That sounds great, but an entry level wireless microphone system can cost as much as your camera did. You also have to order them online and wait to test them once they arrive.

I decided to see if it was possible to create a battery powered (i.e. portable) wireless microphone system from components that are available locally and for about $60. I also recorded myself while I did it. The result is this three part series where I literally show you every detail.

It turned out to be quite easy to find components and add battery power to them. The down side is that the sound quality isn’t very good and, without some sort of mixer, the audio comes in on only one channel. Aside from that, this is an easy, fast and inexpensive way to build a portable wireless microphone system for your Kodak Zi8.

Remember to leave me a comment telling me what you think and if you used my suggestion.

Part 1, Components and Assembly

Part 2, Testing and Permanent Assembly (AA Batteries)

Part 3, Build 9V Battery Assembly

Happy Recording!

I’ve built a lot of membership websites in WordPress, and perhaps the most frustrating part is getting the video right. Video is one of the key components to communicating with your members. In fact, video should be used throughout the membership process, including:

• Landing page for optin conversion
• Sales page to increase sales conversions
• As member content to increase retention and effectiveness

With the advent of mobile devices, like Apple’s products, more and more people want to consume their content on the go. That can mean that many of the more traditional ways to deliver video content just don’t work. There are already many services that will offer to get your video up and running in HTML5, but none of them are easy, so I created two plugins for WordPress that accommodate two spcific uses of HTML5 Video. Here’s a video that shows you how they work.

One thing I didn’t mention in the video, is how my HTML5 landing pages ROCK THE WORLD in terms of optin rate. I created special landing pages for two JVs that wanted to offer the optincrusher to their subscribers and clients. When I got around to checking what the optin rate was, I almost couldn’t believe it. Especially because some of those unique impressions are me checking the page occasionally. Here’s a snapshot from my aweber account:

That’s 42.6% optin rate for one site and 81.0% for the other. How does that compare to your optin rate? You can even see my blog optin rate sitting at 5.9%, which still isn’t that bad for general traffic.

Here are the takeaway points (as I see them). I want to make sure targeted traffic sent to a landing page has the following experience:

• They can see the video (yes, especially on mobile devices)
• There’s a clear call to action
• There aren’t any distractions

It turns out that my HTML5 landing page does all three very well! At the moment I don’t have a timeline to publicly release my HTML5 video plugins for WordPress, but if you think you’ve got a site that would really benefit from them, leave a comment below or shoot me an email. I would love to hear what you think and where you would use them.

UPDATE [9/1/2011]: This plugin is now available for download. Get details and training at http://mobilevideoforwordpress.com/

After completing that integration, I thought it would be useful to offer some background on why it’s so important, and how you can approach list segmentation in your business.

Segmentation defined

My first encounter with segmentation came as I marketed a product to owners of SUVs back in the mid 1990s. I discovered that there are companies whose entire business model is to maintain large lists of individuals, addresses, phone numbers and so on along with a type of meta information, such as where they shop and what car they drive. They even claimed to tell me that I could target owners of a specific model SUV within a zip code region. Wow.

In internet marketing, segmentation takes many forms, including targeted search traffic, strategic joint ventures and, quite importantly, segmenting your own email lists. The most successful marketers manage their email lists in such a way that they can send different messaging to each lead, prospect and customer.

Desired benefits of segmentation

Profit should be the focus behind segmenting your email list. When done properly, segmentation can allow you to craft messages and offers that are most likely to be accepted by a group of people.

Many of the best sales people will tell you that every pitch is individual. While that’s not possible (strictly speaking) in direct marketing where an offer is being presented to thousands or even millions of people, the aim is to get ever closer to a customized pitch for each prospect.

Technology

Technology is becoming more and more sophisticated in its ability to deliver unique, personalized messages to each person on your list, which gets you closer and closer to the individual pitch that sales professionals know closes more sales.

At the same time, you run the risk that you’re messaging becomes unnatural and contrived. Just because technology allows you to insert customized variables, such as name, email address, dates and so on, doesn’t mean that it will enhance your message.

Always run your messaging through your ‘real person’ filter. By that I mean that technology should enable communication, not define it. Don’t do something just because you can, make sure that it ends up looking like something that one real person would actually send to another person.

