The Most Amazing Marketing Book Ever
is a community-produced book by Mark W. Schaefer and Friends—of which I’m one. It’s a big book of strategies and tips on everything Marketing. And it’s an exciting adventure into the Web3 world of collaboration.

The community working on the project includes 36 authors from 10 different countries, each an expert on a subcategory of marketing, such as Content Marketing or Social Media Marketing. (See below for a full list.)

Join our Email List to be notified of The Most Amazing Marketing Book Ever events.

Visit the Landing Page for The Most Amazing Marketing Book Ever.

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Download a Free Chapter of The Most Amazing Marketing Book Ever.

My chapter is: “The Magic Of Search Engine Optimization.”
Here’s a quote from what I wrote:

I joined the Rise Community after hearing Schaefer speak at the Creative Economy Expo last Spring in Phoenix. We met again at the University of West Virginia where he and my wife, Heidi Cohen, both spoke at a marketing conference. When Mark presented his community book project last Fall, I volunteered.

Schaefer is a well-known author and popular speaker. His books include Belonging To The Brand, Marketing Rebellion and Known. Visit Mark’s website, BusinessesGrow.com.

“I challenged my community friends to create insights, not just re-hash information you can find in a blog post somewhere. They delivered. Whether you’re a seasoned pro or a small business owner trying to establish your first marketing strategy, get out your highlight marker!”

Read more about The Most Amazing Marketing book Ever

Please email me for more information or if you’d like to interview me or have me on your podcast.

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The Most Amazing Marketing Book Ever!

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By now you probably have heard about NFTs (Non Fungible Tokens) and how they provide proof of ownership for digital art. This is great for creators, allowing them to profit from their work, and exciting for investors who can afford six-figure sums for an image of a bored ape.

Securing and authenticating digital artwork is just one use of NFTs (and, yes, there’s a lot of hype and scams in that area.)

But there is another side of NFTs that is just as exciting: Creator Coins.

A Creator Coin is a fully customizable, branded form of digital currency that is unique to the individual creator. Holders of creator coins get rewards and discounts as members of the creator’s community. Unlike discount coupons and other forms of promotion, creator coins have intrinsic value in that they can be exchanged for real money (aka: Fiat Currency.)

Here’s how it works:

Say you have a product or service to sell. You’ve created a lot of content and built a trust-worthy brand. By publishing your content on your website/blog and platforms like Medium, LinkedIn and YouTube, you’ve amassed a considerable following. And, by promoting it in your newsletter and on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, you’ve extended your reach and built an audience receptive to your products and services. Good for you!

The next step is to convert your audience into a community.

What’s the difference between an audience and a community?

Members of your community are invested in your success and you’re invested in theirs. They are your super-fans and will seek you out first for new products and services they need.

What do you need to do as a content creator/publisher?

You “mint” your own creator coin and offer it to your audience as a reward for taking actions you want them to take, such as sharing your content with friends or attending your events.

For example, Joe Pulizzi, author of Content Inc. and founder of the Content Marketing Institute, rewards every new subscriber to his email newsletter, The Tilt, with $5 USD worth of $TILT coin ( Subscribe to The Tilt newsletter and earn $TILT. )

Holders of $TILT get exclusive access to the Tilt community on Discord. Additionally, they can use $TILT to purchase reports, training, or other educational opportunities. (Read more about the $TILT coin.)

Joe Pulizzi is also selling lifetime passes to CEX conferences (Creator Economy Expo.) The pass is an NFT (Joe calls it an NET for Never-Ending Ticket) which you can purchase using Ethereum or other digital currency. Only 100 NETs have been minted so, if you hold one, you can be sure of your elite status. Holders get special VIP access and SWAG at CEX events. Since they can be sold, traded and gifted, just like any other NFT, NET holders’ investments are protected.

