Coinciding Your Email Campaigns with Major News

Contributed by Heather Maloney .   Heather Maloney, Founder of Contact Point IT Services and eNudge.com.au, has a Master in Technology (Information Technology) majoring in the web, and has over 16 years experience in the IT industry, most of which has been focused on delivering business benefits via the use of internet related technologies.

Heather Maloney has written 8 article(s) for us.

Visit http://www.contactpoint.com.au

And Then There Were Lists …

The now well recognised Twitter Lists feature is a great way to organise the people you’re following on Twitter, or find new people. In reality these lists are actually Twitter’s version of a ‘groups’ feature, offering an easy way to cluster other users on Twitter into groups allowing you to get an overarching view of what they are up to without having to filter through your vast followers list or visiting each and every profile.

Lists are not just static listings of users, rather compilations of feeds from a specified set of users that you choose. What this means is that you can create a live feeding snapshot of the tweets from your users by viewing a specific list’s page. Lists are a great way of organising the people you are following into topic based groups. Lists also have the great benefit of allowing you to include people who you are not following! Read the rest…

Database Management: Does Size Matter?

When I’m talking to people who are considering starting up a regular e-newsletter, I often ask “how many contacts do you have in your client database?” [I ask this question as it relates to the pricing of my services]. The response is very often almost an apology such as “oh, I only have a few hundred, but I intend to increase it”.

I would like to say here and now, there is no shame in a list of ‘only a few hundred’, and the size of your list should not delay you in starting your regular email newsletter.

An email campaign to the 200 person list, where every one of those 200 people personally know the business owner and the services they are providing, could deliver a much better response rate than the same campaign to a list of 2,000 people who subscribed to a list ‘accidentally’ or ‘by default’ and have never used the business’s services. Read the rest…

Business Know How: The Social Media Mix

If someone says spider and you reach for your thongs…  If you consider web presence to be something you send to a friend via email for their birthday…   If you still think tweeting is a sound that birds make…  Then you need to get online more! With so many new social media sites (Facebook), ecommerce platforms (eBay), media (Source Bottle) and article banks (Free Sticky) popping up, navigating the World Wide Web is becoming a mammoth task for business owners everywhere! Read the rest…

Get the LinkedIn Advantage

Unlike Facebook and Twitter where you can mix personal with professional, LinkedIn is specifically for business and professionals. There are over 25 million registered users from virtually every industry and profession. LinkedIn is a nonintrusive way of staying in touch with business contacts. And even better, it’s an easy entry point for small businesses looking to get into social media because it doesn’t take much time and it’s pretty easy to use. Read the rest…

The Top 3 Mistakes Most People Make When Writing For The Web

Writing for the web is similar to writing for any other medium but it does have some unique protocols that must be followed. This article outlines the 3 big mistakes business owners make when writing website copy and how to avoid them. Read the rest…

Social Media Rules Of Engagement

Since social media has exploded onto the scene, a new set of cultural rules has emerged to accommodate each tool and it sometimes can feel like there is a secret handshake to gain access that no-one told you about!

Firstly, it is important to understand that all social mediums were not created equal! Socialising approaches are different for each channel, for example, I would not post on my Blog in the same tone that I Tweet, and I would utilise a different approach when updating my Facebook page in comparison to updating my LinkedIn account. Read the rest…

TweetMeme is Good Good for Business!

Since Twitter has reared its popular head around the web, there seem to be more chicklets (A chicklet is a feed button that normally contains a feed reader logo and has a specific blog or feed information attached to it. It is coded to easily allow users to subscribe to a feed), plug-ins , buttons and widgets than you can poke a stick at! One in particular that you may have noticed popping up on many a blog or website is the ReTweet button! Read the rest…

Save Time by Using RSS Feeds

Do you start your morning by visiting numerous websites to find the latest information and updates? Do you find it annoying trying to remember lots of different log in names, user names and passwords? RSS feeds can help you eliminate this time consuming process.

So what is RSS anyway?
RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary. In its simplest form RSS can be described as a list of a web site’s new or updated content. It is a format for delivering regularly changing web content straight to your email inbox. Read the rest…

Blogging- The Essential Marketing Tool

You are reading a business style blog right now -  but have you thought about creating one for your business? Blogs create marketing opportunities that allow businesses to interact with customers like never before. As the blog has evolved - and because it is an interactive medium where readers can comment on the articles, or ‘posts’  - businesses have embraced the blogs ability to build rapport with customers and humanise the business. Read the rest…