I found two interesting pieces of information about search engines a couple weeks ago. One was a report from the Pew Internet & American Life Project that stated about half (49%) of all internet users use search engines as a routine part of their day. That number had grown from roughly one-third of all internet users since 2002.

The second piece of information is that according to a blog post by ReadWriteWeb, the popular search engine Google is close to getting 70% of the U.S. search market. Right away, this should tell you several things…

1. More and more people are using search (most likely Google) to find what they want on the internet.

2. If you want these people to find you, you’ll need to make sure your website shows up in the search engines.

Certainly people will come to your website by just typing in your website address. But these are people you’ve already come in contact with, say through a craft show, or a open studio, or perhaps through a referral from an existing customer. What about those people on the internet that haven’t even heard of you? How are they going to find you?

Back in July, I had a tele-seminar called “How to Build Traffic to Your Art Website : SEO Secrets” which outlined some important things you can do to make your website more search-engine friendly. I’ve now turned that tele-seminar into a CD and I’m giving away a free copy of that CD to one of my newsletter subscribers.

Along with the CD, the winner will also get:

• a written transcript of the CD with a list of resources and SEO terms
• instructional videos on how to use Free Keywords and Wordtracker for keyword research
• an instructional video on meta tags, alt tags, and title tags for web pages and how to use them

To enter the giveaway, just subscribe to the newsletter by filling out the subscription form on the right or by visiting this page.

I’ll be announcing the winner of the giveaway on September 16th on the blog. That’s tomorrow, so enter today!

I got this question following my latest article in my newsletter.

Hey Nicolette,

I read your last article on how to send out your newsletters, but I was wondering what an “autoresponder” was, you didn’t explain it in the article.

Thanks
Natalie

Autoresponders have been around for years and they can be a powerful addition in your marketing arsenal. Here’s what I wrote to Natalie.

Hi Natalie,

Thanks for the email and I hope you’re finding the info useful. Basically, autoresponders are simply email programs that send out an email or a series of emails that are scheduled to go out at a specific time or in response to a specific action taken by someone. Here’s an example:

The software I use for my mailing list allows me to create an autoresponder for each of my mailing lists. I’ve set mine up so that when someone joins my list, they are automatically sent a copy of the latest newsletter. I’ve set the autoresponder to send out this email five minutes after they join. This is a useful bit of customer service for me because 1) some subscribers sign up because they were interested in what was in the current newsletter. So this gives them (almost) immediate access to what they wanted, and 2) it runs automatically, so I don’t have to fill these requests myself and the subscriber doesn’t have to wait for me to do it.

There’s two different types of autoresponders. You have the “one-time” autoresponder that only sends out one message in response to say, someone joining a mailing list, or someone sending an email to a certain email address to request information. These are fairly common and most hosting services offer this ability as part of the hosting package. The other, more powerful kind is the “sequential” autoresponder. This means that you can set up and schedule a series of follow up messages instead of just one.

I use a sequential autoresponder setup for my mailing list. The first message, which is a copy of the latest newsletter, is scheduled to go out 5 minutes after a person signs up for my mailing list. The second message is scheduled to go out 24 hours after a person has signed up. In this message I remind the subscriber to get their free audio download and give them instructions on how to do it. I also remind them to contact me if they have any questions or difficulty with downloading their audio. The third message goes out 48 hours after they’ve subscribed. In this message I remind my subscriber that they can access previous newsletter articles on the website and give them the link to the archives. And so on and so forth.

Why do I give out this information in a series of messages instead of just one? I’ve found it to be more effective this way because a lot of people either skim over or don’t read their welcome messages when they subscribe to newsletters. If I only put this information in the welcome message, a lot of people will miss it or forget about it. The sequential autoresponder messages serves as a reminder and it also keeps the blog and the newsletter fresh in their minds.

Using autoresponders when someone purchases something from you is also a great way to follow up with your customers. We all know that it’s good customer service to follow up with people who buy stuff from us. By using a sequential autoresponder, you can create a setup that automatically sends out thank you messages and customer service follow up messages without having to constantly remind yourself to send out follow up emails. This saves you time and keeps you in touch with your customers.

