Quick post today for those of you who are running blogs yourselves.

(Not yet using a blog to grow your business? Learn more about how blogging and email marketing go hand-in-hand.)

Today I came across a list of 16 ways to expand your blog’s reach.

I’m particularly fond of strategy #6 Establish an Email Newsletter:

Newsletters are great for monetization and are an easy way to keep certain readers (those not familiar with RSS) close to your weblog. When combined with landing pages, they work better alongside PPC advertising when it comes to capturing leads.

but the author lists plenty of other good ideas, too. Definitely worth a read.

Want to learn more about blogs? Check out the recording of our live video seminar on business blogging.

Between our blog, knowledge base, and live seminars, we offer an abudance of information covering a wide range of email best practices from different angles and through different mediums.

The depth and detail of these resources is expansive, and we’re continuously adding to them.

As much as we’d love to have each and every reader browse through it all, there’s so much information published that even now, it wouldn’t be possible to get through it all in an afternoon or possibly even a day.

If that were our only option, we might consider putting a hold on publishing new information, focusing on organizing and pushing the older information while it’s relevant. Fortunately, it isn’t…

Efficiently Leveraging Information

Like we preach in these resources, information needs to be provided in a consumable way for prospects, customers, or anyone who finds it if it is to be effective to promote the goals of our business.

Often times, this is where technologies like email and RSS come into play, so that information can be pushed to subscribers in “digestible bits” they can easily consume.

That’s why we offer both email and rss subscriptions to our blog and why, as an email service, we provide an rss to email feature for our customers.

A Brief Guide to Email Best Practices

So, pushing information over time is beneficial, especially when detail and depth are indispensible, as is often the case when we’re trying to educate our audiences.

But sometimes a resource summing up and abstracting the most important pieces of a larger whole is useful, especially for newcomers who may feel overwhelmed by an abundance of starting points.

A new article in our Knowledge Base collects some of the best and most important email marketing practices we’ve been writing and talking about for years.

  Read the Email Marketing Best Practices article

New Years is just a few days away, so it’s a great time to make some resolutions about our email campaigns.

Use this article to focus on what’s most important for your campaigns.

Little known fact: there’s an RSS feed available for the Knowledge Base that provides updates on new articles as they are published.

Hard as it is for many of us to believe, 2008 is right around the corner, and we may be thinking of some of those annual New Years resolutions we make and would like to keep.

These resolutions could provide a timely opportunity for our businesses — a kick in the butt to move some ideas sitting on the back burner up to the front where we can act on them.

This year, improving our email marketing campaigns could be one of the best things we can do for businesses, so let’s take a look at a few achievable goals we can work on.

Practical Goals for the New Year

Get Started!

Still sitting on the fence in 2007, procrastinating or waiting for the right time or circumstance to jump into email marketing or start a new campaign?

Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. It doesn’t take much to set up a campaign that clearly benefits the bottom line and the long term legacy of your business.

Hop off the fence and make new (or more) waves for your business in 2008.

Get Serious About Deliverability

We frequently see businesses making simple, preventable mistakes that knock their messages off course on their path to the inbox.

Start the new year with a brief review of email deliverability best practices and help ensure your messages are reaching your subscribers.

Stay on Schedule with Messages

Waiting too long between messages and erratic scheduling are two of the most common ways email marketers lose their subscribers’ attention and interest.

Review your message scheduling from 2007 and make sure it’s on par with what expectations you’ve set for yourself and subscribers moving forward.

Optimize Your Opt-In Forms

Is your email sign up accessible and clearly seen as a useful resources to visitors? Do you have your forms placed prominently on any of the pages visitors may land on?

Carefully review your website and forms and consider making some changes to see a boost in new subscribers.

Target Your Subscribers Better

The more we know about our subscribers, the better we can target them with information they will find valuable and timely.

Consider tactics like tracking clicks and opens, soliciting feedback, and integrating with a web analytics package to gather information. Then, form some conclusions and split test different strategies to see what works best.

My Resolution for this Year

One of the major goals I have for 2008 is to consider better ways to get the free resources we offer out there and used amongst customers and others interested in email marketing.

I’ve resolved to focus on exploring ways to integrate our email and other channels better to maximize the quality and number of touch points we have with people who are interested and could benefit from these resources.

What Do You Have Planned?

What are some of your resolutions for improving the marketing of your business next year? Please join the discussion in the comments.

Here’s wishing you a prosperous 2008!

Our Education Team is here to provide free marketing resources such as this blog, our Knowledge Base, and our live seminars.

