The iPhone is on its way to replace every product with a service attached to it.

Could the iPhone be everything? Could the iPhone do everything? Could the iPhone have everything?

Imagine having access to army’s of cars through the iPhone, with Zipcar you do. Imagine a credit card terminal on every iPhone, of yeah, it is there already too. What about snail mail, yep, with Earth Class Mail, all your mail can be delivered to your iPhone. Do you need to buy a scanner, no, their is a business card scanner, document scanner and everything else. Hmmm, what if it could secure my home, yes this is there to linking your security system, lights and everything else to the iPhone. What about TV? Hulu and/or Slingbox have taken my TV mobile. Books, well there is iBook, Kindle and 100′s of other. Radio? Pandora and access to every digital radio channel is a nice touch. I always wanted one of those Conference Phones, yet iPhone is that too. So what is it not?

So here are some ideas for Steve Jobs for the next generation of iPhone, numbers 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9. If Apple needs help working through these, I am always open to work for just a few companies, Apple is one of them.

In the near future, I see a projector (like the Microvision Pico Projector), inserted into the end of the phone, lighting up the wall for a presentation or a movie while camping. I blow people away in presentation using my Projector attached to a Keynote on my iPhone. I see the iPhone becoming a wallet – cash or credit, anywhere or anytime. I see it being our identification or a smart card. A complete resource from insurance to medical history. How handy would this all be? Most of it is here already. I see healthcare applications from life saving health scanners and attachments that bring medical diagnostics and devices together. I see the iPhone replacing all my keys, so with my phone I can access my car, home, office, vacation cottage, hotel room. Imagine never checking in or out of a hotel? Just iPhone it.

Soon the iPhone will be a complete life recorder, videoing and recording every action. No more arguments on what was said, just playback. I see services like iPhone Black (a mockery of AMEX Black) creating high level concierge and access to online Personal Assistants available to the masses. Everything is a click away. Amazon would love it. Google loves it already. Apple does too, since they are now the largest technology company in the world. With a huge energy dilemma, the iPhone could use some alternative energy sources with kinetic and solar powered batteries. This could be huge as it replaces almost every electronics device in a house, except the kitchen appliances. I do not see it as a toaster in the future, yet this is where I bump into my creativity with what the potentially the iPhone could do. Already there are laser keyboards and speech applications that advance the capabilities far beyond the best technologist dreams just 5 years ago, yet the amount of applications we will see in the future, will continue to advance life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness in my mind. I can now, be anywhere in the world, with access to everything in my world. I was on a beach in remote part of the Philippines transferring bank funds, playing video games and emailing clients.

In the future, I can see total inventory management with rfid tags and iPhone scanning everything we own and categorizing everything in our life. Ordering new stuff when things wear down and complete management of everything we could think of. I could imagine an application that records all the mileage, we walk, drive, run, commute, ride a bike and even calculate our carbon output. Transferring dollars to become carbon neutral. Oh what a better world we have the potential to create. The further I think about the iPhone platform the more I am part of the revolutionary technology that is being created to help life become simpler and more stress-free. I can see my iPhone auto-suggesting services and applications based on my habits and goals that it records and on the semantics I speak or even think. I can imagine the iPhone improving my golf swing as much as it will some day manage every piece of maintenance in my life. As I can visualize it suggesting haircuts based on the time I had my last one to changing my air filter from an air quality analysis, or let me know it is time to get an oil change or suggest I get gas the night before an early morning meeting.

As you can see, I am an optimist. As of now, I can do just about anything for my company from my iPhone and the future has unlimited possibilities as we further use this mobile platform and others to help solve simple problems and the more complex. So sit back relax and let your iPhone think for you. Everything is coming together, right now.

Companies big and small seek to find out what their customers are thinking. Yet, in a recent HBR article called Stop trying to delight your customer. It measure three different metrics and shares how their customer service metrics is better. It jarred me into thinking about it and writing this post.

Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) is a pretty standard metric that measure customers level of overall satisfaction, which may be an inaccurate gauge depending on the emotions and logic at the time of the survey of an experience prior to they survey. Then, there is the Net Promoter score which I am a big fan of its simplicity and accuracy in sharing brand reputation and perception. Finally, this group of Dixon, Freeman and Toman enlighten me by broadening my thoughts on what customer service is and at the same time align with everything I believe. Hence, the whole contention was that the amount of effort a customer has to put into a relationship with a company or a product is the far better indicator of the level of satisfaction and the level of promoting.

