by Graham Cox on May 19, 2008
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My favorite autoresponder service Aweber have just announced they will be launching their much anticipated email analytics feature later this week.
It’s main benefit will be the ability to show which of your subscribers clicks through from your emails and takes an action such as ordering a product, thus allowing you to determine your most profitable and responsive customers.
You can then segment your lists accordingly, for example by promoting higher value products to your best subscribers.
I’ve no doubt this will prove a killer feature and set Aweber even further apart from their main competitors.
Read more about email analytics here
by Graham Cox on March 14, 2008
The word “Free” has become so overused in webcopy now that it’s lost much of it’s ability to convert visitors to subscribers. That’s the conclusion of David D’Anna in his latest post over at Clayton Makepeace’s wonderful copywriting blog.
To a large degree I think he’s right. The mere fact that something is FREE in todays hyper-competitive online marketplace no longer counts for much. As some marketers have abused their lists with offer after offer, surfers have understandably become more choosy who they hand out their email details too.
That’s why it’s imperative to offer huge value in your opt-in offer and then deliver on what you’ve promised. The benefits and value of your offer should be so obvious and compelling, the fact it’s FREE should barely matter.
The really smart marketers out there will tell you the same.
Lee McIntyre for instance, is almost evangelical about building strong relationships with his lists and web visitors by giving away value-packed original content . And he’s proven it works with a string of successful product launches and lucrative affiliate promotions.
So by all means, give stuff away free. Just don’t expect it to be enough by itself. Your offer has to be top-notch too.
by Graham Cox on February 22, 2008
I‘ve just read a fascinating post by UK Internet Marketer Frank Haywood about the SEO strategies he’s used to climb the Google Search Results for an extremely competitive search term.
For anyone using Wordpress in particular, his post contains tons of valuable advice regarding which plugins to use and how to fully optimise your blog.
But what I found particularly noteworthy was how Frank used the post as a list building strategy.
Here’s how he did it…
- A few days ago, he made a regular post revealing that he’d managed to climb from page 30 of Google to page 19 for the keyphrase “Internet Business” in just 2 months. Now that may not seem like any great shakes until you consider that search term is highly competitive with over 19,400,000 competing webpages on Google.
- In the same post he promised to reveal the exact SEO tips he used to improve his ranking in a future password-protected post (made today) but only for anyone signing up to his blog notification list.
- He then password protected the new strategy-revealing post (using the Post Password functionality in Wordpress’ Write Post admin area on his blog). The post title however is still viewable to anyone arriving at his blog.
- After posting, he sent a broadcast message out to everyone on his list to let them know the password.
- Frank then offered to provide the password for $10 (which is money well spent in my opinion) to anyone not already on his list.
It’s certainly a novel approach for a blog. I havn’t seen it anywhere else which is surprising given how easy it is to password-protect posts in Wordpress.
I wonder if we might see a trend towards this type of subscriber-only or pay-per-view posting in the future?
What do you think? Post a comment below and let me know
