I grew up in Detroit, and eventually moved to Nashville, but ended up in Spain in 2018 with my family. Valencia, Spain - to be exact. When my son started in public Spanish school, within the first week, there were reps from Panini outside of the schools passing out packets of 1 EURO cards for free. The set they were passing out was Panini Adrenalyn. Soccer Cards, called "cromos de futbol" in Spain, are definitely popular in Europe, but aren't exactly flying off shelves like they do in the United States. Basically, they're readily available. From Panini's premier set in Spain called Megacracks (MGK) to Sticker Collections like Este Colleciones (both of which I'll cover in future blogs) to Adrenalyn, the popularity is strong, but the availability is also solid. There aren't card shops; you definitely have to hunt them down at your local random souvenir shop or cigarette store, but it's possible to find packs in retail stores, and also online. It turns out Panini's grassroots school kid freebees were genius marketing moves three years ago, because now in 2021, Adrenalyn's popularity is solid. Adrenalyn La Liga has a base set, nicely and clearly organized by team. There are different levels of special cards, from Rookies, called Nueva Fichajes and Actualizaciones, to Limited Editions (Edicion Limitadas), Idolos, Entrenadors (Coaches) to the premium cards like SuperCracks (SuperStars) and the sought after Balon de Oro (Gold Ball). In short, Panini Adrenalyn La Liga reminds me of NBA Hoops 1990 and Fleer 1990 Basketball cards, where there was a set for each team, numbered by player, and there were also clear sets of special cards with a checklist. The difference with all Panini Adrenalyn sets - not just La Liga, but also Premier League, etc. - is that they double as a Trading Card Game, explained online here (right click and translate to English). 🙂 Euro Soccer cards by Panini do a great job of introducing both the ability of collecting the whole set (featuring actual binders to keep your sets in) AND playing the online game (by publishing a magazine that explains the game called Jugon - and yes, it comes with cards).

So you want to sell your sports cards? Or at least understand what they're worth? The best way to sell a sports card is to first create an accurate sales comp, then of course make your listing look good. In this post, we'll be primarily focused on the former. Although technically I've been collecting Sports Cards since I was 8 years old, I really only collected heavily from 1989-1994, then paused big time until early 2021. After getting back into what many call "The Hobby," I realized that "The Hobby" is actually dead, and what we're living in now is a world of Competitive Sports Card Collecting, which, quite frankly suits the forty year old version of me better than trying to put together sets like the 8 year old version of me did more than 30 years go. Why? Because collecting competitively combines predictions related to player success, grading company values, market demand vs. supply along with vintage vs. current, set type and more. All of the variables are super fun, which leads me to the topic of how to establish sales comps for each of the sports cards you're looking to buy, hold or sell. Establishing sales comps are important for two main reasons: 1. If you want to sell your cards, offering them for fair market value is essential 2. It's important to know what your cards are actually worth Collectors and investors know what cards are going for and follow popular cards closely, so it's nearly impossible to move frequently sold cards for much more than their recent sales comps on eBay, which we'll get to in a second. But the harder part is establishing a sales comp for a less frequently sold card. While it's fun to think you can just make up your own prices for those (which technically you can), there is math to figuring out what the sales comp would project to be, and it's pretty firm. If you want to sell cards that don't have sales comps, this article will help walk you through that math. But first, let's cover the basic way to find sales comps on eBay.

Competitive Sports Card Collecting is like Fantasy Sports mixed with the Stock Market, mixed with Sports Betting...with Entrepreneur-flavored sprinkles on top.  It's all about skill, pride and bragging rights. It's filled with failures disguised as learning experiences; and losses that ultimately help your long-term winning percentage.  And the best part is, it doesn't at all need to be about high stakes or big money. In fact, it should be a stress-free experience that doesn't put your family in a bad financial position, ever.  Whether you just found your old sports card collection and are feeling some juices flowing, or you're a seasoned card flipper or big money long-term investor, I'm going to introduce a new concept that I believe appeals to every sports card fanatic - Competitive Sports Card Collecting.  “Competitively” collecting cards makes life more fun. Just like Fantasy Sports, I want to make sports related predictions that come true, so I can feel good about myself, accomplish “something,” and yes, brag to some of my closest family members and friends about it. NoOffseason.com used to be a fantasy football website where I’d make predictions about which players would breakout, and which would suck. Every Monday during the NFL season from 2006-2012 I’d write a column called “WE WERE RIGHT ABOUT...WE WERE WRONG ABOUT.” I’d simply jock myself for my correct predictions, and laugh at myself for my incorrect ones. I’m not sure if the readers liked it, but I loved it.  This is the main reason why I’ve decided to continue to collect sports cards into my 40s. It’s fantasy sports on steroids, to use my earlier example. And, oh by the way, you also have the cards.