Here are the key questions:

CSAT

On a scale of 1 to 5 where 1 represents “Extremely dissatisfied” and 5 represents “Extremely Satisfied,” how would you rate your level of overall satisfaction with Company ABC, Inc as a supplier?

Net Promoter

On a scale of 1 to 10, Promoters (9-10 rating), Passives (7-8 rating), and Detractors (0-6 rating), “How likely is it that you would recommend our company to a friend or colleague?”

Customer Effort Score
On a scale of 1 to 5 where 1 represents “very low effort” and 5 represents “very high effort”, how much effort did you personally have to put fourth to handle your request?

So in the future look for Buzz Mouth to work on the ease of doing business with us. How frictionless can we make every touch-point? Hmmm… They may be on to something, this is a good indicator of how people will talk about a company or product, the buzz and word of mouth they will give a company.

Key take-away: Make it effortless to work with you. No forms. No meetings. No crap. Just ease of doing business, using your product. Design effortless.

Good luck! Buzz Mouth is reinventing everything to make it easy. Test us, call us. We’ll send you a proposal with an electronic signature, no long contracts and a complete training program to support your growth in social media, email and search engine optimization.

7 Keys to Successful Lead Nurturing

1. Lead nurturing starts with research

2. Develop a content map

3. Create missing content

4. Walk the buyer on a journey from Problem to Solution.

5. Use Catch Factors® (credit: Ardath Albee of MarketingInteractions) to get their attention.

6. Space out your communication

7. Launch your program, measure the results and refine your program.

• Sales lead expert, Mac McIntosh, found that six months after inquiring, 23% of the surveyed subjects had bought the product or service, from the promoter or from a competitor. An additional 67% indicated that they still intended to buy but they were not ready.
• According to Forrester Research, companies that excel at lead nurturing are able to generate 50% more sales-ready leads at 33% lower cost per lead.
• According to CSO Insights, companies that excel at lead nurturing have 9% more sales reps make quota, and enjoy a 10% shorter ramp up time for new reps.
• According to DemandGen Report, nurtured leads produce, on average, a 20 percent increase in sales opportunities versus non-nurtured leads.

Today’s marketers must synchronize their marketing throughout the buying process, providing potential buyers with high quality content that is contextually relevant.  As Inside the Mind of the B2B Buyer showed, buyers look for content throughout the buying cycle.

• Urgency (Why do they need it?)
• Impact (What will result?)
• Effort (How hard will it be?)
• Reputation (Can I trust you?) and
• Intent (Why should I buy from you?)

include a Call to Action (What you want them to do.) and a Cliff Hanger® (Ardath Albee)– think of the TV show 24 and coming attractions. That’s a cliff hanger. You want to grab their interest and keep it.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Tips for WordPress

By Michael Pollock in WordPress

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1. Write keyword rich post titles – it almost goes without saying, but the post title is the most important part of the blog post for many reasons. From your reader’s perspective, a descriptive and compelling title helps them decide if your post is worth reading or not. From an SEO perspective, think about the keywords or phrases people might type into a search box to find your post 2 months from now, and use those words or phrases in your post title. For maximum benefit, try to avoid titles that are cute, clever or cryptic.

2. Make your post titles live links – many of the WP themes already do this, but if yours doesn’t, you can add the necessary code pretty easily. In your Main Index Template and Page Template, find the code for the post tiltle. It’ll probably look like this:

<h2><?php the_title(); ?></h2>

To link your post titles, you’ll want to replace that code with the following (be sure to leave out the “#” symbols):

<h2><a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent Link to <?php the_title(); ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a></h2>

3. Optimize your permalinks – the default WP 2.0 installation displays permalinks this way: http://www.savvysolo.com/?p-123. A more search-engine friendly permalink includes the post title in the link, like this: http://www.savvysolo.com/2006/01/16/keyword-rich-post-title/. This is a simple change to make. In your WP admin panel, click on the “Options” tab, then the “Permalinks” sub-tab, and choose the option just below the “Default” permalink option. See the WordPress Codex for more on permailinks.

4. Optimize your page titles – According to most SEO experts, the page title tag is one of the most important tags on your page. In most WP themes, you’ll find the page title tag in the Header Template, and the default version ususally looks like this:

<title><?php bloginfo('name'); ?><?php wp_title(); ?></title>

The best tweak I’ve seen to optimize this tag comes from Stephen Spencer, who suggests using the following code for page title tag (omit the “#”):

<title><?php if (is_home()) { print "whatever title I want to have on my blog home page."; } else { wp_title(' '); print " : "; bloginfo('name'); } ?></title>

This tweak does a couple different things. First, it allows you to use a more descriptive, keyword-rich title for your blog’s main page. And second, for the individual post pages, it will use the title of your post as the page title, which is another reason to follow the advice I mentioned in #1 above.

