***

Update: We've released v1.1.0 which addresses some confusion as to how it works and also fixes a couple of bugs with some themes.  You'll also now find it's much more intuitive to use, and actually works the way you'd expect it to rather than the original way we designed it.  It's just much better all round…

***

In case you're wondering what it does, here's the background.

WordPress will let you schedule posts (not pages) to go live at certain times in the future.  But once the post is live, that's the end of the story.  If you want to change any of the content within the published post, you have to go do it manually.

This is one of the key failings for WordPress in its quest to be called a true Content Management System.  (There are quite a few others.)

The new Content Replacement plugin I'm releasing today addresses this problem very neatly.

Once a post (or page) is published, you can add time and date based amendments to it.  So what you can do is insert some additional content that will appear (and disappear if required) at set dates and times.

This is useful enough a feature for most people, but for marketers it's a godsend.

This now means that what we can do is things like creating a post with a payment link on it for a low price, that will automatically disappear at the time required and be replaced by another higher price.  And even that can be swapped out at another time to be replaced by a different payment button.

This means that if you're using WordPress to run a sales page, then you can easily set up rising price sales that are triggered over time.

And of course because you can have multiple items of text and HTML swapped in and out at different times, you can also change other content on your sales page too.  Such as a table showing people how the price rises are going to occur over the next few days.

It's an extremely powerful and useful plugin, and I class it as one of the "control" plugins like Ads Manager, Widgets In It and Contextual Widgets.

And because it's one of the "control" plugins, then at official launch it will command a price of $27.00.  BUT for this sale I'm releasing 50 copies at $10.00, 50 at $12.50, and then any after that will be at $17.00 until official launch.

So that's:-

1-50 = $10.00
51-100 = $12.50
101+ = $17.00 until launch in January.

-Frank Haywood

At this moment you may be thinking "What use is that?", but it's something I realised I was doing quite a lot of by hand.

Let me explain.

Imagine you're running a time-based sale on one of your blogs…

Aha!  With me?

There are suddenly several scenarios that jump to mind.

#1 – You're running a sale from 6.00pm on the 15th December for 48 hours.  You want the sale to automatically go live at 6.00pm and close two days later on the 17th at 6.00pm.

#2 – You start at a heavily discounted price, and after 48 hours flip to the regular price.

…and variants of the above.

Marketers do this kind of thing all the time to reward their regular customers and subscribers, and also seed the marketplace with a new product to get it talked about.  I do it for those very reasons myself.

Here's another good use and one I'm planning to do in January.

You write several blog posts that actually constitute an ebook or short report.

Your subscribers get to read it for free, and in return for this free content, you ask for comments and feedback.  You let everybody know that the content will auto-expire at a certain date and time and will then only be available for purchase when you release your ebook.

Suddenly you've given what (on the face of it) is free content, a LOT of value.

And you've picked up testimonials and suggestions for improvement along the way.

Most importantly, all the while you've been doing this, you've earned the gratitude of your subscribers.

Take careful note of the above.  It's marketing dynamite (on a timer) when used carefully.

On Wednesday 15th at 6.00pm I'll be running a 48 hour low cost introductory sale of this new plugin.

It's another one of those steps to turning WordPress into a total marketing machine, and you need this one in your marketing arsenal.

More on this on Tuesday.

-Frank Haywood

I'm still looking.

A weakness I've noticed in many of the membership scripts is you're either IN the membership, or you're OUT of it.  It doesn't seem like there's been enough thought given over to all the different methods of actually handling members.

Even the the one I've found that has considered that you might not actually want members to be just in or out is flawed.  The assumption is that it's a drip fed membership concerned with supplying content as learning rather than as products.

Here's the specific scenario I'm thinking about where the content is product, as with PLR Code Mine.

Someone joins a membership today.  They're a member for three months and then for whatever reason they drop out.  Two months later, they rejoin.  What would you expect to have happened in this scenario?

What I expect from a really good membership script is that if someone has been a paid member for 3 months, then they should ALWAYS have access to that content, even during the times they're not a paid member.  So if the content they've purchased is updated, they get the benefit of it.

If they then drop out for two months, then as administrator I should be able to specify that they shouldn't get access to that two months worth of content.  They've missed the boat.

I may also wish to sell it to them at a much higher price than if they'd been a regular member, to allow them to catch up.

So when they rejoin at month 6, they now have access to months 1-3 and 6, but not to month 4 and 5.  They can purchase month 4 and 5 at say three times the regular membership price if they wish to, at which point they then have perpetual access to it, even if they drop out of the membership again.

To me, that would be a perfect membership solution.  But I'm damned if I can find anyone that does such a script.

I have found one where a lot of thought has gone into membership as learning, but not where membership involves a product.  What happens there is that when the member rejoins at month 6, then they get access to month 4, not month 6.  And the workaround suggested by the very helpful developer / owner involved just doesn't cut it.  Grrr…

There's nothing for it, I'll have to get my own done.  I can see from other sites that I'm a member of that there's a real need for such a script, as they all have the same issues.  I'm either in or out, and once a month has gone by, the back products get removed.

I just find it difficult to believe that no-one has ever sat down and thought about this.  Fortunately for me, it's such a glaring omission it leaves the door wide open for a BETTER membership script than the rest of the stuff on the market, doesn't it?

Watch this space.

-Frank Haywood