Email Marketing

I spent some of yesterday looking for email marketing solutions for this blog. It has been some time since I last investigated the available offerings for email marketing and I was expecting there to be several freely available solutions to try.

There are various options that you can freely use, but I had some specific requirements that most of them didn’t meet, thus limiting the choices.

Requirements

I had some fairly simple requirements that had to be met.

• It must easily integrate with the blog.
• It must be able to format the email in HTML.
• It must have autoresponder functionality.
• Users must be able to subscribe directly from the blog.
• User data can be exported for use in external programs, such as in CSV format for Excel.
• The ability to direct to specific landing pages.
• Confirmation email.
• The ability to customize the email layout.
• The ability to broadcast to multiple users.
• There should be some reporting functionality with various statistics and information.
• Reliable email delivery.
• Minimal impact on website.
• Preferably free.

These requirements are by no means exhaustive, but they are fairly essential for effective email marketing. Armed with this list, I went searching for available tools that could meet these requirements.

I can say that I was surprised by the lack of options in this market. After much searching, I came up with the following options:

• shiftthis WordPress plugin. - looks reasonable, but costs $30 to purchase.
• cforms II - quite easy to integrate, but lacks functionailty.
• PHPList Form WordPress Integration plugin - meets many of the requirements, but requires installation and management of separate application.
• Zookoda - meets nearly all of the requirements.
• Aweber - The best of the lot by a far way, but is not free.

Out of the above selection, I chose to use Zookoda, primarily because it met most of the requirements while also being free. Zookoda has many good features, but it appears to be quite neglected since IZEA (PayPerPost) purchased it in April 2007 and does not seem to have had any development since the last time I tried it.

TechCrunch even forecast it going to the deadpool in December 2007, after IZEA suspended the service due to what it called excessive spamming.

The service is functioning again at the moment, but it does appear to be heavily neglected, and slightly old now, which is a pity, as it could be a very valuable service in IZEA’s collection.

Because of this neglect, and the increased features offered, I will probably switch to Aweber at some stage in the future, as it does provide the most complete solution.

How I Wont Make $10,000 In 37 Days In Social Media

I didn’t really want to give this guy any more publicity, as that pretty much plays into his hands, but I felt that the value of the warning outweighs the benefit to him in free publicity.

I first heard of Brian Campbell on John Chow’s blog. If you are not familiar with John Chow’s blog, he basically writes posts about products or services that generate affiliate income for him.

At the end of April, John had a post on a guy by the name of Brian Campbell who was going to demonstrate how to make $10,000 in 37 days on Facebook.

I read the post and immediately thought, ‘ok, here we go again, some guy is going to suck a bunch of people in to the trap and then hit them with the sales pitch’. As it turns out. I was not too far off.

To condense Brian’s strategy, essentially he searches for appropriate people on Facebook, i.e. people who have an interest in marketing, entrepreneurialism and any associated area with making money online. He then proceeds to add at least 500 of these people as friends and create a Facebook group with these friends as members.

He repeats this process, creating more groups and inviting more people to join them, while promoting his Website, product and seminar series to each group and continually updating his status to increase his profile in each ‘friends’ Facebook feed.

Once his friends list is large enough, he creates and mailing list (not in Facebook) and sends direct email marketing to the list.

Brian explains all of the details on how to achieve all of this in a series of MP3’s and videos. If you are not familiar with this type of marketing (it has been around for years in the form of all those get rich quick books), there is some useful information in Brian’s videos.

I briefly skimmed them, as the general premise and concepts were nothing new to me. I actually thought that if he had a slicker presentation, his scam strategy would be far more effective.

When you get to the end of Brian’s videos, you find out the secret to making money from Facebook; you need to have a product or service to sell; the more expensive the better.

You need to pick very popular niches, with minimal competition. Easier said then done, but don’t fear, here is where Brian makes his money. For an upfront fee of $47 and then a monthly fee between $27 - $297, depending on the package you have chosen, Brian will show you how to do this.

When Brian fist announced this ‘money making scheme’ he said he would show everyone how he did it for free and to some degree he has, but, in reality, he hasn’t. There is nothing illegal with what he is doing, it is just a typical example of taking advantage of people’s susceptibility to be taken in by the prospect of easy riches. Don’t buy into, you would be better off saving your money.

Oh yeah, just to make sure there is no ambiguity, that’s not me in the image…..

Twitter - Tweet Your Way To Success

Many of you reading this have probably heard of Twitter, but have you may not have taken the time to engage with it, or may have only taken a passing interest and thought, what is the point?

I was like that, thinking, this is just another application that is going to take up time and keep me away from doing more important things.

recently however, I have decided t investigate it a little more and found it to be a great networking tool.

What is Twitter?

If you are unfamiliar with Twitter, or have heard of it, but not had the time or inclination to take a look, I’ll explain what it is.

The best way to think of Twitter is as text messaging for the Web. Below is the Wikipedia description:

“Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to send “updates” (or “tweets”; text-based posts, up to 140 characters long) to the Twitter web site, via the Twitter web site, short message service (SMS), instant messaging, or a third-party application such as Twitterrific or Facebook.”

Personally, I prefer to use the Adobe Air application Twhirl for Twitter.

Still confused and wondering how this can be of benefit to you?

Why Bother?

Aside from just being able to send text messages of what you are presently doing, eating, reading, seeing, etc, you can also post links tp posts you have made, pics, videos, or any content that you would like to share. Don’t be concerned about the length of the URL, as tinyurl takes care of that.

The really cool thing about Twitter is that you can follow the ‘tweets’ of other people and likewise, people can follow you. For example, you may want to follow all the ‘A-list’ bloggers in your niche. The good thing is, that many of these ‘A-list’ bloggers will reciprocate by following you. You can also see who is following other people, and choose to follow them as well, thus increasing your circle of influence.

You may have emailed some of the ‘A-list’ bloggers in the past and never had a response. That is to be expected, they can receive hundreds of emails a day and simply do not have the time to respond.

On Twitter however, the response is as simple as a quick text message. You may find that Robert Scoble has written a tweet that you just have to respond to; you write your response and may well find that he finds your tweet interesting enough to reply.

Twitter also has direct messaging capabilities for friends who are following each other.

So use Twitter to build a profile and following on Twitter which can greatly enhance your reach and exposure to a wider audience and network of people.

You can start by adding me here: http://twitter.com/RossMaguire

Happy tweeting.