Content Marketing Archives - Page 3 of 3 - WeGrowMedia

4 Simple Steps to Create an Email Newsletter

Dan Blank One question I get asked frequently is how to setup an email newsletter. So today, I want to share some very basic strategies and tactics I use:

Choose an Email Management Service.
I use Aweber to create, manage and deploy my newsletters. They offer a robust service at a low cost. If you are just starting out, I believe it costs $19 a month, and you can send emails as often as you like – they charge by the size of the list you are sending to.Create an account, setup a new list, and then create a sign-up form that you can embed on your website. Aweber provides a cool form creation tool, so you can make it as simple or complex as you want, design it easily to suit your style, and then they give you a little bit of code that you add to your blog or website.

The service gives you all the tools you need to create an attractive template, manage your list, and deploy the newsletter each week, plus metrics to see how well it’s doing.
Create Useful Content.
Clearly, the newsletter content depends partly on your area of focus, your goals and your audience, but I recommend keeping it somewhat more personal than the rest of your online content. Email is personal – give people something special.The number one rule, of course, is that your content must be USEFUL or entertaining. The newsletter should give a behind the scenes look at you or the topic you are an expert in. It should also be content original to the newsletter – even if it’s just a short intro. You need to give people a compelling reason to sign up. If you are just repurposing content they can get elsewhere, that limits the value of the newsletter.

Personally, I try to share a mix of original content, as well as content that will be published elsewhere. If you can, make it fun.
Set a Schedule.
I am a huge believer in the weekly schedule. More than once a week is fine too, but at least once a week is a requirement.You want to build expectation with your audience, but not overwhelm them with too much connection. Depending on your goals, your content and your audience, you will have to start somewhere, and adjust as you go. Some newsletters work best weekly, others daily, and some do well with multiple sends a day, such as HARO.

Jump In.
I won’t get much into promotion at the moment, but I will say this: jump in. The biggest challenge to launching a newsletter is not the technology, it is your own willingness to get started. Tell your Facebook friends about it, your Twitter followers, post the sign-up form on your blog.Consider who your intended audience is, and what they desperately need most. Then, try to deliver that in small ways each week. You don’t have to create something that will ‘go viral,’ you just need to provide one useful or entertaining nugget.

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Thanks!

-Dan

The Secret to Growing Your Business Online: Customer Service

David Taub successfully transitioned his guitar instruction business to the online world, and now earns his living via the web. Today, I want to share the reasons that online made sense for him, and his tips to building a successful online business.

David’s brand is Next Level Guitar, which I profiled a few weeks back. He and his business partner Tim Gilberg create guitar lessons on video, promote them via YouTube and sell them via subscription & DVD on their own website.

Why online?

Scale
David had a successful in-person guitar instruction business where he lived, but couldn’t expand further. He had about 30 students a week, which was his max. Likewise, there is only so much you can raise prices before he is priced out of the market. He hit the wall in terms of trading time for money.
Expand his Reach & Influence
David has been playing guitar since the 6th grade and has been teaching others for years. As he honed his skills more and more, the brick & mortar nature of his business limited his influence. He may be the best guitar instructor in his area, but people in other states and other countries would never benefit from his teachings.
Differentiate His Product Offering
People learn in different ways, and for his in-person lessons that meant constantly creating custom lessons for each individual student. With virtual instruction, David could productize these lessons to fit a wide variety of teaching styles and musical styles. Today David sells a variety of DVD packages in addition to his online courses and has several other instructors teaching for him, each with their own flavor and teaching style.
Build a Stable Business
Before the web, 100% of David’s income came from him showing up to teach someone. Today, is clearly the linchpin of his business, but he has come a long way. He has a business partner who runs part of the operation, he has brought other instructors into the fold, and while he still works long days, it is certainly possible for him to hire others to help run the show if he needed time off or focus his efforts elsewhere. All along, he has been honing his skills as a businessman, understanding how to build a stable foundation and plan for growth.

