Pump Up Your Blogging with an Email Strategy

Blogging was founded on the principle of engaging in a conversation, yet one of the earliest and still most popular ways to have a conversation on the Internet is email. This makes blogging and email natural marketing partners. If you are looking for a way to boost your business blogging objectives you need to bring email to your small business blogging or corporate blogging marketing plan.

One of the earliest challenges of blogging was alerting readers to new posts. Unlike the typical website, blogs make web publishing a snap. The simplicity of blogging makes for a dynamic and high frequency of new and valuable content, but how do your readers know?

Using Email and Blogs Together

RSS and blog ping servers were designed to help solve this problem. They have arguably done a great job, but they still have not eclipsed the popularity of email. Email, in contrast to an RSS reader, is a multi-use communication tool. It is the foundation of most people's communication with friends, family, and work colleagues. I might read my RSS reader a few times a day. However, I will be in my email all day.

This is precisely why email is an important opportunity for any blogging initiative.
If you want a consumers attention--use email. If you want instant traffic--use email. If you want to stay top of mind--use email. Email marketing is the secret gem of online marketing. You need to plug it into your corporate blogging plan. It can raise your small business blogging efforts to a new level.

In addition to simple alerting your readers to new blog posts email can be a tool to engage your subscribers. Injecting unique content, email only tips, and special incentives can pave your way into the "sacred" marketing place--permission based email marketing.

Blogging Can Be a Sales Agent for Email

Email also gives you the opportunity to pre-qualify customers or drive them deeper into the buying cycle. An email can only hold so much content effectively and your audience may be overly broad. However, when you combine email with a business blog you can direct them to additional information or purchase. Likewise, using email you can test a variety of concepts and messages in email(s) and let the customers funnel themselves into appropriate sales channel(s).

Email + Blogging = Big Results

Combining these two powerhouses in Internet marketing can be the boost you need for your business. Never leave your business blogging to do all the heavy lifting. Blend in email marketing to drive traffic and engage readers. These blogging tips and email techniques will make monetizing your web publishing or building up your sales leads very easy to accomplish.

image credits to Joey Rozier

Outsource Your Email or Autoresponder Service for Better Results

Email marketing is increasingly one of the toughest marketing techniques to get right, but when executed well is still a hands down leader in effectiveness. The key to that direct email marketing success is execution--reliable email delivery and credibility. For these key components to a successful email marketing strategy I go straight to a reputable email or autoresponder service provider.

You can attempt to reliably deliver email messages and avoid spam filters on your own. However, it is a short cut I do not recommend. It is likely to end in frustration, poor results, and possibly expensive CAN-SPAM (compliance) fines.

Message Delivery

Reliable and consistent delivery of emails is probably the trickiest part of email marketing. Even the most legitimate, permission-based direct email marketing is likely to land in spam filters without professional help.

An autoresponder service spends 100 percent of their time and resources on understanding the latest email technologies and regulatory compliance. This is their value to the process freeing you to put 100 percent of your focus on the email campaign design and sales content.
A service provider can also add value by providing you the latest in email marketing tips, email conversion, and small business email marketing success strategies.

Reputation, Trust

Credibility, reputation, and trust are important concepts in any small business email marketing strategy. Giving your small business email marketing a professional look and feel can do as much for email conversion and response rates as the content itself. Simply, using a reputable autoresponder service like ConstantContact, iContact, or AWeber can increase credibility with the consumer.

Service provider strictly adhere to current rules and regulations around email marketing. Their services can help keep you on top of things like: opt-in requirements, appropriate company contact information, and unsubscribe compliance.

Making delivery on your email, building trust, and doing it consistently are integral parts of email marketing success. Outsourcing those duties to an email or autoresponder service is one of the smartest email marketing tips you can follow.

image credits to photobunny

Engaging Subscribers, 3 Strategies that Improve Your Email Marketing Success

Email marketing is more than blasting email and hoping for a reaction. Even getting a great autoresponders service and building a few great emails is not enough. To get real, meaningful email conversion you need to engage your subscribers--this is what makes real direct email marketing.

Small business email marketing is where a lot of great email marketers get started. Small business owners know the power of engaging the customer personally. That is precisely the strategy you want in your direct email marketing. Optimizing email conversion has to be the main objective.

