Month: December 2017

  • Why I’m Having an Affair with Divi, yet Can’t Break off My Thrive Themes Marriage

    Why I’m Having an Affair with Divi, yet Can’t Break off My Thrive Themes Marriage

    I make most of my living out of Thrive themes and their plugins.

    Almost all of my clients use it.

    But even after my 3rd renewal of my annual subscription with Thrive themes, I still will NOT call them one word – reliable. Time and time again, since their early versions, they have been consistently overselling their capabilities, and shipping products that are buggy.

    Perhaps its because I use it to manage multiple clients’ online businesses at a time. And an average user would use it only on 1 website at a time. Maybe, I’m a minority.

    Naturally, I always keep an eye open for another, more reliable tool that could potentially save a lot of my headaches from Thrive Themes.

    Experience with Divi

    I tried Divi builder once (before Thrive Architect came out), and definitely found my first experience delightful. It was perfect to build beautiful websites, without having to adjust things like padding, margins as their default settings were perfectly designed.

    Looks like one of Divi’s core goal was aesthetics, and hence many of the design decisions has been already made for you, by adapting best design practices out of the box. Of course they allow you to change all of it. But I hardly did. I built a beautiful webpage pretty fast.

    And more surprisingly I didn’t run into a single bug. You might laugh reading this, but for me, after working with Thrive Content Builder for so long, this was a luxurious experience.

    But why haven’t I switched to Divi yet you ask?

    Two reasons – Familiarity and Cost of Change. You see Thrive themes as a company is building a platform. They are a platform like Amazon, Google, Apple or Microsoft is. They don’t consider themselves a software or a tools company. Shane is someone I respect and learn from. He is very smart and right about this strategy.

    Their platform design and strategy will seduce and attract every online marketing business out there. And make them marry their platform, not just have casual no-string-attached fun.

    And when you break off a marriage, its going to cost you. In various multiple ways.

    Their plugins are designed to be used with each other seamlessly.

    Once you are in, you find yourself using all or most of their plugins – Thrive Comments, Thrive Architect, Thrive Ultimatum, Thrive Leads, Thrive Ovation, Apprentice, Quiz Builder, Headline Optimizer and Clever Widgets.

    And even when your experience isn’t great, they still do work and you find your business depending on it. (again marriage analogy)

    Now let’s say someone like me updates a client’s website to Thrive architect 2.0 and all hell breaks lose.

    What do I do?

    I write a blog post bitching about it, share my frustration with clients on project update calls, and then… go back to continue fixing the bug, finding workarounds and then do intensive yoga at the end of the day to get rid of all the stress caused during my work day.

    Because, its not just a matter of finding a replacement for Thrive Architect. I can’t just swap Thrive Architect with Divi Page Builder. No.

    There are 15 lead groups with multiple optins, 6 Thrive light boxes and few Thrive Lead short codes with content locking setup on my client’s website. Buttons on various Thrive Architect pages launch many of them.

    Is Divi Builder going to be able to launch a Thrive Leads popup by a button press? Noooo…

    The Thrive Comments plugin is already linked to Thrive Ovation. And my Thrive Architect page displays the Thrive Ovation testimonials with features supported only by Thrive Architect. Is Divi Page Builder going to display those? Noooo….

    And what about Thrive Ultimatum and its integrations with Thrive Architect and Thrive Leads?

    You get the point.

    So switching to any of the alternatives will mean, finding a replacement for all the rest of their plugins.

    Yes, they advertise that their plugins work independently blah, blah, blah. Devil is in the fine-print here.

    And they have been unstoppable. Plugins like Thrive Apprentice and Thrive Comments are perfect examples of their company’s long term strategy.

