I’m proud of having tens of thousands of people subscribed to my weekly E-Newsletter. Most of them are active subscribers and open the emails with an incredible steady rate of 50-55 percent just in the first 24 hours.

Although the design of my newsletter has undergone various changes and still evolves to satisfy my current subscribers and to attract new ones; I’m already happy with it.

So I decided to share my experiences in writing an effective E-Newsletter here.

1. Preparing and sending weekly newsletter is a long term investment.

Never believe in anyone who tries to convince you that you will have a high return on your investment within a couple of weeks.

I think that in most cases you won’t even see the return of your investment in the short-term or mid-term. But don’t worry. Developing and publishing an effective, engaging E-Newsletter, would be one of your most rewarding decisions in long-run.

2. Sending newsletters to the people who have not asked for a newsletter is not a wise decision. If someone advised you to do so, send him generously to your competitor at your cost.

Sending bulk emails to every email list you’ve found will lead to some results. That’s for sure.

But it’s the most expensive content marketing strategy and considering all tangible and intangible costs, the cost of such campaigns exceeds the benefits.

Every unwanted message irritates the user, and a beg-for-click approach will ruin your brand in long-run.

Do your homework and prepare the best possible E-Newsletter. Your subscribers will forward it to the others, and your subscriber community will grow.

The logic behind is so simple: If your content is helpful, no one likes to be a second-hand receiver.

3. The formal style of writing is not attractive anymore.

The corporate-style email writing is not the key to trust or success anymore.

As most of your subscribers receive many formal messages every day, no one looks for more.

They are looking for an informal, casual style of writing and a message to be read in their coffee time whether in the office or at home.

4. Provide your readers with the quotable information.

It would be too optimistic to suppose that the majority of people look for the knowledge to put it into the practice.

Sure using the content in life or business is one of its applications but not the most important one (at least for most of us).

Quoting is the most practical use of every piece of content.

Write a piece of content titled “How not to be stupid in the workplace” and show it to your friends.

I bet that even before reading it, most of them will tell you: “YES! I have a colleague who must read this!”

Designing and creating a quotable or viral content has its own tips and tricks which I will write about in future.

5. Use original content as much as possible.

As I have mentioned before, no one likes to be a second-hand receiver of good content.

So the major part of your content has to be original.

Hiding the source doesn’t make you an original publisher. Even if you hide your sources, sooner or later someone will find them, and you will lose their trust.

So if you use any source for curation of the content, you have to specify it explicitly and honestly.

6. Neither pure-click nor full-content are the best email content. Try to find an optimum combination.

Some of the newsletters are pure-click emails. Full of links and tempting headlines trying to seduce the reader to click on them. Some other newsletters have taken the exact opposite side. They are full-

Full of links and tempting headlines trying to seduce the reader to click on them. Some other newsletters have taken the exact opposite side. They are full-

Some other newsletters have taken the exact opposite approach. They are full-content emails. These emails are a combination of texts and illustrations in such a way that you will lose nothing if you print them out on the paper.

These emails are a combination of texts and illustrations in such a way that you will lose nothing if you print them out on the paper.

Pure-click emails will become boring and even irritating after some time. According to my experience and also experiences of other friends, subscribers of such letters will not stay loyal to them and this strategy will lead to lower open-rate and higher unsubscribe rate in the long-run.

According to my experience and also experiences of the other friends, subscribers of such letters will not stay loyal to them and this strategy will lead to lower open rates and higher unsubscribe rates in the long-run.

Full-content emails have other downsides.

First of all, your subscriber will not visit your website anymore; If there’s something important, they will tell me via email.

The second problem is that a full-content email is not a newsletter anymore. It will be closer to a newspaper or magazine, and your subscriber will unconsciously compare its quality and content with his/her favorite newspaper or magazine, and sure you know who will be the winner.

7. If you’d like your subscribers to do something, ask them to do it.

You may not believe me, but I firmly believe that in spite of existing hype around the highly interactive digital media, nowadays the audiences are more passive than ever.

Just test it as I have tested:

Put a hyperlink in your email and send it to half of your subscribers:

Here is a hyperlink to a very nice article.

At the same time, test a different style with the other half:

Here is a hyperlink to a very nice article; please click on it.

You won’t believe me. But I have even tested a third style:

Here is a hyperlink to a very nice article, please click on it and write there your opinion.

You can’t imagine the incredible difference between results of these three emails.

You may love it or hate it. But it’s the fact. Test it with your next newsletter.

