The “Ask” Method has been somewhat of a game-changer despite how it seems like a no-brainer once you’ve read about it…BUT…the one thing that hasn’t really been addressed is HOW you can maximize your responses when you actually do the “asking”.

Here’s something for you to ponder.

How are people truly interacting these days the MOST? It’s not email. It’s not by using “Survey Monkey”-like surveys where you ask a bunch of questions and expect someone to answer them all. It’s via text – or instant message – or chat. All are basically the same thing. You ask a single question in a conversational way and respond based on the response you get from that question.

The problem is, MOST “Ask” surveys are NOT done this way, so while you can glean a lot of valuable information from your leads/contacts/prospects using a long, boring survey, what if you could do the same thing, but do it conversationally? Just think how many MORE people would probably engage in your survey?

Enter the next game-changer: “Survey Sparrow”.

Survey Sparrow is a whole new way of turning surveys into conversations. I was testing out a quick survey on my own website and was getting responses here and there. Since I was really only testing out a couple of different systems I wasn’t expecting a whole lot. Then I tried “Survey Sparrow”. You probably haven’t heard about it because it’s less than six months old. In those six months with word-of-mouth they’ve signed up over A THOUSAND businesses. I heard about them from a Facebook group I’m part of and was captivated by the concept once I saw it in action.

When I put a test survey up (something so incredibly simple, yet kind of fun) I was amazed at how many MORE people actually answered it. It was the same exact question, just presented in a different way. Now, the way I did it, I had a single question, but you could use as many as you wanted. And guess what? You can use LOGIC to tailor the answers and the follow-up questions based on the answers given. This is the same type of thing you would expect from something that’s been around longer and is more expensive like Survey Gizmo. I loved that the logic was there, and I had fun working with it. You can see what my little survey popup looked like below (and actually it’s still live on my site as I write this):

So, someone sees this pop up and clicks the “sure” button, then gets my survey question…

They click their answer (so simple) and get a targeted response:

I know…super simplified, but it shows the basics of how it works. You can assign a value to each answer and could then target those who answered based on the points they accumulated. Of course you’d have to ask for their email address at some point, but that’s just another question and is easily incentivized by offering them some sort of lead magnet for it.

I brought “Survey Sparrow” up for this blog post as a way of letting people know about a possible NEW way to use the “Ask” method, but do it in a fun, engaging way that MIGHT convert better for you (I know it did for me). But “Survey Sparrow” does more than just do cute popup surveys.

You can also do embedded surveys that could go on thank-you pages and ask some quick thoughts on a process or product. There’s also the ability to send a survey via email, but that’s not really useable right now. The cool thing is the developers are very actively developing the software and are adding new features on a regular basis and even though it’s not full developed since it’s still young, I believe the popup widget (and YES, there is a WordPress plugin to make this easy for you!) is a very cool NEW way to engage with your potential leads and it IS working great right now.

Check ’em out while the pricing is still low.

Oh yeah, one more thing. Survey Sparrow is optimized for mobile.

P.S. The links from this page are affiliate links. I very rarely become an affiliate for a product, but when I do, it’s because 1) I believe in it, and 2) it doesn’t change the cost by using my link. :)

That’s your first clue that this Facebook account is CLONED and was NOT created by the person you think it was. (Warning: Sometimes someone will create a new account if they got locked out of their original account and couldn’t recover it, but that’s rare).

The second clue is to look at the profile of the person you already have as a Facebook friend. See if their account is active and also if their friends list is PUBLIC (meaning you can see ALL of their friends). If so, they have set themselves up to have a hacker/spammer CLONE their profile to get access to their friends.

If your friends list is PUBLIC, ANYONE can see who your friends are and can send them a friend request as YOU once they have cloned your profile

Unfortunately, many people don’t pay attention and just assume either they weren’t already friends with the person, or the person had to create a new profile, so they just say “yes” to the friend request.

