Given a list, there are a few things to know to make your broadcast work.

This is Email Marketing 101 - very basic - but we still see these points violated every day. So I thought it worth repeating (I've said all this before).

1. The subject line is critical. It has to start to interest the person, just as the headline in an ad. Put yourself in their shoes.

Realize that they probably receive a zillion emails every day. If it isn't a personal email from someone they know, chances are it has quite a wall to overcome to get them to stop and look at it, not just delete.

2. Your email needs to be mostly text. Fancy emails largely or completely in images don't work. These days hardly anyone will see your message without clicking to download pictures.

So you can use pictures but you have to interest them enough with the text FIRST so that they DO click to download them.

3. Realize the purpose of your email is to get people to click through to your website. Don't try and do too much with it. Get them interested and give them links to click through to a page on your website (a landing page) that continues the message of your email.

4. Make the email something they want to read. It could be a short, straight sales pitch about something new, a special sale or the like. That's fine for a very targeted mailing list. I'm always happy to receive Tiger Direct's latest "what's on sale" emails.

Most of the time you want informative, interesting content that will keep them reading - not a sales pitch at all. Keep them interested enough to perhaps open the NEXT email you send. Don't make them decide to unsubscribe or just to ignore all future emails from you.

Seth Godin's Permission Marketing is a great book on this. You can't make people receive or read your emails. You are going for their cooperation, willingness and interest.

Your email list may be your most valuable marketing resource. Take good care of it. It took a certain amount of trust and a certain amount of hope for someone to give you their email address. Don't violate that trust, and don't bore them to death.

Email broadcasting remains an incredibly valuable marketing tool.

But, much as other aspects of Internet Marketing, it has changed and is likely to continue to change, but there are some rules you can count on if you want to pursue a strategy.

1, The single biggest issue continues to be spam. You do NOT want to be labeled a spammer.

2. A good targeted email list WHICH YOU HAVE BUILT YOURSELF is about the least expensive and most effective marketing there is.

3. It is almost impossible to buy a usable email list. In some specific instances you can get a list for example, if you are exhibiting at a trade show. That are also many organizations and publications that will send out your email broadcast to their list. They are rarely inexpensive, in fact, they often cost about as much per address as mailing a post card.

4. So the many offers you get for cheap email lists are NOT legitimate.

5. You can build an extremely valuable list yourself, but it isn't going to happen overnight.

6. You have to get people to give you their email addresses. That means you have to give them a reason why THEY would want to give it to you. Everyone is tired of spam, so they aren't just going to give you their address for the heck of it.

Got it?

So let's say you have a list. What do you do with it? Stay tuned....

This information has moved to http://www.fastf.com/knowledge/new-technologies-face-web.htm

Great article in Search Engine Watch, "How Do You Find High-Quality SEO Services?":

Because anyone can sell SEO without a license (or sadly, without any knowledge), the industry is rife with, frankly, crap.

Coupled with this reality is the fact that SEO is a combination of art and science....

High-quality SEO is in high demand indeed. There's a lot of money at stake, too. Traffic and ranking improvements can mean millions of dollars for a company's bottom-line revenues.

This has created a market with service providers who are adept at selling SEO services, but less skilled at carrying them out.

The man speaks Truth. Read the whole article.

This is about SEOs (Search Engine Optimizers) - an article written by a European Internet Marketer. I agree 100% with what he says.

Rules You Have to Know

"Once you've found that great SEO, it's easy to screw up the project...."

You don't have to use the same old Twitter and Facebook icons on your website.

Free Social Media Icons

(thanks to Laura Betterly)

This information has been moved to http://www.fastf.com/knowledge/organic-seo-vs-click-ads.htm

Believe it or not, spam e-mail is on the decline:

Data from Cisco, which makes networking gear, show the volume of e-mail spam began declining slowly in late 2009 (see chart) and by almost half in the past three months, after the authorities disabled spam networks in Russia and the Netherlands.

