Developing a Better Home Page

We've moved. Please visit us at www.marketingformavens.com/blog.

Over the last few days, I've put a good deal of time into reconfiguring the home page. The previous design was very text heavy and the feedback I received revealed that it didn't clearly explain the services provided by Marketing for Mavens.

It's funny how you can be a web marketer for 10 years and still find yourself reverting to poor design practices. In this case, I'm far too close to the content then I'd prefer to be. I know how valuable Marketing for Mavens can be to a web marketer but when you've been so focused on developing the product for the last 6 months, what you consider to be a clear and concise explanation, turns out to be confusing to people who are learning about your services for the first time.

I still feel like the content needs to be revised further especially on the pages beyond the home page. I'll be updating it over the next several days and will continue to listen to the feedback we've been receiving and update the site accordingly.

Treat Your Web Visitors with Respect. Stop Herding Cattle.

We've moved. Please visit www.marketingformavens.com/blog.

One of the features of Marketing for Mavens is the ability to see how each visitor comes to your site and where they go. The real value is that it forces you to see your visitors as individuals instead of a crowd of people.

When you look at your typical web report, you see how all of your visitors interact with your site. You know that a majority of people visit your home page and that a certain percentage go to your product pages but you miss out on the details like how did this person get here, what were they looking for, and did they find it. The other problem is that any changes you make to your site based on these reports is designed to appeal to the masses. Web reports force us to treat our visitors as cattle that we can herd around. We try to find the path of least resistance that we can push them towards and then track the results through funnel analysis knowing that a certain number will drop out but if we can convert 10% to leads we'll be very happy.

This leads us to the niche that Marketing for Mavens fills. There's a very good reason to use all those web reports and you should continue to do so but you should also be looking at your individual visitors as well. Marketing for Mavens will assist you in treating each visitor, or as we like to call them citizen, with respect and open up a new way of communication that will transform how you interact with your potential customers. With this approach, you will understand what your citizens needs are and assist them in fulfilling these needs turning your citizens into customers more quickly and more efficiently then pushing them through a path that you already know loses 90% of your potential leads.

New Feature: Track Referrer and Search Words

A new feature has been added which allows you to see if your visitors found your site through Google or Yahoo and what keywords they used. This information is now listed in the citizen profile. For now, the code only looks for Google and Yahoo user but it will be expanded in the future to include other search engines and paid advertising campaigns.

Where is the integration between content management and web analytics applications?

We've moved. Please visit us at www.marketingformavens.com/blog.

One of the problems which Marketing for Mavens tries to solve is that most sites use some kind of content management system and a separate web analytics application and neither of them talk to one another.

Every day your content management system pushes out the same content to the same people and it doesn't know whether that person has visited your site in the past or what they were looking for. Instead, web marketers are left looking at reports on a monthly basis and then trying to configure the site content accordingly. This response is far too slow and you're reacting to the masses and not individual visitors.

Marketing for Mavens helps to solve this problem by tagging you're visitors based on the web pages they view. It then knows each visitors interests and can push the appropriate promotions and content to them in real time based on these interests. Now your site can be personalized to your visitors without them having to register for your site. This is important as you can now target your content and messages to only the visitors interested in seeing it. If you are interested in seeing how Marketing for Mavens can help you to manage your web content and promotions and deliver them to targeted visitors, please check our our short demo video and join or beta program.

Added Time Zone Preferences

Today, a new time zone option was added to the dashboard. In the past, all of the statistics were returned in UTC time. Now each user can select their time zone and have the statistics display in their local time.

Giving back to the web community

Today, I've been working on a little side project. This idea popped into my head during lunch and I feel compelled to act upon it. Over the years, I've received a lot of help from web community. Whether it's support for a particular product or learning a new programming language, I couldn't imagine having the success I've had without someone answering these questions or showing the steps necessary to solve various problems.

