Issue #2649
- WEALTHY: One automaker that’s not in trouble (Christian Hill)
- HEALTHY: 3 steps to keeping obesity, diabetes, and heart disease at bay (Shane Ellison)
- WISE: Alex Mandossian on the Internet
ALSO IN THIS ISSUE:
- Pretty can be bad for business (Edwin Huertas)
- One of the worst things you can do to your writing (Suzanne Richardson)
- It’s Good to Know… about ghost twittering
- Add "ignoble" to your vocabulary
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The Wheels Aren’t Falling Off This Car
In an industry full of missteps and forced resignations, Hyundai is one company actually headed in the right direction.
First off, the economy is playing right into Hyundai’s hands. Long known as a maker of low-priced vehicles, Hyundai in an enviable position. The Sonata is priced roughly $2,000 less than a Toyota Camry, and the Santa Fe SUV is almost $10,000 less than a Toyota RAV4.
While still lagging far behind Toyota in sales, Hyundai does have one advantage: A full 55 percent of its sales come from countries in emerging markets, versus 31 percent for Toyota. And because those countries have withstood the worst of the global slowdown, this means the company can continue to see greater sales growth.
Also helping Hyundai is its product mix. Almost 65 percent of the automobiles it makes are small cars. In a world of rising gas prices, demand for these vehicles will increase, allowing the company to capture market share while other manufacturers re-tool their assembly lines.
Finally, the company introduced its AssurancePlus program, where it will make your payments for three months if you lose your job. And if you’re unemployed longer than that, Hyundai will buy back the vehicle. (This idea has proven to be so strong that GM and Ford recently announced similar programs to encourage people to buy.)
If you’re looking for an investment that could be on the upswing, Hyundai fits the bill.
[Ed. Note: Detroit native Christian Hill doesn't just follow the auto industry closely, he offers advice covering everything market-related in Investor's Daily Edge, ETR's sister publication. Sign up free here ]
Investing in automakers on the rise is just one investment you can profit from in 2009. This June, a group of financial experts will give you their top recommendations for making 2009 the best year ever for your portfolio. Find out more here.]
"Content is king on the Internet."
Alex Mandossian
Boring Is Better
You may have noticed that ETR’s email newsletter looks a little different these days…
Some might even say it looks "boring."
But we say "Boring is better!"
Some of the more "exciting" features of our e-mails were preventing them from reaching our subscribers. (Maybe even you!) So we’ve made a few changes to ETR – to make sure you get it in your inbox every morning.
And by making your own e-mails more "boring," you could see more subscribers receiving and opening them. Which, in the end, should result in more sales.
You see, the most important thing about an e-mail newsletter is not how "pretty" it looks or how "flashy" the design is. The most important thing is the content. The innovative ideas and useful techniques that made readers subscribe in the first place.
And if a newsletter’s subscribers can’t access that content because the graphics are too "high-tech," there’s no point in sending it out at all.
Every time you send an e-mail to your subscribers, their e-mail service checks to make sure it meets their deliverability standards. E-mail policies for Internet service providers (ISPs) change more often than you can keep up with. But if you follow a few basic guidelines, you should be able to get your e-mails to nearly all of your subscribers all of the time.
I’ll outline some of the more important guidelines below, but I’d like to discuss the design of your newsletter first.
I’ve managed well over 100 e-mail marketing campaigns for various companies around the world – and it seems to me that most businesses are more interested in designing a snappy-looking e-mail than in making sure the e-mail actually gets read.
Think of it this way: Your readers didn’t subscribe to your newsletter because it’s pretty. And once they have been duly impressed by the design of your first e-mail, do you really think they care about the design of your second e-mail? NO! They simply want the content they know the e-mail can provide. The design has nothing to do with the information they want and need.
In my experience, newsletters that focus on content rather than design experience higher sales conversion rates than newsletters with heavy HTML and graphics.
The more HTML and graphics you add, the more you take away from the message you’re trying to relay. As a result, I’ve found that newsletters willing to go lighter on HTML and graphics have higher open rates.
