Consider this an early invitation. I’ll be doing a live demo how to install WordPress on the awesome MomWebs. Go register for all the freebies at TotallyFreeTuesday.com

Pricing

Here’s the good news. Delavo is free. I purchased it for a couple hundred and others paid over a thousand for it before. But now you can now get it at the super affordable price of $0.

The Catch

I haven’t seen one, but I suppose it’s what you consider a catch. If you want to add plugins, they come at a price. You may be thinking now, well there’s the catch. Give you crippled software so you will upgrade. Not true. Delavo is marketed as a Freemium shopping cart solution. The free version is fully functioning and even includes some key plugins like the ability to connect to third party scripts like WordPress.

We never used many of the features that the premium plugins afforded us for a long time. So, the basic version will probably last you a while, especially if you are selling only digital products with a workable affiliate program. When you want to start doing more advanced marketing techniques then the plugins certainly make it a whole lot easier.

Installation

Like anything self-hosted, you will have to install it yourself. There are people whom you can hire (like us). If you are prepared to do it yourself, the install is pretty straight forward and we usually don’t have problems on regular Linux servers.

Features Important To Internet Marketers

Without a doubt Delavo is one of the most feature rich carts I’ve worked with. With the basic version, you can:

• Run your own affiliate program
• Host multiple products, there is limit on the number
• Have many customers – As long as you don’t max out your web hosting database you’re good to go
• Link up many payment options like PayPal, 2Checkout, Google Checkout, Authorize.net, Linkpoint, Moneybookers, Setcom, Eway, Protx and Pageseguro
• Connect your products to third party scripts like phpBB, WordPress, SMF, Drupal – this is so very convenient for membership sites or even free community sites
• Skin your checkout pages for each product – we love this feature. If you’d like an example, visit BloggingStarterPack and TechBasedTraining. Click on the checkout links you will see they have very different themes or skins but they all run under one cart. Awesome if you want to maintain the branding for each product or even for JV products.
• Import your affiliates and users when switching over from another cart
• Publish posts directly to your blog from inside your shopping cart – we haven’t used this because we don’t have a need but if you do it is certainly a nice feature.
• Hook up your own scripts/solutions with the API – this is quite technical and most won’t use it. We do and we love it because we can pass information from one script to another easily and do more exciting stuff.

It’s quite plain the basic version is packed with features that online marketers need. But there’s more.

Plugins

We’ve already dropped hints of plugins everywhere. They are what makes Delavo go from great to awesome. There are so many of them which we will admit haven’t got around using yet. Here are the ones we have used for a while.

• One time offers – pretty self explanatory. No more juggling with external scripts or worrying about cheaters. The OTO really is an OTO. Once it is gone, its gone. No way to re-load the page to circumvent your OTO
• Packages Pro – this adds a bunch of features to your product including the ability to integrate with TurboAutoresponders or Aweber which we use, customize the pay now button, add terms, pay-per-click commissions, and more. To us, it is an essential plugin just for the autoresponder integration alone.
• Products Pro – adds order restriction or renewal restriction, giving charity commissions, limiting commissions after so many installments, disabling thank you pages.
• Upsell – works a lot like one time offers but upsells are displayed during the checkout process, makes it super easy for customers to add extras to their order
• Customized Forms – another essential plugin. You can edit what information is collected in the checkout form.
• Taxes – these days you can’t escape it. If you have to collect local taxes. Essential plugin
• Questionnaires – a very handy plugin. We used a questionnaire for custom work where the customer is asked to supply us with FTP or login information right after checkout. This way, we can get to work on their site quickly without having to email back and forth, wasting time. You can customize the information you want and have it sent to any email.
• Dynamic Pricing – you don’t have to use a separate script anymore. Automatically adjust the pricing for a limited time. You can choose to have it increase every day, every hour or month you can even set it to increase every X sales. All automated. No more manually editing your sales page how many packages you have left to sell.
• Coupons – this is an essential plugin
• Rewards – this plugin allowed us to create a different sales model using points. You can reward customers points for each purchase, for each recurring subscription. With just a little creativity this alone can help you make some unique products.
• Privileges – have assistants? You can create accounts with limited access for them highly configurable.