8. Sometimes full-text emails can be more successful.

I’m nearly sure that even if you trust me on the previous point, still you will not believe this one.

Take a look at the most popular newsletter recommendation lists and you will find a standard advice there in the first lines: Make a combination of text and picture.

Yes. It can make your newsletter attractive. But will it make your newsletter a differentiated one? I don’t think so.

People get used to any attraction, but they will never get used to the differentiation.

Nowadays, every email is full of photos and click-on-me-banners and irritating colors and please-look-at-me dancing-gifs.

If you want to be one of them, just do it. But if you are aiming at a differentiated newsletter, there might be the better options.

Any newsletter is kind of letter after all, and any letter has to be informative before anything else and images are more a tool for the attraction than a piece of information.

I’m not against combining photos and the text. But just please double-check your decision before blindly following the popular practice.

The Popular practice is not necessarily the best practice.

9. Don’t limit yourself to the contents you have generated by your own.

We all have heard that content is king. But just a highly optimistic king would try to expand his territory with the soldiers of the others! This is the reason that in any website, it’s neither strategic nor prestigious to use the contents of the others excessively.

But the situation is a bit different in newsletters. The first aim of a weekly newsletter is earning subscribers and if there’s any way to provide value to them, just use it.

Offering them some links of the week from the other publishers would make every subscriber happy if you select them carefully considering interests of your audience.

Quoting sentences or paragraphs from the famous authors or interesting books would make everyone happy.

Don’t forget that newsletters are not supposed to produce the news; they are expected to deliver the news to the audience.

But there’s one thing to hold in your mind every time you quote any content from any publisher: Never Steal their traffic.

Beyond all official rules and laws, there’s an ethical practice in quoting the content.

Every publisher has invested in the content to attract the target receivers and convert them to the active audiences. Quoting the whole content or forgetting to mention the access address to the owner is not a professional act.

10. Consider a limit for advertising material.

We are all fed up with advertising materials, and no one looks for more. In the outdoor advertising, the advertisers are looking for the most exposure, but this is not the case in digital newsletters. In our today’s overcrowded market, every subscriber feels a permanent temptation to unsubscribe from your list. So never trigger them to do so. This is the reason that I never dedicate more than 10% of the whole newsletter space to the ads.

In our today’s overcrowded market, every subscriber feels a permanent temptation to unsubscribe from your list.

So never trigger them to do so. This is the reason that I never consider more than 10% of the whole newsletter space to the ads (whether direct or indirect ones).

11. Provide them with downloadable content.

Tina Seelig notes a critical point in her fantastic book called What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20:

People waiting in a long restaurant queue would easily pay you to get your position if you are far before them.
But they would pay more if you give them the electronic notification device you have received from the restaurant.

It means that for most of us, any tangible object would be more favorable than an intangible service with the same characteristics.

The same holds true in the digital world.

Having a link to an article would be good. But a downloadable pdf file would be great.

Streaming music is nice, but I feel if I could have it downloaded on my computer.

So even if your subscribers are already happy and satisfied with the links you have provided them, still consider some downloadable pdf files or audio files in your weekly newsletter.

The post How to tweak your E-Newsletter for better conversion rates appeared first on webmindset.

Digital Content Marketing: A step by step guide

What is content marketing: Is it what are you looking for?

• What is the definition of content and what do we mean by digital content?

• Definition of content marketing

  • Content marketing and permission marketing are not the same concepts

    Many content marketers insist on using permission marketing mindset in designing a content marketing campaign.

    Sure it’s a better approach to pull the audience instead of pushing them through the sales funnel. However, still, you can design an interruption marketing campaign based on content marketing tools and methods.

  • Any content marketing plan should pursue the goal of changing or enhancing the consumer behavior.

    You can take a look at the models I have quoted for the consumer behavior concept to find some ideas about the targets which are possible to set in this regard.

  • It’s part of your digital branding strategy

• Where can I find a better or more comprehensive definition of content marketing?

  Heidi Cohen has collected a collection of 21 different definitions of content marketing from the content marketing experts. This article is one of the best sources if you want to have a better understanding of the concept.

• Is it useful to me / my company?

  • What’s your digital strategy?

    Before developing a content strategy or content marketing plan, you have to think about your digital strategy. As have mentioned in my article on developing a digital strategy, there are five critical topics to consider before developing any content plan:

    • What do we mean by the term digital in our business?
    • What are the “real” opportunities there?
    • Whether we look for a better digital presence or deployment of more digital processes.
    • What is our time horizon?
    • Do we consider digital technology as a core competency or just as a strategic enabler?

