I've run a fairly low key affiliate partner program for a while, but haven't really promoted it very much since the new website was launched.
For the uninitiated, an affiliate program is just a way of rewarding people who recommend the service to friends, colleagues and family. Basically, you register as an affiliate, and I provide a unique referral link for you to give out whenever you recommend ScreenCastsOnline. If someone subsequently signs on as a member after using your link, you'll get some commission.
With the newly redesigned website, the huge archive of ScreenCastsOnline tutorials, the simplified membership structure and the new complimentary subscription to the ScreenCastsOnline magazine, more people are recommending ScreenCastsOnline than ever before.
So I've decided to reboot the ScreenCastsOnline Affiliate Partner program, and would invite you to take part.
I had some banner ads created a while ago, but they are starting to show their age and needed a refresh, plus I've decided to be a bit more generous on the commission paid for referrals!
Firstly, I've commissioned some new banner ads and very smart they are too!
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All of these banner ads are available via the affiliate website. It's really easy to set them up by simply copying and pasting the provided HTML code snippets to your blog or website. Links to the images and your referral code are already included for you.
Second thing I've done is to increase the affiliate commission to 50%.
So now, if anyone joins up as a member as a result of your affiliate link, you could receive up to $35 for each annual membership, or up to $12.50 for each quarterly membership (for the initial membership period only).
You don't necessarily need to have a website or blog to become an Affiliate Partner, as I also provide simple text links that you can send via email or embed in replies to blog posts or forum signatures etc.
If you think you'd like to register and become a ScreenCastsOnline Affiliate Partner (it's free and you don't even have to be a ScreenCastsOnline member), you can learn more about it and register here.
On the face of it, this looks like a sensible move to try and stop "scam" applications as illustrated in this post by Panic. Sensible, but it does impact on legitimate Developers who might want to tweak their application screenshots for valid reasons. The screenshots are hugely valuable for marketing an application, and on the iPad and especially the iPhone, it's crucial you get them right.
This new ruling presented a major potential problem for me with the ScreenCastsOnline Monthly Magazine.
As I've mentioned before, this is a special type of App - a Newsstand app. The App remains constant, but each month, a new issue is published with fresh content.
I've been using the App screenshot feature to display the contents of several key pages such as the cover, the index pages and some articles. I refresh them each month to reflect the refreshed content of the magazine. See the image below (click to see a larger version)
Screenshots used in ScreenCastsOnline Monthly Magazine in iTunes Store
To freeze the screenshots and only allow updates when a new version of the app binary was released and approved would be extremely limiting.
With trepidation, I logged onto to iTunes Connect and sure enough, the Mac and the iOS SCOtutor App screenshots are now frozen and cannot be deleted or changed.
However...
The ScreenCastsOnline Monthly Mag Newsstand app is not affected.
It looks like Newsstand Apps do not have this limitation and the screenshots can still be legitimately swapped out - phew!
Whilst it's still a pain to have the iOS and Mac App screenshots frozen, I'm glad Apple have not applied this ruling across the board and have give the Newsstand Apps a let.
If you want to checkout the ScreenCastsOnline Monthly magazine, you can find our more here.
I'm delighted to announce a new update to the ScreenCastsOnline website - a new customised HTML5 video player to view the tutorials.
Previously, if you tried to watch any of the videos directly from the website, they would appear in a "lightbox" with minimal controls.
Now, the video page has been redesigned and the videos play on the page, with some customised playback controls and with support for subtitles.
The video player now shares the same look and feel as the playback controls in the SCOtutor apps and includes a volume control, a scrubber, rewind and fast forward buttons, a new download button, a subtitle toggle, a very neat focus control to dim the page and a full screen option.
We've also included a new option to mark a video as watched on the page itself.
The player works for both the Mac and iOS videos (check out how it handles the iOS videos - one of my favourite features) as well as support for the individual chapters found in the Chapter tab.
It will take a while for us to tweak all the videos to support the new subtitle and chapter features, but the most recent videos and all new videos will be fully supported.
As with any new feature, there may be a few teething problems, most of which may be resolved by updating your Safari cache or restarting Safari. If you have any problems, just drop me a note at support@screencastsonline.com
I've included a short video below, demoing some of the new features.
