Just last week we were trumpeting the continued growth and popularity of Internet video and its many uses across the Web. We do this ocassionally to remind our readers about this amazing tool that you have at your disposal for powerful marketing strategies and branding efforts.
Coincidentally, Clickz.com reported only last week that Nielsen Company data indicates online video use in America is up by 45% compared to where it was last year at this time. Now, admittedly, it's been a rough winter in parts of the United States and a lot of folks have been home-bound, but we at Fathom don't think that explains this very large jump in web video viewing. Rather, between Netflix, Hulu and YouTube, more and more consumers are "tuning-in" to the convenience of Internet video as their viewing resource. And with YouTube now featuring more commercials before their video content, advertisers are "getting it" about reaching this growing Internet generation with their products and services messages.
If you "get it" too, we'd like to work with you. Fathom Online Marketing produces and distributes web videos for branding and marketing purposes for clients across the spectrum of the business world in North America. Contact us today to learn more about our Internet video marketing services. And check out the full Clickz.com article here to learn more about the growth of online video in the U.S.A.
No Comments yet, your thoughts are welcome. »A mechanic relies on his racket and socket set. An artist relies on her paint brush. An email marketer relies on the best email marketing tools. Here is what you need to be using.
HTML & CSS
- W3Schools offers free HTML and CSS tutorials. You'll need to know both for designing email templates and editing content.
Email Marketing Creative and Design
- Adobe Photoshop for editing images, creating layouts, and slicing large images.
- HTML editor such as Adobe Dreamweaver for creating and previewing HTML. Just make sure you use the coding view in Dreamweaver to build your html email template.
Email Lists
- Sign Up Forms to help you build a high converting email marketing list.
- TextPad to open different types of text files.
- Microsoft Access to work with large databases.
- Microsoft Excel as a general purpose database tool.
Email Message Delivery
- Email Service Provider because there is no reason for you to manage the complex process of transferring email when there are hundreds of great, and ultimately less expensive, options available.
- Transactional Messages to immediately communicate time-sensitive information to your subscribers.
- Rendering Tests to preview how your email design looks across ISPs, browsers, devices and operating systems.
- Delivery Reports to learn more about potential blocks or delivery issues at certain ISPs.
- Test Accounts with AOL, Hotmail, Gmail and Yahoo at the bare minimum. Check rendering and delivery manually.
Tracking
- Open and Click Tracking should be provided by your Email Service Provider, if not, get a new one.
- Conversion Tracking to segment out subscribers who have completed your desired conversion goal.
- Google Analytics to continue tracking subscribers after they leave the email and peruse your website.
These are all great tools and are the bare minimum to get started creating effective email marketing campaigns. What is the best email marketing tool though? What one tool will help your email marketing performance and generate the highest ROI?
In my opinion, the best email marketing tool is a smart, creative, and outgoing team. No one person is ever going to be the best at strategy, design, analysis AND testing. Sure, they can attack the low hanging fruit of email marketing, but they aren't going to be able to generate the highest ROI for a big email database by themselves.
By allowing your team members to focus on their one area of expertise, you can build an email program that is strong in every area, not just one or two.
No Comments yet, your thoughts are welcome. »
When it comes to blogging, you might think there’s no right or wrong way to go about it. Blogging gives you the freedom to creatively express your opinion and state your viewpoint on any given subject. Yet, there are a number of things you could do wrong that not only make it difficult to communicate your point effectively, but also tarnish your reputation. Here are the “seven deadly sins” of blogging:
1. You don’t answer the 5 W’s (and the H). In just about anything you write, you need to address the who, what, when, where, why and how of the subject you’re talking about. Without these basic questions answered, readers won’t have a complete understanding of the subject and will wonder what was the point of your blog post.
2. You make “actual word” typos. Any typo will easily and immediately tarnish your reputation. Don’t use spell check as your safety net because this tool won’t catch an incorrect word spelled correctly. Examine your content to make sure that each word is actually the word you intended to write.
3. You publish your first draft. Each step of the writing process needs to be carried out when blogging. Your process should include writing, editing, proofreading and more proofreading. The first draft of your blog post should never be the final draft.
4. Your post looks like a Wikipedia article. Don’t mindlessly spit out facts. Each fact included must have a purpose and support your blog post thesis.
5. Your paragraphs break the four-line rule. Edit your paragraphs to be four lines or less. People don’t have all day to read your blog posts, so your posts should be structured for short attention spans. Shorter paragraphs grab people’s attention and keep their attention.
6. Your posts include obvious factual mistakes. For instance, if the URLs you link to are not accurate or are no longer live, your post just ends up looking sloppy and you look like a careless blogger.
7. You make word choice errors. Do you know the different between “stationary” and “stationery?” You should. By not using the correct words, your blog post looks unprofessional.
How do you keep your blog and your reputation in mint condition? Share your tips in the comments below.
