Monthly Archives ⇒ April 2010

Hyper Inflation

· Brandon Hann

This post simply comes out of an interesting article I found about hyper inflation. We all know what inflation is, right? Here’s a quick explanation: a one dollar bill printed in 1900 was worth one dollar. A dollar bill printed in 2010 is also worth one dollar. The value of that dollar has changed. Loosely translated, this means that in 1900, your 2010 dollar would be able to purchase about $25 worth of stuff.

Naturally, inflation has its ups and downs (literally too) and it also means that no matter how long you keep your paper money, it’ll never be worth more than the little number printed on it. In fact, the value will actually go down the longer you keep it.

This is quite the opposite of gold by the way. If you had just one ounce of gold in 2001, you’d have about $300 in real money. If you held onto that same ounce until today, you would now have $1100! So gold beats inflation. Imaging if our country was still on the gold standard: there would be hardly any inflation…movies would still cost $0.10, cars would still be under $1000, etc. There are critics on both sides of that argument, but I’ll leave that to another day.

Zimbabwe

This country suffers from up to 2 million percent inflation prices! That’s insane! What’s even more crazy is the denominations of their paper money. Just recently, they printed a $100,000,000,000 note. One hundred BILLION dollars!

Just when you thought you’d move to Zimbabwe, let me explain to you what that bill can buy:

3 eggs

Well I guess I don’t have to explain that to you. It’s amazing to imagine a country where a $100,000,000,000 bill can’t even get you a dozen eggs.

Here’s the picture:

By the way, eggs are cheaper in Zimbabwe than here in the U.S. so stop complaining!

List Building – Can-Spam Act

· Brandon Hann

Since this is an actual law, I’m going to simply post the text directly from its source at www.ftc.gov below.

Do you use email in your business? The CAN-SPAM Act, a law that sets the rules for commercial email, establishes requirements for commercial messages, gives recipients the right to have you stop emailing them, and spells out tough penalties for violations.

Despite its name, the CAN-SPAM Act doesn’t apply just to bulk email. It covers all commercial messages, which the law defines as “any electronic mail message the primary purpose of which is the commercial advertisement or promotion of a commercial product or service,” including email that promotes content on commercial websites. The law makes no exception for business-to-business email. That means all email – for example, a message to former customers announcing a new product line – must comply with the law.

Each separate email in violation of the CAN-SPAM Act is subject to penalties of up to $16,000, so non-compliance can be costly. But following the law isn’t complicated. Here’s a rundown of CAN-SPAM’s main requirements:

Do you use email in your business? The CAN-SPAM Act, a law that sets the rules for commercial email, establishes requirements for commercial messages, gives recipients the right to have you stop emailing them, and spells out tough penalties for violations.

Despite its name, the CAN-SPAM Act doesn’t apply just to bulk email. It covers all commercial messages, which the law defines as “any electronic mail message the primary purpose of which is the commercial advertisement or promotion of a commercial product or service,” including email that promotes content on commercial websites. The law makes no exception for business-to-business email. That means all email – for example, a message to former customers announcing a new product line – must comply with the law.

Each separate email in violation of the CAN-SPAM Act is subject to penalties of up to $16,000, so non-compliance can be costly. But following the law isn’t complicated. Here’s a rundown of CAN-SPAM’s main requirements:

  1. Don’t use false or misleading header information. Your “From,” “To,” “Reply-To,” and routing information – including the originating domain name and email address – must be accurate and identify the person or business who initiated the message.
  2. Don’t use deceptive subject lines. The subject line must accurately reflect the content of the message.
  3. Identify the message as an ad. The law gives you a lot of leeway in how to do this, but you must disclose clearly and conspicuously that your message is an advertisement.
  4. Tell recipients where you’re located. Your message must include your valid physical postal address. This can be your current street address, a post office box you’ve registered with the U.S. Postal Service, or a private mailbox you’ve registered with a commercial mail receiving agency established under Postal Service regulations.
  5. Tell recipients how to opt out of receiving future email from you. Your message must include a clear and conspicuous explanation of how the recipient can opt out of getting email from you in the future. Craft the notice in a way that’s easy for an ordinary person to recognize, read, and understand. Creative use of type size, color, and location can improve clarity. Give a return email address or another easy Internet-based way to allow people to communicate their choice to you. You may create a menu to allow a recipient to opt out of certain types of messages, but you must include the option to stop all commercial messages from you. Make sure your spam filter doesn’t block these opt-out requests.
  6. Honor opt-out requests promptly. Any opt-out mechanism you offer must be able to process opt-out requests for at least 30 days after you send your message. You must honor a recipient’s opt-out request within 10 business days. You can’t charge a fee, require the recipient to give you any personally identifying information beyond an email address, or make the recipient take any step other than sending a reply email or visiting a single page on an Internet website as a condition for honoring an opt-out request. Once people have told you they don’t want to receive more messages from you, you can’t sell or transfer their email addresses, even in the form of a mailing list. The only exception is that you may transfer the addresses to a company you’ve hired to help you comply with the CAN-SPAM Act.
  7. Monitor what others are doing on your behalf. The law makes clear that even if you hire another company to handle your email marketing, you can’t contract away your legal responsibility to comply with the law. Both the company whose product is promoted in the message and the company that actually sends the message may be held legally responsible.

What does this mean?

Quite simple put: DO NOT SPAM. The Internet is already full of junk and you don’t need to add to it by sending out bogus offers and junk mail to people that don’t expect it from you. Worse yet, if your site or your server gets marked as a spammer you can consider your reputation done.

It is hard to bounce back from being labeled a spammer. Don’t do it and if you know of other people doing it, you should report them. You can find more information about this law at the FTC website.

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List Building – Auto Responses

· Brandon Hann

I’ve been going over many list building ideas and they all seem to point to the relationship you develop with your visitor using the very first message you send to them. This is called an auto response and just as the name implies, it’s the very first thing your customer reads when your mailing list welcomes them to your site.

There are three sub-sections in this area, but I am grouping them altogether because I’ve touched on each topic in the previous sections and there’s no sense in going over everything twice. However, I did want to show you the correlation between each item, so I’m going to touch on a few more key points with each below.

Content

Your auto response should contain some content. It should not be a simple 1-line message that says “Thank you for signing up!”. While it’s perfectly ok to thank your visitors, you should also include something for them to read. Maybe create a snapshot of what they can expect from your future emails. Here are some ideas:

  • Sample newsletter – If you publish a regular newsletter, send them your previous copy. If you have a few “back issues” send a link to an archive page that allows them to click through and download any past issues they wish to view.
  • Related content – If your blog is relatively consistant, you should have no problem adding links to the auto response that offer various content on your site that you think might interest your visitor. This is also an opportunity to tell people about any other blogs you run.
  • Site updates – If you’ve made changes to your site, you might also want to add this information to your email if you think the changes will benefit a user directly. This one is more for your future emails, but it’s also nice to let the new subscribers know that they can expect to see these items again.

You don’t want to overdo it, so find a perfect balance to try and make that first message very similar to what your next emails will look like. The point is to make you visitors feel welcome, show them what they can expect from you and not overwhelm them at the same time!

Newsletters

I’ve been talking about newsletters throughout this entire section, so you should already have an idea of how these can greatly benefit your site. Here are some tips on how to create awesome newsletters.

  • Design – A lot of people are still getting email in the HTML format and you can use this to your advantage. Try to design an email that somewhat matches your site. I wouldn’t use a lot of images, but a logo and maybe a few borders are ok, but try to get the colors right. This will go a long way for keeping your “image” in your visitor’s heads.
  • PDF – An alternative to fancy HTML emails is to create your newsletter as a PDF file and attach it to a standard email. You want to be careful here because a lot of email programs and services can be set up to remove attachments on delivery. There are tons of viruses running around out there and people are more fearful of receiving emails with attachments. Just inform your visitors before they sign up and they can make arrangements.
  • Content – What you should include in your newsletter is entirely based on who your audience is and what your business is. Ideally you want to add content that will get a response. Simply recycling content from your site won’t help. If someone just wanted updates on that, they could bookmark your RSS feed. Give them some content that’s not on your site. It also helps to add some engagement tools like surveys, contests and free offers.

Offers

It may be hard to understand what an “offer” is. It could be a free item, a download not available to anyone else, access to a special section on your site, the newsletter itself, etc. The idea is to entice your visitors to come back for more. How they come back is not the point. They can come back for your newsletter, your daily blog post or to leave some comments. Here are some offer ideas.

  • Starting offer – Give up something valuable right out the door. Let’s say you’re writing ebooks on how to eat healthier. Your first offer could be something like “Join my site today and receive my free ebook on how to lose 10 pounds in 10 minutes!”. You would then attach this ebook to your auto response for first-time subscribers and you’re done.
  • Special access – Create a small section for your members. Let them feel like they belong to your site and that they have a unique place that they can come to get information tailored for them.
  • Repeat offers – Don’t spam your users, but you should send periodic emails that let them know about special things going on with your site or how they can access new content. Don’t be afraid to offer things. Your users won’t consider it spam if done every once in a while. Remember that they signed up!
  • Partner offers – Try to work with other websites out there to offer each other’s products for discounts if they sign up at either site. You always see John Chow out there partnering with Shoemoney to give price breaks to recommended sign ups.

