Have you been wanting to learn more about email marketing and what it has to offer for your business? Or, perhaps you’ve been using email marketing and would like to learn how to maximize your email marketing efforts.

If so, then you need to attend this FREE Seminar!

When: Wednesday, September 21
8:00am – 12:30pm

Where: Greater Mankato Growth
1961 Premier Drive, Suite 100, Mankato

Cost: FREE with Registration

At this seminar you will learn:

Engagement Marketing: Building relationships that drive business success

The two questions this seminar will answer:

1. How do I generate more repeat business from existing customers?
2. How do I get my customers to refer my business to others?

Building lasting relationships with your existing customers and members drives business success. Making that happen is called “Engagement Marketing.”

The Power of Email Marketing:

* Reach more people with your message

* Create email campaigns that get results

* Get your emails opened and read

* Write compelling subject lines and copy

* Interpret email campaign results (open-rates, bounce-rates, click-thru rates, etc …)

Getting Started with Constant Contact Email:
Learn how to use Constant Contact to design email newsletters

* How to brand your emails to match websites & logos

* How to work with links and graphics for a polished, professional look

* How to analyze results and target your most profitable customers

* How to link Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn into your newsletters

* How to use the latest Constant Contact features

8:00 am – 8:30 am – Check-in & Networking.

8:30 am – 9:30 am – Engagement Marketing

9:45 am – 10:45 am – Power of Email Marketing

11:00 am – 12:30 pm – Getting Started with Constant Contact Email

Join Jeff Ferrazzo of Constant Contact and Holly Anthony of Office Moxie on
Wednesday, September 21 from 8:00am -12:30pm for an exciting morning of learning!

Space is Limited — Click Here to Register Today!

Jeff Ferrazzo – Regional Development Director, Minnesota
Jeff is a business expert with over 20 years experience helping businesses initiate and build meaningful professional relationships with both organizations and individuals. As the Minnesota Regional Development Director for Constant Contact, Jeff uses his deep consulting and training experience to help small businesses, groups and associations maximize the power of relationship marketing.

Holly Anthony – Office Moxie
Holly Anthony is the founder of Office Moxie, a company dedicated to helping clients effectively and efficiently use technology to grow their business. Office Moxie offers social media, email marketing, website design, virtual team collaboration, computer training, and administrative support services. Office Moxie is based in Madison Lake, Minnesota.

Nice Job Firefox!

How FAST is your Internet?

I am VERY happy to say (er, type) that my Internet is super fast now — well, it’s fast for a DSL connection.

Since we cut our land-line a few weeks ago, I am now enjoying (and I mean ENJOYING) a download speed of 9-10 mb/s and an approximate upload speed of 1 mp/s. Now, I can upload/download/blog/schedule appointments/make VOIP calls/surf/research like never before. My speed prior to cutting the landline was turtle slow compared to this. It also helps that my 5-month-old Toshiba laptop has the Intel® Core™ i7-720QM processor.

Read more about how the processor speed affects surfing here:
“How Does Processor Speed Affect Surfing the Internet?”

Below is a screen shot of a recent speed test.
I believe the 13.62 MB was a fluke as I haven’t come close to that since but I have been maintaining an average of 9-10MB.

Speed Test Results

You can check your Internet speed at www.speedtest.net.

What were your results?

I know I’ve blogged about Google Analytics in the past but I wanted to tell you about the report I received from GA this week. It was interesting because there was international activity on my site in April. The countries where my visitors originated from are: India, Switzerland, Canada, Iran, Taiwan, and the U.K.

Another thing that surprised me on the report is the fact that there were visits from people who are using dial-up. And there were some hits from people who browse from their PlayStation 3 console – wow!

I also figured out how to get the report emailed to me each week so that I don’t have to log into my account to view the report. What a time saver!

If you or your virtual assistant aren’t monitoring your site traffic yet, you can sign up for GA here.

If you have a blog, are people able to comment on your blog instantly or is your blog set up so that you can approve or reject a comment before it’s posted?
I can’t tell you how glad I am that I can read a comment and determine whether or not it’s posted. Lately, I received a couple of emails requesting that I approve or reject comments that were in no way related to my blog topic. Fortunately, I can immediately mark those comments as spam and delete them. Bub bye spammer!
If your blog isn’t set up for comment management, ask your blog guru to change that setting. You can also have comments emailed to someone else to manage them for you. It sounds like a good job for your assistant, eh?

To your blog success!
Holly

P.S. – To change the setting in your WordPress blog:
Go to Settings, then Discussion, and check the box next to “an administrator must always approve comments”

I was speaking with a potential new client today. She hired a VA last year and things were going great. At least they were going great until December. She hasn’t heard from her VA for about five weeks now. No calls, no emails, no nothing. What happened?

I wasn’t surprised as I’ve heard of this happening before. What I can’t understand is why a VA would suddenly stop all communication. I know that emergencies come up, illness, etcetera but as a solo business owner, it’s especially important to have processes in place so that a client isn’t left wondering what happened and whether you’re going to continue to help them.

This situation really got me thinking about disaster planning and how I would handle an emergency and what processes I should have in place so at least my clients would know something happened and what their expectations should be in terms of my return or whether we need someone else to step in to assist. I also started thinking about how I can help clients set up their own disaster plans.

So, one of my projects this quarter is to set up a disaster plan for my business and to find out from my clients what processes they have in place, if any, in case of a disaster.

Do you have a disaster plan?

Are you monitoring your website traffic? If not, you need to start and an easy way to do so is by signing up for a Google Analytics account. Once you sign up, you can copy the HTML code and place it on each page of your website. Okay, if you aren’t skilled in that area, then send the code to your web guru and ask him or her to put it on your website for you.
By monitoring the reports, you’ll find out how many visitors have been to your site and where they came from. For example, let’s say you recently posted a news release on webpr.com. If you put a link to your website in the article, Google Analytics will show you how many people visited your site from clicking on that link. Then you’ll know which marketing campaigns are working and which are not.

You’ll also learn:

• the length of time spent on each page of your site
• what browser visitors are using (i.e. Internet Explorer, Safari, Firefox)
• source of the traffic
• keywords used in their search

If you don’t want to have to sign in and out of Google Analytics and monitor the reports yourself, your virtual assistant can do that for you. Just be sure to discuss the reports during your weekly or bi-weekly telephone calls.

If you’d like to see a sample report, post a comment here or send me an email. I’d be glad to show you one of my reports.

To your success!
Holly