The Juggling Entrepreneurs

[Reprint from Christopher Knight's Ezine Tips]

Recently Email Service Provider (ESP) MailerMailer released an email metrics report on the first half of this year. To save you some time from reading all 28 pages of this report, I’m going to give you the quick highlights:

• Mondays, Tuesdays and Weekends are best days to send.
• Wednesdays and Friday’s are the days your email is least likely to be read.
• Tuesday mailings typically get the highest click rates.
• Shorter Subject Lines (less than 35 characters) significantly outperform longer subject lines (greater than 35 characters) by both open rate and click through rate (CTR.)
• Subject line personalization is the single best place to add personalization if you want to improve open rate and CTR.
• Shoot for having either 5-10 links or over 20 links for best performance. Try to avoid having 6-19 links within your emails.
• Text messages show a very slight advantage in CTR over HTML, but the percentage is negligible

Read the full Ezine-Tips article: http://EmailUniverse.com/ezine-tips/?id=1367

Today there will be a live video seminar at 2 PM EST about how to get your email into the Inbox and not into the spam folder.   The seminar is free.  Click here to register.

For information about upcoming seminars, click here.

Every once in a while, I take a look at Isolated Entrepreneur’s statistics.  I thought I would share some since many subscribers are bloggers themselves.

Over the past year, the type of postings for our audience (micro business owners) that have the most hits continue to be the same.

• Case studies of successful companies (i.e. Baby Einstein)
• Economic outlook
• Marketing statistics

The periodic news tidbits are starting to take off as well, indicating an increase in RSS subscribers and repeat readers.

Writers wanted

Isolated Entrepreneur is looking for additional authors who want to blog to the micro-business communities.  Of special interest are: virtual assistants, coaches, accountants, and marketing specialists.

An author on a community blog will find the commitment level is smaller and the exposure is greater.  More authors means more contacts.

Authors at Isolated Entrepreneur have their own author profile page (just click on the author’s name at the top of a posting  or on the right side.

One of the first checks I do when I am about to meet with a prospective client is try and access the client’s website with www in front of the domain name - and without.

In most cases, it works with and without. If all or part of the site does not load, it usually involves a web-based application such as Joomla!, Wordpress, Typepad, etc.

Usually, it is an easy fix. Search “without www” in the support pages of the application or your domain registry’s website.

I have handled email lists and published e-newsletters for several clients in the past.   I always insist my clients comply with SPAM laws and grow their email lists through traditional means rather than sending it to everyone who drops a business card in their fish bowl at conventions.

Many people think of email marketing as a cheap, impersonal way to market.  It’s not.

Email is very personal to the person who receives it.  Many people think of email as an imposition - a necessary task that keeps them from getting things done.  E-newsletters should be informative and enjoyable first - a sales gimmick last.

Just like Justin at AWeber, I get offended when I get emails I did not explicitly opt to get.  Here is Justin’s take on it.  It may be worthwhile to read the comments below it as well.

Every year, I use my digital photos to use as notecards and to make gifts for relatives. Through my projects, I have learned that not all services are alike.

Snapfish is great for calendars, but Shutterfly rocks when it comes to a collage poster. (more…)

In this week’s Get to the Point newsletter, there is a great case study of why a person would drive approximately an hour to a Mac store rather than going to the local Apple store.

Don’t depend on the forward button in your subscriber’s email software to spread the word about your e-zine.

Depending on what software the subscriber uses, the forwarded email may look garbled or just be the text version of your product.

By including a “refer a friend” and/or “forward newsletter to friend” links and webpages, you are better able to control the look-and-feel of the forwarded message.

Finally, you can get statistics on how viral your e-zine is.  =-)

If you are alike me, you mostly scan web content rather than reading it word-for-word.

Jakob Nielsen has a great newsletter article about web writing. Click on the “writing for the web” under Mea Culpa for great words of wisdom.

Source: Forbes, “The Single Greatest Marketing Tool“, Lisa LaMotta, 7/24/07

Forbes released a great article about how public relations/press releases are the “single greatest marketing tool”. Amazon and Google appeared in some 13,000 news articles in the last 30 days alone.

The main benefits are that it is free and it creates buzz about a company and its products - the same buzz that is repeated all over the Internet in blogs, on forums, and in social networks. (more…)