Finding the “best” of anything is not always an easy task, and when you do, it’s only natural to expect to pay a hefty price. This is also true with respect to website and page-building tools. There’s plenty of good ones and finding one or more that will best serve your purposes can take time. Well, I’m going to make it a little easier for you! Enjoy this selection of some of the most highly-trusted tools currently on the market. Hefty prices? Forget it. These trusted site and page building tools are top quality. Most are free, or at least there is a free plan to start-with. Check them out! WixIf you’re looking for a hassle-free way to build a professional website then Wix is your answer. It a cloud-based development platform that allow you to design and build a high-quality website with all the elements needed to establish your online presence. The best thing about Wix is that you won’t be required to write a single line of code. Just pick one of the templates and customize it according to your taste and requirements. You can add many advanced features and even SEO optimize your site. Some of its best features include mobile optimization of your website, intuitive editor, online scheduler and booking tools, incorporate a blog, professional logo maker tool, and customized domain for your brand. Mobirise Website BuilderIt could be difficult to think of a reason not to download a copy of the Mobirise Website Builder; especially if you’re in the hunt for a top-quality product that just happens to be free with no conditions attached. The Builder can be used for your commercial projects as well as for your personal projects. Your websites will be responsive, and thus mobile friendly, so there’s no need for you to create a mobile version of each website. This drag and drop builder is a joy to work with, and no technical or coding skills are required. A key feature is the collection of more than 800 pre-made website blocks to build your pages with. Creating a page is as easy as combining these blocks in different ways on your page and dropping other design elements you select onto the page as well. Mobirise’s many other features include a content slider, bootstrap carousel, a responsive image gallery with lightbox, parallax scrolling, and much more. Visual Composer Website BuilderWPBakery Page Builder users take note. The Visual Composer Website Builder is not an updated or upgraded version of the WPBakery builder. It is an entirely different animal, which features a myriad of impressive functions that enable you to create jaw-dropping websites. The Visual Composer Website Builder comes in two versions, Free and Premium. Either version enables you to build a website by using your mouse to click on and drag and drop content elements as you design your layout. Coding is not required. Visual Composer Website Builder works with any WordPress theme, WordPress shortcodes and widgets are supported, and you have a multiplicity of design elements and options to work with. We suggest that you give the free version a try. Then, you can check out the Premium version to see if it might be to your advantage to sign up for it. PortfolioboxPortfoliobox obviates the need to constrain yourself to using a standard theme. You can use any style you choose for any website page, and there’s no need for coding. The ability to use any style you choose makes it much easier for you to create a website that’s unique and will stand out from the crowd, and with Portfoliobox it’s possible to do so in a few hours. Free and Pro plans are available. The free plan includes hosting of up to 30 images, 10 pages, and 10 products and the use of any Pro template for the first 30 days. With the Pro plan you’ll receive hosting for 1,000 images and unlimited hosting for products and pages. The Pro plan also offers a personalized domain, custom CSS/JS and Easy Google integration. We suggest you go for the free plan first, and check into the Pro plan later. ElementorElementor is a super-fast drag and drop page builder for WordPress that offers a great UX. It’s easy to use, it features a flexible editor, requires no coding and it’s free. You’ll quickly discover how easy it can be to create a pixel-perfect landing page and how features like mobile editing, template library and the ability to import and export templates can speed up your workflow to the point where you can create stunning websites in minutes. Themify BuilderThemify Builder offers a better, more practical way to create layouts. It will work with any theme, and other plugins as well. Working from pre-designed layouts (40+ of them) it’s simply a matter of drag and drop with a tool that provides a live preview. Themify Builder also features responsive styling. No matter which approach you take to build your layout, you can custom style it to appear correctly on desktops, tablets and mobile devices. uKitIf you run a small business, and you want to create an online presence but you lack the technical or coding skills to do so, uKit is your answer. Starting with one of the 200+ templates, drag and drop design elements along with your content onto each page. When you’re finished, it takes but a single click to publish your website. It’s not at all complicated. Sign up for a free trial and find out for yourself. IM CreatorIM Creator is not your typical website builder. It offers alternate ways of building a website. You can build your site starting with one of more than 200 templates, or if you like playing with Lego blocks, by mixing and matching ready-made stripes and polygons. IM Creator is free, it’s super flexible and does not require coding. It also comes with a free eCommerce solution. PixpaLast but not least, if you’ve been told that to create a professional looking portfolio website that includes an eCommerce store, you need a ton of experience and a well-stocked design toolkit, Pixpa will show you otherwise. Pixpa is ideally suited for creatives. It’s an easy to work with, feature rich, all-in-one platform with best-in-class hosting and customer support. Pixpa is affordable, but we suggest you take advantage of the free trial offer to make sure it’s right for you. SummaryBest of the bunch and mostly free. It doesn’t get much better. If you only find one that you can use, it can still make your day. Discovering new website building tools is a little like playing chess. Strategy dictates that for a move to be a good one, it should put you in a slightly better position. It’s somewhat the same for selecting a tool from this list. Any one of them can enable you to build a better product and increase your productivity. from https://fatsfixedassettracking.com/8-websites-and-page-builders-to-try/7092/
