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! Simple Steps I.T.
RelationologyHow to use Artificially Intelligent Websites to Propel Your Business
Michael AnderlePresident - Simple Steps I.T.www.SimpleStepsIT.com
(C) 2010 - Simple Steps I.T. www.SimpleStepsIT.com 1
Table of Contents
Automated Marketing Support! 3
Artificially Intelligent Websites #1 – Foundations! 5
Building an Artificially Intelligent Website #2 – Hosting! 8
Building an Artificially Intelligent Website – Part 3 – Installation! 10
Create an Artificially Intelligent Website #4 – Plan your Menu! 12
Create an Artificially Intelligent Website #5 – What is a Page?! 15
Artificially Intelligent Website #6 – What is a Post! 18
Artificially Intelligent Websites #7 – Search Engines! 23
Artificially Intelligent Websites #8 – Email Marketing! 25
Artificially Intelligent Websites #9 – Backups! 28
Artificially Intelligent Websites #10 – Relationships! 30
(C) 2010 - Simple Steps I.T. www.SimpleStepsIT.com 2
Automated Marketing SupportThe 5 second description of an Artificially Intelligent Website
An Artificially Intelligent Website is the blending of a regular set of website
tools and additional automated marketing and administrative support
functionality. (There is the 5 seconds … here comes the 1 minute
explanation).
So, for example, when you create your post from your computer, iPad,
iPhone, Android, Blackberry or email, your website has the functionality and
connections built in to immediately update your Twitter account, Facebook
page and LinkedIn profile.
The next step your website performs for you is to automatically update
Google and Bing – performing needed services to speed up your organic
searching tasks.
Either once or twice a day, some administration functionality automatically
backs up your database, code, support files and everything you need to
replace your website and sends it ‘offsite’.
Once a week, or once a month, an email is sent out automatically from your
posts to those subscribers interested in receiving updates without you
spending more time and effort to put it together.
To finalize I have two lists of responsibility. The first list is what you are
required to do, the second list is what your website is required to do. If you
are doing (or not even accomplishing) items in the second list, it is time you
think about moving to the future.
Your Responsibility:
(C) 2010 - Simple Steps I.T. www.SimpleStepsIT.com 3
• Write a post
The Websites Responsibility:
• Update Twitter Account
• Update Facebook Account
• Update LinkedIn
• Create Email from weekly Posts
• Back up website daily
• Copy backup offsite daily
• Create sitemap.xml file for search engines
• Notify Google of new sitemap.xml
• Notify Bing of new sitemap.xml
(C) 2010 - Simple Steps I.T. www.SimpleStepsIT.com 4
Artificially Intelligent Websites #1 – Foundations
The Jetson’s cartoon promised us a utopian future, one where we only had
to touch a button to have so many functions and services done for us.
Unfortunately, technology has provided us a way to do so much more, with
less time and across many more areas of knowledge however; it causes us
to have to do so many more smaller and dissimilar tasks to get our jobs
done.
The best tools (from either the future, or the past) are simple to use, easy to
understand and work effectively to save us time and effort.
For websites, the core tool we need to make creating, updating and editing a
website is a Content Management System (CMS).
Enterprise ready CMS tools came together to allow those with less technical
expertise, and more content knowledge to create the content without
needing to know the technical software. These tools (10 years ago) cost
well into the hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Now, the most popular Content Management Systems are free.
(C) 2010 - Simple Steps I.T. www.SimpleStepsIT.com 5
You can look at Joomla, Drupal, DotNetNuke, WordPress and others. All of
these systems will help you create a compelling website, without having to
learn how to integrate static HTML, database connectivity and SQL query
requests.
You will want to know that the CMS you choose is freely extendable, easy to
use, supported by a significant user base (or larger company), has many
themes or is easily skinnable (to change the look of your website) and offers
some sort of easy way to add functionality.
I have chosen to use WordPress for all of our clients websites. From the
easy to learn and use interface, admin support, huge theme repository and
active 3rd party plug-ins activity WordPress is a powerful and fully mature
CMS today.
With a little over 11.4 million active installations, and over 28,000 extra
downloads daily, WordPress (now at version 3.01) has become one of the
top (if not the top) CMS in use today.
Not only for smaller and mid-sized companies, WordPress is used by world
class companies for some of their web needs including: UPS, Coca-Cola,
Harvard University, People Magazine, GE and the United States Navy.
