Christopher S. Penn has thrown out a great idea for bloggers: The Evergreen 5.
If you’ve blogged for any length of time, you have a handful of posts that are your real hits. They get regular views. They’ve been retweeted and shared. The comments are healthy.
Then you’ve got those posts that you know are great, but nobody read them for some reason. That’s your Evergreen 5, in Chris’ words.
So, to join in on the fun, I followed Chris’ formula and came up with the Marketing In Progress Evergreen 5. Here’s to a second chance. Enjoy (and RT and comment while you’re at it!).
I recently shared some stats on email open and click-through rates. Shortly after, I found this post from Drew on a study sharing ideas on what a good open rate for email marketing is. So thought I’d pass it along. Here’s the original study at MailerMailer.com.
A few half-baked observations:
I had a great conversation with a new friend last week who was asking me all kinds of questions about social media. He was new to the whole scene, but knew it was important.
In a nutshell, he told me he wanted ….
More traffic to his website
More fans on his Facebook page
Bump up the level of content on Facebook and his website
Pretty common wishes, I suppose. So, I took at look at his website, his Facebook page and some other stuff. Then, I asked a very simple question:
So once you get more traffic, more fans and more content, what do you want all these new people to do?
I just finished suffering through an almost pointless meeting.
Happens all the time, actually. In fact, it happens all the time for most of us. So why is that? Why do we continue to spend so much time in meetings we all know are useless?
Today during the meeting, prior to paper-cutting my wrists with the meeting agenda, I did some figuring. I tried to figure out what that meeting was costing us, simply based on hourly rates based on salaries of the people in the room. I came up with $210 for this one-hour meeting (and that only accounts for people on my side of the conference call).
That’s not astounding, but it’s only four people. You can see where this can get out-of-hand quickly.
You could sell 100 things for $100, or …
10 things for $1,000, or …..
Two things for $5,000, or …..
200 things for $50, or …
Four things for $2,500, ….
1,000 things for $10, or ….
10,000 things for $1, or ….
One thing for $10,000.
It’s that time of year again.
I was walking around a park near my house just the other day. I noticed a couple, probably in their 40s, or 50s, walking briskly behind me as I began. They were focused, and clearly getting a head start on their New Year’s Resolutions.
I then heard their footsteps quicken behind me. The husband passed me, then looked back and saying “C’mon, baby.” The wife quickly snipped back with “I can’t.” The husband then doubled back to encourage her, and she managed to run a few more steps, only to further confirm her sentiment with a strong “I can’t do anymore!” The husband backed off.
I know exactly what the husband was thinking at this point. He was thinking, “Oh, you don’t even know how to push yourself.” I could see it in his eyes, his posture, everything. He was a relatively fit guy, and I’d be willing to bet he’s spent plenty of his youth on sports teams, at two-a-day football practices or the like, pushing himself with 50 other guys that we men eventually, somehow, consider the greatest days of our lives.
What I’m saying is he recognized that the whole point of this running thing was to push yourself into p
I’ve been digging around lately, looking for some standard email open rates and click-through rates to compare my own projects against. There are obviously so many variables in every campaign that it’s hard to compare apples to apples (the data is normally only as specific as comparing fruits to vegetables). But I did run across the links below that are quite useful.
The long and short of it is this:
Average open rate across the board seems to hover at 22%.
Click-through rate varies wildly, but circles in around 3.5%.
No industry suffers from more than an average 0.85% unsubscribe rate.
You know why headlines aren’t as important as they once were? Because they have reached such a level of importance that their old level of importance simply shutters at the size of this new level of importance. Ya follow?
Headlines are everything.
Of course, you already know this. Headlines have been everything for ages. But the web is proving this truth in ways we’ve never imagined.
Think of all the ways we receive content now. Emails. RSS feeds. Tweets. Links on Facebook. Ways that didn’t exist (for the masses, at least) 15 years ago.
And with messages infiltrating our every inbox by the second, you have to ask yourself one very simple question:
What makes you open it?
I’ve received some sobering advice lately.
First, in an email from Pamela Wilson, she quickly let me know she wasn’t crazy about a dry, sarcastic headline I’d come up with for a project. She told me it didn’t motivate her to do anything.
She’s right.
Then, Dave Curlee replied to an email with this simple statement: “Lay this out for me again will you. No fluff, Just the facts.”
I read several posts last week about not phoning it in during that week between Christmas and New Year’s. Like this one from Chris Brogan, this one from Jen Fong and this one from Christopher S. Penn.
That was completely my plan, too. I freakin’ love being at the office during the week. Mostly because no one else is there. It’s a great week for finalizing plans, catching up, cleaning up and thinking. And all that with no meetings and few interruptions.
But it didn’t happen that way.
Instead, my wife got sick. Which meant I had to pinch-hit in taking care of our two-year-old hellion. It amounted in a day in the office on Monday, home Tuesday and Wednesday, back in the office on Thursday, and then off on Friday through Saturday.