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By Kelsey Johnson July 28, 2022Send emails that arrive in your subscribers’ inboxes at 10am (or whatever time you choose) — no matter where your subscribers live, worldwide. Effective email marketing is all about sending the right email to the right person at the right time. Now, you can send your emails at the right time for each of your subscribers with AWeber, no matter what timezone they’re in. That timing is important. Getting the content, subject lines, and branding of your emails is important, too. But if your emails arrive at a time when your subscribers are likely to be offline (or asleep), they’ll just get pushed down in the inbox by other emails. So set your campaigns to go out by time zone and start seeing better results from the exact same emails you’re sending! It’s a no-brainer. How to set up campaigns to go out according to subscribers’ time zonesClick “Automations” -> “Campaigns” to start a new campaign or open an existing one. Add a wait time before the email you want to send. This will determine when your email goes out after a subscriber is added to the campaign. When editing the “Wait Time,” click “+ Add New Send Window” under “Set Custom Time.” When you do this, it means your email will send on a specific day and time, like Wednesdays at 9am. Without a custom time, your email will send according to whenever the trigger happened (like a new subscriber signing up for your account). Once you’ve set your custom time, click the box next to “Use the subscriber’s time zone.” That’s it! Your emails will be sent out in the appropriate time zone, at the time you’ve established. Note: This feature is not available on free AWeber plans, or (yet!) for Broadcast emails. Upgrade now to access it if you’re on a free plan. 5 types of campaigns to optimize for time zoneLooking for some inspiration for how to use this new feature? Here are five ideas to get you started. 1. Weekly YouTube or blog post notificationsSet up a weekly automated email to announce your new content. If you blog regularly or create content on YouTube, you can let your audience know what’s new with surprisingly little work. Just ask people to sign up for your emails and then create an Auto Newsletter to automatically notify them about anything you’ve recently published. Now here’s how to use the time zone feature to make this even more powerful: Figure out when you tend to get the most YouTube views. For example, maybe people like to watch your videos on Friday afternoons or Sunday mornings. So set up your weekly emails to go out at that time — for every subscriber. 2. Welcome emailsAfter someone has subscribed to your list, send them a lead magnet or welcome email immediately. Then, set a wait time to send the rest of your emails at times that are better for them. For example, if you sell to businesses, you’ll want to send your emails during working hours. Set up your welcome series emails to go out Monday to Friday, 9am to 5pm, in each person’s time zone. That way, your subscribers in London and your subscribers in New York will all get emails at 9am their time. 3. Abandoned cart emailsSometimes when someone signs up to buy something but they don’t complete the purchase, it means they need some time to think about it. Or maybe they didn’t have their credit card nearby. Either way, an abandoned cart email is the best way to make that sale happen. You can send an abandoned cart email one hour after the person has put the item in their cart. But you may want to avoid certain hours of the night that you never make sales. So set that email’s custom time to between 8am and 12am every day and then set it to send in each subscriber’s time zone so you can remind them the next morning to make the purchase. 4. Etsy product inventory updatesDo you have an Etsy store? You can send automatic inventory updates to your subscribers when you add more products to your store. Make this an immediate or weekly email — but set it to go out when people are most likely to buy from your store. Just check your sales reporting so you know when your target audience is likely to buy. Then send the new product email notifications at that time, but optimized to arrive in everyone’s specific time zone. 5. SurveysSurveys are useful for you and your customers, but even short ones can be time consuming. Your customers may want to help you out, but they have more available time at the beginning or end of the work day when they’re not focused on tasks. Set up your survey emails to send at 4pm in your subscribers’ time zones. They’ll get the email at a time when they’re likely winding down from the day, so they’ll have a little extra time to give you feedback. Get started with AWeberReady to start sending emails at the perfect time for your international customers? Sign up for an AWeber account today. Upgrade to a pro plan to get the time zone feature. from https://fatsfixedassettracking.com/get-more-engagement-when-you-set-email-campaigns-to-arrive-by-time-zone/7090/ Subscribe to updates for Local video file uploads not working via email and/or text message. You’ll receive email notifications when incidents are updated, and text message notifications whenever Wistia creates or resolves an incident. from https://fatsfixedassettracking.com/wistia-status-local-video-file-uploads-not-working/7089/ Have you ever felt perplexed about how to use WYSIWYG editors in WordPress? We’ll