Wow, almost a month since my last post. That’s partly because I’ve been out of town visiting family for the last 3 weeks. But it’s also because I am not going to post something here just for the sake of posting something here! I want my posts to be worth your time to read them.

Now let’s get to it . . .

Back in June I published a little post titled “Tiny Scripts for “Stealth” Form Submissions“. Then last month I talked about dynamically personalized HTML — which talked about making your web page change according to some user input such as a radio button selection.

Today I’m going to show you how I combined those two ideas for a client . . .

The thing about web forms is they usually take you to a new page when you submit them. But using the “nonewpage.php” file discussed in the “Tiny Scripts . . .” post, we can prevent that from happening.

But we still want people to know their submission was successful. One way of doing this (as shown previously) is to set the “onClick” attribute on the submit button so a little Javascript “alert” pops up when the form is submitted.

This works okay, but the alert box doesn’t allow for any formatting, and it’s kind of intrusive. Plus, it comes with an audio alert, which can be somewhat irritating in my opinion. So what’s one to do? We just use the same principles outlined in the “Dynamically Personalized HTML” post and “replace” the input form with a nice HTML thank you message!

The client I did this for was Yanik Silver, and I don’t think he’ll mind my linking to the page in question. Here it is:

InfoPlayers WorkshopVideo

Once the page has loaded for you, take a look at the source code for the form — notice the <div id=”formdiv”>and </div> tags that surround the input fields. These mark the HTML code that will be changed when someone clicks on the submit button.

Now look at the opening FORM tag — you’ll notice it has an attribute, onSubmit=”wait(3000);” — this refers to the Javascript “wait” function that’s in the HEAD section of this page. The “wait” function just waits for 3 seconds (that’s what the 3000 is for — it means 3000 milliseconds, which is 3 seconds). Then after 3 seconds, it executes the “rmform” function. I’ve copied both of these functions here:

function rmform()
{
document.getElementById(’formdiv’).innerHTML = ‘<center>Thank You!</center>’;
}

function wait(delay)
{
string=”rmform();”;
setTimeout(string,delay);
}

I actually shortened the HTML message being displayed by rmform() for brevity, but if you look at the source code can see the whole thing.

Why not call rmform directly instead of calling on “wait” to wait 3 seconds first? Well, that’s what I did at first, but it appears that the input field information is lost when you replace the input fields with something else — so I have to give the browser time to submit the data to the target script before replacing the form contents with other HTML code.

One last critical thing — notice how I set the hidden “redirect” form field to point to a “nonewpage.php” page — this is so the browser window won’t redirect to another page when the form is submitted (again, this was discussed in June’s post).

So now you have everything you need to keep people on your sales page after they opt in to your newsletter (or to get your free report, or whatever). And you can give them feedback letting them know their submission was successful, without using an annoying Javascript alert.

I don’t know about you, but I think it’s pretty slick . . .

Best,

Paul

P.S. Tell me what you think!

P.P.S. Also, you ought to check out Yanik’s page I’ve linked to above. I’ve seen this course, and it IS impressive.

Lately I’ve been playing around with what I refer to as dynamically personalized content.

Basically this means the visitor enters some piece of information and one or more things on the page changes as a result. For instance, they select from 3 radio buttons describing their current employment situation, and the text of the page changes according to that selection.

The idea is almost as old as the original Mosaic web brower, BUT in this case I’m talking about having it all done by Javascript and not using any server-side computing power or CGI processes.

I have created a simple utility to illustrate how easy it can be to have your sales letter change depending on a user selection (specifically, a radio button selection).

Click here to create your own dynamically personlized sales copy

Now, this utility will allow you to do dynamic personalization in the simplest way — you can expand on this idea to the nth degree. For instance, check out this “Affiliate Tools” page I did for the ClickBank version of “The Internet Marketer’s Little Black Book”:

Affiliate Tools Page

Observe the little box with the “Generate Link” button next to it. When someone enters their ClickBank nickname (affiliate ID) in the box and clicks the button, all the hop links on the page change so that they include the affiliate ID.

Some of the instructional text also changes (no more need to tell people to “replace xxxxx with their Clickbank ID”) . . .

A year or two ago there was somebody selling some software that allowed you to have dynamically personalized salesletters — I’m pretty sure this is the way they were accomplishing that.

It’s a powerful concept because it allows you to customize your sales copy (to some degree) to the individual needs of each of your visitors.

