The Remote Working Revolution and the Secret That No One Will Tell You

This isn’t to gloat, but this was the first cup of coffee I had yesterday morning:

The view from La Carita Del Cafe

In the background you can see the mountains of southwest Costa Rica, Jaco Beach, and beyond that in the distance, the Pacific.

I’d love for every one of our customers to have the amazing opportunity to live or work from wherever they want, and that’s one of the big goals we had in creating UBot Studio – to help you build your own business and let it run on autopilot. It’s not an easy thing to do, but it’s possible. And if you already own a copy of UBot Studio, then you are at least part of the way there. You understand the value of automation and of being able to quickly build your own products, sell your services, or automate your business.

But there’s probably just one step missing – and it ISN’T that you’re tied down to a job or you don’t have enough money.

The step is convincing yourself that you can do it.

Yesterday I was talking with a friend I made here named Danny while we drove in a rented Toyota down the coast, coming back from Volcan Poas, a beautiful, mostly inactive volcano whose crater is filled with bright blue water.

It was too cloudy to see inside so the guide didn't make us pay - the people in this country are incredibly kind. Instead we bought a pound of the best strawberries I've ever tasted for $2.25.

It was too cloudy to see inside the Volcano, so the guide didn’t make us pay – the people in this country are incredibly kind. Instead we bought a pound of the best strawberries I’ve ever tasted for $2.25.

I told Danny that I didn’t really know anyone other than me who could take multi-week vacations: “Even I’ve been working the whole time I’ve been here,” I told him.

“Are your friends too busy because they have kids?” he asked. “And are you so important you literally can’t take more than a week off at a time?”

See, Danny runs a consulting business and has just a few major clients. He works long hours and travels all over the US, helping companies organize projects. But he is taking a month off work to practice surfing and Spanish while in Costa Rica. That’s how I met him – at the surfing school.

“No,” I said. “My friends’just don’t want to leave for that long. And I like to work to keep from falling behind. And anyway, you aren’t really supposed to take two weeks off in a row, most places frown on it.”

“Well, if someone has time off, it’s not legal to control when it’s taken and for how long in a row,” he reminded me. “And if you choose to keep up on work while you’re here, that’s your choice. That’s what you decided to do, but it’s not what you have to do.”

“Yeah, I know, I mean, it’s just that their jobs are really important to them. And I don’t want to fall behind….”

And then I started making excuses for everyone out there who hasn’t yet realized it’s up to them to say, I truly want to live my life a certain way.

After I was done trying to explain that Yes, technically everyone could take a long vacation to Costa Rica if they wanted to, maybe, but it was discouraged to be gone that long, and they would possibly get passed over in the future for a promotion, or maybe they were just starting a new job and needed to look good to management, or maybe they were afraid to rock the boat, or whatever the excuses are, Danny corrected me.

We drove around a little town in Costa Rica called San Mateo, dodging dogs and bicyclists and fruit stands, and Danny drove and somehow also managed to remind me that “we choose the way we work.”

“I know everyone feels like they are the most important person in their job. But everyone is just brainwashed,” he said. “Maybe you don’t want to fall behind, or maybe they don’t, but that’s a choice – don’t you work for an automation company, anyway?”

It stung a little, but I realized that he was right. Even I sometimes forget that the real secret is just convincing yourself that you can do it. Life has a way of putting up walls, locking the door, imprisoning you, and it’s really not your fault. It’s just the way jobs are. And if you’re a hard worker, it’s the way YOU probably are. And sometimes it’s easy to forget that those walls are completely imaginary. But even if they’re imaginary, only you can remove them.

“It’s not the first thing I say in an interview,” Danny told me, “but I need an employer or a client to know that if I have vacation time, I’m not going to trade it in for a bonus, I’m not going to accrue it and take a day off every week for a month. I’m going to take a vacation, and go do something amazing.”

And I realized that even while I sat in Costa Rica, thinking about the emails I needed to send that night, I had forgotten how much of living the life you really want is about mindset.

Don’t forget that. As I write more about living remotely, and how to do it and what it’s like, the most important lesson I can impart is the one that I’m still learning: You make the choices that keep you where you are, doing what you’re doing. No one else. So if you love the business you have or the work you do or where you live, fantastic. You did it. But if you don’t – you’re the only one responsible for keeping you there.

Kudos to my friend Danny (foreground) for reminding me how much of what we do is our own choice.

Kudos to my friend Danny (on the right) for reminding me that we choose how we work!

