FeedBlitz News - Email Contact and Social Media Marketing Automation

FeedBlitz v4 Going Live for Everyone

2012-01-15T09:04:00.004-05:00

All things being equal, the new FeedBlitz v4 user interface will be on by default for all users starting Monday, January 16th, 9:00am eastern. You can get a jump start on it by visiting www.feedblitz.com/f?v4 if you haven't already done so.

Shopping Cart Integration / Email Parser Policy Change

2012-01-13T15:24:00.001-05:00

The FeedBlitz email parser integration that enables subscribers to be automatically added to one of your lists has been modified since we launched it. If the list you are adding to is an autoresponder, FeedBlitz will add the subscriber and activate the autoresponder automatically. It doesn't feel right to make them go through dual opt in in this case just so you can say "thank you."

If the list the parser is attached to is a standard mailing list (newsletter, blog powered or otherwise), dual opt-in will still be required.

Join me for Adventures in Listbuilding: An Evolution of List Automation and Segmentation

2012-01-03T10:03:00.001-05:00

I will be the guest on the NAMS (Niche Affiliate Marketing System) weekly training call tomorrow evening, Wednesday, January 4th at 8pm eastern. Join me and David Perdew for an hour of education and chat on using email marketing profitably for digital products and your site. Hope you can join me - use the guest registration process if you're not a NAMS member.

I'm also going to be running some training at the NAMS7 conference in Atlanta in early February. You can find out more about that here - I'm really looking forward to it. See you tomorrow!

N.B. The links in this post are affiliate links

Adding Google+ to FeedBlitz Feeds and Emails

2011-12-30T07:43:00.003-05:00

Following yesterday's announcement of our Pinterest integrations, today it is Google+'s turn. Google+ has been added to FeedBlitz in two key areas to enable end-user sharing of your posts and links to their G+ circles:

As a new social media feed "flare" added to FeedBlitz RSS feeds (enabled at RSS - Social Media), enabling RSS and email subscribers to share the post with their circles on Google+
As an additional sharing option when an email subscription is activated, added to the screen blogged about here, so that new, enthusiastic subscribers can invite their circles to join your list.

If you use FeedBlitz's email services you'll need to set up a FeedBlitzed version of your site's regular RSS feed if you haven't already done so, enable the G+ social media flare, and then make your list's article source your new FeedBlitz feed. Easy!

So now your readership can share with pins, circles, tweets and links. Whatever next?!

Pinterest for Feeds and Emails

2011-12-29T14:41:00.004-05:00

I'm happy to announce that FeedBlitz has added comprehensive support for Pinterest - the increasingly popular social pinboard service - to FeedBlitz's RSS (and by extension, blog to email) subscription services.

What we've enabled is:

The ability to splice your pins into your FeedBlitz version of your blog's RSS feed (via RSS - Splices), which will include your pins into that feed, and by extension into any emails and updates sent from that feed. The default is to add a daily summary of pins to the feed, but you can change that on the splices page. All you do is put in your account ID, and FeedBlitz takes care of the rest.
Enabling your subscribers to pin your posts to their Pinterest boards, increasing your social sharing. Again, this is via our RSS feed service, the premium alternative to FeedBurner. Go to RSS - Social Media and enable the Pinterest "flare." Your FeedBlitz feed will now have the Pinterest icon added to its sharing options. When clicked, the first image in the post is put up for pinning along with the post's title. The icon will show up in your feed and in any mailings it powers.

This is great news for crafters, art bloggers, photographers, or any bloggers who uses imagery consistently in their posts.

If you want to add Pinterest to your blog's email subscription mailings but don't yet have a FeedBlitz RSS feed, creating one is easy. All you need to do is:

Create a FeedBlitz version of your blog's feed at RSS - New Feed.
Change your FeedBlitz mailings' article source to be the feed you created in step (1) at newsletters - Settings - Content Settings - The Basics (v3) or via the list's settings button in FeedBlitz v4.

You don't have to use that feed anywhere else if you don't want to - but you might well be tempted when you see what we can do :)

Happy pinning, folks!

How I Quadrupled My Subscriber List, by Katey Schultz

2011-12-23T08:34:00.001-05:00

I'll admit it. I'm one of those writers that used to blush when being called a blogger. My embarrassment was based on stereotypes, of course, and I'll confess them here only to prove a point. I didn't like being called a blogger because bloggers weren't artists. Bloggers were in it for the money and would do anything to make a sale. And if they weren't that, bloggers were publishing drip about their personal lives, which I didn't care for.

I started blogging in 2005, when perhaps those stereotypes had a percentage of truth to them. I kept my blog to myself, oddly enough, but as people started to find me and as my short stories and essays earned recognition in the literary world, The Writing Life blog started growing - whether I was ready for it or not. Now more than ever, I understand that bloggers can't be boxed in to a single category and that, as a young writer trying to earn a living, one of the most important things I can do for my career is identify as a blogger.

Reading Phil Hollows' List Building for Bloggers e-book changed my entire outlook. I purchased it because I'm also an editor for TRACHODON Magazine and am in charge of its blog, Cheek Teeth. I figured I shouldn't let my stereotypes about blogging get in the way of my business as an editor. But, wait a minute…didn't I also have a business as a writer? Listbuilding helped me see that as a blogger I am also an "accidental marketer," as Phil would say, and that by failing to take advantage of branding, list building, and email blasts, I was missing an opportunity to make a name for myself…and maybe even make a little money for postage and gas. I could still write quality blog posts and publish short stories I was proud of, but I could also maintain an active blog and website that offered incentives and literary products to my readers.

So I read the book, twice, with highlighter in hand. I already had the FeedBlitz "subscribe by email" bubble on my site, but it wasn't in the right place and I hadn't notified my contacts, branded the newsletter, or paid any attention to its schedule. Following the instructions in List Building, within a matter of days my email subscribers quadrupled and, several months later, I still get a few new subscribers each week. More importantly, I saw the hits on my website increase over the weekends - when I never post new content - because my subscribers were taking their time with my weekly FeedBlitz newsletter (which is emailed Friday mornings) and perusing my blog via click-throughs that FeedBlitz makes so easy in the newsletter format. Despite my belief that if I organized my readers through an email list my hits would go down, in fact, my hits kept going up.

Bolstered by this experience, I followed the other tips in List Building to a tee. Most changes were small - including a subscription link in my email signature, titling blog posts to make them appear readily in Google searches, dreaming up relevant incentives for subscribers - and within one month traffic on my site increased by over 35% and continues to grow. Excited, I set up my first autoresponder, as List Building suggests. Using an email blast to announce the project, and further promoting it on the blog and through social media outlets, I launched Monthly Fiction by Katey Schultz, 12 short stories in as many months for just $12 - a FeedBlitz autoresponder with my branding that delivers one new short story to subscribers each month for an entire year.

I'm a small operation with a lot on my mind, but List Building for Bloggers made marketing easy for this non-tecchie writer and helped me gain confidence that I do have things I can sell. Just last week I tested Phil's suggestion to market by using repetition. I posted one status update each morning on FaceBook with a quote from my chapbook Lost Crossings. In less than a week, I sold eight copies. We're not talking New York bestseller, but that's eight books that were collecting dust a week ago and will now be wrapped under people's Christmas trees.

I wouldn't be a good "accidental marketer" if I didn't end this post with a pitch. So here it is, fellow bloggers and business owners: Subscribe to Monthly Fiction by December 31st and get 33% off - just $8 for 1 year of award-winning fiction.

About the Author

Katey Shultz is a writer living in Bakersville, North Carolina. In 2010, she had over 10 short stories published and was recognized with 5 fiction awards, including the Linda Flowers Literary Prize. Her most recent work, Flashes of War, is a collection of 29 fictional stories focusing on characters in and around the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Shipping FeedBlitz v4

2011-12-20T13:41:00.000-05:00

It's time.

Starting this afternoon, active FeedBlitz publishers (well over 72,000 of you!) will be getting an email, letting you know that your account has been readied for the new capabilities of FeedBlitz v4.

FeedBlitz v4 is significantly easier to use than the current version, enabling you to work faster. If you've found the current FeedBlitz web site a challenge at times, then you'll find FeedBlitz v4 delivers a significant leap forward. Beyond better usability, though, FeedBlitz v4 also delivers insight into your site's entire audience across the social web.

If you have any questions about FeedBlitz v4, need help making better use of FeedBlitz in general, or just want help with your current setup, don't hesitate to contact tech support at support@feedblitz.com or read our knowledge base. We're more than happy to help.

You can always get a jump start on the new look and feel by going directly to www.feedblitz.com/f?v4 - you don't have to wait for the email to arrive!

Meanwhile, if you're curious about the changes that are a-coming, check out the video below.

FeedBlitz will become exclusively v4 in early the New Year.

Advanced Email Marketing: Landing Page Monetization, Part 3

2011-12-02T12:50:00.000-05:00

In the previous two posts, I've discussed three of the most engaging landing pages you have (and that you're almost certainly not monetizing properly), and gave some suggestions for what you could do to change that.

Before I wrap up with the FeedBlitz "how-to" however, one point I didn't emphasize earlier but should is this: You should monetize the landing pages, true, but not the interactions that lead up to them.

By which I mean, don't bling up the subscription form with lots of offers and competing links. You want to draw the subscriber in closer, so make it clear what you want them to do. Don't distract them before they even start the process.

Similarly, you should keep the activation email down to one call to action: Activate your subscription. By all means brand it, but, again, don't add other competing links, distractions and bright shiny objects. You want them to finish the play, so make that the first, obvious and only choice they have.

Obviously, the same applies for your unsubscribe form. You don't want to be reported to your email service provider or the relevant government authority for making it hard to unsubscribe, so don't get in the way on the conformation page. Ask them why they're leaving and let them go. Save the monetization for the page that follows.

Set Up the Landing Pages on Your Blog

You need to decide which landing pages you are going to use and make them. Don't make them as posts, but as pages. Also make sure when you publish the page that you tell your blog to omit the landing page from your site menus and navigation. They should only be reachable as a result of the opt-in and opt-out processes in the email subscriber life cycle.

Now, bear in mind that you don't have to do all three at once in order to be successful. The "check your inbox" page will have the most traffic, but the people reaching the "welcome - you're in" page will probably be the most engaged. I recommend picking either of these as your first page to produce, depending on the programs you have available to monetize with. Leave the unsubscribe landing page until later if you're short on time.

As you build each page, remember too that the job of each page is to inform the subscriber of what to do next and / or confirm what it is they have just done. Make sure that the relevant message is front and center; don't shove it below the fold. After all, you've built enough trust to merit someone wanting to become a subscriber; don't give them second thoughts now.

Setting Up FeedBlitz

In your mailing list's settings, go to Newsletters - Settings - Content Settings - The Basics (v3), or your list's settings page (v4) and look for the three landing page redirect fields. Add the URL(s) of the landing page(s) you've created here and save. If your landing page is a script and can parse incoming variables, you can pass the subscriber's email address into the redirect as well by following the tip on that screen. That's it! What you then need to do is test that it all works, so log out of FeedBlitz, and then subscribe to your list using an email address you haven't used before. This ensures that you get the same experience as a fresh visitor to your site as you move through the process. FYI there are similar options for autoresponders too - just find the analogous screens and fields.

Test, Optimize, Repeat.

As you build your list, you should start to see increased engagement and monetization from these new pages. Once they're settled in, try changing the offers, the headlines or other elements on the page to see how that affects click through rates from those pages. Optimize steadily over time to grow your business further, and good luck!

Advanced Email Marketing: Landing Page Monetization, Part 2

2011-11-30T10:52:00.000-05:00

In the previous post I pointed out that there were three landing pages on everyone's web site that are typically ignored or forgotten about from a monetization perspective. They are the landing pages that appear in an email list's dual opt-in transaction cycle:

The "Check your inbox now" landing page;
The "Thank you for joining the list" landing page; and
The "You have been unsubscribed" landing page.

What, then, can you do with these pages to help boost earnings without messing up each page's core purpose, which is to guide / reassure the subscriber through the relevant step of the email opt-in and opt-out processes?

Don't Bury the Lead

Well, the first thing you should not do is build a salesy squeeze page that distracts or detracts or confuses the subscriber. Each landing page has a core mission. So make sure that the basic message of each page - check your inbox, congrats you're in, sorry to see you go - is front and center for each. You need to make sure that the messaging of each page matches the visitor's expectations. Don't hide that core message with flashy bling, confusing text or a barrage of popups.

That said, once your main headline and opening sentence get the relevant point across, you can work on leveraging the engaged reader into something more revenue-positive.

The "Check Your Inbox Now" Page

When the visitor reaches this page, they're about half-way through the dual opt-in process. They completed the form, filled in any squiggly letters in your CAPTCHA, and the activation email is on its way.

The first thing this page has to do is to reassure them of this, and to remind them that they should check their inbox to activate their subscription. What you don't want to do is have them not finish the play, so you do need to encourage them to check their inbox ... eventually.

But since they're here, now, on this page, you have their attention. As they haven't yet fully signed up, it isn't time to ask them to refer your site to their friends; save that for the successful activation landing page later on.

If you're offering an incentive for new subscribers, this page is a great place to remind them of it. Let them know that they will be rewarded somehow when they finish up. Perhaps a 10-30 second video from you would work too.

You can also use this page to promote further activity on your site. A variation on the "sneeze page" theme, this can be a "while you're here, check out our most popular posts" message. It can be two or three of your greatest hits, or a more comprehensive list if your site has enough quality content. It's also entirely appropriate to use ads and affiliate links on this page, provided that they don't distract the reader from figuring out quickly that a confirmation is required. If you have ebooks to sell, or some other service that helps build your earnings, you could provide a prefilled order form. You get the idea...

Finally, if you have partner sites where you earn referral fees, you can offer your nearly-subscriber a set of "we recommend" links or a form that invites them to do whatever your partner site needs. You can't force them into it - permission is required - but it is a way to get paid for leads if the visitor converts on the partner site's page.

When you're done defining the page, just make sure it isn't over done. If there's too much choice you'll end up confusing the visitor and they're more likely to do less, not more. Take time to edit.

Mission Accomplished - Welcome!

The visitor has activated their subscription. Thank or welcome them on this page, of course, and (if you can) set their expectations about how often they will be mailed.

If you offered some kind of reward for new subscribers, this is when it should be fulfilled. If the reward is they are part of a sweepstakes, say, instead of having access to a tangible deliverable, tell them that they've been entered (or whatever is appropriate). Let them know they've succeeded. If you are delivering an incentive, it's also a great idea to use an autoresponder here to deliver it as well as using the landing page.

Now, by getting to this point, the subscriber has completed the multi-step dual opt-in process. That's an achievement! They're pretty pumped. So NOW go ahead: Ask them for a referral. This is the perfect time to ask them to share your site or their new subscription with their social networks. Put big friendly sharing buttons on this page for that purpose, and place a good call to action around them. (FeedBlitz does this for the default landing page we serve, see this blog post).

Moreover, if you have a multiple list strategy in place at your blog, this activation page is a great place to offer additional subscriptions to your site. If most of your readers are joining your main list, then offering niche, category or other lists here is a great idea to bind the new subscriber deeper to you and your site. The deeper in with you they are, the more you can potentially earn. MoneySavingMom.com does this - when you activate a subscription, you're taken to her list of store-specific coupon mailings.

Finally, pretty much all of the ideas I mentioned for the "check your inbox" page will work here too. A little repetition won't hurt. Encouraging exploration - more time on site, more ads to be seen, more offers to view - will also boost your income.

Oh no! You're leaving.

Sooner or later, a subscriber is going to unsubscribe. Don't stand in their way.

But on the page that tells them they've been removed, what you can do is offer them alternative ways to reach you. Perhaps email isn't the way they want to follow you now. You can and should offer the ability to keep up via your favorite social networks on this page - you may lose a subscriber, but gain a Facebook Fan.

If you have multiple lists, perhaps the subscriber is unsubscribing because the list they were on is no longer working for them. Well, offer them your other ones - perhaps there's a better fit there that will keep them in the fold. Remember, people unsubscribe for a variety of reasons, so if all it is that they'd prefer to have a weekly wrap up and not a daily deluge, offer the weekly version here. You never know!

Wrapping It All Up

Next post will conclude this short series, along with a "how-to" implementation guide for FeedBlitz publishers.

Advanced Email Marketing: Landing Page Monetization

2011-11-29T07:38:00.012-05:00

Landing pages. Generically, landing pages are the pages where a user starts to interact with your site in some way, usually after an search, or possibly clicking on an ad. One of the things that Internet Marketers (and any business online) spend a lot of time optimizing are their landing pages.

The landing page is your last best shot at converting the new visitor into something else: A buyer, perhaps. A lead. A subscriber. A donor. A voter. The point being that you want that new visitor to do something when they hit that landing page, and optimizing that landing page to improve its conversion rate typically leads to more success (however you define that) later on.

Landing pages can be short and sweet, or go all the way through to screenful after screenful of text, with embedded videos, highlighted text - "squeeze pages" in the industry jargon. Optimizing landing pages needs lots of testing. Even simple headline changes, a subtle change in the call to action, or adding a chevron to a button can dramatically affect how well a landing page converts.

Dollars to donuts, you have three highly visible, highly engaging landing pages that you haven't even thought about. And that means you're losing out on potential conversions, and therefore on downstream monetization.

Thinking Harder About Dual Opt-In

The tragedy of most bloggers - which is why I wrote the "List Building for Bloggers" series and subsequent ebook - is that email subscriptions are neglected, forgotten about and generally ignored. Not only is that in and of itself a tragic loss of potential engagement (and, again, monetization opportunities), it also means you're missing out on three critical landing page monetization opportunities.

What are they? Well, think about the dual opt-in process. You probably haven't for a while, so here's a little diagram as a reminder:

See, after the subscription form is completed, there's the "Check your inbox now" page. It's a landing page.

After the subscriber activates their subscription, there's another "thank you for subscribing" landing page.

The third landing page I mentioned? Happens when a subscriber unsubscribes. They opt out of the list, and a "Sorry to see you go" landing page appears.

Three, very engaging, well-read, landing pages. Have you thought about how to make better use of them? Optimize them? Leverage them to help you monetize your site better? Because if you haven't, you're missing out on some great revenue opportunities.

More on what to do with the neglected landing pages hiding in your dual opt-in process in the next post.

UnWord

2011-11-16T07:47:00.003-05:00

Microsoft Word, part of the Microsoft Office suite, is a great word processor. I use it myself for documents, e-books; and I use the rest of the Office suite for email, spreadsheets etc. It's a great desktop app.

It's really easy to copy / paste from Word into a blog post to make creating pretty blog posts with good spell checking super easy. Which is fine, except that unless you have (and use) a special "Paste from Word" feature in your blog's post editor, lots of Microsoft Office-specific custom HTML comes along for the ride as well. You may not see it when you're editing, or even on your blog when it goes live, but it's there. When emails built from that post arrive at non-Office subscribers, and sometimes when Office-using subscribers do something like forward an email, much weirdness can result. Text changing size and / or typeface are common symptoms; or line spacing suddenly not being what you expect.

The reasons why this happens relates to things called CSS classes and custom conditional HTML that nothing outside of Office and Internet Explorer recognize, and I'm not going into the gory details here. Suffice to say it's there, and it's frustrating to everyone when perfectly happy posts "suddenly" don't display correctly.

When things like this happen, my usual advice is "Don't paste from Word to create posts!"

But that's unrealistic. People are going to do it anyway, and that ought to be OK.

So, here at FeedBlitz, we're going to make it OK. Tools should interoperate properly and your emails should work, consistently, for as many of your readers as possible. So, as of now, FeedBlitz will attempt to fixup Microsoft Office-related custom markup to minimize the sometimes bizarre effects that it can have; we call it "UnWord." The results are more consistent rendering across the board, and your emails staying that way when your subscribers forward or reply to them.

There's nothing you need to do; it's automatic for everyone. Now you can use Word to create your posts and they will both look better and behave more consistently across the board. Although, honestly? I still recommend you draft your posts in your blog's post editor. You'll get the best results that way, no matter what.

Advanced Email Marketing: Suppression Lists in FeedBlitz

2011-11-15T08:07:00.002-05:00

In my earlier post about using Suppression Lists in email marketing, I explained how suppression lists are used to restrict to whom a third party an send a mailing. They're important because selling a direct sponsored email blast to your list can be the best form of one-off email monetization available to you, so you need to be able to use them if and when you get the chance.

This post is the promised "how-to guide" for FeedBlitz users who've sold a dedicated sponsorship email and need to use our suppression list feature.

1) Setting Up - Use FeedBlitz v4

Suppression lists are only available in the new FeedBlitz user interface, so you'll need to try that out. Visit http://www.feedblitz.com/f?v4 to start.

Once you're in, Suppression Lists (along with Custom Fields and Surveys) are in the "Publisher Tools" section of the navigation, just under your Sites. Select "Suppression List Management" in the navigation.

2) Import your Suppression List File

You can import into a new suppression list or update an existing one. If you update an existing suppression list, FeedBlitz deduplicates, so that it's safe to re-add the same addresses if all you have is a single monolithic file from your vendor. There's no practical limit on imported list size, but if the upload is so large that it times out on you, you can split it into multiple parts, or ask FeedBlitz tech support to help you out.

As you import the file and further work on your list, you'll see your activity is recorded on that suppression list's page. You can use that information to prove to your provider how you used the list if you need to.

3) Use the list!

Suppression lists are designed for one-off mailings, so you can use them in either Newsflash ("email blast") or On Demand (manually selected posts from your site) mailings. Pick the suppression list you want to use at the foot of the on demand or newsflash page, just under the subscriber segment area.

And that's it; pretty easy. The mailing will use the suppression list to ensure that nobody on the suppression list gets the email, even of they're actively opted in to your mailing list. FeedBlitz won't mail anyone on the suppression list.

Your use of the suppression list is recorded in the list's activity log, and (for newsflash) saved along with the contents of your mailing. If you like to jump start later email broadcasts by picking one you used earlier, your suppression lists selection now comes along for the ride too. If you want to use a different list (or none at all), simply change your selection in the newsflash email builder while you're editing your copy.

Advanced Email Marketing: Suppression Lists

2011-11-14T08:09:00.058-05:00

One of the great ways to raise extra revenues from your list is by selling advertising sponsorships. The more responsive your list, the better rate (usually expressed as a CPM, cost per thousand, value) you can expect to get. Higher response rates tend to accompany focused, targeted audiences, so if your site is the industry leader in couponing or IT security or antique french flange sprockets, then you can get a high CPM from sponsors wanting to target your list.

There are several ways to monetize a list via advertising and sponsorships. These are:

Ads in your mailings;
Sponsored posts;
Direct email blasts.

Ads in your mailings can be included via your email template or the copy of your post; that's easy to understand. They'll typically earn relatively low amounts for you on a CPM basis, but function a little like an ATM machine: they're always working for you whenever you mail.

Sponsored posts are where you are paid a certain amount of money to review or promote a product or service. Again, fairly easy to understand (but don't forget to disclose!). Sponsored posts are one-offs, but will probably make you more money on a per-mailing basis than passive ads alone.

Direct email blasts are where you send an exclusive mailing to your list with just the sponsor's content. It's obviously an ad, it will perform much better than any other form of email list advertising, and is often of the "20% off, free shipping" variety.

Direct emails, like sponsored posts, are one-offs, but they will earn you much better rates than a simple sponsored post or passive ad. This is especially true if you blog often enough that a sponsored post ends up being just one of several in any day's mailing. By making the mailing dedicated to the sponsor, and it being much richer / up-front content-wise than a simple sponsored post, you ought to be able get 2x to 10x your standard sponsorship post rate on a CPM basis for a direct email broadcast. Direct mail on behalf of sponsors can be very lucrative!

Direct Broadcast Email Marketing Issues

Now direct emails come with a number of related issues. Most importantly, how will your audience react? They may object to your "using" them in this way. You can try mitigating that by warning them up front that there's a sponsored mailing coming (and actually spin that as a "bonus" mention to your advertiser). If they're forewarned they will be less likely to complain or unsubscribe, and instead stick around for your next content-related mailing.

Make sure that, if you're typically a blogger / content marketer, your dedicated email blasts are the exception not the rule. The more your list feels "bombarded" or "taken advantage of" then the higher your unsubscribe and complaint rates will become, which will be an unwelcome step on multiple fronts.

Assuming, though, that you can manage all of this, and you've sold a great package to an advertiser that includes one or more dedicated email blasts, what every reputable email advertiser should then offer you is their suppression list. And, if they don't, you should ask for it. Which begs the question...

What is a Suppression List?

A suppression list is basically all the people who have unsubscribed from your advertiser's mailings. If a subscriber is active on your list but has unsubscribed from your sponsor's mailings, then they should NOT receive an email blast from that sponsor via you. In other words, that particular email address is suppressed from your mailing. Your advertiser will provide you with a list of email addresses that you may not mail this way: the suppression list.

Now, you're never going to email people on your list that have unsubscribed from your mailings. Your email app or service won't let you do that; that's standard stuff. What you need to do is have a mechanism to apply the suppression list to your one-off mailings, so that once the sponsored mailing is done, people who are active on your main list but who are also on your sponsor's suppression list will continue to receive your regularly scheduled updates.

