Franklin Taggart's Unconventional Life Blog

If you've just met me, you probably don't know that I'm a fanatic about online quizzes, and my software of choice for such things is Interact. In this Coffee Break, I share some of the experimenting I've been doing with quizzes and some of the ways your business or organization could be using them to create valuable, memorable, interactive experiences for your site visitors and social followers. And I also want you to know about the learning you can do about the people who are attracted to what you're doing. All this is in preparation for an upcoming event next week that I will encourage anyone who is even minimally interested in quiz building to attend. The Interact Quiz Mastermind will be happening October 11-13 online, featuring some of the industry's best quiz builders and marketers. Don't wait to sign up. Just go to https://bit.ly/QuizMastermind to learn more and enroll. In addition to the expert instruction, you'll be offered some amazing deals on...

I've built several email lists over the years for various enterprises. My music email list grew to about 3500 people over 20 years. This isn't huge compared to the efforts of others, but it was grown a couple of enrollments at a time when I was playing for small audiences consisting of mostly the same people. My current email list is less than 500 people, and I write only a few emails yearly. Most of my marketing for coaching is face-to-face, and I've not had much to promote through email. I'm not someone who will tell a new business owner that they MUST do anything regarding tools and tactics. I think we need only to concern ourselves with two questions - how will we make and maintain connections with customers, and do our methods work adequately? My social media experience goes back to MySpace. I've experimented with every platform except WhatsApp and Snapchat. None of the social media platforms have been as reliable as email for reaching people I need to stay in ...

A few years ago Gmail introduced the promotions inbox, which was kind of a intermediate spam folder. I stopped using it almost immediately, mainly because there were emails going there that should have shown up in my primary inbox,  which continued to be inundated with marketing and sales email. Hell, I can't turn down a good lead magnet. I've created a Google Drive file just for them. But the collateral mess that began to pollute my inbox became frustrating and overwhelming. I tried some of the inbox cleaning services like Unroll.me and SaneBox, but they didn't really unsubscribe me from mailing lists, they just direct deposited emails into my trash folder befoer I could even see them. This also became problematic when, later on I wanted to reengage with some of the accounts that had been included in the scrubs. Even the emails I wanted to receive ended up in the discard pile. A few years ago I created a completely separate email account that I use only for signing u...