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Rude and crass e-mail seems to be at an all time high. E-mails blurting out demands or questions without the courtesy of a decent subject field or a thank you to follow. Questions or requests that are demanding a reply without the courtesy of a hello, or a closing that notes their name.

Could it be because manners seem to be at an all time low off-line? Combine this with folks not learning the power of the written word or the skills to communicate clearly to reflect their tone and intent and you have a volatile combination.

There are two assumptions here. The first being that anything goes online. There are no rules, you can do what you want - period - and don’t try to tell anyone differently.

Secondly and a big contributor, is the belief that there is no good reason (even if there actually is one) for anyone to not say what they want when they want (freedom of speech issue) or have what they want, when they want it and how they want it. Consideration for other’s feelings and opinions don’t matter when you can tap out some uninformed crudeness and hit Send.

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The topic of sending attachments by e-mail is not one that is discussed as much as it probably should be. It is easy to attach a file to an e-mail. Almost too easy! E-mail programs allow you to attach almost anything, regardless of the size and format without giving the sender any sort of guidance as to the consequences of their actions.

And yes, there are consequences. Like shutting down other’s e-mail accounts and causing subsequent e-mail to bounce. Now, that’s not a very nice thing to do, is it? And to think with just a bit of thoughtfulness you can avoid embarrassment and set an example of proper technology use!

Most that forward attachments or send photos along are doing so with good intentions not purposefully wanting to cause any problems for the other side. That said, though, one has to take a moment and think before attaching files to an e-mail and clicking Send. To simply attach files without taking the time to consider the person on the other side can come off as self-serving not to mention reflecting your overall lack of tech savvy.

My first email address was with compuserve.com back when you could only have numbers for an email address. They then allowed us to have letters as well on prodigy so I switched internet service providers or internet content providers as they are better known to us geeks. My next stop was with the number one provider AOL and my name became an extension of my love for jazz music and I have had that email address ever since. I also have a yahoo.com email address that I use strictly for its Spam filter and free virus protection software that is built into the website. Free email addresses are great and I suggest you take advantage of their many no cost features. But I only use them for personal reasons. The main reason I don’t use them for business is because I refuse to give the free email services anymore free publicity and not get anything in return.

The use of email addresses that promote anything but your business is a waste of great branding potential. Every time you send and email to a potential client or customer you have a perfect opportunity to promote your business. Yahoo and MSN will gladly give you a free email address because you help market their business with every click of the send button.

Any business today, be it online or off needs a solid foundation, without one a business will topple.

Think of your business as a skyscraper, each level or floor is a different function within your business. Your skyscraper may contain a newsletter floor, an automated follow-up floor, a floor for free reports, an eCourse floor, a networking floor and so on. The height of your particular skyscraper (business) depends upon how many floors or functions operate within your business, each is important and one does not function without a strong foundation.

The “foundation” of all of these floors is based upon email marketing.

Think about it for a second. Your skyscraper did not start to build it’s floors without first starting with email marketing and the building of a good, solid list. You certainly would not have a newsletter floor without a list. If you didn’t have a list, then who would you send your newsletter to? No need for an automated follow-up floor, because if you didn’t do email marketing, you didn’t gather an email address from a prospect, therefore there is no need to follow-up.

The #1 Thing You *MUST* Have Before Even Thinking About Building An Opt In Email List

It’s not a website.

It’s a smart autoresponder and mailing list software.

Be aware, I just said smart autoresponder. Not a cheesy one, I mean regular one.

You know what a regular autoresponder is. It’s the thing that a lot of people use when they are out of the office or on vacation. It works like this.

Let’s say you are emailing a friend that is out of town. You send the email and then instantly you get a reply back saying something like this, “I’m out of the office right now, I’m on vacation and won’t be back until Tuesday the 21st.”

Well, that’s a regular autoresponder.

What you want to have before you even think about building a list is a smart autoresponder. Here’s how it works, when someone sends it an email it captures their first name, last name, email address, date stamp, and IP address.

That’s just if they send an email, now what if you had a form on your website or a popup?

It will capture almost any information that you want and get this.

How many times have you realized that your email simply doesn’t arrive to your list or you suspect something is going wrong because you don’t get the response you are waiting for?, this is more common today than yesterday and will be critical tomorrow.

