Author Archives ⇒ Brandon Hann

Social Bookmarking – LinkedIn

· Brandon Hann

LinkedIn is a really neat site that is basically like Facebook or MySpace except that it’s strictly for connecting with co-workers and other people in your industry. If you have a huge list of contacts in your field or a stack of business cards, you’ll want to check out this site.

What’s so great about LinkedIn?

In you’re currently using MySpace or Facebook to do all of your networking, you might be doing yourself a disservice because those sites are not geared for this type of networking. I’m not saying they can’t handle it, but instead, they focus primarily on sharing things like photos and videos over business-related ideas. Because of this, it’s not hard to get your personal life and your professional life mixed up.

Beyond that, you’ve probably heard of these stories where an employer has accessed the Facebook page of an employee to determine what kind of life they lead outside of work. If you’re trying to maintain a professional image at work, don’t let your wild weekend adventure take you down a few notches in the eyes of your boss.

LinkedIn helps you bypass this by allowing you to create a professional profile to share with all your colleagues and work friends without having to censor yourself.

More benefits of Linked In

  • Groups – LinkedIn now offers LinkedIn Groups, a new way for groups to bring value to their members. Many professionals advance their business goals by counting on professional groups, alumni organizations and work groups to make vital new business contacts which will enhance their trusted connections.
  • Find jobs – Using your LinkedIn profile as a professional resume can help you land jobs! There are tons of job opportunities out there that are tailored to match your profile, so it makes finding a new job much easier.
  • Network with others – Now you don’t have to search for people who might be related to you (in terms of your industry). They become part of your extended network and you can choose to add them to your list of contacts.

How does this help your site?

As with any online account system that contains a profile, you can add your site link(s) to it so anybody who’s a friend of yours or anyone that happens to stop by your profile will be able to see what you’re all about and they might be prompted to check out your website. Check out my LinkedIn profile to see what I’m talking about!

Get started with LinkedIn today!

<< Back to StumbleUpon Forward to MySpace >>

Social Bookmarking – StumbleUpon

· Brandon Hann

Over 10 million members have made this site a place to go for organizing your “corner” of the Internet. More importantly, it allows you to use a simple toolbar to share websites that you’ve been to so others with similar interests can find them.

Over time, people who share the same interests as you are more likely to be recommending websites that you’ll also enjoy. This can be a drastic improvement over standard web searching because you won’t have to filter pages and pages of search results that are exactly relavent to you.

What is StumbleUpon?

Install the toolbar and get browsing! When you “stumble” on a site that you enjoy or one that you found very helpful, you can click the Stumble button and instantly share it to the rest of the community. The system then matches this result to your previous recommendations. In time, StumbleUpon will get to know you and be able to make recommendations of other sites it thinks you might be interested in.

  • People-driven – StumbleUpon now has over 10 million web users all with unique interests. The combination of human interaction with computer-based learning technology makes find relavent websites fun and easy.
  • Up or Down ratings – Using a thumbs up or thumbs down rating, you have control over which sites are ranked higher than others. This will then affect which sites other like-minded people see (or won’t see).
  • Toolbar – The toolbar is always available and you can rate any website that you travel to.
  • Dynamic content – StumbleUpon changes as the web changes–which is every minute of the day! As older content becomes lower-rated, it eventually drops off the site while newer, higher rated content stays fresh.
  • Better results – Because the content has been recommended by other users that share common interests with you, you will receive more relavent websites than you would from a basic keyword filter on most search engines.

Can StumbleUpon help my site?

It sure can! When you become a StumbleUpon member, you can download the toolbar which allows you to Stumble any site you wish. All you need to do is simply navigate to your own site and say that you like it by giving it a thumbs up.

You can also add your site or a specific URL from within your user account. At any rate, once your site is listed, it gets broadcast across the network for others to see. If your content is good and everybody likes it, you’re going to get a lot of thumbs up ratings and this means more and more people will be seeing your page!

