How To Keep Your E-mail Off The “Naughty” List

Someone’s making a list and checking it twice; but it isn’t Santa. Due to rising e-mail abuse and spam, hundreds of servers at various companies now monitor e-mail accounts to make sure those accounts are not sending out mass e-mails. If that e-mail account is assumed to be sending spam it is put on the “blacklist”. Once on the blacklist, your e-mail account is virtually SHUT DOWN because your e-mail is blocked by hundreds or thousands of servers and your message can’t be delivered. Big companies who give out e-mail addresses like AOL, Google, and Comcast, for example, will cut off e-mail service to anyone who sends an e-mail to a large number of people at once. Because of this, even if you or your employees innocently send a message to 100 of your clients, you could be without e-mail for days or weeks. So, how do you avoid this costly & frustrating downtime to happen to you? Read these tips to find out:

Protect Your Server. Spammers LOVE to find e-mail servers that don’t have a proper firewall , anti-virus, and intrusion protection. They get a high from hacking in to these servers and then using them to send out thousands of e-mails. Plus, with no protection in place, tracking and catching these spammers is nearly impossible. The right protection will also prevent malware from being installed on your server, which can automatically send spam without human interaction.

Don’t Allow Employees To Forward Messages. Unless it is for work-only related purposes, make a policy that no one is to forward messages like jokes, photos or videos outside the company. If just 4 of your employees send out this kind of an e-mail to 30 of their contacts, that’s well over 100 people receiving junk mail on the same day from the same e-mail server. This puts you at high risk of being blacklisted.

Have Your Clients and Prospects “Opt-In”. Sometimes companies end up on the blacklist because someone on your list complained and reported your message as spam. If you have your clients and prospects agree via an opt-in form that they want to receive communication from you and confirm their permission, then you’ll have better protection against that. Also make sure you keep good records of these opt-ins. That way, even if you do get blacklisted, you should be back up and running fairly quickly.

Make Sure Your E-mail Is Set-Up Properly. In addition to protecting yourself from hackers and invasions with software and firewalls, you also need to be sure that your e-mail is configured correctly and is set-up to block outside relays. If you’ve got the wrong settings in your e-mail account, you could wind up blacklisted, without any e-mail for days or weeks,

Keep Your E-mail List Up-To-Date. If someone asks to be removed from your list and you continue to send messages to him, the changes of him reporting your company as a spammer is pretty high. Avoid this by using in-house lists (instead of purchasing one) and contacting your list to verify the information.

For Help With Keeping Your E-mail Up & Running And Off The Blacklist, Contact Us By December 31st For A FREE Blacklist Avoidance Assessment (A $295 Value!)

(508) 992-2541

How To Secure More Sales And Clients Using FREE Search Engine Marketing

With the economy tanking and businesses looking to cut costs every way possible, it only makes sense that many are focusing more attention on using free social media marketing to fuel sales and new customers. After all, almost everyone uses the Internet to research a company before buying from them; and if you are not coming up in the local searches, you are definitely missing out on a number of potential prospects who are ready to buy what you sell.

While there are dozens—if not hundreds—of strategies for being found online, I believe you have to walk before you run. To that end, here are a few simple, key strategies you can use immediately to improve your search engine ranking locally.

#1: Add yourself to the local search engine pages:

GOOGLE LOCAL
http://local.google.com/

ADD YOUR BUSINESS
http://www.google.com/local/add?hl=en&gl=us

YAHOO LOCAL

http://local.yahoo.com/

ADD YOUR BUSINESS
http://listings.local.yahoo.com/csubmit/index.php

MSN LOCAL
http://local.live.com/

ADD YOUR BUSINESS
http://webapp.localeze.com/bizreg/add.aspx

Other web sites to list yourself include:

• CitySearch.com
• Local.com
• MerchantCircle.com
• Yelp.com

#2. Figure out a handful of “seed” keywords you will focus on.

While many online marketers will tell you to have hundreds if not thousands of keywords, the reality is that there are only a few key search terms people will be looking for.

The goal is to get 10 very well selected TARGET keyword phrases that will be worth the effort. These target keyword phrases should provide enough traffic, a spot on SERPs (search engine results pages) that you can potentially get top ranking in, and will provide the type of targeted traffic you most want.

Use your KEYWORD PHRASES in:

•  Page TITLES 
• Page Headers 
• Sparse bold or italic words  
• Internal linking (Coordinate things so that they match up; linked TEXT must go to a page with the same keywords in the TITLE) 
• External links coming into your site such as Twitter, YouTube videos, your blog (if hosted on an external web site), etc.

Here are a few web sites that will help you determine what keywords you should focus on:

http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

http://www.google.com/insights/search/#

#3. Add a blog to your web page and update it with a new article or post at least once a week.

One of the best is WordPress; however, you will need help from a web master to set it up. Another option is to set up a blog at www.Posterous.com or Blogger.com, which you can easily do in a few minutes.

Whatever you choose, make sure you write relevant, keyword dense articles that link back to your main web site.

BLOGGER.COM
https://www.blogger.com/start

WORDPRESS.COM

http://wordpress.com/

POSTEROUS.COM

http://www.posterous.com/

This blog replicates posts to Blogger.com, Tumbler and Twitter. To post something, simply send an email to post@posterous.com and it will instantly update the pages on all sites, as well as embedding photos and videos.

#4. Start Tweeting!

Twitter is nothing more than a mini blog that should be updated daily. The best Tweets include news, jokes, offers and quotes. Try to include at least one keyword in your Tweet.

TWITTER.COM

Create an account here: http://www.twitter.com/

Read Dan Hollings' work on how to use Twitter in your marketing: http://twittinsecrets.com/