Although there are lots of factors to consider when sending promotions, such as timing, sender name, and so forth, the subject line of the newsletter is perhaps the most important. With an enticing subject, the reader is more apt to open the email. For example, a subject line like, “Check this out,”  almost guarantees your message will be deleted and/or flagged as spam. But a good subject line, such as “Invitation to Our Next Event,” stands a better chance of being opened and read.

Writing good subject lines is simply good copywriting. It takes time to master, but that doesn’t mean trial and error is the way to go about it. If you spend just a little time researching the dos and don’t you’re apt to find yourself reaping much better returns from your e-mail marketing efforts.  A short but sweet article on this subject can be found  on Mailchimp’s website, where they’ve spent a good deal of time analyzing what works and what doesn’t.

For those who feel they could use a little help, today Mailchimp announced their subject line suggester. As the name, ahem,  suggests, you provide Mailchimp with phrases from the subject line you’re thinking of using and they provide you with examples of wording changes that will likely make it more effective. The suggestions are based on their analysis of subject lines used by their customers and the open rates those subject lines garnered.

As with any automated tool, use good sense when considering the recommendations.

Today, while visiting the site of one of the leading Mac OCR vendors, I saw a link labeled ‘Demo,’ which I clicked, assuming it would take me to the page where I could download a demo version of their software. I landed on a page that requested my name and email address, and I assumed that after handing over that information I’d get an emailed link where I could grab the software. It seemed like a fair trade.

But that didn’t happen. After I provided my personal contact information, I was taken to a page where I could view a Flash-only demo of the product – no download in sight, and certainly not what I was expecting or what I believe most people would reasonably have expected. I was so incensed by this blatant bait-and-switch that I no longer care about their product. (I’m also so irritated that I’m not even going to mention the company’s name)

This example demonstrates the type of tactic that will backfire all the time. Don’t do it.

So how do you know what your priorities are? Over the years I’ve developed the following rules for managing websites. Remember,  these are general rules I use to dictate the order in which I perform site-related tasks; my specific rule is that people who really know their business can get away with shifting the order from time to time, with one caveat: Rules 1,2, and 3 must always come first.

1. Backups – Most people roll their eyes at the thought of backups, and there’s no way of reminding someone about this without seeming preachy; but most people also seem to forget about their backups, so I’m putting this at number one on the list because it is so critical. I can’t stress this enough: if you fail to do you backups, sooner or later you will lose everything you’ve built. Everything. Backups are easy to do,  and they can and should be largely automated. There’s no reason to take this shortcut.
2. Security – A close second to backups is security. If there’s one thing that people think about even less, it’s this. In a nutshell, solid security is keeping the site safe from those unauthorized to use it, and also from unauthorized alterations or defacements. It’s a complicated topic, but it begins with keeping your server and your software updated to the latest versions. (For a cautionary tale on this subject, see how Robert Scoble lost parts of his blog due to a security flaw in Wordpress and also how he didn’t have backups.)
3. Monitoring –  Monitoring your site means knowing whether its up or down at all times. Waiting to hear about downtime from your customers is not a monitoring strategy. Keeping tabs on your site is absolutely critical, and it’s yet another task that can be automated. Pingdom is a great and inexpensive solution for your monitoring.
4. Customer Service - Building traffic to your site and translating that traffic into customers or repeat visitors is hard work, and every time you accomplish the next sale or the next regular visitor you’re enhancing the level of trust between you and the visitor. Why on earth would you want to do anything to jeopardize that trust-based relationship? Getting people to give you their trust is hard work; regaining their trust after you’ve lost it is nearly impossible. Take care of your customers and visitors and they will take care of you.
5. Creating New Content - Adding more content to your site will give it the kind of depth required to bring visitors back again and again. If you run an e-commerce store that means making sure you carry all the items your customers are likely to want; if you run a blog, it means writing the kinds of blog posts that your readers appreciate. It all adds up to giving people more of what it is that brought them to you in the first place.
6. Traffic Building – It makes absolutely no sense to build traffic until you have a site worth visiting, so if you haven’t really done your best on #5, stop right there and keep at it until you’re certain. Then, and only then, will your efforts at building traffic pay off. Why bother building traffic to a site that doesn’t have anything to attract visitors and, more importantly, retain them once they’ve stopped by? But once you have that solid base of content, it’s time to get busy building traffic to your site with advertising, affiliate program, search engine optimization (SEO), commenting on other blogs, etc.
7. Site Enhancements – The urge to tinker with a site’s design and functionality is so powerful that it’s almost irresistible, and site design often get the blame when a site is performing poorly.  But in my experience this is rarely the real cause. In fact, I’ve seen sites that were terribly designed do extremely well despite being ugly and counterintuitive. MySpace is a good example of this; though now fading in popularity, it continues to be one of the hottest properties on the Internet despite an almost comically bad user interface. How is it that MySpace does so well despite looking like something designed by a second-grader? The answer is traffic, traffic, traffic. And the traffic keeps coming because MySpace has something people want, something that makes them overlook those glaring design deficiencies. When performing site evaluations, one of the very first questions I’m asked is whether I believe a redesign will improve the site’s performance. I respond with a question: How much a traffic are you getting? If the answer is, “not much,” then a redesign is a waste of time. Why bother redesigning something that people aren’t visiting to begin with? In short, whether your site looks like the Mona Lisa or a kindergarten art project, it doesn’t really matter until you have a solid base of visitors.
8. Everything Else – This is my catch-all category, the one in which you do whatever it is that you want to do. It’s here to show that whatever it is you’re planning to do needs to come after everything else. Always.