guide you through what WYSIWYG editors are, give you tips on using them, and show you an alternative to the built-in WYSIWYG editor for WordPress. What is a WYSIWYG editor?WYSIWYG stands for “what you see is what you get”. This means that whatever content is entered into the editor is shown exactly the way it will be displayed when it is published. It is similar to desktop publishing tools such as Microsoft Word, having similar formatting tools displayed on the toolbar at the top. WYSIWYG editors are usually integrated into various apps and websites. They can be used for content management, website building, messaging, and other different features. However they’re used, these special editors significantly save development time, reduce maintenance and manpower costs, and provide the ideal user interface and experience. When should you use a WYSIWYG editor on WordPress?In WordPress, the WYSIWYG editor is the primary input field for post and page content. Thus, whenever you create and edit content on WordPress, you use a WYSIWYG editor. What are the benefits of using a WYSIWYG editor?By using WYSIWYG editors, users won’t have to know much about HTML to manage and format their content. They’ll be able to write, insert images and other files, and perform rich text editing (and more) just by using the several buttons on the toolbar. A modified version of TinyMCE, an open-source WYSIWYG editor, is built into WordPress. Its extensibility allows WordPress plugin and theme developers to add custom buttons to the visual editor’s toolbar . However, using a built-in editor often won’t be enough. There will be times when you will need faster and more sophisticated editors. As we will explain below, you can greatly improve upon the built-in editor by setting up an alternative. You can read more about how easy it is to do here. How to extend the built-in WYSIWYG editor in WordPressTo display the full TinyMCE text editor so you have access to all of the advanced features available, add the following code to your functions.php file, enabling the hidden buttons: function enable_more_buttons($buttons) { $buttons[] = 'fontselect'; $buttons[] = 'fontsizeselect'; $buttons[] = 'styleselect'; $buttons[] = 'backcolor'; $buttons[] = 'newdocument'; $buttons[] = 'cut'; $buttons[] = 'copy'; $buttons[] = 'charmap'; $buttons[] = 'hr'; $buttons[] = 'visualaid'; return $buttons; } add_filter("mce_buttons_3", "enable_more_buttons"); An alternative WYSIWYG EditorIf the default editor is too limited for your project, it is possible to integrate an alternative WYSIWYG editor to allow for more complex editing for your users. One of the top alternatives is this beautiful JavaScript web editor from Froala that has a lot to offer for developers and users alike. Its easy integration, rich features, customizability, and informative yet organized documentation let developers have an easier production time. Moreover, it gives users a better editing experience because of its cleanliness, speed, and intuitiveness. With a flat interface, SVG icons, buttons, dropdowns, and popups, every detail of its design is amazing. It has full mobile support, with popup formatting controls that appear the same on both mobile devices and desktops and image and video resizing. Froala is easy to customize, fully scalable, and fast, loading in less than 40 milliseconds. Compared to TinyMCE’s 15 integration guides, Froala provides 17 framework libraries and is the first editor to provide SDK libraries for 6 different servers. Its intuitive interface also accommodates 100+ features without overwhelming users with a complex and complicated GUI. In addition, Froala has easy-to-follow documentation and easily integrates with your products. Migrating to FroalaIt only takes a few steps to replace your standard WordPress WYSIWYG with the robust Froala:
Once you’ve completed these steps, you’re all set to use a powerful, faster, and cleaner editor. To learn more about integrating and using Froala with WordPress, check this page out. If your project requires more extensive features than what the built-in WordPress editor offers, Froala is definitely a great option to explore. Read more about Froala here. Will you upgrade or extend your current WordPress WYSIWYG editor?Based on the information we’ve covered in this article, it is obvious that you can do so much more with your WordPress WYSIWYG editor than how it comes out of the box, so to speak. For instance, you may choose to extend the TinyMCE editor to give your users even more control over the formatting of their content. Better yet, you can choose to go even further and upgrade your WYSIWYG editor to a more powerful one altogether. If you follow what we’ve discussed in this article, you will definitely take WordPress content entry and editing to a better place for your users. This post may contain affiliate links. See our disclosure about affiliate links here. from https://fatsfixedassettracking.com/when-why-and-how-should-you-use-a-wysiwyg-editor-on-your-wordpress-site/7087/ Artificial Intelligence (AI) adoption has skyrocketed over the last 18 months. And Gartner says that chatbots are just one step away from a slope of enlightenment on its AI hype cycle. At the same time, AI technologies are coming to accelerate business growth and ensure engineering trust. Together with Conversation Design, Conversational AI is transforming customer experience, customer support, and digital customer services for an onscreen world. “Mobile-first experience” — this is the paradigm that has been the number one goal in the strategy of IT companies since Google announced this concept back in 2010. Now in 2022, it’s time for companies to expand on that approach and think about multimodality. To determine if multimodal experiences are best for your users, you need to ask yourself the following questions:
The mobile world shows the flexibility and scalability of company offers, and virtual assistants are the same. But not everyone has multimodal assistants in their household and its adoption for enterprises is still in its infancy.
