If you ever wanted to track the progress of your email campaign, Aweber has a great online tracking and reporting tool.
But before you dive in, you should have clear expectations of what you want your email to achieve i.e.
- Product sales (number / conversion)
- Brand awareness
- Customer retention
(more…)
After doing a bit of a data clean up on my Phone, I discovered that around 80% of my blog posts had been sparked off by me tapping away on my BlackBerry.
I tend to use my phone to jot down blog post ideas/structure and then flesh them out later.
I find that this works for me, as it suits my current lifestyle.
To further increase my productivity, I normally plug in my Sennheiser CX300II earphones and find the hardest inspirational instrument track. This is my cup of tea. (more…)
There are a few guidelines to bear in mind when sending emails to your mailing list.
Have I missed out any?
You may wish read a related post: Plan Your Marketing Campaign
The other day I received a request from one of my clients who wanted to pre-fill subject lines with the appropriate info.
This was for an email campaign with several email links embedded for different departments. This would prove useful when it comes to sorting them, using MS Outlook.
If you are familiar with HTML then this is quite easy to do.
To link a text, we normally write
Email us
To a subject line, you simply need to add the following
?subject=My Subject Line
The whole code should now read.…
Email us
That’s it…
So if you now click on this link it would automatically pre-fill your subject lines with the text “My Subject Line”
As far as I’m aware, this process works seamlessly on standalone Email clients such as MS Outlook. I’m not sure how it behaves with web based email apps.
Did you find this helpful?
Creating your first e-book can be a very daunting task – and rightly so.
But with a bit of structure and a clear approach it’s not so bad.
I would start off by identifying your purpose. Why are you creating an e-Book?
I decided to create one for two reasons;
1. To inform my readers about blogging from a business standpoint.
2. To create my first information product.
Originally, the content of the e-book was meant to be a series of guest posts on other blogs, but decided package it as my first product. As a result my email subscriber opt-in rate exploded.
Since the e-book was blogging based, I needed to have a story. People generally relate well to stories and practical examples.
I simply incorporated my interest which was music to the everyday blogging practices. This brought about Build a superstar blog.
The book looks at blogging from a music angle and they are some great analogies in this book – That was my story.
I was not interested in putting out regurgitated stuff. I wanted to do something different.
I approached this e-book by jotting down all my ideas on papers. At the end I ended up with a story board that illustrated flow of events.
From this exercise, I drew up chapter titles that relates to the story, action points, backstage access for further learning e.t.c.
They best way to start is in small chucks.
I broke the story down to chapters, so in a given day, I would tackle a chapter.
I used voice recognition software to help transcribe my voice into words, a product called Dragon Naturally Speaking.
In each chapter, I spoke from three different angles, from the bloggers, Musician and a Superstar angle. This meant recording three times.
Since this isn’t a blog post but a takeaway e-book, I adjusted my writing approach slightly.
Although I wanted to maintain a conversational style of writing, I felt it needed to be less chatty and a little bit polished – only slightly.
It’s important to keep the reader interested. I tried to make the chapters interesting and progressive.
I was also keen on keep the book short and to the point. Based on my initial survey a larger majority of readers would be reading from screen – I didn’t want to bore them.
Based on the number of pages I had initially I was quite impressed to have brought it down to 25 pages, there many pages and chapters that I had to sacrifice.
Make sure the material you are putting out is of good quality. It may seem good in your eyes but probably not in the eyes of others.
In my case, I gave it to a few people to proof read – It was the best move ever. They were able to point out things I had missed and gave me new ideas too.
Time taken:
It took just over a month to put together after the idea was given birth to four months prior– procrastination is a killer
The book was in a half complete state for a long time, moving further and further down my priority list.
I finally took action by setting myself a deadline, which I announce publicly on the blog.
I even installed a countdown for all to see and it worked – I got it done
You know the saying, build your list, money is in the list….
Well, for the past couple of days, I have been playing around with a fantastic WordPress plugin called PopUp Domination.
It is a very slick looking popUp opt-in box which is guaranteed to boost your opt-in rate significantly.
It’s being created and developed by a fellow blogger Michael Dunlop over at Income diary, which uses on his own blog.
What’s different about this tool is the ability to customise its look and feel to match your blog. Plus it has a high impact feel about it – which means more subscribers.
There are 4 templates to choose from which can be altered to suit your taste.
Popup domination is also compatible with the major email marketing providers such as Aweber and many more.
The plugin provided the following configuration options:
- Choose template
- Pick buttons and layout colours,
- Choose your Email marketing provider i.e. Aweber
- Input your content
- Highlight important messages using bullet lists.
- control PopUp timing sequence.
…and more
There’s a video tutorial of this plugin. See it in action >>
Start converting your readers into email subscribers using PopUp Domination.
You can pick up this amazing plugin for only $37 – a complete bargain if you ask me.