So you have a mailing list sign up form set up on your website, but are you getting enough users to notice it and willingly give you their email addresses?
A very good way of collecting user’s email addresses is to offer them something in return for signing up to your mailing list. This popular strategy is widely used across many sites on the web.
In this tutorial, I am going to show you a way of setting up your mailing list created using MailShoot to automatically deliver the free item when the user confirms their subscription.
This tutorial will assume you already have your mailing list set up. If you do not have your mailing list set up, or you are new to MailShoot and want to learn how to do everything from start to finish, visit this page to view our other training tutorials.
The first thing you will need is to have your free gift handy. Since we are dealing with the internet and computers, we will need to have our gift be in digital form. For my example, the gift I am offering is this PDF that I have here on my desktop.
Now, I will open up my web browser to ge.tt which is a website that allows users to upload files to share with others. All I will do is drag and drop my PDF onto the screen here. This might be different depending on which web browser you are using.
When the upload has completed, we will be given a link to access the item that was just uploaded. What you will need to do is now copy that URL.
Now, in MailShoot, open up your mailing list, or click on the Subscribe Page button. Then select the Messages tab. On this page, here is where you will paste the link that we just copied. You can write a message next to the link to let the user know that this link is where they will find the free gift that was promised. When you are done, click the Publish button.
Now when users sign up to your mailing list, and then confirm the subscription, they will see this Welcome message and will be able to download your free gift using that link.
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This video tutorial is going to show you the proper way to load an iWeb site in WebCrusher. This tutorial can be used with any version of iWeb.
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
This tutorial is going to show you how you can use WebCrusher with any version of iWeb.
The first thing you need to do is export your website from iWeb to a local folder on your hard drive.
If you are using the latest version of iWeb, which is iWeb 09, or iWeb 3 then you will publish your website by clicking on your site name in the top left corner, which will bring up the publish page. Then select Local Folder from the drop down menu.
Choose the location on your hard drive to publish your website to. For simplicity, I like to choose the Desktop. This also ensures that my URL will be a short URL and not a long URL.
Next, click on File in the menu bar, and select Publish Entire Site.
If you are using an older version of iWeb, then you will just click on File in the menu bar and select the option that says Publish to a Folder. You will also need to select the location on your hard drive where you want to publish to. Then you will need to enter your website’s URL and click choose.
Next, locate the folder that you just published from iWeb, and drag and drop it onto the WebCrusher window. Click the Go button, and let WebCrusher optimize your site.
One of our most popular video tutorials is shortening your iWeb URL. In this tutorial, you’re going to learn how to shorten your iWeb URL, but also learn how to get rid of the home page site redirect. For an illustration of this, watch the video below. Don’t forget to subscribe to our YouTube channel to never miss out on an important video.
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
In this video tutorial, I am going to show you how you can make your iWeb URL not forward to the site name and first page name.
To illustrate what I mean, here is what a typical iWeb URL looks like after typing in the domain name. Notice how ragesw.net turns into ragesw.net/jeremys_golf_shop/clubs.html
Where do each of these part of this URL come from? This part of the URL, the domain name, is the obvious one, as this is what the user selects and purchases when registering a domain. This second part is the Site Name, and it comes from this section of the iWeb publish page. You will also notice it right above the pages in the column on the left. This part of the domain, is the page name. It comes from the name you give to your page in the menu on the left hand side.
So to just give you a bit of background on the way all of this works, whenever you publish an iWeb site, you will see three things right away. The assets file, the site folder, which will have your site name and contain all of your website’s files, and an index.html file. When these items get published to your server, and you subsequently type in your domain name in your web browser, your server will default to the index.html file, which then has a line of code instructing the browser to forward to the first page of your website. That first page of your website is located within the other folder which is labeled with your site name.
Now that we know how all of it works, let’s change it so that our URLs are shorter, and the browser doesn’t forward when we type our domain name into a web browser. In other words, we’re going to change it so that when you type in your domain name in your web browser, all you will see is the domain. Then, when you click to go to a subsequent page on the site, you will only see the domain and the page name. This is the normal way the most websites operate.
I want to quickly mention that doing this will change the structure of your URL, so if your site ranks in search engines and is giving you traffic, then changing this might hurt those rankings.
