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Think Outsourcing = Chasing freelancers from India? Think again!

Mike Peters, November 12 -- Filed under Get Online

Chris Carpenter, Joel Comm, Amit Mehta, Tellman Knudson, Anik Singal and Mike Masterson are just some of the Super Affiliates you might recognize, who are bringing home hundreds of thousands of dollars every month, thanks to work and services rendered by third party providers.

The common misconceptions involving outsourcing are

(a) Outsourcing is about paying an offshore freelancer $10/hour to produce shitty work
(b) Outsourcing requires a lot of micro-management
(c) Outsourcing is risky because I will be revealing all my secrets to a company I don't know
(d) Outsourcing is something only big companies use
(e) I have technical skills and have engineers on staff, Outsourcing is not for me.

In reality, none of these arguments hold much merit. Much like PPC is a tool to drive qualified leads to a target website, Outsourcing done right, is a tool that can help you get your ideas to fruition at minimum risk. Successful companies (Microsoft, Sony, HP), Super Affilites and individual Entrepreneurs alike use Outsourcing daily to develop prototypes, clone websites, launch products and test new ideas.

What's the key to it all? Three little letters known as ROI (Return On Investment). If you want to duplicate the success other super affiliates are seeing with outsourcing, your first step is to get over your natural instinct to hustle. Shopping for an Outsourcing partner is not like looking for the best deal on an 8GB iPhone. And it's not like a visit to your local flea market. Not all outsourcing companies are created equal.

Forget about price-per-hour. Use deadline-guarantees, references and specific experience in your target vertical as your metrics when looking for an outsourcing partner. Pick a budget for the project and insist on deadline guarantees with penalties for not meeting the deadline. Look for a company that employs marketing account managers who can take your ideas and work directly with the engineers, so that you don't have to waste your time.

In his book, "The 4-hour Workweek", Thimothy Ferriss shares how he managed to outsource his entire life, using virtual assistants across the globe to send flowers to his wife on their anniversery, remind him to pick up his son from practice etc.

While I don't encourage you to go that far, I do invite you to explore how you can use Outsourcing to effectively employ an army of software engineers, link builders or copywriters, to grow your business for you. Start small but never lose sight of your Outsourcing projects ROI. Outsourcing done right is simply when total revenues exceed outsourcing project investment AND does not require your direct involvement every step of the way.

Working with Super Affiliates, one of the most popular uses of Outsourcing we see is when a Super Affiliate has been working with a particular niche for a long time, gets great results and is now looking to increase his/her profit margins. Using Outsourcing, the Super Affiliate can hire a small team to clone a website or create a standalone product, so that the affiliate becomes a merchant and significantly increases profit margins. This is a great model that is almost always guaranteed to work well, with the right outsourcing partner.

Another popular example is when affiliates look to avoid the mundane tasks of running a website. Content generation, Handling support tickets and maintaining your website are all tasks that you should never ever be wasting your time on.

You'll be getting a much better ROI on your time if you focus on what you do best - Marketing.

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xml_parser and htmlspecialchars with unicode (utf8)

Mike Peters, November 5 -- Filed under Programming

If you use PHP xml_parser or htmlspecialchars functions on a Unicode (UTF-8 encoded) string, you're going to run into problems.

In the utf-8 world, some foreign language letters are represented by a number encapsulated with &#number;

For example, the Hebrew letter Alef (A) in utf-8 is displayed as:
&# 05D0 ;

PHP xml_parser and htmlspecialchars functions are not smart enough to realize the first two chars (&#) are part of a single utf-8 encoded letter. These functions end up converting such letters into question marks or generating a segfault.

The workaround?

str_replace &# with a random string before calling xml_parser / htmlspecialchars, then str_replace back before returning.

Example:

// Strip &# so that xml_parser / htmlspecialchars don't
// confuse this with html code
$str = str_replace("&#","unicode_replace_me", $str);

// Safe utf-8 htmlspecialchars
$str = htmlspecialchars($str);

// Bring back &#
$str = str_replace("unicode_replace_me","&#",$str);

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Integrating SPI & 3rd party leads capture

Kyle Deneen, November 4 -- Filed under Programming

Integrating SPI leads capture along with a 3rd-party leads system into your website is a fairly simple process. Some 3rd-party systems such as AWeber and Lyris use a form-based method for acquiring leads from your opt-in forms. SPI leads capture uses a cURL-based PHP function call to accomplish this.

