• Buy gasoline during coolest time of day - early morning or late evening is best. During these times gasoline is densest. Keep in mind - gas pumps measure volumes of gasoline, not densities of fuel concentration. You are charged according to ‘volume of measurement’.
• Choose type and brand of gasoline carefully. Certain brands provide you with greater economy because of better quality. Use the brands which ’seem’ most beneficial.
• Never exceed legal speed limit. Primarily they are set for your traveling safety, however better gas efficiency also occurs. Traveling at 55 mph give you up to 21% better mileage when compared to former legal speed limits of 65 mph and 70 mph.
• Car pools reduce travel monotony and gas expense - all riders chip in to help you buy. Conversation helps to keep the driver alert. Pooling also reduces traffic congestion, gives the driver easier maneuverability and greater ’steady speed’ economy. For best results, distribute passenger weight evenly throughout car.

Link: More Tips

• Grocery stores that sell gasoline will often give discounts to club card members. Safeway gas stations will give every club card member 3cents off per gallon. If you spend $50 or more in the store on one visit, you will get a 10cent per gallon discount on your next gas refil.

Since we cannot beat the prices — these tips can help you save a few bucks at the station.

Do you have any gas saving tips? I would love to hear them!

Justin Capasso

Related Articles:

(Via Tech News Watch.)

Is your web site working hard enough for you? Run it through the following 20 point fitness assessment to find out:

• Is your site fully search engine compatible? Are all your pages being indexed by the major search engines?
• Do you track your visitor statistics on a regular basis? Do you use the information provided by your visitor statistics to improve your site?
• Is your web site accessible to visually-impaired visitors? Does it meet the international standards set down by the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI)?
• Do you know which sites and search engines provide you with the most traffic? Do you use this information to improve your traffic further?
• Do you track the source of all reported errors in your site statistics and fix them promptly?
• Do you know which keywords your site was found for in the search engines? Have you conducted keyword research to determine what search terms your target markets are looking for so you can optimize for them?
• Does your web site HTML code validate to W3 standards? Do you check for validation regularly?
• Does your site contain zero broken links? Do you check for and fix broken links regularly?
• Has your site been fully search engine optimized to integrate your target search terms into your Page Titles, META Tags and visible page text?
• Have you created and submitted an XML sitemap to Google Sitemaps?
• Have you created and submitted a sitemap to Yahoo Site Explorer?
• Have you checked to see if your site meets Google’s Webmaster Guidelines?
• Do you measure your visitor sign-ups and conversions on a regular basis? Do you tweak your landing page copy to improve the conversion rates?
• Is your site navigation intuitive and are your visitors following the navigation paths you intended?
• Do you encourage feedback from your site visitors and provide an obvious way for them to provide such feedback?
• Are there at least 250 words of text on your home page to satisfy search engines?
• Does your site contain a visible, text-based site map to aid user navigation?
• Do you have an ongoing link building campaign running to secure more incoming links to your site and improve your site’s link popularity score?
• Does your site have a high percentage of repeat visitors? Are the majority of your visitors staying on your site for more than a minute?
• Do your search engine referrals and site traffic figures grow each month?

Unless you can answer yes to all the questions in the above checklist, your web site is not working hard enough for you and needs a workout. Get to it!

By Kalena Jordan

“

(Via KDI Media : Savannah, GA.)

What’s the best remedy for ‘designer’s block‘? Easy – visit design gallery websites to get you back in the creative groove. There are many wonderful sites out there specifically to help inspire designers, and here are just a handful of them.

Best Web Gallery

Best Web Gallery features only the best XHTML and Flash designs you can find online. Best Web Gallery has a clean and easy-to-use interface, letting you preview a featured design when you hover over its image. Users can leave and read comments on the designs, giving you the opportunity to see what other people have to say about a particular site. Best Web Gallery is a project by Nick La, a highly talented freelance web designer, who also created Web Designer Wall and N.Design Studio.

Unmatched Style

Unmatched Style is a community dedicated to acknowledging beautiful CSS-based, web standards compliant web designs. People can rate and comment on the sites displayed here to help you narrow down worthwhile designs to check out. Unmatched Style also provides resource links, news, as well as interviews of top designers such as Roger Johansson, Jeff Croft, and Mark Boulton.

FAVUP

FAVUP currently has four gallery categories: Logos, Business Cards, Flash Websites, and CSS Websites. Each design furnishes a link to the designer - so if you like a particular design, you can also check out other works they’ve done that may not be featured on FAVUP.

Adobe Design Center

The Adobe Design Center has a gallery section where you can find featured designers from a variety of fields. You’ll find Photoshop experts, illustrators, and web designers featured here. The Adobe Design Center also has tutorials and articles that you can read to find further design inspiration.