Now you might be thinking to yourself, "Why would this change my open rates?" I don’t have enough space to give you a complete answer to that question. But here – in brief – are a few of the main reasons (based on theories I’ve tested and know to be true):
1. Most SPAM protection software utilized by ISPs makes use of predetermined scoring mechanisms that look for e-mails that are bloated with HTML and graphics to determine if they are SPAM. SPAM Assassin, for instance, will penalize your e-mail if it has more than 30-40 percent HTML (vs. text).
2. Graphics do not always display correctly in e-mails. Plus, HTML standards are always changing. So the techniques you used to design your e-mails last year might not be as effective this year.
3. People do NOT prefer heavy HTML and graphics in their e-mails. E-mails that are graphics/HTML-heavy can take much longer to download.
4. Most e-mail software (and most e-mail services like Gmail and Yahoo) blocks images by default. This is a built-in security precaution. In order for the recipient to view the graphics, they have to click on a button or link to allow it. (And why would you want to make a customer click anything just so they can read your e-mail properly?)
5. Many of the companies I’ve helped in the past had the idea that, in order to make the most of their (virtual) real estate, they should leave no white space in their e-mails. But I’ve found that most people react much better to e-newsletters (and Web pages) that are "clean" looking, with plenty of white space.
Leaving the right amount of white space allows your viewer to read your e-mail more easily. (They can target the specific sections they’re interested in.) This gives them a better overall usability experience and makes it more likely that they’ll continue to open and read your e-mails.
ETR’s CEO and Publisher, MaryEllen Tribby, said, "I don’t care how "pretty" our readers think it is – I just want to make sure they get our valuable content everday."
Keep her words – and my guidelines – in mind when you send out your own e-mails. Sure, graphics, colors, and HTML can make an e-newsletter look slick and professional, fancy and fun. But they can also trigger your subscribers’ spam filters and cause other problems with deliverability and readability that you just don’t need.
Keep it simple. You could increase your open rates – which could skyrocket your sales.
[Ed. Note: There are a lot of details that go into running a successful Internet business. Fortunately, they aren't impossible to master or hard to learn. But if you don't know where to start, let ETR's experts help you. At our 5 Days in July business-building seminar, we'll walk you through everything from setting up a website to picking products to writing persuasive sales copy, and more. Get the details here.]
The Code of Silence Has Been Broken…
In today’s financial climate you can’t just keep doing the same old thing or you could see your entire nest egg vanish.
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Are You Guilty of Vocabulary Abuse?
In my brief stint teaching college writing classes, one of the biggest problems I saw among my students was vocabulary abuse.
You know what I’m talking about. Instead of writing simply and clearly, they would "bulk up" their sentences with complicated words.
Example: "In her book Meadowlands, Louise Gluck shifts seamlessly between the present day and the time of Odysseus, creating the sense that time as we know it doesn’t exist" becomes "In her quixotic volume of verses Meadowlands, Louise Gluck interleaves the contemporary era and the Odyssean epoch, which constitutes a continuum of consciousness unoccupied by ordinary chronologies."
Whew. What a mouthful.
And it’s not just college students who commit vocabulary abuse.
As Stephen King says in On Writing "One of the really bad things you can do to your writing is to dress up the vocabulary, looking for long words because you’re maybe a little bit ashamed of your short ones."
You can write well – as well as Hemingway or Steinbeck – without using "fancy" words with obscure meanings and multiple syllables.
Instead, stick to using the words that best convey what you’re trying to say – whether they have three letters or 25.
[Ed. Note: Statistics prove that people with broader vocabularies - people who always know the right word to use - earn more money. With ETR's Words to the Wise vocabulary-building program, you can improve your mind as well as the way others perceive you. Pick up a copy of this powerful program, and you'll be sounding - and feeling - more intelligent in no time!]
