How to Create An Email Newsletter

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You've made all those sales with your shop, you have all the email addresses of your customers...what can you do with this valuable information? Create an email newsletter, of course! Below, Cynthia Minnaar, a full-time internet marketer, shares her expertise with the New York Etsy Team on how to create a spectacular email newsletter...

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1. Maintain focus. A narrowly focused newsletter performs better than a broad themed one.

This is because it is easier to get people to subscribe to it. Also it is an excellent way to sell targeted niche products. As an example, publishing an email newsletter on putting it is likely to do better than a newsletter on golf in general.

2. Make use of a good auto-responder. It is very important that your email newsletter gets through spam filters and into a person's email inbox.

This is why you need to use a quality auto-responder. Get Response and Aweber are two of the best.

3. Always be consistent. This does not mean that you have to publish every day or even every week if you don't want to.

What is important is that you set a schedule and stick to it. If you decide on a monthly newsletter then consistently get your newsletter out every month on the same date so people get used to seeing it.

4. Include useful information. Bear in mind that email newsletters are not sales letters. You can send out solo email ads for that purpose.

When people receive useful information they will be glad they subscribe to your newsletter. Also the more unique information you can include in your newsletter the more subscribers you will get and keep.

5. Use your newsletter to sell advertising. Selling top sponsor adverts, bottom sponsor adverts, classified adverts and email solo adverts is a way you can make money. Just don't over advertise in your newsletter to the point that people can't find the quality information you provide.

6. Use It for Branding. Ensure that you get the header at the top of your newsletter. Also if you are going to include colors into your newsletter make it match the theme of your blog or website.

You will be doing a good job of branding your Internet business when people get used to seeing the same things over and over from you.

The above are a few tips on how to create an email newsletter. You will discover that an email newsletter that is published on a consistent basis, to people who choose to receive it, becomes a very valuable business asset.

About The Author

Cynthia Minnaar is a full-time internet marketer and owner of http://www.cyns-home-biz.com. For more tips she invites you to subscribe to her free email newsletter and receive free internet income training. Click here: http://www.cyns-home-biz.com/Internet-Income-Training.html

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Until next time!
Mary Ann
www.maryannfarley.etsy.com

 

Get Clients With Your Blog By Being Authentic

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Online business consultant, expert and author Biana Babinsky was kind enough to share her thoughts with the New York Etsy Team as to how to boost your blog readership. Etsy always tells us how important it is to tell our "stories" to our customers, right? But how exactly do we do that? Biana here gets specific.

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Are you looking for a way to bring target customers to your business while using your authentic voice?

Many coaches, consultants and other solopreneurs have told me that they feel that the only way to get clients is to adopt the marketing methods of a used car salesman. They feel they have to change themselves and their approach and adopt hard-sell sales techniques to bring in clients.

Fortunately for all of us, this is not true. You can remain true to your authentic self and still have a thriving business with all the clients you can handle.

You can speak in your authentic voice and get clients. One of the best ways to do this is to have your own blog and post new entries consistently. Here is how:

Write your blog posts in a conversational style, rather than the more formal style that the rest of your web site is written in.

When you are blogging, simply imagine that you are talking to your readers and let your authentic self shine through.

When you talk to your blog readers, they feel more connected to you and are more likely to become your clients as a result.

Use your blog to tell stories.

Your blog is the perfect place to tell stories that illustrate what you do. Such stories might not be appropriate for the rest of your web site, but they are perfect to share on your blog.

For example, is there a popular story in the press right now that you can relate to your products and services? Did you hear an interesting anecdote that illustrates a point that you want to share with potential clients?

A great story helps you share with your potential clients and at the same time spotlight your business, products and services.

Offer your blog readers a gift.

What can be more helpful, authentic and professional than helping your potential customers with a problem they are experiencing? Your potential customers need help with problems they are trying to solve. Your blog is an excellent tool for you to help your potential customers do just that.

Create a gift that your potential customers crave. This gift should solve a problem that your potential customers are experiencing and desperately need help with. Package your gift as a special report, e-book or audio recording so that you can create the gift once and give it out to thousands of people.

Once you have the gift ready, offer it to your blog readers in exchange for subscribing to your newsletter. Doing this will help you build a list of potential customers that you can contact and market to on a regular basis.

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About the author: Learn how to get clients, customers and newsletter subscribers with your blog at http://www.avocadoconsulting.com/rlinks/zbt.

Until next time! Mary Ann

How to Monitor Your Shop Online

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Looking to monitor your shop online? Here are some great tools that will let you know how your presence is doing on the web...and most of them are free!