Multimodal Conversation Design is exciting because it marries voice and chat together, and they can fill in gaps that each experience may not offer. For example, today’s voice technology is still limited, such as the challenges around understanding certain accents. Multimodal technology can support this pain point by leveraging visuals for the user to lean on instead of the voice experience. This offers a more accessible experience to all users. “During consultation for the automotive industry, when we looked at English support it became very clear that for English US, English UK, Australian etc cultural context is extremely important to consider. So the way you would name a car part in English US would be different from English UK, and you really need to customize your language model.” — Quirine van Walt Meijer, Senior Designer in Conversational AI at Microsoft. Conversational AI creates stable and well-trained language models as basics, and then you look outwards in the context, what channels are interesting, or what modalities can best surface brand or user experience. Language is the biggest factor in Conversational AI, once you get started to build a conversation you probably have dialects or different languages inside one country. Check out our investigation of different names of soft drinks in the United States in a recent post, Dialect Diversity in Conversation Design. It’s essential for conversation design teams to understand how the end-users talk about products, services, and things the virtual assistant will need to know. Always collect sample dialog from a diverse representative sample of the bot’s end users to ensure the system will understand all the different types of jargon and phrases.
A great multimodal experience is one that feels seamless, easily switching out contexts. A good example with a booking self-driving vehicle agent by the textbox, but also talking to you inside of the vehicle via voice. Check out more Multimodal Conversation Design Use Cases and opportunities for enterprises. The not so far future will be that everytime a brand launches a conversational experience, it will be across multiple channels, specially designed for that channel. Brands need to invest in offering automation to their customers across multiple voice and chat channels, creating more accessible solutions. By allowing more entryways for users to self-serve, a company’s ROI will only increase. Want to Reduce Customer Support Costs? We analyze your customer pain points and address them with automation. Get in touch with us! from https://fatsfixedassettracking.com/multimodal-conversational-ai-assistants-by-master-of-code-global-jul-2022/7085/ If you’re like most business owners, you want your website to show up at the top of search engine results pages (SERPs). And if you’re not at the top, you want to be as close to the top as possible. This is where SEO optimization comes in. SEO can help improve your website’s ranking in SERPs, but it’s important to choose an SEO optimization company that knows what they’re doing. In this blog post, we’ll discuss how to choose an SEO company and what factors you should consider when making your decision. ExperienceChoosing an SEO company is a big decision. After all, they will be responsible for helping you improve your website’s ranking in search engines and drive more traffic to your site. But with so many SEO optimization companies out there, how do you know which one is right for you? One important factor to look at is their experience in your industry. Do they have experience working with businesses like yours? If so, that’s a good sign. They will know what works and what doesn’t in your particular niche. Take a look at their testimonials and case studies and see what they have about companies in the same industry you’re in. If they can show success, they might be the perfect partner for you. Also, when you’re looking for an SEO company, it’s important to find one that has experience with small businesses like yours. Have they been able to help other small businesses achieve success with their SEO campaigns? If so, that’s a good sign that they can do the same for you. Find out how many small businesses they’re currently working with, and consider reaching out to those companies to find out how the experience has been. You don’t want to feel overlooked in favor of those with bigger budgets. How Do They Approach SEO?When it comes to choosing an SEO company, it’s important to look at how they approach SEO and the strategies they use. There are a lot of different ways to optimize a website for search engines, and not all of them are equally effective. A good SEO company will take a holistic approach to SEO, using techniques like keyword research, content marketing, and link building to improve a website’s visibility in search results. Both on-page and off-page SEO are an important part of how well you do on Google. Additionally, a good SEO company will be up-to-date on the latest changes in search algorithms and know how to adjust the strategies accordingly. Ask about the company’s reporting and communication process. Mounting an effective SEO campaign requires close collaboration between you and the company you hire. Finally, look for an SEO company that uses ethical techniques and strategies. Black hat SEO practices may get you short-term results, but they will ultimately damage your reputation and could get your website penalized by Google. A good SEO company will use only white hat techniques that follow Google’s guidelines. By looking at how an SEO company approaches SEO, you can get a better sense of whether or not they’re likely to be able to deliver results. What Do Former Clients Say About Them?As anyone who has ever hired an SEO company can attest, there are a lot of scams out there. Promises of overnight results and first page rankings