There are not going to be many updates over the next few days, although I will try and post a daily update. The main bulk of the work right now is working with the new MVS system and seeing how it all fits together with the Seven Dollar Secrets software.

So far I have compiled a list of around 25 PLR products and dozens of reseller products that all related to list building, email marketing, advertising and traffic generation. I have to whittle these down to the best ones and then sort them into the giveaway products, OTO products and the upsell products.

As I mentioned yesterday, using the Seven Dollar Secrets I can give subscribers the full 100% commission on the OTO and I get to keep any money made on the upsell. This gives people (particularly JV’s!) an incredible incentive to promote it as it’s like them selling their own product to their list where they keep 100% of the money made.

The failure to find the right software for my original plan has sent me off in a new direction for the List Building Project. I’ve vented my frustration and fury on my other blog at PeterClaridge.com about the lack of decent flexible software out there.

So, due to not being able to find the right software, as I mentioned yesterday, I’ve moved over to using My Viral Spiral. I’ve had to change my hosting account to their $49.99 per month hosted option because the old server I was on was limiting the number of emails I could send out per hour. Since the new software isn’t integrated with Aweber (another example of software not reaching my requirements) all the emails are sent from your website. This includes your welcome and automated emails, your broadcast emails (where you email your list) and your members emails.

It also meant that today I had to start doing some more research on finding products to create an enticing and ‘too good to miss’ one time offer for my subscribers to earn money on as well as an upsell and downsell for me to earn money on.

I’m not sure how to do this exactly just yet, but I think I need to re-work some more PLR products to create the truly unmissable offer. The thing is, I have to do it not only for the members OTO where they make 100% commission but also for the upsell where I will be making my extra cash.

So I’m almost back to square one in this project. Hope I can see it through to the finish!

After a long search, going through more wannabe products I think I may have found the solution. Unfortunately it changes my gameplan somewhat with regards to The List Building Project. The software is called My Viral Spiral and let me tell you, it’s certainly not cheap! At $497 it’s an expensive bit of kit, or you can have it hosted for $49.99 a month.

Either way, it cuts into my $1,000 budget.

Basically, what the software does is it enables you to make dozens of squeeze pages, let people signup and then they can rebrand your products and start giving them away building their list at the same time. You are helping other people build their list and they are helping to build your list.

At the same time, you can send them (your new subscribers) to a OTO page and - this is the great part - you let your subscribers keep 100% of the money from the OTO! Crazy I know. Then you send the subscribers to an upsell and you keep 100% of the profits from that.

This gives people an incredible incentive to promote your products because they are getting a OTO created for them, everything handled for them and they get to keep 100% of the money.

I have decided to use this software in conjunction with the Seven Dollar Secrets software so that I can offer the OTO and the upsell automatically.

Unfortuantely, this has moved the goal posts of the project somewhat and will delay the launch time even further.

This is something that happens so often with my projects. What starts out as a seemingly simple project quickly snowballs into a larger and more expensive project - and often I get bored or lose motivation to stick with it and let it go.

However, writing this blog daily is helping to keep the motivation and the momentum so I really hope that it will become successful this time.

For my feelings right now, see the title above Utterly frustrated. You see, I installed the ListSpawner software only to discover that many files were encrypted and the software just wasn’t as flexible as I first thought.

For example, I want to give people 3 bonuses on my squeeze page, have them fill out my Aweber form and then be re-directed to the form that tells subscribers if they refer just X amount of friends then they will be eligible for some extra bonus products.

All seem pretty logical and fine?

Well, the ListSpawner software insists that you use their signup form on your front page to sign users up to the service as well as your autoresponder. OK, that’s fine, I could live with that. But then on the ‘members’ page which gives users their referral link I wanted to be able to edit that to tell them about the extra bonuses I’m giving away if they refer X number of friends.

Unfortunately, because the ListSpawner software is encrypted you can’t edit the members page to put any extra information in.

In short, it was useless for what I wanted to do, so I have to find an alternative solution.

Compounded to these problems are the fact that I’ve decided that one of the products I’m offering is just not up to scratch (even though it’s a free product and in all likelihood people are not going to read it). I’ve also decided that the autoresponder series is not up to par and need to do an alternative.

Yep, sometimes is does suck to be me :-/

Sunday is traditionally the day of rest (well according to the bible anyway). Today I decided to take a break from working on The List Building Project.

Out of curiosity I decided to check my traffic stats for this site. Remember, I’ve not promoted this site or told anyone about this site. Check out the stats below:

These stats were generated by StatCounter.com. I then checked Google Analytics which gave the following information:

To be honest, I don’t like the way either site presents the data. I prefer the simplicity of AwStats or Webalizer, but this site doesn’t seem to have that enabled

Yeah! Today I finally finished re-working all the autoresponders. I’ve been doing 15-20 minutes on it everyday because it was one of my least favourite tasks (after searching and sorting through all the products I own related to list building). However, since I did just a little bit of work on it each day, it got completed.

I still need to get List Spawner and install it, set it up and test it out, but I’m 99.99% confident that this baby can go live on Tuesday or Wednesday.

To be honest, I’ve not thought about the best way to introduce this website. Making a couple of forum posts? Start off with Pay Per Click…I’m not sure. I will have to think about it in the next few days!

