Help! How Do I Get My Website Live?

I frequently receive emails from people who don’t know what to do to get their website off the planning stage. So often I hear, “I want a web presence, but where do I start?” All too often, I can see the “doe-in-the-headlights” stare.

I hope that in this article, I can show you the steps to getting your website live and help you move forward in the right direction.

What’s a Domain Name & How do I get one?

A domain name is your website name. It is an address (URL) where Internet users can access your website. You’ll need a Domain Registrar to get your domain name.

A Domain Registrar like GoDaddy, for instance, sells and registers your domain name.

Deciding on a domain name can take some time. You want to pick one (or more) with a User Interface (UI) that you don’t hate and has a trustable vibe. For example, if you’re an author, you can try your name (i.e., heidihafner.com), or use your business name (i.e., hafnerdesigns.com). There will be times when your domain name choice has already been claimed. For this reason, it is essential to come up with several different ideas. (i.e., authorheidihafner.com, heidi-hafner.com, heidihafnerauthor.com, or any of these names with hyphens between the words). I might suggest that you purchase both the .com and .net domain names, too. Purchasing both helps you to own your brand.

Your Domain Registrar or Web Designer can help you set the nameservers so that your shiny new domain name points to the web host where your website will be.

What is a web host, & why do I need one?

A web host is where you build your property, your website. I always explain that the host is the land you construct your house. Its address is an IP address (Internet Protocol address). An IP address is a numerical label assigned to each device connected to a computer network that uses the Internet Protocol for communication. An IP address serves two functions: host or network interface identification and location addressing. Depending on the host you choose, your IP address could change periodically. So, remembering numbers is tough. We don’t use IP addresses to locate websites. So, you’ll need to configure the DNS (Domain Name Service) of your new domain, to point at the server where your website will be. Your Domain Registrar, Web Host, or Web Designer can help you set the DNS or nameservers.

Buying web hosting is a little trickier than purchasing a domain, though. You’ll need to know a bit about the website you intend to host when making that choice. Will it be a WordPress site? Or another PHP/MySQL-based CMS site? That means your host will need to support those technologies. Most do, some don’t. You might want to look in their documentation or ask them before investing your money if you are unsure. There are lots of technologies for running websites. Make sure the web host of your choice can support you.

Just a word of encouragement here, not everything is locked in stone for the first 2-weeks to 30-days. So, if you make a mistake and find that you typo’d your domain name, changed your mind on the domain name, bought web space from a host you don’t like, or whatever, you can, in most cases, get a refund or change. But it is better to make sure you have most of these decisions made, and ready to go. You can also move your website if you’ve already begun working on it. However, moving isn’t always super fun, but everybody ends up doing it, and you’ll learn as you go.

Should you bundle your domain registrar and web host into one if a company offers both?

You can if you would like, but I find it is sometimes more expensive that way. For instance, as a web designer, I sell hosting to my clients. My hosting is a bit more costly because I maintain my sites regularly, and I have security on each site. I have the option to buy domain names through my host as well, but I choose GoDaddy to handle that. GoDaddy is good with domain names, and they’re prices are reasonable. By having the Registrar separate, if you need to change your host, you can do it easily with your Registrar. You have control of your domain name.

Ok, you have your domain name, your host, what else do you need?

At this point, you need to decide whether your website will be static (doesn’t change much and has no database), or dynamically generated like with a Content Management System (CMS). How often will you be working on your website? Will you have a blog where you publish posts or articles? Will you have a store to sell products?

What is a “CMS”? What’s its purpose?

CMS is a generic term for Content Management System. Generally, it manages all your assets for your website, like images, PDFs, audio, and video files. It can also manage products, memberships, and much more. If you’ve been doing some research, you’ve seen some big players like WordPressJoomla, and  Drupal

I’ve reviewed all the significant CMS contenders. I have found WordPress the easiest to install and manage. The other day, I read an article that gave statistics on the better-known CMS systems and which are the more popular. In this article, they show how WordPress dominates the CMS market, holding 61% of the market. Whereas in this same report, Drupal holds 5.1%, and Joomla holds 3.3%. Websites like Shopify, Squarespace, Wix, etc., all 2.8% or less.

