heartharmony.com.au

Humans are funny beasts. We focus on what’s important to us and can miss the most amazing things as this classic test on selective attention shows.

Now, if you have already seen that video or know about it, you need to see this one …

You see, people only pay attention to what’s important to them at the time … and miss the nuances. How can you grab their attention and make them pay attention to what’s important to you? One way is by doing something expected in an unexpected way – like this in-flight safety video.

And reach one to two three … break a pattern in your marketing today. And if you would like more information about Professors Simon’s research, take a look at Simon’s Lab.

Ingrid Cliff
We put your business into words
Heart Harmony – Brisbane Web Copywriter

Yesterday I was sent an email from a rather embarrassed colleague.

Why was she embarrassed? Well, she uses a company called Sendpepper to distribute her ezines, and it seems that back in February they changed their policy on “acceptable” emails.

They no longer deliver emails to generic addresses starting with info@, sales@, marketing@ mail@, support@, accounting@, or billing@.

And to add to the difficulties, they didn’t notify my colleague of the change in policy and it was only when people complained to her that they weren’t receiving their emails, that she tracked down the problem. So, over the weekend she was trying to get everyone with a generic email address to give her a non-generic email address, so she could continue send out her emails to them.

There’s a lot of issues to consider here. Yes, a lot of spam emails do come from generic email addresses. However, pretty much every business I know (both large and small), have tried to move away from personal to position-based emails, which means seamless continuity of service if the person leaves or goes on holidays.  And if you scan over any email marketing list, you will find at least 50-60% of email addresses falling into the generic category.

If suddenly 50-60% of your email list was not receiving your emails, what impact would that have on your business?

I’ve hit the net to do some research, and so far haven’t been able to find any company (other than Facebook) with similar limitations, but that isn’t to say that they aren’t on the way.  So, from a business perspective you have a few things to consider.

1. If you subscribe to an ezine that you particularly value (hint – Words from the Heart from Heart Harmony would fall into that category), you may want to consider changing your subscription from a generic email to a person based email.
2. Keep in touch with your ezine hosting company to monitor any changes in policy they may have.
3. Consider the new trend towards ezine subscriptions/ email list subscriptions occurring via a Facebook App rather than direct.

All part of the rich and interesting joys of running a business. And if you have heard of any other email hosting providers moving the same way as Sendpepper, drop me a note.

exuberantly yours

Ingrid Cliff

We put your business into words

Heart Harmony – Web Copywriter

PS:

Just been given the word that Mail Chimp, Benchmark email & i.send have the same policies relating to banning role based emails.

They do allow role based email individuals to subscribe to lists, they just will not allow bulk uploading of lists with role based emails. They are doing this as a way to reduce spam complaints, but is creating challenges for businesses uploading lists after tradeshows or other events.

Here’s the discussion on the Mail Chimp Blog, Benchmark Email and i.send.

The impact of these limits on role based email subscriptions are definitely a trend to watch if you are in email marketing.

Well, last week’s post about alternate ways to drive traffic to your site created a load of interest – particularly around Squidoo.

So what is Squidoo? Squidoo is a community website, started by Seth Godin and some others. People can create pages (called lenses) about single subjects of interest to them.  As a writer (or lensmaster), you can go as deep or as shallow as you like in terms of information – as long as each lens is a single subject.

I like to think about Squidoo as a sort of more fun version of Wikipedia. If you want to know how to create Star Wars birthday cakes – you will find a Squidoo page on it. If you want to learn more about Woodstock – someone has written a page about it.

There are 35 different category areas in Squidoo, of which business is only one category. In business, there are a range of sub-categories including marketing, small business, internet, real estate, employment amongst other things.

Creating a lens is simple. It is a content managed site, so you don’t even have to know HTML – just choose your modules and fill in the blanks.

My lens on Employee Performance Review Tips hovers consistently in the top 20 pages in the business category, so it seems to have captured the imagination of readers. A few people last week wanted to know how to write great Squidoo pages – so here are some of my tips of what works (and doesn’t work).

