Business
FeedBlitz’s Position on SPAM
I recently announced to my Tip of the Day mailing list that I was going to be converting the list over to FeedBlitz. I had one of my subscribers email me saying I was violating my privacy policy and that FeedBlitz is a “known spammer”. I have found nothing indicating FeedBlitz was a known spammer, and all indications have been to the contrary. In fact, a few days prior, here is part of a message sent to me from the CEO of FeedBlitz in response to a question on the topic of email deliverablity:
OK, to deliverability. We’re in the feedback loops for major ISPs like AOL, excite and United. Our hotmail / MSN / Live application is in process. So we track directly with major ISPs for any issues and immediately respond to unsubscribes / spam notifications from these channels. We also maintain the correct DNS entries for our servers and maintain the appropriate information at places like abuse.net. We have also placed our servers on various ISP white lists, including Yahoo and Verizon.
In addition, more formally, we use Return Path to monitor deliverability to major US and international ISPs. As part of the services we buy from them, we track our standing with the major anti-spam services to ensure our emails go to the inbox and not the bulk folders. Finally, we use Return Path to monitor several hundred major and minor SPAM RBLs (Real-time Black Lists) daily, to make sure our servers are not listed, and if they are to remove them. Since inception we’ve been only one RBL (twice), and the block was taken down in a day.
Ultimately, the only way to ultimately guarantee good delivery is to be a well-behaved sender that follows industry best practices. That’s why we require 2 phase opt in, we use image verification, we have properly formatted SMTP and HTML messages, we always provide text alternatives of the messages, we always have our sender in the header, we always and immediately honor unsubscribes .. you get the idea. Our reputation is ultimately at the core of how we work, and by combining best practice with 3rd party monitoring and ISP feedback loops our deliverability is excellent.
Which is not to say we aren’t working to get to the next level, however. We have issues with some Chinese ISPs that need work, and we’re working with Return Path on getting FeedBlitz into their “Sender Score / Bonded Sender” program, which will further improve deliverability. It’s an ongoing (and relatively expensive) process, but it’s worth it for us and for our publishers.
I have some issues with FeedBlitz, but all having to do with the design and user interface. But, I see nothing indicating they are spamming anybody. My suspicion is that what we have here is a case of a few stupid web users reporting FeedBlitz as a spammer when, in reality, they signed up for somebody’s feed and forgot they did so. Folks, there is a thing called an UNSUBSCRIBE button. For any legit emailer, those things work.
7 Actions for Success
I recently found an article in Entreprenuer magazine entitled 7 Secrets to Success. The article talks about the seven C’s, however it has a 7-point small action plan that I like even better and thought I would pass along to you. For each, I am going to include my own comments on it, because I think this is important for anybody looking to succeed and being their own boss.
- Decide on exactly what you want in your life and write it down. Make your goals specific and, for each, define a measurable statistic. The statistic is important. One key reason people fail at their goals is because they do not track their progress and/or the goal is too vague. It is important that the goal be stated in such a way that it is clear when it has been accomplished. “Increase revenue by 10%” is much more measurable than something like “Make my website better”.
- Specify the most important skill you could develop to move you into the top 10% of people in your field, then figure out your first steps to gain that skill.
- Identify the major constraint or limiting factor inside yourself or in your world that is setting the speed at which you achieve your goals. Then, work on removing or handling that limitation. For many people who want to do this, they are their own worse enemy. There are barriers, either inside or outside, that one can blame for why they are not succeeding, but the truth is that the right mentality that it takes to succeed would also involve actively removing those barriers.
- Determine your single biggest barrier in your business or personal life and work our solutions to make it go away. Again, a successful entreprenuer doesn’t mold to the world or accept barriers. Instead, he or she molds the world to him and actively makes things go right. The supreme test of anybody’s true ability is whether or not that person can make things go right.
- Create a list of what you want to be, do and have. Create this list based on everything being ideal. Start with the HAVE, then see what you will have to DO to have those things, then you will see what you need to BE to get there.