(Ab)Using Suppression Lists

Yes, as in many good things in life, there is also a dark side to suppression lists. Here's the thing: They're full of email addresses. It can be tempting to take a peek. For mailers that don't have any scruples, it can be tempting to mail this list anyway, once the email blast is done.

Obviously, anyone who does this would have the ethics of a sewer rat, and that isn't you, Gentle Reader. Equally obviously, though, the people providing suppression lists are aware of these risks because, would that it were different, there are in fact people with the moral values of sewer rats lurking on the Internet.

So you should know that the suppression list will contain emails that are owned by the sponsor, but won't be obvious by their address. They'll be buried in the list somewhere. Not only that, but these addresses will be unique to the suppression lists given to you (in other words, the same list given to somebody else will contain different traps). Bottom line: If any of those email addresses receives an email, they will know exactly where and whom it came from. These addresses are spam traps on steroids, in other words, and you will have no idea which addresses on your suppression lists are real and which ones are the gotchas. So you can't risk mailing any of them, because doing so risks your entire ability to mail anyone in the future.

It's really simple. Apply your suppression list to that sponsor's mailing, and then forget about them. Don't peek. And, for sure, never ever send email to an address that you took from a suppression list.

Suppression Lists - The Flip Side

The other side of suppression lists is when you are the sponsor, using a trusted third party to mail. Many industry journals and magazines have mailing lists that they open up to sponsors. In which case, you will be asked to provide your suppression list to the mailer. You should be able to export your unsubscribed reader list to a simple file format (email addresses, no need for demographics or other data), add some traps of your own if you wish, then send it on to the mailer.

What this means, though, is that if you ever plan on using a third party mailing service, such as an email marketing program run by an industry journal, you should never remove unsubscribed readers from your database. Why? Because you want your suppression list to be complete and accurate. And with a complete list your risk of complaints and unsubscribes is significantly reduced when using a third party service.

Now at FeedBlitz we don't charge for unsubscribed addresses (and you can't get rid of them either), so this risk doesn't apply to publishers using FeedBlitz for their email marketing solution. But other services (a.k.a. ESPs - Email Service Providers) do charge for such addresses, even though they're not going to mail them anymore for you. Crazy, I know. But if you are in that situation and you remove unsubscribed addresses from your list to keep your ESP's fees down, then you may risk higher complaint rates from your mailer when it comes to delivering your sponsorship. If you can, I recommend you keep unsubscribe information around.

Alright. So much for email marketing suppression list theory. Tomorrow, how to set up and use suppression lists in FeedBlitz.

The Money's In The List: BlogWorld L.A. Monetization Video

2011-11-13T11:27:00.000-05:00

Here's the video of my BlogWorld L.A. presentation on email marketing and blog monetization, a.k.a. "The Money's In the List."

If you can't see the video, it's available on YouTube here: http://youtu.be/Wz0RGHbq9F4

For the Fallen - We Will Remember Them

2011-11-11T06:08:00.003-05:00

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.

From "For the Fallen" by Robert Laurence Binyon

For the benefit of my mostly US audience, in the UK and many other countries we buy paper poppies around the 11th to commemorate those who served and those who fell during the World Wars. The poppies specifically memorialize the killing fields in France and Belgium during WWI where the "lions led by donkeys" on both sides killed each other in unimaginable numbers. Day in, day out. Only the Spanish Flu of 1918 outkilled the machine guns, mustard gas and barbed wire.

Today, then, is a noteworthy day in Europe, where the slaughter of the horribly misnamed "Great War" mostly took place between 1914 and 1918. Today, entire countries largely fall silent at 11am on November 11th to remember the wars, their dead, the valor of those who served and the bravery those who still do. It's a day of respect, retrospect and introspection.

In churches and schools, at services, memorials and cenotaphs in the cities, towns and villages, the stanza from Binyon's poem, quoted above, is often spoken as part of memorial services and readings. The focus back in Britain is markedly different today - a day that's somber, one of mourning not celebration - than Veteran's Day is here in the US, my adopted home. It has always been this way: Armistice Day has never been a celebratory day off. It's not a day to celebrate the military like it is here in the States (which is not to say it is necessarily better; it's just a different perspective).

In that spirit then, no matter what your politics, no matter where you live today, no matter what else you are doing or celebrating this November 11th, I would ask only this: Please take a moment today to remember the Fallen and their sacrifices, no matter where they fell nor for what cause.

Let us make it so that, for today at least, we will remember them.

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.

List Hygiene, or Cleaning Up Your List, on FeedBlitz

2011-11-10T07:49:00.003-05:00

The prior two posts have been talking about list hygiene - keeping your list's quality up by removing non-engaging subscribers - and described how to use a re-engagement campaign to do it. This post describes how to do it in FeedBlitz, everyone's favorite premium FeedBurner alternative.

New FeedBlitz Custom Fields

What you're going to need to do is cast your mind back to Monday (cue wavy time travel / flashback effects) where I described new date-based custom fields. I mentioned that there was a new set of "built in" or "system" custom fields now available in FeedBlitz - Joined, OptedIn, Opened and Clicked.

These are all date fields. They are there primarily to facilitate date-centric email marketing campaigns, such as list hygiene re-engagement programs. You can use them for much more than that, of course, and by the end of this post you'll know how.

The meaning of these fields is as follows:

Joined: The date the subscriber's email address was first entered onto the list (e.g. via s subscription form);
OptedIn: The mot recent date that subscription was activated (e.g. by clicking the link in the activation email);
Opened: The set of dates where an open was recorded for the subscriber;
Clicked: The set of dates where a click through on any link in a mailing was recorded.

So, if you imported a subscriber, the optedin date will typically be the same as the joined date. Otherwise, the optedin date will always be after the joined date.

The opened and clicked dates represent all the recorded values of an open and a click. How they're all used in segments is pretty easy easy, as you can see from the following examples:

joined<"2011-02-28" picks all subscribers added to a list before February 28th, 2011.
clicked>="2011-11-01" includes all subscribers who clicked on or after November first.

Using System Date Fields

One way to use these fields is as a loyalty program. Let's say that you started a promotion on November 1st, 2011 that rewards all new subscribers with sample chapters from your latest e-book. That's great! But somewhat unfair to your established subscriber base. So you set up an email blast using the segment expression joined<"2011-11-01" and send subscribers meeting that criteria a link to the free chapters. Subscriber loyalty rewarded, trust reinforced. Nicely done!

Or, say you want to draw a random subscriber from the prior month as part of a giveaway. Copy active subscribers from your list to a new one using (say) joined>="2011-10-01" and joined>="2011-10-31" - then you can use FeedBlitz's "random subscriber" feature on this list to pick your winner.

Building a Re-Engagement Campaign in FeedBlitz

And this, then, is how you can build a re-engagement campaign. To keep things simple, we're going to assume that you want to remove all non-responding subscribers who haven't interacted with your mailings since April 1st, 2011.

The segment expression you need is:

optedin<"2011-04-01" and opened<"2011-04-01" and clicked<"2011-04-01"

Why these fields? Use optedin instead of joined because some people may have left your list and come back; optedin makes sure you limit things to people who've stayed subscribed the entire time. Then we add both opened and clicked criteria, since (as I explained yesterday) open rates are typically under-reported, so we smarten the expression up by referencing the click through data as well.

Set up the segment expression at the bottom of the Newsflash screen in v3, or create it directly in the sagments area in "Publisher Tools" in v4. Validate that you typed the expression correctly using the validator, then give it a name and save it: You're going to use it a lot during the re-engagement program.

What you're going to do is send each of the emails in your re-engagement criteria to this segment. In FeedBlitz, the segment is evaluated every time it is used. As and when subscribers that match this segment interact with you campaign or with your main mailings, they will no longer meet the opened and clicked criteria, so they won't be included in any subsequent re-engagement mailings. In other words, there's no need to worry that people who have ben encouraged to re-engage are going to get later messages in the program. They won't.

You send the initial email in your list hygiene program as a newsflash using this segment expression. Wait a while (1-3 days), and then send the next in the series, using the same expression. Repeat until you get to the final "See ya" message. Each mailing should be to a slightly smaller subscriber base than the one before, as people re-engage and take themselves out of the group the segment expression defines.

Finally, you're done. It's time to move the remaining people off your list. Here's how:

Create an empty mailing list that's not blog or feed powered, just a simple list. Call it, say, "Non-engaged subscribers."
Under Newsletters - Subscribers - Move / Transfer, move (not copy) subscribers from the list you ran the re-engagement campaign on into this list. Make sure you use the same segment expression you used in the newsflashes to select the people who didn't come back.

At this point, the non-engaged subscribers are OFF your list and now ON this new list. Your main list is now squeaky clean and much higher quality.

Fee Reduction with Effective List Hygiene

If you want to save a little on fees, delete this "non-engaged" list under Newsletters - Mailings - Delete. It's worth pointing out that in FeedBlitz, deleted lists (and also deleted, unsubscribed and pending subscribers) do NOT count for fees. We believe that you're using FeedBlitz to send subscription updates; if there are addresses in your account we're not going to mail (e..g unsubscribed readers, bounces, people yet to complete the opt-in process) then we're not gong to charge you for them. It might save some money on fees; it might not. If you're not sure, contact FeedBlitz tech support to understand any impact it might have.

If you have any questions about FeedBlitz, custom fields, segments or our fee structure, please don't hesitate to contact tech support. Next week, a deep-dive into another more advanced area of email marketing automation.

Advanced Email Marketing: List Hygiene, or Cleaning Up Your List - Part 2

2011-11-09T08:11:00.047-05:00

In the first part of this mini-series on list hygiene I talked about why list hygiene was a good idea, and outlined a typical re-engagement program sequence that you would send to non-responding readers as part of the process.

Before you head off and do that first, though, a few tips on best practice.

How Many Non-Responding Readers Do You Really Have?

Say your open rate is, on average, 10% on any given mailing. If the same 10% open every email you send, then you will have a 90% non-responsive reader rate.

That's pretty unlikely, though. It's one extreme. The other extreme is that each mailing is opened by a different 10% each time. In that case, over 10 mailings, all your readers will have interacted with your messages and you're golden.

The truth lies somewhere in between, of course, and where that is depends greatly on your audience and how you engage with them.

You should find out, though.

Why? Because the total non-responsive number is the largest number you will actually force off your list. If you have 1,000 people on your list and a 10% response rate, worst case you could end up getting rid of 900 at the end of the process. Is your ego ready for that much of a hit? Is your manager / investor / partner going to be happy? Your advertisers and sponsors? If you use subscriber counts as part of providing "social proof" that your list is worth joining, what might the downstream effect be if that number is crushed at the end of the process?

See, you should occasionally clean up your list. But as well as gaining greater focus and engagement, you're going to end up with a lower subscriber count. Perhaps a LOT lower. Prepare your ego (and warn your associates!) before you begin.

Most email services, FeedBlitz included, will have the ability to tell you more-or-less how many subscribers are going to be affected by the process. If you need to explain, justify and prepare other stakeholders in the process, do so up front. It will help avoid, um, uncomfortable conversations further down the pike. You don't want to finish up with a nicely focused, effective list ... and end up having to prepare your resume because your boss didn't like losing a zero from the count.

One trick you can use is to move the relevant subscribers into a separate list just for the purposes of the re-engagement campaign. That way you know who many you're working with (and might therefore possibly lose) before you even start.

When to Stop the Re-Engagement Campaign

What you really want to avoid is to have your engagement campaign keep running for a subscriber if that subscriber has started to interact with your mailings again. That's aggravating and likely to lead to a slew of unsubscribes from people whom you were *this close* to winning back as long-term readers.

As you work through the multi-step mailing, make sure that you remove all the subscribers from the campaign that have opened, clicked or otherwise done what you wanted them to do to stay on the list. Depending on the email application or service you're using, that might be handled automatically for you, or may require a little manual intervention. Make sure you know how to do this before you start!

How Often Should a List Hygiene Program be Run?

Well, it depends. If you have a relatively new or highly engaged list you can probably defer for a while. If your list has been around for some time, perhaps sooner rather than later would be a good thing.

What you don't need to do is run this on a daily or weekly basis. That's just silly. A four or five sequence re-engagement campaign will take the best part of a week or two to run if you space the emails out to every three days, so don't make yourself crazy this way. Most bloggers could probably run a list hygiene campaign at most every quarter and you'll be fine. You can even do it annually.

Once you decide how often you're going to run the campaign, make sure that engagement time span is at least as long as the time between each re-engagement campaign. So, if you do list hygiene annually, I'd recommend that you include people who haven't interacted for at least that year. If you run hygiene campaigns quarterly, I would say that your cut off time should be at least one quarter, and maybe two.

No matter what, once you have a list hygiene campaign under your belt, you'll be able to look at how well it did and adjust accordingly. So that's one last check box item: Give yourself the time to see how much better open and click through rates become after you run each campaign, so you can see that you're getting the results you wanted from it.

Essential Re-Engagement Prerequisites

If your email application makes tracking opens and click-throughs optional, then you can't run a re-engagement campaign if you haven't enabled those features (you need both, by the way; more on that in a moment). Further, you have to have had these features on for at least the "idle time" you are using as your non-responding criteria. For example, if your criteria is to filter out subscribers who haven't interacted in the last three months, then tracking must have been enabled for at least three months for that list. You can't switch it on today and then expect to have data miraculously "appear" for the last N months. It isn't going to happen. If you must, switch it on now, and set a note in your calendar to revisit list hygiene in a few months' time once you've got enough data safely gathered.

Secondly, as I said earlier, you need to have both open and click tracking enabled. That's because open tracking typically uses an image to track the activity. When the tracking image is served, the image server can note that the image HAS been served and that the email sent to that subscriber has therefore been opened.

The problem is, it's both tempting and easy to draw this conclusion: If the tracking image has not been served then the email has not been opened.

This is not true.

Images - specifically open tracking images - won't be served when they're explicitly disabled by users for privacy or security reasons (image serving is off by default in gmail, Outlook and many other email apps, so this is a very real risk); they may not be fetched in a timely manner by mobile devices or low-bandwidth connections; or the subscriber may be reading the plain text version of your email.

In all cases, the email may well have been opened by the subscriber, but it will remain untracked by your email service. The subscriber will appear to be non-responsive and not engaged with the list, even when they are.

So the reason you add link tracking is simple. If a user clicks a link in your email, then that email MUST have been opened, even if the tracking image itself hasn't been served. Once you click through, whether or not images have been served is immaterial. So link tracking - and using link tracking as a selection criteria - helps keep people off the list hygiene program who shouldn't be on it. Not all of them, mind you, but it's better than the alternative.

The bottom line, then, is this: Simple open tracking is at best only indicative of your true open rate. It will almost certainly be under-reporting the actual number of opens any one mailing is getting.

Re-Engagement: Full Circle

And, ultimately, this is why you need to run a multi-step re-engagement list hygiene campaign. Not only is it simply common sense to try to keep people on your list using multiple triggers and emotions; it takes into account that your non-responding subscriber count is probably over-estimated due to the challenges inherent in open tracking. You will include people in the program who are, in fact, engaging with your mailings, but are simply not being tracked. The multi-step list hygiene campaign will readily find these folks, and help ensure that you don't erroneously remove them.

All clear? Great! Now you know what to do to create an effective list hygiene campaign. Tomorrow, I bring this week's series full circle by linking the new FeedBlitz system fields mentioned on Monday into a how-to guide specifically for FeedBlitz users.

Advanced Email Marketing: List Hygiene, or Cleaning Up Your List - Part 1

2011-11-08T08:11:00.005-05:00

Why You Should Clean Up Your List

Keeping a good quality list is important, because it means that you can get greater engagement from it, which in turn will enable you to derive greater revenues.

It's also important from a deliverability perspective. ISPs track how many emails of yours are opened, and one factor they use to determine inbox placement is how your list engages with your mailings. The more your emails are interacted with, the more likely they are to be safely routed to the inbox and the less likely to end up in the dreaded junk folder.

Finally, economics comes into play. You might be able to move your list into a lower pricing tier if you can cut some of the dead wood out.

List Hygiene - An Ookie Term for an Important Process

This is the essence of "list hygiene" - a term professional and corporate email marketers use to describe a process used to keep a list down to its most engaged, enthusiastic and committed members.

What you want to do is get rid of subscribers who haven't engaged recently. But what you don't want to do is lose subscribers who might engage soon, still want to hear from you, but have gotten a little lazy or switched off. That's why engagement date fields, as hinted at yesterday, are crucial. They help define the group of subscribers you're going to work with.

So a thorough list hygiene process is based on a "re-engagement campaign," where you try to convince, cajole and coerce apparently non-interacting subscribers into engaging with your content again. This ups the energy level, and means that you get to keep the relationship with subscribers who you can work with more in the future. Everyone else who isn't interested, you can safely clear out.

Elements of a Successful Re-engagement Campaign

So remember, you want to convince, cajole and coerce people into staying engaged. OK, so you can't really coerce them into doing much of anything, so the content plan is simple: Start out all sweetness and light; then ratchet up the intensity until you're done.

Your biggest decision is probably the amount of time you want to use as the non-engagement window. Let's say it's six months. In that case, you know that there are two core criteria for recipients of the re-engagement campaign:

The subscribers much have been on the list for more than six months; and
The subscribers must not have engaged in the last six months.

The second criteria is obvious; the first one stops you from throwing out people who joined recently and haven't yet had the chance to engage in many - or perhaps any - of your mailings.

Now instead of throwing these folks off the list in a fit of social media pique, let's send them a sequence of emails, spaced a day or two apart, as we roll the campaign out.

Mail #1 - Hey, Haven't heard from you for a while, are we still friends?

See, I told you to start with sweetness and light (with a side of guilt thrown in - obviously tune the messaging to suit your audience). We just want to make it seem more personal and not a run of the mill blast to our list. If you have custom fields, this is a great campaign to use them in.

What you do in this list though, is set the stage. Tell them that you really don't want to keep mailing them if they don't want to hear from you, and that's what's behind all this. This initial mailing is also a great place to showcase your popular posts - you want them to engage, so each mailing in this campaign must give them a reason to!

Mail #2 - A sweet deal for you!

As it turns out, many people are lazy, deadline-hugging procrastinators. Come on, we all do it.

It's actually unlikely that your first mailing will have brought many people back into the fold. That's OK - we have a ways to go yet.

With this mailing, then, you want to incent your laggard subscribers. Just as incentives work brilliantly to attract new subscribers to your list in the first place, they can work here too. That incentive could be a coupon, a freebie, a sample from your e-book, some of your time, a transcript of a webcast or an introductory membership in your coaching program. You have to do the work of finding the right incentive for your audience and your site, and that the incentive you use makes sense for you financially, operationally and personally.

Mail #3 - Time is running out.

Tick, tick, tick - Let's make your procrastinators aware that the deadline is starting to lurk offstage, even if it isn't looming directly overhead yet. Again, you emphasize that you don't want to bother them, but if they want to keep hearing from you they need to act now to avoid being turfed off. But don't be all stick and no carrot; find something you can offer them that's positive. For example, perhaps they can switch to a weekly version if the daily one is too much? Give them that link here.

Mail #4 - Action Required: Last Chance

Oh my. Now we're serious. The subject line is imperative. The content is short and to the point. You're off, this is it, fix this now! Since you actually don't want to lose someone who actually will engage, perhaps you can remind them of all the reasons to stay you delivered in emails 1-3. But this is the last chance. You mean it!

Mail #5 - Bye Bye, Baby

This is it. The subscriber hasn't responded, and you've had to let them go. Let them know to confirm you did this (it's OK, you chose to get rid of them; they didn't unsubscribe). And give them, like on "Who Wants to be a Millionaire," a lifeline. Tell them how to get back onto the list, and perhaps you can leave them with a reason to do it, or a small gift to thank them for their long-standing subscription.

Moral: Don't burn your bridges when you run a re-engagement campaign.

Tomorrow: Setting expectations, protecting egos and list hygiene process implementation tips.

New Date-Based Custom Field Options

2011-11-07T12:03:00.001-05:00

Newly released into FeedBlitz, a new custom field type to hold dates. You can use this custom field like any other, such as making it public (so they enter, say, their birthday on your subscription form), or you can make it private (such as their last purchase date). Date custom fields have a handy little popup calendar to help make data entry easier, as in the screenshot below.

If you create a field for birthday, say, you can (for example) create a segment that pulls out people born before 1990 like this:

birthday<"1990-01-01"

If you play with this or any custom field feature (Newsletters - Custom fields in version three, Publisher Tools in v4), you will notice that we've added some more "system" custom fields that - interestingly and not at all coincidentally - happen to be date fields. They are Opened, Clicked, Joined and OptedIn.

Intriguing, huh? More on these tomorrow.

Engage, Grow, Monetize with your Blog's Secret Weapon

2011-11-05T13:47:00.000-04:00

I was delighted to be able to give a presentation at BlogWorld in Los Angeles a couple of days ago. It's about:

How to learn from social media leaders to help grow your list faster;
Some ideas to inspire the community on ways to make money from their otherwise free blog content;
Some tips and techniques for automating your email marketing to maximize your revenue potential.

I've now made my slides available online at slideshare for broader distribution. If you're interested in having me address your event or conference, please do get in touch!

Engage, Grow, Monetize with your Blog's Secret Weapon

View more presentations from phollows

Updated: Delayed Mailings, Nov 1st 2011

2011-11-01T09:10:00.002-04:00

09:55 AM: Repairs are done; we are now catching up on missed mailings. If a scheduled email was missed please DO NOT force it out now; we will catch up and send it soon.

08:55 AM: A problem with a server has affected overnight mailings. We are fixing it now and will run the missed mailings as soon as we can.

The issue will also prevent on demand and newsflash updates until it is fixed.

We apologize for the inconvenience. Updates will be posted here and on the @phollows Twitter account.

Fearless FeedBurner Migration - No Login Required

2011-10-27T12:49:00.031-04:00

In yesterday's post about setting up your RSS properly I talked about the risk of getting trapped with a particular feed service because your subscribers are subscribing to their feed URL on their domain, not your URL on your domain.

That's bad enough. What's worse in FeedBurner's case is that people may have set up their feeds years ago (or their web folks did), and they can't figure out how to access their feeds and metrics. Or, from worse to worsest (?), FeedBurner users can migrate their account to Google apps and suddenly find out that a perfectly good FeedBurner login no longer works - and can't be recovered. Not only are you trapped at this point, you have no recourse other than abandoning your feed, its subscribers and starting over. There's no corporate support for FeedBurner at all (but it's free so that's OK, right? Perhaps not...). End up at this point and you're well and truly up the proverbial creek. You're by no means alone in your paddle-less adventure, but that's cold comfort, I know.

This is a tragic turn of events for what was once a fun, supported (and supportive) service. I've written on the topic before, but as I try and provide a little help to frustrated users in the FeedBurner forums, it's sad to see so many people disappointed and frustrated by the complete lack of engagement from FeedBurner's owners. They simply don't understand why Google doesn't care about them (another instance of digital share cropping - what would happen if FeedBurner went away? Yikes...).

Sounds like an opportunity for FeedBlitz, right? Well, not so fast. People frequently can't log in to FeedBurner to use FeedBlitz's migration wizards, so they're stuck. Often, that leaves their readers sitting out there subscribed to a FeedBurner URL, with nothing that can be done by the site owner to access that audience and its stats.

Which means, as I said yesterday, that site owners have to get all those readers to resubscribe. It's the only way to get their readers off that FeedBurner URL, and the only way for the publisher to re-take control of their feed, their readership and their RSS metrics. Even with the pain and frustration many FeedBurner users are now experiencing, the fear of starting over and "abandoning" their subscribers is just too much. They give up, and resign themselves to putting up with it. The fear and lack of access put even major bloggers on the back foot, and prevents them from making a switch they'd otherwise be more than happy to make. After all, their subscribers are their most committed audience, and surely far too important to abandon to the free but unsupported service that FeedBurner has become. It's a shame to see such confusion descend into lost hope, day after day. But that's what's going on.

Good news, then. There is hope.

As I alluded to yesterday, FeedBlitz does now have a way forward for people stuck in this scenario. It ain't pretty, but it works. Our approach assumes that you have control over the original feed that FeedBurner is polling, that you can use your blog's redirect features, and that you're going to try FeedBlitz out as a premium FeedBurner alternative.

First, set up your own feed on your own domain, like I outlined yesterday, if you haven't already done so.
If that is different from your FeedBurner original feed (our tech support can help you identify the URL FeedBurner is accessing), set up a permanent redirect from that feed to the new feed you set up in step (1) above.
Then set up your FeedBlitz feed at RSS | New based on the URL you set up at (1).
Set up a temporary redirect from your feed (1) to your new FeedBlitz feed (3), making sure that you have an exception defined so that FeedBlitz can access your source feed OK without going around in circles.

At this point you have FeedBurner - and everyone using it - redirecting to your new canonical feed on your own domain (good!), and you are then having FeedBlitz serve it for you. Which means that FeedBurner (or whatever you use) is, in fact, accessing FeedBlitz for your feed. This is the key part.

(Note that at this point we don't have to log in to Google at all, so even if you can't get in, you're golden.)

The bad news is that all the people using FeedBurner will still have to resubscribe. No avoiding that without login access. Simply asking them to do it in a blog post is unlikely to have any effect; people are lazy and - hey - the FeedBurner feed's still working (although it's a lot cooler now it's using FeedBlitz's feed goodies).