In order to create an Artificially Intelligent Website, the foundation is a
powerful and easy to use Content Management System.
This tool allows our clients to create more content to drive more
opportunities in Social, Search Engine and eMail Marketing simultaneously
without hiring costly I.T. staff or huge graphic budgets for their websites.
The website should be about creating relevant conversations with new and
existing clients. When your website integrates with Twitter, Facebook,
(C) 2010 - Simple Steps I.T. www.SimpleStepsIT.com 6
Linked In, Google and Bing to promote your latest post, you have effectively
supercharged your marketing, increased your sales options and decreased
your time and effort.
All of this while needing the same amount of knowledge as using Microsoft
Word.
Consider implementing an Artificially Intelligent Website to bring the power
and opportunities back to your marketing and sales people. Get those on
the front line empowered to drive your company to the next level.
(C) 2010 - Simple Steps I.T. www.SimpleStepsIT.com 7
Building an Artificially Intelligent Website #2 – Hosting
The last article in this series about creating an Artificially Intelligent Website
discussed the benefits of selecting a Content Management System for your
web marketing activity.
In this article, I will discuss the engine which powers (or supplies power) to
your Content Management System with the right server, operating system,
services (email, ftp) and database connectivity.
While you can purchase a server, install the Operating System (Windows
Server, Linux, or Mac OSX Server – Snow Leopard) and setup the services,
pay for the Internet connectivity (and worry about the Internet connectivity
redundancy) and electricity. I wouldn’t suggest doing this.
In today’s economy, the benefit of hosting your own server (with the
included headaches) is not a fiscally good idea. If you need more
capabilities than you get with shared hosting and are considering a
virtualized server option, you might consider looking into the Mac-Mini as a
server.
However; hosting yourself is a bigger discussion for another time. Today,
we are discussing automating your marketing and sales and procuring
hosting for your website using a third party.
In our last post, I discussed using WordPress as the CMS of choice to move
your company along when creating an artificially intelligent website.
Although WordPress is free (meaning, no license costs), you still have to
make sure that it is installed properly. If you do a little research before you
pick out your hosting provider, you should be able to install and setup
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WordPress using provided scripts which could have you running WordPress
in a matter of a few minutes with all of your hair intact.
WordPress requires PHP (a web scripting language) and MySQL (a database
server solution) to be installed and running in order to operate. The right
hosting provider (frankly, if they do not have this capability they are not a
‘right’ hosting provider) will have these abilities already installed and running
for you.
I recommend Hos tGator (www.Hos tGator . com) o r B lueHos t
(www.BlueHost.com) for hosting needs. While I personally supply hosting
for my students, I will often have my larger clients procure their own
business account with HostGator directly. If necessary, I call HostGator on
behalf of my clients to solve technical issues.
With this setup, you will have your email services, web servers, ftp services
and significant options available to load other software (such as vTiger for
Sales CRM) for the same monthly fee.
When you add their excellent customer support (based here in the USA),
HostGator has proven to be a dependable partner for web and email hosting.
One word of warning. I do not recommend using the same company to host
your website and be the registrar for the company domain name. The
reason for this is if you choose to move your hosting, or have an issue with
the hosting for any reason, you can easily use the Registrar to point to a
new web hosting company be be back online quickly and easily. This way,
no one hosting company (no matter how good they are) will ever be able to
limit your options and take your website out of business.
(C) 2010 - Simple Steps I.T. www.SimpleStepsIT.com 9
Building an Artificially Intelligent Website – Part 3 – Installation
One of the biggest concerns most individuals not familiar with web servers,
databases and Content Management Systems is the learning, training and
frustration when installing software.
Fortunately, when you host with a qualified and supportive provider (read
the last Building an Artificially Intelligent Website segment here), you can be
literally minutes away from a stress free install experience.
Most hosting providers (at least Linux webservers) provide an administration
interface called cPanel to handle your email, ftp, subdomain and other
services setup needs.
If you look ‘down’ the list, you will find an option to click on a button called
“Fantastico”. Upon clicking this link, you will be giving a practical Christmas
list of Open Source options to install for your company.
One of those options will (or should) be WordPress.
From this interface, you will be just a few answers away from installing
WordPress for your company.
