How to Get More People to Read Your Emails

I don't know about you, but I have an aversion to books with small print.  I read a lot - and I buy a lot of books.  But, not infrequently, I'll open a book to have a look through and put it back on the shelf because its format is so unappealing.

The same, it seems, is true of emails.  People who read their emails on mobile devices like the type to be clear and readable.  They don't want to have to be scrolling all over the place to get an idea of what the email is about.  If the email looks as though it's going to be hard to read, 70% of recipients will click 'delete'.

So, in the same way that I must have missed out on reading some very interesting books because they were printed in such dense type, there are many people who may be missing out on interesting emails because of the format in which they've been sent. 

 Nowadays our emails not only have to read well, in terms of content, but they have to look good too.  And, with over half the adult population using smartphones - and well over 80% of these using  their smartphones to read and send emails - it's essential that our emails show up well on all mobile devices.  Responsive website design has been around for a while.  Now it's the turn of responsive email design to be in the limelight.

There is some confusion, however, between the terms 'responsive' and 'mobile ready'.  From the names, one would suppose that they were one and the same thing.  But they're not.  If you have constructed an email which looks like this:

 

'mobile ready' will simply deliver the identical format - but smaller to fit the screen size.  This, of course, may mean that the typeface is now too small to read without a magnifying glass, so the recipient is likely to click 'delete' straight away.

A responsive design, however, will change the format to:

Now the typeface remains clear and all the recipient has to do to read the entire email is to scroll down.

A few days ago, the autoresponder service GetResponse announced that all the emails sent via its service will, from now on, be in responsive format.  Apparently it's the first service to offer this, although I daresay that the others (such as Aweber) will not be far behind.

I've been using GetResponse for a couple of years and, although it has a few quirks that annoy me, on the whole it has proved to be very satisfactory.  I chose it in the first place because, of the well known autoresponder services, it was the cheapest.  It took a little time to fathom out how to use all its bells and whistles but, having done so, I'm pleased with the design of my weekly newsletter and of all the emails I send to my list.  In addition, it provides some useful and insightful analytics on all the emails I send.  I know, for example, that the great majority of the people who open my newsletter do so on a pc.  It's possible that GetResponse's new format will mean that people who have been receiving it on mobile devices will find it easier to read so that the overall number of people reading my newsletter - and my emails - will increase.

How to Increase Your Productivity

Reading a blog post the other day, I found a link to a site called RescueTime which advertises itself as "A personal-analytics service that shows you how you spend your time & provides tools to help you be more productive".  Now, I spend a LOT of time at the computer and, yes, for a large proportion of that time, I'm working. But I also catch up on TV and radio programmes online and . . . (confession coming up) . . . I play solitaire and Mahjong.

And I have to admit that, from time to time, I worry about how much time I spend playing games.  I'll only play for ten minutes or so at a time . . . but it can mount up over a day.  So I signed up for  RescueTime, intending to give myself a short sharp shock that will (perhaps) stop me playing games . . . or, at least, stop me from playing games quite as much.

But, actually, it wasn't as bad as I thought.  Overall I spend something over four hours a week on games but, considering that most of that is in coffee breaks or after I've finished work, I'm not displeased.  And I'm a lot more productive than I thought!

Like most of us, I suppose, I can get distracted by an interesting (but irrelevant) website, when I should be working.  And RescueTime shows you exactly how you divide your time between productive and distracting activities.  To begin with, however, I didn't think this would be useful because the charts were showing all the time I spent working (on social media) as 'very distracting'.  However, I then found the link which enabled me to grade all the sites I visit and activities I engage in, so now Twitter and Facebook and writing my blog all appear as 'very productive'.

I do wonder, though, how the default was set up.  During this week, I visited some 20 internet marketing blogs.  RescueTime graded five of them as 'very productive', ten as 'neutral' and the remaining five as 'very distracting'.  Admittedly, this is balanced but I'm intrigued to know what it is that separated the supposed 'very productive' from the 'very distracting'.  Now I've regraded them, they're all showing as 'very productive'.

I was amused, however, to find that a certain fashion site, where I'd spent twenty minutes or so browsing through the end of season sale, was graded on the default as 'very productive'.  I was tempted not to change it!

All the results on RescueTime are charted out very clearly

and are then broken down into lists so that you can see exactly how much time you've spent doing what, and on which days.

