Business @ BrandonGreenlee.com

Buchheit’s Law:

• Advice = Limited Life Experience + Over-Generalization 

We are in the middle of yet another product development phase. This requires large amounts of product descriptions to be edited into a standard HTML format. Very grunt-level work, but since we are building every description using the same guidelines, it would be immensely helpful if we were able to link the most used HTML tags to different key combinations.

I’ve searched many times for this type of software before. All of what you come across is either crippled shareware or other useless spam. This time, however, I finally came across a free open-source piece of software that makes all of my dreams come true. Like most open-source software, it is initially rather unintuitive and unbelievably flexible, but after a few minutes of actually reading the help file (ugh) it was working perfectly for me.

http://www.autohotkey.com/

Below I have pasted the basic AutoHotKey.ahk file that I am using for my project. Simply, I have mapped the 4 functions I am looking for to the arrow-keys, which are activated by hitting Ctrl+Alt+ArrowKey. In AHK, Ctrl is defined as ^, Alt is defined as !, and the arrow keys are simply the direction of the key. The double colon :: signifies the end of the key combination required to trigger the action. Send places the following text in the active window, while return ends the function.

^!left::
Send <br>
return

^!up::
Send <ul><li>
return

^!right::
Send <li>
return

^!down::
Send </ul>
return
—–

Ctrl+Alt+UpArrow, now out puts <ul><li> into my active window (notepad++.) I have these arranged in the order I am using them, so I can just follow a left-up-right-down flow for every product I work on. I only wish I had come across this software sooner.

Sometimes solving the littlest of headaches can truly mean the difference between productivity and frustration.

You can track anything in Google Analytics by simply appending UTM information to the urls of your site. Not hard to do, but there does seem to be very little information concerning it.

For example, to track Google Product Search append this to all of your urls:

?utm_source=Google-Product-Search&utm_medium=organic

making your final url:

http://www.example.com/product1.html?utm_source=Google-Product-Search&utm_medium=organic

You can stick anything in the utm_source and medium sections, but it helps to keep these in a similar format as all of your other analytics data. We also do this for our MSN & Yahoo PPC campaigns:

http://www.example.com/product1.html?utm_source=msn&utm_medium=cpc

http://www.example.com/product1.html?utm_source=yahoo&utm_medium=cpc

 (Make sure the “yahoo” & “cpc” sections are lowercase or Analytics will not recognize them as search engines.)

Simply insert this text as your ad links in your campaigns. (You don’t have to do this with Google Adwords as Google automatically handles the CPC differentiation for Analytics Data.)

You don’t even have to generate these urls yourself. Checkout the Google UTM URL Builder.

It goes without saying, the more you can track & differentiate your data, the more informed decisions you can make.