I have never been a fan of anything Christmas before Thanksgiving, but since that’s not terribly practical, I think that not sending Christmas email before Halloween will have to do. These days, many businesses will say that I’m wrong, but I am personally annoyed by Christmas advertising before November 1.

Well, it’s Nov 1 and time to begin. Before you start with any email campaign please read my thought on doing this right.

• Your own list
• Opt-In only
• No Spam
• Post your old newsletters

Let me also say to offer something of value to your readers. It’s all well and good go send sales and discount coupons, but if your think “value” and offer something unexpected like a cool craft pattern or an old family recipe, readers will be more inclined to pay attention to the rest of your email.

For a small business offering more personal service is your biggest advantage. Your email could also become something treasured by your reader (fan) and make it more likely to get passed around.

The email insider has more good tips.

Do Your Emails Reflect The Emotions That Define The Holidays?

I saw a great post by Eric Brown on the Search Engine Guide site where he reports on an apartment rental company in Michigan who’s blog has nothing to do with apartment rentals and are still top of the search engines.

They offer virtual sightseeing tours, restaurant tips and reviews, and other good information about the community. Without ever directly plugging their main business from their blog their website business has more than doubled. A very good lesson for anyone interested in writing or improving a business blog.

If your blog screams that you can “Make You A Million Dollars”, but offers no other value for free, your visitors will not take you seriously. However, if you offer them something of value without any strings attached they will take the time to find out what else you can offer them, even if it’s not free. In fact, they will look expecting to have to pay for it. You’ve already proven that your experience can be valuable to them.

As a designer I think that the Urbane Life Blog is very hard to read, with blue text on a black background, but they have done everything else right. It’s just my opinion and who knows the blue on black may even help them.

Read Focus on Your Core Community

I recently got in touch with a high school classmate of mine. Barb Girson is an International Direct Selling expert, trainer and coach who recently set sail with her own business called mysalestactics.com. We had a few emails back and forth and an interesting conversation about where we have been and what works in promoting out businesses.

I mentioned to her that Craigslist has been one of the best tools that I use to find new customers. Barb asked me about how I get it to work for me and also asked me an interesting question, “Would you consider this a networking strategy?”

My first thought that no it was not, but after pondering the question for a while I have decided that it is. I’ve met new people through the use of it and have used my networking rule of trying to offer something of value (free information) without expecting anything in return, so I guess it could be called networking.

Her next request was for me to describe the process that I used for this. I decided to write this post about it because I believe what Scott Ginsberg says “Writing is the key to all wealth“.

There are two methods that I use to promote my business on Craigslist:

First, I have written a series of advertisements that I rotate through several cities in my region in the “computer services” section. It is important to follow Craiglist’s rules by not posting too often and only posting these ads in the appropriate section.

I have seen many ads for different services posted in the “web design jobs” or “computer gigs” sections. Since these sections are for people looking to buy web services these ads usually get flagged and removed pretty quickly, but more importantly they are not read by the people who are actually in the market for their services. I know that personally I would never hire someone who didn’t understand or care that this was not the correct section to post their ads.

Second,  the “web design jobs” and “computer gigs” sections are the ones that I need to be reading to find people advertising jobs that I can do. To read those I use RSS. Every Craigslist page has it’s own RSS feed and I can subscribe to those just like any blog and get these ads almost as soon as they appear in my feedreader. For that I use Thunderbird another great free Open Source tool. Not only do I get my email, Thunderbird brings all of my RSS feeds into it as well and I can read them just like my regular email.

Even though there is quite a bit of Spam on Craigslist using Thunderbird I can still monitor many Craigslist cities, have all the post sent to one folder and go through 30 or 40 posts in a couple of minutes. I currently subscribe to two feeds in well over 30 Craigslist cities and still only spend about ten to fifteen minutes a day working on it. I probably actually answer five to six ads a day and I have a general outline that I use for this. I try to personalize each reply to the individual city and request, but here’s the basic outline:

Hello,
My name is Jim Lillicotch and I am replying to your Craigslist ad.
I live in Pittsburgh PA and have customers in (local city) and many other areas that are very satisfied.

