This week is a well rounded week when it comes down to email and internet marketing news. We've got some great email marketing articles, Facebook is at it again with another update, and a beefy piece on how to build a Top 100 blog in 12 months (click here to read Issue 3 of the Marketing Minute).

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I’ve never met kids like my own. They’re weird. They love school. Even before they could go to school they were stoked about the idea of it.

And as the sun starts to set on their summer vacation they’re revved up once again to go back to class.

Which got me to thinking about teachers. And all the prep and planning that they do in order to teach a class for a year. Which really is no different than everything that goes into having a successful email marketing program for your business.

As marketers there’s a bunch of things we can learn from these unsung heroes. 

Which is what inspired us to create the Email Marketing Assessment Workbook.

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The big news over the last little while has been about Gmail’s new tabbed inbox (check out Tab Attack) and Facebook’s latest series of updates.

There's other stuff going on as well. Like Microsoft picking a fight with Google, we discovered Tapiture (it's like Pinterest for dudes) and speaking of Pinterest they released a pretty cool feature recently as well.

Before you dig into the hottest articles below I wanted to share with you my favourite quote of the week. It comes from Tom Bell, VP of Corporate Communications at Email List,

"Here's an experiment for you: Imagine if the US Postal Service determined whether to throw away a piece of mail before delivering it; or if Twitter, Facebook, or YouTube hid your latest post to “protect” its users. Sounds crazy, right? Yet, that's exactly what's happening in the email industry."

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Social Media is all the rage nowadays - with adults.

PewInternet did some interesting research into who's using social media sites like facebook, twitter and instagram. And the people over at NextAdvisor were nice enough to take that data and create a fancy little infographic to help us understand what the stats are trying to tell us.

Looking at the data though brings up some doubts in my mind though...

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”Women are five times more likely to be on the site
(Pinterest) as men.”

The Pew Internet Research Study

There’s a lot of talk out there that Pinterest is dominated by the ladies. There’s even some interesting stats that back up these claims like, “Women are five times more likely to be on the site (Pinterest) as men.” Which is one of the biggest gender gaps found on the social media platforms.

So maybe that’s the reason the male dominated Tapiture is gaining some ground as the go to platform for dudes.

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This week's Marketing Minute is includes a little creative break. 

We've gathered the best email and internet marketing news from around the web to help inspire and inform you on what's happening and what's working right now. Ideas and insights that you can take and make your own.

We were also pretty busy on our own blog - releasing 4 posts this week (insert pat on the back here).

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You ever wanted something that was just a wee bit pricey for your budget?

And you said to yourself, "I'll be good. I'll wait 'till it goes on sale."

Well now Pinterest has made that process a heck of a lot easier.

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Did you know...

It's estimated that about 700 million people use Facebook's newsfeed each and every day.

And with that many people sharing cat pictures and inspirational quotes on the social platform the news feed can become pure whitenoise.

Facebook knows this.

And they also know that if your news feed experience sucks you'll bail from their network pretty fast.

That's why they tinker, tweak and manipulate what's shown on your newsfeed(out of a potential average 1500 potential stories from friends, people you follow and pages you've liked).

Finally coming up with their Edgerank algorithm.

The reason in their words, "With so many stories, there is a good chance people would miss something they wanted to see if we displayed a continuous, unranked stream of information. Our ranking isn't perfect, but in our tests, when we stop ranking and instead show posts in chronological order, the number of stories people read and the likes and comments they make decrease."

Every time you like, lurk or share something on facebook the algorithm takes notice. Facebook explains this further, "When a user likes something, that tells News Feed that they want to see more of it; when they hide something, that tells News Feed to display less of that content in the future. This allows us to prioritize an average of 300 stories out of these 1,500 stories to show each day."

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Microsoft has a serious beef with Google.

Back in late July we reported on Gmail's new tabbed inbox and what marketers can do to beat it.

And it looks like Microsoft is raising some hell about Google's ability to read your email and inject ads right into your inbox message stream (cloaked as regular looking emails).

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We were at an event last week and everyone was asking us about Canada’s Anti-Spam Legislation (CASL) and what it means for business.

So we wanted to take a moment to get you up to speed and put your mind at ease when it comes to email marketing in Canada.

Anyone who’s been doing email marketing for a little while will be familiar with the Double Opt-In process. Some people call it “permission based marketing” the idea of which was made popular by the ever insightful Seth Godin in his free ebook “Permission Marketing” which you can still grab here http://www.sethgodin.com/permission/.

The Double Opt-In process is where you get confirmed permission from an individual to send them email messages from an Email Marketing Service like MyBizMailer.

It’s an added (and often unwanted) step during the signup process. One that truly confirms that the person who’s signing up to your newsletter actually wants to hear from you. This not only helps to keep your email marketing reputation in good standing it also provides you with a higher quality list. Which helps to keep your spam score low (even if there’s some hidden influence that effect your spam score that don’t really get talked about much).

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