HTML Email Experiment Results

You may have heard of Marlon Sanders, a very well known and long established Internet marketer. Marlon specializes in teaching others how to succeed in Internet marketing using his proven formulas. I’ve purchased a number of Marlon’s products and have found them to be high quality and full of good information.

I mention the above because as a result of having purchased from him, I’m on Marlon’s mailing list. Every week or so I get an email from him containing marketing tips, promos for his latest products, etc. Until recently, these emails were in plain text. A couple of weeks ago, the email arrived in HTML format.

Being a savvy marketer, Marlon is always trying new things and this latest experiment with HTML email was just that: an experiment. To be frank, the email was very poorly done. Marlon asked for feedback and boy, did he get it! When I skimmed the comments on his blog, they were almost universally negative.

Being a smart marketer, Marlon took the feedback to heart and this week send out another HTML email with a new and different format. To say that it is a major improvement is an understatement! This time, the layout is clean, easy to read, and uses pictures in such a way that they add to the content instead of just looking fancy.

I took several lessons out of this experiment and wanted to share them with you. First, don’t be afraid to try something new. Granted, HTML email isn’t all that new, but if you haven’t used it before, it’s new to you! Plain text is fine up to a point, but if you need to provide a picture to better explain what you’re writing about, HTML is the only way to do it. For that reason, it pays to learn how to use HTML email.

The second lesson is to ask for opinions from your readers and customers. If you don’t ask, most people will never give you their opinion. If they hate what you’re doing, they’ll just move on and you’ll never know why. Even if they love what you’re doing, unless they have an opportunity to say so, they generally won’t. So, if you want to know what your customers are thinking, ask them!

The third lesson is that HTML email has to be done right. Marlon’s first try was poor because he tried to get too cute with it, putting a background image on it and using a font that looked like it was typewritten, among other things. HTML email is a primary example of the KISS principle: Keep It Simple, Stupid! Keep the graphics to a minimum. Use them primarily to enhance the content. If you have any doubt about whether a graphic belongs in the email, leave it out. Keep the font easy on the eyes. Use a font that is large enough and very readable. There’s a reason why Arial and Times Roman are the default fonts!

Finally, Marlon noted that sales of the featured products were higher for the original HTML attempt than previous emails. It will be interesting to see if that trend continues with this week’s effort. It could very well have been a coincidence, so it will take a few more emails in the new format to determine its effect on sales. Who knows? The crappy HTML format may prove to be a sales winner for some unknown reason. I’ll be interested to see how that plays out.

If you’d like to get on Marlon’s mailing list, here’s a free ebook he offers that has a lot of great tips for marketers:

The Best of Marlon Sanders

Marlon’s mailing list is a weekly source of excellent marketing information and well worth the read. He’s got his own unique style that’s fun to read as well as informative.

John The Geek

Online Task and Time Management Tool Debuts

I’ve written before about the Action Machine, a productivity application that brings the tried and true “time boxing” technique into the 21st century. I was one of the early users of the Action Machine and have found it to be an excellent tool for task and time management.

The latest version of the Action Machine has been relabeled as the Action Enforcer and is being sold by Dennis Becker of Earn1KaDay fame. Dennis is known as The Five Buck Guy for his now famous 5 Bucks A Day system. The Action Enforcer is ideally suited to the 5 Bucks A Day system as it helps the user focus on a single task for a given period of time by reducing distractions. In addition, the time boxing strategy at the heart of the Action Enforcer compels the user to plan a set of tasks, prioritize them and work through them one at a time.

As you can tell, I’m a fan of the Action Enforcer. As I said earlier, I own the desktop version (currently available for Windows only). Despite its many virtues, the desktop version has a couple of drawbacks. First, it’s only available for Windows platforms, so Mac users couldn’t take advantage of it. It also doesn’t work very well on netbooks due to resource constraints in those mini-machines.

Well, the good news is that both of those issues have been addressed! The Action Enforcer is now available in an online version so any machine that can run a browser can get the benefits of the Action Enforcer’s time boxing techniques. Even better, the online version is free! Check it out here:

http://johnthegeek.us/proaction

Download the user’s guide from the site and read it over, then give the online Action Enforcer a test drive. I think you’ll be as impressed with this tool as I am. The online version does have a few limitations compared to the desktop version, but is still a very powerful time and task management tool that will make you more productive.

