Believe it or not we're still debating the price and how many copies. We know it's a balancing act. If we get it wrong you may not buy.

Here's what I know to be true. For every 100 copies sold, only 1 person will actually do anything with their purchase. The rest will let it gather dust on their hard drive. It's the 1 percent rule – the 1 percent that actually do anything towards improving their business or even getting started online.

So this means you have very little competition.

With just a little bit of effort you can take the code that took us umpteen man weeks to develop, shine it up and have your own brand digital delivery software.

The longest it will take you to do that is a month. If you're quick and focussed you can probably get it done in 10 days or less with very little effort on your part.

You know what? That's what always amazes me. With just a little application and patience you can get some amazing things done. But many people don't bother.

Now I know you might be saying "but you have developers who will do the work for you".

That's true. But if I didn't, this is what I'd do. This is what you can do.

#1 – Go here and get yourself a really nice sales page design done, together with a software box. Cost $87.

#2 – Go to ScriptLance.com or eLance.com or Guru.com – there are others. Take your pick or use them all. Sign up and post your job as requiring a redesign of a script you have. Say it's a CSS design around a php script and that it's an easy job and that any competent person could do it in a couple of hours tops.

Offer $100 and wait for the bids.

You'll get some spam bids almost immediately where they haven't even read your requirements. Wait at least 3 days (7 is better), to get some real bids. You'll be able to tell the difference between the spam and the real bids when you see them, trust me.

Accept a bid and pay no more than one third down. Pay the next third when they show you the design, and pay the final third when you have the code in your hands. NEVER give feedback until at least 10 days after you have the code, and NEVER give it before the job is complete no matter how much they plead – tell them it's company policy when dealing with contractors.

#3 – While all this is going on, rewrite the docs in your own style with your own product name, register a domain, write your sales copy and generally do all the things you'd do when setting up a sales page and product.

#4 – When you have the sales page design and the re-design of the code done, put it all together including a JV sign up page.

#5 – Start writing to potential JV partners and point them to your JV sign up page. Offer them 60% – 75%, and normal affiliates 50%.

Just keep on keeping on. And look around for your next product. I always say it's not hard, but it's not completely easy either.

That little bit of effort is what keeps the 99% from moving forward and succeeding, and of course makes it a whole lot easier for us 1-percenters.

And that's why if you make just that little bit of effort, you'll quickly rise above everyone else. It really is as simple as that.

If you think you're the 1 in 100 that can do this, then on Thursday it's your chance to get the ball rolling.

-Frank Haywood

So there have been suggestions in pricing going from $18 (!) all the way up to $197.

The figure that Paul and I had in mind was $297 per licence which I mentioned earlier this year (keep reading, that's not the price we're going to use). With a little effort, you could start to see a return on your investment within a month or less depending on how you approach it.

The reason we chose that price was because:-

#1 – It would remove those people who weren't serious or who "don't get it".

#2 – It would increase profitability for those people who *are* serious as they would be loathe to sell at ridiculously low prices.

But…

Knowing that $297 was a little bit of a shock for *some* people, even though it's a sure fire way of keeping the price and the profits up for those that buy, we decided to listen to what people have said, and so we've decided to consider a lower price

And another but…

Rather than keep the licencing fairly loose while selling at $297, if we're going to sell at the lower price, then we would do what some people have suggested, and put some provisos in the licence to make sure that people don't shoot themselves and other buyers in the foot.

I would like to point out the natural and inevitable conclusion of a price war between two (or more) sellers.

You BOTH go out of business, and the customer can't get what they want any more.

Nobody wins. When the dust settles, the final seller is making pennies on their sales, and the market has been trained to expect a very low "going price".

Been there, done that, never going there again. It's a fools errand.

I'd also like to do a bit of explanation here too.

It seems that some people don't understand the sometimes subtle difference betweeen Resale Rights, Master Resale Rights and Private Label Rights when applied to digital products.

Okay?

In order, MRR will see the price of a product plummet to a dollar within a week (the bottom feeders as someone mentioned), RR will usually see the product keep its price, although you are sometimes allowed to give the product away which can be useful as a list builder in giveaways etc. Because new customers can't compete with you by reselling, the price doesn't come down.