Try out the tool and let me know what you think!

Paul

If you’re on the same email lists I am, then you’ve probably received a lot of emails about the “Speed PPC System” . . .

I haven’t said anything before now because I wanted to try it out for myself first. I am NOT a PPC (pay per click advertising) authority by any means, but I have “dabbled” in it for awhile. So I think I was a pretty good test subject . . .

I downloaded the software tonight, viewed the instructional videos, and tried it for myself . . .

The “short of it” is that I was able to create 50 ad groups containing 8700 keyword phrases, and 300 keyword-loaded text ads in about 30 minutes (hey, I know the site claims to do a lot more in just 12 minutes, but I’m still getting familiar with this software!)

But that’s just the beginning of what this software will do . . .

I recorded a short “Overview” video you can watch to get my take on the whole thing . . . just click here to view . . .

Best,

Paul

P.S. Or just read about it by clicking here . . .

Hmmm, “meanderings” — an interesting word. While I intended it to refer to my own meandering, I suppose it could also be interpreted as “those who meander”, just like “earthlings” are those who are from the earth.

Anyway . . . I’ve always liked that word.

Last week I told you about a new AdWords tool, “SiteSniper Pro” — as you may recall, I had only about a 0.2% clickthrough rate on those ads, and I assumed it was because of the poor quality of my image ads.

However, after going back to my AdWords account, I found that almost 100% of my ad impressions were text ads — and 95% were from the home page of the same site. AND when I looked at that site, I discovered that the text ad was clear down at the bottom of the page. So very few even saw it.

So I consider myself just plain lucky for getting that first $297 sale. But I’ll take it.

Squidoo Offers

Earlier this month, I also purchased a 4-week “Squid Offer” as a test. The idea is that you have your “offer” in a given category, and people “vote up” the ads. If my ad is one of the top 5 ads, then it appears on ALL Squidoo lenses that display Squid Offers for that category.

It’s an interesting concept, and I figured I’d just give it a go to see what happened . . .

Mine was in the “Computers, Gadgets & Tech” category . . . I was offering software resale rights (the “Pregnancy Sale“, I believe I’ve referred to previously), and I figured this category might be viewed by people who put together websites. This product would be a natural for professional webmasters, in my opinion.

Well, my month is almost up. I checked today and my ad IS in the top 5 (with only 10 points!). BUT, so far this month I’ve received a whopping 43 visitors from the ad (at a cost of $100).

Now here’s the problem . . . I have no way of knowing the reasons behind this low visitor count. It could be any of the following:

1. It’s a poorly targeted ad — put in the wrong category
2. The ad itself is poor
3. The ad is getting very little exposure

I have no idea what kind of exposure the ad is getting, because Squidoo doesn’t offer much of anything in the way of ad stats . . .

So keep this in mind . . . you may want to try Squid Offers yourself, but when you’re done all you’ll be able to give is a “pass/fail” grade based on your visitor and/or sales counts — there’s no way of determining impression or clickthrough stats. Still, for only $100, it may be worth testing with your own offer.

BTW, Squidoo is okay with you promoting your Squid offers and soliciting people to “vote” for your ads. So I wouldn’t be surprised to see some “Squid Offer Clubs” popping up, where you would get everyone in the “club” to “vote up” your Squid offer. If I had more time, I’d form one myself!

As long as we’re on the topic of advertising . . .

ClickBank Marketplace Ads

I just found out that ClickBank is going to be adding more paid advertising to their site, starting August 1.

If you have a product you sell via Clickbank, this could be a golden opportunity for you. There are only 8 ad spots available for each of the 9 Clickbank marketplace categories, and the current pricelist shows they’ll sell for $300-$700/month . . . go to the ClickBank “Advertise” page for details (you’ll have to send an email to the address listed on that page).

Have a great week!

Paul

Just a couple of items real quick . . .

There may be times when you want a submit button to NOT look like a submit button, but rather look like the blue underlined link text everyone is programmed to click on. Here’s an example (this is actually a submit button):

All you have to do is use a bit of CSS code on the submit button, like so:

<input type=”submit” name=”submit”
style=’font-size:12.0pt; border:0; background:white; color:blue; font-weight:bold; text-decoration:underline; cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;’ value=”Click Here To Order Now!”>

(Note: You can copy/paste the above code, but will need to make sure the quotes are the right characters — Wordpress is converting the double- and single-quote marks to some other character set…)

This CSS code (the “style” settings) does the following:

1. Makes the button background white
2. Gets rid of the border button border
3. Makes the button text blue and underlined (like a link)
4. Makes it so the cursor changes to a “hand” as you would expect to happen when you put your cursor over a link

That’s it — pretty simple, but it can be very nice to have when you need it.