It is for this reason that I've decided to devote an hour of each day to answering one person's web marketing questions. The questions can be from a wide range of topics including coding, web design, development, SEO, paid advertising, database design. No questions is too dumb and I welcome questions from those who have no clue about the web but find it fascinating or need help getting started. I don't pretend to have all the answers but I can, more often than not, point you in the right direction.

Of course this is free and in return I want nothing other than for you try to pass the knowledge along or help others as best you can. This is my opportunity to pay forward all the help that people have given me in the past. If you're interested please fill out the form at www.marketingformavens.com/free_web_marketing_help.html.

Taking Twhirl for a Whirl

Sorry for the title but I couldn't help myself. I just started giving Twhirl a test drive. Here are some first impressions:

• I love that I can keep up with both Twitter and FriendFeed using the same application but I wish they were integrated into the same window
• There is something about the text that makes it tough to read. I tried changing fonts and colors but I'll have to experiment some more. It might be the line spacing
• I like the Growl like notifications
• Nice built-in search and shorten url features...no more heading off to tinyurl to post a tweet
  

I'm going to use this as my primary Twitter client for the next week or so and see if I get the urge to go back to Twitterrific.

Beta Now Open to Everyone

Today, we opened the beta to all new registrations. If you would like to participate in the beta, please register now and you can begin promoting targeted web content on your site in just a few minutes.

For those that choose to participate in the beta, please keep in mind:

Bug and Issue Tracking

As a member of the beta, it is your responsibility to make Marketing for Mavens aware of any issues or bugs you find while using our products. Please post these issues to our forum at www.marketingformavens.com/forums. When logging a bug, please post as much detail as possible including time of day, screenshots, browser version, and any other information that can help us narrow down the problem.

Support

If you need assistance with your account, please contact us at support@marketingformavens.com.

Additional Resources

• Videos - (http://www.marketingformavens.com/demo_content_management_web_analytics.html)
• Forums - (http://www.marketingformavens.com/forums)

Beta Agreement and Privacy

Web Site Visitors: Tag and Learn

One of the side benefits of using Marketing for Mavens is learning what topics (tags) your visitors are interested in and how they relate to other topics. For example, you can tag all of your web pages with keywords associated with your content, as each visitor navigates your site, a list of tags become associated with them. Through this relationship you begin get a different level of insight into how your individual pages relate to one another. Unfortunately, right now, most of this analysis must be done by hand. I'm trying to come up with a better way to show this relationship in a report which would remove a lot of complexity. Either way it give a unique view into your visitors and your site that I believe you'll find valuable.

Update: Limited Beta

The limited beta has been live for a week now and the first round of invites has gone out. We're keeping the number of invites to a minimum to ensure the best service possible for our beta group. Over the next few weeks, the number of invites will increase so if you would like to take part in the beta, please submit your email address at marketingformavens.com or use the form on the right.

A Huge Thank You to the Rails Community

On Monday, the Marketing for Mavens web application will be going live as a limited beta. The past 4 months have been filled with development work that couldn't have been accomplished without the help of the Ruby on Rails community. I'd like to thank everyone who has helped out along the way and those that have created some wonderful resources for speeding development time and finding the answers to various questions. In no particular order, these resources have been a life saver:

• Finding Hosting: http://www.railshostinginfo.com/
• Restful Authentication: here and here
  
• The best forum for finding and answering questions: Rails Forum
• Integrating tags into your application: acts_as_taggable_on_steroids
• How to videos: Railscasts
• Tutorials and Getting Started Guides: Akita on Rails, Rails on Edge, Hivelogic, and Loud Thinking
• Create, Read, Update, and Delete information from you database using simple table structure: ActiveScaffold
  

I'd also like to thank James at MarginLeft for his help with JSON integration in Rails.

And for those interested in all of the resources I've compiled for Ruby on Rails, they're available on my del.icio.us link.

Developing for IE6, will this nightmare ever end?

We've moved. Please visit us at www.marketingformavens.com/blog.