So, the question now is: what will you do with the extra hour or two you’ll have each day?

John The Geek

Seesmic Desktop – Time For Another Look?

In my last post on Twitter tools I mentioned that I’d tried Seesmic Desktop, but stayed with TweetDeck due to some issues with Seesmic Desktop. Shortly after that post appeared, an updated Seesmic Desktop was released that addressed many of the complaints I’d had with it.

I’m now using Seesmic Desktop as my primary Twitter interface. There are still a few things about it that could be improved, but overall, it’s working really well for me.

The big advantage of Seesmic Desktop over TweetDeck is its ability to handle multiple Twitter accounts simultaneously. TweetDeck can only display one account at a time. Although there is a way to use the Search function to monitor other accounts, you can only tweet or retweet from the account with which you’re logged in.

Seesmic Desktop, on the other hand, gives you the ability to not only monitor multiple accounts, displaying the account(s) to which a particular tweet was addressed, but to reply or retweet from any of your accounts without a separate login. IMO, this feature puts Seesmic Desktop ahead of TweetDeck by a long way.

I’d like to see Seesmic Desktop provide a means of synchronizing settings between multiple machines. I use a minimum of two different computers on any given day and regularly use up to four different machines. It would be wonderful to have a way to automatically synchronize the settings between all my machines and avoid the lame manual copying that has to happen now.

You can download Seesmic Desktop for free from here:

http://desktop.seesmic.com/

John The Geek

How I Handle The Chaos of Twitter

Unless you’re living in that cave in which my wife grew up (a little family humor), you’re aware that Twitter is the hottest thing on the planet and therefore the single greatest contributor to global warming at the moment. I’ve been using Twitter for a couple of months now and have come to a number of conclusions about it.

First, it’s an incredible time sink if you don’t take control of it quickly. Once you’re following a few hundred people, you could literally spend all day reading their tweets and get nothing else done. Unless you have nothing better to do with your time, that’s pretty obviously unproductive.

Second, the tweet-o-sphere is chaotic, to say the least. The word “twitter” is much more benign than the visual cacophony of tweets that come flying at you once your follower count starts to grow. I don’t care what anyone says, it’s not physically possible to follow a large number of people and A) read all their tweets and/or B) get anything else accomplished.

Third, Twitter is a marvelous source of information, if you can manage to filter out the wheat from the abundance of chaff. I’ve learned some useful things from tweeple and managed to do so without spending more than 20-30 minutes a day on Twitter.

After a fair amount of experimentation, I’ve come up with the following system that works pretty well for me. I use TweetDeck (http://www.tweetdeck.com) as my interface to Twitter. The Twitter website is a terrible user interface unless you sit there staring at it all day dealing with tweets as they come in. Its shortcomings are fertile ground for application developers, however, and there are a number of Twitter applications out there.

Admittedly, I haven’t tried most of them. So far, I’ve used TweetDeck and Seesmic Desktop. I simply don’t have time to use and evaluate the rest.

Seesmic Desktop (http://desktop.seesmic.com) shows promise. What I like about it is that it can handle multiple accounts simultaneously. I have several Twitter accounts for specific purposes and one “main” one, so it’s nice to be able to aggregate all my accounts in one place. Unfortunately, there are a number of problems with Seesmic Desktop that are annoying enough that I’ve given up on it for now. It’s still very much beta software, so hopefully, they’ll get it together eventually.

I’m using TweetDeck regularly. It took me a while to figure out how to configure it for the best results. My current configuration is based on this article, so I can’t take credit for coming up with this strategy all on my own.

Here’s what my current TweetDeck configuration looks like:

Note there are four columns. The column on the left is for all tweets from all those I follow. As you can imagine, that column fills up rather quickly!

The second column from the left contains tweets from those I have added to my one group. These are people I want to follow more closely.

