Bretts Marketing Bytes

Email marketing is an excellent way to get people to buy your stuff if you know how to do it correctly.

Here are some useful tips to making email marketing work for you.

• Use opt-in email lists. This ensures that the people know who you are. If they know you, they will open it. One for sure way to get reported for spam is to send emails to people who don’t know who you are.
• Always personalize an email with the recipients name in the greeting.
• Keep it short and sweet. Some of the best success comes from just talking about one specific piece of information. Trying to cram too much into one email will annoy your readers and they will delete.
• Make it easy to scan. People like to scan an email and get the information that they need quickly. Make sure to use plenty of images and white space to make the layout easy to scan.
• Follow canned spam act of 2003.
• Use a catchy but not spammy subject lines. There are many different methods for writing catchy subject lines.
• Track opens, click-through rate and conversions.

Hope these are helpful. Be on the lookout for an upcoming post about writing catchy subject lines and the email marketing magic formula

twitter is so popular for the same reason that talk radio was such a hit in the 80’s. It is interactive!

As humans we like to have a voice and are sick of  big media giants telling us what to listen to, watch and read.

If you have ever read the book, "How to win friends and influence people " by Dale Carnegie, you know that the whole premise is based on the fact that people love to talk about themselves and want to be heard. It is a natural behavior that is ingrained in us as humans.

twitter gives us the medium in which we can start to act natural again. It allows us to voice our opinions, ideas and views in a way that has never been done on such a mass scale before. Sorry media giants, but you have been telling us what to listen to, watch and read for way too long.  It is our turn.

What does all this mean for business?

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It is easy to see what others are saying about your company on twitter by utilizing a few tools.

Who is responding to you?
To see who is responding to your questions or posts use the "@yourname" link on the right hand side of your screen.  Example: @bburnsworth

What are tweeple saying about your company, product or service?
If you want to monitor the brand of  your company name, product or service, simply use the Twitter Search feature (search.twitter.com) In the search type your name, product or service.

If you want to use this search again at a later date, click on the save search link.

Happy monitoring. Hope this helps.

Social Networking is such a huge part of business these days. However, most companies aren’t sure how to leverage it. This is partly due to their thought process. Business people think in dollars and cents, but with Social Networking you have to think in friends.

"Social Networking is NOT about making money, it’s about making friends or connections."

You should treat it like a networking party that never ends.  Good networkers don’t go to an event and simply pass out their card and ask you to buy their stuff, they become your buddy by sharing thoughts and personal information about themselves. They may even join you for a cocktail or two.  In fact, they may never even bring up business at all. People that are really good at this get you to ask them for their services without ever bringing it up.

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I was recently asked by a company if they should do anything critical before engaging with their web design company to perform SEO. My first response was “What makes you so sure that your web design company knows SEO?” They looked at me with a blank stare.

Believe it or not this is my answer to anyone who uses a web design company to do a marketing job.  My opinion is based on what I have seen in the past few years from web design firms who claim to perform SEO.

“Most web design firms are good at web design, keep it that way!
SEO is a marketing function. Most of the best SEO’s that I know have very little website development experience.”
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Today micro-blogging through twitter is what all the rave is about. It is leapfrogging traditional blogging, and leaving search engine giant Google shaking in their boots. Why are some experts saying that traditional blogging is becoming a favorite past time?

First off, twitter is easier and quicker to distribute content. This makes it much less work than publishing a full blown blog post. Are we getting lazy or what? Even though twitter is easier, faster and can streamline the process of hitting millions of people, it will never replace a full blown blog. Instead it should be thought of as a delicious topping on your blog.

Twitter is a great tool, but because you can only tweet 140 characters, it is difficult to go into any depth on any topic.  However, by creating a link back to a traditional blog, it becomes an extremely useful tool. Many businesses including media and news outlets will benefit from this, creating headliner tweets that pull readers into their traditional blog post. Imagine a future world of tweets.

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Twitter is taking the world by storm right now. Up until a few months ago there weren’t many companies utilizing this tool for business. Now the tables have turned as more and more organizations realize the power of this medium.  Lets take a look at some practical applications

• twitter is quick and easy to write a headline. Use it to promote your blog.
• Use it to attract like minded individuals to share information.
• Position yourself as an expert by giving advice in your industry.
• Answer questions on topics about your industry by utilizing the twitter search feature to find them.
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Hello everyone.

Welcome to my new personal blog. Here you will find cutting edge information on Internet marketing, social media, and blogging. I am very excited as I am using the Wordpress/Joomla integration tool from ‘corephp ‘. I have been using Joomla for a long time now and love the fact that the  two platforms can be integrated. Wordpress is a gem for blogging and Joomla is the cats meow of CMS. Put them together and what do you get? Well… we will see.

Hopefully I made the right choice for my new blog. We will soon find out.