Using Email Marketing Services

Email marketing is one of the fastest-growing forms of marketing, and it can be extremely effective -- as well as extremely cost-effective. Companies just starting out with this form of marketing sometimes think they can just send out a bunch of emails from their own email account and call it email marketing. 

Not so. You can write individual email messages to each of your prospects, of course, and that can be very good if the numbers are small enough to make it practical. Write up what amounts to a newsletter and shoot it out via blind copies to your whole customer list, and you're just going to get banned for spam.

You can have a custom template made, written, and sent, as Sweetique did with their newsletter. 

The advantages of this are probably obvious: you have a custom look that reinforces your brand, and readers are more likely to respond to your email.

If you want to be able to do it yourself, though, there are plenty of services out there that will let you send a proper email newsletter or advertising message at economical rates. I've had clients who found it too difficult, and certainly many business owners will find that their time is better spent on other things, but I think that most computer literate people can use these services successfully. 

Take iContact as an example. They're not a client of mine, I don't own stock, and I don't even recommend them over any other service; they're just a good example of how these things work. 

You'll have a dashboard for your account. It's laid out very simply: you can find help right away if you need it, you can see the stats for your last message readily, you get a nice graphic measure of how many more contacts you can add before you need to upgrade.

You have four choices for tasks: My Contacts, where you can add names to your subscriber list, is the first one. You can type the names in if you must, or you can upload them from a spreadsheet. You can also search for individuals and segment your list -- for example, you can divide the resellers of your product from the end-users, or your regular customers from the ones who only shop at Christmas or back-to-school.

Just be sure that your list only includes people who have asked for information, who have contacted you, or who have given you their email addresses in the course of networking.

I get email marketing messages from people who announce in their messages that they have found my email address through their own efforts. Why they think this is admirable I can't imagine. My email address is public knowledge, and I'd be delighted to have an email from you sometime. People who think this means they can send me offers for Viagra are mistaken. Their stuff is spam, and I delete it unread. What a waste of money and effort for them! Don't get lumped in with these guys by forgetting email marketing ethics.

Once your contacts are in, you can go to the next tab and create your message. iContact allows you to do this in three ways. You can follow their step-by-step method with their templates. This is very easy, and you will be able to do it yourself with no trouble. Click on the artist's palette on the left of the screen, and then just do exactly what they say.

You can also create your message in html and upload it. if you can do this, you don't need my help with this step (you may still need me for the content of the message, of course).

You can also write your newsletter into a visual editor. That's the middle option: the pad of paper.

Click that pad of paper, and you'll get a visual editor like the one you might use for your blog or your Facebook account. It may look a lot like your word processing program. You can type directly into this text box, using the familiar icons for "bold" and "italics" and inserting pictures or hyperlinks.


Resist the temptation to copy something into this from Word. if you want to do that, copy it into Notepad first to clean out the computer language, and then copy and paste it again.

When you finish, you can click "Preview" at the bottom left of the screen to see how your newsletter will look in the recipients' mailboxes. You can send a test copy to yourself or a colleague for feedback. And then you'll move on to the next tab, Send. Here you can choose which segments of your list to include in the mailing, and schedule the newsletter for some later date if you care to. Now, hit "send" and relax.

If you're not a relaxed person, you can go to the Track tab and track the progress of your newsletter in real time, watching to see how many people open it, unsubscribe, and click through. I'm too relaxed and too busy to do this, so I just go back later and check. However, if this is your first email newsletter, I think you could get the whole office together and watch, as though it were election results or something, and celebrate if it does well.

I'll leave you with a line from an email ad I received just this morning, possibly the most revolting email ad I've ever received: "The possibilities are restricted only by how much juice your greed glands can push out." I've carefully noted the name of the company in order to make sure never to buy anything from them, even by accident. Don't do this to yourself: think about your audience. Send messages about greed glands only to people you're sure have some.

Copyright Issues at Your Website

There are changes taking place in the realm of intellectual property. From the sheer ease of copying to the attitude shift among users who've grown up with seemingly unlimited amounts of information available to them entirely for free, current circumstances encourage sharing and viral spread of information, not to mention sheer piracy. It can be difficult for even the most honest among us to be completely certain of the source and provenance of things available on the web.

And yet, intellectual property may now represent a significant part of a company's value. The stakes are higher, and some industries are willing to go much further in pursuit of information pirates than they ever were in the past.

