And if you haven’t started using email marketing in your business, now is the time to start. It definitely is for me, as I’ve finally just sent off my first email newsletter blast to my mailing list. Yes, it’s taken me this long…3 years! The funny thing is I do this for clients regularly. I design their newsletter templates, input their content and send out blasts via their email marketing clients, but never for myself. My excuse..too busy doing for others. Doesn’t this sound familiar.

These are the things to take into consideration when planning your email marketing strategies.

• Have a custom designed newsletter template to complement your brand.
• Keep your message simple, clear and speak directly to your audience.
• Personalize your message, include your recipients name where ever possible.
• Ensure your content will be of value to your readers
• Include a call to action.
• Keep your newsletter clutter free.
• Include the capability for readers to have access to past issues.
• Use a reputable email marketing client.
• If you can’t manage your newsletter activities, DELEGATE it!

Here is a link to my first newsletter. I do two versions of the newsletter, one that goes into the email marketing services and a second one, a web page for people who don’t have html enabled email services and also for the purpose of having an archive of past issues.

Don’t hesitate to contact me for your business newsletter design and management needs.

Here are some important elements to having a website:

• Your website is your storefront and should be attractive and easy to use
• Your website is your presence online 24/7
• Your website provides a convenient way to keep in touch with existing customers and keep them informed of developments in your business
• A website maximizes your marketing investment
• The exposure of your company with a website is far greater than traditional forms of advertising
• A website can give a small business, a well deserved presence in the marketplace

Creativity and Connectivity comes into play:

• Your website allows you to be creative with how you present your information/products/services
• When a potential customer hears about you, they turn to the web to locate your contact information & to learn more about what you do and a direct point of contact to you.
• If your site is e-commerce enabled, your products are ready & waiting to be sold

Allowing Expansion/Growth:

• Your website opens the door to a wider market of potential customers
• Even if your product or services are generally sold or performed locally, there is still potential for expansion

You become a Competitor:

• Your website is your shop window & you are on equal footing to compete with much larger companies
• Your site is a means of providing information to those who do online research before buying
• Your website is a powerful tool for sustainable development of sales opportunities
• Your website will offer your company the opportunity for thousands of potential customers
• Simply put, to be competitive in your market you have to have a website

We are interested in knowing how having a website has made a difference in your business or how investing more in your website has made a difference. I can confidently say that having a website has made a significant difference in my business.

In web design, getting the right combination of colors is important and many factors come into play, for example: the business focus, target market, and your personality as the brand and business owner.

I just had to re-post this cool article about colors that I’d read at websitemagazine.com, especially as I eagerly approve of the characteristics of my favorite colors and how it ties with web design.

I would like to hear what your favorite colors are and if they are part of your website colors combination.

I’ve just started working on a new WordPress custom design project and these are the colors combo that I would be using. Can’t wait to see the finished product.

Enjoy the article!

Trust and the Theory Behind Color

by Peter A. Prestipino

Trust is defined* as, “the reliance on the integrity, strength, ability, surety, etc. of a person or thing.” In relation to Web design, it involves honesty and competence, and a subtle, yet powerful way to achieve that elusive trust factor is through the use of color.

Color theory is a set of principles used to create harmonious color combinations, or color schemes. When determining which color is right for a website, you are not just choosing one color (e.g. make it blue). Your designer will actually be choosing and applying an entire color scheme to a website. Knowing the types of classic color schemes is essential when influencing an end-product.

Monochromatic color schemes use variations in lightness and saturation of a single color, whereas analogous color schemes use colors that are adjacent to each other on the “color wheel.” There are many types of classic color schemes (complimentary and split-complimentary, triadic and tetradic) so let’s instead look at the basics of the colors themselves and how they are perceived by end-users.

Red is considered to be an emotionally intense color. While red is commonly associated with danger, it is also used to stimulate people to make quick decisions. Red is highly visible, so using it to bring text and images to the forefront makes it a perfect color for “buy now” or “add-to-cart” buttons.

While not as aggressive as red, orange is also a highly visible color, ideal for calling attention to or highlighting the most important elements of a design, without causing stress.

Yellow produces a warming effect, arouses cheerfulness, stimulates mental activity, and generates muscle energy. Use yellow to evoke pleasant, uplifting feelings. You can choose yellow to promote children’s products and items related to leisure. Use yellow carefully however, as a dul yellow represents caution.

Green is the color of nature — symbolizing growth, harmony, and fertility. Green has a strong emotional link with safety and is considered to be the most restful color for the human eye. Green suggests stability and endurance, making it a perfect fit for finance-related design, but is also used to indicate safety, making it a viable choice for medical-related design.

Blue, often associated with stability, symbolizes trust, wisdom and confidence. Blue has been shown to produce a calming effect and is often used to promote products and services related to cleanliness. More accepted by males than females, it is a preferred color for corporate America.

Black typically carries a negative connotation but carries with it a feeling of perspective and depth. Strength and authority are also attributed to black. Although black backgrounds diminish readability, combined with other intense colors such as red, they remain aggressive and unique, good for attracting a risk-taking mindset.

This article is for you, if you have a good size contact list and you’ve wondered how to create business opportunities. Or even if you are just thinking about starting email marketing as part of your business marketing action plan. Are you in between? Then, this article is for you are well.

