Types Of Spam

By Helen H

 

Out of all of the emails that are received each year 70%-80% are spam. The amount of spam sent is ever growing with no signs of slowing down. In 1994 the First large-scale spam email was sent to 6000 newsgroups, reaching millions of people and today there are around 90 billion spam emails sent each day.

Most spam that is sent and received is commercial advertising for doubtful products and get-rich-quick schemes. We are now also seeing new trends in the spam nature. Political spam is one of these new trends, these political spam emails often attack political parties, sometimes even threatening parties or political practices. Even though in most cases these threats are empty, it is essential that the members of the law keep up-to-date with what is contained within these messages as they could possibly contain genuine threats or contain communication between terrorists.

Anti-spam Solutions is the other new trend in spam that we are starting to see. This is the most ironic form of spam mail that we have seen emerge as the very thing telling you to get rid of spam is a spam email. The people behind this new form of spam want to cash in on the negative publicity that is generated by spam. Although this type of spam is highly annoying it seems harmless, however the truth is that opening the attachments and or clicking on the links contained within these Anti-spam Solutions emails you could potentially be downloading a Trojan virus.

The most common types of spam emails are made up of Adult Content, Health, IT, Personal Finance and Education/Training. These types of spam make up 50% of all the spam emails that are sent, with Adult Content and Health being the top culprits.

Subject: best and cheap erection tool, Subject: Lose up to 19% weight. A new weight-loss is here – These are classic examples of what most of us end up seeing in our inbox's everyday. To make matters worse Trojan viruses and Spyware is more than often sent to your email address along with the spam message.

The way spam is sent to you is your email address is harvested from places like WebPages, forums, chat rooms, etc that you are either signed up to or that you visit on a frequent occasion. Even if you have never posted on a chat room or forum, your details remain there, making it possible for spammers to get hold of them.

As well as various types of spam emails, spam also comes in other forms of media that can be found online. Websites, guestbook's, forums and link spamming happens on a regular basis. Link spamming is when a normal link is manipulated to take you to a spammer's site so that the site gains more hits and therefore increases the sites page rank. As well as this, links can be manipulated and placed on websites where the links tag looks innocent but when it is actually clicked it takes you to sites containing, for example adult content.

For advice on getting rid of spam visit MySpamBin Claims Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Helen_H

List Building - 12 Secrets to List Building Mastery

By Christopher Dittemore

 

List building doesn't have to be a secret. It's mastery can be broken down into simple steps. It can basically be defined as the process of collecting voluntary response of your ethical bribe. What we are going to do next is define a simple step by step pattern to driving traffic to your opt ins. This will help grow your online business to a strong mature base.

1) First you need an ethical bribe to drive your conversions to higher levels. After you have a "bribe" that is relevant to your industry. Put together an opt in box and have this go to an auto responder that will put your business on auto pilot.

2) One of the best methods of driving traffic free of charge are Articles! Write articles that are packed with benefits and your readers will greatly appreciate you. This means more traffic to your "resource box". Make sure that you offer a gift investing their valuable time with you.

3) Conduct teleconferences during your conference be sure to include information about your website or blog. Use these signs up for your teleconference by driving your subscribers to an opt in box with a compelling ethical bribe.

4) Form a real life mastermind. Make sure that your supporters know about your website or blog. Make it easy for them to promote it. Give them the tools necessary for them to help you. A little bit of foresight will help you in the long run.

5) Develop an opt-in mailing list 'sign up' sheet for your website or blog. Bring this with you to all offline functions. We already mentioned conducting seminars. You can also use this sign up sheet at your classes, speeches, meetings, etc.

6) Forums that are aligned with your website or blogs mission or topic are going to be the fastest way for you to get into the "hub" of your online community. Answer and help the members with their problems and they will be much more open to what you are selling. Don't forget to add your website or blog to your signature line!

7) Use PPC - Pay per click is generally used a one shot marketing tactic. Add your opt in box to these landing pages and you can market to clients while they incubate until they are ready to buy from you.

