Building an email list is said to be one of the most profitable things a webmaster can do. Of course, you can’t simply ask people to give you their email addresses. You must offer something in return, and this “something” usually is a newsletter. However, many webmasters hesitate in starting their own newsletters because they already struggle to find fresh ideas for their sites; having to find content ideas for yet another venue looks like quite a challenge.
If that’s your case, fear no more. Today you’ll see there are at least two easy ways to create content for it.
1. Using your newsletter to plug your site
Even if at first you really, really can’t think of any exclusive content to fill your newsletter, it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t begin collecting those email addresses now. You can always start out with update alerts and evolve as time goes by. Update alerts are great to generate repeat traffic, because subscribers will be regularly encouraged to visit your site.
Do not just put together a lame list of new items added to your site. View each site update as an important happening — and try to convey such view in your newsletter text. Use it to tease your subscribers, to make them feel that they must visit your site right away. Of course, you should never generate false expectations; if you’ve just published a new article, don’t make your newsletter’s subscribers believe they will find five new pieces.
In case you tend to update your site daily, you’d better send out weekly update alerts. Otherwise you may look pushy and even spammy.
2. Complementing your site’s content with a newsletter
This method allows you to plug a site on your newsletter and the newsletter on your site at once. But it depends on your site content’s structure. Here’s what you should do: whenever you publish a list of new items, make sure not to post all of them on your site; save some for your newsletter. Alternatively, publish only one type of media on your pages and save the other ones for the newsletter.
Say you’ve written a list entitled “50 Effective Money-Saving Tips.” What you want to do is post 30 or 40 list items on your site or blog and end the text with a paragraph like this: “The remaining tips will be published on the upcoming 20th issue of our newsletter. If you don’t want to miss them, subscribe now.” If you have shot a video to demonstrate some (or all) of the money-saving tips, you can post the whole written piece on your site and entice readers to subscribe to your newsletter in order to get the video’s link.
In both cases you must display on the newsletter some links to your site’s content. This way, subscribers who still haven’t seen the updates will feel enticed to visit your pages. Taking the examples above, they’ll want to either read the first items of your money-saving list or view its written version instead of the video one only.
Do you have a newsletter? Leave a comment to tell us how you create content for it.
Everyone at some point or the other has been fascinated by how Google views their sites and decides the rankings. While one can only assume based on a few factors, Google Webmaster tools are the only solution with any to that effect. The tools help in diagnosing the errors if any on your site, in increasing its visibility in terms of rankings and also let the owner make preferences with regard to how his/her website is listed. It is a treasure house of tools indeed.
The first and foremost thing one requires to use Google webmaster tools is an active Google account. Once that’s done, the rest is almost done as well. (more…)
I have previously written about the backlinks that really matter for Google: the ones which come from authority sites. However, many, many webmasters and bloggers claim that one should get all the backlinks they can, no matter where they come from. In their opinion, Google won’t ignore discounted links even when they aren’t as valuable as the authority ones.
What are discounted links anyway?
There are three basic ways to look at it:
1. A discounted link would be one that comes from dubious sources, i. e., obscure pages that don’t have a strong reputation among Internet users. (more…)
As professional bloggers, there’s constant pressure to keep ourselves updated on the latest trends. Subscribing to the RSS feeds of the most important websites makes this so much more convenient and faster to do. Looking back, I don’t know how I ever did without it. Reading feeds every morning is a great way to start your day, because it gives you a lot of article ideas and interesting conversation pieces. Not yet into the habit? Here’s a few of RSS aggregators you can choose from. (more…)
Many webmasters spend part of their time monitoring their competitors’ performance. One of the things that they usually do is to try to learn more about competitors’ traffic. But when stats aren’t publicly available on a given site, how can one find out how many visits it gets?
On the Internet you’ll find several tools that can help you estimate a site’s traffic. Today I’m going to review one of them: Statbrain. (more…)
As a small or home-based business entrepreneur, the Internet is like your henchman, always at your disposal and providing his powerful services for you to profit from. Google local search is one such convenience that the Internet provides for you to exploit.
No matter what your business is – whether it is a small local business, a business run from home or an online business, no matter what, it always helps to list your business online, especially on local searches like Google Local. (more…)
There is nothing worse for a website looking to expand than being removed from the Google Index. If your site has been removed and you have absolutely no clue why this happened and how to recover from this onslaught, this article is for you.
Before we move and we tell you how to recover from Google’s snub, lets review what Google probably told you when they removed from the index. (more…)
Google love — i.e., good rankings that lead to abundant traffic — is what most webmasters and bloggers struggle to get. And I’m sure that most of them have already learned what it takes to achieve it: they must ensure that their blogs and sites are good resources which will benefit web surfers in some way, hence generating the backlinks that Google values so much.
Since most — if not all — webmasters and bloggers are aware of this, why so many insist in using “dirty tricks” to build links? (more…)
If you haven’t heard of it already, Yahoo! is going head-to-head with Digg via its new service called Yahoo! Buzz. While it has been active for a few months now, Buzz was confined to only a few select publishers for testing. Now, Yahoo! has opened it up to the public, so anyone from the online news giants to small niche blogs can participate. But, you may ask, with many established players in this field, what’s Yahoo! Buzz got to offer? (more…)
In the eventuality that you are like many others whose fate depends on Google when it comes to searches and traffic generated, negative SEO tactics is something you need to really know.
If your pages have started dropping in search results suddenly, there is an excellent possibility that your competitors are trying to suppress the appearance of your webpage in search results and literally hiding your webpage instead of boosting their page rankings. (more…)
