First, scour your hard drive and put together a mega package of products, something like the subscriber offer I make to everybody when they sign up to my blog notify list.

Create a regular sales page for the mega-package at $47 or $67. Next, create a nickel sale (I'm assuming you have the Nickel Script) for the same deal, in a sub-directory of the site, and keep a local copy of the entire set up on your PC to use as a template that you can use to quickly upload.

On the download page, put a sign up form and use the words "To register your purchase, enter your name and email address in the boxes below. This is currently the only way I can keep you informed of updates to this package."

95% of people will signup after their purchase, and this will build your mailing list.

Finally, write to other marketers offering to set the sale up with their name as the directory, and with their PayPal address in the config so that they get 100% of the sale paid directly into their PayPal account.

e.g. http://wwwYOURMEGAPACKAGEDOMAINHERE.com/johnsmith/

Explain that nickel sales are dynamite and that you will start it at $0.07 and increase the price by 5 cents with each sale. Give them 2 carefully worded emails that they can send to their lists to warm them up before the sale, and a 3rd email to give them the link.

If they make a typical 300 sales, the final price will be $15.07 and they will make $2,263.50 in about a day.

No average marketer (non-guru) in the IM niche is going to refuse that as long as they haven't already done too many similar offers to their lists. (I think I may have done too many recently, and I'm trying to rectify that…)

You will have nearly 300 brand new buyers on your mailing list per JV partner.

Have a game plan to offer them some useful freebies, maybe a video or two and a report you've created yourself, as well as some useful blog posts to enamour them with you.

Then after you've given them some very useful and valuable free info, send them an email to a product you're promoting to make your money from the deal. Ideally, it would be a product that you've created of course, but if you're in a hurry you can promote someone else's.

Make sure it's a good one!

Set all this up as an autoresponder series.

Then all you need do is find people who are willing to promote the deal for you, one at a time. Set up a brand new directory for each marketer, and leave it in place permanently.

You now have a system you can just plug in and run. This method of running a promotion with one JV partner at a time is called a bulldozer launch, and is an immensely powerful way of building a list (your list is your internet business), and making some back end money yourself.

-Frank Haywood

P.S. If anybody wants to do something like this with me for the Nickel Script itself, just raise a support ticket on my help desk at http://www.Vendiva.com/support/ in the "Personal Message" department.

http://www.nickelscript.com/videos/

On Friday, if all goes well, I'll also upload the latest version of the Nickel Script to the download page, and add a fourth video to explain the additional changes.

-Frank Haywood

http://www.gimpvideos.com/NickelSale/

(By the way, with any luck there will be a new version of the Nickel Script released on Monday.)

-Frank Haywood

In case you didn't know, The GIMP is a free graphics tool that with each release gets closer to rivalling the enormously expensive Photoshop. You can even load most Photoshop format PSD files into The GIMP.

This means you can take advantage of the huge number of existing PSD files out there on the web and use them in your own creations. In fact I just checked my hard drive and I have resale rights for 40 graphics headers in PSD format.

I really want this sale to succeed for Stan, so I tell you what…

Buy Stan's GIMP videos and I'll also supply you with the 40 PSD graphics headers too. Included in the pack are some background tile images for your sales pages and a selection of order buttons which you can edit.

If you register with Stan I'll get him to email you a link in the next few days.

So to me, that sounds like a pretty impressive package for just a few dollars, and remember, once you have the initial skills that Stan will show you, you're not just limited to using those skills on your own sites.

You'll then also have the ability to put together your own unique sales page bundles and graphics, which you can sell.

So at 3.00pm GMT (10.00am EST), the sale goes live and I'll let you know about it here on this blog. Don't hang around and you'll get it at the lowest price.

But even if you end up paying $15, it's still an incredible bargain, and is one those opportunities I wish I'd had 2 or 3 years ago.

Watch this space.

-Frank Haywood

I then spent a fortune buying pre-made graphics that I could edit.  The software I used was PhotoShop, and even though I got a second hand copy on eBay for a couple of hundred dollars or thereabouts, it was still a relatively big investment for something I knew nothing about.

Then with another long period of trial and error trying to get to grips with Photoshop, I eventually splashed out on some videos to show me how to do it.

The total cost to me I guess has been about 150-200 hours, and about $2,500 if you count I also bought the Macromedia Suite 8 which cost me about $1,800 (most of the suite I've never used).

I was prepared to spend all this time and money because I know it's a skill we all need online.  Even if you don't get good at it, I feel it's still important to know how it all works, and be able to put together a simple page.

So for me it's a given fact that in order to be successful online, you need to have at least some web page and graphics creation skills.

But rather than spend weeks of your life and thousands of dollars, how about learning how to do it all in a couple of hours using FREE tools to achieve the same thing?  NO Photoshop, NO Dreamweaver.

Yeah, I know.  Great isn't it?  That's progress for you…

The other day Stan Craigie contacted me to let me know that he'd finally finished putting together a set of videos on how to create your own sales page graphics using a free graphics tool called The GIMP.