Thank you, Pete Codella (@Codella on Twitter), VP of marketing and PR for Alexander's, a Utah-based full-service traditional and digital marketing communications firm, for these suggestions.

MONITOR YOUR BRAND

SocialMention

  • Track and measure what people are saying about your company.
  • Monitor Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Digg, Google and many more.

Google Alerts

  • Receive email alerts about your brand, topics of interest and more.

SEO

HubSpot's Marketing Grader

  • Measure your marketing activities.
  • Find out how your website ranks.
  • Find out how competing websites rank.

TRACK YOUR TWEETS

Topsy

  • Get realtime insights from Twitter conversations.
  • Search links, tweets, photos, videos, what's trending and more.

Twello

  • Find users in a specific locations based on their Twitter bios.

FACEBOOK

Involver (paid plans available, too)

  • Add branded applications to your Facebook fan page.
  • Has additional paid and free apps for other channels.

ShortStack (paid plans available, too)

  • Design Facebook Apps and contests.

PINTEREST

Pingraphy

  • Schedule pins on Pinterest.
  • Analyze metrics.
  • Upload pins in bulk.

PinPuff

  • Calculate the measure of your popularity on Pinterest and value of each pin.

VIDEO

Grovo (paid plans available, too)

  • Online video training site that teaches you social media tricks and tips through quick videos.
  • A great way to strengthen your team's understanding of social media.

See you next time!

Mary Ann / MaryAnnFarley

Social Media Traffic 101

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Ana Hoffman at TrafficGenerationCafe.com is one of the most knowledgeable people I've come across on the web when it comes to promoting yourself through social media, and all of the info on her site is free!

Here's just one article that I've found incredibly helpful...

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Social media has been called a lot of things:

  • the best thing since sliced bread;
  • productivity killer;
  • the next marketing wonder.

Truthfully, it doesn’t really matter what YOU think about social media. If your audience and your competitors are there, you don’t really have much of a choice, do you? Social media is to your website as breathing is to living. Period.

A few quick tips before we dive into the mysteries of driving traffic from social media:

Start with one platform

Social media is the great example of Pareto principal  at work (roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes). My best advice is not to spread yourself too thin.

  • Find the one social media platform that YOUR target audience seems to favor and stick with it.
  • Learn the ins and outs of it.
  • Master all the nuances of traffic generation.
  • Figure out how to put most of it on autopilot.
  • Move on to the next one.

How to figure out which one to start with

1.   Use your Google Analytics (GA) data

If you are already driving social media traffic large enough to analyze some stats, then start here.

  • Go to your GA dashboard and look up your referral traffic.
  • See which social media platform drives the most traffic AND converts the best.
  • Focus on that one.

2.   Use your competitor’s data

If you are brand new to social media or even blogging in general, then see where your competitors get most of their traffic from. That should be a good indicator of where your potential readers might be hanging out. The easiest way of collecting this type of data is through Alexa.com.

Just search for any competitor’s site and go under “Clickstream” to see where their social media traffic comes from.

While there are scads of social media traffic sources, I have outlined some of the big dogs for you.

Twitter

Facebook

How to Get the Facebook Crowd to Like You More

Google Plus

Google Plus Bite-Sized Tutorial for the Busy Marketer

Pinterest

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Thanks, Ana! That's certainly enough to get us started!

Until next time! Mary Ann

Boosting Response on Facebook: 3 Creative Ideas

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I love this web site for its great articles on social media marketing. They're always on the lookout for the latest trends and tips on what's working for people, and this one posted just last week about Facebook ranks among their best.

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John Jantsch at Duct Tape Marketing recently shared with MarketingProfs.com his insights about three tactics boosting response for him at Facebook. Feeling creative? With your next post, you might want to:

Use an image for your update.

Forget the blah, blah, blah. Upload a photo as your next status update! Then add a little descriptive copy and a link to your blog post (which can go into detail about your big announcement) in the "say something about the photo" box, Jantsch suggests. "I notice that when I do this I get … more views and more engagement," he says.

Use a tab for a call to action.

The space to the right of the About box will display four images (tabs) of your current pages or apps. The good news is you can create your own images in those spaces! Why not include a call to action in one of them? For instance, "if you want to send someone to a page to grab a free eBook, you can use an image to create the call to action," he advises.

Schedule your posts.

According to Jantsch, scheduling posts is no longer a professional no-no, and it might even get you more TLC at Facebook. He reports that his scheduled posts are getting seen by greater numbers. Why? Perhaps Facebook favors direct posts over those posted by third-party tools. "I know off hand that my direct content gets 30-50% more views then content from Buffer," he notes.

