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