Steve Wagenheim’s Home Business Blog

Okay, let me start off this article by saying this. I do NOT condone spam. It is an abomination that is destroying email marketing. Okay, maybe destroying is a harsh word. But it is certainly making email marketing a lot harder than it has to be because of all the safeguards put in place that ultimately end up hurting the legit email marketer more than the spammers. Having said that, you can learn a lot from all the spam that comes into your email box.

For starters, check your spam folder. Thanks to George Sepich for reminding me about this. If an email ends up in your spam folder, that means that the person who sent the email put something in it that caused it to end up there. Read the email, especially the subject. See if you can figure out what caused it to end up where it did. Run it through an online spam checker. It’ll point out all those bad words in it that triggered a high spam score. By doing this, you ultimately figure out what NOT to do.

But you can learn more than just how to keep your emails out of the spam folder. Sadly, a lot of these spammers have some excellent writing skills. I have actually read some emails that had excellent sales pitches in them. In fact, I’d say that the sales copy was written by a pro. I’ve seen excellent uses of mystery, scarcity and a killer offer at an unreal price. Hey, let’s face it. If spam wasn’t profitable, these guys wouldn’t do it. So some of them MUST know something about marketing. Too bad they don’t use their smarts for good rather than for evil.

Point is, as bad as spam is, and as much as I personally hate it (You should see my in box) you CAN learn something from it. It does serve a rather twisted purpose if you’re a marketer and have the time to go through it all. That’s the problem though. You get so much of it, and so much of it is pure garbage (one line ads) that finding the quality spam (is that an oxy moron?) isn’t so easy to do. But if you have a few extra minutes, like maybe during your lunch break (if you eat lunch at your PC like I do) go through some of your spam and see if you can’t find something that gives you a few ideas. At the very least, make sure you do a spam check to see why it ended up in your spam box. Then you’ll know, at the very least, what to stay away from doing when you compose your legitimate emails.

For example, some people will spell the word “free” with special characters. Believe it or not, this will trigger off the filters more than if you just left the word free in. There is actually nothing wrong with this word. Problem is, people have been conditioned to believe it’s a bad word, so they don’t use it. I use it all the time and my emails get through with no problem at all.

Yeah, spam sucks…but by at least learning something from it, you can make it suck less.

To YOUR Success,

Steven Wagenheim

Tired of not getting your emails delivered, read or opened? Sick of not making any sales from your email marketing efforts? Visit my site at http://www.stevewagenheim.com/emailmarketing/index.html and get your hands on 5 years of my personal experience with email marketing…experience that has earned me tens of thousands of dollars yearly.

Well, list builders are in a panic today…especially those who use Aweber, which just happens to be one of the biggest autoresponder services on the planet if not THE biggest. So, what exactly happened? Why are customers being dropped like hot potatoes? Well, read this article and you’ll find out. You’ll also learn what to do in order to keep YOUR list from being blow to kingdom come.

Essentially what has happened is this. Delivery rates are going down for the service. According to Aweber, it is an ISP wide problem and they are looking into it. But you can bet they already know that the reason is for all the spam complaints. And why are there so many spam complaints? Because marketers are jack asses. That’s the only way to put it and be anywhere close to accurate. To give you an example of what jackasses they are, the other day I got an email from one of my Aweber subscriptions that essentially told me in the subject line that I had a sale. When I opened it up, it was nothing but a sales pitch.

Unless you are as brain dead as a rock, you have to know that this is a deceptive subject line and against the Can Spam Act of 2003. You are actually committing a crime. And if the feds wanted to make a case out of it, they could. But Aweber isn’t waiting for the feds to get involved. They’re being proactive about this. Customers who use their service and send out deceptive subject lines are being dropped…period. Say goodbye to your precious list. But that’s not all. Aweber has also issued a warning about relevancy. If you have a list that’s about how to make money with blue widgets, you better keep the content relevant to blue widgets and nothing else. If you’re going to make sales pitches to your list, you better be up front about that on your squeeze page.

Okay, so how do you keep from getting your list yanked out from under you? Well, for starters, make sure that on the squeeze page where they are opting in, you tell them everything that they can expect from you when they hand you their email address. Full disclosure is going to be required if you want to have any chance of keeping your list. You also want to ensure your subscribers that their information will NEVER be shared with anybody. And of course, when you do your emailing…NO deceptive subject lines.

Aweber means business. If you violate any of these things, expect to have your list yanked out from under you.

You’ve been warned.

