One way to draw in and retain your website audience is to create an enewsletter. In an enewsletter, you can provide links back to your website for more detailed information. Newsletters keep your organization or business in your audience’s mind. But how do you get people to subscribe?

There are many ways to approach people about signing up for newsletters:

• If you have a storefront, provide a signup sheet with perhaps a monthly promotion/raffle for opting in to the newsletter or even a coupon for everyone who signs up.
• If your organization participates in fairs, this is also a good place to have a signup list, perhaps tied into a promotion.
• On your website, create a signup link/graphic. For courtesy’s sake, make this link unintrusive to the browsing experience–just put it on a sidebar on most of your site’s pages and give your readers a clue in the form of a one or two sentence description about what the content will be about so that they can infer the benefits of subscription.
• If you have a Facebook page, it is relatively easy to create a tab that contains a signup form or link to your newsletter. You’ll need web development skills to do this (http://developers.facebook.com/docs/appsonfacebook/pagetabs/).
• If you give presentations or classes, you can provide even more value to the attendees by informing them of your enewsletter and making a signup clipboard available at your presentation.
• You can contribute articles to other websites and blogs, especially those of organizations, and provide a signup link there as well.

There are economical ways and practical ways to create an enewsletter, and then there are ways that are a little more elaborate but which produce a more polished result.

Economical Option: Google Feedburner

If you produce a blog or if your site is RSS enabled, you can easily create email subscriptions to your new posts using Google Feedburner. After you burn the feed with feedburner, go to the “Publicize” tab and then click on the Email Subscriptions link on the left. After enabling email subscriptions, you’ll see code for a form or a link that you can add to your website. If you are using WordPress, you’ll find the most benefit by adding this code to your theme or a sidebar widget.

The benefit of using Google Feedburner is that it takes very little time and effort–all you need to do is blog and then the posts are sent out automatically. The drawback is that the formatting is very rustic–pretty much plain text.

Next Level Up: Constant Contact Template

Constant Contact is a versatile solution that can fit your budget. There are alternatives to Constant Contact such as Mailchimp, but Constant Contact is the most widely used enewsletter service so I focus on it in this article. If you are doing all the work of putting together your newsletter in Constant Contact, the professionalism of your newsletter will depend on the amount of work you put into it and your technical, artistic and writing skillset.

The basic level is $15 a month for 500 subscribers, and the cost goes up for more subscribers. Constant Contact provides a number of templates to choose from that–depending on your skillset–you can adapt to your particular organization’s message and look.

If you do not have graphic design and web technical skills, you can hire a web designer to do this for you. The designer can adapt one of the existing themes or create a totally new one. You could hire the designer to create the initial theme, and then whenever you send a newsletter out you can manage it yourself if you like.

High End

At the upper end, to obtain a totally polished look in a newsletter does require the use of a graphic design/web professional so of course this is a more costly way to do a newsletter. Many large businesses and organizations use Constant Contact as the platform for their newsletters on this level, too.

Tips: Keep it Relevant, Timely and Appealing

• If the material you are writing is suitable for different niches, you can also configure Constant Contact to allow people to sign up for various lists pertaining to different niche topics.
• Good, also, to not overload people by sending out newsletters too frequently. Everyone is not always interested in, say, selling with a website on a daily basis even though many businesses do have websites.
• If you are promoting events, it is also good to make people aware of events in time to attend them!
• One’s email inbox is an intimate place. People want to feel good–they want to see the possibilities of what can be done. So, for instance, if you are writing a newsletter about the environment, please help people see what can be done rather than use scary subject lines for your email. And likewise, if you are writing a newsletter about your business, it is good to present information in a more positive, calm way, i.e., “Here’s how to solve a common problem” rather than “If you don’t use our service, you are at risk for such and such a thing to happen.”
• If you can possibly integrate food, recipes and entertainment into your newsletter (if this applies) this appeals to many people immediately on a fundamental level.
• People in the food and entertainment business have it easy because everyone is actually interested in food and entertainment on a daily basis, and many even actively search out food and entertainment promotions. If you are a business that is not food or entertainment related, it can be a bit more challenging to promote your business. Keep your mindset very altruistic and don’t make things too “salesy.” It is good to stick to educational topics rather than present advertisements, and hope that people keep in mind that you have provided actual useful information and will remember you when they want the type of service you provide!