I had a chance to speak with David recently, and these are the tips he shared for building a succcessful online business:

Focus on Things that Deliver Long Term Value
Don’t wait to go ‘viral’ – that’s akin winning the lottery. Give your online business a solid backbone, focusing on core customer needs and building great products. It can be tempting for some to do a hard sell, trying to scale revenue quickly. This may work for some people in the short term, but it is difficult to build long term value this way.
Customer Service is Critical
David feels that most companies miss the boat because their lack of focus on customer service. David works long days, and his top priority is ensuring that all emails are answered quickly, all products sent out immediately and that daily operations are running smoothly. There are always hiccups in business systems, and David focuses his energies to ensure these don’t affect customers.
Have a Plan
I’ve seen many brands approach their online business by allowing their most junior employee to sketch it out and launch. Senior managers wait for it to pan out before they give it their attention. This only hurts your business, and makes it harder to re-align once you do approach it properly.David and Tim spent months prepping for the launch of their business, spending long days recording videos and setting up their online operations and marketing efforts. To this day, they still work long hours creating new material and taking measured steps forward. They are conservative about spending money, and are risk averse.
Build on Your Strengths
Don’t focus on some wild new idea that is outside of your core competencies. David spent decades honing his guitar playing and teaching style and Tim has a strong background in the web and marketing. They each stuck to their strengths and partnered to create more value together than either could by themselves. Find out what your existing customers value most, what you do best, and focus on bringing that experience online.
Keep Overhead Low
David and Tim each work from home, research all expenses before making a decision and keep their operating expenses as light as possible. For their camera equipment, they buy budget cameras and lighting, ensuring they balance quality with price. Don’t assume that ‘the big boys’ are buying expensive systems, so you need to as well.

Every step of the way, David mentioned his focus on serving customers, and each of the tips above reflect that. So many companies worry too much about finding office space or complicated promotions instead of just creating a great product and ensuring their customers are happy. Thanks to David for sharing his story!

How Saddleback Leather is Building Their Brand Online

How does a small company that makes leather bags create online buzz about their product leveraging free social media tools? Today, we are going to take an in-depth look at Saddleback Leather.

Now, for the most part, this encapsulates their online presence:

But that doesn’t really tell the story how the web & social media has effected their business. These experiences tell the story better:

3,028 Fans on Facebook who have uploaded 350 photos of themselves with Saddleback Leather’s bags.
Chris Brogan reviews a Saddleback bag, as did others on YouTube. Considering he has a successful speaking career and more than 100,000 followers on Twitter, sending him or others a bag or two for review is not a bad investment. It’s clear that Saddleback sent some of these out as review samples, but I am not positive which online reviewers purchased bags vs receiving free samples. His video review alone has been viewed more than 3,000 times, and others have been view about the same amount. Imagine thousands of people watching reviews of your products or services on a site you don’t own or maintain.
Jason Fried ordered a bag and told people how impressed he is with it. Jason is well known, with 23,000+ followers on Twitter reading his messages.
Elsewhere on the web, there are some very detailed online reviews (some with affiliate links) that receive more than 40 comments from readers. Here is another.
People are talking about Saddleback Leather in forums, questioning their claims of quality and looking for advice from those who have experience with their products.

I had the chance to speak with Saddleback Leather’s founder Dave Munson who shared details on how his business formed and his learning curve in online media. Below are some lessons that I think many businesses can take away from Saddleback Leather’s experiences.

As others before me (here and here) have pointed out, Saddleback’s website is masterful in its use of storytelling to explain their brand, the quality of their products, and its benefits for the customer.

Their website shares details about Dave’s colorful life, his passions, his odd experiences, and focuses on his family and beloved (but departed) dog Blue. Check out their “Our Story” page for an example of Dave’s storytelling skills. This is clearly not Samsonite.

What does the Saddleback brand represent? After studying it, I would say two things:

Quality
Identity

The message of quality is so overt on their website that he shares links to his competitors, daring you to compare. In terms of identity, again and again, Dave mentioned how his customers tell him how their bag got them noticed, and provided something of an identity. As you browse SaddlebackLeather.com or the many offshoots of it elsewhere on the web, you see the same messages repeated over and over in different ways.

One of the many identities Saddleback tries to convey is adventure. And this is evident in the many photos they post and that their customers share.

Dave’s business evolved slowly, selling his first bags on eBay in 2003, forming the business in 2004, naming it & launching the website in 2005, and getting a working ecommerce system on the site in 2006.