How can you protect yourself and avoid crossing the line? Ask yourself these questions about the intellectual property you're planning to use:

• Is it public or private? If the information is freely available to anyone whether you share it or not, it's public. For example, Santa's physical address is not widely known, but I found it on a public website, and so can you. There's nothing private about it (he lives in Finland, and he answers his mail, too). If you got the information from a document emailed to you -- or, worse yet, to someone else -- that's not public.
  
• Did you take it or leave it there? Sometimes clients ask how to get permission to link to a site. This is completely unnecessary. When you link to a site, you've taken nothing. When you save that site's images and upload them to your own site, you're stealing.
  
• Did you pay for it? If you pay for a stock photo, stock music clip, or other piece of intellectual property, then you can use it according to the terms under which you bought it. If you didn't read the terms, you're still responsible for following those rules. For example, most stock photos can only be live in one place at one time; you can't use them at five different websites.
  
• Do you plan to make money with it? Fair use is a very important concept. You can use information pretty freely for study or research, though the rules are not so clearly defined that they don't involve some subjectivity. However, you can assume that you can't sell someone else's work. You can't sell a list of links to other people's knitting patterns just because you compiled that list. You can't use someone else's musical composition on your website just because you went to the trouble to upload it. You can't profit from someone else's work in a way that takes potential income from them.

I had kind of an interesting case once. I reviewed a local restaurant on a blog I was paid to write. I was paid to do this by quite a large company, and when they decided to end their paid blogging program, they invited the bloggers to continue their blogs, but I didn't do so. The review of the restaurant therefore was removed from cyberspace.

I met it again a couple of months later as content for the homepage of the restaurant's new website.

Since this was work-for-hire, the words didn't belong to me. Since the website no longer existed, use of the words did the large company no harm.

Still, since I am a web content writer, the argument could be made that the restaurant's use of stuff I'd written deprived me of the payment I would have gotten if they had hired me to write their website instead of just doing a cut and paste. I'm not litigious, so I didn't even think of suing them, but I bet I could have won.

Only Pay If You're On Page 1!

A client shared with me a high-pressure sales pitch he's been getting from an online promotion company.

The deal is pretty simple: you pay a monthly fee of $120 dollars to stay on page 1 of the search results for Google. That is, if you're on page 1 that month, you pay. If you're not, you don't. There's a fee for the first month, to get your rankings up. After that, you pay only for results.

Doesn't that sound great?

It might, unless you know how search engines work.

While this online promotion company assured my client that Google rotates your link off page 1, and thus a continual watchful eye and "quick optimization of your link" is a must, in fact the search engines search for the best pages to offer the searcher. That name, "search engine," is a bit of a clue. The search engines then offer the best, most appropriate, most trustworthy page -- as far as they can tell -- to the searcher. The bit about rotating people off the front page is, if I may be forgiven a technical term, a lie.

No reputable SEO guarantees any particular results, any more than a pediatrician is going to guarantee your kid a particular height. It depends. However, I get most sites to the first page within a month. Some may even go to that first page within the first month all by themselves.

I like to have five to ten clients at a time, so I can look after them well. When we've met their goals, they may be finished, or they may have new goals. They may want to rank for more keywords, or they may just want maintenance. Keeping their content fresh, keeping up with their analytics, helping out with blogs or social media -- I'm sort of like having a worker who spends a morning or two a week taking care of that stuff for you.

But if I were a confidence trickster, I could offer to keep hundreds of people on the front page for $120 a month, per keyword, each. Once they were on the front page, I could take their money and do absolutely nothing. Chances are, many of them would stay there on the front page for that particular keyword. They would happily send me money for nothing every month. Those whose rankings slipped -- perhaps because a competitor got busy and did something to push them off to page 2 -- wouldn't pay me.

I wouldn't care. There are plenty more suckers out there, right?

Mind you, I'm not saying that the company my client told me about is running a scam. Perhaps they don't know any better themselves. I'm just saying what I, if I were a confidence trickster, which I'm not, could do.

SEO Don'ts

Recently a client asked for a list of SEO dos and don'ts. The client is a franchise operation, and they wanted to help their franchisees get the best possible results on the web. I was happy to provide a checklist of SEO things to do to get a new web page visible.