I love how easy it is to set up SEO within WordPress. There are tricks you can do inside each page and post that are complete “White Hat” and safe to use without getting removed from search engine results pages (SERPs). Write clear, understandable content, and strive to strike a balance between technical writing and readability, ensuring that the average person can understand it.

There are a couple of different ways to deploy your website. If you choose a product like WordPress, you can install it using the cPanel, which comes with your hosting service. Sometimes you may not have cPanel, and in that case, you can upload it to your server via FTP and then deploy it from there. Here is a step-by-step article published by WordPress. For me, this was a bit tech-jargon-heavy. But it has a lot of useful information.

How do I make it all pretty? 

Once you have installed WordPress, it comes with a couple of default, free themes that you can use. However, you’re not limited to those themes. There is a WordPress repository for themes and plugins. I’ve found two very impressive Themes I use that do cost a little bit. One is “Thesis” offered by DIYThemes, and the other is “Avada” by Themeforest. I love these two Themes because the possibilities are endless.

Whatever theme you choose will have its share of support to help you through the tough times. Ideally, if you don’t know how to code HTML or CSS, you want to pick a Theme that doesn’t need coding.

Some Pointers about Assets

Assets are files that you add into your posts and pages, primarily images. The tendency is to post large photos so people can get a good glimpse of what you have to show. However, that is not what you do on a website. The idea is to make your website load fast and cleanly. Therefore, you need to make sure your images are small, not in width and height but the overall size. I always suggest that the width and height be no bigger than 1200px on the longest side. PNGs & JPG/JPEG are the best file extensions for images. These extensions compress and maintain clarity well. 

Using large images should only be used if you’re selling the photo or for setting up an Electronic Press Kit (EPK). For audio and video files, if you own the data and don’t want to put them on YouTube or Vimeo, you can open an account on Amazon AWS  and put your files on their S3 servers. Amazon offers storage for a very low fee. In the first year, you get their storage, up to 5gb, for free.

Your best bet!

If this all seems overwhelming to you, no worries, you’re not alone. Many people would instead hire a web designer to do all this technical stuff. And why not? Your business needs your undivided attention on what you do best. Let a professional, like me, build your website for you. Of course, to be completely transparent, there are other web designers out there who can help as well. You might be able to get a cheaper rate, or perhaps more, but I love to work with you, my client, one on one! We’ll build your site together! I want to talk to you and see where your dream takes you. Contact me and tell me about your dream website.

Please comment below with your experiences setting up your website. Share this article with someone that you know who needs a website. 

Dos and Don’ts of Do It Yourself SEO

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has been an interest of mine for many years, and it should be when developing and building websites. When I create websites, I make sure that my clients have the means to produce an excellent SEO strategy for every page and post. Let’s learn a few dos and don’ts of do it yourself SEO for your website.

There are many websites with very well known authors out there who have spent time and money exploring the ins and outs of SEO. Much of what I have read has excellent information, albeit it’s easy to get lost in a sea of confusion if you are new to writing blog posts and selling products. My job, as a web designer is to teach what I know in ways that are easy to remember.

Are you wondering why your website may not be getting the traction it needs in Google? I hope that I can shed some light on some simple things you can do, or should not do, to help optimize your website for search engines.

Experts suggest that a third-party plugin can handle any theme for independent functionality on a WordPress site.

DO: Always use a plugin to manage the SEO of your WordPress website.

WordPress offers many SEO plugins. Most SEO plugins can help you administer basic optimization tricks that you don’t require an expert. Even a novice website owner can use these plugins to reap the benefits. For instance, the Yoast SEO plugin provides a box below the WordPress editor to help you perfect each post. It analyzes the post and shows you how to make the post more readable. It lets you set a “focus phrase.” According to Yoast’s website, “the focus keyphrase is the search term that you most want your page to rank for, so when people search for that keyword or phrase, they should find you.” Yoast SEO also has a premium package that builds more into the focus phrase and other functions. 

DON’T: Rely on the theme to be sufficient for overall site optimization.