Mark Schaefer, author of Cumulative Advantage and Marketing Rebellion, is also offering creator coins. Submit an article to his blog, {Grow} and, if it’s accepted, you’ll be rewarded with $200 USD worth of $RISE coins. Like $TILT, $RISE coins are traded on the Rally.io network which returns rewards to users of their network (note: Rally.io was a main sponsor of CEX.)

Mark puts 90% of his Rally rewards back into the $RISE coin for long-term growth of the community. See: https://bit.ly/growblogpost for further information.

Holders of $RISE get access to Mark’s exclusive Discord learning community. Additionally $RISE can be used to purchase Mark’s books at a steep discount, or a personal Branding Master Class.

The major social media platforms, Facebook, Twitter and TikTok are all adding support for creator NFTs. How this will work out is still somewhat uncertain at this stage. Meanwhile, new platforms for minting, buying and trading NFTs, social tokens and creator coins are popping up every day. Stay tuned.

The post The Creator Economy Goes Social appeared first on larryaronson.com.

I’ve been working on a plugin that speaks content segments of a post or a page.

The plugin, ListenUp, provides four shortcodes:

1. ListenUp will speak the text content enclosed between its opening and closing tags when that content is clicked.
2. ListenUpExcerpt will provide a link that when clicked will fetch and speak the post excerpt.
3. ListenUpImage will provide a link that when clicked will fetch and speak the description of an image.
4. ListenUpCustom will provide a link that when clicked will speak the contents of a custom field.

This post provides examples of its use. I’ve published it so that my beta-testers, friends and others can see (and hear) it in operation before installing it on their WordPress websites. Eventually, I’ll add a story of how I developed the idea and put it into code.

Each instance below shows how the plugin is employed in the editor followed by the presentation. Clicking on the presentation will initiate speaking; clicking again will cancel speaking.

The last two examples show how to grab and speak arbitrary sections of speech stored as custom fields. This allows you to have spoken text without having that text appear in the post content.

Please note that this is experimental software. Browser support for voice synthesis is not universal and may not work in older versions.

Send me an email if you’re interested in testing out ListenUp.

To experiment further with spoken text, check out my Voice Synthesis Playground. Comments and suggestions are welcome.

RELATED READING

Adding Voice to WordPress. Parts of my presentation on ListenUp that I’ve made to various meetups and usergroups.

Understanding HTML5 Audio. Although I wrote this post 10 years ago, it’s still a useful guide to implementing recorded sounds in a webpage.

The post ListenUp appeared first on larryaronson.com.

Google wants to help everyone manage their trust relationships and is making changes across their technology to nudge the Web onto secure platforms: https: and SSL.

https (httpsecured) is a version of the protocol web servers and user agents (browsers, apps, robots) use to talk to each other. SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) refers to the encrypted communication channel they use – the private side of the Internet.

SSL provides certificates website owners use to authenticate their websites. The certificate is a set of cryptographic keys your webserver uses to encrypt and sign the documents (webpages) it returns to your visitors. Their browsers verify the certificates  and get the decryption keys. If all the various components of the webpage are from secure sources, the browser puts a “Secure” tag or icon in the location bar.

It’s actually a good idea for the 5 reasons listed below.

But the clock is running! Starting next month, visitors to http webpages using the latest version of Google’s Chrome browser will see a “Not Secure” tag appear in the location bar as soon as they start entering text in any input field on the page. This has been the case for pages containing a password or credit card number field since January.

This animated gif from the Chromium Blog explains it all:

https://blog.chromium.org/2017/04/next-steps-toward-more-connection.html

Updates are automatic for most Chrome users and Firefox and Safari will be making similar changes. Starting next month (Oct. 2017) this becomes the default behavior.

This change affects every WordPress website owner and admin. Think about all the places you might have an in input element on your website. If you have a search field in your header or a newsletter subscribe form in your sidebar; that’s every page on your website!

