Once I decide on which song or album I want, it’s one click, I type in a password, and it immediately begins downloading to my computer.

Everyone knows how iTunes works, but what I really love is how they get it: by making this process even *simpler* than giving someone the opportunity to pirate music, it will provide an alternative that is incredibly successful. Ease of use winning time after time.

Almost all regular consumers have to work harder to pirate music than to just go ahead and buy it. It’s addicting to get music, and with the Genius functionality, it will only get more addicting. Hats off to Apple, as always.

So their business model is not to drive revenue through the website but more focused on driving engagement of interested parties. Although they sell merchandise online, their ultimate goal is to drive workshop attendance. The site features a top-notch speaker and the main message of the website is to engage with him, get to know him, and fork over the dough to listen to him talk. Another note: Totally worth it, and I’m not just saying that.

I suggested something simple: “Whenever they need to download the PDF of an article, why don’t we ask for their email address?” We would then email the link to the PDF. I suggested this for two reasons:

1. Email marketing is an extremely cost-effective way to nurture leads and keep a steady stream of communication going with interested existing/prospective customers.
2. It provides a method to push communication to engaged visitors to the website.
3. It could ultimately lead in a workshop attendance. It’s all about timing. By delivering an email message to an interested party at the right time, we are far more likely to earn their business than if we were just provide the download outright.

Of course, we’ll only find out how successful this methodology, but there is significant value to having someone’s email address. Not so we can SPAM them–though, I’m sure it can be tempting to email them until they never want to be emailed again–but so we can get to know them better while also getting the message out to more people through multiple channels. From there, we can garner tons of data about what is successful at driving workshop attendance, and tailor our marketing programs even further to better our revenue-generation strategy.

Google offers an incredible API for use with their Charts capabilities. You have the ability to pass numbers to a URL and define that URL for the source of an image. That image will render a graph or chart that you specify.

That means any time, any where, through any medium, you have the ability to better prove your point through charts. By the way, this really requires no development work. The only things you need to know are…

1. chart size (width x height)
2. the data points
3. chart type
4. chart text

That’s it. From there, you can either direct your browser to the URL that you need to build—and go to File > Save As… to save the image—or you can insert the chart in a Web page using an HTML “img” tag.

The URL would look something like…

http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?
chs=250x100
&chd=t:60,40
&cht=p3
&chl=Hello|World

And will render like this…

And that’s amazing. This stuff should be on every website. Seriously.

So get out there and go check out how you can start using Google Charts.