When switching to a new theme or revamping your website layout, you should always prioritize on elements such as meta tags and title tags. If the SEO functionality is built into the WordPress theme by default, implementing a new theme with the same SEO elements would be impossible.

Let me explain. Meta tags are snippets of text that describe a page’s content. Meta tags do not appear on the public view of the page itself, but only in the page’s code. A title tag is an HTML element that specifies the title of a web page. Title tags are displayed on search engine results pages (also known as SERPs) as the clickable headline for a given result and are important for usability, SEO, and social sharing. 

Taxonomy

Okay, what the heck is Taxonomy?  😕 I pulled this definition off of Webopedia.

Taxonomy is the science of categorization, or classification, of things based on a predetermined system. In reference to websites and portals, a site’s taxonomy is the way it organizes its data into categories and subcategories, which can sometimes be displayed in a sitemap.

DO: Use appropriate taxonomy terms with descriptions

By using categories, subcategories, & tags, you organize your site so that both the reader and search engines can navigate easily through your website. 

Readers navigate differently than search engines. People click on topics that they find interesting and then move on to another topic. Your readers are random in comparison to search engines. Taxonomy allows you to connect people with their interests and likes.

Search engines, on the other hand, need structure to be effective and efficient. Search engines crawl the web and websites just like humans do but do so through links and structure. The more optimal your structure (both internally and externally), the more efficiently and effectively the search engines will be at finding, indexing, and ranking your content.

Your SEO plugin should ask you what you want to index, posts, pages, archives, slides, etc. You can choose to index all, but if you do, do everything possible to enhance them. 

DON’T: Go tag crazy!

It is possible to go tag crazy. Don’t do it. It’s cluttered and in most cases, redundant. I’ve seen people use tags like they do categories. For instance, you’ve created a category, “Recipes,” but then you create a tag, “recipes.” This redundancy trips up the search engines and marks the post as a duplicate. Another example of redundancy is making tags to include the author’s name. The article already has the author’s name, and your SEO plugin should allow for search engines to crawl all authors on your website. Therefore, it’s not necessary to tag your name. 

Ideally, a good rule of thumb is to maintain between 5 to 7 categories per website and up to 3 tags for each post. It is a common-sense measure because too many categories imply that your page covers too many topics and many tags imply that your posts don’t have focus.

DO: Write Short Page and Post Titles

Your page and post titles are critical, not only for SEO but also to grab your reader’s attention. If your SEO plugin is one like Yoast SEO, you can create two titles…one for your readers and one for search engines.

When writing your post/page, you are given a field to input a title. Once published, this title is what I call the public title and is surrounded by <h1> </h1> HTML tags. When Google crawls your website, it looks specifically for <h1> heading and <h2> subheading tags. All WordPress pages and posts titles render with the <h1> element. There is some controversy over how many <h1> elements there should be in one post or page. I side with those who suggest using only one <h1> tag per post. With HTML5 you can have more than one on the page. It depends on how you separate the content. My advice would be to use <h2> or <h3> tags instead of multiple <h1> tags. Using the different sized elements makes your content cleaner and more organized for both the reader and SEO.

Next, keep your titles catchy, not too short, and not too long. Remember, your title is what search engines, like Google, use in the Search Engine Results Page (SERPs). Google typically displays the first 50–60 characters of a title tag. For optimal title length, if you keep your titles under 60 characters, you can expect about 90% of your titles to display correctly. Yoast is an excellent tool for judging the length of your title.

These are just a few ideas to help perfect the SEO for your website. Let me know your thoughts below in the comments section.

Deleting Google Analytics

Clients come and go. There comes the day when you must delete their Google Analytics from your dashboard. It had been a while since I needed to delete any analytics. So, recollecting how to proved to be a little challenging. After trying over and over again, I found the right combination and deleted the account that needed to be removed. It’s not really that hard, but to make things a little easier, I thought I’d post a quick how-to, so you don’t lose time trying to remember, as I did.

To remove Analytics tracking codes from all your web pages or from your app.

