"The Banter" A Quarterly Newsletter: Vol. 1, 4th Quarter :: October 2005

How to Increase Your Opt In List by 322% in 28 Days Our Clients in the Spotlight: First Interstate Properties, LTD Tech Tips: What Is E-mail Phishing? Product Highlight: Cobalt Direct Email Marketing Keeps Customers, Customers! A Case Study: LightHouse Promotions LLC Designers Corner: Help Search Engines get Smarter, ROR your Website! Guest Columnist How to Increase Your Opt In List by 322% in 28 Days by: Colin Evans "The money's in your list" - how many times have you heard this statement? Plenty I'll bet... Ever wondered why it's been repeated so often it's like a mantra? Simple, it's the truth. Anybody who owns a list containing the contact details of people interested in their products or services, has a high degree of control over sales. Luckily, there are numerous low or no cost ways you can rapidly double, triple or even quadruple the size of your opt in subscriber list. Here are 3 of them: 1) Increase Your Opt In List Through Ezine Advertising. Many ezine publishers incorporate advertisements into their emails. Most will charge for this, but there are ezine owners who publish ads for free. Without getting too involved, here are the three basic types of ezine ads: i) Solo Ads - separate emails dedicated to a single advert, and are the most effective. Unfortunately, nearly all ezine publishers will charge for a solo ad. ii) Top Sponsor Ads - a short classified ad published at the top of an email. Not as effective as solo ads, but most ezine publishers will charge for these. iii) Trailer Ads - these are short ads published in the middle or at the bottom of the email and are the least effective. They are often grouped with a number of other ads, and are the most likely type of free ezine advertising you'll find. If you are prepared to search, you will find ezines which publish free ads, and many ezine publishers allow new subscribers a free solo or top sponsor ad. 2) Increase Your Opt In List By Posting to Forums. If you think the only people to frequent online forums (or discussion groups or bulletin boards as they are also called) are spotty faced techno geeks, you are wrong... Successful business people (and some of the wealthiest) use forums and they do so for 4 major reasons: i) They are looking for advice - people like to ask for opinions about various products or services before purchasing. They also ask for help on using the multiplicity of ideas, tools and services available on the internet. ii) They are on a search for new products - the replies to people looking for advice often contain links to new ideas, tips, tools and services, making forums a great place to search (and just as great a place for you to promote your list). iii) They are searching for ideas for their own products - the types of questions asked, and the number of people asking similar questions often leads to the creation of a successful product. iv) They want to make contact with others - quite often the owners of the tools and services recommended to those searching for advice will set up joint ventures with each other. This is good news for you as a list owner if you frequent forums related to the topic of your list, because in no time at all you will be able to post numerous helpful replies to other forum user's questions. Most forums will allow you to use a "sig file" at the end of your post. This is where you place a brief advertisement and the link to your list. 3) Increase Your Opt In List Through Small Changes to Your Everyday Business Stationery. A common misperception is to think list building is only an internet marketing "thing". The plain truth is offline businesses also benefit from building their own email lists. If business is slow, you could send an email to your list containing a "discount coupon" for a particular product or service you sell. A boring morning idly watching people stroll past your shop window could quite easily turn into a mad rush, which leaves your cash register bulging to the point of busting. To get people to join your list, you need to make maximum use of every piece of normal everyday business stationery. On every invoice, statement, packing slip, delivery note, parts list, itinerary, you name it, you must have a brief advertisement and the link to your optin form. You can build on these three tips and put together a formidable list building arsenal. Don't sell yourself short by using only one method, use as many as you possibly can and you could build an incredible list in a relatively short space of time. About The Author Colin Evans is editor of the List Building Tips newsletter. Get a free detailed 7 step process to supercharge your opt in list, visit ... http://www.list-building-tips.com. articles@opti-income.com This article was posted on September 12, 2005 Back to Top Our Clients in the Spotlight: First Interstate Properties, LTD Website: www.first-interstate.com As a full service real estate development and management company, First Interstate is dedicated to quality work, quality relationships and uncompromised values. Known for the recent development of Legacy Village, an upscale, first-class "life style" retail center located in Beachwood, Ohio, they've built a solid reputation as the development firm that becomes an intricate part of the community. They've accomplished this by establishing long-term relationships and demonstrating long-term commitments to that community in which they have properties. The results can surely be seen in any one of the properties it owns. Back to Top Tech Tips: What Is E-mail Phishing? E-mail Phishing is the act of sending a false e-mail claiming to be an established business in an attempt to trick the e-mail receiver into giving up private information that can be used for identity theft. Almost all of the time, the e-mails will state that the established business needs to verify information about you and your account. Usually this information that they are asking for is sensitive information about you. According to some recent