July 2010 - Newsletter

Hi guys,

Hope you're having a great week. This month we are super excited to announce the launch of our brand new Blogs and Social Networking add-on, which will make it easy for you to manage all your social media profiles and start a blog for your business. As a celebration, we also have a great introductory offer for a limited time on this product. We've also included a couple of awesome articles on how to start using your social media profiles to promote your business.

For a full list of the topics, check out the contents below - and hope you enjoy the read!


Brand new Social Networking add-on

With all the social media buzz around, we thought it was about time that we developed a new product that will make it easier than ever to manage your social media presence. To make this happen, we've been busy working away in the background to create a new package that will integrate with your website seamlessly - and we think we've finally nailed it! We've also been testing some of the software on one of our own websites to find any kinks and iron them out.

The Zeald Social Networking Add-on allows you to setup all your Twitter, Facebook and Google Buzz accounts in your Website Manager. From here, you can easily post updates to all these platforms with one click every time you introduce a new product, create a new page or enter a new blog post.

We've also included a blogging tool so you can start updating your customers and followers with any new news or interesting articles. It integrates nicely into the front end and the back end of your Zeald website and you can add this blog component to any page by going into the 'Live edit' mode. Your followers can also subscribe to an online news feed of your blog. Find out all about our Social Networking Add-on in our What's New blog.

To celebrate the launch, we have an amazing introductory offer on this product - for any orders placed in the next week, you will get $100 off the set up fee (usually $997+GST). It's for 7 days only and if you are interested in the add-on for your website, it's a great time to invest in it and take advantage of the savings. Visit our Online Store for details.

Why you should take the social media plunge

Last month we wrote a couple of articles introducing social media and the various platforms available (we announced it through our Friends & Supporters update). If you have missed out on it, have a read here. Since we published those articles, we've had a number of questions and requests asking for more information on how to get started with a profile for your business.

To help you along a bit more, we've written another couple of articles in our blog - the first article outlines the key benefits of social media for small to medium size businesses. There is still a bit of uncertainty out there in terms of the what social media can offer businesses - the reality is that businesses have been using it very effectively to generate real results and to improve customer satisfaction. Social media has a number of benefits that other forms of advertising and marketing don't offer and it is still a relatively new phenomenon - which means that this is the perfect time for you to get involved and give your business the edge. The article also includes an example of an award winning Kiwi business Belly Beyond, who have seen great results - just to inspire you. :-)

By the way, from now on all our general E-Business and website related articles will be posted on the Zeald Blog. We are slowly going to move across all our old articles from the 'Resources' section of our website to our Blog as well. Please keep checking back as we will regularly update it with new material.

Social media strategy: A plan of attack

The second social media article in our blog is all about coming up with a great social media strategy for your business because it is a very important step when you get started. The more time you invest in this part of the process, the more effective your social media presence will be. The strategy answers all the questions like who your customers are, what your customers are interested in, why you should measure your results, who should be responsible for handling your Facebook and Twitter profiles, etc. etc. - all the questions you need to think about and understand before you start running campaigns or promotions on social media platforms. Plus, once you have your strategy in place, the whole idea of delving in won't feel as daunting anymore!

Hope both these articles address any questions you might have, but remember, the key is to get started. Even if it means getting yourself a personal account on these platforms and start observing what people are doing and saying. If you find that you really need help, we do offer consulting services where you can get pointers on how to use social media to promote your business and also get some assistance with your strategy. But this is not about us pushing our services, we really just want you to get started. :-)

We hope you enjoyed the read. If you have any feedback for us, don't forget to post it on our Learning Centre - we love hearing from you! If you have any friends or colleagues who could use our help, please do let us know, and don't forget to check out our Friends & Supporters Club!

Thanks and hope your week goes well,

The Team at Zeald