5. Use the related posts plugin – Alex Malov’s Related Entries plugin is a neat little addition to any WP blog. Not only does it enhance your blog’s usability, but it also helps create a dense link structure throughout your site, which makes it easier for the search engine spiders to find and index older blog posts.

6. Use the Google sitemap plugin – According to Google:

“Google Sitemaps is an easy way for you to submit all your URLs to the Google index and get detailed reports about the visibility of your pages on Google.”

WordPress user Arne Brachold has made the sitemap creation and submission process fairly simple with his Google Sitemap plugin, which was recently updated for WP 2.0. This plugin will create a sitemap for you and submit it to Google.

Additionally, Elliot Kosmicki offers a script that will convert your Google sitemap into a Yahoo compliant sitemap that you can submit to Yahoo.

7. Add meta keyword tags and Technorati tags to your posts automatically – although it’s questionable whether or not meta keywords are still valuable when it comes to SEO, ultimately, they can’t hurt. As far as Technorati tags, they have little impact on SEO, but they can help increase your traffic directly from Technorati, so it’s a good idea to use them.Rick Boakes created the Autometa plugin that will add both tags to your posts automatically.

Another simple and effective Technorati tag generator I’ve used is Broobles’ Simple Tags plugin.

8. Validate your code – Use the W3C Markup Validation Service to ensure the code behind your pages is clean and valid. If you find your pages have errors in the code, hire or make friends with a savvy web developer to help you clean it up. See Google’s Information for Webmasters for more info on creating a technically valid site.

Posted by Justin Premick

Think you know the best day and time to send your email newsletter?

Ever wonder if your fellow email marketers are all sending at the same time you do?

Convinced your open rate is too low (or amazingly high)?

Some recent statistics pulled from all AWeber users may help you answer these questions:

What Kind of Open Rates Are People Getting?

If you’re sending HTML emails, you probably use your open rate to help gauge your success.

Even though it’s not a perfect measure of whether people are actually opening and reading your emails, it’s useful as a relative measure:

If it goes up over a short period of time, more people are probably reading

If it falls over a short period of time, it’s almost certain fewer people are reading.

Plus, all other things being equal, it can give you some motivation (if your open rates are lower than other senders’) or satisfaction (if your rates are higher).

So, here goes…

When Is/Was The Best Day To Send?

You’ll often hear (at least, I often hear) that Tuesday is the optimal day to send, because on Monday people are catching up from the weekend, and that on Tuesday morning you’ll have their undivided attention before they jump into their work for the upcoming week.

Do the numbers back up that theory? Let’s see.

The breakdown of open rates by day of the week:

Last month, Tuesday was actually the second-worst day to send, at least if you’re measuring by open rates.

(While we’re breaking assumptions, I should point out this, too: the hour of the day that got the best open rate was not 8-9AM, or 9-10AM, but in fact 2-3PM Eastern Time — email newsletters sent during that hour last month enjoyed a 19.1% open rate.)

Does This Mean I Should Switch My Campaigns To Thursdays?

In a word: No.

In both March and February, Thursday newsletters got the 3rd-worst opens vs. the rest of the week.

I hesitated a little to publish these stats, because I’m concerned that people might flock to sending their newsletters at the day or time that happened to get the best results lately.

Please, don’t drastically change your sending times/days just because you see that the average last month, or any month, happened to be higher on a different day or time.

Yes, you might eventually be able to shift your sending schedule, or split test some broadcasts, but if you up and move everything, you may throw off subscribers who are used to hearing from you at the usual time.

“It’s So Busy, Nobody Goes There Anymore”

To get at the other reason for not shifting your sending based on these stats, let’s paraphrase Yogi Berra (see above).

If everyone switches their sending schedule to send on say, Thursday, then recipients will start getting a ton of email that day, and start paying less attention to each individual email.

One possible reason for Thursday’s success last month may be that it wasn’t as popular as say, Tuesday or Wednesday for sending email:

Those higher-volume days mean more emails in readers’ inboxes, which might contribute to reduced open rates. Following that reasoning, some people may look at the low weekend volume (more email newsletters were sent on Tuesdays than on Saturdays and Sundays combined) and see an opportunity to get their audiences’ undivided attention.

My main point in showing these is to point out that our assumptions about what works are often quite wrong, and that you ultimately have to test for yourself to see what best suits your audience.

Some Inspiration… And Some Help

Are you getting better open rates than this?

