By : Nidhi Gupta

An e-newsletter can be a powerful marketing tool. By providing timely, relevant and useful information on an ongoing basis in this format, your company reinforces your importance and builds value among its customers and prospects. Whether you create your own e-newsletter or use template software, you can put it to work for your company quickly, easily and less expensively than a print newsletter. Here are 10 tips for strengthening your marketing efforts by using an e-newsletter.

1. Define Your Goals: Clarifying your objectives includes defining your target, which may mean specific segments of your market or the entire market itself. Describe your audience in terms of their demographics, psychographics, needs and interests.

   Typical goals include motivating purchases; reinforcing your brand and building trust; increasing awareness; motivating recipients to visit your Web site or store; prompting requests for more information; deepening partner relationships; and increasing attendance for a conference or seminar. You can get additional value from articles by sending your e-newsletter to trade publications for them to reprint specific articles from it.

   Decide also on your publishing frequency. Because e-newsletters are delivered at regular intervals, they allow your company to consistently and regularly position itself as a trusted resource. If you send it too infrequently, you’ll be forgotten. Publish at least quarterly, but bimonthly or even monthly is preferable.

2. Build Your Subscriber List: Email your initial newsletter to anyone with whom you’ve had a preexisting business relationship, and confirm their interest in receiving it. Your list should include anyone who has requested more information about your company; names collected at trade shows; your employees’ business contacts; and billing department contacts. Remember to send all of your employees the e-newsletter, as well.

   All your marketing efforts should be aimed at growing a well-qualified database. Ask your readers to encourage their colleagues and friends to subscribe. Use your Web site by placing an e-newsletter subscription box or link on some or all of your pages. Use your offline media efforts to drive subscriptions, too.

   Employees should include a link to sign up for the e-newsletter in their email signatures. Your partners and strategic alliances might help you spread the word about your publication, if you offer to promote them in it. Consider buying outside lists from a broker and doing an email promotion.

3. Create Compelling Content: Interesting articles are the foundation of any good newsletter. Content should be targeted to your ideal readers and match their preferences and reading style. It should be timely, relevant and useful (or fun and entertaining). Cover a variety of topics, including how-to tips, case studies, trends and the latest developments. Vary the type of the content by using articles, factoids and including a poll.

4. Design Your E-newsletter to Be Attractive and Easy to Read: Using HTML rather than straight text is recommended. It allows you to format your message in an attractive way that’s compatible with your brand image, including using your typeface and colors. The layout should help organize content and make it easy for subscribers to find material of personal interest. Use a limited number of graphics to add visual appeal. Be consistent from issue to issue in the placement of name and contact information and the design layout. Make email and website addresses clickable.

5. Attend to the Details: Include a way for recipients to unsubscribe or opt-out. All requests to be added or deleted should be handled within five business days. Assure people that you won’t sell their names by including a link to your privacy statement. And make sure to include a copyright statement.

6. Make the Right First Impression: These days, if you don’t get it right upfront, your email will end up deleted before it’s even opened.

   Include a real person’s name in the “from” line. Place your company or product name either there or in the subject line. Hone your subject line by making a pithy statement (30-40 characters including spaces, or 5-8 words) with a specific benefit. Personalize the e-newsletter, if possible. When a recipient’s name is not available, use a term such as colleague, subscriber or some other appropriate word. Ideally, you should conduct a small test of several subject lines to see which gets opened more often.

7. Increase Response Rates: The rates at which emails are opened vary greatly and depend on many factors, including the list and subject line. Timing can also play into response. The rule of thumb is to send B2B emails on Tuesday through Thursday between 10 AM and 3 PM. On the other hand, consumers may be more responsive if it’s sent in the evening or on weekends. However, it sometimes pays to stand out by breaking the rules. Test sending your e-newsletter on different days and at different times to see what works best for you.

8. Follow Up When and Where Appropriate: Provide a confirmation message whenever someone subscribes or unsubscribes. It’s not only courteous; it’s good business. Be prepared to handle inbound email responses and questions resulting from your e-newsletters. Follow-through is as important as the initial contact.

9. Test Before Sending: Before sending to the entire list, send to a small internal list to check everything. Is the e-newsletter formatted correctly? Are the right typefaces, type sizes and colors used? Are the graphics loading in the right size and location? Are all the HTML links working and linking to the correct URLs? Check spelling and grammar as well.

10. Calculate Your ROI: Determine the metrics upon which you will evaluate the performance of your e-newsletter. For example: open rate, click-through rate, subscribe/unsubscribe rates and conversion rates. Compare results by market segment. If possible, measure the revenue produced by subscribers before and after they subscribed.

