Promoting your email newsletter is a critical component of building your opt-in list. Online for Success offers a good starting list of special interest e-zines that accept advertising.

For those of you who are celebrating the absence of marketing in your favourite blogs, hold on to those champagne glasses! Sony Pictures created a series of custom Spiderman 2 templates for users of both Blogger and LiveJournal - 2 of the more popular blogging tools available. Also available, Spiderman 2 backgrounds and animated icons.

While you mourn the loss of innocence, think of the implications of blogs as branding for your business. Blog templates could become the new screensaver - offer website visitors custom blogging templates that contain links back to your website or online store. While you’re at it - why not tie the whole thing in with your affiliate program to encourage downloads?

According to Trendwatching.com, pop-up retail remains one of the hottest phenomenons to hit the industry in years. Target may be the latest example of successful pop-up retailing - their temporary, 5 week opening in the Bullseye Inn (28 May - 4 July 2004) for all things summer was one of the places to shop in the Hamptons.

Find out more at http://www.trendwatching.com.

I have a permission email newsletter list. I also send out special marketing offers and advertisements to members of my list from time to time. I have a really great promotion coming up and I want to make sure everyone has an opportunity to get in on it. I’d like to send to all the names I have, even those who’ve unsubscribed from my newsletter. Just because they don’t want the newsletter doesn’t mean they wouldn’t be interested in this offer, does it?

Lonely,
St. Johns, NFLD

A: Dear Lonely,

Get a life! Face it, your subscribers have broken up with you. They UNSUBSCRIBED from your list. Last time I checked, unsubscribe meant don’t send me any more email. Period.

No, you cannot send them email just because you think they made a mistake. That they really do want it, they just didn’t know it when they asked to be removed from your list. Go out and meet some new subscribers. Once you get to know them, you’ll forget all about your old, unsubscribed email addresses.

Meanwhile, stop depriving yourself of wonderful response rates! You’ve got a great group of active subscribers who love you and want to hear from you. Why focus on the old ones?

Aunt May

I’m the VP of Marketing for a national distributor of nuts and bolts. We’ve just launched a new consumer ecommerce portal where the home-handyman can order specialty hardware at great prices. I know that search engines are still a solid way to build traffic to a new website and I found a service that offers automatic submission to hundreds of search engines for only $9.95. Do you think I should try it?

Searching,
Seattle, WA

A: Dear Searching,

Honey, you’re looking for traffic in all the wrong places.

Look, those services aren’t geared towards big, successful companies like yours. And they aren’t going to get you the results you’re looking for. You need high rankings - top ten results in the major search engines, or at least top 30. You want to think about some really targeted keyword bidding programs, a presence on some targeted portals, maybe even an affiliate program.

You don’t have to face this yourself. Get some professional help! Marketing Sherpa has a great guide to SEO services, or visit our links page for a starting list of SEO vendors to talk to.

Aunt May