How do I get more thumbs up ratings?

Of course, the first way to do this is to create awesome content. Make people want to click on thumbs up. However, even when people do like your page, they may not take the time to vote for it (good or bad). Fortunately, if you’re using WordPress, there’s a plugin that will look at where the user came from and if it says they came from StumbleUpon, you can display a custom message to remind them to vote!

The name of the plugin is called Increase Sociability and it’s free.

Join StumbleUpon now and let the world rank you! You’d be surprised how fast your traffic can grow from submitting a few great content pages!

<< Back to Digg Forward to LinkedIn >>

10 Ways To Increase Traffic To Your Blog

· Brandon Hann

All over the Internet, you’ll find lists like these and some are just basic, mindless collections of the same old ideas re-written to look new. While a lot of what you’d find on these lists are very obvious ways to increase traffic to your site, there are smaller details that you may not have thought about.

One such list I recently found was over at Espreson.com. I was reading through it and even though I was already employing about 9 of the ideas, I noticed that there were at least 15 new things I learned. How is that possible? For one, there were new angles on old games. So, what I’m doing here is I’m going to reiterate the same list, but add a few of the things I thought were missing. In effect, I’m updating it slightly since the original post was published back in 2007.

Top 10 Tips

10. Write some pillar articles. Your blog will mostly contain small to medium-sized posts about a variety of related topics, but pillar article is a big one. These articles should generally be larger content pages aimed at providing a wealth of information to your visitors. They are also not news-based articles as news posts have a short shelf life. Pillar articles will round out the content on your site and provide clearer focus to your overall agenda.

I recently became acquainted with a site called AssociatedContent.com that allows you become a freelance writer for their site. The biggest draw for me what getting my content in front of many readers all while pointing them back to my own site.

9. New content everyday. First off, let me say that you blog frequency should be decided up front and you should stick to it often. This doesn’t meant that you can’t start off at 3 posts per day and then drop to 1 per day and the change to 2 per day, but it does mean that you shouldn’t go 6 months at one post per day and then go 2 weeks without a post and then the next week is 2 posts per day and then nothing for a month and a half! Your posting frequency will never be perfect–I’m sure you have a real life!

The goal here is to allow your users to reasonably expect new content at various intervals. This is especially true if your blog contains of lot of project posts like you’re doing a 3 month test on Google AdWords and your posting your daily updates.

8. Get a domain name. There are countless blogs out there that a just sub-domains of Blogspot or WordPress and a lot of them are doing very well. However, getting people in the real world to see your site might be more of a chore than a pleasure. Having a great sounding domain name or at least one they can remember will ultimately increase the odds that it will be remembered. For example, I’ve noticed my domain kind of sticks with people because as soon as I say ‘ledfrog‘ to them, the first question is always “What does that mean?”. Once I tell them, they usually remember the definition and therefore the domain name. If all else fails, I have plenty of “backup” domains that I use as forwarders so depending on the person, I can give out the easiest to remember.

If you’re thinking of making it as a semi-pro or pro blogger, you may want to consider getting “YourFullName.com” so that way people who meet you and remember your name will inherently remember your blog. For me, I own BrandonHann.com and also Brandon.me even though I have them pointed to my other site.

7. Comment on other blogs. I can’t tell you how important this step can be. You literally have to see for yourself. As an example from my own experience, I posted one comment on one article with a link attached to my site and from that, I get about 80 hits a month. Of course this isn’t a whole lot, but imagine if you got that same result from 100 comments? That would be an extra 8000 hits per month! I advise you to comment wherever you can, but don’t spam anybody. Leave genuine comments that provide actual conversation and where applicable, leave a trackback (see next step).

The reason why comments work is because other bloggers can read what you thought of a post and if they find value in it, they are more likely to click through to your blog to see what else you talk about. This may then lead to them linking directly to your blog which again, brings in more traffic!

