Spam Guard Your Business

Have you started or are you thinking in starting an easy home business?

Then be carefull because spam guard may harm your business!

I bet that you know that the bulk e-mail marketing technique it's widely used on Internet, it's free, it's easy and it's fast...

But on the long run it can cost you more than you will gain with it!

Many people identify bulk e-mail with spam. Spam used to be referred about posting or broadcasting ads to unrelated discussion groups, but now this term has grown meaning "any unsolicited e-mail" or "any e-mail sent to people that didn't ask for it". And the Internet Service Providers are taking steps in order to spam guard themselves, that can be very dangerous to your business if you decide to use bulk e-mail as your promotional tool.

If the people that receive your unsolicited e-mail, complaint to your ISP and or your virtual host service, you may end up loosing one or both of them. This means that your web site will be shut down, and you will lose your connection to the Internet.

Of course that you can get another ISP and virtual host server, but this will harm you in three ways:

* It will be a waist of time

* It will cost you money

* It will damage your reputation

So this free medium for online promotion, can be the source of too many problems, and the best that you can do, is to do not get involved with it.

But SPAM GUARDS can give you problems...

EVEN WHEN YOU DON'T WANT TO SPAM!

And this brings us to our next topic...

FREE SPAM GUARD CHECKING

Let's say that you're about to mail out your e-zine...

You can't have an idea of how many will actually REACH your subscribers and how many will get filtered, junked, trashed, or stomped by ISPs, HotMail, Yahoo! Mail, etc., along the way.

Why?

Simple answer... spam guard software.

You know how important e-mail is to YOUR business, right? What if I told you 10%, 20%, maybe 50% or more of it is not getting through?

Spam has reached epidemic levels. So much so that ISPs have been forced to combat it with filtering spam guard software.

Alas, many legitimate marketers are getting caught up and hurt, even though they are not the target.

Now, instead of JUST hoping for the best...

With our spam guard checking feature, you can know exactly what to do to reduce the "spamminess" of your e-zines and promotional e-mail!

As a result, you will know that your e-mail and newsletters are being delivered directly into INBOXES of your clients and affiliates...

... and NOT sent by spam guard software into the Junk Mail Folder.

It's no longer just enough to send the mail...

You must be sure that you can reach the INBOX!

What should you do to protect your honest business from being recognized as spam by spam guard software when it is not?

Send your marketing letters and e-zine issues to my special autoresponder, and you will get a Spam Guard Check Report.

Even if you don't have an ezine or newsletter you should check your e-mail signature file!

Why?

Simple answer... the average marketing sig file can contain enough "spam triggers" to throw you into Yahoo! Mail's Junk Mail folder.

STEPS TO SPAM CHECKING YOUR MARKETING TOOLS

USE THE SPAMCHECK TEST

Send an e-mail to spamcheck-RB@sitesell.net with the word TEST (in caps, no quotes) preceding your subject in the Subject line.

I repeat, because it's important...

* Start the subject line with... TEST .... or the spam guard software will assume it's spam, and follow up with your usual e-mail or ezine's Subject

i.e. if your Subject is:

"The best home business"

you should write:

TEST "The best home business"

* On the body of the e-mail put your ezine's issue content or your marketing e-mail's content

* Send it to: spamcheck-RB@sitesell.net

And that's it, that's all there is to it!...

You will receive an Instant free spam guard checking, and a free Report telling you the results. :-)

Written by Dr. Roberto A. Bonomi

About the Author:
Dr. Roberto Bonomi is a successful e-book writer that shares his home business ideas at: http://www.easy-home-business.com. And you can post free your own articles, or find free articles for your web site or ezine at http://articles.drbonomi.com.
This article was posted on September 05, 2006
Article Source: articlecity

Do Your Autoresponders Drive Your Customers Crazy?

Writing chained auto-responder messages to sell a product is a good idea in principle, but in practice it can LOSE you clients just as well if you don't get right.

A chained auto-responder is a sequence of emails that gets delivered automatically when someone subscribes to this autoresponder.

It is used in marketing to deliver mini-advertisements, teaser courses, demo extracts, testimonials or stepped sales letters, and all of this is designed to get the client eventually to click on the "buy me now" link for the main product that is being promoted.

There are three main problems with chained auto-responders. Avoid these, TEST your linked auto-responders before you inflict them on the general public, and you should see significant increases in your sales.

Problem No. 1 - No Content Beyond Selling

This is THE most VIOLENTLY annoying class of chained autoresponders - message after message from the same place, trying to sell you something, in so many different words. YUCK!

What marketers who don't THINK seem to forget is that folk who own and manage PCs and email aren't that stupid.

They can read and write, you know, and they are not IDIOTS.

After two or three repeats, they will immediately delete such messages from their inbox and probably put a spam block on the sender domain for good measure.

That's not what the marketeer had in mind, I should wager ...

Problem No. 2 - Too Little Content

I remember one "mini course" which contained nothing but teasers and virtually no useful information whatsoever.

Once again, look, marketeers!

If you want people to "try" the product, you need to give them at least a little taste of it.

Don't hold the glass with the sample wine under their nose, and when they reach out, oops, that'll be $875 dollars please ... but we do have a "money back" guarantee ...

This is just ANNOYING, it's even dishonourable and an angry person does not make a good customer.

Problem No. 3 - Too Much, Way Too Much ...

I subscribed to another auto-responder teaser mini course just a few days ago, and here, the folks in charge had done a 180' U-turn on the two points above, most likely because they got it that those content less/content poor efforts don't work to sell more of their product.

In their desire to have it be known how marvellously content packed the main item was, they created this huge long document, of at least 20, 25 paragraphs for the first instalment of their chained auto-responder.