- Accept complete responsibility for your life. This is SO important. The biggest difference I see between an entreprenuer and a normal blue-collar worker is that the blue-collar worker will have a laundry list at all times of reasons why they are where they are. It could be their significant other, their boss, high taxes, whatever. They are all excuses why they haven’t gotten to where they wanted to be. An entreprenuer, on the other hand, will not AGREE with those barriers and will, instead, find ways out out-smarting them. So, taking responsibilty for your own life instead of acting like others have responsibility for your life is VERY important. You will not get anywhere by waiting for others or the government to prop you up.
- Reaffirm and visualize your goals as reality. In other words, operate as if those things that you want are either there now or that there is absolutely no doubt that you will get them. If you operate this way, you will be suprised just how well things will go for you.
Those who succeed in this busines do so primarily because of their mindset. Sure, there’s a little bit of luck involved, no doubt. But, mindset is everything. Decision is everything. If you don’t really make the DECISION to succeed, then nothing else will really line up for you.
My Favorite Web Services
Working on the internet means that I’m online all the time. Or at least it seems that way. The saving grace is that I am online with a purpose, not just wasting time surfing Myspace. Being that I use the internet to serve an end, I am always looking for web-based services that can make my life easier in some way. Never more than in the last year or two, the internet has sprung up with some great web services that really make life easier. And the great thing, too, is that many of them are totally free. Let me share with you the ones that I use:
Google Analytics (www.google.com/analytics/)
For those operating a website, Google Analytics is a great option for capturing site statistics. The service is derived from Urchin due to Google’s purchase of that service in 2005. And in true Google fashion, the service is completely free. When first launched, Google ran into unexpected demands on this service and they had to severely limit the amount of sign-ups. At this point, though, I think they have things in order and, to my knowledge, you can get an account quite easily. I am using Analytics to track traffic on every one of my sites. For a freebie, the service is amazing, but true stat hounds will quickly see it’s limitations. One of those limitations is that it’s information on search engine keywords is a little limited.
FeedBurner (www.feedburner.com)
Feedburner is a service which allows webmasters to “burn” RSS feeds for their website. Of course, it is pretty easy to have your own RSS feeds independently of Feedburner. Most blog packages and CMS packages all generate RSS feeds. So, why would you want Feedburner? Because Feedburner not only ensures that the feed format is correct, they also offer a variety of add-on services to track readership, promote your feed, email items from your feed to a mailing list, etc. Feedburner is a good all-in-one kind of service for RSS feeds. And, of course, it is free as well.
DNSStuff (www.dnsstuff.com)
This site is a great, free tool for doing things like IP lookups, WHOIS lookups, pings, traceroutes, etc. Getting a strange e-commerce transaction and want to see if the guy is in some foreign country? Run an IP check on his IP address and find out their geographic location. Want to find out who owns a domain? Run a WHOIS report. This is a good site to bookmark for those times you need it. It looks like they just recently launched a membership service, however they still have free tools.
iWebTool (www.iwebtool.com)
These guys have a variety of web-based tools at your disposal, almost all for the webmaster. Things like domain checkups, SEO diagnostics, etc.
Basecamp (www.basecamphq.com)
Basecamp is a web-based project manager by 37 Signals. This is a great service, too, which emphasizes easy of use. As a developer, I admire the way this company approaches the field of application decvelopment. They focus on simplicity and the user experience, and that is the key to their success. But, if you need to coordinate with other people on your web projects, Basecamp is a nice option for you. There are some short-comings to the system, in my opinion. In some ways, its actually a little too simple. But, powerful nonetheless. I should note that I no longer use Basecamp mainly because of those shortcomings, but I still very much admire this service.
Google Docs & Spreadsheets (docs.google.com)
This is a free online word processor and spreadsheet app by Google. There are better ones out there, such as ThinkFree, but there is a certain stability to Google. For those in business, the great feature of this is the ability to easily share and/or collaborate on documents. So, it can be used for team collaboration. It can also be used to quickly write documents when you don’t have access to an office suite. There are easy options to save as standard documents (such as Word).