I recently recommended the “Adword180” book. The really interesting part of that publication was its treatment of site-targeted Adwords ads. The problem with site targeting is that it takes a long time to build up a good list of URLS to target — there’s just a lot of manual research required.

Well, no more — enter “Site Sniper Pro“. I wish I had an affiliate link for this puppy, but no matter.

Basically this tool does all the hard work for you, and identifies all the pages that come up in the search engines “natural search results” (and are relevant to your keywords) that have adwords ads on them.

I used it to target several “resale-rights” web pages to promote my “Software Resale Rights” package — it took me about an hour to get everything setup in Google Adwords. After two days I’ve had about 11,000 impressions and 20 clickthroughs.

Doesn’t seem that great, I know. The clickthrough conversion is about 0.2% — I attribute this to my AWFUL image ads — they’re basically just text banners. Very plain. No creativity or imagination whatsoever. Ugly. My bad.

BUT, I’ve only spent about $22 (average CPM of about $2, average cost per click of just over $1.00) and have already had a $297 sale. I know it’s not statistically valid, but it’s definitely a good start.

I’m going to work on my image ads (actually, I’ll pay someone else to — I don’t DO graphics!) and we’ll see what happens. I’ll keep you posted. In the meantime, check out SiteSniper and if you didn’t check out Adwords180 before, get that too — I DO get an affiliate commission on that one

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!

I know, I know — what a mundane subject! But if this little post prods you into action, you may thank me later.

We’ve all heard horror stories about people who have “lost everything” in a computer crash and for whatever reason did NOT have a good backup of their most important files.

And backing up the data on your web server is equally important (sometimes MORE important) than the files on your office machine.

So, how safe is YOUR web server data? Do you have a backup process in place?

You may be surprised to hear that many hosting companies don’t backup the data on their DEDICATED servers — they leave that to their clients. If you’re on a shared hosting account, or if you have a dedicated server and know the data is being backed up regularly, you may be feeling pretty good right now.

But unless that data is backed up”offsite” (to another system in a different geographic location), don’t get too smug . . . you could still lose everything.

To start with, make sure everything you have on your server is also on your local machine. One of the resources in my “Little Black Book” was the CP SiteSaver software. If your web server uses the Cpanel administrative control panel, you can use CP SiteSaver to backup all your account files — including MySQL databases — to your local hard drive.

I bought it myself the other day (I realized I hadn’t put a backup plan into action for my new dedicated server yet — yikes!) and I have to say it’s pretty nifty. It was $27 and that’s way underpriced in my opinion — you just can’t put a price on the peace of mind it brings.

Call me paranoid, but I also like to have a 2nd backup in a different geographic location — so I decided to also use an online backup service (which allows me to backup data from my local machine to one located elsewhere).

Again I turned to my “Little Black Book” and reviewed the online backup services there . . . I really liked the “Altexa” service, and I stumbled upon a way to get it at half price!

I was actually looking at the Amazon “Simple Storage Service” (S3) web service as part of a programming spec. I clicked on the link to the Altexa “customer spotlight” and at the bottom of the resulting page, there was a link to Altexa. Apparently Altexa is looking at the referring URL because at the top of the page it says:

Special Offer for visitors from Amazon! 10GB space, for $60 per year instead of $120! 50% off!
This special offer is available on the “subscribe” page, only for visitors coming from Amazon.com

Now, a typical user will get 50% compression on the files they backup, so we’re talking 20GB of storage for 5 bucks a month — I don’t think you can beat that anywhere.

Well, I take that back — right now you can get a 120GB web hosting account at 1&1 for $3.74/month. But with Altexa you also get the backup software that automates the compression and online backup of all your selected files. Everyone has their own preferences, but for someone like me with no time (more like none of the required discipline) to manually do backups, Altexa seems like a good solution.

Take it from me, having your data backed up in multiple locations will help you sleep better at night — so click on the links above and get going before something bad (nay, “unthinkable”!) happens!

Paul