So here's the kicker. FeedBlitz has a new feature in its RSS settings that will try very, very hard to FORCE all your FeedBurner subscribers - at least the ones who are actually reading your old FeedBurner feed - to change their feed settings and resubscribe.

How? Well, when you enable the FeedBurner migration option at RSS | Settings, you can edit a fairly loud and to the point message (lots of bold text and colors) that says: We've moved, update your settings, oh faithful reader! OK, not quite so Jane Austen perhaps, but you get the idea. When the setting is enabled and FeedBlitz detects FeedBurner accessing your FeedBlitz feed (courtesy of the redirects you set up above), FeedBlitz does NOT send your post to FeedBurner (and by implication, on to every subscriber using it).

No. Instead, FeedBlitz serves the "resubscribe" message. Just to FeedBurner and its subscribers; everyone else gets your regular content. As long as you have that setting enabled in FeedBlitz it will continue to (loudly, persistently, consistently) urge your remaining FeedBurner subscribers to switch over. Not for only 15 days, but for as long as you have the FeedBlitz feature switched on. So people taking long vacations, sabbaticals or whatever will still get it. Everyone accessing your content via your old FeedBurner feed will know, in no uncertain terms, what they need to do. And they will be reminded, every single time you post, until they change.

So, although it's not as smooth as you might like, there's no need to access your old FeedBurner account to switch, which is a huge win. (If you can log in we have wizards to help expedite setup and email subscriber transfer). With this capability, FeedBlitz can basically push every one of your subscribers with a pulse over to your new core feed living at your URL on your domain. You don't need to delete your old FeedBurner feed either, which means all the old links in aggregators will work too. But everyone paying attention will quickly switch because they want your content and NOT an annoying message from the likes of us. As I said, pretty it is not. Effective, though? You betcha.

Sure, not everyone will come over. You're going to have a proportion of abandoned subscriber accounts, and so at the end of the day your numbers will start off being lower here at FeedBlitz than at FeedBurner. But what you gain is:

Control over your feed and how it's served.
Knowing you have a supported, reliable service.
Knowing the people you do have are fully (re)engaged with your content.
A powerful platform to build on going forward.

That first point is important. You can (should!) configure the message we send to FeedBurner subscribers to direct readers to the feed on your URL (remember we still serve it, because of the temporary redirect). But you own those readers on your URL on your domain. Don't care for FeedBlitz later on? Well, switch the redirect off - done! They're still yours. They won't need to resubscribe again, because as far as they're concerned they're subscribing to the same feed.

At the risk of harming FeedBlitz's future revenue growth, you could in theory start a trial with us for the sole purpose of rescuing your feed from FeedBurner, and then cancel before the trial ends, planning on the migration message having moved anyone who cares across back to you by then. Obviously, we hope you'll stick around, but it's certainly something you could consider if you want to make that move and take back your feed. Our RSS only prices are just $1.49 a month anyway, so if you don't use our email services you're not going to break the bank if (when :) ) you choose to continue with us.

I hope this helps someone get out of the quagmire. Know that, if any of this resonates with you, at least you're not alone, and there is a way out.

If you're interested and would like help getting control of your RSS feed and your subscribers back, please tweet me @phollows or contact us via support at feedblitz dot com. We're happy to hear from you and will help as best we can, client or no.

The ONE THING to do to Get Your RSS Right

2011-10-26T11:09:00.003-04:00

RSS. It's an essential technology underpinning much of the modern web's content, social or otherwise. But, like email subscriptions, it's often poorly implemented. Worse, decisions can be made "because everybody else does it this way" that can really mess things up for you later as your blog grows.

And it boils down, in many ways, to just one thing.

So here it is:

Have your feed on your own domain.

In other words, if your web site is on example.com, then your feed should be something like: example.com/feed or feeds.example.com/example or example.com/posts/default/feed or whatever. The point being, as far as any aggregator or end user is concerned, it should be hosted on YOUR domain, example.com, not SomeFeedService.com

Note that this doesn't mean your feed should be SERVED from your domain. You can easily use third party services like FeedBurner or FeedBlitz to serve your feed (and gather metrics about its readership) using a variety of different and (usually) easy to implement things called redirects. This means the feed is hosted on your domain (i.e. its web URL is on example.com), but delivered by your feed service. How? Well, there are plugins for wordpress, .htaccess files for Apache servers, fields on Blogger, CNAME DNS switches for this, depending on how you're set up. And, as a feed service vendor, I think you SHOULD use a third party service for this job because it's the only way to determine subscriber counts and reach.

But I'm not talking about RSS serving here. I'm talking about the URL your feed is found at.

Assuming you own your own domain and have a hosting package (and, if not, for crying out loud spring the $5 / month for a hosting service and get a deal on annual domain pricing, otherwise all you're doing is helping wordpress.com's or blogger.com's SEO and not your own) ...

... where was I? Oh yes, assuming you have your own domain, you need to have your feed URL on your domain too.

Why?

Because then you control and own it, that's why. It generates SEO goodness for you (since it is the canonical source), that's why. It enables you to serve your feed yourself, or use a third party service, or switch back and forth without losing subscribers, that's why.

And if you don't? Let's say your feed is exclusively hosted at SomeFeedService.com, and that is the URL that all your RSS subscribers have in their RSS readers. You decide later that SomeFeedService.com isn't cutting the mustard any more, and you want to move your feed. Some feed services have tools to enable permanent redirects, but others don't.

Without a permanent redirect option, guess what happens if you switch, which means changing feed URLs? All your RSS subscribers have to resubscribe. All of them.

That stinks. You're caught between a rock and a hard place. Stay - trapped - with a service you don't like any more, or lose a portion - possibly significant - of your subscriber base in any transition. Most people become stymied by the fear of losing subscribers, and end up unhappily tolerating the legacy service (the one "everyone else is using" most likely).

Avoid the feed trap. Set up your feed correctly, on your own domain. Use a redirect / plugin / CNAME to have a feed stats service serve it to your subscribers and analyze its use, by all means. I recommend that! Just make sure they're subscribing to the feed on your URL, and not somebody else's.

But what if you ARE caught in this trap? What if you are stuck on a free feed service URL that is unsupported but effectively holding all your RSS readers hostage? It's another twist on "digital sharecropping" and ceding control to third party sites.

Turns out, we at FeedBlitz can help you with that. So from this important general advice to the specific, tomorrow. Stay tuned.

See you in L.A. at BlogWorld - Video!

2011-10-24T15:02:00.002-04:00

I'm speaking about (surprise!) email marketing - and, more importantly, how to use it to improve your ability to monetize your site - at BlogWorld next week in Los Angeles. It's going to be a fun and informative and practical session; I guarantee you'll leave it with some easy changes to up your earnings. If you're going, I hope to see you in my session at 3:45pm, Thursday, November 3rd. There's a short video here:

Video not working? Click through to my speaker page: http://www.blogworldexpo.com/2011-la/conference/speakers/phil-hollows

If you can't make it, you should know there's a virtual ticket option that lets you stream all the sessions live and, I believe, have access to the video recordings too. Tickets are still available, so find out more using the big friendly buttons front and center on my speaker page.

P.S. If you want to buy either a real or virtual ticket for the event, use the code BWEVIP20 when you purchase for 20% off the full freight price. Not too shabby, right? Right! See you there...

New Ad Campaign Launches Tomorrow for Ad-Funded Mailings

2011-10-13T15:05:00.001-04:00

Update October 14th - The campaign's been moved to Novemeber.

A quick heads-up to bloggers grandfathered in on our free service from before 2009 and who are not using their own graphic design template for their mailings. We have a new ad campaign going live soon, maybe as soon as tomorrow, and for up to about 10 days thereafter.

If you're not paying FeedBlitz to deliver emails to your subscribers, and you have not changed your template (i.e. you're using the FeedBlitz default), the ads we serve in lieu of payment are going to be more intrusive than usual during this campaign. Hence this heads-up.

If you don't like these new ads (or the prospect thereof) you have three choices:

Wait it out; it will be all done in about 10 days;
Go to Newsletters | Settings | Easy Email Design Editor and customize your mailings with your own logo and more, in which case the standard banner ads you're seeing now will continue to be served instead;
Upgrade. All ads placed by FeedBlitz will disappear altogether. Upgrade here: https://www.feedblitz.com/f?NewsUpgrade pricing here: http://www.feedblitz.com/f/?Newsletter/pricing - we have deals for grandfathered accounts and annual payment plans; contact support for information about what we can do for you.

Remember, this only applies to publishers on our free service who haven't customized their layouts. If you're paying FeedBlitz a monthly fee, or you have customized your mailings, this won't affect you at all.

Facebook New Design Fallout: Your Traffic?

2011-10-06T08:48:00.003-04:00

"What if Google went away?"

It's one of the things I like to say when I speak about the importance of email marketing and list building for bloggers. It's a deliberately attention-getting phrase, and it matters. Still, too many people ignore it, though, because, LOL, no way Google's going away, right? What could possibly go wrong?

It matters because if your traffic (and therefore your dependent downstream revenue) depends on Google, and your search engine ranking changes, or you're dropped from the index, your ability to get new traffic is slaughtered. Without a solid list, your ability to continue to monetize your site and grow your business can be crippled, overnight.

So. In a post about Facebook, why the hell am I talking about Google? To illustrate this simple point: Facebook just "went away" for many blogging businesses. The new design has dramatically reduced Facebook referrals - and subsequent revenues - for many bloggers. Sure, Facebook.com is still there; it just isn't bringing most people nearly as much traffic and business as it used to. It's the same idea, different web site. And prior to last week, I bet nobody would have thought that Facebook would "go away" either. Silly Phil, suggesting such a thing.

Yet here we are.

If you're relying on a third party site - Facebook, Google, Etsy, whatever - and building your business on it, last week's Facebook changes shows the real risks you are running. I'm not saying don't use, sell or manage your communities on Facebook; far from it. But pay more attention to bringing your traffic from third party sites to yours - the only one you actually control - and pay MUCH more attention to keeping visitors there and turning them into subscribers.

Remember: Google, Facebook, whatever site you're "share cropping" on, don't know you, don't care about you, and are not in business to help you. They are there to help themselves, and if your business takes the hit while they take care of their business, it is not their problem. It is yours. What are you going to do about it?

Google's never going away?

Facebook just went away for many small businesses.

Who's next?

Are you ready?

[Resolved, Take 2] Outage at our hosting service Mon Sep 26 9:00 am eastern

2011-09-26T09:04:00.003-04:00

3:30 pm. Our servers are back online. Apologies again for the inconvenience.

1:50pm update. Our hosting service is again down.

11:44:00am Update: Our hosting service has finally recovered and we're back online. Apologies again to those affacted.

We're looking at a problem with our hosting service. Apologies for the inconvenience this may cause; more news as soon as we have it.

Tying it All Together - Beefing up FeedBlitz Autoresponders, Part 3

2011-09-24T15:40:00.001-04:00

In the first part of this three post autoresponder series I announced the following new features for FeedBlitz's autoresponders:

Custom landing pages for autoresponder subscribers;
Custom confirmation emails;
Event rules and triggers;
New "On completion" event trigger.

In the second post, I talked about our AWeber-compatible email parser capability, enabling simple third party shopping cart and form integration.

This last post shows you how to tie them all together. Here's the scenario:

You want to thank your store's purchasers with a coupon and then a three part "how to" series;
At the end of the series you want to add them to your full mailing list (so they don't get too much mail while they're in the autoresponder)
You want to do this with minimal unsubscribe or spam complaints.

Here's how.

Create your autoresponder and define the sequence of articles;
Create a custom landing page on your site where you deliver the coupon on your site, and tell the autoresponder about it;
Set up an trigger event on the autoresponder to subscribe people to your main mailing list on completion.
Use the custom confirmation (the dual opt-in activation) email to tell people that there's a coupon waiting for them and all they have to do to get is to click the confirmation link.
Set up the parser for the autoresponder to watch for notification emails from your shopping cart, which kicks the whole process off.

What happens is this.

The visitor makes a purchase from your store - hooray!
The parser picks up the notification from your shopping cart, and sends the opt-in confirmation email to the subscriber.
This opt-in email is the one you customized, telling the user about the goodies they are going to get if they click the activation link.
The user confirms, and two things happen:

The first email in the autoresponder sequence is sent.
They are sent to your custom landing page to pick up the offer.

They get remaining articles in your series over the next few days.
When the last one goes out, the "completion" event occurs, subscribing the user to your regular mailing list, where you can build upon the trust you've already created between you and the buyer.

Not much work to set up, but what you get at the end is a powerful, fully automated email marketing solution that builds trust with - and who knows, maybe some extra revenue from - your new purchaser.

Shopping cart and popup integration - Beefing Up Autoresponders, Part 2

2011-09-23T10:38:00.003-04:00

Autoresponders are often used to thank people for subscribing to your mailing list, or to launch multi-step drip marketing series, or as standalone email courses sent to subscribers. These are easy to set up because all these features are inside the FeedBlitz service.

But some of the best uses for autoresponders is to add a new subscriber when they've done something outside your email service's ecosystem, such as when they buy from your online store or when you use a third party popup or widget to solicit new subscriptions.

FeedBlitz has now been extended to easily support third party shopping carts and other third party lead generation products for your site.

Introducing Email Parsers

Available at Newsletters - Settings - Email Parser and Responders - Email Parser, the approach we've adopted will be familiar to anyone who has used AWeber. Better yet, the approach will work with any third party shopping cart, widget or plugin that supoprts AWeber too, so integration is a snap. Unlike them, however, you are spared having to learn about regular expressions to make it work. Phew!

Here's a sample FeedBlitz email parser screen:

FeedBlitz generates a large, random email address (hidden in the screenshot above) for you to put into the AWeber integration's "list email address" field in your shopping cart's email service settings. Since the email is a feedblitz.com address, it will come to us.

When the email arrives, it is processed by the parser assigned to that address. You can tell it how to detect whether the inbound email is (a) genuine and (b) the kind of email you want to process (so you can differentiate between, say, a sales notification and a shipping update). If you don't know what these values are, you can use the email forwarding function (set to "Always") to get all the messages the parser receives sent on to you; you can then see what it's getting and edit it appropriately.

Then you tell the parser how the data you want to grab appears in the body of the mail itself. One per line, or PayPal style, or comma separated etc. The parser splits up the inbound email, and then looks at the matches you specify to figure out information such as the buyer's email address and their name.

When a parser's trigger matches the settings, it will create a pending subscription, populate the relevant custom fields with the data it finds, and invite the subscriber to join the list (yes, we enforce double opt-in, because it gets us better deliverability - it's a good thing).

You can set the email forwarding value to forward you the mail the parser receives. So, for example, for new email parser addresses you want to use with PayPal, set the forwarding to be "Always", tell PayPal to use that email address, and when PayPal's confirmation email is sent to the parser it will be forwarded on to you. You can confirm using the link in the email, and then go back to the parser and change the forwarding setting (if you like) to keep the noise down.

Finally, once defined, a parser can be used by any of your lists or autoresponders. The email address the parser listens to is what changes on a list-by-list basis. You cannot change the email address from the long random value which FeedBlitz assigns, and this is by design. It makes the inbound email address fundamentally unguessable and therefore highly resistant to spambots. Spammers are bad. We don't want to help them add junk to your list, which a short changeable inbound email address risks.

So, we've introduced easy to use, well behaved, AWeber compatible (at least as far as the shopinig cart or popup is concerned), easy to use parsers. Another form of API you can use at FeedBlitz, and one that anyone who's set up a shopping cart plugin, PayPal button or Cafepress store can manage. Now you can thank your buyers with drip emails, thank you autoresponders or coupons off their next purchase.

Tomorrow: How to tie parsers and the autoresponder features I mentioned yesterday together for a sweet, effective retail autoresponder solution.

Beefing up FeedBlitz Autoresponders - Part 1

2011-09-22T09:13:00.001-04:00

Autoresponders - a predefined sequence of emails that go out to subscribers - have long been a part of FeedBlitz's offerings. Most folks using FeedBlitz, however, don't make the most of them. While that's OK, it means that many of you are missing out on one of the keys to making your blog a financial success.

Autoresponders are used by the most successful organizations and online marketers - especially those wanting to boost their affiliate earnings - to automatically market and sell to their audience on an unattended basis. Done right, autoresponders can become your blog's personal ATM. I covered autoresponders in this post in my List Building for Bloggers series, and I'll be talking about them a lot more in the coming weeks.

Today, though, I'm going to tell you what we've been working on here at FeedBlitz to make our autoresponder program more appealing for bloggers who want to focus on more aggressive monetization and making their blogs financial successes. There is much to talk about, which is why I'm splitting things into multiple posts. Here's part 1.

Extending RSS to Email Newsletter Features to Autoresponders

In the responder tab (v3) or the autoresponder's settings page (v4), we have enabled the following features that were previously available only to automated newsletter production (blog to mail):

1. Custom landing page redirect for directly subscribing readers

Many monetization approaches have web site visitors subscribe directly to an autoresponder instead of to your general mailings list. If you want to build your list this way, you can now tell FeedBlitz where to send new subscribers once they activate instead of using our default thank you page. You can use the page you specify like you can its equivalent for newsletters: Recycling popular content, delivering incentives or rewards, etc.

2. Custom confirmation email text

You can now customize the "click here to confirm your subscription" email for autoresponders, again when the subscriber subscribes directly instead of triggering the autoresponder via a subscription to a regaulr newsletter.

3. Event rules and triggers

List automation was previously available for newsletters only. List automation events are triggered when a subscriber subscribes, unsubscribes or (this is new and only for autoresponders) when the autoresponder sequence completes. This last feature allows you to grow your list by having visitors subscribe to your autoresponder offer or campaign, and then add them to your regular mailings when the autoresponder wraps up. Doing this ensures that only one list at a time is mailing a new subscriber (first the autoresponder, and then your normal list), reducing the risk of excessive unsubscribe rates that you might run by having both lists (newsletter and autoresponder) mailing the user concurrently.

Further, we've modified event trigger functionality for all lists, such that if any trigger on any list adds a user to an autoresponder, that autoresponder will fire off the first message in the list. It didn't work that way before, which was an oversight. Oops!

Automatic for the People

(OK, yes, this is a reference to REM's breakup annoncement yesterday. I'm a fan.)

What this means to you is that FeedBlitz's autoresponders are now as rich in terms of core functioanlity as their RSS to email newsletter bretheren.

Better yet, as they like to say on late night cable TV ads, "But wait, there's more!"

And indeed there is. But that's for the next post.

Pouring Social Media Gas onto Your Email List's Fire

2011-09-20T12:02:00.003-04:00

One of the challenges of email is privacy and junk: People are leery of sharing their own email addresses. It's why dual opt-in is essential for maintaining your deliverability and list quality.

But this also means, as I've said before, that when someone activates a subscription to your list, they are pumped. Committed. After all, it's taken work to get themselves there.

And that little burst of excitement can now be used to help accelerate your list's growth here at FeedBlitz.

Once someone activates their subscription from the dual opt-in email, our default landing page invites them to optionally share their excitement on Facebook, Twitter and / or LinkedIn. They keep their email address private, but they share the news that they just joined your list on their favorite social media networks. As part of the notification the subscriber can create, FeedBlitz adds a link to your online subscription form. All your new subscriber's followers and friends have to do is click the link to start the subscription process to your list.

Here's what the new section of the activation landing page looks like (it's just a picture; it won't work here):

Trusted social relationships help turn that new subscriber excitement into a networked referral. That's more interest for you and, ultimately, more email subscribers more quickly.

There are also similar sharing options now available for select list owner activities too! See if you can find them...

Update 2011-12-30 - Now with Extra Google+

Service availability problems morning of Sept 9th

2011-09-09T10:40:00.001-04:00

Update 10:41 am - we're back.

Earlier this morning apparently some networking equipment has been misconfigured at our hosting service taking core servers offline. They're working on it but for now service availbility is very limited and you may see errors. I apologize for the inconvenience this may cause.

Announcing List Monetization for Bloggers: An email marketing and monetization series for social media

2011-08-25T09:40:00.008-04:00

The blog post series and subsequent publication as an e-book, List Building for Bloggers, has been very well received. Nearly seven hundred copies of the book have been sold since it launched in May (get yours here). With luck, you've been starting to follow the advice and have started to see the quantity and quality of your lists improve.

Which begs a question, though. Now you're building your list, what to do with it? And, in particular - because let's cut to the chase, why not? - how can you make money from your mailing list?

You've probably heard the phrase "the money's in the list." That's what this next series - and, who knows, perhaps the next book! - will be all about: Making money from your list (or lists, I'll get to that too). Practical tips and techniques gleaned from personal experience, leaders in the field on how to grow your income via email marketing.

Like its precursor series, List Monetization for Bloggers (a.k.a. LMB) will appear more-or-less weekly. Although I'll be focusing on list monetization for blogging and social media (or, more formally, "content marketing"), many of the tips will be gleaned from (and applicable to) what's called "internet marketing." Bloggers will learn core internet marketing techniques that they can apply to gain new revenue streams via their list and other venues; internet markers will end up with a comprehensive one-stop guide to list monetization and insights into how blogging and social media can further their income growth.

Topics I will cover include:

Multi-list strategies
Master lists
Advanced autoresponders
Affiliate programs
Monetizing list signups
Incentives and giveaways
Packaging, partnering and bundles
List hygiene
Ethics and best practice

Where appropriate, LMB will recap or reference LBB (start reading online, or buy the book). Online, there will be content showing you how to configure FeedBlitz to help you monetize your list.

Posts will be tagged "LMB" here and I'll be tweeting about it on Twitter with the #LMB and #LBB (for continuity) hash tags.

Next week I'll start with a comprehensive introductory post, after which I'll jump directly in to multi-list strategies.

About List Monetization for Bloggers

Written by Phil Hollows, author of List Building for Bloggers and FeedBlitz's Founder & CEO, List Monetization for Bloggers is a series of posts to help you make more money by effectively using these monetization tips. No matter whether you're a novice, a more advanced blogger or and internet marketer, there will be something for you to learn, apply and benefit from in this series.

P.S. If you think your friends or followers would find this series valuable, please retweet on Twitter or "Like" on Facebook using the buttons below. Thank you!

FeedBlitz Founder Video Interview

2011-08-11T12:25:00.000-04:00

Recently published by Bob Andelman, aka "Mr. Media" - here's a video interview with me on lists, email marketing and blogging.

The original post is here at Bob's site - http://www.mrmedia.com/?p=2334 - or you can catch the interview below:

List Building for Bloggers interview with Feedblitz founder Phil Hollows! from Bob Andelman on Vimeo.

Try FeedBlitz v4 for yourself!

2011-08-05T07:39:00.003-04:00

We've posted a second tutorial video for FeedBlitz v4, see below.

If you missed it first time around, here's the original video on the new UI.

Want to try it? Of course you do!

Click here to start on FeedBlitz v4 now »

Blogging Myth: The "Newsletter" is Different and Special

2011-07-25T09:35:00.009-04:00

I'm often asked whether FeedBlitz, as well as doing RSS to email, can cover a blogger's "newsletter" as well. People who ask this usually do so for a couple of reasons:

They have a separate weekly or monthly newsletter list that they don't want to overwhelm with daily posts form the blog;
They like to write "special" content for the mailing list so it is not just a recap of blog posts.

So can you do this in FeedBlitz? Yes, via our Newsflash feature.

But you shouldn't! Here's why:

Everything is Bloggable

If you're writing special editorial for your mailings list in the form of a newsletter, there's no value in limiting your content to just the mailing list. If you wrote that editorial as a blog post, it would be archived on your blog, be indexed by search engines, and you'll influence a wider audience. Don't just mail it, blog it!

So what you write instead of a "newsletter" is a weekly wrap up on your blog - perhaps on weekends when things are more quiet. Consistently tag / categorize it "Weekly Wrap" or "Newsletter." @CopyBlogger does this each and every week; it's a great way to summarize your week in a single post and to add extra editorial if you want. If it's good enough for Brian Clark and his hundreds of thousands of subscribers, it's good enough for you!

How Not to Overwhelm your "Newsletter" Readers

Easy: Only mail them the weekly wrap up, as opposed to your "blog subscribers" who get everything.

Here's how.

Clone your blog's list in FeedBlitz via Newsletters - Settings - Clone.
Change the name of your new cloned list to "Weekly Newsletter" (or whatever you want to call it)
In Newsletters - Settings - Content Settings - Tag Filters, set the include tag to be "weekly wrap" (or whatever you decide to categorize those summary posts with)
Import your "newsletter" subscribers to the list
Done!

All you do to create your "newsletter" is post a weekly summary (which also goes to your regular readers, as well as generating google juice and SEO points for your site). Then FeedBlitz mails it out to your "newsletter" list automatically - without sending them the other posts, thanks to the tag filter.

It's probably less work for you, so you save time producing the "newsletter" plus you get the SEO benefits and an online, indexable archive on your blog, none of which you'd generate doing your "newsletter" the old fashioned way.

So that's the myth of the newsletter debunked - your blog can generate it just as easily as you can any other RSS to email mailing. In fact, it's better all around, thanks to the SEO and online archive benefits.