Source: Stengelsolutions.com

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By : Nidhi Gupta

1. RSS / Livebookmarks / Podcasting
   • In a traditional filesystem you’d have to update these files by hand, and believe me you can easily forget, and besides who wants to update 2 3 or 4 files everytime you update a page or make a new page for your website.
   • In a CMS based web application tasks like this are automated, “set it and forget it”.
2. Index pages and other aggregation.
   • Who wants to keep 2 or 3 files index pages straight, just setup some rules and bam, it just works.
   • In a flat file system how many edit might be needed for adding a single page?
     1. Add the page
     2. Add the fact that you added it, to your home page
     3. Add it to your rss feed
     4. add it to your Google Sitemap XML document
     5. Add it to any category pages
     6. Add it to a news section
   • Wow almost 6 edits, (maybe 5) what a waste of time.
3. Commenting
   • No brainer here, can you do commenting on a static html website?
   • CMS solutions help with adding a “community” sense to your website,the web can be more than static documents, quite thinking of the web as carbon copy of your printed material, it can be better, social, and interesting.
4. Templating
   • Want to change that design your 10 year old nephew/neice made for you? Even if he/she used good CSS and xhtml mark-up it can still be hard if you want to add whole new features or sections, say advertisements or other “included” content.
   • With a CMS solutions it’s quite easy to have multimpletemplates for your content, sotring all your data in a MySQL DB is the pinacle of seperation of content and presentation, albiet a bit convoluded at times, but they’ll have to pry my database content from my cold dead hands if they want it in flat files.
5. Options
   • There are many great CMS solutions avaliable.
     1. MODx - My personal favorite, it’s more of a framework allowing for rapids application development, heck you can even “bake” your site to flat files (if you do God have mercy).
     2. Drupal - It’s all the rage for features and support, but it can be slow, and has some bloat, but the new 5.0 soom to be an improvement.
     3. Typo3 - Little confusing, but it seems powerful
     4. WordPress - The “bloggers” tool of choice, hence it is great for blogging, but not much else.
     5. Mambo/Joomla - Confusing but again great support and community.
     6. There are plenty more to try for free at opensourcecms.com
   • Or you could roll your own.

Source: Webbake.com

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By : Nidhi Gupta

Running a blog is harder than it sounds at first. The biggest problem with maintaining a blog use to be finding something to write about on a regular basis.

That’s why there are hundreds of articles about finding content to write about, writing different content etc.

With all of these resources that are available to you, finding something to write about on your blog shouldn’t be that hard. But the main problem with maintaining a blog isn’t about finding something to write about anymore; the problem new bloggers - and probably you - are facing is about writing something unbelievably great.

To write something that is absolutely great for your blog, something nobody will ever forget, you have to know the process of writing incredible content. Fortunately, just like finding something to write about, there are ways.

Draw the line:
The first step to writing an unbelievably great article for your blog is to draw the line that separates “regular” content from “great” content. In order to draw the line between average, bland articles and unbelievably great articles, you have to first determine what your intended audience has already read, and what they would take time out of their day to read.

One way you can do this is to find other blogs in your niche and dig through their archives. Find out what has been covered and what hasn’t. Or, if digging through thousands of articles for topics doesn’t interest you, doing a quick search on Google for a topic can return great results.

It’s not hard to find out what resources are already available for your readers, and what sources aren’t. All you have to do is do a little searching. Then, when you’ve discovered what topics have already been covered and which ones haven’t, you can have an idea of what to write about that would be classified as “great.”

Write from your own experience:
One of the major problems most bloggers face with writing great articles is that they
write about things that they have never experienced or tried. If you’re going to write a post about “how to write great blog article” you have better have tried the techniques for your own blog.

Your readers will, firstly, be able to tell if you’re writing really great content based on your own experience, or if you’re just writing an article to get attention. The best articles in the blog world are articles written by authors who experienced something that their readers could benefit from learning.

Learn from their example - and experiences - and write from your own experience about a topic that is over the line and great.

Don’t write about things you don’t care about:
Writing from your own experiences will benefit your readers, but the real key to writing great articles for your blog is to try.

Too many bloggers go through the motions of writing content without actually putting any heart into what they’re writing. Typing words, putting in tags, publishing posts and marketing what they have published is how 85% of all bloggers blog.

Does it work? Sure it does. But those bloggers aren’t the ones on the top of blog lists and search engines.

The bloggers who determine what is average content and what is great content, who write from their own experiences about topics that have yet to be covered, and who put heart and a lot of effort into their posts, are creating unbelievably great content.

Don’t waste any time starting on writing great content either, get started right now. You’ll notice a change to your writing, as well as your blogs traffic, almost immediately.

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