Content

Sarah Worsham / Jan 21, 2009

eNewsletter Benefits

envelopetimmorgan By offering timely information of value, an email newsletter can be a great way to connect with your customers and business contacts to create an ongoing relationship. Content is important to your Internet business strategy and eNewsletters give you another type of media to circulate your message. Here are some of the other benefits of an eNewsletter:

Keep customers and business partners informed of new products and services.
Direct contact with people interested in your business.
Opportunity to build reputation and brand loyalty.
Ability to track customer interest via opens and clicks.
Reduces marketing efforts – can offer promotions directly to customers.
Collect customer research via surveys and responses.
Cost effective marketing and communication with a targeted audience.
Can schedule regular communications with customers – for anniversaries, birthdays, etc.
Offer information to help purchase decisions.
Followup on potential leads.
Reduce support costs via continuing product and service information.
Continue relationship with customers.

(photo by Tim Morgan @ Flickr CC)

Technorati Tags: enewsletters, email marketing, newsletter, internet marketing, internet strategy business

Sarah Worsham / Jan 16, 2009

Are your FAQs Questions your Customers Actually Ask Frequently?

question-bast When was the last time you went to a website looking for some information about a product or service? Did they have a FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions)? Was the information you were looking for actually there? A lot of times FAQs are only marketing driven – trying to cover any doubts a customer may have about purchasing a product. But there is a real opportunity to provide useful information for your customers by providing answers to questions they actually ask frequently.

Obviously listening to your customers is one way to find out what types of questions they may have – and the best way – support and sales people often are a good source within your company. Another source of information is the search functionality on your website (if you have one). What searches are people performing on your website? Those may be the types of questions that are worthwhile to provide answers for (and make easy to find).

If you don’t have search on your website, or don’t have a good way to tell what people are searching for (both I would recommend remedying), take a look at the searches (keywords) that people use to come to your site from outside search engines. This is information that the search engines feel you are good at answering, so it may be a good idea to make sure your answers are well rounded and provide all the information your customers (or potential customers) need.

The best source of FAQs really should be your customers. Provide contact forms and periodically poll your customers (both in-person and online), to make sure you really do have all their frequently asked questions answered. By providing FAQs that your customers actually need, you’ll provide more support information for current customers and more purchasing information for potential customers.

(photo by -bast- @ Flickr CC)

Technorati Tags: faq, content, content strategy, customer service, business

Sarah Worsham / Jan 5, 2009

Moving to WordPress.com – What to Consider

Over the break we moved Sazbean.com and some of our other blogs over to WordPress.com from self-hosting WordPress on our own server. Most of the process was relatively easy and overall we’re pleased with the results. We made the decision to move for a few reasons: saving time and effort from updates and support, saving hosting costs (much cheaper), and additional syndication across WordPress’ network.

If you’re thinking of moving to WordPress.com or using them as your blogging platform, here’s what you should consider:

Advantages

WordPress.com takes care of all the updates and support
Cheap – you can have a blog hosted for free, but their low cost upgrades for control over CSS and domain name are worth it
Additional syndication of your content throughout the WordPress network – we’ve already seen a jump in traffic from this effect
Good selection of widgets to add functionality to your site – no need to worry about getting them working properly
Integrated dashboard – makes it easy to work with multiple blogs and the interface is very easy to use

Disadvantages

Limited control over the design and functionality of your blog (you have full CSS control with a paid upgrade)
No javascript allowed – which limits your ability to use custom widgets and other services that require a script tag
No outside site analytics – WordPress.com provides integrated statistics, but you won’t be able to use any outside analytics services since you cannot add any script tags to your blog
Limited control over your domain name – unless you have control over your name server, you have to point your blog domain to wordpress.com so you’ll lose the ability to add any subdomains. They have allowed some ability to host your own email or use Gmail. Hosting multiple blogs from the same domain is also limited.
Limited control over files you can add to your blog (only images unless you purchase an upgrade – and then only movie files) – not too much of a problem with the various types of web services available to link to

Summary

After we moved to WordPress.com there have been some things that we could no longer do on our blog (in design and some in functionality). But, overall, the tradeoff in terms of cost and time savings as well as additional exposure has already been worth it. We’ll update you on our thoughts again after we’ve been here for awhile.

We want to hear from you – Do you use WordPress.com? What are your thoughts? If you have a self-hosted blog, why did you make that decision?

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