8) Online Communities are a free and very effective way of getting your opt in offer in front of more people! These communities are packed with like minded people. Your profile will help drive more traffic to your opt in offers be sure to include a great ethical bribe that your friends will appreciate.

9) Press releases are an awesome and highly leverages media form of traffic generation. Press releases can be your friend or your foe. Make sure that when you do use a press release the information you supply is highly relevant and backed up with significant research. If used correctly, press releases will make or break your online business.

10) Attend trade shows. Get a booth and display information about your business. Have your sign-up sheet available in clear view. When someone expresses interest, inform them of what they will receive by signing up. Using offline strategies like this are often overlooked!

11) Use a Joint Venture or JV. Your competition can be your ally in business. Trade offers back and forth between your lists. This can be a strong way to increase your mailing list. Be sure to ask to trade links!

12) Co-Registration is another method of competition helping competition. Simply, adding a question at the beginning of your opt in box. "Would you be interested in receiving information regarding topics that are relevant to what you are searching? Will drive traffic to each other's opt in lists.

Use just a couple of these strategies and your opt-in list will be packed with clients. Make sure you stick with the lifeblood of your customers. Help them and they will help you. These tactics will drive traffic to your opt-in use them today.

Christopher Dittemore, CEO of Imagine Freedom, Inc., is a master list builder and is poised to change the internet marketing realm. Join him on his crusade to bring profit to struggling internet marketers today and you will receive his free report, List Building Secrets Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Christopher_Dittemore

Catch the Viral Marketing Bug

By Gunjan Tiwari

 

With advertisers constantly on the lookout for new ways to spread their message, the new social networking phenomena of the late 1990's became a perfect venue. Viral marketing is a form of advertising that relies on the enthusiasm of the end user to actually pass on the message to others.

Using easily self replicated processes like individualized affiliate squeeze pages and interactive games or flash movies, the viral marketing ad can spread from the original ad to the friends of people who liked the ad or program. It is through this beyond-the-advertisement spread of interest in a product or service that gives it the name "viral", like a virus spreading a disease.

Viral marketing techniques include researching who among the social networking websites has a high user potential. Then advertisements are formulated to appeal to this particular segment of the population.

It is hoped that with targeted marketing, the message will garner enough interest for the user to pass it on to his friends who might also be interested in it. While sample giveaways can be useful, one must make sure their viral marketing campaign is not in fact viewed as merely a publicity stunt.

There is a dark side to viral marketing that needs to be avoided. "Undercover" or "stealth" marketing involves having someone in the guise of a regular user promote and recommend the product or service to everyone he can.

If this tactic is discovered then the backlash from people feeling they have been unfairly manipulated can have lasting ill effects on future advertisements from the company.

As an added benefit beyond just creating good search engine optimization, the social potential on the Web2.0 makes it easier to target a specific niche and customize more precise and effective ad campaigns.

People are readily affected by sound and pictures so Viral Video Optimization has come into being used with the quantitative marketing algorithms to determine who has the highest Social Networking Potential, ads that entertain as well as inform stand the greatest chance of being passed on to others.

On a smaller scale viral marketing can be used in even simple places like the signature lines in forum posts. Provided you can add helpful information when you post, you will give the appearance of being savvy about the topic at hand and thus make your recommendations seem to be of greater value.

An effective e-mail signature line can also help keep the potential word-of-mouth advertising information passing around the web.

Whichever approach you take to fitting your advertising to a specific market, be careful not to disenfranchise other potential customers. Even though one niche may accept the risqué bit of advertising, unless they are your only target audience you could run the risk of offending many more.

Remember, bad advertising spreads even more quickly than good. According to the marketing study "Secrets of Word Of Mouth Marketing" by George Silverman, while a person may tell three people about a good experience, they will most likely tell eleven people about a bad one.