Seth Godin in his recent book Tribes, heavily promotes the idea of becoming a leader - innovating, creating a new game, gathering like-minded people.

He gives lots of great examples and makes a strong case that this is the wave of the future.

Well, maybe.

Or more accurately, sometimes.

The truth is sometimes you need to lead and sometimes you need to follow.

Here's a great example where the only choice is to follow. It doesn't matter what anyone says about the new TSA screening measures, why they are necessary and make flying safer. True or not, these measures are hated. If the Obama administration doesn't back off, it'll just make Obama less popular. I'm sorry but you just can't sell Americans on the idea that if they want to fly, they have a choice of being viewed naked or receiving intrusive physical pat-downs.

It's common in marketing to find yourself in a situation where your most fruitful route to success is to be a follower.

Of course there are tons of counter-examples. Many marketing gurus have pointed out the fastest and easiest route to huge success is inventing a new category of product, like Xerox when they invented plain paper copiers.

So be alert to what makes most sense for your situation and realize that marketing is VERY different in these two cases.

I predicted that following the U.S. mid-term elections earlier this month, that business would pick up some in some industries. That turned out to be correct.

The other part of my prediction is that the real economic recovery will actually begin after the New Year's.

We already see signs of this. The fact is that the recovery will be led by companies being willing to invest in business expansion activities such as new marketing, hiring and infrastructure. We have been seeing clear signs of that - halting, tentative but clear - over the last couple of weeks.

The caution is that this is going to be slow and spotty for quite a while. Don't expect the economy as a whole to really start humming for a couple of years.

But for many things are going to start getting quite a bit rosier, if I'm right.

One specific caution. The U.S. dollar is being deflated - meaning all imports will become more expensive and less competitive. Likewise U.S. exports will be more competitive overseas.

So factor that into account if there is any international aspect to your business.

If you are going to have effective marketing, it better be reality-based.

Of course 90% of what is being peddled by marketing companies is varying degrees of horse manure, so that is a problem.

Almost every day I speak to prospects who NEED good marketing but are faced with a wide variety of mutually contradictory information, to a point where they can't make up their minds.

I wish there were an easy answer to this, but the smell test is helpful. If it smells funny, it probably is.

Here's one: If easy and cheap answers were workable, everyone would be rich.

Now it doesn't matter who is peddling that particular line. Intuit, the company with the most well-known and widely used financial software in the world (Quickbooks) has and GoDaddy, the world's biggest domain registrar and website hosting company, each have their version of this, promoted with millions of dollars of TV advertising.

Who do you trust? Big names?

Phooey.

It is well known that Google gives credit in search engine rankings if you have a part or all of the search term in your domain name.

This is logical since perhaps you are looking for that exact company.

How Google has dealt with this has changed. A couple of years ago it had to be an exact match or you got no credit for it. Even singular versus plural washed out the advantage.

Now even one word from the search phrase will give you a leg up in rankings.

According to Matt Cutts, Google's spokesperson for Search Quality, this is under debate at Google. The article referenced has more interesting material on what Google is and has been up to.

Matt Cutts at PubCon

We no longer support IE6 with our web designs.

Market share is now way below 10%.

And in case there is any question as to Why:

Why Web Developers Hate IE6

I had to laugh the other day when someone promoted themselves as a Flash SEO expert.

Huh?

That is what is known technically as an oxymoron. Like "cold heat" or "poor rich man".

Flash is NOT good for SEO. It can be AWFUL if you have an all Flash site - Google can barely see your site at all.

Google has made enormous strides over the last couple of years in being able to index text inside a Flash animation.

Here's their latest announcement of progress on this.

Even Better Indexing of Flash Content

That being said, I just saw another example of the limitations. Instant Preview, the new search feature that lets you preview a web page before you click on the link, does not work on Flash pages.

The Obama administration states their losses in the midterm elections are due to a communication problem, they were too focused on getting things done and not enough on communicating what they were doing and how it was helping the country.

