E-Biz Booster Blog

Dear business builders,

You might have heard it many times before, “Content Is King!”

This little phrase gets everyone excited who is especially afraid of paid advertising.

Countless blogs and worthless article directories have been started with the hope to attract traffic and turn it into money without spending a dime.


But this is not about it.

Content Marketing is serious business!

Toby Murdock of SEOmoz wrote a detailed article about “How to Build and Operate a Content Marketing Machine.”

He says, “The question is not ‘why?’ your organization should start with content marketing — that should have been answered already — it is ‘How?’”


Check it out, take notes, and most importantly define action items and set a due date for each.


To Your Success

Yours
John W. Furst

Welcome to the 26th edition of email marketing tips on October 14th, 2010.

In this edition I present hand picked articles about email marketing. Enjoy.

Editor’s Pick

Mark Brownlow presents False idols: four beliefs that can hurt your email marketing posted at Email Marketing Reports, saying, “Our basic beliefs about how our emails work aren’t as self-evident as we’d like to believe. There’s nothing like a bit of pointy-finger self-criticism to brighten up the marketing week.”

John’s comment: Excellent article. Check it out.

Barry Adams presents Keyword Research for Email Marketing posted at Internet Marketing Blog, saying, “When we think of keyword research we usually don’t think beyond search engines. However, keyword research has applications beyond SEO and PPC. Another online marketing discipline it applies to is email marketing — albeit with a different angle.”

John’s comment: Interesting analogy to SEO. Using the wrong words can get your campaign in trouble, especially with spam filters.

Chrissane Sternal and Lisa Barone present 12 Email Marketing Tips For Small Business posted at Understanding Marketing, saying, “Email marketing is still one of the most common forms of customer communications and outreach. And while other forms of outreach have piqued the small business owner’s interest, such as social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook, email marketing is still central to the larger integrated marketing approach.”

John’s comment: A primer for small business owners to get started easily.

Mike Hillyer presents How To Send One Billion Email marketing Messages Per Month posted at Mike Hillyer’s Webspace, saying, “Contrary to what the image to the image above implies, there’s nothing inherently evil about sending a billion messages a month. Some of the businesses that move a billion messages a month include ESPs, social networks (some move more than a billion a day for that matter), social gaming sites and large online retailers.”

John’s comment: Interesting. Explains a lot of technical details and teaches what is involved with sending emails in huge quantities.

SendBlaster Email marketing Blog presents 7 Books To Enhance Your Email Marketing Skills posted at SendBlaster Email marketing Blog, saying, “If you are directly involved in email marketing activities and truly want to enhance your skills, it is also a good idea to spend some time reading printed books!”

John’s comment: Some good books on email marketing.

That concludes this edition of email marketing tips. Past posts and future hosts can be found on my email marketing tips blog carnival home page.


Continue reading the next issue: Email Marketing Tips - Edition 27.


Yours
John W. Furst

P.S.: If you like this edition, check out the previous email marketing tips - edition 25, too.

Technorati tags: email marketing tips, blog carnival

Okay, now it is official.

Google finally announces that page loading time has become one of the ~200 signals (↑) that influence rankings in its search engine. If you are a little bit tech savvy when it comes to web technologies, check out the post. There you’ll find resources and tips on how to tackle the issue.

The Google Webmaster tool (↑) also offers a new function at Dashboard / Labs / Site Performance which gives you a hint how your site is doing right now.

I already told you in September, 2009, how to speed up your website.

Now it’s time to get going.

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A couple of month ago I have written about the basics on how to choose a domain name. Today let me add one important point.

A friend of mine runs a successful business and just has launched a new website with some great tips for lead generation. I wanted to read one of his articles again and typed-in his URL. Instead of his homepage I saw:

Error: Server not found

This was quite a surprise. He has one of those domains where you have a hard time to remember whether to add the “s” for plural or not. Like in

car.com or
cars.com

The weird mess up on his part is that he even has a very beautiful logo with …labs, but his domain name is …lab.com.

I don’t think I am the only one making this mistake, but I am one of the few who actually try the other version as well. The average web surfer might just give up right away.

Of course I wrote to him immediately and shouted,
→ Continue reading:

Do you have Google Toolbar With Sidewiki installed?

If yes, please, watch the navigation bar of your browser.

I am using Firefox and noticed a hashtag after the URL in many instances. Not always, so I am not sure about a pattern, yet. When I turn Sidewiki off in the toolbar this effect disappears. Here is the proof.



Google Toolbar Seems To Interfere With Other Browser Add-ons

→ Continue reading:

A very quick insider note.

The infamous NOFOLLOW attribute has been removed from this blog for the backlinks of all trackbacks.

I think, why not share some appreciation for (quality!) bloggers who write about my posts.

Right now this blog still does not accept PINGBACKS, but TRACKBACKS are highly welcome (quality only!). Regular comments are still not followed.

Now, it's up to me to write and distribute posts which are worth to be written about.

I think about upgrading and enabling PINGBACKS as well.
Let me think …

Of course, I will monitor, possibly moderate trackbacks, and update the comment policy accordingly shortly.

Yours
John W. Furst