Traffic Rush is LIVE!

I’ve developed a home study course on the usage of StumbleUpon to drive traffic to your website. This project is the account of my progress in developing and marketing that course. The course is now LIVE, is called Traffic Rush and you can enroll right now at http://www.traffic-rush.net/.

Gosh, I Actually Finished It! :-)

A couple of months ago I was seriously wondering if I had bitten off more than I could chew with this project but I am thrilled to have finished the course at last! It is now live which means that the free lessons should start being delivered now (I’ll discuss technical hitches in a moment!) and it is also possible to buy the full course. Since I announced the launch date and price last week I was delighted to have several people email me to ask if they could buy it right away! Well, here is the direct link :-)

For all you eager bunnies, click here to buy the full Traffic Rush course for $27 :-)

I am astounded that I’ve already started to make sales within one hour and you guys haven’t seen any more than the introductory lesson, I am flattered! I do hope it lives up to expectations. I sent an email to my first buyer to thank him for making my day hehe!

A Multitude of Technical Hitches!

You didn’t think my first launch would all go smoothly did you? No, neither did I lol!! Never mind, all sorted out now. Here is a run down of the problems I had and how I fixed them.

Innaccessible Lesson Pages

I had tested all of my links extensively but it didn’t occur to me to double check that other people could see the pages until a couple of hours before the launch. To my dismay, everybody but me got a 404 error page. However, it didn’t take me long to find the solution. I’ve set up the Traffic Rush website in WordPress using static pages for each one of the lessons. I have password protected each page and and I also set them to be private.

The problem was the private flag – I thought this simply prevented the page from being indexed by Google but in fact it prevented everybody apart from the administrator from accessing it. So, thankfully just a simple fix :-)

Sending New Messages To An Existing List

I am using AWeber to manage my email list and I have not used it before. The way I had set it up was to write a single autoresponder message that welcomed people to the course, described the curriculum and asked people to hang tight until release. What I did today was add a further 10 messages to the autoresponder sequence which contained links to the lessons.

I set message 2 (containing the first lesson) to an interval of 0 which means “send immediately” and then set all the others to an interval of 3 days. So I expected the first lesson to arrive as soon as I created it but it didn’t. After some digging around in the help I discovered that AWeber will only guarantee delivery of one email per day!

In order to fix the problem I have changed the first message to contain the first lesson as well as a short welcome message so there are just 10 messages now. But I still had the problem of getting this out to all of the existing subscribers to the list. As a botch job I just created a broadcast email (which is sent to all list members immediately) with the contents of lesson one. The downside is that a few people will get two copies of the first lesson. Oh well, we live and learn!

Use of Custom Fields

There was one other minor technical hitch. In Aweber you can set up custom fields so what I did was set up a field called “price” which I set initially to “$27 (until 16th July 2008 only!)” with the intention of changing it to “$47″ next Thursday so that I don’t have to modify the sequence. In order to use this field inside a message you have to use the following syntax:

{!global price}

The snag is that this must appear on a single line. AWeber has a button to allow you to wrap long lines and it kept wrapping the field so that the second half of the tag “price}” was on a separate line to the first half and so it didn’t replace the field with its value. Never mind, was an easy fix, I just had to manually remove the line break from the tag.

Next Steps In the Project

My first job will be to send out the free copies of the full course to all of those winners of my Easter Egg Hunt as well as a few other people who had qualified for a free copy in one way or another.

During this first week I might tweak the site a little bit, look at doing some split testing and of course I’ll be keeping an eye on everything and making sure there are no more technical hitches! Next Thursday I am putting the price up to $47 and then I want to open it up to affiliates. Ejunkie which is the system I am using for payment processing also manages affiliates so this should be a straight forward process.

After that my intention will turn to marketing. I have a whole bunch of ideas for that. In the next update post I will explain how I did the videos as that was a little bit tricky, kind of.

The Joy of Twitter

My Twitter following has been an absolute godsend today! When I discovered that a friend of mine was getting a 404 error I hoped it was just a problem with his computer so I sent out a test link to Twitter and within minutes I had almost a dozen replies from people confirming that they couldn’t access the link. Once I fixed the problem they were just as well to tell me that it worked!

Later, during the launch itself I sent out many tweets about the email and I had so many people being so helpful letting me know whether or not they’d got the follow up email and so on. Twitter is wonderful because your followers are just right there at your fingertips. Nowhere else can you get such instant access to help! Thanks to all of you :-)

Click here to buy the full Traffic Rush course for just $27

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