  1. Sign in to Google Analytics
  2. Click “Admin” at the lower left of your screen.
  3. In the “Account” column, on the left, use the triangle at the top to bring down the menu to select the account you want to delete.
  4. Also, in the “Account” column, click “Account Settings.”
  5. On the far right, click the button, “Move to Trash Can.”
  6. On the next page, Move Account to Trash Can, click the button, below to “Trash Account.”

You and all users for that account will receive an email stating that “the Google Analytics account “YourWebsite.com (UA-xxxxxxxx)” was moved to the Trash Can by *AdminEmailAddress@yourdomain.com*. It will be permanently deleted in 35 days and cannot be restored after that time.”

That’s all there is to it!

The account will still show up in all your accounts until it is permanently deleted. Google gives us time, in case we need to restore the deleted account.

I hope this helps.

15 Free Google Tools That Will Enhance Your Marketing Strategy

When it comes to anything done on the Internet, Google is king.

It’s the most popular search engine in the world, with a global market share of 89%.

Each day, 3.5 billion searches are performed on Google. That’s more than 1.2 trillion searches annually.

With so many people using Google to search for information online, it’s more important than ever for businesses to understand the Google algorithm. That knowledge will help them use SEO tactics to drive ecommerce sales.

But Google is much more than just a search engine. The Google Play Store is the official app store for all Android devices. It’s developed, owned, and operated by Google. 

Dark modes with CSS

With the introduction of dark mode in macOS, Safari Technology Preview 68 has released a new feature called,prefers-color-scheme which lets us detect whether the user has dark mode enabled with a media query.

That’s right. If this becomes a little bit more supported in other browsers, then we might potentially soon have a way to toggle on night modes with a few lines of CSS!

Recently Mark Otto described how we can start using prefers-color-scheme today in order to create themes that dynamically adjust to the new user setting. And the neat thing about this post is that Mark sort of frames it as an accessibility issue and shows how he uses it on his own website to adjust images so that they’re not too bright for the user:

CSS

@media (prefers-color-scheme: dark) {
  img {
    opacity: .75;
    transition: opacity .5s ease-in-out;
  }
  img:hover {
    opacity: 1;
  }
}

In the code above, Mark detects whether the user has dark mode enabled with the media query and then makes the images darker so that they match a dark background. This reminds me of an excellent post by Marcin Wichary where he explores a similar technique and goes one step further by adding all sorts of filters to make sure they have a much higher contrast.

Andy Clarke also wrote up some thoughts about how to take this fancy new CSS feature and how we might apply a dark theme across our website. He describes how to pick colors so our light/dark themes are consistent in terms of branding and how we might want to use a lighter font-weight for darker backgrounds. He writes:

17 [Advanced] SEO Tips For 2018

Today you’re going to see 17 advanced SEO tips and techniques.

In fact:

These are the same tips that I’ve used to grow my site to 186,081 visitors per month.

Visitors per month

Let’s dive right in.

  1. Use Title Tag Powerups
  2. Stop “Pogosticking”, Get Higher Rankings
  3. Delete Zombie Pages
  4. Do An Industry Study
  5. Use a “Feeler” Email
  6. Optimize Content for Google Hummingbird
  7. Add Text Content to Infographics, Podcasts, and Videos
  8. Give Old Content New Life
  9. Build Backlinks From Speaking Gigs
  10. “The GSC Hack”
  11. Create Linkable Content Around “Shoulder Niches”
  12. Get Links From Sites That Use Your Visual Assets
  13. Create Branded Keywords
  14. Provide “What is X” Information For Definition Keywords
  15. Replace “Published On” Dates with “Last Updated”
  16. Use Google Images to Find Guest Post, Column and Interview Opportunities
  17. Tap Into Google’s Underrated Keyword Research Tool

Helping a Beginner Understand Getting a Website Live

Did you catch this post by Chris Coyier, over at CSS-Tricks.com? I love how he breaks down the various parts of getting your website live! Check it out. I posted the link to the full article, below! Let me know your thoughts!

I got a great email from a fellow named Josh Long the other day. He is, in his words, “relatively new to web design” and was a bit stuck on the concept of getting a site live. I should say that I’m happy to get emails like this an I always read them, but I typically can’t offer tech support over email. If I can respond at all, I normally point people to other community resources.

