One idea (thanks to Susanne Myers of Daily Affiliate Tasks) is to re-use the content in our autoresponders. You can record them as audios or create PDF reports with them. The not so easy part especially if you’ve been in the business for a while is, to get all that content out of your autoresponder account. Some of our lists have been in existence for years and we have many lists. Big headache.

We use Aweber. One great feature they have is the ability to export all your autoresonpder and broadcast messages too. The not so great part – you have to re-download regularly and there is no way to only download in increments. So you get the entire archive every time. If you are a prolific emailer, you’ll find your archive set getting outdated pretty quickly. Good thing there is another option and oh such a wonderfully simple one it is. Ready?

Just subscribe your Evernote account to your lists.

Inside each Evernote account, you can create your own private email address. Simply log in. Click on your account settings.

In your Account settings tab, towards the bottom, you should see a spot that says Email notes to and a unique email address. Copy that. (Hint – save this to your address book too so you can quickly save email messages into Evernote anytime later).

Once you have that email address, you can either subscribe yourself via your web form

Or, you can add yourself to your list via your autoresponder control panel

From now on, you will receive your own autoresponder message as well as all your broadcasts in Evernote. You can access this information anytime, on any device with an Internet connection. Plus, you get to leverage its fantastic search and tagging capabilities.

There’s only one small gripe I have. Emails to Evernote by default are sent to your Evernote inbox. Normally, you can add special commands to your email subject line so it will automatically get moved and tagged. With this method, I will have to manually tag and move them to an appropriate notebook.

Perhaps, you could subscribe yourself using a regular address, create a filter to automatically alter the subject line and forward to Evernote… Something to explore but for right now, this setup works for me.

It’s much better than emailing the messages to myself or creating a separate email account because:

1. We sure don’t need yet another email inbox. Sure, it’s not an address you check regularly but it’s there and eventually fills with spam.
2. We have a habit of deleting emails. I think we’re kinda conditioned to want to get rid of all ‘new’ emails and do something with them.

Now… to get to work re-purposing the content from those email messages.

Photo credit: Warm 'n Fuzzy via Flickr

You know I believe in automation. Here’s another thing about automation I believe in.

Small increments matter.

That is why I use tools like RoboForm, auto typing software and tons of filters in Google Apps (Gmail). Now, I have another tool to add to my arsenal. ifttt.

No, it’s not a typo. ifttt stands for “If This, Then That”. This little bit of logic is the basis of many software including plugins, themes, content management systems, your operating system and if you look clearly – in our everyday lives.

How many times have you said things like, “If it rains then I’ll go later” or “If it is within our budget then we’ll do it”. Well, ifttt works on the same principle except it ties together many of the popular tools you find on the Internet. Here are some ways to use it.

Usage #1

Let’s say you get alerts when someone mentions your name and you normally tweet or post to Facebook to promote these kind people’s content as a thank you for mentioning you. Using IFFT, you can automate it several ways. You can tell ifttt to automatically tweet or post the alert to Facebook. Or you can forward the email to ifttt (once you checked it out) and ifttt will automatically post and tweet it. The 2nd option while not fully automatic still shaves off a couple of steps.

Usage #2

You change your social network profile pictures often and you’re tired of having to log in to different networks. You can let ifttt do the work for you. ifttt can monitor your Facebook profile for changes and change it in Twitter when there is an update.

Usage #3

You star articles in Google Reader regularly these are things you’d like to keep. But what you’d really like to do, is save them to Evernote. ifttt can take your starred articles and dump them in Evernote. Brilliant!

Usage #4

Monitoring Craigslist for something? ifttt can notify you when it finds new posts matching your search criteria.

Usage #5

You marked your webinar date in Google Calendar so you won’t forget it. You’d naturally like to share your call details with social networks as well. ifttt can help do it for you.

I think you get the idea how this works now. I mentioned a lot of social media stuff that’s because I often find updating social networks tedious and I truly subscribe to the thinking of making an action pull double duty (or more) but this can be really helpful in your daily life too like reminding that forgetful spouse or child about events. ifttt can call, text or email so they get reminders in the mode best to reach them.

