Red Kite Creative

Newsletters and Email Campaigns

Weekly Links Roundup – Facebook, GDPR, Email Open Rates, WordPress Launches

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The top website and marketing links of the week.

If you’ve considered deleting your Facebook account, but can’t bring yourself to do it for one reason or another (like if you use it for your business, for example), there are still things you can do (probably? maybe?) to improve the security of your account. Take it with a grain of salt, but try taking these Facebook privacy steps if you’re not ready to go all the way.

Speaking of privacy, the new GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) is going into effect in May and will affect you if you do business with EU countries or target their residents for marketing in any way. Learn about GDPR and how it can affect your business website.

If you do email marketing, or are thinking about starting (and you should, because it’s still a high-ROI marketing method) check out these 5 tips on improving email open rates.

Many of my clients were under the mistaken assumption that once we launched their WordPress site, all the work was done. Nope. Here are 11 things you (the website owner) need to do once your site launches (hint: if you’re our client, a lot of this has already been done for you, and the rest was explained during our training meeting).

 

Weekly Links Roundup – WordPress Performance, Marketing Plan, Text on Images, Email Lists

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The top website and marketing links of the week.

WordPress performance can be a hard thing to get your head around – there are a lot of factors that play into page loading time. If you’re willing to try to tackle a slow-loading site on your own, this checklist of 19 ways to speed up WordPress may help.

Are you a freelancer or solo entrepreneur? If you are, you have to be your own marketing team (as well as wearing every other hat) and mastering your marketing may seem like an impossibility. Here’s a nice post that describes a simple, effective inbound marketing plan for solo business owners that might be just what you need.

Earlier this week I was Googling for ideas on text overlays for hero images and found this post which might help you too if you’re creating your own graphics.

Finally… email marketing still provides one of the highest ROI (return on investment) for any marketing method. If you don’t have an email list, it’s time to start one! Here’s info on why with email lists, bigger is better.

 

Weekly Links Roundup – Holiday Marketing, Local SEO, Blogging, Security

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The top website and marketing links of the week.

Happy Black Friday! To celebrate (is that the correct term?) here’s a collection of top tips for holiday email marketing from HubSpot and more email tips from Mailchimp. And one more from Constant Contact – how to stand out in an overstuffed inbox.

Oops, here’s another one… a holiday checklist for Local SEO, including things like making sure your listings are accurate and your website is all updated, especially if selling products online. And, that you’re ready to deal with complaints…

If you’re blogging (and you should be, it’s a great way to both establish yourself as an expert and grow your site) you don’t have be a great writer, just be yourself. Learn why it’s important to write like you talk.

Hacking is bad anytime of year, but getting hacked during the holidays when you may be at your busiest with online sales is the worst. Learn the very basics of protecting your WordPress site from hacking. And if you’re not comfortable handling these technical details yourself, check out our sister site WP Minder, we have maintenance plans which include all these security measures to keep your site safe.

 

Weekly Links Roundup – WordPress 4.8, Holler Box, Getting Subscribers

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The top website and marketing links for this week.

WordPress 4.8 was released as I was writing this post… The two big things you’ll most likely notice are:

  • New native image, video and audio widgets, finally! You can now display this content in widgets without HTML or extra plugins.
  • Link boundaries – know how you sometimes will grab a few letters from the previous or next word when making a link? This new feature makes it more clear where the link starts and stops.
  • To learn more about the new features, visit this post.

Looking for something like a chat or popup, but not annoying like popups can be? Try Holler Box. This new WordPress plugin is customizable and a pretty elegant way of making quick announcements or capturing email addresses without being so obtrusive. Get it here or read a review about the features and potential usage.

Speaking of capturing email addresses… how do you actually start getting more signups and subscribers? It can be hard, as you probably know. Learn how to ask for it in this post.

Friday Link Wrapup – Hosting and Performance, SEO, Email Marketing

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If you think it doesn’t matter where you host your business website, think again. Cheap shared hosting is not a bargain when slow loading times can be costing you customers and conversions. Check out our post on hosting and performance here.

When it comes to optimizing your site pages or posts, you don’t want to waste time and effort – but you could be doing just that if you’re adhering to these 6 outdated SEO strategies that are no longer important – or could actually be hurting your site.

And since we’re talking about not doing things – here are some email marketing practices you can safely leave behind in 2017https://blogs.constantcontact.com/email-marketing-practices/email marketing practices you can safely leave behind in 2017.