Over the last few days I've been troubleshooting some CSS styling issues with IE6. This is no different than much of the design and development work I've done on web sites and applications over the past several years but this time, I seriously considered not supporting IE6 any longer. I've become spoiled but the ever increasing amount of standards compliant web browsers that all render very close to each other with the exception of some minor tweaks. Then we have IE6.

Yesterday, as I ran into a very frustrating bug, it led me to wonder how many wasted hours do web developers spend per day trying to code for IE6? It has to be hundreds hours per day worldwide. This is a browser that is well past it's life span but for whatever reason continues to have 40% to 70% market share depending on your audience. Is IE6 good enough for that many people that they refuse to upgrade or do they just not know that at the very least IE7 is available to them? Either way, at some point, I think we need to move on with or without these people. For now, I'm going to continue to put fixes in place for IE6 but my patience for this browser is wearing thin. Hopefully sometime soon we can move on from the IE6 nightmare and for me, and I'm sure most web developers/designers, this can't happen soon enough.

Launch Update

Launch day is shaping up to be Monday, June 30th. We'll be opening this up as a limited beta to start before rolling it out to everyone who has registered. If you've registered for the beta, you will receive an email when your account is ready to be opened. More people will be added through the month of July so if you don't receive notification right away, you should be added shortly.

If you're haven't registered for the beta but would like to or if you would like to learn more about Marketing for Mavens, please visit www.marketingformavens.com.

Launch Day Approaching

It looks like we're on track to launch our new targeted web content service at the end of the month. If we can wrap everything up over the next few days then the limited beta will begin. More news coming soon.

Firefox 3.0: So far, I'm Impressed

Well the Firefox 3.0 launch time came and went but it now appears ready for download. I've been using 3.0 release candidates for the past few weeks without a problem so I took the plunge and downloaded the new release. So far, it's been a pleasure to use. Most of my add-ons were available and the speed difference on the Mac is great. I also really appreciate that the Firefox team took the time to make Firefox now feel like an official Mac application. Simple and beautiful. If you're interested in the latest version of Firefox, download it now, and be part of what Mozilla hopes will be a record breaking event.

Build Dynamic Web Content Without Costly Upgrades to Your Site

Building a site with dynamic content can greatly improve the user experience. It keeps your content fresh and it ensures that the right information is delivered to the right person when they want it.

When it comes to moving from a static to a dynamic web site there are several approaches that you can take...everything from an open source content management systems to very expensive enterprise systems to hand coding your own solution. Any of these solutions, depending on the size of your site, company, and budget, could take several months to a year to accomplish. I've gone down each of these paths in a corporate environment and can confirm that there are no short cuts.

As an alternative, I've been building Marketing for Mavens, a micro-content management system that allows you to add JavaScript code to your existing web pages (html, php, asp, etc.) giving you control over the parts or sections of a page where you want to display dynamic content.

The advantage to this is that Marketing for Mavens can assist you in the distribution of your content and promotions. It tracks your visitors similar to how any web analytics system collects visitor information. This information is then used to distribute your content based on the previous pages the person visited. In addition to this, anyone in your company can be setup with an account to update and control your dynamic content and web site promotions.

If your interested in trying out Marketing for Mavens on your site, please visit sign up for the beta coming at the end of the month.

New Videos Now Available: Build Custom Content & Determine Best Potentential Customers

I've created two new videos. The first is a new overview video showing how to setup a new account, create new promotions, and integrate them into your web site. This is very similar to the previous overview video but it has been updated to show the latest interface and coding changes.

The second video shows how you can use web forms to send visitor data to you Marketing for Mavens (MfM) account. This is important as MfM can help you determine your best potential customers. MfM scores and tags each visitor based on the pages they visit and the content they view. This not only helps you to market the most appropriate content to your visitors but also helps you determine each visitor's level of interest.

Watch the new videos.

If you have any questions regarding the new videos, please send me an email.