The third column is a Search query. This is the key to keeping track of all my accounts. I have written the query to search for my main Twitter username: johnsawyer or any of the other of my accounts. This is accomplished by using the OR keyword. My query reads like this:

johnsawyer OR john_the_geek OR critterreiki OR rootsrocknblues

The results of this query include any tweets containing one or more of those user names. This includes tweets I make, re-tweets of any of my tweets, replies I make to other tweets and replies to my tweets. It would also include any arbitrary references to any of those user names in anyone else’s tweets.

The last column on the right is for Direct Messages to the account with which I’m currently logged in via TweetDeck (usually my main account).

You’re probably wondering why the screen shot shows three of the four columns empty. That is because I keep them empty to reduce the clutter. I leave the search column tweets because those are typically the ones I’m most interested in and may want to refer back to later. The other three columns are disposable.

I know this will likely bruise some egos, but the left column gets skimmed fairly quickly. I’m looking for pictures I haven’t seen before, or for keywords to jump out at me. If I don’t have time to get through the whole column (there are often several hundred tweets), I skim as far down as I can, then clear the entire column and let it start over.

If I find someone tweeting something interesting, I’ll add them to my group so that they show up in the second column. This is a small percentage of all the people I’m following, so I can keep up with them more easily. I can always remove people from the group is need be, and sometimes it needs be! The idea is to keep people in the group whose tweets are interesting and/or useful to me and remove those who aren’t. This column is read and cleared regularly after noting URLs or whatever other info I may find to be of value later on.

Again, the search column is never cleared, but it doesn’t tend to fill up that fast, either. I’m not one who tweets constantly, as many seem to do, so at any given moment there aren’t a zillion tweets out there containing my usernames.

Finally, the DM column is checked when TweetDeck starts up to see if there are any new DMs since the last session. If not, the column is cleared.

One other tool I use is TweetLater (http://tweetlater.com). I discovered TweetLater by way of a tweet that touted it as a way to eliminate many of the automated Direct Messages we get when we follow people. TweetLater can be configured to block any that come from its service (which is most of them, apparently). That alone is worth its weight in gold! I get far fewer DMs now that I’ve turned on that filter.

TweetLater has a number of other great features. The two I use regularly are the keyword reports and the auto-follow feature. The keyword reports are just that: reports of tweets containing specific keywords for the time since the previous report. This is very handy for keeping track of references to your username(s) and for references to topics in which you’re interested. These are automatically emailed to you at specified intervals.

The auto-follow feature saves me having to manually check out and follow (or not) anyone who follows me first. I’m very likely going to follow back most anyone who follows me, so I figure it takes less time for me to unfollow the few I find obnoxious than to manually visit the profiles of those who follow me. I don’t believe I can make an informed decision on whether to follow someone just from their profile, unless they’re obviously a mismatch. So far, few people have been an obvious mismatch.

Between TweetDeck and TweetLater, I find I can accomplish what I need to on Twitter in about 30 minutes a day. I’d be interested in other strategies you’ve used that worked for you. Please leave a comment about your favorite Twitter tool or strategy.

John The Geek

Action Machine + Dashboard = Can’t Miss System

As I mentioned in my last post, I’ve been using Derek Franklin’s Action Machine software for a while now. The more I use it the more I like it. I keep finding things it does that not only help keep me focused and productive, but enhances other parts of my product creation system, too.

Here’s a good example: I’m in the middle of writing an e-book. The e-book is actually written, it just needs some editing and formatting to make it look nice. There is still a lot to do, however, before it can go live and start making sales. Among other things, I need to create the cover graphic, make two web sites, one for a free e-book that promotes the paid one, and the other for the paid e-book.

The first site needs to interact with AWeber to collect contact info, and the second site needs a sales page, order button, and the back end for payment processing, downloads, customer registration, etc.

Once all that’s done, I need to promote the sites, so there’s a whole list of things to do in that regard, too. The list of to-dos is pretty long and keeping track of what’s done and what needs to be done can be a real challenge without some kind of system.

To help me manage all these tasks, I bought Marlon Sanders’ Promo Dashboard last year. This is a great product that lays out step by step everything that needs to be done from product creation to promotion. Each step is explained and there is a ton of videos and other training tools on the Promo Dashboard site.

