No matter what type of business you have or the industry you’re in, email marketing remains one of the most cost-effective marketing methods available. It offers a high return on investment and an incredible reach. However, that is only true if you don’t make major mistakes that relegate your marketing emails to the trash bin, or worse, blocked as spam. This is why you always have to be aware of best practices and do everything you can to not violate them. Here are five email marketing mistakes to avoid at all costs.
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Get–and Keep–Attention with Custom Content Marketing
The Internet is deluged with new articles, videos, and images every day. People don’t have to go far to get something new to look at it—and most of the time, it’s being shared en masse on their social feeds. To rise above the noise, you have to offer something special. Once you’ve captured the attention of a person, you need to maintain consistency to keep it. Custom content marketing must be added to your marketing strategy if you’re hoping to be a standout in your niche. [Read more…] about Get–and Keep–Attention with Custom Content Marketing
9 Ways to Maximize Your Reddit Marketing
Reddit is an online hub where people shares links, content, and stories. Every post made has the potential to generate user discussion, too. While Reddit as a community doesn’t respond kindly to direct advertising or marketing, it can still be a useful place to get the word out about your site, product or service. Just go about it the right way. Since Reddit has more than 234 million unique users, it’s worth taking the time to learn how to join in and share on the site if you aren’t already fluent in Reddit. [Read more…] about 9 Ways to Maximize Your Reddit Marketing
What Is The Inbound Methodology?
If you are looking to sell any kind of product or service online then the old methods of buying display ads and selling to who you think your audience is fast becoming irrelevant. To capture the attention of an audience and turn them from strangers into leads and then customers you need to focus on creating quality content and make them come to you. [Read more…] about What Is The Inbound Methodology?
Top 5 Marketing Mistakes That Will Cost You
Marketing via email is a great way to expand your customer base and increase your sales without spending too much money. Providers of services and goods can easily disseminate announcements, deals, and promotions, and also grow their business by increasing the number of prospects and making the first contact with cold leads. Taking an effective marketing campaign from theory to practice, however, is easier said than done. Unless you employ the proper marketing strategies and techniques with your email marketing campaign, you may even suffer brand damage instead of just suboptimal results. [Read more…] about Top 5 Marketing Mistakes That Will Cost You
The Powerful Art of Community Building – Increase Your Blog’s Reach & Traffic
Community building is basically communicating with users in your niche, whether online or off, by engaging them in conversations important to them and the market, offering advice or any useful content to make their lives better. Its about becoming a leader in your industry, with whom other users can relate to and rely on. Its about building trust and relevance in a fast paced and ever changing environment. Yet, as bloggers, how do we achieve this? Where do we go to find the users and environment for building that closely knit and profitable community?
Well, the easy answer is that its everywhere. Wherever users have a voice and are free to connect and express themselves with others, you’ll find an opportunity to engage, extend your reach and grow your community. Although communities are all over the web there are some sites which will help you gain much better results and better connections.
Don’t know where to start? Here are 2 powerful places. [Read more…] about The Powerful Art of Community Building – Increase Your Blog’s Reach & Traffic
5 Free Photo Editors For Viral Image Creation
Thanks to the exploding popularity of sites like Pinterest and Wanelo have shown that creating visual interpretations of content (like infographic creation), as well as substituting images for the written word itself, can have a big impact. As the web gets larger and larger, it seems like its users are looking toward a more beautifully-design Internet that both inspires and educates them.
Photo manipulation has grown from correction to more of an art form, allowing anyone with an iPhone and the Instagram app to create edited photos with filters applied, easily and in a matter of seconds. This has created a demand for more photo apps that have greater features that are easy to use but can make a photo look how a user wants it.
If part of your social media strategy includes quotes or sharing images of projects or products, then the following free photo editors can certainly help. Each has its own benefits and set of unique tools that can make any image posted on your social media accounts, websites, or blogs stand out better than ever.
Pixlr
Pixlr is a popular and easy to use app because it mimics the major tools of Adobe Photoshop, but it is free and online. This means that you can access Pixlr from any internet browser without having to download (or pay for) any software. Pixlr is great for basic image correction and editing, including resizing, color correction, and cropping. It is easy to save images and the process is fast. Pixlr also has an app for iOS.
