Software

Software reviews

Program Review: Landing Page Monkey

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One of the most important parts of any sales funnel is your landing page.  In most cases this is your prospect’s first introduction to you and whatever it is you are promoting.  Having a good landing page could make all the difference in whether or not your new prospect becomes a customer.

Over the last few months I have tried a number of landing pager design services that offer page building platforms and can also host the pages for you.  I was looking for something easy enough for any newbie to get inside and create a killer landing page without costing an arm an a leg.

I settled on “Landing Page Monkey” which was advertised as a way to take away all of the work normally involved in creating great looking landing pages.

I like Landing Page Monkey because you don’t need to touch a single line of code to make your page. Simply log into your dashboard, click your way through the user-friendly form, and in just five minutes you can have a cutting-edge, high-converting and mobile-responsive landing page to build your mailing list or sell your products.

A created a few sample pages so you can get an idea of how easy it is to make a professional looking landing page.

Sample 1 – A blank template.

Sample 2 – A blank template with a YouTube video in the background.

Sample 3 – A finished landing page.

Here’s some of the key features offered by Landing Page Monkey:

• Delivers highly customizable pages. You can quickly fine-tune your landing page to get just the right look and feel to seamlessly integrate with your site. Landing Page Monkey lets you change layouts, font colors, font styles, background graphics and even background videos to give your landing page a cutting-edge, polished design that’s sure to impress.

• Make changes on the fly. You can tweak your landing page without disrupting sales or sign ups, touching the code, or uploading anything. Just log into your dashboard, make your changes, and hit save to instantly update your pages.

• Works with all major autoresponders.

• Works on your server or Landing Page Monkey will host your page for you. You can upload these pages to your own site, or save on bandwidth by letting Landing Page Monkey host the page for you at no extra charge.

• Tracks your campaigns. Landing Page Monkey tracks your impressions and mailing list sign ups so you can optimize your campaigns for maximum profits!

• Your pages will show up on all smart phones, tablets, laptops and other devices. Plus they’ve been rigorously tested to work across platforms, including Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Internet Explorer and other major browsers.

• Saves you time and money. In just minutes you’ll have a beautiful landing page that looks like it was created by a high-priced web designer.

I’m really glad I gave Landing Page Monkey a try.  Being able to add any YouTube video as the background is super cool. I also love the way I can animate the ad to make it really stand out.  Having my ad automatically optimized for mobile devices and different screen sizes is also a huge plus!  The only downsides are as I am a little techy I wouldn’t mind a little more flexibility with the design options.  Also if there is a way to make a splash page without including the autoresponder sign-up form I haven’t figured out how to do it yet.

For sure if you want a great landing page maker that is easy to use, makes professional looking pages, and includes free hosting Landing Page Monkey is a great product.

Click the banner link below to visit the Landing Page Monkey website.

Safelist Genie Review

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About a week ago I started seeing some ads for a new program that was just released called “Safelist Genie” which is supposed to help you manage all of your safelist accounts.

Having written a book on safelist marketing (“Safelist Marketing Tactics“) I thought Safelist Genie would be a good product to buy and review here on my blog.  Luckily, I didn’t need to buy anything because the program comes with a 14-day free trial which is more than enough time to see exactly what it can do.

Safelist Genie is a stand-alone software product that works with Windows 2000, XP, Vista, and Windows 7 (sorry, there’s no Mac version).  It was created by the same people who did TE Browser.

Before I continue I should probably point out that safelist marketing has been a daily part of my marketing routine for the past two years.  Having spent so much time doing it I have naturally developed my own style and method for handling the tedious task of reading credit emails and submitting my ads every day.  It’s not fun, but it works.

It was my hope that Safelist Genie would be a good enough for me to recommend to my readers who don’t already have a system of their own to hopefully make using safelists a little bit easier for them.

So I signed-up for Safelist Genie with high expectations.   I was even prepared to buy the “one time offer” but I was surprised to find that there was none.  Instead I continued with the free 14-day trial and installed the program on my computer.

I don’t know about you but I like to jump right into new programs and start pushing buttons.  I guess I like to learn from experience.  Unfortunately that just isn’t possible with Safelist Genie.

After staring blankly at each of the feature screens for a few minutes I finally came to the “Help/Guide” section which contains the user manual for Safelist Genie.  You must read the manual if you want any chance of figuring out how to setup and use this program.  And good luck getting through the manual without scratching your head in confusion more than once.

My first task was to setup my pop3 email so that the program could download my safelist emails.  I admit that I am one of the few people who still checks their emails with an offline email program.  Because of this I do have some experience with managing my pop3 email setting but I still had a hard time configuring this thing.

After several failures I finally guessed what “port” I was supposed to use by trying the one in the manual’s example.  With my pop3 settings in place I selected a few safelists to test.

The safelists page is basically a giant spreadsheet containing a list of all the supported safelists.  If you enter your username and password into the spreadsheet and click the “update” button the program will retrieve your safelist info… sorta.

As you can see in the image above the software was able to tell me the current mailing limit and even how many referrals I have but it failed to tell me how many credits I have left.  Don’t ask me what “daily use” and “credits level” are because it failed to fill anything in there too.

Checking my email for the selected safelists wasn’t too difficult once I got my email settings correct (there is no error message if they are wrong, it just does nothing).  However I also found myself confused just trying to read the emails.  Back to the manual!

As you can see in the image above (click it to make it bigger) the downloaded emails appear in the top frame.  To open an email you click it once and the email will appear in the bottom left corner of the screen.  To access the credit link click the email twice and the link will be opened in the bottom right corner of the screen.

