Archive for January, 2012

Just Upload It: The Real Secret to Jumping Through Hoops & Getting All Your Micro-Tasks Done

• January 22, 2012 • 32 Comments

I can't begin to calculate how much money I lost for years just because I didn't put a single optin page online.

Email Optin Page

Simple "piece of paper" web page, headline describing what my free gift was, three bullet points going into very QUICK detail of each one, call to action telling people to fill in the form below, and an email optin web form.

Set it to redirect to a page offering a free gift. Easy way to offer a free gift? Go to EzineArticles, search your niche, grab 3 articles that look good, copy them out leaving names and resource boxes intact, add the link to your website. Paste into Microsoft Word and save as a PDF file.

  • Do you have articles or blog posts of your own? Even better. Put 3 of your own articles into that PDF.
  • Do you already have an information product? Pull out one of the bonuses or one chapter  and that's your free gift.
  • Do you run free 1-hour pitch webinars? Take your most recent one and put the video behind that optin page.

I don't know why, but I used to think it was "a lot of work" setting up a simple optin page using this exact process. It's not work! You're sitting in a chair, not even really thinking too much, taking 5 minutes on this total.

Webinar Optin Page

For some reason I fell into the same pattern when it came to running webinars. You might have noticed that early on, many of our webinars had a "fancy" optin page. Meaning, when you signed up for one of our webinars, it wasn't the usual ugly GoToWebinar screen.

It used our template. We could embed an autoplay audio or video on the signup form. Even auto-signup any of our subscribers with one click. (This is all possible using our "Webinar Optin" plugin.)

But you know what happened for years? I was lazy. I right click and copied the webinar link and sent it to my list that way. I still do many times.

Login to GoToWebinar, find upcoming webinar, right click webinar link and "Copy Link Location" ... go to template, paste in webinar link, change headline and bullet points... save and email. Once again, 5 minutes tops.

Affiliate Optin Page

Here's a technique Lance and I have been using for years. An affiliate wants to promote us, we setup an optin page just for them, once again using Webinar Optin. We setup an optin page just for the affiliate, which tags any subscribers they send into our affiliate program.We setup a page for them such as www.example.com/lance. The page registers that subscriber to our pre-sell list for that product, and registers them for the webinar.

I record the webinar as we run it, where we have some teaching and pitch the offer at the end. I save and produce the recording in Camtasia, and throw it online behind the optin page. That affiliate can still send traffic, get tagged, show people the replay, and there's now a button under the replay for people to buy.

Why did I used to think this was "a lot of work?" And it's all possible using ONE simple piece of free software...

The Secret: EditPlus

I've used the same text editor for over 12 years now and it's called EditPlus. I started using it back in high school when I became tired of... downloading a file from my web server, editing that file, then uploading it back up and checking to see what changes had occured on the website.

EditPlus has a built-in FTP client. Which means you can login to FTP and access your files right within the program, open a file, edit it, hit the save button... and it "magically" saves it without you having to do any extra uploading and downloading.

Here's where it saves me tons of time setting up optin pages, webinar pages, and affiliate pages. I just find one of my optin pages laying around, open it in EditPlus... and just re-save the template with the new changes in the new location.

What It All Means

The next time you're putting off setting up an optin page, signing up to an affiliate system like Clickbank, throwing some solo ads onto an "affiliate toolbox" page for your affiliates, heck, even sending out a quick email to your list... just ask yourself, why? It's won't even take 5 minutes.

And if you just re-use the last template you used, and use EditPlus to quickly open and re-save... you can do it even faster.

Here's something else to think about: If you really can't bring yourself to do it, could you record your screen using Camtasia Recorder and record yourself doing it, so that you HAVE to do it?

And what about this: Could you find a way to provide this as a service, and get paid to setup an optin page? Get paid to setup an affiliate program? Get paid to setup a 1-click webinar optin page... for people who don't want to do it?

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