Growing Your Permission Email List
Starting from Square One
If you just started your business, or if you just launched your website, you probably don't have an email list to send to. So what do you do?
Ways To Grow Your Opt-In List:
Place your email newsletter signup form on your home page (MailChimp gives you free signup boxes that you can customize and copy-paste to your website).
Link to your signup form from every page of your website (you might add a link to your footer, or side navigation).
Place a link to your email signup form in your email signature (ask everyone in your company to do it too)
Add the link to your signup form in all the invoices your company sends
Offer free giveaways to one lucky subscriber (it can be a company t-shirt, or something kooky, like a 20 pound box of banana candy).
Post free whitepapers or helpful articles on your site. They'll get downloaded like crazy, if you just offer them for free, and with no registration. Inside your whitepaper, place your own "full page ad" to your newsletter.
Send out personal, one-to-one emails to all your clients, and ask them to please signup to your newsletter.
In your "Contact Us" form on your website, add a checkbox to "signup for our newsletter"
Add an "opt-in for our newsletter" checkbox in your e-commerce checkout page.
Already Have a List of Customers?
What if you already have an email list of customers that you've been doing business with for years? Well, just because they're your customers, it doesn't mean they want to start receiving your email newsletters.
Let's say you run a small consultancy with a couple dozen clients who are very close to you. If you just assume they'd want your newsletter, and you subscribe them to your list without their permission, you're just going to irritate a lot of them (or worse, get yourself reported as a spammer). I've had colleagues start their own companies, and then add me to their lists. It's kind of awkward clicking the opt-out link in those emails, know what I mean?
If you've got an e-commerce store, you're probably sitting on a huge email list of customers who have purchased something from you in the past. But if they didn't check a box for email marketing, or if you haven't emailed them anything in years, you shouldn't start sending them emails out of the blue. If only 0.1% of your customers forgot who you are, and report your campaign as spam, you could get blacklisted.
So what the heck can you do? It's simple, but surprisingly few email marketers bother. They're so excited about sending their first campaign, they throw politeness out the door.
If you have a list of customer email addresses, and you want to start sending them email marketing, but you don't have their permission yet, ask them for permission.
Send a "Re-Introduction Email." It's extremely effective, and best of all, it's polite. You just put together a personal note. Write it like you'd write to a friend.
(For the full article, you might want to refer to http://www.mailchimp.com/articles/growing_your_permission_email_list/)
Thursday, October 22, 2009
Sunday, September 20, 2009
RECOVERY IS JUST AS IMPORTANT AS TRAINING - DON'T OVERLOOK IT
For more info, free traning articles, training plans and e-books on cycling and training, visit this website.
Recovery is just as important to improving your cycling fitness as is the riding itself. You see, the way I think about it, training breaks your body down. It's the recovery that brings you back stronger. So you can't say one is more important than the other. You need both training to provide the training stimulus (and damage) and recovery to repair the damage and bring you back stronger. Most of the time I spend writing about the training piece but this month I'm going to focus on the recovery side. When you do a hard or long ride, a number of things happen to your body. You use fluids and energy, you get tired, and you break down muscle tissue. Each of these need to be addressed with recovery.
When you ride you lose fluid through breathing and sweating. The hotter it is and the harder you are working, the more fluid you lose. You should attempt to replace some of this fluid while you ride but when sweating heavily, this won't be possible. Therefore, you should concentrate on drinking a lot of fluids after your ride is completed. You should drink 1.5 litres of fluid for every litre lost during your ride. No idea how much you lose? Then you should weigh yourself before a ride and then after, without clothes, to see how much you lost. You might be surprised how much you lost, even though you drank lots during your ride.
You also use a considerable amount of energy during a bike ride. Your body uses both fat and sugar during a ride, and even some protein on longer rides. You need to replace lost nutrients after a ride. It's most effective to replace your blood sugar through carbohydrates within two hours of finishing a ride. This is the so-called Glycogen Window when your body is most receptive to absorbing energy into cells. It's also good to include some protein after a ride so your body can repair damaged cells. Your body has enough stored sugar for a 2-3 hour ride. You will need to replenish all these calories through food in the 24 hours following a long ride.
Muscles also need time to recover from the stress and strain of training. As you use your muscles, you create tiny trauma to your muscle fibers in the form of small tears. This is partialy what causes sore muscles following a hard ride. As your body heals your muscle tissues, they grow back a little thicker and stronger, which is what creates larger and stronger muscles through training. For this to happen, you need adequate food and fluid intake and you need to give your muscles time to heal. Depending on how much damage you did, how young or old you are and how fast your recover, it can take 1-3 days to fully recover from a hard ride or race. Massage can help the recovery process by flushing out waste products from your muscles and loosening up tight, sore muscles.
There are two main ways to rest from a hard workout, complete rest and active recovery. Complete rest is exactly what it sounds like, not riding, staying off your feet as much as possible, napping and sitting around. Going back to the office on a Monday after a hard weekend of riding is a good thing. Think of it as recovery. Just don't tell your boss. Active recovery involves easy riding or other types of cross training. The purpose here is to not rest your legs completely, where they may get stiff, but rather to move them easily to help stay loose and to use the muscles enough to flush out the waste products and pump blood and nutrients into your muscles. Usually, active recovery is preferred over complete rest but there are times when complete rest is called for.
