Newsletter Mistakes You Need To Avoid!

Posted on November 8, 2012 by admin

Newsletters are an excellent way to gain credibility with customers and to get repeat business from previous customers. But if you’re not careful, subscribers could be clicking the unsubscribe button en masse. And, for every subscriber that clicks the unsubscribe button there are probably many more who just stop reading your newsletter.


Avoiding the Appearance of Being a Spammer

Additionally, those who send out newsletters are often mistaken for spammers even though all of the recipients opted to receive their newsletter. This can get you in trouble with the law unless your opt-in software keeps an IP log of each subscriber. The most likely result is having email hosts filter your email into spam or bulk folders, and having your email address or domain put on an email blacklist. But the most likely devastating results include having your ISP and webhosts notified that you’re a spammer, often resulting in immediate termination of your accounts. This can shut you down for weeks and cost you major income and headaches.

Often these results all happen when one of your subscribers has forgotten subscribing or being a customer of yours and gets angry and reports you as a spammer. One way to prevent them from getting angry is to have a functional unsubscribe link at the bottom of each edition of your newsletter. Failure to have a working unsubscribe link is one of the most important newsletter mistakes to avoid. Utilizing software that tracks the IP of each person who subscribes will keep you out of legal trouble, but unfortunately it won’t usually help you with your ISP or host as they tend to cancel accounts without asking any questions first.

Avoiding Other Newsletter Mistakes

You need to pay attention to the technical side of your newsletter too. Take note of emails that bounce and don’t go through. If an email address bounces several times, you need to clean that address out of your list to speed up your newsletter sends. The email address in this situation is probably either canceled, incorrect, or belonging to a member whose inbox is full. If an email address bounces only once or twice, it is nothing to be concerned about; the recipient’s email server was likely just busy or rebooting at the time of the send. One of the common newsletter mistakes is to delete an email address the first time it bounces your newsletter. Every newsletter subscriber counts.

Take note of those email addresses that bounce so you can check them later. Also, if you notice an obvious misspell such as domain.con or domain.vs or hotmil.com, go ahead and correct the address and see if the email goes through next time. In addition to slowing your newsletter queue down, bouncing newsletter email addresses can add up quickly and provide you with inaccurate statistics about subscriber to sales conversion rates for your mailings. These statistics are crucial to learning what works in your newsletter.

Do not include any content that is inappropriate for minors. Also, do not include shocking or disturbing content. Not only can this all get you in serious legal trouble, it undermines the very credibility and trust you are trying to build with your customers.

Also, unless your site niche is controversial issues, you should avoid controversial issues in your newsletters. Your goal is to make your website and newsletter appeal to your customers as a credible, unbiased source of information, products, and services. You can’t do this by taking a stand in a controversy. Concentrate on building on areas of agreement.

One way you can make your newsletter appear very un-spam-like is to limit the sales pitches. This will greatly reduce the likelihood of being accused as a spammer. More importantly, you can really make more sales with subscribers by focusing on branding the quality of your website and products with positive information. Heavy sales pitches are more successful with first-time buyers than with repeat website visitors and customers. If they’re placed in your newsletter they will lead to a lot of unsubscribers.

In closing, I want to re-emphasize the importance of placing a functional unsubscribe link at the bottom of every edition of your newsletter. Sometimes subscribers will email you and ask to be removed from your list as well. You do not have a legal right to refuse them, so grant their request and be very gracious and humble. You might make a good impression on them that could lead to future sales. And besides, you can’t really afford legal battles over someone that wouldn’t even continue reading your newsletter anyway.

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Web and Graphic Design Templates

Posted on November 8, 2012 by admin

When you are knew and launching you first e-business you would find that you know precious little about creating a website – let alone a professional looking one. Most people are of the impression that a website without some impressive graphics is not worth a dime. While it is true that graphics does make a web design attractive, their importance is often overrated. People think that graphics is what makes their website sticky to the audience; however, it is the content and usability that does so.
The Benefits of Using Web Design Templates

If you are an expert and can do it yourself or have loads of money to hire a website designer for yourself. If you neither of these is applicable to you, then your best choice is to use graphic templates, from a company like www.templatemonster.com. Contrary to popular belief, using graphic templates does not make you blend with the crowd. What you write on your web design would be enough to differentiate you from other websites which have used the same graphic templates. Besides you get a handful of benefits that would have otherwise missed:

1. Low investment – many web design templates are free or have a very low cost for using which would keep your investment low. This is very important when you launch a new business and you have very little capital. Hiring a web designer costs a lot of money, which is not a good option when you are starting a new low-cost venture.

2. Possibility of customization – many of the web design templates are perfectly customizable and hence you can play around with the design until you get just the right look for your website. This would also eliminate your fears of being too similar with other websites. The customization you would thus acquire would cost next to nothing when compared with the cost involved for obtaining similar results.