So I took a look at what he'd done, I was impressed (I didn't know you could do that with The GIMP), and then I suggested he top it off by creating an additional video showing how to create your own sales page, which he's now added to the set.

I won't go through all the details, but the videos will show you how to create ebook covers and software boxes WITH reflections and shadows.  He'll also show you how to create sales page objects such as order buttons.

Now I can remember paying $97 for a set of Photoshop videos to do the same thing, and that's without the sales page video.

Stan has decided that his launch price will be $27, BUT…

As Stan is a customer of mine, he's decided that it's a good idea to pre-launch his product using the Nickel Script in a nickel sale.  So tomorrow at 3.00pm GMT (10.00am EST), Stan will be opening his site for a pre-launch of his video set, starting at $5.

This is NOT something you want to miss out on.

I've said it before and I'll say it again now.  I don't promote every single product that pops up.  I don't jump on the big product launch band wagon – I'd probably make a lot more money if I did.

But this is definitely something worth having and using.  And starting at $5.00, you really can't complain about the price!

Think about it.  If you're quick off the mark, then for less than $10 you can have over two hours worth of video that will propel your knowledge forward, and also give you the skill set to offer a graphics and design service to other web users.

Yeah, that's a nice thought isn't it?

So tune in tomorrow at 3.00pm GMT (10.00am EST) for a blog post here pointing you to Stan's nickel sale.

-Frank Haywood

P.S.  I predicted that we'd begin to see lots of nickel sales appearing now that it was easy to do so using the Nickel Script.  Didn't I?

Well, here we go…

It's starting at $5.02 and the faster you get there, the cheaper it will be.

http://www.nickelscript.com/nickelsale/

Some fun and games but it's all working now.  Better still, because of the PayPal IPN mess, we've added a new feature today.

Testing proved it worked for us, fingers crossed it continues to work in battle. 

-Frank Haywood

David is adding an extra feature which will allow you to switch on a workaround any time PayPal mess up IPN like they have today.

He's working on it right now, so let's say it's a 5.00pm GMT launch to give him time to finish it and me give it a quick test. If that then breaks something else, well, we'll fix it as quickly as we can, but whatever happens I'm determined to launch the Nickel Script today!

-Frank Haywood

http://www.paypaldeveloper.com/pdn/board/message?board.id=ipn&thread.id=10795

From what it says in that thread, it's not affecting everyone, and it seems clear that PayPal don't even know what's causing the problem themselves.

Can you believe that?

Worse still, I checked the Nickel Script and every single transaction is going straight into the error file.  David took a look, set it into sandbox mode and it works perfectly.  He  then put it back into live mode and it failed.

What's really bad is, PayPal are letting the payments go through, but then because IPN isn't doing its thing, the customers aren't getting their goods.  Some people are reporting HUNDREDS of bad transactions that they're going to have to fix manually.

Common sense says to me that they should be rolling back to the old version that worked for everyone.  But no.  They're trying to fix the new version.

That tells me that there's some change been made that they either don't dare roll back to, or can't.

I've asked David to tweak the script so we can still launch.  I'll be supplying the standard version while using our tweaked version to deliver it.

As soon as PayPal know what they're doing, we'll apply any necessary fixes and supply that to you.  My guess is it won't continue over the weekend, and when PayPal fix IPN, the Nickel Script won't need any changes either.

If we can get it sorted at our end, launch will go ahead this afternoon at 3.00, but I'll have an update closer to that time.

Who was it mentioned Murphy?

-Frank Haywood

Last night, my final task was to move the domain from the test server to my dedicated server where the licence generator lives. I went to my domain registrar to change the name server addresses to point to the live machine and their site was down while undergoing maintenance.

Agghh!

As it can take 12 hours or more (sometimes only 5 minutes depending on where in the world you live) for name server changes to propogate around the net, I have no choice but to delay the launch until tomorrow.

I could release it tonight maybe, but I don't think it's worth the risk.

I'm sorry about this, but at least you'll have the Nickel Script to play with over the weekend. Remember if you use it in the right way, you can quickly build yourself a list of buyers.

-Frank Haywood

I've added a few little tweaks to it since I used it last that I think you're going to like. There's one feature in particular that I know you'll like a lot, and you can count on me to extend it with later versions.

In case you're a new reader and you don't know what a nickel sale is, I'll explain.

The sale price of an item starts with a relatively low price, and with each sale it increases by a set amount, usually 5 cents, hence the term nickel sale. The sooner the item is bought, then the lower the price.

It's an extremely powerful way of kicking up a lot of interest in a product, and pulling in a chunk of cash very quickly. As the starting price is usually low (much lower than the actual final release price of a product), a very nice bargain can be had when the item is bought in a nickel sale.

I'm still toying with the starting price and the final price after the sale is over, but I'll announce more detail in the next day or so.

-Frank Haywood