HowToAdvertise.net

I recently received a newsletter from one of my professional contacts that’s not in the online marketing business. He had chosen an html format newsletter instead of using plain text. I’ve posted the results below so you can get an idea how his carefully crafted marketing message (the one that represents his business) looked to me.

If you’re doing an online newsletter html can work for you, but you have to be careful. Use in-line CSS and a limited number of images to reduce the annoying X’s. Here’s an example from one of my own sites to show you what I mean.

Personally though, I highly recommend using plain text instead of html. It’s less eye catching, but it’s also less likely to get caught in a spam filter or ignored as an advertisement. For myself, I’ll read anything pertinent and interesting to me – whether it’s written in html or not, and I give my audience the same consideration.

If you’ve ever wondered whether that all important email you sent got to where it was intended, look no further!

The good people at Danifer Web Services (a web publishing firm based out of Dallas, Texas) have released DeliveryConfirm.com, an online read receipt utility, to alert you when your messages have been read. DeliveryConfirm is a simple online utility that you can use to create and send email, and get a notification when it has been read.

The trick is that instead of sending the whole message, you send just a brief summary and DeliveryConfirm includes a special link and password. In order for your recipient to read the whole message and get any attachments, they have to follow the link and use the password. As soon as they do, you get an alert telling you that your message has been accessed.

It’s a surprisingly simple utility with a wide range of uses. Although it was developed for the freight forwarding industry, I could see it as an effective solution for any business that needs to know whether their emails are getting to the right place.

If you haven’t already, I highly recommend you check it out today.

The latest in our series on Web 2.0 projects includes SignatureConfirm.com. It’s an online signature utility designed to allow individual the ability to draft and send their own agreements and contracts via email where they can be digitally signed.

The concept is not new, and you’ve probably accepted the terms of service or agreed to a company’s conditions online before when signing up for a new service. The aim of SignatureConfirm it seems is to allow individuals the same convenience and utility when they might not otherwise be able to incorporate it into their own website.

At the very least, this concept eliminates the need for an individual to create a contract, fax or email it as a .pdf, have the signing part review it, and wait for them to sign and send it back.

With SignatureConfirm, the online signature process is a fast as an email response.

How it Works.

This part is pretty straightforward (which I like). The site isn’t trying to be a one stop solution for everything, but rather seems to focus on doing one thing and doing it well. This is an approach that I really appreciate in my online applications!

1. Sign up for a free account,
2. Type in or cut and paste the language of the contract you want signed,
3. Send via email to the recipient,
4. They get an encrypted URL and password that they can use to access the agreement (they don’t have to sign up for an account which is nice),
5. They can view the agreement as you typed it and can choose to digitally sign it.
6. Both parties receive confirmation emails during each step of the process and both the signed and unsigned contracts are available for download in .pdf format.

All in all, a good solution if you’re needing to collect online signatures and I can think of dozens of smaller and individual companies that could use it to streamline their contracts process.

As part of my new question and answer series, here are some of the questions my customers have been sending:

Question
How long does it take for my new website to get some traffic?

Answer
You probably won’t see much return on the things you post for at least a month. That’s why we want to get things up sooner rather than later so we can see the traffic as soon as possible.

Question
After looking at my Webalizer statistics, it looks like I’m getting a lot more traffic than I thought. Is this accurate?

Answer
These statistics include a lot of automated search traffic. This comes from the search engines like Google and Yahoo! scanning the site to determine what to return in their search results. A good rule of thumb is to assume that anywhere between one-third and two-thirds of your traffic is automated rather than human eyes on the screen.

One of my customers recently asked me:

“If I want searches such as “Southlake marketing” or Colleyville marketing” to lead to our site, do I have to incorporate those specific terms into my document, or is that just something you can register?”

The real answer behind this is too complicated for an email. It’s a skill like any other that has to be developed with time and practice. Instead of overwhelming her, I tried to lay out a sort of checklist that included some of the major elements.

These all have a similar theme, so it won’t be too hard for them to apply the theory to other aspects of their writing that I didn’t mention.

Here’s my reply:

Getting search phrases is a little tricky, and there’s almost an art form to it. You can’t just register a search phrase (well, you sort of can but it’s expensive). Instead, we’re trying to produce a niche-market website that the search engines (Google, Yahoo!, etc.) will pick up on naturally. The term for this is “organic marketing.”

That doesn’t mean you don’t have any control. There are a lot of little things you can do with your writing to help get the search phrases you want. Here are a few:

• Write your article and then decide what search phrases you think people would use to find it. Go back through your work to make sure you use those same phrases in your writing.
• Don’t target overly-generic search phrases. The search term “marketing” has a lot more competition than “marketing consultants in Southlake”
• Title your article with keywords that you think people will be searching for.
• Target a niche market. This is why I think it’s important to keep all of your local articles on the site – you’re targeting the DFW niche.

You can get caught up in doing too many things to get search engine rankings. Just keep in mind that you’re writing for other humans to read, not for machines. Don’t get carried away with tips like the above. Instead, write for the purpose of providing value to your reader and you’ll be fine.