In this case, it struck me what a perfect moment this is for Josh. He’s a little confused, but he knows enough to be asking a lot of questions and sorting through all this stuff. I figured this was a wonderful opportunity to dig into his questions, hopefully helping him and just maybe helping others in a similar situation.

Here’s one of the original paragraphs Daniel sent me, completely unedited:

I’m relatively new to web design, but I’ve taken a few courses on HTML and CSS and I’ve done a Codecademy course on JavaScript. But, (jumping forward probably quite a while here!) after having fully designed and coded a HTML/CSS/JS website or webpage, I don’t fully understand the full process of going from a local site hosted with mamp/wamp to publishing a public site using wordpress(?) or some other host (is WordPress even a host?!) and also finding a server that’s suitable and some way of hosting images/videos or other content. (If that sounded like I didn’t know what half of those meant, it’s because unfortunately I don’t!.. but I’d really like to!)

Can you sense that enthusiasm? I love it.

We worked together a bit to refine many of his questions for this post, but they are still Josh’s words. Here we go!

Original article published by Chris Coyier. Click the link below to continue reading.

Continue reading article…

Backlinking for Better SERPs

There have been many articles on backlinking over the years. I have heard positive and negative remarks about it. In fact, even today as I do some more fact checking, I found so many regurgitated articles on the Pros & Cons of Backlinking. I understand why a website owner might get confused!

Backlinking is the “link juice for ranking your website with Search Engine Optimization (SEO). It used to be that the more backlinks you had on your site, the higher you rose in the search engine results pages (SERPs). Many website owners purchased links from link brokerages to increase their link juice. 

There’s a problem with this method of backlinking. When Google rolled out the Penguin update back in 2012-2013, things changed. Google’s new Penguin algorithm aimed at decreasing search engine rankings of websites that violated their webmaster guidelines. Google wanted to remove what we know as black-hat SEO techniques that involved artificially increasing the ranking of any web page by manipulating the number of links pointing to each page.

The guiding principle for the Penguin and Panda updates was to penalize websites that were using manipulative techniques to achieve higher rankings. Google’s purpose was to catch excessive spammers. More changes followed between 2013-2015. Each update honed from the last one.

With Google cracking down on black-hat SEO techniques web pages with spammy links and ineffective keywords were penalized by Penguin and knocked down in the SEO rankings.

So, now that we know a little history let’s talk about the benefits of backlinking. Backlinks do still count as organic ranking for Google as they speak to the overall authority of a domain. 

When building a website, the focus for increasing search engine optimization (SEO) has been to add keywords/key phrases that coincided with the content on each page of your website. Of course, you will see controversial opinions on this subject as well, but I feel keywords and key phrases are just as important today as yesteryear. Perhaps in another article, I’ll explain why I think keywords/key phrases are important. One crucial yet overlooked SEO factor is backlinks.

Experts in the industry estimate that backlinking accounts for upwards of 80% of the page ranking weight that search engine algorithms give websites. It stands to reason that if you want to improve the ranking of your business with search engines, you need to cultivate links from other sites that point back to your own. 

In Simple Terms

Let’s discuss what backlinking is first. Google says that backlinks display other web pages that link to your posts. Google gives this example: Suppose Alice writes a blog entry that Bob finds interesting. Bob then goes to his blog and writes a post of his own about it, linking back to Alice’s original post. Now Alice’s post will automatically show that Bob has linked to it, and it will provide a short snippet of his text and a link to his post.

Simply speaking, a backlink is a hyperlink (link) connection between two web pages or websites. Links that connect another site to yours are understandably called backlinks because they point back to your website.

What’s the importance of link building?

Links demonstrate the popularity of a web page or website. Every time a site links to yours, it bumps up your reputation and says that you’re worthy of sharing. As search engines deploy their spiders, and those spiders find a lot of linkages back to your site, the conclusion is that your web pages/site provide quality material and, therefore, deserve the reward of higher rankings.

Ranking algorithms also take into consideration the ranking of the sites that link back to you. For instance, a backlink that comes from a high ranking site counts more than a low ranking site, or a link from a relevant site within your industry, a related business, will rank higher.