The FWA

The FWA (Favorite Website Awards) is a showcase of excellent Flash designs. To be awarded the FWA is a great honor so you can be guaranteed to find first-class designs in its galleries. They also post articles and interviews on the website.

Patrick Haney’s Flickr Web Design Inspiration Set

Patrick Haney created a Flickr set of web designs that quickly grew to include over 400+ designs and has reached over over 600,000+ views. Each design in the set comes with a brief description of the website. To learn more about the Web Design Inspiration set, check out his post on Think Tank.

LogoPond

LogoPond is a community where users can submit their designs to share and receive feedback from other members. Comments on the designs are a valuable resource, and most often you’ll find tips and suggestions by community members that can inspire you on your own logo design.

Most Inspired

Most Inspired shares beautiful design work and also aggregates design gallery feeds in one page on their Gallery Feeds section. Some of the galleries on the feeds list are CSS Mania, Style Gala, cssimport, and InspirationKing. Most Inspired also lists links to blog posts that you may find useful.

Web Creme

Web Creme is a no-frills, simplistic gallery for web design inspiration. Each entry is tagged with their primary color palettes so that designers can quickly view designs that are in tune to what they’re currently searching for in terms of color theme.

DESIGNFLOOD.com

DESIGNFLOOD.com collects unique, handpicked, well-designed websites to showcase in their gallery. Users can rate each design from a score of 1 through 9 (they believe that no website can achieve a perfect 10 and that there’s always room for improvement). DESIGNFLOOD.com features large screenshots so it’s easier to find the designs you might be looking for.

Where do you go for design inspiration?

Let everyone know which places you go to for inspiration - whether it’s a website, a book, a magazine, or a particular art gallery - share your thoughts in the comments section. When I’ve amassed enough input, I’d like to someday post about the readers’ sources of inspiration.

(Via Six Revisions.)

Most of the time when we pitch to a new client we are asked for SEO guarantees. ‘Your competition has guaranteed top results and submission to 100,000 Search Engines and Directories’. We go all out educating clients that Search Engine Optimization is all about smart work and not just adding random keywords and submittíng to every directory possible. I’m writing this article to reach out to the SEO buyers and help them distinguish the crooks from the genuine SEO cos. I’ve compiled my Search marketing experience over the years in this article. I hope this helps you in selecting your Search Marketing initiative.

Commandment 1: There are No Rank Guarantees. (Period)

Search Engines alone control their indexing and ranking algorithm. Do not try to trick Search Engines. The only way to improve your search engine rank is by playing by the rules. And the rule is very simple: make it logical. Web content is primarily for the site visitor and not crawlers.

If your Search Engine Optimizer sold you magic ‘Top rank on Google in 10 days flat’. Forget it. There are no short cuts. Top ranking in Search Engine Natural Results will take time. Hard work is imperative especially in developing the content on your website and the links to your site.

Commandment 2: Ranking is Not the End, It’s the Means.

Ask yourself what will a top search engine rank get you? Most businesses are interested in increasing sales on a website or at the least driving qualified traffic. Ranking for the right keywords (keywords used by your target audience) is important. There are SEOs who will try to show case results for keywords that occur only on your website. Beware such gimmicks.

Commandment 3: Know Your Competition.

‘Rank’ is relative position and more so in the Search Engines’ natural results. How well you do in the search engine results is a function of how much hard work you have done in relation to your competition. Analyze your competition’s keywords, links, keyword density and spread, but be sure not to copy your competition.

Commandment 4: Use Search Engine Friendly Design.

A search and visitor friendly design is a must for any successful website. Your website should be compelling enough for repeat visits by search engines and potential customers. Make sure you have search engine friendly URLs and avoid those long URLs with query strings.

Commandment 5: Select Keywords that are Worthy.

You must research your keywords before targeting. There are tools that give you a good idea of a keyword’s search potential for example. It is important to know the number of searches for a keyword in the last month, last 6 months and last year. You should also find out the number of web pages that are targeting the keyword. It is advisable to start a campaign with keywords with moderate competition and a high number of searches.

Commandment 6: Write Great Content.

Even if your website site is technically perfect for search engine robots, it won’t do you any good unless you also fill it with great content. Great means it has contextual and editorial value. Great content brings repeat visits and increases the chance of conversion. Great content is factual and appeals to your target audience. Your web page should have your desired action embedded in the content and you must ensure that the content is fresh. Keep adding and editing content regularly.

Commandment 7: Use Good Hyper Linking Strategy.