And finally, your head needs to rest up from a hard workout. Training hard takes a lot of mental energy. Too many days and weeks of hard training can drain your brain of the necessary mental energy to keep pushing to avoid burnout. Rest days are just as important for your head as for your body.
When I am creating training plans, I put in anywhere from two to four recovery days per week. If someone is racing and training hard, they may need four days. For older riders, more recovery is needed. Then there's the mental energy component. Someone who works long hours and has other family activities to tend to, rest days are much appreciated.
So don't shortchange your recovery. The harder you ride and train, the more time you need to spend on recovery. Failure to do so may result in burnout, overtraining and the possibility of injury.
For more info, free traning articles, training plans and e-books on cycling and training, visit this website.
Recovery is just as important to improving your cycling fitness as is the riding itself. You see, the way I think about it, training breaks your body down. It's the recovery that brings you back stronger. So you can't say one is more important than the other. You need both training to provide the training stimulus (and damage) and recovery to repair the damage and bring you back stronger. Most of the time I spend writing about the training piece but this month I'm going to focus on the recovery side. When you do a hard or long ride, a number of things happen to your body. You use fluids and energy, you get tired, and you break down muscle tissue. Each of these need to be addressed with recovery.
When you ride you lose fluid through breathing and sweating. The hotter it is and the harder you are working, the more fluid you lose. You should attempt to replace some of this fluid while you ride but when sweating heavily, this won't be possible. Therefore, you should concentrate on drinking a lot of fluids after your ride is completed. You should drink 1.5 litres of fluid for every litre lost during your ride. No idea how much you lose? Then you should weigh yourself before a ride and then after, without clothes, to see how much you lost. You might be surprised how much you lost, even though you drank lots during your ride.
You also use a considerable amount of energy during a bike ride. Your body uses both fat and sugar during a ride, and even some protein on longer rides. You need to replace lost nutrients after a ride. It's most effective to replace your blood sugar through carbohydrates within two hours of finishing a ride. This is the so-called Glycogen Window when your body is most receptive to absorbing energy into cells. It's also good to include some protein after a ride so your body can repair damaged cells. Your body has enough stored sugar for a 2-3 hour ride. You will need to replenish all these calories through food in the 24 hours following a long ride.
Muscles also need time to recover from the stress and strain of training. As you use your muscles, you create tiny trauma to your muscle fibers in the form of small tears. This is partialy what causes sore muscles following a hard ride. As your body heals your muscle tissues, they grow back a little thicker and stronger, which is what creates larger and stronger muscles through training. For this to happen, you need adequate food and fluid intake and you need to give your muscles time to heal. Depending on how much damage you did, how young or old you are and how fast your recover, it can take 1-3 days to fully recover from a hard ride or race. Massage can help the recovery process by flushing out waste products from your muscles and loosening up tight, sore muscles.
There are two main ways to rest from a hard workout, complete rest and active recovery. Complete rest is exactly what it sounds like, not riding, staying off your feet as much as possible, napping and sitting around. Going back to the office on a Monday after a hard weekend of riding is a good thing. Think of it as recovery. Just don't tell your boss. Active recovery involves easy riding or other types of cross training. The purpose here is to not rest your legs completely, where they may get stiff, but rather to move them easily to help stay loose and to use the muscles enough to flush out the waste products and pump blood and nutrients into your muscles. Usually, active recovery is preferred over complete rest but there are times when complete rest is called for.
And finally, your head needs to rest up from a hard workout. Training hard takes a lot of mental energy. Too many days and weeks of hard training can drain your brain of the necessary mental energy to keep pushing to avoid burnout. Rest days are just as important for your head as for your body.
When I am creating training plans, I put in anywhere from two to four recovery days per week. If someone is racing and training hard, they may need four days. For older riders, more recovery is needed. Then there's the mental energy component. Someone who works long hours and has other family activities to tend to, rest days are much appreciated.
So don't shortchange your recovery. The harder you ride and train, the more time you need to spend on recovery. Failure to do so may result in burnout, overtraining and the possibility of injury.
For more info, free traning articles, training plans and e-books on cycling and training, visit this website.
Cycling at its peak
For more info, free traning articles, training plans and e-books on cycling and training, visit this website.
If you follow a serious training regime, you've been training for months now and have built up your fitness to a high level. If you race, you are well into your racing season. If you ride in tours, you've probably done several and perhaps even a multi-day tour such as RAGBRAI(R). You ought to be feeling really good about your riding right now. If you feel tired of riding or burned out, read the next issue on recovery! Now that you've arrived at mid-season, there are some workouts you can do to hone your peak fitness for the season. I have a collection of workouts intended to work the anaerobic and VO2 max systems of your body. I enjoy this time of year because I can pull these workouts out of my collection and use them with the cyclists I coach. Before these can be done, you need to have a solid base of fitness which comes through a lot of endurance miles and aerobic threshold work. Once you've done these for a few months, you can take on more intense workouts. (Disclaimer: Be sure to be checked out by your doctor before attempting anaerobic type workouts!). Keep in mind, not every cyclist needs to or should do these intense workouts. It depends on your goals. If you are performance-minded or race, then you need to do these. If you are happy tooling along and just riding for the fun of it, then you really don't need to subject yourself to these workouts unless you want to.