Props go to Jamie Peak for the awesome design and coding of the updated player and page.
Back in the summer of 2011, I was at WWDC when Newsstand was announced as part of iOS5.
As a content provider, I was intrigued at the concept and realised that this was the boost that digital publishing needed. The iPad had always been touted as the saviour of digital print since it’s inception, but had never delivered.
Traditional publishers created huge digital facsimiles of print magazines that needed manual download. Poor image rendering. Expensive content. No easy way to find digital content. Digital magazines on the iPad didn’t really didn’t take off at all.
Newsstand was Apple’s strategy to address some of these issues.
A new container folder permanently wired to the iPad home page, specifically for newspapers and magazines.
A new type of app - the Newsstand app - closely modelled on traditional print magazines, the Newsstand app uses the cover of the latest issue of the magazine as it’s icon.
A new push distribution mechanism - Magazines and newspapers are episodic in nature. You expect a new content on a regular basis. Once subscribed to a Newsstand app, any new issues are pushed to you automatically, without any action from you. True push distribution. No longer did a user have to notice a new issue of a magazine was available, then download it before they could read it. Newsstand just delivered the magazine to the iPad. Not only that, the magazine icon in the Newsstand container updates automatically to display the new issue cover and you get a “new” marker on the magazine.
Purchase and Subscription - Apple nailed the difficult problem of charging for your content with a whole range of options available via in-app purchases. Want to buy a single issue - no problem. Tap purchase and Apple will do the entire transaction, take 30% and pass the rest on to you. Even better, Apple allow you to create subscriptions to your magazine - Monthly, six monthly, annual - all available via in-app purchases. A customer just taps a button and Apple will set up the subscription, process the financial transaction and start downloading the current issue. They take their 30% and from that point on, Apple will deliver new issues automatically and even handle the recurring transaction when the subscription is up for renewal. Mind bogglingly simple.
For years, I’d been using the magazine analogy when describing my podcast - you susbcribe and we deliver episodes. Now we had a mechanism that was the exact copy of the magazine subscription analogy - in fact it wasn’t a copy at all. It’s a digital magazine subscription, where Apple does all the hard work (well other than provide the content of course).
But it gets even better!
People are subscribed to your magazine using their Apple ID and the credit card associated with that ID. If there is one account that people make sure is up to date with a valid credit card, it’s your Apple ID. You use it to buy all your music and your Apps. It has to stay current. No more messing about with failing PayPal accounts, the Apple ID purchase is magic!
So it’s been well over 12 months since Newsstand was introduced, so how did I get on?
Not very well up until 4 months ago.
It became apparent during the WWDC sessions I attended that I was out of my depth from a technical perspective. There was no way I could create a Newsstand app from scratch, so after WWDC, I started looking at services that I could use to create Newsstand content.
Ouch!
They took a while to appear but when they did. Ouch!
Hugely, hugely expensive to setup and some of them even wanted payment based on the numbers of issues created.
Much too expensive for a small content provider like myself.
So I abandoned the idea of a Newsstand presence - something probably only the large publishers or traditional media outlets could afford. I was disappointed but not surprised.
Until fours months ago when things changed - very rapidly!
At the end of last year, I’d met up with a good guy called Ed Dale at the Blogworld and New Media Expo. We were on a panel together (unrelated to Newsstand) and I learnt a bit about his organisation and what he was involved in. He seemed like a really good guy, and we kept in touch.
At the time, although I didn’t know it then, Ed was working with a partner, John Bass, to create a Newsstand Publishing platform - MagCast.
I heard about it four months ago and it’s significance hit me like a ton of bricks.
This was what I’d been waiting for!
MagCast is an all encompassing solution to enable content creators to create and distribute interactive digital iPad applications via Newsstand.
The works - the whole enchilada!
App creation, support for ad integration, analytics, issue creation and conversion, testing, distribution to Newsstand, full support for all in-app purchases, push notifications... basically, everything you need to create a Newsstand iPad magazine wrapped up in a single solution - no programming skills or technical know how required - seriously. Access to MagCast also includes full training in the form of comprehensive video tutorials taking you through the entire process from start to finish - from setting up your Apple developer account to publishing your first magazine to the Newsstand. As well as full technical support and a wealth of marketing advise and guidance.
