By now, you have probably had your fill of spam. It's sad to malign such a noble luncheon meat by associating it with one of the scourges of the Internet - junk e-mail. Most of you have probably gotten messages promoting some MLM scheme, an adult site or saying that your site can be an overnight success by submitting it to over 5000 search engines. Spam is one of the worst ways to promote your website. But if e-mail is supposed to be the "killer application" of the Internet, what is the best way to use it?

Sign up for Success

>Most of you who are reading this website have signed up for this newsletter. Either that, or you're a customer of The Web For Business.com or you're someone we met who expressed some interest in what we do. In almost all cases, recipients of this newsletter have given us permission to send it to them. This is in contrast to Unsolicited Commercial E-mail (UCE or Spam) which is flung to the far reaches of the Internet in hopes of attracting some business.

Think about these two approaches for a minute. Let's say that you are a health-food distributor offering a two for one special on the purchase of vitamins. You send the promotion via e-mail to 1000 health fanatics or 100,000 random people. Which do you think will get a better response? You will likely get more responses from the health fanatics group and they will probably purchase more from you than respondents from the random group. Sending e-mail to people who you know are interested in your product or service is much more effective than sending out spam.

Give People a Reason to Subscribe

Going about getting those names can be a challenge. One way to get people to sign up for your mailing list is to provide an incentive for them to do so. Information or other things of perceived value are the best ways to convince people to join your list. In general, keep your advertising to a minimum. You'll notice that in the main body of the e-mail, our promotions consist of 1/4 of the content in the message. People become subscribers because they are getting something of value from you, not to receive mounds of advertising. If you must advertise, compensate with proportionately more content.

E-mail can be a "killer-app" when used correctly. We are embarking on the launch of a new website that will rely extensively on e-mail marketing techniques for promotion and we will give you the inside scoop over the coming months to show you what works and what doesn’t. Until then, avoid spam and give people the option to opt-in.

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