media reports, e-mail phishing attacks are on an increase. Here are some tips on what you should do to protect yourself from these scams: NEVER provide personal or financial information, such as bank account or Social Security Numbers, etc. Avoid clicking through links in e-mails asking for such information. Be cautious about opening any attachment or downloading any files from e-mails Use anti-virus software and a firewall, and keep them up to date If you think the e-mail might be genuine, call the company using a telephone number that you know to be genuine, and ask them about it. Also, read tips from the Federal Trade Commission on how to protect you from e-mail phishing scams. If you ever receive e-mail from Intersoft that you're unsure about, please send the e-mail to: support@intersoftgroup.com. We will be able to tell you if it is a legitimate e-mail from us or not. Back to Top Product Highlight: Direct Email Marketing Keeps Customers, Customers! Cobalt is a web based email marketing software that sends personalized HTML emails to your mailing lists for direct email campaigns and marketing. Cobalt helps you stay in contact with your prospects & customers, send newsletters, product updates, sales promotions and much more! It also allows you to categorize your emails. You can import email addresses by industry, product line, type or any other category you choose. It's unlimited! Cobalt delivers statistics on the number of emails sent and is capable of automated bounce and opt-out processing. Cobalt comes with powerful campaign tracking showing exactly WHO opened your emails and WHO clicked on the URL links in your message. Cobalt complies with all the new Federal anti spam legislation by allowing recipients to opt out from further mailings. In addition, it keeps a master opt-out list and checks the list before sending any email. So should an email get added back into the system, they still would not receive unwanted email. Simply deleting emails would not accomplish this and could lead to a violation of the new law. Getting started with Cobalt is easy! There are no setup fees, no contracts & no suprises. Cobalt is $19.95/month and only $2.75/1000 sent emails. Order Online or Call 1.888.932.7228 today to get started! Back to Top A Case Study: www.lhpromo.com LightHouse Promotions LLC LightHouse Promotions provides quality apparel and promotional products with over 13 years experience in helping people with their promotional needs. Excellent products, excellent price and excellent pursuit set them apart from the rest. Challenge: LightHouse Promotions was looking for a way to contact local area businesses to alert them to their ad specialty products and monthly specials. Solution: They were introduced to the Cobalt Email Marketing System and decided to give it a try. Impressive enough, after their first Cobalt campaign, they managed to peak interest to their site and increase sales. Back to Top Designers Corner: Help Search Engines get Smarter, ROR your Website What is ROR? ROR (Resources of a Resource) is an exciting new website content description tool and format. It makes it very easy to describe the content, objects, and structure of your website so search engines and other web applications can better find and understand your information. For example if you are selling products, ROR enables you to document your product names, descriptions, prices, images, availability, affiliate programs, etc. Or if your site or blog provides information on a given topic, it allows you to describe how this information is organized (sitemap, topics, categories, new information, archive, blogroll, etc). ROR also provides terms for documenting objects such as contacts, articles, newsletter, feeds, images, audio, links, reviews, privacy policy, copyrights, and more. ROR information can be easily added to your website by adding a ROR File called ror.xml. To create the file ROR provides templates and examples. It also provide a ROR File Editor, which will extract information from your website and allow you to describe it further. Larger websites can also generate ROR files from their databases. Why Describe? But why is it important to describe your website? Well, consider this phrase: "We offer a 10% discount on all our products until Mother's Day". While these words mean a lot to your visitors, they unfortunately won't mean much to a search engine or shopping search engine. Language is extremely complex and it will take time even for Google to elevate search to such levels of sophistication. And that's just one language, English. So for now, to communicate your product information to shopping search engines you typically need to provide a feed (a machine-readable description of your products), and re-submit that feed to each engine each time the information changes. And to make matters worse, none of these feeds have the same format, so you also have to learn each format. Another Approach ROR suggests a better approach. Since search engines already come to your site to read text information about your products, it makes sense to also read additional information like prices, image URLs, discounts, etc. This way, you only change the information once, in your ROR file, and that's it. Product information is just one example but it illustrates this issue rather well. ROR information can also be displayed on your website in a generic fashion so visitors can quickly and easily find information, without the need to re-learn or remember the structure and navigation of each website they visit. For that purpose, ROR provides an Info Button. The button reads the information directly from your ROR file. ROR simply makes a lot of sense! It's powerful, easy, and very flexible. ROR your Website, Spread the Word You can get your ROR file at http://www.rorweb.com, it only takes a few minutes for a basic file. You can always add more information later. You can also help spread the word by adding this article on your website, or a link to it. Happy RORing! The ROR Team http://www.rorweb.com Back to Top