Hello

Suzanne here at HotScot with the HotScot March newsletter. Get your Email Etiquette right, and should you Froogle? ..........................

• Email Etiquette
• Be Careful of 3rd Party Links
• AOL Email Problems
• New Copywriting Service
• Do You Want to Froogle?

• Hints and Tips
• And Finally
• Feedback
• Unsubscribe

There is a tendency for emails to be less formal than other written correspondence, but emails are a permanent form of communication and are valid legal documents. The style they are written in says a lot about you and your business.

DO:

• Use "Dear..." if this is a first formal contact
• Distinguish between formal emails that need to be written like a letter and informal ones that are more like a compliment slip with a casual message
• Only cover one subject in each email to make it easier to file
• Be polite and friendly
• Be concise and logical
• Write grammatically correct sentences and use a spell-check option if available
• Write short paragraphs and leave spaces between them
• Answer questions properly in replies
• Read over your email before sending

DON'T:

• Write in capitals as it is like shouting
• Use fancy fonts, colours and backgrounds that distract from what you are saying
• Use abbreviations that your recipient may not understand
• Use the words "Urgent" and "Important" in subject lines
• Be familiar unless you know the recipient well
• Discuss or forward confidential information as you could breach copyright rules
• Make libellous or offensive remarks you will regret later
• Send huge attachments that can clog up mailboxes

Thanks to Frances from Buttercup Miniatures for drawing our attention to this.

We all get link requests from time to time and some of the sites will look an attractive option to link to. Just make sure that if you give a link to their site that in return you get a link back from their own site site and not just one from the link farm of a third party link campaign management agency that will be worthless to you.

We continue to hear of problems from clients using AOL email accounts. AOL is very much aimed as a family solution so that parents can exercise control over content, as a result there are a lot of security measures in place that can result in email problems, particularly with attachments and emails with a lot of links in the body. For a business level solution you need to have an email account on your domain that you manage with a professional email client such as Outlook.

With content managed websites now the norm, many clients struggle to find suitable content to keep the site fresh and updated.

We are now able to offer an affordable copy writing service that will solve this problem. As an example we can arrange to write the copy for up to 4 simple pages for under £50. Contact Suzanne for more information if this is of interest to you.

Google has launched a new online shopping service called Froogle which is intended to help those selling online to get their products noticed easily by customers.

If you are selling anything from smoked salmon to a Special Break or Tour you can create a Google account and then upload your products to Froogle for FREE. There is a bulk upload facility for customers with lots of products.

Froogle looks set to become the place to search for those elusive online bargains and is well worth checking out as a way to promote your online sales.

Keep it clean: Content management is a wonderful facility and enables site owners to look after their own destiny. However the chance to twiddle with the fonts and colours is just too much to resist for some of the more creative sorts! DON'T! Text on a web page should be simple and easy to read and using colours, bold fonts, underline (which should be kept for links) and italics all make your content harder to read. Don't use red as it is considered to be shouting!

Check your Links: From time to time click on all the links on your website to make sure they still go where you expect. There have been one or two instances recently of domains being bought out and replaced by unsavoury material - not what you want your site visitors to be directed to!

Compare your ranking ! This is a useful little tool to show you how your website ranks on different search engines http://ranking.thumbshots.com. Remember that while Google remains the biggest player, particularly for B2B (Business to Business) searches, Yahoo is becoming just as important for B2C (Business to customer) searches.

Search Engine update:

• 80% of users only visit first 2 search pages.
• Yahoo Search is growing rapidly – up 12% in the past year
• Search traffic. Google: 35%, Yahoo: 28%, AOL: 16%, MSN: 15%, others: 6%.
  (Source: SearchEngineWatch.com)

1. Every day more money is printed for Monopoly than the US Treasury.

2. "I am." is the shortest complete sentence in the English language.

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