I think that an email newsletter is a wonderful way to build your business.

You could do it the easy way and hire me to design and run your campaigns or you can do it yourself.
Either way an email marketing blitz is inexpensive and can still be one of your most effective marketing tools.

There are some important rules for starting any email campaign

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

Post your old newsletters

It is always a good idea to post your newsletters on your site.
This will do at least two good things for you.

1. It will get you new content. That’s one of the best thing that you can do for your site to raise your rankings in the search engine results pages. Plus it will give you many new keywords that you can be found for in the search engines.
2. t will give your potential subscribers an idea of what they will be getting when they do sign up. That will make your newsletter even more powerful because you will be getting subscribers who read what you have and request more.

You can have a newsletters section on your site or a way to do it for my customers who want to do it themself would be to create a blog category named “newsletters” and post your email newsletters in that category. You can place a link from your newsletter sign up page that goes to this category. That way the link will always go to the most current editions. This is also a good page to link to in the header of your newsletter for those readers that are unable to view your email newsletter.

Well, that’s the end of my little mini-course, but there’s so much more to learn, many things that I may have missed or just glanced over and email marketing is changing all of the time. I invite your comments, techniques and opinions. and if you would like to learn more..

I can highly recommend emailexperience.org

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I think that an email newsletter is a wonderful way to build your business.

You could do it the easy way and hire me to design and run your campaigns or you can do it yourself.
Either way an email marketing blitz is inexpensive and can still be one of your most effective marketing tools.

There are some important rules for starting any email campaign

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

No Spam

You might think that “No Spam” is all about yesterdays post. That if you only have a opt-in mailing list you provide an method to opt-out and you have your name and contact information in your newsletters that you are not sending Spam and technically you are correct. I have a bigger definition of Spam. I believe that if I sign up to receive a newsletter and it is all ads and promotional material with no other good information it’s still junk even if I asked to receive it.

Unfortunately many site owners just want to know what’s the easiest and cheapest way that they can “blast” their advertisements to as many people as possible.

It’s important to remember here that your subscribers are guests of your site who were looking to see what you can do for them. They are hoping that you will provide them a way to make their life easier or maybe just to entertain them a bit. If you do that they will allow you to promote yourself and possibly even help you, but if all you send is advertising it will be ignored and what could have been your most valuable resource will simply unsubscribe or block your mail.

It is also true that in these days of email filters more and more email is being blocked and deleted. Many times the sender doesn’t even know it. The more images that you include in your newsletter the more it looks like spam to the filters.

In addition did you know that most major online email clients (Yahoo, Google, Hotmail) will block your images by default? The best way to get your message through to your readers is to not look like Spam. Just a few pictures and lots of text. Have good descriptive alternate text to describe your images so readers will know what the pictures are if they can’t see them. Be sure to provide a plain text version of your email to users who can’t get html email and provide a link to a page on your site where the reader can go if the email is unreadable.

The main thing that I want to stress in this post is that you don’t get to decide if your email campaign is spam or not, the folks on the receiving end get to decide that. Don’t give them an excuse to block your mail.

Tomorrow – Post your old newsletters

I think that an email newsletter is a wonderful way to build your business.
You could do it the easy way and hire me to design and run your campaigns or you can do it yourself.
Either way an email marketing blitz is inexpensive and can still be one of your most effective marketing tools.

There are some important rules for starting any email campaign

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

Opt-In only

It may be tempting go add the names of everyone that you can find to receive your newsletter, but the best way to go is to have your visitors ask to be placed on your mailing list.

It is important that you make sure that the option to opt-in to your newsletter is prominent, easy to use and on every page of your site, but the only way most people will subscribe is if you offer them something that they really want to receive.

In the case of yesterday’s free samples, where you are requiring the visitors to fill in all of the fields in a form in order to get their sample, I would advise to have an unchecked checkbox for your newsletter subscription.

Some people will say you should have the box prechecked so you get as many subscribers as possible, but I believe that you should make it as easy as possible to let your visitors add themselves to your list, but they should never have to opt-out.

You may say that this kind of thing is just petty, but I believe that it’s usually the small things that you do (or don’t do) that let your visitor know that you are not going to take advantage of their trust. You will definitely get fewer names on your list, but the ones that you get will be your best resource, your fans, so to speak.

When you do send them something they feel is worth passing along they will do so with a recommendation and some passion and that will best help you promote your newsletter, your site and your products and services.

Tomorrow – No Spam

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I think that an email campaign is a wonderful way to build your business.
You could do it the easy way and hire me to design and run your campaigns or you can do it yourself.
Either way an email marketing blitz is inexpensive and can still be one of your most effective marketing tools.

There are some important rules for starting any email campaign

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

Your own list

Your own list of customers and visitors who have asked for your newsletters are by far your most valuable resource. These are your core business. Very few, if any, lists that you can buy will give you people who are specifically interested in what you have to offer.

The main goal of a newsletter is to get people to actually receive, open and read your email. This is called deliverability. The best chance of this happening is to have recipients who want and have asked for your information.