Hyperlinks make your content accessible and contextual. You must hyperlink in the right context within the website and to other websites. Good links are appreciated by the Search Engines and by visitors. No one likes to be taken to a mall selling ‘Macintosh’ when shopping for ‘apples’.

Commandment 8: Write Relevant and Original Meta Content.

Meta content is like a business card. Just as your business card tells who you are and what you do, Meta content tells the search engines the relevance and context of a web page. Resist the temptation to include everything in the Meta content, but make it detailed. Confused? The idea is to include only what is relevant to the page in the Meta Content but to include everything that is relevant.

Commandment 9: Acquire Relevant Links.

The links you acquire are the roads to your web page for search engine bots and visitors. Good links improve your webpage’s equity on the World Wide Web and bad links make a dent in your equity and credibility. Be selective in reciprocal linking. Both reciprocal and one way links work, if you are prudent in selecting the links. Submit your website to the relevant sections in relevant directories.

Commandment 10: Consult Experts, If You Need To.

If you have the competence, there are two ways to learn - learning from your mistakes and learning from others’ experience. You can choose either. If you have the time and can wait for the online dollars, do it yourself. If you want to get started now, it may be useful to consult the experts.

By Bhaskar Thakur

Create Your META Description Tag

Take your líst of target keywords and phrases and open another text file. Again, you can use an existing sample META Description Tag as your template. Let’s say our existing description is:

<META name=”description” content=”Miami Florists create beautiful floral bouquets, arrangements, tributes and displays for all occasions, including weddings, Valentines Day, parties and corporate events. Deliveries throughout Florida.”

You can make your META Description Tag as long as you like, but only a certain portion of it will get indexed and displayed by search engines. According to Danny Sullivan in his (old but still relevant) article How to Use HTML Meta Tags, 200 to 250 characters of the META Description gets indexed but less than that gets displayed, depending on the search engine. So you want to make sure all your important keywords are listed towards the start of the tag.

Now take your líst of keywords for the home page in order of importance. For our fictional florist these were:

- florists Miami

- florists Florida

- wedding bouquets

Now you need to create a readable sentence or two describing your web site and incorporating these keywords so they make the best use of the keyword real estate available.

Because search engines often display the contents of the META Description Tag in the search results, it is very important that your sentences make grammatical sense and are enticing enough to encourage readers to clíck on your link. Let’s start with:

If you’re seeking a florist in Miami Florida, Funky Florists create unforgettable wedding bouquets, floral arrangements, tributes and displays for all occasions.

Ok, so that’s around 150 characters long and gets our three important keyword phrases included. But it’s a bit bland. We need to add something to entice the searcher to clíck on it. How about:

Order online for a 10 percent discount!

So now we have the following completed META Description Tag:

<META name=”description” content=”If you’re seeking a florist in Miami Florida, Funky Florists create unforgettable wedding bouquets, floral arrangements, tributes and displays for all occasions. Order online for a 10 percent discount!”>

Our new tag is optimized for our keyword phrases, it’s around 200 characters in length, it describes our site accurately, it speaks to the reader and it (hopefully) entices them to clíck on the link and view the site.

Create Your META Keywords Tag

We’re almost there. Now it’s time to create your optimized META Keywords Tag. Let me stress here that this Tag is quite unimportant in the grand scheme of things. Not many of the search crawlers even support it any more. You can see which ones do on this page. If you have the time and you really want to create META Keywords tags for your pages, then go ahead, but if not, then leave them out of your code altogether. This tag will have very little impact on your overall SEO campaign.

Assuming you do want to create a Keywords tag, take your líst of target keywords and phrases and open another text file. Again, you can use an existing sample META Keywords Tag as your template. Let’s say our existing Keywords Tag is:

<META name=”keywords” content=”flowers, roses, weddings bouquets, florists, floral arrangements, flower deliveries, Valentines Day gifts, Christmas decorations, Mother’s Day, tributes, wreaths, clutches, sprays, in sympathy, funerals, corporate functions, parties, floral displays, Miami, Florida”>

You are just including a líst of related keywords to include in this tag. Now take your líst of keywords for the home page in order of importance. For our fictional florist these were:

- florists Miami

- florists Florida

- wedding bouquets

Because you have a lot more room in this tag, a good rule of thumb for creating a META Keywords Tag is to include the keywords and phrases you are targeting with your site content, as well as some terms that you don’t necessarily want to use in your site copy but are still relevant to the site content. For example, the site copy, TITLE and META description tags would include the most important search keywords, but the META Keywords Tag could be used for keyword variations and combinations that don’t appear in the visible site text, but that people may also search for. Examples include plurals, contractions, slang, variations, misspellings, cultural nuances and industry jargon.

