So on to a lovely little weekend-killer topic… do you use a project management system?

I am a bit of a systems and apps junkie. I love trying and failing to organize my life, for the thirty-fifth time But really, having a system helps. Whatever you are comfy with – spreadsheets, wordpress, your own filesystem – but have some way of organizing your project information, timelines, and goals, so you can see if you can get a life in the near future

Basecamp has long been a popular solution for online project management for freelancers – solo and teams. I have never used it because when I was starting out it was prohibitively priced (and I wasn’t willing to spend on recurring costs till I had a comfortable income from my freelancing efforts), and by now, I’ve painfully pieced together my own system using google apps and wordpress and this-and-that. Hey – it works out, largely!

But – missing a slick and under-one-roof interface, I have always been tempted by the idea of using activecollab, which is a lot like basecamp, except you can get it for a one time fee and use it for ever. The price point is just shy of $300 for the cheapest version. Sighs!

So when I stumbled on this – totally by accident – on the WF yesterday, yes, I lost a good weekend evening just to exploring the live demo! To be honest, I haven’t bought this YET – but I plan to pull the trigger soon. I just want to spend some more time seeing how this fits into my workflow – as should you. And if you don’t have an organized workflow – hey, you need this kind of goodness already

The Splash All Demo

If you want to check out the demo, the password is already in, just use any one of the following usernames…

• admin@splashall.com
• client1@splashall.com
• corpmanager1@splashall.com

(There are a number of other options, too.)

Impressed with the interface, and my curiosity completely fueled, I digger deeper to verify the street fred of the makers, and I found that:

• the project has been 21 months in development, and the code is very mature,
• Willie Crawford is an investor in this venture,
• this integrates with Google, Zoho, Twilio, Freshbooks and even Basecamp,

Woohoo!

If you are looking to build a team, or even happen to be working solo, you are going to love this program. It’s designed to scale to large teams – they have thought of everything – customer reps, JV partners, and of course, the all-important clients.

Their almost-high-end package is available for a 75% deep discount at the moment – it’s just a $32-ish monthly investment.

I’m excited enough to go back and play some more, meanwhile, you can check out the full details here. Not a pretty enough sales page for me, sadly, but sweet offering!

I hope you enjoy this, and you should find everything you need to know about outsourcing in the members’ area. Combine this tool with outsourcing and work on the lead gen, and you are on your way to at least a 20-hour week, if not four!

Let me know if you have any outsourcing questions, I should be able to help!

I rather enjoy watching promotional drives for Indian film releases. They are quite varied – elaborate, amusing, entertaining (oftentimes the joke’s on them, but hey, so long as I am having fun…) And every so often, someone does something that’s different from the usual parade, and it really does stick out – for better or for worse. When done cleverly, it really does work in keeping the buzz alive all the way to the box office release.

I’ve noticed that folks in real world marketing promotions work very hard at being different and unique. Sometimes maybe too hard, and even being different becomes trite.

In the online marketing copy space, though, I don’t see the majority trying to be different, because folks like being formulaic, for some reason – maybe because “it just works”, and why would you want to deviate from something “proven” anyway?

Formulas are great to follow for making your first dent, but at some point you want to transition from average to awesome… and that’s when you really need to get comfortable with risks, experimenting, gut-following, being yourself, showing personality, and doing things differently.

How many times have you seen people say the same old thing on their guarantee statements, disclaimers, and even headlines? It’s like everyone is borrowing from an universal swipe file, isn’t it? So the few times that you see things done differently, they make an impact – and that could well be your point of conversion, so to speak. A couple of examples off the top of my head – Brad has an unusual, almost offensive, refund policy, which says something to the effect of “I can’t help it if you are a nitwit” And then Dave Hughes, when selling a product for $5, said that it costs “less than anything that costs more than five bucks”, which was his unique take on the notorious “this costs less than burger/lunch/pizza/coke/coffee” statements in sales pages.

Dave said that an amazing number of folks wrote to him saying how much of a chuckle they had over that – and I definitely remember that catching my attention and putting me in a great mood as I clicked through to the buy button.

So well, when Dave wrote a report on Pattern Interrupts – how to do things differently to really stand out, and did a full video course – I was all eyes and ears. And he’s really (over)-delivered on this one. I’d egg you on to check this out – if nothing else to read the most entertaining sales copy you’ve likely seen on the WF – Dave really does walk the talk!

I’m going to stop rambling at this point because you have better things to read!

Go ahead… the rules are yours to break today…

Everything you want to know about breaking the rules!

I’m already using a bunch of their plugins – most notably:

• membership for paid membership sites,
• marketplace for selling stuff,
• a SEO and sitemap plugin that’s quite handy,
• the ultimate FB plugin helps with auto-posting your blog posts to FB (and a bunch of other ways of integrating with FB).

The cool thing is that they are complete with redistribution rights (fully licensed under the GPL), so they make great bonuses to go with your products, in case you happen to be a product creator with a product that’s somewhat related to the plugins in their database! And there are also a bunch of unbranded tutorial videos introducing you to wordpress – very handy for “newbie” offline clients. Their support, in my experience, has been very good – although it might take some time for them to sort out issues you run into, they are never abandoned.

