Deliverability is one of those areas of digital marketing where the details matter, so for this interview I turned to Tim Watson, Operations Director of Email Service Provider, SmartFOCUS Digital for the low-down on email deliverability best practice.

Typical deliverability problems

Q1. What are the main problems the email marketer needs to be aware which can lead to their email being blocked? There are two main areas for B2C e-marketing: Emailing solution setup technical factors IP address reputation, content and HTML factors The technical factors are controlled by the Email Service Provider or your IT department if you run your own mailing solution. The IP address reputation is under direct influence of the email marketer"€™s actions and should be of primary concern, after which content and HTML factors are next most important. B2B e-marketing is not so dependent on IP address reputation,…

Update, June 2009 - see my review of O'Reilly Book on developing Twitter business strategy. Everyone is familiar with the rapid growth in followers of celebrities such as @stephenfry and @britneyspears on Twitter. As the chart from Twitter Counter shows there has been an acceleration in adoption in 2009 has celebs have used offline media to drive their followers. You may also have seen my post on the top digital marketers (consultants, publishers and agencies) to follow on Twitter - this shows how many digital marketers are learning from each other through Twitter. But how are businesses using Twitter? And is Twitter worthwhile for all types of business? In this post I will review some examples of how companies from the UK and US are using Twitter in different categories of benefits.

How Dell use Twitter for different business applications

Before…

This post is a summary of my presentation to the Advanced Search Term Research & Targeting session at Search Engine Strategies London, 2009. I hope to share and learn on tools and tips for keyword analysis - so please add your ideas to comments. The reality for most SEOs today who are working for agencies or clients is that they are trying to get better rankings in the natural listings for a site that has already been SEO ed, so a basic keyphrase audit and analysis will already have been completed. Which tools and process should you follow  to audit the current effectiveness of your keywords and get better results? I'd like to thank Vince Coyle, Head of Search at  Universal McCann for reviewing the types of tools and providing the summary of the UM keyword research process at the end of this post. Let's start with the main types of keyword research tools…

This Subdomain vs subfolder issue is one of many decisions on business blogging for companies deciding on setting up a blog. If you get the decision wrong you may not take advantage of the authority of your existing domain and so your blog won't attract much traffic initially. I've recently setup a new Wordpress blog to replace my legacy blog, so I thought I'd share my experiences in case anyone passes this way. Initially I set it up on a subdomain http://blog.davechaffey.com. I pointed all my run-of-site nav links at this sub-domain. I think I felt that the longer-term benefits of being on a sub-domain and pointing back to the main site might give some SEO benefits. I used this earlier discussion on Subdomains vs subfolders for SEO to inform my decision. There's clearly no right or wrong answer. After a week it was in the index, but not featuring for any 3-4…

Why the list?

Many marketers on Twitter are still relatively new to it, and like me have the challenge of needing to keep up-to-date across the whole of digital marketing. So, I wrote this post at the start of 2009 to show who I think is really worthwhile following, i.e. there is a good signal to noise ratio focusing on insights which help me learn about the latest developments or best practice. I've updated it in 2010 to include others I now regularly follow. My recommendations on who to follow are categorised across all the the different areas of online marketing shown in the diagram below based on who I have found useful to follow to keep me up-to-date, advance my knowledge. Generally I have just included real people rather than publishers or information sites that just push updates and don't interact. I hope you find my tweets useful too! - I try to act…