There are a few items to consider which could trip you up, however; they
are not esoteric requests which confuse easily.
The first item to consider is what domain you are going to connect this
WordPress install with.
Typically, you will be given a selection of domains and subdomains you have
created for your company with cPanel at this point. Every one of these
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choices have already been associated with a folder on your server (or should
have been).
You have the option of creating the installation in the main directory for the
domain / subdomain choice (by leaving the next option blank) or selecting a
subdirectory (new or existing).
For most clients, their main directory is where WordPress is installed.
However; for example, one of my clients has an existing website in their
main directory and wanted the new features of a blog. Here, I created a new
folder to instal l WordPress into, and pointed the subdomain
“blog.WebsiteName.com” to this folder.
Once you are past these two selections, the next five have to do with giving
your website a name, a tagline, an admin username and admin password
and where you want to send the setup email (I highly recommend you do
this). At a minimum, write down the username and password you just
created!
Sit back for the 5-10 seconds that the script takes to setup WordPress and
you are done. Total time for most installs I do this way takes less than 1
minute. Plan on maybe 3-5 minutes for your first time.
If you make a mistake (for instance, installing in a wrong directory),
Fantastico allow to you to easily delete the installation and start fresh.
So, with the right services provided with your hosting solution, your
installation experience can be overcome without having to learn a new
profession.
Now, with a hosting provider selected, a content management system
selected and installed, next segment we discuss your first planning step.
(C) 2010 - Simple Steps I.T. www.SimpleStepsIT.com 11
Create an Artificially Intelligent Website #4 – Plan your Menu
So far, we have talked about the following in our previous three articles:
1) Using WordPress as the foundation for your Artificially Intelligent Website
2) Using a qualified and competent Hosting provider to make your life easier
with less headaches, and support when they happen (it is, after all,
technology).
3) Using cPanel, and Fantastico, to quickly and easily install WordPress on
your website.
For this segment, I am going to ask you to step away from your computer
and do a little thinking about the structure of your website.
Two areas which slow website implementations
There are two pieces which slow down most web implementations. The first
has to do with how the website will look, the second has to do with the
content of the website and how to organize the content (the menu).
In this segment, we are discussing the website menu structure. Effectively,
thinking how your clients, customers or prospects will interact with your
website.
Your website has a purpose, generally for profit generating companies this
has to do with supporting sales and support services. I.E., show me the
money!
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For others, it might be to help reduce support calls by giving the clients a
place to help themselves quickly and easily get the information they need
without calling your offices.
Whether for these, or other reasons, your website needs to have it’s content
easy to find and easy to consume. There needs to be an simple call to
action placed on the front page when you are ready to push your marketing
and sales effort and compelling and fresh content to encourage prospects to
come back and sample your website again. After all, research shows that it
takes an average of 7-8 contacts to move a prospect to a client.
When you are thinking about creating a menu, think about how you want a
particular type of client to get to your information internally. If you are
targeting an information seeker, then make sure that your information is
clearly organized and easy to find – don’t make them search through months
of content (posts) to find the gems they might rave about to their friends or
co-workers.
For example, look up YARPP (Yet Another Relevant Post Plugin) to
automatically find similar posts and encourage your readers to see other
content on your website.
When you have an Artificially Intelligent Website, you are creating a system
to automate your efforts. For example, if someone was browsing your
products, you would want a service person to show them additionally related
products if they are in your store, right? Well, YARPP (and similar plugins)
do the same function for your content, automatically.
Think not only about your main menu (usually underneath or on top of your
header), but also about side menu’s and the integrated links within your
website. Always encourage the wonderful curiosity of prospects to get to
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know your services and prospects … and you … better by pointing them to
your website’s information.
When your website creates a compelling draw for prospects, you have a
better chance of being ‘top of mind’ when they have a problem or
opportunity you can solve. Furthermore, the prospect has become more
comfortable with your company by learning valuable information in your field
of expertise. Hopefully, the prospect has learned they can trust your
direction and has overcome some of the beginning sales issues when your
brand is unknown and untried.
Since the point of your website is to deliver information (whether sales,
support, marketing etc.) you need to have a defined path for the viewer
through the website. When their is a logical flow to your website, the
prospect is more likely to look around since their frustration has not been
triggered causing them to just go back to Google and try again.
If you would like to understand more about how your website is used by
viewers, consider installing Google Analytics (free) to get objective
information regarding what pages are viewed on your website.