I’ve used these priorities for many years, on sites ranging from small to huge. Rarely have I found a good reason for diverging from the order of things as I’ve described them. You may find peace of mind if you apply them yourself.

But what if you’re on a Wordpress.com blog, where you can’t install plugins, or maybe you just don’t want to mess with plugins, period? The answer is Twitter Feed, a service that polls your blog, looks for updates, and posts them to Twitter on your behalf.

Twitter Feed is totally automatic, totally free, and works with any RSS feed – not just those from blogs. It couldn’t be easier to use.

Since the changeover, I’ve been happily visiting TD Bank online using the same bookmark I’ve had for the past several years.  The bookmark originally pointed to commerceonline.com, and that’s how I’ve done my online banking since the day I first saved it. When TD Bank took over Commerce, the link continued to work.

Not what I expected to see when I clicked my online banking bookmark.

When I visited today, I got a big surprise: at first glance, I thought my bank’s website had been taken over by a domain squatter.  Actually, in a sense, it turns out it had been taken over by a domain squatter. It was filled with ’sponsored search results.’  After I recovered from shock, I realized that what had probably happened was that TD Bank, the new owner of Commerce Bank, had probably forgotten to renew the registration on the old domain, and so it fell into the hands of whomever has it now. The net effect is that when I use the my bookmark that has always taken me to my online banking login, I now land on a page not apparently controlled by Commerce or TD Bank, but one owned by some unknown entity.

This poses potential security problems. Let’s assume there are lots of people like me, people who long ago bookmarked the site and trust it to take them to their bank. Now, what if the new custodians of the domain decide to take advantage of this fact and masquerade as the bank? I’d be willing to bet a lot of people might accidentally give up their login and pin number before they realized what had happened. We’re all creatures of habit. How often do you really click the little security icon in your browser to verify a site’s identity?

This brings me to my point: guard your old domains. If you ever used them for anything important, it’s better to keep paying the $9/year to renew the domain than to let it fall into the hands of someone who might use them to take advantage of others.

And if you happened to once bank with Commerce Bank USA, I strongly suggest updating your bookmarks.

Studies have shown that Transactional Emails, as they’re known,  are opened and read about 75% of the time. In contrast, regular email newsletters have much, much lower open rates – typically 10% – 30%, and often in the single digits. It’s clear that if you’re looking to grab the readers attention, you’re much more likely to be able to do it with a transactional email. Their higher open rates also tend to garner higher click-through rates, multiplying the effect.

Given this insight, it’s surprising that many sites don’t take advantage of the extra marketing potential they provide. Certainly the large e-commerce vendors like Amazon do, but smaller shops tend to ignore them, partly out of ignorance, but perhaps also out of the effort it takes. True, taking full advantage of transaction emails can mean a lot of customization, especially when it comes to providing tailored upsells of related products or services.

