My Current Consulting Assignments

My current consulting assignments are moving ahead quite well now.

I have been working with Tsahai de Silva to help her to get her new product ‘Affiliate Income Boost’ ready for launch.

In yesterdays’s consultation on Skype we:

  • added a watermark into all of her videos
  • we created two new eCovers to replace the ones that she had received from Fiverr.com, which were unbranded and uninteresting
  • we added two of my products into the ‘Resources’ section of the site
  • we set the product up on JVZoo
  • we configured Membersonic, her membership plugin, and integrated it with JVZoo

Tsahai de SilvaAfter our consultation, Tsahai was kind enough to say this:

[boxibt style=”success” bordercolor=”red”] “I have admired Mark’s work for sometime and I recently got the opportunity to work with him in a professional capacity. Mark’s knowledge and professionalism is exactly what you need in a consultant. He is patient and has a eye for detail that makes such a difference in the end product. His easy going style immediately puts you at ease and it was such a pleasure to work with him. My product rocks now thanks to Mark and I am eternally grateful. Cheers Mark!”[/boxibt]

Thank you Tsahai.

I also admire Tsahai because she is working on her internet marketing business part-time whilst looking after her young son and holding down a full-time job.  This is not easy to do but she is making good progress now and she is close to launching her first product so look out for ‘Affiliate Income Boost’.

[hr2]

My other client is Emma Breeze, who I featured in an earlier post.

In that post I revealed the first draft of her new website but neither of us was entirely happy with the results of my efforts but, in doing the first draft, she gave more some important clues as to what she wanted. (If you read between the lines on that post you will see that I was feeling frustrated!)

Then Emma dropped something into the conversation about her father’s website, that I had built a couple of years ago, which made me realise exactly what she was looking for.

Subsequent to this conversation, I was sitting in my chair at 9 p.m. watching TV when I had another inspirational moment that told me exactly what I needed to do to please her.   I immediately went to my computer and, by 1.30 a.m. in the morning, I had replaced the WordPress Theme and set up a new design.

I spent the rest of the following day on Photoshop working with the photographs of her clients and resubmitted my design to her.  This is what she said in the email reply:

Emma[boxibt style=”success” bordercolor=”red”] Its fantastic! I love it!
Great slider and feedback page!
Thank you for your time and patience!
Emma[/boxibt]

This is exactly the encouragement I hoped and expected to receive.

Her site is still under construction and I will reveal it shortly because I think it might end up as being my best work yet as far as website design is concerned.

(By the way, I received the assignment on Wednesday, stared work at 4 p.m. and by close of business Friday had created two versions of the website prior to the comment above.)

I am hoping that this project will lead to other projects like it because I have enjoyed creating the images on this site which exactly illustrate what Emma’s business is all about.  They do say that ‘a picture paints a thousand words’ and in this case it is true.

It got me to thinking about how impersonal most websites are.  The true nature of the people and their business are hidden behind a façade that is impossible to penetrate.  This is why images and video have such a vital role to play in online marketing.

Of course, you need some courage to put yourself ‘out there’ but, if you do, I feel that you can differentiate your business and immediately begin to build a relationship with prospects and customers.

It is important to tear down the curtain and give direct access to the people involved in the business.  It is then much easier for the website visitor to decide whether or not to transact business.

So my current consulting assignment are moving ahead well and I’ll reveal the final results shortly!

Consultation with Tsahai De Silva

Last Sunday, I had an online consultation with Tsahai de Silva who is based in Trinidad.

The purpose of the consultation was to build her membership site as she had created most of her content.

Tsahai had already outsourced her graphics and sales page and they both look great.

Using my developers licence for the Membersonic Theme, this is how the site now looks:

23-02-2014 14-04-24

I am really pleased with how this site has turned out.  As you can see, Tsahai is using a ‘pen’ name for this product – Robert Black – and the product is called Affiliate Income Boost.

I’ve added one of my products into the site as a Bonus, to help Tsahai to offer an awesome product.  As you can see we are delivering the videos using Easy Video Suite in a playlist and during the consultation we created a sexy video splash image.

In the course of my consultation, I showed Tsahai how to store and deliver products from Amazon S3 and how to create ecovers with Photoshop actions so it was quite a wide-ranging consultation.  I did have difficulty resizing the header image to fit the site but I got there in the end.

Tsahai is using the Membersonic membership plugin I recommend to secure her membership area.

