Automatically add to an Aweber List from Shopping Cart Sales

I don't know about you but are teleseminars getting more and more complicated for you to setup and manage? As clients are picking the "best" parts of products to use, several of them are choosing different platforms to fit the different activities involved in hosting an online event.

For example:
AWeber for autoresponders
1ShoppingCart for the Shopping Cart
Add paypal as an option for payment
Build a custom sales page with custom buttons
GoToMeeting as the event host

While the end product is very good and as the client has picked the products for different features, sometimes keeping them all in sync and working together is a challenge. Add to the matter it might be a series of events and you can quickly have a lot of coordination to do.

The issue I want to address today is:

"How do you get the sales contact information over to aweber without having the client do another physical entry of their name and email address?"

Manual works up to a point but you want automatic and "brainless" whenever you can.

So Faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, able to leap tall buildings in a single bound. It's a bird! It's a plane! No, it's the email parsing feature of aweber!

To set it up:
Login to the aweber account.
Go to My Lists and choose Email Parsers
Pick your shopping cart service, membership service, or leads service and that will activate the feature.

But Wait! This is only the aweber side. When you click the checkbox a listed help topic will pop down. READ it! It will give specific tips, cautions and steps to setting up the shopping cart side.

Most of the time it will be a generic instruction like: Enter the email address of the list in the notification of order area of your shopping cart. So if your list is called mymainlist the email address would be mymainlist@aweber.com. Some services require a few more steps but most are that easy.

So what does that do for you? When a purchase is made in your shopping cart it automatically emails notification to your aweber list. Then the first confirmation email is sent to the recipient. Nothing could be simpler and one less thing for you to setup.

Now if they could figure out how to get my desk cleaned off automatically I would be all set!

OK already! I'm giving in...

OK, OK I am giving in... and for good reason!

I am not one to jump on the newest, greatest thing in technology. I like to let other people get the bugs out, see how the application and use goes and then use the best of the best.

What am I giving in on? WordPress!

I have been using Blogger for my main blog and while I like it, as I work with other clients on their blogs and websites I have been increasingly impressed with WordPress. I was looking for the best blog interface for my newest website, and am going to convert my buildyourvaskills.com site to WordPress.

There are several reasons I am doing that. Here are the main reasons.

Open Source Software

WordPress is an Open Source software which allows it to be used free of cost. You can use it on any kind of personal or commercial website without have to pay a single dime for it. It is built on PHP/MySQL (which is again Open Source) and licensed under GPL.

User Friendly

You don’t really have to be experienced to use WordPress on your website. Most hosting companies provide the utilities to install WordPress on your site at a single click of the mouse. The administration section is easy to navigate and its even easy to add articles/content to your website.

Themes Support

You will never run short of templates when using WordPress. If you don’t like the themes that come with the default installation of WordPress, you can hunt on the Internet and you will find thousands of free themes that you can download and use for your website. There are themes which can even make your website look like a regular site instead of a blog. Also I have clients that change their theme to fit the season, a product launch, their mood, basically whenever they want.

Plugins (widgets) Extend Functionality

WordPress plugins allow you to do just about anything that you want and can be installed quickly. For example, you want to customize the sidebar? Just look on Google and you can easily find the relevant plugin that will easily do the job for you.

Standards Compliant

WordPress is one software that follows all the Web Standards and keeps your blog or website compliant to all the rules that have to be followed when running a website. They provide timely updates and remind you when a new update is ready to go.

SEO Friendly

I am no SEO expert. I find I have no time to really concentrate on all but the simplest SEO techniques when updating my blog. Let's face it, I am doing good just to get it done. WP does it for you! Search Engines have to be definitely kept in mind when building a website. WordPress uses different functions which allow it to be search engine friendly. For example sending pings to other sites, making categories, tagging your posts, use of h1/h2 tags etc.

Large community Support

WordPress is used on more than 1% of the websites on the Internet in the world. There is a large user community backing the development of this software. So, whenever you face any problems, you can go through all the available WordPress forums and communities and find answers for all your questions.

You can customize if you are so inclined

If you just can't live with the standard theme and plugin (widgets), you can hard code WP to do anything you want. I don't suggest it but it's possible. Once you start you are opening a can of worms, but if you like that sort of thing, you can certainly do it.

And just a few more quick reasons:
-Wordpress can automatically ping all the RSS sites.
-Wordpress allows the use of Categories (VERY SEO friendly, and automatically found by search engines.)