But even without a million dollar technology budget you can still use the technique. Here are a few examples of simple things you can incorporate:

• Invitations to subscribe to your Twitter or Facebook pages.
• A link to signup for your mailing list
• A link to your RSS feed
• Coupon codes
• Dates of sales or upcoming promotions

None of these suggestions requires much effort, but the payoff can be significant. If you’re sending a transaction email that means you’ve already established some degree of trust with the recipient. So long as it is used tastefully, this marketing technique can be extremely effective – and a terrible waste to ignore.

To those just getting started in the online world, the question is usually surprising, and understandably so, because a site makeover just seems to be an obvious improvement. But the question of traffic is paramount, because without it you can change many things about a site and none of them will make the slightest bit of difference. Why?

I’ll use his site as an example. Right now he receives about fifty visitors each day, converting about 1% at $23 per sale. Over the course of a 30-day month, he will gross about $345 in revenue. Now, assume he opts for the redesign, does the impossible and manages to get everything right the first time, and spends $500 in the process. ($500 would be a fire sale price for a Wordpress theme). The redesign works great: he’s boosted his conversion rate to 1.25% (a very strong increase.) Instead of $345/mo in revenue, now he pulling in $431.25.  It will take him a few months or so to recoup his initial investment, but after that everything else is gravy. What could be wrong with that?

Now consider an alternate scenario. Lets say that, instead of doing the redesign, he begins to aggressively promote his site by blogging each day, posting links to his content on Twitter and Facebook, commenting on blogs, and generally doing things that attract new visitors. After one month, he has modestly increased his traffic to 100 visitors each day. Of course, he’s still hamstrung by the same old blog layout, converting at the same old 1% rate. Or is he? The math is same as in my first example and it tells the tale: monthly visitors X conversion rate X price, which gives us $690(3000 X 1% X $23) . That’s considerably better than the results with the redesign, and he didn’t have to spend the $500 to redesign his blog.

Of course, in this post I’ve used small numbers, but that’s really my point. If you’re just starting out, anything you do aside from building traffic will deliver statistically insignificant results: you won’t really know if what you did had a great effect or if you simply just had a great (or lousy) day.

Focus on building traffic first and foremost. You can worry about the other things later – when they’re worth worrying about.

“I don’t like to pay for the same real estate twice,” said George S. Patton, in the eponymously named 1970 film classic. (I don’t know if the real George S. Patton ever really said this, but it seems consistent with his persona.) It concisely describes what many site managers do: work hard to attract visitors but do nothing to retain them as regular readers.

Building repeat visitor traffic can be done in many ways. The first and most obvious way is to encourage users to bookmark your site. Unfortunately, this is the least effective method since people simply don’t bookmark sites the way they once did;  even when they do there is no guarantee that they’ll remember to use the bookmark they’ve created.

The next method is to offer an RSS feed and encourage users to subscribe to it. What this method has going for it is that RSS is a ‘push’ method; once someone subscribes to your feed, the next time you publish something it will show up in their reader – no action is required on their part. The downside of RSS is that,  aside from power users and techies, most people don’t know what it is or how to use it, and trying to convince them to subscribe to something they don’t understand will be a wasted effort.

The last method is ‘Subscribe via Email.’  It may seem passé, so 20th century,  to even suggest it, but personal experience has shown this to be one of the most effective methods of bringing visitors back to a site. You can see an example of this at work in my sidebar at right. The technique works for blogs just as well as it works for e-commerce sites, and it does so because, when people find something they like, they want to get more of it, and they want to get it in the easiest possible way. Email fits this bill nicely.

The best part is that if you have an RSS feed – and just about every blogging or e-commerce platform does these days – you can deliver your content to  subscribers without any additional work. All you need to do is find a service that will take that feed and retransmit it to your readership. One of the most widely used (and the one I use here at The Well Run Site) is Feedburner.  Feedburner is great for adding all sorts of functionality to an RSS feed, but it also offers a free Email Subscriptions feature that is all most sites will ever need.