For our fictional florist, these may include things like:

- wedding flowers

- roses

- wedding roses

- Valentine’s Day roses

- sympathy gifts

- Mother’s Day gifts

- funeral wreaths

- flower deliveries

- floral arrangements

- birthday gifts

- flowers

- flowers for wedding

- wedding decorations

So now we have the following draft META Keywords Tag:

<META name=”keywords” content=”florists Miami, florists Florida, wedding bouquets, wedding flowers, roses, wedding roses, Valentine’s Day roses, sympathy gifts, Mother’s Day gifts, funeral wreaths, flower deliveries, floral arrangements, birthday gifts, flowers, flowers for wedding, wedding decorations”>

However, when creating your Keywords Tag, you should not repeat any particular keywords within your META Keywords Tag more than five times and I would recommend excluding commas so that all your keywords can be indexed in combination with each other.

So we need to fix the draft tag to remove the excess repetition of the words “flowers” and “weddings”. This is easy to do because some of the keyword phrases already incorporate these single generic keywords.

For starters, we can lose the single “flowers” as it is already covered by some of the other phrases like “wedding flowers”. Next, we can drop “roses for the same reason. Then we can combine some keyword phrases together to save space, e.g. “flowers for wedding” and “wedding decorations” can be integrated to become “flowers for wedding decorations” so we can lose the extra instance of “wedding”.

So now we have the following completed META Keywords Tag:

<META name=”keywords” content=”florists Miami florists Florida wedding bouquets wedding flowers wedding roses Valentine’s Day roses sympathy gifts Mother’s Day gifts funeral wreaths flower deliveries floral arrangements birthday gifts flowers for wedding decorations”>

Tailored TITLE and META Tags

While some webmasters remember to include a META Description and a META Keywords Tag in their home page HTML code, many forget to include them on every page of the site that they want indexed. Or worse, they duplicate the homepage TITLE and META Tags on all other pages. To give a web site the best ranking ability possible, it is highly recommended that each page of the site include a unique TITLE tag and unique META tags, individually tailored to the content of that specific page.

For example, our fictional Miami florist may have a page devoted to wedding bouquets and another devoted to funeral wreaths. The TITLE and META tags for the first page should include keywords relating to weddings and the page about wreaths should utilize keywords relating to funerals and sympathy.

The use of tailored TITLE and META Tags on each page creates multiple entry points to a web site and enables relevant content to be found in search engines no matter where it resides on a site. For example, instead of relying on visitors to arrive via the Home Page, the optimization of individual site pages makes each page more visible in the search engines, providing additional gateways to the site’s content. The more pages optimized, the wider the range of keywords and phrases that can be targeted and the more entry points are created to a site.

By Kalena Jordan

The TITLE Element

TITLE elements, (commonly called TITLE Tags), are one of the most important factors that search engines “look” at when it comes to determining the relevancy of a web page against a search query. In their ranking algorithms, nearly all the major search engines attribute a high relevancy weíght to the content of the TITLE tag.

In the HTML code of a web site, TITLE tags look like this one (for a fictional florist):

<TITLE>Miami Florists - beautiful floral creations made to order.</TITLE>

To view the HTML code of any site, choose “View, Source” from your browser toolbar or right clíck anywhere on the page and choose “view source code”.

The META Description Tag

META Description Tags are designed to describe the content of web pages. Search engine robots will gather up this information when indexing web sites and often use it when referencing web pages in the search listings.

While not all search engines continue to utilize the META Description Tag, a majority of search engines rely on the content of this tag (together with a site’s visible content) to provide information about a site that they can match with search queries. It is therefore important for webmasters to include keywords and phrases in the META description that they would expect searchers to use to find their site content.

In the HTML code of a web site, a sample META Description Tag looks like this:

<META name=”description” content=”Miami Florists create beautiful floral bouquets, arrangements, tributes and displays for all occasions, including weddings, Valentines Day, parties and corporate events. Deliveries throughout Florida.”>

You can view the META Description Tag of a site by viewing the source code.

The META Keywords Tag

While only indexed by a small handful of search engines these days, the META Keywords Tag is still worth including within a site’s HTML code, if only to provide those search engines with as much information as possible about site content.

