Sorry for bad English. Let me know what you think in comments.

Sorry for bad English. Let me know what you think in comments.

I couldn’t agree more with everything this guy said. Now ask yourself, if you’re bad at something, and you quit it, do you really actually fail? And have you really put enough effort, so you could suceed?

Let me explain by example, imagine yourself carrying water from a river two miles away from your home, with two different buckets: one is small, and another is big. First part of a day you carry with small bucket, you harvest water like crazy, flying from river to home and from home to river in no time, let’s say you carry half of tank first half of the day. In second half of the day, you carry water with big bucket. BIG BUCKET AS HELL. You go to the river, fill bucket with water and then you carry it home. Unfortunately, bastard is so heavy that you could hardly drag it along the ground. Anyways, you finally end up with big bucket in your house, fill the tank with it, and tank still needs three or four buckets like that to be full. But oh, it is nearly a night and you’re exhausted as hell! That means, if you were carying water with small bucket ALL DAY LONG, the tank would be full and you wouldn’t be as tired.

That what exactly happened to me, I was focusing on lot of things, putting same effort in all of them, but only small part were actually WORKING for me. But I didn’t knew that at first, of course. That’s why you have to track your stats! If you’ll find something, that really works and is better then the rest of the methods, FOCUS ON IT. Most of the succesful marketers don’t do all at the same time, they find what they’re good at, and they stick to it. That’s it! One more key to success!

“So, how do I track my stats?”

I use google analytics. This is 100% FREE tool provided by google. Just visit www.google.com/analytics . It shows you how many people hit your website, how they found your website, which referal links they’ve pressed, how much time they spend on your website, how much people leave your website without even doing anything in it.  You have to have your own google account. It’s not very noob friendly, so I suggest you googling something like “Video how to set up google analytics”

So, I’m pretty much done here, thanks for reading, let me see what you think in comments! Bye!

First of all, you’ll get known as a spammer. There are sites on the internet that register spammers and then ISP (Internet Service Providers) punish them. Once I’ve had a virus, I was green as grass with PC, had no reliable anti-virus software, and that virus (I found out later) was sending emails like a machine gun. RIGHT OUT OF MY PC. So, I’ve got known as a spammer and blocked from full internet access for a week. Then, I’ve had to reinstall my windows, so I could get rid of it finally, all of my files were gone (important ones I’ve put into a DVD) and then I’ve had to call my ISP and tell them “Yeah, ok, I got rid of it, you can unblock me now…”. THAT SUCKS. Of course, you might set up auto responders on remote hosting, but then, when they’ll get informed about email flow out of your account, you’ll get banned.

Second, it is strictly forbidden. Internet was really really soft and fussy for all of the spam things backday before 2003. Then there was no such thing, as I call erights. Anyone could create a website, full of fake ads, fake screensavers that were infected with malware and all the creepy stuff, and everyone spammed liek crazy. Internet was literally wild west few years ago, no rules, just mess and chaos. But after 2003 everything changed, now you can sue spammers, you can track them down to the place where they live and call police on him, you may even make them pay fine, take their last pants off and might even throw to jail. Beware, cause if you won’t obey these rules, you might end up as one of them!

Third, it is NOT effective. As a Mike Dillard said, you CAN’T offer s steak to vegetarian, no matter how juicy, crispy and tasty that steak is. You just can’t. I mean seriously, when you open your mail box and you see that’s it’s full of crap like “Become a cook Deividas!” “Become a proffesionall guitarist Deividas!” (that kind of stuff I see in my spam folder every day) do you really fall for it? Like, after reading an email “Become a cook Deividas!” I’ll drop all my marketing stuff and say to myself “Hey… He’s right! I guess I’ll drop all my marketing work and go to learn cooking! I WAS BORN TO COOK RISSOTOS!” (I pity the one, that would actually DO that). Come on! If you were that spammer that sent me that stuff, I guess you were really expecting that, but do one thing NOW: if you were (or you are, I don’t know) a spammer, imagine yourself that moment, when after clicking one button your email will hit 5000 mail boxes with letter “Become a cook <recipient’s name>”, and then, jump to recipient’s shoes and ask yourself “Do I really want to get this email?”. Do you? Well I wouldn’t FOR SURE. I hope you wouldn’t neither. I want to give you advice: from now on, anytime you do something related to people in marketing, jump into their shoes and ask yourself “Do they want that from me?”. I guess what I wanted to say, by saying it’s not effective, that you can send 99999999 emails for people and try to sell them, but 99,99% of the emails will be deleted without even reading or end up in spam folder as well.

