Why websites maintain email lists (and perform dark arts)?

We have touched upon the subject of email lists before. Though I regret not maintaining it, I do not do it for the continued reason that:

• I am lazy
• I do not think I have intelligent enough things to say that people want to read every week/fortnight/year

But with my enhanced ability to take BS, I do subscribe to a lot of email lists and have a really good conclusion on why websites (especially internet marketing websites) talk about email lists way more than blogs and forums. First the conclusion: maintaining email lists and pumping them information including product advice, affiliate links, and the likes are like people performing dark arts. Yes, more than a few people fall to the advice to earn some money, and fame to the practitioners. No, there are not a lot of people practicing dark arts for the good of humanity.

I will not harp on the goodness of email lists, that has been done before. But it is equally interesting on how email lists avoid the pitfalls and negatives while you are demonstrating your expertise in a public forum.

• Email lists are private. The reader either opens the email or no, the reader may click on the links or otherwise, and the reader may simply move the damn thing to spam. At the end of the day, this remains private. I am free to claim what I want to claim. I do not have to provide insights into how many returning readers actually come over to the website, what percentage of traffic is from email list subscribers, what percentage of readers are led by my other dark arts, and so on. This is crucial while I am trying to play the expert giving some 'gyan' to the lesser mortals
• Opinions are mostly kept private. Unless someone (like me) erupts in some forum or website, the email responses are private, and kept that way. Strong opinions on emails from the website are neatly sidelined. There is no way to discuss what is there in the list and whether this helps or harms the user. This is a one way water hose, the information from which has to be carefully cross examined elsewhere. Often (as in the case of internet marking software), BS is way way beyond what is reasonable. As a result you may not find any negative opinions for the first five pages of a search engine result. You have to really deep-dive in the topic, visit a lot of internet markets forums and find out by yourself
• You can share silly information and disguise it as a thorough professional quality work. People click on something that is "free for 10 days", "free only for the loyal subscribers of the lists", "free for idiots", look at something that has been rehashed and resold from a totally unrelated story and get satisfied for the day. This especially builds up the opinion provided the subscribers do not know what a feed reader is and do not know what is going on other than what has been provided in online/offline newspapers, Facebook and the great knowledge repository called Twitter. Read here for an example. I totally agree this is needless here (especially while I have singled out the website somewhere else before), but this was just to show the trend.

QuickSprout or not to sprout?

This is another piece of bad advice, so go away. If you intend to stay on, do not believe all that is written here. The original content authors on the mentioned website and related affiliates make a tonne of money, have big-time followers and fans, and are highly successful. I am too small to matter and you can safely disregard the content here. If you are wondering, this is my disclaimer :)

I have mentioned about my liking for the proven ways of internet marketing before. I continue to pursue that interest, partly due to my interest in creating content that I may have an audience for (one day in the not so future, provided there is no skynet). But quicksprout.com did take the cake when I was trying to get it to someone else.

To be fair, the landing page for the website is a really good URL analysis tool.

But what got me really interested was a referral for the course materials from other site. This brought me to this page.

For more than 1.5 MB the page goes on over 39 pages to establish and re-establish one fact - get QuickSprout Traffic System Pro, a product that can help you make whatever you are doing in the internet better than current. All the interesting facets mentioned in my earlier post are here and then some. Start with clear typography, shiny images, good feedback from existing customers and follow it up with clear call to action at least 4 times to buy the product at a fraction of the price that big corporations pay. Nothing wrong with all that - been there, seen that elsewhere, but what got me to write this post was this. When I browsed till the end, I get the following page:

This rattled up me a bit. Not to blame the page - again clear call to action and everything to incentivise action in a few hours. And, not that I was going to buy all the materials that can make me some good money and popularize this "not so good", "D rated" (both at the time of this post) website of mine. I was just overcome with emotion for the poor jerks who would have said "you had me at 'income-boosting'", and went ahead with the purchase of the goodies. 

I still have a way lot of things to learn folks, but I can never learn how to give discounts on my 'expertise' at the nick of time. Or may be I will do sometime in the future - stay tuned.