  • Why do you want to use it?

    • Increasing Brand Awareness
    • Increasing Brand Preference
    • Greater reach at a lower cost
    • Attracting new prospects
    • Overcoming objections (existing ones, future ones)
    • Exploring prospects’ pain points
    • Inviting Strategic Partners
    • Lead conversion
    • Lead nurturing
    • Customer Conversion
    • Building trust and rapport with audience
    • Retention (loyalty)
    • Upsell
    • Passionate Subscribers

  • Are you able to create content?

    It may look like an easy challenge. However, content creation is the most critical bottleneck for content marketers.

  • Are you suitable for this skill?

    • You need a content marketer mindset
      • Consider integration
      • True customer value
      • Customer Centric Approach (Curve)
    • You need to have some skills
      • Storytelling
    • You need to have some traits
      • analytical aptitude
      • patience
      • persistence
      • generosity
      • Conversational
      • creative

Think about your content strategy

• What is the content strategy?

  • Definition of content strategy
  • The Difference between content marketing and content strategy
  • Content Marketing without content strategy: A powerful car without navigation system

• What’s your content mix?

  • What combination of evergreen / topical content fits your needs?
  • What proportion of your content should be original? What’s the best share for the curated content?
  • What combination of content types would be better for your purpose?
  • Which types of content presentation methods would be more effective for your audience?

• What’s your core purpose?

• What’s your preferred content strategy theme?

  • Inbound?
  • Outbound?
  • Hybrid?

• How to design The Content Ecosystem

  • Combining the components
  • Choosing the primary platform and the content hub

The most important questions to ask before starting content marketing

• What are your objectives?

• Who are your audiences?

  • Persona

    • What do they need?
    • Where do they look for solutions?
    • Demographics
      • Age
      • Location
      • Gender
      • Income Level
      • Education Level
      • Marital Status
      • Occupation
    • Psychological Factors
      • Personality
      • Attitude
      • Values
      • Interests
      • Hobbies
      • Lifestyle

• What can you do for your audience?

  • What’s your online value proposition? What do you have to offer that the audience is willing to pay for it?

• How can you differentiate yourself from them?

  • Competitor Analysis

  • Content Research

  • Designing a differentiated offer
    • content
    • price
    • value
    • structure
    • wrapping
    • Identity

It’s all about customer base (Developing, Maintaining, and Managing)

• Minimum Viable Audience

• Empathy in the digital world

  • Why it’s core of content marketing
  • How to draw an empathy map
    • Think, Feel, Act, See Model

• What are your Key Performance Indicators?

  • Classification of the key performance indicators (KPIs):
    • KPIs measuring efficiency vs. KPIs measuring effectiveness
    • Primary KPIs vs. Secondary KPIs
  • ROI is just of the indicators and even not the most important one!

• What are your Key Operational Indicators?

  I’ve listed some of the most important Key Performance Indicators in content marketing. Besides KPIs, there are other type of indicators called KOI (Key Operational Indicators) concerned with the efficiency of the process. The conversion ratio is considered as one of the most important KOIs.

Operational Aspects of Content Marketing

• Corporate Content Machine

  • Why do we call it a content machine?
  • How to design your content machine
    • Content Production Capacity Management (CPCM)

• Choosing the right platform for your content machine

  • Are you going to be a pure digital player?
  • Channels
    • Medium vs. Media
    • The classical make or buy dilemma
  • The Web vs. App
  • Future of mobile and mobility
  • Which screen is smarter for you?
    • Forget about smart devices, look for smart screens
  • Social networks: structure or infrastructure?

• The Content Creation Process

  • Do you have any content?

    • What kind of resources do you have for your content factory?
    • Creation or Curation?
    • Relevance
    • Value
    • Originality

  • User Generated Content vs. Branded Content

  • Questions to ask about each piece of content

    • Content Essence
    • The most effective content type
    • Short-form or long-form? This is the question!
      • Definition of the long-form content
      • Why do many content marketers recommend using long-form content?
    • The art of copywriting

  • The content fine tuning process

    • Form is the content (The new version of the old phrase: Medium is the message)
    • SEO is not about keywords anymore:
      • Information content of the message
      • Information structure
    • Content Identity

• Content Distribution & Delivery Process

  • Editorial Calendar

    • How often should you publish?
    • Managing your topics portfolio

  • Channel Selection

  • Content Promotion and Traffic Generation

    • SEO
      • Keyword dominance era is over: Semantic Structure as a new approach to page evaluation in SEO
      • A list of free SEO tools
    • Paid search marketing
    • Social Media Marketing
    • Email Marketing
    • Guest Blogging

• Process Optimization & Auditing

  • Customer Journey Analysis
  • Conversion Rate Optimization
  • A/B Testing
  • Audience Engagement Tools / Auditing
    • Engagement as process addiction
      • Review of the Hooked book by Nir Eyal
    • Gamification
    • Loyalty Programs
    • How to audit engagement process?