Besides us, here at AWeber’s offices there is also our Customer Solutions team, available to solve problems and offer advice, and our Development Team, the geeks (as we so affectionately call them) who power an evolving feature set and who we owe credit for keeping things running smoothly.

But isn’t there a piece missing? Where is the team of hawkish marketers sealing deals then taking names (and credit card numbers)?

Really? No Sales Team?

That’s right — we don’t have a sales team. OK, so if you dial us up on the phone, you will find an option to talk to “Sales”. But in doing so, you will be connected to the same people who provide solutions to our customers.

We put them on the phone because they know of the ins and outs of how to best use our service to engage and connect with subscribers. We think that because of that, they are most qualified to understand the position and needs of those new to email marketing and/or our service, and they don’t receive commissions or push sales for sake of sales.

We’re Not Bragging … and That’s the Point

Now, my point is not to say, “Our model is so lucrative and flawless that we attract business — it just comes to us!”.

By focusing our communications on educating and providing real solutions […] we think we’re establishing the types of mutually beneficial relationships that generate lifelong customers

In fact, we work hard to position our business online and encourage word of mouth marketing, including through our affiliate partnership, which our customers and others tend to market our service to other businesses who could use really use email marketing.

What I am saying is that by focusing our communications on educating and providing real solutions to our prospects and customers, rather than an endless onslaught of hype and product pitching with unrealistic claims, we think we’re establishing the types of mutually beneficial relationships that generate lifelong customers who tell their friends about our service.

And this is an equation for effective marketing that many businesses (but still too few) are using.

Preaching What We Practice

One thing that’s neat about my job is that I get to share with business owners tips and advice that we use for our own business, and we’re happy to include our marketing as an evolving case study, informing you of what works well and cautioning on what doesn’t.

We have seen success with focusing our communications (including email) on providing value to our audience, and frequently tell our readers, viewers, and listeners to do the same with their email campaigns.

Today, think of ways to emphasize providing value within your own marketing plan.

So, where are these free resources?

Well, you’re looking at one now on our blog, and you can sign up to get free advice straight to your inbox.

And don’t forget the other completely free resources available to you:

Receive Blog Updates by Email

Browse or Search Our Knowledge Base

Join Us For a Live Seminar

You’ve stuck to a regular schedule for posting to your blog or writing email messages. People have come to depend on your wise words of worthwhile advice and information.

You don’t want to let them down and risk the growth of your readership and business!

Despite this pressure, or sometimes because of it, we’re all liable at one time or another to sit down at our desk desks, open a new message or post , crack our fingers, rest them on the keys, then … nothing. We draw a blank.

How frustrating! But fortunately, we do have options.

Sometimes we have to wonder what causes a subscriber to delete our messages instead of reading them. Maybe they don’t connect with the reader’s interests. Or, maybe they’ve gone with a competitor and just haven’t unsubscribed yet.

There are several reasons we can guess at, but few are more troublesome than the idea of the subscriber simply not recognizing the sender or the fact that they’d requested information in the first place.

It’s frustrating, and it seems to happen all to commonly. Fortunately, it’s easily preventable. Let’s take at easy-to-implement ways to ensure your subscribers remember you and their subscription to your campaigns.

To achieve the best results we can with email marketing, it is imperative that we write both to and for our audience. In order to do that, we need to recognize that each of our subscribers is unique, often in significant ways.

If we are mindful of this, we can better:

• Write compelling content
• Segment our campaigns
• Write compelling content

Ultimately, we would do better to constantly put ourselves in the shoes of our subscribers when considering these factors. Let’s take a look at three examples of what I mean by this.

During yesterday’s Workshop/Q&A Webinar, Karen asked a great question:

We commonly get this question from people who are concerned that putting a signup form on their site will be difficult, or feel that in order to maximize response, they need to make significant changes to the appearance of the form.

Listen to Marc’s and my take on this, and then let us know what you think.

From time to time comments on the blog are worth discussing with everyone in a new post.

During a recent critique of a post-purchase marketing email, Phyllis asked:

She’s certainly not alone in asking this. Many other users have voiced the same concerns to me over the years. So let’s talk about it…

Most of the important questions about running an email marketing campaign are not technical by nature. The occasional question like “How do I know what a good open rate is?” is often complemented by the more fundamental ones like:

• How do I build a list of subscribers?
• Where do I find content for my messages?

If we don’t have sufficient answers to these two particular questions, our campaigns will never be successful.

And so I’d like to point out something you may be doing well, poorly, or not at all that can potentially be of tremendous benefit to your email marketing.

If the title of this post hasn’t already given it away, then I’ll just say it outright — it’s blogging!