Traditionally, MosquitoMax relied on a system based on an obsolete rabbit controller, which was difficult to stock and prone to bugs. A technician was required to be physically present to check on the system’s health and make manual adjustments for weather and seasonal variations. This led to a number of challenges:

• Non-functional systems going undetected for weeks or months: This resulted in more mosquitoes for customers and a loss of revenue for MosquitoMax.
• Limited ability to scale the business: The manual process couldn’t keep up with increasing demand, and the obsolete hardware made it difficult to introduce new features.

To address these challenges, MosquitoMax embarked on a modernization project, with the goal of making their system real-time and online.

Here’s a breakdown of their key objectives:

• Monitor the entire fleet for:
  • Low chemical solution
  • No water pressure
  • Non-functional mister line or nozzle
  • Improper solution mix ratio
  • No power, and other possible issues
• Customer should be able to:
  • Schedule sprays, spray now or skip future sprays
  • See when the last spray happened and when the next spray will happen
  • See details about each spray
  • Request support and manage account
  • Do all of this from their mobile device

To achieve these objectives, MosquitoMax implemented a solution that included:

• Hardware: Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W, custom Printed Circuit Board (PCB)
• Languages: Python (controller, API), Dart (mobile), JavaScript (functions), Bash (automation, service management)
• Mobile: Flutter for native Android, iOS and web interfaces, FlutterFlow.io for rapid prototyping
• Cloud: Google Cloud (Storage, Functions, Cloud Run, Build), Firebase (Firestore, Realtime database, Auth, Messaging), Source Repositories

This technology allowed MosquitoMax to create a more robust and reliable system that could be easily managed and scaled.

The video shows a number of demos, which illustrate how the new system works in practice. For example, you can see how a user can register a new device, view the spray history, and make adjustments to the spray schedule.

The new system provides a number of key benefits to MosquitoMax and their customers, including:

• Reduced operating costs: The automation of many tasks allows MosquitoMax to operate more efficiently and save money.
• Improved customer satisfaction: The ability to monitor the system remotely and make adjustments in real-time helps to ensure that customers get the best possible service.
• Data-driven forecasting and business intelligence: The data collected by the system can be used to forecast customer needs and improve business operations.

This case study highlights the power of Google Cloud to modernize traditional businesses and unlock new opportunities for growth. If you are looking to modernize your own business, be sure to check out the resources linked below.

Resources:

• Google Cloud Platform
• Firebase
• Flutter
• FlutterFlow

If you have any questions about this case study or about modernizing your own business with Google Cloud, feel free to leave a comment below.

Advertising online doesn’t have to be overwhelming, even if you’re new to it. It’s just a matter of familiarizing yourself with your options and determining which is best for your business’s unique marketing goals.

While there are many different platforms available, online advertising essentially boils down to X core types:

Email

Email marketing remains one of the most powerful and cost-efficient ways to advertise – both to prospective and current customers. Nearly every business has more than one audience to target. For example, a political campaign will want to target general voters, supporters and volunteers, all separately. Each group requires a unique message or even a different type of advertising. This is why it’s crucial to build segmented email lists, constantly. Sending emails frequently will keep your audience engaged, build loyalty, position your brand as an authority, and boost sales.

Paid Search

Google Adwords is still king in this arena, but there are plenty of other options, including Bing and Yahoo. By targeting the people who are already searching for keywords related to your business, you can display highly targeted ads and only pay when you get actual clicks. If you’re new to paid search, it’s best to hire an expert. Platforms like Adwords make it easy to waste money on bad clicks and blow through money faster than a slot machine. An experienced search marketing professional will ensure your campaigns perform as they should.

Display

Display marketing is basically synonymous with banner advertising: you place visual (or text or video) ads on various websites – ideally websites that are relevant to your industry. Platforms like Adwords let you run display ads in addition to search, but there are hundreds of other ad networks to choose from as well. Some display ads charge per click (PPC); others charge per impression (CPM). Like most online ads, the key is to pay as little for these ads as possible while also aiming for the highest conversion rates (e.g. the number of people who click an ad and then subscribe to your newsletter).