If so, GREAT! Give yourself a pat on the back…

…but don’t get complacent. Open rates aren’t the be-all, end-all of email metrics. They don’t guarantee that people are reading your emails, only that they have images turned on and that they probably saw your email for at least a moment.

Plus, there’s always room for improvement, right?

Some ideas that can help you raise your open rates:

Ask people to add you to their address books. Some email programs will display images from senders who are in the recipient’s contact list.

If you are putting pictures in your emails, use the ALT text for those images to pique readers’ interest in what the picture is, so that they enable images. Or, just directly ask readers to turn on images!

Add a picture of yourself to your emails, near/next to your signature. People like seeing your smiling face, and if they see it in one of your emails, they may be more likely to turn on images to see it again later.

Posted by Tom Kulzer (AWeber CEO)

Ensuring requested opt-in email is delivered to subscriber inboxes is an increasingly difficult battle in the age of spam filtering. Open and click thru response rates can be dramatically affected by as much as 20-30% due to incorrect spam filter classification.

Permission

Confirming that the people who ask for your information have actually requested to be on your list is the number one step in the battle for deliverability. You should be using a process called confirmed opt-in or verified opt-in to send a unique link to the attempted subscriber when they request information. Before adding the person to your list they must click that unique link verifying that they are indeed the same person that owns the email address and requested to subscribe.

Subscriber Addresses

When requesting website visitors to opt-in ask for their “real” or “primary” email address instead of a free email address like Yahoo or Hotmail. Free emails tend to be throw away accounts and typically have a shorter lifetime than a primary ISP address.

List Maintenance

Always promptly remove undeliverable addresses that bounce when sending email to them. An address that bounces with a permanent error 2-3 times in a 30 day period should be removed from the list. ISP’s track what percentage of your newsletters bounce and will block them if you attempt to continually deliver messages to closed subscriber mailboxes.

Message Format

Usage of HTML messages to allow for text formatting, multiple columns, images, and brand recognition is growing in popularity and is widely supported by most email client software. Most spam is also HTML formatted and thus differentiating between requested email and spam HTML messages can be difficult. A 2004 study by AWeber .com shows that plain text messages are undeliverable 1.15% of the time and HTML only messages were undeliverable 2.3%. If sending HTML it is important to always send a plain text alternative message, also called text/HTML multi-part mime format.

Content

Many ISP’s filter based on the content that appears within the message text.

Website URL:Research potential newsletter advertisers before allowing them to place ads in your newsletter issues. If they have used their website URL to send spam, just having their URL appear in your newsletter could cause the entire message to be filtered.

Words/phrases:

Choose your language carefully when crafting messages. Avoid hot button topics often found in spam such as medication, mortgages, making money, and pornography. If you do need to use words that might be filtered, don’t attempt to obfuscate words with extra characters or odd spelling, you’ll just make your messages appear more spam like.

Images:

Avoid creating messages that are entirely images. Use images sparingly, if at all. Commonly used open rate tracking technology uses images to calculate opens. You may choose to disable open rate tracking to avoid being filtered based on image content.

Attachments:

With viruses running rampant and spreading thru the usage of malicious email attachments many users are wary of attached documents. It’s often better to link to files via a website URL to reduce recipient fear of attachments and reduce the overall message size.

CAN-SPAM Compliance

The January 2004 Federal CAN-SPAM law introduced a number of rules regarding the delivery of email. It’s important you have your legal counsel review your practices and ensure you are in compliance. The two most important rules include having a valid postal mail address listed in all commercial messages and a working unsubscribe link that is promptly honored to remove the subscriber from future messages.

Reputation

Reputation services are often used by large ISP’s as a way to vet email senders regarding their email practices and policies. Businesses listed with these services are then given less stringent filtering or no filtering at all. Several reputation services are:

• http://www.isipp.com/iadb.php
• http://www.bondedsender.com
• http://www.habeas.com

Relationships & Whitelisting

Contact with major ISP’s and email providers is essential in letting them know about your requested subscriber email. Many large providers such as AOL and Yahoo have specific whitelisting programs and postmaster website areas to ensure your email is delivered as long as you meet their policies and procedures in handling your opt-in list.

Email deliverability is about ensuring requested opt-in email is delivered to the intended recipient. While no single tip will enable you to get 100% of your email delivered each one utilized as a group can go a long way to reaching that goal.

To learn more, sign up for a free trial at www.buzzmouth.com/email.

Posted by Sean Cohen

Confirmed opt-in as defined by SpamHaus, who is one of the most respected anti spam organizations in the world:

Known as “COI” in the legitimate bulk email industry, also known as “Confirmed Opt-in”, “Verified Opt-in” or sometimes “Double Opt-in”.