PicMonkey
PicMonkey is what most Insatgrammers probably envisioned a great photo editor should be. The controls and options have fun references (e.g. you save file sizes as Roger (Federer? Ebert?), Pierce (Brosnan), or Sean (Penn)) and there are so many creative and fun features: cool fonts, seasonal clip art add-ons you can lay on top of your photos, custom filters that can be applied to only certain parts of the image, beauty filters like wrinkle remover and blemish fix, and so much more.
There are certain fonts and features that are only accessible with a paid membership, which is $4.99/month or $33 per year.
QuotesCover
QuotesCover is an image editor that was created to put words on patterns or images, with a typographic, artistic emphasis. There are hundreds of quotes you can already choose from on the site, as well as color combinations to create the perfect background. You can also upload your own words or images for the background. When you have chosen your words, you chose from 5 different image types: Facebook Cover, New Google Plus Cover, Viral Images (these are square), computer wallpaper maker, and for art prints.
Once you have chosen your image size, it then takes you to a creation tool where you can choose from pre-designed font and color combinations. You can also add your image background.
Once you are ready to download your image, click Download Picture. When saving, do not change the file name until the image is downloaded. Otherwise it won’t download (for reasons unclear).
Using the viral image size is also a great option for creating unique Pinterest pins that can help get your Pinterest account more traffic.
FotoFlexer
This free image editor is online as well. It has a robust set of features and lets you upload a photo from your computer as well as get your photos from a variety of online sources, including Facebook, Flickr, and SmugMug. Once you have chosen your photo, you can begin to make edits, which include the ability to fix red eye, smooth wrinkles, add glitter text and stickers, or even a border. There are also a wide selection of effects (or filters, to the Instagrammers) to add to the photo.
There is even a Geek section, which allows you to use Smart Resize, Smart Recolor, and the Morph feature. Because of its fun stickers and actual photo editing features, FotoFlexer is a great choice for creating viral images with text or just retouching a few images that need help with coloration or red-eye.
GIMP
GIMP is the only downloadable program on this list, and it is most similar to Photoshop. For that reason, it is useful to have some Photoshop experience before using it. GIMP is completely free and has a variety of features, including a customizable interface, photo enhancement, and the ability to open several different kinds of photo formats, including .PSD, the default Photoshop format. GIMP is a great alternative to Photoshop and while it cannot do everything that Photoshop can, it is a great alternative, especially because it is free!
While these are just some of the copious amounts of free image editors online today, these 5 will give you a great start toward creating viral images that could help you get more traffic and views online.
Wanelo Marketing: Does Your e-Commerce Site Need to be on Wanelo?
Wanelo, short for Want, Need, Love, is a visual image collecting site that is similar to Pinterest. Their website states: “Wanelo (“wah-nee-lo,” from Want, Need, Love) is a catalog of products organized by people. You can buy almost everything you see on Wanelo, and everything is posted by members.”
The main difference is that all images link to the pages where the item depicted in the image can be purchased. This is of great benefit to e-commerce sites that have their products on Wanelo, as it makes it easy for customers to purchase items quickly.
Wanelo is still a fairly new site, but has gained the greatest amount traction among teenage to twentysomething women. For e-commerce businesses that offer products that may target this demographic, it is crucial that they get on Wanelo as soon as possible. While it isn’t experiencing the record numbers of growth that Pinterest has, it’s audience continues to grow.
For e-commerce sites that offer home, fashion, design, or even technology products and accessories, Wanelo can still be another great outlet to promote online products. The type of items shared on Wanelo shouldn’t be strictly feminine items– there are also several occurrences of gadgets, video games, and other products that are gender neutral and even masculine. Just like with Pinterest, Wanelo is skewed to the feminine audience. However, sharing items that are visually appealing and creative can still be of great benefit to online marketers.
Once a company’s products are shared on Wanelo, they can be reported for incorrect or missing links to product pages by users. This is great for companies who have had their products shared by a user instead of via their company profile.
To get your company started on Wanelo:
- Sign up for a profile on Wanelo.com.
- Add the Wanelo Save buttons to all product pages on your e-commerce site.
- Add a link to your company’s wanelo profile on your website with other social media profile links.
- Maintain the company Wanelo profile by regularly sharing new items to your collections, as well as uploading photos and links to new products as they appear on your e-commerce site.
Wanelo marketing is still a relatively new e-commerce strategy, but companies that stay ahead of the growth of Wanelo are sure to find success, especially if they are in the design, fashion, and technology industries.