In the HTML code of a web site, a sample META Keywords Tag looks like this:

<META name=”keywords” content=”flowers, roses, weddings bouquets, florists, floral arrangements, flower deliveries, Valentines Day gifts, Christmas decorations, Mother’s Day, tributes, wreaths, clutches, sprays, in sympathy, funerals, corporate functions, parties, floral displays, Miami, Florida”>

The current lack of support for the META Keywords Tag by so many search engines can be attributed to increasing sp@m abuse by ignorant webmasters. These webmasters thought the keyword tag was a good place to stuff hundreds of keywords in the hope of achieving a higher search ranking, thereby “sp@mming” the search engines with useless, non-relevant data. This prompted many search engines filter out the META Keywords Tag or lower its importance within the ranking algorithm.

You can view the META Keywords Tag of a site by viewing the source code.

Create Your Optimized Tags

Now, it’s time to create optimized TITLE and META Tags for your site. Let’s start with the TITLE Tag for your Home Page.

Create Your TITLE Tag

Take the líst of target keywords and phrases that you want your web site to be found for in search engines. You should have already allocated them to the appropriate pages of your site to be optimized. I use a spreadsheet for this purpose, but you should use whatever works for you.

Now, open a text file in Notepad or something similar. If you like, you can use an existing sample TITLE Tag as your template. Let’s say our existing Title is:

<TITLE>Miami Florists - beautiful floral creations made to order.</TITLE>

Now take your líst of keywords for the home page and put them in order of importance, with the ones you want to rank highest for at the top. For our fictional florist these are:

- florists Miami

- florists Florida

- wedding bouquets

Now you are simply going to combine these keywords into a sentence or short blurb so they make the best use of the keyword real estate available. Always try to use as few words as possible in your Title Tags, because each additional keyword dilutes the ranking relevancy of all the others.

In this case, I would initially combine the keywords as follows:

Florists in Miami Florida specializing in wedding bouquets

Notice how I’ve got the keywords in the correct order for the search queries? I’ve tried to include the most important keywords towards the start of the tag. There was no need for me to repeat the keyword “Florists” more than once because the sentence I’ve used covers both “Florists Miami” and “Florists Florida”. Most search engines will ignore “in” as a stop word, so it shouldn’t matter that we’ve included it.

Although it’s tempting to put a comma between Miami and Florida, on some search engines commas act as a keyword separator, so we don’t want to use one here because we don’t want “Florists’ and “Florida” to be separated.

Now, there is just one problem with this draft Title. Our 3rd keyword phrase ‘wedding bouquets” is right at the end of the sentence, meaning it may lose some relevancy weíght (search engines consider keywords closer to the start of the tag as the most important). How do we fix this? Let’s try this:

Florists in Miami Florida - wedding bouquets a specialty.

We don’t want to use a period after “Florida” for the same reason that we don’t use a comma. But a hyphen should not make a difference to search engines yet still allow the sentence to read logically to a searcher. So now we have our three target keyword phrases covered in a very short space.

In fact, the above sentence now covers the following keyword combinations:

- florists Miami

- florists Florida

- florists in Miami

- florists in Florida

- florists in Miami Florida

- wedding bouquets

- Miami wedding bouquets

- Florida wedding bouquets

When integrating your keywords, remember that their order is important. If you want your site to have the best possible chance of being found for the search query “Miami florists”, you need to put the keywords in that exact order and not “florists Miami”, because the spider searches the keywords in exact order. Unless they are stop words, also try to avoid using extra words between your keywords.

If you wanted to, you could integrate your company name into the Title tag, but (unless your company name is super short or includes a keyword), don’t sacrifice a keyword to do so. Instead, try placing the company name at the end of the tag so you can be sure that all your important keywords will be indexed first.

In the case of our florist, let’s imagine their name was Funky Florists. We could easily accommodate the name into the beginning of our optimized Title as follows:

<TITLE>Funky Florists in Miami Florida - wedding bouquets a specialty.</TITLE>

It may reduce the keyword relevancy impact very slightly, but including your company name enables you to brand your page, which may be more important to you.

The content of the Title Tag is also what gets saved in a person’s Favorite’s líst when they bookmark your site, so having your company name included is worth considering from a branding perspective.

In Part 2 of this article, I will show you how to create your optimized META Description and META Keywords Tags.

By Kalena Jordan

(Via BusinessWeek Online — Most Popular Stories.)

There are a number of stages to a successful email marketing campaign and by nailing as many as possible you can improve your results. The key to success, though, most commonly lies in the planning stage – if this is your first foray into email marketing then be prepared to treat it as a test run. The more direct email marketing campaigns you run, the more opportunity you have to optimize the process and improve your results. Here are ten of the most important steps to an effective email campaign.

1 – Determine Your Ultimate Goal

This might sound obvious, but having a clear goal in mind will help to concentrate your efforts. There are many effective uses of an email marketing campaign from increasing brand awareness to pushing a new product or seasonal promotion. Each of these uses typically demands a different campaign with its own style and its own components.

