Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

Email marketing: it feels great to say no

05/08/09 by lizm | Uncategorized | No Comments »

Yeah! I got a client to say no to an email marketing project today. I wasn’t alone in saying no, and that makes me feel good too.

Yes, I help clients organize emails, and newsletters, and do the creative for them, etc., etc., and that this could have cost me money and future business from other clients wanting to do the same sort of thing and needing to see samples of it, but I don’t care. There are times like this when I know for a fact that my client is better off not having exposed her business to 400,000 people.

This client is launching an existing business into a new market niche. She has a new website with an eCommerce functionality that has taken nearly a year to build. I am helping her with a blog that will drive traffic to that site.

She was excited to be approached by someone who offered an email list of 400,000 supposedly qualified and interested prospects. Who wouldn’t jump at a chance to jumpstart a new business with that sort of exposure, right?

Unfortunately the person offering the database wouldn’t or couldn’t even send us a simple email stating that he legally owned the database and had the right to rent it to us. The programmer who has spent the last year lovingly creating a 1,500 item eCommerce engine and I ganged up on the client to remind her that she’s come too far and worked too hard to throw everything away.

Moral of the story is an old one…if it sounds too good to be true it probably is. Compound that old common sense with the new reality that nearly anything and everything can be tracked on the Internet and you have a recipe for business disaster. If  you send emails to a stolen list (or one that is just “scraped” and not double opted), you are just as tainted and guilty as the person who stole (or obtained that list under shady circumstances).

Building a business online takes time. Real time, not just Internet time. The tried and true techniques we use to get your site ranked and increase human traffic to your site work, but usually take at least 3-6 months to see results. The one thing we can do today that will show you results today is Pay Per Click advertising and that will cost money instead of time.

There are no shortcuts if you want to build a business.

Website vs blog: can you spot the differences?

02/15/09 by lizm | Uncategorized | No Comments »

I wish I could just fold my whole website into my blog. In my case though, the coding of the site itself (pure CSS layout) is part of my professional portfolio so I can’t.

But you probably could. And you probably should.

Blog is both a noun and a verb. Post is also used as both a noun and a verb in the blogosphere. That’s a bit of confusion that’s led a lot of people to think the mechanics behind blogging (the verb) and posting (the verb) are a lot harder than they really are. Such semantics don’t count with blogs (the noun) the same way they do for a post (the noun) on a website where the coding of a post (the noun) also makes up the structure of the website.

If you do know even a little bit of coding (specifically CSS or PHP), you can usually find and remove a little snippet of code from your blog’s main page and post templates that removes the automatic insertion of the date of the post. That, along with another tweak or two, makes your blog a full fledged and very robust content management system. Not too long ago, only enterprise sized companies could afford the powerful back-end programming that is a CMS.

Today, anyone can have a clearly and cleanly designed web home that consists of thousands of pages or posts of information. If you have the time to set it up and tweak it correctly yourself, you can have it all for free. If you don’t have that time, there are plenty of people (like me) who are happy to help.

So unless you need to show you control the technology behind your website, why let it weigh you down and take up one minute more of your time? With a blog you can update your content as quickly and easily as you can type an email. If typing is even a bit too much of a chore for you, you can also turn on your webcam (or microphone) and record a video, or audio, blog post.

You just concentrate on saying what you need to say as clearly and concisely as you can and both you and your readers will be happy.  The only people who are likely to care if your site is made up of webpages or blog posts are the IT people who helped build the engine you’re using to run it all, or the web designers who lost their jobs because of it.