Get FeedBlitz to Produce a Weekly Wrap Automatically with No Extra Effort

If you don't want to add extra editorial (i.e. no weekly wrap up blog post) but you do want to send a weekly summary to a group of subscribers, you can automate that in FeedBlitz too. You create your clone, but instead of setting a tag filter, you set it to have a weekly schedule and abridge the post content. Once a week FeedBlitz will generate a nice digest of your week's posts and mail it out to your "newsletter" subscribers - zero extra work for you. All you have to do is import the subscribers from your legacy newsletter service.

So don't let your existing legacy newsletter hold you back. Using your blog and FeedBlitz together to generate both newsletter and bog / mail subscriptions is easy, saves you time and better for your SEO.

Watch the FeedBlitz v4 intro video now

2011-07-21T11:16:00.001-04:00

FeedBlitz v4 is ready for its close-up, Mr. De Mille! At a little over three minutes this short video gives you a quick view into using the new user interface (and a link to get started too). Take a peek and then start your adventure into v4 (it's backwards compatible with "old" FeedBlitz).

If the thumbnail below is too small, click through to YouTube where you can watch it all the way up to 1280p HD!

8 New School Ways to Build Your List Using This 50-Year-Old Technology

2011-07-19T11:04:00.001-04:00

The room was filled with bloggers of all ages. I was giving a presentation at BlogWorld Expo and I had lured these tech-savvy bloggers to my talk on the premise of unveiling the 50-year-old technology that was the hidden profit center of their blog.

What is this 50-year-old technology that I speak of? It's e-mail, and specifically marketing via e-mail. Now I feel like I'm preaching to the choir, but let me explain.

First of all, e-mail is not a new technology, it's not a cool new start-up that is getting a lot of buzz. It predates the Internet we know and love today, and was used by university researchers to share data.

But before you start saying that e-mail is irrelevant in our social media world, let's look at a quick study done by Microsoft and picked up by Mashable, which I believe highlights why it's so important to keep building an e-mail list even if you are building an online presence through social media.

You see, people are using e-mail more than ever. According to the study, 96% of people are either increasing their use of email, or keeping it stable. Only 4% of respondents use email less than they did last year.

People who are active on social media tend to use e-mail even more than other people. Surprising? Maybe, but I think it just means that we are becoming more interconnected and we want to you stay in touch with the people who are providing us with entertainment and value online.

So how do you build your list in this world of social media without defaulting to to 50 year old email techniques?

1. Value first

Build your list by offering something of value up front, and continuously sending the best quality stuff to people on a regular basis.

2. Exclusivity

Be upfront about what's different for people who are on your list, versus people who read your blog, versus people who follow you on Google plus or twitter.

3. Make it easy

It's easy to think that everyone in your target market is on social media, but depending on what type of market you're in e-mail is still going to be the best means of communication. So make it easy for people to sign up via e-mail.

4. Push versus pull

E-mail allows for permission based marketing. To top it off, most people are checking their e-mails on a daily basis, versus people who might not even see your message because of the number of friends they have on Facebook and how much activity is taking place.

5. Don't send people away

Your e-mail list should be the biggest ad on your website. Do not send people away from your site by allowing them to click on an ad that makes you pennies. You could be building a long-term relationship with someone after they become a subscriber, and that is worth more than a few cents.

6. Speak to one person

It's easy to start looking at your list as a mass of people, but you need to remember that these are individuals and you should address your e-mails to a single person. That way every person who reads your e-mails feels special.

7. Consistency is key

Make it easy for yourself to remain consistent with your publishing schedule. Don't try to pack too much into your e-mails but rather attempt to deliver the most value in the most succinct and easy to absorb way possible.

8. Ask for what you want

Ask people to share your e-mails or your free gifts with their friends and family. Your content is new to people who have yet to discover you, even though you might be tired of talking about it. You have new fans that have yet to discover you.

Let's do it!

Keep on building your list, because e-mail is here to stay. There are plenty of ways to differentiate your list from those of your competitors and most of the advice comes down to being a good listener and treating your people like gold.

Leave a comment below and let me know what one tip resonated with you the most!

About the Author

Nathalie Lussier is an online business triple threat, she combines marketing with web design and technology. Find out more about building your list by watching her free list building webinar here, and you'll also receive her free weekly Getting Techy With It newsletter.

Why @Klout has it wrong: The Intersection of Attention & Influence

2011-07-13T11:08:00.000-04:00

Klout and services like it seek to measure your influence - that's not a bad idea.

Where Klout goes wrong, I think, is that it then conflates all the different metrics down to a single score. I'm currently a 61 (See http://klout.com/phollows)

So what?

Inevitably, the issue becomes not about your influence per se, but your influence compared to everyone else's. Great for gamification and, depending on how you're doing, your ego, but we all know where a "mine's bigger than yours" mentality gets us in the end.

I am not Robert Scoble, nor Ashton Kuchner, nor Lady Gaga.

Nor are you.

Comparing our Klout scores is therefore a meaningless, apples to oranges exercise. It fails to answer the question I posed above: So what?

What is not important is your influence compared to everyone else. What matters is your influence among the people you want to influence. See the difference? Your influence is only important within your community (or, more cynically, within the community you're trying to reach).

So what you really need to do is find out who the key influencers are within your community. That's what PR agencies are good at in more traditional media.

But there's an additional factor in play here: Attention.

It doesn't matter at all if you find the right people if you can't influence them. What you need to do is find the people with influence - one degree away from you, as it were - and who are also giving you their attention. If you can find an influencer who's paying attention to you, you're in great shape. To be fair, Klout tries to give you some insight into that with the "influencer of" data - but it seems to select people you chat a lot with rather than people who really wield the power you may be seeking. It rarely seems to be right for me.

FeedBlitz v4 (which will be out next week not this due to some travel commitments and last minute performance tuning) has the ability to tell you this vital information. It can tell you who the influencers are that are also paying attention to you. It's part of v4's enhanced social media integration.

Every person we've shown this to has found out something interesting about their followers (it's largely a Twitter-centric feature right now). It will enable you to be much more focused when you're reaching out to key people in your community and your sphere of influence. Not a single, apples to oranges score, but a list of people who are listening to you and can massively amplify your message. You save time and energy by gaining insight into the influence-brokers in your audience.

FeedBlitz v4 will also email you a report about your important followers (and unfollows), so you can spare your inbox from the death by social media notification emails. One daily digest to tell you who's new, who's gone, and who matters.

"So what?" I asked. Well, FeedBlitz v4 can tell you. Rolling out next week. Promise!

Get the Kindle Edition of List Building for Bloggers

2011-07-06T07:05:00.000-04:00

It's on the Kindle.
It's $9.99
It's a great price.
'Nuff said.

Click the image or click here to get it now for your Kindle.

Countdown to v4: Easier Email List Management

2011-07-01T09:11:00.000-04:00

The next version of FeedBlitz radically rethinks navigational organization for lists, feeds and social media marketing content distribution. It's faster to find what you want when you want it.

But we haven't stopped there. We've also simplified the pages used to manage your blog's email settings as well. For example, here's a screenshot of the v4 settings page for this blog.

The first thing to notice is that there's just one page - all the settings are accessible from there. They're also presented in more or less plain English, so it functions as list documentation - something that wasn't available anywhere in prior versions of FeedBlitz. To change a setting, click the linked text that refers to it, and a popup appears. Make your change there and then - easy.

Advanced users who want to get straight to brass tacks can click the "Edit Settings Inline" button and get to a more traditional, form based approach.

Next week you'll see several posts about v4 countdown ... because we're opening this baby up the week of the 11th!

TypeACon: Save $10 on "List Building for Bloggers" e-book

2011-06-23T09:57:00.003-04:00

To celebrate the Type-A Parent conference I'm delighted to be able to offer a $10 discount off the list price of List Building for Bloggers - simply use the TYPEACON code at check out to get the saving.

If you're unfamiliar with the book, it's all about how to maximize your blog's best resource: its email subscribers. It covers how to build a better list, faster, along with autoresponders and HTML design tips. Visit the book's site for more information (PDF download), or get it for the Kindle here.

Countdown to v4: Dashboards and buttons and widgets, oh my!

2011-06-22T15:19:00.001-04:00

Continuing our "sneak peek" series into the next version of FeedBlitz - aka v4 - this post is about how v4 takes the opportunity to add more dashboards and metrics.

The "always on" navigation I mentioned last time enables more opportunities to provide meaningful insight into your subscribers at more opportunities. Beyond that, we've simplified the "in screen" navigation and replaced the cascading series of menus with clear, simple, task-centric buttons.

The Main Pane: Delivering the Goods

There are new site dashboards and multi-site summaries. We've added site thumbnails, audience metrics and Alexa rankings.

Within each site, you can see at a glance how your audience divides between the different social media channels, email and RSS. You can quickly see what's growing and what's not, essential data for the modern social media blogger and marketers.

Major task: The green button

At each level, the big green button upper right takes you to the main task for that screen or element. The green button always represents the most valuable sub screen at that point in the navigation. So, for example, at the site level the most important task is editing the settings for the site itself. At the mailing list level, it's sending a mailing.

Other tasks: Orange buttons

The orange buttons represent other significant tasks you can do. Yet more options are available in the rest of the screen or any displayed widgets.

Widgets

At many places in v4 you will find screen elements called widgets, like this one from an RSS feed:

Text in the lower dark bar is clickable, taking you directly to the applicable option for that widget.
Also note that we've tried making the screens more useful. There are no intermediate menus any more; clicking on a feed or a list gets you real data right away.

Next time, I'll drill into the mailing list area, to talk about the new capabilities and ease of use changes there.

This weekend only: Save $5 in our 500th sale celebration

2011-06-17T18:32:00.001-04:00

To celebrate the 500th sale of List Building for Bloggers in just over five weeks, use the code 500 at checkout this weekend only to save 500 pennies ($5) off the MSRP of $24.95. Offer expires Sunday night.

Click the link to see why so many bloggers are grabbing this "must have" book: http://listbuildingforblogges.com

Remember, offer expires Sunday, so don't delay. Find out why @DianeCorriette tweeted:

"List Building For Bloggers. Excellent ebook on how bloggers can profit from their blog using email marketing http://t.co/9WBzpE8"

Did you miss it? Here's the LBB audio from the BizBuzz podcast

2011-06-17T17:19:00.000-04:00

I had a rocking good time with Becky Cortino, host of the BizBuzz podcast and Blog Talk Radio show yesterday. Thank you for having me on the show, Becky!

If you're interested in:

Why email's not dead yet.
How it can help you.
Tips on improving your list.
Insight as to whether you should by the book.

... then click here and tune in to the archive.

The show's home page is here, with the audio online. There are links there to iTunes for all you podcast types as well.

So go ahead and tune in. It isn't dull, trust me on this one. Better yet, I have a deal for those of you who make it through to the end, so pay attention. Listen now.

Join me for List Building for Bloggers on the radio!

2011-06-15T12:54:00.003-04:00

Becky Cortino, host of the "Bizz Buzz Blog Talk Radio Show" is interviewing me live on Thursday, 1pm eastern. Join us!

We'll be talking about List Building for Bloggers, how to improve your site's email list and lead generation, and a whole lot more.

Tune in Thursday at 1pm eastern at http://www.blogtalkradio.com/bizbuzz/2011/06/16/list-building-for-bloggers-with-phil-hollows to access the show (and archives if you miss it); if you are a Facebook maven the event page is at http://www.facebook.com/#!/event.php?eid=136023673141829

See you then!

P.S. There will be a special offer for listeners at the end of the show, so stay tuned in for the deal.

Countdown to FeedBlitz v4 - New Navigation Sneak Peek!

2011-06-14T11:46:00.006-04:00

A day later than promised, here's the first post in our countdown to the brand new FeedBlitz user web site. As I've mentioned before, we took on the challenge of making a great (but fairly complex) service more approachable by a wider group of people, bloggers and companies.

Put another way, the goal is to make it easier and faster for you to:

Find where you need to be;
Do what you need to get done.

The result? Well it's a lot different from the current user experience (not such a bad thing, in many ways, I know). It really, really meets these goals.

Finding Your Way Around

New Navigation

No more tabs. No more hunt and peck to find what you need. No more working through page after page to find where you need to go.

All your navigation is now in the left side bar, available all the time. Click the orange and green to open up each section; click on the titles for the relevant dashboard or the individual entry to work with that element.

All wrapped in a more contemporary look and feel with a dash of added drama.

Sites are the Key

Your content the way you think about it

When you think about your site or your blog, you think about your site or your blog. The "Site" is the intuitive way to arrange related subscriptions and social media, because that's how you think about them.

And that's how the new UI works. It organizes FeedBlitz elements the way you naturally think about them: By site. Open the site you want in the navigation and everything related to it is right there - nothing more (and nothing less). Easy to find, quick to use. There are dashboards at multiple levels (more on these in a later post), as well as site thumbnails and latest Alexa rankings.

Finally, we've also simplified some of the more complex individual pages. Mailing list settings, for example, are now presented in in english, with simple popups to change your settings right there. Fewer clicks, easier to understand what you're working on.

Existing features more readily available

The new "always-on" navigation also makes it possible for us to raise the profile of core features you may be under-utilizing or even unaware of. Custom fields and segments, for example (at the bottom of the sites area). Affiliates can jump directly to a client. You can manage your subscriptions much more easily here than before, too. There's also a new "breadcrumb" trail above the main pane and a new "utility bar" across the top.

Next up: Dashboards and Widgets

I'll cover these in the next update in a few days. Meanwhile, comments welcome!

Are you Ready? FeedBlitz v4 Countdown Starts Monday

2011-06-09T15:43:00.000-04:00

The changes we have been making in private beta will be revealed starting Monday as part of our countdown to general availability. It's faster, cooler and generally full of social media and email marketing yumminess.

Stay tuned. It's worth it.

List Building for Bloggers: The Movie!

2011-06-07T07:32:00.003-04:00

First the book, now the movie! Or, strictly speaking, movies, because I had to split the video of my recent session at Blog World NY into 4 uploads to keep the moving parts at YouTube happy (less than 15 minutes per video).

If you like, you can watch the videos and keep pace with the slides posted on SlideShare (linked to here). Although not the official conference recording the sound and the video itself came across really well, given I had to rely on an audience member for the camerawork! So enjoy -- and if you make it through to the fourth video you'll see how well I can hurl a t-shirt too (it was a *big* room!).

Finally, don't forget you can buy the book of the movie here at www.listbuildingforbloggers.com

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Did you Miss Blog World Expo in NYC?

2011-05-29T07:20:00.003-04:00

At Blog World Expo last week I gave a presentation about how bloggers (and, really, anyone!) can use email better. In case you missed my session or weren't at the conference, I've uploaded my slides to slideshare where you can take a look at the deck. Enjoy!

P.S. Don't forget you can buy the e-book this presentation was based on over at ListBuildingForBloggers.com

List Building for Bloggers

How To Create A Successful, Profitable Relationship With Affiliates by Lynn Terry

2011-05-27T08:03:00.001-04:00

Before you can create a successful relationship with your affiliates, it's important to understand the expectations upfront. Both yours and theirs. It is not the affiliate's job to sell your products. Their job is to pre-sell the product, and bring you new potential customers (traffic).

Conversions are your responsibility, both at first contact and in your follow-up process. And of course customer satisfaction and affiliate payments. Affiliates do like to get paid - on time. ;-)

Interact With Your Affiliates Publicly

You may not be able to keep tabs on every single affiliate in your program, but you definitely want to keep a finger on the pulse of your super affiliates.

Set up Google Alerts, groups in TweetDeck or HootSuite, a directory in your Feed Reader, or however it is most convenient for you to keep an eye on their promotions.

This allows you to enter the social media conversations, and/or the discussion within their blog comments, and provide additional support and credibility. Not only does this increase conversion rates, but it also strengthens your relationship with the affiliate – which will give them incentive to continue promoting for you.

Give Special Requests Serious Consideration

Super affiliates want a person they can talk to and work with directly. Someone who has the power to pull strings, make changes, and get things done. They usually have special requests, and you want to give these serious consideration. At the very least, always respond with the reason you can't fill that request.

To give you examples they may ask for special landing pages, exclusive special offers, unique coupon codes, or an interview. When you go the extra mile for an active affiliate, they'll go the extra mile for you.

Be A Team Player

Treat your top affiliates – your super affiliates – like partners. Consider them part of your team. Keep in mind that they spend their day interacting directly with your target market, or with a specific subset of your market. They will often have valuable feedback that could be as much an asset to your business as the sales they generate.

Your top performers are more than just affiliates, they are usually Market Leaders in their niche. Be available and let them know you are interested in working with them personally. Take very good care of them – and they'll feel comfortable that you'll do the same for the customers they send your way.

We've discussed why you need affiliates, where to find affiliates, how NOT to treat your affiliates and now - how to create successful relationships with your affiliates. I hope you've enjoyed this series, and see the value in creating personal (profitable) relationships with the super affiliates in your space!

About Lynn Terry

Lynn (@LynnTerry) has been working from home and online for more than 14 years, and is both a super affiliate and a professional blogger. Subscribe at http://www.ClickNewz.com for creative ideas and actionable tips you can use today!

The 2 Things You Should NEVER Do To Your Affiliates by Lynn Terry

2011-05-26T07:32:00.007-04:00

In my last post, I explained just how beneficial affiliates can be to your business. But it's a two way street, and if you want to keep your affiliates motivated and engaged (selling your products!) there are two things you should never do...

1. Never Compete With Your Affiliates

Never, ever, ever compete with your super affiliates – especially not on their turf. If you enter an affiliate’s social media conversation on Facebook or Twitter, or you comment on their blog post, use your affiliate’s referral link to your site – not a direct link.

The minute a gaping black hole opens up that bypasses their referral link… is when you’ll lose them as a promotion partner.

On the flip side, if you do take the time to participate in their discussions and promotions you will win them over for life. You want to support your affiliates 100%. You can do this by setting up a Google Alert for your domain, brand or product name so that you can follow the buzz. When appropriate, offer to answer questions or thank them for reviewing your product.

2. Never Leave Your Affiliates In The Dark

It's important to keep your affiliates in the loop, particularly your top affiliates. Have a technical issue? Let them know. Changing your prices? Give them a heads up. Coming out with a new product? Give them a sneak peek and let them leak rumors about what's coming up.

You can really win your top affiliates over by letting them promote a new product before you even announce it publicly. Give them an edge to work with, and you'll have very loyal affiliates on your team.

Bonus Tip: Never ignore your affiliates. Communication is very important, particularly to your super affiliates. If you can't answer emails, tweets or facebook messages from your affiliates right away... hire someone who can.

Sending a potential super affiliate through a help desk loop and then responding with a canned answer is a surefire way to turn them off from working with you. Fortunately (for them) they can easily find someone else that will work with them directly: your competitors.

I've mentioned "super affiliates" a couple of times. Those are the top performers in your affiliate program - the top percent sending the majority of the traffic and sales. Go out of your way to work with them personally, while maintaining regular communication with the rest of your affiliates via autoresponder.

We've discussed why you need affiliates, where to find affiliates, and how NOT to treat your affiliates. In my next (and final) post I'll share the best ways to create extremely profitable relationships with them for long-term success...

About Lynn Terry

Lynn (@LynnTerry) has been working from home and online for more than 14 years, and is both a super affiliate and a professional blogger. Subscribe at http://www.ClickNewz.com for creative ideas and actionable tips you can use today!

How To Find and Recruit Affiliates For Your Affiliate Program by LynnTerry

2011-05-25T09:02:00.012-04:00

If you have an affiliate program, your highest priority is to recruit active affiliates and get them to promote your product or service.

You may have already done everything you can think of to get your affiliate program in front of people, yet you're seeing very little response. And it’s a great opportunity! So why aren’t they biting?!

Just one or two super affiliates can out-perform the rest of your affiliates combined! As a super affiliate myself, I get a lot of requests to look at various affiliate programs. From my personal experience, I’ll share ways that you can recruit "super affiliates" successfully…

First, The Basic Groundwork...

There are three things you need to do upfront to make sure affiliates can find your affiliate program.

Add your affiliate program to affiliate program directories
Create an optimized page for “niche/keyword affiliate program” so your program shows up in Google searches
Join and actively network at the top affiliate forums

If you haven't yet done these steps, they should be your top priority tasks. The first two will require a very small investment of your time upfront, but continue to pay off for years to come. The third is more time intensive, and can easily be outsourced to a dedicated Affiliate Manager if you prefer. Forum networking has major viral potential though, so it's worth the time invested. Make friends in the affiliate world, and you’ll get super-profitable referrals!

Finding Super Affiliates

Now that you've done the groundwork so that affiliates can find you, it's time for you to go out and find them.

The most obvious place to start is on Google. Take the top keyword phrases in your niche and do a search. Make a note of the paid advertisers, the bloggers, the websites, and the communities that show up in the top 20 results.

Check YouTube, and look for active affiliates or those with popular video channels in your niche. Search is going social, so you want active affiliates with video presence and/or social media skills.

Next, check Twitter. Use http://search.twitter.com to perform searches on your keyword phrases, your product/site names, your competitors and their product names, etc.

Find the people who are already talking on your topic. Whether they are a “super affiliate” yet or not, they are reaching your target market. And they are likely interested in ways to monetize that conversation.

Recruiting Super Affiliates

Once you find affiliates you want to work with, or the people in your niche with "reach", it's time to make contact and invite them to your affiliate program. These hand-picked recruits are generally busy people, and get bombarded with requests and opportunities. You'll want to plan your approach carefully.

First, contact them where you find them. And do it while the conversation is "hot". If you find them on Twitter, enter the conversation there or send them a DM (direct message). If you find their blog, contact them through their contact form at the blog. If they offer a number, pick up the phone and call.

You'll find that each marketer or affiliate has their preferred mediums and channels - figure that out, and contact them where they are most likely to respond (email, Facebook, Twitter, etc).

Do your research - get to know them before you shoot off a message. Address them by name. Include something personal, such as their great article on XZY or their top ranking for ABC. (forget copy & paste canned emails!)

Did I mention they are already successful and therefore super busy people?? Keep your messages short and simple. REALLY short and simple.

Do NOT bombard them with follow-up messages or phone-calls. If you send an email, DM them on Twitter, comment on their blog and leave a voice mail – all within 24 hours – they will likely never work with you out of fear you’ll harass customers they refer to you in the same way. Don't be annoying, be appealing.

If you can, offer them something extra. That might be a 2nd tier, an exclusive interview, first dibs at a new viral report, a coupon code to share, higher commission rate, etc. Anything that gives them an angle and an edge - and an incentive to seriously consider working with you.

Discovering or Creating Super Affiliates

New high performers appear on the affiliate leader boards all the time, so don’t limit yourself to known super affiliates. You may just discover the perfect affiliates for your program, and turn them into super affiliates yourself. ;)

There have been merchants who took a chance on me in the past, and went out of their way to help me succeed with their program – well before I was known as a super affiliate (under this name, or certain pen names).

Always give an affiliate the benefit of the doubt. You never know when or where you’re going to find your next top affiliate.

Stay tuned - in my next post I'll share the two things you should NEVER do to your affiliates...

About Lynn Terry:

Lynn (@LynnTerry) has been working from home and online for more than 14 years, and is both a super affiliate and a professional blogger. Subscribe at http://www.ClickNewz.com for creative ideas and actionable tips you can use today!

Top 3 Reasons Your Business Needs Affiliates - Now! by Lynn Terry

2011-05-24T07:31:00.008-04:00

If you don't yet have an affiliate program for your products or services, now is the time to consider it. If you do have an affiliate program, but you're not actively working with the program and you're affiliates, you're really missing out.

Affiliates can be a huge asset to your company. And it doesn't matter if you're a small one-man operation or a large corporation. Here are the top three reasons you should consider working with affiliates to sell your products or services online:

1. Affiliates Cost Nothing Upfront. You Only Pay For Results.

Merchants often question the cost of affiliates, and whether they want to split profits in the form of commissions. Your affiliates are your marketing team, not an expense. Instead of paying an in-house marketing team for hours worked, you pay affiliates based on their performance only.

And guess what? Seasoned affiliates will out-perform an in-house marketing team all day long!

Affiliates will reach customers for you that you may not have reached otherwise, so your affiliates are actually generating more revenue for you instead of costing you money. And if they're not generating revenue for you... they're not costing you a dime!

2. Affiliates Create Awesome Buzz About You and Your Products!

Your top affiliates will go out of their way to talk about your products. They will create blog posts, start discussions on forums, start engaging social media conversations, and even take out paid advertising across the internet - on their own dime.

All of this buzz coming from a variety of sources is much more valuable to your company than you talking about your own product.

And it's not only buzz, it's also seen as "social proof" by your target market. When you talk, it's advertising. When they talk, it's buzz and social proof. And since you only pay based on performance (ie sales!) it's the best free advertising you can possibly get.

3. Affiliates Will Increase Your Market Reach Dramatically

Most business owners are limited by time or money, if not both. You can only achieve so much on your own, even if you employ a team of geeks. That being the case, you generally target a very specific sector of your market and spend most of your resources there.

Affiliates, on the other hand, will reach all the nooks & crannies throughout the internet. They fill in the gaps. Each affiliate will have their own approach, or target different sub-niches of your market, allowing you to effectively reach customers you may not have otherwise.

Each top affiliate you recruit will increase your reach exponentially.

As you can see, affiliates can be a huge asset to your business. Consider setting up an affiliate program right away. Or if you already have one, consider giving your affiliate program more time and attention. Working with affiliates is one of the fastest and easiest ways to take your business to the next level.

