This is a guest post by Susan Fleming of Electronic Marketing Success.

One of my clients publishes a weekly newsletter, and he sometimes gets emails saying that the images he included didn’t display. He creates his newsletter online, using Adobe Captivate, and it also becomes a page on his website. When he is finished creating the page, he goes to the HTML view, copies it all, and dumps it into his newsletter service to send out. The newsletter looks just like the web page.

The problem is that while all of the images show up on the website, not all of them show up in the newsletter – what’s the deal? The official answer is, “the reference is relative instead of absolute,” and if you understood that, you would know already know how to fix the problem and you wouldn’t need this article!

Let me try to explain it this way. Suppose you called your friend and asked him where the stepladder is. He says, “It’s in the garage, behind the bikes.” So you go out to your garage and look… no stepladder. Maybe no bikes, either. “Error: Stepladder not found!”

So where’s the stepladder? Well, duh, it is in your friend’s garage. If he had given you the address of his house and told you to look in the garage there, you would have found the stepladder. Or, if you had been over at his house and he told you to look in the garage, you would have found it, too.

It’s the same with those images. If you visit my client’s newsletter page on his website, the HTML code can say, “the picture is in the images folder,” and it will show up. But when that newsletter comes to your inbox, if you want to see the picture, it needs to specify that it is in the images folder on his website. If it doesn’t, your computer will look for the image folder on your own hard drive, and when it doesn’t find the picture, it will only show that pesky little X-in-the-box.

Now for the technical stuff – don’t be scared!

When you look at the HTML code that calls an image, it can be written one of two ways:

• Relative Reference = <img src=”images/success.jpg” />
• Absolute Reference = <img src=”http://www.ZippyTurtle.com/images/success.jpg” />

The Relative Reference tells the computer to look in the images folder (garage) right where it is. The Absolute Reference tells the computer to go to a specific website and look in the images folder (garage) at that address.

If you want to make sure your images always show up, use the Absolute Reference.

Let me know what YOUR question is!

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Susan Fleming rescues coaches who are being held hostage by the demands of their online marketing efforts. As a Certified Internet Marketing VA, teacher, corporate trainer, writer, public speaker and technophile, Susan has a unique skill set that helps her breathe new life and encouragement into flagging marketing efforts.

If Google Analytics, keyword research, HTML and meta tags give you a headache, relief is just a click away at Electronic Marketing Success.