All I can say is “Wow!” and “Thank you!”

When I added the “Why I am NOT Attending RJ’s Party” post last week, I knew it would be controversial, and I wondered what backlash I might experience.

Usually I get from 3-5 “comments” on a post within a week of posting it. I published that post Saturday morning, and by lunchtime you (my readers) had left 119 comments! That’s amazing! As I write this post, there are 192 comments . . . it was obvious I touched a nerve with this one.

The VAST majority of you were supportive and shared my dim view of pornography and its damaging effects. Some of you argued that pornography wasn’t a bad thing, but still agreed that people who disagree with pornography shouldn’t be promoting this particular event. And a few of you told me (basically) I was completely wrong on this one.

I thank you ALL for leaving your opinions here. For those of you who disagreed, I respect your opinion and especially your courage for posting here in full knowledge that the majority of comments were not in agreement with your own. Bravo!

Some of you lamented the fact that I had identified myself as a “conservative Christian”. Please understand I only shared this information so people would know where I was coming from personally. I do not for one second believe that “morality” and “family values” are limited to Christianity. In fact, I believe most religions share this common thread.

Also, it was not my intention to call into question the integrity of the people promoting this event. Most of them I don’t know personally. Perhaps they don’t share my sentiments about the evils of pornography. Or they sincerely believe the Playboy Mansion is just a fancy “venue”, no longer associated with the other Playboy enterprises. Or maybe they just didn’t think it through.

One person I DO know personally is Yanik Silver. I’ve worked with him for years. We’ve exchanged gifts when our children were born. I consider him a friend.

He is a man of high integrity. He cares for his customers and one of his primary concerns whenever he does a promotion is that his affiliates get credit for whatever sales they generate.

He and I come from different backgrounds and obviously think differently on the issue of what the Playboy Mansion represents, but that doesn’t change my high regard for him and the integrity he’s displayed in all the years I’ve known him.

I thought it was “important” to take a stand on this and publish my thoughts. I think it’s good to “step back” and talk about the really important things in life sometimes.

But this blog is supposed to be about “business tools”, so that’s what I’m going to get back to in my next post.

If any of you wanted a personal reply to your comment (there’s just not enough time to answer every one), then please copy it to me in an email (just click on the “contact me” link on the right side of this page) and I’ll be happy to reply.

See you next time!

Paul

I’ve thought a lot about whether or not to post this — I know posting it will most likely result in some lost business. I expect some people will say I’m being “self-righteous” or trying to force my morality on others. This is not my intent.

But sometimes I think it’s important to take a stand and let the chips fall where they may.

I’ve received many emails over the past few days about the “Rich Jerk” and his upcoming “Internet Marketers Party” at the Playboy Mansion. It’s being promoted as the hottest networking opportunity ever — and that’s probably not far from the truth.

I was in fact personally invited to this party by Ryan (RJ’s front man), as their guest (no cost) — this was right after the Affiliate X-Ray launch (which I helped with) –  before most people even knew about the event.

But I respectfully declined. I wouldn’t even go if they paid me, BECAUSE it’s at the Playboy Mansion.

From a purely business standpoint, it’s a great example of marketing the “event” — something Dan Kennedy harps on continually. I’m sure in terms of dollars and prestige, this will be a very successful event for RJ and many others.

But I don’t think you can go to that event without, in some part, putting your stamp of approval on all that “Playboy” stands for — and as a conservative Christian who considers pornography to be one of the plagues of modern society, I could never entertain the idea of setting one foot inside that place.

Frankly, I’m surprised at how easily self-professed “family men” are justifying their attendance. They say they’re going there strictly for the business networking, and I believe them. But I wonder if they’ve really thought this through from any angle besides business.

My friends, you can’t go to the “Playboy Mansion” without associating yourself with “Playboy” and ALL that it stands for — going to the Playboy Mansion is the same as placing an advertisement in Playboy Magazine. You can’t play in the mud without getting dirty.

Think about it . . .

Now obviously some people don’t have the same views on pornography as I do, and for you there’s no conflict of interest. But if you think like I do that pornography is wrong, that it’s harmful to society, that it increases sexual abuse and violence against women, that it breaks up marriages and causes irreparable harm to families, then how can you go to this thing?

I invite your comments — I will print all of them (as long as there’s no personal attacks or profanity)  whether you agree or disagree. Let’s talk about it!

Paul

I was actually going to make this part of the last post, but decided it deserved it’s own title . . .

By virtue of the TAFPro and Synergyx software I sell, I do a lot of custom web form code.

Here’s a couple of tricks that have really come in handy lately . . . these aren’t “new”, but are still generally unknown.

Usually when someone clicks the “Submit” button on a web form, their browser loads a new page. But there are times when it’s advantageous to keep them on the same page.

For instance, when someone purchases my resale rights package at pregnancysale.com (and YES, that page is all true, not just some made-up story), they are taken to a download page. On that page I ask them to sign up for my “Updates” list so I can let them know when new software is released.

But I don’t want them to be taken from the download page just to see a “Thank you, you’ve subscribed” message. So what I do is set the “redirect” URL (this is a hidden field in the web form used by Aweber) to a tiny little PHP script on my server called “nonewpage.php”

This is the contents of that script, in its entirety:

<?php
header(“HTTP/1.1 204 No Response”);
?>

This script simply tells the browser, “Nothing to see here — don’t load a new page, stay where you are.”

So all you have to do is copy/paste the above code into your text editor and upload it to your webserver as “nonewpage.php”. Then in your web form, set the redirect URL (most form processing scripts allow you to define where the person goes after they submit the form) to the full URL for that file (e.g. “http://www.yoursite.com/nonewpage.php”).