One of the problems most merchants experience after setting up an affiliate program... is getting affiliates. In my next post, I'll share ways for you to find and recruit active affiliates that will promote your products.

About Lynn Terry

Lynn has been working from home and online for more than 14 years, and is both a super affiliate and a professional blogger. Subscribe at http://www.ClickNewz.com for creative ideas and actionable tips you can use today!

List Building for Bloggers Price Change Tonight + Blog World New York

2011-05-23T07:32:00.003-04:00

I'm heading off to New York City today for Blog World Expo, where I'll be giving a session on Wednesday at 3:45pm on List Building for Bloggers. If you're attending BWENY, you should click here to pre-register. Hope to see you there!

It has been something of a challenge to convert 45,000+ words and nearly 170 pages into a 45 minute talk. I'll be awaiting the feedback from my presentation with bated breath...

Meanwhile, however, the e-book's launch offer coupon (LBBLAUNCH) expires today. The price goes up to $24.95 at midnight tonight. Save yourself $15 and head over to ListBuildingForBloggers.com and grab it now at the launch offer price of just $9.95.

P.S. While I'm away, Lynn Terry of clicknewz.com has written a series about online affiliate marketing which will unfold all week here - stay tuned!

P.P.S. Follow Blog World Expo updates via the Twitter hash tag #BWENY, and follow Phil Hollows as @phollows

"Email converts sales for me five times better than my website" @mikecj

2011-05-21T10:32:00.001-04:00

Mike Cliffe-Jones is the epitome of modern content-based marketing. He has two published, two more on the way, and speaks on the topics of social media and on-line marketing.Mike helps business to understand what he calls the new "people driven economy." Here's what he thinks about List Building for Bloggers and the importance of email marketing:

Ask anyone who successfully blogs for an income to name the single most important asset they own, and they'll tell you it's their email subscriber list. As a professional blogger, my email list is both the heart of my online community and the backbone of the income I generate

Email converts sales for me five times better than my website.

I've learned the hard way what works and what doesn't, and how to build my own email list quickly and to the right people.

List Building for Bloggers will take that pain away for you, showing you why you need to build a list, who you should target, and most importantly, how to do so.

If you are serious about making an income from blogging, then you need to be serious about your email list. You should start by investing in this book.

~Mike Cliffe-Jones, professional blogger and writer. www.mikecliffejones.com

Thank you, Mike!

If you want your list to convert 5 times better than your site, take Mike's advice and invest in List Building for Bloggers. Click here to find out more.

Launch Price Expires Monday for "List Building for Bloggers"

2011-05-20T11:47:00.000-04:00

If you've been contemplating buying List Building for Bloggers, the e-book by FeedBlitz Founder and CEO, Phil Hollows, but haven't yet done so, may I make a suggestion?

Hurry up.

The launch offer price expires midnight, May 23rd. You can buy it now for $9.95 ... or you can wait and spend $24.95 later.

I know what I'd do.

The e-book contains 24 chapters, 167 pages of solid advice, three case studies and more. If you put into practice its 10 Power Tips at just one a day - and they're not hard to do - the book will pay for itself in terms of a better list, growing faster, earning you more. In just 10 days.

Ten days to a better mailing list. Is that worth $9.95 to you?

So you can save $15 and buy now, or dither and pay full freight come midnight on Monday.

Just buy the book. You know you should :) Might as well save the money, right?

Right.

Visit http://listbuildingforbloggers.com now and place your order.

P.S. If you're in New York next week for Blog World at the Javits Center, say hello and attend my List Building for Bloggers session on Wednesday afternoon.

"Fantastically useful to me personally and many others." - @amayfield

2011-05-18T06:10:00.000-04:00

One of the things that I hoped to achieve, as a beginning author writing a "trade" (i.e. business non-fiction) book was to keep it real. To make it a little fun and a lot helpful without veering into too much, well, baloney. So I was dead chuffed (I'm reverting to my native English here) when Antony Mayfield, a consultant, author and commentator on web media strategy, social media, online content, reputation management and digital literacy, wrote this about List Building for Bloggers:

"When you have a gap in your knowledge you want this kind of an e-book, with the depth and integrity and lack of blather that List Building For Bloggers offers. After reading just a few pages I knew that this was going to be fantastically useful to me personally and many others."

~ Antony Mayfield, Founding Partner of Brilliant Noise and author of Me and My Web Shadow: How Manage Your Reputation Online

Antony also founded the content and social media teams at iCrossing, which became the largest independent digital marketing firm in the world, before being sold to Hearst Media in 2010. Prior to iCrossing, Antony spent a decade in journalism and corporate communications, most recently as a director in the Bell Pottinger Group.

Thank you, Antony. Wow. That means a lot to me as a newbie.

Take a look at the book's largely blather-free web site (ahem!) at http://listbuildingforbloggers.com and buy a copy today.

"I've just bought an excellent eBook and ...recommend that you get a copy" @bmon

2011-05-17T07:10:00.038-04:00

Chris Rand writes the Business Marketing Online blog in the U.K., covering SEO and online marketing. He bought his copy of List Building for Bloggers on its first day, and writes:

"I don't normally recommend stuff you have to pay for, but I'm going to make an exception today, because I've just bought an excellent eBook and would thoroughly recommend that you get a copy and have a read too."

Read the original post, entitled "How to build a real audience for your news" on the BMON blog.

Thank you, Chris! Click here to read other testimonials and learn more about the List Building for Bloggers e-book, available now at its launch price of $9.95 until May 23rd (list price is $24.95, so you're saving $15 if you buy before then).

Are You Wasting your Blog's Most Precious Resource?

2011-05-16T12:02:00.001-04:00

Are You Wasting your Blog's Most Precious Resource?

Don't miss out on the easiest, fastest and most under-rated way to grow your blogging business.

I've seen it happen too many times to mention.

Over the years I've found great blogs, fascinating people, and amazing content. But far, far too many were missing out on easy wins to help make a little extra money for their families, promote their businesses or grow their cause. Simply because they were neglecting their email lists.

You too?

Thanks to plugins, widgets and social media technology, tens of thousands - maybe hundreds of thousands - of bloggers, just like you, have become accidental email marketers. While obsessing about SEO, poring over Google Analytics, agonizing over what to write next, email subscriptions have become a casual "put the form over there" checkbox item and then forgotten.

Which is a shame. Your email subscribers are, in fact, your greatest fans and probably your most under-valued resource. By not paying attention to them - by staying an accidental email marketer - you're missing out on increased page views, increased revenues and increased engagement.

The problem is that the tools that make it easy for us to blog - themes, plugins and templates - simply make it all too easy to neglect this vital opportunity.

Been there, done that.

I know - you don't have the time. You're not an email expert. Yet the blogging superstars we all follow have lists numbering in the tens and hundreds of thousands. What's their secret?

Wouldn't you like to know?

I'm a blogger too; I started in 2003. I know how it is; I made all the mistakes. I learned the hard way. But my business, FeedBlitz, happens to be an email service, for bloggers. I do this for a living.

So now I can help you avoid the rookie mistakes and casual errors that are limiting your blog's potential, stifling its growth and costing you money. With this book, you can learn in days what it took me years to figure out by trial and error.

List Building for Bloggers - Proven Email Strategies that Build your Audience, Increase Engagement and Grow your Income

So this is it. After eight years combining blogging and email marketing, I've taken these lessons and created List Building for Bloggers. A book that, in just ten days, can transform your blog's potential.

Here's what you get:

Ten Power Tips to turn your blog into a rocking-socking, butt-kicking, inbox-busting, fully automated email marketing and subscriber retention system.
Three case studies so you can avoid the mistakes even the Big Guys make.
Easily actionable tips to grow both list quality and quantity.
Chapters on autoresponders so you can market while you sleep, custom fields for personalization, and how to avoid spam traps.
All in easy to understand plain English!

Now available for Immediate Download!

"Trust what Phil Hollows has to say. Not only does he talk the talk, but he walks the walk when it comes to mastering email marketing. I'd recommend tattooing his recommendations on your arm."
~ David Siteman Garland, Creator/Host, The Rise to the Top
www.therisetothetop.com

Come on In, the Water's Fine

Step by step, page by page, you'll find ideas that will quickly make a difference and tasks that you can easily achieve. From suggestions about subscription forms to discussions about the risks and rewards of incentives, you'll find it easy to make better use of what you've built already - and the ability to rethink what's possible in the future.

You see, unlike other email marketing books, List Building for Bloggers isn't targeted at the corporate sector, nor at professional marketers, nor is it for IT geeks looking for a manual.

Instead, List Building for Bloggers is written in plain English. It is full of actionable, proven tips and techniques you can easily put in place, step by step, on your blog. Each one makes your email list better. Together, they make your blog outstanding.

"List Building for Bloggers is thoughtful, detailed and progresses in a natural way to introduce bloggers not only to why they need to focus on list building but also how to ethically and consistently build a list that supports their business goals, step by step. This must be required reading for every blogger serious about building their business on the Web."
~ Denise Wakeman, Online Visibility Expert
denisewakeman.com

What makes List Building for Bloggers Different?

It's practical. It's for bloggers by a blogger. It's for you. And it includes:

Over 45,000 words
24 chapters
167 pages
Three case studies
Five key steps to grow your blog's mailing list
Nine essential inbox-busting, spam trap trumping, anti-complaint tips
Seven top landing page tips
Exactly one mention of the mating habits of the South American ping pong ball

Start Making the Most of Your Mailing List Now

"A comprehensive guide that enables bloggers to reach their readers and clients through effective and strategic email marketing. Phil helps you understand the importance of email marketing, and then leads you through the practical steps necessary to make the most of your email newsletters."
~ Erin Chase, Author and Founder
5DollarDinners.com

Isn't Email Dead in the Age of Social Media?

Not at all! Email subscribers are the most committed you have - look at what they have to do to sign up! Dual opt-in. Squiggly puzzles to prove they're human. There's nothing casual about it.

True, many people follow hundreds of "friends" on Facebook, Twitter accounts. Yet all those teeny-weeny, unbranded, untracked, undifferentiated, easy to miss messages simply fly by.

So, compare and contrast. Your email to a subscriber is in their inbox, by invitation. Fully branded. Content rich. Tracked. Customized. Personalized. A Tweet? A Like? Not so much.

They've committed to you. Why not return the favor? List Building for Bloggers makes it easy as well as worthwhile.

"Phil Hollows takes the geek-only out of marketing your blog and makes it possible, and surprisingly easy, for anyone to get and keep an audience for their online content. Comprehensive and written in everyday language, this is a must-read how-to for any blogger."
~ Mark David Gerson, screenwriter and award-winning author of The MoonQuest: A True Fantasy
www.markdavidgerson.com

Get List Building for Bloggers Now!

You can carry on being casual. Or you can choose, now, to stop being an accidental email marketer, and to start making a difference.

You could hire a VA to do this for you at $30 an hour. A specialist consultant at between $1,000 and $3,000 per day (which is what I charge for my time, by the way).

Or... or you can get all this great stuff for only $24.95 (or less if you've a discount code). Right now.

It will work for you no matter which email service or app you use. And I'm backing the book with my 100% guarantee so you can buy in confidence, risk-free.

List Price: $24.95 - Launch Price just $9.95 through May 23!

Save $15.00 when you use the code LBBLAUNCH at check out!
(Expires May 23rd)

No Hassle, 100% Bullet-Proof Guarantee

This book will pay for itself when you use its ideas on your blog. I guarantee it. I put my name, email address and Twitter account on the cover! That's how confident I am about the value this book can bring you.

Still not enough? Sure, I get it. So here's the deal:

You don't like it, for whatever reason, I'll buy it back from you. No quibbles, no stalling, you get a 100% refund; no questions asked.

"Phil Hollows is a mensch, and a generous one. In this book, he's sharing a ton. Stuff he learned the hard way. Ignore it at your peril."
~ Somebody so famous I'm not allowed to name them except in the book! Seriously.
(Buy it and see who it is!)

P.S. Did I mention the BONUS CHAPTER?

Not only will this book rock your email world, I've added a BONUS CHAPTER on how to use Twitter for real-time sales results. Super actionable, easy to use techniques that can find your next customer on Twitter at exactly the time they want to hear from you. Make just one sale using this chapter and the book more than pays for itself!

REMEMBER: Save $15.00 if you use the LBBLAUNCH code
at checkout until May 23rd!

P.P.S. We also have an affiliate program

You can also make a little extra by referring sales for the book via our affiliate program, which pays 50% (not a typo) commission. Visit http://listbuildingforbloggers.com/affiliate-program/ for more on the program and sign yourself up.

"If you are going to read just one book...consider reading List Building for Bloggers" @KareAnderson

2011-05-16T07:14:00.001-04:00

Regular readers will know that I've been on something of a tear with quotes this week, following the availability of the List Building for Bloggers e-book.

While I am thrilled with all the quotes and support from everyone, I am particularly honored to share this quote from Kare Anderson, Leader, Collaborative Strategies, Center for the Edge, Deloitte.

Before we get to the quote itself, though, you should know that Kare's lengthy job title simply doesn't do her justice.

Kare has helped diverse clients develop a profitable collaborative culture, communication and methods, including mutual mentoring, self-managed teams, charettes and crowdsourcing. Her clients include LEGO, Singapore and Mayo Clinic.

She was the Obama campaign’s Issues Team Formation Director and is an Emmy-winning former NBC and Wall Street Journal reporter. Anderson is the author of Getting What You Want, Walk Your Talk and Resolving Conflict Sooner.

She is, in a nutshell, an incredible talent. Read more about Kare here at her LinkedIn profile.

And so I am humbled and flattered when Kare wrote this about List Building for Bloggers:

“Just as I think meeting planners could ask us speakers, who see hundreds of conferences, for insights on how to engage their attendees, I strongly believe that it behooves bloggers to get tips from someone who has seen, first-hand, what makes some bloggers break-out stars with thousands of avid subscribers. More than anyone else I know, Phil Hollows knows what turns subscribers on and off. If you are going to read just one book on how to be one of those break-out stars consider reading List Building for Bloggers.”

Thank you, Kare.

Three Reviews and Commendations

2011-05-14T09:39:00.002-04:00

Becky Cortino of Express-IT, an integrated marketing communication and professional services firm writes:

An opt-in email list is one of your most valuable business assets. Although the need for developing a viable list is widely-recognized, folks are often unsure of the best strategies to use to build their audience. Others plunge into list-building, but feel the need to fine-tune their efforts, to be more effective.

I recommend Phil Hollows' “List Building for Bloggers” eBook. This is a comprehensive and insightful guide for building your list, using email effectively, and growing your business — starting now!

Click here to read the full post.

Denise Wakeman, business blogging and online marketing advisor, posted a review here, titled "How to Maintain Visibility with Your Blog Audience [Recommended Reading]"

Regardless of what list system you use, setting up an email list, managing it, using it ethically, and promoting it can be confusing and overwhelming. That's why I love Phil Hollows, CEO of Feedblitz. He has just released a detailed, comprehensive ebook called List Building for Bloggers. I had the privilege of reviewing the book and I was blown away by the level of detail Phil goes into around three core strategies:
Building your audience
Increasing engagement with your audience
Growing your income

Read the full review by clicking here.

Chris Rand, publisher of the U.K.'s Business Marketing Online blog, posted his analysis on Monday, the day the book launched! Chris is clearly a speed reader :) He writes:

I don't normally recommend stuff you have to pay for, but I'm going to make an exception today, because I've just bought an excellent eBook and would thoroughly recommend that you get a copy and have a read too. The reason? It's all about email, and in particular, list building.

Read the whole piece here.

My thanks to Chris, Denise and Becky. If you have a review, please let me know!

"An invaluable treasury drawn from real experience" - Rory Sutherland

2011-05-13T13:14:00.002-04:00

Rory Sutherland is a Past President of the U.K.'s Institute of Practitioners in Advertising. The guy knows what he's talking about! Here are his remarks about List Building for Bloggers:

"This is an invaluable treasury drawn from real experience from what may seem a specialized field, but it will have innumerable useful applications for many people simply involved in email marketing - and in digital marketing in general. And it is also good to see someone proselytize for the continuing importance of email at a time when many people are falsely proclaiming that it is somehow in decline - in reality its importance is still growing."

Thanks, Rory! Much appreciated. Click here to read other testimonials and learn more about the List Building for Bloggers e-book, available now at its launch price of $9.95 until May 23rd (list price is $24.95, so you're saving $15 if you buy before then).

P.S. If you've bought the book and have a comment, please let me know!

"A must-read how-to for any blogger" - @MarkDavidGerson

2011-05-13T13:14:00.001-04:00

Mark David Gerson is a screen writer and award-winning author of "The MoonQuest: A True Fantasy."

I'm delighted and humbled that Mark David has this to says about List Building for Bloggers:

“Phil Hollows takes the geek-only out of marketing your blog and makes it possible, and surprisingly easy, for anyone to get and keep an audience for their online content. Comprehensive and written in everyday language, this is a must-read how-to for any blogger.”

Thank you, Mark David! Can't wait to see your book on the silver screen...

Meanwhile, click here to read other testimonials and learn more about the List Building for Bloggers e-book, available now at its launch price of $9.95 until May 23rd (list price is $24.95, so you're saving $15 if you buy before then).

"Leads you through the practical steps necessary to make the most of your email newsletters" @5DollarDinners

2011-05-13T13:14:00.000-04:00

Erin Chase is the $5 Dinner Mom. She cooks. She blogs. She authors cookbooks. She writes for SCJohnson.com. She's also one of the founders of the SavvyBlogging community and the Savvy Blogging Summit.

Erin comments on List Building for Bloggers:

“A comprehensive guide that enables bloggers to reach their readers and clients through effective and strategic email marketing. Phil helps you understand the importance of email marketing, and then leads you through the practical steps necessary to make the most of your email newsletters.”

Thank you, Erin! Click here to read other testimonials and learn more about the List Building for Bloggers e-book, available now at its launch price of $9.95 until May 23rd (list price is $24.95, so you're saving $15 if you buy before then).

"Required reading for every blogger serious about building their business" @DeniseWakeman

2011-05-10T07:11:00.004-04:00

Denise Wakeman is a powerhouse blogger and online visibility expert. She helps entrepreneurs boost their Web visibility with blogs and online marketing strategies so they get found by their ideal client. Denise has what some call "social proof": Over 20,000 followers on Twitter.

Here's what Denise Says:

“List Building for Bloggers is thoughtful, detailed and progresses in a natural way to introduce bloggers not only to why they need to focus on list building but also how to ethically and consistently build a list that supports their business goals, step by step. This must be required reading for every blogger serious about building their business on the Web.”

Thank you, Denise; blog on!

Click here to read other testimonials and learn more about the List Building for Bloggers e-book, available now at its launch price of $9.95 until May 23rd (list price is $24.95, so you're saving $15 if you buy before then).

"I’d recommend tattooing his recommendations on your arm" - @TheRiseToTheTop

2011-05-09T14:13:00.009-04:00

David Siteman Garland, host and creator of the influential video blog series for entrepreneurs "The Rise to the Top" says this about List Building for Bloggers:

“Trust what Phil Hollows has to say. Not only does he talk the talk, but he walks the walk when it comes to mastering email marketing. I’d recommend tattooing his recommendations on your arm.”

Thank you, David! Click here to read other testimonials and learn more about the List Building for Bloggers e-book, available now at its launch price of $9.95 until May 23rd (list price is $24.95, so you're saving $15 if you buy before then).

List Building for Bloggers is Out!

2011-05-09T10:01:00.025-04:00

LBB is shipping! You can now buy and download my e-book List Building for Bloggers.

So I'm keeping this update short and sweet, except to say:

List price is $24.95 but all readers and subscribers can get it at the launch price of just $9.95 if you buy before May 23rd, 2011. Use the LBBLAUNCH code at checkout.
Quantities are limited. OK, that isn't true. Buy as many as you like! We'll make more :) But buy it!

Here are some advance quotes:

"I’d recommend tattooing his recommendations on your arm"

"Required reading for every blogger serious about building their business on the Web"

"Ignore it at your peril."

Here's the big fat "buy now" button. You know what to do...

Just two days left to pre-order "List Building for Bloggers"

2011-05-07T08:41:00.002-04:00

Time is running out to save 80% - that's $20 - on List Building for Bloggers when it is published. The pre-order list closes first thing Monday morning, at which point this offer will be gone for good.

So, head over to the List Building for Bloggers site now - http://listbuildingforbloggers.com - and register for the early-bird program now.

P.S. You can join the List Building for Bloggers affiliate program too! See http://listbuildingforbloggers.com/affiliate-program for details.

List Building for Bloggers Pre-Launch Insanity

2011-05-05T15:11:00.008-04:00

The first email marketing book aimed at bloggers and content marketers that delivers proven email strategies that build your audience, increase engagement and grow your income will be available for purchase and download on Monday, May 9th!

Read more about it by clicking through to listbuildingforbloggers.com now.

Its list price will be $24.95. It delivers:

Ten Power Tips to turn your blog a rocking-socking, butt-kicking, inbox-busting, fully automated email marketing and subscriber retention system.
Three case studies so you can avoid the mistakes even the Big Guys make.
Easily actionable tips to grow both list quality and quantity.
Chapters on autoresponders so you can market while you sleep, custom fields for personalization, and how to avoid spam traps.
All in easy to understand plain English!

It's great value at that price. You'll want to buy it at full freight.

So here's the insane, Phil-has-lost-his-mind, too-good-to-be-true offer:

It's yours for just $4.95, an 80% saving.

The catch? No small print. Just one task and one deadline:

The task: You must register (click here) before the book is available.
The deadline: You must use the code I send you after you register in the first 48 hours after the book's released.

OK, got that? The book's yours for just $4.95 if you pre-register (no CC required) and buy using the super-secret code by Tuesday midnight.

Easy, right?

There's no risk to you in signing up now, and when you buy using the code, you're saving $20. Better yet, you have the confidence of a full refund if, heaven forbid, you're not happy with the results and you end up wishing you'd bought three Starbucks instead.

So there you have it. Don't delay - the countdown timer is running and you only have three and a bit days to secure this discount. Miss it and the book will cost you more. It's that simple.

Over 45,000 words
24 chapters
163 pages
Three case studies
Five key steps to grow your blog’s mailing list
Nine essential inbox-busting, spam trap trumping, anti-complaint tips
Seven top landing page tips
Exactly one mention of the mating habits of the South American ping pong ball

So sign up already. Click the big "sign up now" button below. Now! You'll kick yourself if you don't, forget and miss your chance to save $20.

Coming Soon: The List Building for Bloggers E-book!

2011-04-28T12:59:00.012-04:00

List Building for Bloggers will soon be available as an eBook! I can't wait to have this see the light of day, as well as being just in time for my List Building for Bloggers session at Blog World Expo, New York.

The book contains additional new content, new illustrations and consolidated tips to help you rejuvenate your email list building activities with very little work.

When it comes out, I'll be thanking FeedBlitz clients with super-special customer-only pricing for the first couple of weeks, so watch out for that. FeedBlitz News subscribers will also get a good deal!

In addition, everyone will get the chance to pre-order at a simply insane price that will only be available for 48 hours once it's released. News next week on where to go and how to secure the "Phil is out of his freaking mind" launch discount.

Finally, we will be welcoming affiliate sales of the book. You'll be able to keep at least 50% of the sale price your sales make, so it's a standout opportunity. I'll have a full blog post to talk about affiliate pricing once the pre-ordering pages are ready to roll.

Subscriber Management Improvements for FeedBlitz Mailing Lists

2011-04-22T16:16:00.005-04:00

As part of the changes that are going into the FeedBlitz v4 beta, we're not only changing overall navigation but also the way certain individual pages work as well. Some of these changes are sufficiently useful that they merit porting back to the current version.

The following changes should reduce a lot of the more common complaints we get about some of the things that FeedBlitz does!

Hope you like 'em :)

Easier resubscribes

Subscribers who used a site's subscription form to start subscribing after their subscription had lapsed used to have to log in to FeedBlitz to complete the task - a complex and confusing process for some subscribers. This is no longer true; a standard dual opt-in activation email is sent instead. One click there and they're back on the list.

Simpler dual opt-in activation emails

The default activation email (which list owners can change via Newsletters - Settings - Custom Confirmation Email) used to be verbose, and included the subscriber's email address in the activation link. This could create two problems:

The chattiness of the text confused some would-be subscribers, and
The email address confused some email apps, some of which erroneously converted the email address to a mailto: link.

If the subscriber had this second problem and clicked on the email address to activate their subscription, their app would instead fire up their email editor as if they were composing an email to themselves. Not a FeedBlitz bug, but something we can help change.

So, the text has now been dramatically reduced to improve clarity, and the email address in the copy moved outside the activation link, so users who are confirming their subscription won't be tempted to click that part of the text as they do so.

Direct subscriber change of address

List owners, when requested to change a subscriber's address, used the screens to create a request that was sent to the new subscriber to activate. A publisher-initiated dual opt-in, in effect. This was tedious and, since we know our publishers are made of the right stuff, largely unnecessary.

As of now, changing a subscriber's address via Newsletters - Subscribers - Change Subscriber Email Address will usually change the relevant email address immediately, sending a notification email that the change has been made to both the current and new addresses. No need for any activation clicks any more.