To speed things up Safelist Genie has 6 different browser windows that you can use.  So you can double click an email to open the credit link, switch to a new reader, and open another credit link.  This saves you time because instead of waiting for the safelist timer to count down you can open up 6 credit links at once.

While this may be a huge time saver for earning credits it certainly doesn’t help the people who are using safelists to get their ads seen.  The actual email becomes virtually meaningless as it is confined to the small bottom left corner of the screen.  While the size of the window can be adjusted to show more of the email it isn’t necessary if all you are after is the credit link.

Even if you wanted to read the emails it’s almost impossible.  It seems that Safelist Genie will only displays emails in html format.  If the email was sent as a regular text email it is virtually unreadable here.

The credit url window isn’t much better.  While it can be resized to make the page more readable I suspect most people will only be seeing the very top of the pages being promoted.

It’s not all bad though.

The safelist submission tool is actually pretty cool.  Once you setup your ads you can simply select the safelist you want to submit to from a pull-down menu and push “Go”.  The submission form immediately appears with your ad already filled in.  What’s cool is that it also fills in the maximum credits to use and even sets the “Save This Message?” button to “No” (I hate always having to change that).  All you need to do is click the “submit”  button and move on to the next safelist.

It usually takes me about 15-20 minutes to submit to my 25+ safelists every day.  I’m guessing once I have this all setup Safelist Genie can probably do the job for me in about 5-10 minutes.

I am interested in hearing what safelist owners think of this submission method though.  Automatically loading the safelist submission form does save time but it also means less revenue for the safelist owners as fewer people will be logging into the site normally and bypassing any offers.

Overall thoughts?

Pretty disappointing.  While I can see the value of some of the features this program is just way too complicated for me to recommend for the casual user.  The interface is neither intuitive or user-friendly.  However, if you have the patience to figure out how everything works I can see how Safelist Genie can be a huge time saver.  I just hope giving members the ability to read emails in tiny windows doesn’t kill the effectiveness of safelist advertising in the future.


Click Here to Download Safelist Genie

How To Add Audio To A Website

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A few weeks ago I was hanging out at the SWAT Traffic conference room and we were discussing putting audio onto webpages.  Seems sign-ups go through the roof when you add audio to a webpage especially in traffic exchanges.  On high traffic websites where there is a lot of competition for people’s attention having audio on a webpage can be just the thing you need to give you an advantage over your competition.

I spent this past weekend recording audio and adding it to my pages.

But first I needed some software that will play the audio when people visit my page.  I looked at quite a few expensive programs to add audio to my website but I didn’t need anything fancy.  I settled on Impact Web Audio.

Impact Web Audio is extreamly simple to use.  No complicated interface to figure out.  Simply record or import your audio files, pick out your graphic “play” button, and generate the code.  Then it’s just a matter of uploading a few files and your updated webpage to your webhost.

Want some professional sounding background music for your webpage?  I actually spent quite awhile looking for royalty free music to use on my webpage.  Apparently royalty “free” music isn’t quite as free as it sounds.  No problem!  Impact Web Audio actually comes with a dozen audio clips that you can use in your recording.  It’s very simple to use.

If you are looking for an easy and inexpensive way to add audio to a website check out Impact Web Audio.


How to Choose a Niche Market

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When it comes to Internet marketing it seems that choosing a good niche market is where most people make their biggest mistake. People usually do two things when they pick a niche… they either choose a market that seems to be really hot, or they pick something where they have a lot of expertise.

If you don’t do it correctly, there are problems with both of these methods.

Let’s take the first example. When you choose a market that looks like it is doing well you are going to be hard pressed to be a new comer and have any sort of control over what is going on.

If it is a really popular niche and there is a lot of money changing hands then there is most likely going to be some serious competition. If you don’t know what you are doing it won’t take long for your competition to bury you because they are going to have a lot more experience than you and will probably have a bigger budget to spend on advertising.

The second method that people use to choose their niche market is to choose a topic they already know a lot about. This can either really help you or it can be your worst nightmare.

What usually happens is that somebody will create a product based on something that they know, and in their eyes, it looks like it should do great. They start buying advertising and marketing it all over the place but they soon find out that their product either doesn’t have a market or the market doesn’t have very much potential for making money.

Before jumping into a niche market there are a few things to consider:

1. How much competition will there be and how big are your competitors.
2. Whether there is a market for your product.
3. Would that market be willing to spend money on your product.
4. Will you enjoy what you are doing if you start a business in this market?

All these factors are very important. I have personally have found that when you really have a passion for what you are doing, then you can do it better. You consider it fun because you enjoy doing it.

It is important that you do not jump into the hottest market just because you think it can make a lot of money. Learn to do something you really enjoy and you WILL make money.

Discover how to make an obscene amount of money selling niche products on the Internet.

Niche Profit Formula
Click Here to get Read Niche Profit Formula

Twittering and Tweeting

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Ok, I am just about happy with where my blog is now.

I have been hearing about “Twitter” for awhile now and when I heard about this cool plug-in called “Tweet My Blog” I knew I had to try it… but do I really want to put myself on Twitter?

Too late. It’s done!

If you want to “follow me” and get notified every time I scratch my butt check out My Twitter Profile.

Now that my Twitter account is all setup the first thing I did was to get a copy of “Tweet My Blog“. This is a really cool plug-in that links to the Twitter network that sends an update every time you post a new blog. This will be my first time trying it so it’s pretty exciting to say the least.

If you have a blog of your own and you use Twitter check out Tweet My Blog.