SEO

SEO (search engine optimization) is the process of optimizing your website and using external channels to attract visitors through search engines organically, rather than with paid ads. These days, SEO is more about creating relevant content on your website, rather than keyword stuffing – but it’s still critical to have your most important keywords prominently placed on your site. For example, if you run a Pizza Shop in Brooklyn, but you don’t have the words “pizza” or “Brooklyn” on your website, then you’re making it very hard for locals to find you in search engines.

Social Media

Every business should have social media accounts on platforms like Facebook and Twitter. It allows you to stay in touch with your audience, announce major news, offer special promotions for followers and so on. You can also use social media for paid advertising to reach people who don’t already follow you. Running “sponsored” posts and ads in Facebook, for example, can be a cost-efficient way to reach your prospective customers on a platform they already use. Plus, you can target by a number of criteria, such as age, location, gender, other pages they “like” and so on.

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Keep in mind that most businesses will get the most from their ad dollars by running a combination of the above ad types and splitting up their budget based on ongoing campaign performance. Keep testing and experimenting to discover what works best for your business.

When things are going well, it’s too easy to become comfortable. Money is flowing. You’re on top of the world. What could go wrong?

This is the mentality that can hurt a business – even if that business is an industry leader. Regardless of what success they’ve had so far, entrepreneurs have to keep working hard to maintain it. A critical part of that is keeping a close eye on your competitors to out-strategize them and stay several steps ahead.

Know your opponent

In political campaigns, candidates are focused intently on opposition research. They study their opponents aggressively. And they use that information to fine-tune their message to voters and differentiate themselves from the other campaign. That’s how politicians win – and the same strategy is true in business. You must be constantly evaluating your competitors to make sure you’re doing everything better. More importantly: your customers must believe you’re better, too.

Think beyond your outdated business plan

If your business was founded with a thorough business plan (and hopefully it was), then you’ve already done your competitor research. But how long ago was that research conducted? Two, three, five years ago? Chances are the playing field has changed dramatically since then. If your competitor research is more than a week old, then it’s probably outdated.

Integrate competitor research into everything you do

Some businesses form teams that are tasked with devoting a portion of their work week to evaluating competitor messaging and news. That’s fine, but you can do this even more efficiently.

Train your staff on how to make competitor evaluation in-grained in the work they’re already doing. Encourage them to be occasional customers of your competitors. Follow those businesses on social media. Subscribe to their emails. Open their browsers to their homepages. And when your employees see something significant, they should say something. Encourage them to feel comfortable reporting anything competitors are doing that is unique or better than your company. This information can be invaluable.

Follow industry news and trends

As an owner or executive, you should be leveraging your personal/professional network for “inside” information about competitors. This isn’t the time to stop attending networking opportunities. Talk to industry insiders. Follow analysts on social media and subscribe to industry news. When competitors are planning new products or making significant changes that could affect your business, then you should know about it before it happens.

Invest in market research

If your budget allows for it, invest in professional market research services or custom whitepapers to ensure you’re constantly looking at the latest data. Rely on credible projections. Know where the industry is moving.

The sooner you can react to potential competitor advantages, the better prepared you’ll be. You must evaluate this information constantly if you want to be a leader in your industry.

What this means to your messaging

When it comes to the messaging you create to engage with your audience, you need to think about their current typical engagement patterns as well as the action you hope they will take. With the rise of social media, it can help to think about messaging in a timeline and what type of timeline update tend to get the most views. For example, if you are able to effectively target your consumer market on Facebook, it might be helpful to think about how you can make your message look as organic as possible, so that it will naturally fall into the usual flow of consuming the timeline updates they consume on a regular basis. Making use of video can further engage consumers and may increase the likelihood that they share your content.