    Is it really that bad

    Their tools have been improving. Given their recent, finally, some good looking templates for Thrive Architect, they seem to be getting good with design as a company. I just found ways to adjust by making rules like – “Never ever update a major version of their plugin, until 3-4 weeks after release and the bugs get sorted out”

    And even after all this complaining, I haven’t found a company at their price point, with tools like theirs that covers most aspects of a web business and their amazing marketing methods. Companies like Elementor, Beaver Builder and Divi are far behind in terms of marketing skills compared to Thrive themes’ Shane Melaugh. I doubt they will ever catch up. (Divi calls their Thrive Leads competitor – “Bloom Email Opt-ins”. Thrive sells you leads, while Divi sells you Email Opt-ins. Rookie marketing mistake of selling features vs benefits)

    This means their customer base is growing faster than ever. They have been eating market shares of other competitors. And that ultimately translates to more business and clients for consultants like me.

    So will I switch from their tools? You tell me.

  • Cannot Access Thrive Architect Pages After Enabling Thrive Ultimatum?

    Cannot Access Thrive Architect Pages After Enabling Thrive Ultimatum?

    Recently more than one of our clients have run into this problem. So I assume there are more Thrive Ultimatum users out there who face the same problem.

    So, you recently designed a few pages on your website with Thrive Architect.

    Everything looks and works great. Then, you go ahead and start using Thrive Ultimatum. You created a Thrive Ultimatum campaign, configured it and then turned it on.

    Everything seems to work fine. Until, you decided to send your website to your friend, or open your website in an incognito window. You find or hear that many pages aren’t loading. Instead they maybe even redirected to other pages.

    So you login again, check the pages, and a few Thrive Architect options and still nothing. You can’t seem to figure out why those pages aren’t accessible. Probably you wonder if its another one of Thrive Architect’s bugs bothering you. I’m happy to tell you, its not. (At least not this time)

    Don’t panic. Its simple. You cannot load them because you activated a feature called ‘lockdown campaign’ (most probably in your evergreen campaign).

    When you activate a lockdown campaign, you see a screen like the one shown below.

     

    Thrive Ultimatum Lockdown Campaign screen
    Thrive Ultimatum Lockdown Campaign screen

    The page is the middle is the protected promotion page. Thrive Ultimatum doesn’t let you see this page, unless you use a special URL link to access it (explained with screenshot below)

    The reason is that, this is how Thrive Ultimatum is intended to be used and to run limited time sale offers. These pages are supposed to seen only using special links and during limited period of time as configured by you.

    In other cases, which is, if a user visits the page before their promotion period begins, they will be redirected to Pre-access page URL (the top one in the screenshot above). You can use this page, to do things like

    • Setup a big heading saying, the offer hasn’t begun yet. Or simply say something else.
    • Or you can design opt-ins to get them onboard a wait list. You can later notify the waitlist members, when the offer opens again.

    In case the users visit after the promotion has ended, you can simply show them a page which says the offer has ended and ask them to buy your products at normal price.

    So what about that special link I talked about?

    Here is a screenshot to explain about it.

    Thrive Ultimatum Lockdown campaign screen
    Thrive Ultimatum Lockdown campaign screen

     

    You see that blue COPY button? That will copy the link to your clipboard, so you can simply right-click + paste it anywhere. But its actually intended to embed on your email.

    For example, in the screenshot above, our client used ActiveCampaign. So we would take that link, the paste it on an ActiveCampaign campaign email. This email is usually sent to a lead, for whom the promotion period has started.

    Here is an example link which can be used with ActiveCampaign

    https://yoursite.com/your-promo-page/?tu_id=2099&tu_em=%EMAIL%

    ActiveCampaign automatically replaces the %EMAIL% part automatically with your mailing list subscriber’s email before sending that email to them. So the final email might look like this

    https://yoursite.com/your-promo-page/?tu_id=2099&[email protected]

    But, how do I test it without having to send an email from my email marketing platform every time?

    1. Just take the link, replace the %EMAIL% variable with a dummy email, like the last link above.
    2. Open an incognito browser window and paste it in your address bar.
    3. You will see the protected page load in your browser now.

    If this post helped you, leave a comment saying ‘thank you’.

    If you still have problems, leave a comment and I will try to help you.