are all too common, and it can be difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff. That’s why it’s so important to check references and previous clients before signing on the dotted line. A good SEO company will have a track record of happy clients and will be more than happy to provide references. On the other hand, if there are a lot of complaints or unhappy customers, you’ll want to stay far away from that agency. Checking reviews online can also be helpful, but be sure to take them with a grain of salt; some companies resort to fake reviews in order to boost their reputation. As you look at online reviews, be sure you check out the one-star and two-star reviews in particular. What made the previous client unhappy? Is it something you’re concerned could happen to you to? In the end, doing your homework is essential if you want to avoid being taken for a ride. Find Out About Their CommunicationOne of the most important factors to consider is communication. A good SEO company will take the time to get to know your business and understand your goals. They will then develop a customized strategy that is designed to achieve those goals. Furthermore, they will keep you updated on their progress and make sure that you are happy with the results. Regular reporting is an important part of client communication, and you should know what to expect before you sign up. By working with an SEO company that has good communication, you can be confident that you are making the best use of their expertise and maximizing your chances for success. Find the Right Partner for Your NeedsSo, how do you find the best SEO company for your business? It can be tricky to weed out the good companies from the bad, but we’ve discussed a few key things you can look for. At Local SEO Search, we’re proud to have a history of helping small businesses succeed with digital marketing. We’d love to share what we can do for your business. Contact us today!
from https://fatsfixedassettracking.com/how-to-choose-an-seo-optimization-company/7083/ According to a 2021 HubSpot Blog Marketing Trends Report, 69% of marketers surveyed say they use automation in their marketing role.
Whether automation is a new or standard practice in your company, we want to help you avoid common traps marketers often fall into.
In this post, we’ll discuss them and alternatives that solve these challenges. Top Marketing Automation Mistakes
1. You have dirty data.In a 2021 state of marketing automation report, 58% of B2B professionals say the number one tactic that most amplifies the success of their marketing automation tool is quality data. Dirty data can cost brands not only money but also time, as they take actions based on inaccurate information. This can be anything from duplicate records and naming inconsistencies to outdated contact information and incorrect attribution. A simple example of dirty data is an email list that’s never been cleaned. Your list likely has disengaged users, spam addresses, and duplicate emails that threaten the integrity of your data. This will lead to low engagement numbers, damage to your IP reputation, high email marketing costs, and a loss of leads. For your automation to function properly, it’s essential that you work with clean data to ensure your work will be worth the effort you’re putting in. 2. You picked the wrong automation tool.A HubSpot Blog research report on media and content planning revealed that finding the right tool is a roadblock for many marketers. In fact, 45.9% of those surveyed who don’t rely on marketing automation say the biggest obstacle they face is that they can’t find platforms with the capabilities they need. In addition, 59% of B2B professionals say they don’t feel they’re utilizing their marketing automation tools to their fullest potential, according to the state of marketing automation report. So, not only are marketers struggling with picking tools, they also struggle to use them. Picking the right marketing automation tool is essential, as it will determine how successful your strategy is. Here are the top features to look for in marketing automation software:
Check out this article on the top marketing automation tools available on the market. 3. Your marketing and sales teams aren’t aligned.The worst thing you can do with marketing automation is operating in a silo. At the end of the day, marketing is a function designed to support sales, products, and other business sectors. As such, it’s imperative that your marketing team bring in all necessary stakeholders to build workflows that align with teams beyond your own. This is particularly important with marketing and sales teams who work hand-in-hand to turn leads into marketing-qualified leads (MQLs) then sales-qualified leads (SQLs) and finally customers. Have you thought about what processes would benefit your sales team? This could look like an automated email from a sales rep once a lead has completed a high-intent behavior. Of course, to define what that behavior is, you have to define that with the sales team. Marketing automation software can enable sales reps to focus on converting leads instead of tedious tasks. 4. You don’t train your team.According to the state of marketing automation report, 31% of B2B professionals say the most significant barrier to using marketing automation tools is lack of training, the most popular answer after lack of resources. Automation tools are powerful but worthless if your team doesn’t know how to use them. Holding training sessions will ensure that key stakeholders know your tool’s capabilities, are aware of current workflows and understand the processes to create new ones. Here are a few tips for training your team:
5. You set and forget.Although automation does suggest a set-and-forget approach, the reality is it’s very hands-on. The difference is that your attention is going to something else. Instead of focusing on output, you can direct your attention to assessing performance and optimizing. 6. You only leverage only one type of automation strategy.Too often, marketers start using marketing automation, get familiar with one set of tasks, then focus on that. Never expanding beyond what they already use. This is how you miss out on opportunities to improve your brand. Take advantage of all of the features your software offers to maximize efficiency. There are probably a lot of little tasks over the course of your work day that don’t seem time-consuming individually. However, if you add up all of the time you spend posting on social media, updating contact information, and other tasks, you end up with a large chunk of your day spent on things that can probably be automated. Poke around your marketing automation to see which processes you can make more efficient. For example, in the HubSpot software, users can bulk update lead contact information instead of clicking into each record and changing details there. The more processes you automate, the more time you’ll have each day to strategize with your team about content, lead generation, and lead nurturing tactics to keep attracting quality leads to your site. Here are automation strategies you can leverage:
7. Your automation software doesn’t integrate with your CRM.A marketing automation system is supposed to make marketing easier. A CRM system is supposed to make managing leads and customers easier. If your automation software and CRM don’t talk to each other, then you are making a lot more work for yourself. Before deciding on marketing automation and CRM platforms, make sure they can integrate with one another, and make sure you have the budget to make it happen. 8. You don’t have a goal.Take advantage of the ease of use marketing automation software provides and invest time and efforts into determining your goals first. Once you have them, you’ll want to assign these goals to each automated effort – social media, email workflows, and so on – to ensure it’s easy to track progress. After all, marketers need a way to measure success when it comes to marketing automation, and one means of doing so is by evaluating goal attainment. For example, here at HubSpot, the Visual Workflows tool lets you set a specific goal for each automated workflow. A goal might be a new lead transitioning into a marketing-qualified lead based on certain behaviors, such as downloading a specific number of content offers. HubSpot Visual Workflows also allows you to track the percentage of contacts in each workflow that achieve the goal, which is another great way to measure the success and ROI of your marketing automation. 9. You don’t segment your email list.You have a database full of qualified leads, but you’re using marketing automation software to blast out tons of emails that aren’t customized at all. As a result, your leads are churning because your emails aren’t useful to them. The solution? Develop a lead nurturing strategy that includes email list segmentation so you’re sending specific emails to specific people that they’re more likely to open. With the right marketing automation software, it’s easy to execute an email list segmentation strategy that delivers strong results. For example, HubSpot customers can use the Visual Workflows App to target their emails based on dozens of criteria, both demographic and behavioral. Marketing automation is a powerful tool for any company – the trick is knowing how to optimize it and which pitfalls to avoid. By keeping these in mind, you’ll ensure your automation is working at its maximum potential. Editor’s Note: This post was originally published in Nov. 2016 and has been updated for comprehensiveness
from https://fatsfixedassettracking.com/9-marketing-automation-mistakes-you-cant-afford-to-make/7081/ If you’re looking for an SEO company in Ontario, it can be difficult to know who to trust. There are so many companies out there that claim they can help your website rank higher, but how do you know if they are telling the truth? And more importantly, how do you know if they are the right company for you? In this blog post, we will give you a few tips on how to evaluate SEO companies and make sure you choose the right one for your business. What Type of SEO Services Do They Offer?There are a few different types of SEO services that companies can offer. The most common type is on-page optimization, which is when a company makes changes to the website itself in order to improve its ranking in search engine results pages. This can include things like updating the website’s content, adding new keywords, and improving the website’s structure. Another type of SEO service is off-page optimization, which is when a company promotes its website on other websites and online platforms in order to improve its visibility. This can include things like link building and social media marketing. Finally, there is local SEO, which is when a company specifically targets its marketing efforts toward people in a certain geographic area. Local SEO can be especially beneficial for small businesses that have brick-and-mortar locations. As you’re comparing SEO companies in Ontario, make sure you’re aware of what services are available. If they don’t offer all three of these, you won’t get good results. What Kind of Experience Do They Have?When it comes to choosing an SEO company, experience is always a major factor to consider. After all, SEO is a complex and ever-changing field, so you want to make sure that you’re working with a team that knows what they’re doing. Fortunately, there are a few easy ways to evaluate the experience of an SEO company. First, take a look at their website and see how well it ranks for relevant keywords. If they’re able to get their own site to rank highly, that’s a good