Why would a scammer want to do this? There are several reasons that I can think of off the top of my head. Once the scammer has “friended” you, they can:

• Send you a private message with a fake story just like the old email scams where someone says they are stranded without money and are asking you to send money to them
• Scan your profile (since they now have full access to it) for personally-identifiable information that will allow them to do identity theft
• If that info isn’t in your profile, they can PM you and ask you for private information that could possibly help them do identity theft
• Send you links in a private message or post to your timeline links that contain viruses or cause you to send out spam on their behalf
• Steal your private photos (including those of your children) and use them for nefarious reasons
• If your phone number is listed in your profile, they will steal the number to sell to telemarketers

That’s just a few off the top of my head.

How Do You Keep Hackers/Spammers from Cloning Your Account?

It’s so simple, but 90% of the people don’t do it.

Make your friends list PRIVATE.

If your friends list is PRIVATE, then spammers/hackers who are not friends with you won’t know who your friends are, so you are of no use them in terms of cloning your profile. They clone your profile so they can impersonate you and get access to your friends, so if you take your friends out of the equation, you will no longer be a target.

Simple, huh?

Here’s how to make your friends list private:

I haven’t found a way to do this on the mobile app, so log into Facebook on your desktop computer. Go to your “profile” page by clicking on your name at the very top of the page in the blue bar. Once you’re on your profile page, look to the left-hand side. You’ll see a box that says “Friends” and has all your friends listed. At the upper right-hand corner of that box is a little down arrow. If you click it, you’ll see a popup that says “Edit Privacy”.

Click that little popup, and change the privacy setting to “Only Me”.

That’s it. You have now protected yourself from being a target for spammers/hackers who clone sites to get access to friends lists. Now when one of your friends looks at your profile page, the ONLY friends they will see listed are any friends you have in common. They won’t see any others. But most importantly, spammers/hackers will see NO FRIENDS.

By the way, the spammers/hackers don’t need access to your account to clone it. Your cover photo and profile photo are usually public unless you specifically set your profile photo to private. All they need is to be able to SEE your photos and your public friends list and they’ll have everything they need to clone your profile. Because of this, you should feel safe that your password was probably never compromised. More than likely, they never had access to your account directly. You can change your password if you’d like to (and it’s generally a good idea to do that periodically), but it’s probably not necessary in this case.

Please tell all of your friends about this tip and have them protect themselves.

Here is some simple code you can add to your WordPress functions file that will properly insert the iframe portion of the Google Tag Manager code after the opening <body> tag, and insert the rest after the opening of the <head> tag. Simply cut and paste this into the functions.php file of your theme (or child theme) replacing both instances of GTM-XXXX with your container ID.

Also note some of this is loaded via javascript AFTER your page loads, so you will not see it if you simply do a “view source”. Instead, you will need to “inspect” the code once your page is loaded and you will then see everything is inserted properly.

Please leave me a comment if this was helpful to you. :)

function gg_insert_gtm() { ?>
<script>(function(w,d,s,l,i){w[l]=w[l]||[];w[l].push({'gtm.start':
new Date().getTime(),event:'gtm.js'});var f=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0],
j=d.createElement(s),dl=l!='dataLayer'?'&l='+l:'';j.async=true;j.src=
'https://www.googletagmanager.com/gtm.js?id='+i+dl;f.parentNode.insertBefore(j,f);
})(window,document,'script','dataLayer','GTM-XXXX');</script>
<?php
}
add_action('wp_head','gg_insert_gtm');

IMPORTANT: The above code assumes you are inserting this code somewhere before the final php end tag (?>). IF you are inserting it AFTER the final php end tag (i.e. at the very end of your functions php file), then you will need to add in both a START php tag (<?php) at the very beginning before the word “function” AND an END php tag (?>) after the “add_action” line.

Also note the “noscript” portion isn’t here because it is for when you don’t have javascript and this obviously is inserted via javascript as pointed out. :) (Silly me on that one!)

How?

Infusionsoft’s Secret Backdoor that Leads Directly to ALL of Your Products

Whenever I start to work with a new client, one of the first things I check is to see if they have this backdoor slammed shut or not. Amazingly, 9 times out of 10, it’s NOT.

I mention this to Infusionsoft Certified Partners and they didn’t know it existed – or forgot about it.

And that’s the whole issue. Like a secret passageway whose entrance has been forgotten, Infusionsoft’s Secret Backdoor is just waiting to be opened.

