Sports Card Strategy Show

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.

Reasons to voice-enable your WordPress Blog/Website: – More than 500 million active users get their information from Alexa and Google Assistant – Accessibility (which doesn’t get talked about enough) – It’s super easy with The Voice Designer WordPress Plug-in This audio shows you the tactics and strategy to voice-activating your blog content for Alexa and Google Assistant.

One of the main challenges with Alexa Skills is discoverability. How do you find them? Marketers and business owners are constantly telling me - "hey Paul, all this Alexa Skill stuff is cool and everything, but how do I let people know about it? Does our business have to promote it in order to gain users?"  My answer is always, unequivocally YES, you have to promote your Alexa Skills in order to drive user adoption.  I've blogged and vlogged at length about how businesses can benefit from Alexa Skills, and Amazon continues to roll out solutions for not only Voice App developers, but also marketers and business owners.  The latest was announced at the end of July, 2020, at Alexa Live, and it's called Quick Links. As explained in this video/audio, Quick Links are a way to embed a link to your Alexa Skill in your website, email marketing blasts, social media posts and more, that allows a user to click a button to either launch an Alexa Skill immediately on one of their devices, or send their device a reminder for later to launch a skill.

WordPress Featured Plug-in: Redirection - how to ensure your website has no broken links! Very helpful tips for WordPress SEO.

WordPress started as a blogging platform, but now hosts more than 70 million websites, and is the most used content management system (CMS) in the world.  It has become one of the top marketing engines, and when integrated properly with other free marketing tools like Mailchimp (an email marketing platform) and WordPress plug-ins like WooCommerce (for eCommerce), your website can become a full business, complete with an integrated marketing CRM and optimized shopping cart with physical and virtual products.  This podcast features a WordPress Plug-in, Mailchimp for WooCommerce.

Voiceflow is an amazing no-code Voice Design tool, that allows Voice UI Designers like myself to author voice apps and deploy them to both Alexa and Google Assistant. However, sometimes, Google Assistant has other plans. :)  Recently, Google made some updates and it kind of ruined the process for uploading Voice apps to the Google Actions Console from Voiceflow.