I'm trying not to come at this with a particular political point of view. This is the classic is it the marketing? or is it the product? problem. Let's just skip that question.

At the very least you can say it is a difficult marketing problem because the unemployment rate remains high, the economy is in the doldrums and health care costs continue to rise.

Imagine giving someone a medicine and after taking it for a while, the patient feels much worse.

You would have to be coming from quite a position of authority and trust to be able to get a patient to accept that:

a. they would have felt much worse if they didn't take the medicine.
b. if they keep taking it all will be well.

Few companies are in a position to be able to make a sale in those circumstances.

So if there is a takeaway here for marketers, it is this: Some marketing problems are tougher than others.

Google's official announcement on Instant Previews.

Bing has been powering Yahoo search for a couple months.

Now Ask, the only remaining search engine with more than 1% share, is folding, probably will be powered by Google or Bing.

Ask Joins Jeeves in Retirement

And then there is Google.

That's it.

Google continues to roll out upgrades to Search at a mad rate. Barely two weeks after launching the integration of Google Places with organic search, and six weeks after the launch of Google Instant, here's another feature.

This had been announced previously, but now it is fully implemented. You will see a little magnifying glass at the end of the first line of a listing.

Click on that and you'll get a preview of the page.

This will of course reward great looking sites and help people distinguish actual company websites from directories and other intermediary type sites.

Like other recent changes, these are designed to speed up people finding what they are looking for.

Incidentally - or perhaps not - all of these as well tend to bypass the many businesses designed in a greater or lesser degree to compete with Google. Not just the yellow pages sites, but shopping sites, directory sites of all sorts, and so on have less reason for existence and less ability to compete.

Oh yes, and leaving Bing/Yahoo and the lesser search engines in the dust.

But the one big takeaway from all these changes is this:

More than ever, you need a great website and effective Internet Marketing.

It only makes sense to have a system in place so you don't lose track of the domains you own, your logins or email addresses for notification.

We usually keep track of this for our clients and make sure we are info'd on emails. so that this kind of thing doesn't happen:

Someone, probably someone not named Phillips, neglected to renew the domain name "dallascowboys.com" and as the Cowboys were playing the Packers on Sunday night in Green Bay, the site was replaced by a page that indicated the name was available for purchase from Network Solutions.

If it can happen to the Cowboys, it can happen to anyone.

There are many companies selling Internet Marketing Cheap.

The reason why you should run screaming in the other direction when you see this is that Internet Marketing is inherently a challenging undertaking.

No less a person than Google's spokesperson for search, Matt Cutts, says it is as much art as science.

While there are many things we know, there are at least four important elements that are constantly changing:

1. Google is making major changes at a faster rate than any time in its history. Each important change affects what we have to do for our clients to a greater or lesser degree.

2. Competition is not standing still and that can affect such factors as how large a site needs to be to compete, or what it has to do to differentiate itself and stand out from the competitors.

3. Your prospective customers are changing. How they search, what their fads are and so on, all can affect how you market your products, services and business. This includes seasonal changes as well as changes in the economy which affect the Internet to a degree WAY beyond what you would expect - we can see the shifts quite literally month by month.

4. Technological changes can majorly affect what you can or should do with a website or in promoting it.

All these factors make Internet Marketing a continuous challenge - and one which someone not focused on the area has little hope of keeping up with.

Some may wonder why such a high percentage of my posts are about Google, what it is up to, and what it all means.

Some may think I'm obsessed.

Well, maybe I am.

But there are few elements of this civilization that are significantly consequential. I can assure you that 50 years from now, Nancy Pelosi and John Boehner are going to be footnotes.

Amongst the factors that DO matter, few are corporate. Google is one of them.

Google matters.

Especially, if you are in the marketing business Google matters.

Here's the official announcement on the change in Google Places - which Google is calling "Place Search". Note that if Google doesn't automatically serve up integrated local results, you can now select it in the left column.

