How to Turn Your SPAM Into Cash

Spam can really be a good thing. I know most of you are thinking to yourself that I'm crazy, but I'm not. I have built a huge warm market and many affiliates from the information you are about to read. Spam can be good or bad it just depends on how you look at it.

Truth be told, spam just doesn't work if you're trying to build a home business. You might get a few new affiliates or sales from spam, but then you get busted and your hosting service cancels your account and you have to pickup shop, get another host, setup your bulk mailer and start all over again. This cost time and money which some spammers chalk up to "cost of business" but ultimately it's just not worth it.

Now knowing this simple fact is what makes your spam so valuable. Of all the spam emails that you receive there are plenty of potential clients; however there are more useless leads. The key is finding the diamonds in the rough, the people who really are trying to build an online business but obviously don't know how. The emails to ignore are the vast majorities which are selling Viagra, Cialis, penis enlargement drugs and other similar products and services. I would also steer clear of any spam with pornographic content or you could get yourself on multiple spam lists which send nothing but pornographic material.

Now that you have found a few potential clients you need to really take a look at what they are offering. Don't just send them an email advertising your affiliate program or product, because then you would be spamming. Take a look at what they are offering and really critique it. Look at the positives and negative aspects of their business and ask them questions. Ask them how they are doing, ask them what techniques they are using to advertise and network. Ask them about their business and compensation plan. Put all of these questions into an email and explain how you received their email and checked out their website and now would like a little more information. It is important that the email subject have the name of their business in it so they will likely open and read it.

Then you listen and honestly try to help them, this technique is not an advertising campaign it is a way of building long term business contacts. Who knows, their product or company might be something you need, or maybe you can synergize and work together so you can both benefit. The key is not to advertise to them, you must restrain and build the relationship first. You must give them something, weather it is help, guidance, free e-books or marketing tools that you have picked up, whatever it is just be sure to show them that you want to help.

Going back to my statement before, where I stated that spam is not profitable. This tells us that most of these people are willing to listen to other ideas and techniques that do work, and that's where you come in. You should also be thinking about a back end product that can really benefit them, not just something you can sell to them and make the most commission on, I mean something that can truly help them. For instance you could offer them an alternative to spam, maybe teach them how to build an opt-in email list which is much more profitable in the long term than spam. Help them install an autoresponder or refer them to a good autoresponder company. Then maybe you can mention that you are an affiliate of a list building company where they can purchase some real leads. Or you can teach them about search engine optimization and give them some free information about linking, blogging and article syndication. Then let them know you are an affiliate of an article syndication automation website.

Do you get my point, get involved with their business and educate them on effective marketing strategies and feed them a back end product down the road. This is a very effective method of networking, if you can restrain from advertising to them and just give them information when they need it.

Using this method on a continual basis can produce a great list of contacts that respect and listen to you, which of course will eventually lead to sales and duplication.

About The Author:
Adam Beazley - The Web Marketeer http://www.Plug-In-Home-Business.com Did you found these tips & Strategies usefull? Get More! Sign up for my Newsletter Now! http://www.plug-in-home-business.com/PIHB.html
Posted: 22-09-2006
Article Source: ArticlesBase.com

What You Need to Know: CAN-SPAM Laws

Anyone doing business online and using email for marketing needs to know about the CAN-SPAM laws.

Smart online marketers use "permission" marketing: you invite potential customers to join your email list, and offer a newsletter, a special report, or a sequential series of messages to form an e-course. The recipient "opts-in" to the list by replying to an invitation and subscribing. By "opting in", your subscriber is telling you it's OK to send email. They've given you permission and your email messages are not considered spam.

But most people don't really understand what constitutes spam. If you're in business for any length of time on the Internet, you may encounter false accusations of spam simply because people forget they opted in receive your message. To many people spam is simply an unwanted message.

This can cause problems for you with your email service provider. You must be able to prove that you haven't been sending unsolicited email. Your proof lies with the list management system you use that tracks invitations and opt in responses.

Here's what you need to know about the law is so you can rest assured that you aren't breaking it.

CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 (Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act) establishes requirements for those who send commercial email, spells out penalties for spammers and companies whose products are advertised in spam if they violate the law, and gives consumers the right to ask emailers to stop spamming them.

Simply put, here's a rundown of the law's main provisions:

It bans false or misleading header information. Your email's "From," "To," and routing information must be accurate and identify the person who initiated the email.

It prohibits deceptive subject lines. The subject line cannot mislead the recipient about the contents or subject matter of the message. Subject and content must match.

It requires that your email give recipients an opt-out method. You must provide a return email address or an automated way for your subscriber to opt out. You must honor the requests.
When you receive an opt-out request, the law gives you 10 business days to stop sending email to the requestor's email address.

It requires that commercial email be identified as an advertisement and include the sender's valid physical postal address. Your message must contain clear and conspicuous notice that the message is an advertisement or solicitation and that the recipient can opt out of receiving more commercial email from you. It also must include your valid physical postal address.