So, you see the benefits of using WordPress now? And, you can add to this list by providing your feedback in the comments.

Follow Me!

Susan Snyder

Create Your Badge

Track Facebook, Twitter & Social Networks in Google Analytics

By Jeremy Shaffer

A cornerstone of any organization's overall social marketing strategy should be reliable web analytics - that is, accurate tracking of traffic coming from networking sites on which you're conducting marketing efforts. This will enable you to slice and dice statistics for those visitors, and hopefully align those numbers with your marketing goals!

Google Analytics will automatically track referrals from other websites, including Facebook, LinkedIn, and other networking sites. In your Traffic Source reports, you'll see your social network visits grouped under referrals from that site - sources like LinkedIn or stumbleupon. However, these sites are grouped in with all other referring traffic! What if you want to track statistics for incoming traffic from ALL social network sites? It'll be hard to do that if you have to sift through all your other referral traffic.

Grouping Social Network Traffic in Google Analytics

Google naturally defines traffic as being organic, direct, referral, etc - so what we're doing here is telling Analytics to place certain sites within a certain category, or "medium." Chances are, this is how your Traffic Medium report looks right now if you haven't applied any custom filters - visits are grouped by 3 or 4 mediums. Organic traffic covers non-paid visits from search engines, (none) means direct traffic (IE, a visitor typed in your website's address directly), and all your social networks are grouped under referral traffic.

We want a separate category for those sites though! Using a filter, we can tell Analytics to remove specific sites from the "referral" classification and group them under a new medium.

(Note: This technique involves creating a filter. Create a duplicate profile before proceeding - any mistakes can screw up your historical data. We'll install the filter on the new, duplicate profile.)

Once you've got the profile set up, click "Filter Manager" from the Overview Screen (the one that lists all your profiles), then "Add Filter".

Name your filter something descriptive, then select "Custom Filter" from the Filter Type drop down box. We are advanced analytics ninjas, so select the "Advanced" button and configure the filter like so:

Field A -> Extract A

In the first drop-down, select "Campaign Source". In the second field, you'll be entering which sites you'd like Analytics to automatically group into your new social networks category. For best results here, we're going to be using the Regular Expression character (directly below your Backspace key), which means "or" - this allows us to select multiple domains that traffic would be coming from. If, for example, you wanted all your referral traffic from Stumbleupon, Facebook, Twitter and EzineArticles to appear in this new, social-media-only category, you'd enter "stumbleupon|facebook|twitter|ezinearticles" (without the quotes) into this field. Adjust this to fit your needs.

Field B -> Extract B

These fields will be empty: in the first drop-down, select "-". Nothing in the second field.

Output To -> Constructor

In the first drop-down, select "Campaign Medium". In the second, enter the name of your new category - this can be anything you want, but make it simple and descriptive. "social" is always a good choice!

Radio Buttons

Field A Required: Yes

Field B Required: No

Override Output Field: Yes

Case Sensitive: No

You're done! After you've applied the filter, you should see a spiffy little line in your Traffic Medium report - in this example, "social" would show up, and by clicking on it, all your visits from Stumbleupon, EzineArticles, Twitter, and Facebook are in one, social-media-only category, separate from your Google Image referrals (man, that's a lot of cat pictures).

Now all your metrics in this category will accurately reflect social-media-sourced visitors only, without all your other referrals skewing the data. Analyze away!

Jeremy Shaffer, Web Marketing Specialist

BEM Interactive - Providing full-scope services in Website Design / Development and Web Marketing / SEO

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Jeremy_Shaffer
http://EzineArticles.com/?Track-Facebook,-Twitter-and-Social-Networks-in-Google-Analytics---Social-Network-Marketing-Analytics&id=2657607

If you found this helpful and you want more great tips sign up for our free report on "Top 10 VA Skills Most Requested by Employers" at http://www.buildyourvaskills.com
or sign up for our Super Summer School Series to learn more skills to build your Virtual Assisting business. Join us on Thursday, August 13, 2009 at 10 a.m. CST for a great overview on Facebook. We'll walk you through how to set up a Fan Page and a group page (and explain the differences). Plus, we'll show you some quick tips to find potential clients!

Go to www.buildyourvaskills.com now to sign up for this course. Only $20 to attend. Can't make it in person? Don't worry! We'll have the call recorded for you to review any time!

Plus, just announced, our Inner Circle program!

Visit our main website at www.pcstraining.net for a full range of our services.

Susan Snyder
Practical Computing Solutions, LLC