PLR normally sees the product hold its price unless the right to sell PLR is given in which case like MRR it quickly plummets to a dollar.

WLR products will always hold their price as it's controlled by the product creator.

So those people that bought Resale Rights for SmartDD LITE at a snip way back in April should have made their money back many times over because of their customers inability to resell and compete with them. (If you didn't, what do you think you're doing wrong?)

This offer is now for PLR, which as you can see above is quite different.

Taking on board what people have said, here are my provisos with PLR for SmartDD LITE which differ from normal PLR.

#1 – You must rebrand.
#2 – You must not use my name (or Paul's) or mention SmartDD or SmartDD LITE.

That's it. That will hold the price for you and weed out the bottom feeders.

To rebrand, you can fairly easily use a text search and replace, and do a rename in all the PHP files, and in the docs. You might have to edit a few screen shots, or do a few yourself. Additionally you could tweak the CSS files to change the colours and layout.

Alternatively, you can get someone on ScriptLance to do a more professional job for you including a complete redesign of the appearance probably for less than $100. Which to my way of thinking is a lot less hassle.

A few other thoughts.

I know some people will say to themselves "Well what's the value of a product like this given the market – isn't it over saturated?"

My answer – Nope the market isn't over saturated. The market is HUGE and growing bigger every day, and I don't have the resources to cover it all. If you really think it's over saturated, do a bit of promotion for SmartDD and see what happens.

Here's an example.

The other day while on Tim Knox's blog, I saw a post by Tim answering a subscriber question which showed perfectly how a lot of people still don't know anything about digital delivery and how it works.

Just because *you* may know all about digital delivery (or any other subject) doesn't mean that everyone else does. We all make the mistake of thinking something is common knowledge just because we know it and the people we hang out with know it too. That's not true.

And we all undervalue the information in our heads when in reality it's a gold mine if handled properly.

Anyway, back on track and let's get this ramble finished.

Your comments made me stop and think about pricing. I sort of expected that.

I had a chat with Paul and we don't want to give PLR away. But by the same token we don't want to make it so expensive that no-one buys.

Going back to the value we believe SmartDD LITE is worth, Paul and I expected total revenue from the sale to be about $3,000 – that was our target – $297 x 10.

We've come to a compromise. We've made some concessions. You've read the two provisos we've added above.

We're going to run a "nickel" sale for PLR. We're going to start the sale at a much lower price and we've also halved our revenue target.

But, the incremental price isn't going to be a nickel. We're going to make it higher than that.

We've decided to sell 20 copies instead of 10, thereby reducing the cost of each copy.

As usual, first in gets the best price, but the final price on the 20th copy still won't be outrageous by any means. We'll run the sale until all copies are gone or 48 hours have passed, whichever comes first.

If you're interested in this, stay tuned. I may throw in a couple of other nice little freebies that will make you a very happy bunny, so let's wait and see what happens.

-Frank Haywood
P.S. I know I said I'd run it on the 16th, but I've had a nasty end of Summer cold that's knocked me for six and I haven't been able to trust my brain while I've been taking Ibuprofen. While it makes me feel better, it always wrecks my ability to think clearly, so I don't like to take any chances…

The PLR licence will allow you to do what you like with SmartDD LITE other than sell PLR yourself.

Interested?

Well…  How much should I charge?  Leave a comment and let me know.

If I don't get any comments I'll choose a price depending on what I believe it's worth.  I already have a price in mind that I believe is fair, but I'd like to see what you think.

The sale will be first come first served.

-Frank Haywood

This doesn't include resale rights, just the ability to use it on your own sites.

If you've purchased resale rights, then why not use the same principles we've been discussing here the last few days and give your internet business a boost?

You know it makes sense.

-Frank Haywood

There have been various changes to it made along the way.  I've been using it to handle support this last three weeks, and it's now at a point where it can be released.

David (the developer) has been working on it for 2+ years on and off, and has recently added all the new features I've requested – he's been working on the new bits since November 2007.  After the first release, there will be other releases every so often as we add requested features.