Increasing traffic to your website is not usually a bottom line target. The reason for increasing traffic to a website is normally to improve sales and increase profits. In the majority of cases, it is more desirable to attain greater sales through fewer visitors, than having a site awash with visitors but with a poor conversion rate.

A prolonged and careful email marketing campaign will naturally help to improve brand awareness. Your readers will naturally remember your name and the products or services that you sell as they gain more and more exposure to your marketing emails. Similarly, as long as you produce relevant and useful emails, your potential customers will grow to trust you making it more likely that they will purchase from you now or in the future.

2 - Your Opt-In Email List

There are a couple of key aspects to this section. YOUR opt-in list will generate better results than the use of somebody else’s list. If you have taken the time and put in the effort to grow your own list, then the members of that list will already have some degree of awareness for you, your products, and your website.

Developing your own list can take time and money. To get a head start it is possible to buy or rent email lists from others. In these cases it is particularly important to pay attention to the second important factor – the list MUST be an opt-in list. Every member of that list must have opted in to receive marketing communication from you and they MUST be given adequate opportunity to opt out of future communication.

Particular care needs to be taken with your list management techniques to ensure that you are not deemed as being spam. If you purchase lists or partial lists then members that opt out need to be recorded separately. If you purchase another list that includes the same name and you subsequently email that person without their express request to be re-included in your list then you face the very real possibility of being flagged as sending spam email.

3 - Establish Performance Tracking Techniques

Tracking the performance of any advertising campaign should be foremost in your mind. This is the only true method of determining its worth and is the only way you can optimize your advertising to generate the best possible results. Web analytics are an absolute must-have, and with the wealth of affordable and even free choices available today there is no reason not to have a good analytic package in place.

Tracking code can also be placed into an HTML email. You need to operate a degree of caution when implementing code into HTML emails, because it could lead to your email being blocked by over zealous spam filters. If you can use hyperlinks that include tracking code, and your analytics package includes referral data, then this can generate the majority of the information you require.

The more information you can gleam from an advertising campaign, the better. You will be using these results to fine tune future advertising campaigns, so too much information is better than too little. If in any doubt then consider using an email marketing management service to conduct the tracking on your behalf.

4 – Ready Your Website

Directing visitors to your website is only a portion of the battle ahead. Once a reader clicks through the links in your email, you then need to be confident that your web pages are optimized to complete the sale. Conversion rates need to be high on the pages you direct traffic to, but you also need to target the traffic to the most appropriate pages and vice versa.

Consider the anchor text, or link text, that you will be using in your email. If you are encouraging readers to learn more about a product then don’t direct them straight to the purchase page unless that page includes the inferred information. Similarly, if you have pre-sold your readers so that they are poised and ready to buy, and your CTA (Call To Action) indicates that this is the next step then you can navigate readers through to a more direct sales page.

Introducing a new product or a new concept will usually take more information than you can provide in a single marketing email. If necessary, add a page or multiple complementary pages, to your website. Direct readers to these pages so that you can combine the use of your email marketing and your optimized and informative content to really persuade and hammer the message home hard.

5 – An Effective Subject Line

The subject line of your email is the first thing your readers will read, and you need to ensure that it won’t be the last. Human spam filters can be just as difficult to avoid as software spam filters, even for genuine email. You should certainly avoid the use of typically spammy subject lines and opt for a more effective approach.

There are many ways to write an appealing subject line. A newsworthy subject line will often grab the attention but only works effectively in limited cases. Otherwise, try to evoke an emotive response from the reader. The strongest emotions include greed, love, and even hatred or controversy. With these latter two it is again important that you exercise appropriate caution otherwise you may alienate your readers against this and future marketing emails.

Intrigue and appeal work very well. An intriguing headline will draw your readers into the main body of the content and the subject line will have then done its job effectively. Never mislead in the subject of your email but do try to peak your reader’s curiosity to the extent that they can’t help but open the email and read it fully.

6 - Email Body Content

Finally we reach the main body content of the email. That it’s taken to point six to do so is an indication of how important the planning and preparation stages are. The subject line has hopefully driven a good portion of your list to open the email, and those readers should be intrigued enough to want to read more.

Research shows that the more personalized the message, the more likely it will be to succeed. Start with a personalized greeting and use a friendly, even conversational tone, throughout the message. Inform readers of what they need to know but do so informally and in as friendly a manner as is possible by email.

The email absolutely has to be grammatically and factually correct, and must not contain typos. These types of errors can be an instant turn off for readers. Run a spell check. Twice. And then check it manually and have somebody else check it again for you. At the same time check the links and ensure that they do indeed direct to the proper pages.

