Lifeline Blog

A local Brantford Golf Course, Fescue’s Edge, has contracted Lifeline Design to redesign their website.

Even in the age of Web2.0, email campaigns are still being used to get the word out there. However, as the trend moves towards mobile and social media, your email efforts should blend smoothly in the marketing mix. Here are some tips that will help you stay on top of the competition.

Offer relevant content

Content was and always will be very important. Send your readers PDF white papers, MP3 and video courses and, in general, anything that will cater to their interests and bring an added value. In other words, you are to give them reasons why they should stay subscribed. Not all media can be embedded in an email, but one of the purposes of email campaigns is to generate click-throughs. Send them to a download link on your site where the content can be accessed.

If your blog or service isn’t laser-targeted on a certain niche, you may want to segment your list and deliver a personalized message that focuses on your readers’ specific interests. For instance, if you run a general news site you may have readers who are solely interested in Business and Technology and don’t care about your Politics section.

Review your design periodically

Your HTML newsletter shouldn’t just reflect your company brand and values, but also present content in an intuitive and easy to follow manner. The design of your email should be in line with common usability principles: important content and eye-catching phrases go at the top, legal disclaimers and unsubscribe information at the bottom and so on. Don’t mix and match, there is not much room for innovation here. However, you should audit your design every once in a while and see if it follows industry trends.

Co-ordinate your email campaigns with your marketing strategy

While the main website should be the centerpiece of your marketing efforts, it’s alright to promote your other Internet presences. Your newsletter should encourage your readers to join your Facebook page and to follow you on Twitter. As long as you promote engagement and encourage readers to join in conversations, things should be alright.

Use reliable delivery services

If your emails don’t reach the mailbox then all your marketing efforts are useless. It doesn’t matter how well designed your newsletter is or how specially crafted a message you designed – it’s all useless if the email is flagged as spam. Use a reliable email service provider or stay away from email marketing altogether.

The art of emailing is evolving and you should keep up with the new trends. Do it properly and you will reap the benefits.

So you’ve built up your site, filled it with very good content, built a few quality incoming links and still haven’t had a visit from Google? If that’s the case, then something may be wrong.

Before we get started, we are talking about your site not being indexed at all (i.e. the query “site:yoursite.com” in Google yields no results) as opposed to not ranking for your designated keywords. Ranking depends on a whole lot of factors and there might be certain keywords where you hardly have a shot at being in the top 10 results in your lifetime.

Misconfigured robots.txt

Some popular CMS’es have a Disallow: * directive in the robots.txt when you first install them, and you will have to switch it off manually. Having a bare-bone site or default installation show up in Google results is equated by some with being caught with your pants down – it’s not wise to allow spiders to crawl your site until you are ready to launch it to the public. Make sure your robots.txt allows crawlers in – this is one of the most common reasons why no spider visits your page.

Banned domain

If you have purchased the domain from an online marketplace (“a man in a white van”) as opposed to having registered it yourself, it could be that the domain has been previously banned by Google. Since the ownership has changed, you can have the name cleared out. Log in to Google Webmasters Tool, authenticate your site and follow the steps to request a reconsideration.

You just need to wait a bit longer

Depending on the amount of incoming links you have built, it can take spiders up to a week to visit your site for the first time. Don’t freak out if your site didn’t get indexed within the first 12 hours. You may start panicking if you don’t see any results in two weeks or more.

Way too many pages

Putting up way too many pages from the very beginning can lead spiders into believing you are a spammer. And it makes sense if you think about it, who builds a site with a million pages and launches it all of a sudden? Pages should be built gradually, more than a few thousand of them overnight is probably too much.

Flash or Javascript links

Even though Google is known to be able to crawl Flash links, don’t rely on it. Make sure you provide a text-only version of your site – at least while it’s still brand new and you need spiders to get a good grasp on what it’s about. Same goes for Javascript-only links, as well as Java or Silverlight plugins.

The above are probably the most common reasons why your website doesn’t get indexed within a reasonable time. Under normal circumstances it shouldn’t take more than a few days until you get at least the front page spidered so wait a little while before you start to worry.

The fact that blog comments can be a great way to get visitors, build branding and awareness and improve your site’s rankings should be a well-known fact. Dave posted a great article on the how to ethically comment on blogs last year; here are a few more tips.

Use a real photo

If you haven’t already done it, get a Gravatar account and upload a picture. To build trust and credibility, don’t use a cartoon, stylized picture or company logo. People want to know who they are talking to and associate the name or nickname with a face. Since avatars are usually very small in size (40 by 40 pixels), a headshot photo is highly preferred.

Have your profile link point to the right place

Linking to an irrelevant site may seem like spam and your comment may be removed, no matter how insightful it is. If you comment on an automotive site it’s not okay to link to bestflowerstore.com. If your link is a completely off-topic link to an About Us or Bio page, that’s not okay. Though if you comment as Bob Smith, linking to bestflowerstore.com/about-bob might pass moderation.