But right now, it's really nice.

In fact it's better than nice, it's excellent.

The features are:-

• Multiple departments and multiple users.
• Multiple departments (CTRL-click selectable) per user.
• Multiple users per department.
• Moderators, Super Moderators and Administrators.
• Allowed attachments which you can specify e.g. .jpg|.gif|.doc|.txt.
• Auto zip attachments.
• Open tickets which can be filtered in real time.
• Filters for department, priority and awaiting response by.
• Search tickets by key word, department, priority, status and date.
• Multiple standard responses which can be selected, added and edited.
• Merge similar tickets.
• Frequently Asked Questions by department.
• System tools function to purge old tickets and attachments.
• Ability to contact other help desk staff by email.
• Ban filters by email address, IP address and key words plus wild card support.
• Email notifications to both customers and support staff.
• Choice of PHP mail or SMTP to send emails.
• Signatures for staff replies to customers.
• Captcha codes.
• Auto close tickets.
• Time offset where the server is not in your time zone.
• Multiple languages via language files (only English initially).
• Last but not least, LIVE SUPPORT (operator – customer chat) with optional captcha codes.

I'll be launching it as a nickel sale because I want as many people to start using it as possible in as short a time as possible.  And most importantly, I'll be looking for affiliates.

The nickel sale will start at $5, increase by 5 cents with each sale, run for a week or two and then be removed and the real site will go live.

After the nickel sale is over, the initial price will be $47 and it will be promoted via ClickBank with a restricted free version on the front end, and the purchase of the full script offered to those that take the free version.  After a month the price will go up to $97, which reflects its true worth.

When we set it up through ClickBank, the affiliate commission will be 50%.

Like all scripts you can expect to be released by me, this is premium quality software.

So you'll be getting 5 star software for under ten dollars if you're quick.

THIS IS A PRE-LAUNCH.  Maybe not everything in the sales process will be perfect, but it will be good enough.  The software is complete and fully functioning.

When the nickel sale starts, the first people to be notified will be those that bought resale rights to SmartDD LITE.  They'll get an hours start.

The next group that will be notified will be subscribers to this blog.  You can subscribe on the home page at the top right by entering your name and email address.  Blog subscribers will get 3 hours start on everyone else.

Finally, 4 hours from launch I'll send out an email to my remaining lists.

So I'm rewarding buyers first, then subscribers to this blog, then everyone else gets told afterwards.

The start time will be at some point on Tuesday 18th March.  I can't give you an exact time yet due to circumstances beyond my control, but Tuesday will definitely be the pre-launch day.

I'll be doing the pre-launch using the newly updated nickel script, which is also developed by David.

In fact, he's just making some changes now as I type this, to finish an admin panel to search orders, re-send links and ban customers who you don't want to deal with, such as serial refunders.

More on that software when we've battle tested it next week, but you can be sure we'll be releasing that too, likely in a nickel sale, and likely within a month.

Again, it's premium quality 5 star software.

-Frank Haywood

Don't get me wrong, the nickel script was fine and actually did more than I expected it to considering it was a first prototype.  There were a couple of tiddly bugs in it, but they were fixed almost immediately by David.

The nightmare was because of all the support issues.

(BTW – if you have a problem, raise a ticket at:-

http://www.Vendiva.com/support/)

The support tickets pretty much broke down into two groups.

#1 – I haven't had my download email.
#2 – The zip file I've downloaded is password protected.

NEITHER of these were caused by the nickel script.

#1 Was because of email providers routinely blocking business email, I've mentioned this before.

http://www.frankhaywood.com/internet-business-taken-seriously/
http://www.frankhaywood.com/does-your-email-work/

#2 Was a doozy.

To make things easier (hah!) my SmartDD developer, Paul, wrote a bit of code to zip up the SmartDD Lite package on the server and automatically insert your affiliate ID into it.

He used standard code to do this, nothing out of the ordinary.  We tested and tested it with and without an affiliate ID, and it worked perfectly for us.

But for some people, they couldn't read the file because according to Windows it was password protected.  This completely puzzled us, as it most definitely isn't.