Automation Mindset March 10, 2013

Three Economic Theories, and One That Works For You

When it really comes down to it, we don’t actually need an economy. It is not a requirement for human life. We could simply do as our ancestors, gathering nuts and berries and occasionally feast on a wild boar. It’s even been said that hunter/gatherers only worked 4 hours per day. So why even deal with a messy thing like economics? Well, eventually a hunter figured out that if he traded some meat for a sharper spear, he could kill more wild boars. A gatherer figured out that by trading some berries for a knife, he could collect more berries. It turns out that doing things like making knives and spears can make our lives better – and that’s worth sharing some of our resources for.

It’s been suggested that early human trading actually killed off the Neanderthals, who couldn’t compete because of it.

While the skilled tool-maker might not be hunting or gathering, he’s still being productive. Being productive moves us forward as a civilization and as a species. When you boil it all down, the economy is nothing more than a complex system that motivates people to be productive.

I find it curious that the American dream is to live a middle class existence working 40 hours per week and retiring at sixty something. Comparatively speaking, this may seem great for some people, but I’ve always set my eyes on a higher prize. For others, the American dream might be to become rich. Having a lot of money is great too, but I know a number of wealthy people who work 80 hour weeks. What kind of dream is that? Perhaps a bigger American dream is to become so rich that you never have to work again, and you can simply live your life however you want.

To live any version of the American dream, you have to be productive. You have to create value for others or for society. (It can take years for some people to learn this simple secret, especially in the internet marketing field where wanna-be entrepreneurs are always looking for a quick scheme to basically steal value from popular trends.) How much value you can create determines how much money society will be willing to give you. Therefore, if you want to increase the money you have, you can either increase the amount of value you create in any unit time (say, an hour), or you can increase the amount of time you spend creating value. In short: either work longer or work harder.

One way to do this is by increasing your own value as a productive contributor to society. In my early adulthood, I saw people do this in two different ways. Some people would increase their productive hours by working more than one job. Minimum wage might not be much, but if you have 2 or 3 minimum wage jobs, you can still get by. I’ve tried this. It sucks.

Other people would increase their value per unit time by becoming educated.

One way to increase your value

An educated person has the ability to do more complicated and difficult tasks, and therefore can create more value for society. Everyone should become educated.

It makes you a better person, and it makes us collectively better as a species. Still, I can’t help but feel like there’s something missing from this equation. You are still limited by the number of hours that you have in a day. While you can significantly raise the amount of value you create in an hour, you will always only have roughly 16 waking hours in a day, so your productivity, and therefore your income, can only increase linearly.

Educating yourself is becoming more and more unattainable and the actual cost of living is rising, making this method even less useful.

There’s another method, and it’s the one that creates most small businesses. If you have a solid system that creates value, and also money, then you can increase the total number of productive hours by outsourcing those hours to other people. If you’re smart about it, and you use outsourcing sites like Freelancer.com and Elance.com, you can outsource tasks fairly cheaply. With outsourcing, we now have a new factor in the equation. You have to pay people to do work for you. That means you have to feed value into the system. This is only worthwhile if the value created by the system is greater than the value you feed into it. Or to put it more obviously, your outsourced business needs to make you more money than it costs you.

Obviously Elance.com doesn’t look like this, but the method is the same. (Photographer Michael Wolf has taken incredible shots of factory workers, ie, outsourcing.)

But have you ever tried outsourcing? If you have, you know its potential pitfalls are great, many, and varied. Someone has to manage those people. It sounds easy enough, but managing people can be a difficult and tedious job. Even if you hire a manager, you’ll still have to manage the manager. It creates a whole new reason to need productivity – that is, the productivity of managing others. All this is added into our original equation of how to create a net value for society. The good news is that this method can potentially increase value exponentially. If a system creates enough value, then you can continually hire more and more people to run it.

But there’s one more way to create value, and it’s the one that gives us the best option. Granted it won’t apply in every situation – there will always be times and places that the other two methods are necessary. If you haven’t guessed yet, the third method is automation. Automation allows you to take a productive system and remove the burden of labor from you or your employees. An automated system can run 24 hours, 7 days per week and never require a paycheck. The value that it creates is equal to the value of the system that you automate with it. The number of productive hours is as many hours as you run a process times the number of instances of the process you have running. This means that the productivity can run exponentially, but without all those nasty negative variables that we had to mess with in outsourcing.

