How To Keep Your Online Business Newsworthy

How To Keep Your Online Business Newsworthy

Staking out your online real estate can be fairly easy: you start a website, join some social media groups and before you know it, you have carved out your own little section of the Internet.

But online businesses rely heavily on email marketing to keep customers thinking about them. Since they?re not driving by your store, the only contact they have with you is online. You have to keep them interested; your content has to be newsworthy.

John Frenaye, owner and manager of Eye on Annapolis, knows how this is. He runs an advertiser-supported newsletter about happenings in the Annapolis community. He?s able to draw an income thanks to his newsworthy stories: he covers timely, significant and locally-based news. Let?s take a look at what he?s doing and how you can adopt this for your online business plan:

Eye on Confirmation

Visitors can subscribe to the Eye on Annapolis newsletter on the website or on the Facebook page. There are currently over 3,500 email subscribers, 46,000 Facebook fans and 8,000 Twitter followers. John follows best practices and has new subscribers confirm, something he thinks contributes to his high engagement rates:

?We grew this list organically and the people want to see the information we offer. Our subscribers will get private content, polls, photos, coupons, etc that is not published publicly on the site or indexed by the search engines,? says John.

Eye on Timing

Emails are sent once or twice a month, and John found that late morning Tuesday through Thursday brings the best open and click-through rates.

The emails cover current events happening in the area:

Eye on Relevancy

How else does John make sure his emails get opened and clicked on? By making sure the content is relevant and upbeat, and leaving out the in-depth reporting as much as possible.

?With the busy lives we all lead, reading a local paper is not necessarily something we have the time for any longer. So we deliver it in short ?just the facts ma?am? bursts. Our audience gets it and appreciates it and since we do it right, they are more apt to subscribe to see what else we have to say,? says John.

More specifically, the emails cover current information that affects a good majority of the people in the area:

News sites aren?t the only online businesses that need to consider the newsworthiness of their content though?

Eye on Your Own Campaign: Email Tips and Tricks

Timing: Does your email have current, up-to-date information? Or do you tend to use evergreen content? To stay up-to-date, use Google Reader or a similar service to follow what?s going on in your industry.

Significance: How many people does your email apply to? Would it be better to send to a segment?

Proximity: Does your subscribers? location affect the relevancy of this email? If so, you can use their IP address to create segments based on location.

You want your email campaign to perform the best it possibly can. The only way to achieve this is by testing and optimizing based on what works. We have recommendations on what to do to get more subscribers, keep subscribers and create attention-grabbing messages, in the free Optimize Your Email Campaign guide.

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Source: http://www.aweber.com/blog/email-marketing/how-to-keep-your-online-business-newsworthy.htm

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