Sep 05 / 2013
0

Articles, Blogging for Business, Social Media

Havasu Graphic Design-How to Get More Subscribers, Part I

Good morning NSquared readers!

Do you have a blog?

If so, chances are you want people to read it, right? Well Hubspot posted a fantastic article, “How to Concert Casual Blog Visitors into Dedicated Subscribers“. Check out Part I below:

“How to Convert Casual Blog Visitors Into Dedicated Subscribers

You probably know all too well by now that content creation is a very necessary function of successful inbound marketing. And for the inbound marketers who embrace that, abusiness blog is one of the most reliable and effective platforms for publishing much of the content they create.

But if you’ve been consistently blogging for a while, you probably have all the business blogging basics down pat. So wouldn’t it be great if you could take your blogging to the nextlevel, scaling the impact of your blog so it makes an even bigger, better, and more powerful dent in your marketing results?

Enter the concept of ‘blog marketing,’ which refers not to using a blog to market your business, but instead to implementing a marketing strategy to grow and scale the impact of your blog. In other words, marketing for your blog. There are three critical steps to blog marketing: 1) getting your blog discovered by new visitors, 2) converting those visitors into dedicated subscribers, and 3) leveraging your blog evangelists to share your content and attract brand new audiences.

So let’s say you’ve worked through step number 1, and you’ve got a good amount of blog traffic flowing. How can you get those folks to stick around and keep coming back so they become avid readers and fans of your blog content? With step number 2: by converting those visitors into subscribers! In this article, we’ll give you some great tips for turning those casual visitors into valuable, dedicated blog subscribers.

1) Blog Frequently (and Make Sure It’s High Quality)

First things first: frequency matters. How can you expect visitors to subscribe to your content if you rarely or infrequently publish anything for them to come back to? You wouldn’t exactly be making the strongest case for subscription. If you really want to scale your blog, you need to make a commitment to boosting your blogging frequency. According to an internal study of HubSpot customers, businesses that blog more than once per week add new blog subscribers at twice the rate of businesses that blog just once per month.

Yes, frequency matters — so work your way up. If you’re currently blogging once a month, work your way up to once a week. If you blog once a week, work your way up to a few times a week. Truthfully, the most successful blogs publish content daily — or multiple times a day.

Keep in mind, however, that a boost in frequency can’t come with a decrease in quality. Your new visitors won’t be enticed to subscribe if they don’t find your content to be worthy of their attention. And with all the crappy content out there, you can’t afford mediocrity if you want to win over those new visitors. For more on creating high-quality content, here’s how to tell if your content is actually valuable, and here are eight instant ways to improve your content’s quality if it’s not.

2) Encourage Blog Subscription (Particularly Email)

If you want people to subscribe, encourage blog subscription! Sounds simple right? But it’s amazing how often I have to hunt through a blog’s homepage to find where in the heck to subscribe. Make it easy for visitors to subscribe — put your subscribe module above the fold on your sidebar, and display it prominently.

Also notice how I mentioned you should emphasize email subscription. Remember, there are two ways your visitors can subscribe to your blog — via RSS, and via email. Both are valuable, but email subscription can have a much bigger impact than RSS subscription. Email boosts traffic to your blog, since subscribers get emailed whenever new content gets published (compared to RSS, which subscribers have to manually check on their own).

In fact, 14% of our monthly traffic to the HubSpot blog comes from email. And to tie this all back to the importance of blogging frequency, in that same study of HubSpot customers we mentioned earlier, we learned that businesses that blog more than once per week generate 9x more blog email traffic than businesses that blog just once per month. Convinced that you should put more of an effort into generating email subscribers yet?”

Contact us if you need a website, inbound marketing campaign, or IT consulting. Stay tuned for part II where we share more tips on boosting your subscribers and talk about CTA’s (call to actions).

Jun 19 / 2013
0

Articles

How to Write Properly

Howdy there NSquared readers. I’m sure you have noticed that this week we are covering writing.

Here are ten tips to make sure the professional emails that you are sending are just that…professional.

Check out, Ten Tips on How to Write a Professional Email, below:

“Ten Tips on How to Write a Professional Email

Email is one of the most common forms of written communication in the business world–and the most commonly abused. Too often email messages snap, growl, and bark–as if beingconcise meant that you had to sound bossy. Not so.

Consider this email message recently sent to all staff members on a large university campus:

It is time to renew your faculty/staff parking decals. New decals are required by Nov. 1. Parking Rules and Regulations require that all vehicles driven on campus must display the current decal.

Slapping a “Hi!” in front of this message doesn’t solve the problem. It only adds a false air of chumminess.

Instead, consider how much nicer and shorter–and probably more effective–the email would be if we simply added a “please” and addressed the reader directly:

Please renew your faculty/staff parking decals by November 1.

Of course, if the author of the email had truly been keeping his readers in mind, he might have included another useful tidbit: a clue as to how and where to renew the decals.

Ten Quick Tips on Writing a Professional Email

1.) Always fill in the subject line with a topic that means something to your reader. Not “Decals” or “Important!” but “Deadline for New Parking Decals.”

2.) Put your main point in the opening sentence. Most readers won’t stick around for a surprise ending.

3.) Never begin a message with a vague “This.” (“This needs to be done by 5:00.”) Always specify what you’re writing about.

4.) Don’t use ALL CAPITALS (no shouting!), or all lower-case letters either (unless you’re e. e. cummings).

5.) As a general rule, PLZ avoid textspeak (abbreviations and acronyms): you may be ROFLOL (rolling on the floor laughing out loud), but your reader may be left wondering WUWT (what’s up with that).

6.) Be brief and polite. If your message runs longer than two or three short paragraphs, consider (a) reducing the message, or (b) providing an attachment. But in any case, don’t snap, growl, or bark.

7.) Remember to say “please” and “thank you.” And mean it. “Thank you for understanding why afternoon breaks have been eliminated” is prissy and petty. It’s not polite.

8.) Add a signature block with appropriate contact information (in most cases, your name, business address, and phone number, along with a legal disclaimer if required by your company). Do you need to clutter the signature block with a clever quotation and artwork? Probably not.

9.) Edit and proofread before hitting “send.” You may think you’re too busy to sweat the small stuff, but unfortunately your reader may think you’re a careless dolt.

10.) Finally, reply promptly to serious messages. If you need more than 24 hours to collect information or make a decision, send a brief response explaining the delay.

Contact us if you need IT help or inbound marketing. Until next time, stay professional (and classy…being classy is always cool).