It’s frustrating for us that our Content is not deliver to the end-user, this is true for you and all the people dependable on email technology, the results plainly don’t come, whatever they can be.

Have you seen those funny email arriving to your email container with odd characters that some times seem like the sender is telling you rude words? Don’t take it literally, is an effort from the advertisers to deliver their best proposition trying to bypass the filters… some of them will arrive, some of them are taken out from you and put inside the waste container of your ISP.

Is there some hope for the small entrepreneur in this jungle of spam filters, viruses, and junk information?

Deliver Quality Content To End-user And Promote Your Products Without Annoying Spam Filters: RSS Gives you the Chance To Deliver messages To End-user

Out of all the possible approaches to affiliate marketing, lead capture and list building represents the smartest and most effective option.

Why?

A lost visitor is a lost sale. A lost visitor is the loss of potential repeat sales. Think of it this way: you’re putting time and money into your advertising. If you aren’t capturing your visitor’s email addresses, you’re basically throwing all of that traffic right down the drain.

When you capture your visitors to your list, you open a whole new world of profit opportunities - not just for the short term, but for the long term as well.

The Benefits of List Marketing

- You can educate your prospects. This will increase your conversion rate by giving you the opportunity to turn hesitant prospects into enthusiastic customers.

- You can market to your prospects over and over again. Your long term profit potential exists in repeat sales. Never work for “just one sale”.

- You can double your return on investment while lowering your advertising costs. Once you’ve got a list in place, you don’t have to limit your offerings to just affiliate product. You can bring in any additional, related products of interest to your list and make sales immediately without going through the same advertising process all over again.

Autoresponders, or responders, are simply programs that allow you to send out pre-written emails which have been pre-loaded into the responder. Prospective customers or recruits either input their email addresses into a signup form on a website or send a blank email to a trigger address. They are then entered into a database and receive your emails at the intervals you specify when you set up the responder.

This is an extremely powerful marketing techinque as it allows you to send repeated messages to people who have positively displayed their interest in whatever you’re promoting.

Numerous studies have shown that the majority of consumers will not buy, or signup to something, at the first exposure. Prospects typically need to have somewhere between 5 and 12 exposures to the product or service before they feel comfortable enough to commit. The ideal number of follow up contacts is often said to be 7, but this will vary depending upon the individual consumer and the product on offer.

Another powerful reason for making the switch from using the unlimited autoresponders that come free with your web hosting account to paying a monthly fee for an autoresponder service is improved legal protection.

Since all e-mails you send using a paid autoresponder service are hosted on their servers, you are insulated from false accusations of sending spam (unsolicited commercial e-mail).

Even if you send your paid autoresponder service your list of current newsletter subscribers, they will require confirmation from each subscriber.

A subscriber to my newsletter confirmed their subscription (with date, time, and IP address recorded) through my paid autoresponder service. Then, with the first issue sent her, she filed a spam complaint with AOL (America Online, Inc.). My autoresponder service terminated her subscription and notified me of what happened.

Now, had I still been using my free mailing list software (and the free autoresponders) that came with my web hosting, I might never had known what happened. I would have assumed that my subscriber was getting my newsletter and was happy about it. I would never have imagined that I was being accused of sending spam and at risk of being blacklisted!

Another powerful reason for making the switch from using the unlimited autoresponders that come free with your web hosting account to paying a monthly fee for an autoresponder service is improved deliverability of newsletters and other e-mails.

Are your subscribers even getting your newsletter? You might be shocked to find out how few of your subscribers are actually receiving your e-mail. I know I was!

Paid autoresponder services cultivate relationships with major Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and online services. It is in their (and your) best interests that your e-mails get through and they work very hard to achieve high deliverability.

Some services supply a spam test to show you how spam filters would rate your e-mail. If your spam rating is too high, you can edit your e-mail to improve deliverability.

When I moved my newsletter over to a paid autoresponder service, I received several e-mails from autoresponders. They basically said that because of spam (unsolicited commercial e-mail), I had to confirm that I was a real person who wanted to communicate with the recipient.

With the paid autoresponder service, I received these e-mail messages and was able to respond to them in order to try and retain my subscribers.