While reading this article, think about the sites you do and don’t like. More importantly, think about the sites you find easy to use versus the ones that you hate going visiting. I will bet you that many of the reasons for those differences are listed here, such as “never ask for more information than you need.” If you aren’t going to use the requester’s pet’s name, why are you asking for it.

Again, a good article and well worth the read. 101 Five-Minute Fixes to Incrementally Improve Your Web Site.

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101 Five Minute Fixes

There are a number of services out there that can tell you if you have been marked as a spammer. These services will also mark senders that have a habit of sending out virus laden emails. Instead of going to each individual blacklist owner and finding out if you are on their list, the best thing to do is go to a site like MX Tool Box. Here you will find the most important tools you will need to assess your reputation. First is a tool that will tell you your “MX record“. Since most blacklists are done by IP address, not domain name, you need to know what IP address is really sending out your email. Depending on your setup this may or may not be your IP address as seen by websites. If you go to the MX tool at MX Tool Box and enter your domain name, it will tell you what IP address is registered to send out your email. Note that this can be your first hint. If you have other addresses sending out mail than the one specified some servers will refuse the mail.

Now that you have your IP address, go over to the “Blacklists” tab and put that IP in and hit “Blacklist Check”. This tool will go out and check most of the main lists to see if you have been flagged. What you want to see is all “OK”s. This lets you know that your reputation is still in tact. If you are flagged by one of the services, you will need to go to that service and find out why and what can be done to fix the rating. Know that fixing things is not always a quick or easy thing. Be prepared to do some work that will will talk about in future columns.

Assuming that everything is OK, you can also use some of the other tools on MX Tool Box to test the speed of your servers, the responsiveness, and best of all you can set up a proactive monitoring service that will check all of this stuff regularly and alert you if there is a problem. The monitoring service can even send you a text message if you email server goes down or becomes unresponsive.

Knowing what your reputation is, keeping a good one, and monitoring how you are perceived by others is just as important in the world of the Internet as it is in your personal relations. What’s more, in the world of electronic communications news travels fast so you most remain ever vigilant. There are lots of other services in addition to MX Tool Box, such as Habeas, Blacklisted Domain and others. They vary in price and effectiveness, so look around and see which one is best for you. What is important is that you use something.

In future columns I will be talking more about email integrity and other methods, such as identity verification and whitelists, that are being introduced to combat spam and increase email reliability. Please subscribe to the site feed by either RSS or email to stay on top of everything coming out. The links for those subscriptions are up in the top right corner of this page.

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Know Your Rep

If you send out 5000 emails per day to the same 5000 prospects, you are spamming. I don’t care how interesting that message is. By the third day, of fourth day if I am slow, I am wanting off of your list. There is no way you are fine tuning a personal message to that many people in bulk. Oh, and if you are a smaller company the numbers are smaller, but you are still spamming.

Beyond that, a brief review:

• Don’t contact me every day unless we are in the middle of a frantic negotiation. Even then, you had better have something very important to say.
• Don’t send me the same message as you send to a thousand other people and expect me to consider it a personal interaction. You are just fooling yourself.
• Don’t put all of the email addresses for the hundreds of people you are sending the email to in the “To:” line. You just broadcast everyone’s emails, gave away your contact list, and invited more spam into your prospects inbox.
• Do use a subject in your email that is clear and accurate. Don’t put it in ALL CAPS, and don’t use words that are spam triggers like “free”, “great deal”, “viagra”, or “sex”.
• Do be aware that if you act like a spammer, the anti-spam services will conclude that you are spam and will start blocking your emails.

OK, those are some of the very basics that you should keep in mind all the time. Beyond that there are lots of other things to do and not do, but that is what this entire blog is for and what I will be talking about in the future.

If you want to make sure to stay up on getting your message across, getting your email read, and keeping your company off the spam blacklists, then make sure to subscribe to this blog through the RSS feed or through the email.