The most obvious problem with that approach is that very few Facebook users take action on a timeline post, other than possibly sharing it, of course. What this means is that once you have their attention, your call to action must be compelling enough to pull them temporarily away from viewing their timeline to engage with you. Even then, remember that you have a limited amount of time to engage them and capture a potentially valuable lead or sale.

What this means to your organization

Consumer messaging is not the only engagement scenario to change with a shrinking attention span. Younger employees, who have always had access to social media are more conditioned than ever to respond to chimes, vibrations, blinking lights and any other notification our electronic devices create. Where it was once considered rude to answer a phone call while having a conversation with someone, it is now considered rude to ignore your phone, regardless of the context or discussion. The impact on training, safety and quality of work on your business environment are significant and could represent a real impact on your bottom line.

How can you use technology to compensate for short attention

What can be done to counteract this shrinking attention span? Perhaps it’s more helpful to look at it from the other perspective of what it is that’s taking their attention away from work. If our generation is constantly engaged on mobile devices, including their cell phones and tablets, perhaps a new breed of mobile resources could train and focus the attention of our younger workforce. Imagine an app that was synchronized with your business and provide the types of alerts, dings, vibrations and notifications that they are already tuned in to receive and would help keep employees on track with deadlines and other commitments. Imagine adapting workplace processes to make use of tablets and other technology that felt natural to use and helped the employee feel as engaged as he does when viewing a timeline in social media.

Whatever the winning combination turns out to be, it’s likely to adapt to the changing culture rather than running counter to it. On the other hand, if you need steady employees who aren’t distracted by every noise and who you can trust to keep track of details and follow through, perhaps it’s time you forget about generation X and choose more mature employees who know how to get things done!

Create Evergreen Content

The content you use for your autoresponder series cannot be time-sensitive since these emails will be automatically sent whenever someone subscribes to your email list. Keep time-sensitive offers for your one-time broadcasts and update your autoresponder series if content becomes outdated.

Each Email Should Have A Goal

A good autoresponder series should include emails that have individual goals. You can for instance send a first email to introduce yourself and your brand, send a second email with more details about your product and a third email with some industry insights. Regardless of the topics you choose, each email needs to have a specific goal and cannot cover more than one topic.

Use A Strong Call to Action

Your conversion rate will go up if you use a good call to action. Your autoresponder series can generate a lot of clicks by delivering quality content and by encouraging readers to perform an action to get more content. You can, for instance, encourage recipients to follow a link to your site, watch a video, like your official Facebook page or download an eBook.

Be Brief

Each email should have a specific goal and should be straight to the point. Try keeping your content under 300 words and include a link where readers can find more content. Lengthier emails are not a good way to generate conversions since most recipients will not take the time to read everything and will not see the call to action.

Find The Right Pace

You might find that you get better results by sending a new autoresponder email every couple of days or by sending a new email once a week. The ideal pace depends on your audience and on quickly they move along the purchase funnel. Try running some tests with different groups of recipients to determine which pace generates the most conversions.

Keep The Big Picture In Mind

The primary purpose of an autoresponder series is to educate your target audience. Each email needs to provide valuable information that will bring subscribers closer to figuring out which product they need and how to use it to get the most out of their purchase. Any information that does not help you reach this goal should not be included in your email series.

Adapt Your Strategy To Your Target Audience

You will generate a higher conversion rate once you make a few changes to your autoresponder series in function of what seems to work best for your target audience. The way you address your audience, design your email, write your subject lines or create your call to action needs to be adapted to the behaviors and preferences of your target audience. This is also true of the content you share via email since some groups will prefer reading an article while others would rather watch a video.

Developing a good autoresponder email series is a project that takes time. You need to focus on creating high quality content, be consistent, and address the needs and expectations of your audience. Use tests and analytics to measure your conversion rate and test different types of content, calls to action and timings for your email sequence.