One of the best ways to get your visitors to sign up is to offer them a gift. It’s pretty easy to offer something to download like a great report, helpful tips or perhaps an ebook that you have written or purchased the distribution rights to. These gifts can be presented as very valuable even though they don’t cost you anything or very little.

Another way to go is to give away something that costs you more. One of my customers Melosleep tried a limited time promotion where they gave away a free sample of their product to anyone who filled out a form. The freebie sites passed their offer around and in a very short time they had a huge amount of requests. It was expensive, but they built up a very large in house mailing list quickly.

A huge list can also be another expense as most web hosts will limit the amount of email any one account can send in order to keep the spammers out. For example this site is limited to sending 100 emails per hour max. There are programs like PHPList that will limit how many emails that it sends an hour, but if you have tens of thousands of names it would take weeks to send one newsletter.

In that case you probably need to use a commercial email sending (or hosting) company. A company with a good reputation so your email doesn’t get blocked even before it gets to your reader as being from a spammer.

Tomorrow – Opt-In only

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I have been reading Dennis Gaskill’s (aka Boogie Jack) newsletter for almost 10 years now. Even though I have only emailed him a couple of times over the years I feel like he’s a good friend. He provides his readers with good free information including web design tutorials, free web graphics, search sngine optimization and some great words of comfort and wisdom as well.

I thought his site had gone away and was very happy to report last January that he had returned. While reading his newsletter last night he reported that his business has “fallen off” due to something bad happening from outside of his site. He didn’t say just what it was yet, but asked if his readers would spread the good word about his site.

I’ve enjoyed reading Dennis for years and I think you will too. So drop by his site and sign up for his free newsletter if you like what you see.

Visit Boogie Jack

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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 Cottonseed Oil Tour.

Looks like an old fashioned country store for “America’s Original Vegetable Oil”. The site looks like what it is. Navigation is clear, easy to use and right at the top.

They ask for your story and sign up for their newsletter right up front.

I think that this is a great site for this promotion.

More…

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I have a page on my site with some of my favorite new sites that are showing up on the web. These are not my sites, but they are the kinds of things that I like in a website. There are different reasons that I picked these sites, 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 them are not in English and I still know what they are about.

The newest one is called Stemilt Creek Winery.

It’s a rustic looking site that is about wine. Is there any doubt? It could be in any language and you would know that right away. I love the look of the grapes growing right out of the picture. The navigation is easy to find and I like that they let you know what page that you are on

I also like that they ask you to sign up for their newsletter right on the navigation bar and have a simple to use form.

Visit Stemilt Creek Winery

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I got a birthday email from one of my neighborhood restaurants, Minutellos for a free bottle of wine. They have a rewards program.
I got the same email last year, but it came a month later.

I still had the wine and mentioned it was a little late. Not much, just a word and this year they fixed it.

I’m impressed!

I think many people send out email newsletters, but if you are going to personalize them and send special ones for events like birthdays or something else, it’s always pays to go the extra mile and try your best to get it right.

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I wrote yesterday about having a blog or newsletter. Then yesterday I discovered something else that I really like about having this blog. It’s the search feature. I can use it to send a targeted list of my work to people with a single link.

For example, I have quite a few cities on my Craigslist feed reader. When I an replying to some of these ads that are looking for a specific ability, I go to my blog first. On every page I have a search box where I can do a quick search for what I’ve written that would apply to what they are advertising for.

In this case they were looking for an email campaign so I typed in “email” and came up with this nice page of my articles to send the potential customer to. It’s a great page where the visitor can see the titles of many of my blog posts on the very subject that they are looking to hire someone for.

I wrote this post last night and I’m thinking that this is a pretty good tool and another reason to have a WordPress blog. Then today I see Google’s Matt Cutts writes about pretty much the same thing. He talks about categories (and a feed) and I wrote about search, but it must be true, great minds do think alike.

Read Matt’s Post “How to subscribe to just my Google/SEO posts”

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I often advise my customers that the best way to add more content to their sites is to start a blog and/or a newsletter. Of course, most of these people are busy running their business and many don’t think they have enough time to do one let alone both both. So the question is which one is better.

In either one you need to find some actual content. Whether you write it yourself or get it from some other source it’s probably the same amount of work. It used to be that blogs needed to be updated more often to work well, but that doesn’t seem to be true any more. People can access so many blogs at the same time now you don’t need to post as often.

In terms of work I think the newsletter is less. If you have a good newsletter program like PHPList which will manage your names and bounces without having to get you involved, the newsletter can be less work. You write, send and then post your newsletter to your site to give you new content (spider food) for the search engines to index. After that you are done with it. You may want to do some occasional cleaning up of your menus maybe once a year, but there is not much else to do.

With a blog you have to manage comments (and comment spam) possibly for as long as you post is on your blog. Although there are many good tools to make this less work, you do have to keep an eye on the comments and pings so things don’t get out of hand. The benefit of this extra work is that other people are constantly adding new content to your site without you having to do much work to get it.

It would probably be best to do both, but that’s not always feasible so here’s more information by Web Marketer Rich Brooks in his post on flyteblog. He looks at things more from a marketing viewpoint.

Business Blog vs. Email Newsletters: Which Works Better?

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