Tag: website

    What You Should Include on Your Business Website

    Your business website is often the first foray that your audience will have into your business. That’s why it’s important to include certain information that everyone will be looking for on your website.

    A business website is there to give information about your business to your audience in very specific detail. You want to ensure that it’s laser directed to your audience in such a way as to make the audience feel understood and safe at the same time. With that end, it’s essential to include these elements on your business website.

    * Unique Content – Content consists of all information you put on your website, from blog posts to the about page. Images, forms, contextual information, the words on a submit button and more are all content, and all opportunities to appeal to your ideal client. The more you can direct everything toward that client, the more results you’re going to have.

    * Overview of Benefits – A list of benefits of your offerings someplace or in many places on your website is a great thing to include. Your audience should leave your site totally understanding the benefits of your offerings, without having to question anything.

    * Contact Information – Some people seem to want to hide their contact information. Make it easy. Use your contact me page to offer multiple ways that your audience can contact you, including a phone number, email form, social media pages and more. Don’t hide; be open.

    * Simple Navigation – Nothing is worse than not being able to figure out how to get around a website. If you want your audience to not only stick to your website but also to use it to its full potential, make the navigation easy to understand and intuitive to your audience.

    * Comments Section – Whether via blog posts or an entirely new page for comments, make it easy for your audience to comment and read comments from others. This is a wonderful use of website space, especially because user-generated content is loved by search engines.

    * Clear CTAs – Don’t be shy when it comes to calls to action. Your audience has no idea what to do unless you tell them. Make your CTAs super clear and try to limit them to one or two per page of your website so that they don’t get confused about what to do.

    * Special Offers – A great way to draw people to reading more information on your website is to always include some sort of special offer to new visitors. You can use plugins to time offerings as well as to only offer them to new visitors. This is a great way to increase customer loyalty.

    * Email Newsletter Subscription – Don’t let your visitors leave without offering them the ability to get updated about your offerings in the form of a newsletter or email list. Pop-unders and sliders are very common today because they work. Consider adding them to your business website for maximum impact.

    Adding these elements to your business website will make your site work that much better within your marketing and sales strategy. Just remember to frame everything you do in terms of how your audience thinks and feels rather than how you think and feel.

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    Ten Metrics to Track

    As an online business owner, one thing you can do for your business to improve upon your chances for success is to track several metrics to determine if you’re reaching your goals. First, set goals, then match them with data. Finally, match that data with online software to help you track the metrics that will help determine whether or not what you are doing is working. Here are ten metrics to track.

    1. Traffic Sources – Where is the traffic coming from? Knowing this will help you know where to put your attention. If you have places you’re spending time but getting no traffic, you can stop and spend more time on places that are sending traffic.

    2. How Many Unique Visitors – If you’re getting plenty of unique visitors and that number is going up with consistency, then you’re doing something right for your business. But, there are numbers that are more important than visitors, such as conversions and revenue.

    3. How Many Repeat Visitors – If you are bringing back people that have been to your website before, you’re doing even better. How are you bringing the repeat visitors back? Are you using email marketing or are they doing Google searches that bring them back?

    4. Total Visitors – How many total visitors you have each day is a good indicator if your content marketing and other promotion methods are working. But, do they stick around? If not, is your content targeted enough?

    5. Bounce Rate – How many of those total visitors “bounce” off your site without doing anything or spending any time on your site? Most sites have a bounce rate; you’ll need to know the industry average to know what you should shoot for.

    6. What Visitors Do on Your Site – Tracking what your visitors do on your site is important because you can see how many articles they read, how many menu items they click on and more.

    7. Conversions Per Visit – With this information, plus healthy calls to action, you can determine how many people convert per visit and compare that to industry standards to see how you’re doing.

    8. Dollars Earned Per Visit – Knowing how much money you are making per visit is an important number to know so that you know how much you can spend on marketing. After all, the bottom line of any business is earnings.

    9. Which Pages Your Visitors Leave On (Exit Pages) – If people are leaving on the same page a lot, you might want to check that page to figure out if you can optimize it better to keep people on your site longer.

