I think it’s going to help me be more organized and productive, but if not, it’ll still be cool to show my brother when he’s visiting — that’s worth the price by itself.

Anyway, I had to share it with you! First, check out my little demo video showing how it works:

Then if you want to try it out for yourself they have a free trial), just click on this link . . .

In other news, I’ve decided to go ahead and try having a “chat night” on Wednesday at 9 PM central time. It’ll be text only (the voice broadcast system isn’t that great with the system I’m using), and the system only allows a maximum of 25 people. Let’s try it out and see how it works!

And finally, for a bit of inspiration, check out this video about “Team Hoyt”. I thought I was a good father, but I this guy taught me a few lessons . . .

That’s all for now my friends — I hope to see some of you on Wednesday’s chat!

Paul

P.S. Comments, I need comments!!

I won’t bore you with my various excuses, but I’m back now . . .

Even though I’ve been up to my eyeballs in product launches and other client work, I’ve still been buying all kinds of internet marketing stuff. I’m frequently amazed at the low cost for resale or private label rights these days. 20, 45, 100, or even 300 products with resale rights for just a few dollars.

Now sure, lots of the offers include products we’ve seen before, and much of it it total garbage. But there are definitely some diamonds in the rough. So I keep collecting it and someday I may actually get some sites up there and start selling the stuff.

Last week I found a pretty nifty tool for “Link Effects“, and was surprised to see it was selling for just 5 bucks, so I dashed off a quick email to my list. It had been 6 weeks since I had emailed my list, so I was curious what the response would be. I also tried a split test of a straight-text email vs. a text/html email. Check out the stats from my Aweber account:

Now remember that Aweber can’t track the “open rate” of a straight text email. But the clickthrough percentage was pretty comparable for both versions. What I found interesting was the number of complaints — the text-only email resulted in almost double the number of complaints as the text/html email.

That may be because the link was visible — it was an Aweber-tracking link, which is pretty ugly and has a certain “commercial” feel to it (in my opinion).

Aweber recently added the ability to track clickthroughs while using your own domain for the link URL — you do this by adding some Javascript to your page and notifying Aweber via your control panel there, as shown in the video on this page.

This is a step in the right direction, but Aweber still tacks some tracking code onto the end of your link, something like this: “?awt_l=9YfeG&awt_m=8WL4Mnm0rvusc”. So it still looks a bit on the ugly side, as links go.

Another thing to consider is how this appended code will affect your affiliate links. If Aweber’s algorithm is intelligent enough it will detect an existing query string in your link and just append to it with the common ampersand divider.

For instance, if this was my affiliate link:

http://www.biztoolsbrief.com/?12345

Then Aweber would make it like this:

http://www.biztoolsbrief.com/?12345&awt_l=9YfeG&awt_m=8WL4Mnm0rvusc

But even that might mess up the afiliate tracking system, depending on what it’s expecting to see.

So if you’re going to use Aweber’s new tracking system with an affiliate program, make sure it’s not going to mess up the affiliate tracking!

One more thing about Aweber I discovered a little while back . . . they allow you to collect “custom” data fields on their optin forms, and merge that data into outgoing emails. That much you probably knew. But what I found out is that you can’t include that merged data into a URL if you’re going to have click tracking turned on — the merge code is not translated to the correct subscriber value in that case.

That’s a shame, because we don’t always use their “meta_adtracking” form field to hold the affiliate ID — but that’s what you’ll have to do if you want to include the affiliate ID in the URL and at the same time use Aweber’s click tracking system.

With the new tracking system via your own domain URL, this may not be an issue . . . check with Aweber to find out for sure.

Okay, now I need your feedback . . .

I’m working on a book (to be published by Wiley this fall) and while I was reviewing various online communications tools, it occurred to me that it might be fun to have an online chat with my readers. I was thinking maybe every Wednesday night from 9 PM - 10 PM central I could open up my chat lines and we could talk — any question goes . . . is that something you’d be interested in?

Let me know!

Best,

Paul

P.S. In case you’re interested, here’s the latest (about a month old, actually) picture of our latest addition:

I was an electrical engineer at Motorola at the time, trying to sell direct marketing books (hardcopy, not ebooks) over the internet for some extra income.

