Email Marketing 101, Part 1
Why Email When you think about building your site for the first time, you’re probably also thinking about your Facebook presence. After all, that’s where the people are, right? OK, that makes sense at a superficial level. But there are two problems with emphasizing platforms like Facebook instead of your own site and your own list: Facebook owns Facebook. Building your online presence on someone else’s digital turf which they adjust to please themselves (and not you) is risky. Facebook stinks for engagement. “Stinks” – a bit strong, you say? Well, according to https://www.michaelleander.me/blog/facebook-engagement-rate-benchmark/ a very good engagement rate on …
Email Marketing 101, Part 2
When to Start Email Marketing In the previous Email Marketing 101 post, I talked about why email marketing is vital. Today I’ll talk about when – when to start your email marketing efforts. Good news! It’s a one word answer: Now. No, I’m serious. Don’t delay because “I’m not big enough” or “I don’t have enough traffic.” You simply don’t know when and which subscriber will be the one that buys from you, spreads the word about you, or invests in you. Look at it this way. As you start out, you’re building pages; thinking about SEO; …
Email Marketing 101, Part 3
How to Start with Email Marketing Honestly: Don’t over think it. Sending blog updates by email is not only great, but also very much good enough – you’re saving your blog’s subscribers the time and effort to remember to go back to your site. Your content is already great, and now people have invited you to send it to them whenever you write. That’s what they want; so go ahead. Give it to them. Here’s how you…
Email Marketing 101, Part 4
How to be Successful with Email Marketing 101 The previous three articles in the “Email Marketing 101″ series dealt with three core concepts: Why you should be email marketing; When to start email marketing; and How to start email marketing. But email marketing isn’t an end point, or a static goal. It’s an ongoing process. While automation can and does yield significant benefits, you still have to make certain commitments to be successful. If, however, you’re an avid blogger or content marketer, meeting these commitments isn’t going to be a big deal. To finish up the series then, here are some basic steps you need to keep on taking in order to be successful: Email regularly and predictably…
SmartForms: The Email Subscription Form Wises Up
Today I’m delighted to announce the introduction of FeedBlitz “SmartForms” – responsive, adaptive, flexible subscription forms available now, for free, with every active FeedBlitz publisher account. To view the video online, go to https://animoto.com/play/Pvhh0ATjCknt0EUyD700yw What’s Wrong with Email Subscription Forms Today There are several problems with almost every subscription form out there right now, no matter what product, plugin, widget or service you’re using. Very often they’re not responsive — in other words, ill suited for mobile usage. They can be hard to update and / or customize, but worst of all, they’re Just Plain Dumb. Why? Because if you have a popup, it’s…
We’ve Added @Animoto to our Video in Email Support
FeedBlitz today enabled support for @Animoto video embedding in emails we send for our publishers; an example using yesterday’s SmartForms announcement video is included here. What this means is that if you embed an Animoto video in a post, FeedBlitz will automatically convert that to a video thumbnail and mail that out instead (videos typically don’t work well in emails, here’s why). You don’t have to do anything special to include the thumbnail — it just works. Like our …
Faster Ad Revenue Reporting
Publishers making the most of their content by monetizing with FeedBlitz’s unique RSS and email ad service can find out how they’re doing more quickly. Ad earnings are now being calculated hourly, with about an hour’s delay, instead of overnight. In other words, checking your ad earnings at 2pm will give you an idea of your earnings through about 1pm today, and the numbers are updated hourly. Ad earnings are reported at My Account | Ad Revenue Share | Opt-In Ad Reports in the left sidebar navigation. If you’re not using our ads and would like to try them out, you can set up ads …
Monetize Your Mailings: Introducing the Marquee Ad Unit
FeedBlitz is enabling a new, higher earning ad-unit, called a “Marquee” for publishers opted in to our ad network. The marquee unit in testing has significantly boosted earnings, in some cases nearly doubled them. As such, we’re really excited about this new ad format, and have enabled marquees for all publishers currently earning with our email ad network. Marquees go live for everyone using our ad network tomorrow, March 31st, 2015. Marquees don’t always show, but when they do, they appear exactly once per mailing, just under your logo and above the post content. If they don’t, there’s no material effect on your mailing’s layout. If you’re reading this via email, then odds are there is a…