6. Leave trackbacks and link to other blogs. I wrote this post explicitly in response to the top 10 list on Espreson.com and I left a trackback and a comment on the original blog for this very reason. A trackback tells the other blog that you wrote about them or linked to a post on their site and most of the time will create a comment-link post that mentions this. Once again, this helps you because it creates a link back to your site!

Just keep in mind that blogs are supposed to be connected. We’re all a community here and no one site can provide you with everything you need to know. Help others out and they will help you.

5. Submit your site to directories. Back in the day Dmoz.org was IT. If you were listed here, your site was golden. It’s amazing to see that Dmoz still holds a lot of clout and being listed here is still a great benefit, but there are more options. There are even options that are specific to blogs. Adding your site to these lists is usually free and will provide two things: new people reading your posts and more traffic to your site.

My favorites: MyBlogLog.com (no longer in service) and Technorati.com.

4. Guest blogging. Many blogs out there allow visitors to write blog posts on their website to help further community interaction. Adding your own blog posts will obviously bring more traffic to your site, but it also helps build your reputation. However, all this depends on the quality of your content. Remember when your guest blogging that you’re a guest so follow any posting rules that the webmaster has laid out.

3. Add your site to Blog Glue. This allows you to add your site to a service that reads your content and makes recommendations of other blogs related to yours right on your content pages. The ultimately drives focused traffic to your site. For example, if you wrote an article about how to get links to your blog, the Blog Glue plugin will search other Blog Glue blogs to add related articles under your content. See below this post for an example. (Update: Blog Glue is the new name for Arkayne)

2. Submit your site to blog search engines. There are plenty out there. Do a Google search for sites that specifically focus on sorting out blogs and you’ll come across names like BlogSearchEngine.com, BlogTopSites.com, BlogDigger.com and many more. Remember, some will be better than others, but in the end, you just want to build your reputation and get your site’s name in the public eye whenever you have a chance. Every 1 visitor to your site counts!

1. Content, content, content. This is more of a grouping of all the underlying techniques from above, but the point is you need to have content and lots of it! Generally, you want your content to be similar in subject, but if you have a blog that covers a lot of topics or it’s your personal blog, you’re bound to have many types of posts. If that’s the case, just make sure your site flows.

This not only helps users find your content, but it helps search engines catalog your site better. Remember that linking of all types count. Google PageRank is based on things like anchor text, keywords, topic relation and more. Typically, the more content you have, the higher you’ll rank in the search engines.

Social Bookmarking – Digg

· Brandon Hann

Digg is a very popular site that brings together the top stories in just about every subject matter you can think of. It also allows people to recommend websites, links, videos, pictures, etc. The service accomplishes this by using a recommendation tool called a “digg”.

Websites and blogs all over the Internet have the ability to include a button or link somewhere in their written text that allows a user who likes what they see to digg the site simply by clicking on the link. This click then takes the user over to their Digg.com account and allows them to post the content on Digg.com for everyone to see and search through.

Digg Advantages

As a web publisher, Digg gives you the ability to allow others to rank your content. The more people dig your stuff, the more it’s seen. This gives you the opportunity to promote yourself even more. Here’s how you can use Digg to promote your site:

  • Publish original content – When your content is original, it’s more likely to be included in the directory because when Digg sorts data, it checks to see if there is similar content already on the site before including any new submissions.
  • Digg buttons – Use a button that links to your Digg account on your site so users can cast a Digg vote right from your site. If you’re using WordPress, you’re already at a slight advantage because there are plenty of plugins that support Digg!
  • Digg others – Your account can be viewed by every other member and if you create a name for yourself by consistently recommending quality resources, people will view your profile page. This can cause more people to see your own content and drive traffic to your site.

My two cents

Digg is just one of many similar services out there that can maximize your content’s reach. If I were you, I’d get signed up with all of these services and start plastering your content everywhere you get a chance.