In order to add some interactivity to my own site, I learned the predominant web-server script language of the day, “Perl”, and I was on my way. Soon I started getting requests from other webmasters to write scripts for them

One of the first people to actually PAY me for a script was Allen Says, of “Internet Marketing Warriors” fame. As I recall, he wanted a script that would take an identifying code (”affiliate code” in today’s vernacular) and propagate it from one page to the next so that it would eventually be inserted into a hidden form field on the order form.

If I remember correctly, the script was 280 characters in size, and Allen paid me $250 for it - that was almost a dollar per character, which at the time was heady stuff indeed! (Actually, it still is - I don’t think I’ve ever been paid that much per character since!)

This was shortly after Amazon started their affiliate program, and it seemed like a great idea. So I decided to create a full-blown affiliate program system, which I started selling in 1998.

Back then, browser cookies weren’t used for affiliate tracking. Either the affiliate code was propagated from one page to the next, or static copies were made of the site pages for each affiliate - so their affiliate ID was hardcoded in these static pages. This was done automatically when the affiliate signed up.

The problem with both of these approaches is that affiliate site “templates” were required. They were just standard HTML pages with some “merge codes” added. For instance, if I wanted the affiliate ID to show up in a certain place on the page, I’d use the merge code of AFF_NUM in that location in the template page. Or for the affiliate’s name, I’d use “AFF_NAME”

It wasn’t difficult, but it was more than most people wanted to deal with, especially if they had a lot of pages on their site.

In order to prevent “affiliate abandonment”, the entire site would need to be templated, OR a portion of the site would need to be templated and designed such that no links led to pages outside the templated pages.

With the widespread adoption of cookies, these things were no longer a concern. You merely “tagged” the visitor with an affiliate cookie when they entered the site, and then read it back again at the time of the order to determine which affiliate got credit for the sale.

At least that’s how it worked in theory . . . as long as someone had their cookies enabled (which most did).

But in the years since then, the browser environment has become more and more hostile to cookies. The default security settings are more discriminatory and various applications designed to “protect” the consumer delete cookies on a regular basis.

In this day of dynamic IP addresses (I’ve seen my own DSL IP address change while in the middle of a shopping session!) using the IP address as a cookie-backup system is hit-and-miss at best.

It seems that as soon as new tracking methods come out (such as the “flash cookie”), new methods are devised to defeat them for the consumer’s privacy and security.

Natural consumer behavior is another factor to consider. For instance, in a recent high-profile promotion, I tracked the orders that didn’t get attributed to the correct affiliate. I actually picked up the phone and called a couple of the customers, asking them about the circumstances surrounding their order.

One person had received the promotional email on their work computer, but had waited until getting home to place the order. The 2nd person had used a different computer for their order as well. What kind of affiliate tracking technology is going to overcome that? Ironically, it’s the “old” technology.

If you want to make absolutely sure the correct affiliate gets credit for a sale, provide them with a static page hard-coded with their affiliate ID. And have that page link to an order page that is also hard-coded with the affiliate’s ID. Make sure their affiliate ID is coded visibly on the order page for cases where they FAX or call in the order. And don’t have any entry or order pages OTHER than the affiliates’ - that way it’s not possible for someone to make an “end-run” around your affiliate.

In this case your promotional home page (e.g. “www.example.com/widgets”) might have something like this:

Alternatively, you could create static pages for all of your affiliates for a particular promotion using one of the available “site replicator” scripts. You’ll have to do a bit of work to import your affiliate list and “replicate” the promotional pages for each one, but using a replicator script should at least make it feasible to do so (doing it by hand is NOT feasible if you have more than a couple dozen affiliates).

In fact, I just remembered I created a free “feature limited” version of my affiliate software some time ago - it will replicate pages just fine, and in fact is very similar to what I used for a couple of past high-profile client launches to create static pages for the VIP JV partners. You can download it here:

http://www.paulgalloway.com/utilities/yoapfree.zip

This will probably be part of a paid package at some point in the future, so download it now while you have the opportunity.

Note: Please don’t ask for support for this free software unless you’re willing to pay for my time ($150/hour, 1 hour minimum).

Keep in mind that this software was designed to replicate pages in real-time as people filled out and submitted a “signup” form. If you already have a bunch of affiliates that you want to replicate pages for, you will need to populate the affiliate data file first, then run the “Update” utility to create the replicated pages.

