Confused.
That’s how I felt when I visited a website without a chatbot.
Consider my late night predicament:
Looking to monetize my writing services, I visited a service for freelance writers.
I had a flurry of emotions.
I felt excitement at the opportunity awaiting me all the while feeling perplexed and frustrated I couldn’t get my burning questions answered.
Now, my emails are going back and forth with the company who could have trained a chatbot to answer frequently-asked questions.
I realized it was after hours. Having a chatbot on a website enables you to respond to your visitors 24/7.
Perhaps I should get a chatbot for my website, I thought.
I was concerned if I created a chatbot to greet my guests, they will be turned off by the automated reply.
On the other hand, I write about blogging tips. How can I recommend technology that exists to help bloggers if I don’t adopt the technology myself?
My article Why Should Bloggers Quickly Join the Chatbot Revolution? gave an overview of chatbots and Bottr, the company that makes them.
This article gives you a tutorial on how to create a free chatbot for your website.
By reading today’s post, you will learn:
- Why You Need a Chatbot
- How to Make a Chatbot
- How to Use a Chatbot to Generate Website Traffic
- Other Benefits of Having a Chatbot
- Why You Shouldn’t Listen to Suggestions to Ignore This Technology
Why You Need a Chatbot
- Bots are interactive. They don’t feel “canned.”
- Your bot is intelligent.
- This technology exists to save you time; for example, you don’t have to answer the same questions repeatedly. Your bot will answer for you.
- Your bot is free.
- Training is easy and quick. There are only four steps involved in training your bot.
- Your bot comes with analytics. By looking at the analytics you can see the following: in-depth analytics on bot visitors, messages exchanged, reactions, and shares. Therefore, you will know how your visitors to your website are reacting to having a chatbot welcome them and other metrics.
- People will know they are talking to a chatbot. You don’t have to worry they will feel deceived.
- Bottr will schedule your appointments for you. I connected Google Calendar to facilitate this. At the top of my response, I wrote instructions to book appointments with me after 5:00 pm.
- YouTube has videos about how to use Bottr’s chatbots in case you need clarification.
- You can embed your bot link into your social media profiles so anyone can talk to you at any time.
- When I went to interact with my free chatbot, just two days after I made it, it (she?) started asking me questions. She wanted to know how to respond if someone asked for my work history.
- You can embed your bot in your blog, email, and social media feeds so people can talk to your bot in many places.
- Bottr is easy to use. No coding or prior knowledge is required to make a free chatbot.
- Younger people aren’t using email to communicate anymore.
Tutorial: How to Make Your Chatbot
1. Go to Bottr.me.
2. Authorize one of your social media sites. I authorized Twitter.
3. Select your role. I selected “blogger.”
4. A list of questions will come up your bot will be able to answer for you. Uncheck any you don’t want your bot to answer. You can type in any frequently asked questions you want your bot to answer. These are frequently asked questions people in your role often get asked. Your bot will save you time repeatedly answering them.
5. Very cool: My bot already knew the answer to the question, “How would you describe yourself?” I edited the answer.
6. When I was asked to activate my bot on my social media, blog widget, and email signature, I clicked “done.”
7. I received a message that my bot was going to go off to train. I was informed I’d be notified of its progress.
8. Curious, I wanted to check on my bot’s progress, so I clicked “log in.” Just seconds later, I was told my bot was already knowledgeable. I was told to add social networks where it could interact on my behalf further. In addition to Twitter, I chose Google.
9. I clicked “train,” so I could make sure my bot knew the answers I’d give to frequently asked questions.
Would you like to meet my chatbot?
10. I intentionally confused my chatbot. One of my frequently asked questions is if I will stumble links in my StumbleUpon group.
I asked my chatbot, “Will you stumble my link?”
Predictably, my chatbot did not know the answer. It asked me what it should say when asked this. I typed the response I want it to give.
11. At the bottom of the screen, questions bloggers frequently get asked appeared. I clicked on the default question, “Do you accept guest posts?”
12. My chatbot wanted to know how to respond to this question. You are welcome to respond with links. You can review your answer before you save it to ensure you want that response to go out. Emojis and social share buttons appeared in case I wanted to use them.