New Videos Coming: Overview Demo, Sales Lead Demo & New Content Distribution Demo

The plan for this evening is to record a new demo video. This will incorporate all the tweaks and updates that have been made since the previous demo was recorded. For those who watched the first demo, there won't be much new information but you will see that recent changes have simplified the setup process and reduced the amount of code that needs to be added to your site. The plan all along has been to make this as simple as possible to use and I really think we've delivered on this promise with these changes.

If I have time, I plan to record a short demo showing how you can use forms to populate visitor information in Marketing for Mavens. Most companies use forms to gather sales leads. Marketing for Mavens works off this same concept but it takes it one step further to help marketing to further qualify leads and send the top prospects on to the sales team.

Finally, I'd like to do a third demo which shows off two new features that have been added in the past couple of weeks. This demo will show off how you can setup promotions which change depending on how often someone has visited your site and how you can display unique promotions or content to individual visitors.

Running Multiple Versions of Firefox

Recently, I've been testing the latest version of Firefox 3. I had held off on the testing version 3 because it overwrites previous installations of Firefox. You would think that Mozilla would find a better solution so they have a larger install base for beta testing but maybe this is by design.

Well the other day I came across this nice little application for the Mac which lets you keep your default Firefox installation while also testing Firefox 3. It was writen by Dave Martorana and the full details can be found at dangerouslyawesome. If you have the need to test Firefox 3 before it comes out or want to see what's new with Firefox without the risk of losing everything, check out this application.

New Look!

I hope you enjoy the new look. I've always thought that the product pages should be blogs and I think over time you will see a convergence of social web apps with company web sites. I'm still finishing some of the design details. If something doesn't look right in your browser please let me know chris@marketingformavens.com.

Quick Update: Performance Improvements

This week I have been able to make several changes to the Rails and JavaScript code to gain some significant speed improvements when serving up promotions. This has resulted in eliminating some delays that were needed to ensure IE and Safari displayed the HTML code without returning JavaScript errors. I'm currently testing these changes on the Marketing for Mavens web site.

Web Marketing: Stop Spamming the Masses and Start Building Relationships

One of the problems with web marketing is that thousands of dollars are spent to bring in new visitors but only a small percentage of this is used to retain and nurture these visitors once they come to your sites.

One reason is the difficulty in building and targeting pinpoint messages, promotions, and campaigns to web visitors. Companies tend to focus all of their effort on getting the company message out to the public. The problem is "the public" is a very broad group so the content is watered down for consumption by the masses. This is not what most of your visitors are interested in.

Another reason is how difficult it can be to manage, maintain, and update content for individual web visitors. The people in the company who would best manage this content don't have the tools and resources to access the web site and track how well campaigns and promotions are doing. Instead, they must fill out a web request form to get added to the queue. On the other hand, the web team is busy creating new pages for a product launches, managing Google Adwords campaigns, or analyzing web site statistics. They have tools that assist them in managing all of these tasks but they don't have a tool for efficiently managing campaigns that are targeted to individuals.

A third reason is how easy it is to setup a Google Adwords campaign, show how many click-throughs your site is receiving, and stop there. You can get your ads out to the masses in just a few minutes. Then, every few weeks, you justify this spending because you can see the results in real time using the web interface or through nicely printed reports. This is great but it's only half the battle. Wouldn't it make more sense to take all of this great traffic you are getting from Google Adwords or search and continue to assist your visitors in finding what they want once they're on your site?

This is why I built Marketing for Mavens. It's a unique web application which puts the power of marketing to web visitors into the hands of those who are most capable of maintaining these campaigns. The web team can choose to keep control over the content management of the campaigns or give access to people in marketing programs or other groups within the company to handle this themselves. In addition, Marketing for Mavens tracks and tags each individual based on the pages they visit so now your company can ensure that your campaigns are matched up with right person at the right time. With Marketing for Mavens you know who your top visitors are and you can customize your messaging to them leading to quicker sales and improved visitor satisfaction.

