Sports Card Strategy Show

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.

What is "Advanced Floating Content?" Well, it's the name of an amazing WordPress plug-in, and it's a great way of describing content that can be added to a WordPress site to either float, animate, or stick in place as a user scrolls your website. It can be used to create any number of design features, including Lead Generation overlays, Calls to action that stick as your user scrolls, and even links to your company's phone number that follow your user around your website. But more than that, the Plug-in, Advanced Floating Content, is $23 on Envato Market, and is worth every penny. You can style it to make it look exactly like your web design, with gradients, borders, images, and you can control the exact placement on all devices in a pixel perfect manner, with NO CODING. I'm all about this. In this video, I show you a couple examples of what you can do with this plug-in, and how to get started using it! Happy marketing and web designing peeps! Here is the link to Advanced Floating Content.

Data Driven Daily Tip 291. As a marketer, haven't you ever wanted to make your content more personal to your audience? The data says that the more you can personalize your content and make it relevant to the user reading it, the better you can increase your engagement and conversion rates. As, such, I've found the least complicated way to display unique content to your audience based on geolocation. In the past, this would have either had to have been done via some complex coding or via an expensive third party tool like Visual Website Optimizer. Now, using WPEngine's GeoTargeting Capabilities, you can create an account with WPEngine and upgrade your account for $150 for the year, to get access to a premium plug-in called WP Geo-IP, that allows you to use shortcodes to only show content to particular geographic regions such as cities, states, zips and countries. In this video, I break down exactly how to do this, and use an example where I only want to promote the Nashville Voice Conference on our website to people in the State of Tennessee.

Data Drives Design. The Proof Is In The Data. Data Over Opinions. Stop wondering how your business is doing. Google Analytics is powerful stuff. Here's how I get my Google Analytics, and how you should too. Spend 10-15 minutes (or 30) a month looking at Audience, Acquisition and Behavior reports.

I asked Amazon Alexa Skills Marketing Employee #1 Dave Isbitski about Alexa Blueprints. What are they? Essentially they're a way to use a free, visual dashboard to create your own Alexa Skill. This is something all businesses should be aware of. What is an Alexa Blueprint? Dave says “one of the things I’m most excited about that has been happening in the last 18 months or so are Alexa Blueprints.” You can go to https://blueprints.amazon.com and create an Alexa Skill in minutes. Blueprints is a visual tool for creating a Skill. Now you can share them and publish them to the Alexa Skills Store for anyone to download and use. This can be a great tool for brands and businesses to connect with customers. So an Alexa Blueprint is a visual tool for creating an Alexa Skill. Brilliant.

You may have previously read some of my blogs about GoDaddy Webhosting. They have an amazing managed migration tool, as well as the ability to spin up development / staging servers, however, the Proof is in the Data, WPEngine has better Uptime and Speed than GoDaddy Managed WordPress. Both solutions are "Managed WordPress" which means you don't need to be a Web Developer or WordPress Developer to manage your webhosting, from set up, to back-ups to staging environments and SSL, it's all taken care of for you. We are solutions providers at Data Driven Design, and the data is starting to tell us after 3-4 years of hosting our clients' websites on GoDaddy Managed WordPress, that it may be time to upgrade to WPEngine. WPEngine costs significantly more, and we're willing to eat that cost for our clients to have a better experience. As a result, I wanted to show all of you out there how to migrate your WordPress sites to WPEngine. I hope this helps! Best, Paul

Attention Marketers and Small Business Owners: the data is overwhelming that you should not bombard users with pop-ups that prompt them for their email addresses upon immediately accessing your website. To many it feels intrusive. They've visited you, and you're already asking them for something. Gross. BUT, there is a web design / digital marketing tactic that the data says works EXTREMELY well, that is non-intrusive. If you've ever been to a website, browsed around for a minute or three, then moved your mouse to close out that browser tab or enter another URL into the address bar, there is a slight chance that you are prompted at that moment - the moment you try to exit the site - for your email address. This, my friends, is called an "Exit Intent" pop-up, and this video shows you how to install one on your WordPress website. Things you'll need: 1. A WordPress Website 2. The Pop-Up Builder Plug-in for WordPress 3. The Gravity Forms Plug-in for WordPress We always say that high school kids can build websites. Why would a small business or mid size brand with a small marketing team pay a professional team like Data Driven Design to do it for them? This is one of the many reasons why. We are thinking about how to help you use data to grow your business and acquire new customers.