Should you blog, tweet or start an e-newsletter?

Guest blog by LisaMarie Dias, e-newsletter diva

As a designer of e-marketing materials, people will often ask “Should I blog, tweet or start an e-newsletter?” While the question is usually posed as ‘which one’, I will often answer “Yes” in an attempt to help them re-frame the query. There are valid reasons to start any one of these and in my opinion, often very good reasons to have all three!

First and foremost, you need to be very clear about the message you are trying to share. The mode of transport – and that is all that these choices are, different modes of transport for getting your info out into the world – depends on what, exactly, you want to say and to whom.  Are you selling a product to a new customer or disseminating information to establish your expertise?  Are you speaking to someone that knows of you and your product or are you introducing yourself?  Once you clarify the message and the recipient, it will usually be easier to determine how to share it.

Each mode is best suited for a different type of message with some working well in multiple situations.  An e-newsletter gives you the time to introduce yourself and to provide detailed information.  It also allows you to define your ‘tone’ and to post upcoming events. But it is not a good medium for sharing time sensitive information or for last minute reminders.  Blog posts are excellent for distributing daily and timely comments, insights and musings but work best when they are sent to someone that already knows you. The same goes for tweets.  They are the perfect way to stay on someone’s radar with quick observations, retorts and reminders but only when received by someone that is ‘following’ you.  They are not a very good vehicle for introduction and certainly not for explanation.

One client, a financial planner, offers a tremendous amount of timely and valuable financial information and advice each month complete with references, charts and foot notes.  This is obviously not a message suited to a blog post or ‘tweet’.  His e-newsletter offers the space and time to deliver this information properly.  Blog posts are a great way to define your tone and to grow your following.  By posting frequently, people get a feel of who you are and over time, you can build a level of trust.  This same client might blog about the daily ups and downs in the market as well. It would not necessary conflict with the e-newsletter and, if done well, could certainly support it. And I suppose he could tweet too, though I am not sure if financial advice via tweet is in anyone’s best interests. My point is that these modes are not mutually exclusive.

Sometimes I will hear the question, “I have a blog and I am active on Twitter, do I need an e-newsletter/ e-zine as well? “

I believe that, if you have the stamina – and do not underestimate the amount of time and effort each of these endeavors will require – it is often best to combine all three modes, using e-newsletters to introduce yourself and define your area of expertise, blog posts to build on that expertise and tweets to ensure that you are on your reader’s radar.

Promoting an event is a great opportunity to use the strengths of all three modes.  An e-newsletter calendar, posted regularly, makes someone aware of the event and allows them to register and plan to attend. A blog post can then be used to discuss the event and build anticipation followed by a ‘tweet’ to remind them when the date arrives.  Working together, in a coordinated timeline, these three tools will increase the likelihood of having your message received and in this case, ensure event attendance.

Pick the format that works best for your message.  Or better yet, try all three. This is not an ‘either – or’ proposition.  They are all useful tools which should be created and designed to work together to ensure that your message is broadcast and shared.

LisaMarie Dias works with people to create dynamic online marketing materials using Constant Contact.  She offers individual and group classes for those that are interested in doing it themselves and full packages for businesses that want it all done for them.  Give her a call and let her help you get your message online and into your client’s in-box!

How social networking can help with your marketing

The power of Web2.0, the interactive side of the internet, opens up a huge potential to publicise and expose your business to a larger audience than ever before. No longer is the world a huge place, with the rise of social networking it seems like it’s just outside your back door!

Social networking for business began with blogging, a medium which enabled organisations to write about their business in other ways, to advertise their expertise, explore new concepts, ask their audience, invite feedback and responses, and publicise their events and activities; and because it was open to all who wanted to view it, especially through the search engines, good blogs could command a wide readership, and using RSS could be followed on a regular basis without unnecessary researching.

Then there were social networking sites, with the ability to collect and make friends and communicate with them in a relaxed and convivial style, even from the other side of the world. My friend in China would be lost without Facebook! There are now a myriad of different websites, each communicating, emulating, competing and evolving as technology moves continuously and rapidly forwards.