Automation – the most effective method of increasing value

Additionally, since automation is not limited by human factors, the exponential growth is significantly faster than with outsourcing. The only limitation is the extent to which technology can actually automate human tasks. There’s a lot that technology can do, but, for the moment at least, humans are still much smarter than machines.

As technology increases, more and more productivity will come from machines. This has already had, and will continue to have, profound effects on our lives and on the economy. As humans living in the first part of the 21st century, we may do well to hop on that wave early. There’s an incredible amount of opportunity out there for those who are willing to venture out into the lush wilderness. Go and figure out how to make machines do all your work for you. You’ll free your time, make your entire income on autopilot , and maybe even help to push our society towards a more automated, more perfect economy.

Automation Mindset March 6, 2013

The Quickest Path from Product Development to Sales, or, How to successfully survive being air-dropped into another country with only $20 USD

I’ll admit: I’m not a “trained” marketer. In fact, when Seth hired me, I didn’t know what a WSO was, I’d never heard of an autoresponder, and I’d never even written ”copy” before. Seth was taking a risk, but I promised him I was going to improve his bottom line, somehow. My background isn’t in software development or sales – I have an English degree that somehow landed me a job as a corporate cog in a big industry wheel. My last job was kind to me—if you ever need to order ten-thousand cardboard boxes, contact my old boss, Mark, at Rock-Tenn Company and he’ll help you out. But as a khaki-clad college graduate who knew very little about how to get ahead besides sticking with the same company for decades, I wanted to try something new, and starting out in online marketing offered a lot of exciting potential, even though leaving everything I knew was taking a daunting leap.

But thanks to a lot of reading, a fair amount of trial and error, and the gracious help of some top-notch marketers, I can honestly say that if you air-dropped me into another country tomorrow, with no friends, no job, and only twenty dollars, I’d be fine as long – as I could get on the internet.

Because once you know how to do it, online marketing is the fastest path to success for anyone who wants it.

That’s what we believe at Seth Turin Media, and that’s why we work so hard to get UBot Studio to everyone we can. There’s no software out there like ours, nothing as easy to use for beginners or as powerful for those who want to learn to do more with it. But the software alone isn’t going to get you to the next level – it’s just the foundation you’ll need to start either automating your online marketing, or building software to sell. And for those of you who plan on building software to sell, I have a little bit of advice.

I want you to imagine, like I mentioned before, that you’ve just been kicked off a bus somewhere. Let’s say a town in Costa Rica (because as I write this I’m sitting in the Sansa Regional Terminal at San Jose International Airport in Alajuela, Costa Rica – but that’s another story). And let’s say you have $20.

Actual picture of my destination: The Sansa Regional Airport in Tamarindo, Costa Rica.

You take a taxi to a little hostel somewhere overlooking the Volcan Poas, a small, mildly-active volcano. (Don’t worry; the locals tell you it’s quite safe. Most of the time.) The hostel costs $6 USD a night – a good deal, although you’ll have to find your own food. Luckily in most countries for $2 USD you can buy enough cheap food to make it. Also, thankfully, that $6 comes with free wireless internet and coffee, which means you have about 3 days to start making money before you end up turning tricks or begging tourists to please throw you twenty-five colones—about a penny, USD—outside the alleyway of the Mall Internacional.

So you need the fastest path from Product Development to Sales. Luckily, just a few days before you got kidnapped and brought here to be thrown unceremoniously from the bus, you purchased a Standard copy of UBot Studio. In that time you built something small but cool—maybe it’s a little automation tool that you use to help automate a blog, maybe it’s a bigger product that someone might actually want to pay a few hundred bucks for. Either way – you’ve got something, and now, you just need to know how to sell it. You’re right where I was when I started at Seth Turin Media, Inc.

Day 1: Building Your List

Your Money: $20

This is a graph of UBot Studio sales, averaged by quarter, from the time that I started.

Sales in Monthly Increments

The biggest increase, you’ll be surprised to find out, wasn’t from finding new customers. It was from working with our current list to increase the sales of those who were interested in the software, especially those who’d already purchased or downloaded it before. (Think of it how Apple does – once someone buys an iPhone and likes it, they are far more likely to buy a Mac.) With UBot Studio, there are (at the time of this writing) three levels to purchase. Anyone who buys the first or second (Standard or Pro) probably has a good reason that they didn’t pay more for a more advanced Edition. While respecting that decision, it’s my job to convince them that they’re wrong, through targeted emails, new features, and useful reminders of what they’re missing out on, and why it matters.