Now, if you use this, you will WANT to provide feedback to your users when they click the submit button — because if they don’t see the page change, they’ll think that nothing happened. So add an “onClick” attribute to let them know their input was sent . . . something like this:

<input type=”submit” value=”Submit” onClick=”alert(‘Thank you! Your feedback is being sent now. \nPlease continue reading (no new page will display’);”>

The “\n” in the message is optional and will simply put the 2nd sentence on a new line.

Now, here’s another trick that has been very useful . . .

Sometimes, for whatever reason, you would like to have a form submit WITHOUT the user clicking on anything.

For example, imagine that your shopping cart displays an interim “confirmation” page requiring people to click the “Continue” button before their credit card is actually charged — and you’ve determined this extra required “click” from the customer is costing you sales (which is very likely BTW).

So you opt to skip the confirmation page and have a “one click” order process instead. Assuming you control the HTML code on the confirmation page, this would be simple to accomplish. Just make all of the form fields on the confirmation page “hidden” and add this bit of javascript directly beneath the closing form tag (“</form”>) :

<script type=”text/javascript”>
<!–
document.orderform.submit();
//–>
</script>

This example assumes the “name” given to the form is “orderform” — if it’s something else, then use that name in the example above instead.

Or if you don’t have that level of control over the page (you can’t change the form name), you can do it this way:

<script type=”text/javascript”>
<!–
document.forms[0].submit();
//–>
</script>

This assumes that it’s the 1st form on your page. If you have multiple forms on the page, and the form you want to “auto-submit” isn’t the first form, then you’ll need to change the [0] to [1] or [2], etc. (0 for the first form, 1 for the 2nd form, etc.).

Now, in MOST cases (not all) you’ll want to include a visible submit button even if you do use the auto-submit code, as some people may have javascript disabled in their browsers. You could just have it say something like, “If this page doesn’t refresh in 5 seconds, please click this button to continue . . .”

Now, think about the combination of the two above scripts . . .

If you had the desired data already, you could post that data to a page without the visitor doing anything.

For instance, you could send out an email to your list and link to a page on your site. The link would include the person’s name and email address, like this http://www.example.com/go.php?e=me@yahoo.com&n=Paul

That page would include PHP code to grab the “e=” and “n=” parameters, and stuff them into hidden form fields on the page. Then your auto-submit Javascript code would submit that data to your autoresponder service or software. And the “nonewpage.php” script would prevent that form post from loading a new page — making the whole process a “stealth” operation.

This would basically allow you to “segment” your general list into several special-interest lists with a single click from each subscriber.

Now, whether this is ethical or not depends on what you tell people in the email before they click the link — and I would definitely encourage full disclosure. But I’m just using this as an example of what you can do with these simple little scripts.

Love it or hate it — let me know what you think!

Paul

P.S. If you’re a TAFPro user, this “nonewpage” capability is built-in. It’s an undocumented feature. Just add a hidden form field to your TAFPro form with a name of “nonewpage” and set its value to “1″.

Okay, here’s the deal . . .

I wanted to wait until these tools actually “launched, but the developers are taking their own sweet time and I’ve run out of patience (what little I have).

Check this out:http://trafficregenerator.com/

Once you get to the page, move your mouse pointer to the middle of the page or so, then move it up to the top of the window as if you were about to click “Back” or “Next” (or “Home”) on your browser. You’ll see one of the “effects” these guys have come up with to stop people in their tracks when they’re getting ready to exit your page.

Very cool, says I.

Now check out this one:

http://www.visitrievebeta.com/

Click on the “Play” or “Replay” button and the nice actress will tell you all about it. (I think you should visit this site to see a good example of using a spokesmodel, if nothing else…)

I can’t tell you how much of my life I’ve wasted trying to find a website I ran across previously — THIS tool would surely have come in handy!

And it’s free, which is also cool, naturally.

Let me know what you think!

Paul

A few months ago Aweber (the autoresponder service I recommend to all my clients) came out with a new backup function — allowing you to download a backup of all your lists in one fell swoop.

For any of us who had been laboriously exporting our data one list at a time, this was real cause for celebration! I have one client with, I swear, over 100 lists at Aweber, and downloading the data from all of them was tedious, mind-numbing work. After the first time, I refused to do it anymore.

Anyway, I digress.

The only fly in the ointment is the way the data is exported. You get a zip file, and this zip file contains a folder for each list. That folder contains three MORE folders, “broadcasts”, “followups”, and “leads”. Inside the “leads” folder there are two files, “active_leads.csv” and “inactive_leads.csv”.

So if you want to have all the leads in a single file, you need some way of extracting data from this hierarchical file structure. Doing it manually can be very time consuming, especially if you have more than a half-dozen lists.

Remember that client I was talking about with over 100 lists? Scary!

But fear not, a simple solution I have for you!

Just click here to download my “Aweber Data Extraction” software tool — you should probably “right-click” and “Save Target As” (or “Save Link As”) to save the .exe file to your hard drive.

Now, let’s say you downloaded the export file from Aweber. When you unzip it, you’ll have a folder with a name similar to “yourlogin_2007_06_01 ”

It’s important that the .exe file be placed in this main Aweber data folder, on the same level with all of the folders which consist of your list names. Drop the “extract_aweber_leads.exe” inside that folder and click (or double click) that file to execute the program.

This program will then extract all of the data from all of your lists, and will create three new files, “active_leads.csv”, “inactive_leads.csv”, and “all_aweber_data.csv”(which contains both active and inactive leads).

If you choose the option of only extracting the email addresses, then the software will remove duplicates — so you won’t have more than one instance of the same email address, even if that lead has subscribed to several of your lists.

Enjoy!

Best,

Paul

P.S. If you download and use this utility, please let me know how it works for you!