Email is a wonderful business tool that, if used properly, will enhance your sales and marketing efforts significantly. Try these methods to get the most out of email communications:

1. Use permission lists only.
2. If you buy a list, make sure it is qualified – that is, those email addresses are valid and they belong to people who have opted in to receive emails on products and/or services like yours.
3. Ideally, build your own list.
4. Include an opt-in page on your web site, so people can sign up to receive email communications from you.
5. As an incentive, offer customers something free in exchange for signing up – a one time discount code, or a free ebook.
6. Make it easy to opt out or update an email address.
7. Only ask for the information you need – too many questions puts people off.
8. Adopt a formal policy about how the data will be used, and make sure each subscriber has to read those terms before opting in.
9. Honor those terms, no matter what.
10. Put a cap on the number of emails you send each subscriber – once a week is likely to be welcomed, but three times a week may cause people to opt out.
11. Set up your system to flag addresses after so many failed delivery attempts; this will make it easier to keep your email list clean and up to date.
12. Avoid attachments; many people won’t open them.
13. Go for something that will work in the body of an email.
14. Offer plain text as well as HTML to accommodate different loading speeds.
15. Set up a reply email, so your subscribers can reach you when they want to respond to the email.
16. Consider using a newsletter format for your email communications.
17. Subscribe to a few email newsletters, so you can see how others are using the medium.
18. Make notes on what type of newsletter formats seem to grab your attention.
19. Ask others for their opinion of which newsletters they like, and why.
20. Don’t send email communications when there is nothing new to say. Repetition will only cost you subscribers.
21. Make the content of the email interesting.
22. Avoid the appearance of being spam, by not using all capital letters in the title for the email, or announcing “Free” in the title line.
23. Do always make sure the subscriber’s name appears in the “To” field. It’s more personal.
24. Look into using email programs that automatically include the subscriber’s name in the body of the email.
25. Keep it short and sweet. Rambling emails, even if they are newsletters, are likely to be closed and deleted without being read.

P.S.: Contact us if you have been thinking about using email as one of your marketing tools but don’t know where to start. We work with many of the popular email marketing clients including:        1 Shopping Cart, Aweber, Constant Contact, iContact, Campaigner, and more. Check out some of the email/newsletter templates that we’ve designed for some of our clients. Keep an eye out for Part 2, 25 More Tips to Using Email Marketing Successfully.

Here are five simple ways that your website could be losing you business:

1. Slow Page Loads: People get really frustrated when pages take long to load. If you have this problem then check the size of your images and ensure that their sizes are optimized to load quicker while still maintaining the integrity of these images. Find ways to optimize your pages as well, also contact your web hosting company about this issue if everything you’ve tried hasn’t resolved the issue.
2. Dead/Broken Links: No one likes to click on a link and it goes to a “not found” page. Use a good broken links checker regularly to ensure that all your links are valid. A great tool to use for checking links is the W3C links checker.
3. Inactive Contact Forms: Imagine someone who is really interested in your products and/or services and then they’d taken the time to complete your contact form, click on the send button and NOTHING HAPPENS! Many people would immediately move on to the next person.
4. Poor Navigation: It’s important to give visitors to your website many ways to navigate through your web pages. It comes highly recommended from the usability point, to have more than one way to click through pages.
5. Visible Contact: Not every potential client wants to use your contact form. So create other options for they to contact you via. Some people like to send emails and some like to speak to a person. Adding an email address link and telephone number can make a difference.

Taking into consideration the mentioned above points can makes a huge difference in whether you gain more business or not.

In web design, there is the tendency to sometimes get carried away by all the many fancy techniques and shiny things syndrome. So, I’ve been pondering on my style and how to tweak it so my clients can get their message across concisely and really quickly thus capturing their audience, get great conversions and repeat business.

My first test came today, I had to create a business card size ad for my business that’s going to be placed in the Women Biz Owner’s October 2009 Convention booklet. So I thought…simple, clear and direct. What do you think? Is the design simple and is the message clear?

You have to ask yourself a number of critical questions:

Who is my target market?

Once you are able to identify who you want to sell to, its then easier to find out what their needs are and how to competitively meet those needs.

What marketing methods should you use?

Being in the non-traditional profession of Virtual Assistance has encouraged me to think outside the box and stretch myself a little bit. Understanding that in a world that is ever changing, ones marketing strategy also has to be flexible. Here are some of the marketing methods that are tried and tested. Your industry would largely determine which methods would be most appropriate and effective and also note that some can be less expensive than others in terms of cost and time.

* Having a fully functional and up-to-date website
* Placing ads in publications, radio or TV
* Posting online ads in bulletin boards and industry directories
* Joining and participating in industry specific forums
* Doing email campaigns
* Mailing out marketing material
* Writing articles and submitting to article directories
* Calling and introducing yourself to your target market
* Telling everyone what you do
* Asking for referrals and referring others
* Following up on inquiries and other activities

Its important to use the methods that you feel the most comfortable with. There is no point in taking on an activity that you don’t believe in, you would not be able to pick your audience’s interest or get them excited about what you have to offer.

With all the many hats we have to wear, we have to decide what are our most critical tasks and perform them to effectively grow our businesses. You can delegate tasks to your virtual assistant, even marketing tasks so you can focus on the “must dos.”