Would you like to view the Brainshark presentation I talked about in my last blog post? You can see an example of how Brainshark can be used for instruction, and learn how to add an HTML email signature to your outgoing messages in Outlook at the same time.

To view the presentation, click here: Creating HTML Email Signatures in Outlook

I usually use my MP3 player for rocking out, but the other day I was able to use mine (a Sansa c240) to get some work done.

I needed some voice narration for an instructional Brainshark presentation I was working on. With Brainshark, you can take a PowerPoint presentation, bring it into the Brainshark software, and add things to it such as audio, questions, polls, or guestbooks, and make it into an on-demand presentation that can be launched from or embedded in web pages or email messages. If you would like to see some sample Brainshark presentations, we have several on the Webinar For One^SM landing page on our web site.

I had not used the voice recording feature on my MP3 player yet, so I decided to try using it to narrate the slides. It was very easy to record the audio by speaking into the little microphone on the MP3 player, saving the resulting .wav files, connecting the player to the computer with the USB cable, then dragging and dropping the saved files into sound editing software on my computer. After editing, I added the sound files to my presentation in Brainshark. Now that I know how easy it is, I'll be using narration this way more often!

Your website is a valuable tool that can be used in concert with just about any other marketing strategy you care to employ. Do you participate in email marketing or direct mail campaigns? Use your web site to collect subscribers. Are you a presenter or speaker? Archive your presentation content or audio or video of yourself on your web site as on demand presentations. Are you participating in a trade show? Use your web site to invite visitors to your booth. I could go on and on, but you get the idea.

In order to use your web site to leverage your other marketing activities, you need visitors. Search engines are very important for bringing in web site traffic. Your website needs as many incoming links as possible to be competitive in the search engines, and there is no denying it's a lot easier to give yourself a link than to get other people to give you a link. It also helps to have good keywords inside hyperlinks, since text in hyperlinks carries more weight with search engines than plain text.

  If you have a large web site with lots of content that is updated frequently, or more than one web site, you are in a good position to take advantage of those facts about search engines.

One way to do that is by putting a site map on your site if you don't already have one. This is simply a web page with a linked outline to all the pages on your site. Here is an example of a site map.

Another way is to add a What's New page with listings of what is new on your site and links to any new content you add. I recently started updating this What's New Page again after a long period of neglect. It was foolish of me to deprive myself of the benefits of all those links. I resolve to be smarter in the future!

So why not give your visitors a break by making your content easier to find, and give yourself a break with the gift of  valuable links?

I know a lot of people who are thinking about starting an e-newsletter to add powerful support to their customer acquisition  process. Are you one of them?

When you are ready to start sending out your newsletter you will be eager to send it to as many contacts as possible. You will be tempted to add any email address you can find to your subscriber list. This is a temptation you must resist, because you do not want want to be perceived as a spammer, or get into legal trouble. Your subscribers need to be opted-in, in other words they should have given you permission to send them a newsletter.

Even if you are not ready to roll your newsletter out right now, I suggest that you start building an opt-in subscriber list as soon as possible. An easy way to do this is to ask your customers for permission whenever they are sending you information via an online form. Just add a question worded something like "Would you like to receive a newsletter from us?" and a yes/no response field to any forms you might have on your web site. This applies to forms on paper also. Whenever a customer or prospect sends you information, there might be an appropriate way to ask whether they want a newsletter or to inform them that by taking a certain action they will be added to a mailing list. Take advantage of these opportunities whenever they come up. Then when you're ready to send your newsletter, retrieve this data and you'll know who it's safe to send to.

Do you publish an email newsletter as part of your customer acquisition program? Once your newsletter is sent out, you don't have to stop reaping the benefits of your work. I suggest that you make copies of your newsletters as web pages and archive them on your web site. That way they can continue to work for you by bringing in traffic via the search engines. Be sure to put a newsletter sign-up form on your archived newsletters to pick up new subscribers. Here is an example of a past issue of our Webinar Resources Newsletter. The sign-up form at the bottom automatically adds new subscribers to the list as they request to be added to the subscriber list. You can learn more about email marketing by viewing the Brainshark presentation "Beyond Opens and Clicks - How to Use Email to Transform Marketing Performance from Good to Great".

Hi, I am Creative Director for Webinar Resources. Welcome to my blog. I will discuss techniques and strategies for web site owners to improve their web sites, ways to  increase the number of visitors and lead generation, and how to use a web site as a tool for marketing campaigns over multiple channels.

Since I'm always eager to spread the word whenever I have something new for people to see, one of the the first things I did upon starting this blog was to find a way to syndicate the RSS feed from this blog to my own web sites. I accomplished that with the help of some free software called RSSinclude. If your own web site needs some more content to keep your visitors coming back, give this or a similar tool a try and include some RSS feeds on your site that your visitors might enjoy.