At the end of last week, the subject of emails and how often they should be sent to your audience moved to front and center on the SIPA Forum. The prevailing wisdom is that it's the content that matters most.

Finalists Named for First-Ever Andy McLaughlin Rising Star Award

Towards the end of a takeaway-stuffed session at our BIMS conference in November titled Bringing Customers Into Your Marketing, Fulfillment & Product Development, Jim Sinkinson of Fired Up! Marketing asked his fellow panelists this: "Do you ever get to the point of asking customers or prospects, 'Would you buy it [if we built it]'? How do you get as close as possible to the answer in your interactions with customers?"

It's great when there's member follow-up to my posts, and this week provided some very beneficial after-column info.

Prior to joining School Family Media, Ed Coburn was senior VP at Mequoda Systems where he provided strategic consulting to numerous B2B and B2C publishing clients. Previously, he was publishing director at Harvard Medical School.

Gamification can even help a presentation on SEO for Publishers. During a talk last month at SIPA's Best Practices Conference on New Marketing and Sales Strategies for Customer Acquisition in San Francisco by Ed Coburn, co-president, School Family Media, a chart popped up that drew quick interest. It read Optimizing Posts and listed point values for various criteria of your posts: