Last Friday, after publishing the post about Google’s quality raters handbook (which I’d found through a post on “Pot Pie Girl’s” blog), I spent a little time looking over her older posts and found an interesting one showing the results of an email subject line test she ran back in March.

I thought I’d share the [...]

The AWeber blog this morning carried a little debate over whether you should ask for more than a name and email address in your signup form. Here’s an excerpt:

Nick: … We tend to think of our mailing lists as something we give to our subscribers for free, but that’s kind of a flawed assumption. Subscribers [...]

It’s time again for a report on which headlines got the most of my blog broadcast emails opened and click through last month. Where you see (+), (++) and (+++), that indicates that the headline in question was at the top of one of the other lists (with (+++) indicating the #1 position).

Highest Open Rates

Here [...]

Yesterday, I wrote about how to avoid information overload in a too-fast world. Today, let’s talk about how to get your marketing message heard above the noise in a world where your prospects are overloaded.

Be Good Better the Best

Okay, being the best is a tall order. But at the very least, you’ve absolutely got to [...]

The internet has given us instant access to more information and entertainment than we’d even dreamed would ever exist a few decades ago. On the one hand, we’re empowered to accomplished more, faster than ever before.

But there’s a downside too. A few days ago, Seth Godin asked, Has the speed shortage been averted?

We certainly had [...]

I hope all of you in the States had a good Independence Day yesterday. My family and I enjoyed doing some much needed yard work, and then a trip back through time to Railroad Town at the Stuhr Museum of the Prairie Pioneer.

Speaking of history, here are the headlines that got the most of my [...]

A while back, I got an email from an unhappy subscriber. Among other things, he complained that the last email he’d gotten — a “blog broadcast” message announcing my latest post — was all about me, and thus not interesting to him.

I’ve been at this long enough to have developed a reasonably thick skin, so [...]

I learned a new word last week: gustnado. It’s sort of like a tornado, but doesn’t last as long, and doesn’t reach up to the cloud base. We had a few blow through Grand Island, knocking down trees and trashing some mobile homes (uninhabited, thankfully) and storage units.

When a friend of mine first heard the [...]

Once again, it’s time to publish the list of which headlines got the best open and click-through rates last month.

The rankings are calculated based on the numbers reported by AWeber for my “blog broadcast” for this blog.

Where you see (+), (++) and (+++), that indicates that the headline in question was at the top of [...]

A few years ago, I had an email that I’d send out through ListDotCom twice a week (if I remembered), and, despite incredibly low response rates, it would make me $20 each time.

Not a fortune, by any stretch of the imagination, but considering that it took me all of about 30 seconds to send, my [...]