Two extremes

As we look at the spectrum of uses of technology, there are extreme cases. Some marketers put everyone that ever showed interest in their product on a single list. Whether they buy one offer or another, they stay put on that one single list. Other marketers create labyrinthine frameworks that infer interest based on every click in an email, thereby changing the future messaging for that individual.

Neither extreme strikes me as being effective. In the simplistic single list case there are many missed opportunities where individualized messaging might better resonate with a group. In the second case there is an assumed intimacy that rarely exists between a marketer and a group. In other words, it’s difficult to verify that what you assume an individual is thinking when he clicks one thing and not another is accurate.

Problems with multivariate testing

Which brings me to the vagaries of multivariate testing. In it’s simplest form, testing takes on an A/B question. Two options are presented to large populations and whichever form, A or B, produces the highest response is considered the winner. Typically an A/B test will involve the change of a subject line or an image with all other elements remaining fixed.

On the other hand, if you attempt to test a simple combination of Headline and image, assuming you have two of each, you now have four possible combinations. With four possibilities, the number of people that see each one shrinks. Smaller groups make the results statistically more difficult to distinguish. As a result, the more intricate your triage process the more opportunity for error.

Autoresponders

The good news is that most autoresponder services provide built in mechanisms for sorting through your lists and communicating in both broad and specific ways. When you’re evaluating email services, make sure that the type of segmentation you want is easily accommodated with the solution you choose.

Conclusions

Email list segmentation is an integral part of effective marketing. Finding the proper balance of segmentation and ensuring that your criteria for sorting an individual into one group as opposed to another are effective will require finesse and careful attention. In every case, the outcome is almost certain to be market dependent and so for each new market approached you should expect a settling time to find an effective groove.

Membership websites

As I mentioned, my reason for writing this article is that I just finished extending one of the better membership frameworks available for WordPress to accommodate segmentation. Segmenting visitors, from free members from premium members is a key component to building an effective sales funnel and retention strategy for any membership website.

I recently developed a tool to increase the optin rate on my websites (and for my clients). During development I got to work with nearly all of the major email service providers. While many of them are very strong and offer some clever tools to make marketers more successful, iContact stood out with a special 2-for-1 offering of a combined email and survey service. Let me explain why this is such a powerful combination and then I’ll show you a tool that can make it even better.

Utility

Email services are what I like to call a utility service for marketers. It’s like gas and electricity for a home. You can’t go without them and really have a decent quality of life, and when they flake out, the pain is felt almost immediately. The good news is that nearly all the email services have a rock solid platform that’s fast and reliable.

As I integrated each of these services, there were some features that started to jump out to me as being extremely useful. One of the services that I think did the best job with this was iContact, and to understand why I say that, it’s important to review the advice I got as a beginner to email marketing.

I heard from Jeff Walker, Ed Dale, John Reese, Frank Kern, Eben Pagan and just about everyone else that you have to do these two things with your list:

• Ask them what they want
• Build a relationship

That’s why most of these marketers use surveys in various ways to accomplish both of these tasks. But they use a combination of two separate services to get it done. That means their email list and communication are in a database independent from survey results and respondents. As it turns out, that can present a big challenge when processing survey results and conducting follow up.

2-for-1 email and surveys

The first thing I noticed about iContact is that they put those two services in one integrated package. I can only imagine how much easier it becomes for new marketers to survey and interact with their lists, not to mention the efficiency gains that more experienced marketers get. I should know since I’ve spent time working through the details of not having an integrated email and survey service.

The integration is great and opens many possibilities, however it’s also important to know that each service can be used independently. That means you can publish a survey and link to it from your website without an email, or include it in an email broadcast or an autoresponder sequence. It’s very flexible.

Leverage the combination

Since this was the only truly integrated provider I found (some parent companies offer both as separate labels so they can charge more, but they don’t integrate like iContact) I decided to publish a customized version of the optincrusher software. I called it ioptinboost.

The reason I decided to create a separate piece of software is that I could integrate the survey function in directly. So with ioptinboost you can run a survey on your site, the same way you would an optin form. It will get your visitors attention and tell you loads about the traffic you’re getting to your site.

If you structure your survey correctly, you can even provide an incentive and get them onto an autoresponder. If you’ve followed Eben Pagan for a while, that’s very similar to what he did with the Psychic Sales Letter. There’s some very powerful psychology at play here, and as a smart marketer, you can leverage it like never before.