For me, RescueTime offers the great benefits of reassuring me when I'm working well (currently it tells me that I'm more productive than 61% of people) and of alerting me if I start to be less efficient.  Although, in the back of my mind, I can't help wondering whether it could, in itself, become a distraction because the charts and the details are so good!  However, it does record how much time you spend on its own site (which, naturally, the default shows as 'very productive'), so time will tell!

I should add that the link I've given for the site at the head of this post is an affiliate link, because I believe it's a good site and worth promoting.  There's a free version, but the pro version (at $6 a month) offers a lot more data.

Content Curation - or Cloning? What Price Originality?

Content curation is all the rage.  Just recently the process was described by Carrie Morgan in an article on Business2Community.com:

You provide value by identifying a specific target audience, filtering through relevant online content, then sharing only what you find most interesting, trendy or applicable to that audience. Nothing else, just what you feel is most meaningful to that particular audience, then adding in your own expertise and opinions as you share what you’ve curated.
Read more at http://www.business2community.com/social-media/understanding-content-curation-how-it-applies-to-social-media-0575832#0KD3K43cC8wrd43H.99

"You provide value by identifying a specific target audience, filtering through relevant online content, then sharing only what you find most interesting, trendy or applicable to that audience . . . then adding in your own expertise and opinions as you share what you’ve curated."

And, put like that, it does seem to have a purpose and a value.  And, certainly, I use my weekly newsletter to tell people on my list about the best articles on aspects of internet marketing that I've come across in the previous week.

But, in trawling through numerous blogs to find those articles, I am all too frequently coming across what I can only describe as clones.  Someone will bring out an infographic - and suddenly there are six or eight articles by different authors, using the infographic as the core, with an added paragraph or two of comment.

Or there will be a sudden glut of articles on one subject.  This may occur when there has been a recent change that affects internet marketing - for example, the recent introduction of 'tabs' by gmail.  A lot of people have been writing about whether it will affect email marketing (some say yes, others say no) and, if it does, what marketers can do about it.  And a few days ago, after changes to the Facebook news feed were announced, one multi-contributor blog carried four articles on the subject, by different authors, in quick succession.  Sometimes, though, a clutch of articles seems unrelated to any changes and, here, I suspect that one good article has led to a load of copycats.

When I left school, and before I went to medical school, I trained as a journalist.  This was in the pre-internet era when news was provided in large part by newspapers.  And the thing that every journalist wanted was a scoop.  Because if you were writing about something completely different from your competitors, you were likely to sell more copies.  But if your stories were just a variation on those of everyone else, then readers had no incentive to buy one paper rather than another.

And, of course, newspapers (unlike blogs and the internet itself) have finite space.  They can't afford to fill that space up with run of the mill articles.  As a journalist, you can't keep writing about the same thing or copying the rest.  You've got to be original.  And originality is something we seem to be seeing less and less of online.  Unfortunately, this is inevitable if we follow the frequently-given advice that we should blog every day in order to keep our audience.

As you will have realised, I don't blog every day.  I write only when there's something I want to write about and something that I think may interest you, my reader.  I don't want to be a bore!

So, to anyone who is thinking of starting a blog, I would say:

• write only about those things that interest you
• write only about those things that will interest the audience that you are aiming for
• don't worry if your opinions differ from those of other people writing online - your opinions are what people will come to your blog for
• keep up to date with what is going on in your niche but don't write about a subject just because everyone else seems to be writing about it
• be original - express your own thoughts, not thoughts regurgitated from other people
• and don't try to write every day if you haven't any original thoughts to write about.  Of  course, you don't want to leave it too long between posts but I believe that you are far less likely to lose readers because you only post once a week or once a fortnight than because you're constantly writing about the same thing as everyone else.

You provide value by identifying a specific target audience, filtering through relevant online content, then sharing only what you find most interesting, trendy or applicable to that audience. Nothing else, just what you feel is most meaningful to that particular audience, then adding in your own expertise and opinions as you share what you’ve curated.
Read more at http://www.business2community.com/social-media/understanding-content-curation-how-it-applies-to-social-media-0575832#0KD3K43cC8wrd43H.99

You provide value by identifying a specific target audience, filtering through relevant online content, then sharing only what you find most interesting, trendy or applicable to that audience. Nothing else, just what you feel is most meaningful to that particular audience, then adding in your own expertise and opinions as you share what you’ve curated.
Read more at http://www.business2community.com/social-media/understanding-content-curation-how-it-applies-to-social-media-0575832#0KD3K43cC8wrd43H.99

