22 Feb 2011

Subscriber Engagement Half-Life by @mailchimp

It's a never-ending story. Stay relevant alone won't keep your readers to slightly disappear. Click rates drop even from most active subscribers

Amplify’d from blog.mailchimp.com

After about 4 months, your average click rate for your average email subscriber drops to less than 1%.

We could talk about ways to keep people engaged longer, like sending more frequently (I think Mr. Zarrella recommends this in his presentation), sending less frequently, engaging with people on alternate channels (like Twitter and Facebook), and on and on. But 9.5 billion emails tell you something. You’ve basically got 4 months to entertain, delight, sell, and make your point to subscribers. More importantly, you need to do something awesome enough to keep feeding in new subscribers, because the churn might be faster than you think.

See more at blog.mailchimp.com

17 Feb 2011

Is a blog still important in 2011? @jowyang answers Your question

Your website and your blog is the central communications hub for your message, ideas and communication. Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn are only more means to get traffic to your site and expose more people to your company, your mission, your voice and engage with them, after you wrote something. You have to deliver relevance content and "Feed the Beast" - a play on words, as all the connections with the Interwebs are handled via feeds and apis... Share you knowledge and you will be ahead of the curve and much more visible to the world, then 90% of your competition.
And Blog engines, self-hosted or shared hosted have the best features to "Feed the Beast". And you can measure, what is the current interest of your growing readership. Measure it, not to get frustrated but to focus your topics more to your audience. Google Analytics helps a great deal and it's free.

A common mistake people make is that people live in a “field of dreams” world whereby they think that simply blogging about a subject will make people come and visit. Blogging is great for telling prospects about what you are selling but it does not bring people to your site.

In fact a blog is a focal point and acts as a base of operations for communications. Even though you may use Twitter and Facebook there still needs to be landing point – a place that people end up when they click on the link.

What’s more a blog can also address questions or concerns your audience find important. By all means people use amplification tools like Twitter and Facebook to draw their attention to your blog post, but the thoughts reside in one place.

SEO is also vital. New, focussed and relevant content will always be picked up by Google which will in turn bring extra traffic. It is here where the second stage of engagement takes place – directly on the blog. This is often more in-depth and focussed than through other channels like Twitter. How often have we all felt that 140 characters is not enough to give a detailed opinion. Facebook too has its limitations – even though you can write as much as you like, many find lengthy wall posts unappealing – it really is a case of the right message for the right channel.

Read more at technobabble2dot0.wordpress.com

21 Jan 2011

Tongue-in-Cheek: Post about Twitter Profiles by @Joey_Strawn

I giggled all morning at the egg heads and other symptoms. Don't take it too seriously. Sometimes reverse psychology works. Hehe.

Amplify’d from joeystrawn.com
It seems a lot of people want to build terrible and crappy profiles, so I thought I would answer the call and put together this little How-To to teach people the proper ways to really suck it up on Twitter.
Read more at joeystrawn.com

Contributors

paulisystems Birgit Pauli-Haack