Free Softare

Just like the optincrusher, I’m releasing ioptinboost for free (as of right now anyway). That won’t last forever, but today you can download it here:

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If this article has piqued your interest, you can try the icontact service for free. They have great live support, so it’s very easy to get your first survey or campaign up and running quick. Of course I created HD videos showing you how to do everything you need to do on http://ioptinboost.com/

Leave a comment about your experience with iContact and how you use their service to improve your marketing.

The reason I wanted to post it here is that it turned out to be a good tutorial about using a fantastic free tool (Inkscape) to create graphics for your website. I actually show you how to use Photoshop too.

You can download the HD version below the video. If you watch it on the page, click the full screen button so that you get all the details.

Download in HD

Onsite vs. Offsite

First it’s important to understand some backup terminology. An onsite backup means that the data for the backup and the data for the production website exist in the same physical location. This might be like making a backup of your computer onto an external hard drive attached to your computer. This would protect you from a hard drive crash, but if your house burns down then both go up in flames.

Offsite means that the data for your backup and the data for your production website are in different physical locations. If one place burns up, the other will still have all the data intact.

There’s a benefit to each type of backup. An onsite backup, such as an external hard drive, can provide a much faster recovery than downloading the data from another site. Offsite backups are more resilient to acts of God (and kids).

Backup in the cloud (Amazon S3)

When it comes to your website, it turns out that the hard drive at your house qualifies as an off site backup. Even better than your hard drive is Amazon S3. There are two reasons why choosing a cloud based service is more appealing than your hard drive.

1. You can automate access to it from your website
2. They manage redundant, fault tolerant data storage for you

What to backup

I think many bloggers (those that create backups at all) use the WordPress export feature and feel confident that they have everything they need to recover their website in case of a crash.

It turns out that several things are missing. First is that even the most disciplined person can find it difficult to login regularly and take frequent backups. Since a blog is an evolving opus, constantly changing, it’s important to take frequent backups. Another problem has to do with the ‘rest’ of the information on your website.

What about all the pictures, audios and videos that you upload, along with theme and plugin files? This data needs to be included with your backups in order to restore your website. Without it, you would be able to restore little more than the text content from your site.

So, if you insist on taking manual backups then make sure you use FTP and grab the wp-content folder of your WordPress website in addition to the XML file that you export.

There’s a better way

If you don’t want to worry about all these details and risk messing them up then you’re in luck. I found a great plugin which I’ve been using on all my sites for about a half a year now. It’s called Automatic WordPress Backups. To get it up and running all I had to do was provide it with my Amazon S3 account information and it took care of the rest. It manages creating backups on a regular schedule and maintaining historical backups too.

The cost for S3 storage works out to be pennies a month, and for the peace of mind that it brings, that’s CHEAP!

How to restore

In the event that you need to restore your data, you can most likely find someone on elance.com. In fact, if you’re restoring after a hosting company crash, you could probably even give them the backup file from your S3 account and let them work through the details. It turns out to be pretty easy. Here’s the process I would follow:

1. Ensure that you have the domain configured and pointed to a directory on your host
2. Upload WordPress (you can probably use cPanel if you want to)
3. Delete the wp-content folder and upload the folder from your backup
4. Create a database and import the database file from your backup
5. Update the wp-config.php file with the connection information to your new database

Hopefully you never need to go through these steps. but if you do, you’ll be glad that you took the time to setup Automatic Wordperss Backups. Post a comment if you have any questions or need additional help.

Geeky looking actor #2: “Watch me turn this wrigley’s gum wrapper, a AAA battery and some titanium shavings from my laptop case into an instant bypass of this multi-million dollar security system”.

Don’t you love the movies? They rock. Some total stud and a complete geek get together and decide they’re going to save the world by breaking into the pentagon or CIA and getting access to top secret files. There’s actually a good reason these persona’s exist. It’s because you want them to exist.

It’s really a funny quirk about human nature that we tend to think that everyone else has a “secret” or “discovery” that we don’t. That’s why headlines like “1 Secret to a Flat Belly” pop up all over the place. It’s not because they really have a secret, other than do tons of exercise, stop eating like a garbage can and get plenty of sleep. It works because way too many people assume that the hot girl with the sexy abs is eating twinkies and sitting in front of the tube six hours a day, just like us.

Enough about twinkies. What has this got to do with internet marketing technology?