If you need more control over how things look or how often they’re sent, you may want to consider one of the commercial services specializing in email newsletter marketing. Some the biggest are Mailchimp, Aweber, and Constant Contact. (I’ve been singing Mailchimp’s praises for quite a while. See here and here for more.)

During the call, we briefly touched on some of things I’ve found that have helped to make my experience with their site so productive, things I omitted from my original post because it was already on the longish side. Today I want to spend just a few minutes highlighting what I’ve learned and how they can help anyone to make the most of the experience.

For most people – basically everyone who doesn’t have a full-time staff of designers – getting something designed usually means spending a lot of time reviewing portfolios, selecting a designer, and then working with that person to execute the vision. There are a number of problems with this method:

• Unless you already know someone, reviewing designer portfolios is time consuming.
• I hate to say it, but some designers often misrepresent their work; their portfolios will include items that were designed by others. (In an extreme example, I had a designer submit work to me that I knew someone else had designed. I knew this because it was one of my projects.)
• You’re only working with one designer at a time, and that designer, though competent, might not be able to deliver what it is that you’re looking for.  When that happens you’re going to have to go back to step 1.

The 99Designs process is completely different, so different that it completely eliminates the problems I’ve mentioned above. To begin, since you’re running a contest, there is no need to review designer portfolios. Second, because it’s a contest, you’re going to be working with multiple designers simultaneously; if one can’t provide what you’re looking for, another one will. Finally, you don’t need to care about their portfolio because only their contest submissions matter, and it is only when you wish to accept that work that they get paid.

I’ve now used this process twice, once for a logo, and once for a site design, and in both cases the results have been outstanding. While I once would have spent a lot of time dealing with the issues I’ve highlighted above, I now spend that same time interacting with designers, and in the process have achieved results that are, so far,  significantly better than I probably would have gotten if I’d used my old methods.

If you plan on trying 99Designs for yourself, here are some pointers:

• Leaving feedback for designers is  the most important thing you can do while your contest is running. Designers need this feedback so they can update their work and iterate towards something you find pleasing. Do it for every contest entry if you can. If you do, you’ll get more and better submissions that will result in a higher quality finished product.
• Don’t wait on giving your feedback. Once a designer has submitted a design, try to leave your detailed feedback as quickly as possible, while they’re still online and can make corrections or submit an entirely new concept.
• Since the site won’t notify you of new submissions, it’s up to you to check your contests frequently while they’re running. You can do this manually or, better still, use the RSS feed associated with your particular contest; add this feed to your feed reader and stay up-to-date.
• Be sure to create a good design brief for the contest. Provide the designer with as much detail as possible. Let them know what you like and don’t like, but leave the creative details to them. If you can provide a wireframe diagram of how you think the site should look, by all means do so.
• You don’t have to pick just one winner. When a contest is over and you think you might want to use more than one of the designs, you can pay a second (or a third, for that matter) designer and use both works. I haven’t done this yet, but the quality of the work I’ve seen has had me seriously considering it.

I fear that my enthusiasm for the 99Designs approach leaves me sounding a bit like a fanboy or a shill. Rest assured, my excitement is genuine, and I sincerely believe they’re on to something. I’ve done things the old way for so long that I can’t help but see the promise of something that has taken much of the grief out of what was, and remains for so many people, a painful process.

Of course, I know that there are online apps out there that address each of these needs; but my complaints with all of them, to varying degrees,  is that they fall short in some significant way, whether it be a rotten user interface, or functionality that is too limited for my needs. I also don’t like having to use multiple tools when one could do the job. I began to think that my needs weren’t very unusual, and that others might feel the same way, and that this might be the sort of thing that they would find useful, too. What really sealed the deal was that I felt that this was a tool I really wanted to use myself, and so I decided to begin building it. Thus, Lystie was born.