Certain sites, such as LinkedIn, Plaxo, FriendsFeed and Ecademy (to name but a few) have adapted their services for the business world by seizing this opportunity for business networking, whereas Facebook provides for all kinds of social networkers, and indeed some applicants use their profiles for many different activities. In fact for Facebook it is suggested that you apply as an individual, rather than for other sites in which you would join as your business name. Twitter, the ‘micro-blogger’, has taken the world by storm because it appeals to the quick-fire responses of 140 characters combined with a desire to know what everybody else is doing in ‘real time’.

The need to network for business using Web2.0 should not be seen merely as a trend. Although it may be seen by many as a ‘time waster’, I think it does depend on ‘how you use your time’ to achieve results. Social networking is about increasing your following (aka collecting friends) to find other like-minded or interesting people, learn what each other is doing (this is certainly come to the fore in Twitter), a place to express and publicise your activities, form groups and forums for more interaction, ask questions and receive answers (LinkedIn has excellent facilities for this), publish your blogs and advertise through marketplaces (using Ecademy’s extensive SEO properties), republish your articles for a wider readership (though there are sites designed for this), and learn much more quickly about what’s going on in this ever-increasingly fast world.  If your business is one of the first to hear of a particular subject and is then able to rapidly respond to it, what difference would that be against your competitors?

It is also the concept of RSS and feedburning that has contributed to wide social networking use. Think of the implications if your posts could be automatically reproduced in other social networking sites just by pressing one button, combined with the ability to enable your blog posts, articles, weblinks and other relevant material instantly accessible to a potential huge readership throughout the world. Many businesses have benefited from an increased traffic to their websites and blogs, plus other media such as audio and video, with the chance to explain, educate, publicise, inform, request material, gather information, become established as an expert in your field, and achieve more sales – surely this is a phenomenon of the 21st century we cannot ignore.

Up-selling pizza blogs

Up-selling is a concept I have been thinking a lot about lately. The book The E-Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber explains how the idea of franchises combined with upselling have helped businesses become successful – but how do I transform this into my own business?

I want you to visualise a pizza base, which is an excellent medium for adding things onto. Not just tomato sauce and cheese, which adds value anyway in creating a Margerita, but all the extra toppings which make the pizza individual and appropriate for its consumer. You can add many different toppings to enhance the product, and its the combination of these when added together creates the final effect.

What if your blog was just a Margerita, serviceable on its own, but a bit boring? OK, it tastes nice, and it seems to do well, but do you think extra features would help?

Consider mushrooms as a link to other websites, peppers as a link to your newsletter signup page, chillis in the form of your picture, olives as RSS feed options, anchovies linking to your categories and tags, pepperoni as your social networking links, pineapple for your recent visitors and tuna to show past comments.

As long as all these ingredients are your favourites, it doesn’t matter if you put them all on at once! Although they all have an individual purpose, explore combining these tastes to see what effect they have. Test and measure the responses. Rearrange the positioning to highlight specific items. Work with your widgets!

But don’t forget the tomato and cheese, which should relate to the blog posts, as these are the mainstay of your pizza. Good quality and value should always be on the menu.

How does this relate to upselling? ‘How to beautify your blog’ offers a series of packages that can be added to the main staple, the blog itself. Investigate this concept and give me feedback – does this sort of thing appeal to you? More ingredients cooking away are advice on exiting posts and how to write them effectively, plus all the other marketing elements of blogs I am researching into. Should be the making of the most fantastic pizzas (sorry, blogs) ever!

My 2009 blogsites and newsletters

There are several new ventures I will be undertaking in 2009, and one of them will be my new blogsite.

A blogsite is a hosted blog. A blogsite is not free like this blog, it has an individual URL and has to be web-hosted. One difference between a blogsite and a website is not only the special programming used, but the way it is treated by the search engines. Spiders are trained to visit websites depending on how frequently the content is updated, and visits can range from days to weeks. But a blogsite, which looks like a website, is treated like a blog, so the spiders visit hourly or even less, especially if there is lots of new stuff for them to feed on.

Another reason why I want to create a blogsite is because I believe in visitor interaction. Using Web2.0, I want to create a social network within my blogsite, with comments in the blog section, suggestions in the forum, submissions into the directory, and lots of valuable information to help you in your businesses.