Rarely, the old "opt-in" method will still be used, depending on the status of the new address in the FeedBlitz database. This happens if something's up with the desired new address only.

Subscriber screens clarified

Some of the icons on the subscriber screens could be confusing to list managers; these have been replaced with labeled buttons instead. Much clearer.

Subscription audit data visible

A subscriber or a list manager can now access a subscription's audit data - creating IP address and referring page - in case the subscription was maliciously created. Drill down from the subscriptions page or the subscriber pages to view the data.

Clearer account merging

Finally, instructions on how to merge two accounts have been clarified. Sometimes users would feel stuck in a loop because they weren't logged in to the correct account as they tried to complete the merge.

Your Email Marketing: DIY or Outsource, Free or Paid?

2011-04-15T13:00:00.005-04:00

My goal with this final post in the current List Building for Bloggers series is to help you frame the questions you need to answer to find the best fit for you, in terms of going DIY (Do It Yourself) or using a third party email marketing service; and paying or using a free option. In this article I will discuss:

Back to Basics
Planning

Minimizing list management technology changes
Understanding the true cost of "free"
DIY server restrictions
Understanding free service volume limits
Features
Support

When to DIY
When to FREE
When to PAY
Three Real World Examples
Your Mileage May Vary
And, Finally...

Full disclosure: Obviously, I run a service and I’m skewed to thinking that’s a good idea. Don't say you weren't warned...

[This is the latest article in the List Building for Bloggers series – Click here to read all the recent #LBB posts]

Back To Basics

Throughout the List Building for Bloggers (LBB) series I’ve been emphasizing permission and relevance above all for success with your email marketing and subscriber growth efforts. The reason for this is that with permission and relevance you get better deliverability – your email is much more likely to make it to the inbox, and much less likely to be flagged as spam.

I’m emphasizing this point – again – because in this post I’m going to offer some tips on choosing between running your mailing yourself, or whether / when you should use an outsourced service. Deliverability is key. If the mail can’t get through, you’ve failed.

For the purposes of this article, the DIY option includes any software or service that you run on your own servers, since that means that any email you send goes through your mail servers, and that’s a critical for deliverability (see this earlier LBB post).

The Difference is Planning

Minimize list management technology changes

One of the things that can really mess up a mailing list and your success with email marketing is changing how you run that mailing. Every time you transfer subscribers from one app or service to another, you risk losing some of them according to the provider’s import policies (see the section on importing in this LBB post); you may experience significant delays if your new technology requires subscribes to resubscribe (FeedBlitz doesn’t), or if your new provider requires your list ot be vetted before mailing can begin (again, FeedBlitz typically won’t make you wait). Changing email servers and technologies might also require white list changes by your subscribers, further complicating inbox deliverability.

So, in a perfect world, you need to minimize the number of times you change list management systems for the life of your blog. It’s much less hassle all around.

What this implies, then, is that you need to think about where your list is now, how large you expect it to become and how quickly, because list size is a significant limiting factor on DIY implementations; I’ll get to this later when I discuss mailing volume limitations.

Understanding the true cost of “free”

Free is a compelling price point, no doubt about that, especially if you’re just starting out and don’t have many subscribers (yet). But free usually comes with extensive limitations: No support, limited features and no subscriber import (FeedBurner). No phone support (some services). Volume limitations (fairly close to bait and switch, in other words). Deliverability nightmares. Who needs that?

For apps that are free and limit your feature choices, you need to think about how much you intend to use your list in the future.

For apps that are free but have no – or restricted – support, do you have the time to dig into issues with ISPs, blacklists and logs to resolve deliverability problems? Do you have the time to figure out why an email did or didn’t go out, or why it looked that way?

Because in the real world, time is money. Consider: How much do you / would you charge for your time? If you’re spending time self-supporting your mailing list app, what is that time being NOT spent on (the “opportunity cost” in accounting-speak). Is spending time self-supporting the best use of your time and resources?

Let's make it really clear how much free really costs you by attaching some dollar numbers to it.

For the sake of argument, and to keep the math simple, say your nominal hourly rate is $60. If you spend just 5 minutes a day managing your mailing list during the work week, that’s 110 minutes per month on average. So your not being able to have a service do it for you is costing you $110. Put another way, if your ad revenues are such that every post you write makes you $100 ad revenue a month, and you can write two extra posts in that 110 minutes, you just missed out on $200 of real money. Total cost of "free"? $310.

It gets worse if you’re constructing your newsletter by hand instead of using an email marketing automation solution like FeedBlitz. If you spend an hour a week on your weekly newsletter, in addition to anything else, that’s costing you $240 a month in your time alone at $60 / hour, and if that’s 4 blog posts that could have been written instead, a financial loss of $400 in terms of revenue you didn’t see. That service (free or otherwise) is costing you $640 a month even when it “only” takes an hour a week of your time.

Yowzers.

This is why FeedBlitz exists: automating these tasks practically eliminates these chores, saving you time and, hence, money.

But I digress...

DIY server restrictions

For most bloggers, a DIY solution means sending emails via your ISP’s email servers. Most ISPs and hosting services will strictly limit the number of emails that can be sent per day, because they don’t want their systems to be tagged as spammers (remember from earlier posts that IP sender reputation is the #1 factor in good deliverability). That number is usually in the 250-1000 emails per day range.

If you think your list has a chance of growing to be in this range, you’re going to exceed your ISP’s limits quickly and you’ll need to outsource to a dedicated service anyway.

Again, if you do end up with deliverability problems, or a subscriber saying “I didn’t get your email” – then what? You need to access logs (if they exist), interpret them (if you can) and then figure out a solution. Which is part of the deal if your day job is email marketing, ISP relations and server management.

But wait, yours isn’t, is it?

More on free and volume limitations

It’s also worth noting that some “free” solutions are for list sizes under some number, which might seem pretty large and decent to you at first, and also limit you to the number of emails you can send per month for free. At which point of course, comes the switch, and you have to pay.

For the sake of argument, let’s say the limitation is your list must be under 500 subscribers and you can send 5,000 emails for month for free. To keep the math simple, let's further assume that your list size is 400 subscribers, as an enthusiastic / professional blogger / content marketer you post once a day during the week, and your automated mailings are sent on a daily schedule if there's new content.

In this scenario, you hit the volume limit, without any list growth, in the third week. Gotcha! The larger the list, the sooner you hit that limit. And now you have to pay. It isn’t really going to be free after all...

Well, perhaps then you can scale back to a weekly mailing? Oh, wait, you can’t, because these services don’t have a weekly automated mailing option (unlike FeedBlitz, which does). Well, OK, so instead you go to a manual mailing – but now "free" is costing you $640 a month (see the calculation further up) in your time / opportunity costs, plus your relevance just cratered because mailings are reaching everyone days late. Or you can just write less – only you’re a content marketer, and that’s a quick way to lose your audience to a competing site. Not an option.

Does that sound like a win to you? Well, not for you, no. For the service, yes, because you pretty much have to upgrade to keep going.

Feature Creature

Of course, every email service or app is different. Broadly, though, you can consider categories of capability that you can use or grow into as your subscriber base expands. I’ve discussed these in earlier posts on growing your lists here, here and here, and discussing things like autoresponders here.

At a high level, this is checkbox stuff – and remember, even if you’re just starting out in bogging, you want to minimize the number of times you change services. So these questions apply to both “now” and “in the next year or two.”

Do you / will you want to say “thank you” or run time-based drip marketing or email courses? Then you need autoresponders.
Do you / will you want to automate the email process completely from your blog, or spend time constructing additional editorial content (why? Seriously, why is this not on your blog anayway?) and manually building your mailings? If you want to spend your time in things you’re good at and creating compelling content, a service must have blog-powered automation.
Do you / will you want automated mailings from your blog (a la FeedBlitz) but want to offer different schedules for different audiences? Then you need a solution with automation AND schedule flexibility.
Do you / will you have the time and energy to manage and maintain an email app on your own systems, or do you have more valuable things to do with your time? If the latter, run with a service.
Do you / will you use video in your blogs? Then a solution that automatically handles embedded video is a requirement.
Do you / will you need segmentation, personalization and demographics? Then you’ll need custom fields.

Support

Sooner or later, you’re going to need help. Getting set up, changing a setting, or dealing with an issue. Can you fire off an email, pick up the phone? If not, what other resources are there – user forums? (yuck, see here what I think about companies that abandon their product support to user forums).

Now it may be that not having true support is OK with you, especially if you’re blogging casually for kicks and not for greenbacks. But the more important the blog becomes to you and your income stream then the more important your list and deliverability becomes. A snafu at the wrong time can kill a campaign, event or special offer. Who are you going to call if and when that happens? Access to knowledgeable support is invaluable when you need it.

The devil (or God, depending on your perspective) is in the details of course. But at least answering questions like these can help you make the best informed choice you can.

When to DIY

If your list size is going to remain below your ISP’s volume limits (250-1000) for the foreseeable future;
AND there are no better ways to spend your time (and money) than to install, manage maintain and self-support the app for the foreseeable future;
AND you can handle deliverability / IP reputation issues from your server(s).

Only go DIY if your needs match all these criteria.

When to FREE

If your list size is low enough to qualify for the free service for the foreseeable future;
AND the feature limitations are not important to you for the foreseeable future;
AND price is the most significant factor;
AND the lack of prompt available support is not an issue;
AND you can trust deliverability.

When to PAY

If your list will outgrow your ISPs of FREE service limits;
OR your content marketing will result in many email sends a month;
OR you want expert support when you need it;
OR you want features like multiple lists, advanced scheduling, autoresponders, enhanced branding;
OR you want to NOT worry about deliverability, subscriber management etc.

In other words, you should plan on paying if ANY of the above criteria match your needs or expectations.

Three Real-World Examples

Google’s FeedBurner is a free service for bloggers that does the basic email service well and there are no list size restrictions. So it’s not DIY, and it is FREE. But there is no support, limited branding, no schedule flexibility and no features like Facebook integration, autoresponders or manual mailings. There’s no subscriber import and no subscriber management API. So it's very limited from a feature set perspective, and so an increasingly poor choice as your blog becomes a larger part of your income, marketing and branding strategy.

On the other hand, FeedBlitz is a PAY service (fees start at only $1.49 for very small lists) for bloggers with all the bells and whistles. Read more about us here.

Of the more traditional services serving small business and personal markets, Constant Contact is probably the best known. They’re feature rich, lots of service and oodles of support. But the service comes with higher entry costs, and charges extra for features such as archiving that other services bundle. Crucially for bloggers, all mailings have to be built by hand – they automate delivery, but not production. So you need to understand the extra hidden costs to you in terms of time and money building the mailing (there's that $640 a month again), as well as their service fees. If you’re not a blogger or content marketer, they may well be a great fit for you because you can't automate it - but then why are you reading this? Hmm...

[I haven’t any installed software examples because, honestly, anyone with any list of any size should not, in my opinion, be taking on the time burden, deliverability risk and feature limitations of self-installed email list management software. But you should certainly do your own due diligence if your email marketing goals match the DY criteria above.]

Your Mileage May Vary

Obviously, what works for you depends on your current and expected needs in terms of email marketing, and how that fits into your overall content marketing / blogging / social media efforts. My goal with this final post in the current List Building for Bloggers series is to help you frame the questions you need to answer to find the best fit for you.

Good luck!

And, Finally...

I'm wrapping up this series here - it's been both fun and challenging to write, and I hope that you've manage to get something out of it.

I'm not, however, done with the concept! There will be a full recap post (maybe more than one) to come, and I'm using this series as the basis for conference presentations at Blog World Expo in New York this Spring, and at the Savvy Blogging Summit in Colorado in July. If you're at these events, please stop by and say hello.

Not only that, though. I'll be making a special announcement May 1st about the series that I'm pretty excited about! So stay tuned for that too.

About List Building For Bloggers #LBB

Written by Phil Hollows, the FeedBlitz Founder and CEO, List Building for Bloggers (#LBB) is a series of posts to help you make the most of your blogging by harnessing the power and capabilities of email, the universal social network, with your bog and social media communications. No matter whether you're a novice or a more advanced blogger, there will be something for you to learn, apply and benefit from in this series. Click here to read more about #LBB

P.S. If you think your friends or followers would find this series valuable, please retweet on Twitter or "Like" on Facebook using the buttons below. Don't forget to use the #LBB hashtag when you do. Thank you! And if you have a comment, contribution or something else to say, please comment too. :-)

HTML Email Design Tips

2011-04-13T10:34:00.003-04:00

In this issue of List Building for Bloggers I'll give some hints and tips on making your HTML mails work well in most readers. It isn't a "how to design great looking email" post; it's "having designed your great looking email, here's what you do to get it to look right" post.

It isn't as simple as you might think. It certainly isn't as easy as you want.

[This is the latest article in the List Building for Bloggers series – Click here to read all the recent #LBB posts]

All HTML is not created equal

HTML is the "language" - the code - that web pages are written in. Every web page is HTML; in fact is has to be in order to be a "web page" in the first place. Now, some of that HTML may be just enough to host the Mother of All Flash Objects (e.g. game and movie sites), but they all start as HTML.

As you also probably know, despite one's best efforts, some sites look sightly different, or behave slightly differently, depending on the browser you're using. The more complex the site, the greater the risk that some browser incompatibility will cause something funky to happen.

And it gets worse with smart phones. BlackBerry browsers, let's be honest, are simply awful. iPhones and Android devices are a whole lot better because they use the same core browser technology that powers Apple's Safari browser (amongst others). But phones have different size screens, and they're typically a lot smaller (not just physically, but in the number of pixels they have) than most computer screens. It all adds to the fun of web site design.

HTML, CSS, WTF?

As well as HTML, graphic designers use a related technology called CSS which helps make sure that the HTML displays (or "renders") the way they want. Like HTML, there are multiple generations of CSS, and each browser supports CSS to varying degrees. CSS is really, really powerful - and can get really, really, complicated - but the tools that graphic designers have rely on CSS to turn the HTML they build for sites into something that, more or less, within a certain degree of acceptability, looks and works the same way no matter where the web page is viewed. CSS is great for web sites; it helps eliminate many browser compatibility problems and makes complex / interesting web sites much easier to build.

So the typical web designer has to deal with all of this in order to get your web site to look good on all the different platforms and browsers that are out there.

It's a lot of work. It's complicated. It's often infuriating, fiddly and tiresome to boot.

They have it easy.

Welcome Back to the Stone Age - HTML for Email

Because it's just worse here in email-land. There are many more email apps (aka "clients") than there are browsers out there. There are desktop clients (e.g. Outlook, Thunderbird, Notes); the email app on your mobile phone, and web apps (gmail, hotmail, Yahoo!, whatever your ISP or cable company gives you).

All of them have different HTML rendering engines. All of them make different decisions about how to render the HTML. And, especially for desktop email clients, people can keep using the same app around for years and years (I still use Outlook 2003 personally, for example). Many of the older ones only have basic support - or even none at all - for things such as CSS.

Oh, and there are some email clients (I'm looking at you, Gmail), where lack of support for these capabilities is a design decision. They could support this stuff (if Yahoo and Hotmail can do a better job at rendering than gmail, it isn't a case of it being impossible). They simply elect not to. Don't like it? Tough luck.

So all the tools, technologies, that your web designer uses to build your beautiful web site? HTML 4, CSS 3? No good for email. Forget it. They're really not going to like what one has to do to get good HTML email rendering across the broadest set of email apps.

Email CSS Compatibility - the Chart of Doom

Corporate email provider Campaign Monitor has an excellent resource they update from time to time on the CSS support each major email client delivers. If you're a graphic design maven, gird your loins and read the whole post there. The chart doesn't yet include Android mobile devices, but since Android uses Apple's WebKit (well, mine does), the iPhone column will do for now. For bloggers, I'd caution that the market shares listed at the foot of the table will probably not reflect your readers' email software use, since you're much more likely to be talking to consumers. As such, webmail services like gmail, yahoo and hotmail etc will have a much higher share of your readership than indicated on the chart.

As a blogger, though, graphic design is no more your job than it is being a full-time email marketer. What the heck are you supposed to do to get your emails looking right across the board, given this degree of complexity?

K.I.S.S.

Keep it simple, silly. The whole chart at Campaign Monitor is useful for graphic designers, but for the rest of us there are two areas that merit picking out.

They are the Notes 6/7 and Gmail columns, and the background and colors sections. Here they are, excerpted (remember, the source post with the whole graphic is here). Just look at all that red:

What you need to internalize from this is really basic:

Gmail and Lotus Notes 6/7 really stink at CSS (and Outlook 2007/2010 is pretty odiferous too);
Doing anything other than simple foreground colors is asking for trouble.

And it gets worse from there. More advanced CSS used for positioning and what's called the "box model" is inconsistently implemented, if at all. Use these CSS features at your peril.

The Blogger's Advantage

Ok, so this whole HTML email thing is one giant screaming nightmare, right? What are we to do?

Well, it isn't quite as bad as it seems as long as you follow a few basic rules of the road.

Better yet, as bloggers and content marketers, we actually have a huge advantage compared to corporate email marketers building custom "blasts" (ugh) every time they run a mailing. We deliver our messages in consistent form - what most email services call a template - time after time after time. The basic layout is similar every time we mail; only the post content changes. So what you need to focus on is getting the template right; once done you ought not to have to worry about rendering much in the future, provided you're a teensy bit careful with how you build your posts (and more on that below).

HTML Email Rules of the Road

For best results and the most consistent rendering:

Don't use CSS at all. Use standard HTML tags - yes, even the nominally deprecated ones - to format your posts and template. So use old-fashioned tags such as the font, b and em tags; and use HTML tag attributes such as color, bgcolor, border, align attributes etc. instead of CSS. Don't use the style attribute; as soon as you do you're going to have rendering problems.
Never, ever use CSS positioning statements. Use HTML tables to lay out your page. Yes, tables. They work consistently in HTML email; positioned divs won't.
If you do use CSS for style, specifiy as much as you can as style attributes of the relevant HTML tags. Gmail in particular will simply ignore style tags and the classes / selectors they define or modify. Just to add to the fun and games, CSS will not always cascade as it should in some webmail clients. So if you're getting really fancy (again, don't), you're going to have to specify the style attribute on each tag. But, really, don't do this. Specify a font, color etc. in the template with the font tag and be done.
Don't use background images. They're inconsistently implemented, and if the subscriber is viewing with image display off, not having a background can make your email unreadable. In fact, if you can, avoid background colors too. Same reason.
Don't use external stylesheets or classes. Did you not see the chart? They won't work in gmail at all. They also won't work in any email client where the user has images disabled. Besides, you're not using stylesheets, right?
Always specify width and height for images. It makes the page look heaps better if there are no images, smooths rendering when images are being downloaded, and for some email clients (Outlook 2007/2010) stops images being displayed as too large or too small if they are downloaded late.

THE BOTTOM LINE: If you build your HTML template and party like it's 1999, you're going to be just fine.

It's also safe to ignore these rules, as long as you're ok with the email not "looking right" in certain email clients. That should be a business decision, though; don't take it lightly. It is also true that you can specify styles and classes (in which case redundantly include them in the HEAD and BODY of the HTML), knowing that email rendering will be better in those email clients that support them. By all means specify that images shouldn't have a border via CSS. But again, you need to know what your baseline is without that support, because you simply can't rely on it.

Other best practice

Use meaningful alt tags with images. When an email app doesn't display an image, it will typically display the "alt" tag in the box the image would have occupied instead (and if there isn't an alt tag specified, it may display the images URL, which will be very ugly). Why meaningful? Because you still want to get your message to the subscriber. Don't have an alt tag of "logo" - make it "The Latest from " or something. If you have a lot of imagery, see if you can "read" it using alt tags with images disabled. By the way, your blind readership only has this way of "seeing" images. Make your mailing work for them too.
Use a few, small images. The less work your email app has to do, the faster your email will display. Fast is good. Your beautiful 1MB photo will simply stop your mail from displaying right - if at all - for your mobile customer or the rural subscriber without broadband access.
Think about the preview pane. If you only have 3 lines in the preview and the user is going to decide whether to open your mail based on that, get the details up front - e.g. view online, the latest from , new coupon from Target today only etc.

Posting

Once you have your template happy (see testing below), you shouldn't have to worry much when you post. There are a few things that can mess up in certain readers, beyond the CSS tips above:

Keep the HTML simple in your posts. No CSS! Try to avoid using classes within the post itself.
Always specify image sizes for all images.
Always use alt tags for images.
If you have active content (e.g. script, embedded audio, flash, even forms), provide options in your post to access the content if it doesn't appear, because in email it probably won't (well, apart from video, which FeedBlitz fixes for you).
Don't use MS Word to create posts. It adds lots of CSS and styles and will mess things up royally.

Testing

So there are three main problem email apps. Gmail, older versions of Notes, and Outlook 2007/2010. Most bloggers are unlikely to have many Notes users, and since it's about as useless as gmail, for most of us gmail can be used as a proxy. Once your mail looks OK in gmail with and without images, you're 95% of the way there everywhere else, especially when you follow the other rules.

To quick and dirty testing, then. Send yourself test mails from your system, and view in gmail. View with images on, and then view with images off. Don't like it? Edit, rinse and repeat.

Be Realistic

Finally, understand that 100% perfection across all email apps is very, very hard to achieve. Know your audience; if you have extensive readership on old Notes platforms you should verify your changes on Notes once you have gmail working acceptably. If your audience is using mobile devices more - and who isn't these days? - then consider how your template should change to accommodate the different form factor: Perhaps you can go from a fixed width to a flowing layout? Understand what compromises you are - and are not - prepared to make.

For FeedBlitz Users and Prospects

If you have a template you like from another vendor or service, please contact technical support. We'll be more than happy to help you convert it to our templating tags to simplify transitions.

Next Up

DIY or outsource: some help on deciding.

About List Building For Bloggers #LBB

Blog World Expo NYC - List Building for Bloggers Session

2011-03-30T09:25:00.001-04:00

The List Building for Bloggers series is now a session at BWENY in May, given by Yours Truly - May 25th, 3:45pm. If you're enjoying the hints and tips in the series (recent articles listed here), I hope to see you in the city this Spring.

BWENY is the east coast offshoot of the very successful Blog World Expo and New Media Conference held in Las Vegas last fall and to be held in L.A. later this year. Early bird pricing is available until April 14th, saving 30%. I learned a lot following last year's show and my presenting in May is a direct result of the changes I put into practice following last October's conference. Only goes to show how important and valuable conferences can be - provided one applies the lessons learned, of course.

Scheduling is here: http://blogworld-nyc2011.sched.org - if you don't get the interactive schedule, click the schedule link on the right hand side.

Hope to see you there - expect to hear more from us about the conference and the LBB series as we count down to the event.

Does a Social Media Multi-Channel Strategy Make Sense / Cents for Your Business? by Adam Metz

2011-03-29T08:46:00.002-04:00

Running a multi-channel social business program, even for a small company, can be a huge investment in time and resources, as many as 500 per year. And for larger companies, social media teams of 40 to 50 full time employees, are not uncommon.

There are many factors to consider before diving into social feet first.   Will a multi-channel social media initiative broaden your reach and measurably increase your revenues? How long will it take?

Does multi-channel mean that you’ll be using both Facebook and Twitter? No! Facebook and Twitter are not channels. They’re two different social media services, on two different social platforms. Facebook is a social network (probably the second largest in the world, after China’s Tencent QQ). Twitter is a social networking and micro-blogging service. Whether or not you engage Facebook and Twitter as part of your multi-channel strategy depends on the nature of your company and your objectives.

According to the American Marketing Association, a marketing channel is a set of activities you need to execute to move goods from the point of production (your office) to the point of consumption (when your customer buys or downloads your product).    A social channel is different because the social channels that your customers are using are constantly evolving, as technologies, and customer preferences on technology uses change, from month to month.

Here are some suggestions for successfully engaging the social customer using social channels:

Consider deploying a methodology called l-P-O-S-T-m, partly developed by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff in their book, Groundswell, l-P-O-S-T-m stands for listen, people, objectives, strategy, tools and measure. (I added the "L" and "M").

The “l” stands for listen. For the first few weeks, you’ll just want to “listen” wherever your customers gather, on-line. If you’re a B2B brand, Facebook and Twitter may or may not be on that list.   It all depends on where your customers are gathering online as to what tools make sense for your business.

Recently a big customs brokerage company was having trouble making a list of “watering holes” because there were only a couple of relevant spots in their industry. Our recommendation was to call 250 of their current customers and 250 of their lapsed customers, and ask them six simple questions:

Have you ever used the social web to search for information on our industry? (YouTube, blogs, forums, LinkedIn, etc.)
Where do you go to find information on our industry?
Where do you find videos to help you learn the tactics of our industry?
Have you ever created original content on the Internet?
What kind of content?
Have you ever posted a review of a business that you’ve worked with?

Once you obtain this data, you can assess if social makes sense for your business.

If it does, dive a little deeper into the People, i.e. the “P” in your strategy. Obviously, you’re going for current and prospective customers, but now, you have some data on where they actually hang out, and which social tools might be worth using, to reach them. Most critical, in the first half of your social strategy development, is picking the single business objective upon which to hang the strategy. Too many companies try to hit multiple objectives in their first engagement, and fail.