Finally, remember some of the basics that prospects will need when seeing
your website. Always include a ‘Contact Us’ page for example. Make sure a
client never has difficulty figuring out how to get in touch with you to
purchase or hire your companies services and products.
Your website must have compelling information to be beneficial to a
prospect, however; if they cannot easily figure out how to locate the
information they will just go to another website. Protect against this by
doing some early planning on your menu structure and links which draw the
prospects into and through your website.
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Create an Artificially Intelligent Website #5 – What is a Page?
Artificially Intelligent Website – Pages
We discussed in our last segment about taking the time to think through the
menu structure, the flow, of how to encourage the use of the content you
have placed on the website. From the content you create a relevant reason
for the prospect to interact with you online.
The file most websites are familiar with is the ‘page’. The page is simply
the location and information served up to the prospect when they click on a
link whether from your menu, a hyperlink within your website, or from a link
located on a different website (Google, eMail, etc.).
Now, in WordPress as the foundation for your website, there is often
confusion between what a Page is, and what a Post is and how they are
different.
Pages are the basic, do not change information about your company,
products and services. Example pages include:
• Home
• About Us
• Contact Us
• Products
• Services
• Our Team
• Our Vision
(C) 2010 - Simple Steps I.T. www.SimpleStepsIT.com 15
When you create a page, you are expecting that page to stay relevant the
life of your website.
You could, for example, change information on a page (you might change
contact information on your Contact Us page), but you will almost always
need the information on your website.
Often, you will direct individuals to your Home page which has a defined
layout when building a business website. For blogs, they most often will
show their posts (the next article) on the home page because what they are
writing about most recently is the most relevant information they have to
deliver. This isn’t true for a business website.
For a business website, consider the following aspects when designing what
to place on your Home page:
• Branding
• Call to Action
• Contact Information
• Keep in Touch actions (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Email signups)
• Most recent posts showing (keeps new content rolling through your
homepage)
• Video options
• Market Updates (for example, for a mortgage company, the most
recent Mortgage Loan Rates)
• Links to other areas on the website (Products, Services, Support
FAQ’s)
Each of your pages should have a purpose which include:
• Creating excitement about your products or services
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• Educating your clients about your market
• Providing information to reduce anxiety when a prospect wants to
learn more about your company and what their risk is buying your
products and services
• Creating lead information from prospects and delivering the
information to sales people for follow up
• Reducing support calls by placing frequently asked questions online
Finally, always remember some of the basics when planning pages which
include a nice layout (easy to read), good SEO habits which include good
titles, page names, paragraph headings and content key phrases and always
have a way for an interested prospect to contact you from that page.
(C) 2010 - Simple Steps I.T. www.SimpleStepsIT.com 17
Artificially Intelligent Website #6 – What is a Post
BUILD A WEBSITE, AND THEY WILL COME…
Well, that is what a lot of people in business believe, anyway.
Unfortunately, without advertising (either offline, online (PPC, ads etc) or
organic search hits your website will NOT be found.
While it is true that Google, Bing (and Yahoo) and others are trying to crawl
the web to find as much content as possible, if they do not find out about
your site (through links from other websites, or site submission), your
website will not be in their database. You want as much content (links)
located in the major search engines as possible. One of the best ways to
accomplish this, is to write articles on your website (blog posts).
In this article, we are going to discuss what Posts are, how they are different
from Pages, what to think about when writing them and SEO (search engine
optimization) features.
What is a Post
A post, also called a “blog post” or web article, is a short to medium length
(300-700 words) discussion on some subject.
For many bloggers, the subject might be whatever their thoughts on the
latest trends in fashion, their children, politics or whatever muse hits them.
For businesses, your post should be relevant to your company, industry or
subject your clients and customers find compelling, insightful and / or
interesting.
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All Posts have a title, an image (preferably) and the content which can be
created in WordPress under the menu selection “Posts > Add New” on the
left hand side.
WordPress has a great WYSIWYG editor built in. Use this feature from
within any browser or use any of the many apps on smart phones, iPad, and
computers. Due to the many applications available, there is freedom to
work from any place and at any time.
How is a Post different from a Page?
When we discussed Pages in our last article here, one creates a Page almost
identically as one creates a Post.