The first thing we’re going to do is change the name of the first page of our website to index. Make sure you type it in just like I have done. You will notice how I used only lower case letters, and there are no extra characters or spaces. This is an extremely important step, so make sure you have followed the instructions as I just outlined.
There is one other drawback to this. When we change the page name to index, it will show up in our navigation menus. If you’ve watch some of our other tutorials, you will remember how I recommend users to disable the navigation menu that iWeb makes, and create your own. Once again, I will recommend doing this, but if you don’t want to, just make sure you at least take this main page out of the navigation menu by clicking on the Inspector button, clicking on the Page tab, and then un-tick the Include Page In Navigation Menu option. If you want your home page to still have a link in your menu bar, you can add it via a text link, or via an image linked to the homepage. This part is entirely up to you, but I recommend removing the word index from your navigation menu as it might confuse many of your visitors.
Our next step is to publish the site to a local folder on our hard drive. To make things as easy as possible, let’s publish the site directly to our desktops. When I say directly to the desktop, I don’t mean in a folder on the desktop, but rather directly on the desktop.
When we do this, we’re going to see those three items that I mentioned earlier; the assets file, the site folder, and the index.html file.
All we are going to do, is publish just the contents of the site folder. You can do this by dragging and dropping all of these files into your favourite FTP client.
I will show you how to do this using iWeb SEO Tool since I know a lot of users’ next step would be to load their site in iWeb SEO Tool.
So all I will do is drag and drop this folder onto iWeb SEO Tool’s local sites column. Now you can optimize your site for search engines, or press the Re-Apply Saved Tags button to get your old tags back, and publish your website.
When you are done, type your domain name into your web browser, and you will notice that the URL does not change. It will only change when you click on a link to be taken to a different page on your site.
If you are having problems making this work correctly, the first thing I want you to do is make sure that you have correctly typed in the first page of your site as index. If that was not done correctly then this will not work. Also, unless you publish the site folder contents correctly, this method will not work.
Before assuming that you did it incorrectly, try restarting your computer, and checking again. You can also check the website on your phone to see if it works there. Sometimes it can take several minutes to several hours for some users to see the changes. If you are still having trouble, please send us an email.
SEIntelligence’s user base consists of many RapidWeaver users. While making SEIntelligence’s recommended changes within SEIntelligence is always an option, we recommend RapidWeaver users to make the changes within the RapidWeaver application.
The reason for this is because over time, as you update your website, you will be able to publish your site straight from RapidWeaver, rather than add an extra step of re-loading your site in SEIntelligence, and then publishing from SEIntelligence.
You will still use SEIntelligence to analyze your website and learn how to make it more search engine efficient, but the changes will be made in RapidWeaver. The video below illustrates the easy process to accomplish this task. Stay tuned for Part 2 of this tutorial, which will cover the Site Settings section of SEIntelligence, and how to modify those for a RapidWeaver built website.
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
If you are a RapidWeaver user, here is how to most efficiently use SEIntelligence on your website.
The first thing you need to do, is make sure the pages on your site have keywords listed in the meta keywords section. To do this, select the page on the left hand side, and then click on the Page Info page. Then click on the Header tab. Next, click the Plus button for the Meta tags box. Under the Name category, type in keywords. Under the Content category, type in the key-terms that you want to be associated with this particular page. Key-terms, can be as many words in length as you want. Just remember to separate each of the key-terms with commas. Repeat this process for the rest of the pages on your site.
Your next step is to export your website from RapidWeaver to a location on your hard drive. For simplicity, I like to export the website directly to my desktop, so I suggest you do the same.
When the site has been exported is on your hard drive, launch SEIntelligence and choose the first option which is to optimize website for search engines.
Select the first option which says Open local website folder. Type in your website’s domain without http or www, and then select the Choose button. Highlight your website folder and click Open. Then click on the Next button.
Your website will now load in SEIntelligence. Now, we’ll perform the competitive analysis so that we can compare our website’s to the website’s we compete with. We’ll do this one page at a time, so click on one of your pages in the left hand side. You should notice your keywords appear in the keywords column.
