The Evolving Internet Marketer

Building Your eZine List – 5 Ideas Off the Top of My Head

A prospective client who’s interested in having me take over management of his electronic newsletter asked me if I’d talk to him about building his ezine subscriber list. I mean what’s the point of having a great newsletter if nobody’s reading it, right?

Here’s a few of the ideas I gave him…

1. Take a cue from print publishers and offer a premium for subscribing to your ezine. Maybe it’s an informative white paper, an introductory teleseminar for new subscribers, or a chock-full-of-great-ideas e-book. The point is, incent people in some way to sign-up for on-line newsletter.
2. Promote the cr*p out of it. Pardon my french but to mangle an old saying, “if an ezine is published on the internet and nobody knows about it does it make an impact?”
• If you speak or provide workshops or seminars, include a handout that combines your subscription info with the description of both the invaluable content they’ll receive with each issue but touting the insanely valuable premium they’ll get just for subscribing.
• In your email signature file add a blurb with a link that says something like, “Subscribe to my SuperDooper Ezine for valuable tips on widget fabrication and receive my award winning eBook on ‘Ten Things Your Mother Never Taught You about Widgets But You Need to Know’.”
• If you have a retail store include a sign-up form next to your cash register and train your staff to ask people if they want to sign up for this valuable tool.
• Prominently promote your ezine on every page of your web site. Include access to sample issues or invite them to browse your archive of past ezine issues.
3. Don’t use it as a glorified sales vehicle. Follow the 70/30 rule that says provide 70% valuable content for every 30% of self-promotion you include.
4. Go viral. Use a broadcast service that provides “Forward to a Friend/Colleague” type functionality. Oh, and don’t just ask them to forward it to one friend, suggest they forward it to 5 people. You’ll be surprised at how many people will do so.
5. Write killer content and publish it on a consistent schedule. Make it valuable. I know when one of my clients has hit a home run with their content because click-throughs go way up. Forwards boom and web site traffic (to the ezine archive) soars.Consistency means that if you’ve captured their interest you’ve also captured their trust by being regular and reliable. There are 2 local papers in my market. If I’m subscribed to one but they deliver sporadically while the other delivers daily – guess which one will get my subscription?
6. Bonus Tip: Consider co-promotion which means finding complementary ezines and swapping subsription links with them. If you provide sales training find a marketing guru and offer a link to subscribe to their electronic newsletter if they reciprocate. If you’re a restaurant in an entertainment district, work a deal with the community playhouse next door.

In other words, market and promote your ezine like you market and promote your products and services. And don’t forget #5. That’s the key. Good content, consistently presented will do wonders for your subscriber base. How do you know it’s good? Ask yourself: Would I subscribe to my ezine?

Want to Use the Blogosphere to Promote Your Next Big Thing…

…then you might want to give a read to Gina Trapani’s Press release mashup post on the topic at her personal weblog, “Scribbling.net“. Why do you care what Gina has to say. Mmmm, maybe because she’s editor of one of the most influential blogs on the planet (don’t take my word, Time says you can’t live without it!).

Don’t want to click around, Gina’s advice, if you want to grab her attention, is very simple:

Send them an email in the following form: “Hey there, this new product X does Y for folks who need Z. Check it out at http://link.com.”

Got it? Good.

Why You Should Use Paid Search

Many of you are probably wondering if you should use paid search to complement your search engine strategy — assuming you have a search engine strategy!

Let’s start by clarifying, for those of you who aren’t sure, what constitutes paid search? Well to use Google as an illustration, the following screen capture shows a search for ‘pickled herring’:

The Result in the light blue box at the top of the search results column as well as the items on the right side of page are all ‘paid search’ results. The actual, or what are referred to as organic, search results appear in the left hand column. You’ll notice that even a less than mainstream query, like pickled herring, can result in several hundred thousand (290,000 in this case) results. A popular search term, like cheap tickets, returns over 83,000,000 results so this becomes reason number…

1.) To get noticed by the search engines — and searchers — when your site isn’t drawing their attention ‘organically’.

For example, one of my clients has budgeted less a dollar a day for an AdWords campaign that’s focused on a key phrase at the heart of his business. The problem is that his site doesn’t show up in the top 100 organic results for this term. Yet this term is the top producing phrase in terms of delivering traffic from search engines accounting for almost 23% of his search traffic for the most recent month. What can you buy for a buck a day?

2.) They actually work. I mean people aren’t giving billions of dollars to Google and other internet ad sellers out of the kindess of their hearts. Google, according to AdWords guru Andrew Goodman, says about 15% of the time searchers will judge paid results more relevant than organic. From my own experience I find myself more willing to pursue paid results the further I am in the buying cycle, e.g., the more ‘commercially’-oriented my search.

