Author: Nancy McCord

Nancy McCord is the President and resident blogger for McCord Web Services LLC. She has been providing global web services since 2001. She is a web designer, search engine marketing professional, and search engine and blog expert. She lives in Maryland just south of the Washington DC metro area.
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Why a Privacy Policy is Important

Every website needs one – a privacy policy! If you market your business online or for that matter just have a web presence, it is a best business practice to let reader’s know one what you do when they contact you, if you will use their email address and in what way, and to include any legal disclaimers to protect yourself from litigation.

Every site should have one. Yours doesn’t need to be as detailed as ours, (click our post title to see ours), but it should cover what you do and how you will use a reader’s information such as an email address even if you don’t collect them on the website.

The other important issue is that did you know that Google looks for a privacy policy when you are using Google AdWords? If you have a landing page for your advertising, make sure that you have a link to your privacy policy to give you additional legitimate standing with Google.

A privacy policy page is much like a site map, every site should have one and make it accessible from every page in your website.

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Blogs and RSS Feeds Explained

If you are new to blogging or just want to learn and know more, we havc created and excellent resource center on Blogs and RSS News Feeds.

In our resource center you will find easy to understand information on how to set up a blog to custom FTP publish to your own web server using Blogger, how to create an XML document for your RSS news feed, how to use blogs and feeds for your business, and the technological information on both and how closely intertwined feeds are with blogs.

The resource center contains white papers, presentations from speaking engagements, and much more that I am sure that you will find helpful in understanding and using this exciting technology.

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E-Newsletter Best Practices

So you’ve been thinking that maybe you should do an d-newsletter, here are some tips to get you on your way.

1. Make sure that before you start e-mailing and for that matter before you even create your first e-newsletter, that you have updated or created a privacy policy on your website. Your privacy policy should clarify what you will do with e-mail addresses and how you will harvest them. If you will be selling your list or renting it to others, you need to spell that out and allow an opt out before you do that in order to be Can Spam Act compliant.

2. Use a professional subscription service for your list. This will allow for easy subscribe and unsubscribes and allow for users to self manage their subscription. The key to keeping and adding subscribers is to make it easy to enroll and to unsubscribe. Do not use MailMan as your subscription list. If you have ever tried to manage your own subscription through this open source application you will experience a high level of frustration . Once you have used it you will know that you should not use this for your own list. Stay user friendly!

3. Make sure to install an auto subscription box throughout your website. Let your website work for you in getting new subscribers. Personally I have found the best way to build a list is to do a white paper and then require an email address to download the white paper. I have added nearly 600 subscribers to my list this way alone.

4. When you have prospects contact you by email, make sure to collect their email addresses and manually add them to your list. Make sure that you have this covered in your privacy policy before you routinely start to do this to prevent complications.

5. Make sure you understand e-newsletters in today’s world. It is important to understand that e-newsletters can still be great marketing tools in today’s business environment, but the typical open rate will be between 10% to 30%. Don’t expect that everyone will open your mail and be prepared for that. Make sure that this is not your only marketing endeavor. Internet service providers are making the delivery of e-newsletters more and more difficult so make sure that you are using alternatives as well. Some of those alternatives would be RSS feeds of your e-newsletter content, online e-newsletter archives accessed from your own website, and a blog that points to your e-newsletter articles or announces when one is posted. It is very important to note that if you are emailing to a large corporation or any state or federal government entity that the reality is that your subscribers will simply not get your email. It will be filtered at the IT staff level.

E-newsletters can still be great marketing tools for your business but should not be your only marketing vehicle.