One of the best and most efficient systems with a minimum of complaints is the ecommerce system, www.KickStartCart.com . They automatically include CAN-SPAM compliant features when they send out email broadcasts. Furthermore, if you import a list of email addresses into the system each recipient will be required to confirm they want to be on your list. All potential recipients must respond to a confirmation email in order to be included in an email list. This is called closed loop or double opt-in and is further assurance against people using the system to spam or send unsolicited messages.

While the respectable business community strives to be compliant, the spammers find new ways of circumventing the laws and jamming up email inboxes with junk. Unfortunately spam filters never do a reliable job of keeping the spam out and are more likely than not to keep legitimate email from being delivered.

The best assurance against spam complaints is to use a reliable system such as KickStartCart, and to send out valuable relevant content to your subscribers. The ratio of information to promotional messages should be in the neighborhood of 80-20 or 75-25.

As a serious business person using the Internet and email, it's important you comply with the laws so you can avoid getting in hot water with your service provider and keep your subscribers happy.

About The Author:
Denise Wakeman & Patsi Krakoff
For more leading edge Internet Marketing tips go to http://www.biztipsblog.com. You can also subscribe to The Blog Squad's ezine Savvy eBiz Tips at http://www.savvyebiztips.com. To learn more about using social media tools like blogs, go to http://www.buildabetterblog.com. Denise Wakeman and Patsi Krakoff are Internet Marketing experts and are known as The Blog Squad.
Published 09/27/2006
Article Source: http://www.EzinePlug.com

Protect Your Users’ Privacy. Fight Spam.

On all the websites where users interact with each other, the email addresses have to be displayed. But this causes big troubles, due to the Spy Bots, who parse the websites and try to find email addresses. When they find an email address, this is added to a database, which will be soon sold to many companies that need potential customers. Then, in a few days, you will start receiving a lot of "super-offers", most of them being just damn scams, filling your inbox and making you waste a lot of time distinguishing useful emails from the spam-emails.

This is the reason why many people become members of sites using a "spam account", and I mean an email account that is used just for subscribing, and not a real and official email account. But what if you need to register on a site and you are forced to use an official email, something like support@yourdomain.com ? Should you register, though you know that soon your inbox will be full of useless Spam messages? Here comes the decision of webmasters, who may or may not try to protect their users' emails.

Many of the webmasters don't care about the consequences of showing their users' email addresses. But this can determine people not to register, as absolutely nobody wants to receive tones of Spam. On the other side, if the webmasters make efforts to protect their users' email addresses, the latter ones will surely be happy. And we all know that a happy user is a returning user!

That's why I recommend that all webmasters and site owners fight Spam and protect their users' privacy. There are 2 aspects that need to be considered: the text displayed and the link itself.

The HTML code of an email would look like: username@domain.com

To better understand the explanations, I will notate:

- mailto:username@domain.com as String1
- username@domain.com as String2.

Spy Bots try to find email addresses in both String1 and String2, so it would be best to encode them both.

The best way to hide String1 is to use JavaScript. For String2, a simple replacement between "@" and "." (dot) with other characters would be enough.
username [AT] domain [DOT] com

Because normally the user's email is taken from a table in a database, I will now show you how to quickly implement this anti-Spam solution. I will use PHP, one of the most used scripting languages nowadays. We assume that $support is the variable that contains the email address.

============================================
// we will now encode String2, replacing "@" and "."
$sup_text=str_replace("@"," [AT] ",$support);
$sup_text =str_replace("."," [DOT] ",$sup_text);

// we will now get the username from String1
$i=strpos($support,"@");
$sup_user=substr($support,0,$i);

// we will now get the domain name from String1
$sup_ext=""; $i=strlen($support);
while($support[$i]!=".") { $sup_ext = $support[$i].$sup_ext; $i--; }

// we will now get the domain suffix from String1
$sup_domain=""; $i--;
while($support[$i]!="@") { $sup_domain = $support[$i].$sup_domain; $i--; }

// we will now encode String1
$sup_hidden="$sup_text";

echo "Support: $sup_hidden";
============================================

Using this method, the users' emails are displayed, but it is much harder for the Spam Bots to find them. Of course, the people behind the Spam Bots can adapt the Spy Bots Engines, but parsing the pages would be much more difficult. If you also combine the solution I described with some random text replacements (in String2), you will have an anti-Spam shield that will make the email-hunters go away from your website.

Webmasters, web freelancers, forum administrators, do not hesitate! Use this method and gain your users' trust and respect. Protect their privacy and make them feel sure that their registering to your site won't make them receive hundreds of useless Spam emails.

About the Author:
Ted Peterson writes for several websites like CoreDownload http://www.coredownload.com and Adolix http://www.adolix.com. You are welcome to visit them to read more articles.
Article Source: www.iSnare.com