To YOUR Success,

Steven Wagenheim

Tired of not getting your emails delivered, read or opened? Sick of not making any sales from your email marketing efforts? Visit my site at http://www.stevewagenheim.com/emailmarketing/index.html and get your hands on 5 years of my personal experience with email marketing…experience that has earned me tens of thousands of dollars yearly.

You’ve probably read the title of this article and said to yourself, “Huh? I don’t want a long cut. I want a shortcut. What’s the point?” Well, keep reading and you’ll get the point.

Okay, let me ask you a question. Did you ever try to do what I call a live PC screen video? For example, you’re trying to walk somebody through a process like how to buy a domain at GoDaddy. So you take them through the entire process, in real time.

All of a sudden, you click on the next link in the process and your Internet connection hangs. And there you are speaking into your Camtasia fumbling around for words to say while your PC tries to connect to the Internet. It can get to be real awkward and unprofessional in the presentation. And then of course there are those instances where you type in a password and it’s the wrong password. Yeah…that looks real professional.

Truth is, when doing a video live, things can go wrong. And trust me, they WILL go wrong. I’ve learned this from personal experience. Well, there is a way to make sure your “live” PC videos come off without a hitch and no errors or mishaps. However, in order to make this happen, you need to take what I call a long cut.

Here is the step by step process. It takes a little longer to create the video, but it’s worth the effort.

Step 1 – Take a screen print of each web page you’re discussing. This way, load time doesn’t come into play. Make sure any typing that needs to be done is already on the page.

Step 2 – Bring screen print into editor and add any arrows or other graphics that you feel are needed.

Step 3 – Import each screen print into Powerpoint, creating a new slide for each one. A simple “insert picture” will overlay the screen print onto the blank Powerpoint slide.

Step 4 – Write out the script for each slide in a Word Doc and then print it out.

Step 5 – Go through the Powerpoint presentation adding the narration. You won’t have to stumble over any words because the script is right there in front of you.

Step 6 – Import into Camtasia and produce in whatever format you want.

By doing this, you don’t have to worry about any of those annoying “live” things that might pop up.

Slow load time
Forgotten passwords
Results you didn’t expect
Expired coupons (for demonstrating GoDaddy domain buying)

And so on.

By going through the process beforehand and capturing each screen as you get to it, you virtually eliminate any problems you might run into.

Try it. You might find that you like this much better than recording live.

To YOUR Success,

Steven Wagenheim

Want to find out how to create killer videos like my friend Kevin Riley and rake in a 6 figure income like he and I do? Check out my review of his dynamite product at my blog at http://stevenwagenheim.blogspot.com/2008/06/kevin-rileys-recipe-for-success.html

Every once in a while, a thread pops up at the Warrior Forum that asks a really good question. This morning, one such question smacked me right in the face and it really got me thinking about this issue. If you change the design of your blog, something I have done several times, is it risky? Good question. It wasn’t something I really thought about until now. Anyway, keep reading to get my personal take on this issue. Naturally, you will want to do your own testing.

There are essentially two concerns when changing the design of your blog. The one concern is with rankings. The other concern is with the retention of your readership. So let’s take each of these concerns one at a time starting with rankings since that is the one that bloggers are most concerned with.

The truth is, nobody knows what changing a blog design will do to rankings. They may go up, down, or be totally unaffected. Remember, we’re not changing the content of the blog itself…just the way that it looks. Theoretically, a search engine, such as Google, shouldn’t care what your blog looks like as long as the content is relevant. But since nobody really knows everything that goes into Google’s algorithm in determining rankings, by changing your blog design, you are essentially taking a risk. How big a risk depends on how relevant design itself is to rankings. Those are the facts and can’t be disputed until Google actually comes out and says that design DOES play a major role and changing it WILL affect your rankings.

But let’s forget about rankings for now. What about your long time readers? Sure, the people first coming to your blog won’t even know it’s a new design. They’ll evaluate this design on its own…good or bad. But the people who have been coming to your blog for a while, what do you think might happen if they see a new blog design? Do you think it’s not possible that they might think that they’re in the wrong place? After all, what they’re looking at isn’t what they’re used to looking at. So, it’s quite conceivable that they’ll see the new design and navigate away from your blog because they DO think they’re in the wrong place. On that level alone, changing your blog design IS risky.

Having said all that, should you do it? Well, it depends. Is your current design ugly? Are you not getting much traffic? Is your bounce rate high? If you answered yes to those questions, then quite honestly, you have nothing to lose by changing the design. But if you’re blog is number one in the SERPs, you’re getting 10,000 visitors a day and you’re making six figures a year, changing your blog design could be suicide.

So whatever you decide, decide wisely.

To YOUR Success,

Steven Wagenheim

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A great way to build a list is through a giveaway event. You get to access other people’s lists and can leverage that to your own list building efforts. However, you must be VERY careful when participating in a giveaway. This article actually comes from a recent experience another marketer had when participating in one of these things. Yes, this is scary stuff.

Okay, here is what happened in a nutshell. The marketer in question got involved in one of those list building giveaways where, on the backend, you can hopefully sell some stuff to the people on your list. Well, it turned out that one of the products that one of the other participants was selling was against the terms of service of PayPal. Now, the marketer who was unaware of this, and had nothing to do with the product other than promoting it indirectly through the giveaway, made some sales of the product and ended up having his PayPal account limited. He was explained why by PayPal AFTER the horses were already out of the barn.

Yes, this can happen to you EASILY if you get involved in a giveaway event, something I refuse to do anymore because of problems like these. But, if you’re determined to participate in one of these, there are a few things that you better do BEFORE you get involved. I’m going to go through them so that you give yourself the best chance of coming out of these with your business still running.

At the top of the list, ask to inspect EVERY product that is being given away. Yeah, I know…if you’re involved in one of these with 100 other marketers, you’re talking about countless days of time wasted on this. But if you’re going to make sure that there is nothing being given away that won’t raise any red flags, it has to be done. You also want to inspect any backend products being sold to make sure that none of THEM violate any TOS of the payment processor you’re using.

Then you want to limit your involvement to JUST items that you are selling yourself. In other words, you DON’T want to plug your PayPal email address into a system where you could end up making a sale for another product that MIGHT raise some red flags. In other words, the only money you’re looking to make out of this event is from sales that you personally make to the list you’ve built from the giveaway itself and only YOUR products.

Yes, I know…quite a few restrictions. Almost makes doing these not worth it. But trust me when I say this. There are REAL dangers in doing these. You have NO idea what other people are promoting if you don’t inspect the products. And if you allow the event runner to plug YOUR payment processor account into the system for ANY sales made, you are putting your account at risk. That is the reality…like it or not.

So be careful if you’re going to get involved in a giveaway.

You may end up giving away more than you expected.

To YOUR Success,

Steven Wagenheim

Tired of not getting your emails delivered, read or opened? Sick of not making any sales from your email marketing efforts? Visit my site at http://www.stevewagenheim.com/emailmarketing/index.html and get your hands on 5 years of my personal experience with email marketing…experience that has earned me tens of thousands of dollars yearly.

A common question that’s often asked by Internet marketers who do email marketing or just use email a lot in their marketing efforts is this one…”What’s the best email service provider to use?” Well, wouldn’t life be great if there was just one answer to that? Unfortunately, as with everything else in life, the answer depends on what it is you’re looking to get out of your email service provider. This article explains.

There is no question that the number of email service providers is staggering to say the least. Off the top of my head you have Google Gmail, Yahoo, AOL, Hotmail, USA Mail, and on and on and on. To test them all out would literally take you a month of Sundays. What do you do if you don’t have that much time and don’t want to take a chance that you’ll make the wrong choice? Well, here are a few tips.

At the top of the list is delivery. How much of your email are you actually going to get OR is it going to end up in your spam box or worse…not delivered at all. For example, as an AOL user, among many other email service providers that I use, I know for a fact that if AOL sees a certain number of spam emails coming from a certain domain, or even suspect they’re spam, they will simply not deliver emails from that domain. I know this because there are tons of emails I expect to get from certain people that never get to my AOL account. For those emails, I have to rely on one of my other accounts.

Another thing that might be important to you is functionality. For example, Gmail has some really cool features where you can have each email go to a certain folder depending on who the email is from. This is something that you don’t get with AOL and I am going to guess, many of the other email service providers as well. In fact, from the people I’ve spoken to on this subject, Gmail seems to be the provider of choice among as lot of them.

Finally, and I feel this is the most important, is security. I have heard problems in this area with just about every email service provider EXCEPT, believe it or not, AOL. I have, in all my years of using AOL, never had a problem with security in regard to their software or email itself. I can’t say that for other providers, without mentioning any names. I’m sure you yourself have heard the horror stories of certain email service providers being hacked. Just recently, a friend of mine had her email hacked (won’t mention the provider’s name) that almost cost me $2,470. I’ll leave it at that.

So as you can see, there is no one answer to this question. You have to go through all the options and pick the provide that you think is best for you. By considering delivery, functionality and security, eventually you’ll make the right decision.

To YOUR Success,

Steven Wagenheim

Tired of not getting your emails delivered, read or opened? Sick of not making any sales from your email marketing efforts? Visit my site at http://www.stevewagenheim.com/emailmarketing/index.html and get your hands on 5 years of my personal experience with email marketing…experience that has earned me tens of thousands of dollars yearly.

Well, this is one article that I know is going to get a lot of people all riled up. So be it. If you’re one of those Internet marketers who gives away free reports in order to get people onto your list, I’m writing this to tell you that your free report stinks. You heard me…it stinks. Want to know why it stinks? Well, keep reading and you’re going to get an earful.

Okay, where do I start? Well, why don’t I start with the biggest offender of the stinky free report? You didn’t even bother to write it. You heard me. You got some garbage material from who knows where and stuck your name on it. That’s not writing a free report. That’s just plain criminal. How about coming out with an original idea and giving THAT away? Yeah, there’s a novel concept for you.

Want to know why else your free report stinks? It stinks because it’s 7 lousy pages long. Heck, in some areas, that’s not even an article. How about putting at least a little effort into it? I’m not saying it has to be the length of War and Peace, but how about a good 15 to 20 pages? Certainly you can get up enough energy to give your subscribers THAT much.

Here’s another reason why your free report stinks. It’s nothing but a glorified sales letter. You know what I mean. Somebody opens up the report and they’re greeted with a whole lot of “Did you know that…” and so on and so on. And then finally, after you’ve asked all these questions about what the prospect knows and doesn’t know, you end the report with something lame like, “Well, if you want to find out the answers to these questions, go to…” and then you give them a URL. How about actually answering some of the questions in the report itself?

Add to all of the above the fact that the report is terribly formatted, has spelling and grammar mistakes, has no design whatsoever, and you can understand why people get your free report, chuck it in the trash and opt out of your list. That’s right…take a look at your opt out rate. There’s a reason why it’s so bad.

So please, if you’re going to create a free report, please put a little effort into it.

Your subscribers will appreciate it.

To YOUR Success,

Steven Wagenheim

Tired of not getting your emails delivered, read or opened? Sick of not making any sales from your email marketing efforts? Visit my site at http://www.stevewagenheim.com/emailmarketing/index.html and get your hands on 5 years of my personal experience with email marketing…experience that has earned me tens of thousands of dollars yearly.

Everybody who builds a list talks about list segmentation. But what is it? What’s the most effective way to segment your lists? Is it something you should even be doing at all? These questions will be answered in this article. I think you will find this interesting reading.

Okay, let’s start off with what list segmentation is. That part’s easy. List segmentation is taking a big list (big being a relative term) and breaking it down into smaller lists. So let’s say you have a large list of about 100,000 people. After segmenting that list, you might end up with six or seven different lists of about 15,000 people, more or less. Some lists will obviously be bigger than others.

Why do we do this? Well, the easiest way to explain this is with an example. Let’s say you’re in the “make money online” niche, which by itself is a very large niche that covers lots of different topics. You have everything from PPC advertising to Video marketing. In fact, next to the health niche, I’d say that the make money online niche has more sub niches than just about any other niche.

Now, given this broad topic, you’re going to have people on your list who might be interested in different aspects of making money online. Some people may in fact just be interested in learning PPC or article marketing or whatever. What you want to do is put these people into a list that specializes in that one sub topic. But what’s the most effective way to do this?

In my opinion, the most effective way to do this is to take your general list, cover as many topics in that general list as you can, just not in great detail, and THEN…offer them low end products for the various sub niches such as PPC, article marketing and so on. Then, for the prospects who buy the low end products, give them the option of joining the list specifically made for that sub niche. When they join that list, remove them from the general list. Then, all your content and promotions for the smaller list will be specifically for that sub niche.

Now comes the $64,000 question. Should you be doing this? Well, the answer I’m going to give you is going to surprise you. It depends. If you don’t have enough content or a targeted enough product for that particular sub niche, then you probably don’t want to start a new list. What will you offer the person who’s on that list? If not much, you might end up losing them permanently whereas with the larger list, covering a number of different topics, you might have had a better chance of keeping them interested enough to stick around.

Ultimately, you have to look at your business model and see if it makes sense to actually run multiple lists given the amount of content and the product(s) you have to offer for that sub niche.

To YOUR Success,

Steven Wagenheim

Tired of not getting your emails delivered, read or opened? Sick of not making any sales from your email marketing efforts? Visit my site at http://www.stevewagenheim.com/emailmarketing/index.html and get your hands on 5 years of my personal experience with email marketing…experience that has earned me tens of thousands of dollars yearly.