    10. Conversion Costs – With the information of how many visitors you have going to your site, and how much revenue you’ve earned during that same time period, you can track conversion costs which are very important to help with marketing.

    Metrics that you track should be based on your goals. Every goal you make should have a corresponding numerical figure to track, along with software to help you track it. Some software to look at are Google Analytics and KISSmetrics.com.

    Link to Google Analytics – http://www.google.com/analytics/
    Link to KISSmetrics – http://www.kissmetrics.com/

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    Common Website Mistakes to Avoid

    When you decide to build a website for your business, there are so many things to consider. It can be confusing to deal with the conflicting information out there about what constitutes a useful website, as well as matching it with your own vision. As you work everything out in your mind, try to avoid making these mistakes.

    * Ignoring the Rules of Accessibility – It’s very important to understand the rules of accessibility, not just so that differently-abled people can enjoy your website, but also to help search engines access your site better.

    Link to rules – http://www.w3.org/

    * Including Irrelevant Content – From images to audio, to text, you want to avoid including any type of content that is not relevant to your audience and the message you want them to take away from visiting your website.

    * Contact Info Is Not Readily Visible – Nothing is more frustrating than wanting to contact a business but not knowing how. Don’t hide your contact information from your website visitors. It’s imperative that they can contact you.

    * Unnecessary Entry Pages – You’ve seen websites like that; the ones that you have to “click here to enter.” This is completely unnecessary. It can be an impediment to your audience finding the information they need, and is absolutely a problem for search engines.

    * Including Automatic Audio – Some websites have sound that comes on the moment the visitor goes to it, or if the cursor goes over it, but this is also a bad thing to do. Let your visitor choose when the sound comes on and goes off so that they aren’t irritated.

    * Not Updating SEO Regularly – Search engine optimization involves ensuring that the right keywords, headlines, sub-headers, and information are in each page, plus that you provide enough information off your page to help get links back to your page. Learn all you can about SEO to make the most of this organic means of getting traffic.

    * Too Many Graphics – Graphics are important for a website and add to the look, feel and mood of your website. But, you don’t want to have too many, because it will make your website load slower and cause your visitors to get tired fast.

    * Unorganized Navigation – Learn how people tend to look at websites. When they read paper, it’s left to right, but websites they read vertically and sometimes in an F pattern. If you can understand that, you can put the important information where they’re most likely to view it.

    If you can avoid these mistakes, and in fact perfect each item here, your website will be that much more inviting and useful to your audience. You’ll get more visitors to come to your website, plus you’ll get more of them sticking around, answering your calls to action and more.

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    Eight Website Builders That Work and That Anyone Can Use

    Building a website is one of the most important marketing materials you’ll ever create for your business. You can use the website to demonstrate your skills, announce your sales, and communicate with and educate your audience. Today, a website is an essential element in getting the word out about a business. Here are eight website builders that work and that anyone can use.

    1. WAHMDrive.com – This website builder is simple to use for an e-commerce site or a regular website. It has many wonderful features, from a catalog to a shopping cart. There are limitations to it but if you’re just starting out and need a site up fast without hiring someone, this builder really does work.

    2. Wix.com – Drag and drop functionality allows you to build powerful, beautiful, and attractive websites easily. This builder is very good for anyone who wants to have a lot of images to show on their website, such as photographers. They are displayed beautifully and aren’t hard to build either.

    3. Weebly.com – This is actually a WordPress-based builder using drag and drop functionality. It looks great and works great too. That’s why so many people choose to use it. Don’t use the free version, though; always upgrade to the paid version for the best looking websites as well as the most attractive websites to your audience.

    4. Squarespace.com – This visually attractive, mobile responsive builder is very powerful and flexible for many of your website building needs. The only drawback really is whether or not you are patient enough to figure out how to create websites that are as awesome as their samples. The templates are designed for artists, designers, and people who care more about visuals than the back end in terms of search engine optimization.

    5. WordPress.org – Self-hosted WordPress is by far one of the most popular website building software that you can get. For a good reason too: it’s free, and it’s easy to understand and use. You can find a lot of people to help you in terms of contractors, and the fact is, it works very well and you can create very complex websites with it as long as you find the right plugins and themes. WP is the best builder when it comes to SEO.

