E-Biz Booster Blog

Welcome to the 28th edition of email marketing tips on February, 9th, 2013.

After having put to sleep for more than two years, it’s time to wake up the carnival, again. I also have done some housekeeping:

All obsolete tips, broken links, etc. in the legacy editions 1 through 27 have been taken care of and are deleted now. Only evergreen, good tips from reputable sources have survived this procedure.

Interestingly it was mostly copywriters’ tips which had to be removed. Most of them just have disappeared from the web or their sites have got in too bad a shape that I don’t want to link to them anymore.

The good news is that we had some well known experts contributing here in the past.

You’ll find expert advise in those past editions from authorities like:

• Bob Bly (↑) - copywriting, USA East-coast
  
  
• John Carlton (↑) - copywriting, USA West-coast
  
  
• Patrick Schwerdtfeger (↑) - authority on self-employment, USA
  
  
• Mark Brownlow (↑) - email marketing, Austria
  
  
• Terry Dean (↑) - internet marketing, coaching, USA
  
  
• Michel Fortin (↑) - copywriting, business building, USA, Canada
  
  
• …and many more.

Since I started this carnival in 2008 the Web and the relevance of blogcarnival.com have changed. However, let’s see how it goes in 2013.

Here are the tips of the day.

tools and strategy

The next two tips are quite interesting because they are quite opposite to each other. At first Ioan shows us how to use your blog to send out emails for free. Then Mike suggests to re-purpose your ezine content on your blog.

Ioan Draniciar presents How to Use Your Blog to Create a Free Viral List Building System (↑) posted at Lazy Cash Making Formula (↑), saying, “If you follow my blog closely, you’ll notice a pattern. I post an article on my blog every time I learn something of real value from internet marketers I respect and follow. We all have to learn from someone and it should be from somebody who’s an authority in our niche. Brad Gosse is an awesome internet marketer, a straight shooter, honest and someone I can really trust.

I picked up this little gold nugget of information from Brad and added a little twist of my own to it in order to make it more effective. This method can help you tremendously when it comes to getting repeat visitors to your site.”

John’s comment: Indeed, you can put an email signup form from Feedburner on your site. However, you are very limited with this approach. But, hey, it’ free and it might get you started.

(On the other hand the author uses email marketing services from getresponse.com on his site. I wonder why?

Mike Munter presents Move Your Newsletter Content To Your Blog And Reach A Wider Audience (↑) posted at Mike Munter, Marketing Consultant (↑), saying, “Use this tip to get more web traffic and increase sales.”

John’s comment: Personally I am not a fan of pretty, content rich ezines but there are certainly plenty of use cases for them. Saying that, I find it a good idea to put those ezines online for public viewing and indexing by search engines. Thanks also for the descriptive screen shots, Mike.

Nishadha presents Market Your Startup with Emails: 6 Effective Ways with Examples (↑) posted at Creately Blog | Diagramming Articles and How to Draw Diagram Tips (↑), saying, “How a start-up can use email marketing.”

John’s comment: Good examples and guidelines for a brand building type of newsletter. Also with pretty screen shots. Nishada lists and explains six important features of such a newsletter. Miss one and you diminish your ROI.

editor’s pick

Mark Brownlow, The permission gamble: can you send more email safely? (↑) posted at No man is an iland (↑), saying, “”

John’s comment: The article I have picked here is from 2010 but still relevant. After a short discussion Mark calls out 6 way you could send more emails to your subscribers without too much risk of annoying them.

Zach Bulygo, How to Keep Email Marketing Manageable (↑) posted at KISSmetrics - Tips, Tricks and Resources for Analytics, Marketing and Testing (↑), saying, “It could be argued that email marketing is a better and more effective form of marketing. Unlike TV, print, and internet ads, email marketing is opt-in, so people are willing and want to read your email messages. Unfortunately, many companies get overwhelmed and abandon their email marketing efforts. How can you set up an email marketing initiative that is relatively easy to undertake and maintain? Well, cover the basics first.”

John’s comment: Zach provides three ways for getting the creative juices flowing. And he discusses them in context of recent real world examples and shows why they work.

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.

Yours
John W. Furst

P.S.: If you like this edition, check out the previous email marketing tips - edition 27, too.

Technorati tags: email marketing tips, blog carnival

I just have read a not so bad blog post. However, when I checked out the about page I got turned off.

“This is an example of a WordPress page, you could edit this to put information about yourself or your site so readers know where you are coming from. You can create as many pages like this one or sub-pages as you like and manage all of your content inside of WordPress.”

Come on. You can do better than that.
And you should.

Anybody who is getting serious about putting your blog in their RSS reader or subscribe to your e-mail list will want to know more about you.

