Amanda Tradwick serves up a few ways to bump that email list of yours.

Growing a large opt-in e-mail list is key to the success of your business and your blog. You can use it to cultivate relationships with your readers, build brand loyalty, promote your products or services, and grow your affiliate and ad revenue. Just like with any other aspect of growing your blog, targeted marketing efforts are required for effectively growing your opt-in e-mail list. Here are 5 easy ways to help you grow your list quickly:

Provide Multiple Options for Sign-Up

Not every visitor will come to your blog on the home page or another designated landing page. Perhaps they will find you through a link to a specific post, or by searching for terms that lead to another page on your blog. Make it easy for these new readers to sign up for your e-mail list by including a pop-up option that appears on each page at first visit. If you don’t like the pop-up option, you can include a permalink on your sidebar, header, or footer. The key is to make sure the option is accessible to readers no matter how they arrive at your blog.

Include Link in E-mails

Promote your e-mail list among your own contacts by including a link to it in your e-mail signature line. It provides an easy, low-pressure way for your contacts to sign up for the list or to share it with their own contacts. Be sure to also include the link in your e-mail newsletter so that your subscribers can forward it to others for easy sign up. The more options you make available to people to sign up for the list, the more likely you are to get new subscribers.

Promote It on Social Networks

Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and other social networks offer effective ways to connect with new customers and subscribers. Be sure to include a link to both your blog and your e-mail list in your profiles on every social-networking site to which you belong. Then promote the link in your tweets, posts, and other shares. Be sure to share the link regularly, but not to share it so much that your connections start to view it as spam.

Offer Special Incentives

Providing added value for your readers will give them a reason to sign up for your e-mail list. There are many ways to offer this, depending on the types of goods or services your blog offers, including free shipping, discounts on products or services, or other special promotions. The key is to make sure these offers are exclusive to your e-mail subscribers and are not offered to just any reader of your blog. Otherwise, there is no incentive to sign up for the e-mail list to get them.

Offer Exclusive Content

Another great way to offer your customers added value for joining your e-mail list is to provide exclusive content. A free e-book or e-learning course is a great way to encourage your readers to sign up for your e-mail list. Be sure to offer new content or to rotate content so that your readers will be encouraged to remain subscribers. Once they have finished the e-book or the course, they may no longer find a reason to remain subscribers. Keep providing exclusive content to maintain that relationship.
Growing your opt-in e-mail list should be a key part of your overall marketing strategy for your blog. It allows you to build relationships with your readers and to grow a list of customer contacts to promote your services and products. Following these steps will help you grow your list more quickly.

About the author:
Amanda Tradwick is a grant researcher and writer for CollegeGrants.org. She has a Bachelor’s degrees from the University of Delaware, and has recently finished research on minority grants and scholarships and west virginia education grants.

Our guest today, Mariana Ashley ,gives us some advice on offline promos.

Almost every blogging tips site, this one included, will give you plenty of great advice about promoting your blog to reach a wider and more diverse array of readers. While this advice is certainly useful, most tips focus on promoting your blog using various online methods, like social networking sites, linkbacks, guest posts, and more. Once you feel as though you’ve exhausted these methods, it is important to realize that you can promote your blog in the “real world” as well. Here are a few tips that have worked for me.

1. Create business cards and carry them with you everywhere you go.

This is a very simple and handy way to promote your blog on the go. You can easily create business cards using free, online software and quality stock paper, or you can always order them from a print shop, too. Carry them in your purse or wallet, and if you happen to strike up a conversation with a stranger at a restaurant, bar, at the gym or wherever, don’t forget to hand them out. Having a physical piece of paper that potential readers can refer to once they get home is a great way to generate curiosity among new readers.

2. Attend blogging conferences and Meetups.

While there are many blog readers who are not bloggers themselves, the majority of your audience who will play a key role in further promoting your blog will have a blog of their own. As such, getting to know bloggers in person by attending local conferences and Meetups (see Meetup.com) will help you widen your blogging network in a more personable way.

