1. Optimal width: Due to the limitations of many email clients, stick with a width between 500 to 600 pixels wide.
2. Make your email look good with images disabled. For email clients such as Outlook, this is now the default feature. Even popular web mails like Hotmail now disable images unless the sender is in the address book of the recipient. The best tactic to create readable emails that make complete sense without images and apply an alt description on all images.
3. Provide an online version of your email for users having trouble viewing images or for those that just want to view your email, e.g. newsletter, as a webpage.
4. Experiment with subject lines: Sometimes short subjects are better, sometimes long, sometimes intriguing, sometimes urgent, only testing will reveal what works best for you/your company.
5. Grammar and spell check. Often we are the worse checkers of our own work – we tend to see what we expect to see. Always have every email proofread by at least 2 detail oriented people. There’s nothing more embarrassing than a typo in an email blast.

1. Spam ‘STOP’ words and delivery rates. Ok, there’s always someone in the office who says “we shouldn’t use the word ‘performance’ or ‘free’ in the subject line of the email because it will get treated as spam”. Don’t get caught up in such angst, email filters have gotten smarter and  ISPs have moved away from content based spam filtering in favor of reputation based filtering. In other words, the sending IP address and the ‘from’ email address are more important than whether or not your email contains certain words.
   



2. Don’t send too little or too often: You know this from personal experience, if it seems like you’re getting regular email from a vendor or organisation that you are not directly working with you get tired of it – right? Seems like spam and you want it to go away – unsubscribe. On the other hand if you don’t send  regularly enough, maybe once every three months, you can get the same result. The trick is identifying, through testing, unsubscribe rates and identifing the optimal balance between over and under mailing your customers and prospects.
3. White List Prompt: If you want your subscribers to add you to their white list, you need to ask. Not everyone will add you but some will and this will ensure that those who care most about receiving your email get it.
4. Easy Unsubscribe: Make it easy for people to unsubscribe, if someone doesn’t want to receive your emails that’s their right and they will take the time to look for that ‘unsubscribe’ link or button – if you make it difficult for them you will just make them annoyed with you, your company – don’t acrue bad feeling toward your brand – make it easy and hopefully they’ll be back.
5. Keep the Good Stuff on Top: Remember that many email clients will obscure a large portion of your email unless the user scrolls down. Make sure the top 400 pixels grab the attention of your readers.

Part two next week….

1. What’s you budget?
2. How big is you’re list?
3. You haven’t got a list…?
4. How do you collect email addresses?
5. Do you use an auto-responder for follow-up emails, if so what?
6. Do you currently use any email management software, if so what?
7. What is your open, clickthrough, unsubscibe rates?
8. How often do you usually contact your list?
9. Who is responsible for maintaining the list?
10. Who is responsible for writing email content and subject headings?
11. Have you got content planned for the first 10 emails?
12. What do you know about anti-spam law?
13. Why should anyone open your email?

In no particular order, except for no.1

Owning the ‘right’ domain name is one of the best assets your can purchase on for your business. Get it ‘right’ and it will enhance, even drive, your online business. Get it wrong and well…if it’s not working for you, it’s probably working against you.

We’ve all seen it, maybe on the back of a bus, go to my website at www.clevlandmacmillanjones.co.nz. By the time we’re home and on the internet it has become www.macmillanjonesclevland.co.nz or perhaps www.jonesclevlandmacmillan.co.nz.

Choose the

Here are some tips to choosing the best domain name for your business:

1. Short is sweet. Although you can register up to 63 characters remember your customers need to remember it and easily type it into their browser. A good rule of thumb, unless you are registering a dictionary keyword, is to keep it under 7 characters. If your business is called Cleveland MacMillan Jones, as a first preference check if www.cmj.co.nz is free, if yes, use that as your primary domain name (the one you put on all your branding and promotion) then also purchase www.clevlandmacmillanjones.co.nz and forward this secondary domain to www.cmj.co.nz so that you capture any additional traffic.
2. Dot what? Have you got customers outside NZ or is your business primarily local to NZ? If purely local go for .co.nz; if international I would go for .com
3. Avoid trademarks (unless it’s your own!) in a domain name. You will be found and punished – it’s just not worth it.
4. Register first or pay later. I’ve seen it happen so often, it amazes me. The marketing department choose the name of a campaign or initiative, tell everyone; get the brochures, posters, bookmarks etc etc printed, even commission a pretty website only to find out near launch that the domain they assumed they would just get isn’t available. Oh dear….”but everything is branded www.wellingtonfitday.co.nz?! What do you mean it’s not free?” Before you undertake any branding that will include a website address make sure you register the domain name. It can be a very expensive lesson.
5. Character Types. Domain names can only use letters, numbers, and dashes. Spaces and symbols are not allowed. Also, domain names are not case sensitive.
6. Get feedback. Once you’ve decided on a domain name, purchase it immediately. Then, and only after you have purchased it, ask people (preferably users of your future website) what they think of it. Can they spell it, remember it, does it make sense to them? If you do this market research before you have purchased it you run the risk of someone else purchasing the domain before you. Secure it first, domains are cheap, if feedback from people is not positive get another domain and let the unwanted one expire.