This confuses many people since there doesn’t seem to be a difference how
they are created, so how are they different?
Well, Posts are effectively date stamped ordered by their date descending
and created more often than Pages. As mentioned before, Pages are for
static – long term information. As you write more posts, your earlier efforts
get pushed ‘down’ the list, your most recent post stays at the top of the list,
typically.
However; your goal is to allow clients, customers and prospects to
understand more about your company, people, beliefs (both professional and
altruistic), capabilities etc. To accomplish this, you engage people into
conversations and posts facilitate these conversations.
There have been studies that people need to be touched on average 7 times
before a sale occurs, through the use of Posts, you can make this happen
more quickly, effectively and efficiently.
What to think when Writing a Post
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First, you need to be interested and knowledgeable about the subject.
Unless you are a very creative fiction writer, your readers will know when
you are faking your interest and have no clue what you are writing about.
Second, pay attention to sphellng and punkuation. It will seriously draw
aware from the readers experience if you are consistently misspelling words
or have incorrect punctuation in your posts.
WordPress has a built-in spell checker, make sure you use it.
Third, if you have no ideas what to talk about spend a little time with
Google’s Search Keyword tool (www.Google.com/sktool). Type in a one or
two word phrase which is relevant to your industry and then see what people
are searching for. The higher the search count, the more interest people
have in the subject.
For example, one of my clients (home loan industry) typed in “mortgage”
and found that most people were searching for “mortgage calculators” by
almost 4 times more than the next most searched phrase.
SEO Suggestions
When you write an article, if you are working to get your article ranked
higher on search engines there are basic items you need to be aware of that
help.
1. Title – Your title (and keyphrase in your title) is very important. Make
sure your title has a phrase which also connects with the content in the body
of your post.
2. Post filename – WordPress allows you to change the filename of the post.
Make sure that your phrase you are looking to promote is in your filename.
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3. Content – Your content needs to promote both the phrase you are looking
to have people find your post with, and ‘near phrases’. What this means, is
do not spam your post with the exact same phrase too many times as
Google will score you lower for this. If you would like to understand how to
write effectively, load Scribe (www.ScribeSEO.com) into your WordPress and
use the free 10 checkups to give you a better understanding. Also, they
have a great white paper on how to write, as well.
4. Write for People – Write for a person to read and understand, but be
aware of how to tweak the parts for Search Engine Friendliness.
5. Submit to Google immediately – install and use the Google XML Sitemap
plugin. This tool is one of the most important pieces in an Artificially
Intelligent Website to integrate with Search Engine Optimizations.
6. Be Consistent – Don’t write four articles in one week, and then nothing for
three weeks. It would be better to write four articles and use WordPress’s
ability to publish the articles at a later date (say two a week) than push all
four out in one day, and nothing for two weeks. This is also a benefit with
Search Engines, as well.
Hopefully, this post has helped you grasp some of the differences and
benefits of writing Posts. I work with my clients in the beginning to just get
accustomed to writing posts consistently. Let the Artificially Intelligent
Website handle all of the rest (Search Engine submission, Email distribution,
Twittering / Facebook / Social).
If you get on a standard 3′sh posts a week, in just 3 short months you will
have created 40 new pages of content, submitted new Sitemap.XML pages
40 times to Google, Bing and Yahoo, created and delivered 12-13 new
weekly emails and minimally Twittered 40 times about your company.
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All of this when you just write 3 posts a week.
Consider it fishing with forty new lines of bait, instead of just one.
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Artificially Intelligent Websites #7 – Search Engines
In this article, I am going to discuss a couple of the basics about Search
Engines and how to make sure your post can be found in Google within
minutes of publishing.
Previously, I discussed creating a foundation on a Content Management
System (WordPress) in order to both simplify building a website, and using
the powerful authoring tools included.
One of the additional benefits which come with a good CMS, is the ability to
add additional functionality others have made available (and tested) easily
into your website. We will use this capability to add a specific plugin below.
There are three components to think about when working to have a high-
ranking page for a certain key phrase in Google:
1) Your Pages: Title, Filename, Content
2) Once published, your sitemap.xml file updated with Google and Bing
(Yahoo) notified of the new update
3) Backlinks from websites (the higher ranked those are, the better) pointed
back to your page(s).
The first two components you can work on easily, the last is a little more
difficult to accomplish and I will save for another discussion later.