3. Write freelance articles for local print publications.

Although many people who consume media are skeptical of the future of print publications, there’s no denying that they still exist and they still have plenty of readers. A fun way to promote your blog is to write freelance articles for local dailies, and include in your byline your blog. For casual readers who don’t necessarily read many blogs themselves, seeing your name in print attached to an interesting and well-written article will pique their interest in looking you up on the Web.

4. Don’t underestimate the power of word-of-mouth!

Many bloggers only spread the word about their blog online. But they often forget their closer circle of friends and family, who, consider your close ties, will have a greater desire to tell other people about your blog. So don’t be shy—talk to everyone and anyone you know about your blog and encourage them to visit it!

While blogging itself can be very time consuming, promoting your blog can take up just as much time. Although promoting your blog offline should never be your only method, when combine it with online promotion, you’ll have a marketing strategy that’s tough to beat. Good luck!

About the Author:

Mariana Ashley is a freelance writer who particularly enjoys writing about online colleges. She loves receiving reader feedback, which can be directed to mariana.ashley031@gmail.com.

Today’s well-written article about Google Panda is provided by Mitch O’Conner.

Back in February of 2011, Google unleashed a sweeping change to their search results ranking algorithm known as Panda, all in hopes of downranking “junk” and “copy-pasted” websites while boosting the visibility of better, more useable and unique sites.

Big surprise: it didn’t work perfectly. Although the algorithm changes indeed altered search results (in some cases for the better), the search giant was met with a backlash from many site owners accusing it of everything from poor quality control to putting its own corporate interests over those of the websites they help internet users find.

If you run a website or blog, there’s no getting around Google Panda. Instead, you’ll need to adapt and adjust, which in many cases will mean improving the overall quality of your site. Here are seven ways to do exactly that:

1. Create More Content, and Don’t Worry About Length

If you read too heavily into SEO guides (many of which are outdated by Panda, by the way), you may think that every single page on your site should contain no more than 300 to 500 words of content. Although there’s certainly a case to be made for short, punchy, to-the-point posts, the reality is that Panda calls for the best possible user experience, which in turn calls for content that’s only as long as it needs to be. You might have one page that makes its point in 200 words, while another may exceed 1,000.

Of course, there are some common sense limits to this. If a single page of your site exceeds, say, 2,000 words of content, you may want to think about how it could be restructured or broken into two or three separate pages that obviously deserve dedicated areas of their own. The old advice about breaking up lengthier posts with plenty of pictures, lists (when applicable and needed) and subheadings still applies, too.

2. Make Your Content Valuable and Non-Redundant

If you’ve had some sub-par content sitting and rotting away on the outskirts of your site, now might be a great time to clean it up. Although this type of content may have been seen as a neutral factor in the eyes of Google pre-Panda, especially if the rest of your site was high quality, it’s now viewed as a serious detriment that could drag down the rest of your site along with it. Anything that even remotely resembles spam will fall into this category.

Here are a few tips that go beyond the basic advice of writing for value:

• Update pages whose only purpose is to link to other pages. Roll them into other pages that have content, or write some new valuable content for them.
• Place plenty of original content above the fold, in the area immediately visible upon landing on the page.
• Don’t plaster every page with ads. Having some ads is still fine, of course, but they shouldn’t take up more real estate than your actual content.
• Never use auto-generated content. This simply won’t fly anymore with Google’s new algorithms.

3. Aim for a Natural Link Profile

Let’s say the purpose of your site is to discuss wireless internet services. You might link to a bunch of broadband providers, and possibly some mainstream media articles regarding the same topic. What you probably wouldn’t do, however, is link directly to competing sites trying to fill the same niche. In a post-Panda online environment, this is a mistake.

Panda is all about delivering the best possible experience to the user. Your site can do that by linking to other sites solely based on the value and relevancy of their content, regardless of whether they’re competing for your traffic. Your readers will appreciate it, and hence, Google will too.

4. Build Your Empire by Creating More Assets

When Google looks at your “brand,” they want to see more than just a single website that looks like a buoy in an ocean. Modern internet users want more than just pages with pictures. By creating more assets for your site, such as email lists, interactive forums and Facebook pages, you build a community around your brand. In a post-Panda environment, these are the types of sites that Google will prioritize in search results.