Gunjan Tiwari is making part-time healthy living online! Gunjan's Free "6 Part E-course" is jam packed with tips & techniques on how you can create a non-stop cash flow online in less than 2 hours a day. Get an insight on how to REALLY make your living online for FREE ==> http://www.ebizfaststart.com/intro.html Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Gunjan_Tiwari

Quick Email Marketing - 3 Forceful Means to Make Money With Email Marketing

By Sean R Mize

 

If there is one marketing tool that is considered the pioneering tool among all the various marketing tools on the net, it is the e–mail marketing. With the proven efficiency and the unparalleled reliability that e-mail marketing possesses, it is no doubt that it is considered the fore fathers of all marketing tools. To date, the e-mail marketing tool has been in use for decades of times that it has existed. Now, this tool has become on of the most used tools when ones to engage in a money generating business. To learn more about this, the following issues are raised:

a. Is it really forceful to have a high percentage of open rates? An e-mail used in marketing should contain enough driving forces for the potential recipients to open it. When the e-mail does not contain the material that potential clients need, the action of opening it becomes futile and useless if you cannot drive them to call for an action. If you are dead serious about getting into a forceful e-mail, then work on the e-mail content. Make sure that it creates more reasons for people to open it and have it more driving force.

b. Is the e-mail materially relevant? This means that the e-mail content should bear coherence and organization in all aspects of it. When potential clients are not able to see any relevance in the e-mail marketing material towards their respective needs, it becomes difficult for the e-mail to reach a higher probability of being opened.

c. Is the e-mail attractive to potential clients? Usually, when the potential clients receive the e-mail, he would ask himself about what benefits would he get should he open the e-mail. To make it look more beneficial to clients, attach with it some give away gifts or freebies that they can enjoy.

Do you want to learn more about how I do it? I have just completed my brand new guide to email marketing success, 'Secrets of Email Marketing' Download it free here: Email Marketing Secrets Sean Mize is a full time internet marketer who has written over 1574 articles in print and 11 published ebooks. Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Sean_R_Mize

How To Identify 3 Of The Most Common Usability Problems For A Website

By Nizzura Sofea
 

 

One of the tools for an affiliate marketer to be a successful affiliate marketer is by having a website. As a website owner have to ensure that the visitors to our website will feel comfortable with our website. We have to ensure that our website is as user friendly as possible to our visitor. Large commercial sites invested in full-scale usability studies just to ensure that their website will be as user friendly as possible.

We, as an owner of a small sites cannot afford such luxury. But we also need to find a way to identify the usability of our website so that our visitors will be comfortable with our website.

There are few ways to identify the usability problems with your website. The easiest and cheapest way to do so is by asking your friends to browse to your site and give their comments on your site.

You have to make changes if you encounter the top 3 of the most common usability problems for a website.

1)Visitors of any websites have the patience to wait only as long as 10 seconds for a page to be loaded. We have to ensure that our website meet with this requirements. Pay attention to images to ensure they are properly optimized and do not excessively delay load time. Place your important content at the top of the page where it will load first. Avoid using Java applets, huge images, banner ads or flashy elements because it will slow down loading

2)You have to ensure that your content is relevance with your website. Do not include irrelevance contents because your visitors will feel irritated with it. A visitor of a website usually only want to find the informations they are looking for.

3)Pay close attention to your website design. Your visitor will feel discomfort due to ugly design or inconsistent design. Cleanly designed pages are pleasant to look at and easy to read. It takes no great design skills to create clean pages; it just requires thought and adherence to the principle that when it comes to design, less usually is more.

Remember that if at any stage you feel the urge to intervene and explain, then you have identified a usability problem. Websites should not be designed for their owners - they should be designed for their users.

Nizzura is the creator of the higly rated yet simple "Mini Sites 4 Mega Profit Mentoring Program". She is an expert affiliate marketer who rakes in over $100,000 annually via his amazingly simple online profit system. Learn how you,too, can break free from the 9-to-5 rut by doing what Nizzura does. Just visit: http://www.MiniSites4MegaProfit.com. P.S.: Don't forget to download her highly rated "5 Minutes Perpetual Traffic Generator™" Report for free when visiting her website. The author grants full reprint rights to this article. You may reprint and electronically distribute this article so long as its contents remain unchanged, and the author's byline remains in place. Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Nizzura_Sofea

25 eCommerce Checkout Best Practices

By Justin Palmer

 

Imagine walking into a busy, high traffic grocery store. Despite the large number of customers in the store, you notice abandoned shopping carts strewn about the aisles and checkout lanes. For many online businesses, this example illustrates perfectly the predicament many online retailers find themselves in. Why? For one, I believe many online retailers rarely actually test their own checkouts from the user's perspective. If they had, they would have identified stumbling blocks. Below I've compiled a fairly comprehensive list of ideas on improving the checkout process.

Eliminate pages, eliminate scrolling: Many usability experts decry the benefits of shortening the checkout to as few pages as possible. While in theory this works, sometimes the real world provides other factors that must be considered. For example, suppose you combine your whole checkout into 1 page. Sounds great, unless the page is a mile tall and requires excessive vertical scrolling. In my opinion, the basic rule of thumb should be to condense the checkout into as few pages as possible requiring little to no vertical scrolling.

Hide the Navigation: Hide both your top and side navigation once the customer has initiated the checkout in order to prevent distractions. At this point, your goal should be to finalize the order as soon as possible before the visitor loses interest.

Hacker Safe Logos: Services from HackerSafe or Control Scan can be a great way to boost confidence during checkout. For more info on Hacker Safe, check this post.

Secure Certificate Logos: Most likely, your Payment Gateway and Secure Certificate provider offer a clickable security logo that you can install in your checkout pages. This provides an external way of validating the authenticity of your site.

Progress Indicator Bar: Always show shoppers where they are in the process. Everyone likes to know there is light at the end of the tunnel.

Prominent 1-800 Number: If you offer a live help line, make sure the number is highly visible everywhere in the checkout screens.

Live Chat: For those not wanting to call a 1-800 and wait on hold, Live chat is an excellent customer service feature. I've found it to be very effective for businesses with high value items such as jewelry.

No Default Credit Card Type: Typically, before or after you enter your credit card you are asked to select what type of card it is. DO NOT default this option to one of credit card types as many people will not notice it. I can't tell you how many times I've neglected to change the default option, and tried to use a MasterCard with the Visa option selected. Customers then become confused when they received an error telling them their credit card it invalid.

Auto-Detect Credit Card Type: Many card processors, including Authorize.net don't even require you to have a credit card type drop down box since the first 4 numbers of the card determine that. Paypal does a nice job of automatically detecting and showing the credit card type with AJAX.

Don't Up-Sell or Cross-Sell: Resist the temptation to up sell or cross sell during checkout. Remember, this is not like a supermarket checkout aisle. Users get distracted and are free to abandon their shopping carts at any time for any reason.

Gift Receipt / Gift Wrap Option: Customers have begun to expect this, especially during the holidays. No one wants to send a gift with an invoice showing what they paid. At the very least, offer a gift receipt with the prices not showing. Even better, include an option for a gift message.

User Friendly Credit Card Errors: I rarely have seen this done, yet it can make worlds of a difference. In the complex world of online credit card processing, it's crucial to simplify any potential problems for the end user. If their credit card is declined due to an address mismatch, give them a list of possible solutions. For example, maybe they have moved recently and the processor or bank still has the old address on file? Or maybe they don't know where to find the 3 digit security code on the back of the card.

Don't Require Phone or Email: Though most e-tailors would like to have this information, you must ask yourself if it is important enough to risk losing the sale. Many privacy sensitive customers don't like to give out this information.

Email List Opt-Out: Validate Email Address: Always allow people to opt-out. Though technically this is not required since they are making a purchase, it is a best practice required by most ISPs in order to be considered for white listing.

