Archive for the ‘Misc.’ Category

Exporting Customer Emails from Quickbooks

July 13th 2011

We have Quickbooks for our business and I wanted to export emails for certain customers. That way I could send them all an email telling them about our upcoming vacation dates. But easy as this may sound, I couldn’t find any help online. So I’m posting this.
  1. Go to Reports/Customers & Receivables/Customer Contact List
  2. Click on Modify Report, click on the Display tab, and select the Email field (it’s hard to find but is right after Ship To Country).
  3. Still in Modify Report, click on the Filters tab.
  4. Under the filter dropdown, choose Customer.
  5. Under the customers dropdown, choose Multiple Customers & Jobs. Then pick the customers you want.
  6. Click OK to get out of Choose Customer/Job and then OK to get out of Modify Report.
  7. The report should now be displayed on your screen. Click on the Export button and select A New Excel Workbook. Click Export.
  8. This should open Excel with your report displayed. Just select everything in the email column except the heading and copy it to your clipboard.
  9. Then in your email program, create a new message and paste into the To or BCC field. This will paste the selected customers. Write your email and send!

Posted by susb8383 under Misc. | No Comments »

AMAutomation Review

June 15th 2009

Product: Article Marketing Automation (AMAutomation)
Website: AMAutomation.com

In the training videos of AffioBlueprint, Mark Ling recommends joining AMAutomation. It’s a paid service (can try for free) that has two parts:

  1. A network of blogs where they’ll post your article. (You can add your blog to this so that you can get content, but it isn’t required to take advantage of the second feature).

  2. A function to ‘spin’ your article into different versions, thereby getting around Google’s duplicate content rules.
The first function, posting to a blog, is interesting. The main purpose for doing this is not to get traffic but to get backlinks. Each time someone carries your article on their blog, you get a backlink (assuming that you’ve put links into your article text).

It is similar to when you submit articles to an article directory, but your article is totally anonymous. You don’t put a bio box at all. When someone else decides to carry it on their blog, it looks like they wrote it.

But I’m more interested in the second function of this service, spinning an article.

Here’s what I mean. Suppose you’ve written an article that starts like this:
Teaching your dog to sit is very important. It’s also one of the easiest things to train a dog to do.

What you do in AMAutomation is imbed spin tags in your text and add alternate wording. One type of tag lets you specify an alternative sentence, like this:
{Teaching your dog to sit is very important.~It’s very important to teach your dog to sit.}
It’s also one of the {easiest~simpliest~most easy} things to {train~teach} a dog to do.


Recognize the potential here? With the example above, we already have multiple versions of the first two sentences of the article:

Teaching your dog to sit is very important. It’s also one of the easiest things to teach a dog to do.

It’s very important to teach your dog to sit. It’s also one of the most easy things to train a dog to do.

Teaching your dog to sit is very important. It’s also one of the simpliest things to teach a dog to do.
etc.


If my math is correct, just those few spin tags will generate 12 versions of my sentences.

Then when you submit this, a different variation becomes available to the network. Blog owners can choose to display it or not and there’s no problem with duplicate content if more than one blog carries it.

Unfortunately there is no way to tell which blogs are displaying your article, but you do get a count of how many sites. You also get a count of how many rejected it, so this will tell you if you need to write a better article.

So, all this is well and good, but does it work?

Well, I just signed up for a trial account and forked over $47.00. The site I set up using the AffiloBlueprint methods does not have any traffic from search engines so far. I’m going to start spinning articles, posting them to AMAutomation, and then see if I get backlinks and traffic.

Later…I’ve posted my first article. AMA submits the article to blogs over time so that Google doesn’t see a huge increase of back links overnight.