Guest Author Jonathan Leger has been a successful Internet Marketer for over 11 years. He owns an SEO Tools suite at KeywordCanine.com and is the creator of a number of well known and respected software and service applications such as The Best Spinner, Article Builder and more.

Why it’s important to make and keep commitments

The point is that you want to help interested people engage with you and take certain steps. Whether you run a for profit membership website, an ecommerce store, a non-profit or support a political cause, you want people to make donations, purchase products and spread the word. In most of these scenarios, the best first step is to get them to subscribe to your email list.

There’s some powerful psychology involved in the subscription process. In the first place you make a promise to give something of interest. They take a risk that you’re not a scammer or a spammer and give you an email address. The email subscription process is your chance to deliver on that promise and establish trust.

When you make and keep commitments to your subscribers, it becomes easier for them to trust you when you ask them to take bigger steps, like making a donation or buying a membership.

Thank You Pages

The Thank You page is central to the optin process. All email service providers, of which I’m aware, allow you to identify a Thank You page where the subscriber is sent after confirming his or her email address. Many even allow you to send the subscriber to a custom page after subscribing but before they confirm. This gives you two chances to deliver on the promise you made and to build confidence in your subscriber that when they complete certain actions for you, they will be rewarded immediately.

Remember that the visitor who ended up at your site has only had a few seconds or minutes of exposure to you and your site. You have spent hours, days, weeks and maybe even months thinking about what you want that visitor to do. If they optin and find themselves on a generic email service provider website telling them to confirm their email address, that can be very confusing! Many consumers still don’t understand what an email service provider is. They may feel like they got tricked into signing up for something other than your email list.

Simplicity and clarity are important on Thank You pages. When you craft deliberate messaging and always bring the user back to your website and deliver immediately on the promises you make, the end result is trust. When trust is present, you will find it easier to help subscribers take future steps toward bigger actions that will benefit both you and your subscribers.

When you design your optin sequence, you want to include the following items.

• Optin landing page
• Confirm the optin
• Deliver the content

The way that you go about this is extremely important. The process you implement can improve your subscriber’s experience and strengthen your brand. When it’s done right, you also have more opportunity to build a relationship and deliver on your optin promise. With the diagram below, my objective is not complexity. I’m aiming for increased clarity.

Let’s go over some highlights from the diagram above.

Optin Page

The optin page is the first page the subscriber reaches on your site. This page has the sole purpose of getting the subscriber’s email address. Typically you would make a promise or an offer. A weak offer might be that you promise to send them email whenever you publish new content. A stronger offer might be a special report or a white paper. It could also be training, videos, software, printables, templates, and a bunch of other stuff. The real point here is that you only have one job on that page. Don’t distract the user with anything else, like banner ads, menus or links to related articles. Just make your offer and get the optin. One exception might be a tool like the optincrusher that asks for the optin on every page.

When the user provides her email address, that is posted to your email service provider. Most email service providers offer a default page that instructs the user to go check her email and click the confirm link. I recommend that you create a page on your own site with that message and have your email service provider forward the user to that page after processing the initial optin.

View my Next Steps page for the optincrusher optin sequence.

At this point, your email service provider will send a confirmation email to your subscriber.

Confirm the optin

When the confirmation email arrives, the user will be instructed to either click a link to confirm or ignore the email to not subscribe to the list. Assuming they click the link and confirm their interest in being on your list, you want the user receive one of two things: the content you promised them or instructions about how to get the content you promised them.

In the case of optincrusher, the download is protected by a password. The password comes in the first email message, so I choose to send the user to a page that will tell them what to expect.

View my Download Steps page for the optincrusher optin sequence.

If your promised content is publicly available, you could skip the thank you page and send the user directly to the content. You could also link directly from the thank you page to the content. I recommend you use the thank you page to further set expectations.

