Archive for May, 2008

Are you using email to promote your business and stay in touch with your customers? If so, are you using email as effectively as you could be? As with processes there is often room for improvement, so I’d like to share with you a few tip for using email for effectively.

1. Personalization. Studies have shown that personalized emails are opened far more than those that are not personalized. Adding the “first name” field to a form is really not going to detract from true prospects completing your form.

2. Add a Sign Up Form to Your Website. I am amazed at how many companies still do not try to capture their visitors information. It is a huge missing link for many search marketing campaign because knowing how many people came from Google really won’t help if you can’t market to them or follow up and see why they didn’t do business with you.

3. Whitelist instructions. If you are serving a web-based audience, this may not be necessary, but if you are a non profit trying to communicate with it members, then perhaps you will need to help them understand how to ensure that they get your emails.

4. Stop Using Outlook. Yes, people still use Outlook and other personal mail clients to send email, and it is about the worst thing you can do next to not using email at all.

5. Double Opt In. By asking for your users information twice, it ensures that they know they are giving it up and reduces spam complaints. The more spam complaints you receive, the more you risk getting your domain blacklisted or getting “fired” from your email service provider.

6. Branding. Sending from a consistent name and using a consistent theme (i.e. logo and imagery in HTML emails) will increase your open rates and reduce your unsubscribe rates.

7. Make it abundantly easy to unsubscribe. some people may argue with this, but that just means that they don’t know the difference between a double opt-in list and a qualified double opt-in list. I recently had an offer for one of my niche websites that I run. Wanting to have the most accurate numbers, I sent out an email to the list offering them updates and additional information, but I opened the email with a statement that showed them how to unsubscribe if they were no longer interested. About 5% of the list unsubscribed and most said it was because they no longer need the information because they had made a purchase. I now have a stronger list to market to and one that is less likely to hit the “spam complaint” button – even though they all double opt-in, they forget and they will complain.

8. Maintain Consistency. You want to market to your customers and prospects consistently for a few reasons. First, to give them up to date information and keep you on the top of their minds, but also do they don’t forget who you are and hit the “spam complaint” button.

9. Convert Direct Mail to Email. Do you know how much money you could save by using email marketing as opposed to traditional direct mail? Given that is takes 3-4 print mailings for your prospect to remember you, how much more cost effectively could you reach the same audience. Keep in mind, once you reach your prospects off line, getting them to your website is a separate conversion process, whereas if they get an email from you it’s just a click away and the contact-to-web visit rate is increased significantly.

If you are looking to enhance your business by using email marketing, I would be happy to speak with you. My firm, AKA Internet Marketing, offers full service email marketing consulting and management services and whether you run a local web design company or a Fortune 500 company, I assure you we can help you improve what you are doing in the area of email marketing.

Link building is all the talk in the online world, and for very good reasons. It can do wonders to put a website that was otherwise invisible in the eyes of would-be customers. There are several methods to accomplishing this, but the 9 listed below will definitely get you moving in the right direction. The bullet points are listed here, but all of the details for each link building strategy are listed on our website.

These are in no particular order:

1. Submit to all major search engine directories first.

2. Build internal keyword anchored links.

3. Utilize Niche Directories.

4. Write & Distribute Press Releases.

5. Article Marketing

5. Create Solid Informative Content that people will want to link to.

6. Blogging

7. Use Social Media Networks

8. Participate in Online Communities.

9. Be Persistent and Consistent – Don’t Give Up

Please visit the Web Traffic Team website to read the full story and details on each link building strategy mentioned.

If you would like to stay current with online business development news and views, please subscribe to the blog using the email box or an RSS feed located to the right of the article.

In a previous blog post on blog monetization, I mentioned Scratchback (the donation widget) as a way of monetizing your blog. It seemed to be a great system – you tip a blogger that you like and you get a listing on their website in return. As of yet, no one has taken me up on my offer to be listed here for 30 days for a $5 tip. So I had to ask myself, is it worth listing other sites on my blog for less than $5? Well, not to me, but apparently it is to others. I currently have three #1 spots on various blogs and websites that are using Scratchback, and two of them I only paid $1 for. Some publishers used a fixed time frame (as I am currently) and others use the auto-bump feature where the listings just keep moving along as new people come along and tip. Two of my three listings are still at the #1 spot since last Thursday, which isn’t a pretty bad return for spending $2 – and yes, I have seen traffic come through for my $2.

I guess the concept is slow to catch on, but it is promising, especially given the traffic I am getting based on being listed for $1 on various websites. I can’t give away all of my secrets without negatively affecting my current position, but once I am moved to the bottom, I will let you know where you can get listed for $1 on a site that lists about 20 sites in it’s widget. I will most likely do it again, once my $1 ride is over, and you will be amazed at the site when I tell you. If you figure it out, let me know. Until then, I will see how much traffic I can get for my $1. Actually, if you sign up for a listing on my site, I will let you in on the secret early, as long as you promise to keep it a secret. You can also search the Scratchback Directory for other sites to get listed on.

Two weeks ago I did some updates to a website; primarily titles on a site that had the same title tags for nearly all of it’s pages. A week later (last Friday) I was checking to see what updates, if any, had been picked up. Google had not seemed to notice, Yahoo noticed a bit, and MSN Live had a few top 10 rankings. Interesting, so I thought and then I made some additional changes on a different area of the same web site, and here is what I found this morning. MSN Live has already spidered the changes, updated the code and also has several top 10 rankings based on these changes.

Kudos to the MSN Live search team!

Oh yeah, and the subtle moral of the story is “if all of your title tags are the same, you are likely missing out”

First, I would like to honor all of the moms out there and wish each one of you a very Happy Mothers Day. I have had the privilege of working and networking with many mom bloggers over the past year. I have enjoyed learning from you all and I am thankful for all of the support that you have given me (and my site).

Every Mom Needs some pampering, right? As much as I’d like to be able to bless each one of you with a day of pampering, the best I can do for now is to offer a one hour massage from Massage Envy (or comparable center, if there is no Massage Envy near you) to the mom blogger that does the best mothers day related blog post. It doesn’t have to be posted on mothers day, and it can be related to you as a mom, your mom, of just something related to Mothers Day (a special memory, etc).

No need to stress about it this weekend, just post sometime between now and Sunday, May 18th. Make sure to add a reference to the contest with a link to the contest at the end of your blog post. It doesn’t have to be a brand new post either, you can link from anything you have written related to Mother’s Day at any time. Every time someone clicks through from your site to this blog post, it will count as a “vote” and the blogger with the most referrals from her site wins. You must agree to be listed as a winner so people know that someone got the prize. This offer is open to US and Canadian residents only.

Happy Mother’s Day!