Monday, May 27, 2013

Going completely automatic with iMacro


Ok so I have been receiving a lot of emails about how to make it completely automatic; iMacro scripts are helping out thousands of people however humans are required to be present most of the time to execute the script and to monitor it – what solutions do I have for that? Well, there are two basic solutions for that:
  1. iMacro scripts aren’t actually self sufficient in their basic form; lacking of logical/decision-making power make them react odd most of the times and increase human dependency as they get stuck or stop without warning. Solution is easy, however may require little programming experience – you need to integrate the scripting with some other programming language, I use java-scripting for enhancing my scripts, you can choose any language from java-scripting, visual basic scripting or Php (Google it for samples).
  2. And the other problem with iMacro scripts is that, what will happen even the scripts are make using java-scripting however due to some problem in computer or internet connectivity, they get stuck or close without warning – I mean again you come to same point where human efforts are required? For by passing this dependency, here is one the solution that I personally use:
Scheduling iMacro scripts:
  1. Fire up Mozilla Firefox browser and access iMacro panel
  2. Select your desired iMacro script and add it to bookmark
  3. Open bookmark panel by pressing Ctrl + D and copy bookmark link of iMacro script
  4. Now execute the script from command prompt or start->run, script look like ‘Drive:\Path\Mozilla Firefox\Firefox.exe imacros://run/?m=%23Current.iim’
Bookmarketing imacro scripts

Bookmarketing imacro scripts

Once you perform above steps, it’s time to make it execute with single click. For that, you need to create a .bat file (.bat files are just like .exe files, you can make them in notepad by setting its extension to .bat (i.e Testing.bat). All instructions that you execute in command prompt can be executed through this single .bat file – Google it for details), here is the testing script/command that you need to copy in .bat file:

C:\program files\Mozilla\firefox.exe imacros://run/?m=%23Current.iim

After putting this line in the .bat file, save it at desktop; for executing the file, just double click it. It will open Firefox and execute Current.iim script itself. You can add instructions like ‘Tab close’ in your script to close all tabs, which will eventually close Firefox as well.

Now, the last stage is to set scheduler. Scheduler is facility that Windows and other operating systems offer for executing any file/script at a particular time or repeat it after some particular intervals.

scheduling imacro scripts with windows schedular

scheduling imacro scripts with windows schedular

scheduling imacro scripts with windows schedular

scheduling imacro scripts with windows schedular

scheduling imacro scripts with windows schedular

scheduling imacro scripts with windows schedular

scheduling imacro scripts with windows schedular

Enjoy going completely automatic with your iMacro scripts!

Friday, May 24, 2013

Taking iMacro to real business


If you search for "iMacro" and "iMacro scripts" at Google, you would most probably end up with a biased result – where iMacro is portrayed as a tool for automating social media websites mostly Facebook, Twitter, Like4like, HootSuite and for form filling purpose. I remember, when I used be a beginner of iMacro, I found it accidently while searching for solution to automate my form filling redundant activities that were lot of my time and efforts.

Though it is useful for automating such kind of tasks however not limited to these tasks only! I have been utilizing it for official purposes from a long time, mainly in generating Inquiries from global buyers and later match making with relevant suppliers. I am sure business community would also be reading my article, so I thought to share some good ideas about utilizing iMacro scripts for generating some real business for them as I do myself – this article is part of business series.

Ok, so here goes nothing – there are multiple B2B websites available allowing option to have free account and provide facility to contact with their buyers and sellers without Captcha! As Captcha breaking is a huge and time consuming process and expensive often, therefore it would be good to go for those portals where enough data is available and security is low as possible. Anyhow, I have around ten portals in my list who are simple and allow me to send hundreds of auto-emails on daily basis without suspending my account, I do get their promotional emails however that isn’t concern over here – I like it free as everyone does.