For information about my business, I invite you to tour my blog:

• seo
• promotion
• email
• viral
• management
• security
• do it yourself

Feel free to comment on any posts that strike your interest and contact me with any questions

Thank you for your consideration.

Jim Lillicotch
Lillicotch.com

I have found that people posting these jobs on Craigslist tend to be bombarded with responses to their ads, but if I get a reply I try to find out exactly what their job entails and offer to be as helpful as I can. I have foud several customers this way and also a few good friends.

I was speaking with a customer the other day about ways that he could use email marketing to promote his business. He was belt tightening like most businesses today and he finally realized the possible value and low cost of this kind of promotion.

When I first built his site he asked for and I installed a free open source email newsletter management system called PHPList. There have been several visitors sign up and other than the initial welcome email there hasn’t been anything else sent. I explained that since it may have been several months since some of his visitors had signed up, his first email should be an explanation of why he had not written sooner. It’s possible some of his subscribers may have forgotten that they actually signed up and accuse him of spamming them.

My next chore was to talk him out of buying or renting a list of names to send to. It’s always a great temptation to collect a zillion names any way that you can and start sending email “Blasts”. I even hate the term “email blast”. While this method may have once worked very well for any business (and probably still does for some spammers), for most legitimate businesses the costs in terms of loss of your reputation and bad will from your recipients far outweigh any benefit. I have written before of the value of using your own list of names and email addresses.

Finally I mentioned that before he sent anything out that I would like to have a look at it. What I got was just a giant picture that only promoted his business. No text just pictures and nothing that I would call an special offer.

The first thing that I mentioned was that many email clients (Yahoo, Google, etc.) now block images by default, so those folks won’t see anything but a blank page. I also told him that he needed to send something that his recipients would consider valuable. An unadvertised special or a special tip (a trick of the trade) that would benefit his readers. I advised him to look at his email from his customers point of view and ask himself this question if he wanted to grow his subscriber list and business. Is this email something that I would consider passing on to one of my friends or family?

Here’s an interesting follow up article by Loren McDonald on the email Insider called

Are Your Emails ‘Shareworthy’?

It is a pretty much undisputed truth these days that getting inbound links to your site will move you up the search engine rankings. It’s also true that higher ranking sites pointing to yours will help more than lower ranking ones.

I can’t even guess how many times that I have heard people say that I’m not going to bother trying to get links from “them” because they are too new and won’t be worth anything. That may be true if you are planning to close down your site tomorrow, but do you think that these sites will always be new and low ranking?

You may be able to look into the future and see which of these will grow and which ones won’t, but I’m willing to bet if you could do that you would be retired, living on a tropical island somewhere and probably not reading this blog.

I believe a couple of things. First that unless your link is on a link farm page or some kind of spammer/scraper site that all inbound links will help your rankings right now. Is is also much easier to get new sites to mention you, especially if you offer them something (your help, advice, encouragement or just a friendly word).

High ranking sites are just not in the habit of giving away free mentions. Just try to get Yahoo, Cnet, WSJ, etc. to link to you and you will see what I mean. Newer smaller sites will be much more receptive and some of them won’t always be smaller. They will grow and so will the value of their links to your site.

If you would like to read more there’s a post on the Search Engine Watch site by Justilien Gaspard that I recommend called…

Think Links from New Sites Have Little Value? Think Again

I have been helping several of my clients with their marketing recently by using email newsletters.

Newsletters are a wonderful way to promote your business in a very cost effective way. I wrote about PHPList which is a effective way to manage your email list and campaign for free. It works very well for a small and even a medium sized list.

Having a newsletter that is popular and effective means that you need to offer your subscriber something of value that they will want to receive and read. It’s also important that if you are sending a newsletter that you stick to a regular publishing schedule. That means you need to keep coming up with ideas that will inspire your reader. For this reason alone it’s probably best not to be too ambitious with your mailing schedule. Find a pace that you can continue even if it’s only once or twice a month.

As for content for your newsletter here’s a post on the Contactology site called “How to Set Goals That Increase the Value of Your Email Newsletter”. There are some very effective ideas here.

More…

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