And I bring this up with respect to QR codes. You may have seen them already on flyers, on posters… they look like weird bar codes.

A QR code can be read by your smartphone using an app. You run the app, point the smartphone’s camera lens at the code and it can scan it and take you to a website.

The utility of QR codes is that they eliminate a lot of typing on tiny cell phone keypads. From a marketing perspective, using QR codes on your printed material shows that your business or organization is on the leading edge with a popular, useful trend.

You can receive the most benefit from QR codes by using them wisely and in contexts where they make sense. For instance, Lake Metroparks has started to use them on outdoor plaques. Their code conveniently links to maps and a lot more information about nature, helping the park district to make these outdoor signs much more interactive.

You can generate your own QR code here: http://qrcode.kaywa.com/.

This is a win-win situation because it doesn’t cost much (just a voluntary donation) to use QR codes.

There are many other win-win tools for engagement out there for organizations and businesses, such as Facebook, Google Places, Groupon and Foursquare.

So how does one sort through all this and decide what to do? When you evaluate whether to invest your organization’s time and/or money in technology, you might want to think about these factors:

Is the business providing or assisting with the technology local?

In today’s economy, it is a good idea for local businesses to do business with each other when possible, and there are distinct advantages to this. Local businesses can respond more to your needs and provide more personal relationships. The longevity of the local business is a good factor to consider as well.

Is the technology sound?

Does it work well on multiple platforms if this is a criterion for the application of the technology?

Is the technology reasonable for your business’s or organization’s application?

Place yourself in your potential customers’/web users’ shoes and think how they would use the technology. Is it difficult to use? Easy? Intuitive?  Does it make sense for your business or organization, or is it just gimmicky?

Is there a long-term commitment to supporting the technology?

Invest your efforts in a business that focuses on its core offering. Even if a business is huge, such as Facebook, this doesn’t necessarily translate into a long-term commitment toward a technology. For example, Facebook stopped its Facebook Deals program after running it for only four months.

Does the technology have a strong developer base? 

Some free tools (such as WordPress) are successful because they have a strong developer and user base, even though the offerings are free.  The more users and developers a particular technology has, the more likely it will be around for a long time. If you are not familiar with current web trends, it may be difficult for you to determine if there is a strong developer base. In this case, consult with a web professional before investing a lot of your time.

In conclusion, there are plenty of tools for engagement in the Web world. Evaluate them carefully, then go ahead and engage!

* With respect to QR codes, do keep in mind that there have been some concerns about cell phone use and radiation. It is probably beneficial to moderate use of cell phones especially around one’s ears and pockets, and children should probably not use them. Even some cell phone manufacturers have asked people to hold cell phones an inch or so away from one’s head when using them.

In his book Trust Agents: Using the Web to Build Influence, Improve Reputation and Earn Trust, Chris Brogan spends much oxgyen expounding upon the concept of "thought leadership" and how it applies to building up one's business. The term was coined by Joel Kurtzman, editor-in-chief of the magazine Strategy & Business.

A thought leader is someone who has helpful information and makes it available to the public. This applies to small businesses and organizations in several ways:

• Sharing useful information helps your customers and/or readers and potential customers better use your products and services.
• Sharing useful information helps your business or organization by fostering trust.
• Sharing useful information helps your business or organization by fostering its credibility.

Blogging is a great and inexpensive means of providing one's thoughts to the public, but has other dividends as well:

• It increases traffic to websites via direct and indirect means such as a greater likelihood of being found in search engines, providing information that prompts people to share blog entries, and subscription to blog entries via tools such as feedburner.
• It provides a means of organizing the blogger's thoughts which can result in more focused, higher quality business practices.

Where to start

I recommend WordPress as a blogging platform. It's free and very versatile, and can be easily installed in a subdirectory on your existing website. It can be used to manage your entire website if you wish. It is completely customizable, so your web developer can create your own theme that has your own specific design without any technical constraints from WordPress's end other than the time to code the theme.

Many plugins are available for WordPress, including ones that can help you "get the word out" by facilitating social media sharing.

If possible, install WordPress on the same domain as your website because will help with your domain's informational footprint, or "domain authority." Also, it improves the amount of activity going on on your site. Both are good criteria that search engines such as Google can use to help determine a site's relevancy. (We are in the process of doing this ourselves.)

To be continued…

In the past, your web designer might have been the only one working on your website. But with today's technologies and expectations, you as business owner, content contributor, or marketer can have an expanded, active role in posting information on your website. 