In case anyone from B2B is reading my article, I won’t be sharing their details however will provide you clues so that you can start working yourself. One more thing, iMacro in its simplest form doesn’t offer much features like logical decisions, doing functions based on dynamic values, executing only certain code based on conditions and more like that, so you need to take support of java-scripting  otherwise you will end up semi-automated solutions. Check out below image (s), I found a business platform with around 350 vacuum cleaner buyers:

This very same portal allows sending emails to all buyers with simple howeTaking iMacro to Real business

If you search for "iMacro" and "iMacro scripts" at Google, you would most probably end up with a biased result – where iMacro is portrayed as a tool for automating social media websites mostly Facebook, Twitter, Like4like, HootSuite and for form filling purpose. I remember, when I used be a beginner of iMacro, I found it accidently while searching for solution to automate my form filling redundant activities that were taking lot of my time and efforts.

Though it is useful for automating such kind of tasks however not limited to these tasks only! I have been utilizing it for official purposes from a long time, mainly in generating Inquiries from global buyers and later match making with relevant suppliers. I am sure business community would also be reading my article, so I thought to share some good ideas about utilizing iMacro scripts for generating some real business for them as I do myself – this article is part of business series.

Ok, so here goes nothing – there are multiple B2B websites available allowing option to have free account and provide facility to contact with their buyers and sellers without Captcha! As Captcha breaking is a huge and time consuming process and expensive often, therefore it would be good to go for those portals where enough data is available and security is low as possible. Anyhow, I have around ten portals in my list who are simple and allow me to send hundreds of auto-emails on daily basis without suspending my account, I do get their promotional emails however that isn't concern over here – I like it free as everyone does.

In case anyone from B2B is reading my article, I won't be sharing any B2Bs details however will provide you clues so that you can start working yourself. One more thing, iMacro in its simplest form doesn't offer much features like logical decisions, doing functions based on dynamic values, executing only certain code based on conditions and more like that, so you need to take support of java-scripting  otherwise you will end up with a semi-automated solutions. Check out below image (s), I found a business platform with around 350 vacuum cleaner buyers:

imacro script b2b

This very same portal allows sending emails to all buyers with simple however lengthy form; check this one out:
imacro script b2b

Ok I agree this isn't going to be too easy; form looks simple at first glance however there are lots of tricky places where you have to use dynamic variables or some sort of randomized sentences for making it look real otherwise repeating same content, subject lines and selecting same country or phone number can trigger website's anti-spam or security detectors. Now there are two solutions to bypass this condition, 1) generate individual fields in excel sheet and post them directly in to the form fields or 2) go complete dynamic. First approach includes making lots of subject lines, emails, messages, sender names, and later integrating them in the form – quite difficult and lengthy task and there is a certain amount of times where they don't fit exactly, I mean if someone is asking for services and randomly selected template/content is about products then it's not going to work.

Seconds approach is lengthy however it is one time effort; like in my case, I made a java-script code for randomly generating numbers in code-area-number format (standard phone number format), give list of names to an array and pick one randomly, use the same randomly picked name and inserted ‘company ltd', ‘pvt ltd' etc to make it look like a company name, country is chosen randomly, subject is same as the title of the inquiry plus some additional keywords like ‘exporter', ‘suppliers' or ‘distributers' and the main body of the message is based on an array containing ten different templates, each has option to fit dynamic variables like name of user, company of user, offer title & country of buyer. As soon the script executes, everything sets up for the first time and then scripts starts contacting buyers individually with completely different messages and contact info's.

Even though there are certain cases, where a single buyer receives multiple emails generated through iMacro scripts however as everything is different, buyer thinks it's a new supplier and responses accordingly.

When required, I send around 500 - 1k emails to most relevant fresh buyers from different B2B websites using iMacro scripts and get good responses and enough orders to keep up my supply process continued. I use this approach for agricultural and machinery industry however this can also be useful for consumer electronic products and gadgets including iPhones, laptops & other gadgets. So, point of article was to make people understand that with little smartness, you can make things do what they weren't supposed to. iMacro scripts are solution to a wide variety of web-based platforms, you need to think wide!

For all kinds of suggestions and feedback, be my guests.