A list of don'ts was another thing entirely.

I've seen lots of SEO don'ts. Based on my experience with clients, I could give you a list, beginning with this sort of thing:

• Don't hide your keywords on the front page in letters that match the background.
• Don't place links in directories of Malaysian massage parlors if you run a pet store in Ohio.
• Don't try to get links by having quasi-English articles with no real content posted at 0 PR article mills.

Chances are, the franchisees weren't planning on doing these things. In every case, these were things done for my clients by people who didn't know any better, but still charged for their services. Or possibly by people who did know better, but dishonestly did these things and charged for them. The clients paid to have these harmful things done, but they had no idea that they were being done.

So it may be that the real list of SEO don'ts for businesspeople, rather than SEO professionals, is something like this:

• Don't hire people who guarantee you some particular ranking in some particular number of days. Not because it's impossible to achieve, but because it's considered bad form in our industry, and honest SEO professionals don't make guarantees like that.
• Don't do anything online that you wouldn't do in the physical world. If you don't have your business card up on the bulletin board at the local massage parlor, then you don't need your business listed with massage parlors in directories. On the other hand, if your business is a massage parlor, then that's exactly where you ought to be. But on your own continent, unless you make international house calls.
  
• Don't do things that sound dishonest or sneaky to you, such as hiding words on your website, because they probably are dishonest and sneaky. If you're not sure, then ask your online marketing people why they're recommending this move, and notice whether the answer sounds dishonest and sneaky.

Online marketing is all about trust. Google's PageRank is about whether or not your website is trustworthy. And there's no reason for people to send money out into the ether to you if they don't trust you. So most of the real SEO don'ts are about trying to sidestep normal growth by doing something shady.

You can feel fairly sure that the search engines are ahead of you on that.

Oh, and a poorly-designed, badly-written website is a definite SEO don't.

Avoiding Piracy: How and Why

In a meeting last week, a client said that he'd heard from the guys that websites like his were just made by taking pictures and information from other websites.

I hastened to assure him that we wouldn't do that. I'm working with Shan Pesaru from Sharp Hue to make this website, and we are both committed to the highest standards of integrity. I felt confident telling the client that he need have no worries about copyright violation when he worked with us.

It didn't strike me till later that this might not have been what the client was saying at all. Some people, after all, are very casual about copyright laws. Maybe the client was thinking that it would be a timesaving measure, and thus a moneysaver, to lift stuff from his competitors' websites. He might not have known that there was anything wrong with that.

For him, and for you, here are some reasons not to join the pirates:

• It's stealing. Bottom line, when you use someone else's words or images without permission and credit, you've stolen their work.
• You may lose customers. Copyright law, like cheating on taxes and driving over the speed limit, is one of those areas where many people feel some moral flexibility. I know -- I mean, I teach writing and have conversations on plagiarism pretty regularly, not to mention all that time I spend trying to convince fellow musicians not to make illegal copies -- that many people honestly see nothing wrong with freely using other people's intellectual property. Are you sure that all your customers and clients feel the same way? The problem with those gray areas is that they can be very idiosyncratic.
• You might get caught. It's pretty easy to catch people who steal your words and pictures. I don't make a fuss over it, myself. I usually contact the people who do that, say that I'm glad they like my work, and suggest that they pay for it next time. Not everyone lets it go at that. You can find yourself in court over these things.

And here are some ways to avoid it:

• Ask permission. It always amazes me how resistant people are to this idea. When I want to use someone else's stuff, which happens pretty frequently, I contact them and ask their permission. They usually agree, often with thanks. After all, you're giving the person a link, and helping them expose their work to a wider audience. It takes a little effort sometimes to find the person you need to ask, and of course it only works if your heart is pure, but it's not a big deal.
• Use copyright-free materials. The image at the top of this post is from Dover, a terrific source of copyright-free images. Click on that link and subscribe to them, and they'll even send you samples from their books. There are other sources of copyright-free images, including things that are in the public domain. Here is a clear explanation of the rules about using other people's stuff, if you need details. Just remember that everything is automatically covered by copyright, whether it says "copyright" on it or not.
• Do your own work. Whenever I discuss plagiarism with my classes, someone always starts up with the current urban myth about how to avoid getting in trouble for using other people's words. "You just have to change 20% of it," they say, or "It's okay as long as it's a wiki" or something. Forget that. The rule is: if you wrote it yourself, drew it yourself, programmed it yourself, then it's yours. Otherwise, it's not. Very simple. (Oh -- and if someone else paid you to do it, it's probably not yours any more.)
• Pay for it. When you hire someone to write or design for you, you get exactly what you want, and it usually is more cost-effective than doing it yourself. Depending on your business, one or two extra sales can cover the cost of hiring a professional to do creative work for you. A good website will get you way more than one or two extra sales, compared with a poor one. Plus, you own the work you've bought. You can continue to use it in a variety of ways (I'll talk more about that in a future post) forever. Do check when you use sites like istockphoto to see whether you're buying one-time use or unlimited use. Custom work should simply belong to you.