There’s a lot of logic behind this. Your most likely customer is someone who trusts you – someone you’ve helped in the past. You, sitting in this little hostel, will need to find these high-potential customers, and you’ll need to find them fast. Even the greatest product in the world isn’t going to find these customers on its own. That’s up to you.

Step 1: Contact your friends

(Here’s a blooper’s reel from the TV show Friends. Why not?)

I’m going to assume that you have friends. (If you don’t, then you’re probably going to want to work on that first.) The first thing to do is to send your product to all your friends – and I mean everyone – people you’ve only spoken to in passing, your parents, that guy who emailed you once about buying his dog. The chance that someone who already knows you will want to help you out is far greater than the chance of you convincing someone who doesn’t know who the hell you are to buy your product.

Step 2: Contact your enemies

(Did you know there’s a Kris Kristofferson song called “Shake Hands With The Devil”? Now you do.)

This is a little counter-intuitive, but I promise – it’s strategically very important. Your enemies include anyone who is already selling a product like yours or offering a service like yours, whether it’s exactly the same or just similar. You want them to know that you exist, because the more people who know they have a competitor, the better. They’ll offer you all sorts of advice – they’ll tell you that your service isn’t as good as theirs. They’ll tell you that what you’re doing doesn’t make sense for various reasons. Sometimes they’ll even ask to partner with you. Get in touch with them and find out what they think of your service, and you’ll instantly know more about the market than you ever could have discovered on your own.

Step 3: Contact your potential partners

The key to this step is to determine what people might need or use directly before, or directly after, they buy your product. It’s easiest to think in food terms: If you were selling ice cream cones, you would want to partner with someone who sells ice cream. If you were selling ketchup, you would want to talk to people who were buying hot dogs and french fries. Moving onto IM examples, people who are using WordPress to build their first website often need hosting. If you build WordPress sites for a living or sell WordPress plugins, it makes sense to partner with hosting companies who host WordPress blogs – you can send them potential customers, they can send you potential customers. With UBot Studio, for example, people often use our software in conjunction with text spinning software, so it makes sense for us to reach out to every text spinning service provider and see how we can work together.

Try to jot down ten different ways people might decide they want your product or service, and then spend a few hours tracking down some of the bigger players in those markets. Give them a free copy of what you’ve got and tell them you’d like to work with them. Do the same for those who might already have purchased something that makes them need your product.

This entire process will take you about 12-14 hours, longer if you customize each email that you send (which ideally, you will). Hey, I didn’t say this process would be easy—I just said it would take three days.

PS – Another popular way to find friends/enemies/partners is within Mastermind Groups. If you can find a Mastermind Group, ideally on Skype, that’s free to join and is relevant to the market that you’re in, you’ll grab a great # of contacts and info all at once, because anyone inside of the group is a potential source of customers and knowledge. If you can find a Mastermind group that’s in your area, you can probably join them as well, but it may take some time. (Visit http://mastermind-group.meetup.com to start your search.)

Day 2: The Setup

Your Money: $12 ($20 – $6 for a room, $2 for food)

Step 1: Sign up for affiliate sites

You should be getting some responses already, but don’t worry if you haven’t. This is the day where you sign up for all the potential affiliate networks that you can, places like JVZoo, Clickbank, etc [need larger list]. Just like waiting for responses to your emails, it’ll take a few days for some of these to be approved, so needless to say, the sooner you do it the better.

This is better than Clickbank’s logo, I promise.

The key to signing up for these is to make your product stand out. If it doesn’t stand out, no one will see it. Frequently, the way to stand out is to have a high affiliate commission – and that’s something I’d highly recommend. I’ve spoken to dozens of affiliates who basically discount anything less than 50%, which means that you should at least start there, but probably start at an even higher rate than that—maybe even 70%.

Remember, your product is entirely reproducible at the click of a button. If someone buys it, you don’t just get the money they pay, you also get a hot lead – their email address. And you can use that almost immediately to offer something else, if you can find something else to offer. This might be another product of your own (like an add-on to your software, or a service, or an info-product), or it might be an affiliate’s product or a partner’s offer, but whatever it is, the sooner you can give it to them the better. You could even look into OTO’s – One Time Offers – that match well with your product. I don’t recommend using more than one of these at a time, because they quickly lower your customer’s goodwill. Whatever you do – try to email your customers at least two positive, useful, non-commercial emails for every offer you send them. (I’ll have another post soon about autoresponders, but for now, just try to get those emails and make the people at the other end – and they are people – happy with you.)