    6. WordPress.com – Many people realize that this is really a blog builder, but if you upgrade to the paid version you can make quite a detailed website that does everything you need it to do without having to worry too much about the inner workings of the technology. It’s more limited than the .org version but it’s a lot easier for a novice to use, too.

    7. SBI! – This is a website builder that seeks to have all-in-one functionality so that you don’t have to know much about technology. You can learn more through their website http://www.sitesell.com, which can tell you everything you need to know about the software as well as the entire program that comes with the software that will help you build your online business from scratch.

    8. SimpleSite.com – This builder is truly for someone who has no idea how to build a site or what to do. It will lead you through step-by-step screens that tell you exactly what to do to build your website. It helps you with all types of websites. The functionality isn’t as high as some of the others, but it does work well for a brochure-type website.

    Having a website that you’re proud of promoting and that gets the job done of telling others about your business, is an important part of running a business today. These builders can help you.

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    How to Optimize a Squeeze Page for Search Engine Traffic

    When building a squeeze page it’s important that you understand who your audience is and what the purpose of the page is before getting started. Then, to optimize the squeeze page appropriately consider the following.

    1. Keep It Simple – Don’t go nuts with putting every last thing in every last squeeze page you make. You don’t want pop-ups and pop-unders on the same page. You don’t want too many keywords to gunk up how readers view your page either. You want the page to read well for real-life visitors, while at the same time attracting the search engines to rank you higher.

    2. Know Your Keywords – Study the keywords that your audience uses to find you. It doesn’t matter what other people think about your keywords, it only matters what your audience is using to find you. Look for high value, low competition keywords to use to attract your audience.

    3. Keywords in Titles – Not only should the titles on your page be keywords, they should also be in the proper heading style. If the search engine recognizes it as a header, it will place more importance on the words than if it’s body text.

    4. Optimize Title Tags – If you look at the top of any webpage, there is a title for the page. Take advantage of this area to define what the search engine sees about your page. If you don’t control this area, every page of your website will have the same title tag. Differentiate each page in order to get more hits from search engine.

    5. Use META Descriptions – Every page has a META description that will define how the search engine displays your search results to the reader. Make the most of this feature. If you use WordPress to build your sales pages, you can use a SEO plugin like YOAST, which allows you to control the META description and even see a preview of what it will look like before publishing the page.

    6. Keywords in Subheadings – Creating subheadings with keywords and header tags will help not only lead your user’s eye down to what you want them to read and describe the actions you want them to take, but it will also draw attention to the search engines.

    7. Keywords in Links – Make links within the squeeze page with words that are keywords and specific about the link. Don’t use words like “click here” – use words that describe what they’re clicking such as “100 Stroganoff Recipes” instead. Most people understand that underlined words are clickable now.

    8. Keywords in URL – If you can include a keyword in the URL of your squeeze page, that is a very good use of a keyword or keyword phrase. Don’t go too crazy with the keywords, though; you want the page URL to also look nice.

    9. Use Descriptive Keywords in Alt Tags – Search bots cannot read images, so it’s up to you to provide descriptions to the images that you have in your sales page. Use more than “pretty blue flower” to describe the image. Instead use words that are particular to your offer.

    10. Craft Awesome Headlines – Headlines in squeeze pages are important because people do not read horizontally online; they read vertically. Bolding a headline using headers and making sure it’s an important keyword, will not only lead the search engines to rank you higher, but it will also help your audience read your page better.

    11. Create Actionable Copy – Your squeeze page copy should include keywords that make sense. Don’t overdo it because using more than two percent keyword density in your pages will send alarms to the search engine that your site might be spam. Instead, create copy that leads your viewer to perform some sort of action.

    12. Consider Adding Video – Video is often shared, which adds an additional dimension to the sales page, but while a search engine bot can’t really watch the video, it can read the tags and notice that there is a video. And since users like video a lot, the search engine is more likely to put that page toward the top of the results.

    13. Responsive Design – People don’t exclusively use their PCs when looking at sales pages. In fact, a lot of people use their mobile devices while they’re waiting in the doctor’s office or visiting a coffee shop. The more responsive your design is, the more the search engines will like your page.

