Writeyness :: Info to snack on

Every web business should collect the email addresses of its visitors. However, not every website needs to send out a monthly email newsletter. Although it is possible to find articles of interest in pretty much any subject, if you sell janitorial supplies, for example, your target market may not necessarily welcome a monthly missive on toilet cleaners and mops.

However, an occasional email “blast” to your subscribers is always a good idea. All you need is a reason for mailing… a summer sale, an imminent price increase, a damaged stock blow out, a limited edition release.

A client of mine learned the power of an email blast like this when he decided to raise the price of his ebook, and emailed his list to tell them the bad news. The good news for him arrived in the form of a load of sales from a group of people who may not otherwise have returned to his site — simply because they hadn’t been given a reason to.

After all, people forget and move on. Email is your way to remind them and encourage them to return to your site. This client was kicking himself that he hadn’t emailed his list for several months. Now he looks for an opportunity every month or so.

All you need is an up-to-date, clean subscriber list, a compelling seling point and engaging copy.

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An essential strategy when marketing a business online — no matter how big or small — is using email to keep in contact with your visitors. It commonly takes around eight contacts with a prospect before that person feels comfortable enough to buy from you. And the best way to maintain this contact is through email.

However, you first need to collect the email addresses of people who visit your site. That’s best done by offering them something in return. By far and away the best, and most cost-effective, incentive is to offer free information in the form of an informative white paper, an instructive email course or an ebook containing information relevant to your target audience.

Not only does this act as an incentive for people to give you their email address, but the information you give away can be designed to show off your experience, build your credibility and indirectly promote your services.

All you need to do is set up a simple web form, upload the file to your server and provide your visitors with the download link.

To see how this strategy works, feel free to download my free ebook “10 things your website must do: A checklist for doing business on the Internet”.

I’ve written a number of these types of opt-in offers for clients, ranging from a two page report to a 20 page ebook. The length isn’t important — it’s the information that counts. Make it valuable to your target audience and they’ll thank you for it. Everyone I know who uses this strategy raves about it.

I got an email from Amazon the other day. Amazon is, of course, the bee’s knees when it comes to identifying what individual customers are interested in, and using that data to suggest products to them.

In this email, they informed me that “Night Gardener” by George Pelecanos was now out in paperback, and they thought I’d be interested. I was, and I logged on and bought it.

I’m not alone in doing this. A large percentage of Internet users have bought something as a result of an email — 82% according to Postfuture, with 32% having made an immediate purchase. These figures are certainly big enough to make emailing your subscribers with relevant information and offers very worthwhile indeed.

(By the way, if you like hard-boiled crime fiction, filled with characters who ooze booze, angst, one-liners and bodily fluids in equal measures, as they either commit or solve crimes in the seedy underbelly of a teeming city (in this case Washington DC), then you should give George Pelecanos a try. It’s great stuff.)

To get yer free 16-page ebook, click here…

To find out how to create an opt-in offer or other content for your customers and website visitors, click here…

This is the blog of Tincan Communications, a company that provides copywriting and content services for small businesses, sole traders, large companies and agencies — for both online and offline communications and publications. I’m the senior writer, well, the only writer just now, although I do involve other writers — and designers — on a project-by-project basis.

This blog will feature news and tips on content and copywriting, samples of writing I like, any Internet writing and marketing tools I come across and can recommend, book and software reviews, and — in true “blogger” style — any other “writeyness” that springs to mind.

Feel free to comment on anything that sparks your interest or drop me a line at rob at tincancommunications dot com. Comments are moderated to avoid spam etc, but they’ll appear reasonably quickly.

People make up words online all the time. “Google,” the verb, has just entered the dictionary. “Blog” is another. “Podcast” another still. And now… “writeyness”!

Well, not really. “Writeyness” isn’t a word. Not yet anyway. But if Stephen Colbert’s “truthiness” can be a word, so can “writeyness”.

I can’t take credit for it. That has to go to the sinisterly-named “mr_wombat” who used it in the page that came top of the 17 results that turned up when I googled “writeyness.”

However, it seemed like as good a name as any for a blog like this, better than The Tincan Communications Blog anyhow. So I may as well give it a definition:

I would describe “writeyness” as follows:

Noun: Writeyness

Writeyness can be seen as random thoughts and views typed into the Internet to be read later by persons unknown — mostly “infosnackers”.

For example, “Did you read Wendy’s latest blog post – it was a great piece of writeyness?” Or, “I came down with a serious bout of writeyness last night, and wrote 104 blog posts.”

Adjective: Writey

People feeling writey might turn to Writely to ease their writeyness. For example, “Bring me my laptop — I’m feeling writey.”

In pre-Internet days, the main outlets for people overcome by writeyness would be newspaper columnists, people who wrote letters to newspapers, fanzine publishers, and journal writers (or at least, journal writers who allowed people to read their entries, not the ones that wrote in mysterious books with a lock on them like your little sister used to. Well, like my little sister used to.)

These days, when there is more self-published content around than ever before thanks to the Web, writeyness is everywhere. But mostly in blogs. Including this one, judging by the length of this post.