300 Seconds: Check Those Links
If you send out an electronic newsletter, take an extra 300 Seconds before you press send to double check the links.
I use several types of links in my newsletters. The most typical is the link away from B&Wn to a site with supplemental information, like Edelweiss, the ABA’s bookweb.org, or a publisher asset page.
I like to link to my site, booksandwhatnot.com, because that’s where I like to house hi-resolution images, embedded videos, and more information I would like to include in the newsletter if it wouldn’t make it too long.
I also link my article headlines and photos to the longer piece on my site. The majority of email is now read on a smart phone, and many users tend to fat-finger articles. If you accidentally click on a photo, I want you to be able to read the article instead of having to close the image you accidentally enlarged in order to get back to the article.
Occasionally, I leave the image unlinked so you can actually see the image better if enlarged. In Wednesday I actually unlinked the image of Cynthia Compton’s posts so you could better read the captions with the photo enlarged.
When I have ads, I always double check that they are pointing to the correct landing page.
You might have noticed the past several days an ad for Sourcebooks’s ‘Readers Recommend Your Bookstore’ Sweepstakes, promoting The Readers of Broken Wheel Recommend by Katarina Bivald. When I tested the link for that ad, I really liked some of the items they’ve included on their landing page that not only help booksellers with content, but it keeps them coming back.
To help booksellers with the promotion of the sweepstakes, Sourcebooks provided graphics for postcards, social media posts and electronic ads. They also are maintaining a running tally of the bookstores with the most votes. (The consumer winners will be selected at random by a computer program, but the bookstore winners will be the bookstores with the most votes.)
Valerie Pierce, marketing manager for Sourcebooks, says they also emailed booksellers with both co-op and sweepstakes information. “We also offered to create a custom poster for any Indies that ordered 10 or more copies of the book,” she says.
Bookstores were also offered $25 co-op in exchange for photos of in-store displays featuring The Readers of Broken Wheel Recommend. Pierce shared these with me from The Learned Owl, Anderson’s, and The Bookstore Plus.