You can even string several tasks together to start a chain of automation. Best of all, ifttt makes it super easy to set up. Try it. It’s 100% free.

Photo courtesy of duosecurity

My initial thought is, how secure can this be? After thinking through it a little, 2-step verification is perhaps as good as it gets for now. Why? Because a hacker sitting somewhere half way around the world is not likely to have my cell phone. So when they try to log in to my account, they are immediately presented with the code request, which is sent almost immediately to my cell. Without that, they cannot enter and I know at once someone is trying to log in to my account.

Is it fool proof? Of course not. If there is a concerted effort like someone breaks into my office, steals all my logins and my cell phone. Yeah sure they can get into my email. Can people half way around the world hack my cell phone? I’m not so naive to say no but at this time, it is unlikely. What I’m trying to say is, this is a pretty good way to deter hackers who are banking on our lack of security measure or ignorance.

Since enabling 2-step authentication, it has sometimes been a pain but worth it. I sometimes wished it was available for other things as well like… for our web sites and then I came across the plugin Duo WordPress, from Duo Security It looks really interesting and am installing it on one site to try it out for now.

The basic service is free for 10 users and you get up to 1000 calls or phone messages. From what I understand, if you run out of credits you can purchase a block of 1000 for $10 or you can upgrade to their paid plan for only $3 per user, per month it truly isn’t a bad price for extra security.

There’s another alternative in the WordPress repository that makes use of Google Authenticator. I believe that is free. All worth checking out before it is too late.

Problem is, sometimes you want more like the text formatted with headings headings, bullets and stuff like that to mimic real content. Of course you can do that either through regular HTML or inside your CMS WYSIWYG editor but that takes time. I love finding ways to shave off time on stuff we have to do regularly so I’m quite happy to find these two dummy text generators. They each have their own strengths and will come handy depending on the task.

Loripsum.net

Fillerati

What Makes WP Squeeze Pro Different?

Sometimes, I need to get opt-in pages setup lickety split so I can move on to other things. I don’t want to think about copywriting, I don’t want to be logging into Aweber to grab form codes, I don’t want to mess with design options like adding images, page widths, font types or add a gazillion testimonials.

Don’t get me wrong. Those can be important in the long run. Good copy obviously helps with conversions and so does the right design. However, there are times you need to throw something up fast and tweak later. This is where WP Squeeze Pro shines. It lets me get it all set up super fast with very little tweaking. My copy may not be perfect but having it up and getting low conversions is better than zero opt-ins.

The other thing to love about this plugin is built in confirmation pages. One thing I absolutely loathe about creating opt-in pages, is the confirmation page. Sure you can use your email service provider’s default confirmation pages but I want the entire experience branded to me not jumping from one site/design to another. Normally, I’d have to create all these pages ahead but with WP Squeeze Pro, I don’t need to… unless I have more time and wanted to do so. This alone is a big time saver because one of my goals is to put up more opt-in pages. Anything that reduces the pain of the process works for me.

Nice, templates. According to the developer these opt-in templates have been hand picked because they have consistently proven to perform. I can’t say anything about that one way or another but I do like the template designs. Many opt-in plugins claim to give you design choices but they are limited choices. The layout of the pages remain the same. These templates are entirely different in layout, design, and quite nicely done. Also, if you are the techie type, you can design your own templates and add them to the collection. This part is sweet because you can’t do that with some plugins since the templates are deeply embedded in the code.

How WP Squeeze Pro Works

Once installed, you’ll get an option at the bottom of the Page editing screen to use WP Squeeze Pro.

Check that and up pops this form, giving me a variety of templates to choose from. You’re only seeing two in this screen shot there are some really nice looking ones in there.

Once you make a choice on the template to use, you’re given several options. The options will vary slightly depending on the template chosen. In this example, you’d need to enter a headline, an image is any, some copy and optionally additionally copy below the opt-in box.

If desired, you can also add footer text and change the confirmation URL. If you enter a confirmation URL, WP Squeeze Pro will use that. Otherwise, it’ll direct people to the built in confirmation URL. Love this.

Next, select the autoresponder service you use.

Finally, enter the name of your list. Depending which you choose you may have to enter more information for example, if you use Get Response, you’d have to add the API key in addition to the list name.

Click the Insert button and all that information is added to your page like this. You can use the Visual editor to further edit and format the text if you you want.

The result is this. You can demo it live at MembershipSiteHowTo.com

Any Cons?

WP Squeeze Pro uses short codes to achieve all this. As a developer myself, I wonder how scale-able short codes are. Obviously it has worked well so far. It’s just not my natural choice because short codes aren’t really made for content but then again, opt-in content is not that long so maybe it’s just my own doubts and not a real down side. If you have no idea what I’m talking about ignore this it works great

Strange licensing. Ok, maybe not all that strange. You get to use the plugin on 20 sites with your regular purchase. 20 sites really isn’t a lot especially when you throw in client work which I guess is good in a way because you’d want to convince your clients to purchase their own copy and you can pocket a commission. You can buy packs to add more sites. Overall I just don’t like this type of licensing structure.

It is page centric – you cannot use it on posts. At least not in my tests. Not a huge problem really.

Suspends all pages upon plugin installation. When you first install the plugin, you need to go and enter the license key. If you don’t, all your pages become un-usable with a one line error message to the public saying the page cannot be viewed because the license key is not entered or some language like that. I did not appreciate that at all. This happened on all of my pages whether WP Squeeze Pro was used or not. It’s not a deal breaker but you have to be quick on a live, well trafficked site. Make sure you have the key handy before you activate the plugin and enter the key immediately upon activation so you minimize the number of people who might see that error. I truly hope this can be fixed or done in a more elegant way.

*Updated to add*

Note these squeeze pages will not pass the Google landing page test. What I mean is, if you are advertising the squeeze pages made with WP Squeeze Pro, they will not approve your ad. I’m not PPC expert but have been told it is because there is no content on the page. If you want a combination of content and squeeze page, try MarketerCMS. Of course, none of these plugins are required to do any sort of marketing but they do make things easier.

Want To Watch A Video Demo?

Click here to view the embedded video.

Bottom Line

WP Squeeze Pro is perfect for the newbie. It gives you the bare basic variables to create a great looking opt-in without tweaking design. If you are a bit more advanced, this works too because you can add your own templates and I love the speed and ease of it all. At the end of the day, I give it a thumbs up.

Learn more about WP Squeeze Pro here.

Then… I found MOO! I’d spend hours just admiring those beautiful cards. Take a look at these. Aren’t they gorgeous?

Question is, can I the geek and just about anyone who is design challenged make such lovely creations? You see, one of my problems with business cards is, I do so many things within technology. How can I pack all that in a card? Seriously, it hurts when I have to tell people “I make websites” because what I do is way, way beyond that. I decided to try. There’s something about MOO that gives birth to inspiration.

The grand idea – use word clouds. I headed over to Tagxedo. You can use Wordle too but I like Tagxedo better because you can make shapes out of your words. Entered a bunch of words that describe what I do. I created 5 different clouds in different shapes. Why 5? Because MOO oh! MOO! I’m so in love with it – they can print different cards in one order. If you order 100 cards, you can make every card unique or you can split it all up like I did and have 20 cards in 5 designs. Gotta love technology.

At the end of it all, here’s the result. I opted for the mini cards because I thought they were cute and would be a great conversation starter – and boy were they ever! The choices too made great conversation since sometimes people chose what they wanted

Here’s another reason to love MOO the quality is absolutely fab. The card stock is heavy and rigid. I’m getting ready to order another batch this time I want to try no graphics only text with tips on them e.g. “Make your site mobile friendly. Try MobiPages” or something like that haven’t quite thought them all out yet.

If you need business cards, I highly recommend MOO. They may be a little higher than say Vistaprint or other online printers but it really isn’t that much more if you consider the design flexibility and the results will wow you. You’ll get a 10% discount too if you use this link. Try it.

The Tools

One of them – believe it or not – is an app I bought for my daughter. It’s called Drawing Pad. She absolutely adores it and despite my challenge with drawing and graphics I love doodling on it too.

The other is AirSketch. This one is a work tool. AirSketch is essentially a whiteboard type application but it has a neat feature that allows you to broadcast your whiteboard locally so anyone in your office can just pull up a web browser, type in the IP address for the app and voila! Everything you draw or write shows up on their browser. It is so very cool.

The How

How can these two apps replace PowerPoint? Remember, I said I was not working on the computer but I still wanted something that look like slides.

Step One

Using Drawing Pad, I loaded a fun background and used a brush to write my slide heading. If there was text I could add them otherwise I just left the space blank so I can use AirSketch to illustrate my points later. I created a bunch of blank slides with headers and saved them all to Photos.

Step Two

Next in AirSketch, I loaded the photos as the background and saved them in the correct order of my presentation.

Step Three

When it came time for class, I used the share desktop feature in my conference room, opened the browser and loaded AirSketch into it. Now, I am ready to display each slide and free to annotate, draw, illustrate to my heart’s content. Loved it!

Even though my conference room has the ability to do white board, I find it a million times easier to draw on an iPad using a Stylus than trying to draw with a mouse. It’s also more natural, like teaching in a real classroom except you’re writing on the iPad instead of the chalk board.

More Reasons To Love It

You can get pretty creative, fun and even polished and professional if you want. Drawing Pad app is not required. I used it because I wanted to create slides while away from the computer. The key is AirSketch and the ability to share your desktop in your conference room. If you are teaching in a real life classroom you will need to hook your computer up to a projector.

There are other neat features in AirSketch too like import PDF’s so you can essentially load your slides into the app and draw/annotate on it as you present. You can change the colors of your pen, there are 5 pen types to choose from and you can undo – great feature. I messed up in my annotation during class once and just hit undo.

Watch A Demo

My drawing skills aren’t the best so the ‘slide’ may not be up to par for some of you but you can certainly load up professionally created graphics as your background.

What It Costs

AirSketch cost me $9.99. There is a free one but with very limited options and Drawing Pad was $1.99 definitely so easy on the wallet and worth every single penny. What more, the freedom to step away from the computer is hugely liberating. Highly recommended if you teach a lot of webinars or love doing recorded videos.

It’s very flexible. You can change the colors, size, add text all on the fly. Below are some placeholder images generated. Check out, bookmark and use Placehold.it.

“Deep Linking is making a hyperlink that points to a specific page or image on a web site instead of the home page”

A real live example is in the paragraph above. I just deep linked to Wikipedia so you will land on the exact page explaining this term. You may not even think twice about it when you’re on blogs and other people’s site. You may even be actively doing it because it helps make your content rich and relevant.

Deep linking is also good to establish usability. The last thing you want to do when creating content is to frustrate readers and make them search for the page or item you’re referring to. People expect logical continuity when they click on a link.

As an affiliate, I always love it when marketers allow me to use deep links to their content and still cookie my referral. It makes me want to talk about that program, their content and link to their stuff everywhere in all types of content I create – videos, blog posts, reports, tools, landing pages etc.

In short – deep linking is good for you and your affiliate.

Many shopping cart and affiliate systems have this feature. Off the top of my head, 1ShoppingCart, Digital Access Pass, Delavo they all offer this. In this post, I’d like to focus just on aMember.

Traditionally this is not a feature that it supports. The good news is, this is not very difficult to do if you have a geek working with you. He (or she) can whip up a quick script to do all that.

Another way is to use our RSSBrander plugin because it comes bundled with this very script. Big hint – the plugin also a lot cheaper than paying a developer to write custom code for you

Once you have installed the script (included in RSSBrander), you can now tell affiliates you now support deep linking. Here is an example how they would craft their affiliate coded deep links.