5 Reasons why SSL/https is a good idea.

1. Domain Authentication – Provides assurance to your visitor that the webpage they asked for is the webpage they got. That no man-in-the-middle has intercepted your visitor’s request URL and sent back a page pretending to be you.
2. Data Integrity – SSL encrypts all communication between your website and your visitors. Any attempt to remove, modify or add data turns that communication into nonsense. Governments and telecom companies can still block traffic to your website through their networks, but they can’t interfere with the conversation if they don’t.
3. User Privacy – It’s not just the newsletter signup form on your website that needs to be encrypted so spammers can’t steal names and email addresses. It’s also WordPress logins credentials, post comments and search terms. Think about how visitors connect through open WiFi and mobile data networks they know nothing about. Yet they ultimately hold you responsible for protecting their confidentiality.
4. Load Speed – A new Web protocol version, HTTP 2.0, is replacing the very old version 1.1. HTTP 2.0 manages multiple connections over SSL more efficiently. Your website’s visitors will experience faster page loads. But this only works with secured websites. HTTP 2.0 falls back to the version 1.1 protocol for websites without an SSL certificate.
5. Search Ranking – Google regards secured websites as more reliable, more serious in intent than unsecured websites, especially if the website requests user input via forms. Your secure website will appear in search result pages above insecure websites that would otherwise rank equally for a given search term. Not secure pages in SERPs will be labeled as such.

Migrating a WordPress website from http to https

The process will vary from one webhosting company to the next. So, the very first thing you need to do is check your hosting company’s documentation to see if they support https access for a website under your hosting plan. If they do, then ask them for help.

Make sure your WordPress installation and plugins are completely up to date and that the database and files are fully backed up before you start. Check what version of PHP your WordPress is running under. You’ll want PHP 7 or later to take full advantage of the speed improvements.

Here’s a overview of the steps:

1. Get SSL certificates from a Certificate Authority for all domains and subdomains served by your website. Your webhosting company may do this for you.
2. Duplicate your website & database. Enable the new website for SSL/https: and install the certificates.
3. In the new website, change internal links from http://yourwebsite.com/  to   https://yourwebsite.com/ .  Do this for both the content in the database and the code in the theme template files.
4. Find and replace non-secure external sources of content with equivalent secure sources. This has to be done on a case by case basis. Older plugins may not have secure sources for the assets they embed into your pages.
5. When every page in the new website displays the “Secure” label, add a redirect directive to the old website to forward all http: traffic to the secure https: website.
6. Update 3rd party services with your new URL, including: Google Analytics & Search Console, eMail marketing services, payment gateways and affiliate programs.
7. Update your social media and other membership organizations where your URL is in a “profile”. While this isn’t technically required, you want the world to know you respect people’s privacy. Displaying a URL beginning with https: sends a subtle signal that you can be trusted.

Honestly, I’m not trying to make this look difficult; it really is a big job! For a webpage to be considered secure, every content component that goes into that page must come from a secure source. This includes: images, videos, embeds, objects, iframes, stylesheets and scripts. The more complex and content-rich your website is, the more problems you’ll encounter.

Not so long ago, the Internet was open territory populated largely by techies who shared a “Do No Evil” ethic. Now it’s an essential part of billions of lives and encountering people who don’t have your best interests at heart has to be expected. When you interact with your customers and prospects online, trust is no longer assured.

While implementing user security and privacy seems complicated—and I’ve only scratched the surface—migrating your website to SSL/https is well worth it. It shows respect for your audience.

The post SSL: 5 Reasons For Securing Your WordPress Website appeared first on larryaronson.com.

I’m delighted to announce the launching of the new Fovia Inc. website. Fovia Inc. provides software development kits and related services for high-quality, high-speed 3D image rendering. The kind of image data that’s output by MRI, CT and industrial scanning machines.

What makes this website so fascinating (and exciting to work on) are thousands of high resolution medical, archeological and industrial images showcasing the power and flexibility of Fovia’s XStream^® HDVR^® product. If that’s not enough to perk your interest, check out the high resolution, fly-through movies.