Unlike the one-time autoresponders, sequential autoresponders don’t typically come with your hosting service, so you’ll need to use a third-party service like AWeber or you’ll need to install mailing list software that has that ability. The one I use, Oempro does have the ability to create sequential autoresponders built in.

Anyway, I hope this answered your question. I’m thinking that maybe I’ll do an article or blog post that explores autoresponders a bit further. Thanks for asking the question!

Nicolete

Do you have a burning question about websites or promoting yourself online? Click on the “Ask a Question” tab at the top of the page and send me your question. I’ll send you an answer to your question personally.

If you want to start reading the article series on “How to Plan and Start a Great Email Newsletter“, you can sign up for the Crafted Webmaster Newsletter for free here: http://www.craftedweb.com/subscribe.html If you subscribe now, you can get a free audio download on “Effective Ways to Market Your Website Offline“.

I’ve been doing a series of articles in my newsletter called, “How to Plan and Start a Great Email Newsletter” which is about how to develop your own email newsletter and I got this question about blogs and email newsletters from one of my subscribers.

Hi Nicolette,

In yesterday’s newsletter, you listed blog posts as content that you can include in a newsletter. Why would you put your blog posts in your newsletter? Wouldn’t most people have read it already? And why would you have a newsletter if you already have a blog? Aren’t you just making more work for yourself?

Linda-

Now if you are already blogging, you probably thought about whether it’s a good idea to also have an email newsletter as well. This is how I answered Linda’s question.

Hi Linda,

There are a couple good reasons why blog posts can be good content for your newsletter.

1. Subscribers to your newsletter may not necessarily also visit your blog (and vice versa). So this is content that’s new to them and having an example of what’s on your blog may encourage them to visit.

2. Even if your subscribers also read your blog, it doesn’t hurt to remind them of posts that they may have missed. There’s times that I’ve forgotten what I’ve read on a blog hour after I’ve read it (though this just might mean I’m absent minded). Plus you can use the opportunity to expand on a certain blog post in your newsletter or look at it from a different angle. In this way, you’re using your blog post as a jumping off point for content for your newsletter.

Now as for your question about having a newsletter when you already have a blog, it’s important to remember that it’s perfectly okay to have both…there are plenty of people (including me) that do both. Yes, it is more work to have both a blog and newsletter. You’ll need to be able to keep both of them up and to add content on a regular basis, but there are benefits to having both:

1. Not everyone likes reading blogs and not everyone likes reading email newsletters. By having both, you get to appeal to both types of people.

2. The benefit of blogs is that they are a lot more interactive than your typical email newsletter. Plus since you’re always adding new content to your blog, it’s good for getting search engine traffic. On the downside, there’s no way of keeping track of who’s subscribing to your blog unless you’re using a service like Feedburner or Feedblitz. You have no way of directly contacting the people that read your blog about that new piece you posted on your website. Yes, you can write a blog post about it, but there’s no guarantee that they’re going to return to your blog to read it.

On the other hand, the big benefit of an email newsletter is that you have that name and email address, so you can contact that customer directly if you need to. Also, those who subscribe to your newsletter are showing that they value what your saying enough to give you their contact information. Remember that above all else, your goal is to gather the contact info of people that visit your website…and email newsletters do much better than a blog.

3. You can make your blog and your newsletter work together. For example, I use my blog to encourage sign ups to my newsletter. Every time a new article goes out, I post a summary of it on my blog and encourage people to join in order to get the whole article. You can also use your newsletter to encourage more activity on your blog. If you have an article or a news piece in your newsletter which might make a good discussion topic, create a blog post about it and encourage your subscribers to submit their comments to your blog.

So, there’s plenty of reasons why a blog and a newsletter is a smart combination. Of course, if you only have time to do one, then it’s better to pick one thing and get really good with that. It’s better to keep up with one thing than it is to spread yourself too thin.

Sorry this reply was so long…hope it helped some!

Do you have a burning question about websites or promoting yourself online? Click on the “Ask a Question” tab at the top of the page and send me your question. I’ll send you an answer to your question personally.

If you want to start reading the article series on “How to Plan and Start a Great Email Newsletter“, you can sign up for the Crafted Webmaster Newsletter for free here: http://www.craftedweb.com/subscribe.html If you subscribe now, you can get a free audio download on “Effective Ways to Market Your Website Offline“.

