While most internet marketers have turned to social media to sell their products and services, developing a strong email campaign is still an essential component to the entire internet marketing field. In fact, some experts forecast that consumers will contribute about $67.8 billion into the U.S. market simply from making purchases through email marketing this [...]

Ever since Amazon launched their “Simple Email Service” (SES), I’ve been wanting to try it out. Yesterday, I finally got around to sending my first test message. I used a PHP class created by Dan Myers based on one created by Donovan Schonknecht. But I wasn’t quite satisfied with it.

The biggest shortcoming is that it [...]

Last Friday, after publishing the post about Google’s quality raters handbook (which I’d found through a post on “Pot Pie Girl’s” blog), I spent a little time looking over her older posts and found an interesting one showing the results of an email subject line test she ran back in March.

I thought I’d share the [...]

The AWeber blog this morning carried a little debate over whether you should ask for more than a name and email address in your signup form. Here’s an excerpt:

Nick: … We tend to think of our mailing lists as something we give to our subscribers for free, but that’s kind of a flawed assumption. Subscribers [...]

It’s time again for a report on which headlines got the most of my blog broadcast emails opened and click through last month. Where you see (+), (++) and (+++), that indicates that the headline in question was at the top of one of the other lists (with (+++) indicating the #1 position).

Highest Open Rates

Here [...]

Yesterday, I wrote about how to avoid information overload in a too-fast world. Today, let’s talk about how to get your marketing message heard above the noise in a world where your prospects are overloaded.

Be Good Better the Best

Okay, being the best is a tall order. But at the very least, you’ve absolutely got to [...]

The internet has given us instant access to more information and entertainment than we’d even dreamed would ever exist a few decades ago. On the one hand, we’re empowered to accomplished more, faster than ever before.

But there’s a downside too. A few days ago, Seth Godin asked, Has the speed shortage been averted?

We certainly had [...]

I hope all of you in the States had a good Independence Day yesterday. My family and I enjoyed doing some much needed yard work, and then a trip back through time to Railroad Town at the Stuhr Museum of the Prairie Pioneer.

Speaking of history, here are the headlines that got the most of my [...]

A while back, I got an email from an unhappy subscriber. Among other things, he complained that the last email he’d gotten — a “blog broadcast” message announcing my latest post — was all about me, and thus not interesting to him.

I’ve been at this long enough to have developed a reasonably thick skin, so [...]

I learned a new word last week: gustnado. It’s sort of like a tornado, but doesn’t last as long, and doesn’t reach up to the cloud base. We had a few blow through Grand Island, knocking down trees and trashing some mobile homes (uninhabited, thankfully) and storage units.

When a friend of mine first heard the [...]