Goodman finds, in reviewing results from the several hundred campaigns he’s been involved in, that between 1 and 5% of searchers click on these ads. By contrast, a direct mail piece that draws a 1 to 2% response rate is considered successful.

In addition, Google’s not so hidden agenda is to promote organic search for information, educational and government results while steering more commercially oriented response towards their on-line advertising programs. You can see this working in my query above (randomly chosen on the spot, by the way) which shows the first organic result as the pickled herring entry in Wikipedia (the amazing online user-edited encyclopedia) while the first paid result is from an herring importer. Don’t you love it when a plan comes together?

3.) This is a bit of a corollary to #1 but worth noting on its own. If you’re site lacks the content to really make a dent in the search engine’s algorithms you can use paid search to reel in search traffic.

Don’t get me wrong, you can go broke running an AdWords campaign on a heavily trafficed keyword but, with a little prudence, a little bit of investigation and the willingness to experiment you can enjoy some signficant success.

Do You Count Unique Visits or Visits When Assessing Your Site’s Effectiveness?

I, along with countless others, was taught early on to ignore visits and focus on unique visitors as a leading indicator of your websites reach, i.e., the number of actual visitors your site attracts. Or, as many of us think of it, the number of potential prospects that visit our site. Matt Belkin of Omniture has a different take on this. He never uses unique visits. Instead he argues that visits is a more powerful metric as what it truly represents is conversion opportunities.

I think I agree. Why? Because, if a unique visit is considered the sum of the visits made during a single session and the visits represent the total number of pages viewed by a single visitor then it stands to reason that if a visitor didn’t purchase something, subscribe or inquire we didn’t fail to convert them one time, rather, we failed to convert them by the number of pages, and calls to action on those pages, that they were exposed to. When considered by this reasoning it provides a more revelatory picture of the effectiveness of our site.

The lesson that I garnered from Matt’s post was that we need to view each single page of our site as a conversion opportunity and the only way to measure the effectiveness of our site in converting customers is to establish visits rather than unique visitors as our principal metric.

You can read Matt’s post, “Unique Visitors or Visits – which metric should you use?” here. Do you agree?

Improving Your Search Engine Rankings

I assume that we all want to improve our visibility in search engines like Google, Yahoo, Ask, etc. More importantly, we want to rank high for the services and/or products we represent. Here’s one way to achieve our goal. Make a list of key terms and phrases that define and describe

• what you do/who you are
• what services you provide
• what products you offer.

Try for quantity – 50 or 100 key terms and phrases — as well as quality. Keep that list handy and use it when you post to your blog or generate new content for your website in general. Use it for your headlines – example: I advise clients on improving their search engine rankings so I wrote the headline for this post with the dual goal of informing both site visitors and search engine spiders of my expertise in helping people attain higher rankings in the engines. Use it when building your content; don’t be onerous, don’t let key term infusion overwhelm readability but, well used, it can definitely enhance scanability and understanding. If you’ve written elsewhere on a topic, use the key word list to create the link that goes there. Over time the search engines will get the idea and, once they rank you on this topic, it will also be apparent to the visitors they drive to your site what you and your offerings are all about.

Isn’t it Ironic but Misspelled is One of the One Hundred Most Misspelled Words.

Subtitle: Duz gud speling mater?

Go figure but, yup, it’s true mispell misspell is one of the most frequently misspelled words along with my personal favorites:

• occasionally
• restaurant
• and privilege

For all one hundred, check out: http://yourdictionary.com/library/misspelled.html.

As a marketer, why does this matter? Because communication feeds perception and, if you’re perceived to be a sloppy speller, you might also be perceived to be a sloppy business person. Also, some SEO experts believe that misspellings of key words and phrases may be penalized by search engines. Please note that others suggest that you include common misspellings so as to catch the errant speller searching for your goods or services. Oh my, what to do?

Great Reasons to Blog

I use a couple of different Email Broadcast Services to send out ezines and other email communications on behalf of my clients. One of these is Vertical Response out of San Francisco. They have a nice tool. Fairly easy to use although don’t get me started on their 30kb message limit … uh, I digress…

Anyway, I get their ezine which, this past issue, spoke of several good reasons that business should blog. According to Janine Popick, CEO/Founder, these include (with my comments added in []):

1. The Voice of the Business [A blog, particularly an executive's blog, can provide a human face to what may seem a cold conglomeration.]

