What is Spam? 5 Years in Jail ?? Yikes!

A month or so ago I moved my Internet Marketing for Wedding Professionals e-newsletter from AWeber to Constant Contact.

I really like Constant Contact and while it doesn't do everything I have with AWeber (auto-responders, being one of the main differences) it is better.

I'll talk more about Constant Contact and email marketing and how you can use it in the near future at Book More Weddings / Marketing To Brides Online websites.... but today I thought I'd share Constant Contact's SPAM policy.

I'm always asked:

"What is SPAM"

"Can I use this list of email addresses I just got from the bridal show I did last weekend?"

"How do I get email addresses?"

If you follow these guidelines and rules you'll have a complete understanding of SPAM and keep yourself out of jail (yes, you can be put in jail for up to 5 years!).

Constant Contact's Policy (http://ui.constantcontact.com/CCSpamPolicy.jsp)

What is SPAM?

It is a yummy luncheon meat that tastes delicious on white bread with mayo and mustard. Oops... wrong Spam.

SPAM is unsolicited email also known as UCE (Unsolicited Commercial Email). By sending email to only to those who have requested to receive it, you are following accepted permission-based email guidelines.

What constitutes a pre-existing business relationship?

The recipient of your email has made a purchase, requested information, responded to a questionnaire or a survey, or had offline contact with you.
What constitutes consent?

The recipient of your email has been clearly and fully notified of the collection and use of his email address and has consented prior to such collection and use. This is often called informed consent.

Chris: So you should have a business relationship, or pending business relationship AND consent. Not just one or the other - both!

Isn't there a law against sending Spam?

The federal anti-spam law went into effect on January 1st, 2004 and preempts all state laws. While this new law will not stop spam, it does make most spam illegal and ultimately less attractive to spammers. The law is specific about requirements to send commercial email and empowers the federal government to enforce the law. The penalties can include a fine and/or imprisonment for up to 5 years.

How Constant Contact protects you from sending spam:

Constant Contact is a permission-based email-marketing tool that follows the strictest permission-based philosophies:

Communication - Your Constant Contact registration page already states why you are collecting the site visitor's email address, how you plan to use their address, and that you are following the embedded privacy policy. Additionally, by accepting our license agreement you have agreed to use only permission-based lists and never to sell or rent your lists.

Verification - Constant Contact automatically sends all of your new contacts an email confirming their interest in receiving emails from you. Additionally, if your contact changes his or her interests or unsubscribes, Constant Contact automatically sends an email confirmation.

Unsubscribe - Every email generated from Constant Contact contains an unsubscribe link which allows your contacts to opt-out of future emails and automatically updates your contact lists to avoid the chance of sending unwanted emails to visitors who have unsubscribed.

Identification - Your email header information is correct because it is pre-set for you by Constant Contact. Your email's "From" address is verified and already accurately identifies you as the sender.

Contact Information - all of your emails are pre-filled with your contact information including your physical address.

How to protect yourself from Spam: Take the Spam Test

1. Are you importing a purchased list of ANY kind?
2. Are you sending to non-specific addresses such as: sales@domain.com, business@domain.com, webmaster@domain.com, info@domain.com, or other general addresses.
3. Are you sending to distribution lists or mailing lists which send indirectly to a variety of email addresses?
4. Are you mailing to anyone who has not explicitly agreed to join your mailing list? (This is why I believe it is SPAM and ILLEGAL to send email to mail lists you get from a bridal show that you participated in).
5. Have you falsified your originating address or transmission path information?
6. Have you used a third party email address or domain name without their permission?
7. Does your email's subject line contain false or misleading information?
8. Does your email fail to provide a working link to unsubscribe?
9. Are you failing to process any unsubscribe requests that come to you via a reply to your email within 10 days or the request?

If you have answered YES to ANY of the above questions you will likely be labeled a SPAMMER.

For more information visit The Coalition Against Unsolicited Email (http://www.cauce.org/) or contact Constant Contact (http://www.constantcontact.com/).

Chris Jaeger
Book More Weddings
http://www.bookmoreweddings.com/

Get the ADVANTAGE for your website. More traffic, more brides, more inquiries, more sales.

Increase your "dwell time" with FLASH (NOT)

DISCLAIMER: VENT AHEAD

Here's another reason to get expert advice to help you with your online marketing...

Found on the front page of a webmaster/developers home page:

Our designers specialize in Adobe and Macromedia graphic software and will work with you to create images, animations, and effects that grab your viewers attention and increase the dwell time on your web site.

