A mailing list is a list of people who signed up to receive your mailings, such as newsletters, ecourses, ebooks, and other emails. There are many benefits to having a huge mailing list. Here are a few reasons why you will want to start building one today.

There is an old saying that says, “The money is in the follow up”, and that holds true for your list. Your mailing list provides you a way of staying in touch with people who have visited your website. Maybe they didn’t buy anything the first time they visited your site. However, if you stay in touch with them on a regular basis, they may turn into a loyal customer.

There are several types of mailing list formats to choose from. You may want to include each kind on your website.

You can offer a general newsletter that people can subscribe to. This is a great way to keep people informed on the updates you have made to your site. You can include excerpts from any articles you recently added with links to the full text. If you offer podcasts, you can include information about upcoming information you will be featuring, etc.

You can also choose to have a tips list or ecourse. People love numbers and are eager to sign up for a tips list, such as “15 ways to get organized today” or “50 ways to work from home”, etc. These tips can be small emails that are delivered daily to your mailing list. An ecourse is a great way to promote your information products. You can include a tiny bit of information and deliver a daily or weekly lesson to your mailing list.

The best way to manage a mailing list is through an autoresponder service. When you sign up for such a service, you can create a list and load email messages into it. When someone signs up for your list, they will automatically start to receive the messages you have already written. Each person will receive message 1, and the autoresponder will continue to send the messages in the order you selected.

While the main purpose of having a mailing list is to promote products, your visitors will be eager to sign up for them if you provide helpful information. With your mailing lists, you will want to include a “p.s” after the body of the message. These will grab your readers’ attention. You can use this space to include your affiliate links for other products you are promoting. Your mailing list will allow you to cross promote your products and services and turn “fence sitters” into customers.

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A file of group of files that is included with an e-mail message. You can attach files through most e-mail programs. To attach a file to an e-mail, simply click the “attach file” button (or similar button). This will open a menu that will allow you to browse through your computer to find the file or image that you’d like to attach. Never open any attachment you receive from someone your do not know: it may contain a harmful virus.

I also recommend that you do not open an attachment that you didn’t request, even if it is from someone you know. Contact them first to make sure they sent you an attachment. Viruses often replicate themselves inside computers of people you know and send themselves to members of that computer’s email address book.

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Yes, I’m on a Google trip. Down with Outlook and Thunderbird! I switched my email handling to Gmail and I’m thrilled!

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We recently installed Mailscanner on our servers to improve spam handling. This is done on the basis of a score that Mailscanner applies to each email, then tags the email accordingly. For instance, emails with a low score receive no tag. Emails with a medium score will receive this tag: {Spam?}. Emails with a high spam score receive this tag: {Definitely Spam?}.

So, you may be wondering how this helps you…

If you are using Outlook to download your messages, you can setup mail rules to delete spam based on the headers. However, this cannot be done in Outlook Express.

For those of you with Outlook Express, we have kept the subject line tags generated by Mailscanner, which will allow you to filter your email based on the Subject. For example, you can tell it that any email with {Definitely Spam?} should be deleted immediately (Of course, you can do this at the server level as well…)

Then you can tell Outlook Express to send any mail with {Spam?} in the subject to a specific folder, where you can look at it later to make sure nothing has been incorrectly tagged. (And if it has, you can whitelist the address in your Mailscanner settings.)

Of course, if you are using Mailscanner to delete anything with a high spam score, and are separating medium spam scoring email using Outlook or Gmail or another method, you may not want to deal with the subject tags.

So, it’s up to you: Do you want the tags, or not? Tell me what you think…

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Spam, otherwise known as junk mail, or mail that you did not ask for, has jumped to an all time high of 92.6 percent of all email, according to Information Week. Just two years ago, the BBC reported that spam comprised only 70 percent of all email.

Needless to say, the number of spam messages being sent has exploded in a relatively short period of time.

What does this mean for you?

It means that you need to take specific steps in managing your email to get rid of spam.

The steps you need to take include:

1. Set your default email address to :fail: (the only people who send email to an address that doesn’t exist on your account are spammers).
2. Create all your existing email accounts as POP accounts.
3. Do not post your email address on your website. Instead, use a contact form with anti-spam measures).
4. Turn on the spam prevention software in your hosting account. (Watersweb servers use mailscanner/Spamassassin.)

What techniques do you use to keep your inbox clean?

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A woman recently signed up for a mailing list my friend owns. She received the verification email and clicked the link inside which told my friend’s email system that it was OK to send mail.

Now, let’s stop for a minute.