I’ve finally made a decision with regards to which viral script to use. In the end the decision wasn’t as hard as I thought it was going to be. The decision simply came down to price. Where List Virus wanted to charge me an extortionate $97 per month, the List Spawner was either free or just $37.

Since I don’t even have a list to talk of, I just paid the $37 fee. The script also comes with IP tracking, so no signing up under yourselves to get the bonuses

I will get the script installed over the weekend and sort out the bonuses for it too.

I also finished off the video pages. There is a short cut link in The Beginners Guide To Squeeze Pages package that you downloaded to the video pages on this site. This also lets me add some more sales copy and advertise The List Building Project more. The disclaimer and privacy policies are both now done so I should now have some legal standing - not that anyone ever reads these documents anyway.

I guess I could put something like, “continued use of this website means you must pay me $97 every month after the 3rd month that you use it. Failure to do so…” (that text isn’t actually in there just incase you were about to click the close button!) - no one would ever read it though.

I think, maybe, the end might be in sight. With more loose end pulling going on today, I can’t see that I have that much more to do. I think come Monday or Tuesday this baby will be ready to launch…and then we’ll see what happens.

I watched a couple of videos from Keith Wellman about how the traditional squeeze page is dead and you need 10x the number of subscribers to make the same as you did a few years ago…but then again he is promoting a new ‘list building wonder tool’ so it’s in his best interests to naysay current methods. (To be honest, his new method is nothing ground breaking, it’s just a cool little script).

I also got in touch with my graphics man, Hrvoje (he was out buying shares), and organised some time frames for the new squeeze page and membership card.

There are still some autoresponder series that need to be reworked, that is turning into a bit of a pain, I’ve just got to be careful not to start avoiding it and just do it. I also need to finish off one more video page and then that should be good to go.

I still need to add a legal page and an earnings disclaimer page. I’ve also got to make a decision on whether I choose List Virus or List Spawner and get it installed and working.

Still, eleven days in to the project and so much has been done already so I’ve got to take the positives out of that.

I’m nearly there now, most of the major parts to this site have been completed but now it’s just a case of pulling all the lose ends together - the details that make the difference between a successful site and a barron wasteground.

I often find that what you consider to be the bulk of the work can be done in about 50% of the time. The other 50% is taken up with the hundreds of small jobs that only take 10-20 minutes to do but there are so many of them.

Working on the details is often where I lose faith and focus in the project and move on to something else. I have lost count the number of times I’ve gotten a project to 80-90% complete and dropped it by the wayside.

Not this time though.

All the various license pages and PPC landing pages are now done with the appropriate signup forms inplace for tracking. I also added a load of resources to the resources page and removed the RSS feed from the blog. I removed the RSS feed because I want this to be a private blog and not be indexed by the search engines or ping any services.

I had 50% success rate chasing up two people; one for the graphics and another about re-working articles and e-books. I mostly wanted to get in touch with Hrvoje doing the graphics but he didn’t answer all day. Tomorrow hopefully he will have something for me.

Are you following a trend here? Putting together a site, at least for me, is a whole lot more difficult than it probably is. I probably make it more of a challenge than it should be.

Anyway, today I finished reworking one of the ebooks and moved on to the next one. About a quarter of the way through it I was getting a sneaky suspicion that I had already been here and done it. I couldn’t put my finger on it though, I didn’t know why alarm bells were going off in my head.

When I took a break and was making a cup of tea (it’s what us Brits do) it came to me that I had already worked on some of these articles for the autoresponder. Aragh! Nightmare. This meant I had to find and re-format a whole load of new articles to use for the autoresponder…that will be done tomorrow.

Oh yeah, I also forgot to mention that I added a branding ability to the 2 ebooks that I’ve rebranded. This will allow people to add their name and a link to their website in the ebooks. It’s pretty cool because it can generate clicks to your site and gets your name out and about.

Today I also signed up to AdWords, Live (MSN) and Yahoo for PPC accounts. I haven’t spent much time looking into PPC, but I feel that I can get a lot of traffic from it. I can’t wait to get my toes wet when I dip into the PPC campaigns. It will be pretty exciting watching the conversion rates and testing different things and watching almost in real time how it affects the signup rates.

Finally I packaged up the bonuses and uploaded them. They all work now.

I just want to review what I’ve still got to do now, just so that I know where I’m at and so you can see how much I’ve got left after 8 days of work.

• Re-work a new 7 part autoresponder series
• Install List Spawner or List Virus (for email addresses)
• Get the graphics from designer for squeeze page and membership card (need to chase him up on that)
• Have a final once through the ebooks before converting them to PDF and uploading to this site
• Work out what extra products to offer as a gift on the List Spawner/Virus feature
• Package up those extra products, create a download page for them and upload the products
• Create a signup page for people clicking on links in the ebooks (for tracking)
• I don’t know if I have to create individual landing pages for the three PPC sites for tracking, I will have to look into it
• Add list of resources to the resources page (hopefully won’t take too long!)
• Remove RSS feed from this blog to keep it private!
• Upload the videos to this site and redo the design to make it look the same as this blog
• Touch up the squeeze page text a little bit more

I think that’s everything. It sure seems like a fair amount to do. I want to have it all done in the next couple of days though. Wish me luck on that one!