The creation of an effective email newsletter requires a very specific form of writing moxie and the mastery of a structure which varies considerably from your garden variety blog post.

Promotional vs. informative

The first determination which must be made is what your readers want to read. In order to address this situation you might need to rewind your entire creative process back to Square One and re-determine what the actual goal of your email newsletter is in the first place. Of course you’re trying to drive more traffic to your blog, but are you doing it in a promotional or an informative manner? The two approaches can translate in very distinct results.

Depending on your email subscribing audience they may be more responsive to a form of mini-blog which presents ancillary or even totally separate information than what you are currently featuring on your formal blog.

However, some types of readers would rather receive the information you provide on your blog itself and may be confused or irritated by having to resort to two separate channels to receive “the full picture.” You can certainly rely on your knowledge of the sector, but by far the more accurate manner to make this determination is by extensively testing both approaches to see which one provides the better conversion rate.

Short & punchy

Once you have the overall approach set, it’s time to simplify. Most bloggers craft email newsletters that are way too long, complex, convoluted, and detailed to be effective. The best email newsletters feature short, punchy paragraphs, a wealth of bullet lists, and links that not only lead back to your blog, but to other pages that your readers could find of interest.

There is usually no need to cram in everything but the kitchen sink into your email newsletters, as general summaries with links back to your blog for the meat of the matter is usually all that is required. If you find yourself composing voluminous tomes for your email newsletter content that requires repeated scrolling by the reader, you should channel that time and energy into your blog itself.

Chat, don’t lecture

Your email subscriber is a regular person, not a member of a peer-review scientific journal committee. That equates into your composing your email newsletter in the style of a one on one conversation not a post-graduate thesis. You can reserve the heavy lifting of facts and figures for your blog, as an email newsletter is best written in the way that you would chat with them, not lecture them.

Reward your reader for having the trust and confidence in you to sign up for your email newsletter and then carrying through to actually opening and reading the emails they receive by providing them content that is friendly, approachable, and conversational.

Avoid insider-speak

Jargon is one of the greatest enemies of a successful email newsletter campaign. Even though you may operate in an extremely technical industry, you should always aim the readership comprehension of your email newsletter writing at a reasonable eighth grade education level.

Take whatever steps are necessary to avoid writing email newsletters that require extensive technical footnotes, or worse yet read like the Hollywood trade magazine Variety where different movie genres are described in insider lingo as laffers (comedies), mellers (melodramas), oaters (Westerns), or chopsocky (martial arts). Excessive jargon or technicalese can lead to misunderstanding which can alienate a large part of your audience.

You should always place yourself in the position of your subscriber when writing an email newsletter. If you were subscribing to your blog, what would you react to most favorably? If you find that the way you are crafting your email campaign now is actually responsible for disaffecting your subscribers, it’s time that you made a change… while you still have subscribers left!

Hal Licino is a successful author, award-winning freelance writer, and frequent contributor to a blog hosted by Benchmark Email, an email marketing service for small businesses. He also writes a weekly column for Daily Blog Tips.

There are two types of submissions I discard right away, though, without even taking a look. I also consider those the two biggest mistakes you can make while trying to guest post on some blog. They are:

1. Not including the name of the blog owner

If by opening your email I see something like “Dear Sir” or “Dear Blog Owner” I’ll send it to the trash bin immediately. Why? because it tells me that this is a generic guest post offer, and that you probably sent the same post to dozens of other blogs.

The least you can do is to visit the site where you want to guest post and to discover the name of the owner.

2. Not including the post itself

Many of the guest post emails I receive are only asking if I would be interested in having a guest post written. Something like this:

Dear Daniel,

I have been your blog for a long time, and I was wondering if you would be interested in having me to write a guest post for you. I was thinking to write something about Facebook marketing or email marketing.

Please let me know and we’ll get moving.

Thanks,
John Doe

My thoughts when I see such emails: “How on earth can I know if I would be interested in having your guest post if I don’t know how you write or what ideas you have?”.

Sometimes the person will include the title of the guest post. Same deal. How can I approve or reject a guest post just by looking at the title?

Sure, I could reply explaining this to the person, but why waste my time?

This post is just gonna give you the facts; no B.S. about “taking charge” of your blog’s success, just stuff you need to get done to rock it in 2012.

So, how about you stop reading the intro and start taking notes, and after that, don’t go check Twitter, start implementing them right now!

1.) Take Your Email List Seriously

It’s time to start taking your email list seriously, because building it is the “do or die” component of your blog that simply cannot be ignored.

By the way, if you haven’t started an email list for your blog, I can personally call you up and yell at you for motivation if needed .

First things first, nailing the right spots for opt-in forms.