For example, a search on "Dentist Tampa" gives old-style local listings, but clicking on the "Places" button gives integrated listings, which however, exclude videos and other "universal search" items. If you then click onto page two, you get only places results whereas, if Google is computing you are looking for local results (search Tampa Dentist to see the difference - and note that word order matters!) you get very different results on page two.

On a search for "Clearwater website designers", Google is so un-convinced you're looking for local results you have to click "more" in the left column even to get Places as a choice.

You can also see the "snippets" the information lines, will change sometimes.

Lots more to learn about what this all means....

We believe that Google is running a large-scale test right now which is why there are at least three different versions of the Search Engine Results Pages. Most likely within a few weeks, that will be concluded and all SERPs with maps (Places) listings will be fully integrated.

What does this mean?

1. If you are in local search, it becomes MUCH more important that you have Place pages with correct information.

2. It becomes essential to have at least one image on your Place page, so that a thumbnail shows on the SERPs, giving your listing much more emphasis.

3. It makes Reviews a much more important subject. A systematic approach to getting positive reviews and ratings onto your Place page is now essential.

4. Because national companies won't have a local Place page, it will be harder for them to compete with local companies in each locale.

5. Some businesses will be DRAMATICALLY affected by this change. Not all by any means, but some may see a huge increase or huge drop in traffic to their sites.

More to come....

Google about a week ago started to roll out another huge change.

This only affects searches where Google serves up its Places listings (formerly known as Maps, or Local).

So this is only a portion, even of local searches. For example, if you search for "website designers Clearwater" you don't get it, because no one cares exactly where a website designer is located. Dentists, Plumbers and many other searches, are a different story.

Currently there are at least three different versions of the SERP (Search Engine Results Page) that Google will serve up. One is close to the past version, where all the local listings are gathered together, typically after the first few organic listings. However, the map itself is now moved to the top of the right column.

The second version is similar but with each local listing after the first indented further.

The third version is the most radical. Places listings are FULLY integrated with organic search results so the two combined have only 10 listings on the 1st page. If a company has BOTH a Places page AND a website, the two listings are combined, and if their places page has pictures, a thumbnail is displayed.

This makes for a VERY much more robust display, occupying more vertical space, with more information and a picture.

Expect that such listings will immediately start gathering the lion's share of the clicks, even at the expense of higher ranked sites.

There is a lot more to be said about this change. It is HUGE for those businesses that it affects. I'll have more to say over the next couple of days.

In case there was any question that the Internet is here to stay.

You can now get broadband Internet on the top of Mt. Everest.

Or at least electioneering is.

It seems appropriate on this national election day in the U.S., to remind that what politicians do to get elected is called marketing.

In fact, most media coverage of elections is about the various marketing efforts, their target markets, how much they are spending, and how effective they are (polls).

The major reason the results have been such a whip-saw over the last few election cycles is because, of course, this doesn't have much to do with their ability to actually govern - or even what policies they will attempt to implement.

You may recall my frequent essays on how great marketing starts with a great product.

In politics that would be someone with policies that will actually be effective, plus the skill to actually implement them.

Now how rare is that? Republicans are fond of saying that we should elect people who have actually run a company and met a payroll. Sure, that at least gives hope of competence.

Yet if you ever studied the workings of large corporations, you'd be faced with horror stories right, left and center. At the end the usual thought is amazement that these companies manage to survive at all.

The occasional exception - Google comes to mind - stands out by its rarity.

End of rant.

You know a slogan has entered general circulation when it becomes a snowclone (like "X is the new Y").

Samsung has a new TV that runs applications, much like an iPhone. Even look on-screen imitates iPhone app icons.

Their slogan?

Now There's a TV for That

Of course.

Our lowest uptime percentage for a premium hosting client, for October was 99.96% (or 20 minutes downtime in the entire month).

Just to reinforce the quality of our hosting services. We also monitor uptime for Internet Marketing clients we are not hosting, since of course that can effect performance. Half of them had worse uptimes than ANY of our sites.