It’s alright to promote your content

… just don’t go overboard with it. Your own links placed inside the comment are alright as long as they are highly relevant to the context and are meant to support your ideas. It is common sense to use only one link if it’s on a site you control and not more than two or three for other sites. Yes, you can link three times to Wikipedia and no, a comment like “Nice post, I’ve also written about it on my blog: INSERT LINK HERE” is not alright.

One liners are sometimes alright

If you enjoyed a blog post, it’s considered common courtesy to thank the author. In this case, your comment doesn’t necessarily have to bring more knowledge to the discussion. Just don’t be really brief – explain what exactly you enjoyed about the article and if it’s the case, how it has helped you (Given you better insight on a certain topic, saved you $, etc.). Bloggers enjoy a friendly pat on the back, but make sure you give a few arguments.

All in all, you should use common sense when commenting on other blogs. Put yourself in the owner or moderators’ shoes: if you would approve a post like yours on your blog, then it’s alright to hit the Submit button.

Your social media profiles allow multi-channel communication: you put your message through but might get some unwanted noise when your subscribers engage in conversations. With emails however, the contact is more intimate, you can address your visitors privately. The message is to be seen by their eyes only. Social media and email marketing work differently, so you should try to get the best out of the mix. Here are some do’s and don’ts of combining email marketing with your social media strategies.

Don’t be redundant

A lot of companies start a Twitter account, a Facebook profile, put up a mailing list then share the exact same bits of information across all media. Give your visitors reasons why they should subscribe to each of your platforms. If you post an article on your blog, copy/paste it to your Facebook, email it to your subscribers and link to it from Twitter then you might get some extra exposure but it won’t help users who are in your mailing list and follow you on any of the social platforms.

Give your visitors a way to instantly engage in an activity

Focus on engagement rather than simply putting a message through. People read email more often than they log on to social media profiles, so backing up your social media campaigns with a few cleverly designed emails might do magic in terms of subscribers base. You don’t have to post all-new content in your newsletters (even though it would be nice if you could). Post snippets of your best performing articles and link back to the originals. Tease your readers and ask them to perform a certain action. Email them and ask to get a conversation started.

Get the snowball rolling

Use your email list to build awareness, invite your subscribers to visit your social media profiles, then use your Facebook and Twitter to get more subscribers to your email list. Tweet about your mailing list and email about your posts on Facebook. Use the multiple channels to build more buzz around your business, but remember not to be redundant.

Use the right technology

You will need to track goals. Just as you track conversions on your social media campaigns (you do track them, right?) don’t just send the newsletters out in thin air and hope for results. Monitor your campaigns: see how many people opened the email and how many of them clicked through your links. Remember to monitor demographics if it’s important for your goals.

Social media and email marketing is not a matter of either-or. Combine both and you will get the best out of both worlds.

So you have a hosting account and a domain name. The nameservers have propagated and it’s high time you did something with all of it.

Setup WordPress (many hosts, like us, offer a one click install), install some plugins and start adding content. While it’s not absolutely necessary to have magazine-style writing skills (after all, not everybody is a journalist), you do need to make sure your content is readable. If you aren’t a native English speaker you might want to outsource the writing tasks – you can find tons of people who can write insightful articles for as little as 1-2 dollars per hundred words. Make sure to apply all the on-page factors you have learned so far. Then move on to off-page SEO. We have an ongoing series of articles on good and bad link building methods, read part I here and part II here.

At this stage, you might want to invest a bit in a SERPs tracking tool. It’s not mandatory, your free version of SEO Spyglass can still be useful but it’s limitations may become annoying. Alternatively, you can have a look at SEO Panel. It’s open source, free, and you can install it on your hosting account.

Again, document each step. Keep a log of what you did every day,  it will help you analyze what went wrong and keep you from procrastinating. Work on your new site every day. Add 1-2 articles and build links on a daily basis.

You might run into programs that will automate your tasks. While I don’t necessarily condone such practices – particularly since most of them are on the edge of black hat marketing – here are some notes you should keep in mind:

• I would strongly advise against automating anything at this step. You are here to learn how the system works. Don’t use any tools where you click a button and everything gets done automagically. It’s like cheating all your way through college – you get a degree at the end but you can’t use it anywhere. No one will hire you because you don’t know anything.
• Not all automation tools are black hat. There is nothing wrong with using Roboform or writing your own Greasemonkey scripts to fill out registration forms at social bookmarking sites.
• A lot of tools, on the other hand, can do more harm than good if you use them recklessly – that is, you have no idea what you are doing. You can end up spamming certain keywords and devaluing a page you spent weeks building. There are many “horror stories” of webmasters who lost top positions for competitive keywords because they pushed the wrong buttons.
• Last but not least, these tools tend to cost a lot of money. If you aren’t pulling any revenue off your new site you shouldn’t spend thousands for tools you may have no use for.

