Archive for All
The Good and Bad About Working from Home
Posted 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
Posted 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
Posted 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
Posted 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!
Get a Website Installed for Free
Posted by: | CommentsBefore you pay thousands of dollars to hire someone to design a new website for you please consider this: you can inexpensively set up your own website with one of the beautiful themes available these days. Plus you can make your own changes anytime you want because with Wordpress it’s easy to edit your pages online with no technical skills whatsoever. Because most of us aren’t technically savvy I’m making a limited time offer to get your website site installed for free. All you need to do is:
- Get a domain name (or use an existing one)
- Sign up or a web hosting plan via HostGator or GoDaddy
I just need the login info to either HostGator or GoDaddy. Go to the contact page and send me:
-the transaction id for your purchase of hostgator web hosting plan
-the transaction id for your purchase of Wishlist Member Plugin
-the username and password to login into your hostgator account (to install wordpress and upload plugin)
-the username password to login into your domain account (to point domain at your webhost servers)
Want to use a different web host or domain registrar? Send me a note and we’ll talk!
Already have a web hosting plan and/or domain name? I can install Wordpress, and any theme you choose for $100. After that you’ll just need to add your content via the browser which is easy!
Just go to the contact page and send me the details!