If you are curious as to how this works please feel free to check out the demo. Marketing for Mavens is scheduled to launch a beta release in June so please sign up if you are interested in taking part.

Beta Coming in June

I've decided to push the beta release of Marketing for Mavens to June. The application is coming along nicely and could be ready at the end of May but I feel that taking a couple of extra weeks to add some additional features is going to be well worth the delay.

I've been using the application for the past month on some my personal sites and I'm quite impressed by how well it's working. One feature I've been testing is the ability to push the same content across multiple web sites. Using Marketing for Mavens, I can create a promotion that shows up on Blogger, MarketingforMavens.com, and almost any other site where some JavaScript code can be added to the bottom of a web page. This opens up all kinds of possibilities for content distribution using one simple tool.

As the weeks progress, I'll continue to fill you in on the latest new features and update you on the progress being made. It's very excited for me to see everything coming together and I look forward to sharing this application with you soon.

Quick Update: development finishing, design continueing, demo considering

Most of the major changes are out of the way. There are a few minor issues to wrap up over the next week and I need to focus more time on the design of the application. I've been spending a majority of the time making sure the application is solid but I don't want to neglect the usability and design.

I've also been thinking about creating another demo to follow up on the previous overview demonstration. This would be a quicker demo to show how any form on your site can be used to capture visitor information and link it a visitors history within Marketing for Mavens.

Get Better Sales Leads

Business Problem: Obtaining better sales leads

Cause: You receive limited information from your web site on what a person is interested in

Audience: Sales and Marketing

Solution:
One feature built into Marketing for Mavens is the ability to track a visitors history from the first time they come to your web site. As your web visitors provide more information to you through your web forms, it is matched up with their visitor history in the Marketing for Mavens application. So, instead of only knowing that Mr. Smith downloaded a data sheet, you know that Mr. Smith visited product page 'x', read article 'z', and came to your site 3 times before he downloaded the data sheet. Now, which set of information would be more valuable to your sales team? If you're in Marketing, which set of information would help you determine this persons level of interest in your product or service so you can further "nurture" this lead?

If you're interested in learning more, please feel free to view our new video demo or sign up to be part of our upcoming beta program.

Simplified Web Content Posting for Marketing Team

Business Problem: Updating and tracking promotions on corporate web site

Cause: Need for HTML experts to publish and manage corporate site promotions

Audience: Marketing Programs Team

Solution:
This is an issue I've faced many times as a web developer. Often, the marketing programs team needs to post updated promotions to the home page for events, webcasts, product news, etc. These updates are generally simple but would be better managed by the team running the programs. In this instance, a web developer isn't adding any value, and could potentially delay the roll-out of an important campaign.

This is one of the reasons why I've been developing Marketing for Mavens. My goal is to simplify this process and put the power into the hands of those who need to own and maintain the content. The application should be simple enough that people in programs marketing can update and test their web promotions and publish them live. Reporting is done in real time to see how well a promotion is running. If necessary, quick changes can be made and rolled out based on site analysis.

In this scenario, Marketing for Mavens, works as a micro content management system. It's designed to sit between your content management system and web analytics system to quickly deploy web promotions and respond to your web feedback in real time. It's a low cost way to solve a frustrating business problem.

If you're interested in learning more, please feel free to view our new video demo or sign up to be part of our upcoming beta program.

Quick Update

We've had a couple of bugs that have slowed down development over the past couple of weeks but they have been resolved. We're still targeting an end of month launch of the beta. If you're interested find out more, please check out our sneak peak demo. This 10 minute demo will give you an idea of how we're using our web content management system to distribute custom content to visitors.

Custom Web Content Distribution: Demo Now Available

After some delay, I've posted the demo to our web site. The demo takes you through the "getting started" process showing what it takes to open an account, setup page tracking, build tags, and analyze visitors to distribute custom web content. The full demo takes about 10 minutes. If you have any questions, please post your comments here or email me at chris@marketingformavens.com.

