Funnel Reboot

The funnel is dead. Long live the Persuasion Experience. That’s the view of my guest today. 

Alisha Conlin Hurd did something that’s rare for people  in their 20s by turning a side hustle into an agency that she co-founded. Their firm,  Persuasion Experience, works on marketing brands that require funnels  for lead generation, SaaS, and consumer branding.

She shares experiences learned working for every kind of brand, from emergency plumbers and home builders, to Brazilian butt lifts and porn addiction counselors.

People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show

• Alisha Conlin-Hurd – YouTube
• Alisha’s Twitter profile
• Eugene Schwartz
• The podcast, Unapologetically Ambitious, which she co-hosts

You may also be interested in past Funnel Reboot episodes related to this topic:

• 16: Role of UX in a site’s marketing effectiveness, with Farhad Khan
• 65: The theory and Practice behind CRO, with Deborah O’Malley
• 77: Stop arguing over leads; start scoring them, with Gary Amaral

We don’t have the right to retain our visitors’ information just because it’s possible on the internet. 

Complying with data privacy laws can be a confusing, stressful process. We help businesses embrace a new way of working with data, going beyond compliance to create a privacy-friendly strategy that builds trust with customers.

Jodi Daniels is a privacy consultant. She founded Red Clover Advisors in 2017, and through it, she assists companies to create privacy programs, build customer trust and achieve privacy law compliance. Jodi also serves as a Fractional Chief Privacy Officer to small and medium companies. Through frequent speaking appearances and her own podcast, she shares practical tips so companies can carrying on marketing, but in a way that’s compliant and ethical.

She holds a BBA and an MBA from Emory University, and lives with her family in Atlanta.

People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show

• List of US States that have passed Privacy legislation or have proposed bills
• Jodi’s Red Clover Advisors consultancy and their Twitter profile
• Jodi’s LinkedIn Profile
• Podcast: She said Privacy, he said Security
• Video by John Oliver on data brokers
• Jodi’s book

Episode Reboot.

Take the How Data Compliant is Your Business Quiz

Designing Websites involves dealing with Domain Registrars, Hosting Providers, CMSs, Page templates and scripts that run forms. We haven’t even mentioned the things visitors see like text, images and audiovisual assets. It’s a lot. 

My guest has set out to take the complexity out of all this. Knowing that we learn best when we’re absorbed in a story, he rolled all his principles into a book geared for anyone who’s been handed the keys to a website or work with a web designer.  

Patrick Villemaire is the founder of Blue Eclipse Inc, a Canadian web agency. His passion is making the web a better place and he has been building websites for over 20 years.

Patrick is a graduate of McMaster University with a double major in Multimedia and Communications, and a minor in English. He lives in Ottawa with his wife, son and a barking dog. Outside of building websites, he likes to listen to music and play the occasional game of hockey.

People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show

• Steve Krug
• Webby awards
• Patrick’s Web design firm: https://blueeclipse.ca
• His DIY website builder: https://websitefuel.ca/
• The book’s website: https://websitesurvivalguide.com
• Patrick’s Instagram Profile

Episode Reboot

Download this sample of the book, used with permission.

People focus too much on posting content and not enough on asking what content they should post. We can easily get on a treadmill, writing about topic after topic. This results in treating everything as a fluff-piece, overlooking the power of content. And though this hyperactivity may look good on our status reports, and please the search engines, is that who really matters in this endeavour?  

I’m reminded of the movie Jurassic Park,  as financier John Hammond briefs mathematician Ian Malcolm on how they made the dinosaurs. Malcolm scolds him for tinkering with the building blocks of  life.

In the same way, we should think about the person consuming our content, pausing not only to ask if we can create a piece of content for them, but to ask if we should create it. 

Judging what content gets made is a time-honoured skill. News media and the publishing industry have formalized it into the role of the editor.  Today we’ll talk with someone with an editorial background, to learn how they think, so we can judge our content just like they do. 

My guest spent 16 years as senior-level journalist and editor at top Canadian newsrooms, such as The Globe and Mail, CBC.ca and the Ottawa Citizen. Melanie then directed the content for non-profits and organizations like Export Development Corporation. 

She’s happy to share what she’s learned about Digital Communications on the stage at TEDx, or as a lecturer at Carleton University, where she originally received her journalism degree. 

She has now moved into creating content under her own banner as Owner of Big Stride Media. She lives in the Ottawa suburb of Kanata, with her husband and two sons.

People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show

• Melanie’s firm, Big Stride Media
• Melanie on LinkedIn
• Her newsletter, “Owning the Story”
• Intel’s impactful story-based ad
• The disastrous experience Subway had with their spokesperson Jared