First, when you decide what the post / page is about, make sure you use the
phrase customers would likely use to locate your content as part of your
title, your filename (Permalink in WordPress) and at least for 1-2% of your
content. (Check out my post on Google and ScribeSEO for more details)
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Second, make sure that you have Google XML Sitemap Plugin installed and
working correctly. Here is a link to the Plugin website: http://
www.arnebrachhold.de/projects/wordpress-plugins/google-xml-sitemaps-
generator/
When you have implemented the tactics described above, the post / page
has a substantially higher opportunity to be found by new clients and
customers quicker and more often than before.
Unfortunately, in order to get really high Page Ranking, you have more effort
ahead of you (find out more about how to get into Google here)
To truly get into the Organic Results (those results which are not Paid Per
Click (PPC)) in an efficient way takes effort, knowledge, a little luck and
good content. There are many programs which you can subscribe to in an
effort to shortcut the time and work needed to be in the top results with
little effort on your side. Many are highly questionable.
However; just be aware that Google makes their money on creating relevant
results for their users. If you decide to try and ‘game’ the system through
your own, or other methods which are shady consider that you risk Google
finding out about it, and purging your pages from their directory.
Hopefully, this overview and the links provided (especially go to the
ScribeSEO.com website for their in-depth article on SEO) will move you
forward with your search engine efforts.
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Artificially Intelligent Websites #8 – Email Marketing
Artificially Intelligent Websites and your Email Efforts
In this article, I am going to discuss Email Marketing a major component of
Artificially Intelligent Websites.
Social Marketing (Twitter and Facebook for example) are the buzz right now
for companies, however; there are many more users of email than social
media outlets and that will continue to be true into the near future.
In fact, I went to a recent event where Chris Brogan (known as a Social
Networking Guru) was speaking and he mentioned that more people
received an email from a brand over Twitter by almost a 6 to 1 margin, and
almost 15 to 1 margin over Facebook.
Email is still very, very relevant.
With an Artificially Intelligent Website, you can have your (email) cake, and
eat it too!
Email and RSS Syndication
RSS is Really Simple Syndication. Effectively, it is a way to publish your
content to be consumed by other vehicles (such as RSS readers, or services
which use your RSS feed).
Why should you care? Well, because with the power of RSS and MailChimp,
you can pretty much automate your email list administration and delivery.
Each week, without any additional effort on your part you can send an email
of blurbs about each of your new articles to anyone on your email list.
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One of the vehicles which drove more efficient marketing in the last 15 years
is email distribution.
One of the biggest problems with the Internet these days is a glut of email.
However; just like direct mail, there will always be those who prefer this
marketing vehicle to receive your information. It does not take much to
automate this process (nor much money) and the value of a qualified email
list is almost equivalent to money in the bank.
Check out MailChimp, you will find one of their services will pull a RSS feed
from your website and aggregate the information into an email and send it
to your list (RSS Template campaign).
So, if you stay the course by publishing 2 to 3 times a week you can
effectively “email” this content to your list once a week automatically. You
don’t have to setup new software, you don’t have to dream up new content,
you won’t have to spend any time each week building a newsletter once you
have built your RSS template.
The cost? You can try it out free for less than 1000 names (and they will put
a MailChimp plug (not horrible) in the bottom of the email). If you do not
want their plug, you can start with their service up to 2,500 names and be
charged $30.00 a month. See the website for other rates.
One nice feature is that you pay by the names, not the quantity of emails.
So if you have 2,000 names and you mail 4 times a month you are still only
charged $30.00.
When you use a quality email service (Mailchimp, Constant Contact etc.) the
service handles CAN-SPAM compliance issues which you must be aware of
for you stay on the ‘right’ side of the law. CAN-SPAM is a legal requirement
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which could cause fines if you do not handle the rules correctly. Find out
more about CAN-SPAM by clicking on this link.
Artificially Intelligent Websites and Analytics
Typically, I explain to my new clients that in the near future, we will discuss
ways that they can review their success to date, and then work to improve
those results.
When you have a Mailchimp account, you can be assured that your email
campaigns will give you an easy to understand overview of the campaign
results (emails sent, emails delivered, emails opened) but also has the
capability to allow you to dive into deeper analytics when you are ready.
In order to help your company test different ideas, Mailchimp offers A/B
testing functionality.