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Earn Money and Build Your Reputation As A Freelance Writer

· Brandon Hann

Building your blog takes time. In most cases it also takes actual writing skills and dedication to your craft to start pulling in traffic. In the meantime however, there are ways to get your content in front of viewers to use as a platform for promoting yourself and/or your website.

Think of it this way: imagine you had a website and you want to build your reputation rather fast. You come across a website that allows contributions from outside writers and you submit an article. This article is now accessible on an already existing website with a large traffic flow. When people read your article, they see your name (and profile). This information then leads to your own blog or website and instantly you become known in the blogosphere!

Ok, so maybe it’s not as easy as it sounds! But the point is, if you know your content is good and you want to get it in front of people relatively easy, this is one sure way to do it. Check out my Associated Content profile to see how people will view you.

AssociatedContent.com


AC is touted as “The people’s media company” and it is essentially a collection of over 2 million articles written on almost every topic you can think of. The best part is that these articles are written by people like you! That’s right. You are a contributor to a growing collection of content and at the same time, building a name for yourself.

To sign up, you simply need to head on over to the AssociatedContent signup page and fill out the required information. Afterward, you’ll be sent a verification email. Once verified, you’ll be taken into your account and you can start publishing content right away!

How does AssociatedContent work?

Once logged in, you’ll have access to your dashboard. It’ll look similar to this:

From here, you can do a number of different things like publish new content, check messages, edit your public profile and connect with other writers. Once you get going, this is generally how the site works:

  1. Pick the format you want (Text, Video, Audio, Images).
  2. Pick the topic that the content is about.
  3. Answer some copyright questions about how you want your work distributed.
  4. Choose a payment method.
  5. Publish your content!

Within your dashboard, you can also see a number of previously established assignments that you can choose to fulfill if you’d like. Don’t worry about writer’s block either! Associated Content will provide you with ideas if you’re stuck.

How much do I get paid?

The main payout option is Performance Payments. The rate is $1.50 per 1000 pageviews. This amount can be upped to $2.00 after certain requirements are met. This is the description of Performance Payments as outlined on the website:

Performance Payments are payments based on the traffic to your content and allow you to earn unlimited cash from your text, video, slideshow and audio submissions long after they have been published. You earn money for every one thousand page views your content generates (PPM™ rate). The baseline PPM™ rate is currently $1.50 – meaning if you generate 30,000 page views, you’re paid $45.00 in Performance Payments. As your library of content grows and your total page views accumulate, your Clout level increases. When you reach Clout 7 and beyond, your PPM™ rate will gradually increase up to a maximum of $2.00 per thousand page views. Check out the quick stats (under total payments) on your Account dashboard to see your current estimated earnings, and track your page view statistics per piece of content from the Content page. Click here to read more about the Clout system.

Another payout option is Upfront Payment. Your content is subjected to a review by the site editors and based on its originality and quality, you will receive an offer. At this point, you can choose to accept the offer or not. There are stricter rules for submitting this kind of content.

More Information

There is a LARGE amount of information you may want to peruse through before you get started, but if you’re interested in becoming a freelance writer and/or build your reputation along the way, you will love this site. For more information, please see AssociatedContent’s FAQ section.

To sign up now, go to AssociatedContent.com!

List Building – Newsletter

· Brandon Hann

This is what it all leads up to. All that hard work of creating the structure around your mailing list has finally come down to what it is you’re actually mailing. There’s no need for me to explain what a newsletter is, but I will give you some advice on how to make it more effective.

I want to start by explaining why it is important to even have one of these in the first place.

Purpose of a newsletter


Think of it this way. You have a website and on it you sell a product. If someone finds your product through a search engine or an ad you placed somewhere out in the world, they can go to your site and buy it. That’s great, but what happens when they leave? Do you sell more products? And if so, will your customers come back to buy them too?