There are also plugins we think are great, just have not worked them into our products yet for example:

• Content Series – drip feed content into you membership site – yes, you don’t need yet another script or system if you don’t want to.
• Support Tickets – no need to create yet another help desk. Manage it all in one place. This is a really attractive feature.
• Clouds - solicit ideas and feedback from customers quickly
• Follow-up Manager – it is an autoresponder. You can even use it to manage your own newsletters and not pay monthly fees anymore.
• Testimonials – easy way to collect testimonials and display them on your sales pages
• Affiliate series – reward better affiliates with higher commissions or more

Minuses

To us, the minuses are few. There is a learning curve – but then, so do most shopping carts so we think this is a small issue. Another thing, we found affiliates often get confused when they log into their account and aren’t sure how to go about getting their links. So you will need to educate them and have proper documentation to help them through.

The Bottom Line

Obviously, we like Delavo – a lot. We wouldn’t be using this for the last 4 years if we didn’t. In the beginning, we briefly talked about where the product has been since we started using it. We can confidently say that Delavo is actively being developed and keeps getting better. Those in the market for a new free shopping cart software, get Delavo.

Notices: DELAVO(R) is a registered trademark by The Internet Company. All rights reserved worldwide. And yes, this post contains affiliate links where we would obtain a commission if you make an upgrade.

The only problem with that is, sometimes I am not necessarily in writing mode but am in topic research mode so I tend to feed all this into Evernote and go back to write them later. I know some of you would much rather save those interesting posts directly into your WordPress blog so you will be less distracted with more new and interesting posts when you are finally ready to sit and write.

Using The ‘Send To’ feature in Google Reader, you can do that. Here’s a quick tutorial.

1. When logged into Google Reader, go to Settings

2. In your settings screen, click Send To

3. At the bottom of the Send To screen, you will see a link to Create a custom link. Click that.

4. The screen will expand so you can enter the necessary data. Here’s what you enter but please remember to make sure the URL to your WordPress is correct.

Name: Give it a name like your blog’s name

URL: http://yourblog.com/wordpressfolder/wp-admin/press-this.php?u=${url}&t=${title}&s=${source}

Remember to change out the .com and the wordpressfolder name with your own.

If WordPress in installed in the main folder of your site e.g. inside /public_html or /www then you can use this format http://yourblog.com/wp-admin/press-this.php?u=${url}&t=${title}&s=${source}

Icon URL: You can leave this blank it is not necessary but if you want and have your own icon grab your icon URL to put here.

5. Now, when you go back to Google Reader, at the bottom of each item is a Send To link. You will find your blog/site in the list of options.

6. And when you click that, it will open a new browser window or tab where the Title and some information is pre-entered in the post for you. You can then enter a quick note about what you planned to write and save the post as draft.

And that’s it.

Cindy who had never traveled much, certainly not outside the country said she can’t believe that’s all it takes and something is not adding up somewhere. “How can so little money do so much?” she said.

So, my husband started to explain to her how much a family of four would pay for dining out at a local restaurant in Malaysia (where I come from). She was amazed – and get this, even though the cost of living is lower compared to the US, it is still not that low compared to others. So… why am I telling you this?

Because:

• I know first hand how much one $1 is worth. I don’t mean what the Dollar is worth in the market and how much the value has dropped etc. Despite everything the news feeds us, a Dollar from most developed countries goes such a long, long way.
• Children have always had a special place in my heart.
• Children are sick in these lesser developed countries. There is no Children’s Miracle Network, not even a Make A Wish Foundation. But there is you and I.

From today until the 27th of August, 2010, you can head on over to Nams4Kids and join in their cause. Here’s how it works.

