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…

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