All of these offers can be included in your auto responses, but should definitely be included in all your future emails. Don’t let any opportunity for informing your subscribers get past you!

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List Building – Follow Up

· Brandon Hann

One important thing to remember when communicating with your mailing list is to continuously provide follow up communications. There’s no sense in creating a wonderful newsletter one time, blasting it out to your list and then never speaking to anyone ever again. This might generate some buzz in the beginning, but think about the long term. How could you continue making money online without constant follow up?

You’d be surprised how many websites out there are here one day and gone the next. There are countless people that hear the get rich schemes on late-night tv, pour a little money into them, start a website and gain some traffic, but then give up after realizing this whole process is not as easy as it sounds.

Constant Contact

This term is such an industry standard, that there’s a company named after it! Big companies that sell products that are familiar to everyone in the world practically sell themselves, right? Then why does a large company like Coca-Cola spend millions of dollars every year to send out marketing materials emails to people like you and I?

The reason is because they understand that constant contact with consumers is the only way they will survive! The Internet marketing industry is no different, but this term is much more important here. The competition is much heavier and it’s much harder to get your name out there.

Consistency

One key element to keeping follow ups going smoothly is to maintain consistency with your messages. If you’re mailing list offers a weekly newsletter, send one every week. It’s that simple. The moment you lose this pattern, you’ll see your viewership dwindle.

If you promise specific things like content or free downloads, make sure you keep the same patterns going when performing follow up messages.

My two cents

Don’t lose your current subscribers because of something as simple as follow up. Let them know that you’re always there for them and that they can expect certain things from you, your website and your mailing list.

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Should I buy Apple stock over product?

· Brandon Hann

I read an article over on John Chow’s blog that lead me to an interesting bit of information from Kyle Conroy’s blog about buying Apple stock over buying Apple product. At first, I expected it to be a rant about how great the stock market is and how we should all invest in our favorite corporations, but after looking at it, it proved to be much more of a “why didn’t I think of that” type of story.

Although I loved the article, I now hate myself for not being “smarter” in my younger years. I guess I can chalk it up to just not being sure about the future, but then again when it comes to Apple, did anybody really think this company would fail? Google maybe, but Apple? Likely not.

The Breakdown

Essentially what Kyle did was compare the selling prices of almost all of Apple’s products to the stock price on the day these products came out and then again to today’s stock price. Here are the products I own for example:

  • Original iPhone – Price paid on January 9th, 2010: $499 – If I had bought Apple stock on the same day instead of the iPhone, I would now have $1,460 in my portfolio.
  • iPhone 3GS – Price paid on June 8th, 2009: $199 – I would now have $375 in my portfolio.
  • 2.4G MacBook (13″ unibody, late-2008) – Price paid on October 14th, 2008: $1599 – I would now have $4,161 in my portfolio.

That would have given me a grand total of $5,996 in my portfolio today! Instead, I have negative $2597. Granted, the products have served me well and I don’t regret owning (or buying) them, but the point is still made.

Could I have forgone these items to have a few extra thousand in a volatile environment such is the stock market? Probably no more than any of us could forgo our new cars and expensive clothes. However, one item that took the cake on this list is one that I could have forgone if only I had that much money at the time.

Apple PowerBook G3 250 (Original/Kanga/3500) – Price on November 10th, 1997: $5700 – If you used that money to buy stock on the same day, you’d now have $330,563 in your portfolio! On the other hand, maybe you used that PowerBook to start your business and now you make more than $300,000 a year being your own boss! You never know how the tides may turn.

Go check out the rest of the list here and see what your Apple products could have amounted to.

List Building – Instant Gratification

· Brandon Hann

Along with enticing your visitors, you need to provide some instant gratification. People like to feel like they’re getting something for giving you their email address. It may be hard to think about what everyone wants and how people repsond to various things, so always put yourself in their shoes.

As yourself these questions: What makes you sign up to a mailing list? Do you like getting free items sent to your inbox for signing up? Would you have signed up had you not gotten a freebie? Of course, your opinion might be different than the next person, but it’ll at least get you thinking about ways to marketing your mailing list.