Out of curiosity I’ve checked many major marketers to see if they’ve closed this door. They haven’t. It was interesting to view their entire product line and see every price point they offer for those products.

How did I do that?

Simple. Infusionsoft has a built in shopping cart and store front. Very few people actually use it these days. Instead they just use the order forms to sell their products. The shopping cart was (and is) ugly. The newer storefront has greatly improved and some people use it. Those that do would have closed the problems with the backdoor, but they wouldn’t have closed the backdoor itself. Why? Because that storefront IS the Secret Backdoor.

Unless you explicitly tell Infusionsoft NOT to put a product in your store, it will be displayed there. And it’s easy to see ANYONE’S storefront. All you need to know is their app name. You can easily get that by looking at any opt-in form code or order form URL. Once you have their app name, simply substitute their app name for “appname” in the following URL: https://appname.infusionsoft.com/app/storeFront/showStoreFront

Voila! You can see every product they have that has not explicitly been set to NOT display in the storefront. Not only can you see each product, you can purchase it. So you can “go shopping” and see if there is a discount price for the product/coaching program you wanted.

Many people offer multiple versions of each of their products – each at a different price point – rather than use promo codes or other ways to adjust the pricing. Either they don’t know how to do that, or just find it easier to create multiple products.

I’ve seen pricing from conferences where people could have purchased a program for 1/2 off – supposedly ONLY at the conference. But the price is still there in their Infusionsoft app, so it’s there in their storefront and I could buy the program at that price as if I was at the conference.

I’ve also seen products priced at zero or $1 rates, essentially “comped” (and some even listed as “comp”, obviously so internal staff could use that when creating orders) and I could “order” all of them if I wanted to, reaping the same benefits that people who paid full price received.

Unless you have someone auditing every order that comes through, these could easily slip through the cracks unquestioned. And even if you caught it, wouldn’t you more than likely honor the pricing?

So how do you slam that door shut?

Super easy. Go to your product listings. Click on any product in the list. To the lower right you’ll see the options for shipping, taxes, etc. You’ll also see a button that says “Cart Options” and “Edit”. Click it.

In the popup window, check the box that says “is hidden in cart”. Save it. That’s it. That’s what removes the product from your public backdoor store.

What if you have hundreds of products though? It would be pretty tedious to remove them one-by-one. Well, you don’t have to.

Go back to your products list. Click the “Actions” button at the top right of your list. Select “Mass Update Products” from the drop-down. Check “is hidden in cart” and process the action. That’s it. ALL of them are now hidden from your cart, your store and your competition. If you want to selectively choose products, just do that before you click the “Actions” button and select the “Mass Update Products” action. It will then only hide the ones you explicitly checked off.

Now you just have to remember to check that box each time you add a new product.

It would be nice if there was a setting somewhere that made that default to being checked rather than unchecked since more people don’t use the store than do, but also most people don’t know about this backdoor. Now YOU do. So go shut it if you’re not using the storefront.

You’re welcome. :)

UPDATE: Infusionsoft has changed where the “hide in cart” checkbox resides. They’ve moved it from the cart options popup to listing it just above the shipping/weight/taxable section. They’ve also reworded it to say “Is hidden in storefront” rather than “is hidden in cart”. Better description!
]]> https://geekgoddess.com/infusionsofts-secret-backdoor/feed/ 5 https://geekgoddess.com/auto-fill-infusionsoft-forms/ https://geekgoddess.com/auto-fill-infusionsoft-forms/#comments Sun, 20 Mar 2016 17:02:55 +0000 https://www.geekgoddess.com/?p=867 Read More]]> I’m inherently lazy. I think most people are.

Recently I was on a conference call with all the team members of a high-profile direct marketer and one of his team members said if she finds herself doing something over and over again, she always finds a way to automate it. She’s not the Terminator…she’s the Automator.

And that’s a good thing.

I’m the same way. I re-use code so I don’t have to build from scratch. I build systems to do the work for me. And if my clients keep asking for the same thing over and over again, I see if there’s a way to make life simpler for them (and me) by creating an easy way for them to implement it themselves. That way I can get on with solving their bigger problems, and they get to save a little cash in the process.

Win-win.