Ironically enough, Shan is participating in the We Are Microsoft Charity Challenge Weekend with a team called "The Angry Pirates." They're coding for charities in Dallas, and it is not at all piratical, apart from the name of the team. Stick with that sort of thing if you really feel called to piracy; otherwise, just steer clear of it, me hearties.

Stumble It!

Bookmarking Services

I had an interesting conversation over the weekend with David Almodavar of DNA Vertical. Among other things, his company offers a social bookmarking service. That is, his staff will submit your press release or web page to sites like Digg and StumbleUpon. I had an immediate negative reaction to his service, but he has made me think twice about that reaction.

I always get a kick out of having one of my sites Dugg or turning up at one of the aggregates of that type, and some clients of mine who've ended up on StumbleUpon or Boing Boing have found that it gave them terrific traffic.

Now, these sites are there so that people who are sincerely impressed with something they see online can share that excitement with others. I think we all know that many of the recommendations aren't arising from that sincere desire to share. Many are from "you Digg me, I'll Digg you" arrangements, emails saying, "I just posted something. Will you post it on Twitter for me?" going out to 500 of your closest friends, and -- as in DNA Vertical's case -- paid submissions.

To me, this is part of the grayhat stuff that messes up search engine results. If people are continually messing with the search engines, then people who search for information will not be offered the things they need, but just the things we've arranged for them to be offered. The internet will become less useful as a source of information.

Consider the hotel industry. At this point, a person searching for straightforward information about hotels online will have a hard time finding it. That industry has messed around with their search so thoroughly that most people must now turn to phone books to find needed information.

Another example is pharmaceuticals. While researching an article on prescription drug abuse for a client last week, I found that most search terms you'd use if you sought help for this problem actually lead you to ads for cheap Vicodin.

We could, by using grayhat and blackhat techniques, lessen the value of our medium. Do you consider TV ads a good source of information, or do you leave the room when they come on? I think most of us leave the room. And yet there was a time when people actually got information from those advertisements that helped them make decisions.

The internet could be next. We're already teaching our students how to recognize and bypass commercial websites when doing research; grayhat SEO could lead to consumers' doing the same.

And there is a whole lot of grayhatting going on out there. Every day, I pass over ads seeking writers to post fake reviews, to comment at blogs about the wonderful results they've had with something, and the like.

Yet I don't think there is anything wrong with submitting to directories. Nor with asking people whose sites are relevant to those of my clients to consider adding a link. It seems to me that these are ways of letting people who might find it useful know that your website exists. (I've written about this more generally in "The Fairy Godmother Effect.")

Is paid submission to social bookmarking services grayhat, or is it more like submitting to directories? David says, "I don't consider a bookmark a review in the majority of cases. We bookmark a url and 3 keywords to each site. If the users on each of these websites are interested in the keywords they will find them through search or rss and will be able to offer their own opinion... It is really up to the readers/members of the social network to form their own opinion on the content, as we are not a review service, but a submission service. "

I see his point. He's not having people go say, "I tried this product and it changed my life." He's having them say, "Here's a website you might not have seen." For those who are in the early stages where they just need lots of links to establish their presence on the web (and I have a new website myself, so I know how that is), this could be a very useful service.

What do you think?

Stumble It!

Commenting for Links

I've got a linkbuilding campaign to work on today, for an artist who makes steampunk jewelry, a thing I'd never heard of a week ago.

Links are like votes for the trustworthiness and usefulness of your website, so of course we all want links. And one way people get links is by leaving comments at blogs and forums. Many of these places are nofollow (that is, they don't give a vote for your site), but not all of them are. So this can be a useful strategy for the linkbuilder.

