photo by neubie
I’ve been doing some work that means I’ve had to buy a few more email lists lately & mail other people’s lists.
An in-house list is always better than a bought one, but, if you need to buy email lists, here are a few more simple tips to save you money & increase your results…
Keep Reading this entry –»
This is the first in a five-and-a-half part series about content: where to get it, how to get it, plus a few of the pros & cons of each approach.
The easiest way to start getting web content together is to create it yourself: Nothing to organise, no need to communicate your vision to someone else. Here are a few of the good & bad bits of creating your own content:
Top navigation, left & right. Breadcrumbs, headers, footers. We usually think of them all as having only one function: Getting your visitors from A to B.
But - on top of that - really good navigation can help a website achieve some big essential tasks.
While you’re reading the next paragraph, imagine how hard it would be to figure out what to put on the homepage of a company like this:
GE is one of the biggest companies in the world: They’re currently 6th in the ‘Fortune 500′. Their annual tax return is the longest in the Unites States. The company is made up of several ‘groups’, each consisting of dozens of smaller companies. GE has a long history, and was founded by Thomas Edison.
Where would you begin to start? Imagine how complicated the homepage would need to be to get all of that across, to appeal to all of the different types of visitors.
Well - Here’s GE’s current homepage:
So how have they managed to keep it so simple, yet remain useful?
If I visit your website from Australia, is it any different from the website I see if I visit from The USA? Or from England?
That’s only half the question really. The real question is: Could your website perform better if it looked different to visitors from different countries?
A few larger sites understand that they can perform better by speaking differently to visitors from individual countries, and a few of the larger ad networks do too. If you hit the Amazon.com homepage from outside the USA, they ask you politely to visit your local site like this:
The best type of email list is your own: A list made up completely from people who have come to your website said “yes, I like you. sign me up to receive more of this”. However, though that’s always the best type of list, you can get great results from another type: The email list that you buy.
Don’t worry - I’m not advocating going to some back-street broker & hoisting over cash for a list he’s cobbled together by trawling facebook for addresses. There are thousands of reputable companies selling email data. Their lists are usually made up of people who tick those “Yes, I would like to be emailed by carefully selected third parties” boxes.
Buying and emailing this kind of list sounds very simple: Buy the addresses, email them, profit. But in practice there are quite a few pitfalls to avoid. I’ve bought email data myself quite a few times over the years & have learned a lot about the process. I thought I’d share some of the tips with you. I hope these 15 tips save you a bit of pain & save you some money!
Whether you’re running a blog, a shop, a forum, or anything else on the web, you’ve made several hundred decisions to set it up & keep it running. But one big decision that’s often just passed by is the ‘content communication strategy’: You know the type of content you want on the site, but you may not even consider that there are several totally different options for getting that content on there.
In this article we’ll talk about the 4 most common ‘content communication strategies’, with a few pros and cons of each, plus a few examples of sites that use each strategy.
The strategies we’ll talk about are:
Here’s an email I got recently from hmv.com (a CD/DVD store):
Looking at that, they’ve obviously spent time on the creative. It looks ok. It’s very timely. There’s a strong call to action. But it really annoyed me…
‘The Halo Effect’ was popularised by a man called Edward Thorndike in 1920. He’d run a psychological study asking commanding officers how they’d rate their soldiers, & found that the ratings were almost totally polarised: A soldier either had ‘all good’ traits or ‘all bad’ traits. In reality, this was not because the soldiers were all good, or all bad. It was just that commanding officers had a tendency to recognise one particularly good trait (or one particularly bad) & extrapolate that to form their entire view of the soldier. ie. lots of black, lots of white, very little grey.
This is also often quoted as the reason behind those “tall, beautiful people are more likely to succeed” studies: On a rational level, we all recognise there’s no correlation between height/beauty & ability, but on an irrational level there is a correlation between height/beauty & perceived ability. Picture an imaginary successful person in your mind: How tall are they? How good looking?
You often hear people talk about marketing in terms of specific tasks: “we need to work on the marketing” is interchangable in their mind with “we need a brochure & a website”. Sure, in some cases websites & brochures can be used in marketing, but this is focusing on “the means”, not “the ends”. These are just tactics you use within marketing.
So - if marketing is not just the sum of these tactics - what is marketing?
If you are ‘marketing’ something, you’re trying to ‘find, create & keep customers’ for it.
You might find them via word of mouth, or via advertising, or via a scheme to get your website to the top of Google for some relevant term… Keep Reading this entry –»