Instant Gratification

For the most part, getting people to sign up for your mailing list involves enticing them to do so. I covered this topic previously, but instant gratification ties in a little bit. The most important thing to do is make your visitors feel like they actually got something for their time spent on your site. You can accomplish this a few ways:

  • Have an automated, yet informative message delivered to their inbox as soon as they sign up. This message should contain important links on your site, “starter” information about your content and maybe even a free attachement.
  • Send them to a ‘Thank you’ page after signing up which contains something unique that nobody else has access to until they join your mailing list.
  • Consider sending the very last edition of your newsletter to them instantly with links on how to download previous newsletters.

My two cents

Think of it from a sales point of view. How great does it feel to walk out of a Best Buy with your favorite music cd and be able to play it on the way home? It’s that instant gratification that helps justify the purchase. The same goes for mailing lists. You want to make your visitor feel like they got something out of it. But not just something–something great.

As for that image above, I just chose it because I thought it was funny!

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Make money with Kontera

· Brandon Hann

You may have noticed the double-underlined links on various phrases on my site. These are link ads that are dynamically generated through a service called Kontera. You may already know about Google AdSense and how it works by generating ads based on your page’s content, but if not, check it out now. Anyway, Kontera works very similar to AdSense, but I’m very excited to say that it’s much better!

Kontera doesn’t place ads in a single, static location. This is an important fact because there’s such a thing known as “banner blindness”. The term actually references a phenomenon where people will sub-conscientiously block out banner ads on a website. You probably noticed this by going to some website that has a banner ad on it and you skipped right over it to get to the content you were looking for. Well, unfortunately, the same thing happens to AdSense ad blocks and banners.

How does Kontera work?

  1. Page content – Kontera uses its patented software to analyze your webpage through the use of a small snippet of Javascript.
  2. Keywords – Every time a page is loaded, the script kicks in and dynamically creates ad links on certain keywords found within your page. These keywords are based on what advertisers are purchasing.
  3. Dynamic ads – Even though your pages have static content (things that don’t change), the Kontera ads are all dynamic (things that do change), which means that a page loaded by one user will have different keyword ads than the same page loaded by another user.
  4. Fresh ads – Because the ads and the links are generated dynamically, your users always see fresh ads no matter how many times they come back to the same page!
  5. Non-intrusive – The ads don’t show up right when a page loads; only the links do. This means that your webpage can appear to be completely ad-free! When a user sees a link they think they might be interested in, they hover over it and out pops a Kontera window. The user can then decided to click through or not. If not, the mouse is moved and the ad goes away.

Kontera vs AdSense

  • Placement – Adsense uses static ad placement which means your AdSense ads are always located in the same areas of your website and will stay there unless you move them. Kontera changes ad link placement every time a page is loaded.
  • Visibility – Adsense ads are always visible and can be ignored by simply not looking at that area of a site. Kontera embeds ads directly into keywords on the site and a user is more likely to click on a targeted keyword ad. Since the ad links appear on page load, they can show up just about anywhere each time.
  • Site restrictions – Adsense can be placed on just about any website you can think of–including spam and duplicate content sites. This reduces effectiveness. Kontera restricts websites based on strict guidelines and even page length. This increases effectiveness and welcomes higher quality advertisers.

My two cents

I’m not out to destroy Google AdSense and as you can see to the right, I still use it! However, I am already starting to see major improvements and response with Kontera over Google and I’ve only started with Kontera a few days ago.

My suggestion is to get and use both services for your website. Optimize your site with Kontera In-Text advertising now!

List Building – Enticement

· Brandon Hann

How exactly do you get people to sign up for your newsletter? Maybe the more important question is: how do you get people to want to sign up for your newsletter? This question will not be completely answered here because there are so many factors that go into your marketing strategy. These factors are then varied based on the industry you’re involved in.

What I can tell you is that you need to find out what makes your visitors/customers “tick”. Researching your site’s demographics can help with this. Here are a few tips you can use to create buzz around your newsletter.