These are some of my faves, but I know full well that there are a bunch of great web services out there that I don’t use or didn’t mention. So, feel free to comment and let everybody know about your picks.
Mailing List Solution – Follow Up
OK, I have decided to purchase 1-2-All, from Active Campaign. After comparing to oemPro, I decided against it. oemPro is pretty good, but in the end, price made the difference for me. Today, I sent my first email with the new software. It’s very slick and the more I play around with it the more I am convinced I made a good move. So far, the only drawbacks I have found are:
- You cannot import past messages. I would have liked to easily import my past newsletters into the archive for consistency sake, even if I did not use 1-2-All to send them.
- There doesn’t appear to be an RSS feed built-in for people to get the archives. I would like to see an RSS feed for each mailing list, along with an option on each message to include or exclude it from the RSS feed.
Tomorrow, I will bring these items to the attention of ActiveCampaign and we’ll see what comes of it.
Lastly, I have begun working with FeedBlitz. I am still getting used to it and I have gone ahead and signed on for their Pro account for $4.95/month. All in all, the service appears to be pretty good. However, as I brought up to the owner of the company, the interface is simply horrible. The control panel area is awkward to use and I really don’t like the java pop-down menus. The top menus don’t even work for me in Firefox 2. The other thing is that the interface is cheesy and very amateur. I really think the company should invest in a professional designer. The service is pretty good (and I love the fact that I can email them and get a quick response from the actual owner of the company), but this service warrants a much better interface.
Mozilla Being Hypocritical?
I saw on another blog that Mozilla has placed the Adblock Plus add-on onto their list of recommended add-ons. At the same time, Mozilla is said to have brought in $72 million in revenue in 2005, most of it from Google Search ads. Is this hypocritical? I would say so. For those of us in this business, including Mozilla, ad revenue is very, very important in our ability to bring content to the internet. For Mozilla to play a proactive roll in helping people block ads only helps to cut a major source of revenue.
I really like Mozilla and drool over their browser, but this recommendation of their’s does rub me the wrong way a bit.
Another Good PHP Email Application
As a quick followup to the last post, I have since come across another PHP-powered software package for running an email list locally from my server. That package is oemPro, from octeth Technologies. It runs a little more expensive than 1-2-All ($268 versus $189). It seems to have all the capability I would need, however. I have tried the 1-2-All Trial locally and it is robust. The database synch (ability to connect directly with a separate database to import email addresses) is included with oemPro and not with 1-2-All (it is available as an add-on), however the add-on capability for 1-2-All allows running those synchs on a cron schedule, which is certainly convenient. Interface is important to me with good software, and both packages have a nice user interface. I like the large icons in oemPro, so interface-wise, oemPro comes across as a little more user-friendly. Capability-wise, it is on par. I like the fact that it has survey/poll add-ons available (1-2-All) does not, however 1-2-All has plug-ins (such as the EmailCheck plug-in to evaluate spam scores) that oemPro does not.
Overall, the price difference between the two is enough that you could grab 1-2-All and one of their plug-ins for about the same amount as you would pay for oemPro itself. But, I thought I would mention oemPro. It looks to be quite good. They don’t offer a trial version, unfortunately.
As I was about to post this, I got a phone call from ActiveCampaign (the folks behind 1-2-All) just asking if I had any questions on the trial, etc. Impressive. Aweber did the same thing.
Search For Email Mailing List Solution
I have spent several hours last night and this morning investigating email list services. Since one of the founding philosophies of this site is that you can learn by what I am doing, I thought I would post where this search stands. My situation is this: I have a large mailing list over on PCMech. The tip of the day is around 31,000 subscribers and the newsletter is higher than that. And, of course, I have the newsletter here at WebbyOnline. These email lists have been managed in house. I want to move away from the in-house system to a more dependable system. Either a third-party software solution to run locally on my server, or a hosted solution. I have not made up my mind on what to do yet, however here’s where I’m at.