You provide value by identifying a specific target audience, filtering through relevant online content, then sharing only what you find most interesting, trendy or applicable to that audience. Nothing else, just what you feel is most meaningful to that particular audience, then adding in your own expertise and opinions as you share what you’ve curated.
Read more at http://www.business2community.com/social-media/understanding-content-curation-how-it-applies-to-social-media-0575832#0KD3K43cC8wrd43H.99

You provide value by identifying a specific target audience, filtering through relevant online content, then sharing only what you find most interesting, trendy or applicable to that audience. Nothing else, just what you feel is most meaningful to that particular audience, then adding in your own expertise and opinions as you share what you’ve curated.
Read more at http://www.business2community.com/social-media/understanding-content-curation-how-it-applies-to-social-media-0575832#0KD3K43cC8wrd43H.99

You provide value by identifying a specific target audience, filtering through relevant online content, then sharing only what you find most interesting, trendy or applicable to that audience. Nothing else, just what you feel is most meaningful to that particular audience, then adding in your own expertise and opinions as you share what you’ve curated.
Read more at http://www.business2community.com/social-media/understanding-content-curation-how-it-applies-to-social-media-0575832#0KD3K43cC8wrd43H.99

8 Great WordPress Plugins - part II

In my last post I talked about the WordPress plugins that I had found essential to have on my new website.  Now I want to tell you about the other four.

5.  Blogger Importer
Once I've got my website up and running, it's going to make sense to transfer my blog there, too.  In one way, I'll be sad - I've been on Blogger for a long time and it's always suited me - but, on the other hand, it does make sense to have website and blog integrated.  I had thought that I would have to start the blog afresh but then I found this great plugin which enabled me, very easily to import all the posts from this blog, complete with comments. 

There were only a couple of problems that I found, and those were minor ones.  The 'labels' on Blogger were interpreted as 'categories' on WordPress and I had to demote them to 'tags'.  And all my draft posts were imported as though published and I had to change them back to drafts.  But other than that, transition was very easy.

I'm going to continue posting here until I'm really ready to go on the website, and then I'll let you know - and hope that you'll be kind enough to join me there.

6.  Column Shortcodes
The theme that I'm using does, I believe, have a template that offers columns - but no instructions as to how to find it or use it.  I was getting rather frustrated because I wanted columns - and then I found this great plugin.  It installs a button on your screen which, when clicked, offers you a choice of column widths.  It will only give you two columns but you can either divide the page in half, or into one third plus two thirds, one quarter plus three quarters and so on up to sixths.  And the narrower column can be on either the left or the right.

The joy of this plugin is that it's so simple - and I suspect that anyone with a little knowledge of coding could adapt it to do even more than it already does.  The 18 people who have reviewed it on the WordPress site have scored it a solid five out of five.

7.  Fonts
Having sorted out the columns, I then turned my attention to my text.  Try as I might, I could not get the size of font that I wanted.  Here again, the theme offered different font options but I could find no way of overriding the default setting when I wanted to.  And once more I was fortunate enough to find a really simple plugin which does exactly what I want it to.

Fonts installs a drop down menu from which you can choose the font style and the font size you want.  Easy.  I can't help wondering why something of that sort is not basic to every WordPress theme.  We've all been using MSWord and WordPress for so long that surely we now expect to be able to choose our fonts at the click of a button.  And, I would have thought, this was even more important when creating a web page than when writing a letter.

8. Standout Color Boxes and Buttons

I had a picture in my head of how I wanted to display some of my text but was having great difficulty working out how to do it.  I'm going to have several pages on the site which will be reviewing or recommending books, courses and the like.   And I wanted to be able to delineate each one clearly from the next.  Standout Color Boxes has solved my problem - and is rather fun, besides.  You can show your text in a box with either round or square corners, with a choice of several colours for the background.  It makes the page look attractive as well as producing the effect - well, almost the effect - that I was looking for.  Since I could find nothing else that did anything remotely like this, 'almost' getting the effect is pretty good.

It took me a while to find all these plugins (not least because it took me some time to realise that a plugin would probably solve my problem).  But the time spent browsing, downloading and testing (and I did reject quite a few) was, I feel well spent.  For a WordPress novice like me, plugins are proving to be worth their weight in gold.

8 Great WordPress Plugins

For the past few weeks I've been battling with my new website.  I'm new to WordPress and it's been a steep learning curve.  I have always used SiteSpinner to create websites in the past, but these were relatively simple affairs.  Persuaded that WordPress might be quicker and more versatile and, above all, might look more professional, I decided to give it a try.

