Month: August 2009

Marketing Right Now e-book

Marketing Right Now was originally an 8-part blog series that appeared on the Cre8asite Flow blog in the fall of 2008.

It now has been updated and brought together in one place in an e-book (PDF file).  Here are more details on the Marketing Right Now e-book.  The aim is to help entrepreneurs and SOHO (small office, home office) workers start their business in the right way and then grow it successfully.  It covers all aspects of this in a concise 55 pages.

It is intended as a work book, which is the reason for presenting this as an e-book.  It discusses throughout what are the success keys of business and in an Annex presents these keys to success in a single page work sheet.  It does suggest ways of doing extra reading, but the action-oriented entrepreneur will find the essential first steps are covered so that the action plan can start quickly.

Three Key Factors

Why is this book different from all the others that appear so frequently?  The major difference is that this is geared for rapid action rather than slow and leisurely planning.

There are also three important principles that influence how actions should be taken:

  • Internet mindset
    The Internet creates greater openness and changes the balance of power between buyers and sellers
  • Customer-centric
    Unless you see things the way the customer does, you may be surprised when they are cool about what you thought might be good for them.
  • Time Is Job One 
    Time is valued by customers much more than companies acknowledge.  Offering attractive time-related services to your customers will give a competitive advantage.

Why Pay For An E-book

One reaction to an e-book may be to question why it is not free.  There are so many things written on the Internet that are free.  Why would someone not explore those? 

Well of course they can but their own time must be factored into the equation.  It is the principle that Chris Anderson discusses in his book, Free: The Future of a Radical Price.  In this case you can see a good part of the information in the blog posts mentioned earlier and very little has changed since then.  However if your time is valuable, then you may feel it is an equitable arrangement to pay the author a modest contribution so that you have the content in a more usable format that will save your time.

The advantage of an e-book is that you know exactly what you are paying for.  Many sources of marketing information are put behind walls and you must pay a monthly entry fee to have access. One cannot be sure exactly what is the ROI for such more hefty investments, but usually there are a few glowing customer references to encourage you to enter the door. 

If you want to get a better appreciation of such ‘closed gardens’, Chris Garrett wrote a description of how he Built His Authority Blogger Member Site.  As he says there  is a good deal of interest in Teaching Sells and membership sites in general, so he wanted to set out how you can easily create your own membership site using WordPress.

buy marketing right now

Membership sites are certainly one possibility if you think you will have the time and dedication (and money) to follow all that they have to offer and then take the necessary actions.  If you are not sure about what is in that ‘brown paper bag’, then a more appropriate way to go may be a modestly priced e-book that covers all you need.

Natural Links Bring Search Engine Visibility

Create an Online Presence and A Linkable Brand is the advice from Loren Baker in order to help with natural link building.

Link building is generally a term used around the SEO industry to describe building relevant links to a website in an effort to rank that site for specific terms while also building trust, value and equity to that website. All too often however, link building is associated with questionable SEO practices such as link buying or link spamming. As an old school online marketer and PR guy, I tend to take a different approach to my link building philosophy, and see link building as more of a branding and web presence approach.

That’s sound advice and it is particularly appropriate for Google, since Google puts a great deal of weight on links. Bing and Yahoo seem to value them slightly less and of course their share of search is also very much less.

Many A Mickle Does Not Make A Muckle

The old Scottish saying would confirm that if you add sufficient small things, it can add up to something substantial. However it may well be with the Google search algorithms the down-weighting of spam-type links is so severe that there is no SEO benefit by creating them. There are a wide variety of spam-type links including illogical reciprocal links and links from dubious websites. In the worst case such links might even lead to penalties, if the website is deemed to have breached the Google Quality Guidelines. As Baker points out even links that appear on a site-wide basis in sidebars or footers may well be also very much devalued.

Creating Link Value

A much surer approach is to create content on the website that is of interest to other humans, thus attracting unsolicited links from admirers. It is useful to have a diversity of online content. Baker has some most useful information on building out diverse links in a Link Building Evaluation Guide.

The role of blogs in all this should be emphasized. The blog structure naturally creates a number of associated web pages for any single blog post. All of these support extra internal links. Although less valuable than independent external links, they do add real link value. At the same time, the RSS news feed pings the search engines and ensures that the blog is on their (robot) radar screen. Writing well constructed blog posts is perhaps the surest way of expending effort to get more search engine visibility.

Rapid Response Service For Online Success

Karen Mazurkewich suggests that Rapid Response is the key to online success.  Unfortunately a factor that weighs against online ecommerce is that Canadians are more wary about online security.

Online retail sales showed promising growth in Canada. Sales reached $12.6- billion in 2006 — a 61% rise over three years — according to a 2007 Statistics Canada report. Online sales increased only by 3% in 2008, says the Raleigh, N.C.-based media marketing company Sage Works, but are up 9% for the first eight months of 2009.

Canadians have not embraced the online shopping model with the same verve as their U.S. counterparts. Fear of credit card fraud is an issue.  Darrell MacMullin, general manager PayPal Canada, says “Canadians have one of the highest sensitivities globally when it comes to security.”

Nevertheless some online stores have achieved remarkable success including the following:

  • online retailer WineOnline.ca
  • RedFlagDeals.com, for online bargains in Canada
  • MaternityCorner.com
  • ssense.com, fashion retailers
  • rocketfuelcoffee.com

Raman Kashyap, owner of cybershopping.ca, suggests that for success, companies have to be very niche-oriented and have strong social networking programs.  If they can also still any credit security concerns and provide rapid response service, they should have it made.

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Internet Explorer 6 kthxbye

Previous logo of Microsoft Internet Explorer u...
Image via Wikipedia

Internet Explorer 6 should be given a respectful and speedy burial according to Shane Richmond in the online Telegraph. He encourages you to tell an IT person that Internet Explorer 6 must die.

If you’re not familiar with online chat shorthand, “kthxbye” is a slang term generally used sarcastically as a condescending and dismissive insult (“Thank-you for your useless contribution to this discussion, now please go away”).

Richmond writes that:

IE6 was never a top-notch product. And these days it’s even more of a nightmare to work with, resulting in extra time and money being spent ensuring that websites are compatible with the damned thing.  Digg, Facebook and YouTube are all about to end their support for IE 6 and are recommending that users switch to a browser that works.

Among those speaking out against IE6 is a group of more than 70 developers who have banded together to form a project called ie6nomore.

Despite this clamor, according to the BBC, Microsoft is backing a long life for IE6. Indeed the software giant now says it will support IE6 until 2014, four years beyond their original deadline.  Their reasons may be more bound up with strategy versus Google and its cloud computing initiative than with what is best for customers.

The opposition as documented in the online Telegraph is virulent:

A crueller person might say that any IT manager who forces his company to run IE 6 in 2009 is dangerously incompetent and should probably not be in charge of anything more complicated than buying biscuits. However, it’s possible that they’re doing this because their company uses an intranet – or some other custom-built web service – that was designed to work in IE 6 and is useless in any other browser.

It is suggested that victims locked in by corporate policy should use one of the range of posters produced by the helpful people at Hey IT!

hey it ie6 poster

It is suggested that you should print it out and stick it on your computer, around the office or on your IT manager’s forehead. The Internet as a whole will be much improved when we all have said kthxbye (or should that be kthnxbye) to the worn and weary Internet Explorer 6.

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Stop Your Email Newsletter Being Junk – A Case Study

Introduction

AWeber provides a fine email newsletter marketing service, so you might question whether what Tom Kulzer (AWeber CEO) writes in an article on Email Deliverability Tips may represent a slightly biased view of the situation.

Ensuring requested opt-in email is delivered to subscriber inboxes is an increasingly difficult battle in the age of spam filtering. Open and click thru response rates can be dramatically affected by as much as 20-30% due to incorrect spam filter classification.

Having found that my own email newsletter delivery system has encountered even worse problems than that, I can state that Tom Kulzer is not in any way exaggerating.  This article sets out what I found and what you need to do. It all concerns an email version of the SMM Newsletter, which was sent out monthly. 

This has been delivered to just under 1,000 subscribers for many months.  Originally it was a text newsletter but for some months has been an HTML newsletter.  It is issued using the Pimex Mail Express newsletter software.  It was sent out in blocks of 20 with a 5 second gap between blocks.  Suddenly this month something triggered the Shaw Spam filtering system and although it appeared to have been sent, it never got to its recipients.  Explanations and solutions follow.

