Recently I had the opportunity to share some Internet marketing resources with local business owners. What I learned from them concerned me so much that I felt it was extremely important to write about it here so that the information would help as many people as possible.

It seems that some of these small business owners are still using Outlook to send out commercial email campaigns (email blasts). They are chopping up their email lists into small 30 person chunks so they can “fly under the radar” and still send out 200 emails without getting slapped by their Internet Service Providers (ISP) as spammers.

If these smart business savvy business owners are still using Outlook to send out email campaigns, then I am sure there is still a large number of people out there who are doing the same thing. There are many issues that surround this topic and there are several problems with running an email campaign this way.

Before we get into the reasons why using Outlook to run email campaigns is a bad idea and before I share the solution I recommend to avoid the threat of penalty, let’s take a look at what the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has to say about commercial email and the requirements of the CAN-SPAM Act.

What the Law Requires

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 – including the originating domain name and email address 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.

* It requires that your email give recipients an opt-out method. You must provide a return email address or another Internet-based response mechanism that allows a recipient to ask you not to send future email messages to that email address, and you must honor the requests. You may create a “menu” of choices to allow a recipient to opt out of certain types of messages, but you must include the option to end any commercial messages from the sender.

Any opt-out mechanism you offer must be able to process opt-out requests for at least 30 days after you send your commercial email. When you receive an opt-out request, the law gives you 10 business days to stop sending email to the requestor’s email address. You cannot help another entity send email to that address, or have another entity send email on your behalf to that address. Finally, it’s illegal for you to sell or transfer the email addresses of people who choose not to receive your email, even in the form of a mailing list, unless you transfer the addresses so another entity can comply with the law.

* 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.

Penalties

Each violation of the above provisions is subject to fines of up to $11,000. Deceptive commercial email also is subject to laws banning false or misleading advertising.

Additional fines are provided for commercial emailers who not only violate the rules described above, but also:

* “harvest” email addresses from Web sites or Web services that have published a notice prohibiting the transfer of email addresses for the purpose of sending email
* Generate email addresses using a “dictionary attack” – combining names, letters, or numbers into multiple permutations
* Use scripts or other automated ways to register for multiple email or user accounts to send commercial email
* Relay emails through a computer or network without permission – for example, by taking advantage of open relays or open proxies without authorization.

The law allows the DOJ to seek criminal penalties, including imprisonment, for commercial emailers who do – or conspire to:

* Use another computer without authorization and send commercial email from or through it
* Use a computer to relay or retransmit multiple commercial email messages to deceive or mislead recipients or an Internet access service about the origin of the message
* Falsify header information in multiple email messages and initiate the transmission of such messages
* Register for multiple email accounts or domain names using information that falsifies the identity of the actual registrant
* Falsely represent themselves as owners of multiple Internet Protocol addresses that are used to send commercial email messages.

Source: http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/conline/pubs/buspubs/canspam.shtm

Now, it seems pretty easy to understand that there can be some serious penalties for anyone who does not adhere to these rules and regulations. Not only that, but there are some serious administrative hassles to just to make sure you are compliant. So how do you avoid penalty and administrative hassle?

That’s a good question, but a better question is how do I avoid the possibility of penalty and the administrative hassle, and how do I get valuable analytics on my email campaign that will help me target customer better and spend my money wisely?

To answer this question you need to leverage the solid infrastructure of a system that has been specifically designed and built to handle mass mailing of commercial email campaigns. You need to subscribe to a service that offers built in spam prevention processes to easily handle the administrative duties of complying with the CAN-SPAM Act. You need use a service that will help you verify that people want to be on your list, will help you easily remove people from your list when they no longer want to hear from you, and will give you information about email bounce rates, email open rates, link click through rates, and much much more.

I know what your thinking, “That’s all fine and good, but how much will it cost me to have a service like that”. Well, simply put, for as little as $20 a month you can get access to a solid, trusted, industry leading service that offers everything you need to run a successful email campaign. And, yes I know that sounds like a commercial, but the reality is that these words are extremely important. There are other services out there that fill the demand of the email marketer market, but they don’t go far enough to truly provide a service according to industry best practices.

So, let’s recap quickly. Outlook email blasts can get you labeled as a spammer, expose you to financial penalties, and will cost you time and money trying to adhere to the CAN-SPAM Act’s rules and regulations. A legitimate service that offers professional email campaign management, email campaign reporting, and adheres to the requirements of the CAN-SPAM Act costs you only $20 a month.

Now you tell me, what is it worth to you to know your emails will have a better chance of reaching your customers, you will have better insight into the success of your emailing efforts, and most of all you avoid the pain of being caught in the legal troubles that have been put in place to stop real spammers?

Read more about the solution that I recommend.

http://OpenSourceMarketer.com/recommends/autoresponder

Keep reaching for success,

Charles McKeever
OpenSourceMarketer.com

Accelerate your business online using social media.

Charles McKeever
OpenSourceMarketer.com

Currently Woopra is in beta and usage is by invitation only. But, fortunately as an attendee of WordCamp, I received an invitation and have the privilege of getting to use Woopra before the general public.

So I thought I’d give you an inside look so you can be ready when they finally open things up.

Woopra departs from the standard linear analytics reporting that you currently get most of the shelf analytic tools by putting all the information you care about in one executive dashboard.

Realtime stats are displayed as they happen and additional analytic reports can be created from historical data. It’s possible to jump from keyword searches to top referring sites and actually get a sense of how they relate.

Installing Woopra was simple. If you’ve ever pasted a line of code into your website or uploaded a plugin to your WordPress blog, then you can install Woopra in a matter of minutes.

Here are the steps I took to get it installed as well as some screen shots of Woopra in action. I’ll try to include a video later to give you a walk through of how the software works.

After creating an account on the Woopra website, I added my blog. The Woopra site then provided me with a site ID and a WordPress plugin. I downloaded Woopra’s WordPress plugin, installed it on my blog, activated it, and then entered my site ID in the plugin settings.

Once that was done, Woopra began collecting stats about my visitor traffic, much like Google Analytics or StatCounter would do.

The next step was to install the desktop client so that I could see realtime stats.

The Woopra site has reporting in the browser, but it’s not realtime unless you want to click the refresh button on your browser every five seconds.

Having access to statistics from the Woopra website is a nice option if you’re away from your desktop client, but it’s not as much fun as the desktop version.

There is a Windows version of the desktop client and Mac version. Both require Java to be installed on the system before you can install Woopra.

Since I use a MacBook so I downloaded the OSX client installer from Woopra and the Java 1.6 Runtime from Apple.

After installing Java 1.6 I found that I couldn’t install Woopra because, I still needed to change the Java preferences on the Mac. Once I did that I installed Woopra without issues.

Once the desktop client was running, I logged in just as I would have on the Woopra website and the client instantly began giving me statistics on my visitor traffic.

I was able to see when someone entered my site, what pages they visited, how long they were there, where they came from, what keywords they used to find my blog, and a whole range of other information all without changing a single screen.

It was absolutely amazing! I had never seen anything close to this before. As people came and went on my blog, I could see all my important stats in one place like some sort of rocket powered Wall Street stock ticker.

If you’ve used Google Analytics, you know how much of an improvement it is over some of the other solutions for web analytics.

But, you also know that your stats are delayed by a day because Google doesn’t report your number realtime. You also know that you still have to dig for important information.

Even though Google lets you build your own dashboard, it’s really still very linear information because you have to drill down two or three pages to get to the information you want and you don’t really have a side by side comparison of information to get any real sense of what the information means.

Woopra changes all that by giving you realtime stats, historical reporting, and side by side data comparisons. I promise I’ll show you all of this in upcoming articles and videos. Screen shots are nice, but seeing Woopra in action really demonstrates the power of the tool.

Up until this point, the information has been very hard to extract from log files, and off the shelf analytics software. I can’t wait till Woopra goes live. It’s the only analytics service I’ve seen that I would want to pay for.

What about you? What analytics software are you using? Could you gain a competitive edge from realtime statistics?

Amazed,

Charles McKeever
OpenSourceMarketer.com

I’m not going to list all 45 tips in this update, but here are a few interesting ones for you.

1. Use English Names for Images
2. Descriptive and accurate titles are essential
3. Use title elements on every hypertext link
4. Pick the right theme (SEO over Eye Candy)
5. Web hosting affects your traffic – google traffic is affected by site performance (google could flood a slow server). StumbeUpon stops sending traffic to slow sites
6. Serve images from your own server and not Flickr or risk sending traffic to Flickr and not your own site. Images searches will go to where the site is stored.
7. Use a sitemap to tell Google where everything is on your site. Get the WordPress Site Map Plugin.
8. Post regularly, no less than 2-3 days. Post in advance. Keep 2-3 post buffer at all times, a week or two is even better if you can.
9. Always show related posts.
10. Use Print style sheets to make it easy for people to print your content.
11. Use deep linking by using keywords in the link text.
12. Have your own domain name. Don’t use typepad, blogger, or other sub-domain.
13. Create a podcast and/or publish a video to connect with your audience and make yourself real.
14. Pick a theme that loads quickly
15. Use wp super cache plugin to survive a digg front page appearance.
16. Use the link attraction factors plugin to find out if your post title is digg worthy.
17. Always include at least one image per post, period.

These are all great tips, but the grand finale was the best tickler and that was the Layered Technologies real-time analytics reporting tool from Woopra.com. I’m getting a beta account today as part of being an attendee of WordCamp Dallas 2008, so I’ll update you on all the yummy coolness once I have a chance to get in and use the tool.

Updating from WordCamp Dallas 2008

Charles McKeever
OpenSourceMarketer.com

So, what’s a blogger to do if BlogRush doesn’t produce stats? Well, no worries. From the beginning I have been using StatCounter.com and Google Analytics to track all blog activity.

You might be asking, “Why use two separate analytics tools?” And the answer would be, because not all analytics tools are created equal. Google Analytics is a very useful tool that has slick reporting features, but the numbers are only updated on a 24 hour cycle and sometimes you just want a quick look at how things are going on your site. This is where statcounter.com comes in.

StatCounter.com offers a free account that lets you track multiples sites. The stats are constantly updated so you get more of a real time view of what is going on with your blog and all the common information you are concerned with as a blogger is presented right at the top.

So, if you don’t want to wait for BlogRush to work out their reporting issues, then visit StatCounter.com and setup a free account. The process takes two minutes. Put the tracking code in the footer of your blog and your done. You will have stats to look at within minutes, as long a there is traffic on your site.

So what’s next? If you are getting traffic to your blog then today should be about creating more quality content and working on ways to reader conversions. Use the stats from statcounter to understand where people are coming from, how long they are staying, where they are leaving from, and what keywords they are using to find you. All these things create a story and that story should end with a desired result that makes your online business stronger.

Enjoying the BlogRush,

Charles McKeever
OpenSourceMarketer.com

Get BlogRush: Syndicate Your Blog Posts To Get More Reader Traffic

So, please don’t beat me. You will get your article and I will get to write the next article in the series. But, until then, here is something you need to read about. My good Italian friend who is a master of video tutorials recently put out seven fantastic videos about Firefox extensions that will make your life easier.

Here are the 7 Firefox extensions covered in the videos:

1. Get Pagerank And Alexa Rank Of Any Web Site – This is great for selecting sites to target for link building.
2. The Ultimate SEO Plug-in – I use this plugin and it will absolutely change the way you get information about websites.
3. Find Out Your Competition In Google In Different Countries – This is great for knowing who you can potentially target for joint venture partnerships.
4. Monitor Any Website For Changes – Stay on top of specific websites.
5. Exclude Your Own Visits In Google Analytics – Keep your numbers real so you get an honest look at your traffic.
6. Automatically Backup And Synchronize Your Bookmarks - Keep everything up to date without a hassle.
7. No More Waiting When You Click On A Pdf Link – Not waiting is always a good thing, especially when it comes to PDFs.

These extensions are a great addition to your productivity and Internet marketing toolbox. Vittorio walks you through each one. Vittorio really is a master at video, so read his blog post, Top 7 Firefox Extensions For Web Site Owners and give the videos a squint. While you’re there check out the rest of his video library. He does not sleep much so he has an impressive collection of video tutorials.

Now back to that Del.icio.us article,

Charles McKeever
OpenSourceMarketer.com

What is CrazyEgg.com

CrazzyEgg.com is a simple to use click through measuring tool I recently read about in Yaro Starak’s Blog Master Mind Course. I have to tell you, the tool will change the way you look at creating posts for your blog.
In short, CrazyEgg let’s you measure clicks on specific pages of your website. This tells which parts of your page are getting the most attention. Knowing what readers are responding too can help you refine blog post titles, select topics for writing, determine page placement for ads, understand relative placement of content, and ultimately it can help you understand if you are wasting your time on producing content that no one is interested in.

CrazyEgg click through reports are presented as different views instead of flat columns and rows reports. They offer an overlay, a heat map, a list, and a confetti view.

The Overlay View

The overlay view displays a copy of your page with markers on top to show you what has been clicked and how many times it has been clicked. This is probably the most basic view next to the columns and rows list view but it is extremely valuable because of the instant visual information it gives you about what readers are clicking on.

The Heat Map View

The heat map view shows you specifically where people are clicking on your page. This is a particularly interesting view because it shows not only what readers are clicking, but specifically where on the link they are clicking. This can be valuable information if two links are close to one another and one link is getting more action than the other. I have found this view useful when placing videos on a page. Clicks are delivered mainly to the bottom of the video even though there is a large play button in the center of the video. With this information in hand, I will be sure to place resource links directly under videos to encourage click through rates.

The List View

The list view gives you a consolidated columns and rows view of the clicked links and their stats. There is also an option to export this information into a CSV file for use in Excel or Google Docs as well. The list view has several tabs that let you see all the collected data.

The Confetti View

The confetti view gives you double coupon information about what readers clicked and where they came from. This is much better information than the flat reporting most analytic packages provide. Instead of simply knowing that you had 100 visitors to a page and that most of them came from Google or some other referring site, now you can tell that 5 readers from Yahoo clicked link A, and 10 readers from Google click link B, and so on. This is extremely useful information because now you can begin to build a relationship between traffic sources and click through rates.

Total Cost

CrazyEgg has a free account that lets you track up to four pages for a total of 5000 page impressions. This is a great starting point if you just want to create a free account and try it out. After you have proven the value of the service, then you can look at investing in the paid version of the service. The next level up on the service scale is a $9 a month option that lets you track up to 10 pages for a total of 10,000 impressions and you also get live reporting. There are other levels of participation to consider, but if you don’t have a huge site yet, I recommend starting simple and upgrading as necessary.

Overall, CrazyEgg.com is a simple to use tool that provides fantastic value for testing and measuring click through results on specific pages of your website. Once you start using it you won’t be able to stop. Testing and measuring links on your blog is an essential activity that most bloggers are missing from their tool kits. CrazyEgg makes it a no brainer. Anyone who is serious about running a blog or static website should give the service a try.

Continually refining processes,

Charles McKeever
OpenSourceMarketer.com