At each step, Dave mentions friends or friends of friends who helped along the way and became a part of the Saddleback family. Business advisors, marketing advisors, website developers, all were found through people he knew, and each are still a part of his business.

Outside of the company’s doors, it is clear that word of mouth marketing is what Saddleback is all about. As Dave said:

“If people are happy, they talk about it. Now people talk online.”

To help fan the flames, Saddleback has photo contests, gives away bags, and encourages feedback. These outlets also allow people to be involved with the brand, before they shell out $500 on a bag.

Dave says he does not want Saddleback to become a huge brand. He doesn’t want the bags in big retail chains, and limits his paid advertising to banner ads on niche sites, Google adwords, and potentially ads in niche magazines. Saddleback is targeted to a very specific audience, and Dave is okay if that is polarizing.

He says that mainstream is not the goal. One indication of this is Saddleback’s tagline:

“They’ll fight over it when you’re dead.”

An experienced marketing advisor told Dave to avoid using the word ‘death’ in a tagline, advice that Dave ignored. Following all the old rules may be ‘safe,’ but exposes a brand to mediocrity. As Dave said:

“People are tired of Fake. They want real.”

Businesses: Get Serious About Building Your Brand Online

At their best, businesses are a mix of courage, inspiration and practicality, resulting in the creation of something unique, something needed, and something that puts smiles on people’s faces. At their worst, businesses exploit customer needs with inferior products and ruthless practices, skimming off “value” that rewards the few, while depleting the resources of the many.

When considering ways to grow your business online, you are left with two choices:

Leverage new tools to enable customers to meet core needs.
Spam as many people as possible with the hopes that X% of them will click on an ad or buy your product/service.

Today, let’s focus on how an established business can begin thinking about the web and social media in ways that can enable the goals of their customers, and establish your own brand as a powerful presence online.

Common Needs

Every time I walk into a coffee shop, a dry cleaner, a local franchise, or drive by a strip mall or office building, I consider the needs of these businesses. Regardless of their makeup, their market or their history, most have similar needs & purpose:

Find new customers
Grow the value of their existing customer base
Identify even greater efficiency
Explore new market opportunities

And I understand why these businesses are more concerned with the customers walking by their storefront than those doing a web search for “Coffee, Madison, NJ” in Google Maps.

But that doesn’t mean that an opportunity to serve customers and expand your business does not exist online. The sooner a business realizes this and begins taking small steps, the sooner they will realize the fruits of their labor, and get a step ahead of their competition.

New Audience Behavior Within a New Competitive Landscape

Whether you know it or not, the behavior of your customers is changing:

How they find businesses.
How they research and judge products.
How they manage their personal and business finances.

Each of these processes is moving online. If you are waiting for them to tell you this, then you will be acknowledging this shift too late.

Likewise, there is a new competitive landscape – a fight to engage with your market online, to serve their needs in integrated and easy ways. Will you wait and wait until these changes are so solidified that you feel it is “safe” to make a move, long after others have finished the land rush and worked to establish relationships in the lives of your customers?

Focusing on the Right Opportunities

So why aren’t more small and medium sized businesses jumping into the online space to build their brands, engage customers and edge out the competition? And for those who are, why do many of them devote so few resources and execute so poorly? Well, for most business owners or managers, their days are filled with execution – trying desperately to keep up with the many processes and opportunities that they feel will lead to immediate business growth.

While this thinking can take many forms, I can understand why some tactics give the illusion of immediacy: that handing out flyers on the corner 50 feet away from our door would be time better spent than learning about search engine marketing.

It could be argued that this responsibility falls to a sales or marketing manager, assuming the business is large enough to have these roles. The issue becomes this: in all likelihood, the existing business structure rewards old behavior and meeting old needs, and is unsure of how to value new processes, new customer behavior and new sales channels.

We Grow Media: Helping Businesses Build Their Online Brand

I am launching We Grow Media to help businesses realize business growth through online media and marketing. My goal is to offer practical ideas and strategies that a busy manager can implement in small and meaningful ways within their organization.

You can expect a couple new blog posts here each week, but the best way to stay on top of the latest tips and case studies is to subscribe to the We Grow Media weekly email newsletter: