Keeping Up with the Community

online community[This is a guest post from Amy G. Howard, Founder of Raleigh Special Tonight. Follow her at @amgenove.]

Running a hyper-local website about daily specials can be quite grueling. In order to keep readers, you need to update at least once a day, or people will stop visiting your site. Raleigh Specials Tonight averages about 600-800 hits per week and 50% of that traffic is returning. I have very loyal readers and I am grateful for that, but I know I need to keep coming with the content if I want it to stay that way.

Where do I find daily content for my site every day? When I first started the site about a year ago, it was tough. I had to seek the information myself by going to individual restaurant websites. I still do that occasionally, but here are some tools I use to keep up with my community so I always have fresh content:

4 Tips for a Successful Email Newsletter

mailchimp logoThrough LinkedIn (find me at http://www.linkedin.com/in/ddavila) and Twitter (@idaconcpts), I receive a lot of questions about marketing and web analytics.

By far, most business owners and marketing consultants have questions regarding how to get started with their email newsletter campaigns.

Often I direct them to these 4 Steps to Get Started on Email Marketing. Once email marketing practitioners have a solid foundation and have mastered the basics, then we can start talking about content creation.

Here are 4 tips on content creation for a succesful email newsletter and how 4 companies (Facebook, Shutterfly, Bing and Evernote) implement these tips.

Continue reading 4 Tips for a Successful Email Newsletter

e-Mail Marketing: Template vs Plain Text

e-mail marketing template vs text[This is a guest post from Zachary Zawarski of Zadling, a Google Apps Consultant]

Two email newsletters that I signed up for were Mike Michalowicz and Brian Tracy’s newsletters. Most of you probably know Brian Tracy, a self-help author who mostly helps salespeople. Mike Michalowicz, who might be slightly less known than Brian Tracy, but still immensely popular as you may have seen him on MSNBC or CNBC, is the man behind The Toilet Paper Entrepreneur. Being an entrepreneur myself, I set out to gain some resources that would help me increase my own sales, so I subscribed to each of their newsletters.Like I discussed in my last guest blog, email marketing is all about constantly providing your subscribers with value and not constantly bombarding them with your sales message because they’ll quickly unsubscribe if all they’re seeing is sales copy rehashed week after week.

Both Mike and Brian have very different email styles. Brian Tracy has a template design. The email is formatted nicely with various images and colors and with a footer full of resources such as links to his website and links to his Facebook and Twitter pages.  Mike, on the other hand, uses no images or color at all — just plain text.

So who do you think has a better and more effective email marketing campaign?

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