Sports Card Strategy Show

On this episode of The WordPress Show, I show you how to customize your member registration form and profile fields for your members.  This is a continuation of "How to Build a Simple Membership Website" - where we went over how you can easily turn your WordPress site into a membership site for free.  The add-on covered in this video allows you to go further and add whatever profile fields you want, as well as create a member directory.

SHOW LESSIt's definitely not as daunting of a task as you might think to turn your simple WordPress site into a basic membership site. Let's say you have different layers of content, and you want to make your site accessible to everyone, but add a "premium content" layer. You can easily do so with a FREE WordPress plug-in called WP Simple Membership.  This you through the steps to get up and running, as well as gives you an overview of different functionality that the plug-in has.  It automatically creates log-in, registration and password reset pages for you, allows you to create different membership levels, allow for free levels or integrate with payment gateways like Stripe and Paypal for premium levels.  This is great for content rich sites or virtual event sites like the example in the video.  You can protect content at the category, post and page levels, both dynamically or individually.  This also shows the different add-ons available to extend the functionality of the plug-in.  For those not wanting or needing a more robust solution like MemberPress, Simple Membership is my recommended alternative.

Small Business Owners are curious about Alexa Skills, but the main question I always get asked is - "how can an Alexa Skill or Flash Briefing actually help me generate leads for my business?"  This conversion with Dr. Teri Fisher, host of the "Alexa in Canada" Flash Briefing, walks viewers and listeners through how he grew his audience by building an interactive gamified Alexa Flash Briefing to generate leads for his business.  The Proof Is In The Data, his analytics were "off the charts" after he implemented this.  Recorded at Project Voice 2020, there is no video, just audio, so enjoy in its podcast form!

WooCommerce has become the main way to add eCommerce functionality to any WordPress website, but as WooCommerce has evolved, the set-up and installation process has become a bit more cumbersome. Not in a bad way, but in an "I'd really like to skip this and come back later and fill in all this information way"...  This leads to the likelihood that WooCommerce won't totally install all the way, and your site might be left without critical pages that WooCommerce automatically creates when you don't skip any parts of the installation process.  These pages are "Cart," "Checkout" and "My Account."  This video shows you how to restore these pages if the set-up process doesn't finish, or if your pages get accidentally deleted.

I've been building eCommerce sites using WordPress WooCommerce since 2011, and during that entire time, I've had several business owners looking for a way to customize their store to make it B2B (business to business).  What does this mean? Well it essentially means that clients (other businesses couldn't just rock up to the site and see all the products and pricing). First, they'd have to apply to become a member of the site. Then, once their application is approved, they would be able to see various products and pricing depending upon user role (what type of customer they are).  WooCommerce B2B is a great plug-in for this. Features include:  - Extend the default registration form to accept B2B registrations. - Add a user roles dropdown and extra fields to the default registration form. - Manually review and approve new B2B user registrations. - Enable default registration fields - Hide products and categories based on user roles. - Hide prices and add to cart button - Hide for guest users, specific user roles, or specific products & categories - Option replace “add to cart” button with a “quote” button - Add a mini-quote dropdown and customize quote form fields. - Configure different prices for different user roles - Add customer-specific pricing - Tax-exempt specific customers and user roles - Restrict shipping methods by user roles - Restrict payment methods by user roles

In this presentation at Project Voice 2020 in Chattanooga, Tennessee, I talk to marketers about why I started educating businesses about Voice Technology.  Specifically, Alexa Skills and Google Actions can help businesses become more efficient and effective with their everyday business practices, as well as reach a whole new target audience that are using voice devices over mobile phones and desktop computers.  The proof is in the data. As of this writing, more than 500 million people are actively using Alexa and Google Assistant.  I started the Nashville Voice Conference in 2019 (https://nashvillevoiceconference.com) and The Voice Event in 2020 (https://thevoiceevent.com) to give businesses owners free resources on how to expand their overall digital presence into voice.  The Voice Series (https://thevoiceseries.com) continues this.

WordPress has several solid was to add Head and Footer code to any website. One way is via Theme Options. Most solid themes have an option to add Head and Footer code by just pasting it in. But many themes don't have this option. Two of ways to get around this are with plug-ins. One is called Head and Footer Scripts Inserter by Space X Chimp. Another is called Insert Headers and Footers by WPBeginner. Recently when a client of mine saw a blank screen while trying to add Google Adsense code into Head and Footer Scripts Inserter, we solved the problem by pivoting over to Insert Headers and Footers.

Data Driven Design was recently featured as a Top 25 Voice and AI company by Top 25 Today. Here is my recent interview with Keri Roberts where we talk about how Data Driven Design uses Voice Technology to help businesses scale.

Well, you learn something new every day, even when you've been in the content and SEO game for more than 13 years.  Recently, I was banned from Medium for duplicate content. You see, I have posted more than 550 articles on Medium, all of which I'm the original author, but I first had posted all of them on my own website blog at https://datadriven.design.  I figured I'd get flagged for this at some point, but pushed forward, because the awareness from Medium articles is pretty solid.  I have a new way to go in and let Medium know about the original post, using the Canonical URL option under the Advanced Settings.  Apparently, LinkedIn Articles also has this option, so I'll be doing it there as well.  Now, I highly recommend that businesses create content daily in the form of video, transcribe into written blogs, extract the audio, post to podcast outlets like Anchor, and then to YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, Medium and Google My Business.   This is a way to post duplicate content, but keep the SEO juice.

A couple years ago I did a Data Driven Daily Tip on how much SEO juice I was getting by creating original content, normally in the form of a video for YouTube, then taking the audio, using it as a podcast episode, and transcribing it into a written blog, always posting it on my website, https://datadriven.design, as well as LinkedIn and Medium.com.  Well, I recently found out I've been banned from Medium, likely for duplicate content.  This, after posting more than 500 articles in this way, and benefitting from some SEO juice in the process.  I definitely don't regret getting banned from Medium. Here's why:  I'm the thought leader and the content creator. I own the content.   I have more than 500 pieces of original content each posted in more than 5 places, including Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, my own website and of course, up until now, Medium.  As you'll hear in this audio, posting this duplicate content on Medium over the last three years, still benefits me, even while banned.