If you’re handy with a text editor, you can sign up using the included signup form, and then examine the “adm-dealers.txt” file to see how the data is stored. You can then add your existing affiliates to that file using the same record formatting.

The above “home page” example can also be used if you’re using standard cookie-based affiliate tracking - at least you’d make certain the customer comes in through an affiliate link.

But there will still be “breakage” in cases where people have cookies disabled or have their browser security set to reject cookies - so if you can capture and propagate their affiliate ID from one page to the next, that would overcome the cookie deficiencies.

The free software provided above will also do this kind of propagation for you, even without importing your affiliate list - just read the section on “dynamic pages” on pages 22-24 of the user guide.

I don’t know about you, but I’m very curious about where affiliate tracking will be in 10 years. I really will not be surprised if using old, boring “static pages” is still the most reliable way to track, even then!

Best,

Paul

Name: “Sierra LaRae Galloway”
Born: 1:38 PM Central Time, Dec 22, 2007
Weight: 8 lbs 8oz
Length: 19 inches

Baby and mother are doing great — here’s a picture I took when Sierra was about 2 hours old:

I guess it’s time for me to rename my “pregnancysale.com” site! (I can’t tell you how happy LaRae is to not be pregnant anymore!)

Thanks to everyone for their support this past (long!) 9 months!

Paul

The last two pregnancies all went over the deadline, but my wife is REALLY hoping that doesn’t happen this time. And I have to admit, I’m anxious to greet the little one too.

Okay now let’s get down to business . . .

I’ve created some “screen capture” videos before, but yesterday I created what I consider to be my first “real” video. It’s got motion and the last half even has a soundtrack! I think the first part is actually a bit cheesy, but it’s all tongue in cheek and I had a fun time making it.

Check it out here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UyfIcaBewHM

Obviously the video is promoting the “Underground” seminar, but the biggest reason I created this video was to get familiar with the process. And I learned a lot. This video took me several hours to create, but the next one should take me half the time or less.

Here’s the tools I used to create this . . .

To create the movie, I used “Adobe Premiere Elements” software. Now keep in mind that Windows XP comes with “Movie Maker” which includes lots of neat transitions (different screen wipes between scenes) — but I believe the Adobe software gives you greater control over the various elements, such as volume fading.

For the narrative during the first half of the movie, I used Audacity from Sourceforge.Net.

I simply recorded myself reading the script (which I had previously written down) and then changed the pitch of my voice to make it sound “masked”. I was then able to remove all the extraneous sounds (my breathing, sniffing my nose, etc). Audacity is great (I hadn’t used it much prior to this), and I’m once again amazed at the quality of software you can get for free these days.

For the background music (last half of the movie) I used music from “SmartSound.com” — I bought their “Theatrical Impact” CD.

Note that thesse CDs don’t contain standard audio files — you can’t play them in your CD player or even with your media player on your computer. They are in “smartsound” format and require smartsound-capable software. I believe there is a plugin for Adobe Premiere that will allow it to use SmartSound files directly, but I used the software provided by SmartSound (it was free with my CD purchase).

The nice thing about smartsound music is that each piece contain separate tracks — so if you want to change just the “drums” track, you can do that — they are designed specifically with modification in mind.

The little “encrypted message” sequence was done using some Javascript I had saved from who knows what/when — I think it was something I had planned on using for Yanik’s first “Underground” seminar. It was based on the free random text script you can get from Jeffrey Sanders.

I got the “Underground Agents” pictures from Yanik’s past sales pages (cropped them all to be the same size using Paint Shop Pro). The three video sequences (black-masked guy, moving people/landscape, and falling money) and all of the other people pictures were purchased from iStockPhoto.

Getting the content together actually took more time than anything else . . . there were a total of 54 images, plus the video clips.

Once you have all your content, it’s just a matter of dragging/dropping things on a timeline and adding the text elements — not hard, but it does take time to get everything lined up (especially when you’re trying to sync pictures to a music beat).

It was actually a lot of fun . . .

Take a look at the video and let me know what you think!

Paul

P.S. And by all means — if you’re thinking about going to the Underground Online Seminar, use my affiliate link at http://www.covertmoneysecrets.com/ !!!