That’s about it. SEO is not rocket science, anyone can rank for mildly competitive keywords with some work and dedication. Where there’s a will, there’s a way.

The title of your article plays a huge role in your visitors decision to read what you have to say. It should compel your readers to stop whatever they were doing and read your article. Here are some examples of titles that can make your article fail miserably.

Too good to be true

If your title reads “How I made $397,500 in seven days” it will probably be laughed at, to say the least. Everyone knows that you didn’t, you know that you didn’t, and it looks like spam.  Simply put: don’t do it. You don’t want to make claims that are obviously false, and don’t take your readers for fools.

A mile-long title

“With the wealth of the xyz on today’s market, it’s sometimes hard to” … Hello? Paragraphs are meant to be placed in the body, not in the title. If you have some huge chunk of text to be placed on the very top of your article, use a sub-heading. Search engines “read” around 70 characters from your title, so you should at least try to follow their guidelines. You are on the safe side with a little more than 60. (If you are keen on technicalities, Google shows 69 characters from your titles, Yahoo can read up to 72 and Bing 65).

On the flip side, don’t be overly stingy with your title. “Diet” or “Make money” are way too short to provide any information as to what the article is actually about, so they won’t draw any attention. A very short title may be alright only if it’s somewhat provocative, funny or absurd. “Mindreading Explained”, “Monkey knows” or “SEO is evil” might do the trick.

Off-topic titles

Let’s say you run a blog on your pizza delivery website. It’s not appropriate to post an article titled “College cuts scholarships” even though you are going to talk about something that impacted your business. If you lost some clients because students could no longer afford to order pizza from your service and you want to blog about it, call your article something in the line of “College budget cuts affect pizza deliveries”.

Childish formatting

Keep headings like “L@@K!” or “>>WOW!<<” to eBay listings. AlTeRnAtInG letters in your title are also a no-no, unless you are 12 and want to impress your colleagues with your “cool” blog. Don’t use special characters in your titles to draw attention, you will be regarded as unprofessional.

Keyword stuffed titles

Would you read an article titled “Best Ice Cream – Learn How To Make The Best Ice Cream from The Best Ice Cream Makers | Ice Cream Blog”? Neither would I. Even though you might get some benefits from Google, remember that spiders don’t have credit cards. You don’t get any benefit from pages that rank high in search engine results if no one (human) reads them.

All in all, use common sense when writing the title of your article. Put yourself in the shoes of your reader and see if you would read it.

Social media is a hot trend these days and if used properly, can be the equivalent of printing money. However, a lot of people stumble. They launch campaigns (sometimes with great fanfare) and fail miserably. Here are some of the reasons why your social media campaign failed.

You didn’t track anything

If you sent your message out into the wild and waited for the sales to roll in without monitoring clicks, channels or impressions then you got the whole idea wrong. Even with traditional offline marketing you can monitor how many billboards you have posted across town or how many flyers you handed out in the subway – why wouldn’t you make use of the tracking tools that social media offers? If you haven’t monitored anything you can’t diagnose your campaign, you can’t see what went wrong and why.

You thought you could do social media in ten minutes a day

Social media campaigns are like marriages. You probably won’t pull it through if you only talk to your other half for ten minutes every day.

You didn’t capture leads

A lot of visitors who get on your landing page won’t buy your product. In fact, a huge majority won’t. In terms of conversion rates, anything over 10% is very high, no matter what you are selling (Unless, of course, you are offering free gold nuggets and you actually deliver them. But even then, your conversion rate won’t be close to 100%). This doesn’t mean that you can’t “re-use” visits who didn’t convert. Capture their email addresses or ask them to join your Facebook page and follow up later. They didn’t buy your weight loss product? That could be because they are in top shape or they thought it was too expensive. Sell them a subscription to a gym. Offer them a cheaper product or explain why the first one was well worth the price.

You didn’t set clear objectives

I’ve seen a lot of companies create a Facebook page or a Twitter account without a clear goal in mind. The “build it and they will come” paradigm might work with social media, but you need to define some objectives. Do you want more buzz around your brand? Want to drive more traffic to your sales pages? See how the market would welcome a new product? What’s the point?

You didn’t use the right platform

LinkedIn is probably not the best place to advertise your new pizza delivery service, nor is MySpace a good place to post your resume. Use a variety of platforms and see which one works best for your campaign. Split test your message.

Your target was wrong

It’s difficult to market luxury cars to teenagers. If the results of your campaign weren’t as expected, you might want to check if you addressed the right demographics. A lot of social media platforms allow you to track information like age group, location, gender or personal interests. Make sure you use these features!