Thursday, May 16, 2013

Extending scripts functionality to Ajax

These days, I get to see a lot of websites reshaping – transforming from simple HTML to Web 2.0/3.0, utilizing advanced technologies majorly including Ajax and jQuery. This decreases bounce rate by increasing use visiting time as websites are becoming more user friendly and attractive.

Enhancing GUI produces favorable results for website owners, however at the same time; they make it difficult for people like me who are trying to make their work easy using different software, plug-ins or tricky approaches. This article is about how to fool websites and automate most of the tasks that otherwise acquire huge efforts – for now, let’s target one the biggest B2B websites of all ‘Alibaba.com’. I have been utilizing this portal from a very long time and undoubtedly they are the pioneers and result generating platform – none other comes even closer to them.

Anyhow, while working at a website I had to acquire products category list along with sub-categories so I rushed to Alibaba without wasting any time; they offer enhanced category selection option while you post products and it’s complete ajax-ed things. Firstly, I found it bit difficult in acquiring lists as it’s little tricky – you have to click individual categories to drill-down deeper and they are four leaf-level categories present. View the image below, see what I meant:

iMacro scripts

iMacro scripts

At the end, I was able to acquire complete list using java-script based iMacro bots. These bots come handy in conditions like this, as the list contained around 4.8k categories in total and it could have taken around 2 to 3 days for a human being to copy-paste all of them manually – saved me a lot of time and effort, script itself took around half an hour and scrapping took only 25 minutes. Impressive, isn’t it. Here is how the final sheet looks like:

iMacro script results

This is just an example of where you can actually deploy iMacro scripts, there could be thousands of places where you could save days efforts and increase your staff’s performance and time. If you are having trouble performing manual tasks, I am the here for you – share me your problems, suggest me tricky websites and solution and if I like your suggestions, I will share these iMacro scripts for free to you.

Tuesday, May 14, 2013

Lengthy but effective mode for earning extra dollars using iMacro


Adf.ly, time consuming yet one of the free sources of earning some extra dollars through internet; it’s easy to setup and payment receiving is easy as well. Likewise TinyUrl.com, Adf.ly offers a mode of earning – as soon people start visiting your shortened links, a small amount of money gets added with each visit.

There are multiple ways though which you can speed up visiting process, however you need to be careful that none of those actives lie within boundaries of spamming. You could use those links in different but relevant forums, put them in your twitter profile, facebook pages or other social media platforms are attractive sources. Personally I have been trying to encourage thousands of people using my twitter accounts, the shortened link is posted at main profile and tweets point out real users, which indirectly increases traffic at my profile and eventually some of them actually visit the linked posted in profile section.

Adf.ly’s links look more like spamming at first glance & using those links at most of the place doesn’t attract visitors, & using those links in email campaigns may violate adf.ly’s terms and may end up with termination of your account or what so ever; lastly you can’t use TinyURL or any other URL shortening platform for re-shorten these links.

Anyhow, point here is to find out some easy yet effective modes which really pay off. I have earned more than 100$ using lots of tricks however for showing you guys how it works, I have created two twitter accounts, scheduled tweets till next two months and now I am busy with other tasks :) and will check my adf.ly account in few months – smart hah! If two of my twitter account along with little efforts can get me few thousand clicks then consider how much it can generate with more than ten twitter accounts for you?


If you are unaware of how to make tweets and how HootSuite is used for scheduling tweets; checkout Hootsuite and Twitter categories first.

Monday, May 13, 2013

LinkedIn Groups – an unusual mode of marketing

LinkedIn allows contacting only listed connections while sending emails, however you can contact people outside your personal network through LinkedIn groups rather than sending invitations to everyone and waiting for their acceptance. For this, you need to identify the groups where your desired/targeted members are listed; it is easy to identify joined groups of individuals by visiting their profiles, and once you get to know their joined groups – join these groups yourself and visit Members section and there you can search and contact those people.

As being free member of LinkedIn, you will be limited to initial 400 results only (20 pages, 20 entries per page); contacting individual is easy as piece of cake, just point-out your desired member and click ‘Send message’ and it will pop-up a message sending windows – fill out subject and message body and click Send. That’s it!