Step 2: Explain your offer on forums

In addition to utilizing the UBot Studio Underground (www.ubotstudio.com/forum), the most important forum for online marketing is the WarriorForum (www.warriorforum.com), and you’re probably already familiar with it. The key to the WarriorForum is to look credible and create a useful WSO (A Warrior Forum Special Offer sales thread) that’s marketed by several affiliates and that has several great testimonials. But these threads cost $40 to create. (You will undoubtedly make this money back if you do it right, but since we’re assuming you’re starting out with almost no money…)

So, in a nutshell, here’s how to use the Warrior Forum if you’re broke:

1) Find a partner to do your WSO with. If there’s someone you trust, they could put the WSO up for you and act as an affiliate – so all sales would go through them. This might be worth it if you’re starting out, especially if they have beaucoup customers that they could direct to the sale. But it probably means forfeiting their email addresses – which isn’t terrible, because the next time you do a sale, that affiliate will likely send all those previous customers your way regardless. I’d recommend you DON’T search for JV partners and message people you don’t know. Rather, be specific and either make a friend who would be a good partner (as outlined above) or don’t try this tactic at all. I’ve had bad luck contacting people who are looking to sell your product.

2) Give away your product (or a crippled version of it) for free to build testimonials. Visit http://www.warriorforum.com/warrior-joint-ventures/ and post that you’re looking for affiliates and testimonials and you’d like to offer 10 people your product or service for free. Be specific about what you want out of these people. If you want someone to run your WSO, then say that (again, I don’t recommend doing this with someone you don’t know). If you want testimonials, then say that.

3) Ask for advice if you need it. Say where you are in your process and where you’d like to be. It won’t hurt, and I am confident you could get some really positive suggestions that are completely different from what I’m advising here, and more advice and opportunities is always a good thing.

Now that you understand the main internet marketing forum, you should consider the many others.

The other two major ones are Digital Point (https://forums.digitalpoint.com/) and Wickedfire (www.wickedfire.com – be aware, this one tends to be a bit more grayhat). There are dozens of forums out there with hundreds of thousands of users – honestly, you can probably find one that’s more specific to what you’re offering if you look hard enough.

Don’t give up until you’ve found at least 5 places to hawk your wares, even if it’s only for free to get testimonials and spread the word. (A tip: Video testimonials are worth more than text. Ask for them.) But while you’re looking, DON’T GET SIDETRACKED. You are at these forums for a particular reason. Don’t start reading posts and getting involved right now. You’ve got a hostel bill to pay and you’re about out of food.

(There’s a tip that Frank Kern suggests: create a few accounts on every forum months in advance, answer questions, be generally helpful, and then when you go to release your product, use these under-the-radar accounts to recommend it. I’m sure this works if you don’t get caught….)

Step 3: Own your name.

You can get a domain for a few dollars and it adds INSTANT credibility. Check slickdeals.net or a dozen other deal aggregator sites at any time to determine somewhere you can get a single domain, non-hosting, for a couple bucks, usually under $3. You’ll just want to redirect the domain to whatever blog format you feel comfortable using – a site you create at WordPress for example. That site can redirect to your processor at JVZoo, or what have you – but having that site will increase sales considerably.

Fill it with a few blog posts, testimonials, etc.

There are plenty of registrars besides Godaddy, but none of them have Danica’s angry, raven-haired stare of death on their front page.

Next, you’ll need to make sure that your software is well-represented on Facebook, twitter, LinkedIn, and Youtube. Make a page, a twitter account, and a LinkedIn group. The simplest way to do this quickly is to take those blog posts and mention them on your twitter and Facebook every few hours. Get Jing (jing.com) and record a demo of your software, and if you have a webcam, record yourself explaining how it works. Upload about three Youtube videos and make sure you link back to those on your site and on your twitter and Facebook page.

If you’ve done all of these steps correctly, by the end of Day 3 you should look like a legitimate software enterprise.

Day 3: The Climax

Your Money: $1 ($12 – $6 room, $2 food, $3 Domain)

This is the day you release everything. All along you’ve been planning for a big push – you’ve given away your software, you’ve reached out to dozens of potential partners, and now you contact each of them and let them know the sale is ON. Get them to email their lists if they agreed to do that, to give you the testimonials you asked for if they agreed to that, or to write a blog post about your product on their site if that’s what they said they’d do. It will often take 5-10 emails to convince someone to actually move, even after they’ve agreed to help.