Assuming your jump script is installed here:
http://yourmembersite.com/jump.php

The page affiliate wants people to land on:
http://yourblog.com/123/some-cool-post/

Affiliate’s ID: 987

The link affiliates should use:
http://yourmembersite.com/jump.php?r=987&u=yourblog.com/123/some-cool-post/

So in reality, the affiliate needs to save this portion:

http://yourmembersite.com/jump.php?r=987&u=

Then append the URL of the page they want people to go at the end. Pretty neat side perk of the plugin.

Learn what else the RSSBrander can do for you.

What attracted me to it is

• The headline, guarantee, opening text, PS suggestions. You won’t believe how much I struggle with these
• It can work with my existing theme (or most themes)

Pre-Written Copy Suggestions

The moment I got my hands on it, I ran a quick test and managed to cobble up a landing page in 15 minutes. Obviously, I’d need a lot more time when writing a real opt-in or sales page. However, I can already see how much it will speed up this process for me. You need to understand that for me, writing a sales page even a simple landing page is like asking me to jump off a cliff. The result – big time procrastination and that’s never good.

With copy suggestions, the plugin helped me start and re-start my thought process as I work through the different sections a landing page should address. It is like a little nudge to keep me going. That is just as important as getting started – to keep going until the task is done.

Works With Any Theme – Really?

Next thing I did was test the landing page on several themes. I ran it on a Builder child theme and a Genesis child theme since these are almost the only themes I use anymore.

Overall, the landing page performed consistently. The features and benefit bullets, testimonials box, guarantee box, order form, order button and credit card icons all worked nicely on every theme. The page width adjustments also worked well. So did the font headings.

Here are some screen shots of the same landing page on three different themes without doing any kind of style sheet editing at all.

Visual Elements

On my first use, I completely missed visual short codes that’s built right into the text editor. Using it, you can simply select a block of text and tell it to style the text as an attractive highlighted box or button. Really love this feature.

What Could Be Better

Like everything else, there are a few things I’ve noticed. Perhaps because I build so many WordPress sites so it might be I’m extra critical.

• Page width – you can edit the page width of your landing page which is awesome but the most narrow you can specify is 800px. A little too wide for my tastes. I would like to see options down to 650px or even custom defined.
• The video player is set to autoplay by default. It would be better if the user can define this.

What It Does Best

I’ve only ever worked with three other sales letter themes/plugins. Optimize Press, Premise and MarketerCMS. Even so, the encounters have been brief and in the capacity of a developer, not writing copy – with the exception of MarketerCMS. I’m certain, sitting in the copywriters seat would influence my outlook on all three greatly.

When it comes to features like landing page layouts, opt-in form integration, funnels, SEO, membership site integration and pretty graphics – Optimize Press, Premise and perhaps even MarketerCMS will win. They are more fully featured.

And that brings me to the point, WP Sales Letter is somewhat in a sub-class of its own. As it is at time of writing, it does one job really well – get you writing your sales copy as well as thinking in a structured, step-by-step method to make sure you’ve covered your bases.

This makes the plugin ideal for those who are perhaps a little – or a lot – intimidated with the idea of writing copy. After all, it doesn’t matter how pretty a sales page looks if it is not finished, it sells nothing.

If you are a seasoned and very experienced copywriter, this could still work very well for you by making the process go faster.

The other great thing going for it is the fact you can keep your existing theme and you won’t have to set up a brand new WordPress site just so you can use a sales letter theme – that doesn’t make sense at all to me.

The Bottom Line

The plugin is perfect for me. I’m a developer not a copywriter. It helps me keep my thoughts and ideas focused. If there are a few things that don’t play well with the theme, the developer side of me can fix it up quick and easy.

If you’d like to see a real life example of a sales letter created using WP Sales Letter, check out our RSSBrander plugin page. The only thing I tweaked was adding bullets which I needed to do anyway because the theme doesn’t support bullets.

WP Sales Letter is also very affordable. Certainly something to get when working on an existing site where a theme change is not possible or desired. Keep in mind, this is the first release. As with any software I’m sure improvements are worked out as we go so I consider this a worthwhile addition to your toolbox.