A consultant can handle their “Keep In Touch” Marketing (where you keep in touch with past clients, interested prospects and people who have requested that you email them) in a few different ways. These solutions include:

• An e-zine (email newsletter)
• Having people subscribe to get emails from your blog through a solution like Feedburner
• RSS streams

Should you have an ezine list or have people subscribe to your blog?

The answer to this depends on the amount of work you want to do in your marketing.

Newsletter

A traditional newsletter mailing list is more work – you have to write the newsletters and send them out. You can customize this option more – from look and feel, to the frequency that the newsletters are sent out with, to other offers or promotions that you send out with your information. But, this also means that you have to do the work of sending out an email newsletter:

• signing up for a newsletter service

• setting the account up

• designing your email newsletter template

• setting up your newsletter each time it has to go out

• testing and sending it

And, that is the process you have to go through each time the newsletter has to go out (and I’m not even talking about putting together your articles and offers for the newsletter).

Blog Subscription

If you just have people subscribe to your blog (through a service such as Feedblitz, which integrates easily with Typepad or Wordpress), then the work of sending out the newsletter is done for you. Your blog posts, if you have made any, get emailed to people who sign up once a day. You don’t have to do anything extra. If you don’t write a blog post, nothing gets sent out. And, if you want to communicate with your list, you just post on the blog – and take care of 2 marketing tasks at once, because your blog is refreshed and your customers have been updated.

Feedblitz also allows you to log in to your account on their site and view a list of your subscribers – to see exactly who’s subscribed. There are other features on their site that allow you to email your subscribers separately from your blog – for example, if you want to make a special discount offer to subscribers only.

RSS Feeds

The other option is to have people read your blog through RSS Streams, or RSS assistance programs like Feedburner. These are neat and easy for the client to do – they just grab your RSS address from your blog and then paste it into their email program or RSS aggregator. And, they increase the likelihood that people will keep up with your blog – instead of leaving it to them to remember to pull up your blog site every few days. But, the major disadvantage to you here is that they don’t have to give you their details in exchange. That means that you can only communicate with these contacts through the blog – which is better than nothing, but not ideal.

As consultants, we often capture short interviews with clients or leave ourselves digital messages on our smart phone. If your smart phone is an iPhone, there’s a nifty application that allows you to capture those short audio messages (up to five minutes) and share them: AudioBoo out of the UK. Now, thanks to integration with the Spinvox API, a voice-to-text company, users will be able to automatically convert these audio files to text.

I just love handy little tools like this and can’t wait to test drive it out. So, I thought I’d share this with other like-minded consultants.

Read, “AudioBoo Adds Spinvox to Auto-Transcribe Speech to Text” by Mike Butcher on TechCrunch (July 8, 2009)

Marketing Vox summarizes a social media study by Michael Stelnzer that set out to understand how and why marketers are using social media to grow and promote their businesses. The study found that Twitter, blogs, LinkedIn, and Facebook — in that order — are the top four social media tools used by marketers.

Given that the study (”How Marketers Are Using Social Media to Grow Their Businesses” PDF) “began with a Twitter post, which was then re-posted by users onto Facebook and blogs,” it’s not surprising that Twitter placed high (approximately 2,500 marketers were sent an email asking them to take the survey as well). 

Other stats about the survey:

• Survey closed after 10 days with 880 respondents participating
• 70% of the participants were small business owners
• 26% of the participants were employees working at a company
• 78.1% of the participants were between 30 – 59 years of age
• 56% of the participants were female, and 44% of them were male

Read “Marketers’ Top Social Media: Twitter, Blogs, LinkedIn, Facebook“

There’s a lot of buzz these days about sales 2.0. Articles and blogs on the topic are posted daily. Webcasts and videos are prevalent. Books are hitting the shelves. And conferences, such as the 2009 Sales 2.0 Knowledge Share Conference, are being held. Still, many sales and marketing professionals are unsure what sales 2.0 is all about. This latest article by Mary Gospe (KickStart Alliance) in the Women in Consulting (WIC) Featured Article Series provides answers.

Read “What Is Sales 2.0? Leveraging Web 2.0 Technologies for Sales“