These are all valid questions that most businesses often ask and one major solution to getting your customers to come back (besides offering quality products and service) is to tell them why they should come back. Newsletters are great promotional tools. Here are some things you can include in a newsletter to increase its effectiveness:

  • Provide information about special offers for products on your website.
  • Attach coupons for more money-saving opportunities.
  • Send free stuff like ebooks, offers to other websites and helpful downloads.
  • Offer helpful information that a customer can use to get more out of the products they bought from you.
  • Include direct links to specific areas of your website to help people find things easier.

Use to bring in more income

Newsletters can used in conjunction with your mailing list to send out mass offers for your website that can bring in extra income at just about any time you wish. As an example, if you have a list of 10,000 people and only 3% actually respond to a $20 offer you sent, you can potentially make $6000 in one email blast! Now that’s power.

Building your mailing list is a vital tool for promotion of your website, your products and services and a way to get related offers, discounts and important information into the inboxes of your trusted visitors.

<< Back to Squeeze Page Forward To List Building >>

List Building – Squeeze Page

· Brandon Hann

Internet marketing is competitive and you need to be on the cutting edge of the competition if you want to stay afloat. A squeeze page is just one more way to extract (or squeeze) business out of your website. Think of it like squeezing the last drops of juice out of a lemon. Since every visitor on your site counts, it’s important to find ways to get them on your mailing list without running them off.

What is a squeeze page?


You may find various definitions about what a squeeze page actually is and some might even consider a squeeze page the same as a landing page and they are right for the most part–they are very similar.

I make the distinction between the two by reserving landing pages specifically for the advertising of a certain product and a squeeze page for simply the advertising of your site and mailing list as a whole. The main difference would be that one page is very targeted and one is not.

How do I make them effective?

Testing, testing and more testing. That’s the short answer! Nobody can answer this question for you because every website is different than the next. Your visitors might have very different needs than those that come to my site and only you would know what it is they need. The good news is that I have some general tips on how to make a squeeze page! Take these tips and mix them with your own style of branding and you’ll have the advantage.

  • Optin form – This is the most important part! If your users don’t have anywhere to signup, it’s pointless to have. Make this form easily found and clearly marked. Don’t hide or dress it up too much otherwise, you’ll lose potential signups.
  • Benefits – This is where you tell your visitors what they get out of the deal. Remember, the whole point is to get subscribers to your site so offer them something they will be interested in based off the content that your site is about.
  • Header graphics – Ensure that you have an attractive header graphic. Consider the squeeze page somewhat of an advertisement, so this graphic should draw people in. Keep it simple, but effective.
  • Headline text – Provide captivating headline text to help with the graphical “sales pitch” of your newsletter. Once again, the idea is to draw interest to your ad, but most of all, maintain that interest long enough to produce a sign up.
  • Sample product – If you can, provide a sample of the product such as a lengthly product description or a video of your product in action.

More info

As I stated in the beginning, the success of your squeeze page will depend heavily on your audience and you need to know who you’re promoting to in order to increase signup frequency. As an example, if you run a blog about gardening, it’s probable that your users aren’t going to like (or care for) large, colorful, in-your-face graphics and crazy sounds or music, so tone it down.

Beyond that, I hope you got the basics down! Have fun with it!

<< Back to Reviews Forward To Newsletter >>

List Building – Reviews

· Brandon Hann

Setting up a ‘reviews’ page is a great idea to help promote the products and services you have listed on your landing pages. It might not come as a surprise, but today, more and more people are trusting what the Internet has to say about the quality and effectiveness of new products. This is causing less effectiveness over traditional advertising.

What is a review page?


Just as it sounds, it’s a place where people can discuss your products and website. If you’re running a blog, you might already have somewhat of a review system in place and that’s your comment space. Each post you make has the capability of receiving comments from everyone that reads it. By the way, make sure you read my tips about comments while you’re here.

Giving your users access to such content is very important to help sell your stuff. Of course, when you make your own website, you’re going to biased about your products and people can see right through that. It’s not to say that you’re lying, but people want to really know what the facts are.