Next, click on the Get Competitors button. When the search is complete, you will see the results in this section here.
Just below these results, you will see the recommendations and suggestions for your website. SEIntelligence does have the ability for users to make these changes right from within the application, however, for a RapidWeaver use, what we suggest is to read over the suggestions, and then make the changes to your site in RapidWeaver itself. If you are not sure how or where to make these changes in RapidWeaver, make sure to check out our free SEO For RapidWeaver video course. In that video course, you will find where to make all of these changes. So for example, if you wanted to know how to change your title tags, you would click on this video called “Title tags: the most important optimization technique”
When you are all done making your changes to your site in RapidWeaver, what you can then do is once again, export your website from RapidWeaver to that very same location as when you first exported the site.
Now you can re-launch SEIntelligence, and select your website from the Existing Projects column to load the newly exported site.
Now, once again, click on the page name, and then select Get Competitors. Once again, search for your competitors. When the search is complete, read over the recommendations at the bottom to ensure that you have made that changes correctly. If your changes have been made correctly, you will see messages with happy faces beside them. Repeat this process until you are satisfied with your website’s optimizations.
We are currently running a contest on our Facebook page. We are asking our users to post a comment about what they like best about our software. One lucky commenter will receive our SEO Bundle, a $299.95 value, absolutely free.
If you have yet to Like us on Facebook, do so now, and tell us your story! Entries must be submitted by Friday Novemeber 16.
In this video, I’m going to show you how to add a Pinterest Pint It button to your iWeb site. If you are not familiar with Pinterest, please see our video tutorial outlining what Pinterest is and how to use it.
To add a Pinterest ‘Pin It’ button to your website in iWeb, visit your website and locate the image that you want to have the Pin It button for. Locate the URL of the image. You can usually find this by doing a secondary click on the image and then selecting Copy Image Address.
Open up a new tab in your web browser and visit pinterest.com/about/goodies. Scroll down a bit until you see Pin It Buttons for Web Sites.
Paste the URL that you just copied into the second text box. Right above the text box it should read URL of the image to pin. Now just quickly go back to your site, and copy the URL of the page that contains that image. Then paste that URL in the first text box which reads URL of the page to pin. You can paste the page’s URL first, and then the image’s URL, it doesn’t matter, but they must go into their respective boxes. Before we do anything else, I want you to take a look at the drop down menu next to Pin Count. You have three options to choose from here, so select the option you like best.
Next, you can put in a description of what is being pinned if you’d like. You will notice that some code has appeared at the bottom after we pasted our second URL. Highlight the code in the first box, just like I am doing, and copy it.
Now open your site in iWeb to the page that contains the same image that you are pinning. Drag and HTML Snippet onto the page, and paste the code. You should notice a box appear, but that box should be empty. Expand this box a bit so that the Pin It button is a bit larger.
If you selected one of the options for showing the pin count, head back to the Pinterest page we were just on, and copy the code located in the second box. Now go back to iWeb, and in that very same HTML Snippet we pasted the Pin It button in, paste this code at the very end. If you missed what I just did, just rewind and watch this step again.
You can add as many Pin It buttons to your site as you want. Just repeat the exact same process we just did. You will not be able to see the Pin It button visible in iWeb, but once you publish the site, you will be able to see it when you visit your page online.
We’ve just updated SEIntelligence to version 2.7 and added a bunch of great new additions. We updated the user interface an also added support for retina Macs.
In addition, SEIntelligence can now get more back links for your website and your competitors. It also supports HTML 5 now.
SEIntelligence is the most powerful, native SEO software for Mac OS X. It uses statistical analysis to compare your website to the current top ranking websites in all major search engines. It will tell you exactly what you need to change on your site to rank higher and get more website visitors.
In addition to comparing your website to your top competitors, it also includes a powerful back link checker. It can find every websites linking to both your site and your competitors. It gets important details about these backlinks such as Google PageRank, Facebook Likes, Google+ Likes, and much more.
SEIntelligence works great with any website builder including; iWeb, RapidWeaver, Sandvox, Flux, Dreamweaver and even works with content management systems like WordPress, Drupal, Joomla and more.