Programmers have to follow the rules

Many people really believe that somewhere in the world there’s an omniscient hacker who can break into computers at will and reads top secret files like I read my email. They really believe that if you know enough about technology then you can control any computer in a matter of minutes. Here’s a news flash for you. HE DOESN’T EXIST!

Yep. Sorry to burst your bubble. Even the guys that design the programming languages understand that there have to be rules. They define how things are ordered, loaded, protected and so on. You might even think about it like gravity. You can sometimes find ways around it (like an airplane), but as soon as the engines cut out you remember really fast that it’s there working like always.

Remember that programmer? Yeah, the one that you wanted to build your website for $300 and you’re always mad that he didn’t get it done just the way you dreamed about it and that it took more than two days time. He has to follow the rules too.

And if you want the guy that can actually perform “miracles”, keep in mind that he’s worth a lot more than $300. Yep, it’s true: you really do get what you pay for.

The “REAL” secret: Quality comes with time and iterations

Another thing that the movies have ruined is the reality of developing through iteration. Since they only have a two minute montage to show you how they break in to the Oval Office or the FBI mainframe before getting back to the story line, it’s easy to think that real programmers should be able to write a perfect program the first time.

That’s not actually true either. In reality, the best software is the result of iterations! Period! This isn’t just limited to programmers. Look at cars, buildings and architecture, plumbing and even your favorite pancake recipe. This applies equally to the creative design process and shopping at the grocery store. It’s a universal constant.

The bottom line is that if you want something to be top quality then you have to plan for iterations. The first revision product is going to be limited, clunky and might even work (with a little skill and luck). Give yourself and your programmer time and budget to get through a couple of iterations if top quality is your goal.

Did I mention the power iterations

Why are iterations on a project so important? For the same reason that a baby’s first step usually isn’t followed by an immediate second step. Even the unbelievable human nervous system requires many, many failures and falls before all the neural connections function well enough together to enable us to walk. That’s not to mention the building up of strength in the legs.

Programmers are the same way. The more iterations you go through on a theme, the easier it becomes. Even to the point that some tasks may go off just like walking. We don’t really think about walking (I mean lift leg, lean forward, place foot, ensure balance, shift weight, lift other foot, etc.). Some programming tasks can get to be that way too, just like walking, but it’s only after many iterations and failures.

Marketers call this split testing

This is actually an old concept in advertising. Direct response marketers call this split testing. Interestingly, many programmers hold a similar myth about the omniscient marketer. They really believe that there’s a sales guy somewhere that can sell anything to anyone, whether or not they have a need or desire for the thing.

There is no omniscient marketer either.

In reality there’s no direct sales guy that can magically whip out the perfect headline in a matter a minutes based purely on his genius. The best copywriters will tell you that research is the key to good copy. I would add that research must be coupled with many iterations of split tests to identify an optimal headline and offer.

Stop the cycle of first version paralysis

Rather than get hung up on why your programmer or marketer friend isn’t able to pull out the hollywood version of the website or sales offer that you need right now to become an instant millionaire, why not just take a stab in the dark and call it a first iteration. If it’s useful then pat yourself on the back and get back to work!

I promise you the next iteration will be even better than the first.

SEO

I’ve discussed these criteria in a previous post, but it’s worth going through them again here as they apply to Thesis.  First off is SEO.  SEO is tricky for a few reasons. 1) No one really knows Google’s algorithm except for Google.  Meticulous testing has revealed many of the details, but it’s a stab in the dark or a good guess in many cases.  2) SEO and design don’t always agree with each other.  Designers want to make things look good to humans and SEO experts want to make things look good to the search engines. Both are necessary and there’s a trade off involved.  3) SEO is a moving target.  Google and other search engines are constantly making adjustments to their methods and so to maintain rankings and search engine position requires continual vigilance.

In terms of SEO, Thesis has a few advantages. The core development effort is aware of SEO best practices and has made it a focus from the beginning to balance SEO with good design. The large install base for the theme and the caliber of the blogs that use Thesis provide feedback to the developers which improve the core even further.  Finally, the proper use of css and XHTML (standards compliant) ensure that automated bots (from the search engines) can find the keyword information you include in your posts easily.

Speed

One of the most significant factors in the success of WordPress as blogging software has been the theme and plugin architecture.  You don’t have to be a programmer to understand how appealing it is to be able to modify a WordPress blog without having to do a lot of programming.  One problem that comes with this flexibility is that there are a lot of poorly written themes and plugins.  Each task that you want your theme or plugin to do requires processing, which can potentially slow down your website.