Most likely, this sale will be through an affiliate site like JVzoo or Clickbank. You can send everyone to your own site as long as you can set the cookies up correctly, of course, for your affiliates. (If you created a WSO at this point, you’d send everyone there.)

Step 1: Email everyone again.

Step 2: Post in all the forums again.

Step 3: Drink some of that free hostel coffee, because you’re going to be up late.

Step 4: Email everyone again.

Step 5: Moderate your forum posts and make sure you’ve responded to everyone.

Step 6: Email your customers. I recommend Mailchimp, because it’s free for the first 2000 users. Let them know you appreciate their purchase. Check up on them. Be obsessive. These people paid you. You want them to be happy.

Day 4: Reward

Now, you’re in one of the most beautiful countries in the world and you’re rolling in dough. Enjoy it!

Costa Rica from the sky

Ideas & Tips February 28, 2013

Thanks For Your Support!

When I was in high school, I had a close friend who was battling Lupus. She was hospitalized on countless occasions. On some of those occasions, my friends and I would leave school early, take the city bus and visit her at the hospital with her homework as well as offerings of books, movies and videogames. She loved Disney movies and books, but videogames were her everything. Her eyes lit up and she became energetic and talkative when she got into a game. It kept her imagination sharp, which was important, because she was a budding writer.

Videogames allowed her to enjoy her youth, and to set aside the realities of her illness for just a moment. This is why it is so important to support charities such as The Child’s Play Charity. The Child’s Play Charity has been working tirelessly to provide toys and games to children in hospitals since 2003. Their efforts have helped thousands of children like my friend for years and years.
We at UBot Studio first donated to their cause in 2012. Our efforts to do so were supported by our generous customers through upgrades to the Professional Edition of UBot Studio.

We are happy to announce that, because of you, we were able to raise funds to help out for another year! Yet again we successfully reached the level of “Silver Donor” and are thankful and proud to be on the list.

Your continued generosity and support helped us contribute to this amazing charity again!

Thank you all sincerely for your support in making this possible.

For more information about Child’s Play, visit their website, childsplaycharity.org.

– Lilly

UBot News February 27, 2013

How UBot Studio Rocked Your World in 2012

UBot Studio was a great product when I started working on it in 2012 – We’d already released the fourth version, which was a complete rewrite of version 3.5, in August/September of 2011. The new features of version 4.0 were things like image recognition, a cool feature that helped our customers make smarter, more powerful bots.

It took a few months in winter 2011 for me to work out some of the bugs that individual customers found with version 4.0 – I was basically buried in code for about 3 months, just optimizing and stabilizing things.

Once that was done, by 2012, we focused on adding features, mainly as they were requested by our customers. And since I saw this post on our forum recently:

I wanted to write one big post to show what features were programmed into the software in 2012, or as Seth says, “How UBot rocked your world in 2012.”

Maybe the most important feature, in my mind: Plugins:

Everybody likes new features.

I’m a pretty thorough programmer, so new features take some time to add. I try to test them, and to make sure that they work on multiple websites or what have you. We’ve set a goal to create one new feature per month. However, some months the features I work on take quite a bit longer – and in those cases, we are now able to have trust-worthy programmers besides me build in new features using our plugin API. It’s fairly simple to use, and means that we can integrate all sorts of products and features into UBot Studio faster than ever.

We created some of the features you saw in 2012 using the Plugin API, and they’re some of our best additions yet. The API also allows UBot users to have control over development and add features that are specific to their needs. As one customer said, the API and plugin feature is great “because it expands the scope of what features are possible within UBot, above and beyond what UBot development is working on, in case you have specific needs that might not fit those of the UBot community, a plugin could be developed to provide you that functionality.”

The API is available to use any time to build your own feature set. If you have some .net programming experience then it should be fairly simple for you to use.

Want to incorporate a web service into UBot Studio? Maybe add a few quick commands just for yourself? No problem – Just follow the instructions on our Wiki (http://wiki.ubotstudio.com/wiki/Plugin_Development) and submit a request for your plugin key (support.ubotstudio.com).

Here are some more of the best-loved features we added to UBot Studio in 2012 to rock your world!