View the demo.

Coming Soon: Video Demo

Today, I recorded an overview demonstration of Marketing for Mavens showing how to edit a web page to display custom content based on how visitors interact with your web site. The demonstration goes through the account setup process and the getting started tutorial; the 5 steps to getting the application setup on your web site. It's a little rough around the edges but overall it came out pretty good. I'm going to do some editing to it and should have it up either later tonight or tomorrow.

Our Target Audience: Marketing Mavens

Often I'm asked who Marketing for Mavens' target audience is. Although there are many people in any size company that can benefit from this application, it is the marketing mavens, the people who thirsts for information and have a strong desire to use this information to connect with people, who have inspired us to build this product.

Most people use web analytics software to tell them what is going on with their site and a separate content management system or file system to deliver the content. What this application does is bridge the gap between these two systems. Marketing for Mavens only collects the information you need to make decisions on customizing content for your visitors. In turn, you use this information to create custom content and promotions and deliver it to each individual based on their past behavior on your web site. This ensure that the right content and promotions get the people who are most interested. Our focus is on providing an application that help you to deliver better results and a higher level of user satisfaction on your web site.

Screencast Software Recommendations Needed

I'm looking for recommendations for screencast software on the Mac. iShowU looks promising and I'm going to check it out but I was wondering if there are any other applications I should also try? I want to find something that is simple to use and flexible enough to edit and export to different formats after recording.

On a side note and related to this, I'm planning on recording the Marketing for Mavens demo on Tuesday so look for it later next week.

Coming Soon: Video Tutorial on Combing Web Analytics with Web Content Management

One of my goals for the next week or so is to put together a walk-through tutorial. This will show you how to setup a new account, develop custom content, and install a couple of lines of code to get everything up and running.

I also need to update the web site. The current site doesn't do justice for what this application is all about which is, taking advantage of the information you receive from how people interact with your web site and delivering custom content to them as they need it. For now, feel free to submit your email so you can be notified when important updates arrive including information on the limited beta going live in May.

Marketing for Mavens - Now running on our hosting server

Just a quick update to let you know that I have the application up and running at our hosting service. I'll be integrating it into marketingformavens.com so you can begin to see how it works from a "citizen" perspective. This should be ready in a few days. I'll keep you posted.

User Accounts Completed

I spent the better part of this week redesigning the user account system. It feels good to get this out of the way. You can now have multiple people accessing the same account. I still need to work out the final details on assigning roles. This should be resolved next week.

I also wanted to provide a sneak peak of the application. This screen shot is from the citizen profile page. The design still has a long way to go but all the pieces are coming together. A few features that we're added this week:

• Ability to link your account to your sites stylesheet so you can see what your promotions will look like before pushing them live to your web site.
• Added a quick start guide to walk you through the steps for adding code to your web site and creating new promotions. Usability is very important and I want to make sure new users don't sign-up and then wonder what to do next.
• Integrated TinyMCE into the promotion builder page to reduce the need to have in-depth knowledge of HTML.
  

Next week, I'll continue to work on the design and hopefully I can have the site live on the hosting server. I've had some issues with my hosting company which should now be resolved.

Also, if you're interested in getting on the mailing list please go to marketingformavens.com. You will only be notified when we have important news to share. You will not be spammed. Joining the list will also put you into the queue for the limited beta launching in May.

Quick Update

I decided on Friday to throw out the old user account system and start over. This is probably going to take me the rest of the week to complete. In the end, this will be a much better system which will allow you to have multiple people access the same account. You'll also be able to assign roles to each individual will allow access to different areas of the application.

This needed to be done at some point and it is much easier to address it now. The goal of Marketing for Mavens is to make it simple enough for non-html experts to update your web content. However, we recognize that this won't be the case in the beta release but there will still be a lot of valuable information you'll want to share. This can be done by assigning roles and limiting who can add content to the site.

