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You have a blog, email newsletter, facebook page and twitter account. Now what?
You got yourself set up. You are blogging weekly and sending links out via email, Facebook and twitter but you are starting to feel like you are talking to yourself. In fact looking at your follower numbers you are talking to yourself.
Here are 5 steps to start building an audience. One for each working day of the week.

Monday: Find people to follow on twitter.
There are a few ways to do this effectively.

1. Use http://tweepz.com/ to search for a keyword in a users profile. Example “Director of Marketing”.
2. Nearly every conference these days have their own hash tag to people can link and follow proceedings throughout the day. For example everyone tweeting from and discussing the Advertising Technology conference AdTech uses the tag #Adtech. Search the #Adtech keyword at http://search.twitter.com and it returns all the people who tweeted during the conference.
   Find out what conferences related to your business and find out the hash tag.
3. Find a leading commentator in your area of interest. Look at who they follow and who follows them. A tool such as http://tweepi.com can help with this.
4. Check out the twitter directory http://wefollow.com/ or search http://followerwonk.com/ to find people in your market and start following. Don’t forget to add yourself so others can follow you.

The following Monday use a tool like http://tweepi.com to follow everyone who is following you and you are not following back.
Unfollow everyone who did not follow you back last week to leave room for you to follow new people this week.

Tuesday: Post exclusive content on your Facebook page.
Tell people on your blog, twitter and email to go over and check it out and respond.

Wednesday: Ask a question on your blog and ask people to comment.
Tell people on the blog, Facebook and Twitter you are sending out your newsletter soon and they need to be subscribed to get it.

Thursday: Retweet others.
Comment on their Facebook page. Leave a comment on their blog post or write a longer blog post to reply to their points. They are more likely to follow you back.

Friday: Tell everyone on Facebook, Twitter and your email to check out this weeks blog posts.

Every Day:
Check for people talking to you and reply.
Search for keywords in your industry on twitter search and Google alerts and add your 2c.
Tell everyone about any new content or news you publish.

Photo by Anirudh Koul

Our Christmas Newsletter

Who said Christmas can’t come in February. What a lovely surprise to discover that our Christmas newsletter is runner up in Campaign Monitor’s annual Christmas email competition. Chuffed, we sure are.

Overall winner was Six Degrees Digital with Cattails Multimedia also receiving honourable mention.

Overall Winner Six Degrees

Runner Up Cattails Multimedia

A vCard is simply an electronic business card. It is a link or an attachment that contains the name, address and contact number of yourself or the person emailing you. Outlook, Yahoo, etc can understand vCards so that when you click on it, it will automatically add the contact details to your address book, saving you time retyping the details yourself.

Read more at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VCard or http://microformats.org/wiki/hcard

Campaign Monitor is a great simple to use email newsletter tool built to send your email campaign, track the results and manage your subscribers. Below is a simple guide on how to send your Toddle email newsletter with Campaign Monitor and track who opened it and what they clicked on.

• Browse on over to www.campaignmonitor.com and sign up for an account or log in if you already have.

• Once you are logged in click on “CREATE/SEND CAMPAIGN”.

• From here you are guided through a simple 4 step process.

• Select “HTML and plain text” when asked.

• First you will be asked for the HTML version of your email newsletter from Toddle. This is the all singing dancing version with images and colours. You will find this link in the “ADVANCED SENDING OPTIONS” box on toddle.us

• Some of your subscribers reading the email newsletter will not be able to view the all singing all dancing version. Some might use email programs that cannot display it or they might have chosen to turn that option off. For these cases we provide an alternative version of the newsletter in nicely formatted plain text. Click the Plain text link in Toddle and copy and paste the text into Campaign Monitor.

• Then its a simple matter of allowing Campaign Monitor guide you to sending the newsletter. If you are anything like us you will waste a few hours clicking the refresh button after sending your email campaign tracking who opened your newsletter and what articles they were interested in. It can be very addictive!!

• Thats it. Simple wasn’t it. Enjoy.

Read why it might be a good idea to send your email newsletter through a third party like Campaign Monitor instead of sending it yourself.