How to make your email marketing fun, with a Joomla twist

A many of you know, we loooove using Mailchimp for our newsletters! But…the integration with Joomla honestly left us with more to wish for. Sure, it was possible to use Mailchimps API to do some nice things, but let’s face it, if you’re going to run a member-driven site, these things should be seamless.

Joomla and Mailchimp just wasn’t the perfect couple…until now. A big thank you goes out to the FreakedOut team for making it happen!

Last year, the FreakedOut team created Joomailer, which merged the power of the CampaignMonitor email marketing system with Joomla. This made it possible to manage your website and CampaignMonitor driven email marketing from one admin control panel. Pretty sweet, we thought…but we still had our hearts set only on Mailchimp.

To our surprise, the FreakedOut team recently contacted us and said “We’ve got something you’ll love!”. Working together with MailChimp, FreakedOut have created a new version of Joomailer which integrates with our favorite Chimp. Yay! Best of all, the component is 100% free! (more…)

Tags: eMarketing, Joomla, mailchimp, Recommended Services

Treasures of the week

Bookmarking on Delicious, Magnolia, Digg or whatever is one thing. Picking the diamonds out of the heaps of internet treasures you find every week is another thing all together. Below you will find three of the diamonds we found this week.

SOCIAL MENTION

Real-time tracking of what people say about you

Social Mention is a social media search engine that searches user-generated content such as blogs, comments, bookmarks, events, news, videos, and microblogging services. It allows you to easily track what people are saying about you, your company, a new product, or any topic across the web’s social media landscape in real-time. (more…)

Tags: inspire change, Online Presence, Social Media

Fonts, where can I find more?

Have you ever struggled to find a font for a project? Tired of all your default fonts? Does your client want something really obscure?

We have all been to a website with a font we really liked, or really disliked. Sometimes it is really hard to find the one you want in a simple and effective way. I have found a site that makes it all easy.

Neatfonts.com is a great way to navigate around and find thousands of fonts. It has a slick ajaxy feature that lets you live preview any text you want. It is clear, simple to use and gets the job done. The only real downfall of the site is you can literally spend hours considering font options.

Tags: Design, fonts, tools of the trade

Moourl – The web’s cutest URL shortening service

Who’s got a tiny what??

I’m talking about TINY URL’s (universal resource locator). I am sure that many of you are familiar with the various url shortening services out there (such as the original tinyurl.com), but for those who don’t here is a quick summary:

“TinyURL (tinyurl.com) is a web service created by Kevin Gilbertson that provides short aliases to redirect long URLs. Gilbertson, a web developer, launched the service in January 2002 because he wanted to be able to link directly to newsgroup postings which frequently had long and cumbersome addresses.“

In essence what this is doing is taking a really long (hard to remember!) url and turning it into a super short (easy to remember) url.

An example of this could be taking a long url like this:
http://www.joomlajunkie.com/extensions/professional-joomla-extensions/ultimate-joomla-blogging-package.html and turning it into this http://tinyurl.com/2b3zgd. By clicking the short “tinyurl” the user is automatically redirected to the full url.

Why would anyone want to do that, you say? (more…)

Tags: tools of the trade

Read me!!!

We’ve all seen the ReadMe.txt files that come with software. How many of them have you ever read? Probably only a couple and then after the software didn’t work as you expected. A case of “when all else fails read the instructions”.

The point I’m trying to make here is that commanding someone to read something doesn’t work. The same is true of your website content. Just because someone has arrived at your site doesn’t guarantee they will read what you have to say. That’s why you need to either know the rules of web content or employ someone who does – a professional web or seo copywriter.

I’ll try to cover some of the rules in the next few posts so you can try them out on your new “you-beaut!” JoomlaJunkie template site.

Great copywriting + a cool JJ template! What a combination!

Tags: Copywriting