All posts in Articles

Ever seen a car salesmen go from prospect pitching to baseball pitching in 5 seconds? Probably not. Have you seen a surgeon go from operating on a patient to operating a slot machine in 5 seconds? Definitely not. Yet web designers can go from designer to professional time waster in just 5 seconds. This is due to the fact that our work and our recreation exist only a click away from each other. While working for our clients or employers, we face a constant temptation to waste a few minutes here and a few minutes there. You must avoid these productivity killers in order to remain an efficient worker.

1) Stat checking

Do you randomly check your stats in the middle of billable hours? Stats that commonly fuel time wasting include:

• Google Analytics/StatCounter
• Search Engine Rankings
• Adwords PPC Snapshot

Checking these stats while billing hours for your client or employers equates to stealing. They’re paying for your hours of labor, not your hours of statistic obsession. Additionally, of these statistics, the only one worth checking daily is your PPC campaign.

Your site traffic statistics have much more meaning in larger quantities. Daily or hourly measurements of your traffic do not provide a large enough sample size for adequate trend analysis. By checking these stats religiously throughout your work day, you not only waste your clients time, you waste your own time as well. Besides, it’s much more satisfying to see that 200 people have visited your site since you last checked as opposed to 5 people.

As for search engines, rankings can fluctuate daily. Checking your sites’ search engine rankings every hour does not lead to good data. SEO is a long-term process and should be measured as such. Use tools such as SEOMoz’s Rank Tracker, which automatically emails you rankings of tracked sites every week.

Each time you check these stats you lose five minutes of effective productivity. How so? You lose at least 3 minutes actually checking the statistics, and it takes at least another 2 minutes to fully reacquire the level of focus you had before diverting your attention. Designers who compulsively check their stats can easily lose an hour of work in a workday.

2) Social Networking

Facebook and Twitter can easily consume your entire work day. Web designers are more susceptible to getting sucked in for 30 minutes at a time thanks to the link-bait posted by people we follow on Twitter or befriend on Facebook. Link-bait begets link-bait, and without even knowing it, half an hour can slip by as we move from article to article. A recent report suggests UK employees have stolen up to $22 billion dollars worth of labor by using social media on the clock.

Some argue that social media gives your mind a needed break which increases productivity in the long run. While I find the argument valid to an extent, you have to examine your personality to know if this principle applies to you. If you know you’ll be taken on a wild social media ride once you read a tweet, don’t deceive yourself into thinking you’ll only engage in social media activities for a few minutes. It will kill your focus.

3) Skipping out on sleep

When deadlines loom around the corner, sometimes you can’t avoid skipping out on sleep. However, be aware that depriving yourself of sleep severely hinders your ability to function. If you must resort to skipping out on sleep, do not make a habit out of it. Every portion of the web design industry involves creativity and problem solving: creative design, creative code, creative marketing solutions. Since creativity and sleep are directly related, as demonstrated by a Harvard Medical study, not getting the recommended amount of sleep each night could prevent you from coming up with the creative solutions required of you.

Also, keep in mind that in addition to coming up with creative solutions for clients, you must also deal with the business portion of web design: filing, invoice creating, customer calling, etc. These tedious but important jobs become almost impossible to undertake while sleep deprived.

In order to consistently create solutions that you and your clients can take pride in, these productivity killing habits must be eliminated from your work day.

Email marketing has continued to gain popularity through difficult economic times because it requires very little upfront investment and offers extremely high returns. However, it can be intimidating when you’re just getting started. This article will help you to tackle the two major hurdles to launching a successful email marketing campaign: building up your list, and designing your content.

Building Up Your List

The basic principle behind building an email list is simple: you need to ask people if you can send them information, and you need to give them a reason to say yes. Where and how you ask people to subscribe to your list depends upon what type of business you run and what ways you are already engaging your customers. If you are the proprietor of a brick and mortar store, then ground zero for email list signups is likely to be your cash register. You may have noticed many large chains now asking for an email address at the checkout, as this is a highly effective technique. If you do most of your business through the web, then you will want to make sure your signup form for the mailing list is prominent on your web site and that it makes a compelling offer to potential subscribers.

Most people trying to build up new email lists are doing so through the web. This is a perfectly acceptable approach, but I do want to stress that offline approaches can be even more powerful. To convert your web visitors into email list subscribers, you first have to make sure that your signup form is noticeable. Too many sites have tiny signup forms hidden in a sidebar, or off on a page of their own. If you are serious about building your list, you have to commit your prime real estate to it. Think of this as free advertising for yourself. Sites tend to have the best response rates from large, attractive signup forms placed above the fold on the front page of the site — if not on every page of the site. Some site owners also report good results from flash or CSS-based “scroll-up” boxes, which display the form in a div that hovers over their actual page content. I would not recommend using a popup window to display your subscription form, as most web browsers now block popup windows by default.

Designing Your Content

The next issue, content design, revolves around you unique proposition to subscribers. What is it that you have to offer them that will be a genuine value? Simply sending out sales pitches repeatedly will cause people to unsubscribe from your mailing list fairly quickly, as will boring company newsletters. You must find a need within your market that can be fulfilled by your mailings. A good strategy is to sign up for some of your competitors’ email lists and think about what types of content you do or do not find value in from them.

By focusing in on these two essential processes, you can begin to develop an email marketing campaign that has a solid foundation. Once you have your mailing list in place, you can begin to experiment with more advanced processes, such as autoresponder campaigns, split testing, and market segmentation. But the real meat and potatoes of email marketing is simply this: asking people to sign up for your mailing list, promising that it will be useful to them, and then delivering on that promise.