Welcome to Launch Effect! Our latest blog post: Launch Effect 2.4 Released: Major Performance Enhancements!
We’re eager to check out what our customers have been up to with their Launch Effect Premium licenses. Share your Launch Effect Premium Story and we’ll send you a FREE Launch Effect T-shirt (while supplies last)! They’re super soft and features a blown-up version of the LE logo.
Click here to fill out the form and tell your story! We’ll be featuring these stories in a Premium Gallery in the coming weeks.
We’re very happy to announce the Launch Effect Affiliate Program! We’ll be offering 20% commissions on all sales of our Premium licenses. All you need is a PayPal account and you’re ready to start making some money!
Using zferral, you can grab our affiliate ad banners to use on your site.
To get our affiliate system up and running, we opted for zferral, a very easy-to-use affiliate management app. Setup was fairly quick ,and we were able to load up our ad banners in no time. The only thing that we’re still unsure about is the steep $79/month charge for their cheapest plan. We may have to opt for something else in future. We currently use s2Member to manage our Premium area and it looks like s2Member plays well with iDevAffiliate, but we weren’t too keen on the iDevAffiliate interface. Anyway, suggestions are very welcome!
Visit the Launch Effect Affiliate Program website.
New week, new ideas, new Launch Effect sites! Click on the images to see the full-size view.
A gorgeous sign-up page for an online management tool designed for health and beauty professionals:
www.mystro.com.au
New social network for Lady Gaga fans:
www.radiogaga.x10.mx
A curious new site for web developers who want to connect and share ideas in a “self-moderated, karma tracking environment”:
www.baldlion.com/launch
Coming soon page for an online shop selling hand-stitched neck wear:
www.untietled.com
“A site run by businesspeople for businesspeople”:
www.smallbusinesscan.co.uk/blog
A mobile app that makes it easier to search for restaurant deals:
www.fancycraves.com
Want some facetime on our blog? Shoot us a link on Twitter and we’ll get some more info from you on your venture.
One of the requests we’ve received more than a few times is the ability to use Launch Effect while working on a different theme on the same WP install. We’re still a few of months away from introducing a Launch Effect plugin that would allow for this, but we recently came across a plugin that makes it possible for you to have a Launch Effect page up while working on something else.
Theme Test Drive is a plugin by Vladimir Prelovac. You can grab it for free right here. We decided to try it out on one of our demo sites to see how it all worked.
Installation was straightforward-your typical plugin install on WordPress. Our goal for this test run was to work on the Twenty Eleven Theme on the admin side while visitors would still see our Small Poodle Club Launch Effect page. We left the activated theme as Launch Effect:
Our settings under Appearance: Themes
We then went to the Theme Test Drive settings tab and selected Twenty Eleven under “Usage”:
Under the Theme Test Drive settings, we selected Twenty Eleven as the theme to preview as admin.
We left the access to be admin-only (level 10) and then clicked on Enable Theme Drive. This made it look as though Twenty Eleven was activated as the theme on the sidebar navigation, which would make it possible for us to work on theme.
Sidebar navigation after enabling Theme Test Drive: no more Launch Effect Settings
When previewing the site as admin, we saw the Twenty Eleven theme in action. We opened up a different browser and, voilà, The Small Poodle Club was still up and fully functional.
A side-by-side look at what admin sees (left) and what visitors see (right).
A big shout out to our user NS on our support forum for first bringing this nifty plugin to our attention.
Here’s the latest installment of interesting and great-looking Launch Effect implementations. Click on the images to see the full-size view.
A coming soon page for a mobile app that simplifies the online shopping experience:
www.shopfren.sindhu.co
A campaign that aims to “(re)engage” and change the public’s understanding of injustice and poverty in the world:
www.thecomplexityproject.com
“Wear your coffee to work”:
www.coffeejewel.com
A startup with a product for Sharepoint:
www.uxadditives.com
Contest page for 97seconds x Avalanche’s music event:
www.97seconds.com/contest
An eye-catching site for a customer experience-related app:
www.toorisk.es
Want some facetime on our blog? Shoot us a link on Twitter and we’ll get some more info from you on your venture.
We’re gearing up to release Launch Effect Premium 2.0X this week. We’ve made a number of significant changes, and you’ll find all new features that allow you to extend the Launch Effect theme beyond a landing page.
Here’s a peek at what the new Launch Effect Settings section looks like:
The initial view of the Launch Effect Settings page.
We’ve separated out the styling into Global Styles, Sign-up Page and Theme. The Theme is where you can adjust the settings of the pages beyond the sign-up page, whether it’s a static content page or the blog.
The new side navigation under Launch Effect Settings.
Using the “Front page displays” feature under the Reading section of WordPress Settings, you can now choose to start with a page other than the sign-up landing page. We’ve made it possible for you to access Launch Effect’s viral sign-up form through a slide-down tab, so you can do without the landing page altogether.
Here are some examples of what you can do with the new Launch Effect Premium:
An example of a new homepage using Launch Effect Premium.
The Launch Effect viral sign-up form exists as a slide-down tab.
You can turn your Launch Effect site into a blog with viral newsletter sign-up.
Create the classic Launch Effect landing page with a "learn more" tab on the top right...
...which you can link to a fully-built Launch Effect web page like this one.
We’re very excited about what the new Premium version will allow our users to do. If you are a current premium user and would like to try a pre-release version before it’s officially out, please tweet us and we’ll hook it up. We’re making some tweaks to the admin panel and cleaning up some minor bugs, so once that’s all ready, we’ll put out the official version.