Get creative: is there some aspect of your site, or facet of your content, that could be better conveyed with an ongoing, regularly updated video series instead of just text? Seize the opportunity to use increasingly affordable multimedia to beef up your site/brand.

5. Select More Natural Keywords

Outdated SEO advice went something like this: pick one or two keyword phrases most closely related to the topic you’re covering in a post, hammer them into the content as heavily as possible, and make them even more obvious by bolding them and putting them in every subheading as well. Google’s new algorithms see right through this, and treat it as nothing short of a devious tactic.

Of course, you still need to include the keywords you’re trying to promote, but the key is to let that happen naturally. Write about the topic in a thorough and insightful way, and you’ll probably notice upon proofreading that you automatically included several variations of the keyword phrase without even really trying. It’s less work for you, and Google actually appreciates the efforts by ranking you higher.

6. Pay Attention to Navigation

No amount of excellent content will be worth anything if your users can’t find their away around your site. This one’s rather basic: keep menus consistent and logically arranged, use internal linking whenever appropriate, and don’t bury anything on your site.

7. Skip the Short-Cuts

Lots of site developers and SEOs are claiming that they circumvented the downranking effects of Panda through what basically amounts to a tricky short-cut: moving pages and sub-domains from a “pandalized” domain to a new one, and suddenly recovering the search rank and traffic they experienced before Panda even happened. Sounds like they just beat the system, right?

In reality, these types of short-cuts may work for a few days, at which point Google’s search-bots will finish analyzing your “new” pages only to penalize them yet again. The only real way to get your ranking back post-Panda is to shape up your content, cut the duplicate copy and give your users a thoroughly better and more valuable experience.

About the Author: Mitch O’Conner is an online marketer and writer. When he’s not busy testing sites, generating traffic or writing content, he enjoys spending time with his wife and kids, watching TV, playing games or going camping.

ZK from Internet Marketing Blog shares with us how earn from writing for others!

There has been much talk about making money from your own blog. However, there are many opportunities out there for writing for other people’s blogs. There are many people who make a living from this. You just need to know where to find these opportunities.

There are many blogs which allow people to write for them. When you find such a blog, you can apply to write for them in return for a specific payment. However, you will need to give evidence of your experience. If you don’t have one, it is advisable to set up your own blog before applying for these opportunities.

Many people would be willing to allow you to write for their blog as a ghostwriter. This means that all posts will appear under their name. Normally, you will get paid per post or for a specific number of posts per month or per week.

As you gain experience in blogging, you can eventually start writing for a number of blogs and do it on a full time basis. Blogging is a great way of making a living since there are always people looking for writers for their blogs. There are many jobs available, which will ensure a steady income for you. Opportunities for writing for other people’s blogs can be found advertised on various job boards online. Such jobs can also be found on sites such as Craigslist. When starting off, it might take some time before finding your first job. However, with patience and persistence, you might soon find yourself blogging for a living.

ZK is the co-founder of Internet Marketing Blog where accomplished writers and bloggers share their tips, strategies and stories. Follow him on Twitter at @webtrafficroi.

The first article of the year is brought to us by special guest, Sachin.

Smart and intelligent website design will do more than integrate with your social media marketing and provide the platform for your online marketing strategy. With intelligent integration of smart web-based business solution effective web design will save you a lot of money. Most business owners think of a website as something that is money spent on marketing, but actually we can remove costs in other areas of our business while we make money. Online shopping stores have had the head start on every other business when we look at removing costs and making money, but that does not mean that the same mentality cannot be applied to your business. Let’s look at some of the ways we can save money, and make money with a site that has inbuilt browser-based applications.