Now none of you will know of my developments and how they are coming along unless you join up to my newsletter. As part of my community, you will be the first to know of the birth of my new ventures, be offered discounts on my marketing packages and special deals if you find new followers or clients, as well as keeping one step ahead of everybody else.

Interested? Then join up now to my newsletter from my website, to find out the best way to combine design with marketing to make your promotional literature start to make you money! Go on, join up now!

What goes into a newsletter?

When you write about a specific subject in your newsletter, the best way is to break it down into its basic components, and explain it simply using everyday language. This exercise is more difficult than it sounds, because the idea is to make it not only interesting, but to appeal to as many readers as possible to gain their trust and form relationships with them. By breaking down a subject, it will then lend itself to a number of other subjects which will become fodder for future articles.

Do a postcard campaign to gain interest and increase your readership. This is cheaper than creating a large quantity of the first edition of your newsletter and potentially losing most of them to an uninterested audience. The postcard campaign would have to be run over a series, as in today’s society not everyone responds immediately to information, they may need to be coerced into your way of thinking, seduced into the benefits of your profession, and stimulated by fascinating facts that they may not have thought of before. Sometimes it can take several goes to gain a follower.

Please don’t bore your readers too much about your business (this may sound unkind, but people are notoriously self-centered, and only think in terms of what is in it for them). You could easily explain the various features of your company through the benefits it offers, by writing about successful case studies, funny stories with good endings, witty and entertaining information articles about certain subjects you want to get across, special offers that cannot be resisted, competitions to raise awareness, ‘try before you buy’ offers to get them across your threshold…

Selecting certain pages for particular subjects is a good idea, because if you are going to make your newsletter a regular feature, people will like to look at a particular page first (like as for the local newspaper the sports section, the horoscopes, the letters page, the classified ads, for example) before reading the remainder of the newsletter. Keeping a consistency will help your readers in gaining confidence, and they will then look forward to the next issue. It’s like a supermarket that always has its basics like milk and bread, but the way there will offer all sorts of more provocative products to entice their interest.

But it is all very well giving them all this wonderful information if you don’t get anything in return. The idea is to get more people to try what your organisation has to offer. Therefore you must provide special offers that have a time dependent call to action. These must be worth the reader’s while, maybe even a lost leader to get them to sample what you have to offer them. Usually if you do a really good job, it will sell itself and you will get more customers. I say time dependent because if you leave it open ended, the lack of urgency will disappear from their busy minds and the opportunity will be lost or forgotten.

Why not create a blog as an archive medium for all the really important or successful features and articles of your newsletter. Because it is a blog, it would be frequently visited by the ‘internet spiders’ compared to that of a website, which can wait weeks for a visitation. The more frequent the postings, the more often the spiders visit. These postings could have links to your website or any other internet based information, which again would raise awareness and click value of your website, because it is not only spiders who roam the web and click on links but people too.

Create a sign-up form on the homepage of your website to increase your newsletter membership. You could have past copies in pdf form on the newsletter page, which readers could download if they’ve lost their original copy, or interested future subscribers to see what it is like. Again the spiders trawl the pdfs, so more info is passed onto the internet, encouraging more visits to your website, blog and sign up forms, especially if you include web links in the newsletter.

Get noticed above your competitors

Today I met a office furniture company while out networking. They were an established foreign firm who were looking to expand into Europe and the UK, and had formed a Reading branch. The sales rep was out networking around various groups to tout her wares, which included a well designed brochure sporting the clean, simple lines her furniture was valued for.

Now there are plenty of other office furniture businesses in Reading, so how could she get her company’s reputation levitated above the rest? I suggested she should first collect some testimonials of satisfied clients, and also statements of successful return on investments, such as how the lives of their workforce had been improved through a better environment, increased their sales because of the ambience and quality of their premises had impressed prospective clients, and the efficiency of layout of furniture had made the processing and resourcefulness of their business that much easier.