As covered in this post on the AWeber blog, there are 3 main spots where opt-in forms are essential and can really be considered not optional, and they are:

1. Sidebar opt-in
2. End of post opt-in
3. Opt-ins on important pages (about me, etc.)

Two “bonus” places I would greatly consider are the above the fold feature box (like I have on my site) and the dedicated subscription page (which also lists other ways to subscribe, such as via RSS).

The other two things you need to do are:

1. Try new email collection techniques
2. Make your newsletter worth subscribing too

As for the first one, I’ve covered 9 clever email conversion techniques on my own site and 3 ways to increase email conversions here on DailyBlogTips.

As for the second, you need to start creating newsletter exclusive content just for subscribers, in the form of free guides hosted on your site or elsewhere (such as Scribd) or just with plain text emails that provide a lot of value.

Your email list is everything, time to make it count.

2.) Branch Out to New Content Mediums

Time to stop with the boring text posts all the time.

Not that there’s anything wrong with the classic blog article (you’re reading one now!), but in 2012 you need to embrace the change in how people interact with content, and that means getting involved with audio and video.

This is the year where you need to start “Being Everywhere”, and this starts with learning the benefits of using video and also how to start a podcast.

I wrote a post hear on DBT specifically about how to increase your blog traffic with SlideShare, and I have a quick update: I was able to make the SlideShare homepage, get over 18,000+ views on my presentation, and attract over 2000 unique visitors to my blog!

But I’m not hear to talk about my successes, I’m here to prove a point: new content mediums work, and you are missing out on tons of traffic if you stick to your regular old text posts.

It’s time to start engaging in:

1. Video
2. Podcasts
3. Slideshows
4. Infographics
5. Unique images
6. PDF & documents (guides)
7. Webinars

All of these forms of content not only help you stand out, they will also help you attract more visitors and become known as the blogger who dominants all content forms in your niche.

So get on it .

3.) Start Guest Blogging With Purpose

No more of the “spray and pray” strategy of guest blogging.

In my post on creating a funnel with your guest posts, I talk about how a blind guest post (with no real purpose), while it might bring over some traffic/subscribers, is far from being as effective as a guest post that relies on “priming” readers for something on your blog.

Your goal as a guest blogger should be as follows:

1. Create amazing content (that’s a given, “price of admission” as it were)
2. Prime readers for something on your site (we’ll get into that in a minute)
3. Stand out from other guest bloggers

We’re not going to go over how to create awesome content, there’s plenty of info on that.

As for priming readers, as I stated in my post above, you need to write a guest post that does one of the following things:

• Relates to your unique selling proposition
• Relates to your opt-in freebie (e-Book or otherwise)
• Relates to whatever you are selling

The reason you need to do this is because people who have read your post all the way through will be interested in learning more (since they obviously enjoyed the topic of your post).

This is why ‘priming’ work so well, after reading an article of yours about “taxes” on a personal development site, they head over to your blog where you write about taxes and, guess what, have a free e-Book on how to get your taxes done fast.

They’ve been primed by the guest post to your specific topic/niche, and now your blog caters to that topic.

I guarantee you’ll see more sign-ups to your list, try it out and if it doesn’t work, I encourage you to visit my blog and leave me an angry comment .

4.) Stop Wasting Time on Social Media

Okay, before you draw out the fire and pitchforks, hear me out…

As tremendous of a resource as social media can be for creating connections, it pales in comparison when it comes to networking influential people in your niche.

That’s right, email is the greatest “social network” of all.

Staying in touch with people who blog about the same or similar topics as you as the obvious benefit that they will likely support your new posts a projects, sharing them to a whole new audience for you.

Reciprocation generally leads to people willing to help you out back, this is where social media can come in handy (sharing the work of others on Twitter will usually lead to them doing the same).

However, email is where all of the magic happens: guest post submissions, project discussions, debates & private chats, interviews, collaborations, all of the interesting things about your business are going down via email, with social media as the ever present “face” or icebreaker for new contacts & business relationships.

Email is also how you can “chase” traffic rather than sitting around and waiting for it: don’t spam, but for new posts that really push buttons, shoot an email to a few influential people who might be interested in your content, and ask them kindly if they would mind sharing it to their audience (stating plainly that you think their readers would enjoy it).

You’d be surprised at how much a polite email can get done when sent to the right people.

5.) Optimize Your Site Design & Speed

If you recall from this research study on web design, it’s scary how much your site design can effect people’s perception of the quality of your content (and how trustworthy you are)… before they even read any of it!

Did you also know that you only have an average of a few seconds (that’s single digits) to capture someone’s attention before they “bounce” off of your site?

