This is a product review on Opt-In Funnels, another product in our review series.
Opt-In Funnels strives to present you with a hugely powerful list building concept that is beneficial for both newbie and guru Internet marketers.
What our first reviewer said:
He recommends using OptmizePress WordPress theme with it. He says other themes will work with it, but OptimizePress works best (of course, he has his affiliate link for OptimizePress at the bottom of the pages).
It needs a autoresponder to work. A lot of the features that would make it easy to work with need Aweber, but other autoresponders will work. To get the pages to look the best, you need to tweak the AR code. He talks about tweaking the AR code in several places.
There is a lot of technical stuff you have to do/know to get it to work right.
In each part of getting it set up, you have to go through several steps where if you miss one or get one wrong it won’t work.
Once you get it all set up it should do wonders for your site.
The problem, in my opinion, is getting it all set up. I consider myself fairly tech savvy, and I don’t think I would want to try it.
Would I recommend this?
If somebody is a newbie and does not know much about this stuff…NO.
If somebody is tech savy and doesn’t mind going through a bunch of steps, and I mean quite a few steps/processes…YES.
Also, if they don’t already have one, they have to spend more for an autoresponder to get it to work.
What our second reviewer said:
When you first log into the members area, you see the link to download the plugin and you also see your activation key and your number of activations remaining. You start with 30 activations. One thing to make note of: at the moment, there is no ability to
reclaim one of your activations if you deactivate it. The creator did say that he planned to add this feature in a future revision.
Warning: Don’t install this on your site until you’re clear about where you plan to install it. If you are installing on an existing site that have your permalinks set a certain way for SEO purposes, you’ll need to put a new, separate installation of WordPress in a sub-folder. The reason is that you MUST use Day & Name or the Month & Name configuration or this plugin will not work!
Next, you have the START HERE-INTRODUCTION video. It is almost 28 minutes long and it’s pretty tedious. The first few minutes of it are more of a sales video, with presell information about traditional sales funnels and why they don’t work very well. It then moves into an overview of what the plugin does, but it is rambling and repetitive. As a non-fan of video, it was excruciating.
Most of the other videos were a bit better, and shorter, so that helped too. Honestly though, the videos aren’t the greatest tutorials.
Here is a list of the videos and their lengths:
Introduction: 27:53
Installing, Activating, Updating, and Configuring the Plugin: 7:04
Adding a Quiz: 4:20
Adding Questions & Section Pages: 4:28
Adding Answers: 6:29
Configuring Your Opt-In Form & Autoresponder Emails: 27:00
Configuring Your Results Page & Adding Custom Badges: 15:35
Adding Custom Responses: 4:40
Configuring Your Ad Space 7:24
The video on configuring your opt-in and autoresponder emails was the worst. It was the driest of all the videos and the most confusing. The speaker mentions several times about using hidden input fields and custom variables in your autoresponder, but the “how-to” is never explained very well. I “got it” but only because I’ve actually done that before, but most people haven’t. This part of the instruction was most definitely not “newbie-friendly.”
There is a Quick Start Guide in the admin panel of the plugin, and you can copy and paste that to a Word or text document so you can have it to refer to, but a full pdf manual would be a big plus for this product.
One thing that WAS beneficial in figuring out how to use this was to look at some of the examples that are linked to from the members area. When the narrative was confusing about what the result of a particular step actually was, I could look at the examples and understand it. They also helped me to visualize what all of the pieces really were and how they fit together.
I did set up a practice quiz with this, so that I could see if I understood the videos well enough to make it work, and everything went pretty smoothly. I can see where this has HUGE possibilities, and will get easier with practice.
There are also some additions that Rob is planning to make that will help make this an even better value. (See below.)
Optimize Press is pushed HARD in the videos. It’s mentioned again and again. You don’t have to use Optimize Press to make this work, at all. I have no problem with a product owner recommending their favorite resource to complement their product, but the “hammer-it-home” method was a little annoying.
recommend this.
I would hesitate to recommend this to someone who doesn’t have some pretty good technical understanding though. And I mean beyond just setting up websites, and being able to use FTP. You need to be able to troubleshoot and figure some things out on your own, because the tutorials are not the greatest.
Finally, I did test out the Customer Service response time by asking one question. I got an answer in about 18 hours. I consider anything less than 24 hours to be reasonable, and this was during the height of the WSO buzz, so not bad at all.
Pros:
Good Customer Service Response Time
Future Revisions Are Planned to Correct Some of the Cons
Click here to learn more about Opt-In Funnels.
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