Here are some email marketing tips with get you on that path to success:

1. A Friendly Face

When that email lands in your customers inbox they are unlikely to remember you. So, unless you are a celebrity you had better put a friendly face on it. You be the judge of this common mistake. Are you likely to open any of these sender's emails?

• info@bademail.com
• do-not-reply@bademail.com
• admin@bademail.com

I didn't think so. You just expedited your email campaign to the trash bin or spam bucket. How about these equally suspicious characters?

• John@bademail.com
• Joe@bademail.com
• Jane@bademail.com
• Sally@bademail.com

Are you seeing the pattern? A good autoresponder service will guide you around these common gotchas. The bottom line is make your email marketing messages as much like your every day emails, as possible. Use a real name from your company. It doesn't have to be your email address, but it should have a real name. Getting good email conversion typically is helped by adding a last name to the address as well. Also don't forget this common mistake--make the email address match any email signature in the body of the email.

2. Subject, Make it About Me

Subject lines are the keystones of email marketing strategies. There are lots of email marketing tips to improve your email conversion, but here are some of the basics:

• Use their name
• Remind them of email list or opt-in source
• Be descriptive and direct about the content
• Don't use high spam words like money, cash, mortgage
• Make it brief

Sometime you can't make all of this work together, but good testing will help you get the right combination and approach for your email list.

3. Opener, Don't Waste Time

If the email is open your corporate or small business email marketing plan is working. Be careful though. This is when many email marketers get sloppy.

Give you customer immediate clarity. Give me benefit and value. Give me a reason not to trash it with the other 200 emails in my inbox.

Start with an immediate benefit statement then tell them briefly what is to come. We used to call these Johnson boxes in the classic sales letter days. Often a small offer or freebie can entice a consumer to the next step.

Making your direct email marketing work is all about coaxing your prospect to the next step of action. These email marketing tips are a great way to build that framework for consistent email conversion.

Turning LinkedIn into a Small Business Contact and Lead Management System

LinkedIn is full of tens of millions of affluent, well-connected, decision makers. No small business marketing database you could create would have a better base to harvest for sales. So stop working so hard to generate sales from your social marketing plan--building your campaign on one of the top social sites on the Web.

LinkedIn Marketing is an Internet marketing dream. LinkedIn is full of people ready and willing to connect and transact on the Web. But, how do you get them to transact with you? The first step to success is stop looking at LinkedIn as a social networking site and start thinking of it as a marketing database or contact management system. Selling with LinkedIn is like using a super-charged CRM.

Contact Management
LinkedIn is already constructed much like the top small business marketing software. You can import contacts from all of the popular electronic address books (i.e., Outlook, Apple Mail, Gmail, Yahoo!, etc.). LinkedIn helps you segment connections and prospects into affinity groups (i.e., industries, schools, jobs, positions, and even interests).

However, one of the key advantages of LinkedIn being your contact database--prospects segment themselves. With LinkedIn, you have access to search your potential customers' own descriptions and profiles. These same prospects ask questions, answer questions, join groups, and participate in this social network.

No better contact database can put you in the cat-bird seat to observe your customers expressing their wants and needs.

Social Marketing
A social marketing plan is simply the extension of your contact management strategy when managed from LinkedIn. As you assemble connections into your LinkedIn lead management strategy you automatically begin social marketing. Typical contact or marketing management solutions require you to continually push incentives, offers, and teasers. LinkedIn shifts this paradigm, allowing prospects to pull your marketing feed and cause attractions.

Here are some clever strategies to optimize your Internet marketing strategy on LinkedIn:
• Use keywords in your personal profile and descriptions
• Post questions and answers to LinkedIN Answers
• Join an participate in relative LinkedIn Groups
• Create a LinkedIN Group of customer advocates for your business
• Search, visit, and learn from competitors, prospects, and experts in your industry
• Request connections and referrals from your customers and vendors

Connections naturally build trust, credibility, and loyalty for you. Center your marketing with LinkedIn on this strategy.

Lead Nurturing
Although we want every lead to convert that is simply not the real world. This is where Selling with LinkedIn again shows power of LinkedIn being your prospect database. Most contact databases often make non-active prospect difficult to track and activate.

LinkedIn makes a great platform for internet marketing and lead nurturing. These inactive leads still see you, see your activities, are still exposed to your LinkedIn questions and answers. Social marketing is always on with LinkedIn.

LinkedIn becomes a hands-off small business marketing and lead nurturing campaign to your connections, whether they are ready to buy or not.