Always remember you want to make it as easy as possible for your customers to find you online.

On Thursday 25 September Yahoo will reveal its new homepage design – the last redesign was 2 years ago. Initial tasters of the new design will be conducted in the UK, France, India and the United States. Here’s a glimpse:

The new design aims to allow a more personalised www experience with features that include:

1. A tab on the left hand column of the page with links to the user’s 10 or 20 favourite sites.
2. Allows users who have signed into their Yahoo account to see when new information arrives not just on Yahoo sites, like email or news, but off-Yahoo on sites such as eBay auctions or Gmail.
3. Users can see a preview of the information while staying on their Yahoo homepage.

This week Google clarified what has become known as the “Google duplicate content penalty”.

Duplicate content is a huge topic for discussion in online marketing and SEO circles and is considered to be a factor that can threaten ranking, positioning, traffic and consequently sales. It has long been believed that Google imposes a penalty if your webpage is found to contain duplicate content. So this week Google put the penalty myth to bed stating:

There’s no such thing as a “duplicate content penalty.” At least, not in the way most people mean when they say that.

But first…what is duplicate content?

Google defines duplicate content as:

Substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely match other content or are appreciably similar. Mostly, this is not deceptive in origin. Examples of non-malicious duplicate content could include:

• Discussion forums that can generate both regular and stripped-down pages targeted at mobile devices
• Store items shown or linked via multiple distinct URLs
• Printer-only versions of web pages

Types of duplicate content

Google considers duplicate content spam. Websites with identical pages as well as websites that are identical to another website on the Internet are considered to be spam. Affiliate sites with the same look and feel which contain identical content, for example, are especially vulnerable to a duplicate content filter. other examples of content that may be considered duplicate:

Scraped content: scraped content is taking content from a website and using it on another webpage so that it is more or less a duplicate page. With the popularity of blogs on the internet and the syndication of those blogs, scraping is becoming more of a problem for search engines.

eCommerce product descriptions: many eCommerce sites use the manufacturer’s descriptions for the products they list. The problem is, many other eCommerce site are using the same content, this is especially true in competitive markets and popular goods, think ipod, iphone, sony shuffle. This type of content is also considered duplicate.

Distribution of articles: If you publish an article and it gets copied and put all over the Internet this too may be considered duplicate content.

Google says that it ‘filters’ not ‘penalises’ duplicate content

So in order to make a search more relevant to a user, Google uses a filter that removes the duplicate content pages from the search results. A search engine robot crawls a website, reads the pages, and stores the information in its database. Then it compares its findings to other information it has in its database. Depending upon a few factors, such as the overall relevancy score of a website, it then determines which are duplicate content, and then filters out the pages or the websites that qualify as spam. Unfortunately, if your pages are not spam, but have enough similar content, they may still be regarded as spam.

In terms of search engine rankings Google views a penalty as points deducted from a page in order to come to an overall relevancy score. But in reality, duplicate content pages are not penalised rather they are simply filtered out and sometimes good legitimate content is filtered accidentally because it may be so related to content elsewhere.

Google advice to avoid the duplicate content filter

• Don’t create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.

• Avoid… “cookie cutter” approaches such as affiliate programs with little or no original content.

• If your site participates in an affiliate program, make sure that your site adds value. Provide unique and relevant content that gives users a reason to visit your site first.

Read the original article form Google

Chrome is a new web browser developed by Google using open source code, you can download it here for Vista/XP.

Released on 2nd September it is still in early beta and it remains to be seen what slice of the browser market share it will be able to secure over the current top browsers of choice: Internet Explorer, Firefox and Opera.

First impression is that its fast, with a clean minimalist design. When you open a new tab, you get a page showing thumbnails of your nine most-visited sites, plus blue search and bookmarks boxes on the right. If you closed any tabs within the past few minutes, you’ll also see a yellow box containing your three most recently closed tabs, which lets you skip directly to the site you want. Google hasn’t yet created themes for Chrome however others have at Google Chrome Themes, Deviant Art, Chromespot.

Unlike Firefox Chrome doesn’t have an array of add-ons available to enhance its behaviour however there are ways you can use add-ons to Chrome, via bookmarklets which are little pieces of JavaScript that you can store as a bookmark, and when clicked upon, they run as a kind of miniprogram. To add a bookmarklet to Chrome, first display Chrome’s bookmarks bar, which appears just below the Omnibox. (Pressing Ctrl+B toggles the bookmarks bar on and off.) Once you do that, when you get to a page with a bookmarklet link, drag the link to the Chrome bookmarks bar. Once it’s there, to run the bookmarklet, click on it. Here’s a list of bookmarklets that are supposed to work with Chrome.

People generally get attached to their choice of browser, it will be interesting to see if people will give Chrome a go and make the change to it.