1. SEO – SEO – SEO. By this I mean, don’t start writing a lens until you know what people are looking for. I used my internet research skills to find out the most searched for keywords in my niche (and what people were looking for). It then made it easier for me to create my lens.  Of course I made sure my keywords were in my title and throughout my lens.
2. Solid content. Give useful & practical information – this is not the place to push a sale.
3. Pictures. Spice up your text with colourful royalty free images.
4. Link back to my blog. My Squidoo lens pulls in the RSS feed of my performance review blog – so it gives even more targeted information back to reader (while increasing traffic back to my blog).
5. Links to my products - I have links to all of my performance review products.
6. You Tube video – I found some funny You Tube videos about performance reviews. People love humour.
7. Humour. I added in more performance review humour with some performance review jokes that used to be passed around in HR circles.
8. A poll. I added in a poll. This does double duty for me – people love interacting, and it also gives me stats on the most common objections or problems people have with performance reviews (which helps me refine my product and my marketing).
9. Link to my Twitter feed. Another way to get people to interact.
10. Amazon books. These are books that I have read and loved. And a % of each sale comes back to me as an affiliate fee (and I also donate a % to Kiva). Yes, you can make money from Squidoo Lenses (although you will never replace your day job from these fees).
11. Reader thoughts.  People share their comments & thoughts about the lens.
12. Adsense. Another way to earn affiliate income.

The main takeaways from this post is to make sure your lens is optimised for search engines, has killer content as well as a bit of fun and interactivity to to. This is not the place to be stuffy and boring!

So what doesn’t work? If the topic is not a “hot topic” that people are interested in (and you haven’t done your SEO correctly), then you won’t be found and you won’t get the traffic. I have a few other lenses with mixed results. They do get some traffic, but these are not as popular traffic wise as my hot topic.

One of the good bits about Squidoo is the amazing amount of support out there to help you. There is an active forum as well as  Squid U – all designed to help you work out any tricky bits of code you want to insert, or learn the tricks of the trade.

And does Google like Squidoo?  Well in many cases new lenses are picked up by Google within 3 hours (which is another brilliant tip if you want your regular website found – create a lens that links back to your site). And if you look in search engine results – Squidoo is right up there (type in employee performance reviews into Google to see what I mean).

Happy lens creating!

Ingrid Cliff

We put your business into words

Heart Harmony – Web copywriter

Businesses that have websites, automatically think of being found in Google as the top way to attract new clients. But over the past few years, I have been watching the stats on my own site and have found some interesting shifts happening.

Yes, Google is still the number one way people find my Brisbane copywriting studio, but an extremely close second is through my Squidoo pages.

Squidoo.com is a free site where you share information about what you know. It is easy to put a page together about a topic (sort of like information scrap-booking), and provided your information is useful and low on the sell, people find your page (Squidoo ranks well on search engines) and then follow the links to find out more.  So how many people are we talking about?  Well my top Squidoo page averages around 3000 unique visitors per week, and well over half of them come back to my site for more information. Not a bad source of free traffic!

But Squidoo is not the only game in town.  I regularly submit the lead articles from my weekly newsletters to EzineArticles.com. My top article has had over 25,000 views since it went live (and yes, a large proportion of readers have clicked through on my resource link and come back to my website for more information).

You can also create a Hub Page, which is similar to Squidoo.  I haven’t found the Hub pages as brilliant as Squidoo in terms of traffic, but it is worth trying within your niche.

The trick is to regularly take a look at the analytic reports for your website, and see where your traffic is coming from. Also do some keyword research to find out what people are looking for in your niche – can you create a free or low cost product that has the information that people are searching for?

So, congratulations if you have a website … now think bigger than Google and see what else is out there to help drive traffic to your site.

Until next time

Ingrid Cliff

We put your business into words

Heart Harmony – SEO Copywriter