Enticements

  • Content – First and foremost you need to remember that nobody will want your newsletter if it contains useless information. Always provide new, quality content. If you keep rehashing the same material over and over or copy content from other sources on the Internet, you will not be able to maintain a consistant subscriber list.
  • Free stuff – If your newsletter is primarily used to promote products and services that you’re selling, you might want to think about giving away something for free to get people to sign up. This will show your visitors that you are interested in keeping them around. Free stuff can include a special edition newsletter or a free eBook on a subject of interest for your visitors.
  • Speak the truth – Don’t fill your newsletter with bogus information, half-truths or outright lies. This will ruin your reputation and make you lose subscribers faster than you can send out your next message. This is especially true if your newsletter revolves around the latest news in your industry.
  • Be consistant – If you tout that your newsletter will be delivered weekly, send it weekly. In fact, send on the same day and time. Think of your publication as you would the daily newspaper. If you read it, you probably expect it at a particular time everyday. Your visitors will expect the same from you.
  • No spam – Never spam your visitors! Don’t send them offers that you know they won’t be interested in. Never sell your email list (unless you explicitly say you will before someone signs up) to any third party companies. Most of all, don’t overdo it!! If your visitors are expecting a monthly newsletter, don’t send one daily.

If your visitors know that your newsletter will contain the qualities mentioned above, they are more likely to sign up. The best advice I can give you is to put yourself if their shoes. If you were on someone’s website, what would make you want to submit your email address? On the other side, what would make you not want to submit your email address?

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List Building – Post OptIn/White List

· Brandon Hann

Post opt in is a process in which you have an existing email list and you import it into your email marketing campaign. In other words, these visitors did not visit your site and sign up the “usual” way. This is a common practice among webmasters who have changed websites or opened a new one and would like to begin marketing to his/her existing visitors.

White listing, in relation to email lists, is a business practice when a business has obtained email addresses of interested users from all over the Internet–usually thousands of varying websites with numerous topics. They collect all of these emails and separate them into applicable categories and lists and then sell them to other websites to use in their marketing plans.

Post opt in

Some people are skeptical of performing such a task because it’s very likely that you’re going to end up putting people on your mailing list that may not want to be there. Companies like Aweber allow the importing of email lists, but its main purpose is to provide people a means of adding large amounts of email addresses with relative ease when moving service providers.

However, it is possible to take a duplicated list that you may own and import it into another one. This is where things become questionable. For example, if you run two websites with one about cars and the other about motorcycles, you may want to integrate your two mailing lists so you can promote both of your websites at the same time. The problem is that you don’t know for sure that the visitors interested in your car content will also be interested in your motorcycle content and vice versa.

White lists

There’s a lot of debate about email whitelists. On a personal level, you may have created your own whitelist which is basically a listing of all your good emails after pruning out dead accounts or known spammers. From a business standpoint, you may be considering purchasing a white list.

Marketing firms that have harvested thousands of emails based on various topics are in the business of selling these lists to business and website owners like yourself so you can import them into your email marketing campaigns. The debate about the practice comes from the question of how these firms put these email lists together.

Some companies can be spammers themselves who have done nothing but run automated bot searches of the Internet looking for usable email addresses. Others may have legitimately obtained the email addresses, but did not disclose the fact that the addresses may have be sold to another company somewhere down the line.

With that said, you want to be careful whenever you think about adding email addresses to your email list ‘after the fact’ because you never know how those people will receive you and the worst thing that can come of this is getting marked as a spammer.

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List Building – Spam Prevention

· Brandon Hann

Contrary to the title, there is no foreseeable way to completely prevent all spam. It’s just something we’ll have to live with as long as we use the Internet to do business. In fact, even brick and motar businesses suffer from it by getting junk faxes alongside their junk mail.

In the case of list building, there are two kinds of spam. On one hand, you have your own emails to worry about–you have to make sure that the content of your messages are not being classified as spam in your user’s inbox. On the other hand, you have spammers that sign up to your site or newsletter in order to access your free downloads or to write bogus comments on your site to promote their useless junk.

Sending spam

I wrote a full article on email delivery rates discussing the importance of creating messages and newsletters that do not end up in your user’s spam boxes.

This is a vital step in preventing spam for your users and ultimately protecting your site’s reputation. If you’re sending messages being classified as spam, you’re also putting your ISP on the line because it’s their resources that y
you use when sending your email marketing campaign.

Receiving spam

To prevent getting spammers from your squeeze pages, you’ll want to implement anti-spam techniques such as the double opt-in procedure. This is when you have an email marketing signup box such as a newsletter where the user inputs their name email address. Shortly thereafter, the user will receive an email asking to confirm their subscription request.

Automated spam bots aren’t able to get through this procedure because they only know how to “sign up” much like spam bots that scour the Internet looking for email address to harvest are only able to send messages.

Another way to prevent automated signups is to require a CAPTCHA code on your signup box.

Proper email practices

Here’s a list of articles from the website BestPrac.org; a site that offers tips on how to help prevent spam worldwide.

  • Squeeze page scammers
  • Avoiding spam bots
  • Email netiquette
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