Deliver the content

The promised content is why they gave you their email address in the first place. At this point you have a lot of flexibility about how to format and structure your communications. The most important advice I can give you (and myself) is to be consistent. Keep delivering quality content and your subscribers will keep coming back.

Leave a comment below if you have questions or ideas for highly effective optin sequences.

Rules of etiquette are important in marketing and essential to establishing the type of connection you want with your audience. I think that may be why I’m surprised at some of the tactics used online to invite people to optin. Often the trade-off is attention for courtesy. Methods that are sure to get attention often lack courtesy, while courteous methods to get attention often produce much lower response rates. So what is the ideal balance?

Don’t interrupt

One rule of etiquette, which I think is just good manners, is to never interrupt someone. When someone arrives at your website, it’s typically because they’re interested in your content or what you have to offer. Any optin tactic that interrupts them while they consume that content may come across as inconsiderate.

I created the optincrusher to make it possible to get attention without interrupting what the user is doing. When the optincrusher slides up from the bottom, this gets the users attention, but it doesn’t obscure the content they’re consuming. A little ongoing motion with the arrow keeps the new offer in the user’s mind.

A final note is to make sure that the offer or invitation you make in the optincusher is consistent with the content on the site where it’s being used. It’s wise to also make sure that it’s as compelling as possible (i.e. perceived as valuable). Once you get your visitor’s attention, you may only have one chance to get the optin. Relevance and value are the keys.

Get optincrusher for free and accelerate your list building today.

Unfortunately I see many marketers build unnecessary complexity into their membership offerings. There is a lot of attention given to sequence and structure at the expense of clear messaging. This hurts both webmaster and prospective member. From the webmaster side, every minute spent tweaking the timing and levels is a minute not spent creating relevant content for members. From the member perspective, complex registration and content access rules obscure the messaging.

Messaging is Key

Marketing experts say that successful marketing requires getting “the right message at to the right person the right time”. This is extremely relevant for membership websites, where the message often is the product. With membership websites, simple is smart!

Some guidelines to help you craft a compelling membership website include:

• Keep the offer simple. Use the fewest number of levels possible to communicate with your audience (often this is just one).
• When you use multiple levels, make sure the reason is obvious. For example, a healthcare website may have two levels, one for patients and another for providers. Messaging is clear to the member because he clearly identifies with a specific group. Use of tiers, such as bronze, silver and gold can be confusing and may come across as a ploy to get higher dues.
• Always reinforce member content through email and social media. This brings people back to your website and keeps your content fresh in their minds

Unfortunately many of the membership plugins available today are moving in the direction of increasing complexity in ways that don’t improve messaging. Instead they obscure the message in layers of levels and complex registration processes.

If you want a refreshingly simple and powerful membership system, have a look at my own Member Master for WordPress plugin (currently unavailable). Remember that whatever tool you use, it’s crucial that you start with the messaging and then create the most simple delivery mechanism possible.

It’s been working great and was a good addition to that site offering, which complimented my perennial first choice among membership plugins, MemberWing. At least that has been my first choice up until now.

About a month ago I gave one of my best programmers some technical direction and some time to update the plugin again. The result is a fantastic, powerful and ultra stable membership plugin that provides more flexibility in a more simple interface than anything else available.

Name Change

The software has changed so much from the PLR version I bought, that I decided to change the name. I chose the name Member Master for WordPress.

Then I gave Fiverr a go and came up with a couple of logos. Here’s what I got back:

Logo version A

Logo option B

Not bad for $5. I wonder what you think. If you have a preference, leave me a comment below.

Naturally, as I make progress, the https://masteringwordpressmembership.com/ site will become the main site for this plugin in it’s current form. I still need to work out the exact relationship between masteringwordpressmembership.com and www.wordpressmembershipuniversity.com.

Finally, for those that will ask, this new version of the plugin is not up for sale at this time. I think another week or two and I’ll have the loose ends tied up.

Leave a comment with your favorite