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Don’t Spam

Whether you blog about internet marketing, parenthood, karate or ballpoint pens, there are certain things you can do to make each post better. This week, I want to share several strategies you can use to make your posts more gripping — regardless of their length or topic.

Omit any sentences or paragraphs in your post that don’t fall under the following two categories:

1. Words that persuade visitors to read the article.

2. Words that visitors will want to read.

Now, this can be applied to all sorts of writing, not just blog posts. Think about these points as you are writing your next email. Think about the purpose of what you are writing. Is persuading the reader to do something? Or is it providing information that the reader will find valuable. If it is doing neither, then it is wasted breath and a waste of your readers time. And, in this day and age when time is at a premium and your message is battling thousands of others for a shrinking share of attention, you cannot afford to waste anything.

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Writing Better Posts and Emails

Unlike a lot of Godin’s other books, this book is fairly long. Much of it is made up of examples of the strategies he is talking about, so you have plenty of other people’s mistakes and successes to learn from. But, for the meat of the matter, I would say two of the most important things he says are:

Permission Marketing Is . . .

• Anticipated – people look forward to hearing from you
• Personal – the messages are directly related to the individual
• Relevant – the marketing is about something the prospect is interested in

and later in the books is points out…

Permission Marketing As A Commodity

1. Permission is nontransferable.
2. Permission is selfish.
3. Permission is a process, not a moment.
4. Permission can be canceled at any time.

I have covered some of these items in past posts, such as cancellation, and I will cover more in the future. But, for a full explanation on permission marketing and how it is turning the trade on its ear, you really need to read this book.

In the meantime remember this one thing, if you are treating your customer as just that – a customer – and not a valued friend and partner, you are most assuredly doing something wrong.

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Review – Permission Marketing

Ah! There we have the problem. I did indeed receive the status update and had in fact read it. But, I never let him know that. Why? Well yes, I should have sent back some message that just said, “Got it. Thanks,” but it was a busy week. More importantly there was no question in the report that needed answering. When I talked to one of the consultants on the phone later I relayed this and added, “there was no question.” “Yes,” the consultant sighed, “I told him that.”

So here is your question – are you calling you customers to action? Or are you just assuming that they will know what to do with the information you give them? When you send out emails or other marketing, do you know that those peices are received and what happens next?

Anything you send out, even if it is just an update or information, should have a clear and present call to action. It could be as simple as clicking a link to your website or replying to “please let me know you got this.” It could be as involved as “call me know so I can discuss how this impacts you.” Whatever it is, you need to get that action going. You need to make sure that person is actively engaged in the dialog you are having. There is never a reason to just send out things that don’t have an action associated. If you catch yourself saying, “this doesn’t need a response,” then you need to ask yourself why you are sending it at all. There is enough stuff floating around out there clogging up people’s attention space without adding more that really has no use.

So, with customers and co-workers, ask for a response. This will help you to not only find out if they received and understood your message, but if they are even involved in you dialog at all.

And here is your call to action from this post. Please leave me a comment if you find these hints useful. And if you would like to stay up to date with this site, please subscribe to our news feed by clicking on the link in the upper right hand side of this page. Thanks!

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Call to Action

Where is this going you might ask? Well, it goes to a year later. A few weeks ago I start getting unknown calls to my home and cell phone. The number isn’t identified and no message is left. And just so you know, no, I don’t normally answer calls from unknown numbers. I rely on the message the unknown leave to let me know if I should talk to the person. This goes on every day, at least two or three times a day, for a couple of weeks. Obviously whoever is calling isn’t getting the hint. Finally, in frustration I answer it. Guess who?! Yup, the national office of the eyeglass store with a friendly reminder that I have a checkup due on my eyes. No I don’t, I replied.

And whats more I told the person, I wanted to be put on their do-not-call list, and I wouldn’t be doing business with them again. That is my response to being harassed by a marketer. They abused the permission I gave them to do business with me. Now, if they had left a message on that first phone call I would still be thinking kindly about them. I might even have gone in for a check up. But somewhere in their “marketing” materials it said that the business was only to be conducted person to person and no message left. I can tell you from personal experience and from then looking this company up on the web, they are wasting a lot of money on telemarketing, are creating a lot of bad word-of-mouth, and they are driving away their best prospects – the return customer.

The moral is, once you have permission to do business with someone don’t abuse that privilege.

Don’t, as Buy.com does, send me an email every single day. Sorry, I don’t buy electronics every single day and your email gets annoying so you get marked as spam. Do, as some other shops do, ask me what I would like to be notified about and how often. Your emails will get read, not go into spam, and you will be held in higher regard.

Don’t send me a message with no message! That means a phone call without leaving a message or an email that says “click here because we have something important to tell you.” Guess what? I am not going to click there because what you just told me is that you have some big marketing spiel you are about to unleash on me. If it had confidence in what you had to say, you would have told me up front knowing that I would want to click or call back.

And don’t ever give my information to someone else without my express permission. Because if I find out that you did that, I will never do business with you again. Never, ever abuse that trust that I have in you as a partner in business. If you do, you will cease to be a partner and become just another one of the many advertisers out there who I tune out.

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Don’t Abuse the Permission

This is where we go back to last week’s review. Search Engine Optimization, SEO, is like whipped cream on the sundae. It needs to be part of your overall strategy and not just something you slap on to an existing methodology. If you get that high Google ranking, where are you going to direct the traffic? What are you going to do with those people once they get to your website? What experience are they goign to receive? What is your overall plan for converting them to long term, permission based customers?

Remember, getting a message out there is fine, but if the message ends up being “look at me! I can generate a lot of noise and traffic but have nothing concrete to back it up,” then you will be doing yourself more harm than good. You remember those companies and websites that promised a lot but just ended up wasting your time. Don’t become one of them.

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Where’s the Beef?

This is not a long book and in many places it contains statements of the obvious. But, there are other moments and insights that make the book more than worth the price. One of those is on pages 58 and 59 and contain a clear distillation of “What’s and E-mail Correspondence Worth to You and Your Organization.” Here Godin gives a concrete example of a traditional direct mail campaign versus an email campaign. Both are being sent to 1,000 names byt due to differences in response rate and cost of mailing, the net profit from the email campaign would be $19,000 versus a mere $125 for the direct mail. Powerful stuff.

The other big take away is the difference between interruption based marketing and permission based. To understand the difference all you have to do is think about the annoying sales calls during dinner or commercials breaking up your television show (interruption based) contrasted to catalogs you have requested or emailing lists you subscribe to (permission based). But here is the key – knowing the difference is one thing, reforming your organization based on those differences is something else. And that is where Meatball Sundae comes into play.

Overall this is a great book and a fast read. I finished it in just a little over a day, with interruptions, but the lessons learned will stick with me for a very long time. And hopefully I can remember to put those lessons into action.

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Meatball Sundae

So, how do you get to the center of a person without being to nosy or obvious? Try this on for size – ask them their favorite of the four main characters from Winnie-the-Pooh! First of all it will give you both a good laugh. Most importantly though it will give you some good ideas about your person’s personality. So here goes…

Winnie-the-Pooh: A steadfast friend or companion. A “Pooh” will always try to help out and make things better. Will try to fix things.

Tigger: So emotional as to almost be bi-polar! Has great highs and great lows – thought generally more up than down. Likes social situations, parties, and exciting activity.

Eeyore: Very down-to-earth. On the pessimistic side of being a realist. Will make due with the status quo rather than rock-the boat.

Rabbit: The intellectual. Very pragmatic and dogmatic. Wants to see proof and the reasons why. Rabbits make great accountants.

So, there you have the four basic type. Similar to all the other four-archetypes that you will find in studies such as the Meyers-Briggs analysis and others. But this research is a little easier to do, a lot more fun, and a great ice breaker for conversation. After you know the information though, the really key concept is to use it in how you communicate with the person.

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Hundred Acre Personality Types