Debbie Weil is a corporate blogging and social media expert, online marketing consultant, speaker and author of The Corporate Blogging Book (Portfolio). She consults with large companies, CEOs and senior executives on how to create blogs that connect with customers and attract media attention.

Yours for the asking. Click here to download the just-released USC (University of Southern California) Annenberg 105-page report on the digital future. Covers everything from *”What do you miss by not using the Internet” to “Which Web sites are reliable and which are not” to social effects of the Internet and, of course, the Internet at work. Lots of charts and percentages. Much of it just what you’d expect. Some of it rather surprising.
Continue reading “Free download - USC Annenberg’s “Digital Future: Ten Years, Ten Trends””

Forget declining open rates and click-throughs… when I invited Chicago subscribers to a WordBiz roundtable last week, 100% of those who RSVP’d showed up. We crammed into a meeting room provided by B2BWorks.net, a B2B marketing agency with offices in Chicago’s cool River North neighborhood.

We had a lively discussion about email marketing and blogs. Yes, declining open rates for email are a big problem. Along with a corresponding decrease in conversion rates. Re blogs, several attendees expressed concerns about the time it would take to write and maintain a blog. Another topic was RSS feeds: will they provide a new venue for advertisers to push their messages?

Pictured from left to right are: Rickey Gold, Donna Beasley, Fred Faulkner, Debbie Weil, Frieda Curry, Philippe Matthews, Betsy Harman, Brent Brotine, Hilary Marsh and, standing in the doorway, Chris Whalen, B2BWork’s Senior Director of Client Solutions. Behind the camera is Rich Kraneis of The World’s Shortest Excel Book fame (highly recommended, BTW). Rich was a guest expert on my live tutorial, Understanding Online Conversion. You can order the enhanced PDF transcript, Audio CD & Web metrics calculator from this event. Quite apropos re the topic of improving conversion rates from emails or e-newsletters that do get opened. Missing from the photo is Julie Lohmeier of Zacks.com.

Have you heard this one? Thanks to Sean Callahan writing for Crain’s BtoB Online: “How do you say blah, blah, blah on the Internet? The punchline: blog, blog, blog.” Good article about how blogs can help B2B publishers establish a brand.

Paris-based Thomas Sauzedde writes (en francais) about the advantages & disadvantages of publishing e-newsletters vs. publishing via an RSS feed. As he puts it, “Qui va triompher?” (Which will prevail?) He sees a great future for RSS but says it will take a couple of years to be adopted. I agree. This isn’t a new topic but it was fun to run across it in a non-U.S. blog. Read his post (assuming you can read in French). Includes useful links to other sources as well as to FeedBurner’s effort to provide stats on RSS subscribers. Yes, I know I need that little accent thingy under the “c” in francais. I can never remember how to do it.

A fun (& useful) guest article in this week’s issue of WordBiz Report: “3 tips to banish fear of blogging.” It’s penned by information technology consultant Lois C. Ambash, aka the Infomaven. Her advice? Don’t be afraid of the technology. Just plunge in…

A cameraman & a producer came to my office today to film me “blogging” for a segment on the long-running public television show Nightly Business Report. Yup, I was just typing, moving the cursor around, hitting save & publish. But they seemed to find it awfully exciting. Then we sat down for an interview. I stressed that blogging can be an effective marketing strategy for both large corporations and small companies. It’s both an instant publishing tool AND a way to get closer to your customers by speaking to them in a human voice. I’ll let you know what day the segment is going to run. It airs on (U.S.) public TV stations in the early evening.

Intriguing new study by Poynter EyeTrack takes an in-depth look at how people see or read Web pages on news sites. Study notes that only 4 or 5 people out of a thousand click on an Internet ad. But up to 82% will click on a text-only ad. You can read the whole study on the EyeTrack III site. Covers home page design, headline & font size, navigation, article layout, etc. Applicable to any content-rich site.

I worked with the clever folks at KISS Computing for a year or so. They’re responsible for the current design of my site. Here’s a back issue of their e-newsletter with a detailed, step-by-step explanation of how to compute the profitability of your site, assuming you are selling digital or tangible products. If you prefer, you can download a one-page sheet on how to make the computation. The number you want to get to is what KISS calls your BECAC (Break Even Customer Acquisition Cost). You will need to know the total number of unique visitors to your site as well as the total number of sales (and average dollar amount). Plug in your own numbers and give it a go…

Might not be as obvious as you think. Particularly if you’re not only linking to but excerpting liberally from content on other sites. And that content, presumably, is copyrighted. Interesting article titled “Who owns your blog?” by Cheryl Gidley in today’s iMedia Connection. Gidley describes herself as a former senior marketing executive for a division of GE Capital. I think she’s being a bit naive. This problem is not confined to blogs. It’s the same thing as the controversy over “deep linking.” It’s part of the bigger problem of digital rights and paid content. If everything is freely available, it’s hard not to link to it… or quote from it. As Cheryl is now an independent consultant, I would urge her to insist on a bio blurb at the end of all her articles. This should include links back to her site, newsletter sign up, bio, etc. That way she always benefits as her article(s) are passed around virally.

Great article by Nick Usborne on why long copy sales letters work on the Web. He articulately explains the difference between two types of “long copy” Web pages. Approach #1: Selling with hype and extravagant claims related to instant riches, happiness and success. Somehow, many of us want to believe this stuff… and so in fact it does sell. At least once. But Nick doesn’t recommend this style (nor do I). Approach #2: Copy that sells with a distinctive, credible and authoritative voice. He uses Bill Bonner of Agora Publishing as an example. Here’s a Bill Bonner long copy sales letter. This style is tried and proven. It takes a page right out of the best direct response mail techniques. And builds relationships with repeat customers. Not surprisingly, Nick’s article on his site is… long but an effortless read.