Next up, devise the strategy to reach these individuals – this is actually the hard part. If you’ve never written strategy before, I strongly recommend using the Four Actions Framework, from the book Blue Ocean Strategy. Picking the tools should be done last, not until a strategy is set.

You’ll know a lot about which tools (channels) your customers and prospects are using by “listening.” If you’re still wondering about the latest social tools read the top social media blog Mashable.

How do you tell if your multi-channel strategy actually works? That’s where the “M”– measurement – comes in. Be sure to select the measurements that connect directly to your business objective first. And put a premium on all measurements that can be automatically measured by your social media monitoring system, or marketing automation systems. These types of measures are highly indicative of future revenue, but don’t take lots of man-hours to complete.

About the Author

Adam Metz is the Director of Social Business at The Pedowitz Group, a burgeoning social demand generation firm. He is also the author of social strategy book There Is No Secret Sauce and the forthcoming book on social business, The Social Customer (McGraw-Hill Business, September 2011).

To obtain a complimentary copy of There Is No Secret Sauce, email: adam@pedowitzgroup.com, or break into the office of any successful marketer!

LinkedIn Totally Blows Email Marketing Opportunity

2011-03-25T13:44:00.004-04:00

Oh LinkedIn. Reid. Can I call you Reid? I know we don't know each other personally, but really: we have to talk. Sit down and let's chat.

You see, you just sent me this email about your 100 millionth member. (Congrats, by the way. Impressive).

But, you know, it has issues. It really is, frankly, a horribly missed opportunity. Plus you're breaking the law. Needless to say, that's not good for your pending IPO.

Marketing Fail

This was the perfect, perfect opportunity to give us early adopters something special. Some special feature. Free upgrades. Discounts. Extended trials of your premium services. Anything!

But instead you gave us, well, diddly. You emailed us all but failed to answer the 100 million question: so what? What was the point, Reid?

You just blasted all of us, your early advocates, and gave us nothing. No reason to go back to the site. No incentives. Not even a "hey, haven't seen you for a while, come on back." A little ego pampering about how insightful we are, kinda sorta, but maybe we knew that already, y'know?

Such a wasted opportunity.

And by the way: The Law called CAN-SPAM

Yes, CAN-SPAM is largely worthless. It is, nevertheless, the law. And you broke it, what, a million times?

See, your email wasn't transactional. It was marketing. So the law requires, amongst other things

Physical contact data.
Unsubscribe instructions.

And it didn't. Unless I'm blind; here's mine. Did I miss it?

You see, Reid, in the war against spam and in promulgating email marketing best practice, it's important that industry leaders like you and LinkedIn get this stuff right. And you didn't. Not even close. It's frustrating for us toiling away in the field when major Internet firms skip even basic compliance.

So, Reid. If you need an email marketing service or some consulting please do let me know. Happy to help you avoid wasting what is, in other news, a fabulous milestone. FeedBlitz makes sure basics such as compliance and authentication are taken care of for all our users, automatically.

Practical Personalization: Birthday Lists

2011-03-25T13:02:00.005-04:00

In this issue of List Building for Bloggers I'll step you through using birthday lists to help deliver additional value to both your clients and you sponsors, via custom fields.

[This is the latest article in the List Building for Bloggers series – Click here to read all the recent #LBB posts]

Birthday Lists - The Theory

The idea is to ask the subscriber as they subscribe what month they were born in, and then to email them something special from you - or your sponsors - to celebrate the birthday. Why is this a good thing?

It helps reinforce the relationship between you and your subscribers;
It helps incent readers to stick around for their rewards;
You can sell the birthday mailing to sponsors or use affiliate monetization.

Birthday Month, not Birthday Date

So we're going to ask subscribers for the month they were born: January, February etc. We're not going to ask them to enter their birthday.

Why?

Choosing a month is easy - there are only 12 options;
Entering dates is a hassle and error prone, especially if you have international readership;
We're only going to use the month anyway (mailing them on their birthday is a daily chore - don't want that) - the extra data isn't any use in this case;
Some people don't want to give their date of birth for a variety of reasons, but just asking for the month is basically harmless.

So asking for the month only make sense all round - less friction, no privacy issues, and much less work for us.

Birthday Lists - The Practice

Setting Up the Custom Fields

[Note: We're going to use FeedBlitz's UI for the step-by-step here, but most email services support this kind of thing too; ask their support function for help]

In FeedBlitz, click the Newsletters tab and pick "Custom Fields" from the left side bar.
Click "Confgure Custom Fields"
Click the "Add Custom Fields" button

Now let's define the field. Call it (say) "BirthMonth" (without the quotes). Since we want to make sure all the data is entered correctly, and we know the potential choices, define the field as "Choice" - a list is drop down box, which is more compact, whereas radios are easier to use but take up more space.

Now we have to enter the values we're going to allow. January through December, right?

Not so fast.

Here's the planning part. Are you going to require people enter the field? What about existing subscribers who have not shared their birth month with you? What will the default be?

If the field is optional AND you're using the list version of the field, you need to add a 13th option. Why? Because if the user doesn't pick a month the list box will just use the top value; you're going to end up with a lot of folks in January! So for lists, add a 13th value, call it "--Pick Your Birth Month--", give it the undefined value and drag it to the top of the list.

You also need to decide what you're going to store in the custom field - the month name? The month number? FeedBlitz will default to the name you type in, but you can change that to 01 to 12, for example, or the abbreviations like Jan to Dec instead. This matters if you're going to export the data later and use it in another system. Get it right now, otherwise you'll have to "translate" the data when you export it for use elsewhere.

Anyway, by the time you're done, you're going to end up with a screen that looks something like this:

Note that we've made the field optional (so the new subscriber doesn't have to enter it if they don't want to), that it is not hidden on the form, and we've added a prompt and some popup help.

Creating Segments

Let's say, for the sake of argument, that you defined the database values for the birth month to be the abbreviations: Jan, Feb, Mar etc.

Here's the FeedBlitz segment expression that picks all the subscribers, like me, with birthdays in April:

BirthMonth="Apr"

Easy! You can do this when you send your first mailing to your April birthdays (on March 31st in this case) via Newsletters - Mailings - Newsflash. At the foot of the screen you can create the segment expression - and save it for the same time next year. (In FeedBlitz v4, you can define segments in advance, getting the job done much faster).

One List, 12 Segments, Happy Birthdays!

And it's as simple as that. With a simple field, scope narrowed down to keep it simple, your one list has now become much more powerful. No need for fancy triggers or rules or what have you; just a single well-defined custom field.

Wait: What are you going to send?

With the mechanics out of the way, the real work begins: What are you going to send readers on their birthday?

If you're e-commerce, a special coupon or discount code valid for the month.
For content marketers, perhaps a special offer on your e-Book or webcasts.
Service provders - a special consultation, an hour of your time, perhaps?
For crafters, an appropriate seasonal item or tip.

You get the idea. Everyone of us has something we can offer, and your subscribers will totally value that special something you're giving them. Just make sure it is special.

Next Up

Before I get to DIY vs, outsource, I'll address the audience request on graphic design.

About List Building For Bloggers #LBB

Audience Participation Time at List Building For Bloggers #LBB

2011-03-17T12:02:00.000-04:00

I'm starting to wrap up the List Building for Bloggers LBB series with a couple more posts in mind, but before I do, I need your help.

Specifically, are there any topics or questions you have about building your blog's list, email marketing and integrating email marketing with social media that you'd like to see addressed? I know I haven't covered everything by any stretch, so please comment on the blog to add your ideas, thoughts and suggestions. Don't be shy - this is your chance to influence the series. Seize it!

Here's what we've covered so far (in reverse chronological order, i.e. most recent first); click to read them:

So, 14 posts so far and roughly 30,000 words (yikes!); how much further can we push this?! The answer depends on you, so comment now!

I'm looking forward to your ideas,

Thanks

Phil

How social media can improve your SEO by Raymond Denis

2011-03-15T12:44:00.001-04:00

Social Media is definitely playing a huge role in the way people uses the Web these days. It already affects the way many people work, having permeated both home and work lives. By 2014, eMarketer estimates that 65% of all US Internet users will be using social networks.

Social media is increasing its penetration rate over years

Knowing this, Google is now using in their algorithm the "social graph" has a sign of trust. From a Web site’s persective, if you are currently increasing your Web site's ranking through the use of search engine optimization (SEO), you might be interested in knowing that social media influences your rankings for target keywords.

Here are 2 important areas where to use Social Media for SEO:

1) Make sure to have a presence on the top social media sites – regardless of where your audience is.

Remember that we are thinking SEO here. Maybe this recommendation won’t be valid in a distance future but now in 2011 it is very valid. Top social media sites like Twitter, Facebook and Youtube contains the most "authority" from a SEO standpoint – meaning that they influence Google’s social algorithm more than any other social media site. By establishing a solid presence on those platforms, you allow your site to gain more authority for target keywords on the search ranking result pages. Here are some tactics:

[Facebook, Youtube and Twitter] Create a customized profile page. Add your link to your Web site in your profile bio.
[Facebook, Twitter and Youtube] create tons of (real) friends and followers. If those sites are already related to your audience, make sure to connect your niche’s influencers and authority speakers.
[Youtube] Add a link in the description each time you publish a new video
[Facebook & Twitter] Automate updates on your profile pages coming from your blog articles or news releases.
[Twitter] Encourage "retweeting" articles on your Web site
[Facebook] Encourage "liking" pages & articles on your Web site
[Youtube] Encourage "subscribing" on your Web site

2) Target social media sites related to your audience.

It is crucial to be where your users are. Forums, Wikis, Blogs or any other online communities related to your niche are good places to start for influencing your site’s SEO. Why? Because: search engines give importance to signals coming from topic-related sources. Here are some tactics to consider:

[Forums] Contribute actively by replying to user questions. Add a search engine signal (link) in your signature or your profile page. Make sure to follow the forum rules in order to avoid being banned. All comments must be relevant and your intent must be aligned with "positive contributions."
[Blogs] Contribute actively by commenting on articles related to your niche. To avoid being flagged as a spammer, comments must be relevant and your intent must focus on "positive contributions."
[Blogs] On a niche blog, write an article on an uncovered subject or a subject that allows you to add quality or encourage debate. Leaving a signal in the article is useful for the community and is recognized by a search robot.
[Wikis] If your Web site or Web page is worthy of being on a Wiki page, that it can provide value to that Wiki page, you can add it in the "external links" section. Again, the intent for placing your signal must be nothing else than "informative" and "can provide value".

In conclusion, Social Media is more than just a trend – it’s a movement. You will want to think of it as an undeniable mean for connecting to your users and you will want to implement Social Media as the CORE of your Web Strategy.

About the Author

Raymond Denis is an online advertising professional working for AXA - a car insurance company in Canada. Along with managing a car insurance blog, he provides to businesses internet marketing strategies and tactics to improve online performances and goals.

The Prizes and Pitfalls of Personalization #LBB

2011-03-14T11:22:00.004-04:00

The Prizes and Pitfalls of Personalization

In this issue of List Building for Bloggers you will learn:

Boosting relevance: why you should learn more about your subscribers.
Risks and downsides: why you should think twice about custom fields.
Alternatives to custom fields.
Custom field usage.

Planning.
Collection.
Reporting.
Personalization.
Segmentation.

Thinking outside the demographic box.
A quick "how-to" for FeedBlitz users.

[This is the latest article in the List Building for Bloggers series – Click here to read all the recent #LBB posts]

Why learn more about your subscribers

The ability to customize your mailings to subscribers (and, via segmentation, which subscribers you mail in the first place), is a more advanced part of email marketing than most casual bloggers will typically reach.

That said, the more you know about your subscribers, the more you can tune your interactions with them, and so the better your results will be. Think for a moment how you might be able to improve your interactions with your readership if you knew more than their email address:

If you knew buying history you can offer you best / newest customers early bird discounts or special packages;
If you knew location you could invite people to your next training course, tweet up or conference in that city;
If you knew their names you could make your mailings more personal;
If you knew their gender or age range you could write more articles that appealed to that group;
If you knew their Twitter account you can follow them in social media.

It's possible to do all of this without having this extra data - typically known as custom fields - but when you can't target content to the right people at the right time then you're losing relevance. Relevance is the core benefit to using custom fields: it allows you to really get very focused with your content (especially non-automated delivery), which means greater relevance to your target audience. That in turn leads to better response rates.

Risks and downsides

Before diving into custom fields, however, my advice to bloggers is to think twice about it. As bloggers we're typically content marketers, and our focus is that content and our audience. One of the benefits of using email marketing (and, specifically, fully automated email marketing like FeedBlitz delivers) is that it's easy. You can do a really good job with some up-front work and let the automation take care of getting your word out.

This is less true with custom fields. Custom fields take work; it's going to take more time from you to set up, use and manage them. You need to determine whether that time's worth it.

Secondly, collecting that data from subscribers when they sign up will reduce your list growth rate, simply because any extra friction in the process reduces your growth rate. Even asking for basics such as a first name or the recipient's gender will increase the bounce rate from the form. The more you ask for, the greater the hit. Again, up to you if that hit is worthwhile (you can test it, of course!).

Also bear in mind that, unless the extra data is coming from you (e.g. purchase history), user entered data can be unreliable. People lie. They type badly. There may be several ways to enter the same information e.g. in the US, they might report their state as "MA", "Mass" or "Massachusetts"! That makes extra work (yet again) for you in terms of trying to prevent that or bearing it in mind when you come to use your custom fields.

Finally, various jurisdictions have laws about user data and privacy. If you collect custom data and the user demands you change it, you pretty much have to change it. More work there as well.

So it's perfectly OK to say, like the idea, I have better things to do and my results are great as is. That said, the larger your list becomes, the harder it is to back fill custom field data if you have a change of heart or hire someone (e.g. a VA) to help you with your blog or list.

Custom field alternatives: Multiple Lists

If you want to segment your audience, bear in mind that there are simpler alternatives to using custom fields on a single list. Use multiple lists! Have one list for group A, another for group B etc., and power both from the same blog using tag filters. Easy to set up, the subscribers self-select into the right list at subscription time, much less work all around for you. For basic segmentation I would recommend this approach for bloggers instead of custom fields.

Basic custom field usage

A primer on jargon

Custom fields - Data you associate with a subscriber, such as their name, location or birthday.
Personalization - Using that data to modify the content of your mailing.
Segmentation - Using the data to select individuals from a list for a mailing instead of mailing the whole list.

Planning

So you're ready to take the plunge? OK, first you need to do a little planning. Think about:

What do you want to do with the extra data?
Where is the data coming from?
What about existing list members where you didn't collect the data?
Is all the data going to be required or optional?
What data will the user add, and what will you add yourself?

Say you're running a mommy blog. Most of your readers are going to be, by definition, women. It makes little sense to use gender as a custom field. So don't ask for it. Make a "Just For Dads" list instead.

You may also have data that you want to associate with a subscriber instead of having them add it themselves. Say you're a gym and you want to give everyone a special offer on the anniversary of their membership - you can add their "Member since" or "Month Joined" data yourself. You don't want to ask subscribers when they joined on the subscription form, since they might not be members (yet!) or they might not remember. If subscribers have to start thinking as they subscribe then they'll lose momentum, and list growth will suffer.

This is also an example of data you might want to hide from a user. Others might include whether the user is a prospect, customer or partner - data you might use to tune a mailing later.

Decide, too, which data is essential to your plans. Name? Gender? Location? Job title? Experience level? Make essential data required, and the rest optional. But be really brutal on prioritization; remember that the more friction you add (required fields) the lower your growth rate will be. On the other hand, the more friction you add, the more committed the subscribers are who join your list. If you're getting a lot of "tire-kickers" adding themselves, extra friction might very well be a Good Thing. Extra friction (in the form of extensive required fields) is also very useful if your list is being used as a lead generation tool for your business. You want the leads to be as pre-qualified as possible.

Some of the biggest challenges with custom fields, though, come from back filling data from existing subscribers, and what to do when that data (or optional fields) isn't there. There's nothing worse than a mailing that starts "Dear Valued Customer" since that actually shows the very opposite. What are you going to do if you don't have the subscriber's first name? Can you find a decent default? Can you conditionally exclude personalization elements if there's no data? Is there a form or link you can mail out to have the older subscribers add their data? Think, too, about segmentation. If you're going to segment by state, say, what do you do with users for whom you have no state data? Always mail them, just in case? Or never mail them?

Planning is essential. Whatever you do, don't skip this step.

Collection

For new subscribers, this is pretty easy: ask for the data they can supply at subscription time. If you want to restrict choices to a few, make the field a choice field (such as a list box or radio buttons) to avoid the MA / Mass / Massachusetts issue.

For data, you provide, e.g. a link to your contact management or CRM system, you're going to have to sync the email database with your CRM's data. That requires manual or automated import / export - more work.

For the old list, you're going to have to ask them to add the data. You'll need a link to your form from your provider and you're going to have to send them to your readers. Since there's no real incentive to having existing subscribers tell you more about themselves (they're already on the list; they've done the hard part), don't expect great results from this. You can offer incentives and prizes to help, but be prepared to live with data gaps. Since you've done your planning up front, this won't be an issue, right? Right! But you can add a link to the form in your template, so you can give readers a chance to provide or update their data with every email.

Reporting

One use of custom fields is not to use them in your outbound mailing at all. You can think of them as simply a one-time survey. Looking at the data can be interesting, though, so don't neglect reporting once you've set up your custom fields. You may well be surprised at what you learn, and that in turn can lead you to produce better, more relevant content, or enable you to reach out to your subscribers in other ways.

Personalization

Not just "Dear Jane" instead of "Dear jane@example.com" (although that's good too). You can personalize based content based on customer status (regular / preferred), gender and more. So with FeedBlitz, for example, you could conditionally include (or exclude) content from a different feed in your mailings based on the subscriber's status.

Also understand that "content" isn't just what's in your post. It can also mean the HTML you format the post with. So you can change, for example, an image or color scheme based on custom demographic data.

There are dangers here, though. Beware customizing the subject line, as that looks really spammy. Test for cases where the data is missing or defaulted, so that the email still looks good. If you use conditional substitution, test again. If you want to test design changes "safely", clone your list, place test addresses in there with the test cases you want to use, and test using that list before moving your design into production.

Did I mention this was work?

Segmentation

A great example for segmentation is going local. Say your blog is really focused on events in your area. You can collect the ZIP code from subscribers, and then mail only people in the relevant zip code for info on that area. From a monetization perspective, you can start to sell sponsorships and advertising into your segments once your list gets big enough (but keep the messages relevant else you'll lose people). Once you get good with targeting and customization you can really make every email work much harder for you.

Again, however, there are traps for the unwary. Segmented mailings are typically slower than "all readers" mailings simply because your email service has to figure out whether each subscriber qualifies; personalization (if you're using it) adds to the load too. It may not be significant but you should test using a non-time critical mailing to understand the difference.

Secondly, a botched segment mailing can be downright embarrassing. Make sure you have tested / evaluated the segment before you use it with the tools your email service provides; you don't want to send a blast about an upgrade discount to people who've already paid full freight. And it doesn't take much imagination to envisage even worse scenarios.

If you have a segment you like, save it if you can to make it easy to reuse in the future; it's both a real time-saver and SNAFU risk reducer.

Thinking outside the demographic box

Demographics - broadly speaking: name, gender, location - are the typical use for custom fields, especially for personalization and segmentation. But you can do more than this. I've talked about using internal data (customer class or purchase history, for example) as one type of data. You can use activity stream information (did they click or open an email recently) as another. If you collect twitter, facebook or web site links, you can use that too. In fact, simply knowing a subscriber has a website or twitter account may be enough to work with - you may not need to know the details to get a good segment going.

You can also get completely obsessive about this stuff too, so beware the law of diminishing returns. For example, you can make smaller and smaller segments to get more precise, but if you get to the point where it would be faster to use your personal email app to do the mailing, you've gone too far. As with most things in marketing, your mileage may vary. Test, measure and update.

Ultimately, remember that custom fields and the benefits they bring are only really good at optimizing your existing list. If you're not getting the basics right - subscription form positioning; compelling and relevant content; gripping subject lines; effective calls to action - then you're missing a bigger opportunity. Plan for custom fields up front if you have the luxury to do so, but I'd recommend that you make sure you're well past square one with your blog and basic email marketing before you start digging into custom fields and the work they add. Your time is limited and precious; be sure you're spending it wisely.

A quick "how-to" for FeedBlitz users

Custom fields are a lot of work, but they can be excellent tools for making better use of your list. The features are complex and can be found under the Newsletters tab at FeedBlitz; click the "Custom Fields" button in the left side bar. Since there's a lot of ground to cover, there is also a sequence of FeedBlitz-specific tutorial posts on using custom fields and entries in the FeedBlitz knowledge base - click here to start.

Next Up

DIY or outsource your blog-based email marketing - A beginner's guide.

About List Building For Bloggers #LBB

That Perfect Prospect Hasn’t Returned Your Call? Think in Multiples to Multiply Results! by Dan McDade

2011-03-08T08:05:00.001-05:00

[Editorial Note: Although this guest post talks about enterprise sales, the points made by Dan about persistence and relevance apply to any blogger trying to monetize by direct sales, whether to readers, advertisers or other partners. Stick to it and you'll be successful!]

Have you, a member of your sales team, or one of your inside reps ever called a prospect two or three times without connecting and then given up?

The answer is likely “yes” as the temptation is to assume a prospect isn’t interested and move on. Yet many of the best prospects need to be contacted multiple times by voicemail, email and direct mail over a period of weeks and months before a conversation occurs.

Here’s why: executives often don’t respond until a need’s priority has escalated. It’s likely that your first few attempts didn’t overlap with the prospect’s need window. Positive outcomes increase when the person calling makes multiple attempts in multiple media across several cycles.

My favorite stories are about client successes. The best one of these is work we did for a global consulting company where we deployed one of our people for a full quarter to make contact with CFOs at the nation's top 50 utilities.

The associate applied a B2B prospect development touch cycle that frequently includes the following at the C-level:

The associate makes navigation calls to confirm target prospect contact information and administrative support.
This is followed by a series of discussions with administrators to first sell them on our client's solution and then sell them on helping us get in front of their boss.
The associate then engages in multiple cycles of contact that include calls, voicemails and immediate email follow ups. A cycle can include as many as six attempted calls, three voicemails, and three emails over 10 business days.
On the last cycle of attempts, our voicemail explains we do not want to pester the individual, we would like to talk, but we won't leave another message.

So here is what happened:

The CFO called us back after the 42nd touch and said, "Don't stop calling me… you are my conscience. I have listened to and saved your voicemails, and I have saved some of your emails. I want to talk to you. I have just been extremely busy. Call me back in two weeks on Tuesday at 10:00 AM, and I will take that call.”
Two weeks later we generated a high quality opportunity for our client.
It closed in five months for $1,000,000,000. Yes, a billion.

When you approach prospects by thinking in multiples – multi-touch, multi-media, and multi-cycle – you multiply results.

About Dan McDade

Dan McDade is President and CEO of PointClear, LLC, a prospect development firm that helps B2B companies drive revenue by nurturing leads, engaging contacts and developing prospects until they're ready to close. The Sales Lead Management Association named Dan one of the 50 most influential people in sales lead management in 2009 and 2010. Dan’s first book, The Truth About Leads, is a practical, easy-to-read book that helps B2B companies focus their lead-generation efforts, align their sales and marketing organizations and drive revenue.

dan.mcdade@pointclear.com

http://www.pointclear.com/

blog: http://blog.pointclear.com/

book: http://www.pointclear.com/the-truth-about-leads/

An Update on FeedBlitz's Usability Project

2011-02-22T07:43:00.003-05:00

Since posting on September (yes, it was that long ago) on FeedBlitz's UI, we've been diligently beavering away to provide the basis for a whole new user experience for email and social media marketers. The process began in earnest in October, and has been on the go ever since.

So this is the first in an occasional series of posts that will highlight where we are in the process and give you clues about where we're going. As we get closer to release I'll be telling you more about the beta versions and how you can get a jump start on using the new service.

Now Tell Me, Who Are You?

The very first step in the process was to take a long hard look at the people who use the site and why. We thought about the people we'd like to use the site, and who aren't. It's the intersection of current and future markets with the individuals who are in them. Obviously, we also added in the feedback we've received about what works about FeedBlitz as well as the parts that are tougher to use.

We eventually drew up a set of "personas" that we used to name and think about each of these users, the markets and organizations they represent. For example, there's "Bob the Blogger", "Sarah the Savvy" and "Tom the Technical" (yes, I have this tragic alliteration problem). We also have "Suzy Subscriber" representing the recipients of the content we distribute on your behalf. And ten others! Each persona has multiple attributes that cover technical sophistication, the role of social media in their online marketing, how long they've been at it and more.

When the process wrapped up we had built fourteen distinct personas - too many - but they all represented a few different classes of user. Satisfying the needs of these major user categories at a high level (and deciding which ones we're NOT going to address right now), and ensuring that we meet the needs of the personas that they contain, have been the driving force behind the work on what has become FeedBlitz 4.

A New Navigational Architecture

It would have been really tempting to go the "lipstick on the pig" route and simply pretty up the site, move a few options around and declare victory. A short term win, perhaps.

Not for us, though.

The more we thought about the personas and how these people thought about their work, their blogging and our role in their ecosystem, we realized that we couldn't just tart things up and be done. Instead, we saw an opportunity to completely rethink and realign how FeedBlitz works to more closely match the way the personas thought about and worked in their online presence. Going back to square one with the personas was the key to generating the insights we needed.