Want to know when the new Premium is out? The best way to stay tuned is to follow us on Twitter or to sign up for our e-newsletter (link up on the nav). Haven’t bought a Premium license yet? What are you waiting for? All Premium license users will have access to the new version upon its release. Buy one today!
The Rekko Toolbar website uses a heavily modified Launch Effect theme.
We recently corresponded with Dan Jimmerson, Director of Marketing at Convert, a startup that empowers sites of all sizes by providing them the same powerful marketing technologies and analytics that larger, sophisticated marketing organizations use. We checked out their Rekko Toolbar app and asked Dan how Launch Effect played into their marketing plans.
Launch Effect (LE): What is Rekko and what is the Free Toolbar?
Dan Jimmerson (DJ): Rekko is a new, easy-to-integrate marketing platform for websites of all sizes. After adding a JavaScript tag to your website, you’re able to use any of our interactive marketing “apps.” These include tools for A/B testing, personalization, targeted emails and so on. Rekko Toolbar is the first of the marketing apps that we’re releasing free, forever. We think it’s an incredibly powerful tool and gets fantastic results by displaying a simple message in a way that will get a visitor’s attention. When paired with our targeting and split-testing capabilities, you can truly deliver the right message that gets noticed by the right person, at the right time.
LE: Why did you choose Launch Effect for the Free Toolbar site?
DJ: After doing a bit of research and testing with some other popular launch products, we ultimately chose Launch Effect because of 5 primary factors (other than it simply kicks butt):
Launch Effect in action on the Rekko Toolbar site.
LE: How long did it take to design, develop, and deploy the site?
DJ: It took about 4 days of actual work to get the whole thing launched from start to finish (minus the videos of course). The first go at it was up in two days, but we tested different launch services and played with some other elements for the latter two. If there were 0 customizations and we just went through the default settings we could have had the site up within 20 minutes including the time for the WordPress install.
LE: How has Launch Effect helped with your campaign to give away 100 free toolbars each week?
DJ: It has been extremely helpful. Not only is the viral component built-in for our visitors to share, but our evangelism team tracks their efforts with their referral links as well.
LE: Any marketing tips for other businesses and startups out there?
DJ: I think everyone has their opinions on how things should get done or started for that matter. I truly believe the number one tip that I can give is make sure you show up. So many startups spend so much time trying to figure out step 108. Start at step 1. Get your face out there. You’ll probably end up pivoting anyway and step 108 will be just a waste of a two hour discussion and a good cup of coffee.
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We’d like to thank Dan for taking the time to answer our questions. Please check out the Rekko Toolbar and sign up to be one of the 100 recipients of the Free Toolbar each week. And in case you were wondering, we definitely noticed the way Dan modified the sign-up to have an additional field for web url — the ability to have custom fields is one of our most requested features and something we’re very keen on building soon.
We’re constantly amazed by the diversity of our Launch Effect users. Just when we thought we had seen them all, new projects and businesses pop up with their Launch Effect sites, ready to start their own viral campaign or to provide a teaser for big things to come. We came across some recent Launch Effect pages and thought we’d share them. You can click on them to see the full size.
A coming soon page for Thea Creative’s blog:
www.theacreativeblog.com
Sign-up for a site about building a wine cellar (and a chance to win a bottle of pinot noir):
www.winecellardiy.com
An Italian chamber music quintet:
www.quintettebohemien.it
“Music books with extra thrust”:
www.rocket88books.com
Want some facetime on our blog? Shoot us a link on Twitter and we’ll get some more info from you on your venture.
Start off the new year with a bold statement. Have an idea that’s been lingering in the back of your mind for a while? Have a work in progress that you haven’t told anyone about yet? Set up a Launch Effect page and start building momentum. It can take less than an hour for you to get a page up and to start letting people know about your plans.
Start executing on that idea. Once your plans are out in the open, you’ve initiated the countdown clock. Get people excited about your idea. Start getting sign-ups on your mailing list. Send e-newsletters with sneak previews. Light that fire under your butt to get things rolling, to meet deadlines, and to push things live. Feel the pressure and force upon yourself the necessary discipline to make things happen.
We built Launch Effect to give people an easy and viral way to launch new things. In 2012, we’ll be adding more features and integrations to extend the theme. We’ll also be building our Premium version into a fully functional theme that can work as a complete website.
We’d love to hear your plans for launching new things in 2012. Fill out this form by January 1 and we’ll send you a code for 20% off our Premium theme. Let’s make great things happen!
We’re very pleased to announce new enhancements to our MailChimp API integration! This is available for both free and Premium versions!
Our original integration allowed you to input your MailChimp API key and add emails to your list. Several of you asked us to go one step further and pass along more data. We’ve set things up so that MailChimp can now receive the referral code, number of visits, and number of conversions from Launch Effect. We’ve introduced a “Sync Data” feature that will allow people to keep their MailChimp lists up-to-date with the latest Launch Effect stats. This will come in handy if you want to segment your list to send emails to your top referrers. And you can also use the Merge Tag feature on MailChimp to remind people what their referral code is. Wutcha waiting for? Grab the latest version right now.
Here’s how your list will look in MailChimp after syncing:
One thing to note: while we’ve tested this functionality like crazy, we’ve decided to keep a “beta” tag on it for now. We’d love to get your feedback and please do not hesitate to report any issues so we can address them.
Happy holidays! More to come in the next couple of weeks!
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