3. Saving time and effort – web design is very difficult – even for experts – and time taking as well. Using web design templates would help you achieve excellent results with the least effort in the shortest possible time span. This means that your website could be finalized in a shorter time and you could launch it early.

4. Best value – when you use the graphic templates you would have access to some great looking designs which could be customized to suit your website to look like an original and professional work. This means you get the best value for your money.

5. Wide choice of graphic templates – you need to scan the Internet to realize how many web design templates are available for you use. Spend a few days searching and you are assured to get some excellent results. You have a wide variety to choose from and with a little research you could get designs that are the closets to what you would have wanted for your website.

In a nutshell, using graphic templates are beneficial for those who want more out of their money and time.

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Website Design Basics

Posted on November 7, 2012 by admin

Website customization is best done before launching rather than after launching. You can still do it after it is launched, but the longer you wait for it, the more difficult would the customization become for you. Some of the things that would help you with the customization of your website are as follows:

1. Cascading Style Sheets – learn all you can about CSS. This is wonderful tool that could simplify your life a great deal. With this type of formatting you would be able to put your formatting on one page where changing of one code would affect all your website pages. Hence, if you want the font color changes on your website design, all you need would be to do is change the codes on the codes page, instead of changing the codes on every page. Another plus point with the CSS is that it allows you to change the html tags default properties which is a boon when you customize your website to different browser.

2. Compatibility with different browsers – you have designed your website and you find it looks great with your favorite browser. Great! What about other browsers that people out there use? In order to get best results from your efforts, your website should open properly on the majority of popular browsers, i.e. Internet Explorer, Netscape Navigator, Mozzilla Firefox, Opera, and so on.

3. Dynamic website design – when you are a beginner and you are in the learning curve do not be tempted to use dynamic languages (CGI, PHP, Java, etc) to design your features and their functioning. Use instead freeware where the functioning codes and the design codes would be separated. You would find all types of freeware for setting up chat rooms, shopping carts, etc. which can be later on customized to your taste. Using dynamic languages to create your own software would tempt to mix up these two aspects (design and functionality) which would require an awful effort to separate later on when you want to upgrade your features.

4. Use quality hosting in Toronto – though this is not a customization point it affects your website design because cheap hosting usually comes with a good number of ads which would heavily interfere with the loading of your site as well as with its looks. Another point is that most of the free hosting sites would not support dynamic language.

5. Give yourself time – do not put try to put on your website everything you have learned in the near past. Allow yourself to learn through experience and experiment what works and what not. If you have to choose between a simple and highly functional website and a complex and slow website – go for the former any day.

6. Give your website credibility in Toronto – do not post your email id on your website. Rather have a form where the surfer can fill in to send you any message, unless you want to be invaded by spam. Web-crawlers can pick up your email id and spammers would use this method to capture your email id for their use. What you need to put on your website design is your phone number and address.

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Why You Need a Web Design & Digital Marketing Professional

Posted on November 5, 2012 by admin

Why indeed. There are many reasons that would argue for and against hiring an Internet marketing professional and the validity of all these would be calculated by the end result, i.e. how well is your website faring in terms of ROI (return on investment).

You do not need to hire a professional when…

1. You are starting out to wet your feet in the ocean of internet marketing and you want to experience how it feels to be out there on the Net. At this time, the best would be to learn the basics yourself and launch your website in a simple and yet highly functional format and see what it brings back to you. In case you like the response, tweak it again and improve the ROI and continue to improve it as per the feedback received until it functional at its best. For all this, your basic knowledge of Internet marketing would suffice and ensure that your investment stays at the minimum.

2. You are not sure on how your target audience would react to your product. In other worlds you are not sure whether your product or service would receive the attention you want it to receive. Since this is a test drive of the product or service, all you need to do is check it out with the minimum investment.

3. You do not know much about the Internet or e-business and you are launching your website more out of curiosity and sense of achievement (to tell your friends that you have a website and share photographs with them) rather than doing business. Here too, you would do best to use the millions of free web designing templates which would give a great look for least investment and effort.

You would need to hire a firm when…

1. The e-business you have launched as a beginner has picked and expanded beyond your wildest dreams and you need a better design (layout, pages, looks) to manage the ‘crowd’ you are attracting. Expansion is one of the most valid reasons to hire a designer because at that time you cannot afford glitches as these would kill the build up of the traffic. You will need a professional hand to work subtly yet who would give you the maximum results.

2. You need someone to fix problems with your website that do not seem to go away no matter how much tweaking and re-arranging you are doing. These glitches would cost you a lot of money in the future than it would cost you to get a professional designer to redesign your web and remove the glitches. They (the designers) are used to work particularly on such glitches and you would have a professionally designed website up and functioning in no time.

3. You cannot afford to start with a trial and error method. There are times when the business launch is too important to leave anything to chance. Time is often a very important factor and when you want optimal returns on you investment in the minimum time possible, then you need to use an Internet marketing company.

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