sign that they know what they’re doing. Second, check out their client list and see if they’ve worked with other companies in your industry. If they have, that’s another good indication of their experience level. You also want to make sure that they have a lot of companies your size on their current client list. If their normal clients are larger or smaller than you, you might not get the expertise you need. Finally, ask them about their process and see if they can provide specific examples of how they’ve helped other companies achieve success. If they’re able to do all of these things, then you can be confident that you’re working with an experienced and reputable SEO company. What Sort of Results Have They Achieved for Previous Clients?There are a lot of SEO companies out there promising the world to potential clients. But how can you know if they’re actually going to deliver on their promises? One way to judge an SEO company’s merits is by looking at the results they’ve achieved for previous clients. Have they managed to increase traffic to their clients’ websites? Have they helped their clients rank higher in search engine results pages? By looking at the results that an SEO company has achieved in the past, you can get a better idea of what they’re capable of and whether or not they’re likely to be able to help you achieve your own SEO goals. Of course, every website and situation is different, so there’s no guarantee that you’ll achieve the same results. However, it’s still a good idea to look at a company’s track record before making a decision. Other FactorsExperience and the other factors we’ve discussed are certainly important. After all, SEO is a complex and ever-changing field, and it takes a certain amount of knowledge and expertise to be successful at it. However, experience isn’t the only thing that matters when it comes to choosing an SEO company. Here are a few other factors you should keep in mind. The size of the company. A large SEO firm might have more resources available to devote to your project, but a smaller company might be more nimble and better able to adapt to changes in the market. The company’s track record. Be sure to look at the results the company has achieved for other clients before you commit to working with them. Your budget. Obviously, you’ll need to consider how much you’re willing to spend on SEO services before you can make a final decision. By keeping these factors in mind, you’ll be able to choose an SEO company that’s a good fit for your needs. Partner With Local SEO Search for Great ResultsIf you’re looking for a company that meets the criteria we’ve discussed, look no further than Local SEO Search. We’ve been in the business of helping businesses achieve their online marketing goals for years, and we know what it takes to get your website ranking high on search engines. Contact us today to start your SEO marketing campaign and improve your growth!
from https://fatsfixedassettracking.com/how-to-evaluate-seo-companies-in-ontario/7079/ Social Marketing Trends
Need a new plan? Find out how thousands of marketers plan to change their social marketing activities in our 14th annual Social Media Marketing Industry Report. This 39-page report reveals what marketers have planned for their organic social activities, video marketing, social ads, and more. Get this free report now and never miss another great article from Social Media Examiner. from https://fatsfixedassettracking.com/linkedin-content-creation-success-tips-social-media-examiner/7077/ Talking to machines through the yearsConversation comes naturally to us. It’s remarkable just how fluently we can converse on any number of topics, and adapt our style with ease to speak with any number of people. In contrast, our conversations with machines can be clumsy and stilted. Conversational AI has been a long-standing research topic, and much progress has been made over the last decades. There are some large-scale deployed systems that we’re able to interact with by language, both spoken and written, although I’m sure very few people would call the interactions natural. But whether it’s a task-based conversation like booking a travel ticket, or a social chatbot that makes small talk, we’ve seen continual evolution in the way the technology is built. The first chatbotOne of the first, and still most famous, chatbots called Eliza was built around 1966. It emulates a psychotherapist using rule-based methods to discover the keywords in what a user types, and reformulate those keywords into a pre-scripted question to ask back to the user. There are implementations still around today which you can try. Eliza’s inventor, Joseph Weizenbaum, conceived Eliza as a way to show the superficiality of communication between people and machines. And so he was surprised by the emotional attachment that some people went on to develop with Eliza. “Press 1 to make a booking, press 2 for cancellations…”The personal computer wasn’t a reality until the late 1970s. So at the time of Eliza there wasn’t really a way that people could interact with a text-based chatbot, unless they happened to work with computers. Chat technology instead begun to be used in customer service scenarios over the phone. These systems were dubbed Interactive Voice Response (IVR). DTMF (dual-tone multi-frequency) was initially a key part of these systems for enabling user input. DTMF assigns each keypad number two frequencies when pressed, which can be decoded by the receiver to figure out which number the user pressed. This is the mechanism behind the scenes when call centres ask you to “Press 1 for bookings, press 2 for cancellations…”, etc. The first commercial IVR system for inventory control was invented in 1973, with commercialisation of IVRs picking up in the 1980s as computer hardware improved. Through the 1990s, as voice technology