You may be wondering what is a Personal URL or pURL?

A Personal URL is becoming the future of marketing very fast.¬† You can think of it as a personal website, which has been setup to allow a personal feel and touch and capture details from the potential client.¬† They can be customized using text, video, images, etc to target each person’s needs or interests.

Now why do they work?
Simply put people cannot resist checking out something that has their name in it.  Along with the fact that personalizing the advertising or marketing always pulls a more consistent result when compared with standard mail.

How does it work?

Each mailer sent out has a unique domain name or landing page for each person or company on your list. Then your mailer will direct these potential customers to a site like: http://FirstName.LastName.YourDomainName.com.  When they load the page they will see their name in large letters asking them to enter in a private code. Once they enter in their code they are taken to a nice designed page with information, images, and a pre-filled out form asking them to verify their information or even add in an email address. After they verify their information we can now communicate with them to try to sell something, give away free material, or even sign them up for your email marketing.

What are the benefits to a pURL?

We record everything, so when the person enters in there pURL we record the name that they put in-front of the domain name. We also record who enters in their codes and verify information. One of the best benefits is we are able to tell who is interested “people that verify” and who maybe somewhat interest “people that login but do not verify”, which still is a great potential lead.

As I continue to develop and build web-sites in a content management system (CMS) called Drupal.  I look back to what I did before and realized I should have switched over a long time ago.  CMS allow me to develop one main template instead of recreating pages from one main page template.
One of the best parts is the navigation.  While most people like there site to show different views of the link such as a normal link, when you roll over it, and even when you are on that page.  With a content management system you are able to setup easy css class that allow you to quickly change or add links or even change where they are going with a few easy clicks.

Another aspect is the page content.  While getting content right and making it effective is one of the hardest things to do.  Many companies should continue to update the content on their website often and test it to see what works and what does not work.  A CMS allows the content to be easily switched or modified without a huge hassle with search through the html or other programming language.

The last and my favorite part about CMS’s are there ability to build and make them do whatever you want but with still have an extremely clean and consistent website.  While you can also make it so there are only certain areas of the site that can be edited.   This allows every page to be fluid and allowing the end user to navigate through the page knowing where to look for the certain content they are interested in.

CMS makes changing the pages easy and fast.  While also allowing my Boss or other co-workers to go into the site and change the main content without having to ask me to do it for them.    It also allows them to help me keep things up-to-date and current.

The reason this idea came up was because I receive some changes from a client that we did not create the website in a CMS.  While these change are simple and basic they will still take me a few hours to do the old fashion way.  If we had created this site (at least 3 or more years ago) in a CMS these changes could possibly be done in about 15 – 20 min.