• You join for free
• There is an upsell at the time of joining. I understand this will go towards Dr.Mani’s Children Heart Foundation. You do not have to upgrade if you don’t want to, just skip it and you’re on your merry way. But we do hope you do.
• Once you’re in you can also download a bunch of awesome products all free for the taking.

If that works for you, click to go to Nams4Kids.

P/S: If you want to contribute a gift to this event, go http://nams4kids.com/go/529/jv instead.

P/P/S: If you want to see what you can get this ticker below will give you an idea.

Photo by Marco Michelini

If you don’t understand what your blog stats are telling you, you can’t accurately measure the success of your website.  You can’t determine conversion rates, weather a certain marketing plan is working or not, or if your visitors even like your site.

By understand your website stats you can find out:

1. How many page views your site gets. This is the number of pages a person visits on your website.  Page views are a good overall estimate of your total web traffic because it shows how much of your content is actually being viewed. For example, if you have 1,000 pageviews over the course of 30 days that means that 1,000 pages on your site was viewed by somebody.  A note to make is that pageviews are not user specific.  In this example, the same person could have viewed all 1,000 pages.   If you are selling advertising space, this is what potential buyers will usually want to know.
2. How many people make it past your homepage.  If you get a visitor to your website, you want them to stay on your site and browse around right?  Measuring how long someone stays on a page before clicking to another page is called the bounce rate.  Bounce rate is the percentage of single-page visits or visits in which the person left your site from the home page. A high bounce rate generally indicates that site’s homepage isn’t relevant to your visitors.  This is particularly usually is your site is a sales or squeeze page.  If you have a high bounce rate, you probably are not making very many conversions or sales.
3. What your most popular page is.   By paying attention to your web traffic stats you can find out which pages of your site are the most popular.  If you site is a blog, you may think the page with the most comments is your post popular page.  That’s not always  true.  If you check your stats and find the most popular pages on pages, you can then go back and view the pages to make sure you have properly monetized them or properly emphasized whatever call to action you wish.

Understanding your website traffic analytics can help make your site more popular, rank higher in the search engines, and even more profitable.  I invite you to join me for a workshop designed to help you learn all the ins and outs of Google Analytics.  From monitoring every aspect of your website’s traffic, from visitor loyalty, site referrals, to keywords, Google Analytics provides everything you need to know about your readers and blog stats. Familiarizing yourself with Google Analytics and all that it can do will help you make the best decisions for your website and ultimately your readers.

• You print a template from the site, complete the boxes in your own hand writing – or a different hand writing if you’re into calligraphy.
• Then position the template in front of your computer’s web cam.
• Visit the pilot website, to snap a picture and they will digitize the hand writing.

From there on, you can even edit your handwriting. That is pretty cool. And apparently you can send an email directly from that site to your friends in  your own hand writing… with a Pilot Pen strategically positioned in the email to advertise it of course.

It is not clear if you can download the fonts or not. It would be super awesome if it would. I could not get the template to print on two browsers for me because Adobe Flash plugin keeps crashing on me (very annoying). If you can print and test it out, let us know what your experience is.

Apart from the cool factor of this program – I found out by someone voluntarily sharing it, so it is viral in nature – I thought it was a pretty good example of a company using available technology to market their product in a non-in-your-face method. What’s even better, the product is quite low tech. Ok so the guys in the labs formulating ink may not agree with me about the low tech part but in consumer’s minds pens are low tech products. Which goes to show a little creativity + tech help can bring interesting campaigns.

I do not know how successful this campaign is for Pilot but considering I learned this from word of mouth and the person before me learned from word of mouth too. I imagine it must be doing OK if not quite well.

• PhoneFollowup. While this is not originally created to do emergency alerts, it can definitely function as such. There is a monthly fee involved. There is also a voice option.
• Ez Texting. Pay as you go or monthly plans available starting at $10/month for 200 emergency alerts.
• Group2Call. Has both voice and text broadcast. Pay per message at 6¢ a message of subscription plans starting at $15 a month
• Boomtext. Pricing unclear.
• Call-em-all. Can do voice and text. Pay as you go starting at 9¢ a credit or subscription plans for $7.50 a month

And then it occurred to me to send the submissions directly into Evernote. Perfect!