Point is: site design and site speed matter, a lot, and in 2012 it’s time for you to start taking them seriously.

When it comes to site design, you need to think about the end goal of your site: are you trying to get email subscribers? Are you trying to get affiliate sales? Are you hoping people will buy your products?

If you are the typical blog, you are going to want to focus on building your list, and if that’s the case, you need to focus on having a clean, uncluttered site with plenty of reading room and an emphasis on opt-in forms.

Not those annoying opt-in forms that won’t go away when clicked, but natural forms at prime locations, as discussed in section #1.

You are also going to want an easy to navigate site: don’t have a ton of options on your navigation menu, don’t have a search field unless absolutely necessary, and don’t include useless links in your sidebar and other sections of your site (example: get rid of links to categories under your post’s description).

When it comes to speeding up a WordPress blog, there are a few things that will always apply to your site’s speed:

1. Choose a good host (cheap is fine at first, but good hosting matters if you want to grow)
2. Keep your homepage simple and clean (KISS – Keep it simple, stupid!)
3. Optimize images automatically with WP SmushIt
4. Optimize your database with WP-Optimize
5. Consider using a plugin that utilizes LazyLoad
6. Pick a good CDN service and host files there (I suggest MaxCDN)
7. Turn off non-essentials (like pingbacks/trackbacks, default Gravatar images, deleting useless plugins, etc.)
8. [Advanced] Replace PHP with static HTML where you are able (check out this great post on how to do just that)

Lastly, if you are running a WordPress site without running a caching plugin, you are doing things wrong, so make sure you have either WP Super Cache or W3 Total Cache installed right this instant! (I like W3 better, and integrated with CloudFlare)

6.) Create Content With Deliberate Practice

In a recent post of mine of the psychology behind a successful blog, I noted a research study that aimed to address why certain violinists went on to become world reknowned musicans, and why others didn’t (even though they were still talented at the violin).

Their findings?

It was due to the amount of deliberate practice that the world class students engaged in, not the amount of practice.

The thing was, the world class students had a tendency to practice in long, deliberate sessions were they worked on addressing their weakpoints and refining their strong points, ie, practice with a purpose.

This is akin to doing drills in athletics, rather than just “shooting the ball around”.

If you hope to create a blog that gets noticed and makes a difference, you need to take on this mindset when you write.

Write for your blog (and for your guest posts) when you really have time to sit and focus, when you have time to concentrate on creating a post that accomplishes what you set out to do from the very beginning, no matter how many edits and rewrites it takes to do it.

A lackluster effort will produce lackluster results, so if you want to become known for having word-class content, practice like a world-class blogger.

Gregory Ciotti writes about WordPress and online marketing at Sparring Mind (make sure to check it out). He also writers a weekly column for Daily Blog Tips.

Obviously it’s not things like Twitter or Facebook, and even videos on YouTube are getting utilized by more and more bloggers each day.

Want to know the biggest sleeping giant of content marketing platforms?

SlideShare!

That’s right, the platform that allows you to upload slideshow presentations…

Wait A Minute… Slideshows?

Yes.

You might be wondering how slideshows could possibly be considered “untapped” (considering their age), but let me tell you, if there is one platform that most bloggers are missing out on, it’s SlideShare.

SlideShare allows you to upload and “share” PowerPoint (or other styles) of slideshows, either on your own site or others.

Largely, SlideShare offers the same benefits of YouTube in that it can bring traffic to your site from the large amount of users on SlideShare.

What kind of traffic are we talking about, with just a simple slideshow presentation?

Well, on the SlideShare homepage right now (undered the “featured” section), I see a 15-slide presentation that as already garnered over 30,000 views!

Imagine getting that many eyeballs on your content, all for a simple (but informative) 15 slides! (Here’s the presentation in question, notice it’s only a few high quality images with simple text on top)

But… how does content marketing on SlideShare really work?

Content Marketing on SlideShare

In order to drive this point home, I thought it would be silly to describe the process in text only.

After all, I’m about to highlight the benefits of creating slideshows, so why not tell you about smart marketing on SlideShare… in a SlideShare presentation!

Too small to read? See the full-sized version here.

As I’ll get into, you’ll notice a few key elements about my slideshow presentation above:

1. It’s quick and to the point (11 slides, 3 lines of text at max)
2. It’s visual (images obviously do well on slides, always include them!)
3. It’s clean (SlideShare degrades image quality a bit, but I used a clean design to make it easily read and browsed)

However, there are some other great benefits I’d like to elaborate on in this post that I didn’t include in the slide.

More Benefits of SlideShare

SlideShare is really the ‘YouTube for PowerPoint presentations’, allowing you to embed and share presentations anywhere on the web.

