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?

A little while ago I noticed on Twitter a post by a local SEO company that was trying to get Pittsburgh to #1 on Google for the term “best city in the world”. I realized that this was more about them than Pittsburgh, but I was a hometown boy who likes his city and thought I might add a link and help them out. Some also said that they should have picked a more appropriate search term, but I thought it was fine.

I checked back occasionally and this past Saturday the City of Pittsburgh website was on the 12th page. That’s pretty good considering they were not anywhere a week or so ago. Visit Pittsburgh was on the foruth page and the thing that really caught my eye was my blog post was on the first page!

Today the City site is on the first page of Google (#2, congrats Eyeflow) a respectable fourth page on Yahoo and still not anywhere on Bing. My post is still right up there, too and it got me thinking. I just wrote a quick blurb to try to help my city out, not even thinking about what it would do for my site. I’ve had quite a few visitors come through for that term.

I know that the search term “best city in the world” is probably not going to bring me any new business, I would much rather be found for “best web designer” or even “best web designer Pittsburgh”, but who knows?. The point here is that the best way to promote yourself in the search engines is to constantly add new content to your site. Some will say (rightfully so) that you need good outside links pointing to your site, but the best way to get those is to give them something that they want to link to.

Write about your business, tell anecdotes about your customers, give advice and make sure that if you are sending a newsletter that they all are available as a page on your site. This is called the long tail of search, having your site found for things other than your primary keywords. Especially with a new site you will be much more likely to find yourself at the top of a less popular search term, but perhaps one of these terms can land you a great customer!

Read The Newspaper Article

My wife got a newsletter today from Bath & Body Works. She gets them quite often, but I haven’t really looked at them before.

I use Mozilla Thunderbird for our email program and have the images turned off for most everyone. The first thing that I though of is “Wow this sucks, I can’t read it at all.” They did try to put some alt tags and links into their message, but here’s what I saw

How many people delete this before even bother seeing what it’s about? Quite a few I’ll bet. They did have the sense to make the “if you can’t read this email click here” message in white text. Black and blue text on a dark blue background is all but impossible to read.

If you load the images it looks pretty nice

If I wasn’t thinking about how bad this was I wouldn’t have gone this far. Most online email services like Yahoo, gmail, Hotmail, etc now block images by default. You need to make sure your email campaigns will look good enough with the images turned off to at least make your recipients turn them on.

I had a customer who wanted to start an email newsletter last year. I installed a mailing list management program and then spent quite a bit of time explaining how I thought sending it should be done. I wanted to pass that information along so I wrote a series of posts on how to start an email newsletter. There is some good information there about how to handle the mechanics of sending out a newsletter.

I was recently asked similar questions by a new client who wanted to do the same thing and I sent them to my blog posts. Afterward they had other questions having to do with the actual content of the newsletter. What kind of content should they have, should they use the site name of give it another name, and how often to send it?

I usually don’t write the content of a client’s website, I’ll make suggestions, but I believe that no one knows your business like you do. These newsletter questions were about the content, but they were very good questions that were asking for guidelines and I felt that I should find an answer for them.

The Email Insider blog came through for me again with this post and if you are considering starting a newsletter, it’s something that can be a great benefit to read. Rather that just repeating their post I thought I would just pass it on for you to read. Be sure to read to the end, the commenters provide some good additional information.

Read ’25 Random Things’ Is No Way To Write A Newsletter

I have had an account on FaceBook and LinkedIn for quite a while now, but only recently have I started to use them. I also thought about Twitter, but decided that I really only have the time to concentrate on one of them. I picked LinkedIn for that because I thought it was geared more toward business and that’s really what I’m in it for.

I don’t know if any of them will actually do me any good or just waste my time. I have already spent quite a bit of time working on my profile, answering questions and generally trying to be a good neighbor, but have only noticed a large increase in spam business newsletters in my inbox.

The Nielsen Company is reporting that social networking is way up (big surprise) and has now passed email in Internet communication. Since I’m looking at social media in terms of helping my business I’m wondering if it’s replacing legitimate business communication or is it mostly the jokes and chain email that your friends and family send to you. I’m guessing it’s the latter, but I will keep my options open since it sometimes takes only one or two good new contacts to make a business.

Read Social Networking’s New Global Footprint

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’?

I can’t tell you how many sites that I have seen and made where the owner puts up a site and expects the world (with billions of web pages to visit) to beat a path to their door. They never make any changes or even look at it and then wonder why it fails to live up to their expectations.

I had a customer tell me the other day that they were just not getting any hits. I know that what they really wanted was more customers and sales, but he confused hits and traffic with sales.

I asked him just how did he know that? I was pretty sure that he didn’t even know what his visitor traffic to his site was. I went to his visitor logs and saw that the site was getting almost 300 unique visitors a month. Some of those are search engines and blog spammers, but most are visitors. That’s not a huge number, but I’m sure it was more than he suspected.