Here again, Thesis does an amazing job because it was a focus from the beginning.  The core development effort is aware of how WordPress is supposed to work and they have made very deliberate choices to make the theme as fast as possible.  This has two outcomes.  First is that visitors to the site have a better experience.  Research has shown that faster sites get more clicks.  People are more willing to explore the site when each page loads quickly. The second is that you can accommodate more visitors to your site without performance degrading.  I suppose a third would be that Google has just announced that the load time of a website is now a factor in ranking, which means that a fast theme brings SEO benefit too.

Usability

When a user comes to your site, they want to find the information that’s most relevant to what they’re looking for.  The Thesis team has found a great balance between design and SEO that gives the user a very clear path to the information that’s of greatest interest to them.  In addition to good design, they fully support the customizable widgets that are built in to WordPress.  This gives you ultimate flexibility when tweaking your site to increase conversions.

Productivity

Finally, the breadth and quality of the customization options available in Thesis means that you don’t have to fight with your blog or know how to code to get the results you want.  You’re productive from the first moment using nothing more than your web browser to configure your site.  This may be the most immediate benefit to using Thesis.  You get to stop thinking about how to do this or that and instead focus on your content.  Thesis gets out of your way and helps you do what you do best.

My sites run Thesis

I’m a big fan of Thesis and use it for my own websites.  In fact, my first blog ever runs Thesis.  Have a look at these links for a couple of examples:

• Exercise Log Blog
• Choice Software Zone

To see even more examples of how to use Thesis and see some great videos about how to use it, head over to the official site:

Atahualpa

The Atahualpa theme is a mature theme (meaning it’s been under development for a long time) and provides a lot of user configurable options.  Perhaps best of all for non-tech folks is that there are a lot of template type items so that you don’t have to provide your own information.  For example, there are a collection of favicons to choose from without having to create and upload one.  Favicons are the little icon that shows up in your browser tab and they can add some polish to a website.

My first thirty day challenge website used this theme and as I went through the motions I was easily able to take top page listing in Google for a competitive keyword in  just a few weeks, so at least there wasn’t anything glaringly wrong with the theme from Google’s perspective.  I doubt it’s as optimized as something like the Thesis theme, but it can get you down the road quite nicely if you’re on a short budget.

UPDATE: I’ve recently had some trouble with this theme in Internet Explorer.  That’s a pretty bad thing since Microsoft still holds a significant lead over the competition in user base.  If you plan to use this one make sure your finished site looks OK in IE.

Arjuna X

The Arjuna X theme has also been around for a while and has a very polished look.  In fact, it may be the most attractive of the three themes I’m featuring here and would be a great choice for a personal blog.  Customization includes headers, sidebar placement and well defined widgets.  It’s easy to use and gives your blog a clean, authoritative look.

Arthemia

The Arthemia theme is a free theme, but it’s a sibling of a more robust premium theme by the same name.  That means that in some ways you benefit from the commercial development on the premium theme, even if you don’t get all the bells and whistles.  This theme is also the only one of the three that fits in the category of a magazine theme.

Out of the box this theme offers several well defined areas for widgets that look great, but it has no user options on the backend.  That means that any customization will have to be done in the editor and so it’s not a good choice for a non-tech person.

Caution: you get what you pay for

I know that the free themes are appealing because they don’t cost a thing.  If you’re starting out with very little (or no) budget then these three themes give you options that are probably just right.  On the other hand, the SEO characteristics of these themes and customization for branding or conversion may not be as good as the premium themes.

In my experience, I found that I wasted a lot of hours trying to tweak the free themes to meet my needs.  In the end I wasn’t ever quite satisfied, since they don’t have the same polish and purpose that the premium themes do.  If I have to spend two hours getting a free theme to do what I want it to, then I’m probably better off just paying for a premium theme that does it out of the box (like Thesis).

If you have a favorite free WordPress theme, post a link to it in the comments below.

Well, it’s not hosting in the traditional sense, but it’s a fantastic resource, especially if what you’re developing needs to accommodate very large spikes in traffic. It’s called Google App Engine.

If you’re interested in knowing more about it and seeing a sample app I made (with video) then head on over to freesourcing.org and have a look. If you have questions you can post them as comments here and I’ll do my best to answer them.