There are three kinds of comments with links.

• Real comments. After all, blogs and forums are communities. We get to know one another and have things we want to say to each other. We read things and have an addition to make to the conversation. Leaving your website along with your name in real comments is entirely appropriate. You're a member of the community, people might want to know more about you, and these links can help people find you.
• Comments intentionally left for the sake of a link. This isn't necessarily bad. "Patroller" left this comment at my post on "Website Maintenance Without Tears": "Well, I think one of the best indicators if a website service provider really can provide the service you need is to check its own site--if its site is well-designed and well-optimized. " It's a useful suggestion, too. "Patroller" has a hidden profile and left a prominent link to his or her website, so it's an intentionally-dropped link, but it gets to stay. The link is relevant and might be useful to the people who visit here.
• Comment spam. "Susan" left this comment:"I recently came across your blog and have been reading along. I thought I would leave my first comment. I don't know what to say except that I have enjoyed reading. Nice blog. I will keep visiting this blog very often." Along with this content-free comment is a link to a suspicious looking insurance brokerage site. I responded, gave "Susan" a chance to correct my false impression if it wasn't spam, and then deleted that comment.

So how can you get beneficial links with comments?

• First, consider actually becoming a contributing member of the community. I post comments in a variety of communities to which I actually belong. For example, I often post in educational communities. Sure, I leave my clients' web addresses when there's a spot for a URL, but I am a real-live educator and I am actually reading and adding to the discussions. I'm entitled. And my clients, who provide actual useful goods and services for educators, are also entitled to those links. It's the difference between giving your business card to an interested person you've met and connected with, and slipping it under a stranger's windshield wiper in the parking lot. Which do you think is more effective?
• Leave helpful comments. When you can answer a question, make a useful suggestion, or offer a valuable reference, do so. Then you've earned your link. While we do sometimes want to say, "Great post!", especially to people we know (see the point above), skipping all over the internet leaving "Great post! MY LINK" is spam. And you should leave helpful comments even when you don't get a link out of it, at least sometimes. Even including a link to someone else's website that would be more useful in that particular case. If you use your real name when you do this, you may even gain some name recognition from casting your bread upon the waters in this way.
• Drop your links where they will do some good. They should do some good for the visitors, certainly. "Patroller" offers a useful service which I might want to use sometime myself. But I think that a lot of comment spam is placed by low quality linkbuilders earning a penny a post. Even if I left the comment "Susan" posted, you're not going to go and sign up with her client's shady insurance service, are you? You need to place your links where your customers might be. For that kind of website, you need a much lower level of mental functioning than we're using here. Even if you have (as I'm sure you do) a respectable business, it doesn't make sense to leave links in places where your customers don't go. Search engines will only give you credit for relevant links, anyway.

We're back again to saying you need to be honest, upright, and true with your SEO. It isn't news, perhaps, but it's still true.

Stumble It!

An Amazing New Online Marketing Tool!

A man came to see me not long ago. He was trying to decide whether to work with me, or with this Amazing New Online Marketing Tool he'd discovered. I admired the heavy, brightly colored pages the representative of this Amazing Tool had given to him, and I went to their website and saw this Amazing Chart:




Yep, for $1000 a month -- with a lengthy contract -- you too can have 325 clicks per month to your website.

It is possible that I laughed. In fact, I think I probably did. After all, faced with something like this, you have a choice between a merry laugh and saying, "Dude! What's wrong with you?"

I'm sure I would never say a thing like that to a client. Or even a prospective client who's thinking of going with an Amazing New Online Marketing Tool instead.

A careful reading of the materials suggests to me that this is an Adwords campaign, and there's nothing wrong with that. But look at that chart! This company is asking people to pay large sums of money for a number of visitors in a month that you can easily get on your own every day for free. You can get an Adwords campaign on your own, too -- not for free, but for much less than that.

This isn't really funny, though.

SEO is a new enough field, and online marketing is a new enough experience, that there are lots of people out there preying on the inexperience of innocent businesspeople. It's like the time in the long-ago past when anyone at all could claim to be a dentist and practice on people just by hanging out a sign.

I know people who call themselves SEOs who believe that you have to resubmit your website to the major search engines every month, that the best way to increase PageRank is to submit fake testimonials to spammy sites, and that it's impossible to get good rankings without paying for it.