Although it describes a multi-delivery email message, you should note that some of these problems can affect single email messages that are junked on the way to their recipient, even if they wish to receive the communication.

What Is Junk Mail

You should be clear that there are two definitions of Junk Mail.  You may believe it is mail that you do not wish to receive.  Your email delivery system has a different definition and different email delivery systems have slightly different definitions.  Each has a computer algorithm that applies a host of factors to determine whether any given email message should be deemed Junk or not.  Part of it is determined by who is sending the email message and part by its content.  In some spam filtering systems, particular senders can be whitelisted.  In other cases, this is not possible, for example Gmail.

Your IP Reputation

The key parameter in the system used by many ISPs, the Cisco IronPort SenderBase Security Network, is the Reputation of the individual IP.  This is determined by the Senderbase Reputation evaluator.

The Reputation can be shown as Good, Neutral and Poor.  Only the first Good reputation gives an assurance that email will be delivered.  For both the other categories, mail may be caught in a Junk trap.  The Reputation for the SMM IP (70.70.29.11) at the time of writing is Poor.  By ensuring no continuing transgressions, a weak reputation may gradually be restored.  There are other databases that may be consulted.  SpamCop is another but that has no indication about the SMM IP.

What weakens the IP Reputation

The SMM IP (70.70.29.11) is used for only minimal email apart from the batch of emails once per month.  The ISP tech support felt that this highly bunched up activity might have triggered the Poor Reputation value.  This could have the appearance of virus or trojan related email activity. 500 emails per hour may well be a possible acceptable limit although it is probably prudent to have no more than say 200 going out per hour.  This is undoubtedly affected by whether each is a simple text message for a few hundred bytes or multimedia or HTML messages that could be 25 kb or much, much more.

What Aspects Make Junk Mail

In testing different variants of the SMM Newsletter to try to avoid the Junk trap, some interesting facts emerged.  It should be noted that each ISP or service receiving an email message may have different degrees of stringency.  Indeed with the Shaw email service you can select the level of spam you are willing to tolerate.  It turned out that Gmail treated as Junk what was acceptable to the medium level of stringency for Shaw.

The fact that an email is HTML is perhaps the biggest factor affecting how a message will be assessed in Junk terms.  Another is the quality of the URLs (hyperlinks) that may appear within the message.  Initially a URL shortening service had been used for the link to the online version of the SMM newsletter.  The domain for the URL shortener turned out to be on a URL black list (https://admin.uribl.com/) and this was sufficient to cause the email to be Junk for Gmail (although not for Shaw).  Another black list service is to be found at http://www.surbl.org/ and you can check particular  URLs you are not sure about  at http://george.surbl.org/lookup.html

One way of avoiding that problem is to use your own URL ‘shortening’ service.  The shorter URL for the SMM Newsletter is http://www.otherbb.com/n.htm  The page n.htm does not exist.  Instead a 301 redirect is arranged in the .htaccess file on the domain to transfer automatically from n.htm to the actual online newsletter.

The Junk Mail solution for the SMM Newsletter

Given that the IP being used for transmitting the SMM Newsletter is still rated Poor by some services, the decision was made to use a text version of the Newsletter with a minimal number of URLs included and using the 301 redirect approach for the link to the actual online Newsletter.  Even so there were 1% of bounces due to possible spam content of the Newsletter, although there was no questionable content in the Newsletter.

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A Surer Solution To Avoid Junk Email concerns

Another way of avoidng these Junk concerns and many other concerns of publishing a successful email newsletter is to use one of the commercial services.  One which is highly rated by its users is that provided by AWeber (for which I am an affiliate).  If you would like to check out what is involved, why not sign in for that Free Test Drive in the form on the right.  You won’t regret it. The service provides all you could possibly need.

Whether you’re looking to get your first email campaign off the ground, or you’re now ready to dig into advanced tools like detailed email web analytics, activity based segmentation, geo-targeting and broadcast split-testing, you will find that AWeber has all you need to make email marketing work for you.

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