and then they tweet for the track, and so on. And if you’re not on Twitter, you need to be! Here’s a video tutorial I did (click on the button at the bottom right of the player to view full screen). Note you can uncheck instead of checking ‘Use Twitter for Login’ as mentioned in the video.
Click bottom right button on player for full screen!
In order to make this work you’ll need to download some php code. You can get it at CashMusic. They also have a blog post about setting up Tweet for Track but it’s mostly about setting up the Twitter access. The php code is a series of files with a .php extension as well as two directories. You’ll need to put this code on your server, I suggest in a folder called something like tft so the URL would be http://mysite.com/tft. I use CoreFTP to move the files there.
In order for your website to send a tweet on behalf of the fan, you need to gain access to the Twitter APIs (application programming interface) which are a series of functions that you will need to invoke. Go to the blog post above to find out more. To get this going go to Twitter apps. You’ll need to be logged in to your Twitter account (get one if you don’t have one). For application name it has to be unique so put some like Tweet for Track Band Name, where Band Name is your band name. If you put the code in a directory called tft (my suggestion), the callback URL would be http://mysite.com/tft/callback.php. For application website put http://mysite.com/tft and website http://mysite.com
Default access type = Read and Write, and Use Twitter for Login is No (Note you don’t have to select Yes for ‘Use Twitter for Login’ as mentioned in the video), application type is Browser. Once you submit this you will get a Twitter secret and key. You put these and a few other things in the config.php file which is part of the download. The config.php file has some helpful documentation (see below). Paste the secret and key into the file, add your twitter username without the @ symbol, add your Twitter ID (go to your twitter page and click on the RSS feed link at bottom right and you’ll see your_id.rss. Copy that id (the number before .RSS) into the file. Edit the OAUTH callback field to be http://mysite.com/tft/callback.php (same as what you put in the Twitter form).
The default tweet and required content are important also. The default tweet is what you want the fan to tweet, so a link to your Tweet for Track page along with the name of the song and your twitter name is a good start. Think about what you want others to see to encourage them to download it too! The required content could be your exact default tweet or a subset of the tweet, such as at least the link to your page. You can leave this blank if you don’t want to force the user to tweet anything specific.
You also need to set the download URL to your file and the track name.
/** // add all your twitter credentials // set to true to make a user auto-follow you, false to display checkbox // set generic error message — include an email for help // define the default tweet as it should show up in the initial form // set secure download to true (for S3 security) or false for straight http download // set your download title // add a string to randomize the session variable names. or don't. whatever.
* @file
* A single location to store configuration.
*/
// get your twitter API keys here: http://twitter.com/apps
define('TWITTER_KEY', 'xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx');
define('TWITTER_SECRET', 'xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx');
define('TWITTER_USERNAME', 'cashmusic'); // without the @
define('TWITTER_ID', 15013686); // check the RSS feed on your twitter page to find your twitter id #
define('OAUTH_CALLBACK', 'http://yoursite.com/callback.php');
define('AUTO_FOLLOW', false);
define('ERROR_MESSAGE', 'Something\'s gone wrong.');
define('DEFAULT_TWEET', 'Downloading free code for a tweet-for-track app from @cashmusic: http://tweet.cashmusic.org/');
// set required content, or use an empty string for no requirements
define('REQUIRED_CONTENT', 'http://tweet.cashmusic.org/');
define('SECURE_DOWNLOAD', false);
// set amazon credentials if you are using a secure download
define('AMAZONS3_KEY', 'xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx');
define('AMAZONS3_SECRET', 'xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx');
define('AMAZONS3_BUCKET', 'bucketname');
define('DOWNLOAD_TITLE', 'downloadTitle');
// URL or amazon URI (if amazon, do not include bucket)
define('DOWNLOAD_URI', 'downloadURL');
define('RANDOMIZE_SESSION', '123456');
?>
This will essentially get you up and running! Of course I ran into a few glitches along with way. One is making sure you are running version PHP5 (not 4). I had to upgrade this on my GoDaddy web host by going into the admin panel. I also had a problem with some of the core PHP libraries which are part of your web host, the php.ini file wasn’t pointing at the right library. My first point of contact when I had issues was CashMusic (info@cashmusic.org). Then I emailed the support desk of my web host.
Another problem I got was something like ‘can’t modify header, already created’. The most common reason for this is a space before or after the opening/closing php tags (
There are some other things you probably want to modify such as the cashmusic logo. The easy way to do this is delete the bg.gif image in the assets folder. If you see anything else you don’t want you just have to edit the php file that contains it, such as the content_download.php that contains the text on the download page.
Good luck!
Your Customers Want This
By · CommentsLet’s face it, business has changed.
This video explains how two companies are
adjusting to what their customers want:
http://bit.ly/WLInsider
Is your business doing the same?
Watch the video to find out.
Enjoy!
Will
P.S Don’t disregard this “trend”. As the
video explains, it’s responsible for one
customer spending over $80,000 during the
last 5 years with one of the companies
featured in this video:
http://bit.ly/WLInsider
—–
NOTE: I am a compensated affiliate for
WishList Products.
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