The garden is an appropriate metaphor for websites. Websites can be seen as living and breathing things based on the interactivity they can foster. They are virtual gardens that you stake out and refer to by domain. And you, the owner of your site, can be the gardener.

Website gardens benefit from attracting beneficial organisms, i.e. customers, and giving them a spade to dig with, tools to see what's going on, tools for interacting with you and your site and your business. Customers and readers expect to be able to comment on blog entries, to follow up on issues, to really have the ability to gain useful information and engage with you online and not just via email.

Ergo, interactivity and being able to post information yourself is an important component in making your website an engine that can help you promote your products and services.

Benefits of website gardening:

1. The more information you post (as long as it is well organized), the larger the footprint of your garden on the web, which improves your chances for more website traffic driven by search engine indexing.

2. The more items you've planted (i.e. blog posts) the higher your credibility in social media avenues such as LinkedIn and Facebook (as long as posts are relevant and professional).

3. Regularly generating information for your website has indirect benefits in other ways; that of self-discipline, of policy development, etc.

Gardening tools and techniques:

- Blogging and other Social Media use
- Use of tools for engagement such as QR codes
- eNewsletters (like Constant Contact) and the ability to sign up on your site
- RSS subscriptions, Google Feedburner
- Commenting capability

To be continued…

Google+ is currently testing with a small number of people, but it is possible to get an invitation from Google+ once it's ready.

If Google is making the investment in developing this, I tend to trust that it will be a fairly sound and useful social media platform. It looks fun, too!

Business and organization marketers might be interested in the potential application of this technology for SEO and SMO but like any social media platform, the context of sharing should make sense. Social media is a personal experience for many. The marketing messages placed on a particular social media platform should depend on the way the audience opts in to the message stream to ensure a good audience experience.

For those who want to know more, Social Media guru Chris Brogan has been offering a lot of interesting insights about the new platform.

Blogging

The traditional model used to involve you in that you could specify a creative direction for your website developer, offer some initial content, and the developer would code it.

But today you can become even more a part of the team. Not only can you specify the creative direction of your website; you can become more involved in creating and improving your website. 

The footprint of your website, i.e., the amount of information on the website, lends credibility to the site. If your site has a lot of information, it follows that you've invested a lot in it and that it is a good resource for people.

Blogging is an inexpensive and easy way to increase the amount of information on your website. We recommend that most of our customers blog if they can spare the time and if they can write compelling, professional content. WordPress is a great, free tool traditionally associated with blogging. But it can manage not only your blog, but your entire site, and your website designer can code it to look any way you'd like to best suit your needs. As a matter of fact, we've started to code most of our sites with WordPress. 

Incoming Links, You and Your Community

Incoming links have always been a key area that boosts search engine placement. It follows that the more links there are to your website, the more credible your website. We recommend that our customers try to develop their incoming links as much as possible. Ideally this could happen in conjunction with a social media effort and by creating content and periodic articles that people find compelling; articles that they'd like to share.

In addition, you can develop your incoming links by becoming involved in other organizations. Volunteer to write blog entries on their blogs! It is usually appropriate to have a link to your website in your article on their blog, or even an additional couple of links to blog entries you've created for your own website. This is a great way to develop not only incoming links, but to become more engaged in a positive way with a community with which you'd like to network.

Ratings: Encourage Your Customers to Play

Your customers can become more of a part of your team, too. Google seems to need to know that other people care about your business or organization; this makes sense. I believe that business rating tools are becoming more important. I notice that placement in Google Places results seems to correspond with businesses that have been rated well by services such as Citysearch  and the rating mechanism for each place page that Google provides. The more ratings, the better the placement, although this could just be dependent on the general popularity of the site. I have not really started pushing this strategy yet and don't know the result in terms of incoming traffic, but it seems to make sense.

A good approach to this would be to ask customers if they would place a review on your business or organization's Google Place page. That said, we'd appreciate a shout out on our Google Place page if you find these articles stimulating and/or if you are a client!

Be a Good Team Mate

Many variables are critical to the success of your web presence. We recommend being very thoughtful in the coding, presentation, and text content on your site. Ultimately, the key thing is to think like your potential audience and to try to anticipate its needs. 

Consider conversion optimization when creating the core content for your site. Blog entries can be a bit more spontaneous, but the core service pages and home page of your site need to orient your potential client and give them a reason to want to participate, and make to it easy for them as well! 