I had the pleasure of working directly with their VP Global Marketing & Strategic Alliances, Shay Kilby, to complete a WordPress site. The new website was created to replace Fovia’s previous website.

The FoviaTest project

When I took my first deep look into the in-process website installed on FoviaTest.com last March, I saw a good design with a few months of work left to do. Designing the architecture of the site and producing the content for the pages would be done by Shay’s team. Making it all work on smartphone, tablets and desktops was mine.

I was hired to help complete the site after a company that Fovia originally hired did a sub-par job. Shay came to me because “as a technology company, a low-tech, sloppy site is unacceptable, we want someone with a higher standard to complete the job.”

The coding that the former website company left behind, to be polite, was a mess. It looked like it was done by programmers who knew enough PHP to be dangerous but not enough WordPress to follow standard practice. The website was bloated with extra, plugins and single-purpose template files making it difficult to sort out what sliders, carousels and other widgets worked where. None of the code was responsive.

Fovia’s limited timeframe pushed the option of starting over off the table. I worked with the existing template, functions and stylesheets, simplifying the design and restructuring the front page for easier editing. Shay and her team quickly picked up the essentials of WordPress administration and content production.

Launching the new Fovia.Com

All the work was done on a development site and URL. While it’s better to have a separate environment for development work, moving a WordPress install to another host and URL invariably bring unexpected problems.  Here, the FTP program on the development server had a limit of 10,000 entries in any operation. The new website, however, had over 13,000 files in the media library making it impossible to download.

My usual solution for such problems would be to logon to shell sessions on the two servers and transfer the files in batches. However, getting shell access to both servers would be logistically difficult so Shay had her team use WordPress’ Media Manager to delete unused and duplicate images and movies. It was a lot of work but they got the number of media files below 10,000 and we launched the new version on schedule.

Please take a look at the Fovia website and let me know what you think (and remember that I’m not responsible for the design.) If you have any questions about the technology I used or the development strategy I pursued, please use the comment form below or email me directly.

The post Fovia.com Website Launched With Stunning Images appeared first on larryaronson.com.

At MarketingProfs B2B Forum in Boston, October 2016. I was interviewed by Gemma Houghton for Webcertain.tv. The topic: Capitalising On New Technologies.

Unfortunately, Webcertain.tv now redirects to a YouTube channel and our 11 minute conversion, “Capitalising On New Technologies” can’t be found.

However, I was impressed by their video setup and how they smoothly they conducted the interview. So I stuck around for the next one with Ann Handley to learn how it’s done.

One tech person handled all the equipment and, other than turning the cameras and lights on and off, spent most of interview monitoring the audio. Everything in their kit was lightweight and streamlined.

• 3 video cameras on tripods. One trained on each of us and a third getting the two-shot. 
• 2 large LED arrays on tripods behind and above the cameras as keylights plus two smaller arrays to wash out the shadows on the background.
• A simple three-part background screen.
• Lavalier microphones
• Small sound mixing board

Gemma had all her questions on an iPad. This provided a guide for the editor and made it easier to create a transcript. 

I’ve been in and out of the TV world over the years. I’m amazed at how easy and inexpensive it’s become to create professional quality video and distribute it over the Web.

Is video a part of your Web offering? Are you capitalizing on new technologies to reach and engage new audiences?

You should.

Post updated – January 23, 2019.

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The Power of Music is an eight-part, multimedia, professional development course for music educators. The video series and website provide an introduction to El Sistema, the pioneering approach to music education and illuminate the ways it’s being adapted for teaching music in the U.S.

The website was developed for WNET/Thirteen public television with support from the Annenberg foundation. It features over 45 videos and 3 interactive applications. The website’s graphic design was done by Michael Pinto of vm.com with additional graphics by Gwen Singley.

