I’ve recently attended a great webinar where I learned a lot about newsletter trends for 2010 and beyond. So I thought I’d share my learning with you and here are some points that you can implement now to get more business throughout the rest of 2010!

Testing is important

Use your open and click rates to determine the potential strengths and weaknesses of your own campaigns. From the results you can identify areas to test to improve performance. Try split-testing subject lines, FROM name, newsletter title. Research and surveys show that email marketing spend is expected to grow and expand to $2 billion in the US by 2014. The other increase in Marketers’ budgets was in Social Media. This means that if you are not using newsletters yet – don’t miss a chance to get started before it’s no longer a “purple cow” of marketing. continue

Guest post by Barry James, Angel Revolutions.

Are newsletters a waste of time? Yes and no!

But if they take too much time to write and too much time to read then they do just waste everyone’s time.

The pace of life is such these days that it’s difficult to find the time to read a full newsletter – even if most of it is interesting. (Let’s face it the ‘filler’ articles that make up the bulk rarely are).

How much more difficult to find the time to write the stuff – especially if hardly anyone’s going to read it! continue

Facebook has more than 400 million active users. Recently it reported more traffic than Google Search. Most of Facebook users are 18-37 – adults with disposable income to spend.

That’s why advertising on Facebook presents a fabulous business opportunity. You can drive traffic to your website, connect with a huge community of your target customers, promote your services, products and special offers. What’s more – Facebook offers very cost-effective advertising opportunity through its own pay-per-click ads. However you can do it for free by just creating a business page or a group.

Pay-per-click advertising

Facebook allows businesses to purchase image and text-based ads that can be targeted to a specific demographic based on age, location, gender, marital status, interests and more. Therefore a luxury wedding planner in King’s Lynn can target women who are 25-40, engaged, within 20 miles from King’s Lynn and are college graduates. It’s impossible to achieve such targeting with Google AdWords as all you can specify is someone’s location.

Ads are charged on a cost per click (CPC) or cost per mille (or 1,000 impressions, CPM) basis. You can set up a daily budget and a bid per click or impressions. The minimum daily budget is $1. Facebook will show a suggested bid range displaying what other advertisers targeting your demographic are paying. To get good results you’ll need to bid somewhere in the middle of the suggested range. continue

Some people are wondering if Twitter is more for fun and therefore is not suitable as a business tool. Or whether it’s just too full of spam and no one ever reading each other’s comments or messages.

Well, I’d say that Twitter is a bit of both.

It’s like a big party, where you can have fun, make friends and catch up with old connections. But at the same time meet new clients or strategic partners, get referred or make referrals for others. The key is to use Twitter appropriately. continue

I’ve come across a lot of business owners who are not sure why they should be on LinkedIn. “Is it just another social network?” “Why should I have my profile there and spend time keeping it up to date?” Or even – “It’s not going to work anyway so why bother…”

Why bother indeed – with well over 50 million users all over the world, the absolute majority of who are business professionals (not kids or teens like you may assume about Facebook or MySpace) – why would a business owner not want to be part of such network? If you are still wondering how exactly it works, here’s a short video that will explain the basics:

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