With very little effort, Aweber email system allows you to send bulk emails to your entire mailing list. You can also schedule these emails to be sent at specific times you want.
Especially for a newly formed blog, it is very essential to start building your mailing list from day one and to maintain a relationship with them.
One of the key components of AWeber is its Auto-Responder facility.
Subscribers to YourBlogTools.com would have had a taste of this already.
It essentially handles the following:
On a weekly basis, I interact with my readers by doing the following:
With regards to list building, which is quite important to me, I wanted to hit the ground running. Aweber was able to meet my requirements.
What I wanted
What I didn’t want
Try Aweber here
Do you have any questions regarding this tool?
Are you already using Aweber? Share your experiences here.
]]>The same principle applies to a blog. When visitors stop by and find your blog a complete eye sore or of no value, they would simply turn back and go elsewhere.
Do you have a good theme installed?
How many side bar widgets do you have installed? – Must you really have all that?
Do you really need all those social bookmarking icons? Are your text font / size readable by all?
All these factors constitute to the overall appearance of a blog.
Let’s go back to our hotel analogy – although a blog/hotel may have something of value to offer, if first impressions are negative, chances are, the visitor will not return.
Remember first impressions counts, so take time to plan your blog’s structure.
Once that first impression bridge has been crossed, content is your No.1 product of value.
Either you have a news or an entertainment blog visitors are reading your stuff because you have something of value to offer.
Bare in mind, in most cases, visitors on your blog are there simply for their own interests.
What are your thoughts on this?
Have you recently done a stop-by test?
What would you suggest?
Let’s check out some tools that would brag about your blog as well as interact with others.
To continue with our series on “Essentials tools for a new blog“, Engaging your blog with community is a good thing.
Your blog is always going to be in a world of its own without communication channels or means of reaching out.
There are several ways to create these channels,
however, in this post I shall focus on four social media ones. Some of which have been applied to this very blog.
Let’s face it, as of the time of me writing this post Twitter is the biggest thing out there. A social networking service that enables you to send and read messages – also known as tweets.
If don’t already have an account – get involved here
And of course there are several third party Twitter applications that would give you a nice tweeting experience.
You can also decide to incorporate your Twitter conversation on your blog in a form of a widget. On this blog I am using Twitter for WordPress
Benefits:
With Twitter Feed, you can auto-schedule your blog post to distribute to Twitter.
Meaning your followers on Twitter would instantly know when you have a new post.
Benefits:
The TweetMeme retweet button is designed to encourage visitors to tweet your blog post.
This would actually be my first time using this widget.
I am keen to see the effectiveness of it.
Benefits:
It essentially does what it says.
The Share This or Share/Save button encourages visitors to add your posts to social bookmarking sites.
There are tonnes of share this application around. The Share button used here is by Add to Any.
Which tools do you use?
]]>Listed below are some of the plugins I first installed
Have you recently started a blog? Can you remember the plugins you first installed?
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