And that's the honest ones.

The people with The Amazing New Tool aren't exactly deceiving anyone. They are essentially saying, "Look! Pay us lots of money and you can have a small amount of traffic at a website!" They're just saying it in an excited tone of voice and trusting that people who don't know much about websites or online traffic will get excited enough to sign a contract. By the time the poor creatures realize that they've been tricked, it will be too late.

How can you avoid this?

• Learn a little bit about online marketing. You can learn the basics by reading this blog, and there are plenty of others out there, too. Ask questions so you can tell whether the Amazing New Tools are in sync with reality or giving you a completely different story. For example, all respectable sources of information on SEO will tell you that excellent content and design are the basics. An Amazing New Tool that guarantees magical results regardless of the quality of your product or website is not reliable.
• Work with people you trust. Can they answer your questions? Do the things they say make sense to you, based on your knowledge of business and marketing? The internet is a specialized environment, but it's not another planet. If the things your Amazing New Tool is suggesting sound as though they'd be dishonest or shady in the physical world, then they probably will be on the internet, as well.
• Be alert for the scent of snake oil. Sure, scammers can look respectable. But often they don't. If it feels like someone is about to pull out a fake Rolex and offer it to you at an Amazing Price, then you should probably trust your instincts and bow out.

You can get good amounts of traffic to your website by having a useful website, letting people know it's there, and giving it some time. It is entirely possible that you can accomplish the same results by paying an Amazing Company large sums of money, but it isn't sensible. Hire the people you need for the purpose of creating a useful website and letting people know it's there, and pass on the Amazing New Tools.

What Color is Your Hat?

In SEO, we talk about white hats and black hats. Blackhat tactics are those that are frowned upon, and sometimes even punished by Google. Whitehat tactics are those that SEOs admit to using. But there are SEOs who admit to being blackhats, and plenty of whitehat or grayhat SEOs who lament the limitations of the SEO dress code.

I recently ran into a blackhat technique on a client's site. It was interesting to me, sort of like encountering some rare specimen that you've read about but never expected to see in real life. Maybe even like meeting someone who actually makes gin in his bathtub.

This website had a black background, and black words along the bottom of it. If your words are the same color as your background, they are invisible to human visitors to the site, but visible to the search engines. Blackhat SEOs, so I'd heard, would hide keywords there. The idea would be to put invisible words on your site to which you weren't really entitled. Perhaps you'd put a famous brand name when you were selling a much less famous generic version, or some racy words that people often search for, but which you wouldn't want to have showing up on your site.

(I once was high on search for the phrase "hot teachers" with one of my websites, but that was completely innocent, I assure you, and I digress.)

So what's wrong with invisible words your website? My client didn't even know they were there, actually. She had an amateur design her website, and it was a surprise to her to learn that she had any blackhat tactics going on. Her visitors certainly didn't know.

Why did I recommend that she get that little blackhattery cleaned up? It's a matter of ethics. She wasn't behaving in an unethical manner herself, but her website was. And maybe your website is, too. If you haven't checked your code and your backlinks, you might not know.

Here's why it matters:

• Good ethics are good business. It isn't just Google PageRank that's based on a perception of trustworthiness. Visitors to your website are deciding, to a large extent, whether or not they trust you. They can get the goods and services you offer in plenty of different places, probably all over the world. If they choose to get those goods and services from you, it's largely because they trust you. And let's face it, blackhat marketing isn't a strong indicator of trustworthiness.



• Whitehat tactics work better over the long run. We've heard of clever tricks that got someone to the front page of Google fast, or brought in plenty of paid-for clicks for a couple of days. Unless you plan to take the money and run, though, you need to develop your business with the future in mind. You need happy clients who come back to you and speak well of you to their friends. You don't get that with tricks.



• It isn't really a secret. Are you sure nobody's looking under the hood at your website? While it's true that most people aren't viewing your code or analyzing your links, the truth is that anyone can. When I worked as an in-house SEO, I discovered that one of our vendors was using link farms and other blackhat tricks. I figured, if they were willing to cheat on Google, they might be willing to cheat on us, too. We changed vendors.

When you analyze your website, of course you want to check for usability, compelling content, appealing design, and search engine optimization. Go ahead and check the color of your website's hat at the same time.