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Chris Garrett on New Media

the business of blogging and new media

3 Great New Books to Buy TodaySeptember 4

I’m a book addict, I must buy hundreds of dollars of books each month, enough that I dare not count how much I spend at any rate. But I am a lucky guy too, I get sent great books for nothing. Yes, it is not just fancy bean bags I get sent through the post, I also get excellent reading material like these books that I want to tell you about.

Now, that first paragraph might come across as a little smug, and it might also make you a little cross that I am suggesting you buy something that I got for free. That’s why the links in this post are not affiliate links, I will not gain anything should you buy other than a warm feeling that you took my advice

Click Here to Order

This book is being heavily promoted in the internet marketing space and for good reason. It’s a fascinating look at the history of making money online and how the big stars got to where they are today. In fact, it is such

Thesis - No More Reasons Not to Buy itAugust 29

Thesis was already a brilliant theme, I have to concede that. Thing is, I am one of those people who zags when he sees everyone zig. The theme was getting popular fast and I worried the blogosphere was going to look like the Thesisphere. No need to worry now, though, good news everyone!

Chris Pearson has just added the capability to easily change from your control panel

• Font selection
• Column number and size

and next week you will be able to easily change color scheme too! All without touching the code. Chris is constantly upgrading his themes and customers get those improvements completely free of charge.

Now it is not just a great theme (it always was the best for SEO and XHTML goodness), it is probably the only theme you need and it need not look like anyone else when you are done. Even better, right now you get a free magazine style theme with every Thesis purchase.

You know as one of my services I have a combined blog building and coaching package? All my blog b

Email Marketing Tips: Introduction to Email CopywritingAugust 22

Email copywriting is probably the one aspect of actually doing email marketing that people either fuss over or neglect. People either doubt their abilities in this area, don’t think about it or over estimate.

Bloggers, being writers, would expect to be ahead of the game, but sadly that is not always the case.

While a couple of years ago it was common to see newsletter writers brag that they write 50 or so articles a year, a blogger today probably writes as many in a couple of months or less. So there is a practice-makes-perfect advantage in favor of bloggers, but writing a blog post is not the same as writing an email.

Email is Personal

When you are writing an email for broadcast it is best to think of it as from you to one person. It is not a Superbowl ad, it is a letter from one individual to another.

Obviously when subscribers get the RSS feed automatically delivered as email there is not much that can be done, but as my email subscribers found out this week, when you do send out an email broadcast the tone needs to be a little different to be successful.

Always keep in mind the recipient, write it to them.

AIDA for Email Marketing

In the marketing w

First Northern UK Blogging Meet-Up - SuccessAugust 16

Photo by strawbleu

The first Northern UK Bloggers Meet-up took place last friday at the Old Broadcasting House, Leeds. Well, half of it, the other half was in the Dry Dock pub (see a picture of the Dry Dock in daylight) - great venues, both!

I think it is fair to say a good time was had by all.

Jamie did an excellent talk about Woopra and gave out beta invites (which it seems we might not be able to legally use due to some UK/European privacy and data protection regulations, but I don’t think that is going to stop anyone).

After we ooh’ed and aah’ed over Woopra and debated the utility of

Email Marketing Tips: Email TestingAugust 14

Testing, experimenting and tweaking are essential if you are going to be effective in your email efforts.

In the previous entry of this Email Marketing Tips for Bloggers series we looked at email effectiveness tracking metrics. While looking at the stats tells you a lot, it is not going to give you the whole story and they will not make the improvements for you. You need to actively pursue and encourage the results you hope for.

Our last look at emails was to work out which worked best and how. This article is all about trying to work out why.

Before we get in to exactly how you do that, I need to fill you in on a “metric” that I intentionally missed last time.

ROI

ROI stands for “Return on Investment”. It’s probably the most important item to track of the lot.

I know, some of you are wondering if it is so important why miss it out?

That’s because it is not a standard reporting metric that you get from your email service. While Aweber and the other bet