With Closed-Loop Opt-in the Recipient has verifiably confirmed permission for the address to be included on the specific mailing list, by confirming (responding to) the list subscription request verification. This is the standard practice for all responsible Internet mailing lists, it ensures users are properly subscribed, from a working address, and with the address owner’s consent.

In the event of “spam” accusation:

The Bulk Email Sender is fully and legally protected because the reply to the Subscription Confirmation Request received back from the recipient proves that the recipient did in fact opt-in and grant verifiable consent for the mailings.

Source:Spamhaus Website

Numerous myths have circulated regarding confirmed opt-in and its effects. There are many misconceptions out there, and we’d like to help clear those up.

Myth 1: My List Size Will Decrease Because Of Confirmed Opt-In.

Some addresses entered into your form will not confirm — that much is true. The percentage of addresses that don’t confirm depends on many factors, including the quality of your traffic and how effective your thank-you page, confirmation message and incentive for confirming are.

Percentages aside, there are compelling reasons that having fewer addresses on your list is a good thing.

Sometimes Less is Better

I know. You may be asking, “How can a decreased list size be a good thing?” Well, let’s consider:

5-20% of all web form submissions are undeliverable right off the bat.

This means that of your total list size you can cut that by 5-20% because these email addresses are simply dead. Remember these are not temporary undeliverable but permanent dead addresses.

Now, add on the bogus and malicious sign ups that undoubtedly will happen. For example, someone comes to your website and decides to put in bob@aol.com. Well, bob@aol.com was once a real email address and because you were not using confirmed opt-in you are now classified as an unintentional spammer.

A recent study by MarketingSherpa and KnowledgeStorm found that only 68% of users always enter a valid email address.So, nearly a third of respondents knowingly enter bogus email addresses.

- Source

ISPs do not differentiate between unintentional spammers or actual spammers. The potential for you to be blocked or even worse, blacklisted, remains the same.

Myth 2: My Mailing List Is Different! I Don’t Need Confirmed Opt-In.

Let’s be clear, confirmed opt-in is for all businesses, plain and simple. Anyone collecting subscribers and in turn sending email needs to confirm that those people intended to sign up to your mailing list and want to receive your email.

In this age of email regulations and massive volumes of spam email, deliverability can be an issue. Why increase your chances of not getting delivered by putting yourself at risk.

Myth 3: No One Else Uses Confirmed Opt-In. Why Should I?

This is simply not accurate. Our own campaigns here at AWeber use confirmed opt-in for all email marketing activities. When someone signs up for a Test Drive of AWeber, they must confirm.

After setting up an account, if they want to receive our customer training email course, they must confirm. The same goes for our affiliates and their email training. Even when someone subscribes to our blog, they must confirm.

Ok, but AWeber must practice what they preach, who else?

If you want to sign up for the mailing lists of these organizations you will need to first confirm:

CNN	Microsoft
Oprah, CNet	bellagio.com
IRS.gov	weather.com
ign.com	maxim.com
tgifridays.com	olivegarden.com
pbs.org	visitpa.com
Whitehouse.gov

The list goes on and on…

Myth 4: Subscribers In My Market Don’t Know How To Confirm.

The simple solution is to tell them. The first page after someone fills in an opt-in form, commonly called a “thank you page” should tell the visitor exactly what to do next. Often this is done most effectively with a picture showing visitors what the confirmation email will look like.

An excellent example is our test drive sign up video on the thank you page showing visitors what to do.

Honestly, if they can’t click a link then you probably should be marketing your business offline. If someone can find your website online I guarantee they can click a link.

Myth 5: My Sales Will Decrease Because Of Confirmed Opt-In.

Have you tested this assumption? The answer is always, “No, but I just assume” or “No, my colleague told me it would hurt sales”.

It’s best not to assume anything, but rather to seek out your own answers by testing and observing your own campaigns. We have found from our own testing that while the raw number of email addresses on our list declined when we switched to confirmed opt-in, sales did not.

This means that the people who did confirm were the ones that truly wanted the information that they had to offer and the ones that didn’t were not left to bloat the mailing list.

Grow Your Business Without Risk

Will your results be exactly the same as AWeber or even anyone else? This can only be determined by proper testing and measuring.

Use confirmed opt-in as an opportunity to make sure that your lists are 100% clean and that you know without a doubt that 100% of the people receiving your mail have specifically requested it themselves.

Spend your time and energy building your business with subscribers who want to hear from you rather than dealing with issues created by people who don’t want to hear from you.