Month: February 2010

How To

What Is a Blacklist and How to Avoid Being Blacklisted

You may have heard the term “blacklist” and wondered what this meant. If you’re blacklisted it means you’ve been labeled as a Spammer by the internet service providers and the penalties can be stiff.

Now you’re scratching your head and thinking, “well I don’t send unsolicited emails or bulk email messages so I’m safe, right?”

Not really. There’s still more to worry about. There are actually several types of blacklists or reasons for blacklisting. It’s important to understand the difference.

Spam Blacklists are lists of mail servers or open relays known to be used by spammers to deliver unwanted email. An open relay is an SMTP server configured so that anyone on the internet can send email through it, including Spammers.

IP Blacklist blocks specific IP addresses, message senders or message recipients as determined in the blacklists. They can be temporary or permanent.

Email Blacklists include known mail servers and addresses used by spammers. With these lists in place, access to the server can be denied and unwanted email messages are discarded. Additionally your legitimate emails may also be blocked.

DNS Blacklists are usually maintained by anti-spam organizations. They include a list of IP addresses that send unsolicited emails.

Staying Off the Blacklists

To stay off the blacklists there are a few things you can do:

– The most obvious is to not send unsolicited emails or bulk e-mails – don’t SPAM.

– You’ll also want to make sure your server is correctly configured and secure, and not an open relay mail server. This is why it’s important to make sure your website is being hosted by a legitimate provider who doesn’t host to Spammers because if you’re sharing a server, then you can be labeled as SPAM too because you’re coming from the same server. My preferred host is MomWebs

– You’ll also want to make sure your subject lines and email body doesn’t trigger SPAM filters. Occasionally run your content through a SPAM checker site to make sure you’re not triggering any filters.

– And check to make sure you’re not already blacklisted: it can happen quite unintentionally. You can check if you’re listed by visiting:

– http://www.mxtoolbox.com/blacklists.aspx
– http://www.dnsstuff.com/

If you are blacklisted, de-listing isn’t easy but it’s necessary if you want to use email marketing to build and grow your business. The first step is to find out why you were listed and who listed you. Each agency has their own delisting procedure. Follow it, get back in their good graces and then follow the suggestions above to stay off the blacklists.

Getting blacklisted isn’t the end of the world but it can put a huge kink in your email marketing strategy. Best advice: stay off the blacklists by making sure everyone who receives an email from you wants it, don’t SPAM, and make sure your mail server is secure. You can also recommend whitelisting you to people who request email messages from you. This will help ensure they receive your email messages on time.

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Google Adwords

What To Do When You Find a PPC Winner

converting campaign

So, one of your campaigns is doing well: you have a few sales, and wonder what’s your next step. Can you take it to the next level? Make it more profitable? Let’s talk about expansion, as Matt Levenhagen calls it.

If you are using the Adwords Editor, you can view your stats for that campaign and even search for specific parameters. Do you see lots of keywords that have no impressions? Remove them. Do you have keywords with  lots of impressions, but very few clicks? Delete those too, since they’ll pull down your CTR, unless they are making sales. If they are making sales, you need to figure out why your CTR is so low, and take steps to improve it.

Next, you’ll need to see if you have keywords that are getting clicks but no conversions. How do you do that? Well, hopefully you set up tracking at the keyword level when you first started your campaign. If a keyword is getting lots of clicks but has made no sales, it’s time to pause it.

After you you prune your keywords list, take a look at your ads, and start split testing your ads. Here is a little tip for you:  create 3 copies of the original ad (so you’ll have 4 of the same ad), then create a new one by just changing the headline or one of the description lines. Now you’ll have 5 total ads running, but you’ll only be showing the new ad 20% of the time, preventing you from losing too much if the ad will not perform.

You should also figure out how much you earn per click. This is easier to do when you promote a product with a specific price, but it’s important to at least get an idea of your even if the products you promote have different price points. To learn how much you earn per click, divide your profits by the number of clicks you paid for. Now you know how high you can bid to break even. If your ad position is low, you might want to try increasing your bids to get your ad higher on the page, since ads at the top of the page usually perform better. Of course, always test: your specific ad may do better in position 4-6, rather than 1-3. Each campaign and product is different: one size does not fit all.

Go check on your campaigns and see if you can expand on your winning ones. If you want more information about how to tweak your affilaite PPC campaigns, check out the Campaign Blasts Forum: it’s absolutely full of excellent information, and everyone there is willing to help.

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Challenges

My Organized Office

Last month, Lynn Terry challenged all of us at her Elite forum to clean up/organize our office space: not only out physical space, but our computer desktop, email, hard drive, etc.

The challenge couldn’t have come at a better time for me, as I was already planning to do some virtual organizing: it made me push through and get it all done.

Here is my office before the challenge, and here is how it looks today:

organized office

But, my biggest problem wasn’t my physical desk: it was my desktop and email. For example, I had over 1500 unread emails in my inbox: this was not a recent problem, but one going back to more than a year. My inbox didn’t go under 1000 unread messages for an entire year. And I am happy to say that today, I only have the day’s messages.

My desktop was a real mess, with icons overflowing out of the visible area. And I am proud to say that my desktop looks so much better: just need to work on making sure it never gets as cluttered as before.