I’ve marked this under my “DUH! How come I didn’t do this?” file. One of the artists that I’m following on Twitter, miscellaneaarts has created a special landing page for her Twitter profile.

If you’ve listened to my free audio, “How to Market Your Website Offline“, you’ll know that one of the things that I mentioned is that when you’re pointing people to your website you don’t want to do is to point them directly to your homepage. You want to create a special web page that only people who found your website through an ad, or business card, or a hangtag will be able to get to. This is known as a “landing page”.

Why don’t you want to direct people to your homepage? Because 1) if you’re offering someone an incentive to come to your website (which you should), then it won’t do for you to dump them on your homepage with no clue on where to go next, and 2) creating special landing pages will make your marketing efforts easier to track especially if you’re using a website statistic service or software like Google Analytics. You’ll be able to see exactly how many people found your special page and therefore judge how effective your marketing from that particular channel is.

Now I mentioned the concept of landing pages as they apply to marketing your website offline…like using business cards and product packaging. But the concept works great with online sources as well…including any links from other websites like your Twitter profile, or your MySpace or Facebook profile. Just like what miscellaneaarts did on her Twitter profile and just like I’m going to be doing within the next couple days. DUH!

So, be sure to check out miscellaneaarts Twitter landing page, and if you haven’t had a chance to hear my How to Market Your Website Offline” audio, just click here to subscribe my free newsletter. You’ll receive the link to the free audio after you sign up and you’ll hear a better explanation of what landing pages are all about.

Here’s a great application of an artist using online video. Polymer clay artist Judy Dunn has created these great videos on how she makes her polymer clay origami cranes and put them on YouTube.

The videos has been up since March 30th, and they have had over 4,000 views, plus was featured on the Craftzine blog. That’s a whole load of people who have been exposed to Judy’s work through watching the video.

Now while the videos are already great as they stand, here are a few ideas on how she can leverage them further:

1. Show the website URL throughout the entire video. I already do this on the instructional videos I’ve been doing. If you look on the lower right hand corner of the video, you’ll see the address to my blog showing throughout the entire video. This is called a watermark. If you’re using something like iMovie, Final Cut Express, or Vegas Video to edit your videos, you should be able to do this fairly easily. She has the web address to her blog showing at the end of the video, but having it show throughout the whole video will make it more prominent and can lead more people to her website.

2. Put the video on her website & blog. Judy has a blog and whole page on her website dedicated to her polymer peace cranes and the story behind it. The video will make the page even more interesting and will encourage people to stay on the page at least long enough to watch the video. Since the video is on YouTube, it would be amazingly easy to add it to that page. She simply needs to copy the embed code provided by YouTube (that code highlighted in light yellow in the picture below) and paste it on her web page or blog post.

3. Try not to have a multi-part part video. The instructional video is divided up into a part 1 and part 2 which makes it a little disjointed for the viewers. Plus your viewers might not make it to the second video (note that part 2 of Judy’s videos have had significantly less views than part 1). The original video was 16 minutes long according to Judy, but because YouTube has a 10 minute time limit, she had to edit the video into two parts. When you’re planning out your videos, know the limitations and requirements of the video sites that you’re going to post the video on such as:

• how long (in minutes) your video can be
• how large of a file size (in megabytes) you video can be
• any kind of limits as far as content (some video sites don’t allow videos with websites or videos that are like commercials)
• which video format you can submit (such as Quicktime, Windows Media, or AVI)

4. Post in multiple video sharing sites. One immediate solution for the multi-part video problems is that Judy can also post it to another video sharing site that has a longer time limit. Daily Motion has a 20 minute time limit and blip.tv only has a file size limit of 1GB. Don’t be scared to post your video on more than one video website. That’s another audience that you can introduce your work to. Remember that not everyone is on YouTube and some of the alternative sites also may have features that make it easier to share your video. My favorite video sharing site right now is blip.tv. I find that the video player looks a little more elegant than YouTube’s. Plus it has a great feature where you can also hook your video account up to Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, iTunes, Flickr, or to your own blog so that every time you upload a new video, it also posts links to your video to those sites as well.

So…what do you think of Judy’s videos? Go visit her website at http://www.moms-studio.com or visit her blog at http://judydunn.blogspot.com and let her know!