http://www.lakenetwork.net/tutorials/outlook.html

How to set up an autoresponder in Dreamhost:

http://www.lakenetwork.net/tutorials/autoresponder.html

How to access webmail in Dreamhost:

http://www.lakenetwork.net/tutorials/webmail.html

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…

Lake Erie East Coastal Gazette

We are pleased to announce a new e-newsletter, the Lake Erie East Coastal Gazette. We designed this newsletter for the Lake County Visitors Bureau. The first couple of issues will focus on Lake and Ashtabula Counties,  famous for beaches, fishing, B&Bs, wineries and more.

If you are interested in events in Lake and Ashtabula Counties, please feel free to subscribe to the newsletter here.  New newsletter signups will be entered into a drawing for four free Lake County Captains tickets!

Lakenetwork.net provides professional e-newsletter design for businesses and organizations in the Northeast Ohio area and beyond.

1. Go to constantcontact.com (use Internet Explorer or Netscape browser rather than Google Chrome as Constant Contact doesn’t work within Google Chrome).

2. Login with your username and password.

3. This will bring you to a main dashboard. On the right hand side of the screen, there’s an area for contacts. Click Add/Import.

4. Select the list(s) to which you want to add the new contact, and click the “Next” button.

5. Select “Type my email addresses and contact details into Constant Contact” and click the “Next” button. (Or, if you just want to enter in email addresses without additional contact info, you could select “Type or copy my email addresses into Constant Contact.)  This will bring you to a screen that allows you to enter in multiple addresses at once. You can enter multiple fields–email address, first name, last name, and two selectable fields. I suggest selecting “Email Type” as one of the drop downs (and by default you could sign them up for HTML email), and perhaps the other useful field name you could select is “Company Name.” Or you could just leave all these blank, except for the email address field.

6. When you are done entering in addresses, click the “Submit Data” button. The next screen will tell you if you were successful in adding the address–something along the lines of “1 contact was successfully added.”

Lakenetwork

Lakenetwork has a number of clients who use Constant Contact for their enewsletter campaigns. Often, the templates provided by Constant Contact don’t exactly fit our customers’ needs. We are pleased to offer custom newsletter development and management. We can create newsletters that match the style of your website if desired.

Related reading

Constant Contact support blog

Constant Contact Learning Center

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)

OK, so you’ve got a new web site. How are you going to get people to come to the site?

Search engine optimization (SEO) used to be the main method of web site promotion. But Web 2.0 has arrived, and now you’ve got a number of tools to use from the driver’s seat of your web site.

Here are some ideas for consideration:

1. Have a blog? Claim your blog on Technorati and get feedback on the popularity of your blog.

“Getting Started with Technorati”

2. Generate compelling blog content that relates to your web site business. Find an educational mission and write about it.

3. Use Facebook. Create a business fan page and post engaging, relevant content on your page. We post information that corresponds to our educational mission (helping people promote their web sites) on our fan page.

Keep your audience in mind–don’t post spam; post information that can really be of use, and interact sincerely with people who are in your networking group.

Social media resources

4. Post your blog entries on social media such as Facebook and Twitter.

Related articles

• Six Reasons SEOs Love Blogs (searchengineguide.com)
• Three Blogging Tips (best-tutorial.net)
• Build Your Brand Through Social Media (lazerpromotions.com)

Adding a nicely formatted signature to the bottom of your emails with some type of promotional message is fairly simple in email client programs such as Microsoft Outlook.

You can also add your company’s logo or additional images. But professionals should be aware that although it is possible to add logos and images, there are several issues:

1. Images might not appear in your clients’ email reading programs, so it’s possible that the signatures won’t appear as nicely as you expect them to if you use images.

2. Images can appear as attached files, even if you fully qualify the URLs, specifying that the image source lies on your web server or image server. Many users avoid opening emails that look like they have attachments.

> How to add a signature to your email

Lakenetwork can design a professional email signature and/or email marketing newsletter campaign for your business or organization. Contact us at (440) 975-9580 for more information.

Businesses need to be aware of several issues when setting up Facebook accounts and business fan pages:

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 the Facebook accounts shut down.

Currently, users who want to isolate their business persona from their personal persona are out of luck. Even thought it’s possible to create a business account, business account owners are not supposed to have a separate personal account.

There’s a bit of a way around this: set up a business fan page. An individual Facebook user can set up multiple fan pages, one or more of which can relate to business concerns. Messages from a fan page appear to come from the page rather than the page administrator.

Businesses need to be choosy in setting up business pages. The key administrator for a business page cannot be reassigned. Until Facebook fixes this, the original administrator is permanent. It is possible to assign additional administrators, but the original administrator still retains control. For this reason I recommend that for now, have the business owner initiate the business page setup with Facebook. The owner can assign an additional administrator to the page if that is desired.

Related articles

• Does every small business need a Facebook Fan Page? (startups.com)
• Facebook’s collosal Social Media Fail, where’s Mashable to break this story? (theresabloginmysoup.com)

Some reading and trial-and-error is necessary, though. We’ve put together this resource page to help Joomla CMS administrators get started.

Also, check out our Facebook page for Joomla Users. You can subscribe to the information by becoming a fan of the page.

Here are some links to the initial articles we’ve posted on our Joomla resource page:

Starting points for Joomla Administrators
Books and links to help Joomla administrators get started

Logging in
How to get to the administrative interface

Using the Administrative Interface
Key functions for managing articles and pages

Joomla Article Definition
Articles are the means to add content to your Joomla site

Editing an Article
Overview, caveats and links to more detailed info

An easier way to edit your site
You can log in to the front end to edit articles

Creating New Articles
Key stuff to know when creating a new article

Uploading Images
How to get an image onto your site

Editing Article Order
Manage the order in which articles appear

Creating a Page or Menu Item
Menu items are the means by which to define a page

Adding a section or category
Organize the content of your site

Use Article Description fields
Describe your content

Pasting text into Joomla
Be careful when pasting text into Joomla articles

Lakenetwork.net has the expertise to get you up and running fast with Joomla. Contact us about converting your existing site to Joomla, or developing a new Joomla site. Conversion is more economical than one might think, and just about anything can be developed to work within the Joomla framework. Call our office at (440) 975-9580 or contact us via our website.

Unsure of your writing skills? Lakenetwork specializes in content generation and proofreading. With over twenty years in business journalism, we can edit your website text to impart a professional web presence.