Did you know that email newsletters have one of the highest ROIs of all forms of interactive marketing? People really respond to outreach that’s opt-in, and a regular ping in the form of an email newsletter full of helpful or thought provoking information is sometimes just what a potential customer needs to morph into a loyal customer. For those new to email marketing and email newsletters, signing up for a free trial with service like Constant Contact can be the perfect way to get your feet wet. Constant Contact, in particular, is an easy to use program with a lot of customization built right in, and you don’t have to be a web designer to make it look good.
BONUS EMAIL NEWSLETTER TIP: Try adding fun images and content from “Creative Commons” sources (i.e., free content you can use with proper attribution) to spice things up.
Image: Cali4beach
Many companies are turned off by the idea of blogging because they think that they’ll have to devote ages to developing in-depth content. But this just isn’t the case! Ask yourself how often you really read every word when you visit blogs, and you’ll find that the answer is probably not ‘All of the time.’ It’s much more important to make blogs scan and skim friendly than to create a wall of text that’s super information rich.
Blogging, like we’ve always said, is something everyone can do! And if you concentrate on making scan and skim friendly blogs, then there shouldn’t be anything stopping you from creating a business blog.
What does scan and skim friendly mean?
Your business blogging posts should be totally understandable by people who arrive at your blog buy links or by search and just take a single glance. Your primary ideas should be absolutely clear, making the overall slant of your blog clear, too. The web is a visually focused medium. People read web text more slowly, so chances are, they’re not going to read that huge in-depth blog post you were sweating over, anyway!
Making blog posts scan and skim friendly is one way to appeal to today’s busy web reader who wants information now, in easy to digest chunks. Browsing, rather than reading, might be a better way to describe how people interact with text on the web. Readers jump from page to page, from site to site, so even if you do want to get deeper into a subject you know about, your text STILL needs to be scan and skim friendly.
6 Tips for Making Your Blog Scan and Skim Friendly
How do you make your blog scan and skim friendly? Here are some pointers:
1. Make your headlines descriptive and to the point, so the reader knows what your content is about without having to read it.
2. Make your subheads similarly descriptive so a reader can jump down to the section in a post that interests him or her most.
3. Put your conclusions or main points UP FRONT – this makes your topic and slant clear while also making your copy more enticing to the reader.
4. Use short sentences and short paragraphs to avoid overwhelming the reader. Make reading easy!
5. Condense lots of copy into bulleted lists or itemized lists
6. Underline or highlight important ideas in the text so readers don’t have to go looking for it.
Image: Maria Reyes-McDavis
