| LED Digest 2260: Promoting Newsletters |
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How do you grow an online newsletter? What types of methods are most effective in increasing your subscriber base? Also - seen searchmash? And, a interesting post on usability, SEO/M, and information retrieval. ================================================== The LED Digest Moderated Discussion List "Effective Online Advertising, Since 1997" Data > Information > Knowledge > Wisdom pair Networks: The LED's Web Host Hosting and Domain Registration from a Trusted Leader pair.com for Hosting | pairNIC.com for Domains ================================================== List Moderator: Published by: Adam Audette LED Digest adam, led-digest.com http://www.led-digest.com .............................................. October 5, 2006 Issue no. 2260 .............................................. .....IN THIS DIGEST..... ====== NEW ===================== <Moderator Comment> ~ searchmash --== How to Promote an Online Newsletter? ==-- ~ Dan Jeffers "I'm trying to think of online methods to increase the subscriber base." ==== CONTINUING ================= --== Form Spam ==-- ~ Al Toman "Here is an easy way to eliminate (some) spam attempts from your comment form..." --== Usability and Search ==-- ~ Rae Deisler "SEO is basically a capitalistic endeavor. Which is perfectly fine!" ========= NEW ==================================== <Moderator Comment> Did anybody check out searchmash this week? Check it out here: http://www.searchmash.com/ Type in a search, then check out what you can do on the results page: - Click on the green URL for a drop-down of options (mostly gimmicky at this point it seems, stuff like "new window," "cached copy," etc.) - Draggable results - put your #10 result at #1 (not sure what they have planned with this one) - Probably some other stuff I'm forgetting - oh yeah - images on the fly. I believe this is a Google side project. What are your thoughts? Best wishes, Adam -------------------- From: Dan Jeffers Subject: How do you promote an online newsletter? I'm working on a newsletter that already has over 100k subscribers, but the client would like to see it go up by at least 20%. We already have people passing out flyers at conferences and such. I'm trying to think of online methods to increase the subscriber base. (The obvious step of redesigning the sign-up page seems to be out of my hands and on hold for now). Dan Jeffers, Internet Marketing Specialist American Institutes for Research ======== CONTINUING =============================== From: Al Toman Subject: Secure form submissions LED Digesters, Here is a live example of an easy, easy, easy way to eliminate (some) spam attempts from your comment form on your blog / web page that I came across this morning. It implements Captcha without the image recognition aspect that I was telling you about. Scroll to the bottom of: http://snipurl.com/y3v4 [cssplay.co.uk] Mr. Stu Nichols has his CSS together, is highly recognized in the web-compliant web design community, and is a good source for css, to boot. Kind regards, Al Toman studio9.ws -------- new post - new topic -------- From: Rae Deisler Subject: Usability and Search (and Information Retrieval) > ... while I commend Shari and other professionals for their > efforts to raise search to a higher level, we must remember > first and foremost [SEO/M] is about marketing, not scholarship. - Nathan Holley, LED 2255 This really is a salient point, and I'm surprised that no one on the list remarked or expanded on it. Although I'm not experienced with SEO/M practice, I'm only a newbie in this area, I do have deep experience in academia. Coming into the Internet marketing sphere from the scholarly is very interesting, and my perspective is nearly right on the spot of Nathan's. Perhaps the reason SEO/M is so popular a subject in leading forums like these, is because it is synonymous with marketing a Web site. Maybe even with developing a Web site? Therefore it's synonymous with getting a return on investment -- with making money $. Often the SEO crowd appears to fancy itself "cutting edge," even professorial at times, about what is basically marketing and business. Good old fashioned capitalism, which is probably the best reason SEO/M is so prevalent. I certainly can't argue that proper SEO is not a subset of usability. Search as a derivative of a usable site makes good sense to me, a mere layman here. I would only point out that, after a survey of SEO-related forums, blogs, ebooks, print books, reports, and sites, this fact seems lost on the industry as a whole. It is only the exception who point out this critical discrimination. This gives me the impression that search optimization is not widely acknowledged as a discipline of usability, which also gives credence to the realization that SEO is basically a capitalistic endeavor. Which is perfectly fine! But it does echo Nathan's points about the interval that exists between SEO and scholarship. Unless you know the algorithms of the major SEs, are you really "tuned in" to something the rest of us aren't; or to be more precise, something the rest of us can't discover with our own research? I'm sorry, but barring engineering work at Google, anyone's guess is as good as anyone else's, approximately. Thank you to Shari Thurow, who said recently that she's studying information retrieval at the graduate level. I really appreciate her posts here. They are pragmatic, yet elevated. She talks in plain terms and is very direct. It's refreshing. I must say, however, that as Nathan pointed out: > Pure info retrieval, like library science, has > nothing to do with marketing, but only with > delivering as accurately as possible the most > relevant result to the searcher. Therefore, there's > a disconnect here between academics and SEO/M. ... information retrieval at the doctorate level will surely over-qualify you for plain old SEO/M work, even at the highest level of practice. I visited your site, and was impressed by the large corporations on your client list. Grantastic must be one of the preeminent firms in this field. Perhaps Shari will end up at Google with the rest of the PhDs in info retrieval? Either way, I'd hate to lose her voice here. Thank you LEDers, Rae Deisler ------------------------------------------------------- The LED Digest is sponsored by pair Networks: pair.com for Hosting | pairNIC.com for Domains Copyright 1995-2006 Orange Wheel, LLC. All Rights Reserved. ----------------------------------------------------------------- "Principles have no real force except when one is well-fed." - Mark Twain |
