YasTech Developments Blog

Our March newslet­ter almost slipped into April, but we man­aged to get it out the door with a few days to spare. Find out why by click­ing here to view our March Newslet­ter.

Be sure to con­tact us if you have any ques­tions about how your busi­ness could do a bet­ter job of engag­ing with your cus­tomers. And be sure to sub­scribe to our Email Newslet­ter or RSS feed.

Inter­est­ing read­ing in this quick case study of a Happy Cog Karaoke con­test:

Tak­ing into account that there are four of us in our group doing the same thing daily and cumu­la­tively hav­ing the largest fol­low­ing on Twit­ter and Face­book, the results have been quite shock­ing and a lit­tle dis­heart­en­ing. Cal­cu­lat­ing the num­ber of votes we get per day, it’s just over 100. Divided between four of us, that is 25 each. And see­ing that I’m vot­ing 5x for myself (one on each browser and one on my phone browser) each day, that’s 20 per day! See­ing that I have 31,815 fol­low­ers on Twit­ter alone, that’s 0.06% of my fol­low­ers that are actu­ally voting (and that’s tak­ing into account that peo­ple are vot­ing only once!). Not to men­tion that I also got the infa­mous Gary Vayn­er­chuk to ask his 878,000+ fol­low­ers to vote and my SEO friend, Dean B to sprin­kle it through is network…which got us prob­a­bly a cou­ple dozen votes in total.

Empha­sis mine.

While a karaoke con­test isn’t exactly the great­est met­ric for fol­lower sup­port, it does pro­vide an inter­est­ing data set to inves­ti­gate how loyal your followers/fans are on social net­works. As we’ve posted about in the past, vis­i­tors to our web­site from Face­book do seem more inclined to spend longer on your site than Twit­ter fol­low­ers do but that doesn’t require any actual action step other than to leave a browser win­dow open.

There’s an inter­est­ing dis­cus­sion in the com­ments sec­tion of that post, includ­ing one com­ment from Erica that con­firms what we’ve been see­ing with our clients:

My largest asset is my email list. With ~4,000 peo­ple on it, it out­per­forms EVERY other method by thou­sands of times. Sec­ond is my blog’s RSS readership–though they don’t buy as much, they tend to engage.

But I can blast out an email to my list and get hun­dreds of click-throughs and replies in a mat­ter of min­utes. Don’t know what it is about email, but it really is effec­tive, and at this point I think any online busi­ness with­out a list is doing itself a disservice.

Be sure to con­tact us if you have any ques­tions about how your busi­ness could do a bet­ter job of engag­ing with your cus­tomers, includ­ing start­ing up an email newsletter.

And be sure to sub­scribe to our Email Newslet­ter or RSS feed.

It would seem you can’t swing a web browser around with­out hit­ting yet another to-do or get­ting things done appli­ca­tion or website.

One that came out a few months ago that might be a good fit for you is called Teux Deux. It’s a joint devel­op­ment between Swiss-miss.com and Fictivekin.com.

Mar­ket­ing Speak:

TeuxDeux is a sim­ple, designy, browser-based to-do app… The idea was to build a bare-bones, but visu­ally com­pelling and highly usable to-do app based on Tina’s per­sonal ideal work-flow.

Pos­i­tives

It fea­tures a sim­ple list for each day of what you have to get done with an easy to use inter­face for adding or remov­ing to dos. You can also click and drag to reorder items within a day or drag them over to another day if you don’t think you can get it all done that day.

Teux Deux also has a ‘Some­day’ list at the bot­tom of the page where you can put your to-do’s that aren’t urgent and can wait for some free time in the future:

Neg­a­tives:

One lim­i­ta­tion for a lot of peo­ple will be that it’s an online only to do list — so if you’re with­out an inter­net con­nec­tion you can’t add/remove to dos. They are, how­ever, work­ing on an iPhone and Black­berry apps so that should add some abil­ity to have offline access to your list.

Final Ver­dict:

Teux Deux is a free app (expect a pre­mium ver­sion in the future with more fea­tures) so you can’t go wrong in at least try­ing it. It’s clean, sim­ple design will help you focus on your tasks and not dis­tract you with a bunch of chrome and eye candy. Check out Teux Deux for your­self and let us know how it helps you orga­nize your busy life!

You can watch their promo video below for more information:

Direct link to video

We’ve just sent out our Feb­ru­ary newslet­ter, titled ‘The Power of Num­bers’, where we talk about web­site stats, suc­cess sto­ries and todayinSK.ca.

Click here to view the newslet­ter.

Be sure to con­tact us if you have any ques­tions about how your busi­ness could do a bet­ter job of engag­ing with your cus­tomers. And be sure to sub­scribe to our Email Newslet­ter or RSS feed.