| Tip #02: AOL & Text Links |
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| Affiliate Marketing Tips - General Affiliate Marketing Tips & Advice | |
| Tuesday, 04 April 2006 | |
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With nearly 25 million people subscribing to AOL, it’s more than likely that a good portion of your newsletter subscribers have AOL email addresses, and read your newsletter through their AOL account. Our own newsletter subscription list contains about 15% AOL email addresses. For this reason, I had to realize that unless I made my newsletters friendly to the AOL format I would lose some readership. AOL 9.0 (the newest version at the time of writing) handles HTML based email without a problem. But, text-based emails are not the same story. HTML formatting will enable AOL to properly display links, because there is code included that tells AOL to make it a clickable link. HOWEVER, realize that text based email does not give that option. Most email clients in use today are smart, and will make URLs clickable. AOL does not do this – you must provide instructions for AOL if you you’re your content to display correctly. Without including the proper formatting, you are forcing AOL users to take an additional step. They must copy and paste the URLs in your messages into a browser address field in order to open the target page. This is a hassle for busy users, and something that newbies may not understand. So, you can see, this is very important! In order to meet the needs of your AOL members, you must include that URL AND you must include a simple line of HTML that will enable AOLs email client to properly display the link. It’s this simple: You type this in your email: AOL users <a xhref="http://www.yoursite.com">enter here</a> What your subscribers see: AOL users enter here Now that you know the simple trick, give it a shot and watch your readership increase among AOL users. |
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