The major software solution I am looking at is 1-2-All, from Active Campaign. They have been advertising in the Sitepoint forums for a little while now and they offer a free trial, so I checked it out. Good, solid software. I have not yet tried it in a production setting (sending any emails), but it looks to be pretty robust. It also has autoresponder capability, which is something I am looking for. The base license install is $189, and they offer some valuable add-ons for additional coin.
There are a lot of hosted solutions out there. I am looking at two types: (1) your standard email list service, and (2) the RSS feed-to-email services. I have two weekly newsletters (currently) and am seriously considering siwtching our Tip of the Day over to a blog format. So, the RSS-to-email services would be a great way to switch to a blog while still offering the daily tip in the email inbox. The hosted solutions I looked at so far are:
- Aweber – Comes in highly recommended. They offer auto-responder service and solid delivery rate. They do not offer a free trial, so I had to actually charge my card to get an account for trial purposes (however, they offer a no-hassle refund within 30 days). The interface is not very polished and is a little hard to figure out for me, but I can tell this is a solid service. It’s also very affordable. The real kick in the groin here, though, is that they are very limiting when it comes to importing an existing list. They limit the import to 2,000 addresses per day. After 5 days, if the imports go well, they will allow you to import the rest without restriction. However, during those imports, if they find a bunch of undeliverables, they will reject the whole list. Additionally, they will send an email to every subscriber, forcing them to re-confirm in order to stay on your mailing list. So, essentially, this is like handing your whole list over to Aweber and then having them likely throw away half of it. Even if your list is pretty clean, people are people and you’re very likely to have alot of subscribers fail to re-confirm themselves for one reason or the other.
- Constant Contact. Another solid service. Very nice interface, and a free 60-day trial. However, it’s coming in as pretty expensive for a list of the size I have. I am in the “call for prices” range, but judging by the published rates, it’ll probably run me $250-$300 monthly to operate this list. Considering I’m paying nothing now (its all in-house), that’s a large chunk to chew.
- IntelliContact
- GetResponse
- Campaign Monitor – Expensive, in my view. $5 + 1 cent per subscriber. That means every tip I send would cost me over $300. I don’t think so, scooter.
- NetAtlantic – Uses Lyris software. Solid service. I actually used to use these guys and, in retrospect, probably should have stayed. In looking at their rates now, they have apparently gone up for a list my size. But, they do offer an ODBC connection option in their Enterprise accounts for synching with an external database. That would make the job easier, for sure.
- Vertical Response
Now, the RSS-to-email options are a LOT cheaper, many even free. Since my feeds are all managed using Feedburner, there are a few services which Feedburner offers right in their own interface.
- Feedburner. That’s right, they have their own service. Unfortunately, the only way to get a list imported is to email it to them and they do it themselves. Not very helpful.
- FeedBlitz – Looks to be very robust and they do offer list importing. I exchanged emails with Phil over there and they seem to be friendly and would be able to handle my tip list. They just apparently imported a list of 100K addresses for another account. They offer some paid services which I would probably use, however they are cheap compared to the options above.
- Zookoda – Nice, Web 2.0-ish looking company offering a free service. Their system looks a little simplistic, but it would probably work.
- Aweber – already mentioned, but they actually also offer an RSS-to-email option in their accounts.
So, I will post a followup when I finalize on this. As of now, I am leaning toward the tip blog with FeedBlitz, then perhaps either Aweber or the in-house hosted 1-2-All software for the weekly newsletters and auto-responder. Aweber is attractive, however having to re-confirm every subscriber again is a major drag I may not be able to get over.