In the end one of our customers said they'd been trying the built in Windows utility, and when he installed an unzip program instead, it all started working as it should.

Aha!

It turns out Windows was the culprit.  It can't read all zip types.

So we had a fix.  Except…

Some people still had the same problem but finally got it to work by reading all the files out of the zip and then re-creating it themselves again.  Even so, one person just couldn't get it to read and opted for a refund.

This has been really frustrating for both sides, and I'm now looking at an alternative (but messy) method of allowing you to embed your affiliate ID.

Anyway…

Back to the nickel script.

I gave David some feedback and said it could do with this, and a bit of that, and some method of doing this other thing.

So I got an email this morning saying he'd not only implemented my suggestions, but also added in some other stuff too.

I already know how good this script is, it's amazingly easy to use.

It uses flat text files to gather all the order data, has a web page templating system with placeholders, and is a complete doddle to set up.  Just create your web page, add your placeholders, stick it in a secret templates directory, edit the config file, and you're done.

It really is that easy.

What David has now done is add a whole pile of functionality into the back end for handling orders and customers.

Incredible.  I can't wait to see it, because yes, he hasn't sent me a copy yet because he's still working on it.

I'm just really excited at the prospect of seeing it all in action.

See, I know how good the admin panel on our new Ticket Desk Pro (TDP) software is, and if David has applied the same attention to detail to the Nickel Script, I'm talking about a VERY high quality piece of software, a really useful tool in anyone's arsenal.

Speaking of TDP, I'll have an announcement to make in the next couple of days, so watch this space.

One last thing.  The sales page for SmartDD Lite has come back from the designer, so I'll be putting the sales copy in there ASAP, and updating everyone who bought a copy.

Watch out for that too.

-Frank Haywood

The resale rights nickel sale is now live at:-

http://www.smartddlite.com/rrns/

You now have 2 hours head start on my mailing lists.

The install video is up, I'll add the usage video in the next hour or so.

If there's a problem with your purchase, DON'T PANIC! Just raise a support ticket and I'll sort you out.

http://www.vendiva.com/support/

Please be patient if there IS a problem, but don't fret as you'll get your purchase as soon as I'm able to get it resolved for you.

The nickel script I'm using is brand new and was having changes made to it just a couple of hours ago.

We've tested it through repeatedly and it's all working now for us, but you never know for sure what other little bugs haven't shown themselves to us during testing.

Enjoy your resale rights to SmartDD Lite, and thanks again for being on my blog notify list.

-Frank Haywood

P.S. I'll have another nickel sale for my help desk software up very soon. Again, you'll get first notification.

Well, this is one of those times.

Everything was ready to go on the SmartDD Lite resale rights page, and I do a couple of test purchases and notice a couple of little bugs in the nickel script that we hadn't spotted before.

So I try a couple of things, and find it's just making things worse.

Okay, enough's enough. David is going to fix the problems this evening, and tomorrow the nickel sale goes live.

I'm really sorry about this, but it's just one of those times when a battle plan hits real combat and everything goes a bit wrong.

So tomorrow at 1.00pm GMT (8.00am EST), if you're on my blog notification list, you'll see a password protected post go live here with details of where to to find the nickel sale for SmartDD Lite. The starting price will be $1.07 and rise by 5 cents at every sale.

At 3.00pm GMT, I'll remove the password, so you'll be getting a 2 hour head start on my other lists.

To all those people who have emailed me, made comments here on my blog and raised support tickets…

I apologise.

Like I said, sometimes things don't go quite according to plan.

-Frank Haywood

If you're one of the first 18 people, you'll get it for under $2.

If you're one of the first 48 people, you'll get it for under $5.

Even if you buy at $15, you'll still be getting it cheaper than the final price on the official launch day when resale rights will be sold at $27.

Note that this is for resale rights, NOT master resale rights.

If you don't know the difference, then read my earlier post:-

http://www.frankhaywood.com/rr-mrr-plr/

Why is resale rights such a good thing to have?  Well, it means that you'll be able to immediately start selling SmartDD Lite yourself and earn money by doing it.