• Reducing communication costs. Have you thought about supplying 24/7 support services for your customers. With VOIP (Video Over Internet Protocol) technology, even instant messaging, you can have people working for your all over the world at lower costs as they communicate to your customers through your website. They could even be making a call that is directed through your website – how funky is that? Utilising low cost people because they are in lower cost regions makes real sense. You will make more money because you are providing a better service while you save.
• Reduction of IT costs. If your business has a large mainframe, you will probably need a Windows terminal emulator so your people can communicate with it. If you have new suppliers around the world, they will all need those applications. That was the case before. You can have your terminal emulation application built in, or as a part of your website, and reduce your IT costs. This is only one example and a very sophisticated one, but it does show what can be done. You can implement expansion without having to set up the IT architecture for new local representatives because it is already there – it is online.
• Application integration replacing employees or contractors. Unfortunately for us out there who need a job, smarter applications are reducing the need for people in all industries. You don’t need an accountant and stock manager like you used to because you online applications are managing all that for you. I run my small business and my site collects my payments, sends out invoices and puts it all together for the taxman at the end of the year. Yes, I don’t need an accountant. Sorry about that!
• Market researching costs. Market research is one of those costs at the end of the budget. It is the first to go when times are tough. Smart sites do it all the time. They collect information on whoever is visiting your site and more. If you are a business and looking to expand one day, you could put a portion of your business online. As that online business makes money, it saves you money by gathering data, and could point you in the direction of a new location for expansion. Perhaps you did not know your services were in so much demand in Colombia, for example.

Everyone is excited about Facebook and social media networking. It is time to look at Facebook and realise it is an online application doing a whole lot more. How could your website be saving you money and making you money, at the same time?

Today’s post about mobile and search is from Mark Thompson from Businesswebhostingplans.com.

Although the internet and web applications have advanced at breakneck speed, one of the areas that seems stuck in the 90’s and early 00’s are search engines. Although many search engines have done a good job of getting us the information we want quickly and efficiently, not much has changed in terms of the big picture. We are still finding ourselves typing in a few keywords to a box and hoping to get the right web page within the first 3 or 4 results. With the advent of mobile search this dynamic is slowly changing with search engines designed for mobile users on the go.

If you’re in the cohort of people surfing the web more and more on your mobile device the experience you have using a search engine probably isn’t the best from your tiny screen. Search queries originating from mobile devices are still a small proportion of overall searches but they are the fastest growing group overall. Currently, around 15% of Google searches come from a mobile phone and the rate is at 20% for Yahoo. Bing and Windows Mobile have been in the search game for less time so they have actually been able to focus more of their growth strategy on mobile search. The strategy behind the new Windows Mobile smartphones is to integrate Bing across many applications and leapfrog the competition.

One way that mobile search is taking advantage of powerful new smartphones is though voice search. On almost all smartphones you can now simply speak your search query and the result list will load when your voice is converted to text.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about the growth in mobile search is that around a fifth of all mobile searchers are looking to make a purchase of some type. These may be people who are in a physical store or who are doing shopping research online before heading out. Yet another group of people (who must be a large percentage of the total) want to make a purchase with their phone – and quickly.

The fact that most retailers still have not optimized their websites for the mobile shopper is resulting in lost sales every day. A key for website owners to provide a good experience for mobile visitors is to invest in a windows hosting plan . Search engines are quick to this fact and have developed slick mobile interfaces to do the shopping for you. For example, the Deals app from Bing produced by Windows Mobile makes it easy to search for both physical goods like books and DVDs as well as getting a good deal on a restaurant via direct access to Groupon deals.

If you are a website owner, don’t be relegated to the desktop website visitor only. Be sure your site is optimized for mobile search and you’ll see instant growth in visits and interactivity.

This guest post was brought to you by Mark Thompson from Businesswebhostingplans.com, an independent portal reviewing the best web hosting companies

Today’s post about site stickiness is provided by The Website Doctor.

An amazing post, with amazing content is great to have, but if your blog design is not up to scratch, then you can wave good-bye to those readers. In a few seconds, you will be reading tips on how to make your blog design the best it can ever be. Well, I hope so anyway. As you can tell from my blog, I’m a bit of a cheap skate. I’m using a free .wordpress.com domain, and my blogs design is, well, not the best. But I do have something that makes me good enough to give you advice. My blog is all about reviewing websites, and I have reviewed some horrendous blogs, and some great blogs. So I am now going to give you some fantastic tips that will help you improve your blog design. Here goes:

1. The dreaded template.

The first thing you should do when you start-up a blog, is changed the template. Changed the header image to your logo and slogan and change the background colour. I don’t think there is any explanation why, but just change it. You want your blog to stick out, not blend in.