This got me started with WPMU – I am now setup so that I can have different domains pointing to different sites on a WPMU install – and it has been a breeze so far. Although I believe this can be done with free plugins, I was afraid of running into complications – but it’s been a smooth ride so far.

Well, these are just off the top of my head benefits – and I hope to come back with a more detailed review. Till then, if you want a significant 70% discount on their annual membership, head over here:

http://www.appsumo.com/wpmu-dev-evergreen/?r=Bpo1

I hope you enjoy them as much as I have and put those plugins to great uses – cheers!

…over at Selling Books, Cathy Stucker is having an awesome giveaway – so I want to give you a heads up so you can try your luck So here’s the message from over the pond:

There is a hot new WordPress plugin coming soon! Cathy Stucker is giving away a free copy at her book marketingsite, SellingBooks. Learn how you can enter and win by visiting Cathy’s CommentLuv Premium giveaway page.

All the best, and keep your eye out for this one!!!

Most autoresponder companies track your open rates and your CTRs. What they don’t tell you – not by default, anyway – is where you are getting your leads from. Now, hopefully I’m making a valid guess when I suggest that you have fairly organized marketing efforts in driving traffic to your squeeze page. You might be using one or more of:

• solo ads
• ad swaps
• banner advertising
• facebook ads/shares
• tweets on twitter (sponsored or otherwise)
• sig links
• etc.

Now, this one is a special just for friends of [source].

Now, this one is a special just for friends of John Doe.

Ok, so you have mixed sources – not all your traffic is adswaps, and that line is going to flop. Worry not – just segment your list into adswap/solo-ad traffic versus others and include that line in the mail that you send out to only the first segment. Makes sense?

Or, or, or… give all your friends/subscribers a special link that lets you track whoever signed up because of them. Just like an affiliate program, except for a squeeze page. Run a contest or a giveaway for whoever brings in the most signups. Just like an affiliate contest. How’s that for getting started with building your list? (Yes, I hear ya, nanacast users can do this already, but this is just a more direct method for the rest of us. Bear with me )

So. Let’s cut to the chase. How do you achieve this? Today, I’m going to focus on the:

stupid simple way.

This will just tell you what URL the lead came in from to your site. It works great for banner ads, sig links, and the like – not so much for direct links (from within emails and so on). That’s a story for another day – but it’ll be a short one if you get the hang of what I’m going to tell you today.

Setup time: less than 15 minutes, five if you are savvy.

Note: All my screenshots are from my preferred email marketing management company of choice – Campaign Monitor. I’ve worked with Aweber and GetResponse too, and the choices are quite similar – just ping in the comments if you need a hand with your specific situation.

Overall POA: We’ll add a custom field to the list’s form, keep it hidden, detect the referring URL, and “set” the value of the custom field according to what the URL is like.

Step 1: Find your list. Create a custom field. You typically got “name” and “email” – add one more, let’s call it “source”. You want to make sure it’s a text field, and that it’s hidden. If you can find the option to hide the field, don’t worry, we’re going to fix that up in the next step.

Step 2: Hop in to the code generated for your subscription form. We’re going to use a bit of PHP code to detect what URL directed your visitor to the landing page:

$ref = getenv("HTTP_REFERER");

and, for instance, you might want to check if the source is the Warrior Forum, then you would say:

$source = "";
if(strpos($ref,"warriorforum")) { $source = "WF"; }

That code just says that if the referring URL contains the string “warriorforum”, then set the hidden source variable to be WF (or whatever indicator you’d want to use). You can repeat this line of code as many times as you have referring sources pointing to your squeeze page.

Then finally, you want to render add this to your form either after or before the Name and Email fields:

<input type="hidden" name="blah" id="source" value="'. $source .'" />

Make sure the name corresponds to the name in the code generated by your autoresponder, and in particular, that it is not blah!

You have to add this only once – the variable source just picks up the correct option from your if statements above. Note that the type is set to “hidden”, so your visitors know nothing about what you’re up to here

Step 3: Integration. If your optin page is plain HTML, great – just change the extension from .html to .php and insert the code above. If you are running wordpress, then it’s not so easy to insert PHP into your regular posts or pages, so I’ve created a shortcode that you can add to your functions.php – and then simply use the shortcode [cmsource] at an appropriate spot in between the form, like so:

<form id="subForm" action="your" method="post">
[cmsource]
....
</form>

Here’s the shortcode, but remember to modify it to fit your needs:

<?php

function cm_shortcode( $atts, $content = null ) {

$ref = getenv("HTTP_REFERER");
if(strpos($ref,"warriorforum")) { $source = "WF"; }

   return '<input type="hidden" name="blah" id="source" value="'. $source .'" /><br />';
}
add_shortcode( 'cmsource', 'cm_shortcode' );

?>

Limitations

For various reasons, the HTTP_REFERER isn’t the most robust way to get referral information. Besides, this doesn’t let you give out special promo links to your friends. So we want a slightly more robust tracking mechanism, and that’s coming up in part two of this blog post… stay tuned!

Do you want me to send you an email when I have been sufficiently non-lazy about compiling Part two? Just enter your email in here, and you will get a notification. Just the one email – I won’t be storing your email for any further evil.