“So, David… I can’t spam, I can’t annoy people, so what should I do in email marketing anyways?”

Glad you ask! (lol) That is what we call BUILD YOUR LIST. And by saying “build your list” I don’t have in my mind anything like “Buy 10,000 contacts”. Building your list means setting up a form in website, that (in my situation right now) has forms: First Name, Last Name, Email adress. That’s it! And then you just advertise your product. Of course, you won’t probably have as many contacts as you would by buying 10,000 leads like I said, but you know what? Different, then from random people emails your captured contacts WILL BE TARGETED. Meaning: contacts that joined your list first had to click on advertisement, link on your video promoting your product, link in your blog, or they found you by google… THAT’S IT! They found you, your product, form, not because you told them to, they were interested and found it by themselves, filled the form by themselves, which means they were interested and now the chance that your emails won’t be deleted without even reading increases, because, again, your lead must had been interested in your niche! That’s how you build a list of quality, targeted, reliable leads that you can really build relationship with.

Now, how to email these people effectively, without annoying them. It’s good that you set up a form to build you contacts, but that’s not it, you could still screw everything up really easily. Remember, when in beginning of this post I was frustrated by spammers, trying to spam hell out of me every day? Let’s avoid that. I recommend that you send your emails every three days. Spam rule says that you can’t send autoresponders more often than two days, but let your contacts know, that you’re not just trying to obey this rule at minimum, let them know that you care for them and will not smack their mailboxes full of sales letters every day.

ALWAYS put an unsubscribe link to your email. Of course, you don’t want that first sentence in your email would be “Click here to unsubscribe”. I put an unsubscribe link right at bottom of my email, first I write all the content that I want to present for reader, then goes one column of ——————– (that separates content from everything else), then then goes my signature underneath (David Kazlauskas <my contact information>) and FINALLY goes my unsubscribe link (Of course, you don’t want to put just a long link without telling what it does, say “click link below to unsubscribe” then goes link, or just implement link to anchor text). DON’T be dishonest, don’t put unsubscribe link in white so that reader couldn’t see it, don’t make hundreds of blank collumns so reader would have to scroll this decade, so he could unsubscribe,  if reader is interested in your product, he won’t unsubscribe, remember?

While writing your email you assume that lead was interested in your product, because he filled your form and ended up in your contact list, remember? Use it! Write captive subject lines, such as “Hi %%First Name%%, I see you are interested in <your product>.”, that’s will attract recipients name for sure. Don’t write them anything like “YOU MUST BUY THIS PRODUCT IN 9 DAYS OR YOU’LL DIE!!!”. Instead of forcing them, just advertise your product, mention benefits and why it is useful. If your reader will find your product attractive, he’ll buy it!

Remember to check your email for spam related keywords. Letters are blocked because of two reasons (mostly): first, because you’ll get know as a spammer, or second, because your letter contains a lot of spam keywords (in some email clients it is enough of few spam keywords). If you’re using interspire email marketer, then you can check if your autoresponder has forbidden keywords in it just by clicking “Check for spam related keywords”, but if you’re not, or your email marketer doesn’t have such option, I’ve googled few sites where you can check that manually:

http://activewebhosting.com/faq/email-filterlist.html

http://www.flounder.com/mail_policies.htm

Now, one email will not make sure that every reader will buy your product.

Here are some stats from the National Sales Association:

• 2% of sales are made on the 1st contact
• 3% of sales are made on the 2nd contact
• 5% of sales are made on the 3rd contact
• 10% of sales are made on the 4th contact
• 80% of sales are made on the 5th-12th contact

That means, to make sure that you maximize your sales potential, you have to set up twelve autoresponders.

And these are the can-spam laws:

- addresses must be double opt-in
- addresses must be collected legally, not scraped or bought!
- you can not spoof or fake the from address!
- Subject can not be misleading
- Subject can not be “RE: ” to fake that you are replying to them!
- Body of email can not be scammy or full of links! Just be professional!
- Footer of email MUST CONTAIN a working unsubscribe link and an address!
- When a users clicks “unsubscribe” they can not receive another email (72hr cushion)
- You can not send any more than 1 email every 2 days!

If you want to see example of capture page for email marketing, you may go to kazlas.x10hosting.com

So, that sort of wraps it up. Hope you enjoyed reading everything! Comment and tell me what you think about email marketing!