How To Create Multiple Screen Opt-in With Aweber

Tuesday, May 28th, 2013
Basic Aweber form

For most of us, the forms provided by Aweber (or our email marketing solution) works just fine… most of the time. There are some projects where it would be smart to attempt to collect more information from the lead. One smart reason is like a form of opt-in upsell where you provide an option for people to get a freebie of a bigger value if they provided extra information about them or choose to continue, settling for the original freebie and less information. As your technical advisor, I’m happy to tell you this is very do-able, the bad part is, you will require some HTML and perhaps Javascript or PHP knowledge depending how complex your form is. Set up custom fields Your first step is to make sure your custom fields get set up in Aweber. If you haven’t used this feature before, it is where you add the groups of information you’d like to collect on your form. For example, if you need to collect the number of bedrooms people are looking for in a rental or their monthly rental budget. You’d create one field for budget and one for bedrooms. Create two basic forms Next, set up a

Read More→

Comments (0)

Make Glorious Pinterest Graphics For Free

Saturday, May 18th, 2013
Pinterest templates

Oh Pinterest. How it captivates us. I think it is the perfect exemplar how visual most humans are. As a blogger or website owner, you might want to take advantage of the traffic you could be getting from Pinterest. You can roll your eyes – as I did – but when I saw how Pinterest suddenly became a top referrer for one of my sites, you bet I sat up and paid attention. But there is a challenge. Getting those graphics created especially if you lack creativity (like me) and really wouldn’t like to fork out hundreds of dollars for PhotoShop. In the video below, I’ll guide you through the steps for creating pin-worthy graphic from scratch using Pixlr, a free online tool. This tutorial is about 18 minutes long and is packed with tips especially if you are new to graphic creation. After you watch the video, don’t forget to download my Pixlr Pinterest Graphic Templates below. FYI – you can certainly download GIMP which I also highly recommend. Like any professional grade image manipulation software though it’s a huge program. That’s why I love using Pixlr for Pinterest graphics. Since it is online, it means I can access

Read More→

Comments (20)
Go_To_Profile.png

One of the best features about PayPal is the ability to create limited access sub-accounts. You can specify exactly what each person can see or access. If you outsource (and you should), this is perfect because you can let your customer service team to handle refunds, check validity of orders, or give your book keeper access to download reports. Setting up limited access sub-accounts is pretty easy and straightforward. Here are the steps you need to take. Log Into PayPal As Primary Go to PayPal.com and log in as the primary account holder. Go To Profile On the menu, locate the Profile link and click it. My Settings On the next page, you should see a menu to your left. One of the options is My settings. Click to go there. Manage Users Somewhere in the middle of this screen, you should see an option to Manage Users. Click the Update link for that option. Add User Click the Add User button. Security Confirmation You may be asked to confirm some account information before you can proceed Create Login Enter the user’s Name ID which will be used to log in Password User Permissions Select what you’d like the user

Read More→

Comments (0)

Why Create Memorable Social Profile URLs & How To Do It

Tuesday, April 2nd, 2013
media_1364925165326.png

If you do any kind of business online, you’re bound to have an account in several social networks and you often have a profile page where people can read your last shares. That’s all great, but admit it. It’s sometimes difficult to remember the URLs to these profiles. Beyond that, I often wonder at marketers – and I admit making this very same mistake – why we are so smart when it comes to creating affiliate redirects but not for social profiles? Sadly, nothing lasts forever. While I don’t foresee Facebook, Twitter or even Pinterest closing down yet, nothing is set in stone. Great example – Google Reader closing which came as a surprise for many. Truth is, companies cut stuff out all the time. There may not be a rhyme or reason to you but they surely have very legitimate reasons they won’t tell you about. Why would they? Besides the ‘fear’, what about more practical reasons? Take Facebook Pages as an example. A new Page has to achieve a minimum number of fans before you can request for a unique URL. Most of us just beg our friends and network before we promote the Page. Nothing wrong with

Read More→

Comments (0)