Practically speaking, there are a lot of great low budget website promotion tools available to the layman. One of the best tools around is WordPress. It's not just a blogging platform. WordPress can be programmed to run your entire website.

WordPress is well suited to the needs of small businesses on the web:

• It's free
• Well-supported and popular (so it will be around for a while)
• Can be maintained by the layman
• Many great options (plugins and widgets)
• Great for SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
• Great for Web 2.0

We've had success with a number of websites implemented in WordPress. We design the initial site, the home page "look and feel" and features that are supported and integrated into the site, and our customers can take it from there by fleshing out each page's text content, adding new pages and creating blog posts. This saves our customers some money because they do not have to rely on us to create new pages, and can do many website maintenance tasks themselves as well.

It is possible, of course, to use a canned "theme" for your WordPress site. But to integrate your company's graphics into a canned theme requires some know-how of graphic design and web programming if the site is to look professional.

I'd like to talk a little bit search engine optimization (SEO). Consider the websites of just five years ago. Five years ago, it was a lot easier to attain high rankings in search engines. Why? Because there were fewer sites competing for the same key search phrases, and because today's web programmers have become more sophisticated, and because big corporations tend to crowd out smaller businesses for the most popular terms.

Some key factors for high search engine rankings include:

• The volume of content on site
• That it is a well structured site (optimized and coded for search engines)
• The number of sites linking to the site

WordPress empowers the small business person in all these categories. 

Content
Your website needs to stay relevant and have a lot of content. If you don't have applicable content for a particular search phrase on your website, it cannot come up in a search engine. The phrase must be on your site, and the more often the phrase is on your site, the more search engine authority your site has for that particular phrase. By enabling you to add pages and blog entries (which are seen as pages), you don't have to rely on the added expense of having a web programmer create every single page and post, and you can create many pages rich with key phrase terms for your business.

Coding
The web programmer can create a means for the business person to optimize each new page on the site. As long as the programmer is well-versed with current coding methodologies that are best for search engines, a framework will be in place so that the code of new pages is also suitable for search engines.

Incoming Links
Use of a good share plugin for WordPress facilitates the syndication of your content on the web. If the content of your page or post is compelling and your reader is prompted by some type of visual cue to share it, it is more likely to be tweeted or shared on Facebook or Linkedin or other social media outlets. Incoming links not only advertise your site's content, but in terms of search engines, links lend credibility to your content and are a consideration in the placement and listing algorithms used by search engines.

Part I: "The Perfect Website"

Stay tuned for the next followup post in this series. You can subscribe to this blog via email.

An individual can only have one personal Facebook account. Using multiple accounts violates Facebook’s terms of use, and may result in having one or more of your Facebook accounts shut down.

If you want to have two separate identities, one as a business person and the other as a friend and family member who wants to stay in touch, you are out of luck. You can create a Facebook “personal” account for your business, but then you can’t have a separate personal account.

There’s a bit of a way around this: set up a business fan page, which is different from a Facebook account. An individual Facebook user can set up multiple fan pages, one or more of which can relate to business concerns.

Businesses need to be choosy in who sets up their business fan pages. The key administrator for a business page cannot be reassigned. Until Facebook fixes this, the original administrator is permanent.

Recently we had a client whose employee set up a business page. When the employee left the company, there was no way to transfer administration of the page to the business owner. Luckily, the employee had left on good terms, so the owner was able to create a new fan page and work with the former employee to invite the old fans to the new page.

For this reason we recommend that the business owner initiates the business page setup with Facebook. Then, and only then, should the owner assign an employee to be an additional administrator for the page.

Do you want help setting up a Facebook fan page for your business or organization? Lakenetwork.net is offering a FREE workshop Tuesday, September 7, from 8:30 to 10 a.m. at our office in Eastlake, Ohio. The class size will be limited to 4 participants. We will be offering this workshop more than once. Click here to sign up for the workshop or register for information about our workshop series.

To find out more about Lakenetwork, visit our Web site at lakenetwork.net where you will find our online portfolio and links to sites we’ve designed.

Lakenetwork was pleased to attend May’s eMarketing Techniques Workshop presented by Brad Kleinman of WorkSmart Integrated Marketing for Lake Communicators.

We brought away some useful nuggets that Lake Communicators members may wish to employ in their online marketing strategies:

1. Cross Promotion
Place URLs to your social media pages and websites on physical, paper items your organization or business prints.