You'll also be able to earn money just by GIVING AWAY your copy of SmartDD Lite, because the resale rights version comes with the ability to embed your SmartDD affiliate link inside it.

SmartDD is currently at version 2 and sells for $97 in the members area of the SmartDD.com web site.  The commission payout for SmartDD v2 is 50%.

Confused?  Don't know what I'm talking about?

Okay, here we go.

The original SmartDD is now at version 2.

Shortly, I'll be releasing a cut down version of it called SmartDD Lite.  Hence the "Lite"…

SmartDD Lite is based on the original version of SmartDD and until recently, that version was selling every day of the week between $67 and $97 depending on when you purchased it.  All the people that bought the original version in the last 12 months have now received a free upgrade to version 2.

Because I know that many start up businesses can't afford or don't want to shell out $97 to do delivery and download protection, I took the old version of SmartDD, tweaked it a bit, and I'm now releasing it as SmartDD Lite.

And tomorrow, I'll be releasing it with RESALE RIGHTS for under $2 for the first few people to grab it.

This will be done through a NICKEL SALE.

Okay, "what's a nickel sale?" I hear you cry.

Simply, every time there's a sale, the price goes up by 5 cents.

The price will start at $1.07 for the first person fast enough to get there and click the buy button.  The next person gets it at $1.12, the next at $1.17 and so on.  It will take 18 purchases for it to go over $2 to $2.02.

So the fastest clicker gets the lowest price.

I'll run the sale for maybe 48 hours, and then close it down.  After that, resale rights will be set at $27…

Going back to how you can earn money by giving away your copy of SmartDD.

Yes, you can sell it for whatever you think is reasonable, and many people will be happy to purchase from you.  But you can still make money even if you give it away.

How?

Simply by embedding your affiliate link for the FULL SmartDD now at v2.  When someone installs SmartDD Lite and decides to upgrade to SmartDD v2 to get all the swizzy new features we've just added, they'll click YOUR affiliate link, and you'll get the commission.

Isn't that cool?

Well I think it is.

Tomorrow, here on this blog, I'll make a password protected post with details of where the nickel sale is running.

I'll drop you a line if you're on the blog notification list.  After I've sent the email out with the password, then if you aren't on the list, you'll miss the sale and you'll have to pay $27 if you want resale rights.

If you aren't on the list, go to the home page of this blog and look over on the right.  Enter your name and email address in the boxes and click the button.

Then tomorrow (Tuesday) you'll get an email from me.

-Frank Haywood

When the site officially goes live, I'll be selling it at $7 for personal use.

I'll also be selling resale rights to it, somewhere between $17 and $27. We're still talking about the final price for resale rights, but I think it will be settled at $27.

But before I do that, I'd like to offer you the chance to get resale rights at under 2 dollars by offering SmartDD Lite in a nickel sale.

I'll be starting the price at $1.07, and raising it by 5 cents with every sale. So the first 18 buyers will get SmartDD Lite for under two dollars.

The resale rights version is a special version that you can embed with your affiliate link to the full version of SmartDD. The personal version doesn't have this embedded link.

Until we released SmartDD v2, I was selling copies of v1 every day of the week for $67-$97 – that's what you're buying when you get SmartDD Lite v1.

Once you have the resale rights version of SmartDD Lite, you can sell or give it away with your affiliate link embedded inside it. Every person you sell or give it to that then installs it, will have your affiliate link for SmartDD v2 at the bottom of every page.

I'll announce details of where you can find the nickel sale on Tuesday at 1.00pm GMT (8.00am EST) here on this blog in a password protected post.

I'm also considering selling a few copies of Private Label Rights to SmartDD Lite.  This would be for no less than $300.

With Private Label Rights this means you'll be able to completely re-skin it, give it a different name and call it your own. You could easily find someone on ScriptLance, Elance or Craig's List to do this for you for less than a couple of hundred dollars.

If you're interested in purchasing PLR for SmartDD Lite, then go to my support desk at:-

http://www.Vendiva.com/support/

and raise a ticket under the "personal message" department.

I'll keep a note of your details, and let you know when I intend to do this.

-Frank Haywood