Today the new members’ dashboard went live, you should be automatically redirected to it when you next log in. It’s much more flexible and gives direct download links to all the currently released BlogPiG autoblogging plugins.

Tommorow I’ll be adding the first the of the autoblogging wordpress theme packs that Mike has created for you, in fact he created it a litttle while ago but I’ve been waiting for the new members’ area before launching it.

Stay tuned tomorrow for more…

So far I’ve done most of my development and earned most of my money behind the scenes. I have a select group of fellow internet marketers who I meet with once a week to discuss ideas, plans and progress but other than that the first time anyone else hears about new developments is when a new product goes live and is announced on BlogPiG.com. This time I’ve decided to go public early and also go into much greater detail about how exactly I intend to monetise the product.

The benefits for me are twofold. By discussing my plans in public I introduce an extra level of accountability that will help keep the project on track and on time. Secondly I’ll get valuable feedback from readers as to whether I’m on the right track. This will be the first-time I’ve attempted this type of project in this particular arena so I’m all ears when it comes to comments and advice.

The benefits for you are that you get a sneak preview into my latest product and maybe even get to play with it if you make it into the beta program. Secondly you get to watch my product launch cycle in real-time and maybe even replicate it with your own product. Assuming all goes as planned!

As you may have gathered from the post title this project is a membership site. The challenge is to develop a membership site with 100 recurring memberships in 100 days or less, essentially 3 months from now.

The membership price will be set at $47/month, quite a high price so it’s going to have to be a good product (and it is!). 100 members at $47/month will provide a total income target of $4700/month for this project. I have other sources of income but I’m ring-fencing this one for this experiment, I think it’s an ambitious yet achievable goal. Depending on which day you look at the exchange rates, $4700/month is around £3000/month which is, coincidentally, the amount my household income is due to drop later this year due to the imminent arrival of my baby son (Woohoo! Very exciting). The goal is to completely replace that lost income with this project resulting in there being no net effect on the family finances.

So that’s the plan but what’s the product?

Introducing NichePiG – The Keyword Reaper. It might sound like just another keyword research tool, but stick with it, this one is very different.

I’ll go into more detail about the exact features of NichePiG over the coming weeks. For now just imagine the total automation of your entire market research process and you’re still not even close to what it can do…

NichePiG is in alpha testing right now. I’ll be asking for some testers for a private beta in the coming weeks so If you’re interested don’t forget to sign-up for membership of the blog as priority will be given to members on my Aweber list.

Okay that’s it for now, stay tuned for more info coming soon…

I’m talking about the back-end in the traditional systems sense, rather than the new follow-up-marketing usage now popular.

Anway I’ve spent the past couple of weeks pulling together all the various aspects required to fully launch BlogPiG as the hub for all my upcoming automation plugins. I decided which components I’d need and decided on the following:

• Shopping cart
• Licensing/Delivery system
• Encryption
• Helpdesk
• Forum
• Affiliate system

I’d already started by using WordPress as the front-end with a modded version the Glossy Blue theme and I wanted all the various back-end components to mimic the overall look and feel.

The encryption piece was an easy decision, it had to be IonCube as I have used it before with great success and it’s something my coder is very familiar with so we could be up and running quickly. Zend is probably more popular but it’s also a lot more expensive and whilst most servers have Zend available NOT ALL do. Also, as far as I’m aware, you can’t pack Zend runtime loaders with your products like you can with Ioncube. Ioncube offers platform independent encryption.

I’d also used my chosen licensing system before, PHPAudit from SolidPHP. It’s a nice simple solution providing easy integration with my chosen shopping cart, PayPal. I might also add Google Checkout at some point too for a bit of variety. The templates for PHPAudit are fairly easy to modify using mostly CSS and tweaking the header/footer files.

Next-up it was the afilliate sytem. I’d heard  a lot of good things about iDev and it looked pretty good on paper so that’s now in place too. Custimisation again pretty simple with Smarty templates et al.

The first helpdesk software I tried didn’t work and there is jsut too much choice out there to waste time waiting for support to respond etc. so I plumped for SupportTrio which seems to offer everything I require plus a knowledgebase which I build-up over time for self-support.

I hate waiting for support to respond to my queries and I always end-up deep in the forums trying to find my own answers so a forum component will be essential to the BlogPiG suite of plugins. I initially tried to get Vanilla working as it seemed pretty and not too bulky but it was returning errors as soons as I tried to run the setup, so that got deleted immediately. Next I tried http://www.simplemachines.org/ which I’ve seen installed on a lot of sites and that went on very smoothly and after loading a suitable base theme I modified it to look like the rest of the site.

One of my pet hates is after I’ve regsitered once for a site and bought the the software I then have to then register again for the helpdesk and then again for the forum! Well that’s not going to happen on BlogPiG.com, it’s beyond my skills but my coder will shortly be integrating all the logon databases across all the various systems so you’ll only need to register once. It’d be nice to get seamless sessions too but I doubt that’ll be possible, we’ll have a go.

So not long now, it’s all coming together nicely and the first paid module, CommentPiG, will be for sale very soon.

With this in mind I’ve made an early decision not to follow the traditional hype based product launch so BlogPiG.com will be a BULLS**T FREE ZONE! You will not see any mention of the following words:

ninja, laser guided, holy grail, lazy, jerk, dominate, tsunami, flood, silver bullet, storm, unleash, quake, goldmine, riches, explosion, millions etc.

BlogPig will just be about delivering the honest facts about what this software can do for you and what results you could expect if you used it. If you do end up buying it then it will be for the right reasons and because you know it is the perfect tool for you, NOT becuase of my hypnotic writing style and a bunch of marketing claptrap.