I created a special notebook for this project. I don’t like to keep a long list of notebooks I only have 4 permanent ones but some projects like this is good to have one on its own for quick access. In the Evernote account, I grabbed my private email address and put it into cForms as the address to deliver the submission to.

The nice thing about it, because you can automatically tag and tell Evernote where to store the submission, it is all sorted and organized for me. Now, I just go into Evernote – wherever I am to write up the interview post. I can also later share the notebook with an assistant to contact the bloggers if I want to. Or, add a special note for tasks I need her to do for this project in the notebook. No copying and pasting and additional emails for me.

I imagine this would be a great way to collect testimonials of “Ask the expert” type questions for your blog too.

Back to the free blog post – I’d like to invite you to join us. All you need to do is submit 5 questions, get awesome content, share the traffic we will bring in together and maybe win a prize.

And here are more Evernote tips for Internet Marketers if that’s what you’re looking for.

Evernote and the Evernote elephant logo is the trademark of Evernote Corporation and is not affiliated to us in any way.

For one it behaves as your 24-hour shopfront and it’s great to promote your merchandise and services, twenty-four hours a day. Many prospective buyers like to go over someone’s internet site prior to even considering doing business with it. By delivering a well-designed website you ensure that your shopfront isn’t just open twenty-four hours but does a good job of advertising you.

A couple of great methods to do this:

#1 – Make the most of your “about” page. Add brief details about your business and your background. Do not make it overly personal merely a couple of personal insights will help your customer connect to the individual behind the website. Put differently, it makes your business genuine and not simply another internet entity.

#2 – Include information about your services or products. There is nothing more discouraging than not being able to speedily locate the information you want. Whether you provide services or products or both make it easy for your customers to navigate your website and find what they need. You can’t ever include too much information so cover all your bases. Add a frequently asked questions (FAQ) section that’s updated on a regular basis.

#3 – Include customer testimonies. Wherever possible acquire feedback from your customers and clients. Include their feedback on a testimonials page to help build credibility and faith with prospective customers.

#4 – Don’t hold back your contact particulars. Visibly displaying your contact information makes you transparent to prospective buyers. It is occasionally intimidating for people to conduct business on the Internet with people they do not know. By affording them a good deal of transparency you stand a greater probability of earning fresh customers and clients. Make it painless for your customers to get hold of some kind of support twenty-four hours a day. You can hire a VA to assist you in handling customer questions or simply prepare an automatic response message and get back to your customers within an allocated time frame.

#5 – And lastly communicate! Do not make the mistake of merely regarding your website as a glossy pamphlet. It is crucial to keep it genuine and communicate in your voice with your customers. Your website ideally should be a representation of you. This means that you should add subject matter, tales, articles, hints and ideas wholly fashioned to assist your current market in your own singular voice. In doing this, you jump out from all the me-too websites on the internet – a win/win situation for all involved.

And if you are searching a great tool to help make constructing a website that helps you connect with your market effortlessly, try the Internet Based Family Easy Website Builder . It includes online support and ample training to help you construct a fruitful website from the bottom up – no technical or former experience necessary!

Th ban is triggered by the way Blackberry encrypts its data. It does so on servers that are overseas. The encryption of course limits the ability for anyone (including governments) to monitor usage but the fact that the servers are overseas further aggravates (or promotes depending on which camp you’re in) the limitation.

What this means in a nutshell for business travelers:

• You can use your Blackberry – just as a phone. Not for email, Internet, messaging or anything like that.
• The new law applies to visitors too (even people passing through the airport) so if you are passing through after Oct 1st, 2010 and have a Blackberry, although we aren’t sure how exactly this will be done, be prepared to comply.

Hopefully for those of us who travel extensively this won’t be too much of a disruption.

Further reading:

Associated Press