2 Comments »When Facebook Messages was announced last year, it was rumored to be a “Gmail killer”, a “Yahoo! Killer”, etc. Basically, the conventional wisdom was, as the popular song has it: “It’s the end of the world as we know it”, and Facebook was feeling fine.
Following the announcement, I polled acquaintances, friends and reviewed comments from industry folks about whether or not they would use the new Facebook Messages. The consensus among the people I surveyed varied between “What’s that?” and “No thanks, I already have email and I don’t need another place to check.”
Here we are, roughly four months out from Facebook’s message, and the excitement has died down a little. Maybe more than a little. I’ve been tracking the impact of Facebook email addresses on our major client since the implementation, as email addresses became more and more available, and while there has been growth, it’s been relatively minor.
Those numbers represent the presence of @facebook.com email addresses in two email lists. Yahoo! still holds first place in both databases.
However, numbers only tell one small part of the story. Even Facebook admits that Facebook Messages isn’t a replacement of email. In Facebook’s blog, one of their engineers says:
“To be clear, Messages is not email [my emphasis]. There are no subject lines, no cc, no bcc, and you can send a message by hitting the Enter key. We modeled it more closely to chat and reduced the number of things you need to do to send a message. We wanted to make this more like a conversation.”
Having used Messages since it was possible for me to do so, I can say that I find the lack of the things mentioned above, particularly subject line and the inability to cc: so that I can include people indirectly in my “conversation”, quite annoying. If you send out a message to more than one person, any responses someone sends you get distributed to everyone who got the original message (along with complaints about getting messages not meant for them).
In addition, it is presently impossible to delete a segment of a conversation. You have to wipe out the entire thing. Joel Seligstein, the author of the above blog post, states:
“I'm intensely jealous of the next generation who will have something like Facebook for their whole lives. They will have the conversational history with the people in their lives all the way back to the beginning: From ‘hey nice to meet you’ to ‘do you want to get coffee sometime’ to ‘our kids have soccer practice at 6 pm tonight.’ That's a really cool idea.”
I beg to differ with Mr. Seligstein. I don’t necessarily want to remember EVERYTHING I said to someone, and I’m guessing I’m not alone in that. In one thread, I could have a deep and meaningful conversation followed by a really stupid comment I’d like to kill and forget because I hit the Enter button before my brain had a chance to edit itself. Only I can’t.
Facebook is the largest, most heavily used social media site on the planet. It would be foolish to assume that they won’t change and adapt as the Messages (and @facebook.com email address) rollout continues and user feedback comes in. In the meantime, what it seems to be that they’ve done is reinvent Twitter with no 140 character limitation. I have to be honest – if I want to use Twitter, that’s where I’ll go.
In the meantime, it would be interesting to know if anyone has seen a major increase in the presence by percentage of ‘facebook.com’ addresses in their mailing lists. Until that happens, Facebook Messages is not going to have half the impact on how email is done as the growing Mobile market. Right now, that’s where the challenges lie for email marketers.
No Comments yet, your thoughts are welcome. »7 Easy Ways to Annoy Your Website Visitors
When it comes to increasing conversions - whether you've attracted a visitor from a search engine ranking, a PPC ad, or a targeted email with a link back to your website - there's no better way to see numbers take a nosedive than by annoying your visitors.
Why Your Best Practices are Costing You Money
There are a lot of common email best practices most of us follow. Don't use long subject lines, keep your copy short and avoid image calls to action, just to name a few. These are called "best practices" for a reason and they will work well in most situations, but they might also be holding you back.
Should You Jump on the Facebook Advertising Bandwagon?
There's no doubt about it - Facebook has changed us. Not only has it changed the way we interact with friends and family, it has also changed the way advertisers communicate with customers. Just how dramatic is this change? Well, to put it into perspective, Facebook accounted for 4.7 % of the total U.S. online ad market last year. In 2011, that share is expected to grow to a staggering 7.7%! So why is Facebook taking such a drastic toll on paid search?
Video Transcripts and Closed Captioning: Where Optimization and Accessibility Meet Back on the Other Side
As you've become more online video savvy over the course of the last year or two, you're probably feeling fairly confident in your videos from an SEO standpoint. You've been writing your scripts with keywords in mind. Your video titles, descriptions, and tags are researched and keyword-focused to correspond with your content and the trending industry terms. You've built a fan base on your YouTube channel and have subscribers that come back to watch your new videos as they launch.
10 Reasons to Use Local Online Marketing
There are many reasons to start using local online marketing as a tool to benefit your business and discover a new stream of revenue for your company right in your back yard! Some reasons might be tactical, like to gather competitive intelligence about the market around your business and get a feel for the demand for your product or service. Other reasons might be more tangible, like to increase the traffic to your website and physical storefront to increase your sales in a targeted area.