I started off with a basic free theme and set up a website for my counselling practice.  Helped by an ebook - The WP Starter Guide - it took me a couple of days and I was really proud of the results.  So then I decided to set up a new website for my company, Sphinx House. 

Now one of the things that everyone seems to be emphasising these days is the importance of having a responsive theme.  In other words, it needs to have been formulated so that it looks good no matter how you're viewing the site - PC, mobile, tablet, whatever.  At first, I thought this meant having to pay for a theme but then discovered that there are loads of free responsive themes on the WordPress site.  (Something else that I'd picked up was that it's unwise to use free themes unless they're from WordPress or a well-established theme provider because as Alex Moss recently pointed out on Search Engine Watch "the code could contain anything, and could be harmful to your site both in terms of performance and security.")

After quite a lot of research and trial and error, I opted for the Suffusion theme which seemed to be very versatile.  Well . . . it may be, but at my level of knowledge, I'm finding it hard to implement a lot of the features which, apparently, are incorporated in the theme.  And I've found myself getting frustrated by not being able to achieve the effect that I want - either because it's not there or I can't work it out.  But - hallelujah - I've discovered that, if I look hard enough,  I can usually find a plugin to do what I want.  So I thought I'd share with you my top eight plugins.  And I'll start with four which, actually, have nothing to do with design but which seemed essential.

1.  Google Sitemap Plugin
Google states that "creating and submitting a Sitemap helps make sure that Google knows about all the pages on your site, including URLs that may not be discoverable by Google's normal crawling process".  So it makes sense to have one.  And the plugin makes it easy to construct.  This particular plugin has been downloaded over 200,000 times and has an approval rating of 4.5 out of 5 from those people who have reviewed it.

2.  404 to Start Plugin
I don't know about you, but I'm not too keen on 404 pages that just tell you 'page not found'.  Far nicer are those that offer a little apology or make a suggestion as to how you might find the page you're looking for.  This plugin allows you to divert all 404 errors to a page you have created specially.  It's been downloaded nearly 60,000 times and has an approval rating of 4 out of 5.

3.  Cookie Warning Plugin
 This is absolutely essential if you live in the EU and want to keep track of your site statistics.  Since May 2012 it's been illegal (if you're in the EU) to collect statistics on your website by using cookies - unless you get the site visitor's consent first.  Now, way back in April of last year, I wrote about how I preferred StatCounter to Google Analytics, on the grounds that it was much more accurate.  (Incidentally, it was only last week that I came across a post on Social Media Today which was looking at the inaccuracy of Google Analytics.)  But, whichever analytics system you use, if you're in the EU, you've got to ask permission.  When the Cookie Directive first came out, I wrote about this and mentioned that someone had brought out an 'EU Cookie Directive Plugin'.  However, the one I have chosen to use on my new site (the Cookie Warning Plugin) is a lot more popular (22,000 downloads) and has an approval rating of 4.9 out of 5.

4.  UpdraftPlus Backup Plugin
I'd only being working on my website a short time when a message appeared to say that a new version of WordPress was available to download.  Having read that it's important for site security to have the latest version, I clicked the button and was reminded to back everything up before upgrading.  How was I to do that?  I found instructions and was delighted to read that I could do it via a plugin.  There was one that sounded good but (as I always do) I read the reviews before downloading.  All the reviewers liked the plugin but (fortunately) one commented on the fact that this was just a backup and not a backup and restore facility.  So I looked further and discovered Updraft.  This excellent plugin not only backs up the site very quickly but, if necessary, will also restore it to its previous state.  With 175,000 downloads and an approval rating of 4.8 out of 5, I suspect that it's the best backup plugin around.

To be continued . . .

Advice From the Buddha On Setting Up a Business

At first glance, the title of this post may seem a bit bizarre.  After all, what can an Indian ascetic, who died 2500 years ago, tell us about business?  Yesterday, I would have asked that myself.

But I've been reading a book on transpersonal counselling, called "Spiritual Emergency: When Personal Transformation Becomes a Crisis".  It's a compilation of essays, one of which is by Buddhist teacher and author, Jack Kornfield.  And, in it, he describes what are known in Buddhism as the five hindrances.  The Buddha taught these in relation to meditation practice but, as I read, I realised that they apply just as well to business.

Kornfield writes: "The first is desire and wanting.  The second is its opposite, which is aversion - anger and dislike, judgement and fear . . . The next pair is sleepiness, dullness, and lethargy . . . and their opposite, which is agitation and restlessness of mind.  The fifth is doubt, the part of the mind that says, "I cannot do it. It is too hard . . . Morning is not a good time.  Maybe I should do something a little more entertaining . . ."