Knowing what the tasks are is great, but even better is having a way of staying focused on each task until it’s done. Still further, being able to track how much time you spend on each task is very valuable for future projects. If you know how long it takes to complete a particular step, you can accurately gauge how long it will take to complete a project from start to finish and plan accordingly.

The Action Machine allows you to create your own task lists and groups of timers. It dawned on me that I could simply take the steps in the Promo Dashboard, create a list of them in the Action Machine and set up groups of timers for each phase of the project.

Once I understand the task thoroughly from the training in the Promo Dashboard site, I can set to work on it and the Action Machine keeps me focused on it until it’s completed. Then, I move to the next task and repeat the process.

This is a perfect marriage of two separate, but complementary tools. Each by itself is a terrific tool. Used together they make a killer product creation system that is greater than the sum of its parts.

Check out the Action Machine here: http://johnthegeek.com/likes/action

Check out the Promo Dashboard here: http://johnthegeek.com/promodb

John The Geek

The Action Machine – A Great Productivity Tool

I’ve recently been evaluating a new piece of software from Derek Franklin. Derek came up with a really interesting and effective productivity strategy and wrote an application to support it.

In a nutshell, the strategy is very simple: allocate a certain amount of time to a task, set a timer, then focus only on that task until it’s either done or the timer goes off, whichever comes first. This increases your focus because you tend to want to get the thing done before that timer goes off!

It becomes something of a game with yourself to see if you can accurately estimate the amount of time a task will take, and then to see if you can get it done in the time you estimated. You know you can’t be sidetracked by anything else or you probably won’t get it done, so that increases your ability to shut out other distractions and concentrate on the task at hand.

Because it can be a hassle write several to-do lists, then to locate a timer and carry it around with you, Derek had the idea to write a software application to address the problems. What he came up with is called The Action Machine.

I bought The Action Machine v1.0 because I liked Derek’s strategy and the idea of the software. It was good, but had some limitations. Derek asked the users to let him know how the software could be improved and got a ton of great feedback. He’s just released The Action Machine v2.0 incorporating many of the requested features and enhancements.

Here’s what the new version of The Action Machine looks like:

I had to shrink the image so depending on your screen resolution you may not be able to read the text clearly. The lower left pane is the task list. The software comes with a default task list, but you can create your own.

For example, I have a list (shown) of my routine activities, daily, weekly, etc. This is my default task list to which I can add tasks to be done that day, or new daily or weekly or even monthly tasks. I can export the list to save it for future reference, or to copy it to another computer.

I have another list that is specific to the steps involved in a particular product creation and promotion process. When I’m going to be focusing on that process, I load that list to serve as my checklist to determine my progress. More detail on that to come in another post.

On the right, there is a grid of 12 squares each of which may contain a separate timer. In the screenshot above I have five timers loaded. Two of them are set for 30 minutes and the other three are set for 60 minutes. The total time shown at the top is 4 hours, so I know how much time I’ve allocated to the tasks I’ve committed to get done this day.

Timers can be started, paused, reset, cleared, or checked as completed. Completed items can be listed in a report. Lists of timers can be saved under specific names and reloaded at any time. If you know you’re going to work on a certain group of your default tasks regularly, you can simply create timers for each of those tasks, save them as a timer group and reload them when you’re going to work on that task group.

You can see the full demo video at The Action Machine web site. Check it out, I think you’ll like it as much as I do. Highly recommended!

John The Geek

WordPress Plugins Site For Users and Developers

I’ve been a fan of Mass Automation’s WordPress plugins and tools for some time. These are high quality blog administration tools, for the most part, that save me a tremendous amount of time keeping my many blogs updated. If you’re just running one or two blogs, these are not for you, but if you’re like me and have a number of blogs, I highly recommend them.

The Mass Automation folks have recently opened a new site featuring free open source plugins for WordPress called PluginEdge. PluginEdge is a repository for WordPress users to get some very handy utility plugins. It is also a place for WordPress plugin developers to upload plugins for distribution and additional exposure.

I’ve installed several of the free plugins from PluginEdge and found them to be very useful. There are still others I’ve got on my list to check out when I have a chance to do so.

