Archive for Blog
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.
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.
Facebook Changes Raise the Bar on Social Networks
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In the world of social media, things change all the time. What once was hot is now yesterday’s news. This is even truer now with the recently broadcast news from Facebook. With their new revamped social experience, they try to not only secure more users, but also gain the top position over other networks, such as Google+.
What types of new and exciting things did Facebook talk about in their recent announcement? Let’s go through them now:
- Real-time Ticket – Now on the upper right-hand corner of your Facebook page, you will see a real-time, scrolling list of all your friends’ updates. Useful for those who need to know what everyone is and what they’re doing – all the time.
- Top Stories – Surprise! Your Facebook feed is now even more dedicated to news and certain stories may find their way at the top of your feed. Those stories will have a blue corner on the top left-hand corner – this is Facebook’s way of giving you something it thinks you like. If you don’t like it, simply click on it.
- Subscribe button – For those who don’t want to friend someone and share everything with them, there’s now a subscribe button. So if I wanted to see your public updates, I would simply subscribe to them and you don’t even need to be my friend on Facebook.
- New lists – Just when you thought you had your list setup, there’s a new improved list. They help you better organize areas such as friends, family and such. They can even automatically create and grow without your assistance.
- Shares – Now if someone shares out your link or content, you can see who shared it out. Pretty nifty to know who is helping you promote your updates.
- Facebook page activity – If you have a Facebook business page, there’s a new friend’s activity option. This will tell you what your friends are saying about your page. Now you can get more data on what people think of it and how to improve it.
- Timeline and Opengraph– This is the biggest of the announcements from Facebook, by far. Think of this as a completely redesigned profile and dashboard for you. From what Facebook says, you can tell the story of your life on Facebook through Timeline and share everything about yourself via the opengraph that integrates with Timeline. This includes things like music, movies, where you go, what you do and more. Privacy is a concern on this and I’m sure we will hear about this as time goes on.
There’s a lot to take in now from Facebook – all new ways to share and communicate, no matter where you are. Look to see these changes happen in the next few weeks into your profile.
As I hear on these changes, I will keep you informed with updates. Also, stay tuned for more posts topics surrounding Facebook discussing things like rumors of paying and how the new changes can help your business.
Go ahead and like me on Facebook at: www.facebook.com/vbsod