To that end, I finally got tired of people asking me to add some code to their pages so their Infusionsoft web forms would auto-populate with what was sent to the page in the URL. (You know, when you check that little box that says “Pass Person’s info to “Thank You” page url (This is for techies)”). So, I created the FREE “Auto-Fill Infusionsoft Forms” WordPress plugin. Now, all my clients (or anyone who wishes) can simply install the plugin and it automatically fills in whatever data is sent to it into the Infusionsoft form on the page.

Which forms? ANY form you can embed.

Yes, it works for…

• Infusionsoft Web Forms from Campaign Builder
• Legacy Web Forms (including those made by the Classic Web Form Builder)
• Legacy Order Forms
• Any form you manually create as long as it uses the Infusionsoft form field names
• All versions of the embed code, including the javascript snippet

In addition it…

• Automatically makes first name, last name, and email REQUIRED fields (using HTML5 form validation)
• Adds placeholders for first name, last name, email, phone, phone5 (or whatever phone field you’re using for cell) if you don’t want to use labels on your forms (web forms only)
• Adds in the Infusionsoft Web Tracking Code site-wide for you to help with lead tracking

To add the placeholders and automatically HIDE the labels on all web forms (other than those created in the classic builder), simply add the “nolabel” class to the form. For example, where it says class=”infusion-form”, change it to say class=”infusion-form nolabel”.

This should be sufficient for most Infusionsoft users, but for those who want to do more, I’ll be releasing a Pro Version:

Included in the Pro version will be:

• The ability to add in additional fields to auto-fill (standard and/or custom)
• Edit the placeholder text
• Add in the LeadSource field to capture lead source IDs for tracking
• Automatically add in custom fields to capture Google Analytics variables
• …and more

A couple of FAQs

Q. Does this work with Infusionsoft emails?
A. Of course! :) With a caveat. When setting up your automation links in your emails, make sure to add in the information you want to pre-fill in the form you’re sending people to. For example, make your link look like this:

 
Q. Does it work with Optimize Press?
A. Yes, it’s been tested with Optimize Press.

Q. Does it work with Lead Pages?
A. NO. Lead Pages uses a popup window with content that is hosted on Lead Pages’ website. You can only affect forms that are hosted on your own WordPress website. However, it may be possible to use it with Lead Pages with a little extra effort. (More later on this)

Q. I wish there was a way to use this to pass info back to an Infusionsoft-hosted web form or order form and have it pre-fill
A. There is. :) More on that later…

Pre-fill Infusionsoft forms, auto-populate Infusionsoft forms, pre-populate infusionsoft forms

Anyway, with the release of WordPress 4.1, this setting option has disappeared from any brand-new installs (it’s still showing if you have an earlier database version). I was scratching my head and reading the WordPress forums to find out why. It seems the core team felt they needed to clean up the settings area and get rid of the “Formatting” section from the Writing settings so it would be more streamlined. They felt most people left those settings “as-is”, so it was better to just get rid of the option to change them.

Grrrrrrr….

So, I found a couple of solutions which entailed editing some WordPress core files (which I feel is ALWAYS a no-no), then discovered a simple way to fix it. You can go to

/wp-admin/options.php

to see the hidden options page in your dashboard.

CAUTION:Changing the wrong options here or formatting them incorrectly could break your site – proceed carefully.

From there, look for the “use_smilies” option, remove the “1” from there (make it blank), then click the save button at the bottom of the page. That’s it. Simple. It does the same thing as unchecking the box used to do. You can also add a line of code to your functions.php page, but this is much simpler.

If you don’t want to do either of the above (i.e. if editing your options page seems a little too scary since you could end up breaking your site if you accidentally change something else), you can use a simple plugin I built and posted to the WordPress repository:

Keep Emoticons as Text.

It’s only a single line of code (the same one you’d put in your functions file), so it doesn’t add anything in terms of load to your WordPress site.

I have a few clients who use CustomerHub so I’ve had a chance to play in there quite a bit. Usually I’m just building pages and setting up “partials” (included pages), but then I was asked if I could create a popup that would appear upon login. The popup needed to launch automatically and be tailored to show up only if someone had a specific tag (or, didn’t have a tag).