• Content Management System

  • Internal Content Management System

    • Developing effective and efficient metadata
      • Metadata: Data about the data

  • External Content Management system

  • Managing content in different stages of the content life cycle

    • Goal Setting
    • Creation
    • Publishing
    • Promotion
    • Maintenance
    • Retirement

How to design a content-centered marketing campaign?

Agile Content Marketing: Fad or Fashion? (Sorry. There’s no third choice!)

• Rethinking agility concept in content industry context
• Collaboration: Tips and Traps

How to build a content-based business?

• The most popular content revenue models

  • Direct Selling
  • Subscription
  • Quantity Based
  • Selling Advertising Space
  • Collecting market information
  • Collecting donations

• Incredible but forgotten content revenue models

• Which pricing strategy fits your business?

  • Freemium Business Model
  • How will you overcome the penny gap barrier?

• A content-focused organization

  • How to develop a content-centered organization?
  • Positions you should think about
    • Chief Content Officer (CCO)
      • Chief Content Officer as an emerging role
      • Chief Content Officer Job Description
    • Chief Technical Officer (CTO)
  • Benchmarks
    • Leading Content Creating Companies

Future of content marketing

• Trends

  • Expansion of Social Media
  • Multiple Devices and Multiple Screens
  • Distrust of Advertising
  • Content Shock: Fact or Fiction?
  • People to follow
  • Blogs to read

• Megatrends

Future of content

• Emergence of the global mind and content-less community

The post Digital Content Marketing Roadmap (A Step-by-Step Guide) appeared first on webmindset.

To render a list of the content creation companies, first of all, we should distinguish between the content creators and the content creation platforms.

The social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, are of the greatest content publishers ever existed on the planet. However, they are not publishing their own content. They’ve just prepared a platform for the other people to help them – or tempt them! – to create and publish the content.

Putting the content creation platforms aside, still the rest of the content creating companies fall into two categories:

• The companies who are active in the field of content marketing
• The companies who are working in the other industries

The content marketing companies have to be great content creators if they are interested in leading their market. So it’s not so surprising if Content Marketing Institute, Contently, Hubspot, and Moz are providing us with a vast amount of content in their blogs.

By assuming that the ones who are looking for the leading content creation companies are not thinking about the great content marketers, seems that our list has to be created from the companies that are outside the content marketing field or at least, are not often considered as a player in this field.

Here’s a list of the leading content creation companies I believe would be instructive to be studied:

• Coca-Cola has been always great in creating and publishing content. We have always heard of the controversial ads and other stories about the Cola-Pepsi battle that has been helpful for both of them to get more distance from the all other carbonated soft drink brands available in the market. In 2012, Coca-Cola turned its corporate website into a digital magazine (Coca-Cola Journey). So it’s not a place for the company address and some banners and occasional news anymore. It’s a content rich magazine that can be read more frequently.

• Stanford and Harvard universities: For some of us, may it not be so sweet to consider universities as companies. However for anyone with some knowledge about the nature of the business, some of the universities such as Stanford and Harvard, are of the biggest educational companies ever existed. They create a massive amount of content and deliver it in various formats and models from paper to the digital version and from free to the high-price subscribed content. Part of the branding of these universities is done through their media which is under continuous care and development.

• Red Bull is famous for its content creation efforts. This brand tries to associate itself with breathtaking extreme sports. Just take a look at the Stratos Jump and how the Red Bull describes it: the most detailed documented jump ever!  As you see, Red Bull is not investing on promoting the taste of its drink (or let’s say, the investment in side stories is much larger than the root product) and this is the reason that Red Bull is on the top of the most of the content creation companies lists.

• Apple is not always in the list of content creation companies. However everyone knows that they are great storytellers. The most excellent storyteller is the one who helps you to forget that you are listening to a story and even helps you to become part of the story and a new storyteller. Seems that Apple has been undeniably successful in this art.