In this short, three minute video, I reveal the best SEO Tip ever! It's not super complicated. You just need to have your site verified with Google Search Console first. More on that here - https://datadriven.design/?s=google+search+console - Then, you need to log into Google with the account you verified your site with, and make a search for the keyword you want to optimize your site for.  Scroll down under the ads, and you'll see what I see in this video: data on how your site is performing for this query, and links to click that take you to Google's tips on how to improve your site for SEO, related to the phrase you searched for.  Guys, this is what paid tools that aren't affiliated with Google do. Instead, use Google's free version. I'm a big fan of listening to what Google says to do to improve your site's SEO.  That's why I think this short hack is the best SEO tip ever, especially for small businesses with limited resources.

If you're looking to make your WordPress website more professional by giving your visitors the ability to make one-time or recurring payments via Stripe instead of PayPal, WP Simple Pay is a great solution for you.  This covers how to acquire, install and configure WP Simple Pay to make your WordPress website have the ability to sell memberships, take donations and more.

Are you having issues with your WordPress website URLs redirecting to the wrong pages? I may have a simple solution for you.  I've used a plug-in called Redirection for almost 10 years now when I build WordPress sites. Its main purpose is to implement 301 redirects when redesigning websites. This is so that when an old website has a URL like mywebsite.com/contact-us and we change the new website's page to mywebsite.com/contact, we can make the old URL go to the right place.  We perform at least 10-150 redirects on every site we redesign and relaunch. In short, we're making sure that there is no lost traffic due to broken links during the relaunch.  Redirection also has an awesome new-ish feature that automatically creates redirects for you if you ever change the URL slug on a page or post. This is awesome, because it's making sure you don't break your own links.  But recently I got myself into a situation where I accidentally created a duplicate page, renamed my duplicate page the same as a page I had already created. I then deleted the earlier page and changed the slug of the newer one to the URL slug of the older one.  This created a redirect loop that wouldn't allow me to view the page I wanted until I figured out how to delete the redirect that Redirection created for me automatically when this happened.  I spent about 15-20 minutes scratching my head until I finally figured it out. This video explains. I hope it helps!

Sometimes the data leads you to put an exit intent pop-up on your website to collect email addresses from visits as they intend to leave your site.  But what should you put on it? I prefer to allow the data to drive that as well. This video shows how you can use a plug-in called Bloom by Elegant Themes to create variants of your pop-up to increase your conversion rate.

There is now an easy, turnkey way to literally put your WordPress website's content on Alexa and Google Assistant. This opens up your website to a whole new rapidly growing audience of more than 500 million people using voice assistants on a daily basis to get information.  You want your website to rank high on Google, so why wouldn't you want it to also rank high on Alexa and Google Assistant for voice search?  Also, don't you want to offer better accessibility options for your visually impaired audience? This is one great way to do so.  The Voice Designer WordPress Plug-in, available at https://thevoicedesigner.com​ makes it super easy to voice-activate your WordPress Website for Alexa and Google Assistant.  This video shows you exactly how to build an Alexa Skill and Google Action from the backend of your WordPress website, test it on your device, then deploy it live to promote your business.

So you've uploaded a new featured image and published your awesome blog post, but there's one small problem, right?  The beautiful featured image you've loaded in isn't showing on your blog page. In fact, some other, older image you posted as a featured image in a different blog post is showing in it's place!  What's up with that?  This is not random. There is a simple explanation for it. As I show in this video, you have named both images the same thing, resulting in an identical image URL in the media gallery.   Your WordPress website is simply confused and is defaulting to the old one.  1. Fix it easily by simply renaming your original image to something different, preferably SEO friendly, and re-upload it in the featured image slot.  2. Delete the first one with the duplicate name. Keeping unnecessary, unused images in your media gallery will slow down your site speed load time, and over time, could negatively affect SEO.  For more free WordPress tips, visit https://datadriven.design​ or https://thewordpressshow.com​.  To do business with me, email me directly at paul@datadriven.design   Thanks and have a great day!

There are many ways to customize the search functionality on your WordPress website. There are plug-ins that help you control what's shown and what's not shown in the results. There are also easy changes you can make to your functions.php files.  But most of these methods focus on global changes, like what categories or custom post types to include or exclude from your search results. Or what the global settings of the search results pages should say or look like.  The Search Exclude plug-in, however, gives users an easy way to - on a page-by-page or post-by-post basis - decide which pages or posts you want to exclude from search results.