Here they are:

BlackList Monitor - RepCheck — I’ve been behind the scenes in a lot of the “famous” internet marketing product “launches”. One common concern is whether or not your site has been blacklisted by the various spam-monitoring services. I recently ran across this “RepCheck” service that not only monitors blacklists for your server IP addresses, but also for your domain name(s).

Instant Messaging Manager - Meebo — Okay, this has been around awhile, but it’s surprising how many people don’t know about it! Not only does Meebo allow you to access the most popular Instant Messaging systems online (no software download necessary!), but it merges the “buddies” from several of your IM services into one list. Definitely a “must-see” for any of you IM junkies out there!

Voice broadcasting - VoiceShot — Record your outgoing message and upload your customer/prospect phone list, click, click and you’re off! It’s amazing how the internet has simplified communications these days! This service includes automated “do not call” list management and way too many features to list here, so go check it out. The cost for US calls is $0.12 per completed call (60 seconds or less). To the UK is $0.15, Australia, $0.16 . . . amazingly powerful service.

Visual Website Visitor Analytics - Crazy Egg — Cool stuff — gives you a “heatmap” of where your visitors are clicking on your site. Also allows you to break the clicks down relevant to other visitor information, such as their referring URL, search terms used, etc. This will definitely give you insight regarding the effectiveness of your web page.

HTML Scrambler — Hey, sometimes you just want to keep the honest people honest. It’s not going to help protect state secrets, but this HTML scrambler can be used for obfuscating email addresses, links, payment form code, etc.

CD/DVD Duplication/Fulfillment - Kunaki — I believe I read something about this outfit awhile back, but just recently checked them out. Nice service — not only can do they duplicate and deliver CDs and DVDs, but if you want they can take the orders for you (using THEIR credit card merchant account) as well.

I also found out about a script called “DVD Automator” that’s designed to dovetail with the Kunaki service — you take orders via PayPal and the customer data is automatically sent to Kunaki for fulfillment. They claim to make the selling/fulfilling of CDs and DVDs as simple as selling downloadable products, and I think they’re onto something . . .

Now I have a request for you — it’s simple . . . just leave a comment here and let me know what kinds of things you’d like to see me write about here. What kinds of solutions are you looking for? What “how to” knowledge would you like me to share here? Thanks!

Paul

This discount price only good until Midnight, October 8, 2007!

Or maybe they say something like this:

Because you’re ordering today, October 8, 2007, you also get these bonuses!

If you leave the page and come back the next day, you will see the deadline has magically moved. It’s a simple Javascript trick that’s been used for years to create a “sense of urgency” in the reader. The problem is, it’s an old trick, and most IM-savvy people know the “deadline” is a moving target.

I don’t know about you, but when I see something like that, my first reaction is “Yeah, right!” — and the credibility of the author is immediately put in the “questionable” category in my mind.

However, as I’ve worked behind the scenes for other marketers, I’ve seen the power of a REAL deadline — it’s quite fascinating to watch a slew of orders squeak in just prior to an advertised deadline!

Deadlines have power. In fact, many old-school direct marketers don’t consider an advertisement to be complete unless it includes a deadline, and they include an expiration date on all their “offline” advertising.

The problem with a fixed expiration date on your website, though, is that it’s so easy for your visitor to say, “Oh, I’ve got until Friday — I’ll think about it and come back . . .” — and once they’re gone, there’s a good chance they won’t be back.

So we try to get them to opt in to a list, so we can keep nudging them and reminding them about the deadline that’s looming . . . but we usually only get a minority of our visitors on the list.

So what to do?

How about a much shorter (but still REAL) deadline to force them to make a decision NOW rather than “thinking about it for awhile”? And we will reinforce that deadline with a running countdown.

I’ve actually seen these before, but in some cases all you have to do to restart the countdown is refresh the page. That’s no good. Sometimes the countdown timer will run to 0:00 and the offer remains the same — not good either. The page/offer MUST change when the timer runs out, or we lose all credibility with the reader.

You can see a simple example of this here (opens in new window):

Sample Countdown Timer

If you load that page and wait two minutes, the page will redirect to another site. In your case, you’d set the redirect URL to another page on your site with a modified offer (higher price, fewer bonuses, etc.)

