Work Better, Not Harder

OK, so you're all set up with your branded design, great content and a bunch of subscribers that want your emails. What about paper newsletters? So 30 seconds ago? Rethink that. Depending on what you do, you may be able to get more mileage from your electronic newsletter in paper form. Here are 3 ways: Prospecting and Sales Print paper copies of your newsletter to take on sales calls and to networking events. Include an issue in kit folders. If you do speaking or training, take copies to hand out to participants. Your newsletter shows off your expertise - put it in people's hands. You can also use it to encourage new subscribers. Point of Sale If you have a cash register, put paper copies of your newsletter beside it. Use it as an example of what subscribers can expect. Even better, make it easy for your customers by offering to sign them up right on the spot. If you have office space, place paper newsletters in the reception area. ...

All big projects have the potential for scope creep - uncontrolled changes in project scope. It results in missed deadlines, budget overruns and altered deliverables. We entrepreneurs can be guilty of this when it comes to operating our businesses. It’s easy to get distracted by new opportunities and ideas. It’s sort of what small business is all about: being flexible enough to jump on opportunities. I’ve been guilty of doing this myself. It can be fun and challenging but sometimes not very productive. I’ve created 30 or so workshops that I have no desire to sell. My branding and website have undergone many renditions. Was I being productive during those hundreds of hours? It felt like it. I was busy but, oops, I wasn’t making any money. In January 2010 I set my theme for that year to be ‘FOCUS’. It stayed my theme for 2011 and I’m finally seeing the results of my intentions. (In fact, I’m satisfied enough to pick a new theme for 2012.) I did it by creating simple rules for ...

Most people have email boxes that are overflowing and not enough time to read it all. If you are like me, a day out of the office can bring dread when I finally get back to my desk... and my inbox! Your subject line needs to prompt your subscriber to open your message. To avoid spam filters, a quick Google search will unearth lists of words not to use in an email subject line. Getting past the spam filter is just the first step - you still need to encourage your recipient to open your email. Help your subscribers save time with your email subject line. Make your subject line instantly recognizable in their inbox and include the main topic contained within. If they are really busy, they can file it for later reading or delete it without having to take the time to open it. Although they may not read every issue, they will appreciate your effort. Better still, if the topic is of interest to them, they are more likely to open and read it later. Your subject li...

OK, so you might need 34 letters to say "I feel good!" in some circumstances. But I can't ever imagine needing 340 words to say "expect glitches". A client of mine received this email below from an online service provider. No, you won't want to read it anymore than she did. Want to know the short version? Scroll down. Salesforce.com is committed to providing a highly available service to our customers. We are committed to continued investments to increase the overall uptime of our service, to deliver optimal value to our customers. With that, we are excited to announce a major advancement in this area for our major releases, effective with our Spring '12 release. W hat is the change? We are happy to inform you that we are improving our major release upgrade process. This improvement means that your organization will be generally available during our major release upgrade windows. Note: The term "Generally Available" means that we are...

You may have several goals you want to achieve by way of your newsletter (substitute website, blog and/or social media as it applies to you). Probably you want to increase sales. Here are some other possible related goals: 'Touching' your customers, prospects and colleagues on a regular basis Building strong business relationships Developing your reputation and sphere of influence Sharing your valuable information, products, and services Being seen as an expert Growing your fans, followers and blog readership Keeping up with your competition These all may well be good reasons to have a newsletter. The ones that are most important for you will depend on what type of business you have, how long you’ve been in business, what your competitive situation is, and more. You should be able to pick 2-3 goals to specifically focus on - then match your content to those goals. (It's simple logic, but sometimes we forget.) For example, if building your reput...

I love learning. It’s one of my favourite things to do. When I retire, I’m going back to university. Usually, I want to learn something because I’ve had a little taste of it and (a) I’m just plain curious or (b) I want to learn it so I can apply it to my work or personal life. I’m one of those people that actually read those thick manuals that used to come with new computer games before I did the install. There was a purpose. I knew what I wanted to do and just had to learn how to apply it. Learn and then apply - the better the learning, the better the application. I’ve been good at it my whole life. This year learning changed for me. I began learning lots of things without really knowing if: I was even interested in the topic I could apply it it made sense to apply it there were any benefits to the learning at all Lately, I’ve caught myself saying to people, “You just have to try it for a while to ‘get it’.” (Can you guess what I’m talking about?) A couple of years...

Creating content can be a real show-stopper when it comes to kicking off projects like a new newsletter, website or blog. I often hear some version of this: “What the heck am I going to write about?” Fresh, interesting content is important to ensure your newsletter stays relevant to your audience. You want your newsletter to be opened with a sense of anticipation. Remember that you have to compete with millions of other emails. How can you distinguish yourself? It’s not enough to create content about your business and products. Here are some suggestions for you to consider: Have a clear focus Of the many possible goals for a newsletter, what do you want yours to specifically achieve? Measure every piece of content against this yardstick to avoid ‘scope creep’. Write to your reader What are the wants and needs of the person reading your email? Think about the conversations you have with customers and colleagues. You can discuss these same topics by email. Tell stories ...

