Sure, the blogosphere gets bigger every year. The pool of experts continues to expand (you know you’re one if you read ProBlogger). But even more key, the pool of non-experts is really taking off.

Two things are widening the audience for blogs:

1. Better options for integrating blogs into web pages and social sites
2. “Subscribe by email”

Better Options

Back in the day (last year), you could re-publish your blog as html, allowing you to place it on a web page. Now, you can click a box and syndicate your stuff so it automatically appears on Facebook and Twitter.

Over at WidgetBox, you can build a shiny widget with a few clicks that others can easily use to re-publish your content. About a third of our traffic is coming from off-site syndication.

Bottom line: more people have more places to see your stuff and it doesn’t look like a “blog.”

Subscribe by Email

Feedburner and others give publishers an option to include a “subscribe by email” link. It’s easy to enable - just a few clicks and embed a piece of code.

Feedburner’s email service (free) provides a really clean, professional, business-grade product to the inbox of subscribers. People who “don’t read blogs” are signing up in droves.

Check it out for yourself: Subscribe to our blog by email :)

Call it Anything Else

Call it a Journal or a Notebook or News. Take inspiration from The Sartorialist, Make the Logo Bigger and Slashdot.

Why do we call ours a blog? Cause it’s for experts ;)

If you’re embarking on an email campaign, it’s important to consider the effect of the Preview Pane.

Consider two emails we received today: one was from the NY Times, the other was from Ad Age. One email was designed to take advantage of the Preview Pane. The other failed miserably.

Before we reveal the results (it’s pretty obvious), let’s explain:

The Preview Pane gives you a chance to see a little bit of an email from your Inbox view so you can decide whether or not you want to open the message.

Lots of email programs (email clients, in technical parlance) have this capability.

The Problem

Many email clients also sport a feature which blocks incoming images unless you click “get entire message,” “download pictures,” or some such verbiage.

Solution

1. To make proper use of the Preview Pane, your emails should put the important words and links in plain text - not image text.
2. You should compose your email so the most important info is displayed toward the top left (the area most likely seen in the Preview Pane).

And the Winner is

Decide for yourself:

Bottom Line

Effective use of the Preview Pane lifts open rates. Ad Age does itself a disservice by ignoring this aspect of email marketing.

There are two main rules:

1. Don’t use all caps (FREE)
2. Don’t use multiple exclamation points (FREE!!!)

Anecdotal evidence suggests that exclamation points in general trigger some filters. As well, using “Free” as the first word in the subject line may also be vulnerable.

Thanks to Nick Usborne and others for sharing their wisdom.

See also: Great email subject line!

I Stole Your Crutches

[Viewer warning - some of the links may use adult language. Don’t click if you are offended by that kind of stuff.]

It’s instructive to peruse the Best of Craigslist from time to time. These are posts that have been flagged by viewers as worthy of sharing with everyone.

The best of the Best share two qualities:

• Headline that promises something (entertainment, enlightenment, a 1973 Strat for $400)
• Body copy that pays off or exceeds the promise

The same principles apply to email campaigns, websites, landing pages and even your own personal correspondence. Could you be writing stronger headlines for your emails? Think about it. And consider these headlines and posts that made it to Best of:

Bad News About the Screeching Bird on Rossmore…

from your pizza delivery girl

Wanted: STONER BOYFRIEND

I stole your crutches

As usual, Gino offers sound advice, summarized here:

1. Start with a strong headline.
2. Write about what you know. If it’s a gig for a corporate blog, educate yourself.
3. Keep in mind the interests of your audience and how they might find you with a Google search.
4. Include calls to actions too – think “nothing asked, nothing done.”
5. Good copywriting style means writing for “lower-literacy users.” [Hilarious, but true. We always say “Write how regular people talk.”]
6. Write in an “inverted pyramid style” with your most important content in the first one or two paragraphs.
7. Split long posts into shorter chunks. Use bullets, numbering and breakouts whenever it’s apppropriate..
8. Use strong page titles.
9. Put your main points at the beginning of sentences. This helps with scanning and saves time. [We also advocate the use of subheads to aid scanning. Face it - that’s how people read stuff on the web]
10. Use Links

Read the complete article here.

Wow! Who wouldn’t want a free breakfast? (Of course, I stay at an economical Fairfield Inn that already has free breakfast.) But how about $1oo? What’s that about?

Yes, I opened.

This subject line is good in so many ways. It promises personal information (”Your account”) plus gives an incentive to open (”Free Breakfast + $100 Bonus”). It even includes a specific dollar amount which is proven to lift open rates.

Note that the word “Free” managed to pass through the spam filter. Note also that the writer resisted the urge to use an exclamation point.

The subject line is the most important component of an email. This line answers the call. Tip of the old chapeau to the anonymous scribe!

The consensus seems to be that verbs are okay in many instances as link text, even advisable in some circumstances. We officially volunteer to help update the W3C specs on the language of links.

However, our endorsement of verbs has some limitations. For example, we noticed this week that gerunds don’t seem advisable. What’s a gerund? Here’s what dictionary.com had to say:

The English -ing form of a verb when functioning as a noun, as writing in Writing is easy.

This presents some challenges for the online copywriter. We find ourselves often re-working sentences to avoid the gerund form. For example:

You can find out more by contacting us.

Not so good. This is better:

Contact us to find out more.

To sum it up about using verbs for link text:

• Verbs are fine as link text
• Avoid the gerund (-ing) form.