Once I’d picked a name, had a logo designed, and defined the product focus and feature set, I set out to begin the process of designing the front-end of the site. The process by which this is done is roughly standardized by now and I’ve done it myself many times before. You begin by creating a basic wireframe design. This is the ‘back of the napkin,’ high-level vision for what you want the site to look like. You then take that design and ‘play computer’ in your head, making sure that the design allows you to do everything you need it to. Once you’re satisfied that you’ve got something that addresses those needs, you then hand off the wireframe to a designer who takes your vision for the product, adds artistic vision and (hopefully) some ideas of his own, and then you have the finished product, which is a layered PSD file produced in Photoshop. This file is then handed off to a web developer who takes the PSD file and codes it into HTML, CSS, and images, leaving you with a design that is ready to be connected to the actual code that makes the entire site a working entity.

In the past, I’ve always used a Mac application called OmniGraffle to create my wireframes.  I’d then engage a single designer to create the PSD. Finally, I’d hire someone to handle creating the HTML and CSS from the PSD the designer had created. (It is possible to find someone skilled, one who can handle both, but usually they’ll be different people). But I haven’t been entirely happy with the way that process has worked recently; so, this time, I decided to take a different approach.

Although I love OmniGraffle and have used it for years for drawing network diagrams and so forth, I’ve never felt that it was an especially good wireframing tool because it lacks a good set of standardized web design components in its various collections of stencils. So this time I decided to use Balsamiq Mockups, an Adobe AIR-based product that runs on multiple platforms, one that is tailor-made for designing web user interfaces. After about two hours of doodling and adjusting my design, I had a workable mockup. Balsamiq actually made the process both easy and enjoyable. I consider this phase a success.

Next it was time to give the wireframe to a designer who would turn my vision into a visually pleasing (and consistent) reality. This time I chose to take an entirely different approach than I’d ever done before. Usually I visit Odesk or Elance, review a few hundred design portfolios, and then hand off the task to the designer, hoping his portfolio is truthful and that what he delivers to me will be good. Not having had entirely satisfactory experiences in the recent past, I instead opted to use this as opportunity to experiment with crowdsourcing by posting a design contest on 99Designs. Now, instead of hiring  a single designer and a saying a prayer, I would be getting submissions from many designers. Whereas before I could spend many hours staffing the project, in contrast, I spent 10 minutes putting together a design brief and posting the contest on 99Designs. The contest ran for 7 days, during which time I received literally dozens of submissions from different designers. In the end, I suffered an embarrassment of riches: it was difficult to choose a winning design because there were so many good ones. This phase, too, was a resounding success.

Finally, with my completed PSD design in hand, it was time to locate a developer who could skillfully transfer the Photoshop design into clean, well-structured HTML and CSS. Here, too, I usually find resources on Odesk, and finding someone to handle the task isn’t hard. But I wanted to save myself the time of having to review candidates, after which I’d have to hope I’d made the right choice. So I instead opted to use a service that specializes in this area and save myself the time. (Search Google for ‘PSD to HTML’). I chose HTMLBurger, and less than 24 hours after I gave them the project, I had the first version of the completed HTML and CSS returned to me for review. The code was clean, and with minor fixes it worked perfectly on all major browsers.

I’m happy to say that this process has been an unqualified success. In the process, I’ve learned (or re-learned) a few things:

• Just because you’ve been doing something a certain way for a long time doesn’t mean the process can’t be improved. In fact, things change so rapidly on the Internet that it’s a safe bet that it probably can be improved, if you’re willing to occasionally step outside your comfort zone.
• The old way of handing a design to single designer wastes your time and probably delivers poorer quality work than what you can get through a design contest on 99Designs. Although it isn’t necessarily the best approach for all projects, I fully intend to continue using the service for most all of my design needs in the near future. It’s that good.
• I’m not going to waste time reviewing resumes and recruiting web coders on Odesk or Elance any more. From here on out, HTMLBurger, or one of their competitors, is going to have my business. The transaction was easy, the results were outstanding, and they guaranteed the results. No worries.

The Lystie project is coming along nicely. The front-end is in place, our API is working, and we’re beginning the process of connecting the UI and bringing the whole thing to life. We are expecting to launch in September. If you’d like to be notified when we begin accepting beta users, please visit the site and signup for early access.

UPDATE: After this was posted, I was contacted by Jason Aiken at 99Designs. A little while later he interviewed over Skype about Lystie and my experience using their service.  The interview can be found here. I have also posted a few more tips on making the most of 99Designs here.