Pinterest is a site that showcases popular images posted by users. Images are linked back to the original site that they were posted from. This can be utilized as a marketing tool if you have nice images displaying your products that you have for sale on your site. This short video will show you how to ‘pin’ your images so that other Pinterest users can see them.
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
Pinterest is another great way to promote your businesses products, and hopefully catch the attention of users browsing the site. Think of Pinterest as a bulletin board where users pin images to. Users can then click on the image and be taken to the website where the image was pinned from.
Images with many repins will be the ones you see on the main bulletin board at pinterest.com
So how can you pin some images from your website? First, click on the Join Pinterest button. You can sign up with your Facebook account, twitter account, or using your email address. Any of the three options will do. I’m going to fast forward through the sign up process as that is pretty basic, and just skip ahead to the part about pinning.
So once you have signed up and are logged in, go to pinterest.com/about/goodies
You should land on a page that looks similar to this. Locate the Pin It button, and drag and drop this button onto your bookmarks bar. So if you are using Safari, the process should look just like this.
Now, head over to your website and locate an image that you want to pin. Once you are on the page with that image, click on the Pin It button. You will then be shown all of the images on the page. Click on the image that you want to pin. A popup window should appear. If this is your first time pinning an image, you will need to create a board for it. The board is basically creating a new bulletin board for this image to be pinned on, since it cannot automatically be pinned on the main board at pinterest.com. For my example, my business is called Jeremy’s Golf Shop, so that is what I will name this board. Then, all you need to do is click Pin It, and you’re done.
You can now pin more images if you want. You can add them to the same board that you just created, or create a new one if you want. You are not limited to pinning images just from your site. You can pin images from any website.
This can be a good marketing tool for users who sell items such as clothing or jewellery, or almost any product that would catch the eye of someone browsing through Pinterest.
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Sitemap Automator has been updated to version 2.6. This update adds support for Retina Macs, improved support for OS X Mountain Lion and improves website scanning.
Sitemap Automator creates XML Sitemaps for your website which helps search engines properly scan and index your website. With XML Sitemaps you can also get back important information such as why search engines aren’t indexing your website, who is linking to your website, the top search queries used to find your site and much more.
This update is free for registered users or $29.95 USD for new users. A free download is available on the download page.
For those users who are still only now discovering iWeb, below is a quick video introduction to how you can easily build your own website. iWeb is a feature rich desktop application that lets users build a website by just dragging and dropping items on a canvas. If you have any questions about iWeb, be sure to leave a comment below.
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
In this tutorial, I’m going to show you how you can easily build your own website using an application called iWeb.
iWeb comes with 28 built-in templates, each consisting of 8 pages.
Let’s click on the first template, which is called White, and select the first page which is the Welcome page.
As you can see the page shows up on the left hand side. This page’s name is Welcome. Right above welcome, you will see another name, usually Site. This is the entire website’s name. So just to recap, you have the site name here, and the page name here. As we add more pages to the site, more page names will appear in this list. These page names can be changed to be whatever you want them to be.
Now if we take a look at the middle section where we will edit our sites, you will see that the template is pretty plain and standard. This is just meant to give the user an idea of what they can do with their sites. So let’s say you wanted to change the heading that reads Welcome to My Site, you can just double click on the text, and delete what is currently there, and type in whatever you want. You can also drag this heading around to wherever you want it to be placed on the site.
Let’s take a quick look at this image we have here. You can add or remove images from your site as you want. You can also resize the image to be whatever size you want. And of course you can drag the image around and move it wherever you want it to be.
If you ever want to add new text to your site, just click on the Text Box button, and begin typing.
You can also add shapes to your site, and change their sizes and colours as you please.
Adding a new page is as easy as clicking the Add Page button, selecting the page you want, and clicking on the Choose button. As mentioned earlier, the new page shows up in the column on the left.
These are the basic items you need to know in order to easily create a simple website. As you get more and more comfortable using iWeb, you will be able to create much more advanced and professional looking websites.
If you take a look at the icons on the right hand side, these will allow you to add items to your website such as a YouTube video, or almost any type of item that requires some sort of code or script.
To see more helpful videos about iWeb, be sure to subscribe. If you have any iWeb related question, feel free to interact with us and let us know.
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