1. Code View:

As a programmer, I think the other most important addition might have been Code View. This entirely new way to look at your scripts and bots is a simpler version of what other programming languages would consider their “regular” script view. Our regular script view is the “node” view, a graphical representation of your bots that is divided up by individual nodes, where loops and conditionals and other commands that “nest” inside one another are literally nested, like this:

You can quickly see that inside the “if” command, there’s a comparison command. You can probably tell at a glance, even if you haven’t had any programming experience ever, that the comparison command checks to see if the first value, #Register, is equal to “false.” If it is, then the rest of the if “conditional” will take place. Inside that conditional is a navigate command, and inside the navigate command is a URL.

Using the node view you can drop commands onto the script window, visually see how they interact, and fill in all the required variables and answer any questions a command might need to run, without ever really learning the “art” of programming.

You can build a bot without any experience.

But, to program quickly, it helps to learn how those commands work individually, and to be able to edit them, move them around, and see more of them at a glance. So we added code view:

This is a simple text editor and translates every UBot command, parameter, etc, into words.
Here’s a quick video of me switching between the views, and adding a command to each to show what it looks like.

So code view changed the paradigm for how our customers could write their scripts. Use drag and drop if you’re feeling lazy or you’re new to the software, and switch to code view to blaze through your bot-building, or just to learn how the code really works at a more in-depth level.

2. Debugger / Step Mode:

Debugging refers to testing scripts for errors. The debugger allows you to see the contents of a list, table, variable, list item, table items, etc. This helps you isolate parts of a script that aren’t working properly by allowing you to check to see if the proper values are being assigned to each list or table or variable.

But in 2012, we added a “Step” button that allows you to move one command at a time through your script as well. The step button allows you to manually go through each command in a script to make sure the commands are working appropriately. It is used along with the debugger command for optimal debugging, because sometimes letting a script run all the way through is too fast to see why, for example, the loop isn’t working right, or why the scraping isn’t happening correctly.

3. Email commands:

Obviously email is an important aspect of any online business. While UBot Studio has been thought of as a browser-based bot building program, we’ve grown far beyond that, and having useful and simple email commands is a necessity. So we added a simple way for you to connect to mail servers, which makes sending and verifying emails using Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo, AOL or any private SMTP a clear and easy process. The accompanying wizard makes setting up one’s credentials for each email service or SMTP very easy.

Sending email is a simple process where you just enter your credentials (you can use one set if you only have one set, or pull them from a text file if you want to send emails from several addresses.) But the real awesome addition is the ability to connect to the mail servers and “verify emails.” This command is specifically designed to either pull data from emails, or to click links that come inside of them. This mimics what a user would do who is checking their email – compile the info from it, or visit the links that are inside of it. Here’s a good example of how this might work:

Let’s say you’re a realtor and every day you get thirty emails from the MLS (Multiple Listing Service) database – instant updates about new houses on the market. Using set parameters inside the email wizard, you could pull the important info directly from each of those emails, every morning, and then compile them into an excel file, a text document, even a MySQL database, and send out a customized email to your clients listing the new additions.

Or, maybe you have a catch-all email and every day you receive a thousand emails inside with links that have to be clicked (maybe for a contest, because you’ve submitted a thousand blog comments across the web, or what have you). Again, using the email wizard, in a matter of seconds you can build script that will connect to your email, skim through every one of them, and click the relevant link that you’ve chosen in each.
Boom.

4. Windows Commands:

Obviously the ability to interact with Windows is a necessity for a lot of users. We’ve always had shell commands, which let users run windows scripts, and we’ve had the ability to read and write to text files and csv files so that you can always save information and read it again later with the most popular formats available. But UBot Studio continues to go beyond its browser-based roots with the Windows Commands.

These commands mimic a user interacting with Windows directly via the mouse and keyboard. You simply record the coordinates that you want to interact with, and the keystrokes or mouse clicks, and voila – you can build a program that will not only open a program, such as Photoshop or Word, but actually create images or documents, save them, etc. And of course, if there’s any crazy parts of a website that are hard to interact with directly via elements or even with image recognition, you can potentially use Windows Commands to solve the problem quickly and easily.

This is extremely useful for those of you using UBot Studio as a workplace automation tool. If your business or your clients’ business uses a proprietary or a standard software product in addition to the web, you can now build a script that automates that as well.