If someone reloads the page, the countdown timer doesn’t start over — it maintains its “state” and continues to count down. The countdown “cookie” is maintained for a year, so if the visitor comes back anytime after the 2-minute deadline, they will be immediately redirected to the 2nd offer.

Now sure, if someone wants to reset their cookies, the timer will start back at the beginning. But let’s face it, anyone who’s really determined to cheat the system can open up a different browser or go to a friend’s computer and visit your site from there — so it’s not worth our time to try and create a cheat-proof system.

(If you really want to make it cheat-proof, you’ll have to go back to using a specific date as your deadline and change the offer when that deadline is reached.)

To use this script on your own page, just open up the source code on the example page (do it before the 2 minutes timer expires!) and follow these three steps:

1. Copy the Javascript from the HEAD section of the page into the head section of your page.

2. Just before the closing body (”</body>”) tag, add this Javascript:

<script type=”text/javascript”>
<!–
WindowLoad();
//–>
</script>

(Make sure the “WindowLoad();” command is on a line by itself . . .)

3. Where you want the countdown timer to appear, insert this line:

<span id=”CountDownPanel” style=”color:red; font-size:20.0pt; font-weight:bold”></span>

(You can of course change the style attributes . . .)

Obviously the 2 minute timer used in this example is too short — you’ll want to change the “seconds” variable to some higher value (right now it’s set to 120 seconds — 1800 seconds would be 30 minutes . . .)

And you’ll also need to change the “redirect_url” to your “2nd offer” URL

If you don’t mind getting your hands dirty (or hiring someone else to), you can do all kinds of fun things when the timer runs out. For instance, instead of having the whole page redirect to a different page, you could dynamically change the content on your page (see my previous article, “Dynamically Personalized HTML“). The change(s) could include the prices, bonus section, order links, etc.

Or you could get really fancy and have a pop-over window that says something like “Sorry, you missed the deadline; the price is now $X.XX and bonus #1 is no longer available. The price will go up to $Y.YY in 20 minutes. ” and start the timer again . . . that would REALLY add credibility to your deadline, in my opinion.

Questions? Comments? Let me know what you think!

Paul

Good observations.

Now, comprehensive “form checking” Javascript code is beyond the scope of this blog, but I did create a simple example of how it could be done on the form I showed you last week.

To see the new version, click here to open the page in a new window. Then open up the source code and follow along as I explain the changes I have made

First, not the opening FORM tag — it now includes “name” and “id” attributes, both set to “aform”. There’s nothing special about “aform”, any value would work, such as “theform”, “coolform”, “irock” or even “whatever”. But you’ll see where we reference the form name in a minute.

Now, look at the end of the page (source code), just before the closing BODY tag. You’ll see this little line of Javascript code:

formcode = document.getElementById(’formdiv’).innerHTML;

With this code, I’m just saving the “original” HTML code in the formcode DIV, so I can restore it after it’s been changed by the rmform() (”remove form”) function.

The rmform() function has changed slightly — the HTML code that I assign to the formdiv DIV’s innerHTML now includes this code:

<font size=-1><center>(<A href=”javascript:void” onClick=”document.getElementById(\’formdiv\’).innerHTML = formcode;”>Resubmit Form</a>)</center></font>

So if someone does get a bad value through, and they realize that and want to change it (resubmit the form with a good value), then they just have to click on the “Resubmit Form” link to bring back the original form HTML code.

Now, to minimize the likelihood of a bad value getting through, I added some form field input checking to the “wait” routine. Originally, these were the only two lines there:

string=”rmform();”;
setTimeout(string,delay);

But if you look at the source code, you’ll see there’s a bit more to it now . . .

And lastly, I changed the form “onSubmit” attribute from this:

onSubmit=”wait(3000);”

to this:

onSubmit=”return wait(3000);”

This makes it so the form is only submitted to Aweber IF the “wait” function returns a “true” value. Which won’t happen unless the name and email fields pass the input checking I added.

So there you are . . . if someone submits obviously bad data (blank fields or invalid email format), they will get an error message from their browser. If they submit what looks like legitimate information, but get an error from the Aweber service, the form fields MAY still be replaced with the thankyou message, but they can click on the link to get the form back.

Best,

Paul

P.S. Yanik has a couple more content videos on that site now — check them out here:

5 Hooks Videos

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.

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