Pinterest is an often overlooked platform as it relates to garnering web traffic and driving conversions for brands. But if your company is creating content for platforms like Instagram and Facebook, the reward of also creating a version for Pinterest should definitely be worth the time. We discuss further in this audio from our Data Driven Academy Live Access session - www.datadrivenacademy.org

There's no coincidence that I'm posting this on YouTube and embedding it in my website. :) Kelly Savoca of CottonandMoss.com asked a great question in a recent http://datadrivenacademy.org Live Access Session for Data Driven Academy Members. Should I be using YouTube or Vimeo to embed videos in my website? Her concern was related to the "suggested videos" at the end of YouTube Videos. Check out my answer. It's pretty compelling.

One of our principles at Data Driven Design is "don't overthink it." Many small businesses, marketers and content strategists totally over think their content. How many words does it have to be? How many photos does it have to have? Who cares? None of that matters. The only thing that matters is POST FREQUENCY! Find more ways to increase the frequency of your posts and blogs. Watch this video for tangible tips on how to do this. It will increase your web traffic when you execute. The proof is in the data.

In this fun interaction with Kelly Savoca from CottonandMoss.com during one of our http://datadrivenacademy.org members live access sessions, Kate Hickey and I debate whether or not your content actually NEEDS photos. I highly recommend you listen! :)

Did you know that the data says in order to get conversions on your website, your visitors need to return anywhere from 3-5 times? This means, if you think you're going to sell people products or services the first time they visit your website, you're sorely mistaken. As a result, you need to implement many strategies to get people coming back to your website, among them, deploying Facebook Ads to people who have visited your website in the last 30, 60, 90 days. This is also known as Facebook Remarketing, and this video shows you how to set create remarketing audiences in Facebook Ads Manager.  Taken from a live access session of http://datadrivenacademy.org.

Believe it or not, starting a new eCommerce website and getting conversions is one of the hardest things to do. Improving your website design and functionality is only about 20% of the battle. Assuming the product(s) you're selling is/are good and there's a market for them, you'll now need to begin the battle of building enough awareness for your brand to drive enough web traffic to your site, then eventually convert that web traffic. The data shows you'll need at least 100 unique visitors per day, and to keep them coming back 3-5 times to finally start to see some eCommerce conversions. Depending on your time and budget, this can take years. I break it down in this video for www.DataDrivenAcademy.org members.

This video is from the Data Driven Academy - http://datadrivenacademy.org - live access session with myself, Kate Hickey (digital strategist at Data Driven Design) and Kelly Savoca, owner of CottonandMoss.com (and Data Driven Academy Member). In this video, we discuss what a good cost per click on Facebook Ads is.

Regardless of the size of your organization, WordPress is an amazing Content Management System to fit your needs. Not only is everything possible from a design and functionality standpoint, but hosting is streamlined and secure on several easy to use platforms. Perhaps one critical component that gets overlooked in WordPress is just how easy it is to update content everywhere. It's a MAJOR plus and selling point of the platform, and regardless of if you have 2 people or 200 people who have Admin access to your site, you may want the ability to limit what certain people can access and change. In this video, I demonstrate how to use the "User Role Editor" plug-in - https://wordpress.org/plugins/user-ro... - to essentially limit and somewhat customize Admin access levels and permissions in your WordPress site!

WordPress Designers and Developers are capable of making almost anything happen from a User Experience Design perspective, but sometimes fancy things cost extra money and time. Fancy things, for example, like having an animated GIF be an alternate rollover image or "hover state" for a regular image. So when you hover your cursor over it, and alternate image shows of it moving. But I've found a way to implement this within my favorite WordPress theme, Enfold. Using the Code Block element in Enfold, paste this code in... https://datadriven.design/product/skin-test-1/"><img onmouseover="this.src='https://datadriven.design/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/balm_dotcom_cherry_hover.gif';" onmouseout="this.src='https://datadriven.design/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/Screen-Shot-2019-04-16-at-7.38.18-AM.png';" src="https://datadriven.design/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/Screen-Shot-2019-04-16-at-7.38.18-AM.png" alt="what-ever-you-like"  /> Then replace the URLs of your images in the media gallery like I show in the video on this page. Now, the reason I set out to do this was for a WooCommerce product grid that a client wanted to try to achieve. There is a plug-in called "Product Flipper" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BhhzbaK_Fvg -  but that wouldn't work for me, because I needed the GIF to animate. Product Flipper is great for a regular hover state, but not for an animated hover state like my solution. So in Enfold, simply create your own product grid like I do in this video using the different elements including "Code Block" to display your products. This way, you can also control what gets shown on mobile.

WordPress Content Managers and Marketers and Small Business Owners who use WordPress may need this tip. And even experienced developers and Website Builders should know about it. For any free plug-in downloaded via the WordPress Admin, such WooCommerce, Yoast SEO, My Custom Functions, Header and Footer Scripts Inserter, Use Any Font (all of which are plug-ins we use often), as well as hundreds of thousands more, there is an easy way to roll back to previous versions. Why would you want to roll back? Well, plug-in updates are 99% of the time good, but 1% of the time can cause things on your website to break. You may deactivate plug-ins to to determine which one(s) caused the issue, but that still leaves you without the intended functionality that the earlier version of the plug-in brought to the table. This is where WP Rollback - yet another plug-in whose sole purpose is to let the WordPress Admin (aka - you) rollback to previous versions of other plug-ins. This plug-in has saved me a couple times, as you can imagine - since we manage hundreds of client sites here at Data Driven Design.