Include a Call To Action, or CTA, rather than just a link. A CTA is a direction that points your visitors to perform your desired action. This could be to click a link, make a purchase, or even forward the email to friends. The CTA needs to be clearly defined an, obviously, as effective and accurate as possible.

7 - Hyperlinks To Your Site

The entire point (although probably not your ultimate goal) of your email is to get readers to click on links and visit your website. Include two or three links in the body of your email and make sure they are relevant without being too obvious. Lead readers to click the links rather than directly point it out and find something more effective than “click here” to use as your anchor text.

Two to three links is the ideal number. Too few links and your email won’t prove effective at driving traffic, while too many links will detract from the actual content of the email. If your email is very short then offer two links, or offer three links within longer messages. Contextual links (that is, those that appear within the body of the email rather than at the end) are usually significantly more effective.

Check and double check that links work and direct to the correct page. Once you’ve done this, have somebody else check them too. The number of marketing emails that have failed because of broken or incorrect links is alarmingly high and this is not a trap that you want to fall into.

8 - Choose The Best Time To Send Your Email

The time you send your email can have a significant impact on its effectiveness. During the night, most people’s emails fill up. In a lot of cases, this can mean that your reader will be faced with tens of emails in the morning, many of them rubbish. This leaves a very real chance that they will simply ignore or delete your email without noticing who sent it, what it is about, or whether they have any interest in reading it.

Consider your target market and when they are most likely to be sat in front of their email. Those with a global market may find this more difficult because of the time difference, but otherwise bear this in mind too. Not every website or marketing email is geared towards residents from the same country.

9 - Test Email

Initially, send a test email to yourself, friends, family, or colleagues. This is more to determine that it arrives looking as expected. Once you have done this and are happy with how your email looks, you should then move on to send a second test email to a small selection of your list. This gives you ample opportunity to make any last minutes changes or tweaks according to how this small test run performs.

You might even consider sending several tests out to different groups, if you have a large enough list. This enables you to test the subject line, content, and product price, by making alterations before each test run. Be sure to test the different components separately, though, so that you can determine what needs changing and what works well.

A test email also gives you chance to check that you are set up and able to track the results and any other information you want to track. A good email marketing service will do this by default, because the test email can prove to be one of the single most effective ways to improve the performance of a one-off email shot.

10 - Monitor, Optimize, And Start Again

Being careful not to send emails too frequently, you should send regular communication to your list. An unloved list will be more likely to unsubscribe and readers become most responsive after approximately seven items of communication from you. Monitor results, check bounce rates, and look for ways that your campaign could be improved.

Once you’ve found the best ways to improve a campaign make the improvements and begin the procedure again from the beginning. This process of monitoring, optimizing, and starting again will help to increase exposure, improve brand awareness, and generally improve results and profit levels.

Why Your List Is So Important

A list can last you a lifetime and it is possible to continue selling to the same list members over and over again. In fact, once a list member purchases from you, and presuming that everything goes smoothly during and after the sale, they will be more inclined to purchase from you in the future. You will have won their trust, gained their favor, and they can be relied upon to help you with extra sales in the future.

Look after your list and your list will look after your profits.

(Via Lifehacker.)

A website is a tool and can be of significant help to your business. It can cut a lot of time you put into giving information to customers. It can answer questions and perform tasks for you. Find out where websites fail to perform and how you can figure out where to make it better.

1. Undefined Website Objectives

Some sites try to do way too much at once, or worse, they have no definable purpose. Many provide no clear objective. A site can do more than look good and flashy and have your contact information.

Websites can be informational, storing content and articles based on a topic. Sites can run eCommerce solutions that help you with your sales process. It can also generate leads, asking customers to fill out forms with their information and interests. It can also be a hybrid site, with mixed purposes, like offering a free ebook or free access to information (informational) in return for contact information (lead generation).

Defining the purpose of your website gives a clear direction to your customers. Where should customers arrive when they find your website? Where do you want them to end up? Using a clear path and clear objectives, you can lead them through your site, your products, and your information, depending on how you need to sell your products. Not all products or services can be sold directly in an eCommerce situation. Maybe you prefer just getting to know your customer a bit more, and being able to forward marketing materials, so a lead generation type of site might be more suitable.

Assign a secondary objective. Maybe after visitors sign up for free access, or an ebook, they are encourage to ask more by contacting your sales reps, or perhaps they can make a direct purchase online. Use a clearly definable call to action. “Email for more information.” “Clíck here to sign up.” Tell visitors where to go.