I’ll let you know more about how my consultation with Tsahai de Silva works out in due course but it’s looking very good so far!

Shakespearean Copywriting

I’ve been indulging in a bit of Shakespearean Copywriting this week.  I completed my eBook entitled ‘What You Can Measure You Can Manage’ and this in now on my site http://measurenmanage.com.

I will be completing this product with an Excel spreadsheet as I develop my own management information system.  There is already a nice bonus on the site – 5 videos about mastering Google Analytics.  This bonus is relevant because MeasureNManage is all about running your business by the critically important numbers.

I have written the sales page for this site but I now need to create the JV page, list the product on JVZoo and integrate JVZoo with my membership script.

The Ultimate Copywriting Swipe File

I have also created an eBook today on copywriting called The Ultimate Copywriting Swipe File – this is a combination of some PLR material I had about copywriting and a list of copywriting swipes that I obtained from The Warrior Forum.  This book will be used for 3 purposes:

  • as a bonus on a fellow coaching colleague’s (Matthew Houghton) solo ad product
  • as a bonus on my next product which is called Email-ATM
  • as a free giveaway on a squeeze page to build my list.

Here is the eCover I designed:

Copywriting-Ecover-First

I went with the Shakespearean Theme because of the fact that I live in the town where he was born and died – Stratford-upon-Avon!!

My Secret Copywriting Weapons

Advantage Bot

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You can get more details about Advantage Bot here.

Paper Template Plugin

When writing my own sales letters, I mainly use the Paper Template plugin by Robert Plank.  It does what it says on the tin – you follow a template for creating your sales letter.

Here is a demo on how this plugin works:

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You can get more details about the Paper Template plugin here.

A Content Creation System by Omar Martin

This is a note that Omar wrote in one of the Facebook Groups I am a member of.  I thought I would share it here as it looks like a good system.  (I use Camtasia (or Easy Video Suite) and Powerpoint rather than Screenflow and Keynote to make my videos because I use a PC rather than a Mac.)

[features_box_light_blue width=”75%” + border=”1px”]The 5 5 5 Method of Content Creation

“I tend to use audacity quite a bit for narration but other than my brain, the most influential tools I use to create content are decisively Screenflow and Keynote.

I use the 5-5-5 method for drafting a quick outline on a particular topic. This means I create 5 subheadings and put them on Keynote slides then I add 5 bullets to each slide. I hit record on Screenflow and press play on Keynote then I talk for at least 5 minutes on each slide.

5 Slides + 5 Bullets + 5 Minutes = A 25 – 30 minute video.

I try to create 3 or 4 of these videos on the same general topic and then hand them over to a transcriptionist or ghost writer that converts the content into a 100+ page book.

Content creation is only as complicated as we chose to make it.”

[/features_box_light_blue]

Creating my Own WordPress Plugins

Creating my own WordPress plugins has long been a goal of mine but I have been reluctant to get involved in an area that I have little or no expertise in.  I bought into Peter Garety’s Software Mechanics course about a year ago but Peter seems to have lost interest in this programme which was a bonus to another product.

However, on the recommendation of Andrew Hunter (who is himself a plugin creation expert), I bought Plugin Creation Blueprint for $37 when it was launched on 2nd September.  This is an incredible product for the money and made by a coding expert called David Vandenburg.  It has been made with meticulous care and the membership site is incredibly good too.  This guy calls himself the CodeKing and I can see why.

If you have aspirations to get into the business of creating plugins then Plugin Creation Blueprint is definitely worth investing in.

G-Font Plugin

I also bought the developers license for the G-Font plugin – this plugin enables you to use around 600 Google Fonts on your WordPress sites – it works with most themes.  As you can see from this page, I have played around with some of the Menu fonts.

I felt that this was a good investment as it means I can customise the fonts on any theme and make it my own!!  I also love fonts – they just make your text so much more interesting to look at! I hope you agree!!!!

Thank You Tsahai

One of my colleagues, Tsahai de Silva, sent me a message this week – this is part of what she said – it means a lot to me:

[features_box_red width=”75%” + border=”2px”]You are quality and you deserve to be successful. Don’t give up I believe in you Mark. You can do it! What are you doing to get sales? Please let me know if I can help.[/features_box_red]

I have some superb friends online – this is vitally important to me as internet marketing can be lonely at times. With friends like this I am rich indeed!