Intoweb Marketing » spam

Email marketing and the deliverability of your e-newsletters as part of online marketing

Isebell Gauche — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 19:12:18 +0000

You spend a considerable time in developing catching e-newsletters as part of online marketing and as such will want the email marketing campaign to be successful. The deliverability of the e-newsletters can have a tremendous influence on the success of your email marketing campaign. We will have a look at some of actions that you can take to improve the deliverability of the e-newsletters.

Spam complaints and the deliverability of the e-newsletters

Email marketing in terms of e-newsletters can be severally affected by spam complaints as the ISPs will no sooner drop your emails in the junk folder. Few marketers realize that it is possible to receive copies of the spam complaints sent to the ISPs. You can in fact sign up and through the feedback looping system receive copies from ISPs such as Hotmail, Yahoo, and AOL.

How can the feedback loop help you to identify spam complaints regarding your e-newsletters?

You can study the copies of the spam complaints to find reasons for citing the e-newsletters as spam. This will help to identify email hijackings and to identify how many complaints the ISP has received. It is also possible to use feedback loop reports available from Surety Mail that will indicate how many complaints a specific ISP received about your email on a daily basis. Monitor the complaints to ensure that you can act quickly to restore your email reputation where needed.

Importance of good reputation for deliverability of e-newsletters as part of email marketing in your online marketing campaign

The email sender must have a good reputation with the ISPs to ensure that the e-newsletters will not be blocked as spam. The reputation refers to the track record of the company with the subscribers to the e-newsletters and the reputation with the ISPs regarding the sending of accurate e-newsletters to valid email addresses where the content is opened by the subscribers.

Factors that can improve the deliverability of the e-newsletters as part of an email marketing campaign

Make sure you only send e-newsletters to subscribers that are relevant to the topic for which they have subscribed originally. If the recipients perceive the e-newsletters as off track it will create a negative perception and can cause your emails to be blocked at the end of the day.

Never overdo it. If the recipients find their inboxes to be filled too often they will quickly find reason to unsubscribe from the e-newsletters. The problem however, is not with those who unsubscribe, but the ones who don’t and simply block the emails, mark them as spam or don’t open them anymore. If too many of the subscribers fall in the last category, it can severally affect your reputation with the ISP. Make sure you use the feedback loops available from the larger internet service providers and take quick action to remove the subscribers that have tagged your e-newsletters as spam.

Send shorter e-newsletters and rather keep from sending huge volumes at once as this will get the attention of the ISPs immediately. Take action to get negative subscribers to once again open your emails through amazing offers and freebies. Also make sure that the e-newsletters are not unintentionally blocked by the subscribers by giving them instructions as how to white list your email address. Make use of confirmations for subscriptions to ensure that the users will be aware of the subscription to your e-newsletters. Follow the above guidelines to ensure high deliverability of your e-newsletters and the subsequent success of your email marketing campaign as part of the overall online marketing strategy.

“Intoweb Marketing offers internet marketing solutions for your website in South Africa. Contact us for a internet marketing quote today.”

How to identify fake internet marketing companies

Isebell Gauche — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 12:26:02 +0000

You will spend a lot on online marketing and search engine placement. Don’t be fooled; there are literally hundreds of fake internet marketing companies simply waiting for people new to the online world to take advantage of. Read on and learn how to identify fly-by-night, unethical and fake internet marketing companies without losing your money and website reputation.

Spam messages

Any SEO or internet marketing company that sends spam messages to email addresses should immediately be taken off your list of potential service providers. Internet marketing companies should make use of ethical means to market their products and services. If they send emails to you with messages such as “ We have visited your website and have noticed that it doesn’t rank well with the search engines. We have the solution..” they will most probably also use spam to promote your website.

The ranking of the internet marketing companies

If an SEO company claims that it can further a website’s ranking then surely their site’s ranking should also be good. If they only have a ranking of one, two or three how on earth will they be able to push your website’s ranking up? In short a company must practice what it preaches. Go onto Google and type “google pagerank” in the search box. You will find various sites where the pagerank of a site can be obtained in seconds. Use one of the sites to view the SEO company’s ranking. If they rank four and higher then you can trust their word. If not, get another company to do the job.

How did you find the SEO company?

If you could not locate the SEO company on keywords such as article marketing, internet marketing, web marketing, website marketing, online marketing, web promotion etc. on the first page of Google search results, chances are that the company will not be able to push your site high up on the search results for keywords relevant to your site and audience. It is thus essential that the company shows that it can do proper internet promotion and search engine placement for itself as well.

Range of services offered

Internet marketing companies only offering article writing or search engine submission services should be thrown out of the equation immediately. Online marketing is a whole mixture of activities such as link building, website design, search engine optimization, article writing, blog promotion, pay per click advertising, email newsletters, viral marketing and more. The SEO company should offer three or more of the above services to help you get the most from online advertising spending.

Ask questions

When an SEO company contact you regarding online marketing you have the right to ask questions such as:

• Can you list a few client sites with high rankings?
• Do you have examples of sites promoted and how the traffic has been increased to the sites?
• Do you offer a report back system such as web statistics which can be used to track the marketing success?

