Introducing the new AutoConversion Blog Powered by Substack

A brief explanation of the new platform, subscriber and member features

As you may have seen from our recent Coming soon post, AutoConversion.net has a new home - Substack. This is a significant change for us all. We are excited to tell you about it and how this change benefits you as a visitor, free AC Insider, or paid Premium Member. 

To offer some background, AutoConversion.net was registered in 2006 (by me) and it has served a variety of purposes for the company which, by the way was not founded until 2007. The initial company name was web2ologies and the company website was at web2ologies.com. AutoConversion.net was created at that time to be a network for Auto Retailers and Automotive B2B companies. The networking site was powered by Joomla.

The domain name was purchased with the future in mind - ‘Auto’ was a play on words for ‘automotive’ and ‘automation’ while ‘Conversion’ represented the idea of converting leads into opportunities. This was so that we were not cornering the company into working exclusively within the automotive industry, and able to provide the same effective services. 

The networking site never really took off as a business, but if you visit DrivingSales.com today I think you will see a good example of what autoconversion.net had set out to be. After abandoning the networking site model, the site was repurposed as a blog for Blog/RSS Marketing, a service we were providing at the time. Because of this, the blog became an attraction for SEO services. 

In 2016, the site was redesigned to serve as the company website, which it has been doing to this day, showcasing our products and services, while still utilizing the blog to provide SEO services to others. Late in 2020 we began experimenting with a membership model and by 2022 we were thriving with a steady flow of paying members with our group coaching masterminds and roundtables and media productions. 

We faced a problem, however, that was affecting us and our members - our tech stack and databases were all antiquated, creating an unfavorable user and customer experience.

The blog was on WordPress, our subscribers were in Mailchimp, our paying customers and sales pipeline were in a CRM - first Keep and then Pipedrive, and we were using Zapier to connect everything. Then last year we introduced a shopping cart - WooCommerce. Needless to say this involved significant IT overhead, expenses, and worst of all it leading to negative experiences for people.

The New Substack Experience

Today, as we move a grip of our tech stack to Substack, we eliminate these individual technologies and combine them all in one place. This is great for you and us!

With Substack there is a web interface and a mobile app interface. Each provides a unique experience, including a community chat feature which hopefully will be a much welcomed addition. There is also a podcast feature, which we are utilizing but on a separate Substack (AutoConverse).*

*The reason we have a separate domain and Substack for our podcast is because the AutoConverse Podcast is a standalone business. Many of our podcast subscribers are not ideal customers of AutoConversion and we keep the entities separate so that we can monetize the audiences accordingly. 

With the web interface you can access the blog and comment on posts, visit additional pages in the navigation bar, and manage your subscription preferences and membership.

In the mobile app you can access the blog and comment on posts, and you can utilize the community chat feature. You can also listen to the podcast in the app. 

Why Upgrade?

If you are a visitor, you are most likely visiting on the web interface and you probably got here from a web search or link through. Or maybe someone shared an article with you or you came from a social media post. Thank you for coming by.

As a visitor, you will only be able to access only our most recent posts. To access the full archive of posts dating back to 2007 and post comments you will need to subscribe, which is free.

As a free subscriber, you are an AC Insider identified as a Substack user and able to access the site in the Substack app where you can also engage in community chat. You have access to the full archive of posts, and you will receive an email each time we publish new content that is made available to everyone. 

When you become a paid premium member, this makes you an AC Pro where you now unleash a whole slew of premium features and benefits. For starters, you will have the ability to initiate your own discussion threads in the community chat using the Substack app. You also will be able to access any premium content that we publish.

But this is just the beginning for Premium Members, or AC Pros. 

As an AC Pro, you are now invited to tap into our personalized coaching services. Our subscription service is intended for businesses and individual professionals where we help you with things like company vision and mission, planning and prioritizing, and we assist you with web services, your media, and IT.

You also receive a full Slack license, which gives you unlimited access within our Slack workspace which is used for research and planning for media productions, coaching, and networking.  

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Thanks again for visiting, and for being a member at any level. Stay tuned for more information about our personalized coaching services and how we help businesses and individual professionals with media and the web.