Increase Online Sales by Reducing Customer Anxiety – The Scientific Approach
This afternoon I attended the web seminar mentioned in the previous blog post. The seminar was put on by Marketing Experiments Journal, a very professional outfit that takes the science of online marketing to levels you would normally expect from a college course. The subject of the seminar was how to decrease customer anxiety levels and thus increase the conversion rate of a website. In other words, how do you alleviate any fears a customer might have and get them to click on the “Buy” button? Well, one of the things I am most impressed with from these guys is the degree of statistical analysis they put into these things. Most website owners simply guess at what will work on a website, usually from what THEY would want to see. The thing is that the science of raising website conversion is not a matter of guesswork, and it is certainly a matter of knowing your audience. Let’s get right to the 7 tips which formed the basis of this whole talk. And, for each, I will interject my own view and advice on the matter.
Use testimonials
More specifically, use testimonials which address specific points of customer anxiety. For example, if you know that speed of shipping is a concern, post a testimonial that talks about how fast your shipping was. If support is a concern, post a testimonial which talks about how great your after-sale support is. Really pay attention to the purpose of each testimonial rather than simply posting anything that says good things about you.
Use language and tone in your copy
Pay close attention to your audience and what their state of mind is. Use language on your website that specifically caters to your audience. For example, if your intended audience is a younger one, your typical corporate speak is probably not going to sell anything. The presenter of the seminar also alluded to the importance of matching the tone of the customer and said a future report of their journal would discuss how to make a site actually cater to the particular mood of the customer. Now that will be very interesting, if it is some kind of real-time thing.
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7 Ways to Increase Site Conversion
A couple days I got an email from Marketing Experiments Journal notifying me of a free Webinar they are hosting Wednesday, January 24th at 4PM EST. The topic?
Topic: Site design tested: 7 ways to increase site conversion by reducing Customer Anxiety
Does matching your site’s appearance to the expectations and preconceptions of your customer prospects influence its effectiveness?
Could be an interesting hour. If you are in the business and wish to see what’s going on, I thought I would pass on the info. The seminar will be hosted by GotoMeeting.com. Click here to register. And, if you can’t attend, stay tuned to WebbyOnline as I will be posting the highlights of the seminar here.
Google Updates Their Adsense Policies
That’s right, Google has issued their 2007 update on policies to be followed by websites using Adsense. Of course, Adsense is Google’s contextual ad service where websites can place Google ads on their site and earn revenue. The revenue you can make from Adsense is pretty good in the scheme of things, so webmasters who use it should go take a read of the new policies. Google does kick off sites that break their policies, even if they are not as picky as Yahoo, who kicks off sites for having international traffic when YPN can’t pull off geo-targeting on their own.
Here are the highlights of their new changes:
- Sites cannot place images next to ads to in any way direct a user’s attention to the ad. That means no arrows or “click here” images. Nor any trick placements to make people click on your ad thinking it is a valid part of your site navigation.
- You can no longer display Adsense on any site which is displaying competing ads from any source which looks like an Adsense ad. Now, this is pretty wide and sweeping. It basically means Google is going to hold you in violation if you are using Yahoo Publisher Network on the same site. Period. There is some confusion on this policy, though, because the way it is phrased, you could use a competing ad as long as it looks different than Google ads. I’ll have to wait to see if this gets clarified. Plus, it says specifically *site*, which means they won’t even accept you trying YPN in a totally different section of the same site. That is ridiculous.
- You can now place up to two referral links on your site in addition to the ads.
- Sites can no longer ask for anything before displaying a referral link. For example, you can’t ask for a user’s email address before referring them to the Google Pack.
- If you use Google’s custom search engines, you can only display one additional ad unit on the page along with the search results. This is because the search results already come with ads (just like when you search Google normally).
- You can’t run Adsense on any site involved with selling student essays or term papers. I think this one is a little humorous, actually. For a company who got into hot water over scanning books and making them searchable, its ironic as hell that they’re banning these types of sites from their Adsense program.
- You can’t display ads on sites that in any way break copyright law.
I'm David Risley. I've been making my living as a blogger for over a decade. Blogging is my business and how I support my family. With this blog, I'm just gettin' REAL and telling you how this business works. 