Look out for indications of misconduct, unethical behaviour, and scams such as:

• Selling of keywords
• Ranking on irrelevant keywords
• Search engine results which are in effect paid for keywords
• Spam mail
• Internet marketing companies that don’t have their own websites
• Creation of doorway sites which will lead to your site.

Be realistic in your expectations

It is possible to get overnight success with internet marketing, but will the success last or will your website be blacklisted? Stay away from any marketing technique that promises overnight success as black hat marketing techniques will be employed to accomplish this. It will not be long before the search engines pick up on the tricks and you will see your site end up in the sandbox on page four of five for a long time.

In summary

Only make use of internet marketing companies that follow sound online promotion strategies, have their own websites and a track record of successes.

“Intoweb Marketing offers internet marketing solutions for your website in South Africa. Contact us for a internet marketing quote today.”

MySpace tells AP it has won $234 million Spam judgment

Mike — Wed, 14 May 2008 12:16:50 +0000

The popular online hangout MySpace has won a $234 million judgment over junk messages sent to its members in what is believed to be the largest anti-spam award ever, The Associated Press has learned. A federal judge ruled against two of the Internet’s most prominent spam defendants, Sanford Wallace and Walter Rines, after the two failed to show up at a court hearing. Wallace has earned the nicknames “Spamford” and “spam king” for his past role as head of a company that sent as many as 30 million junk e-mails a day in the 1990s. MySpace said the pair sent 735,925 messages to MySpace members. Under the 2003 federal anti-spam law known as CAN-SPAM, each violation entitles MySpace to $100 in damages, tripled when conducted “willfully and knowingly”.

"Intoweb Marketing offers internet marketing solutions for your website in South Africa. Contact us for a internet marketing quote today."

Hackers launch Trojan spam attack

Mike — Thu, 01 May 2008 12:51:30 +0000

Security experts have uncovered a spam-sending scheme described as being of “Byzantine complexity”. BitDefender has identified spam emails that claim to contain links to videos. When users try to watch the video, they are prompted to download a ‘media player’. The security firm said that the media player is in fact Backdoor.Edunet.A which uses compromised computers to send commands to a series of mail servers. BitDefender said that the mail servers are used to spread spam, and are mostly in the .edu and .mil domains. “It is not every day that you stumble on the workings of an honest-to-God hacking ring, let alone one that has a predilection for using military and university-run mail servers as spam relays,” said Sorin Dudea, head of antivirus Research at BitDefender.

"Intoweb Marketing offers internet marketing solutions for your website in South Africa. Contact us for a internet marketing quote today."

Avoiding embedded text in images

admin — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 10:04:10 +0000

Many sites use images heavily instead of using headings and actual text and this problem usually occurs when graphic designers somehow end up becoming website designers. They focus on images more than actual text and make use of embedded text in images to get optimization at no avail.

Such pages transfer across the internet slower than normal text pages because the pages contain no real text and therefore the search engines have nothing to index. Search engines like text and content. Just images do not really explain to the visitor what’s, what on your website.

"Intoweb Marketing offers internet marketing solutions for your website in South Africa. Contact us for a internet marketing quote today."

10 SEO Mistakes people make

admin — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 06:38:30 +0000

Here are a few SEO mistakes to look out for:

Stuffing the page with keywords.
The hide and seek trick, never make words the same colour as the background.
Mirror sites, this can be dealt with by blacklisting.
Too many low value links, rather have a responsible link exchange than to have too many links that are of no relevance.
Not enough good quality content.
Backlink spamming.
Targeting the wrong keywords.
Putting too little or even no text into your website, search engines like content.
Lack of consistency and maintenance.
Concentrating too much on meta tags.

These are a few of the many SEO mistakes which people make. Be wary to not fall into the trap of implementing these, and you will experience great things as achieved from your search engine optimization efforts.

“Intoweb Marketing offers internet marketing solutions for your website in South Africa. Contact us for a internet marketing quote today.”

Spammer pleads guilty

Mike — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 06:46:01 +0000

Spammer Robert Soloway pleaded guilty on Friday in the Seattle US District Court rather than face trial on dozens of criminal charges. Soloway, 29, was arrested early last summer and charged with 40 counts of mail fraud, wire fraud, e-mail fraud, aggravated identity theft and failing to file taxes. He agreed to plead guilty to one count each of mail fraud, wire fraud and failure to file a tax return. Prosecutors dropped the other charges against him. Soloway admitted that he took in $309,000 from his spamming operation during 2005 alone. The FBI have already seized at least four of his bank accounts. He agreed to submit to a lie-detector test about his other assets prior to sentencing, which could be up to 26 years in prison.

“Intoweb Marketing offers internet marketing solutions for your website in South Africa. Contact us for a internet marketing quote today.”

Spam King trial set to start next month

Mike — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 08:09:03 +0000

Infamous spammer Robert Soloway goes to trial next month in Seattle. Soloway was arrested last May and charged with sending out millions of unsolicited messages, so many that investigators called him the “Spam King”. His arrest was hailed as a major blow in the fight against spam. Many of Soloway’s unsolicited messages were sent out using hacked computers infected with botnet software, prosecutors allege. The United States Attorney’s Office is seeking more than $770,000 in fines, but Soloway is also facing fraud and identity theft charges that could result in jail time.

"Intoweb Marketing offers internet marketing solutions for your website in South Africa. Contact us for a internet marketing quote today."