Incredibly, creating the magazine content is based on the PDF format - you can use any application you want to create the magazine issue - KeyNote, Pages, InDesign... basically any application that allows you to layout text and graphics and export to PDF. Once you have your PDF, upload it to MagCast and add in your links and interactive content and MagCast transforms it in to a magazine issue ready for distribution via Newsstand.
I’ve been using the platform for four months and I’ve created the ScreenCastsOnline Monthly magazine available via the Newsstand. Three full issues published as well as a sampler issue. The magazine has been well received (a slight understatement) with over 170 five star reviews. I’ve just recently created a special “Subscribers Only” issue too - MagCast actually gives you more functionality than just producing a standard magazine, and they are continually adding performance and functionality enhancements to the core app and the platform.
Initially, I was inundated with requests for information about how I put ScreenCastsOnline Monthly together, and I decided to wait for a little while before “going public” as I wanted to see how things went and how the platform coped. After all, it all sounds a little too good to be true.
Four months down the road and I can unreservedly recommend MagCast - it’s a killer platform for any content provider wishing to create a Newsstand magazine.
To give an idea on what is involved in creating a magazine issue, I created the special ScreenCastsOnline episode embedded below. Check it out to see what I mean.
You can get more information on the MagCast platform by following this link - MagCast Invitation
Full disclosure...
If you sign up to MagCast based on my recommendation, I’ll get some commission from the Magcast guys.
As you’re aware, I don’t do any sponsorships via ScreenCastsOnline, neither do I accept any advertising or paid endorsements. So it has to be something pretty special for me to endorse it in this fashion.
The support has been top class and MagCast are committed to continually improving and enhancing both the platform and the app at no additional charge, once you’ve signed up for the platform. You become the publisher and you own your own content. There are no hidden charges and no matter how successful your magazine becomes, you are in full control of the costs.
They even offer a full 30 day money back guarantee, so it’s a completely no risk opportunity.
Of course, ultimately your success publishing a magazine is down to the content and not the creation or the delivery platform. I can’t promise you a pot of gold at the end of it, or even that you might replicate the success I’ve had with producing my magazine, but I’ve found that MagCast is probably the most frictionless way to create and distribute content via the Newsstand.
As the owner of a customer centric small business, I take emails very seriously.
I read and reply to each and every one, and I usually respond as soon as I possibly can. If I'm not recording, it's not unheard of for me to respond by return, causing the recipient quite a shock, especially in this day and age when sometimes you're lucky to even get a response several days later (from other people I mean!).
I'll even field the occasional "support" email from ScreenCastsOnline members. I know I shouldn't and I know it's not part of the service, but if it's something I can answer in a line or two, then why not. Answering emails are a major overhead and time suck, but over time, I firmly believe that done well, can seriously improve both your good reputation and customer loyalty.
So I soldier on…
Yesterday, I received an email from a potential customer for the "SCOtutor for iBooks Author" application.
He is an author of children's books, and by his own admission, not very technical or computer savvy.
He explained in his email that he had seen my tutorial for sale but he didn't understand iBooks Author and he didn't understand the relationship between the Mac and the iPad. His main requirement was that he needed to get his book from paper into "something nice to show his agent".
Obviously, iBooks Author was complete overkill for him, and he didn't need to create an iBook for sale at this time.
I took his email and split it into sections and responded to each point in turn, with an explanation of iBooks Author, what it does and how it's positioned along with some further suggestions. My main advice was to perhaps just format his document in Pages to show his agent.
So basically, I advised him to consider another App, and forget about iBooks Author for now.
It meant a lost sale as far as "SCOtutor for iBooks Author" but the response back more than made up for it…
Don:
That is the best reply I've ever received from anyone in the "help" world.
thanks!
Monday, February 11, 2013 at 4:53PM 
I've run a fairly low key affiliate partner program for a while, but haven't really promoted it very much since the new website was launched. 
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Back in the summer of 2011, I was at WWDC when Newsstand was announced as part of iOS5.