The purpose of the popup was to promote an event or product and push the member to a sales page. If they hadn’t been tagged as having purchased the product, they were shown the popup every time they logged in. Once implemented, the response rate goes WAY up – between 30-40% more. Wow. So this was definitely worth doing, and continuing to do.

The tricky part was getting it to work. CustomerHub has a nasty habit of stripping out javascript when you try to insert it on the page. It also strips out adding in external stylesheets. So if you want to add your own popup code, it becomes a game of trying to keep the code on the page.

There are some workarounds (such as hosting the javascript elsewhere and including it) or trying to add it into the theme files, but these didn’t really work natively. I’ll spare you the tech-talk of how I finally got it to work, but I finally did. An example is shown below.

I’m using Fancybox to do the modal, and passing the member’s first name to the popup to personalize it. Once again, the modal only displays if someone hasn’t purchased the product (well, in this case we just showed it to everyone because of the number of products, but normally it was a single product/event being promoted). This was done using a partial that was included on the home page. Basically, if they had the qualifying tag (i.e. they had already purchased the product), the partial “shown” was a blank page. If they did NOT have the tag, the partial they got included the javascript that created the modal popup.

Sweet!

Pretty soon, Google will be adding a new ‘Mobile-Friendly’ label to listings, and if you don’t have that moniker, it could hurt your search ranking. (Note this is for searches done on mobile devices, not desktop searches).

Fortunately, it’s easy to make sure your site passes the grade. Google has come out with a “mobile-friendly” test page where you can see if your site will qualify.

There are a number of other places to check out your website as well. A good place to start (always) is W3.org. Along with their other validators, they have one for mobile. But beware – it’s extremely sensitive to any possible issue.

Another option – if you are using Google Chrome as your browser – is the “mobile device emulation” feature in Chrome Developer Tools. These tools are found under the Chrome menu View > Developer > Developer Tools. Once you click on Developer Tools and see the toolbar at the bottom of your screen, click on the little mobile device icon on the left of the screen.

This will open up a very cool tool that most people are probably not even aware exists inside their browser. Not only can you select from an amazing array of devices (and choose portrait or landscape for each of them), you can also select the bandwidth speed to see how well your pages would load. It even turns your mouse cursor into a touch simulator, allowing you to drag the screen as if you were on a mobile device.

With all these tools at your disposal, there’s no reason to not make certain your website is mobile-friendly, and ready for the new labels when Google finally launches them.

While I really like the new version, I didn’t like how it is not responsive, so it extended outside my container when viewed on mobile:

I wanted to resize it, but it seemed no matter what I tried to target with CSS or a combination of CSS and javascript, nothing seemed to change the look of the captcha. So rather than trying to change what was generated by Google’s externally-loaded javascript and css files, I decided to change what I felt I could change – the div you place on your site with the g-recaptcha class that loads up the reCAPTCHA.

By using the CSS transform property you can achieve changing the width by changing the entire scale of the reCAPTCHA.

By adding in just two inline styles, you can make the reCAPTCHA fit nicely on your mobile device:

Much nicer!

Here’s what your new markup should look like if you want to get the same effect:

<div class="g-recaptcha" data-theme="light" data-sitekey="XXXXXXXXXXXXX" style="transform:scale(0.77);-webkit-transform:scale(0.77);transform-origin:0 0;-webkit-transform-origin:0 0;"></div>

(Updated June 17, 2015: Thank you to Quyen Ha for correctly adding we still need webkit fallback for Safari iOs/iPhone! I’ve updated the code above to reflect that.)

You can adjust the scale to whatever looks best for your particular layout. The transform-origin property is added because when you use the transform property, it doesn’t change the actual space taken up by the element. So, in order to have the reCAPTCHA align to the top left, I set it so the transformation would originate from the top left-hand corner (rather than from the center, which is the default). I used “0 0”, but “left top” would have had the same effect.

That’s just a basic way to show how you can quickly change the size of the reCAPTCHA with inline styling. For something nicer, I’d suggest assigning a new class and leaving it at full size for anything above mobile, then using a media query to change it to the smaller size. Even better would be to use a transition effect so it visually “shrinks down” when you go to mobile.