"increase the dwell time"

OMG

People don't come to your website to "dwell" or to be entertained with graphics and animated dancing objects.

If your webmaster or designer tells you Flash or animated objects on your home page will enhance the user-experience... please find better advice. Your business depends on it.

New Wedding Planning Directory of Local Wedding Services

Marketing to brides just got a bit easier. Our new website, Wedding Vendor 411, makes it easier for brides to find your website online. Watch for our official launch in September.

http://www.weddingvendor411.com

Marketing to Brides Online Using WordPress for a Website - Why Not?

WordPress is blogging software. But it can also be used to create and manage a website. It is easy to update, offers a lot of flexibility with design and features, and is fairly search engine friendly (with a few tweaks). Without a doubt it can be used as an effective tool for marketing to brides.

Here is a great example. It's a bit simple but I bet if a bride visits she makes an inquiry, and that's what it's all about.

http://www.collectivememoriesvideo.com

The Key To Success

Bill Cosby is a guy I'd like to hang around with for the day. I recently ran across a quote of his:

"I don't know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody."

Chris Jaeger
Book More Weddings
http://www.bookmoreweddings.com

Are you marketing to brides online? Get the ADVANTAGE for your website. More traffic, more brides, more inquiries, more sales.

Losing Ground With Google and Other Search Engines

I just got off the phone with an old friend from WAY back in the early Internet days. She was frustrated at how her top ranked website was very noticably yet gradually falling, over the past six to twelve months, at Google for a lot of her targeted keywords.

It's true, I've been watching it.... even telling her she should do something about it. I even tossed her a few "pearls of wisdom" about eight months ago at lunch.

Here's why it's happening and why it might be happening to you.

Six to eight YEARS ago everyone was linking to "good content" and "good websites." It was the thing to do to "help your users have a more pleasureable experience..." at your website.

The idea was better experience leads to "oh, we had such a nice "experience" at that wedding vendor's website that we're going to go back..."

PLEASE SHOOT ME !!

Anyway, back to the story... so years ago other websites linked to this website, or maybe YOUR website, and most of the time you didn't even know it.

Someone found your website, it looked nice, maybe it was top ranked so it was "popular," it had good content.

But things changed.

People got smarter and more stingey about sending their traffic away. Heck, it's hard enough to get it in the first place... better be careful how much of it you send away.

Links AWAY from a website now are mostly seen for what they are: sending potential customers AWAY from your business to someone else's.

AWAY is no way to get a new customer if you're a wedding photographer, wedding videographer, or anyone marketing to brides online.

Don't believe me? How many websites do you know see with banners at the top of them to "Top Wedding Links" and "Look For Us at Best Weddings.COM."

I digress...

So one of the things that has happened as a result of this phenomena is that YOUR site, like hers, has fewer links to it.

This is particularly true if you don't have a link building strategy in place.

It's nothing you've done wrong, other than ignoring how quickly things change on the Internet, but it's a result of the way people "link" or use links at their websites.

It's changed dramatically in the past few years.

Again, these might even be links you DIDN'T KNOW you had. They might have been a link to your website or maybe an entire "links" page was eliminated (where you were just one of the links). This typically took place when a website was "redesigned."

Either way... a link TO your website, which Google views as "vote of confidence," so-to-speak, or "algorithmically" (yikes!), is now gone.

And since Google heavily weighs links that point TO a website as a vote of confidence, they even use it as a factor of Google Page Rank, as my friend lost link after link, very unbeknownst to her, sooner or later Google picked up on it (i.e. fewer links to her website) and it has has a negative impact on her overall rankings at Google.

It gets a little worse...

Add to that that the websites that WERE linking probably were losing THEIR rank for the same reason or because their competition built better websites that were more crawler friendly with better relevancy...

Add to that a million other websites like hers, and yours, that have come on line (i.e.dilution)...

Add to that other search engine optimization variables that weigh equally as important as "links"...

And you have what you have today: losing ground with Google and other search engines.

What should she do?

Join my ADVANTAGE program.

I said four years ago "the days of free traffic are dwindling fast." There's no such thing as free lunch.

Chris Jaeger
Book More Weddings
http://www.bookmoreweddings.com/

Get the ADVANTAGE for your website. More traffic, more brides, more inquiries, more sales.

Mobile Beat - July 2008

I always enjoy getting my copy of Mobile Beat Magazine, Ryan Burger's magazine for the mobile entertainment industry. It's always got a great cover. The stuff inside is good too!

