The intuitive website blog

I was listening in on a discussion between Internet Experts. Speaker A was making the point to Speaker B that every website owner needs to build an email list. They said that the average site visitor spends just 46 seconds on your page. You need to collect a name and email address from them before they leave so that you can market to them in the future. I have mixed feelings about this.

Now you can just ask people for their email and name. You could say, “Hey, can you give me your email address and name so that I can try to sell you my stuff through personalized emails?” That would be the most honest approach, don’t you think?

Maybe you aren’t just trying to sell people your services and products. Maybe you are completely altruistic and just want to give away great advice and tips. Maybe you have truly useful information to share with them. Then you can say, “Sign up to receive my useful tips and advice”, and that way you might get people interested in your tips and advice signing up, because you are giving them something that they consider valuable.

When people give you their name and address, they are giving you something of value. You need to give something back. Don’t solicit emails from people unless you have something of value to share. And make sure it is valuable. Be it a free e-book if they sign up, or useful advice, or a promise of the information that they are looking for, make sure that you are giving something of value. Otherwise people will unsubscribe faster than they signed up, and you are just adding to the obesity of our spam layer.

Back to Speaker A, she said that when you send out your emails to this growing list they should be 75% content and 25% sales. I disagree. I think that if you send emails out to a list of people they should be 90% valuable content and 10% sales. In fact, I don’t think you should ever send an email unless you are offering value. I do believe that email lists are important, however, unless you have something of value to offer your list in addition to advertising, I want to discourage you from sending emails. My point of view might not be the most marketing savvy opinion, however, as someone bombarded with hundreds of email every day, I would urge you to not add to the empty calories. I want nutritious email landing in my inbox. I want them to feed my intellect, or my curiosity, or my spirit. I don’t want the internet to be a huge commercial. I want to believe that the internet is a vehicle for communication and sharing ideas.

That said, I do enjoy an occasional notice from amazon.com about my favorite author - so how is that different? The key word, I think is “occasional”.

Speaker B asked Speaker A, “How often should you send out emails to your list?”. Speaker A said that in the past experts have suggested sending an email once a month, however, she urged, recent studies show that you should send an email every week. “you should be contacting them once a week .. be it with a newsletter or a tip … the reason is that people purchase for different reasons .. emotional … does no good to do it only once … you need to continually be staying in front of your list - broadcasting - it doesn’t have to be lengthy … send a benefit … tie it into current events … share a tip, then at the bottom of the email mention your information.”

Now, I have issue with this again. I recently attended the Social Media TeleSummit, and each of the speakers had a free gift for attendees that required filling in your name and email address (They ALL must be listening to these experts!) Caught up in a flush of enthusiasm about what I was learning, I naturally signed up for ALL. I was then bombarded, literally bombarded with email.  The variety of the email that I received in response to my action of signing up for their gifts covered a range of useful to down right annoying. One speaker  bombarded me almost daily with emails that were transparently just a framework to sell me. Other speakers have been sending me an email once a week, and although some of the content is useful, most of it is just a sales pitch. They might have ONE sentence that is good advice and then point me with an affiliate link to another class or teleseminar that is happening. ONE sentence. That is just plain lazy.

What I am trying to say is, if you are going to start broadcasting email to an email list, put time into it. Don’t cut corners. Give value. Don’t sell products with every email, unless you space them way out, (so people have a chance to forget they were annoyed by the balance of value content to sales in your last email. )

And no matter what Speaker A says. Please don’t send an email every week unless there is really time sensitive information that you need to communicate. If the emails are just a vehicle for a sales pitch, keep it to twice a month, or once a month.  And no matter what you do, make sure you send emails that are well written and contain 90% value content. Don’t do it, unless you are willing to take the time to do it right. You expect your recipients to take the time to read them, after all. You should be willing to invest the time thinking about what you are sending.

These days many of us telecommute - we work from a home office, or we work from a location that is far, far away from our clients. Our clients and colleagues may know us as a voice on the phone, and an e-mail correspondent. A number of you, my goffgrafix.com and intuitive-websites.com clients, I have never met face to face.

Putting a video on your website is a great way to form a personal connection with your website’s visitors and with your clients. And so, to practice what I preach, I have decided to experiment with different media so that I can teach you what I learn. With the content management systems that I have programmed for you all, adding a video to your website can be very easy and inexpensive - even free, if you already have a webcam.

For my first adventure into video recording, I purchased an inexpensive webcam from http://logitech.com. This is a devise that plugs into the USB port of my computer. Now, when I launch my ichat program (I am on a mac), there is a little camera icon as opposed to a phone icon, and if I click on that camera icon, on my computer screen, I can view what the camera is pointing to. You can use a webcam with skype and aim as well. This logitech cam does not integrate with my iMovie software, however, it probably would integrate with movie editing software on a windows machine.

My webcam is perched on the top of my computer and is pointing at me. This was a bit of a shock at first, to tell you the truth. Working from a home office, I had become accustomed to being hidden, reclusive. How many of us who work at home, stumble from bed to our computers and check our email before even brushing our teeth in the morning? and before you know it, you are busy working away in your pajamas. Using a webcam invites people into your private space. Now, all of you can see through this window on my computer, that my home office is cluttered, and that I work in an environment of creative chaos.

If you want a more formal and professional video presentation for your webpage, I suggest that you put some sort of screen or blank wall behind yourself. However, a webcam is an informal tool at best.

I purchased a software from http://ecamm.com that records video conferencing, and I used that to record myself talking. I also experimented with using SnapZ Pro X software which can record my desktop. On a windows machine, I could use Camtasia Studio to record the video conference.

I did some quick editing of the recording in iMovie HD, and then uploaded it to google. If you are on a windows machine, you can edit with windows movie maker, a free software. Once uploaded, google generated the code that I needed to embed the video into my website.

This is a really easy way to make an informal video to put on your website.

Keep in mind that any video that you upload to google or youtube.com is going to be distributed throughout the internet - so use that to your advantage. Put your website address on your video. Introduce yourself and your services. Having your videos in the public domain can be a form of grass roots marketing, if done correctly.