Quick Update: Setting up Ruby on Rails

The plan for this evening is to have Ruby on Rails up and running so I can migrate everything from the local test environment over to the hosting company. If all goes well, the plan is to have Marketing for Mavens up and running in the wild next week. I'm really looking forward to fully testing this application in an environment where I can start to collect some real data.

There are still some issues that need to be addressed and some features to be added before the beta is launched. The some of these features are:

• Reporting: We're going to be collecting a lot of data which you'll find valuable to share with your colleagues. Of course, none of this is of any use to you unless there is some way to get it out of the database.
• Additional Tracking: There is almost an endless amount of information that we could track and store but you have other web analytics tools for this. We want to make sure we're only providing you with the data that you need to make quick business decisions and that we can use to distribute your content.
• Recording non-HTML Links: Right now, tracking is only occurring on page load. We need to add the ability to record clicks on PDF's, ZIP's, etc. These are very important assets that need to be tracked since you can gain more information about a person's needs based on data sheet download then you can from most web pages.
  

Development Ahead of Schedule

I'm very happy with how things have been coming together with the coding for Marketing for Mavens. I may even be a little ahead of my personal schedule but we'll see if that keeps up. Soon it will be moved out of the testing environment and I'll have it up and running on a site so you can get a "citizen" view of how the application works. I'm really looking forward to getting to this milestone as will give me a better perspective on how things are progressing.

Content Management Meets Web Analytics

Right now, our home page doesn't go into a lot of detail on the features provided by Marketing for Mavens, so I'd like to explain it in more detail. You can imagine Marketing for Mavens as the link between serving content and analyzing web traffic. Most companies do both but they tend to be used in a linear fashion and neither integrates well enough to make business decisions on-the-fly. Your typical setup looks something like this:

Content Management -> Web Site -> Web Analytics -> Analyze Data -> Make Content Changes

What Marketing for Mavens does is store promotions/content that you setup and track web analytics information. Then, based on how a person interacts with your web site, it distributes the most appropriate content or promotion to them. It looks more like this:

Marketing for Mavens <-> Web Site

As a person reads through your web content, we're learning more about this person and what they want. The close interaction between your web site and Marketing for Mavens ensures that you don't need to take the time to analyze the data before you can respond to the needs of your citizens (citizens = visitors; I prefer to use citizens as it gives a much better level of respect to the people who take the time to come to your site). Best of all, this is customized to each person meaning you no longer need to try to be all things to all people.

Some of the key features:

• Customize messages/promotions based on your site's visitor history.
• Analyze individual citizens so you can determine who is most interested in your products and services.
• Tag and assign points to your web site URL's to determine areas of interested and the level of interest.

Moving to Blogger

After starting at tumblr, I've decided to move to Blogger. I really love the simplicity of tumblr but I couldn't get past the inability for people to post comments. My goal is to build a community around Marketing for Mavens and comments are a great way to start to do that.

Coding

What amazes me most about coding, in this case Ruby on Rails, is how I can bang my head against a wall for hours trying to figure something out, only to take a break, come back, and figure it out right away. It’s unbelievable how clearing your head for an hour or so can make such a dramatic difference in how you approach a problem.

How do I find out more?

If you have any questions about Marketing for Mavens please feel free to contact me:

• Mobile: 978.234.7071
• Email: chris@marketingformavens.com
• Twitter: twitter.com/cwills
• Jabber: chris.marketingformavens
• Web Site: www.marketingformavens.com
  

Marketing for Mavens

Since February, I’ve been working on a new web application that allows marketers to easily customize web content for visitors based on how they interact with your web site. That’s a mouthful but basically it combines the usability of a content management system with the knowledge gathered by web analytics software to determine what visitors see on your site. The idea came about through my own frustrations and my guess is that I’m not the only one out that wishes it was easier to distribute custom content to only the people who want it.

Yesterday, I launched my new web site, marketingformavens.com. It’s a placeholder page for now but if you want to join the list for the limited beta, you should check it out.