January 2009 Edition of The Net Gazette by Oak
Web Works
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Happy New Year everyone. First I want to welcome all the people who recently signed up for this newsletter from the Microsoft partners online seminar I did through MarketingProfs.com in December. At the end of my presentation I invited people to sign up and many did. I will try to include a recording of a similar presentation in the next issue of The Net Gazette for everyone to watch.
In the last issue I asked for people to fill out a survey letting me know what you wanted to learn in upcoming issues of The Net Gazette. Only a handful of people actually took the survey, far less than what I had expected or what I have typically achieved in the past.
Fortunately though, I learned an important marketing lesson from this. Since only about 005% of the people filled out the survey, and that is an abysmal percentage, I must have done something seriously wrong. And indeed I did. I never offered any kind of an incentive in exchange for filling out the survey. I have always advised people that whenever they wanted your website visitors or email list subscribers to take any kind of action such as going out of their way to fill out a form for example, you have to offer them something in return or not many people will even bother. Therefore, if I had offered something of value for those who took my survey, I would ave almost definitely achieved a much higher response rate. So don't make this same mistake.
Also, in the last issue I asked if anyone wanted a complimentary Web business book I recently authored in exchange for an Amazon review. I chose the first six people who responded and mailed each of them a book at the end of October. So far though, only one person has written a review (and it was a good one!). But all the others except for one have ignored all my follow-up emails I've sent them since, which is very disappointing. I hope that they get around to actually writing a review sometime.
But let us look forward to the brand new year. It's the beginning of 2009 and now is a great time to take a good look at your business and plan for the upcoming year. As Google cracks down on buying links but still puts a lot of weight on links in their algorithm, webmasters and site owners need to come up with alternative ways of acquiring back links if they want to have good rankings. Our feature article addresses this and explains how to create compelling content for your site. Then read a list of vital design, technical and marketing qualities your website ought to have. Finally, read some of my Internet marketing action plan for '09 that may give you some great ideas for marketing your website.
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Feature Article: What is Link Bait? Learn how to get links without paying for them and that will help your search engine optimization efforts. Read this in-depth look at creating content that is so good, so controversial or so extraordinary that people can't help but link to your website. . . . read now |
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Web Design Best Practices List | Ways to Improve Your Website | Top Website Qualities Here are what I consider to be the top Web design, technical and marketing best practices. If you're about to design a new business website or you're looking for ways to improve your existing site, read this now |
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2009 Web Marketing Action Plan If you get a decent amount of traffic from the search engines and link referrals -- which is very typical -- or you want to get significant traffic this way, you want to build your business over time and you're committed to your online business for the long haul, then here are some good ideas for an Internet marketing action plan. Read Now |
Till next time, Happy Webbing
- Jason
To learn more about these subjects or if you have a need for e-marketing, design or programming services, please visit www.oakwebworks.com.
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