The about page is a great place to let your readers know who you are, what you can do for them, and why they should listen to you.

But first things first.

Some Ideas For An Entrepreneurial About Page

• You have a name, haven’t you. Use it. Introduce yourself with a short bio. … or introduce each team member who writes in the blog on a regular basis.
  
  
• Of course we want to see your photo(s). A nice photograph makes it more personal. You do not want to miss this step.
  
  
• What problems can you help the readers with?
  
  
• Why are you qualified to help them?
  
  
• Tell them how they can stay in touch with you. An optin form on the about page i snot such a bad idea. However, remember the good rule of thumb: “One page, one action.” Don’t offer too much.
  
  
• By the way: Have you ever thought of putting a personal video message (↑) on your about page? I guess, it’s time to do that.

Now go to work.
You don’t have to get it perfect.
5 % better than your competitors will do.


Yours
John W. Furst

P.S.: I just realize I should update the about page of my own as, well.

P.P.S.: In the context of legal issues with online publishing, you MUST NOT have an anonymous blog anyway. Pen names are fine, but readers, customers, and the government must be able to contact you based on the information on your website without having to go through hoops. (I’m not a lawyer. This is not legal advice!)

P.P.P.S.: Do you have anything to add? Any comments? I am sure you have. Let me know.

Twitter Has ADD

Sorry for the misleading animation to the right. I won't talk about the Twitter whale, Twitter outages, and overcapacity. It's not a real problem. C'mon, Twitter is usually back in a very short time.

What I want to address is the fact that a recent eye tracking survey has revealed what seems to be so obvious anyway.

“Twitter has ADD”

ADD, the attention deficit order. Your response right now might be, "Wait a minute here, Twitter users have attention deficit order, but Twitter?"

You might be right that many tweeples suffer from this syndrome, but let's think about Twitter.

It paints short messages on the screen and before you have read it to the end it pushes the very same message that you are still reading off the screen.

(Don't miss out the 5 tips at the end of the post!)

→ Continue reading:

Welcome to the eighteenth edition of email marketing tips on June 19, 2009.

This is—as you know a revival—after I had kept the pause button pressed for a couple of month. I am curious to see how it goes.



Here is my brand new “Intro-Video”



Now, lets jump right into this edition with a quote that reminds us why growing an email list for your existing business or your startup venture is not such a bad idea.

Quote of the day

Legendary direct response copywriter Bob Bly wrote as a comment on his blog about a year ago:

“…I have over 50,000 subscribers to my e-newsletter with whom I communicate weekly via e-mail. In exchange, they send me between $4,000 to $10,000 a week to buy my information products. How much money do your 3,000 followers on Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace send you each week?

Also, networking is only of value depending where you are in your life and career. At this point in my career, I have much more work than I could ever hope to handle, and people know where to find me. So doing Twitter or whatever would be a waste of time better spent on projects I am writing for clients and publishers.” --bly.com, May 27th, 2008 at 8:24 am

Today’s categories:

• Editor’s Pick
• Tools & Services
• Email Copywriting
• Strategy
• Code Of Practice

→ Continue reading:

I just got word that we are discontinuing the Email Marketing Tips Blog Carnival. The email marketing tips 16th edition has been the last edition so far.

Update: The carnival is continuing. Read edition 18 of email marketing tips next.
John W. Furst
2009-06-08

Why?

The reasons are twofold.

(1) The top dogs are not contributing their blog posts anymore.

(2) If we have to scan the Web for good content ourselves, what is a blog carnival good for then?

As the quality of carnivals has declined over the last couple of month so has the effectiveness and resulting traffic.


What's next?

→ Continue reading:

When I first saw this interactive mega-pixel photo I certainly thought, “Wow!”, and since I have mentioned Obama in my post “Yes You Can”, I decided to share it with you.

Check it out. It is quite impressive, you can pan and zoom around and therefore it's fun too.



Photographer David Bergman used the same NASA technology that was used to create the stunning picture from our Red Planet Mars.

The result is an unprecedented 1 474 mega-pixels photo. In comparison the average consumer digital camera operates on 5 mega-pixel. The detail is amazing. Pan around and take a closer look on the 2 million people who came to Washington to take part in this historic event. What earrings does Hillary Clinton wear? You even can make out that little detail.

David Bergman says,

“Covering the inauguration of President Obama was one of the biggest thrills of my life. Little did I know that it would be topped by the reaction to a photo I made that day. …With the ability to zoom in and move around the photo, it turned into an international game of ‘Where's Waldo?’ In the first 5 days, the image was viewed by millions of people in 186 countries.”

You might also want to check out the Gigapan (↑) site for more information about that technology and to view other “highest” resolution images.

Yours
John W. Furst