About El Sistema

Founded in 1975 by Dr. José Antonio Abreu in Venezuela, El Sistema has been described as a movement of music education for social change. Ideas of community and citizenship are central to El Sistema-inspired teaching. Students progress through peer to peer learning in ensembles and orchestras. [ Video: How to make a paper violin ].

About the k5music website project

The Power of Music  is a static HTML website generated from an instance of WordPress I built on my development server. This enabled Thirteen’s content producers to compose and edit pages, upload and manage images and video easily. I used the Blankslate boilerplate theme which made it easy to modify the design to accommodate the content as the team became familiar with it.

To export the site to Annenberg’s webserver, Learner.org, I wrote a series of custom unix shell scripts that grabbed the generated pages, munged the URLs and added include commands that generate the common header and footer sections.

This website was a joy to build. The people at WNET/Thirteen were wonderful to work with and the content they created was inspiring.

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I was at the NY Tech Meetup last Tuesday evening. If you’re not familiar with it, the NY Tech Meetup is the largest monthly meetup anywhere.

For the September meeting, they usually pull out all the stops. True to form, it was awesome. Our mayor, Bill de Blasio, dropped by to make a Tech Sector booster speech (see approximate rendering at right).

The NY Tech Meetup is a demo-or-die event where 10 companies get 10 minutes each to show their stuff. There’s no judging. But let’s face it – attendees are picking winners and losers.

During the short Q&A sessions between demos one question is taboo: What’s your business plan?

According to de Blasio, there are 291,000 NYC-based tech jobs. The city’s tech sector growth is accelerating. You could say that NYC is a natural accelerator.

NYC has become a Mecca for startups. It attracts thousands of young people each month to work and create in tech. Everyone I know under 30 is “involved” with a startup.

During the afterparty, I asked a group of 20-somethings about the taboo question: “When you interview for a job at a startup, do you ask to see the business plan?” No one wants to sign up with a “loser” startup only to end up back where they started after a year of hard work and late paychecks.

But, the cold reality is that only 1 out of 5 new businesses succeed. Therefore, how do you pick a winning startup to work for?

The 5 skillsets every business needs to succeed

Here are the five skillsets considered critical for any business. Although an entrepreneur may have more than 1 of these, we can think of them as personas. Look for them in the next company you interview with.

1. The Visionary — (aka CEO) Every startup should have someone with a vision that sets it apart, otherwise it’s just another taco shack down the block. The CEO defines the company’s mission, inspires the sales force to achieve their goals and gives employees a higher reason than their paychecks to show up for work.
2. The Operations Wizard — (aka COO) This is the person who takes the visionary’s ideas and make them happen within the given budget and resources. This is the firm’s problem solver who gets things done.
3. The Money Man — (aka CFO) He figures out where the money will come from and where it will go. Budget, sales, revenue, expenses and earnings are his domain. he has the power to say no to the next big idea, but everything is at best an estimate.
4. The Marketing Maven — (aka CMO) Every business needs customers and it’s the Marketing Maven’s job to get them. Marketing involves product development, pricing, promotion, sales and customer support. Your company can have the most innovative product in the world but without great marketing, the competition will eat your lunch before the public finally beats a path to your door.
5. The Customer Keeper — There’s one thing that customers want beyond a great product at a good price: Respect! Treat your customers well and the one-time buyer will become a loyal fan making repeat purchases and encouraging friends and followers to check you out. Good customers are the most important resource a company can have. They will resent the insult of poor service long after they forgotten the pleasure of low price.

So here’s my advice for young people looking to start up with a startup: Don’t.

You’ll be far better off working in a large established company for a few years where you’ll be paid well, might find a mentor, learn how “real” business are run and can leverage your company’s name to open doors.

That said – If you can’t resist the allure of the next great disruptive idea; the shiny devices doing marvelous things and the ultra cool work environments, then look beyond those attractions when you interview for a job with a startup. Ask about the company’s business plan. Make sure the firm has the 5 skillsets every business needs to succeed.

What has your experience been with interviewing and working for a startup company?

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