(Something sort of funny- from a programming perspective, this was a fairly simple set of commands to add. The hardest part was that despite the Windows platform being around longer than the web and controlled by a single company that entire time, it’s not easy to interact with their windows, dialog boxes, and elements. There’s just a ton of issues with how they build code in so many different ways. Compared to something like the web, where the standards are shifting quicker, commands are added more frequently, and more entities are involved in the standardization, it’s actually easier to work directly with the source (because the source is available—unlike in Windows, where everything is already “compiled” and you have interact with the results.)

5. Public and Private Bot Bank:

Ok, so you want to save a lot of frequently used scripts somewhere? And you want to share some commonly used scripts with other users, or see what other users have built? No problem!

You’ll notice that a lot of the features we add are specifically built for two groups: new users (who will find a lot of help in the Public Bot Bank), and experienced users (who will find the quick ability to save their most commonly used custom commands and scripts inside the Private Bot Bank a seriously helpful feature).

Simply create the category you want (or use one that’s already been created if you’re in the Public Bot Bank), name and explain what your script does, and then it’ll be saved for you to use at any time in the future.

6. Database Commands:

The Database Commands allow interaction between MySQL databases and your script in UBot Studio. You can see that yet again, we put a lot of thought into expanding UBot Studio beyond being solely a browser-based automation tool. We want it to be an all-in-one solution for newbies and programming geniuses alike.

So all you have to do now to directly pull data from your databases is drop in a simple MySQL “query with results” Command and throw your MySQL query into it, and you’re quickly able to grab all the info you want. And if you’d like to add data into your MySQL database, you can do that as well – which means you’ve got a whole new set of ways to automate your business, update your client list, and basically control your entire online customer interaction.

If you’re unclear on why MySQL interaction is cool, you might not be nerdy enough to get it. But basically, instead of using an excel file or something that’s relational in a 2-dimensional way, MySQL lets you create tables that are connected to each other, and then use that info on your web server or what have you. So when you have a list of (for example) customers, they’re often stored in a MySQL database that’s auto-updated with a list of info like the following:

Now, you could use a UBot Studio script to pull data directly from your customer list – for example, to send emails to a list of customers that’s automatically been created when they purchased on your site. There are hundreds of ways to use MySQL, and hundreds of ways to use UBot Studio – so combine these two and you’ve got an amazing opportunity to automate your stuff.

7: Developer Options Expanded:

When you buy our Developer Edition, we know that the goal is to create extremely customized, unique software. So in addition to removing all the elements of our UBot Studio branding, making it virtually impossible for someone to know that you used UBot Studio to create your software (if you choose to hide it), we did a whole lot more.

We added a compilation window that allows developer users to completely customize compiled bots by removing the run bar, navigation bar, and the browser. We also –let you now set the width and height of your compiled bots, and start your compiled bot minimized or maximized, and control the color very easily. We also added a UI HTML command, which lets anybody who knows a little HTML and CSS to customize the look of their compiled bots.

Now, you can create an extremely customized compiled bot that really makes the Dev edition an amazing option!

This feature allows you to change the user agent of your browser, thus affecting the way a webpage is displayed in the browser. This allows you to control the way a website is displayed to you, which makes it easier to automate processes on the website.

8. Set Browser Properties:

This set of commands allows you to send out information to webpages about browser properties such as width, height of a browser, and navigator options such as the App codename, app version, navigator language, etc.

9. Wait Commands Optimized:

For smoother running scripts, we worked on making sure this feature did exactly what it needed to do every time. Waiting for an element to load before running the rest of the script allows the script to run smoother and avoid interference. The wait commands can also be used to debug and isolate parts of a script that aren’t working properly by slowing down the script.

10. AI selector for flash buttons and images:

This simple feature might have gone unnoticed, but it allows you to select and click an item by image. It increased our drag-and-drop capabilities considerably.

11. Windows NTLM Authentication:

Without this, some businesses would not be able to automate the processes for the internal websites!

12. New type text Flash option:

This little “Flash Plugin” that allows you to type capital letters and symbols in flash forms is awesome because it removes simple but annoying limitations in flash forms where one could not capitalize letters or add @ symbols and such.

13. View Source Command/window:

This little feature allows you to look at the HTML on a webpage (for a more in-depth look into a webpage to find html elements such as the names, outer html, id or an item). Very useful if you’re checking out the source of a page for any reason.

Sometimes, it’s difficult to imagine that I could have done all of that in just a year, as well as improve the overall stability of UBot Studio. But with help from users giving support, suggestions, and bug reports, it’s all been pretty easy.

There will be much more to come in 2013. I hope you’re as excited as I am!

– Ed

Release Information February 1, 2013