Do not trust all experts and their tools on internet marketing

Well, I kind of think what I am trying to do here. technosanct was a blog built for some knowledge sharing - the small amounts of which I gain when looking out for solutions for my problems, but equally important - I wanted to check how affiliate marketing (the real mindless ones too) work and whether with my writing skills I have some kind of future somewhere in the near term. So, content here not only includes whatever I find useful for internet, technology and blogging that I come across on my own, but also material I source from my hours of deliberate browsing of the internet to check what others are doing, whether it cuts down on time/money, gains me 100k fans or more. This includes getting advice from bloggers who have apparently been successful, or really successful, or on the verge of being successful. Some of this advice is free, some of them paid and a lot of them promise tools to bring me out of current misery. Sadly search engines or people do not want to go to people who did not quite make it after a lot of writing, key word researching and after some money spent on the experts/expert materials/the like. So as a upcoming (gulp!) blogger, I am lending a hand and giving out advice - get some real advice on internet marketing. All for free, and without scary, shiny buttons in the way. And oh, all in text on this post (and a few others) with no plans to ebookify or podcastify the content.

courtesy: designseoblog

What I discovered in my quest in the past 2-3 months (which does not make me an expert whatsoever) are these:

• Experts in Internet Marketing always link to other experts, not all naturally and not in the way that comes in the way as advertisement. It may be a nudge to the other blogs/websites, materials that others provide and this expert has decided to use, or how beautiful the relationship between those two experts are. The conversation through linking and back linking made me dizzy sometimes, and I am sure the expertise of all involved (except myself) grew several folds in the meantime
• Most of this linking is big time affiliate marketing. If you spend more than 6 hours researching for how to get better keywords for your lame blog, you are going to be amazed at what people can do, how beautiful the websites look (images, typography and all), and how easy actually getting a fan following is. Well, you are reminded from time to time that this is all hard work, but overall quality of life is astounding to say the least
• Expert websites are big landing pages with clear (bold, CLEAR, colorful, shiny) call to action. This call to action is something that you want to buy, to watch videos, subscribe to email lists, and the like
• The number of ways in which most experts like to help commoners like myself became worrisome. The sheer knowledge propagated through blogs, ebooks, videos, podcasts, knowledge articles, guest posting is mind boggling. After two months of this, I am sure I am finding a pattern somewhere here. But I am not sure whether I am a better person as promised by all the knowledge (may be I am since I raise this question?). If there are too many experts, will not the expertise wane? Or do they follow the adage "share knowledge to gain knowledge"? 

One thing I learnt for sure though, I may try all I want but will not reach this level of expertise needed for making a living out of internet marketing. I will try to remain small (back-end blogger for some more time), not invest (yet) in Genesys framework, or teach others on how to do internet marketing :). (This should be apparent by the above post, but thought of reinforcing the message anyway).

If you are wondering about what to do now there is no advice here at this time. Be cautious about your approach, how much money and time you invest in, and be wary of the experts and their tools.

PS: If you are an expert mentioned above, please do not be offended - I was talking about the other 90% who make the internet a scary place.

Maintain a email list for loyal subscribers and increase popularity of your blog or website

Look at this blog and tell me one thing that you see missing (Well, apart from a professional design that is :)). It is this - no emails going out to notify users for absolutely anything.
As blog/website owners tell you putting content that is worth noting is only half the job. Making sure this content actually reaches the people who are interested to see that content is what makes you, or your website popular. The simplest way to do this is of course, pushing your website through your friends, colleagues and more through the social media sites.

courtesy: wikimedia

Though this is a good start, people do not really arrive in hordes unless you are connected to the right people. So, the next easy channel is through social bookmarking. In addition to pushing the links to posts to social media sites like Facebook, Twitter you can now target bookmarking sites like Delicious and StumbleUpon, and hope others take it from there. Alternatively, you can  use IFTTT to setup a few recipes and automate this whole business by publishing posts when your website is updated (not as effective, but works).
The idea is to spread the word, and that has to cascade for your blog to become popular and effective. Imagine the spread of virus, or let's tone down the metaphor to spread of humans on the globe.

courtesy: wikimedia.org

Although the world has changed a lot and moved rapidly towards non-personal transactions that are pseudo-personal, there are just too many people who like to keep things separate and *like* a physical notification. And, emails are just the way to achieve that.

There are people out there including you and me, who just do not care about the messages arriving in their inbox. But, the right amount of incentive to actually open and read email gives you a loyal reader who is assured to have a look at your content every now and then (if not every time). You have to get this first - people subscribed to your emails because they are interested in the topic, and if you keep that interest going and get them to read the content, it is sure to spread like wild fire! If that is not great, what is?

But doing that is not easy, here are a few tips to get it right:

• Do not let your emails be the drones that summarize the website content and nothing else. People are smart - they can follow your website through RSS, through Social Media sites and what not. A more personal approach here in the email builds those relationships that are so important to have a reader base
• Emails also have to encourage response/feedback. Some kind of response mechanism for the user to react and provide feedback goes miles in establishing in their minds that they matter. And, believe me, they DO matter for you to rake in profits
• Emails must have a call to action. Either it can be that one interesting topic or conversation that they have to look at, or that one product they can buy and add absolute value to their lives!
• Emails have to offer something exciting other than what is found on the website (or can be found in a remote corner that users are sure to miss). This can be a discount to a new product, some exciting news about the website, or invites for candid feedback or surveys
• Get the frequency of emails right. Too many emails and your user base will move away, too less and they loose interest
• Finally, use tools to automate things so that you do not get stuck with managing lot of stuff and not creating enough

The last statement is so enormous that I have shied away from doing any kind of email communication on this site. But one way out I see is through the use of effective tools to maintain the email conversation. Let us look at the top three.

