Despite social media currently being in the spotlight email newsletters remain the Internets best tool for supplementing a website. A website and a newsletter complement each other. In some respects you can think of the two in tandem operating like a Facebook fan page or other social media platform. Users can both find the fan page online to ‘pull’ and do research at their pace, and be ‘pushed’ news and updates at a time of your choosing.

These days most (but not all) email contact is done by request, that is you provide mechanisms for users to subscribe to notifications and updates, and they choose what they want to hear and how, examples might be:

> New posts on a Blog
> New images matching specified keywords
> Replies to the comment I just posted
> All images posted in the “food photography > Asian food gallery
> Important site announcements only
>Special offers when they are available

Provide these ‘notifications’ by opt-in email and RSS if you can. In fact provide everything you can via RSS, even if you think that your buyers are not the kind of people who know what a ‘feed reader’ is. There are plenty of bright sparks online who will take any RSS feed of data they can and turn it into some useful service – a service hopefully with your name all over it, or at least things you have posted. This is not theft, it’s syndication, it’s something you want, it means anything you write or images you post have a broader reach. Even if sites syndicate your content without attribution to you as the source you can still liberally sprinkle your posts with links back to your own site or watermarks.

There is still life left in traditional mailing lists and auto-responders, but they are not easy to operate successfully, I’d leave them until you have plenty of visitors/followers, getting people to part with their email address and opt in is difficult but can work well if you dangle a carrot of some kind when they confirm their subscription. Look at mailchimp for a free list up to 1000 users. It’s hard to get more than 10% of users to even click on an email, less to convert them into a purchase that way. If you want to keep people up-to-date touch via email then I’d suggest letting them subscribe to a feedburner email and then look into hosting your own mailing list. Self hosting is a serious and somewhat fraught undertaking if you have more than say 1000 subscribers, but may be the only way unless your list can justify the price of a mail-out at a hosted service – for the pennies involved in microstock the sums often don’t add up unless you have very highly targeted audience with high click through and conversion rates.

Timing
There are two types of message – the instant ‘notify me when this is updated’ (request messaging) and the ‘please subscribe to our newsletter’ list (permission marketing). Obviously the request messages / rss etc need to be as instant as possible, but there is also value is offering users digests of information to receive weekly or even daily. If you have a large enough mailing list you can justify writing tailored content each week or month to update contacts with “what’s happening”, it is however a hard juggling act to balance the frequency and content of these updates, too much and users will unsubscribe, to specific or too generalized information and they will also leave. Take it from me and anyone else living outside of the US, when we receive a message about Black Friday or some other US holiday, it’s usually greeted with “what the hell is that?” and “Well it looks like I’m so special to them, they cared enough to not even bother working out that I don’t live stateside”. This brings us neatly on to segmentation.

The 90 day rule
Marketing edict states that you should keep in touch with your contacts at least every 90 days. Any less and your subscribers start to forget who you were and think your emails are spam. Staying in touch too frequently unless your messages are really interesting also risks losing your subscribers as they feel they are being pestered by marketing junk. Monthly newsletters are fine providing you have something good to say, weekly can also work if you have a weekly special deal, or digests of the weeks posts.

Segmentation
A good email marketing service of software allows you to segment your contacts; this is can be vital to keeping subscribers happy. Good titles and copy are still important, but with segmentation you will deliver a message that a reader finds interesting, this is the type of message that gets read and hopefully acted on. Scattergun emails to everyone can work and may be the only thing you can budget for, The same message to all users can have negative effects, those not interested in them won’t open, may just leave them in the spam bin (a bad thing) or even worse if you send out a series of emails they are not interested in they may mark it as spam or simply filter everything you send to them. Getting your emails actually delivered to someone’s inbox is a fight, the internet is infested with spam emailers, and there are quite a lot of technology hoops to jump through if you don’t use a paid email marketing service.

Revolving Door of Image Buyers
When microstock opened up a new market for casual buyers of stock images it also introduced a problem, rather than having clients who regularly purchased images (those clients do still exist) most of the ‘new’ buyers were individuals who buy occasionally, seldom, and even only just once. Don’t spend too much time keeping in touch with those kinds of prospects or you’ll soon be penniless – if you can do it in volume with very little overhead then fine. Try getting subscribers to tell you what they do for a living if they signup for updates, that will tell you which category they fit into, professional designers and image researchers are to be cherished, amateurs and interns who drew the short straw are somewhat less useful to milk for repeat sales. It’s also useful to collect demographics of the industry the subscriber works in or is working for.

With so much information available today, it’s very important to get the visitors attention and differentiate yourself from your competition as much as possible. Whether it’s an article you posted on a social media site, a page that is competing against 9 other pages on the first page of Google, or an email sent out to a subscriber list; the title is almost always the first thing the viewer sees. Sometimes it’s the only difference between them reading your material or skipping over it. It would be a shame if some of your competitors are stealing a sizable portion of your audience (never mind that they produce inferior content and rank below you on the search engines!) simply because they have a catchier title than yours. Alternatively, maybe your subscribers are not opening up your emails because the titles are dry and boring.

It’s time to treat titles seriously and not just as an afterthought. This is especially true if you are just starting out and your readership is at a minimum. Here is your article marketing guide to improve titles and headlines.

Article Marketing Guide Rule: Include Suitable Keywords
I know this seems obvious, but it goes beyond just relevancy. It’s more about finding your audience. You’ll need to find the terms and phrases that people are searching for. You will want to find a niche that has an active market and is not overly competitive. Most of you may probably know your general niche but may need to narrow it down some more. For example, instead of using a keyword such as “swimming techniques” for a certain webpage, you may want to try “swimming styles” instead, which has lower online competition. There are many keyword tools to help you find your niche including WordTracker and the free Market Samurai software.

Article Marketing Guide Suggestion #1: Title First!
Try to title your article or post right away. It is okay if you are not exactly sure where the article is going while you are writing it, but try to think of a title before you get too far into the writing process. I believe this will not only tighten up your writing and give it some direction but will also lessen the chances of you rushing and giving it a “gung-ho” name right at the end. I doubt I have been the only one who is less than motivated at the end of an article! We want to reward ourselves at the end of writing by posting and publishing our article. When nothing but the title and the summary stand in the way of this reward, there is a greater likelihood that these important parts of our article are given very little thought.

Article Marketing Guide Suggestion #2: Try to Keep the Title Under Ten Words
This tip is definitely not written in stone but try not to exceed ten words. It is especially hard to keep it minimalist when you have a longer keyword phrase you are working with! If you have a longer title, consider breaking it into two parts (e.g. The Lazy Project Manager: How to be twice as productive and still leave the office early).

Article Marketing Guide Suggestion #3: Be Unique!
Don’t be afraid to try something outside the norm! Sometimes the simplest or outside-the-box titles get the most views. E-mail lists are a great way to test your titling skills. If you got a good idea, go for it.