Those looking for all natural lamb meat and cuts can find great lamb packages on RanchlineAllNatural.com . Ranchline All Natural wanted an e-commerce website that not only offered the premium lamb meat from the Felix River area of New Mexico, but they wanted to offer their website visitors great lamb recipes, grilling tips and wine pairings.

You can see the web design is clean and easy to navigate around.  Many e-commerce web designs can make shopping and checking out a difficult task, so usability is always important when Five builds an e-commerce website.  The lamb product pages offer large and professional photos and specific details on the lamb cuts included in the packages.

This e-commerce website is built on our SMC content management tool that allows Ranchline to easily manage their product line, pricing, shipping options. As a reseller for Authorize.Net, we integrated their merchant account into the SMC’s checkout to automate the process for Ranchline All Natural.  The SMC also allowed us to create the site with SEO friendly URL’s and SEO friendly product pages.

Naturally, it turned out to be a fantastic web design project for us. Check it out!

I recently asked the help of a few Twitter users to measure the impact that Twitter can have on promoting a blog post. Plenty of bloggers on Twitter will tweet about their own posts but I wanted to see the power of “retweeting“, when other Twitter users put out a link and suggest your blog post to their followers.

The outcome: Some simple Twitter promotion and retweeting DOUBLED my normal blog traffic for the day.

I’ve found myself referring to Twitter as broadcasting channels, no different than TV or radio. Each channel (person) has it’s own set of followers (audience). Some are shared and the sizes, interests and interaction of the audience vary.

The Blog Post To Be Retweeted
The first thing I did was create a post of solid value and interest. No, not all of my posts make this criteria. So I thought that sharing our email marketing campaign statistics would be a great post.

The Twitter Broadcast Channels
Next I hit up some folks I know on Twitter from various web and Internet marketing backgrounds, “Twitter styles” and number of followers. Accepting my request to help were Desarae Veit of Sniki, David Mihm a Portland Web Designer, Kirk Anderson a Wisconsin Web Designer and Mike Rynchek, a Minneapolis Online Marketer. I’ll break down their Twitter handles and followers at the end of this post, but these four broadcast channels and myself gave me exposure to over 2,300 followers.

The Retweeting Message
Here is a screenshot of a Twitter search of the TinyURL that was given to them to retweet my post. You can see how each of them suggested my post/link to their followers and audience.

The Blog Traffic Result
Retweeting and the Twitter broadcasting made my unique visitors double, my page views double and I gained 8 new subscribers that day. No doubt, it was a powerful promotion tool for my blog. I went into this little experiment hoping for a bit of a spike but was very pleased with what it offered up. A few of my retweeters even shared with me that their readers gave them feedback or thanked them for putting them onto my post. How cool is that?

Twitter is a great broadcast tool and traffic generator, not just a great networking tool.

The Twitter Info On Those Who Helped
Here again are those that helped me and how you can follow them on Twitter. They all put out some great tweets on web design, social media, online marketing, SEO and small business. I suggest you follow them.

• Desarae Veit (1400+ followers) http://twitter.com/desaraev
• Mike Rynchek (500+ followers) http://twitter.com/mikerynchek
• David Mihm (300+ followers) http://twitter.com/davidmihm
• Kirk Anderson (150+ followers) http://twitter.com/kirkaanderson

Of course you can always follow me as well at http://twitter.com/AaronWeiche .

Do you have a Twitter story to share on what it has done for your blogging traffic, web traffic or another aspect of your business? I would love to see your comments on this.

While many businesses are interested in the benefits a content management solution (CMS) or a blog can bring to their web presence, many are confused on the types of content to publish and use.  Fresh web content is a component of search engine optimization so it is important to brainstorm, plan and execute production of new web content to your site.

Here are just 5 ideas to add fresh content to your website with a CMS or blog:

1.   Write a short comparison article on your product or service versus the competition.

2.   Produce case studies on clients you have helped.  Describe the solution and how it benefits the client.

3.  Have some fun.  Put together a Dave Letterman type Top 10 list like “The Top 10 Reasons Our Web Geeks Are The Best”.  Humor can also educate.

4.  Spotlight on an employee.  Breakdown their job position, their interests and how what they do is of benefit to the customer / client.

5.  Recap a company event, a community event you participated in or a networking event.  Add a photo to the recap and show your involvement.

There are just five very basic ideas to add content to your website.  These angles not only produce fresh content but will likely contain keyword phrases that are important to your search engine optimization.  We often work with a client to develop ideas on building better content on their website and it can take only a few minutes of creativity to develop a list of 40 to 50 ideas.

