Facebook Competitions, Blogging and Email Marketing

Maybe because I’ve spent so long this week working on the Blog Awards Ireland I’ve chosen a lot of posts about blogging this week. There’s also some stuff on Facebook competitions, email marketing and social media strategy.

Re: Trust

This post caught my eye during the week. We’re often taught little tips and tricks for getting more likes, more email opens etc but should we use these if they mean that our customers and potential customers fail to trust us?

Have you ever fallen for a clever email subject line, clicked through to see what is inside only to be disappointed that the whole thing was a tactic to get me you open? Once opened there’s noting interesting inside? I know I have and everytime I feel cheated.

I prefer to be upfront and honest about my content. If you have something of value people will open and enjoy and know they can trust you in future. That’s the end of my rant! Find out what I’m talking about here.

7 Things You Need to Know to Run a Successful Photo Contest on Facebook

I’ve been doing a lot of additional research into Facebook competitions as I’m running a course on them for We Teach Social in the autumn. This excellent article on the Jeff Bullas blog takes you through the various things you need to know before running a photo competition. It’s also full of examples to inspire you.

9 Tips For Keeping Your Internet (And Social Media) Use Private

People are rightly beginning to worry about their privacy online. With revelations that the NSA was using internet data to spy on American citizens there has been an added emphasis on these privacy concerns lately. For years most of us have believed there is no alternative, if we go online we have to sacrifice our privacy. The good news is that there are alternatives to the websites that we have come to rely on. From the browser we use to access the internet to the applications we use for our email, instant messaging and even social networking. I know I’ll be trying some of these solutions myself.

This infographic from WhoIsHostingThis.com proposes 9 tips for keeping your internet usage private.

Your Blog Sidebar’s Dirty Little Secret

I found this article fascinating as I know I’ve put a lot of thought into what I put in my sidebar. Also I’ve come to realise after looking at so many blogs for the Blog Awards that I rarely look beyond the first two or three items on sidebars. This is deifinitely worth a read.

Develop A Social Media Strategy – What You Need To Get Started

I meet lots of businesses who know they should have a social media strategy but never seem to get around to it. Of course you can hire me to help you out but if you have a zero budget this primer from Imactiv8 is a good place to start. Just make sure you set some time aside to plan it.

97% of bloggers increase their readership with these opening paragraphs

The opening paragraph of your blog is one of the most important parts of it. Once you have hooked readers with a headline the opening paragraph will help reel them in. Writing those first few sentences can seem like hard work and I often leave them until I’ve finished the rest of the post. This post from the excellent SteamFeed blog gives you some ideas for creating opening paragraphs that work.

9 Critical Components for Optimized Marketing Emails

As much as I love social media marketing you can’t beat email marketing. It gives you the opportunity to communicate directly with your customers and potential customers, it’s easy to measure and it’s a great sales tool. This post from Hubspot is a really good read and takes you through the most important components of an email marketing campaign.

And from Spiderworking.com

See The Whole #Tag Conversation With Tagboard

Hashtags are everywhere now, even Facebook. If you are only searching Twitter for your tag mentions you are missing out. This weeks cool tool Tagboard brings all tag mentions from multiple social networks together. It’s great for research and for those running events.