2. Comment Consolidation – What a time-saver. If one of your readers has a question, chances are others have it too. What better way to answer it than in one place where everyone can see and hopefully benefit. [A great way to check the pulse of your blog as well - are you connecting to your audience? do you HAVE an audience?]

3. Customer Interaction – Not only do I love to interact with our own users but when they comment and others start to comment on the comment, it’s the best thing for everyone. This is exactly what any blogger would want. I don’t have all the answers, so I try to encourage customer experts to comment and pitch in on ideas. What might work great in one industry, might actually do well in others. [Most blogs give their authors an opportunity to moderate a reader's comments and remove or block those you they want posted. Be careful with this power. Unless a comment is down right mean-spirited, nasty or profane then let 'em rip you. You'll quickly find out - from other reader's comments - whether they're just spitting out sour grapes or there's a real issue you need to address.]

4. Traffic Driver – We get about 160+ visitors to the blog a day. When when we combine it with our newsletter email, we get thousands. It also drives traffic from the search engines as another source, and gets picked up by other blogs that find the posts interesting. [Just architected a revamped site for a long time client and, although, he's only got a few posts going, his blog is pulling the 2nd highest number of views aside from the home page. More than generating traffic, a timely, informative blog will generate interest]

5. RSS Feeds – Some people like to get their information with RSS feeds. It’s easy with a blog, they’ll sign up for your feed and get it realtime right in their reader. [And for those who still like their online communications the old fashioned way, there are services like Feedblitz that allow you to subscribe to blogs via email.]

You can read Janine’s entire post here…

If you have a business and a web presence and you aren’t blogging … it’s time to seriously consider it. The cost of entry is incredibly low with hosted services from Blogger, Wordpress and Movable Type running from $0 to a few dollars a month or software you host yourself costing nothing or very little. One caveat, don’t blog unless you’re committed. Full time bloggers may post dozens of times a day. Do you need to go to those extremes, no, but you do need to make a committment to post a few times a week.

Computer Crashed? No Backup?

Or worse yet, your computer was backed up … to an onsite storage device and your office burned down!!! (This happened to a friend of mine…)

All I can tell you is been there … done that … got the t-shirt. Oh, and I also got smarter. I now use an online back up service called Mozy. This nifty remote backup service is free for storing up to 2 gigabytes of data and dirt cheap if you need more space. I’m paying about $55 bucks for 30 gigs of backup space for a year. You can’t beat that. Plus, if you’re a security freak they offer encryption for your files to give you that extra level of peace o’ mind.

Check out Mozy and don’t get caught with your pants down (critical-pc-file-wise).

Oh, but if you don’t like them, here’s a great list of 90 online back up solutions offered by the brilliant folks at LifeHack.org.

There is (dating) Life – and blogging success – after 40

…and one my clients is proving it with her “Adventures in Dating after 40” blog. She even made the top 100 fastest growing blogs at Wordpress.com.

What’s her secret? Like any successful blog she’s writing from her heart and her experience. While this is, obviously, a personal effort these lessons apply to any blogger, personal or business. Blogging, I believe, is about building community whether it’s with over-40 daters or your company’s customers. And the glue that holds a community together is a passion derived from common cause.

I love the Internet as a marketing channel for business, in particular, small business. I hope it shows in what I write. And maybe, over time, I’ll attract an audience who is engaged by my approach and, in turn engages me in dialogue and perhaps partnership where I can apply what I know to help them grow their passion (business or personal) via the web.

AOL Bites the Bullet – Subscribers Go Free

Why do I feel like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz after the wicked witch was turned into a puddle? Because AOL, long bleeding subscribers from their paid services, has turned to an advertiser supported model and is now offering e-mail and content for free to all.

So if you, like I, were paying AOL — in addition to your high speed Internet provider — merely to have access to your AOL email account then rejoice cuz ding-dong the wicked witch is dead! To cancel your AOL account but keep your email service call 1-800-984-6207. You may be faced with a long wait but if it saves you $25 a month, then hey, it’s a good deal.

Don’t worry, if you still need dial-up occasionally, AOL offers a $4.95 plan that gives you 10 hours of dial-up a month. And AOL is still offering their dial-up access and broadband access plans to those who need them.

Why is AOL doing this? Because they’ve lost 10 million subscribers in the last 4 years. At that rate, they’d be out of business by the end of the decade if they didn’t do something like this. They had already freed (most) of their content now they were taking the next step by acknowleding that a captive audience ain’t necessarily a good thing particularly when you’re making them pay double for what they can get for free. It’s a good decision and, if they’re smart, it will pay off for them in the long run.

Lessons for marketers? A customer who does business with you because s/he wants to is a heckuva lot more valuable than who who does business with you because s/he has no choice.