Again, as you already know after reading my previous articles that I don’t do it like what I tell you in my articles; I do it in a smarter way and save my time and efforts by making customized scripts, which allow me to send hundreds of highly customized emails using my LinkedIn account and just because emails are customized (with Member names) thus response ratio is better too. Check out the listed images, view the script in action:



On a regular day, I generate around 12 to 25 genuine leads/inquiries for my clients, consider how much useful it can be for you. For this script to work all you have to do is to join lots of groups, prepare an attractive subject line and email and execute the script; it will do most of the stuff automatically! It costs 110$, however if you share this blog 5 times at 5 different Face book fan pages and contact me with prove, then it will cost only 90$.

Wednesday, May 8, 2013

Effective Utilization of Support Suite

This article is about effective utilization of Support Suite CMS provided by Kayako; which is indeed one of the sophisticated CMS allowing emails, tickets, live chat, calls and remote support management from a single place. I have been using their services from a long time & I was one of the staff understanding true potential of this application while working as Sales executive; most of my colleagues use outlook for emailing or for mass emails (mail merge) however mail merge doesn’t allow attachment & other options like Cc & Bcc.

As this is a web-based application (CMS) that’s why I was able to automate all of my tasks related with emails and schedules using iMacro scripting – I had scheduled months’ emails and set a lot of alerts & auto replies, which helped me a lot in focusing on core Sales. Even in my absence, my emails were reaching my clients gradually & clients were happy with mine as well of the company’s services.

Go ahead, Google Support Suite, have a try and increase your staff’s efficiency iMacro Scripts by scheduling future emails at bulk and by limiting their attention toward core of their roles.




For acquiring Customized Scripts; contact directly.

Saturday, May 4, 2013

Maintaining Google groups with iMacro


Ever wonder where groups are gone? Once Yahoo groups were one of the top most used free mediums of promotion – I remember having 20k members listed in my group; things have changed by now, I do have same groups however most of the member’s emails are either disables or people don’t use them often so it’s more like wastage of time going after yahoo group promotion. Google groups on other came late; they offered variety of services & features to attract people and to encourage people to return back to groups however it was bit late & social media websites like facebook & twitter have changed the trend, people don’t share their views at any group – everyone prefer using social media.

Anyhow, don’t be disappointed completely – there groups don’t look like useful at first glance, however they aren’t completely useless. Creating yahoo or google groups, making promotions to get members & to engage people is a time and effort taking process and most often end up with nothing and disappointment, whereas if same is performed automatically using some kind of auto-scripts, it could get worthy. Personally, I have around 2 yahoo groups with average 10k members and more than 10 google groups with around 4k members in individual groups; it took me lots of time initially when I was doing it manually, how now I use iMacro scripts for adding members in my google groups & posting in all of my groups automatically.

The trick is to utilize other’s groups rather than going for your own groups; I got around 250 yahoo groups & I use iMacro script for posting my articles at individual groups, it’s completely automatic and I usually execute these scripts during night times so I don’t have to wait and watch everything. Anyhow, the point is to join as many as possible groups and post your articles at individual groups; with all of my groups, I am getting around 310 average daily visitors and luckily visit bounce rate is low as well.

While joining groups, make sure that there is at least some kind of activity at those groups, member lists contains at least 2k members & posting is free for everyone. If you invest some more time, you can get more relevant audience by joining only most relevant groups only. Many of old groups are associated with websites/blogs or RSS, posting at those groups also post your article at group owners’ website as well so Go ahead, try it and have some extra traffic – it many come handy if you are out of genuine traffic.

Thursday, May 2, 2013

Keyword rank identification with iMacro


Once again, another useful method of doing time taking task fully automatically! As we all know that being index at google matters a lot, it drives a lot of relevant traffic & we hire lots of SEO staff or outsourcing companies to help us get listed at first page.

