CreativeTechs Tips

We get frequent questions from designers wanting to use HTML email for client projects or their own marketing. Here is our comparison of the four prominent email delivery services on the market today.

1. Campaign Monitor
2. MailChimp
3. AWeber
4. Constant Contact

Implemented properly, email newsletters are a powerful marketing tool. Financially, they are one of the most cost-effective ways you can keep in front of clients and prospects. We’re seeing more creative studios using email as a core part of their own marketing effort. And we’re seeing a lot of design projects with studios creating email marketing templates for their clients.

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This short 7-minute segment comes from CreativeTechs’ Marketing with HTML Email Newsletters webinar on August 20, 2008. This webinar covered the practical how-to’s for developing an effective, ongoing marketing strategy with HTML Email Newsletters. This clip demonstrates the fundamentals using a service like Campaign Monitor. The full online training includes demos of a number of other services including MailChimp, and Constant Contact. As well as digging into ways to preview and proof your designs on a variety of email clients, and show you how to easily send good looking, desired, emails to a growing list of clients and subscribers.

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This is a short 7-minute segment taken from CreativeTechs’ Google for Graphic Designers webinar on August 6, 2008. In this workshop we dig into how designers can build their websites for maximum exposure in today’s search engines. [View all Upcoming Webinars]

Note: The sound is a poor recording of a live phone call. We’re working on a better way to capture sound in future webinar conference calls.

Popularity: 1% [?]

If you want to attract visitors to your studio’s website (or if you design websites for clients) you really must understand and use Google’s collection of Webmaster Tools. This free service from Google provides you with detailed reports about your website’s visibility on Google, as well as giving you valuable ways to influence how your website appears in search results.

Link: Google Webmaster Tools

In this tip we’ll dig into this powerful resource that is key for harnessing Google as a marketing vehicle for your creative studio. As part of that discussion, we’ll show how you can answer the following questions:

1. When was the last time Google indexed your website?
2. Are there any bad links or missing pages on your site?
3. Does your website’s content reflect your brand and target market?
4. Who is linking to your website?
5. How can you make your Flash-based site more findable?
6. Can you stop Google from indexing photos in your portfolio?
7. How do you remove something from Google’s search results?

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It is pretty easy to embed an iPhone-optimized video in any website you are designing. Which can be a nice flourish to welcome the growing hordes of iPhone users who might be visiting your site soon.

Sound hard? It’s not. Apple has added a special Export to Web option to QuickTime Pro ($30) that makes the process nearly automatic.

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A wise blog reader once said, “There are two types of Internet users. Those who use RSS feeds, and those who don’t.” It’s true. Once you grasp how useful RSS feeds are, it changes the way you keep updated online.

The problem is, if you aren’t already in the know, no one seems able to clearly explain what RSS is all about. Most descriptions becomes so convoluted that it leaves the uninitiated more lost than they started.

That’s why I love this simple, unassuming 3-minute video. With a whiteboard, a pen, and a fun casual style, Lee LeFever does the best job I’ve seen describing RSS in easy plain English.

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Popularity: 1% [?]