2. eNewsletters
Kleinman recommended MailChimp over Constant Contact, as Mailchimp allows you to test alternate subject lines. This allows you to see which subject lines have a higher click-through rate.

3. Convey Your Expertise
Today’s successful businesses need to be content publishers. We agree with this entirely, that businesses need to convey “thought leadership” in their field in order to be taken credibly. We recommend the book,  “Trust Agents” by Chris Brogan for people who want more inspiration on this topic.

4. SEO
Kleinman gave a rough overview of two key considerations for SEO–title tags and incoming links.

We’d like to add that by making your content Web 2.0-friendly (so that it can tie in with Facebook or be shared, etc.), you create a larger web footprint for your site. When people share your content, it helps with incoming links and SEO.

5. Social Plugins
In mid-April, Facebook released Open Graph, which enables you to make your website or blog plug in to Facebook. One easy feature: you can place a “Like” button on your blog post, and when a user clicks “Like,” a link to your page shows up in their activity stream. We plan to post more on OpenGraph soon.

> Facebook for Websites

We’ve added the “Like” button to all of our customers’ WordPress blogs and plan to investigate more features soon.

> Like for WordPress

6. Marketing Gimmick
Another useful tidbit Kleinman shared: users like to read quantified, enumerated content, i.e. for your subject line of an eNewsletter, you could say “Five Tips for Better SEO.”

7. LinkedIn
One of the better uses of LinkedIn is to make your topical expertise known by answering questions on the Q&A section of LinkedIn. Also, if you use Microsoft Outlook, you can obtain contextual information about someone by installing a LinkedIn toolbar for Microsoft Outlook.

Lakenetwork

We will be offering an series of free tutorial sessions in our office for common business problems on the Internet. In our first session, we plan to help businesses create Facebook pages. Please contact us at 440-975-9580 for more information, or email contact@lakenetwork.net.

Stay tuned…

This is a very brief overview of the blog post process/screen:

1. Go to your blog’s website address.

2. Click the “Login” menu item under the “Meta” menu, right hand side of screen. This will bring you to a login screen.

3. Enter your user name and password. This will bring you to the WordPress dashboard.

4. Click on the “Posts” menu on the left hand side of the screen. A popdown menu will appear. Click on “Add New.”

5. The “Post” screen is roughly laid out as follows:

a. There’s a long text entry field at the very top where you can enter a subject. The subject should be an appealing description of the content within, and you should keep in mind that you should enter key phrases that people might look for when googling for content such as your blog.

b. The next area is a text area where you can enter your blog. (I suggest that you type out the blog in Windows Notepad and save it locally on your computer, then copy the text from Notepad into the blog.)

c. The next area is for an excerpt. Create a one or two sentence synopsis of your blog here, something that gives people more of an idea of the content of the blog.

d. Moving to the right hand side of the screen, the top area is the publish area. When you are ready to publish the blog, click the “Publish” button. You can also preview the blog in this area.

e. Post Tags. Enter 2-5 subjects to which this particular blog entry relates. Post tags should be phrases 1-2 words long.

f. Categories. The categories you enter here will appear on the home page of the blog. You should try to limit your categories to general or important topics for the blog, because all the categories you define will show up on the blog screen.

How to Enter Pictures

1. In the Add New or Edit Post screen, above the blog entry area, there’s a row of tool bar icons for formatting the blog. Above that, there are four icons to the right of the text “Upload/Insert.” The left-most icon looks like a square within a square; clicking on this icon allows you to select images from your computer.

2. Once you select an image and upload it, you can enter a caption (if necessary), edit the image alignment (recommended) among other things.

3. We recommend that when you create images for the blog, try to limit the width of the image to something less than 270 pixels wide. It would be good to settle on a standard width for the photos on the blog so that the entries have some consistency in presentation. Photoshop is a good tool you could use to prepare photos for websites and blogs.

Why should businesses blog?

Blogging improves your business’s credibility online, and adding more content online gives your business a larger digital footprint.

Lakenetwork.net can help your business get started blogging online. In addition to standard web development, we work with businesses and organizations to help improve their social media presence. Call us at (440) 975-9580 for more information or contact us online here.

Related articles

• How to make your blog posts something more, without getting in trouble (blogmistress.com)
• How To Add Flickr Images On Your Blog (johnchow.com)