While it’s beneficial on one hand, it has little drawbacks as well – don’t worry it always good to rank higher. Things get messy when you get listed at irrelevant keywords or at those keywords which aren’t active - broken links; although it doesn’t affect too much however it’s always good to check for broken or irrelevant keywords. Checking keywords at Google is an easy task, just visit google and post your desired keyword and it will show you all indexed websites; search for your website, if its indexed then you will be able to see it directly.

Simple and easy task isn’t it. However webmasters usually check keywords every week or twice a week and chance strategies accordingly; there are tons of paid tools for doing this along with other rich functions however what’s the use of paying for that you can perform free-of-cost! Yeah I know you agree with me.

With iMacro you can associate a huge list of keywords (in csv format) and program it to search all results from Google and put relevant result in another sheet – which you can check later once all keywords are searched. This is completely automatic, all you have to do is to add/freshen keyword list!

For those who are unaware of iMacro scripting, I got plenty of scripts or if you want to utilize me directly, let me know. Bots cost around 30$ to 50$, where in some cases, you can get them free by posting this article at any of your 10 facebook pages (individual page must contains more than 100 likes).

Here is the sample of what my scripts are capable of while searching these keyword for my blog:

iMacro Script result
iMacro Scripting for 'Keyword rank' identification

Wednesday, May 1, 2013

Tweet Scheduling with iMacro using HootSuite

Once again, I have come up with a not-so-unique however semi-automated tweeting solution, which is going to save you a lots of months’ efforts and of course staff’s salary. Likewise my previous posts, this is another iMacro based tutorial & scrip, which will help you in scheduling your tweets.

A friend of mine actually hired three staff for social media and two of them were doing tweets & scheduling them manually for weeks – unfortunately, all of their effort went useless as tiny amount of traffic arrived from those activities which took months. This doesn’t happen with everyone however as majority of twitter users complain this kind of behavior & eventually some of them actually stop working aggressively at twitter. I don’t blame them for stopping activities however there is always some kind of strategic fault which ruin everything.

Here is what I suggested to my friend & how it helped him getting heavy relevant traffic from Twitter.