improved, limited vocabulary speech-to-text (STT) was increasingly able to handle some voice input from users, alongside continued use of DTMF. Phone conversations also need a way to respond to the user with voice. Initially, this would have been pre-recorded audio, and later text-to-speech (TTS). In early systems, the natural language processing (NLP) to interpret what users said is typically rule-based. To make life easier, questions asked by the system may be very direct in order to reduce confusion between the number of things a person might say in response, e.g. “Please say either booking or cancellation”, or “Please state the city you are departing from”. The conversation flow — i.e. what to say next — in these systems was handcrafted, like a flowchart. Standards were developed for writing conversational flows. VoiceXML is one such standard that came into being in 1999. It allowed VUI designers to focus solely on designing the conversation, while software engineers could focus on the system implementation. Learning how to converseHandcrafting conversation flows is complex, and leads to sometimes clumsy interactions and brittle systems that can break when users say something unexpected. From the early 2000s, researchers looked into ways to learn conversation flows rather than handcraft them. Many of the models at this time were based on reinforcement learning, and were able to learn a conversation flow (or ‘dialogue policy’) through interacting with simulators and by having lots of conversations with real people. One of the difficulties of deploying such statistical systems for dialogue policy is in the lack of control they offer to developers. In a world where companies like to maintain control of their brand in customer service interactions, it’s difficult to accept randomness in performance that might reflect poorly on them. A particularly egregious case is that of Tay — a social chatbot released by Microsoft in 2016 which quickly learnt to post offensive and inflammatory tweets, and had to be taken down. As the internet grew, so too did the places in which conversational AI technology was deployed. Web browsers, instant messaging and mobile apps quickly became channels in which text-based chat was now viable. The deep learning boomThrough the 2010s, deep learning had a big impact on STT and TTS systems, significantly improving them to handle a wider range of language. Deep learning also started to have an impact in the NLP community. Understanding the meaning of what a user says in a conversation is cast as two machine learning tasks — intent recognition and slot (or entity) recognition. Commercial platforms like Amazon Lex and Google Dialogflow are based around the ideas of intent and slot. Intent recognition is a text classification task which predicts which out of a predefined set of intents a user has asked. For example, a ticket booking system might have MakeBooking or MakeCancellation intents. Slot recognition is a named entity recognition (NER) task which aims at picking salient entities (or slots) out of the text. In a ticket booking scenario, DestinationCity and SourceCity might be among the slots a system aims to recognise. Together, the entity and slots can be used to infer that “I’d like to book a ticket to London” and “Please can I buy a ticket and I’m going to London” effectively mean the same thing to a ticket booking system. The system can use the recognised intent and slots to communicate with a wide range of systems (databases, knowledge graph, APIs etc) and act on a user’s request. Using machine learning for NLP leads to conversational systems that can robustly handle a wide range of user inputs. Still, it’s common to have a layer of handcrafted rules alongside the ML model to handle edge cases or guarantee the system will behave appropriately for particularly important or common user queries. Further, even when machine learning can interpret individual user utterances, the overall conversation flow still usually remains handcrafted. Deep Learning for DialogueIntent and slot has its limitations as a way of modelling dialogue. For now though, it’s a common way to build both voice and chat bots in real-world applications. Deep learning continues to impact the trajectory of conversational AI. Deep neural networks (DNNs) were first used for learning dialogue policies. Then, the natural collision of using DNNs for both NLP and for dialogue policy is to build a single model that directly predicts appropriate responses in a conversation. An example of this kind of model is Google’s MEENA — a large neural network that’s trained to be able to respond appropriately in conversations about different topics. These end-to-end neural dialogue models build on large non-conversational language models like BERT and GPT-3. However, they’re difficult to use in commercial products because of some key issues. It’s difficult to have any control over the conversation flow, and they can sometimes produce biased or inappropriate responses. This isn’t great for company branding! Also, they struggle to retain a consistent persona throughout a conversation, forget what they’ve previously said, often produce relatively boring responses, and cannot easily link with external sources of information like knowledge bases or APIs to take action or to find the right information. These models of dialogue are new, however, and current research is addressing these limitations. from https://fatsfixedassettracking.com/the-evolution-of-conversational-ai-by-catherine-breslin/7075/ |
Digital Marketing Journals - SEO News
Digital marketing is the component of marketing that utilizes internet and online based digital technologies such as desktop computers, mobile phones and other digital media and platforms to promote products and services. Archives
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