    Using these tips to create a fully optimized squeeze page to get more search engine traffic will work. Try making one or two changes at a time to make the effect even more useful for getting more search engine traffic. Search engines also like websites that are updated often – and since sales pages and squeeze pages don’t typically change much, improving your page over time is another way to garner more search engine traffic.

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    Market Your Website Offline

    When a business owner builds a website, they often forget the one way to market a website that has nothing to do with technology. Marketing the website offline is a great way to get the word out about your website and what you offer. Using business cards, brochures, t-shirts and other premiums, plus being active in your local community, you can get the word out about your business.

    * Business Cards – Don’t forget to put the URL to your website on your business card. You can even put a QR code on the back of the card to encourage them to use their smartphone to visit the website.

    * Flyers and Brochures – Don’t discount flyers, brochures and other printed materials that you can create and give out when anyone asks questions about your business. Keep some in the car, and ask people to allow you to post your flyers in their business.

    * T-Shirts and Premiums – People love wearing t-shirts with different business names on them. Why not put your business on the t-shirts you wear instead of someone else’s? This is a great way; if you can create something a little different you’ll get more questions.

    * Window Decals – That real estate on your car can be put to great use when promoting your website offline. Be sure to make the information big enough so that people can really see it. Choose a catchy URL too so that people can remember it while driving.

    * Sponsor Events – Whether local or not, you can pay to sponsor events. This means you’ll appear in the brochure, perhaps on signs at the event, and maybe be mentioned by the hosts of the event by voice during speaking parts of the program.

    * Host an Event – When you host an event, you’re a very noticeable presence. Your business name will be everywhere, you will be everywhere and people will get to know you and come to visit your website.

    * Attend Events – When you attend live events, you can draw a lot of attention to your business by handing out cards, wearing t-shirts when appropriate, even giving out premium products like pens, cups, and so forth so people remember you when the event is over.

    * Teach Locally – You don’t have to be a certified teacher to teach classes. Some areas have lifelong learning centers that enable anyone who is an expert to teach something to people who want to learn something.

    When it comes to marketing, don’t leave any stone unturned. That includes marketing your website online and offline. Don’t forget that not everyone, even today, uses search engines or means online to find information. Some people still use old-fashioned information and paper to find the information they need.

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    Page Load Speed Improvement

    Improving your page load speed can increase conversions and drastically improve the user’s experience using your website. Thankfully, there are some very simple things that you can do to improve your page load speed.

    The More You Have on a Page the Longer It Takes to Render

    These are called HTTP requests, and they bring in the components of all the things on the page – from images to style sheets and everything that makes your website look as it does. But there are ways to minimize the HTTP requests so that it doesn’t make it take longer. Even a few seconds of improvement will mean higher conversions.

    Use the Information on Google’s Webmaster

    Google Webmaster gives you all sorts of tools to use, including something called Page Speed Tools. This allows you to analyze the speed of your website, as well as gives you suggestions of what to do to fix it. You can also use Chrome to install various extensions that help you keep your site running fast.

    Be Sure to Compress Where You Can

    If you are creating very long, high quality pages, they are likely huge and require a lot to download to your visitor’s computer. When you can reduce the size of the pages, which also lowers the HTTP response, you can get the pages to load faster. There are many tools that you can use to help you compress pages, for example GNU Gzip which is open source software. However, if you’re not experienced you need to ask your web host to ensure that your server has the right settings.

    Link to Gzip – http://www.gnu.org/software/gzip/

    Ensure that Browser Caching

    If you don’t know what that is, it’s the way that a browser downloads parts of the website on the user’s computer into their temporary storage when you call up the website more than one time. This will make the page load faster each time they visit your website. It’s an important way to speed up a page.

    Format Images Properly

    On websites, the best form for an image is JPEG, which will load the fastest. Next is PNG, and finally do not use GIFs unless you must for animated gifts. Never use BMPs or TIFFs as they will not work correctly. You can change the type of image you have by using free open source software such as GIMP’s photo editing software that is a lot like Photoshop, but free.