How to get all this information out to the public? Well, take this newly resourced material and use it in  articles, press releases, blogs, newsletters, speaking events, direct mail… just to get your concept out there. Keep the same clean, simple style as the company’s branding, in both presentation and writing style, to promote your branch effectively. All this can be accommodated in both a paper format and the web, as combining the two can produce very powerful results. Using all the technology resources to best effect can have quite an impact on your business’s success and sales…

Want to know more? Then go ask Alice!

What advantages are there in a blogsite?

Most of us understand the concept of a blog: an on-line diary that is either used for personal reasons or to promote a business. It is an excellent tool for SEO (search engine optimisation) and to bring more traffic to your website and other on-line media, and allows you to explore, explain and express yourself and your business in a way that is not possible on a website. Multiple posting regularly each week will keep the spiders and search engines busy, and your audience will learn to expect frequent missives from you to learn the latest idea or share your successes and secrets, as well as receive advance notice of any events your are organising, be party to special offers that are available and be kept in the link of how your business is progressing. It’s almost as if your readers have a privileged toe-hold that the rest of the world is missing out on.

Now a blogsite combines the flexibility of the blog and its ability for frequent updates, immediate SEO and access onto other people’s PCs through RSS feeds, with the static backdrop of a website, including fixed information pages, a culture media for e-commerce systems, and the comfort of a navigable and visual brochure status through the world wide web. Your URL can be adapted for SEO and pay-per-click, your blog headlines are stuffed full of keywords combined with relevant tags, and you can take advantage of Web 2.0 for visitor interaction, as well as gathering their contact details to invite them to join your newsletter. All good stuff for generating leads and traffic.

Now another advantage of a blogsite is that it allows the owner to edit and add to contents without the need of a web designer.  Apologies to all those web designers out there, but not everyone wants to pay through the nose to change their text, create new pages, add pictures and frequently update their website to keep the SEO active. I consider myself privileged to be able to change my website at a drop of a hat, but this advantage is not available to all, especially if you’re not ‘techy’.  The beauty of a blogsite is that it is relatively easy to change the contents once it is set up, and posting up blogs is as easy as pie. Just think of the flexibility of adapting your on-line presence to whatever you want, whenever you want.

Have you considered a blogsite?

Wouldn’t it be nice to have a website that achieves almost immediate recognition from search engines and benefits from frequent updates that are achievable by you and not a web-designer?

This is all possible from a ‘blogsite’, a combination of a website and a blog from WordPress, the blog provider I use for my own blog here, but the difference is that a blogsite needs to be hosted and is obtainable from wordpress.org, not like my free blog from wordpress.com.

Think of it as a blog with static pages like a website.  Once main advantage is that these static pages can include shopping carts and other e-commerce activities, something the blog-police disallow on free blogs. It uses an ordinary URL like a website, unlike my blog URL which has to include wordpress within it. Each post has a permalink that contains more beneficial SEO qualities, and is not over-long with the date, category, abbreviated blog title and other unnecessary information.

Because a blogsite has a blog incorporated within it, it is picked up by the search engines within hours, unlike an updated website which can take weeks.  Having such immediate recognition helps towards building up your relationship with your clients, and yes, you can include autoresponder forms for your newsletters too. All this is, of course, enhanced by frequent blog posting, as this keeps the spiders happy and all those lovely contextual links get to work on your other websites and internet activities.

And of course the blog part takes advantage of getting more traffic through integrating with Web 2.0, the new phase the internet is going through which includes encouraging web interaction with visitors. Stuff your articles with keywords and tags, not only in the content but more importantly in the headlines as well, and keep everything short and sweet yet provocative to encourage comments, feedback and suggestions. Frequent visitor interaction enhances SEO, especially when it is of value.

Kicking into Touch

I am always pleased when I come across great design, especially when it’s an upgrade from an existing product. I would like to draw attention to Karen Skidmore’s Kick-Ass Blog, which has been most successfully redesigned by Claire Raikes of the Business Blog Angel. I particularly like the snazzy logo-links that direct the reader to other parts of Karen’s website, large, bright, bold and very inviting – you just want to click on them to see where they go.

Having just totally redesigned my own website, it now looks very bland compared to Karen’s blog. I’ve noticed other sites with brightly coloured links that entice you to take action – you certainly can’t miss them and curiosity always wins in the end. Another ingenious way to get your customers past the index page!