I'm not going to give away much more at this stage, but the end result has not only yielded clearer, faster and more natural navigation, but also enabled significant other usability and productivity changes we can deliver to radically simplify common pain points like simply getting started effectively and integrating social media.

(We've shown a few friends of the firm an alpha version of the new UI. Everyone has found it to be easier to use and to find what they need; and everyone has pointed out ways we can make it even better yet. Thank you!)

Still, to give you a taste of what we're up to, here's a quick example of what the new approach and new UI now enable. Instead of all the screens you see in this tutorial to set up your mailing list: www.feedblitz.com/help/tour.asp, the new UI will have exactly one screen you need to complete to get started. That's not a typo: Just one. And it does SO. MUCH. MORE.

More Than This...

So yeah, it's a pretty big deal. By taking our time and thinking about what we offer you from a wholly new perspective is liberating. We have started to flesh out a fascinating new capability that has surprised and intrigued 100% of the people who've seen it. But more on our super secret WOW factor in a later post!

With FeedBlitz 4 we firmly believe we're more than meeting the needs of our current users; better yet, we will be able to more than meet the needs of the additional target markets - and their users - that we've identified. It's exceeding my expectations across the board.

When, When, When?!

OK, such a large rethink and reimplementation requires a lot of work; we're not done. It's going to be worth it, though, so hang in there.

We have a very functional alpha version and our plan is to have a private beta of FeedBlitz 4 running next month (March) with a public beta to follow when it's ready. So, in a sense, very, very soon. A matter of weeks.

Meanwhile, stay tuned for more occasional updates on FeedBlitz v4. As we get closer I'll let out some screenshots for you; I intend to make you all as excited as I am once you get to see it!
Thanks,

Phil

Counterpoint: Why I WILL Follow you Back, by Debba Haupert

2011-02-21T16:40:00.006-05:00

[Editor's note: Last week I posted about why I don't follow back everyone who follows me on Twitter. Debba, a.k.a. @Girlfriendology is here to share the other side. Debba has built online followings in the tens of thousands on Twitter and Facebook (see how here), so she really knows what she's talking about!]

As founder/manager of an online community for women (Girlfriendology.com with 21k+ Twitter followers - @Girlfriendology), I take a mixed, and somewhat unique, Twitter follower strategy. I also don't want some people to take this personally, but I intentionally stick to my brand of being 'female' and 'friendly.' Friendly to me means "I want to be in conversation with you;" so on Twitter, I’ll follow you back.

Going a step further, I am focused on female followers/followees. I typically follow back the females who follow me. I do look through my following list frequently which is somewhat time-consuming – but always interesting and I often find and reach out to women and companies I’d like to learn more about, interview on my BlogTalkRadio show or ask to contribute a guest blog on Girlfriendology.

I intentionally and diligently try to keep my followers female-oriented so I block most men (generally aside from friends, influencers or representatives of companies with whom I’d love to work). I also spend time (which to me is also very limited), but I think it is worthwhile to also block spam accounts. So, when a company asks me how many Twitter followers I have, I know they could look at my followers and see that it is a pretty pure list of primarily women. (Companies come to me to reach female potential consumers and that is what I want them to find when they look at my followers.)

And, because I focus on females and try to avoid spammers, I do not auto-follow.

I proactively follow women especially those who I believe might be interested in Girlfriendology - they are bloggers, moms, PR and Brand experts, women who tweet about friends/friendship (sometimes even 'shoes'!) and some are personal friends. I would like to grow my Twitter followers and believe it is worth the time I have to invest in keeping the list growing and relatively pure. Admittedly I’m sure some spam accounts are in there and possibly some businesses that might not be viable or strategic partners, but overall, I believe it’s a list I can own up to.

Admittedly, I do this to build exposure to my brand (of Girlfriendology) as well as, again admittedly, impress potential advertisers. I love that 21k+ Twitter followers can DM me if they’d like. (Yes, some DM me to ask me to RT their info or join the Mafia, but those are actually very rare.) I believe it shows my followers that I want to be able to have a conversation with them - I’m not just talking, but I’m listening to them as well.

Yes, it is time consuming to manage a large Twitter following but I’ve made some amazing connections with the women that I followed back on Twitter. One follower just gave me a great idea for a conference I’m speaking at. Others have DM’d me with ideas for guest blogs, interviews and blog post content. Many of my Twitter followers have RT’d me, followed Girlfriendology over to Facebook and, to be honest, have made my day just by saying something that inspired me.

So, to each his own Twitter strategy, right? I’m just glad we have options on how we manage access to this amazing community. Keep up the good work Phil! Thanks for letting me voice my opinion.

Debba Haupert, Girlfriendology.com

Why I'm not going to follow you back (It's not personal)

2011-02-18T13:04:00.003-05:00

[A little off topic, but this is something that's been on my mind lately.]

I'm an avid Twitter user. As such, I know that many people follow folk on Twitter in the hope - sometimes the expectation - that the followee will follow back; it's a fast and easy way to boost your follower count (for whatever reasons that makes these people happy).

Sometimes, said people will then unfollow in a huff a little later, as if the recipient of their follow has been somehow unspeakably rude by not returning their compliment by following back.

I don't get it.

Perhaps it's just me. Perhaps I am unspeakably rude (I'm sure I am, on occasion. Probably accidentally. Probably :-) ).

But I won't follow you back just because you are now following me.

Don't get me wrong. I am thrilled, thrilled, that you seem to want to listen to some of the things I write about. You're more than welcome; I hope I continue to keep thing interesting enough for you to stick around. I have an ego and I am flattered, believe me.

But following me is not a social contract. As far as I'm concerned, there is no moral imperative to follow back (again, perhaps that's my innate rudeness; you tell me). Twitter is not LinkedIn or Facebook, where relationships are reciprocal. Twitter is much more like a blog: the followed write; the followers read. We have conversations. Your subscribing to my blog doesn't create an obligation for me to subscribe to yours; that would be silly. I don't see why some people think Twitter should be different.

I do use Twitter as a conversational medium - it's fabulous for that. It's what I use it for most. But we don't have to be follower and followee for that.

The thing is, my attention is limited. I need to focus it on clients, prospects, industry news and the non-work stuff that floats my boat. So I am very, very discriminatory (in that, I make informed choices) about whom I follow, just as I choose carefully which blogs to subscribe to. There's more than enough noise in my Twitter stream as it is with the few people I do give my attention to; I am therefore very careful about whom I add. I also don't unfollow very much, precisely because I take care about the people I add in the first place. I'm not saying I'm a guru or super special and that if I follow your Twitter stream then somehow you are extra blessed; I'm just saying that when I do follow it's interesting enough for me to keep up with. That's it. Nothing more.

Now, this may come across as arrogant, conceited or pompous (I've been called worse!). But it really reflects on there being only 24 hours in the day and if I'm following you I want to give you my attention - else why bother?

So it isn't personal. It's pragmatic. But if you're following me in the hope I'll follow back, please don't. Go follow Lady Gaga or a politician or your favorite nationally-ranked sports club, they seem to follow back more than most. Grow your follower count that way, not that I understand why that's important or necessary.

But that's my 2c. Comment below if you auto-follow back; I'd welcome your perspective. Heck, I'll even give a guest post slot to someone with the opposite point of view.

What do you think? Chime in!

Update: Read the counterpoint in this guest post by successful online community-builder, Debba Haupert.

One Blog, Many Lists, Much Success

2011-02-17T15:03:00.006-05:00

How to Increase Engagement with a Multi-List Strategy for Your Blog

In this issue of List Building for Bloggers you will learn:

How multiple lists can help you attract and retain subscribers;
The benefits of multiple delivery schedules;
Content focus;
A quick "how-to" for FeedBlitz users.

[This is the twelfth article in the List Building for Bloggers series – Click here to read all the recent #LBB posts]

Multiple lists from a single blog? You bet! It's a great idea, and if you're using automation to send your mailings it won't cost you any more time and effort to manage once you're set up.

There are two core ways you can use multiple lists to increase engagement in your readership. These ways are:

Different mailing schedules;
Focused content.

Both will help you grow your and retain your audience, but they address different needs.

Multiple Mailing Schedules

When and how often to mail your readership can be the source of much angst in the email marketing community. Many people spend (and maybe waste) a lot of time and energy trying to find the right date and time to send out a blast to get the best results.

For content marketers (i.e. us, bloggers), I say that the best approach is not to get down to this level of detail. There are much more important and valuable things that you can do with your blog and your time. You will be more productive creating great content on your blog, building your community, doing some SEO, guest posting etc. rather than spending hours in reports worrying whether it's better to mail out Tuesdays at 10am or Friday evenings after work. Focus instead on getting better results from your mailings by writing better headlines, compelling calls to actions, or adding an autoresponder.

That said, though, what you can do (and should definitely consider) is have your subscribers tell you how often they want to be emailed. That way your mailing schedule best matches their expectations and you're more likely to keep them for longer. Corollary: you're also much less likely to lose them because they feel swamped by too many emails from your blog or updates that are too slow.

This is where having multiple lists, each with a different delivery schedule, comes in really handy. You can offer a "Fast" subscription, which sends out a mail every time you post. For some people that will be great. For others, though, this will be way too much information and aggravating. Enter the next list, powered by the same blog: A daily digest. Same content, just delivered once a day. You might even offer a weekly wrap as well for those who want to stay in touch but for whom even a daily missive would be burdensome. You could perhaps adjust the slower lists to use abridged content if you typically have a lot of posts each week, just to keep the email down to a reasonable size.

All you have to do is offer the subscriber the choice at sign up time. They self-select into the appropriate list and they're done. They get what they want when they want it; you get happy subscribers who don't become frustrated by too many updates, or news that isn't timely enough for them.

Focused Content

The other core use of multiple lists is to focus the content so that every mailing is relevant to the subscribers. Most blogging systems these days will offer category pages, where all the posts sharing the same category or tag can be viewed at once; it's great for search and its great for visitors to see all the related posts in a single place.

You can do the same with your mailing lists too. For example, Elise at Simply Recipes has a "recipes only" email list accessible here, as opposed to her main list which is all the posts - not just recipes - on her food blog. Like Elise, you can offer focused content based on what your readers want. There may be fewer updates going out to a more focused list, but you'll get better engagement with its subscribers with each mailing.

On the other end of the spectrum, Money Saving Mom has over a hundred lists. The site uses both content and scheduling differences. They're all powered by the same blog, but she gives her visitors a lot of choice in terms of choosing when they want an update and what they want to get. Result? Stellar list growth. See her subscription form page here; it's really quite the marvel.

Best Practice in Action

Since I'm drawing attention to Money Saving Mom, her site uses a combination of techniques to grow her mailing lists. It's a fantastic example of how to quickly fire up subscriber acquisition. Use it as inspiration for your list growth, no matter what field you're working in or how large (or small) your lists are now.

Let's take a look:

There's a financial incentive (sweepstakes) above the main banner for the main mailing list;
"Subscribe for free updates" call to action in the right side bar for a menu of all lists;
Autoresponders and custom landing pages driving traffic back to the site.

Dynamic and User Generated Lists

The challenge with offering different content lists have one disadvantage: They require you, the blogger, to know (or to make intelligent decisions about) the different content you should be offering. Sometimes that's hard to do, and as your site grows you may forget to update the mailing lists to include your new posts. What to do?

Well, with luck, your email service has an API that you can use to let the users create their own lists on the fly. You can then, with a little back end or client side scripting, have the subscription form on any one page offer an automatic subscription to that page's tags. You can do the same for search functions too. That way you can ensure that the content is always relevant - the subscriber picked it themselves!

For FeedBlitz Users

FeedBlitz makes creating additional mailing lists from a single source easy, so if you're also a FeedBlitz user read on to see how to set up multiple lists for your blog in just a few steps.

The easiest way to create multiple mailing lists is to start with your main list that you're happy with. Then go to Newsletters - Settings - Advanced Template Editor and make that template your Master Template. That means that all other lists you then make will use the same design as your main list by default, which gives you great brand consistency and saves a whole boat-load of time.

Then clone the list via Newsletters - Settings - Clone. It creates a copy of the list and its settings, but does not copy subscribers. If you're creating a new delivery schedule, pick the new schedule you want as part of the cloning process. It's that easy.

If you want to create focused content specific lists, again clone the mailing. Then go to Newsletters - Settings - Content Settings for your new clone, and either:

a) Add tag filters to include / exclude categories from the mailing; or

b) Change the article source URL to be the category RSS feed for the content.

Don't forget to change the title of the mailing to match the content, and you're done.

If you want to get all techie and use the API, head over here to the Knowledge Base for the documentation - you need to use the publisher ID parameter to link the subscription to your account.

Finally, freshly minted mailing lists in hand, you need to update your forms to offer your new alternatives. Since most sites are not offering hundreds of different choices, FeedBlitz can create a form for you that automatically updates itself as you add new lists. Go to Newsletters - Forms - Subscription Forms and, from the right hand side of options, choose "all public" as the lists to include. Update your site with the code and that's that. (If you want to exclude a list from the automatic form, mark it as private at Newsletters - Settings - Content Settings - The Basics).

Next Up

More advanced topics: Segmentation, personalization and custom fields.

About List Building For Bloggers #LBB

Reminder: FeedBlitz API Changes Tonight

2011-02-15T12:20:00.000-05:00

If you're using the FeedBlitz API remember to check that your integration is now using an API Key and the updated end point URL per this post.

The old API server will be taken down tonight, February 15th (US eastern time).

Everyone else: Hang tight! This won't affect you and your services at all; this message is just for developers and integrators.

Thanks!

Phil

Seth Godin Combines Innovative Incentives, Group Buying for Latest eBook

2011-02-14T10:31:00.002-05:00

Seth Godin, the well-known marketing guru (and FeedBlitz client) is on an interesting seven day campaign to lower the price of his latest eBook (via the Domino Project) by tying it to the number of subscribers to his mailing list.

The more subscribers gained in the next seven days, the lower the price of the book.

It's a group buying approach, but the final reduced price isn't known until next Monday (the start price is already down to $7.99 courtesy the list's initial subscriber count). Plus, instead of buying your groupon with money, Seth instead is trading your attention for the increasing discount. The discount costs you nothing financially. Go on later to tell your friends, tweet your followers and mention it to your associated hangers-on and the deal gets better. What's not to like?

Incentives work; group buying is popular. This is a fascinating way to combine the two into the relatively staid publishing industry with a typically Godin-esque twist.

Read Seth's announcement on his blog here.

See his video on the Domino Project here.

Lower the final price by subscribing to the Domino Project here.

Are you in the Three Danger Zones of Spamminess? #LBB

2011-02-03T11:51:00.016-05:00

Content Filters and Deliverability Traps for the Unwary

In this issue of List Building for Bloggers you will learn the content triggers that can lead to your mail being junked, even when you're using a high-reputation mailing service like FeedBlitz, and what to do about it.

[This is the eleventh article in the List Building for Bloggers series – Click here to read all the #LBB posts]

Blogs are Email Marketing Accidents Waiting to Happen

When you blog and send your words of wisdom out to your subscribers, you are not only a blogger but also a marketer. You may not like to think of yourself that way, but it's basically true.

The thing is, of course, is that most bloggers are untrained as marketers. Specifically, we're largely not trained as email marketers. We put up our subscription forms and hope for the best. Usually, that's fine.

But sometimes that lack of expertise can hurt, because it can lead us to create content that ends up setting off content filters. It's actually all too easy to do, in fact, because in social media we can easily add widgets and plugins that are designed for the web, but which can completely foul up your feed and eviscerate your mailings. Blogging and social media enable us to make the kind of "rookie" error that a professional, corporate email marketer would never let see the light of day.

There are also problems that can creep in because of design decisions that may render your email unreadable and therefore useless; although I've touched on these before I'll go over this ground again in a little more detail.

Hold On - Isn't Reputation King?

Ah yes, indeed it is (You have been paying attention! Thanks!). You're not going to get your blog's mailings anywhere without using an email provider like FeedBlitz with excellent sender reputation and low complaint rates. Having a good sender, especially one that's on white lists and feedback loops (again, you-know-who), does a lot to eliminate the risk of content rules routing the email to junk.

A lot, but not necessarily everything. Basically, when your email is run through the inbound ISP's content filters, a score of some sort is applied to it. Let's say that having a high score is a bad thing, and the higher your score the more likely your email is going to be flagged as junk. Worse, if your subscriber uses a separate email app (e.g. Outlook, Thunderbird etc.) to read her email, that app knows absolutely nothing about sender reputation. Your email is downloaded to your email app, and the only tool it can basically apply to that inbound mail to stop spam is content filtering. So it refilters your messages again, but this time you don't benefit from the trusted sender advantage.

How Content Filters Work

When your email arrives at the ISP from a sender with a great reputation, it benefits by having its score reduced somewhat from the get go. It might benefit a little; it might benefit a lot. Unsurprisingly, ISPs don't share their rules, but open source projects like Spam Assassin work this way. Anyway, using a service like FeedBlitz enables you to start with a reduced baseline spamminess score before the content filters go to work. They raise your score and finally, based on that score, your email is sent to the inbox - or to The Other Place.

Usually, reputation trumps content (i.e. your baseline benefit of using a reputable sender massively outweighs content analysis) unless you are, in fact, writing something spammy. Our experience is that, even for our frugal deal bloggers, who are always talking about free this, 20% off that and sample the other (generally spammy content phrases), their email usually gets straight to the inbox, no problem.

So why fret about content then? Well, some kinds of content will greatly raise your spamminess score. Another is that the ISP's content filters aren't the only ones your email has to pass before it gets to the inbox; you need your email to be able to get past the desktop software filters I mentioned above too. Since trusted sender doesn't apply here, it's possible to lose the battle for the inbox at this very last stage.

To avoid that you need to steer clear of the Three Danger Zones of Spamminess. Grab your online GPS and read on! We have a map...

Danger Zone 1: The Subject Line

The first thing to realize is that your subject line will be scanned by content filters as well as the body of the email itself. A truly spammy subject line will get your mail junked just as much as talking about dodgy pills or offshore banking accounts where you can net bajillions o' bucks in the body of your email.

So as well as following the tips in an earlier LBB about keeping subject lines short, imperative and attention-grabbing, avoid these errors:

DON'T SHOUT.
Especially don't shout FREE, SAMPLE and % OFF.
Don't over use exclamation points!!!!
Don't over-use other symbols $$ #!% in your subject line either.
Phil, don't personalize the subject line with the recipient's name.

The last one may seem counter-intuitive; after all personalization typically increases open and response rates. But mail whose subject line starts with "Yourname, blah blah blah" is almost always spam and will be treated as such by the filters. By all means personalize the subject if you can, e.g. "We recommend this zoom lens for your Nikon D40 camera" if your recipient bought a D40 from your store recently. Just don't use their name in the subject line.

Danger Zone 2: Accidentally Spammy Content

Here it gets more complicated. Not only are content filters (and I'm including your computer's anti-virus software in this category) looking for keywords, they're also looking to see whether your message might be malware (a virus). Sometimes the most innocent things can trigger alarms, leading to the junk folder or scary security alerts. (I'm not intending to cover all the ins and outs of content filters here - life's too short! Just the pertinent parts a blogger can easily foul up on).

A quick technical detour is in order for a moment. The vast majority of email today is HTML email; mini web pages, in effect. HTML is made up of tags that produce your text, break it into paragraphs etc. All handled by your blog automatically and then converted to email by services like FeedBlitz.

But some tags have been abused by viruses and other villainy to the point that email apps won't display them (see this knowledge base article on why video typically won't work in email, for example, and how FeedBlitz saves the day for video posts). This especially applies to tags for JavaScript, forms and what are called IFrames.

The reason why you need to care about this is that the vast majority of blogging widgets use - guess what! JavaScript, forms and IFrames. If those widgets live on your blog's sidebar and not in the post then you're fine. But if you do have these tags in your post (or they're added to the feed by a "helpful" plugin or widget on your blog) then they won't work in your email and they probably won't work for your RSS readers either. This is why blogs and bloggers are so much more likely to fall afoul of content rules than professional email marketers: it's simply too easy to break them with all the cool toys social media let's us add to our sites!

But script doesn't work in email, so ad networks and other active content won't work. A preponderance of script will damage your spamminess score badly. If you do insert a script-based object into your post (e.g. a survey), make sure that it has a noscript tag that will offer email and feed readers a useful alternative. FeedBlitz will help here - it strips script from your content before it mails it out in an effort to increase deliverability and reduce risk for the reader.

IFrames can show up with some affiliate programs and other add ins. While they'll probably pass muster with a content filter, your reader's security software will probably be very unhappy seeing an iframe in your email if that iframe references a page that isn't on your web site. Some Amazon affiliate links for specific books are iframes and can fall into this category, leading to scary, scary security alerts (almost always false alarms, but that's life) when your email is scanned by the subscriber's anti-virus app. Use images or static inline code instead; just say "no" to iframes in your posts.

Then there's forms. Don't put whole forms in your email. They're unlikely to work in many email systems (but will probably display just fine, creating much subscriber frustration when they fail to work). If you want a subscriber to fill out a form, use the mail with a compelling call to action to drive them back to your site instead.

Remember: You're fine if your gidgets, gadgets and doohickeys are in side bars etc. It's when they get into the actual post content itself that you have to be careful.

Finally, there are bad neighborhoods. If you link to a bad neighborhood (or what the content filter thinks looks like it's going to be a bad place to send a reader), your email is going to be junked. This did, in fact, happen to one of our clients; Yahoo was sending their email to junk consistently whereas none of our other clients was having the same problem. The issue boiled down to exactly one link in their email. Sent without the link, the email landed in the inbox perfectly, every time. With the link, away to junk it went, every time. There was nothing wrong with the link (or the site it linked to) per se; it just happened to push Yahoo's content filter over the edge.

So sometimes you can simply be unlucky; it happens. But if you're using an ESP their support function or professional services group may be able to help.

Danger Zone 3: Graphic Design SNAFUs

Speaking too Softly and Shouting Too Loudly

Content filters look to see if they think you're trying to hide content from the user, because doing so is inherently suspect. So very small fonts, colors that are the same as - or very similar to - background colors are all flags on the play. Don't do it.

Ditto for very, very large fonts and over use of bright, attention grabbing colors are also flags. Anything SCREAMING FOR ATTENTION is going to bump your spamminess score heavily in the wrong direction, so nix the 72 point bold red font with the yellow background, OK? Keep the graphic design tone in a normal voice and everything in plain sight and you'll be fine.

Unfortunately, there are other ways graphic design can mess things up just by accidentally crippling readability, especially for older email clients and many webmail readers.

Dark Backgrounds

Some email apps won't display backgrounds, especially if the background is an image and not a solid background color. Since you have a dark background and therefore light text on it, without a dark background your light text is now displayed on a white background. It's illegible now! We recommend using a light background and dark fonts for your copy all the time; you can surround them with images and backgrounds that won't affect readability if they're not displayed, but will still look right when thy are.

Using Styles that Aren't There

Styles and stylesheets, a.k.a. CSS, allow graphic designers great control over how web pages display online. In email, though, not every email app supports all the CSS your designer puts in. Worse, if your post uses styles that are only mentioned in the web site but not defined in the post itself, your feed and emails are not going to render the way you intended at all. This is why, for example, may WordPress blogs specify floating images online, but in feeds and emails they don't wrap properly; the stylesheets aren't there to tell the subscriber's app how to display the image, so it uses the default. (That's why FeedBlitz has a set of template tags to force images to wrap the way you want, even if they don't start out that way.)

And that's the best that can happen. If your post inadvertently uses a style that's used by your subscriber's webmail or feed reader, your post is going to use that style. Results: who the heck knows! Probably something that will make your subscriber very unhappy. Ask your graphic designer not to use obvious CSS class names like "header", "footer" or "style1", "style2" etc. - they're much more likely to conflict with a webmail reader's CSS namespace if you do. Make class names more specific to your site and you'll avoid this kind of naming collision.

Too Complex HTML and CSS

Finally, don't use overly complex HTML and CSS positioning within the post to manage your content. Keep post HTML really, really simple. The more complex it is, the less likely it will be faithfully rendered on subscriber email apps. Gmail, for example, is simply awful IMHO at rendering anything beyond trivial HTML content even with styles.

KISS, though, and you'll be fine!

The Good News on Graphic Design

Once you have a graphic design in place, test it. If problems occur, fix them before you go live with the design. When you have the design working and rendering acceptably across the board, the good news is that you'll have avoided the majority of graphic design risks mentioned above, permanently.

Whitelists Solve (Almost) Everything

If you are white listed in your subscriber's email systems (ISP and desktop app, if applicable) then you are going to pretty much avoid all of content filtering problems. Always ask to be whitelisted when your subscribers join your list or interact with a landing page.

Next Up

I've spent a lot of recent LBB posts on what you should not be doing with your blog's email marketing. Next week, back to how to make it better, faster, with some tips on how to use multiple lists to attract and retain subscribers.

About List Building For Bloggers #LBB

P.S. If you think your friends or followers would find this series valuable, please retweet on Twitter or "Like" on Facebook using the buttons below. Don't forget to use the #LBB hashtag when you do. Thank you! And if you have a comment, contribution or something else to say, please comment too. :-)