If you're just setting out on the rocky road of marketing your small business, you'll quickly trip over advanced concepts: artificial intelligence (AI)-powered segmentation, omnichannel marketing automation, or SMS and social media marketing, for a few. And these are all effective tools for diligent digital promotion. But one of the most effective tools—and a perfect place for beginners to start—is email marketing.

Email marketing remains at the core of most digital-marketing tool suites, even though it's been around for almost as long as email itself. But despite its age, the channel has kept up with the times and remains a top way to reach your customers. EmailToolTesters recently compiled a study of the most current email-marketing strategies and trends based on data from Techjury, Statista, Content Marketing Institute, Salecycle, Blog HubSpot, Klaviyo, Campaign Monitor, GetResponse, and Constant Contact.

Even though you have several new ways to connect with customers—particularly social media—the study found that the email channel still has a massive reach with 4.3 billion people using email and more than 361.6 billion emails flitting around every day. If you think that sounds like a firehose of bits in which your emails will probably get lost, you'd be wrong. The study showed that email-marketing ROI is currently calculated to be 4,400%, or about $44 return on every dollar you spend in your marketing campaign.

The study also had some interesting statistics on strategy. For example, as far as what kinds of emails get the best return, which generally refers to how many of them are actually opened by potential customers, welcome emails top the list with a hefty 82.21% open rate. The next best were triggered emails, which came in at 44.07%. Unfortunately, the email type that's most popular with smaller businesses, because it's easier to create and provides value-added content to your audience, is the email newsletter. According to the study, these emails have the lowest open rate, at 20.48%.

But the study is quick to point out that you shouldn't ignore newsletters. There are several ways to increase the effectiveness of any kind of email content, especially newsletters, including personalization and autoresponders. Another way is by optimizing your email for the most popular email readers—those from Apple, Google, and Microsoft—and doing so not only for desktop users but also for the fast-growing number of mobile users.

YouTube has more than 2 billion monthly users who watch more than 30 billion hours of video per month. Meanwhile, the site has over 37 million channels that upload at least 21 million hours of video per month.

Why are we giving you these rather boring statistics? Because they suggest that you should start that YouTube channel you've been thinking about after all. There are plenty of potential viewers out there, so why not give it a go?

In this article, we list a handful of the very basics you need to nail down when starting a YouTube channel. None of these things will guarantee an audience, but they will give you a solid foundation to build on.

1. Set Up Your YouTube Channel

First things first, you need to actually set your YouTube channel up.

Related: Things to Consider When Starting a YouTube Channel

ActionKit

A major journalistic investigation has found evidence of malicious software being used by governments around the world, including allegations of spying on prominent individuals.

From a list of more 50,000 phone numbers, journalists identified more than 1,000 people in 50 countries reportedly under surveillance using the Pegasus spyware. The software was developed by the Israeli company NSO Group and sold to government clients.

Among the reported targets of the spyware are journalists, politicians, government officials, chief executives and human rights activists.

Reports thus far allude to a surveillance effort reminiscent of an Orwellian nightmare, in which the spyware can capture keystrokes, intercept communications, track the device and use the camera and microphone to spy on the user.

Supplied: Al Jazeera

From the President of the USA to Jeff Bezos, successful people use teleprompters to give speeches that seem impromptu. You can use the same trick to remember your lines with these free teleprompter apps.

We seem to be spending so much time talking to cameras these days, whether it's for a little shoot for our social media or a presentation in a Zoom meeting. Instead of remembering your speeches or writing little flashcards, use a teleprompter. As the text scrolls next to your camera, it will seem like you're talking to the audience while you have the comfort of simply reading so that you don't forget any lines.

1. Teleprompter Mirror (Web): Best Free Teleprompter Web App for Computers and Phones

Teleprompter Mirror is a fantastic web-based teleprompter app that works entirely in your browser, on computers, or phones. It's one of those excellent no-signup web apps that you can start using immediately but is nonetheless packed with features.

Copy and paste your text into the main window to begin. You can adjust the font size, the scrolling speed, the margin, and the text and background colors. If you've got it set up exactly how you want it, save the script file to use it later. It couldn't be simpler.

Teleprompter Mirror also has a sister site, Voice Activated Teleprompter. This works with the Chrome web browser, as it listens to what you speak and moves the script forward accordingly. In our test, it worked well enough for amateurs, but there are better apps for this. That said, this one doesn't require any signups nor has any trial restrictions, so what have you got to lose in giving it a shot?