Search Engine Optimization Tips Blog

There is widely touted and available emailing software that can send out millions of emails in one vast ‘blast’. EBooks and articles and courses are being offered by ‘gurus’ who promise that you can gain millions of visitors from email marketing. In fact, over the past three months, there was an explosion of such behaviour as  people became convinced that bulk emailing was a holiday best selling strategy.

Hold your horses. An email ‘blast’ is really not a healthy thing for your website. It will not only affect your server reputation, it could label you as a spammer.  This can adversely affect your overall website health.

Now, we know it may be highly tempting to engage in such practices to drive quick traffic to your website. This method is promoted and marketed under a number of terms including ‘email marketing’, ‘email blasts’ or ‘bulk emailing’. and many believe it is a legitimate marketing campaign you can use to contact people through emails telling them about your products and services. Irrespective of how it presented, it can and will damage your online reputation.

Bottom line: no one likes to get unsolicited mails in their inbox — especially when they are using internet connection that has volume based tariff. Every email you send to them is costing them money, and they will quickly become irritated and shut you down – or worse, report you for spam.  This means that the effect your emails have on people will be exactly the opposite effect than you hoped for your target audience.

Instead of introducing your products and services to them on request and building a good rapport, email blasts are impersonal and annoying, and will only make people resent you. It’s not that your services or products are bad – you are just choosing a pushy, annoying way to promote them!  Sending out mass emails is like dropping into their house at dinnertime without an invitation or crashing their office during a meeting without an appointment.

Once your website and your server are flagged by disgruntled recipients for sending spam mails, you will lose your ranking in the search engines – and maybe even end up getting your website banned. Your server may dump you because you have given the entire server a spammy reputation.

Does this mean never to email people about your services and products? No, it means  you should build an opt-in list of people who have provided their contact information and agreed to receive your emails or news letters. As they have opted to receive your emails, they cannot complain about spam mails. Even in these cases, however, there are certain guidelines to be followed to ensure your marketing mails comply with local laws and regulations!  Do your homework, be respectful, and don’t spam – then you can market your services safely through email marketing without getting your site banned or your server blacklisted.

Is Email Marketing spam by another name? Is there any situation where this is OK? Or is it a dying way to connect with would be customers?

Email marketing drifts in and out of favor with web based companies, but has become increasingly popular of late for getting the word out about products and services – by way of free information. However, as more and more businesses turn to email marketing, email recipients are becoming jaded and hit the ’spam’ button on their email window.

When too many people receive unwanted email, the word gets out – resulting in a concerted effort to brand you (and your business) as a spammer. This can quickly evolve into a be a marketing nightmare.

That’s not to say that email marketing is no longer a viable marketing technique. It just needs to be approached with caution and handled with care. A few rules of thumb:

Ask First. Don’t send out mass emails to lists of people you have obtained in any way, unless you have their permission to email them.Limit your emails to the select group who say ‘yes’ when you ask, and save your time and money as well as your reputation.\

Only send emails to folks who opt-in. The best way to ask people to ‘opt in’ is through an online form that allows them to check a box if they want to get your emails. This checkbox can be located in your shopping cart checkout form, a newsletter sign-up form or a “contact us” form. Leave the checkbox blank, forcing them to consciously perform an action in order to start receiving emails.

Make it easy to unsubscribe. Taking people off the list should be every bit as much of a priority as putting them on; so give recipients the option of unsubscribing from the list. This can be taken care of in the form of a simple link at the bottom of each email: “click here to unsubscribe”.

As long as you are respectful and don’t spam, email marketing is fine.

Making Email Marketing Work for You

Email marketing can be the best tool a webmaster can have, or the most misused and misunderstood. Many people use emails to spam, giving the marketing ploy a bad name. Others avoid it completely, disbelieving in its power. The potential of email marketing is  huge, however, and this tactic can be used properly to extend your reach, snag new customers and keep in touch with old ones.

First, to take full advantage of email marketing, you must compile a subscriber list. Offer a newsletter on your site by presenting it as a free resource full of free tips, special offers or important information. All you need for this approach is a capture box on your site for visitors to type in their first name and email address.

Make sure you include a disclaimer stating that the address will only be used to send your own newsletter. Alternately, have a separate box to check for receiving special offers and alerts. You have to reassure people that you will never spam anyone and (even more importantly) that you will never EVER sell their information to anyone else. Don’t get greedy and expect them to fill out a huge lot of contact information; stick to asking for a name and email address.

You should also require a double opt-in feature to make sure the email addresses you get actually belong to the person who signed up. This means sending an email to the address provided and requiring the recipient to click on a link. This will complete the sign up process, and put them into your autoresponder system as a verified lead. The best option is to use a service outside your own domain to avoid any trouble with spam complaints.

An email list is great for marketing; as long as you provide helpful, valuable, use-right-now information along with your pre-sell to the customer. See if you can implement a certain theme – include an article, a news story, a helpful tip and a notice about a special in each newsletter, and you can easily add a product review or testimonial in order to pre-selling your product or that of an affiliate.

Offer an incentive if you don’t get many visitors signing up for your newsletter. The first newsletter can include a coupon or a free mini eBook. People love free stuff! Then you can use the newsletter to tell your customers about upcoming sales and new product to encourage them to visit your site. If you get tjhem used to reading your newsletter, they will naturally be reading your pre-sell page.

Start an email marketing program now! Your traffic will get a boost. Just don’t abuse it, or you could be labeled a spammer! Use good judgment whenever you have contact with potential customers, and you should be fine.

SEO is all good, right? Not Black Hat SEO. SEO tactics that are banned can take your site right down with them if you get caught. It’s best just to avoid anything that could be construed as shades of gray, and stick with proven white hat tactics to get your site moving up the SERPs.

Whether you are doing your SEO yourself by listening to the advice of various ‘gurus’ or hiring it out, you need to watch your back and not get pulled into black hat measures just to see fast results. In the long run, you will only hurt your site, and could end up penalized severely for trying to game the search engines.

You don’t want to pay for any links, spam search engines, blogs or forums, pay for dishonest reviews, link to disreputable mass linking schemes, use white on white text, keyword stuffing or other activities. It’s just not worth it.

Instead, concentrate your efforts on the tried and true business of organic linking, article marketing and judicious social book-marking. Produce plenty of relevant, informational content and carve out a niche for yourself of which you are the leading expert.

Articles, press releases, web content, blogging, Squidoo lenses, Knols, videos graphics and other types of content can be optimized with a common goal – making the signposts on the web point to you as the most relevant result in your field.

This means research – choosing a niche, finding long tail keywords, running an effective ad campaign, and optimizing content as well for any affiliates you might wish to partner with.

It also means hard work – you have to follow through, even if you are using a company to handle a lot of it for you. You want to be sure that they are not using any uncertified methods to get fast results and make you pleased with their work, only to be banned three months later!

Once you have your head straight about white and black hat SEO, you can ask yourself every time you get ready to do something new, “Is this relevant? Is it helpful? Anything that helps the USER is usually agood thing.

If you keep your nose clean and watch your step, you can build a solid foundation for your site. Anything else is bound to crumble away. White hat SEO is the ONLY approved way to build a site!

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