How To Offer A Downloadable PDF On WordPress

Friday, January 18th, 2013
Edit the image

Believe it or not, it is super easy to put up a link for people to download a PDF from your WordPress powered site. Create Links To Download A PDF In the post (or page) you want people to download the file from, place your cursor where you want your link to appear. Click the Add Media button Click Upload Select the PDF file you want to share or drag and drop it into the media uploader. Then click Insert into post. By default, WordPress will use the filename as the link text. You’ll want to edit that to something that makes more sense like “Download”. Be careful! If you select the text and start typing you will lose the link. The best way is to place your cursor in front of the link. Start typing and only then delete the portions you don’t want. This will give you a simple link when clicked, will download the PDF. Please note however, different browsers and plugins on users browser can modify this behavior. For example, if your visitor is using Chrome, all PDF links open up inside a new tab. This really isn’t something you can change and personally, I prefer

Read More→

Comments (0)

How To Use Image As Submit Button

Saturday, December 29th, 2012
Code snippets

If you need to use a nifty image as the submit button for your site, here are two easy ways to accomplish the task. Method 1: Input Image Change your submit input code to this – be sure to replace the URL with your own image.

Comments (0)

Make WordPress Menu Items Open In New Window

Thursday, November 17th, 2011
wp-menu-new-window-001

WordPress has a wonderful feature – Menus – that I absolutely love because it lets clients manage their own menus super easily without having to put in a call to me to make edits. Of course I use it extensively within my own sites as well because – well, diving into code sometimes is a hassle. This week, a client asked a good question. How to they make these menu links open in a new window? Well the good news, this is super easy and no extra tweaking required. Here’s what you do. Logged in to your WordPress site (with administrator rights). Go to Appearance > Menus Then on the top right corner under your name, you will see a tab called Screen Options. Click that to expand the options panel Check the Link Target box. You may click the Screen Options tab again to minimize the panel. Now, expand the menu item you want to edit. You will see a Link Target drop down. Default is set to Same window or tab. Simply change it to New window or tab. And that’s it. Pretty painless right?  

Step 1

October 1st, 2011 is the deadline for Facebook apps to use secured URLs. So… this is an app thing right? What has that got to do with you and your Facebook Pages? Here’s what. If you have created custom tabs for your Pages and you host these customized tabs yourself; Or, if you used a WordPress plugin to create content for your Page, guess what? You most likely have created a Facebook app. You didn’t know you were a developer did you How to be sure? Step 1: Go to your own Facebook Page. Take a peek at the tabs (links) down the side on the left. Are there any tabs there that you created yourself? If there are and you used a Facebook app to create it – and you are pretty sure you didn’t create this app then go ask the app creators or check out their pages and web site to see if they have taken steps to support this change. They should. If you still have no idea whether you are hosting the content on the tab yourself, using Firefox or Chrome, click on the tab. Right click anywhere on the tab content – make sure it’s

Read More→

Upgrading aMember Video Tutorial

Friday, July 15th, 2011
upgrading-amember

From time to time, all software need upgrades for various reasons and this week was one of them. aMember released a security patch and also an upgrade. You don’t have to upgrade to patch the software and they do give you clear instructions how to apply the patch. Although it is always recommended you upgrade. We had to perform several of these this week since the patch involves the affiliate program – something all our clients uses heavily. If you need to do this, don’t know of someone who can do it for you and are nervous about doing so, head on over to our sister site TechBasedTraining for a short training video  how to upgrade aMember.

How I Merged 81 Files Into 1 In 2 Seconds

Wednesday, June 22nd, 2011
dos-003

I’m working on something for our fabulous BlogEnergizer Premium members that’s still kind of hush-hush at this time and hit a predicament. I have 81 CSV files that needed to be merged into one huge file.  I had all of them in one folder and sure as hell didn’t want to sit here copying and pasting 81 files. As someone who loves automation and tries to batch my work as much as possible, I had to dig for a solution and found one using good old fashioned DOS. You know, I love modern computing and the snazzy interfaces but at the same time a lot of ‘real computing’ knowledge like using DOS commands is also lost. I’ll admit I’m no where near a DOS ninja I don’t know how to do many things in DOS plus this stuff is kinda scary. However, this was easy. First, I opened command prompt. If you’re following along, you’d go to Start >> Run >> type cmd in the box and hit Open Then, I navigated to the folder where all my files are. For convenience and less typing you could simply move the folder containing all the files you want to merge to

Read More→