A newsletter is not one of those ‘build it and they will come’ things. It takes work to both maintain and build on each relationship that you (re-)start with each issue. Maintain: Give your readers what they want, not what you want to give them. Deliver VALUE in exchange for your readers' time. Respond to everyone who replies to your newsletter, even if it’s just to say “Glad you enjoyed it.” Build: Add new contacts to build your list. Promote each issue through social media to extend your reach. Make it easy for people to share and subscribe. photo by subsetsum / Flickr Click to Tweet this Article

I've been talking to a lot of people lately about creating and organizing their content for various purposes and places. In the process of conducting a recent lunch and learn on the subject, I collected lots of tips and ideas, and here's a good one. Share your opinion about someone else's article or on a hot topic under debate in your industry. If you're good at what you do, you will have lots of opinions. Telling people about them will really define your unique selling proposition. It also makes you a leader in your field. This doesn't have to be about claiming someone else is wrong. It can also be about agreeing with them and offering more info or expanding on the subject. Of course you have to keep up with your reading and research in order for this strategy to work. Current is key. Click to Tweet this Article

As a follow up to my last article about managing what you measure , here is something else you should pay attention to: Do you know what your email marketing campaign is doing for you? That will lead you to answer the question: Should you be doing more or less of it? In this graph you can see how the activity on my website increased as the direct result of two emails sent. If you look at the front and back ends of the graph (before and after), you can see that there was a really significant impact. This is a quick measure that tells me my email marketing is very effective. How effective is your email marketing? I want to point out here that the impact of email marketing will vary greatly by industry, whether B2B or B2C, scheduling and frequency, value of content, the format and delivery mode, the size of your contact list and segmentation, your relationship with your subscribers, and other less predictable things. So now you are able to make a strategic...

One of my favourite bosses worked by the motto “if it’s worth doing, it’s worth measuring”. When I whined that something just couldn’t be measured, he would say, “There’s always something to measure.” And he was always right. It’s an important concept for small business owners. Having a set of metrics that you watch and that you feel are the key drivers of your success, helps you keep clarity. If you don’t have goals stated for your company, and if you don’t regularly measure how you’re doing against those goals, you won’t have your resources focused on the right priorities . The more public you can make your goals the better. Transparency of goals drives performance because it creates both a commitment and a sense of urgency. Commitment and urgency are key drivers of success. People often measure the wrong stuff, or measure with the wrong precision (either too high-level or too detailed). There is no ‘one size fits all’ approach but there are two pretty universal measures...

What you want is fans . Let's dispel a newsletter myth. The myth is that you want to keep as many subscribers as you can. That's simply not true. You pay for subscribers. If someone is not reading or forwarding your newsletter, why do you want to send it to them? And you don't really want to annoy people. Have a simple escape route: Make it easy to unsubscribe. Tell people it's easy to unsubscribe. Tell them how to do it. It's not personal! Just because someone unsubscribes from your newsletter, it doesn't mean they have unsubscribed from you. And, if people know it's easy to unsubscribe, maybe they'll stick around a little longer... ? Click to Tweet this Article

Different types of content will achieve different things. You can educate and inform, build trust, establish your expertise, expand your community, and generate sales. Building trust is one strategy that is appropriate for just about any type of organization or independent professional. It can be used in your newsletter and also extends to your website, blog and social media. This type of content is used to bridge the gap between awareness and trust . Here are some types of content that specifically work to build trust: How-to content - specific advice, tips and processes Articles written by you - displaying your knowledge of the subject Articles published by others that specifically mention you or your organization Reviews - customer reviews on sites such as Yelp and Google Places Testimonials - endorsements from happy customers An added bonus is that these types of content often support your SEO efforts. Being brief and to the point also builds trust so I'll st...

When you're inserting content into your newsletter, website or blog, you're often copying it from other documents.  I suggest you always compose in Word (or similar) to take advantage of its spelling and grammar-checking functionality. Your formatting in Word may not be the same as your default formatting in these various applications.  While there are a raft of applications that make it easy now to do your own newsletter, website and blog, most of them are converting your content to html code in the background.  When you copy in text that is already formatted, you're possibly creating problems behind the scenes .  As well, you'll end up with differing fonts and sizes that all have to be corrected before you publish. You can avoid the potential for problems by stripping off all formatting before you paste into the application.  An easy way to do this is to use Notepad (or similar).  You simply open a blank notepad document, paste your con...

And equally important, how much is too little? Too much and too little can both be bad when it comes to e-marketing. People ask me how often they should send out their newsletter and I always answer the same thing - as often as you can bring value to your subscribers . And if you can do that every single day, yippee! I myself subscribe to 4 daily newsletters. Back to reality... of course, there's work involved and that might have an impact on how often you send too. I do strongly believe that you need to send something at least once a month to be having any impact. Here's a general rule of thumb: more frequent = smaller amounts of content, and vice versa (Now remember, rules are made to be broken so perhaps I should call this a guideline instead.) Of course, social media is a great example of the 'more frequent' strategy. Aside from how much content, you'll also want to consider the type of content in relation to the frequency...