Gee.

Now I don't know about the rest of the planet, but I'm actually quite a busy person and I get STACKS of emails every day.

I try and cut down the time I spent on dealing with email because it does get out of hand, and on this occasion I was into something else anyway.

I took just *one look* at the plethora of writing and went, "Oh god, I don't have time for that right now ..." and left it.

Have you ever left a non-priority email for later ...?

Yeah, you know what I mean.

But then, the very next day, the 2nd instalment arrived. I opened it and damn me, there's another REAM of goodness knows what, but now I've missed the boat because this is No. 2 and I haven't read No. 1 yet!

I hastily closed it, feeling guilty and moved on.

But then, No. 3 arrived - another book length instalment. I just couldn't handle it anymore.

I deleted the lot.

Now that's a terrible shame because there may have been valuable information I never got, and the guys who wrote this spend AGES doing it.

So, here are my suggestion for chained auto-responders copy.

1. Head it with, "Busy? Save me! I contain important information!" or words to that effect.

2. Keep it SHORT. Pick out ONE USEFUL thing and just - tell me THAT. So I can glance at it and say, "Hey, that's useful! Cool! Thanks, guys!" When I mean short, I mean anything above three paragraphs is way, way too long for an autoresponder email in this day and age.

3. Keep it TOTALLY FOCUSSED on the product you are selling. I'm on autoresponders where you wouldn't begin to guess for all the waffle, testimonials, side tracks and "personal messages" what I'm supposed to be BUYING at the end of the day!

4. Give people a chance to keep up. Space your messages three days, don't inundate us. Or better still, test this for yourself. One hell of a lot of "internet marketing wisdom" is completely out of date now because it was researched back in the days when we got four emails a week, and not fourteen thousand each. Time has moved on and requires NEW thinking, and different strategies.

My last tip on chained autoresponders is as follows.

Subscribe yourself to OTHER PEOPLE'S efforts.

Don't look at them as a marketeer would, but as though you were a human being in front of their computer, if you know what I mean by that.

You can learn what pleases and what works, and what doesn't.

Mark out to yourself what you like and use this in your own efforts, and avoid what really turns you off.

Lastly, keep working at your chained autoresponder copy until you have something that really works, and really brings in lots more sales.

They are a great resource - if handle them right.

About the author:
Silvia Hartmann is the author of MindMillion and you can get a FREE course, delivered by autoresponder (!), the 60 Second Wealth Creator, at http://mindmillion.com/60/
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Mail Server Blacklists and Spam

A white-list is a list of email senders whom you trust and would like to receive mail from. Conversely, a blacklist contains those that are not to be trusted. Blacklists need to be configured and administered on a server, at the ISP (Internet Service Provider) level or on your network. If you do not have such access, and most people do not, you can use the blacklists by choosing email services from companies that use such blacklisting techniques.

A mail server is designated as having an open relay when mail is processed in a location that is not local to either the sender or receiver. The mail server is unrelated to either party, and as such, has no business processing that email. Think of driving from your home in Washington, DC to your friend's home in Boston. If you pass through New York City on the way, that is to be expected. However, if you stop in Dallas, the route becomes suspect. An open relay mail server, whether intentional or not, is allowing mail to be routed through it that shouldn't be. In this way, spammers distribute large volumes of junk email in order to disguise their actions. Open relays used to be very common, like public mailboxes. You can drop a letter into any one without any notice of who you are. Spammers ruined this by using open relays to surreptitiously send spam without identifying themselves. When blocked by the administrator or ISP, they simply move on. They regularly scan IP addresses looking for open relay servers. When they find one, they exploit it.

Blacklists contain a database of open relay mail servers and those known to be a source of spam, and are used to filter email coming from those machines. The sender will receive a bounce message or mailer deamon telling them that their email is undeliverable. Often, the sender does not realize that they are on a blacklist or that their server is an open relay. They find out only when they attempt to send mail to someone who is uses a blacklist to filter for spam. If the sender is a spammer, the process is working. If the sender is you, the process is also working because it will force you to take steps to close that open relay or complain to the company who is handling your mail. By closing the holes in the email relay network, the spammers will be forced to stop sourcing their spam in this way. This is but one way to slow down, not stop, the spammers.

Blacklists have a very high probability of false-positives if used in blind faith. Depending on those that maintain the blacklist, email sent in good faith could land innocent people and mail servers on a blacklist. This usually happens to one of two ways. The first is through the procedure most blacklist providers use to find open relays. They simply do what the spammers do and scan IP address to look for a server that will allow them to connect and send mail. Once the program finds an open relay they add the server to the blacklist. The system administrator of the server is usually never notified. There can be mistakes made in this process leaving the administrator with a huge problem when mail starts getting lost or bounced back. Second, you may receive an IP from your provider that was previously blacklisted, even though it may no longer be an open relay. To avoid this, check the IP address against the known blacklists and ask your provider for a new one if it indeed appears.

Do you know whether your ISP maintains an open relay? If you discovered that your employee was doing work for someone else while on your time, you would certainly put a stop to it. Open relay mail servers are doing exactly that and need to be confronted. A mail server should be configured to only relay messages from authenticated users on the network. If properly protected, the server will simply tell the sender that they do not work for outsiders and bounce the message back. More and more, administrators of servers are blocking the open relay. This has been instumental in slowing down spam.

About the Author:
Keith Londrie II is a successful Webmaster and publisher of spam-resources.info A website that specializes in providing tips to help eliminate and avoid spam. Getting rid of spam that you can research on the internet in your pajamas from the comfort of your own home. Visit how to combat spam Today!
Submitted on 2006-09-15
Article Source: http://www.articlesarea.com/