Email marketing for newbies
and professionals

Keep visitors coming back

Update your web site constantly. Be on the lookout for articles and new information on your topic that will interest the people who visit your site. You will keep your customers happy by providing them with more than just a product, and you’ll keep search engines happy by listing new and updated content.

One way to keep visitors returning and get more traffic is reciprocal linking. This is the practice of putting up links to other sites on yours in exchange for a link on theirs. You can create a separate web site page for your links; it will give your listeners even more resources as well as draw traffic from other sites. Though not quite as effective as inbound non-reciprocal links (links from other sites to yours when no return link exists on your site) in influencing search engines, these links still carry some rank weight. It is important to ensure that all the outbound and reciprocal links on your web site are related to your topic—otherwise, it will reflect badly on your professional image as well as your search engine rank.

 
The No-Spam Diet: Black and white listing

By following the rules to refrain from sending out spam and making your web site professional, you can avoid blacklisting. This is when a search engine bans your site or IP address from its listings—and the ban is unfortunately a permanent one.

Other actions that will put your web site on the blacklist:

• Mirror web sites.
  This occurs when you register for more than one domain name, but post the exact same content on each site. This is also a good reason not to plagiarize content from other sites. If you manage to get someone else’s successful site banned from search engines, you will have one unhappy internet marketer on your hands.

• Invisible text.
  One formerly common way to avoid obvious keyword stuffing was to add long strings of keywords to web pages in small font size, in the same color as the background of the page. This text is “invisible” to visitors, but not to search engines—and the spiders are on to this practice.

• Submitting pages too often.
  Keep to the 30-day rule when submitting your page to search engines. When a search engine receives duplicate page submissions within 24 hours, it is often immediate cause for blacklisting.

• Using a free web site host.
  This doesn’t usually result in blacklisting, but free web site hosts don’t generally make the climb to the top of search engine ranks. Downtime and bandwidth exceeding will deter crawlers from your site, and if it happens often enough your listing will be dropped (but not banned) from the search engine. If you plan to have a lot of traffic coming in to your site, you should seriously consider investing in a paid web site host.

If you are interested in finding out whether your site has been blacklisted, you can monitor some of the most popular blacklists yourself by searching for your site on MAPS Realtime Blackhole List or SpamCop.

Since blacklists are undesirable, you may have guessed that whitelists are the opposite: highly desirable. The practice of whitelisting e-mail lists came about in an effort to control the volume of spam flying across cyberspace. ISPs (internet service providers, such as AOL, Earthlink, MSN, and Yahoo) maintain lists of “safe” sites that are allowed to send messages to their e-mail customers. You can write directly to the ISPs and request to be on their whitelist.

Another way to be whitelisted is to subscribe to a certified sender program such as Habeas, where ISPs can access the list to find out whether a sender is qualified non-spam. Or, you could simply put yourself on your subscribers’ personalized whitelists by requesting that they set their e-mail filters to allow your mail. You can either do this in the body of your autoresponder messages (the best place is after you tell them what the next message will contain), or install a simple pop-up message to appear after your customer subscribes reminding them to add your domain to their “safe list.”

 
Launch your list-building campaign

Of course, the most effective means of driving traffic to your site will be your autoresponder series. Your well-crafted messages will send people in droves to your site to check out and see what you have to say. Just make sure you give them a good reason to go there, and great reasons to keep coming back, and you will build a rock-solid autoresponder campaign that keeps your profits rolling in.

Remember to check out the sample autoresponder series in the index for more great ideas on crafting effective sales messages. You’ll also find links to even more resources to help you on your internet marketing journey.
And above all remember this: have fun!

Next: Sample autoresponder messages