I like to think of cycling fitness as a pyramid. At the broad base is the endurance and strength components of fitness. These should be worked on year-round and represent your fitness foundation. On top of that is your aerobic fitness. This fitness is developed by doing aerobic threshold workouts such as time trialing, which are hard but not anaerobic. These, too, can and should be done year-round. Then, and only then, can you work your way up to the pinnacle of the pyramid where you will find anaerobic and power workouts. These include intervals in the anaerobic zone where you will find yourself 'out of breath'. "Anaeobic" means 'without air' and that's what these intervals do - they force you to work in oxygen deficit which happens at very high intensities. These are the intervals that most people think about when you mention intervals - those gut-busting efforts that are very hard and hurt. I also include power intervals such as short hard accelerations and sprints. The nice thing about the pyramid image is that it does have a point at the top, representing peak fitness. You will only spend a short time at peak fitness. It is very difficult to maintain and even the pros can only hold their peak for a couple of weeks. It's possible to have 2-3 good peaks per season.
So what are anaerobic workouts and what do they accomplish? The best answer is that these workouts help every physiological aspect of your fitness. They stress both your aerobic and anaerobic systems. They cause your heart,lungs, blood and muscles to work at full capacity, something they don't get to do the rest of the year. By stressing these systems to their near-maximum, it forces them to get more efficient and thus increases your fitness level. Let's take your blood for example. The reason you get out of breath under high efforts is because you cannot supply oxygen from your lungs to your muscles fast enough. Training at anaerobic levels will force your body to make more red blood cells and increase its oxygen carrying capacity. Over time, your red blood cell and hemoglobin concentrations will increase.
You can only reach your peak fitness after a good, solid fitness base has been developed so your body can handle the additional stress. However, once you are able to do these workouts, you will find you are able to take your fitness to the next level and reach your peak performance!
For more info, free traning articles, training plans and e-books on cycling and training, visit this website.
If you follow a serious training regime, you've been training for months now and have built up your fitness to a high level. If you race, you are well into your racing season. If you ride in tours, you've probably done several and perhaps even a multi-day tour such as RAGBRAI(R). You ought to be feeling really good about your riding right now. If you feel tired of riding or burned out, read the next issue on recovery! Now that you've arrived at mid-season, there are some workouts you can do to hone your peak fitness for the season. I have a collection of workouts intended to work the anaerobic and VO2 max systems of your body. I enjoy this time of year because I can pull these workouts out of my collection and use them with the cyclists I coach. Before these can be done, you need to have a solid base of fitness which comes through a lot of endurance miles and aerobic threshold work. Once you've done these for a few months, you can take on more intense workouts. (Disclaimer: Be sure to be checked out by your doctor before attempting anaerobic type workouts!). Keep in mind, not every cyclist needs to or should do these intense workouts. It depends on your goals. If you are performance-minded or race, then you need to do these. If you are happy tooling along and just riding for the fun of it, then you really don't need to subject yourself to these workouts unless you want to.
I like to think of cycling fitness as a pyramid. At the broad base is the endurance and strength components of fitness. These should be worked on year-round and represent your fitness foundation. On top of that is your aerobic fitness. This fitness is developed by doing aerobic threshold workouts such as time trialing, which are hard but not anaerobic. These, too, can and should be done year-round. Then, and only then, can you work your way up to the pinnacle of the pyramid where you will find anaerobic and power workouts. These include intervals in the anaerobic zone where you will find yourself 'out of breath'. "Anaeobic" means 'without air' and that's what these intervals do - they force you to work in oxygen deficit which happens at very high intensities. These are the intervals that most people think about when you mention intervals - those gut-busting efforts that are very hard and hurt. I also include power intervals such as short hard accelerations and sprints. The nice thing about the pyramid image is that it does have a point at the top, representing peak fitness. You will only spend a short time at peak fitness. It is very difficult to maintain and even the pros can only hold their peak for a couple of weeks. It's possible to have 2-3 good peaks per season.
So what are anaerobic workouts and what do they accomplish? The best answer is that these workouts help every physiological aspect of your fitness. They stress both your aerobic and anaerobic systems. They cause your heart,lungs, blood and muscles to work at full capacity, something they don't get to do the rest of the year. By stressing these systems to their near-maximum, it forces them to get more efficient and thus increases your fitness level. Let's take your blood for example. The reason you get out of breath under high efforts is because you cannot supply oxygen from your lungs to your muscles fast enough. Training at anaerobic levels will force your body to make more red blood cells and increase its oxygen carrying capacity. Over time, your red blood cell and hemoglobin concentrations will increase.
You can only reach your peak fitness after a good, solid fitness base has been developed so your body can handle the additional stress. However, once you are able to do these workouts, you will find you are able to take your fitness to the next level and reach your peak performance!
For more info, free traning articles, training plans and e-books on cycling and training, visit this website.
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