And I suspect that I'm not the only person who, trying to set up a business, has met all those hindrances time and time again.  We start with an idea and a desire to make something of that idea, to be successful, to make money.  We really want to get on and do it.  But, unless we're very lucky, there will be parts of the process that we don't enjoy . . . the long hours of work, perhaps, or the way it impinges on our family and social lives.  There's the anger that arises when something goes wrong - when Google bans us from adwords, or Twitter suspends our account, or we spend money on an advertising campaign that falls flat on its face.  And there's the fear of getting it wrong - of being banned, of getting suspended, of losing money.

So the enthusiasm wanes and the work becomes an effort, particularly the routine stuff that's so important (such as writing regular posts for our blogs and updating our social media accounts).  A whole day can go by and, at the end, there's the feeling of 'I haven't really done much today' which adds frustration into the mix and contributes to the dullness and the lethargy.  But at the same time, aware of the fact that we seem to be treading water, we can become agitated and restless.

And, finally, comes doubt.  Why did I ever start this in the first place?  I can't do it.  It's too hard.  I don't have the skills.  And I'm bored.

Of course, you may be wondering whether, in relation to business, desire is actually a hindrance.  When practising the Buddhist way of non-attachment, of course it is.  But in business?  And yet, I just wonder whether concentrating too much on that desire to succeed can be counterproductive.  Because if the desire is too strong, every little setback will become a major hurdle, rather than just part of the learning process.

The Buddha's answer to the hindrances when they arise during meditation practice is to recognise them for what they are and to 'let them go'.  If we get too caught up in the hindrance - be it desire or aversion, lethargy or restlessness, or doubt - it just compounds the problem.  So perhaps, here too, the answer is to recognise them as being a normal part of the process and to accept (again, as the Buddha taught) that everything changes.  I realise that it's not always the same tasks that I find boring. Because I'm frustrated today, it doesn't mean that I won't find a solution to the problem tomorrow.  And finding that solution may help me to find other solutions further down the path.

But perhaps the thing that I find most encouraging is to know that the frustration, anger, fear, restlessness, lethargy and doubt that seem to arise regularly as I plug away at building my business, are normal.  That these feelings and emotions are not mine alone but have been felt over the centuries by countless people trying to achieve their dreams.


Photo by hde2003 on http://www.sxc.hu

Why Knowing Yourself Might Be the First Rule of Successful Business Building

For the past few months I have been busy.  Very busy.  As is my wont, I have been trying to do more than I can fit into the time available.    Eventually the penny dropped that I would just have to rationalise my work in some way or I'd never get it all done.  So I sat down and looked at what exactly I was doing with my time.  And it was enlightening.

I was spending a huge amount of time on social media - posting, scheduling tweets, replying to other people and, of course, finding stuff to post about and interesting links to post.  And I rather enjoyed this part of it.  But once I started looking at it, I realised that I could automate far more than I was doing.  So why had this not occurred to me before?  Reluctantly, I accepted that, firstly, it was because I'm a workaholic and, secondly, it was because I'm a perfectionist.

The way I was doing things, I was getting the satisfaction of working long hours and of making sure that everything was exactly the way I wanted it, down to the last full stop.  The result was that I was making very poor use of my time in terms of what I was achieving.  I needed to accept that perfection wasn't necessary.  There's a well-known saying in psychotherapy about parents - that they don't need to be perfect, just 'good enough'.  If I could persuade myself to be happy with 'good enough' for the less important work, I could do more - and, probably, the work that really mattered would be of a higher standard because I would have more time for it.

So I automated a few things . . . and (being a perfectionist) spent the first few days checking them frequently to ensure that they were all working well.  In fact, some of the things I'd automated seemed to work better that way than when I was doing them manually.  And when, last weekend, I came down with a bug and took a couple of days off work, it didn't take me forever to catch up with everything once I was better.

Now, as a counsellor, I am aware how much understanding themselves can help my clients.  But I'm only just realising how important it is in all aspects of our lives.  I suspect that the people who really get to the top in business are those who know themselves very well.  They know where their strengths lie - and also their weaknesses.  Perhaps it doesn't hurt, every now and again, to do a SWOT analysis on what we're doing - looking at the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats affecting our businesses.  If I'd done that earlier, I might have got more done in the time available!


[Image by tzunghaor http://primandras.hu]