The Point:

A little creativity can go a long way online. Try a couple of clever tactics at Facebook to help raise your B2B social profile.

Until next time!

Mary Ann

Thinking Small for Big Sales: 3 Social Sites to Boost Your Biz

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No doubt you’re using Facebook and Twitter to build your following in an attempt to find as many customers as possible, and that’s great. But what you may not have considered in the world of social media are the smaller social networking sites as a way of targeting people who already share certain interests with you.

Susan Newman
Susan Newman of Susan Newman Design, Inc. uses a great metaphor to explain the idea: Facebook and Twitter are global, while these smaller sites are more like your neighborhood, and she’s got the perfect virtual hangouts that any New York business gal should know about.

Social Media Examiner. The Social Media Examiner is a blog website that posts news articles and tutorials about social media, business and blogging (among other topics), and in a section called The Networking Groups, features a discussion board that covers three categories: small business, Facebook, and blogging.

“It’s a great site, because they got people interested in social media all together, then expanded it so that we could all help each other and answer each other’s questions,” says Newman.

Members can also sign up for the site’s daily newsletters, which offer the latest news on social media. “I get alerts every day,” says Newman, “and they’ve taught me quite a bit of what I’ve learned about social networking.

“Of course, if you’re knowledgeable about something, the discussion boards give you an opportunity to help others, as well," she adds. “It's a terrific niche community where the answers you get are really relevant and truly helpful."

The Social Buzz Club.  Newman says the Social Buzz Club has been “really unbelievable” in terms of how much exposure it has gotten her on the web.

While it’s a site that charges for its membership (after a free trial), there are different levels of participation to fit anyone’s budget, and Newman says any level is bound to increase your visibility on the internet.

The Social Buzz Club works by members reposting one another’s blog links on Facebook, Twitter, or wherever you specify you’d like to be promoted.  The set-up is simple: You feed your blog link into the stream, check off its subject category, then wait to see how many people repost it for you. Each member commits to reposting a certain number of times each month, and Newman says it’s incredibly helpful to see which of her blog posts get the most reposts.

“What’s great is that as soon as I go into my dashboard,” she says, “I can see which posts were shared how many times, and that’s valuable information for me, to see which posts are resonating. I had one post that was shared just once, while another was reposted 26 times.”

When a member has tens of thousands of followers on their Facebook page, for example, and they repost your blog link, that’s incredible exposure.

“It’s amazing how much this site has exploded my visibility on the web,” Newman says.

(A link to the Social Buzz Club is on Newman’s site, www.susannewmandesign.com. If you decide to sign up for it, kindly consider joining from that link, as it will earn Newman some well-deserved points for all she’s done for the New York Etsy Team. Help her out!)

Savor the Success. Like the Social Buzz Club, Savor the Success has a free trial, but the monthly membership fee, at $50, is a bit steep. However, Newman says the work one can get through the group can often cover the monthly cash outlay.

Savor the Success is a global group of women entrepreneurs, who work in just about all fields; they’re artists, chefs, businesswomen, designers, you name it. (Newman is a member of the New York chapter.) The site's two best features, says Newman, are first, its monthly meeting, which features a guest speaker, then breaks the attendees up into groups of six or seven. During that time, each woman gets to talk for seven or eight minutes about what she does, or she can ask for advice or feedback on some new venture.

The second advantage is access to the group’s web site, and its astounding media lists that cover just about any and all fields…entertainment, jewelry, home décor, business, plus many more.

“They have at least six media lists that get updated every year, and members get to download one per month,” Newman says, noting that for most, just one media list will be applicable to what the member does. “You also get full access to the web site, where you can interact with other members, and find all kinds of video resources as well.”

Newman notes that Savor the Success is a very tight community, which means that each woman knows what everyone else is doing. That, in turn, means that everyone is recommending one another for potential business.

“We also get to post our news, which goes out in a daily email,” she says, “and we can upload our banners, which appear at the top of these emails on a rotating basis. There’s just constant interaction within the group.”

Aside from the free trial, there are also free memberships available, which limits how much access you have to the group's activities and web site. It does, however, allow you to post your profile.

Newman also recommends two other sites: Ozoshare, for Etsy merchants who sell eco-friendly products, and Tumblr, a blog site that is heavy on imagery, and is growing at one of the fastest rates on the internet. More on these sites will appear in a future essay.

Until next time!
Mary Ann

The Brooks Ring
The Shop: MaryAnnFarley