Given that these two mediums are so closely related, their benefits are roughly the same:

• More traffic to your blog from the site they are hosted on (in the same way YouTube can send you more traffic from your videos, so can SlideShare)
• Interesting media format that is great for readers (using video and slides adds a much needed visual element and keeps your content fresh)
• Embedding your SlideShare content makes it easy to get more views (create content once on SlideShare, and it can be embedded anywhere, and by anyone. This leads to more views from other people embedding your content, something they can’t do with text)

For instance, all of you awesome DailyBlogTips readers are now probably checking out my slideshow that I’ve included in this post.

I wouldn’t have been able to “embed” any content from my blog into the post for more views, but I can embed both videos and slideshows!

The great thing about SlideShare is, if you aren’t comfortable with video just yet, it offers a far simpler way to create new forms of content on a small budget and with minimal time (although a great slideshow still requires work!)

Beating the Crowd

SlideShare has been called the “quiet giant of content marketing”, which means if you want to take action on utilizing this service, the time is now.

In the same way that early YouTube users learned to effectively utilize the service to grow their brands, so too can you hop aboard the SlideShare train before it gets too crowded.

Building your brand on a service is much easier in the early stages, and while SlideShare certainly isn’t “new”, it definitely isn’t as crowded as places like YouTube, and content creation for it is far easier.

It also gives you a chance to stand out with amazing content: if you have any design skills, you can make a BIG splash on SlideShare, as many presentations are very basic.

While the world hops from social network to social network, you can get to work on evergreen content that will send you traffic for as long as it’s uploaded (just like YouTube).

Last but not least, SlideShare allows you to create content that not only draws visitors from the site, but can also drive traffic from SEO.

Given the sites high authority presence, creating presentations that rank for keywords can be much easier than ranking a post on your blog.

You can also create presentations a lot faster than 3000+ word blog posts, so as long as you are providing a lot of quality, you can grow you SlideShare views with SEO along with the embedding feature, letting your presentations have an impact that far outreaches their presence on your site and on SlideShare.

Don’t be fooled: PowerPoint presentations are still in style, you just have to utilize them the smart way with SlideShare and content marketing!

Gregory Ciotti writes about WordPress and online marketing at Sparring Mind (make sure to check it out). He also writers a weekly column for Daily Blog Tips.

What is it? Retargeting is the process of serving ads to past visitors of your website. As a website owner, you can put a little snippet of Javascript on your website that anonymously drops a tag in each visitor’s browser. Within an ad network, you can then bid to show ads to all of your past visitors.

For example, if you sell shoes online, you can tag everyone that visited your website, as well as everyone that has purchased shoes. You can then choose to only show ads to people who have visited your site in the last 7-days and who haven’t yet made a purchase.

As an advertiser, this one of the most targeted forms of advertising. You know that all of these people are in-market for shoes. Because these ads are hyper targeted, advertisers often bid two or three times more per click to serve ads to these people than they would via contextual ads.

So How Do You Make Money with Retargeting as a Blogger?

If you are running ad network placements on your blog, chances are, your site is already filled with retargeting ads. In almost all cases, this is a good thing. Ad networks are experts at optimizing your effective CPMs. If a retargeting ad is generating higher clickthrough rates than contextually targeted ads, then the ad network will automatically show more retargeting ads. This will bring up your effective CPM.

If you want to boost your revenue from retargeting, make sure to include both text and image ads are enabled on your site. Most retargeting advertisers will run both text and image ads, so you want to be prepared to be able to show more retargeting ads in the event that these types of ads generate the highest clickthrough rates.

Secondly, consider attracting more US traffic. Retargeting is particularly popular in the US, and many advertisers in the US are trying to increase their retargeting spend, and the only way to do this is to bid more per click, which increases the retargeting ad revenue per click even higher.

Other Ways to Use Retargeting

There are all kinds of nifty tricks you can use to build blog awareness while paying next to nothing.

For starters, with retargeting on AdWords, you only pay per click, so even if you’re paying for one or two clicks per day, you can still generate thousands of free banner impressions in the process.

While building blog awareness, consider highlighting your Twitter account, Facebook fan page, or newsletter. Often, people won’t click on your ad, but instead, navigate directly to your presence on another site.

You can also do cool stuff like promote your advertising opportunities only to people who have visited your advertising information page. Similarly, you can promote eBooks or other paid product to your past visitors.

When retargeting your own traffic, clickthrough rates tend to be abnormally high, keeping your cost per click down, making these campaigns highly likely to generate a positive ROI.

About the Author: Alex Holmes is the co-author of The Hidden Audience, a practical guide to retargeting. He also runs a retargeting ad network called Y Audience.