Here are the before and after pictures for that:

messy computer desktop

organized computer desktop

Being organized will help me be a lot more productive. Is your office a mess? Or is it nicely organized?

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How To, Work at Home

How to Write a Marketing Plan

Starting your own business is an exciting but also very stressful endeavor. In order to ensure the success of your business, you are going to want to conduct a lot of research and do a lot of preparation. An important aspect of your research and preparatory work includes creating an effective marketing plan because behind every successful product or service you will find a well-crafted marketing plan. If you have recently created your own business or are thinking of doing so in the near future, you’ll find useful information concerning the process of writing a marketing plan.

A marketing plan is a written manuscript that specifies what the necessary actions are in order to realize one or more marketing goals. Marketing plans can be crafted for a product, a service, a brand, or a product line and the objectives that they cover typically span between one and five years. In order to have an effective marketing plan, however, you also need to have a well thought out business plan and marketing strategy, which both serve as the foundation for the marketing plan. The business plan details your business’s financial and operational goals and policies and the marketing strategy is the overall direction a business plans to take in the hopes of focusing its finite resources on the best available opportunities so as to boost sales and gain a competitive advantage.

One of the key components of a marketing plan is the mission statement. In it, you are going to want to write a few sentences stating who your chief market is, what it is that you are selling (contribution), and what your unique selling proposition is (distinction).

There are several topics that a marketing plan should address. These topics include:

– market analysis details, sales advertising

– public relations campaigns

– as well both traditional and new media programs and strategies.

In order to conduct a thorough market analysis, you are going to want to collect and organize as much data as you can about the current market that will be purchasing and using your products or services. When doing this, some important aspects to consider include paying attention to market dynamics and patterns like seasonality, assessing the offerings of your competition, and keeping in mind who your targeted market is and what their demographics are.

A marketing plan should also offer descriptions of both your products and services and your competition. You want to detail how your products and services relate to the needs of the market and how they rise above what the marketing is currently offering. As far as your competition goes, you are going to want to detail what makes your product or service distinct and stand apart from your competitors.

Additional components to include in a marketing plan are product pricing details, where your product is going to be positioned in the market, and what your monthly budget is going to be.

After detailing all of the aforementioned information, you should be able to create quantifiable marketing goals for your business whose effectiveness should be closely monitored and revised as needed.

There are so many facets to evaluate and take into consideration when starting your own business, but if you take the time to first create a well thought out marketing plan, then you will be providing yourself with a great guide to keep you on the path towards success.

Seth Godin’s Permission Marketing : Turning Strangers Into Friends And Friends Into Customers is a great resource for those in the planning stages of their business.

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Affiliate Marketing, Google Adwords

How Can PPC Help My Business Grow?

step-by-step affiliate marketing with AdWords

Did you know that PPC can help your business grow tremendously?  Of course, you need to take the right steps in starting your campaigns, but it’s  possible. Read on to  discover how pay per click can help your business grow.

1. It Provides Results-Driven Marketing at an Affordable Price

Using PPC ads allow you to target your specific audience
– Its pinpoint accuracy can reach a local clientele within a 20-mile radius of your business, if that is your best market.
– You can design ads using specific keywords selected to reach those online buyers already interested in your products or services.
– The price per click is totally determined by you and dependent upon the popularity of the keywords you choose.
– There are no ugly surprises, no hidden fees, simply pay for those whom you draw to your ad and convince to click through.

2. It Equips You with Tracking Tools

Depending on what software you choose for your PPC campaign, there are a wide variety of available tracking tools designed to let you see just how pay per click can help your business grow.

For example, Google AdWords can help you identify the most effective keywords or keywords phrases that will give you the most return on your investment. You may also use Google’s contextual targeting technology that automatically matches your ads to similar ones within their network for greater ad performance.

Placement Performance Report enables its users to see exactly where their PPC ads appear and supplies proven results for future ad development.

Using one or all of these tracking tools lets you hone your PPC ads and help your business grow far faster than yesterday’s traditional, and much more expensive, marketing methods.

3. It Builds Brand Awareness

For as little as a few pennies per click, you can build brand awareness as effectively as your larger, richer, and more experienced competitors. Pay per click actually helps your business grow by equalizing the playing field. You no longer have to take a backseat to the large chains with deeper pockets because your name is less known.

4. Get Results From Day One

Once you start your campaign, you can see results almost immediately: you’ll know within days, if not hours, how your offer is performing. Rather than competing by size or experience, you can now position your business at the top of the market based on quality, performance, price, and ongoing customer service.

5. It Teaches You to Create a Buying Atmosphere

Not only will PPC ads help your business grow by showing you how to reach your targeted consumers, but it will also teach you how to convince interested prospects to purchase by selling the benefits of your products and services. PPC ad campaigns help your business grow by suggesting strong selling words as well as emotionally charged keywords. Words like “free,” “discount,” and “limited weekend offer,” will help you move your prospects to make a buying decision.

If you want to learn more about how to grow your business with PPC, learn form the best. Matt Levenhagen created the Campaign Blasts system, and hundreds of people learned how to build their businesses with his method, me included. Here is a link to Matt’s Campaign Blasts system.

start building your AdWords business today!

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