DonMelvin.com

Added An Opt-In Box

Don — Sun, 01 Apr 2012 20:41:10 +0000

I’m pleased. I added an opt-in form to the blog today. I know, big deal, lot’s of blogs have them. That’s true, but this is the first time I’ve done it so I wanted to share some ‘lesson’s learned’.

I can’t say it was a straight path from start to finish, but it wasn’t too convoluted. I used AWeber for the mailing service. It’s double opt-in (duh!) with a confirmation email, a thank you page, and a follow-up/welcome email.

I made a mistake by going to AWeber first and setting up the campaign. I should have written the two emails and created the Thank You page first. That’s one lesson learned.

Initially, since the Thank You page wasn’t actually going to be accessible from from the blog, I was planning to create a stand alone webpage. While thinking about all the effort to make it looks like the rest of the blog, I realized that I could just create a WP page and then exclude it from the page listings and navigation menu. Lesson learned (thought that might be too elemental to count!)

As with many things WordPress related, there is a plugin involved. In this case, I picked AWeber Integration.

So off to AWeber. I created a new list and that was where I realized I should already have my emails and Thank You page ready. After a little back-tracking, I got that taken care of and everything was set other then the form itself. When you’re entering the text of the emails, the HTML email is what shows at the top of the screen so that’s where I started. Right after that, I realized that the way they teach in Marketing With Alex is a better way. Put everything into the Plain Text email and then copy that to the HTML after your done. Less rework needed, so again, a lesson learned.

After that, created the opt-in form, added it to the AWeber plugin, and test everything through every path, including unsubscribing.

Opt-In Process Flow

Here is the process flow:

Someone fills in the Opt-In form and submits
AWeber gets the request and sends the confirmation email
Person clicks on the Confirmation link
AWeber redirects them to the Thank You page. This page has a welcome message and links to some specific free training as a bonus
AWeber sends the Thanks for Signing up email. This email has a link to the Free Training page that lists all available training

After all the testing is done, I reset the list statistics.

All in all, a pretty quick process. And next time it’ll be a faster…

Tech and Kids: Thoughts from Digital Ireland Forum 2012

Don — Mon, 26 Mar 2012 12:57:16 +0000

I was following some of the items coming out of the Digital Ireland Forum from the publication SiliconRepublic. Two things in particular got my attention. Both of them were about kids.

In the first item, “Kids need to think of entrepreneurs as the new rock stars“. IN my opinion, here in the states and probably elsewhere, kids really lack role models to inspired them. There are some, movie stars, sports stars, the ‘money’ professions of doctors and lawyers. The first two are very limited in the number of opportunities which makes it very tough even if you do have the skills. The last two are at least more obtainable, though still with challenges and very high costs.

It would be nice to give kids the opportunity to learn more about entrepreneurs, and how they can take an idea, and if they’re willing to work at it, bring a new product to market, even if it isn’t successful on the first try. Inspiring a child to stand up and start something, successful or not, will teach them a lot that can applied in life to their own betterment. Small business is where jobs come from. For that matter, most of the time it’s also where big businesses comes from.

The second is “Tackling the skills gap: we need programmers who start at 14“. This article is saying that it’s hard to transition a worker into an IT position since they don’t really have the background to make the change. Basically, in order to a world tech leader, you need a populace that is familiar with developing tech from an earlier age, not just using it. Developing a tech culture starts early and at the local level.

The iPhone world is a good example of this. While I don’t know the percentages, I do know that a lot of very popular apps were developed by teens, and I suspect some by kids even earlier.

And it’s not just programming but other technical disciplines as well, electronics, medicine, physics, and others. There are some interesting things going on…I recently heard radio programs that talked about do it yourself genetics kits and about some 17-year old (I think that was his age, he might have been 16) who is now the youngest person to create a nuclear reaction.

While a home reactor might be a little extreme, I certainly have to applaud him for his accomplishment, and also applaud those who helped him achieve it.

On a recent episode of Harry’s Law that dealt with a 16-year who wanted to leave school and work for a tech start up, I don’t remember the exact quote, but it was something like “16 is the new 24″. It’s true, you have to get into the game early. If you do want to be a professional football player, you need to play football when you’re 10. The same applies to tech, get it and get started.

Here We Go Again…

Don — Sat, 24 Mar 2012 18:48:20 +0000

Though it’s a bad idea from an SEO perspective, I’m building a new blog from scratch. WordPress is a great platform and makes updating things very easy, but it’s grown a lot in the past few years and I’d do things differently now.

Some of the decisions I made before were valid then but now is now and it’s time to take a look at things from the beginning.

Now, however, I’m going to document a lot of the steps I’m taking in case it might help someone else set up a new WP blog.

There are a lot of things to do before this post every gets published, but I’m going to start listing them here as I go.

Our Litigious Society

One of the first things is, unfortunately, legal stuff. The number of disclosures and policies that a blogger needs just keeps growing and growing. It’s gotten to the point where it’s hard to list them all and still meet the standards for visibility.

Security

Security is very important. This starts when the blog is first installed. I don’t use the standard login name of admin. I change it to another name. While I don’t particularly think I’m going to be the target of hackers, it’s a simple step and could have benefits.

Permalinks

Next is the start of SEO. One of, in my opinion anyway, the most important is setting the permalink structure before any posts get posted. That way, the search engines don’t get ‘confused’ when the link they first found isn’t there anymore. The WP documentation says that the permalink should start with a number for better and faster performance, but pretty much all of the SEO folks I listen to say it should contain just the postname. The permalink I use is %postname%

Ping

Being found by the search engines is important if you want anyone to actually find and read your blog. WP handles this by sending an update message to various services that alert the search engines that the site was updated. However, pinging to often is bad and you might get dinged or banned for ping spamming. This can happen especially if it isn’t a new post but an update to an existing post. In order to help prevent this, I use a plugin called MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer with a long list of ping sites.

Preventing Spam

There are two types of spam that I want to take care of. The first is comment spam. For this I use WP-SpamFree. While the plugin that comes with WP is good, I find this one meets my needs better. It’s no longer being update so I am watching for a new method.

The other type of spam is email spam. I want readers to be able to contact me, but I don’t want spammers harvesting my email address from the site. To solve this, I use Fast Secure Contact Form. This is a good plugin that let’s me have multiple contact forms for different purposes.

More SEO

Search Engine Optimization is very important, if no one can find you, no one can read you. There are several plugins I use for various parts of SEO, but the first one is always ALL In One SEO Pack. This is almost ready to go as soon as it’s installed and the domain info is added.

That’s enough to get started. There is still some more to do (and write about), but as Mike Littman says, “You don’t have to get right, you just have to get it going”

Happy Blogging!