Todd Donald's article "Can You Really Afford Your Web Advertising?" is right on.

Bottom line: if you're not running a PROFITABLE business you're not in business - all the advertising in the world won't change that - so you have to be careful advertising online because it can add up fast.

He talks about website conversion of 1% to 2%. Sadly, he's quite accurate.

Website conversion is when someone who visits your website actually does something you want them to, like fill in an inquiry form or call you on the phone.

He goes on to say that this miseable conversion (miserable, being my word) is a factor of 24/7/365 access by anyone anywhere in the world - and that's partially true.

The Internet makes it really easy to just waste time clicking around because you're bored and you've already seen The Matrix about 1000 times on cable... who hasn't mindlessly browsed the web for hours?

But also another reason, and the #1 reason for miserable conversion, is:

LOUSY WEB SITES

Lousy websites, websites that don't present a company well, that probably have one of my "10 Reasons A Bride Will Leave Your Website" problems, that don't give a bride/groom the information they came looking for - fast, and deliver a poor "what's in it for me" message and poor "unique value proposition" are THE NUMBER ONE reason conversion is 1% to 2% at most websites.

At some, it's even worse.

Another factor, in calculating conversion, which I've been saying for years; THROW HALF OF YOUR VISITOR SESSION TRAFFIC OUT.

You're not counting "hits" right? If you are we need to talk.

Half of your traffic is no good. Visitor sessions, that is. It is not from real people looking to buy your services. It is search engine spiders, spam-bots collecting/searching for email addreses, people in the Phillipines hired for $100/week to find web-forms and fill them out with SPAM, your own staff updating the website, your mother, your mother's friends (because she's telling everyone you have a website!), and these people are not people who are qualified or interested in buying your services/products - so of course, they don't make inquiries.

As a result, one of your conversion variables, "total visitor sessions" is skewed from the start.

Try this instead: Take half your visitor sessions and throw them out!

1000 visitor sessions last month
divded by 2

=500 visitor sessions

50 inquiries = 10% conversion
25 inquiries = 5% conversion

Frankly, if you have anything less than 5% there is something wrong with your website and your marketing to brides online strategy.

Keep up the good work over there at Mobile Beat guys!

Google Now Crawling and Indexing Flash

Don't get too excited though...

If you are marketing to brides online and have a Flash website there's good news, sort of, for you today.

Google just announced it has a new algorithm that is crawling and indexing Flash and Flash web pages. So, Happy Days for all those with Flash websites.

Right?

Well, not exactly, there's a "but." Actually, a BIG but...

And here it is: Don't be overly optimistic that your Flash website will shoot it's way to a top ranked position at Google or any other search engine, anytime soon, as a result of this change.

Don't think your Flash site (or pages) are still not at a dis-advantage to static/crawler-friendly pages.

I still think VERY crawler-friendly websites, that are professional-quality search engine optimized, the static/html type, will beat out Flash websites for a VERY long time - at least two more years.

Why, you ask? For no other reason than there are dozens of other factors involved with an effective search engine optimization strategy and this new algorithm is only a small piece, although a step in the right direction (if you like Flash), so it really doesn't mean a lot right now.

On a similar note, I spent a lot of time yesterday poking around at a lot of different wedding photographer's and wedding videographer's websites.

I have to tell you, I'm not impressed with Flash at all. What aggravated me the most was the WAIT.

Wait for this to load, wait for that to load...

Oh... and then load some MUSIC on me.

Oh... make it almost impossible for me to read (white text on black backgrounds, graphic-based text vs. text-based, framed windows that I have to scroll, pull-down options that don't work... the list is LONG...)

Add on some navigation that doesn't work or start the whole process of waiting again.

Folks, the web is NOT a TV commercial and frankly I would bet lunch a website that focuses MORE on INFORMATION instead of we'll-impress-them-with-our-Flash, will convert more of your traffic into inquiries.

Actually, I can give you at least 5 examples of wedding photographers who went "Flash" and were totally frustrated that brides couldn't find them at Google, Yahoo!, or MSN.

Even driving traffic to them with Google Adwords (pay-per-click) didn't work. The conversion was horrible.

Bottom line: Flash may still not be the most effective way for marketing to brides online.

I know I'm not going to make it on the Christmas card list of all you folks out there with Flash sites... and Flash developers are sticking another needle in their Chris Jaeger Voodoo Doll - but at least you're hearing it straight from someone.



Chris Jaeger