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

I recently had a client who had a very big product launch. In fact, it was so big that the servers couldn’t keep up!

Consequently, there were many people who “signed up” for his service but never received the “activation” email. And inside the activation email was a link that activated the customer’s account.

Fortunately, my client’s software logged the email address for every “signup” AND for every “confirmation”. So all he had to do was extract the emails from the “signup” list that were NOT in the “activated” list, and re-send the activation link to those people.

This is a perfect illustration of the necessity of logging data for every stage of your process. Any time someone fills out a form or takes an action of any kind, you should be keeping a record of it.

If you have a privacy policy, make sure its verbage takes this into account.

Speaking of Privacy Policies, it’s sometimes interesting to see what a merchant’s machine readable “compact” privacy policy is saying. I created a little tool that translates the machine-readable code to human-readable format — you can plug in your website of interest and see what they’re policy is. Just click the link below to open this tool in a new window:

Analyze A Site’s “Compact” Privacy Policy

Now do me a favor — let me know what questions you may have about internet marketing technology in general — just leave a comment or click on the contact form link on the right side of this page.

Thanks!

Paul

It seems I picked an extremely busy day for my first blog post . . .

I’ve seen countless emails promoting “The Rich Jerk” and his “X-Ray” product a few for ViralShock, several for “My Viral Spiral” . . . and it seems Marlon Sanders is pitching a new “coaching” program for his “Affiliate Dashboard“.

Oh, and for you jaded internet marketers out there, none of these are affiliate links (just so you know)!

There have been a few emails about other products as well . . .

It’s obvious the Internet Marketing crowd listened when somebody (was it Jeff Walker? OR someone before him) said Tuesday was the best day of the week to launch.

But it’s been awhile now and I wonder if that’s still true? There are so many hyped-up promotional emails coming in on Tuesday’s now — the signal-to-noise ratio is definitely trending downward.

I’m not a marketing “guru”, I’m just thinking out loud. But it seems to me like a good time to test that “Tuesday mailing” rule of thumb . . .

Speaking of testing . . . I did an interesting split test of an email headline when I first told my list about my “Internet Marketer’s Little Black Book“. I wasn’t measuring the “open” rate, but did measure the ‘clickthrough’ rate, with these results:

Here’s Your Little Black Book . . . 33.8% clickthrough

[Biztools Brief] Here’s Your Little Black Book . . . 28.8% clickthrough

[BizTools Brief] 1001 Insider Resources For The Serious Internet Marketer . . . 26.2% clickthrough

1001 Insider Resources For The Serious Internet Marketer . . . 22.9% clickthrough

I think the first headline did the best because of the curiosity factory. Any copywriting experts care to comment?

Now this blog is supposed to be about online tools, so let me point you to one just about everyone can use:

Eric Graham (The “Conversion Doctor“) recently showed how he was able to increase his response rate by almost 50% just by changing the look of his submit button!

I put together a simple “button creator” on my “utilities” page which you are free to use . . . I took what Eric did and added some enhancements like the ability to specify text color and bold text.

It also allows you to have multi-line-text buttons . . . I’ve tested with MSIE 7 and Firefox 2 and everything seems to work . . . enjoy!

http://www.paulgalloway.com/utilities/high-response-buttons/

Best,

Paul