PLR Software – Buyer Beware
Private Label Rights, or PLR, is one of the quickest ways to create your own product. This is especially true if the PLR item in question is an ebook or report.
The great thing about Private Label Rights is that you are supplied with the original, editable version of the product and you are free to do anything you want with it. The absolute minimum that you could do would be to resell it as is, but that really defeats the point of PLR. It’s advisable to at least change the title and put your own name in as author, but personally, I prefer to rewrite sections of them, add to them, remove out-of-date information etc.
When it comes to software, though, things aren’t as easy. To begin with, you need to be a programmer, or have access to a programmer if you want to make any changes to the software. Furthermore, you also need a copy of the programming language under which it was developed. E.g. Visual Basic, C++, Delphi etc. If you don’t have that, then you will not be able to create a new version of the software with your changes in it.
Even if you are a programmer, or have access to one, and have the relevant programming language available, the problems don’t always stop there as I found out on several occasions.
As a professional programmer, I know how long it can take to develop new software programs. So there have been occasions where I have been offered PLR on some existing software and I have taken up the offer. Knowing that I have the ability to change, enhance, improve or add new features to the software, it’s a very quick way of getting software written. Or so I thought!
On more than one occasion, the original software programmer has used some additional, commercial software libraries to create the software. If you don’t have those libraries, you cannot build new versions of the software. Buying them is an additional expense that you haven’t factored in to the overall costs.
Similarly, other programmers have used free libraries that no longer exist, or don’t work with the latest version of the programming language. In some cases, they can be made to work, but it requires a lot of effort. In other cases, there’s little or nothing you can do short of finding an equivalent library or writinf the software yourself. In many cases I have ended up abandoning the project as I don’t have the time to spend trying to get it to work.
The worst scenario is that the originator of the PLR software doesn’t give you all of the original source code, so there are parts of the software that you simply cannot change. This happened to me on one occasion. The PLR source was not being sold by the originator, but somebody else who had bought the PLR rights and was selling them on. He had no idea that the source code was incomplete and was also uncontactable.
I ended up hacking the executable to make changes (not for the faint-hearted!). It eventually became impossible to make further changes and I had to withdraw my plans to put the product to market.
That was quite a disappointment to say the least as it was a product that I really wanted to sell. I am now in the process of creating a similar product from scratch, which is actually turning out better than the original, but I have effectively lost the time and money that I invested in that PLR product.
So, if you are getting in to the lucrative software market, and using PLR as baselines for some of your own products, ensure that you have all of the source code, as well as the tools and knowledge you need to modify it.
Caveat Emptor – Let The Buyer Beware!
“Your Software Website” : Review
Filed under: Hints and Tips, Income Streams, Website Building Software
One of the biggest selling products on the Internet is software. You only have to look at the absolutely enormous size of the iPhone App Store to see just how big the demand for software is. But it doesn’t just stop at applications for mobile phones. The world has a voracious appetite for desktop PC software, too.
Dave Nicholson’s Your Software Website lets you become part of this billion-dollar industry by providing you with a complete, ready-to-go software website, complete with a selection of over 30 software products to start you off. What’s more, you get to keep every cent of profit you make from the sale of those products, which means you can recover the cost of Your Software Website after just a couple of sales. Unlike affiliate products, the money you make from these sales goes straight into your PayPal account. No waiting for a check to arrive in the post. No waiting 60 days to cover refunds. They are all direct sales into your account.
Now if you’re an old cynic like me, you may be forgiven for thinking that the software packages that are bundled with Your Software Website are, cheap, outdated products, which will leave you with a site full of garbage that nobody wants. Well worry not! The titles may not be the very latest, ground-breaking tools, but they are still useful software products. If there are products that just aren’t selling, or you don’t like them – then don’t sell them! You are the store manager and you can choose whatever you want to sell.
The site that you get has an excellent control panel that lets you add new Categories, and new Products instantly. As long as you have the right to sell them and you have access to copies of them, you can add them to Your Software Website. And when you do that, a really cool feature kicks in. The front page of your site automatically updates itself to feature the new product that you have added. It’s a nice touch that keeps your site fresh, which the search engines love.
If you are wondering from where you will be able to get new software products to add to your store, you’re in for another surprise. Not only can you sell your own software products, but you can also sell ClickBank and PayDotCom products too. All you need to do is enter your user IDs for those affiliate programs and you’re ready to go. These affiliate products are integrated right into your site, so that visitors will not know the difference. They will just see the details of another softare product in your catalog. It’s not until they click the link for more details that they will be taken to the PayDotCom or ClickBank vendor’s sales page.
If all that wasn’t enough, you can also choose to display keyword-sensitive Clickbank ads on the site using the in-built Clickbank ad rotator, with your Clickbank nickname automatically inserted into the hoplinks. That rotator on its own has a $67 value, so getting a fully-populated software website with over 30 products, complete with a full-featured control panel, 20 display themes, and the ad rotator for just $30 more has to be an absolute bargain.
All you need to do is upload the site to your web host, enter a few details into the Admin area and you’re ready to go. You don’t need to know any HTML, PHP or even set up an SQL database to be up and running. This really is a ready-to-go software website.
As a professional computer programmer, I wouldn’t bother sitting down for hours trying to create a website with all these features – I’d just buy Your Software Website before Dave Nicholson comes to his senses and puts the price up!
As an aside, if you don’t know Dave Nicholson, he’s a UK-based marketer who often works with another UK-based marketer, John Thornhill. I’ve bought several of their products in the past, and they always over-deliver. Without fail. They are probably the most honest marketing “gurus” I’ve come across.