Dear Restaurants,

It’s your friend Dave here. I just wanted to let you know how much my wife and I appreciate you being there for us when we’ve both had a really long day, and/or week, and we don’t want to cook.  It’s been really helpful! I don’t want to seem ungrateful, but we’ve noticed something  that you frequently do which seemed like a cute quirk at first, but over the years it’s become a bit annoying.

Truth be told, we know we’re not the only ones… in fact a lot of your friends have been talking about it behind your back.  I know this may not be the easiest thing to talk about, but someone needs to tell you so that we can break the cycle. Please, I beg you, stop using PDF files for listing your menus on your websites! I’m not knocking the technology, it’s great when used in the proper context. This is certainly not it.

Why you might be using PDF Menus:

• It’s a lot easier, as you can usually just use your existing menu files to export a PDF
• You don’t know what a PDF is, and your webmaster did it. (If you click on the menu and it takes a while to load and you don’t see your website anymore, then it’s probably a PDF)
• You are far too busy, and would like less people to come eat at your restaurant
• ???

Why you shouldn’t be using PDF Menus:

• They take a lot longer to load than a menu set up in your website would. The Internet has made us all impatient. At best your potential customer will be annoyed by the wait, at worst they will give up and go on to the next site.
• They can be frustrating. If you don’t use it often, your pdf reader may need an update.  Even today the most popular browsers can have difficulty with pdf plug-ins, resulting in browser hangs or crashes.
• They are less useful.  Having an entire menu to look at, or multiple menus, may work when you’ve decided on a restaurant and blocked off the next hour to eat.  When you’re trying to find a place to eat, you want to compare options and prices.  Having to scroll through pdf menus in multiple tabs or windows to find the things you’re interested is time-consuming and frustrating.

I know what you’re thinking, “So what Dave? My regular customers love me, and will put up with the wait!”  You’re probably right about that, but your regular customers probably don’t even visit your website, as they already know all about you. The focus of your website should be on showing and telling new potential customers about your restaurant, how great it is and hopefully converting them into new regular customers.

The two most important pieces of information for a new potential customer are going to be the menu, followed by the location. If customers are irritated when loading the most basic information, and that’s the first experience they have with your business, you are starting off on the wrong foot. Despite what we want to tell ourselves, first impressions do matter and it’s difficult to overcome a poor first impression.

I know it’s not easy guys, it’s more time consuming and complicated and just all around harder to do it the right way, but let’s face it: the most worthwhile pursuits in life usually aren’t easy. Also, I just happen to work here at Lifeline, so we can help you if you’re stuck!

If you have just sent out your very first email campaign, you might see some metrics that just don’t add up as they should. You might get complaints that the email only displayed some gibberish or get lots of unsubscribe requests.  It’s okay, even the pros have flunked their first mail-out. It’s important to understand why things didn’t work as they should, here are the most common mistakes you might have committed.

Broken CSS

While it’s perfectly alright to use CSS with emails, your code has to be structured a bit differently when you want the HTML to be rendered by an email client. First of all, using inline CSS is safest and should be fool-proof. If you really have to embed your stylesheet, place the code inside the BODY tag instead of HEAD like you would normally. Web designers out there will call this outrageous, but it has to be done this way no matter how terrible it may sound: email clients and web-based email services often strip out the HEAD tag in HTML emails to keep your code from interfering with theirs.

The email gets delivered to the junk folder

While there may be a plethora of reasons why your email gets flagged as spam, here are a few tips that are under your control:

• Did you use a “spammy” phrase? Words like “FREE” in the subject, or excessive use of aggressive call to action lines (“Buy it now”, “Limited offer” etc) can get your emails flagged. Read more on how spam filters work here and here, then go back and make the necessary modifications.
• As funny as it may sound, getting delivered to junk happens a lot due to the fact that you put “Test”, “Testing” or “This is a test” in the Subject line. Yes, email filters flag that as a spam.
• Your company filters don’t “like” the sender. It could be that your ESP has been blacklisted either by your company filters or some spam monitoring agency your company works with. Contact them and ask what’s going on.

Emails not being delivered to the mailbox is one of the key reasons why people switch to reputable email service providers rather than doing the emailing in-house. If you run into this issue again and are fairly certain it’s not your fault, consider switching to another provider.

That certain super-duper thing doesn’t work

Flash objects, sounds, videos or ActiveX components won’t work in emails. Don’t even try it. Just because it worked as it should in your WYSIWYG editor it doesn’t mean it will function well in Outlook, Thunderbird or a web-based email service. If you really have to do it and/or are sure it will work, at least design it to fail gracefully – display some neat error message or an HTML-only alternative rather than spitting out some nasty error codes or even worse, breaking the whole design.

These are some of the technicalities that you may fail at in your first email campaign. Learn from the mistake and try again.