    Link to GIMP – http://www.gimp.org/

    Optimize Your Style Sheets

    It is thought to be better to use only one external CSS style sheet. Every additional style sheet will increase the slowness of your website. The more you can combine external CSS files, the better the speed of your website will be. If you’re not sure about how to do these things, you may need to seek out an expert.

    Reduce the Number of Redirects on Your Website

    Many people use redirects for affiliate programs and other reasons to make the link look prettier or to hide the affiliate link code. However, while these are great uses for redirections, try to keep them to a minimum. Redirects take more time to send the code to the user and will slow page speed.

    Most people expect pages to load super-fast, so you want to do all you can to maximize the speed at which the page loads – especially if you’re hoping they will purchase the item you’re promoting.

    Use Fewer Plugins

    Many people use website builders like self-hosted WordPress to build their websites. These builders have little applications called “plugins” that expand the functionality of the website. These are great, but it’s important that you find or purchase themes with as much of the functionality already available as possible and use fewer plugins to accomplish what you need for your website.

    Page speed is a very important part of your web design if you want to keep people on your website long enough to make a purchase. If the site loads even seconds slower than they desire, they’ll click away and not buy.

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    Get the Most from Search Engine Traffic

    Search engine optimization is an important component in online marketing. It uses techniques to ensure that your website or blog receives as much traffic as possible from all the search engines. But, you don’t really want all the traffic; you just want the traffic that is right for your website. You want targeted traffic that wants what you have to offer. This is the way you make the most of search engine traffic.

    To get started making the most of search engine traffic, do the easiest things first.

    Check Your Site for Broken Links

    Do you have broken links on your page that you haven’t fixed? This can happen easily for many reasons. However, the reasons don’t matter as much as making sure that you fix the broken links. You can use a broken link checker to check for links regularly on your website. When you find links that don’t work, fix them right away.

    Link – http://www.brokenlinkcheck.com/

    Optimize Your 404 Error Pages

    You can personalize a 404 error page to take advantage of your audience members accidentally going to the wrong page or a link you didn’t catch that’s broken. There are many ways you can personalize and optimize a 404 error page; how you do it will depend on the voice you want to project on your website or blog.

    Update Keywords

    Over time keywords change due to the audience changing or society changing. Words today may mean something else later. Taking time to study keywords and making a long list of all variations of keywords can also help you think of new content to create for your audience.

    Use Keywords in Headlines and Titles

    When you have studied the right keywords, you can use them as titles, headlines and sub-headlines on your website and blog posts. Don’t try to be tricky in your titles at all; instead use all words correctly and accurately.

    Remember Benefits over Features

    Your audience cares more about what’s in it for them than about what’s in it for you if you answer the CTAs. Find ways to get through to your audience about all the benefits of your offerings and what you can do for them.

    Get Links from Authority Sites

    The days of getting any links into your site are over, but getting links from authority sites is always important and will always be in. If you can get links from .edu sites, that’s even better. A way to accomplish this is to create your own courses that are high value enough that an education site may take notice.

    Link to Authority Sites

    A great way to get noticed by others, including search engines, is to link out to other sites that have authority. Content curation is a great way to create valid links out from your website to authority websites. Include a blurb of your own for each item you link to so that your opinion and thoughts are added to the information you share.

    Keep Content Updated

    Content of all forms is important to put on your website and blog. Use text content in the form of blog posts, audio, video, long form, short form, white papers and more on your blog and website to get the most from search engine traffic.

    Finally, use the right meta information such as “alt” tags on images, tags on posts, and so forth. Try using a plugin like SEO by Yoast if you use WordPress to build your site, to help you get the most from search engine traffic.

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    Providing Customers Value via Your Website

    Your website should provide information to your ideal audience in order to attract them to your offerings. But, it should also, without anyone ever having to make a purchase, offer some kind of value to the visitors. The great thing about focusing on value for your website is that you’ll end up with a better, more attractive website.

    Make an Excellent Contact Page

    Many people overlook the contact page as a way to provide value and make an impact. Due to that, the better you can make your contact page, the more people will trust you and want to do business with you. You can turn your contact page into a very important part of your conversion funnel by mentioning your value, giving a guaranteed response time, and then following through.