If you want to see just how easy it is to use this software, check out the videos of Your Software Website.
PDF Power Brand Offers Free Affiliate Marketing
PDF Power Brand marketing executive Dan Blackburn is excited to announce a free promotional offer, available to any online merchant operating an affiliate program. “We want to promote your e-book” says Blackburn.
He goes on to explain. “PDF Power Brand is a free software application that allows affiliates to brand links within a PDF file. Merchants can create effective e-book marketing campaigns for affiliates and affiliates can brand them with one easy click.
We have almost 10,000 affiliate marketers registered at PDF Power Brand and they are all looking for effective, profitable promotions to set up. I want to work with merchants who operate an affiliate program to set up a profitable e-book marketing campaigns for our affiliates to use. It really easy to do.
Imagine all of a sudden having hundreds of professional affiliate marketers all promoting your product and making sales for you every day. That is what I am trying to offer, at no cost, today.”
It sure sounds like an offer that’s too good to be true, but how does it work? When asked how he makes money through this offer, Blackburn explained… “I’m after some free promotion too, and the most powerful promotion you can get is word of mouth. I am looking to help both merchants and affiliate marketers though these difficult times by offering my services for free. Hopefully they will be glad to tell their friends and I will be paid back later”.
“The merchants we work with are required to promote the campaign we create with them to their own affiliates, this will help to spread the word about PDF Power Brand and get more people joining the site, using the software and setting up the profit proven campaigns we give to them.”
To get your FREE copy of PDF Power Brand, click here.
For more information on how to take advantage of this exciting offer to get more affiliates making sales of your product contact Dan directly though the number below or free though Skype
For more details, call:
UK: 020 8144 2865
US: (630) 687-1378
International, +44 20 8144 2865
Viral Reports – Effective, Low-cost Promotion
In the Online Marketing world, the term “viral marketing” has been around for a few years now. It’s a slightly strange name really, because the words “virus” and “viral” usually have such negative meanings.
Nobody likes to contract a virus or a viral infection. We talk about computer viruses – programs that make copies of themselves and transfer them to other computers on a network. There’s a whole industry centred around Anti-Virus software.
Despite the negative uses of the words, Viral Marketing is popular, effective, and ultimately very low cost.
Whether it’s a clinical virus or a computer virus, the underlying “viral” principle is that something is duplicated and passed on to another person or computer. The payload could be anything. In the case of a clinical virus, a person recieves some bacteria. Shortly after this, the recipient displays symptoms of illness. In a computer virus, the computer receives a small program. Sometimes damage is caused to the contents of the computer’s disk, although many viruses are completely benign.
When it comes to Viral Marketing, a person typically receives a free report, ebook or software, which they are then free to duplicate and pass on to as many people as they want. Free gifts are often used as an incentive to get people sign up to a mailing list, and marketers are always on the lookout for new items that they may give away for this purpose. As each person who receives it gives it away to yet more people, the number of people who have copies of the item increases exponentially.
So, you the author, write a report and give it away free to say, 20 people. Maybe 10 of those people are interested in using it as a gift to pass on to other people. If they each give it to 10 people, that’s a further 100 people who have your report. Then those 100 people might also give it away to 10 people each, adding a further 1000 to the number of owners. This can continue on and on as more people give it away.
Now what if each person gave the report away to 20 other people? or 50? or 100? The number of people who own the report after a short time could reach several thousand.
So what is the benefit of unleashing this free report on the market? Well of course, the report contains appropriate links back to your website or sales pages. So for each person who reads the report, you have a potential customer. Of course, not all recipients will read the report – they’ll just pass it on to other people, or forget about it. But those who are generally interested in the report’s contents will read it, and may follow the links back to your website.
The beauty of this system is that you might have given the report to a very small number of people, but the potential to receive a lot of traffic to your website is huge. You have effectively employed other people to promote your website without paying a dime.
This sounds like an ideal marketing solution, but there is a further stumbling block. Having received the free report, what incentive is there for anyone to give it away to other people? Some will welcome it as a free gift that they can use to get their own sign-ups, but many will think “What’s in it for me?”.
This is where Brandable reports come in. Your report contains links to your website, or affiliate links to other products. The Branding process allows the recipient of your report to change one or more of those links to their own. So when they pass the report on to other people, they too can see the benefit of it. Your report would be designed that only a limited number of the links are brandable, so that at least one of your own links remains. Then everyone who receives your report will be able to access your link, regardless of which other links have been changed.
A PDF file is made brandable by inserting special bookmarks into the file when you write it. The branding software that you use then locates these bookmarks and replaces them with the link or text that you enter. It’s an incredibly simple process. If you can create PDF files, you can create a brandable report.
There are many programs available for branding PDF files, but the one which I prefer by far is PDF Power Brand. It has recently been rewritten and updated so that it works properly on Vista systems as well as Windows XP. It is so simple to use, and is totally FREE. It lets you brand as many reports that you want. So go to PDF Power Brand, download a copy and start making those brandable reports.
ScreenRuler
When you’re designing websites and graphics, have you ever wanted to measure the size of something on your screen in pixels?
You can do it by grabbing the screen and loading it into an expensive program such as PaintShop Pro or Photoshop.
Or you could measure it using ScreenRuler.
ScreenRuler is a useful tool for measuring anything in pixels on your PC screen. You can set the transparency level of ScreenRuler so that you can see what you are measuring.
Coming soon to this site, at an incredibly low price.
Article Marketing