To sum up: Change your template header and background

2. Is this a scam?

If you website is full of hyperlinks, Times New Roman text and adverts with a plain white background and single coloured text, people are going to be waiting for a window to pop up, telling them about your new e-book about how to enlarge your you-know-what by 55 inches. You need a proper layout. One clear column with your main features in, then one side bar with a few widgets. Minimize the amount of advertising you have, other people will know you are only in it for the money. Oh, and no pop ups.

To sum up: Use a clear layout

3. Text

Make sure you use a sans-serif font for the body text. No fancy hard-to-read text. This is a sans-serif font, this is a serif font.. Notice that the sans-serif font has clean ends on each letter, whereas serif fonts have pointed or shaped ends, making it harder to read. Also, it really does go without saying, the size. Text that is very big will make your readers think that you are expecting kids or OAPs to be visiting your blog. Text to small and visitors will be wondering if you actually want them to read your post, or if you just want them to get a bad eye site.

To sum up: Make it easy to read.

4. Grammar

This is just as much of a design fault than a content fault. people are not going to read your blog if the grammar is like this because there aren’t any capital letters no full stops no comers and the sentences are so long that by the time the reader has finished reading them they are blue in the face and on the floor. People are also going to think your blog was written by a 5-year-old, if it has little use of capital letters.

To sum up: Write properly.

5. Ease of Use

Every good website is easy to use. If you find it’s hard to use, then you’re probably one of the few people who use it. Make sure your blog or website has a distinctive home page, one that you know is the home page. This means a large logo and slogan at the top, with widgets with news, top stories and other information in your website. If you have a blog, the home page should have a stick post, which explains you blog in a few sentences, so people get the rough idea of why it exists. If your website is full of pages with no menu bar or way of moving around the website, then readers can get lost or stuck, so they will just leave the page. If you run an E-Commerce website, a customer should be able to see if you have a certain product in your store by only clicking three times. Its true! Go and try it on Amazon!

To sum up: Make is easy for your readers.

6. Backgrounds

First of all, if your background is very jazzy and bright, it’s going to hurt people’s eyes when they are trying to read your content. These backgrounds include bright green, yellow, and orange, and light blue block colours, a mix of these colours, or anything that distracts the reader. Don’t skip this bit if you don’t use bright colours. Using picture backgrounds are also not a great idea. Especially if it is a small picture and has been tiled on the page. Just no. You can use block colours such as white, pale colours, grey, black* or any other colour that’s not in your face. 

* When you use a black background, don’t use white text. it sort of pulses when you are reading it, and hurts your eyes, especially if its small. Use a gold colour instead. Much better. If you don’t want to use gold, you can get around this by having a black outer background, then a white background behind the text. Sorted.

To sum up: Keep it calm, don’t jazz it up.

7. Paint still exists?

When you are designing a logo, don’t use paint. It end up with a horrible quality with not so good colours. Download a free trial of a graphic program and use that. There’s not much more to say on this one, but just don’t use it!

To sum up: Make sure your logo is good quality.

8. Picture Quality

I can’t stress this enough. Never ever use low quality pictures on your website. We don’t want to look at pictures that we can’t work out what it is. You don’t see large companies using bad quality pictures on their website, so why should you? On the other hand, don’t use very high quality, large pictures. People don’t want to wait 30 minutes for your website to load.

To sum up: Make sure we can see what the picture is.

9. Steer clear of a competitors design

If you have a clear competitor, don’t go using the same colour background, the same font or the same logo style as them. You want to be different from them, not a knock off version. It very easy to see a competitors website and think, that design is really good. I couldn’t do it better. But you would be wrong. I’m sure if you changed the background colour, or use a different font size, or changed the title of each menu, then you could make it better.

To sum up: Be different

10. What you criticise in others, correct in yourself.

If you see a website, and think Wow, that font looks horrible or Why are they using that colour? make sure your website isn’t doing this too. Before you criticise them, correct your own website first.

To sum up: Sort your design before you sort others.

If you are not sure about your blog design, there are lots of forums or review websites where people will review your website and give you tips. My website, The Website Doctor, offers this reviewing service for free, so pop by and have a little look.

Regards,

The Website Doctor

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