Copy Billing Info to Shipping Info: Most sites have this feature, but I thought it was worth mentioning. Nothing is worse than having to type the same information twice for the billing and shipping.

Don't Require Login: Again, certain people will prefer not to create an account, so don't risk losing the sale over this. Provide a "checkout without account" option.

Prominent "First time signup" Link: If you're like most businesses, you probably get a significant amount of online business from first time shoppers. For this reason, there should always be a prominent "first time signup" link in the checkout when you ask someone to sign in.

Offer Paypal: While I have doubts about certain online payment methods such as Google Checkout and Bill Me Later, I strongly believe adding Paypal will help conversion, especially for international customers or those without credit cards.

Offer E-Check Payments: Another common payment method is by an e-check. Many customers who pay this way have checking accounts, but no credit or debit cards.

Security Code Explanation: Always provide a clear explanation of what this credit card security code is and why you need it. While most sites provide an image of where to find it, rarely do they answer the question of why they need it. Many shoppers are wary about giving this out, so provide an explanation of why it's necessary for an online purchase.

Disable "Finalize Order" button On Click: A lot is going on technically speaking when the user clicks the "Finalize Order" button. Many users are impatient, and will click this button again and again until something happens. Depending on how your checkout is programmed, this can cause serious problems such as double billing or duplicate orders. Prevent this confusion by disabling the button after it's clicked.

Show Estimated Processing Time: In addition to the above, show something to the nature of "please allow up to 60 seconds to process your order." after the shopper clicks the finalize order button.

Bookmark able Receipt Page: Make sure your receipt page is not the same page that processes the order via a form post. Shoppers tend to bookmark receipt pages, but if it's not available later they will be very confused.

Shipping Time Estimates: Usually, the first question on a customers mind after submitting an order is "when will I get it?" Prevent needless customer service interactions by providing an estimate of both when the order will ship and when it will arrive.

Eliminate Insecure Page Errors: A customer should never have to see a "this page contains insecure items" error right before they enter their credit card. Usually, this is just a case of the webmaster not using relative links properly with images (http:// vs. https://).

I hope you found something here useful for your online business. For more e-commerce conversion tips, please the Palmer Web Marketing & E-Commerce blog .

Justin Palmer is the founder of Palmer Web Marketing, which offers an ecommerce book, an SEO ebook, and other internet marketing ebooks. Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Justin_Palmer

Quick And Easy Steps To Product Creation

By Mark A. Abrahams

 

You need to create your own products to truly become successful with internet marketing. Promoting affiliate products is a good way to start your internet business. However, if you truly want to take it to the next level you need to create your own products.

Let us look at the main reasons that you may want to do this. By having your own product you can start an affiliate program and recruit many other affiliates to promote your products. This will result in a lot more sales than what you yourself could possibly hope to generate.

Some tips to remember when creating products is that if your product becomes old and loses value in the market it is time to create a new one. You need to come up with a new idea and it is also important to price the product correctly. Sometimes a certain price will sell a lot of a product while a different price may not produce a lot of sales.

I am going to go through some techniques that will make it easy to create and develop products.

1) You need to perform intensive market research to determine if their is a demand for your product. Often people will create a product that nobody wants. You can do this by creating a squeeze page and advertise it using ppc strategies. Once somebody has opted in to your list you can ask them what the most important problem is that they are having in that specific niche market.

2) Once you have identified the market and a suitable product you can hire people to create it or you can develop it yourself.

3) It is very important to test the product. You can get feedback and improve it till your customers are very satisfied. Also test different price strategies and determine the optimum price that produces the maximum profit.

Would you like to know more about the magical marketing techniques that have helped me to quit my day job? I have just completed my new ebook. Secrets To Make Money Online - Download your free ebook now. Mark Abrahams is a full time internet marketer who has helped others to earn a living online. Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Mark_A._Abrahams