Track Your Email Campaigns With Aweber

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…)

I Zone Out When I Blog

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…)

Email Marketing Guidelines

There are a few guidelines to bear in mind when sending emails to your mailing list.

• Provide something of value when you email your list.

• Put the most important information at the top of your email.

• Try to keep content clear, concise and only to what is really needed.
  You have approximately 3 seconds to get your viewer to open your email and read further.

• Bear in mind that not everyone will be able to view the images within your email.
  If you can, try to keep this as text as it will not appear if people have images switched off.
  Also consider those who are partially-sighted or blind and are using a screen reader. If images are used, specify its Alt tag with an image name/description.

• Emails tend to appear differently depending on which email provider the receiver is using (Google, MS Outlook, Yahoo etc.) Always send test copies.

• Legally, all emails should provide users with an option to unsubscribe from.
  Email marketing software such as Aweber is very good at handling this.

• Some marketing emails tend to remind users why they are receiving updates. This is optional.

Have I missed out any?

You may wish read a related post: Plan Your Marketing Campaign

Add Subject Lines to Email Links

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?

How I Developed My First e-Book

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.

The Story

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.

The Approach

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.

Start Writing

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.

Flow of events

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.

Proof reading

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

Story and Concept: On going

Book Design: 0.5 days

Writing: 3 weeks

Proof Reading: 5 days

Micro-site and Aweber configuration: 2 days

Tools I used:

Book Design: Adobe InDesign

Transcribers tool: Dragon Naturally speaking

Micro-site Design: Click covers

Google Docs used for proof reading collaboration

PopUp Domination

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:

Look and feel

- Choose template
- Pick buttons and layout colours,

Mailing list HTML

- Choose your Email marketing provider i.e. Aweber

Template fields

- Input your content

List Points

- Highlight important messages using bullet lists.

Schedule

- 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.

Get yours now!