With so many benefits and low risk by using Mailchimp the service deserves
further review to include it in your marketing efforts.
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Artificially Intelligent Websites #9 – Backups
Don’t Leave Your Office Without a good Backup
In this article I will discuss backing up your Artificially Intelligent Website.
Admittedly, backups not only lack sexiness (they aren’t capturing new
business) they are usually a complete pain to accomplish as well.
WordPress is comprised a two very important areas which you need to be
aware of when you backup information. The first area is the content you
write which is the HTML (text) you generally see on the pages and posts
inside your website.
However; the pictures, images, plugins, themes and basically any multi-
media assets you add to your website are not stored in the database. So if
the MySQL database is the only item backed up, you will be significantly
short of a full restore if your server goes down.
iThemes and BackupBuddy
Fortunately, there is a plug-in you can use to capture all of your information
from iThemes.
They have a product, BackupBuddy, which can be installed in your website
and setup to not only backup your website, compress the files to one easier
to manage file but also FTP that file off of your website to a different location
to truly be assured you will not loose the incredible investment of time and
effort.
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While there are a few items you have to adjust to get the program running
the effort is pretty small compared to the ongoing automated assistance and
insurance against a total loss the software provides.
Take a look into the service, the cost of the program is a very minor amount
compared to the risk of time and effort to rebuild your website and
potentially lost opportunities if your website isn’t available.
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Artificially Intelligent Websites #10 – Relationships
An Artificially Intelligent Website is all about the Relationship
This final article about creating an Artificially Intelligent Website is focused
on the relationship not the technology.
I wrote the following back in article #4:
When your website creates a compelling draw for prospects, you have a
better chance of being ‘top of mind’ when they have a problem or
opportunity you can solve. Furthermore, the prospect has become more
comfortable with your company by learning valuable information in your field
of expertise. Hopefully, the prospect has learned they can trust your
direction and has overcome some of the beginning sales issues when your
brand is unknown and untried.
People don’t buy from websites
Remember always that people do not buy from websites, they buy from the
company (or group) which created the website. Your company is striving to
become relevant to your prospects. Relevance can be created in a multitude
of ways, but one of the most compelling is to create a relationship with
someone, first.
We buy from those we like. The ability of your team to promote a
relationship with a prospect and client through your website is one of the
defining attributes of a successful implementation. This is more important,
actually, than what CMS you choose, hosting provider or even how
successful your SEO has become.
If, at the end of the day, someone finds the website but comes away feeling
that there is no relationship, you have lost that opportunity.
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Themes
Certainly, one of the big opportunities to start creating a presence with your
website is how it looks. For those who are not aware, WordPress (and the
other major content management systems) have themes or skins to change
the look of your website to a professional look easily and (sometimes)
cheaply or even free.
Remember, dress for success.
I talk more about themes and how to find them in my post on “Free
WordPress Themes”.
It is about Character, Engagement and Value
First, create a compelling value for your client(s) to seek your website. Are
they looking for entertainment? Information? Tips & Tricks? Give your
readers value for their time and effort in order to engagement them more
than a one-time fly by of your website.
The stats on the Simple Steps IT website at the time of this article are pretty
compelling. I have a 1.09% Bounce rate, a 6.92 Pages/Visit count and
52.17 % New Visits statistic.
Basically, it boils down to almost no one comes to my website and
immediately leaves, they read almost 7 pages each time they come, and a
little over half of all visitors are new to the website.
I discern that my effort to create compelling and useful articles are a huge
reason for these statistics (taken from Google Analytics on October 24,
2010).
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When a person finishes reading almost 7 articles, they will pretty much know
where I stand on technology and marketing (most likely). They have
listened to my side of the conversation and have gotten to know me through
my writing.
If we should meet (to move forward with a project) there will be no need for
me to explain much of anything, which shortens my sales cycle and the
ability to create rapport has been greatly enhanced.
Finally – Make Sure they can Contact You
At the end of the day, you need to drive more business. Make sure you look
through your website and that you have not created a difficult process to
contact you. I realize it seems obvious, but I would rather waste a few
words at the end of this article than just one of you making that mistake!
This Is It
Well, this is it. This is the last article in our series on creating an Artificially
Intelligent Website. By now, you should know all of the basic components
which you need to review and implement in order to move your marketing
forward automatically.
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