1. AWeber

AWeber gained my attention due to their low entry fee of $1 for the first month, and $19/mo afterwards. But man, was I impressed with the number of things they offer. The email lists are straightforward to maintain, you can choose to slice and dice the email subscribers for targeted communication, and the email templates can be customized to your heart's content.

However what impressed me the most was the Analytics and auto responders. You can not only target subscribers, but also measure how successful your email was. You can track who opened the emails, who read them and for what time and so forth. This gives a very precise understanding of whether your email communications are moving in a positive path or in need of any course corrections. The auto responders can be programmed to give that fuzzy feeling to your users that they are being listened to and acted upon. You can also automate things here - for example send a link to the program or ebook when they respond to a survey!

 

2. GetResponse

GetResponse is another great tool which does all the things mentioned above. Plus you get the first month free in the trial period. Starting at $15, the interface does look easy to use and colorful. 

The emails are customized through a drag and drop interface, you can create landing pages for the email links and have powerful automation built in. Analytics is great and what is interesting is the mobile app and social media integration with the emails! 

 

3. MailChimp

I started experimenting with MailChimp because it is free to start up. In fact you can continue to remain free if your subscriber base is small (<4000) and you send out not more than 12000 emails/month!

In fact I would say you can experiment with MailChimp while you are deciding whether email is your thing before you spend cash on it. But beware though, MailChimp does not spell out policies on your own affiliate links sent through emails. The reports are average, but pretty good for the price.

 

So, there you go folks - the why and how of maintaining email lists for your own blog or website. Go ahead and try it, and comment on whether it does help.

Use Windows Live Writer for more productive blogging

Windows Live Writer from Microsoft is one of the excellent tools from Microsoft. Live Writer has been on the writing scene for quite some time now, and the latest version as of this post is delivered as part of Windows Essentials 2012.

 

Get Started

Getting started in Live Writer is easy. First download Live Writer. The install itself is a smooth process. Once you are done, fire up Live Writer from the shortcut in the Start menu.

All Windows users will feel right at home with the user interface. The first step to do is to connect to your blog. Go to ‘Home’ tab, click on ‘Add Blog Account’.

Live Writer has support for commonly used blogging platforms. You can rely on it to find out automatically which platform you use.

Notable exception here is support to Drupal platform. Live Writer is not supported on Drupal platform, which I miss the most for my Drupal site (another story). The connection to your blog also includes a step to get the current theme from your blog so that what you write here is what you get on the blog.  You can also connect multiple blogs, and you get to choose which blog is the post intended for.

Start Writing!

Go to ‘File’ menu > ‘New Post’ and start typing away. At the bottom of the page, you can ‘Preview’ what you typed, or also do some changes to the source in the ‘Source’ tab (useful to include HTML / JavaScript and the like). Once you are satisfied with the preview, go ahead and ‘Publish’ by clicking on the big button thoughtfully places in ‘Home’ tab.

Fantastic Features to Note

Of course all of the above can be done by many platforms. But there are too many features that makes Live Writer stand out.

• Typing and navigating in the post or across posts is *really* easy. You get all the great features of an offline editor, and the assurance that the post will not change when you upload to your blog
• Spell checks work, and so does find and all the shortcut keys that you are so in love with (Ctrl+B, Ctrl+K)
• Preview is great and you can exactly see how your posts look like once published
• Setting fonts, headers, paragraphs, highlights etc. is real easy. The fonts are copied over from your theme in the blog, and you can retain them or choose to override them for specific posts
• You can set categories, tags and other taxonomy information as supported by your blogging platform, and also set a date for publishing the posts – all without leaving the editor window and with no refresh of screens or fear of loosing work because of bad connectivity
• Insert pictures from your desktop or from the web, and also videos and photo albums. You get to see the exact size of all these objects and also change them
• You can create new posts or edit existing posts, you can also post drafts to the blog
• The best thing of course is to hide all the non-essentials and focus on the writing!

I only wish I had researched and known Live Writer before. I lost one too many posts because of my stupidity in not saving increments, and spent far too much time on changing the formats in Wordpress or Blogger default editors. Hopefully, this helps someone else save all that time!

Before you rejoice, be cognizant of one fact. Live Writer has sort of fallen on the way side. Though it works on both Windows 7 and Windows 8, the latest app Essentials bundle for Windows 8 does not have Live Writer. Things can change pretty fast in the technology world, and sooner or later the platform will start showing issues. But in the mean time, get prepared to enjoy your life with the improved productivity.