Imagine the following scenario: Your company has a webpage with an opt-in form that asks a user to provide their name and email address. You want to save this information in both your SPI Leads Manager and in a 3rd-party system. Lets assume your opt-in form resides on 'index.php' and that once leads are added you want the user to end up on 'index2.php'. You could integrate form-based 3rd-party leads capture as well as SPI leads capture in the following way:

1. First determine the needed vars for the 3rd-party system. These are usually hidden input tags that should be submitted along with the leads data such as name and email address. Generally, the 3rd-party site should contain directions on which vars are needed to add a lead and where to submit that info.

2. Create a page in between index.php and index2.php where the lead processing will take place. Lets call this page 'subscribe.php'. You would point your opt-in form action on index.php to POST to subscribe.php.

3. To add a lead to your SPI Leads Manager, the following code would be placed at the top of subscribe.php:

<?
// include the functions/data config for your shoppingcart
require_once("spicart.php");

// set data from POST
$name = $_POST['name'];
$email = $_POST['email'];

// set up the $input var to add the lead
$input = array();
$input['name'] = $name;
$input['emailaddress'] = $emailaddress;

// if you wanted to add this lead to an autoresponder, you can do this
// to specify which one. It's based on the autoresponder_id in your SPI
// account for an existing autoresponder
$input['autoresponders'] = 2;

// call the SPI Shopping cart 'do_addlead' API function passing $input
do_addlead($input, $output, $ResultStr);

?>

4. The next step is to create a simple HTML document that will contain a form and all the necessary vars to pass to the 3rd party system.

Obviously, the names and values of the inputs you need for your 3rd party system may differ. Integration instructions for the 3rd-party site should tell you the proper place to point the form for their system to pick up the data. The 'onLoad' event in the tag tells the browser to simply submit the form when the HTML loads. PHP is processed first, so the lead is initially added to SPI Leads Manager, and then the form is submitted to the 3rd party site. Most 3rd party sites allow you to specify a URL that their system will redirect your user to once their system adds the lead.

Press Release: SPI to offer Private-Labeled version of Internet Marketing services

Sisse Naggar, October 31 -- Filed under SoftwareProjects Products

New York, NY October 31, 2008 -- Software Projects, an Inc. 5,000 Company and the industry's leading full-service Internet Marketing and Web Development agency, announced today the general availability of a private-labeled version of its Internet Marketing & Web development services.

The private labeled suite will allow any company to offer Email Marketing, PPC Management, Lead generation, Link building, Web hosting and Payment solutions to its customers under its own brand. The system runs on the partner's domain and is completely transparent to the end user.

"We are very excited to open up our technology platform and allow any business or agency to offer full-service branded Internet Marketing & Web development services to their customers. This development is a major milestone in our road to bring reliable, affordable, results-driven Internet Marketing services to the masses", said Richard Anderson, President and CEO of SoftwareProjects.

With customers such as Nokia, Microsoft, 3M, ReMAX, Estee Lauder, CountryWide as well as other great organizations operating in 14 countries, SoftwareProjects is well positioned to address the Internet Marketing needs of any business vertical. The company is currently managing $90M in Email, PPC and Media marketing budgets.

Mike Peters, General Manager of SoftwareProjects Florida, commented, "While we have a great in-house sales force, we realize acquiring customers one company at a time, is a long process. We are looking to expand our reach by partnering with qualified companies who can introduce a customer base that has a need for Lead generation, Brand building, Web development and Payment solutions. Through our private-labeled offering, our new respected partners will significantly increase the value proposition to their customers."

For additional information about SoftwareProjects private-labeled Internet Marketing & Web development program, contact the company directly at http://www.softwareprojects.com or by phone at 800-218-1525

About Software Projects

Headquartered in New York, with Sales and R&D offices around the globe, SoftwareProjects is a full service Internet Marketing & Web Development trusted leader. Established in 1998, SoftwareProjects is a privately held, profitable, global organization with 250 professionals on staff. The company's focus is helping businesses sell more online, providing a wide spectrum of services including: Email Marketing, PPC Management, Landing pages, Lead Generation, Search Engine Marketing, Affiliate systems and Web development. SoftwareProjects currently supports more than 2,000 businesses in 14 countries. For more information please refer to SoftwareProjects.com (http://www.softwareprojects.com)

How to access SPI Shopping Cart variables

Mike Peters, October 31 -- Filed under SoftwareProjects Products

Unlike other solutions, the SoftwareProjects shopping cart front-end runs on your server (so that you can customize everything) while the back-end processing runs in SPI's robust data centers.

Understanding this architecture is key to learning how to access shopping cart run time variables, such as Order ID, customer shipping information, Order total etc.

Since the front-end runs on your server, you can access all run time variables by simply examining the return values of the cart's do_checkout, do_backgroundcheckout, do_getcustomerorders and do_getcustomerinformation methods.