2. Unidentified Target Audience

Demographics have been used in marketing for generations. Marketers use the information because it works. Knowing who your audience is defines the purpose to your website and calls out those who qualify and would be interested in your products. Marketing is the one area where discrimination is actually a good thing! You don’t want to waste the marketing dollars that draw people to your site who won’t need your products in the first place.

Get to know who your clients are. Are they male or female? How old? Where are they located? What do they do for a living? Habits, income levels, preferences, they can all be discovered with a quick email, phone call or have your current customers take surveys and help you figure out what your clients want.

3. Building for the Wrong Audience

Your site can have a purpose and a select audience, but if it doesn’t appeal to audiences, they tend to go elsewhere. Finding preferences is only the first step. Once you figure out what your demographic is, it is time to find out what appeals to them, and use that to your advantage. It could be something as simple as site colors and images, to where and how they prefer to use navigation systems and the type of content presented.

Maybe you need simple content, easy to read and understand for younger audiences. Perhaps you need something a bit more technical for professionals. You can even see if you need to add features for those who are visually impaired. Paying attention to your demographic and their preferences can mean building your website around their likes and getting more responses.

4. Oblivious to Web Traffic Sources

A link on a Harry Potter fan club forum to your website can bring in traffic, but does it really bring in the right customers? If you’re not directing traffic from sites relevant to yours or where a matching market exists, you might end up with empty hits to your website. It looks pretty on stat pages but it doesn’t really do anything.

Refocus your efforts on search engine optimization and focus on keywords that do fit, not just what might be popular. You can plan the sort of traffic you want and focus your outreach efforts on that. Planning your search engine campaigns can make them more effective, bringing the right customers to you. You don’t need 1,000 random visitors a day, when 100 qualified visitors will do.

5. Underestimating the Competition

Who says you can’t grab ideas from your competition? Find out what they are lacking and draw customers to your site by adding more features and information. Your target audience is searching the web for your product. Don’t let your competition become more appealing.

Understand your competition by observing their sites. Where are your competitors linking? Where aren’t they? What designs do they use on their site? Does your target audience like that type of design or do they want something better? Figure out how to improve your site and make it better than your competition.

6. Poor Site Communication and Inconsistency

If you’re building a website, is one page orange and another blue? Does one page have your logo and another doesn’t? People love consistency.

Does your content and images display the right message? Your website might have pretty pictures of your children, or a fun story about what happened to you last Christmas, but is it really what your customers want to know?

Skip the personal info, unless it’s relevant and your audience wants to hear about it. You also need to make sure you present your brand in its best light, and consistently give visitors the same presentation every time and on every page. Let your brand stand out.

7. Outdated and Antiquated Site Features

Out with the old. Check your site for old content and images and delete them. Remove old links that go nowhere too. Forget pop ups and old methods of keeping visitors around. Content is great, but if it’s so old that it’s irrelevant, you’ll lose respectability and your expert status.

Stick to new information. Don’t be afraid to get rid of old articles and delete old images. Do an update on your site features, like navigation systems and contact forms.

8. Poor Overall Site Performance

You’ve plastered all there is to know about you on a few pages. Is this the right way to do it? Maybe not. Yes, you’ve given them something to look at, but you have to remember, your time to impress people on the Internet is limited to just a few seconds. Long passages of text, lengthy forms, even poorly constructed or confusing navigation can slow people down, which leads to people leaving.

Making your website flow is all about making your site easy to read, easy to browse and easy to find what you’re looking for. Include a search function, highlight popular pages, and make it simple for people to give you their information. Start with short forms, only the essentials, and a few simple questions. You can get more info later.

9. Lack of Commitment

When was the last time you updated additional information to your website?

Remember those “Website Under Construction” images from the early years of the Internet? Over time, people have learned those images are pointless. Your website is ever evolving, ever needing updating. Your website is isn’t ever finished.

You must make a commitment to update information and to improve interest in your site from visitors. It could be as simple as updating a blog once or twice a week, or updating about sales and special events. Give visitors something to come back to, and let them turn into regular guests.

10. Not using an Experienced Web Firm

You do a good job with what you do, and a good business and website owner knows when to call for help. Maybe you’re okay with writing content, but you need help with creating navigation and setting up forms. It’s okay to ask someone else for help, either with a few pages, or for the entire site design, and leave it to a professional.

It also saves money and time getting someone else to do the complicated things for you. Are you spending weeks on figuring out a web page design set up when it takes a professional a few hours to produce? When you’re in business, you consult with professionals who will help you build a better website, develop methods of search engine marketing strategies, and find out how to appeal to your target audience. You save tíme, money, and plenty of headaches.

By Gary Klingsheim