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 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…

Topics touched on during our presentation:

• The "garden" approach to website management 
• Usability – how easy is your website to use and does it lead your readers to where you want them to go and what you'd like them to do? 
• Professionalism – quality of text content and design 
• Technical considerations – good solutions for extensibility and within budgetary constraints

We welcome you to attend this presentation. It will be oriented towards non-web professionals, i.e., the business owner evaluating requirements for his or her own website who doesn't necessarily have much experience with website design.

Registration…

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! 

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…

Sometimes it is hard to figure out how to reach someone in a company, according to marketing manager Laura Freeman. Make sure your contact information is clearly visible. Put contact information on every page, traditionally in the footer (bottom of the page). Or, have a “Contact Us” page. Preferably do both.

Resize your photographs before you put them on the Internet rather than relying on your browser to resize them, says developer Corey Green. Large photos dramatically increase the time it takes for a site to load. Also, the photos look jagged.

Organization is important, especially for larger sites, according to developer Kathy Smith. “I’ve gotten totally lost on sites that don’t have links presented in logical ways. A site should be easy to navigate, and easily expandable without compromising the navigation.”

She added that making a Web site as informative as possible is the best thing one can do. “Put resources online. Give your customers a reason to visit, bookmark, and come back.“

It’s important to not overwhelm your visitors with needlessly long pages or over-elaborate navigation systems, says developer Alex Roys. The more concise you can be, the more effective in getting your point across–rather than burying the visitor under a mountain of information that they can’t use.

Keep these suggestions in mind, and half the battle is won in giving your company or organization an attractive and useful presence on the Internet.

Here are some ideas:

Make sure your pricing is competitive. Is there any way you can shave costs in your pricing structure?

Tell the viewer how essential your product or service is. For example:
Now, more than ever, you need to look your absolute best to get the sale, so come to our salon.

Offer extra value that saves your customers money as they gear up for the holidays.

• Point out to the visitors to your site that with today’s gas prices, shopping online saves not only time, but gas money as well.
• Post a downloadable holiday budget planner on your site – your customers will thank you for helping them track their spending.
• Offer buy one, get one specials, or discounts for those who make a holiday purchase to use next year. This will bring them back in January.

None of these ideas will matter if you’re not getting the traffic you want to your site. Here’s where search engine optimization (SEO) is important. How do you know if you are getting the right traffic? Get statistics from your Web site host on what search terms people are using to find you.

How do you do that? Have your Web maintenance team add Google Analytics to your site. A lot of people think backwards about this – they think SEO is when someone plugs in the name of their company and it comes up. No! SEO is for when someone doesn’t know the name of your company or maybe doesn’t even know you exist! Find Google Analytics at www.google.com/analytics to be able to learn where your visitors come from – and how they interact with your site. Not to mention that it’s FREE to all Internet advertisers and Web site owners.