• Colgate is another company worth a deeper study. Their volume of content may not be comparable to the other brands on the list. They have about 500 articles on their website. But this amount of articles has been helpful in promoting their brand and Colgate brand can be a role model for small and medium enterprises who are seeking to lead their market through content.

• Adobe is the other successful content creator brand. Adobe’s digital magazine called CMO is one the amazing and engaging magazines filled and fueled with fresh, helpful contents. Part of the content is related to the trends and news and the other – more important – part is the ever-green content that is published and republished in many other blogs, helping Adobe to maintain its brand position.
• Cisco is another leading company in content creation. Cisco’s documentary series called my networked life features inspiring stories about the people all around the world who have used technology as an enabler to bring their dreams into reality.

Sure there are many other companies that can be added to the above list. But I believe that the above list can be a good starting point.

The post A list of the 7 Leading Content Creating Companies appeared first on webmindset.

• Long form contents have a higher chance of social sharing (Source: Newswhip report)
• Long form contents inevitably lead to longer stay time of the user on the website (Source: Logic!)
• Long form contents have a better chance of getting a great SEO rank (Source: SerpIQ study)
• Long form contents will likely generate more leads (Source: Curata also SignalvsNoise)
• Long form contents outperform a series of shorter blog posts (Source: Problogger)
• Long form contents have a higher perceived authority of the author (Source: Wordstream and Kissmetrics)
• Long form contents cause longer and more engaging conversations (Source: quicksprout)
• Long form contents get more backlinks (Source: Moz report)

But as every belief needs to be evaluated regularly, the reasons behind credibility of the long form content has to be evaluated considering the ever-changing characteristics of the online world. Especially because search engines are not as blind as before.

In the first years of the introduction of the search concept, search engines were more a computation machine considering so many different content parameters such as content length, domain name, domain rank to find the most credible contents. Just check this list of 200 factors in Google ranking provided by Backlinko and separate the factors showing content characteristics from the factors related to the user behavior.

As in the internet old age, it was not so easy (or popular) to trace user behavior, a significant portion of the traditional SEO ranking parameters were related to the content itself, and the length of the content was surely of the most decisive factors in that paradigm. However, as Google and many other search engines have developed the huge human behavior databases, the relationship between content and the audience is a much precise factor in ranking the contents in comparison to the content characteristics itself.

Besides all the above facts, we should not forget that content creation for the sake of content creation or SEO for the sake of SEO is not justifiable in the current content-saturated world. What we need at the end of the day is conversion. We need profitable user action and the relationship between the content length, and the conversion (to the money and not just to the click) is not as straight as before.

So with all respect to David Ogilvy and his famous quote about long-form content, it seems that there are many other factors in choosing content length:

Use long form when you have a rich message

I’m talking about the rich messages, not important ones. Many important messages can be conveyed with a short sentence or small infographic. Your message is rich if you have so much relevant, useful, data which your audience is looking for and S(he) has to find it in other pages just after leaving your page or blog.

Here‘s a sample of not-so-rich content in long form. Even the best SEO rank would not make a serious conversion (subscription in this case) as the content is just long but not necessarily relevant and you feel that the author has made it deliberately and intentionally long just to bait clicks and hold you there.

Consider your subject and industry before deciding about content length

There are many reports (like Viperchill report) which show that the preferred or at least popular content length is highly dependent on the topic. Personal development articles are one of the longest ones and the readers of this category have got used to the long form. However you can’t expect that the reader of the political news be as patient as the reader of the personal development or financial blogs.

Think about your target audience

Statistics says that a longer content has a better chance of receiving a good SEO rank, Ceteris Paribas. But never ignore the last two words, Ceteris Paribas: with other things the same! This condition is not easily met! So, think about your target audience and their preferences. Demographic factors, interests and their previous knowledge can have a serious impact on their preferences about the content length and SEO rank is determined based on users preference and satisfaction more than any other factor.

What are you looking for?

Are you looking for SEO? for user engagement? Or user conversion? Are you looking for loyal users or accidental customers? Are you trying to collect user clicks or aiming to make your visitor delighted? Sometimes these targets do not overlap! Sometimes a short article can win search engines interest by so many happy visitors but a long article can engage a few visitors and leave the others unhappy and dissatisfied.

So, never decide on the content length blind and based on statistics. Statistics is always talking about the average people and average businesses and average contents. Sometimes we need to ignore them if we are not going to be ordinary!

The post Why you should create long form content? appeared first on webmindset.