How important are reviews and testimonials?

Ask yourself these questions: when you made your last purchase, how much research did you do on the product? If you did any, how much weight did a user’s personal review of the product hold up against the manufacturer’s description of the product?

Look at it this way, if your product starts making it around the Internet, people will review it anyway, so you might as well put some of these comments on your own site to help people along. Using review pages in conjunction with your landing pages will create a successful marketing plan.

What not to do

  • DON’T lie – Making up fake reviews and testimonials will only take you so far. Eventually someone will buy your product and if it’s not like your fake reviews said, they will blast out the truth. In time, your site will be the only one offering positive reviews on your product. And how bad will that look?!
  • DON’T disparage – Never disparage a competitor’s product that’s similar to yours. Even if yours is truly better, putting down another business will only harm your reputation and image.
  • DON’T ignore comments – If you ignore negative comments, you won’t have the chance to improve what’s wrong. Also, flooding a space with only positive remarks can have the same effect as making up reviews. Somewhere else, the truth will come out.

Go look for reviews

It’s true that not everybody will care to write positive comments for you. If you are selling products, you should go out and ask your clients to say a few things about their experience. Offer them a free link on your website or something.

If you notice your business is getting listed on sites like Yelp.com, start linking to them to show your customers you’re not afraid of presenting 3rd party information whether it’s negative or not.

<< Back to Landing Pages Forward To Squeeze Pages >>

List Building – Landing Pages

· Brandon Hann

I’m sure that you have seen quite a few landing pages throughout your Internet travels, but maybe didn’t know what they were called. Or maybe you did, but didn’t understand the importance of these pages.

What is a landing page?


Simply put, it’s a page you land on after clicking a link. This sounds easy enough, but deep down, every little detail you incorporate (or don’t) will affect the quality and performance of this page. So what are they for? When an advertiser is promoting a product or service, they will create a static page on the Internet somewhere that showcases this product or service and is essentially the make or break presentation.

They are commonly used by affiliate marketers as a means to send their visitors to the advertiser’s website to gain a referral bonus. Here’s an example of a successful landing page.

Why is a landing page important?

From an advertiser’s point of view, your landing page should be designed to sell. Unlike a face-to-face sales pitch where you can gauge things like emotion, customer response and even overcome objections, a webpage is a one-shot deal. If you customer lands here and loses interest, they leave the page and your sale is gone forever!

Just like creating effective advertisements like Google ads, banners, etc. you want to keep people interested and above all, you want to make them want your product when they’re done reading the page.

From a visitor’s point of view, your landing page should be straight forward. It should sell the product well and sell it fast. Pre-answer everyone’s questions up front and add just enough visuals to keep people interested.

How should I design this page?

The design should be non-intrusive, but visual enough to maintain interest. For content, some people will tell you that you shouldn’t use a targeted landing page (see below) to promote or discuss anything other than what product your selling. Others might tell you to use landing pages as opportunities to upsell other things you might be offering.

Types of landing pages:

  • Targeted – These pages may be part of your website, but they look nothing like your site because they are only there to promote one item. The entire page is written only for this item and does not contain any other links, pictures or “plugs”.
  • Dynamic – This type of page can be mixed with other types. Essentially a dynamic page, much like any dynamic webpage, will allow you to create custom content based on a referring site or affiliate link. An example would be in the landing page made references to the site you came from, so it appears as though that site heavily endorses this product.
  • Static – This is your average landing page and it can be a page build specifically for a product, or it can simply be a static page located within your site that helps promote the product. Using this type of page may detract a little form your intending purpose, but it could open doors for promotion of the rest of your business.

My suggestion is to go with a page that only focuses on one thing. The reason for this is that you’ll be advertising this page through a PPC network and the traffic generated from these networks is very targeted toward a particular niche. So if you landing page was selling auto-blogging software, you would only be targeting web traffic that was looking for auto-blogging software and therefore you would not want to fill this page with information on other software you’re selling.

