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I had no idea if building my first Alexa Skill was going to work. But it did. Like a freaking charm. It never happens like that. And when it does, it kind of feels like serendipity. There are already more than 40,000 Alexa Skills in the Alexa Skills Store within the Alexa App (how you set up / customize your Echo, Echo Dot or other Alexa-enabled device like the Roav VIVA or Sonos Speaker), but now the Data Driven Daily Tip is in the mix. While future posts will explain why the heck I’m spending time doing this, this post is all about “HOW TO ADD MY BRAND SPANKING NEW ALEXA FLASH BRIEFING SKILL TO YOUR DAILY ALEXA ARSENAL.” But first, we can definitely review. Chances are, even if you have some familiarity with this space, you’re still asking yourself What The Heck Is An Alexa Flash Briefing? Read below from an earlier blog of mine. But there’s also a kind of Skill that many content companies and media companies use that is much simpler and more common during this infancy of Voice. And as you can imagine, these have my attention. These Skills are called “Flash Briefings.” Top Flash Briefing skills include Wall Street Journal, Cheddar, CNBC and Fox News. But even brands like the NBA have Flash Briefing skills. What’s cool about Flash Briefings is that, as a user, you can customize your own. For example, mine could be “weather in Spring Hill, Tennessee,” “Top Tech News from TechCrunch.,” “MLB Schedule Today,” and “Gary Vee 365.” You customize your own by heading to your Alexa app, tapping the hamburger menu then, Settings, then Flash Briefing. So now, you can get my Data Driven Daily Tip on Alexa. Here’s how. 1. Open your Alexa app on your phone. 2. Tap the hamburger menu on the top left, tap “Skills & Games” 3. Search for “Data Driven” 4. See this screen, and click “ENABLE.” 5. Once the Skill is enabled, tab the Hamburger Menu Again, then “Settings” then scroll down to “Alexa Preferences” and tab “Flash Briefing.” 6. This is how your Flash Briefing will play in order when you say “Alexa, Play My Flash Briefing” or “Alexa, What’s In The News?” Make sure Data Driven Daily Tip Plays First! 

In this special edition of the Data Driven Daily Tip Podcast, I talk through an important concept that all business owners and entrepreneurs need to fully understand - the Minimum Viable Product. The tendency when building a software application or even a website, is to try to include everything all at once. To prioritize everything, which basically means you're prioritizing nothing. How do you build something that is basic enough for your initial beta user group to test, and what is the benefit of this vs. trying to build everything all at once. I explain in this podcast. Also, keep listening past the sponsored reads, and hear the special FULL version of my interview with Amazon Alexa's Chief Evangelist, Dave Isbitski.

My reflections on why we're building Alexa Skills at Data Driven Design.

I love WordPress, because you don't have to be a hardcore web developer to do cool, tricky stuff, like make a main navigation menu link open in a modal window, also known as a lightbox. How To Make A WordPress Main Menu Navigation Link Open In A Lightbox  In this video, I show WordPress Content Managers how to implement this sweet functionality free of charge, by using two plug-ins, one called Popup Anything, and another called Shortcode in Menus. Check it out. Thanks for watching and listening and have a great day!

Small Business Owners and Marketers, are you looking to have a form on your website that gathers email addresses that you later want to turn around and send automated or manual email marketing campaigns to? An amazing trio of tools is Mailchimp with WordPress + the Gravity Forms Plug-in. Gravity Forms offers dozens of add-ons for email marketing platforms, including our favorite - Mailchimp. This podcast shows you how to connect, integrate, hook-up, whatever you want to call it - the WordPress Gravity Forms Mailchimp Add-On with your account's Mailchimp API, allowing you to drop email address submissions from your website directly into the list you want!

I've used just about every single WordPress website hosting platform available, and recently switched to WPEngine after five years with GoDaddy Managed WordPress.  GoDaddy just had too many issues with server space, and was super slow, going down too often, and allowing too many "known issues" to take place. And at one point, GoDaddy even deleted one of my sites for no reason. The switch to WPEngine has proved to be the right move, among other things, the ability to use back-up points to swap across environments. In this Data Driven Daily Tip, I walk through how to launch a new website in from development in a Transferrable environment (free of charge) to a production environment. Pretty tricky and cool.

On a rare occasion, you may not have access to an old Google Analytics account, but you're the one responsible for making sure that tracking code from the old website gets on the newly launched website. Or, you already launched the website and forgot. How do you go back and get your Google Analytics Tracking Code once your new site has launched? How do you find Google Analytics Tracking Code without having access to the original account? This video shows you how.

Anyone with a website likely doesn’t think about verifying it with Google Search Console, let alone Bing Webmaster Tools, but even though Bing only makes up 5% or less of organic search related web traffic (according to our Data Download), it’s still super important to gain search engine visibility on Bing via verifying your website and submitting a sitemap. This video shows you how!

While it's true (the proof is in the data) that Bing only makes up about five or less percent of all organic web searches (ways that your web users find your website via SEO / organic search), it is still important to rank highly on Bing, and have solid search engine visibility on Bing, which is why, after verifying all sites on Bing Webmasters, we also take the extra 5-6 seconds to "Fetch as Bing Bot." Fetching as Bing Bot allows us to ensure two things: 1. That Bing sees our site and indexes it 2. Analyze the code that Bing spits back to us to ensure it looks the way we want it to look to not only Bing, but also potentially Google This video explains more.

Attention Marketers and Small Business Owners - did you know you may be missing out on learning valuable information about your web users by not having your Demographics and Interest Reports Enabled? By just toggling one switch in Google Analytics that takes about three seconds, you can start to aggregate data on who your web users are; how old they are, what kinds of websites they like to visit, what their hobbies and interests are and more. But it's critical to do this as soon as you have Google Analytics installed on your website as you cannot gather retroactive data. This video shows you how to enable demographics and interest reports in Google Analytics.