The PluginEdge home page lists the 10 most popular plugins in terms of downloads. Because the site is only a couple weeks old as of this writing, the list changes pretty frequently. As of today, the top 10 plugins are:

1. GAFMonitor – monitors the Get A Freelancer site for project requests
2. ScuttlePlus – create your own social bookmarking site
3. WP Bazaar – turn your blog into an online store
4. Plugin Remover – removes unwanted WP plugins without FTP
5. Robots.txt – creates a robots.txt file for your WP installation
6. WP Database Reverter – restores a WP database to its previous state
7. Trackback Search – search for and find trackback URLs to add to your posts
8. Comments Pinger – pings comments instead of posts
9. Set Permalinks – makes .htaccess file writable via FTP
10. WP Checkup – pings a list of your blogs and warns if any are unavailable

Since this site is so new, you’ll want to check it on a regular basis to see what new goodies are uploaded. Enjoy!

John The Geek

Royalties: The Key To Ongoing Income

We’ve all heard about royalties, usually in the context of musicians, songwriters, and authors. The basic concept of royalties is that you create something, then every time a copy of it gets sold, you get part of the price that was paid for it.

As an example, let’s say you write a book. You get it published and it goes to book stores all over the country. The book sells for $15. To keep things simple, your royalty is $1 per book. So, every time somebody sells one of your books you get a dollar. Sound good so far?

“But, wait!” I hear you say “That means I’d have to write a book in order to get royalties! I can’t write a book. I don’t have the time or talent for that!”

Maybe you do and maybe you don’t, but that’s not the issue here. The problem is that your definition of “royalties” is too narrow. Royalties don’t have to be for a book or a song. They can be for pretty much anything that gets bought and sold. You just have to figure out how to get a piece of the action, so to speak.

More importantly, you need to know how to make that happen on a recurring basis so that you’re not limited by the amount of time you have or the number of promotions you can send in a day. That’s the beauty of royalties!

Royalties mean passive income. That’s income that you’re not trading your time for. Ideally, it’s recurring income that you receive while you’re working on something else. You don’t think Stephen King’s royalties from his last book stop when he starts writing a new one, do you? Of course not!

Christopher Westra has been making his living from royalties for years now. He has created a course called “Royalties University” that will teach you step-by-step how to create royalties in your life. You’ll receive one lesson each week plus bonuses as time goes on.

I’ve known Christopher for a couple of years now and I’ve purchased many of his products. They’ve always been top-notch and “Royalties University” is no exception. I highly recommend it, especially if you’re looking to create streams of income that don’t require your attention 24/7.

John The Geek

SitePoint Supports Australian Fire Relief

The folks at SitePoint.com have put together a sale which benefits both the buyer and the Australian fire relief effort. The devastation down under is extreme and here’s a way to lend a hand while scoring some awesome web design resources.

I have several of SitePoint’s books on CSS, HTML and Javascript and they are excellent. The PDF format books are normally US$29.95 each and well worth the price.

For this sale, SitePoint is offering any five of their PDF format books for a total of US$29.95, essentially an 80% discount. What’s more, they are donating the proceeds from the sale to the Australian fire relief effort. In short, you pay $29.95 and get 5 books and the fire relief fund gets the whole $29.95.

If you have any interest in web development technology, I highly recommend jumping on this deal.

John The Geek

Free Backups For Your Data

Last year, the folks at Neobyte, makers of Titan Backup, offered the full version of their excellent backup software free for a limited time. I’m happy to report that they’re repeating the offer with a little different slant.

You can now get the full retail version of Titan Backup v.1.5 free from Neobyte. Note that this is not the current version of the software (v2.5), but IMO it’s still a great deal. The older version worked fine and you can’t beat the price!

You can download the free version here (opens in a new window):

http://www.neobytesolutions.com/trial-versions/free/titanbackup15.exe

After you install the software, use the following key to register and activate it:

000020-ACM8KK-1YXPMT-JZT49Z-05Z6JZ-7C68TR-9Y7FU9-6PD2P8

If you decide to upgrade to the latest and greatest, Neobyte is offering a coupon for a special upgrade price. Use this link to get your discounted price:

Special Titan Backup Upgrade Discount

I’ve got Titan Backup on all my machines and I recommend you jump on this deal.

John The Geek