Getting started

The first thing you want to do is gather your ideas. Think about what you want to accomplish with your page, who you’re advertising to, how they are able to buy your product and what would make them interested. Once you have these basics down, you should have a clear understanding of how to setup your page.

Just keep in mind that the goal of landing pages is to convert sales quickly. The people that will be clicking through are not there to see your site. They were advised by someone else to click on that link and you need to be there to present them with a valid reason for staying.

Increase effectiveness

Here are some tips on how to increase the overall effectiveness of your landing pages:

  1. Create concise text without being too short. Find that perfect balance so you’re not overdoing or underdoing it.
  2. Add a FAQ to try and answer questions you might already know will probably be asked by your visitors. This way, they don’t need to take time to find out how to contact you.
  3. Keep the content search engine friendly and make sure you’re not using duplicate content on multiple landing pages.
  4. Make sure the page loads fast. Nobody is going to wait for your page to load if it takes longer than 5 seconds.
  5. Consider adding a video clip of the product in use or you explaining your service. Even a video of you reading the same content that’s already on the page will be highly effective.
  6. Add some social media links to increase your exposure. Use sites like Twitter and Facebook so people can readily find you if they’re really interested in what you offer.
  7. If you have a few customer praises about your products, put them on there to let people know what others think of you.

Testing your landing pages

In researching this topic, I found a great site that talked about testing landing pages. Originally I wasn’t even going to mention it because it’s one of those things that webmasters usually do naturally by reviewing page stats and click-through ratios, but this site brought up a really good point.

Michael Bloch from TamingTheBeast.net mentioned that to test a landing page, you should send 5 of your friends to the page without telling them what the page is about and have them look it over for about 5 seconds. When they’re done, instead of asking them “Does it look good?”, ask them what they remembered about the page. Don’t get too specific with the question. Just have them spit out key things that they remembered.

If they can’t even tell you what you were selling or what the page was about, then something is very wrong! Their input might be able to help you pinpoint areas of the page that need improvement.

Further testing is easily done with the web statistics I mentioned, but don’t just look at counters. Look at how long your visitors are staying on the page. If you read your own page from top to bottom, how long did it take you? Are your visitors staying for at least that long?

Further reading

This post was just to touch some key points on landing pages and is in no way intended to be 100% thorough! There are countless possibilities to creating, promoting and using landing pages and your results will vary greatly based on your industry and web skills.

<< Back to Whitelisting Forward To Reviews >>

List Building – Whitelisting

· Brandon Hann

Due to the heavy amount of spam that flows through the Internet on a daily basis, it’s important to let your visitors know that they can expect your emails from a particular email address. This means that your visitors must whitelist your website’s email address in order to ensure that your email will arrive at all intended mailboxes. On your end, when your site begins to grow, you may notice an increase in the amount of mail you get and you may want to check out these services to help you get control of your inbox back.

ISIPP

When you get more emails than you can handle, it’s probably because more than half of them are spam messages. While you could go out and purchase some anti-spam software that attaches itself to your inbox, but the problem is that it doesn’t always block spam and it doesn’t always send good email through.

ISIPP can help you better manage your email. This service is geared toward full-fledged businesses as the total monthly costs can reach $300. However, with one of these systems in place, you can practically guarantee that you won’t be getting any more spam!

Habeas (ReturnPath.com)

Habeas was a company founded in 2002 with the intentions of providing information regarding email reputation to over 1 millions email networks and hundreds of ISPs throughout 190 countries. In essence, it certified email as being legit and created a standard for separating good email from spam. The company was eventually bought by ReturnPath.com after being somewhat of a competitor founded in 1999.

The new company has created a much larger email integrity system that also provides Internet Services. At any rate, this topic is more about protecting your own inbox from unwanted spam, but knowing what kinds of things these companies are filtering will allow you to create much better emails so your visitors aren’t required to place your mailing list on a whitelist.

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