As part of this post, I will provide you with step-by-step instructions for a couple of popular scenarios.

How to display Order ID and Order Total on thank you page

The Order ID is returned when calling do_checkout and do_backgroundcheckout. Every order in the system is going to get a unique ID assigned to it.

Step 1: Find the call to do_checkout (typically done on your main screen or checkout page).

You should find a block of code that looks like this:

// If submitted order for processing
if (Strcasecmp($HTTP_POST_VARS['action'],'checkout')==0)
{
$input = array();
$input['store_id'] = 2;
$input['product_codename'] = $product_codename;

// Checkout
if (do_checkout($input, &$output, &$ResultStr))
{
// If successful, redirect
Header("Location: thankyou.php?order_id=".$output['order_id']);
return;
}
}

Notice in the example above, the order_id returned by do_checkout is immediately passed to the thankyou.php page as an HTTP_GET parameter.

If you have multiple pages to your sales cycle and you're looking to make the main Order ID available to the thankyou page (which is a few pages later in the process), you're going to have to store the Order ID.

The easiest way to do this is by using a cookie.

Add a call to setcookie() to store Order ID as a cookie, prior to redirecting the user to the next step of the process.

Example:

// If submitted order for processing
if (Strcasecmp($HTTP_POST_VARS['action'],'checkout')==0)
{
$input = array();
$input['store_id'] = 2;
$input['product_codename'] = $product_codename;

// Checkout
if (do_checkout($input, &$output, &$ResultStr))
{
// Save Order ID as a cookie so that we can access it later
$order_id = $output['order_id'];
setcookie("order_id", $order_id, time()+3600*24*7,"/");

// If successful, redirect
Header("Location: step2.php);
return;
}
}

Once the Order ID is saved as a cookie, you can easily access it on the thank you page.

Here's an example of how you would populate a PepperJam network tracking script with the order ID:

<img src="http://www.pepperjamnetwork.com/tracking/trackmerchant.php?PID=1977&AMOUNT=0&TYPE=2&OID=<?=$_COOKIE['order_id']?>&CURRENCY=USD"
height="1" width="1" border="0" />

You can use the same approach for storing the order amount.

How to display customer name and emailaddress on the thank you page

The customer name, shipping address and shipping method are also returned by do_checkout.

You can use a similar method as the one described above, storing the pieces of information you need (such as: customer name) in a cookie, so that they are accessible by other pages in your sales process.

Another approach you can use is a function called do_getcustomerinformation.

Once you have the Order ID, you can pass the Order ID to this function and receive all customer information related to this order.

For example on your thank you page, you can use the code below to display Hi FirstName:

// Use "Customer" as the default first name in case we don't have a valid Order ID
$firstname = "Customer";

// Fetch customer information from the database
$input = array();
$input['order_id'] = $order_id;

// Checkout
if (do_getcustomerinformation($input, &$output, &$ResultStr))
{
// Set first name
$firstname = $output['firstname'];
}

// Display greeting
echo "Hello $firstname,";

How to add a new Virtual Host using CPanel

Dawn Rossi, October 17 -- Filed under Programming

CPanel is a popular server control panel that allows you to manage email accounts, virtual hosts, ftp settings and just about every feature of your server.

As part of this video tutorial, I will walk you through the process of setting up a new virtual host account using CPanel.

A virtual host is a domain that maps to a unique folder on your server. It's a way to run dozens of websites on a single server machine.

Setup Domain name

Before you can setup a new virtual host, you'll have to make sure the domain points to your server machine. You can do this by clicking on the Windows 'Start' button, then select Run and type: Cmd followed by enter.

Type ping DOMAIN.COM followed by enter and record the ip-address that is displayed.

If this ip-address doesn't match your server ip, login to your domain registrar and update the domain ip-address so that it points to your server machine. Note: Whenever making domain-name changes, you typically have to wait 2-24 hours for changes to propagate.

Create Virtual Host & Upload files via FTP

The 3 Items on the ToDo list rule

Mike Peters, October 17 -- Filed under Basics

If you're managing engineers, graphic designers, copywriters or anyone for that matter, you might want to try adopting a simple principle that can make a big impact on your troops productivity -

Never have more than 3 items on someone's ToDo list at any given point in time.

As all the personal productivity experts say, sticking to focusing on a single item at a time is the only way to getting things done.

And they're right.

This is particularly true in the software development world, as it takes about 30 minutes to switch from one task to another and get your mind wrapped around all the intrinsic details.

Communicate the 3 most important item to every team member and then get out of their way, don't bug them and don't throw anything else at them.

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