How do you start building backlinks to your site?

It’s not enough to just write engaging content, although it helps. Here are some pointers on how to be proactive with link building.

  1. Backlinks should come from relevant sites that publish quality material.
  2. Don’t use “black hat” strategies that search engines don’t condone. Often, this would include paid for linkage. You should never pay for backlinks.
  3. Take your time building backlinks. Proper backlinking takes time. If you build too quickly, it may set off triggers alerting search engines that you are manipulating rankings, and thus, put you in the proverbial penalty box.

One method of finding good backlinks is to check out your competitors’ inbound links. You can do this with tools like HubSpot’s Marketing Grader, Moz Open Site Explorer, or Google Webmaster Tools. Do those sites that link to your competitors’ sites seem to be a good fit with your content? Reach out to them.

  1. Offer to guest post on people’s sites.
  2. If you have something newsworthy, set up a press release.
  3. Social Networking can boost your backlinks.

I read an article some time back that suggested linking back to your site when you leave comments on websites. Be careful here though because not all bloggers or website owners like having links in their comments. You don’t want to come across as a “Spammy Commenter.” As with all things, moderation is best.

Let me clarify. As a moderator of blog post comments, I will look at a link submitted in comments. If the website has something in common with my website or the post that I’ve written, I’ll allow the comment to remain on my site. However, if the link leads to some unusual place like a store or porn site, I remove the comment immediately.

One more thing you can do is to set up a Google Alert to search for your business name. Setting up alerts will allow you to find all unlinked mentions of you or your company. Finding mentions enables you to request your business name is linked back to your website.

 

How to Promote Your Blog and Make it Viral (Infographic)

It’s common to focus all your energy on writing a blog post, and then completely forget to promote it. Write it and let Google do the rest – right?

The great P.T. Barnum once said:

Without promotion, something terrible happens… nothing!

That’s right. Absolutely nothing.

Today’s infographic goes through the step-by-step process on how to promote your blog and make it go viral.

++ Click Image to Enlarge ++

Source: How to Promote Your Blog and Make it Viral (Infographic) by Neil Patel

Clues to Writing High-Converting Newsletters

Do you send newsletters to help drive deals and income for your business?

You’re not the only one. Research shows that newsletters are one of the most effective ways to drive revenue for your business.

Did you know there are many distinctive components necessary to get the best results in your newsletter? If not, you could be passing up a huge opportunity for significant click-throughs to potential sales.

In this post, I’ll show you 6-key components necessary to help increase conversions and drive more traffic and potential income with your newsletter.

What is a newsletter?

A newsletter is an email campaign sent out regularly (i.e. weekly or monthly) to a list of subscribers. A newsletter has one main topic of interest and has links to articles centered on that particular subject.

Here are 6-suggestions for making high-converting newsletters.

Although each newsletter is distinctive, there are effective ways to enhance your newsletter to help boost the number of click-throughs you capture.

  1. Make your Sender’s name familiar.

A familiar sender name and an eye-catching subject line when looking through their email influence people.

One successful tidbit is setting up your newsletter to have a familiar sender’s name that your subscribers know and trust.

If you sign up for a newsletter, what would you expect to see when you received that email? Imagine that you visited a reputable website where an unknown author wrote an article that you found interesting. You subscribe to receive more articles like what you just read. What would you expect to see once you received that newsletter in your inbox? Would you recognize that author’s name or would you remember it by the name of the web site that you visited? How do people remember you?

I subscribe to several newsletters that use this method. WPMU Dev publishes a couple that I enjoy reading.

First, I receive a digest of their blog. The layout of this one has various boxes with images and excerpts of each article. Each excerpt has a link that sends you back to the specific article of interest. I get tons of great advice about WordPress development. Also, I hear about awesome plugins to try.

Another favorite newsletter is called, “The WhiP.” The WhiP curates articles daily and then handpicks links that are unaffiliated and drawn from the WordPress community and wider tech world. The links come from all over. Not just from WPMU Dev’s website. They layout their newsletter with short excerpts introducing the article they want you to read. They produce a link, sometimes two, which take the reader directly to the article or product.

