A Newsletter by SAM about using your website.

SAM

January 2009

1. Web Newsletter - Setup for Print

2009-01-07 17:48:35

For two important reasons, informative well-written newsletters should be stored on your website. First, their content appeals to search engines and will elevate your site's ranking. Second, storing your company's news gives a broader, accessible picture of you and your company to website visitors. Once you have committed to creating a customer-friendly newsletter, a few suggestions will make it easier for you to create newsletters and for your customers and website visitors to access.

I believe a good newsletter can work hand in hand with a blog. Short, informative blogs spur interest in you and your services by creating a following of readers and visitors. But, use your blog wisely - write weekly or at least regularly and keep your articles to about 300 words. These articles can then be linked to your website newsletter and collected. You might expand on one of your blogs in your newsletter or add company news. But, by using your weekly blogs, you've created content for your newsletter. Now periodically, perhaps monthly, post your collected blog articles in your newsletter.


Our goal is to print a nice-looking newsletter from your website. If you print the newsletter you are reading now, you'll get a nice looking, clean newsletter. However, generally when printing directly from a website, you also print unwanted text like the navigation bar. Every printer is set up with different settings, so text and images often vary according to those settings. In our newsletter, we have eliminated the navigation bar when printed and the logo will automatically change so it looks good on paper. We can set up your newsletter so that it too will print to look like ours.

Once you've created enough content to fill a newsletter, we suggest you email your customers a link to it. To entice them to click on the link, give a bulleted title list of the articles in the newsletter. Go one step further to capture their attention by writing provocative two or three sentence descriptions of each article. Now when they click on the link you have increased your website traffic as well as provided valuable information. If you have a large list of customers, find an email program on the web. These programs help you get emails to your customers. However, I suggest you do not use the newsletter formats provided by them. They will not increase your website traffic and will not store your newsletters on your website. And, these drawbacks erase the two previously mentioned reasons citing how newsletters benefit your website.

View in your Print Preview to see the difference.



2. The Blog and the Newsletter - Great Partners

2009-01-12 09:14:44

What can a blog do for you and your website? At transNETMedia® LLC, we are committed to creating a weekly blog posting because we know that it increases our website's traffic and ranking in search engines.

First, a blog brings users to our website in a couple of unique ways. If a visitor finds our blog and begins to read the article, he or she must click on more to finish it. That click brings the user right to our website, thus helping to increase our traffic and promote our services. But, the advantages of a blog don't end there. Once at our website, the user might decide that our blog is so interesting she wants to be notified of any new articles we write immediately. So, she looks for the RSS feed on the blog. With this web tool, a user can have all of our latest blog postings sent to a destination RSS Reader. This page could be set up on the user's iGoogle home page or Yahoo home page. Now, every time we post a new blog, within hours the RSS Reader finds it and brings it to the user's Reader page. So now I have increased the frequency and number of searches to my blog as well as website. Personally, I have my favorite blogs update on my iGoogle home page. But I could easily do it on Yahoo, too. Check this out yourself by clicking on the RSS feed or one of the icons near it located on my website where you may already have a home page set up.




Second, writing a blog on a regular basis gives you content for your newsletter. We mentioned this in our last blog, but it is worth repeating. If you write a blog weekly, in four weeks you'll have enough for a monthly newsletter. You can expand on those articles or maybe add other company news about employees or services. Then monthly you can send your followers an email containing a link to your newsletter which resides on your website. Again you've increased your website traffic, but you have also contacted your customers or potential customers in a beneficial way. Good marketing practices encourage businesses to reach out to their customers on a regular basis.

If you want more information on the RSS Feed, click here.



3. Emailing Your Newsletter

2009-01-20 19:21:43

A good email list is a powerful marketing tool for communicating to your clients and potential clients. Email lists can be purchased, but the best email lists are created from your personal interaction with people. These people - ones who have met you face-to-face are more likely to recognize your name and be more receptive to your emails. Every time you are out networking, add the people you meet as new contacts to your list. Also, collecting emails on your site is another way to get to those who have an interest in hearing from you.

To contact your list, use email companies like iContact, Constant Contact and Swiftpage who specialize in sending out information to many contacts at once. They have solved the problems of spam and filters to help you get your message out. Yes, you are storing your email list on their server, but they are also taking responsibility for making sure your email gets to your contacts.



Once you have a good contact list, what do you send? Research shows that users respond to an image in emails, so pick one that fits with your message. Use only one appropriate image as well as a small logo for your branding efforts. When sending an email to someone's work address, be aware that he will probably not take time to read your twelve-page newsletter. He may close it forever. Basically, users will read an inch of email copy. Any more copy will be disregarded. The best option is to have a bulleted list of your newsletter's highlights and then have a link to your newsletter which should be located on your website. Make the bulleted list enticing enough to motivate readers to click on the link. They are not only reading your newsletter, but also visiting your site and increasing your traffic. These reasons should motivate you to create a newsletter on your site; however, we do not recommend using a pdf format for it. Place your newsletter on a separate page in your website because search engines will locate it better, and it is more user friendly. Finally, we can certainly help you create a printable newsletter format.



4. A Web Newsletter

2009-01-28 17:15:52

Creating and publishing a newsletter on the web makes a lot of sense for two good reasons. First, it serves as a source of valuable information for your clients or visitors. Second, it keeps your website content up to date and accessible to search engines.

A well-written, mailed newsletter often ends up in the wastebasket even if its content is relevant and important. But, a web based newsletter can be archived on your website and remains available as a source of information about your company and your expertise. For instance, if you are a computer repair company, your newsletter might provide monthly tips on taking care of your computer. These tips are now stored on your website for your customers convenience.


In addition, if your newsletters contain articles about your company's growth and history, a potential customer can get a complete and credible picture of your company.

More importantly, content makes a website valuable, especially to search engines. Well-organized, easy to read content makes your website valuable. So a newsletter is a way to continue writing and publishing content for your website. Producing a website based newsletter increases your value to your customers and to the search engines.