Twitter as I posted in my early posts that, is one of the misunderstood forms of social media marketing, for majority, its’ just a tweet which you post however for rest with strategies, it’s one of the fine mediums of driving relevant traffic; personally, I get around 500+ daily traffic just from twitter – amazing however it took lots of time and efforts initially and by passage of time, I’ve included tens of twitter account for this purpose but on initial level, you can get around constant 50+ daily quick visitors within initial two weeks. Before going for the solution, I would like you to follow guidelines thoroughly as each point is important & can help in increasing general traffic towards your website/blog:
  1. Maintain account properly; make sure to have valid website links, pictures, name & background image with your website URL
  2. For bulk activity, your account should be at least one week old, older accounts are perfect for bulk activities so make as many as possible accounts today so that you can use them later
  3. Do some regular activities and add few followers using like4like or twiends.com in first week
Ok here is the deal, above were just check points of a good looking twitter account; once you are done with above, focus on structure of actual tweets. Following are the main points which I personally follow & you will probably hear from others as well:
  1. Its’ good to have lots of followers in your twitter account however it’s useless in most cases. Until and unless are you are celebrity, people won’t follow you, even if you make them follow you, they won’t read your tweets – wastage of time, so don’t go with the strategy to increase followers, you can add thousands of followers in few days just by using websites like like4like.com, twiends.com & tons of other underground websites (Google them yourself). The main point here is to add IDs of real people and make them feel that they are important; these people are aren’t just real, they are taken from twitter IDs of brands, your competitors & other places which you consider contains genuine followers. Like in my friend’s case, he has a local classified website for Dubai market; I had to find his competitors’ twitter IDs, local trading organizations’ IDs & so forth. Once main sources were identified, I acquire all of their followers using iMacro scripts & arrange them in series of two IDs like ‘@jbgrab @alicewilsons’. Consider if you get an email from twitter saying that someone has MENTIONED you in his tweets! Wouldn’t that be a surprise for you and wouldn’t you once read or click the tweet once? This is the main point over here; to contact highly relevant people by their names so that traffic could be generated – got it.
  2. Ok so first point was to acquire relevant IDs and to use their IDs in your tweets – it will for sure generate result however as each tweet contains two IDs which make only two people to visit your page, what about the general public and the followers? Well, story doesn’t end here; second most import part of making a tweet is to add a HASH TAG. What is hash tag? Except the fancy name, these are just ‘Search terms or keywords’ which you include in your tweets and once they are indexed by twitter, you will be listed every time when someone searches those terms. Where from they come? Well, if you are selling something then these will come from product name like #mobile #jobs (try to search more hash tags from main twitter searching tab). This will allow general public, your followers & of course recipients (who’s IDs are included) to see your tweets easily.
  3. Above points were about hash tags & IDs; this points is all about adding website links & tracking your efforts. Since above points take lots of initial efforts there need to some kind of KPI to measure your efforts – isn’t it. Most of the website owners and webmasters use Google tools for tracking daily traffic and Google Analytics (my favorite tool) comes at the top; it offers highly detailed traffic monitoring tools with features to add filters, perform auto-analysis, track campaigns & lots of other cool stuff. So how do twitter activity is tracked with Google Analytics? Google allows different mediums for tracking traffic directly however it includes adding filters and other tracking stuff that most of us don’t know; for keeping it simple; I use ‘Google link builder’ for decoding my links into Google tracking structure & them convert them using TinyURL.com just to make those links smaller (Google ‘Google link builder’ for additional info about it). With Google link builder, you give some precise tracking terms that Google itself use in Google Analytics; in my case, I tell Google that source of the visit is Twitter, medium was Tweet, term was Mobile & it was a text message – rich amount of information is delivered with each link which you can access under ‘Traffic Sources > Source > Campaigns’ from analytic tool. It helps you in making future strategies by providing precise results of individual campaigns.
  4. This is the final point of the series, where I’ll brief you about ‘Structure of Tweet’. Structure of tweet matters a lot, for suppose if you tweet like this ‘@jbgrab get discounted watches at tinyurl.com/xx_some_link #watch’ – will you click the link, well probability is high. This is just one sample/template; you can make customized templates as per product categories – just make sure that all above points are part of your tweet.
So finally you get to know how strategy works! Well, this is the complete strategy that I made myself and been using it from some time and luckily its working great for me and my friends. The only problem with this strategy is that it used a lot of concentration, efforts, time & resources. Well it was little different from my end as I use iMacro based auto-scripts for performing most of the tasks myself including extracting thousands of twitter IDs & scheduling tweets.

Having strategy at hand is the basic thing for a webmaster however implementing phase is another story; based on different factors including appropriate time, data source (IDs), region, competition & other resources, implementation is performed and for all strategies at twitter, you have to be aggressive & bulky. I mean, you can’t get enough traffic even if you are using best available strategy with just a single account; you need to have multiple accounts operating at same time – don’t go like a gold smith, struck harder.

While working with multiple accounts and scheduling, HootSuite.com is my favorite tool of trade. As being free member at Hootsuite.com, it allows adding up-to 10 twitter accounts at same time and unlimited scheduling (I think so, I tried 2k scheduled tweets & it worked). Be careful using scheduling tools as too many tweets in an hour can block your twitter account, twitter allows only 100 hourly API tweets (API means using different websites like other than twitter itself), personally, I set tweet for every ten minutes, three to four tweets an hour for 24 hours (24*3=72 tweets daily). 72 tweets a day, means around 2,160 scheduled tweets a month for a single account – big deal, but how is it possible to set such huge numbers of tweets and what about having 10 accounts in parallel?

Again, iMacro comes handy in conditions like these. Once setting everything in excel sheet (hard part), an iMacro script schedule every tweet for me, usually I set around tweets of 30 days in future in single account, making 10 twitter accounts sending auto-tweets for next 30 days (2,160*10 = 21,600 schedule tweets). Scripts are available individually costing from 30$ to 50$ and if you want me to handle your tweets for a login time, come talk with me – I done this activity for small scale websites to big websites including classifieds and B2B websites like TradeBanq.com.

Your comments, suggestions and inquiries are most welcome here.