What to Do When Your Doctor Tells You Your Triglycerides Are Too High
By Shane "The People’s Chemist" Ellison, MS
Like most of us these days, Stan has been focusing on work, work, and more work. Doing so has kept him out of the gym and eating for convenience rather than health. He’s been taking in more calories than he uses, and now his doctor tells him his triglyceride level is too high.
A high triglyceride level (usually anything over 200 mg/dL) is simply the result of an energy imbalance within your body. Rather than fat and glucose (sugar) being utilized, they float aimlessly in the blood.
Since metabolism likes to be as tidy as possible, it packages unused fat and sugar into a storage molecule known as a triglyceride. Once merged, triglycerides are then stuffed into your belly, your muscles, or even your liver.
With high triglycerides, Stan risks obesity, Type II diabetes, and heart disease. In one fell swoop, his doctor prescribed a round of cholesterol-lowering drugs, anti-diabetic meds, and, for safe measure, blood pressure drugs.
Since Stan reads the headlines while sipping his sugary cup of joe, he knows these drugs aren’t his best option. Instead, he chose to follow my natural recommendations.
The natural enemy of triglycerides is a hormone known as glucagon. High triglyceride levels are usually accompanied by high insulin. Insulin stores fat while smothering glucagon production. Bring it back to the surface, and glucagon will smash triglycerides, as well as all the medical complications that accompany them.
How do you do it?
First, space your meals out by five hours. This will help insulin simmer down and cause your body to produce glucagon. Make sure you are consuming mostly healthy fats from seeds and nuts , grass-fed beef, real butter, cod liver oil, and avocados.
Second, start supplementing with a teaspoon of psyllium husk and about 300mg of alpha-lipoic acid daily. This will slow the absorption of calories and speed up sugar metabolism, reversing your body’s energy imbalance.
Finally, start exercising.
[Ed. Note: Shane Ellison is a two-time recipient of the prestigious Howard Hughes Medical Institute Research Grant for his research in biochemistry and physiology and is a best-selling author. He holds a master's degree in organic chemistry and has firsthand experience in drug design. Get the benefit of his knowledge and insight with his no-BS practical guide to living young naturally without dangerous, prescription drugs]
For more natural ways to avoid illness, stay healthy, and live longer, sign up for ETR’s free natural health newsletter]
It’s Good to Know: Ghost Twittering
You can follow celebrities and politicians – Shaquille O’Neal, President Obama, 50 Cent, Britney Spears – through their postings on the Web 2.0 darling Twitter. But you might wonder how they fit making those postings into their busy schedules.
Well… turns out they may not be writing them at all. Enter ghost twitterers, the perfect solution for the rich and famous who want to take advantage of the marketing potential of Twitter but don’t want (or don’t have the time) to put in the actual work. These specialized ghostwriters, often part of the star’s entourage, use their client’s "voice" and keep fans stocked with updates throughout the day.
Where does the marketing part of this come in? With frequent special announcements about such things as movie, book, and album launches.
(Source: The New York Times)
== Highly Recommended ==
It’s Time for Revenge on Wall Street’s Low-Lives Who Robbed Us Blind!
There’s no shame in admitting you were conned by Wall Street – you and about 300 million of your fellow Americans! But now if you are rethinking your investments (and who isn’t)… there’s a better way. Come join us in a new society I’ve dubbed "The Liberty Street League". It’s the "Off Wall Street" alternative for independent thinkers looking for respectable gains, even in these difficult times.
Word to the Wise: Ignoble
"Ignoble" (ig-NOH-bul) – from the Latin for "not noble" – means common, base, or humble in quality, character, or purpose.
Example (as used by Don Wyclif in The New York Times): "Heroes are only human. Their noble deeds inspire, as they should. Their ignoble deeds make clear that even the greatest human is no god."
[Ed. Note: Become a more persuasive writer and speaker ... build your self-confidence and intellect ... increase your attractiveness to others ... just by spending 10 VERY enjoyable minutes a day with ETR's new Words to the Wise CD Library.]
Copyright ETR, LLC, 2009
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