13. I edited my reply using the pencil icon.
14. I connected my other social media. Bottr said my free chatbot could learn more about me that way.
15. I added WordPress. A few days later, I connected my bot to Medium. (At the time of this writing, Instagram and YouTube connections are Bottr’s plans in the near future.)
Two days later, my chatbot sent me an email and asked me to take it out to play. It advised me to put it to good use.
A new category appeared on my Bottr dashboard called popular. Steve Jobs and the president had photos there.
In addition to giving a straight answer, your bot can answer with information on cards. You can delete the cards if the answer is not appropriate or edit what’s on the cards.
I tried asking my bot some questions. It already knew the answers since I’d blogged about them. This left little for me to do.
You can add pictures or links to the answers.
You have analytics that tells you how often people saw your bot and their reaction to the bot (if they left one).
To interact with visitors on selected posts: Put your bot where you want it to interact with your visitors. I wanted my bot to greet my party guests, so I’d embed the HTML code on those posts.
To interact with visitors on all your posts:
You can simply install the Bottr WordPress plugin and after installation just put your bot’s name and it will start working on your website like a chat widget.
How to Use a Chatbot to Generate Website Traffic
- Your website visitors can share your bot on their social media profiles. This expands your reach giving you more exposure.
- Your bot doesn’t just tell your visitor the answer to their question; it shows them the answer. When your free chatbot shows your answers to people asking for information, your previous content will be visible. If people want to read the information, it will take them to your previous articles, and your traffic will increase. Look:
My bot is displaying three answers to the question, “How to generate website traffic.” If people click these article excerpts, you get traffic.
- Underneath each one, there are share buttons. Your website visitors can share your content which has the potential for increased website traffic for you.
Other Benefits of Having a Chatbot
- Many websites have a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) page. When I placed an FAQ page on my website, it was for the most part ignored. You receive much more attention when you have a bot on your site. Look at these statistics:
In a two-month period, 1,309 people interacted with my bot. This is far more than the number that use to click my FAQ page.
- Chatbots are innovative. They are downright fun for your website visitors to interact with.
- Artificial Intelligence, a relatively new technology, makes you look cutting-edge by having a bot on your website.
- Bottr, the company that provides the free chatbot, contacts you if your bot can’t answer a question. This saves you time checking your chatbot dashboard.
- You get to connect with your visitors away from your website. On your Bottr dashboard, you will see a “direct message” section where visitors can contact you directly.
Concerns
1. First and foremost, concerns over whether an automated greeting is acceptable or a turn-off for your visitors is so widely debated it is downright controversial. Even Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk are having a heated public feud over whether artificial intelligence is beneficial or disastrous.
My opinion is it’s here to stay. Why, it has been suggested that one day, perhaps not too far off, robots will be able to write SEO optimized posts for us that rank well in search engines.
Machine learning continues to evolve. If it can greet my visitors and assuage the guilt I have over not having ample time to greet them, I’m all for it.
2. It takes time to train your bot before you send it out into the world to represent you. For example, I read I should train my bot by talking to it.
I asked, “So, are you my new chatbot?”
It responded by showing me the recent article I’d written about it: Why Bloggers Should Join the ChatBot Revolution.
It learned on Twitter that I’d written this article.
I tried a different question: “Can you answer the questions I receive in my Gmail?” Again, it gave a wrong answer. It actually gave a correct response to a different question.
While I know you are all busy and may not have time to train your bot, this will save you time, in the long run, having your chatbot respond to questions for you.
I needed to go to sleep. I wrote, “Talk to you later.”
It responded, “Sayonara.”
See, after just three attempts, my free chatbot started responding correctly. While Rome wasn’t built in a day, I realize, this small progress was still encouraging.
Wrapping Up
I recommend using a chatbot to greet your website guests. Training my free chatbot was fun.
If technology exists which can help you, you should use it.
Using chatbots to greet website visitors is becoming commonplace. People shouldn’t be shocked or offended to be greeted by one.
In conclusion, your bot can represent you 24/7. It’s like having your own virtual assistant.
Do you want to see what my free chatbot emailed me?
An email I got from my chatbot read:
I am your bot – new to this world but a very quick learner.
I am the digital identity – the 24/7 assistant – you always needed but never had. I’m reliable and versatile. Train me for anything and everything you want.
You can have your own personal assistant 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Get a chatbot today.