Author Archive
3 Powerful Elements to Effective Email Subject Lines
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One of the most important elements of effective email marketing is the subject line. Just like a headline in a blog post, a subject line is key to get your foot in the door and have the recipient open your email.
Do you know what it takes to craft a subject line that compels your receipt to click each and every email you send? It’s not that complicated and with the right formula, you will have it down to a science.
Let’s take a look at three elements of an effective email subject line and how it will help you get more opens to your email marketing:
- Keep it short and sweet – No one wants to read a long subject line and worse, it will probably get your email deleted. Keep it short and to the point with a reason for the recipient to open the email. Five to eight words is best, but no more than 40 characters.
- Write it last – Don’t worry about your subject line until you complete drafting up your email. This gives you room to put together a great email and this ties into writing a compelling subject line. Also, it’s easier to edit a subject line than it is to edit an entire email message.
- Avoid spammy symbols – We all know about spam and hate it, right? Well, don’t be a spammer by adding spammy symbols to your subject line. These symbols include !@&!? If you’re tempted to add these symbols, just don’t do it. This increases the chance that your email will get a trip to the spam folder and not in your recipient’s email inbox.
Email marketing is an important part of your marketing mix and the first thing someone will see if your subject line. If it doesn’t compel them to open the email, you can bet they will delete it. Don’t fail to reach your customers; use these three elements to craft a powerful email subject line that gets your email opened and noticed.
If you’re looking for more help with your email marketing and list building efforts, consider a look at my email marketing Ebook. Right now, it’s only $9.99 and it covers everything you need to get you down the right path for successful email marketing.
Keep Your Online Branding Consistent for Effective Business Messaging
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Branding is important to ensure you project the right message to your clients and your prospects. If you fail to do this, it could result in a negative impact in your business.
Providing the right message across all of your online profiles, websites and blogs is critical to effectively projecting a professional image. In just a matter of seconds, you could lose a client – simply from inconsistent online branding.
How do you ensure you have consistent online branding online? It takes a solid strategy and a commitment to staying on the same path with each of your online presences.
Here are a few ways to keep a consistent online brand that will keep clients coming in…over and over again:
Blog
Now, anyone can create a blog, but for a business blog, there are different requirements. To ensure you have a consistent online brand, keep your blog design, copy and overall experience the same as your other online profiles.
Ways to include this are using a WordPress theme with colors and design elements uniform across any of your blogs, websites and online profiles.
Facebook Page
Now, you may think that your Facebook page isn’t a place to keep a consistent design or look, but you would be wrong. Again, look to keep the same experience on your fan page as you do for your blog and other online areas.
Some of the things you can do include:
- Use apps that integrate your blog or email opt-in list into your fan page
- Use a custom welcome page designed with the same colors, elements as your other online profiles.
- Post content from your blog and other online outposts to your fan page.
If you didn’t know, you can add a custom background to your Twitter profile. This is a key place to keep your branding consistent. Again, use the same colors, elements and bring out the same experience from your blog and other online outposts.
By the way, you can also do this with your YouTube background for that consistent brand.
Logo
Your logo isn’t just for letterhead or business cards anymore; it’s also a key element to your online branding. Everywhere you have your company name, you need to include your logo. A few places to remember this include:
- Your website
- Your blog
- Your emails to your list
- Your social media profiles
- Your special reports
As you can tell, your online brand is a critical part of your business. Just because you have a blog and a Facebook page, don’t think you can do whatever you want on each platform. Don’t send out the wrong message to your clients and prospects – keep everything consistent for optimal branding.
WordPress Tip
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Image Source: cliconomics
When you publish a blog post, you want to get as many visitors to it as you, right? Well, we know how to push people to our blog from social media and other platforms, but did you know there’s a way to tell sites about your post right away?
Yep, it’s built into WordPress and it’s easy to setup. Some use plugins to handle this function, but we all know that too many plugins can actually bog down your blog’s performance.
So, what’s this option?
Go to your WordPress blog dashboard, scroll to your settings menu on the left side and click on Writing. Under the section called Update Services, there’s an area to enter a list of sites to notify about your new blog post. Simply add the sites and they will get a notification when you publish a post.
To get you started, here’s a list of sites to add to this area:
- http://api.moreover.com/RPC2
- http://bblog.com/ping.php
- http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2
- http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php
- http://ping.feedburner.com
- http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php
- http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/
- http://rpc.pingomatic.com/
- http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2
- http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
- http://topicexchange.com/RPC2
- http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates
- http://xping.pubsub.com/ping
After you enter the sites, just click the save changes button and you’re all done!
Getting Your WordPress Blog Found With a Sitemap
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When you build your blog, you just expect Google and other search engines to just find it. Well, it doesn’t actually work that way and if you just wait for Google to just “find” your blog, you’ll be waiting a long time.
Here’s the thing: in order for a search engine to find your site, it’s got to find a way to it. A few ways to do this is linking to your blog from an established site, going into Webmaster tools and submitting the site for crawling or having a sitemap with notification to the search engines.
In this post, I want to briefly go through how to install a sitemap on your blog and get search engines to know about it. For this, I’m assuming you’re using WordPress for your blog.
Installing a XML Sitemap in WordPress
- From your dashboard, go to the left menu and select Add New under Plugins.
- Then, do a search for Google Sitemap Generator.
- Search the results and find Google XML Sitemaps and install it.
- Now that it’s installed, go the left menu and select XML-Sitemap under the Settings menu.
- Just keep the options default for now, unless you know what you’re doing and then click on the link to “rebuild sitemap.” This will automatically generate your xml sitemap and notify Google, Bing and Ask about your site.
There you have it – a simple how-to on getting a XML sitemap on your WordPress blog and letting search engines know about it. Now Google and other search engines know about your blog and will index your pages based on the information in your new sitemap.
For even more information and in-depth instruction on how search engines work and how your site can benefit from search engine optimization, check into my EBook, Search Engine Optimization, at my website store.