So, when setting up your next newsletter campaign, make a point to use a familiar sender’s name that your subscribers will recognize and anticipate finding in their inbox.

  1. Lay out your newsletter into bite-sized chunks

Did you know that people don’t read newsletters left to right? Research shows that subscribers don’t read newsletters in the same way that they read a book. I know I don’t. People don’t have the time to sit and read long newsletters. Instead, we skim over them looking for something of interest that pops out to us.

Consequently, composing long, text-laden newsletters isn’t the best approach. It defeats your whole purpose of driving traffic to your website or selling your product.

Alternatively, you need to break your newsletter down into small, bite-sized consumable chunks of content.

For example, the WPMU Dev Blog Newsletter uses a card-based design layout to introduce each piece of content. Each ‘card’ separates its content from the others. This method makes it easier for the skimmer to scan your content quickly to find stories or articles of interest.

WPMU Dev Newsletter Layout WPMU Dev Newsletter Layout

So, when setting up your next newsletter campaign, instead of overloading readers with long text-laden content, separate it into easily consumable portions that your readers can rapidly skim over to discover content that interests them.

By setting up your newsletter in this way, it will help draw them in and increase the chances of click-through traffic.

  1. Use groups and dynamic content to customize/personalize your newsletters.

Instead of sending the same material to all your readers, you can break up your list and use dynamic content to show pertinent information and offers to each subscriber or subscriber group.

A retailer like Macy’s or Sears, for example, may find it a better advantage to send dynamic content that is gender specific to their subscriber base. If they know what you’re interested in (i.e. women’s clothing), they could then send newsletters specific to that need or interest.

This method guarantees the content in any one campaign applies to the subscriber and builds the chances that they will use the supplied links to click-through to the website to make a purchase.

So, when setting up your next newsletter campaign, consider the content, and it’s level of importance to each person on your list. Take a stab at utilizing features like dynamic content to display the right stories and product to the right customers.

  1. Include compelling visual aids and images for all content.

Did you know that the average time spent reading a newsletter is less than a minute? The human brain processes images and visual aids 60,000 times faster than text content. So the old saying, “A picture is worth a thousand words” is true! Applying compelling images & visual aids as a part of your newsletter can be an excellent strategy to compel your readers to click-through to your website.

I like Buzz Feed! They are one of the best at using this method. I don’t know about you, but the images and videos used in their articles compel me to follow through to read the articles or watch the videos. I get hungry just reading their food articles.

So, when setting up your next newsletter campaign, make a point to include some high-resolution pictures of the products or services you offer. This strategy will help get your key messages across regardless of the possibility that your reader just skims your newsletter and doesn’t thoroughly read all the content.

  1. Make sure to include benefit-focused headlines and body copy for each article.

The goal is to encourage people to click-through from your newsletter to the offer. Tell your readers exactly what benefit(s) they will get by clicking the link.

The headlines and article copy that follow every part of the content in your newsletter is the ideal place to do this.

A heading and body text should support each section included in your newsletter, which informs your reader of what they will discover by clicking through to the article, service, or product.

So, when setting up your next newsletter campaign for your business, double-check all the content and make sure that it has benefit-focused material that will cause your readers to click-through.

  1. Add a Call-to-Action to each excerpt.

First, what do I mean by a “call-to-action”? A call-to-action is a method of getting your readers to take immediate action by either clicking a graphic file, image, or text to learn more, take a stand, or to visit a web page. If you’re not putting links on your newsletters leading back to your website, you’re doing it wrong!

For every article that you have in your newsletter, you should have some form of clearly visible Call to Action. 

You can decide to do this with either a text link or a big colorful button. Articles that I’ve read on the subject of Calls to Action say that using buttons instead of text links increases your click-through rate. My thought is that having a button draws more attention.

So, when setting up your next newsletter campaign, make a point to add strategically placed Call to Action buttons to catch the reader’s attention.

Newsletters are one of the best ways to stay connected to your readers and draw traffic to your website.

So, when setting up your next newsletter campaign, consider using these tips for the best results possible in your future campaigns.