    Be More Creative with Submit Buttons

    The truth is having a button that says “submit” doesn’t actually convert that well. Having a button that says what the customers get when they click it will. Tell them what the benefits are right on the button. This means that in some ways you have real copy on the button. You may want to get help with writing it to ensure that it truly captures your audience’s attention and provides value.

    Make Your Free Offers Awesome

    Many people put together free offers to their audience without much thought to the value of what they’re offering. You must offer something of real value to them so that they think to themselves, “if this is free and this awesome, imagine how terrific their paid offerings are”. This is something that you can work on to ensure that everything you offer is up to par for your audience.

    Low Prices Doesn’t Mean Value

    When you set up your pricing, it can be tempting to offer your products and services at a low price because you want them to feel like they are getting their money’s worth. But, this can often backfire. People will perceive the value as lower when the price is lower. So instead, offer value-based pricing that prices any offering based on the benefits of the offering, not on the services you have to perform.

    Increase Engagement

    When you increase engagement on your website, the perceived value will automatically go up. Not only that, the more engagement on your website, the more likely people are to become repeat visitors. Those repeat visitors will help you promote your website and offerings due to their participation.

    Understand What Your Visitors Want

    Make an avatar or persona of your ideal website visitor or customer. Then, write all content, create all graphics, make all offerings appeal to that ideal customer. The more you write to, create for, and consider your ideal customer, the more valuable your offerings will become to them.

    Keep the Information Flowing

    People like going to websites where the information is in a continuous flow. The more blog posts and the more information you can provide that are relevant, the better. You do want to avoid updating for the sake of updating. But you want to update as often as possible with smart, relevant, creative and appropriate information.

    Ask yourself before adding anything to your website, “How does this add value to my customer’s life?” If you can’t answer that, don’t include it.

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    Two Keys to Happy Website Visitors

    As a website owner you want to make sure your visitors are happy. Happy visitors stay on your website longer. They come back for repeat visits. And of course they buy from your website. When it comes to a website’s structure, there are two elements that can make or break your user experience.
    #1 Quick load times

    There’s nothing that squashes a visitor’s happiness faster than not being able to load a website page. If the page doesn’t come up quickly, your visitor is gone. We’ve grown accustomed to instant gratification online. If your web page takes longer than a few seconds to load, you may miss out on valuable prospects and visitors. They won’t be happy while they’re waiting for your pages to load.

    So what can you do to ensure quick load times?

    * Reduce and minimize your graphics. Make sure a graphic takes up no more than 10k on any given page.

    * Don’t use flash. Many website designers still turn to flash to add interest. Don’t do it. It takes too long to load. If you do use it, make sure you give your visitors the opportunity to click through and skip the show.

    * Use plug-ins sparingly. There are a number of really useful plug-ins. However, they’re bulky and can slow down your load time. They can also distract from your web page’s purpose and make it look cluttered. If you’re going to use a plug-in, make sure it supports your goals for that page. And make sure it enhances the visitor experience.
    #2 Easy navigation

    The other thing that makes visitors happy is a website that’s easy to navigate. Straightforward and intuitive website navigation can be difficult to accomplish. The following tips can help you get the job done.

    * Eliminate clutter – Many times a web page has so much going on that the visitor isn’t sure what the page’s purpose is. Are they supposed to look at ads? Fill out a form? Read an article? Make sure your web pages have a purpose. Then make sure that page is designed to support that purpose. Everything from the formatting to the add-ons can add or detract from your page’s purpose.

    * Intuitive buttons – The buttons on your page are there to guide your reader deeper into your website. Therefore they must make sense to the visitor. One of the best ways to ensure your buttons are easy to understand is to make them keywords. Keywords are likely what drew your visitor to your website. They’re what the person is using to search for and find information. Create categories and subcategories with your keywords. That way your user is able to easily find the information they’re looking for.

    When your visitors are able to navigate your website with ease, they’ll stay longer. If they’re able to find the information they’re looking for without struggle and frustration, they’ll return again and again.

    When you combine a straightforward layout with quick loading times, you’re well on your way to giving visitors a very pleasant experience. Happy visitors turn into happy customers. Take a look at your website today. Does it make visitors happy?

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