You know…it’s a dangerous world out there. It’s getting to the point where I’m going to just lock myself up in my recording studio, close up my business and shut off this computer for good. Okay, not really, but when I hear stories like the one I heard this morning, it really makes me wonder if any of us are safe with our businesses, especially when it comes to email. What happened this time? Well, keep reading and you’ll find out.

Because this isn’t confirmed yet, no names of companies are going to be mentioned. However, this same problem with this same company actually happened in December of 2009. So it’s not out of the realm of possibility that lightning has struck twice. And if it has, this might be a very devastating blow to this Internet giant among autoresponder providers.

Anyway, the story goes like this. In December of 2009, this company’s database was compromised and hackers gained access to a ton of subscribers’ emails. As a result, lots of spam to these emails went out to these poor unsuspecting people. And yes, this was confirmed. Well, it looks like this may have happened yet again. A member of a forum I attend reported that an email address that they’ve been using just for one specific list has been receiving spam. And this person isn’t the only one. And yes, it’s the same company. So it appears that this has happened yet again, though as I said, it’s not yet confirmed. But if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck…well, you know.

So that brings us to the question we asked in the title of this article. Is your email really safe? The answer is no. It’s not. Great, so what do we do about it? Do we hide under the carpet and wait until the big bad monsters leave the room? No, we don’t. There are a few things we can do, though as has been proven, they are not fool proof.

One thing you MUST do is use a very secure, hard to guess password for your email accounts. A combination of letters, numbers and special characters (if allowed) is best. That way, you give yourself the best chance of not being hacked.

Another thing you probably also want to do, if you sign up with other marketers’ lists, is use a unique email address for each list. No, that doesn’t guarantee you won’t get spam, but unless the service itself gets hacked (cough, cough) you’re safe.

Finally, you don’t, under ANY circumstances, want to give out your password to ANYBODY. I don’t care if it’s your Aunt Tina. They can easily be hacked and compromised and with it, YOUR info gets taken as well. Trust nobody if only because you don’t know how safe their PC is.

Yes, it’s a dangerous world out there. Even the big boys are not immune to it.

To YOUR Success,

Steven Wagenheim

Tired of not getting your emails delivered, read or opened? Sick of not making any sales from your email marketing efforts? Visit my site at http://www.stevewagenheim.com/emailmarketing/index.html and get your hands on 5 years of my personal experience with email marketing…experience that has earned me tens of thousands of dollars yearly.

After you start to get the hang of list building, you begin to find that getting subscribers is a lot easier than keeping them. It seems that they leave almost as quickly as they opt in. If you’re wondering why this is and what you can do to decrease the rate at which your subscribers unsubscribe on you, this article is going to give you a few tips that I think will help.

The problem here actually starts with your squeeze page itself. See, in this crazy world of Internet marketing, with all the competition out there, list builders feel they have to promise someone the moon in order for them to sign up. So they put together this “free” report that supposedly has everything but the kitchen sink in it. And then, when the subscriber gets the report and finds that it’s nothing but crap, they immediately unsubscribe out of disgust. That’s one problem. So fix that and a lot of your other problems will go away or be easy to repair.

But let’s say the prospect gets passed the free report. They actually like it. Another problem is also with the squeeze page itself, but doesn’t appear later on in the process. See, the squeeze page tells the prospect that they’re getting this great free report. But what it doesn’t tell the prospect is that after they get the free report, they’re going to be hammered with sales pitches for everything from how to build chicken coops to how to make a nuclear bomb. And the pitches come day after day after day. Most people will be gone before a week is up thanks to this. So, want to fix it? Tell them up front that they will be receiving emails with offers. Yes, it’s that simple.

Finally, another reason people unsubscribe is, even if they’re told there will be sales pitches and followup emails with additional info, is because the additional info is worthless and the sales pitches absolutely bury the info. There is just nothing valuable enough to warrant staying on the list. If the free report was the only GOOD thing they got, why stick around? Would you? I wouldn’t. So, if you want to fix this problem, simply follow up with information that’s actually going to help your subscribers.

Sound simple? Yeah, it is simple.

What were you expecting? The Law of Relativity?

To YOUR Success,
Steven Wagenheim

Tired of not getting your emails delivered, read or opened? Sick of not making any sales from your email marketing efforts? Visit my site at http://www.stevewagenheim.com/emailmarketing/index.html and get your hands on 5 years of my personal experience with email marketing… experience that has earned me tens of thousands of dollars yearly.