So here are my results (Day 1 is the day I published it to the network):

Article 1
Day 1: Total blogs who are publishing it: 0. Ranking on Google: n/a.
Day 2: Total blogs who are publishing it: 2. Ranking on Google: n/a.
Day 3: Total blogs who are publishing it: 6. Ranking on Google: n/a.
Day 4: Total blogs who are publishing it: 6. Ranking on Google: n/a.
Day 5: Total blogs who are publishing it: 10. Ranking on Google: n/a.
**Fixed a mistake that caused my pages to not be indexed.
Was also offline for a few days
Day 9: Total blogs who are publishing it: 14. Ranking on Google: n/a.
Day 24: Total blogs who are publishing it: 18. Ranking on Google: n/a.
Day 29: Total blogs who are publishing it: 19. Ranking on Google: n/a.

Article 2
Day 1: Total blogs who are publishing it: 0. Ranking on Google: n/a.
Day 2: Total blogs who are publishing it: 3. Ranking on Google: n/a.
Day 3: Total blogs who are publishing it: 6. Ranking on Google: n/a.
Day 4: Total blogs who are publishing it: 10. Ranking on Google: n/a.
**Fixed a mistake that caused my pages to not be indexed.
Was also offline for a few days
Day 8: Total blogs who are publishing it: 15. Ranking on Google: n/a.
Day 23: Total blogs who are publishing it: 17. Ranking on Google: n/a.
Day 28: Total blogs who are publishing it: 17. Ranking on Google: n/a.

Posted by susb8383 under Misc. & Recommended Products | 2 Comments »

Exercise Caution when using Calculated Shipping

December 16th 2008

I always though that calculated shipping is a good thing. When the visitor puts in his zip code and gets a shipping quote, it seems to him that he’s being charged the true shipping cost and not some arbitrary amount.

But I know for a fact that I lost at least one sale and possibly more because I used calculated shipping. eBay Shipping Charge Problem


I created an eBay auction and I set it up so that it uses a shipping calculator for USPS Priority Mail. I got an irate email from a potential customer asking if I really thought people were going to pay 56.00 for my item. (My item was 35.00 plus shipping).

It turns out there was a major problem with eBay’s shipping calculator. When I went to the auction and put in a California zip code, it came to over 35.00. The same zip code on the USPS site was 11+. The visitor who sent me the email was seeing 26.00 for shipping.

I had noticed the same odd behavior a few weeks ago using Paypal. I clicked on Create a Shipping Label to send an item to Florida via USPS Priority Mail and the price came up as 25.00. The same address on the USPS website to create a ClickNShip label was 11+.

I immediately changed the shipping to a fixed price, but who knows how many orders I lost.

Even if the calculated shipping doesn’t malfunction you could lose a sale. On my Zen Cart site I had a shipping module that calculated Priority Mail costs by using an interface with the USPS shipping server. But I got an email from a potential customer saying he was trying to order but my site couldn’t come up with a shipping rate for his town in California.

I tried myself with his zip code and it worked fine. So I think what happened was the USPS shipping server was down or a connection couldn’t be established when he tried to order (it was close to Christmas).

I immediately emailed him that it should work fine now, but he never returned.

I’ll never again use a calculated shipping module.

Addendum: Well, the case of the mysterious shipping charge is solved. It turned out to be operator error. The dimensions of my box are 12 x 12 x 18. The last time I looked at the USPS requirements, this did NOT constitute what they consider to be a large box (and therefore a higher charge). Their requirements were if the largest girth of the box (in my case 12 + 18 + 12 + 18) plus the length (in my case 12) is greater than 84 inches, it is a large box. (My box adds up to 72 inches).

But somewhere along the line, they added this phrase, "or is bigger than 1 cubic foot (12 x 12 x 12)."

My box is greater than 1 cubic foot. On my website and on eBay’s auction, it asked me for the dimensions and it calculated the charge for a Large Package. But when I went to the USPS site myself, I just selected Package.

It’s interesting to note that I saw a post from another person with the same problem. His box was bigger than 1 cubic foot so the shipping calculator gave him a Large Package price, but when he brought it in person to the post office, they charged him the regular package price.

For me, the solution is to use FedEx or UPS from now on.

And I’m still not going to use calculated shipping again.

Posted by susb8383 under Misc. | No Comments »

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