The goal is to show both users and search engines your website is alive and well, not ignored and out of date.

It’s no secret the passion we have for web design. It’s written right on our business cards and is obvious to our clients and prospects. We also get a lot of inspiration from the great CSS Gallery websites out there and we love it when our work is featured in them.

All of this led us to create a website specifically for the awesome web design community in Minnesota, it’s called Websota.

We’ll be featuring great web designs we find or that are submitted by others weekly. Stay tuned for new designs appearing each week. There are directories for web design firms and freelancers to help Minnesota companies and organizations find the right web design provider and a MN blog directory.

You can help (or please help)
It’s not a secret that we need your help to make this site work. We’d love to get a few links and attention from the MN web design community or a blog post from you. Submit your web designs for the gallery, tell us about your web design company or your own skills and add your blog to our directory.

We have some great future plans and ideas for Websota as well. The goal is to make the site a complete MN web design resource full of web design samples, companies, tips, articles, interviews and more. You can also stay in touch with us through the Websota blog or by following us on Twitter (@websota).

Give Websota.com a visit! Rate a few web designs, add your info and tell us what we can improve upon.

Want to see what someone else gets for open rates and click thru’s on their email marketing? OK, I’ll share with you what we’ve experienced this summer with our small start to email marketing for our web design and Internet marketing services.

Five Technology’s Email Marketing Facts:

• With Five Technology as a new brand/company to start 2008 we inherited a small list from our parent company Intrcomm.
• Our first e-letter went out to 149 contacts, over 80% we’re existing clients that had received an announcement letter of Five’s launch about a month earlier.
• We have increased our email list to 195 contacts in just by verbally asking or telling potential / new clients we will add them as a way to keep in touch with them.
• We are experimenting with content, value and calls to action. The whole point is to research, refine, report and review.
• We send out a monthly e-letter on a Tuesday morning (10am or so), mid month.

I’ve talked before about the value of email marketing. The ability to get “inbox time” with a client or prospect is the top benefit. The secondary benefit of email marketing for me is the tracking and reporting. You can actually see what your audience does with your message and apply measurement to it.

+ Open Rate: How Many People Are Opening Your E-letter
You can see that we have had a consistent open rate with 36%, 38% and 41% range on our campaigns after a low of 29% to start. Not a surprise that our first broadcast had a lower number, it was unexpected by our audience to a certain degree. We’re encouraged by our recent high of 41% on our last campaign. We hope to hit a 50% open rate in the next two months.

Keys To A Successful Open Rate:

1. A subject title that is concise and states the value or benefit clearly.

2. Picking a content/subject that has value and relevance to your audience.

3. Feature great content. To get improvement on your opens, you must get those who do open to find it valuable (that’s value for a third time). This builds a following of openers and allows your “newbies” to help increase your open rate.

+ Click-Thrus: Getting Your Readers To Take Action
After you get your audience to open your e-letter, your next goal should be to get them to take action. For some, just getting their name or message to a reader is fine, but a truly good email marketing campaign has goals to be achieved. Clicking a link to buy, fill out a request form, set-up a meeting or get a free report are all examples of a goal for an email campaign. We have had both success and failure with our click-thrus, but we have learned a lot.

Keys To Successful Click-Thrus

• Clearly state, show and offer a call to action
• Test and learn what your audience responds to:
  • Money saving offers
  • Free reports
  • Urgency or time sensitive offers
  • Limited quantity offers

Here is our best campaign for click-thrus. It was where our call to action combined a money saving offer and limited availability. Offering half priced video production to only 3 customers was a success. We generated interest beyond the offer.

+ Success Past One Open & One Week
A great thing we have noticed is how our recipients go back and open our e-letters multiple times, even weeks or months after getting it. While we have yet to make any determinations on why we can only speculate that they found the content/information of value and revisited it to review, get a link or grab our contact info. Having some “shelf-life” to our email communication is great and we look forward to building upon this as well. It caused you to think about your message and how to make it one that has longevity past one read or click.

Summary Of Our Email Marketing Campaign
So as you can see, we have had some successes and some challenges lie ahead. Each time we have sent out our monthly e-letter it has generated opens, clicks, contact forms and phone calls. That’s the goal and we love watching it happen (and tracking it).

We also have some challenges ahead in continuing to deliver valuable content to a growing list. I hope that the next blog post on our email marketing program covers how we have implemented and succeeded at list building and nudged our open rate over the 50% mark.

If you have anything to offer or would even share a few of your email marketing numbers or findings, we’d love a comment from you or your business.