Avoiding Headaches, Creating Flagships and Harry Potter…
How have you been? It’s the darkest day of the year today. Well, on this part of our planet it is. If you’re from my half of the planet, I sure hope you can cope. Actually I always find it this day very festive. As from tomorrow, we’re heading for lots of light again!
Just the other day I was knocked over by an email advertising software which creates squeeze pages. Special offer - bla, bla, bla - flagship of the enterprise - bla, bla - over 50% discount.
About a week before this I had learned that squeeze pages are the way to go, and this thing was advertised as ‘4 clicks - 5 minutes’ to create your squeeze page so I decided to check it out. I bought the software and had it running within 5 minutes.
Well, I did my 4 clicks in way under 5 minutes and then…
- Spent 20 minutes searching for the files I had just created
- Discovered the actual squeeze page was loaded with phrases like ‘here’s where your headline should go’; ‘replace this text with a good description of what you have to offer’; ‘adjust this URL to reflect your main sales page’ etc.
- After another 3 hours of writing a compelling text, uploaded it all to my server and tried it out. Entered my own name and email address, got redirected, but… my salespage wasn’t customized at all?!
- Went back to the software and clicked the help link. This got me back to the original salespage from where I had just bought the software…
Flagship of the Enterprise? My goodness, if this is what people call a flagship these days then what do their smaller vessels look like?
Don’t try this yourself!
It’s the quickest way to get buried in refund requests, see your mailinglist shrink to zero and never be able to sell anything online again…
On the other hand…
If you can create a software yourself which generates working squeeze pages AND if you provide accurate information about your tool AND your help link goes somewhere where you actually provide real help…
- you will save yourself $67 bucks and a headache
- you will have a potential hot-seller
Making your own software is really not that hard. If you can create a webpage, you can make software. If you want to see some cool examples of software recently created by me and a friend of mine, check out the following site:
http://www.articles411.com/wp/on-the-road-again
This is a Christmas package put together by Laurie Meade from Articles 411. A very nice and creative way to make use of Make Your Own Software.
If you are a fan of Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter and other fantasy stuff, have a look at:
http://letsmakesoftware.com/blogs/2005/12/20/mystery-letter-writer
This is a software I initially created for my sons and it can translate any letter you write into 10 different fantasy languages. From the screenshots you will probably be able to tell straight away that it’s an Instant Software Builder application. It goes quite beyond what MYOS can do…
Just for the record: I still have zero knowledge of C++, VBasic, Perl and what else is used to create software. This was all done with CSS, HTML and okay, a wee bit of basic javascript.
Have a great week!
Patricia Ritsema van Eck
P.S.
If you want to learn how to do this stuff yourself, I can teach you. If you already own ISB check out:
http://www.programmersecretsrevealed.com
If you’re contemplating buying it, just hold off for a couple more days as I’ve finally convinced Cody from ISB to…
I’ll tell you that soon!