So the real question is if there are visitors to the site why aren’t there any leads. I’m sure only one or two more a month will make quite a difference.

The questions should be…

• If I am getting 300 visitors to my site why are they not contacting me?
• Are they from out of the country or out of the area?
• What pages are they most interested in?
• On those pages do I have some sort of a “call to action” asking them to contact me?

Here’s where a blog or newsletters posted on your site can really help you gain relevant traffic that converts to customers. The first thing that you need to do is to review your website stats on a regular basis. Make an appointment with yourself to do this, it’s important.

• See where your visitors are coming from.
• What search terms they are using to find you?
• Can you include those words and similar ones in future posts?
• Are they being referred from another site?
• If so, which ones?
• Can you get links to you on more of their pages?
• Write more content that they may be interested in linking to?
• Can you find other similar sites that will also link to you?

Once you know what people are looking for you can provide more of it. Think of your blog posts like commercials, but not too self serving. Your visitors want to know what’s in it for them.
Talk about the issues that you and your customers are having and how you can help them.
Then be sure and check your stats to see which ones are popular and write more.

Be sure to include in your post a call to action. Something like
“If you are dealing with this issue I would be happy to work with you on solving it. Contact me by posting a comment on this page, emailing me directly or call my cel (412) xxx-xxxx right now.

So taking my own advise here, if you have a website that just seems to be siting there and not working for you please contact me and I would be happy to provide a free analysis of your current site.

There is also much more good free information on this site. Here’s a recommendation

What Good Are 1,000,000 Visitors If They Don’t Like Your Content?

Recently I had a very bad service experience with Comcast Cable. It was so bad that I dropped them and closed my account.

Then just the other day I get an email newsletter that was highlighting next months programming. I had never actually opted in to their newsletters (but didn’t opt out either) and usually just deleted them when they came. I’m still mad at them for their poor service so I wanted to unsubscribe. It turns out there is no way to stop their mail unless I logged in to my account and set my preferences to “no emails”.

As I said before I had closed my account so there was no place to login to change my email settings. I went through their site to try to find a way to contact an actual person who may be able to help. What a maze! I sent email and filled out forms anywhere I found them. I spent a good half an hour on this quest.

I did receive a couple of autoresponders telling me that my request was not clear and I should check out their FAQ section. I guess that saying “I am no longer a customer, stop sending me email” was just not very clear. Later in the day I did get a reply from what I think is a real person who told me they would forward my request to someone who would remove my email from their list. I’ll let you know what happens next month.

Besides venting here, my point of this post is that if you are sending out bulk email of any kind be sure it’s easy for your recipients to unsubscribe to your list. In fact while it’s fine to have FAQ’s and automatic service programs, it should never be hard to contact a real person in your company from anywhere in your site. If it is you could be probably are chasing away customers.

Is Anyone There?

I have a page on my site with some of my favorite site designs that are showing up on the web. These are not my sites, but they are the kinds of designs that I like in a website. There are different reasons that I picked these site designs, they all look good and are clear and easy to use. The graphics are good, but not overpowering. Sometimes I just like a picture or the name. Some of the sites are not in English and I still know what they are about.

The newest one is called Walters & Walters North Carolina Wedding Photographers.

When I first looked at this site I thought here is the kind of site where all you really need for human visitors are slideshows that showcase great work. It’s really some of the nicest wedding photography that I’ve seen. The site has good clear navigation right at the top and a place to sign up for their newsletter right on the first page.

This is a case where having a blog should provide plenty of “spider food” for the search engines to read even though it’s not on your main pages. Written content can be on any page provided that the site’s navigation is designed so that your visitors can easily find their way to the rest of your pages once they’re in.

When I clicked on the blog there was plenty of written content and more great photos, but I saw two problems. The blog wasn’t on their domain and likely because of that it didn’t look like the rest of the site.

Here’s a site that is beautiful to look at, but needs written words for the search engines to read. They do have plenty of words, but it’s posted on the WordPress site not their own. I believe that by combining them they could turn two really good sites into a great one.

They could also post their newsletters on their site to preview for their potential subscribers and for more content. I like to see the kind of thing that I’ll be getting before I subscribe to any newsletter, but overall this site is well worth seeing.

Visit Walters & Walters

.

I replied to a Craigslist ad the other day for someone looking to update their website. They replied that they wanted several things:

• google ads
• mailing list where people can sign up for promotions, news etc
• take questions from people and compile into a newsletter to be sent out
• do surveys
• do podcasts
• sell ebooks

When I saw that they were using WordPress for their site I realized that everything that they wanted and much, much more was readily available as a WordPress plug-in. If you haven’t been there before I would like to invite you to

Browse The WordPress Plug-ins