To scale the images popup, you can use this code, either by inserting it as a separate style embed (like below) or simply adding it to your CSS:

<style>
#rc-imageselect {transform:scale(0.77);-webkit-transform:scale(0.77);transform-origin:0 0;-webkit-transform-origin:0 0;}
</style>

Update September 8, 2015: I wanted to give props to Jon who came up with a more elegant solution that encompasses everything. Rather than changing the embed code inline, you can alternately add ONLY the following as a separate style embed (like below) or add it to your CSS (note I’m adding in the webkit styling that Jon left out when he made his comment):

<style>
@media screen and (max-height: 575px){
#rc-imageselect, .g-recaptcha {transform:scale(0.77);-webkit-transform:scale(0.77);transform-origin:0 0;-webkit-transform-origin:0 0;}
}
</style>

If you found this useful, please let me know in the comments below.

Update (April 25, 2017): The latest round of spambot submissions on Infusionsoft forms can bypass any captcha, including Google’s reCaptcha. Also, they come from multiple IP addresses so Infusionsoft’s recent “spambot protection” they put in place is useless. All it does is block legitimate users from submitting your forms because it will show their ugly/difficult-to-read captcha in many cases when the submission is perfectly legitimate. Please see the full response I gave to Hon for more details. Other than doing custom scripting to block the submissions, you can also try to use a popup form where the form data loads from somewhere else (i.e. the info isn’t embedded on the same page the popup launches from). For example, if you are using a LeadBox from Lead Pages, you shouldn’t be getting spambot submissions on that particular form because the LeadBox actually loads from LeadPages and not your own site.

—– Original post begins now :) —–

I’ve talked about how “unfriendly” the built-in Infusionsoft® captcha is in previous posts (here and here). Those posts generated quite a bit of interest, so I knew there was definitely a need for a WordPress plugin to be developed.

That was where my dilemma was. I had never written a plugin before. So, once I had some free time (not easy to find when you’re busy with client work!), I dug my heels in and created my first plugin: GG InfuCaptcha!

You can see it in action on my contact page.

Want it for yourself? Download it directly from the WordPress.org plugin repository, then follow the installation instructions.

Once the plugin is installed, using it is very simple.

First, you will need to visit Google’s reCAPTCHA page and sign up for API keys. Click the “Get reCAPTCHA” button to get started. You’ll need to be logged into your Google account before you can sign up for your keys. Once you’re logged into your Google account and are on the reCAPTCHA admin page, fill out the section that says “Register a new site”:

Once you’ve done that, click on the name of the site you just created. you’ll see a section that says “Adding reCAPTCHA to your site”. Click the arrow next to “Keys” and you will see your Site key and Secret Key.

Open the GG InfuCaptcha settings and insert your Site key and Secret key into the appropriate fields, then save your settings.

That’s it for basic setup! Alternately, you can customize the color theme depending on whether you want a dark captcha or light captcha, and also customize the language (if you want to override the auto-detect) and customize the error message someone will receive if they don’t fill out the captcha.

At this point, you can start using the captcha in your Infusionsoft web forms. Simply insert your web form code (IMPORTANT: use ONLY the “HTML Code (unstyled)” version!) and add the Infucaptcha shortcode: [infucaptcha].

The reCAPTCHA should now show up on your web form once you publish your page or post. In addition, since Infusionsoft doesn’t natively have validation set up for embedded web forms, the InfuCaptcha plugin will add HTML5 validation to your form IF…

• You leave the “label” tags intact in the web form
• The text in the label tag includes an asterisk if the field is a required one

This won’t be a problem if you simply cut and paste the code from Infusionsoft exactly as it’s presented to you.

For Advanced Users
If you want to edit the HTML of the web form, but maintain the ability for the plugin to work, there are only two classes you MUST have in place for proper operation.

1. The “infusion-form” class must be in place for the form element (or submitting the form after captcha validation won’t work)
2. The “infusion-submit” class must be in place as a wrapper for your form button. (this is what is used to insert the captcha)

While I’ve done my own testing across multiple browsers, platforms, and WordPress installations, the plugin should still be considered BETA at this time of initial release. Please post a comment below should you run into any issues. If you need assistance with installation or setup, feel free to contact me for a quote to set up and install the plugin for you.