By following the directions in the email, the subscriber opted into the mailing list twice: First by filling out the form with her name and email address on my friend’s site and then by clicking the link in the email. This is called confirmed or verified opt-in and it is the current industry standard for insuring that only people who ask for emails from your list receive them.

So, back to the story.

The woman received the first email from the list — and promptly reported it as spam, using the spam button inside her email account (this “feature” is available on Yahoo, Aol and Hotmail accounts, among others).

A few days later, the subscriber emailed my friend and asked her why she had not received any mail from the list. My friend chuckled to her self (I imagine!), explained to the woman what had happened and helped her fix the problem.

The next time the woman received an email from my friends, list, she reported it as spam too!

The morale of this story: Allowing users to determine what is spam sounds like a great idea. Most of us who have been online for awhile and involved in ecommerce know what spam looks like when we see it. The problem is that some people out there do not know what spam really is and mistakenly report legitimate emails. Some people hit the spam button when they really mean to hit the delete button. And then there are people who receive your email, decide they don’t like what they are reading, or are in a bad mood or don’t like the color of your website, so they hit the spam button.

Next thing you know, your emails are landing in all your customer’s spam boxes! And if the spam reporting service blocks the IP associated with your email, instead of the domain name, everyone on the server where your site is hosted will find their emails landing in spam boxes!

What does this mean? Incorrect usage of spam buttons by anyone with an email account may contribute to why you can’t send your legitimate non-spam email.

What does this mean for the average product seller, who just wants to keep in touch with her customers?

1. Do unto others… When you receive an email that you asked for, it is not spam. Please do not report it as spam. Just click the unsubscribe link at the bottom and remove yourself from the list. Only report email that you know for sure you did not ask to receive. Only unasked-for email is spam.
2. Please note that unwanted email is NOT spam. If you asked for it, it is a legitimate email, even if you decide you don’t want it now, or if you decide in five months you don’t want it. Unsubscribe or delete. False spam reports hurt everyone. (I know…I can’t say this enough!)
3. Teach your customers to add your email address to their contact list (also know as safe or whitelist) or address book, so that their email filter/spam blocker knows that they want to receive the email.
4. Report any spam notification messages you receive (messages stating that your email has been rejected) to your ISP or web host. If you are a Watersweb client and you are sending email from your domain account, report your issue to the Helpdesk, including the rejection message you received.

[tags]mailing list, confirmed opt-in, verified opt-in, spam, Yahoo, AOL, Hotmail,safe list, whitelist[/tags]

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In a word: No.

One of my clients alerted me tonight about complaints going around embroidery Yahoo groups. Apparently, someone, received emails from a wedding organization out of California.

The email thanked the recipient for registering on their site, though she doesn’t remember doing so. She was concerned because the URL in the link inside the email looked like this:

clicks.aweber.com… followed by several letters and numbers

With all the spam we receive every day, I can understand why she was concerned — and I’m glad that she asked. It’s usually not a good idea to click links in an email when we have no idea where it came from or whether or not the source can be trusted.

In this case though, I can say that I am familiar with Aweber. I am a subscriber to their mailing list services, which I use to manage my “Seven Secrets to Starting A Successful Online Business” ecourse, my Watersweb Biz Tips newsletter and my new Free WAHM Stuff newsletter.

I can tell you that the clicks.aweber link is actually Aweber’s built-in tracking system. When the list owner adds a link into the email she is creating, she has the option to checkmark a box to track whether or not the recipients of the email click the link. She can then determine whether or not her message is reaching her target market. I know “tracking system” sounds like Big Brother, but all it does is help the list owner decide if her marketing campaign is effective or not.

Also, Aweber requires all their lists to be Verified Opt-In, which means that not only do you have to sign up for the list on someone’s website, but you also have to click a link inside a confirmation email before you will receive anything else.

I am thinking that the confirmation email is what the Yahoo group member received. She may have signed up for a list on a website, or maybe someone signed her up. In either case, by doing nothing, she will NOT receive any more emails from that list.

Of course, since I know that people aren’t trusting these re-written links, I don’t think I’ll be using their tracking system again. My client just left my list because she thought that I was sending her weird stuff. (Actually, it was just a link to my Presenting Your Products ask campaign.)

Here are some tips to help you decide if you should click the links in an email

1. Do not sign up for lists, unless you trust the source.

2. Do not click links in the confirmation email unless you trust the source AND you want to continue receiving mailings from the source.

3. If the list is from Aweber or Email Aces or Constant Contact, there will be an unsubscribe link at the bottom of the email. It is safe to click the unsubscribe link that the company automatically includes in the email. You can read more about the unsubscribe link that aweber appends to messages at http://www.aweber.com/faq_messages.htm#21

If you have any questions, feel free to comment below…

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