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       ** DEMC ** Volume IX No. 1 **
        The Truth About Email Marketing!
    Serving the Internet Since November 1995

Quote for today:

"Choosing a goal and sticking to it changes everything."
         - Scott Reed
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What's In This Issue - Features

1) Editor's Note: "Prediction for 2004"
2) Email Marketing Insights: "All Links Are Not Created Equal"
3) Feature Article: "New Years Resolutions for Your Business"
4) SOHO Help Desk: "Subscriber Acquisition and Whitelisting"
5) DEMC's - Advertising Information

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1.

Editor's Note:

"Prediction for 2004"

Happy New Year!

Yes, 2004 has arrived and I have to say I am excited. Well, of course it is the Holiday season, which is a wonderful time of year. But even more than the well wishes, sharing and caring we enjoy with friends and family, it is the future of Internet business that has me in such a good mood.

The success of the Holiday season for Internet businesses in 2003 was tremendous. According to early reports this holiday's e-commerce sales grew well over 30 percent from 2002 levels.

Goldman, Sachs & Co., Harris Interactive(r), and Nielsen//NetRatings revealed that online shoppers spent $2.95 billion during the second week in December, an increase of 48 percent from 2002. Ecommerce Times reported that Amazon.com had its most active holiday season in its nine-year history, shipping 1 million packages worldwide on its busiest day and seeing 630,000 visitors to its U.S. site in a single hour, or more than 10,000 visitors per minute.

And amazingly enough, even with the significant increase in shopping and spending, online retailers managed the flood without strife. I can recall just a few years ago when shopping online during the Holidays was some what of a crap shoot. Due to inadequate bandwidth and server power, you would encounter time out errors and hanging web pages everywhere. Not to mention you never knew if the gifts you ordered would arrive in time or not.

I'm happy to say, I conducted practically all of my shopping online this year from both small and large retailers. And, every single gift I ordered, even those I purchased on the 23rd of December arrived in time. In fact, the one present I had to drive out to purchase, the specialty shop lacked a web site, I complained to the store owner about the inconvenience! Can you imagine - No Web Site - are these people in the dark ages or what ...

The time of the Internet has certainly arrived and changed our lives. Just think of all the wonderful inventions now at our disposal!

For example take search engines, Google and Yahoo being my favorites. They put information at your fingertips. >From doing market research, to locating a store which carries that much needed item, to checking the local news and weather, to investigating the competition - search engines make life and business easier.

Or what about online retailers like Amazon.com or auction sites for finding stuff. Most people I know have bid on something at eBay or purchased from Amazon.com. Internet merchants have made shopping at home so convenient it is now as normal as going to the mall.

Plus think of the craze Napster began of swapping music files. While Napster is now a paid download services, the myriad of copy cats with free file sharing, despite legal issues, do not seem to have diminished. Listening to any music you want, when you want, can be done.

And of course, I have to mention my favorite aspect of the Internet, the communication tools. Instant messaging, chat rooms, Webinars (web seminars), blogs and ... drum roll please ... email are what make the Internet work. These tools let us connect with other people, share our thoughts, our opinions, our knowledge and ourselves with each other.

I expect you use one or more of these tools daily. Especially if you are involved in business. Because as we all know, regularly communicating with business colleagues and customers is crucial to your survival. And these tools save you time and money.

No longer do you need to pick up the phone to conduct business or distribute a memo to make an announcement or travel to a destination for a meeting or seminar. Now you can post a meeting announcement to your company's blog, gather in a chat room to conduct the meeting, IM those missing and conduct your seminar right online. What previously took weeks now takes hours.

The most critical of all the Internet communication tools has become email. Can you imagine life without email? Just think of all the ways we use email. Here are a few off the top of my head - order confirmations, document delivery, support questions and answers, reminder notices, subscription confirmation, ecourses, product inquiries, follow-up sales letters, ecards, thank you notes and let's not forget the all powerful ezine!

Email is the life blood of the Internet! Just the other day I saw a great statement from Jeff Finkelstein of Customer Paradigm, which summed up the importance of email. He said, "The fact that so many people - 136 million active email users in the US alone - put up with porn, body-part extension offers, herbal extracts, the chance to earn $15,000 a week from the comfort of their home - attests to how important email is in the lives of the every day citizen."

If email were not so essential, people would have long ago given up on sorting through the spam. Instead people have demanded filtering tools and laws to help them control their in-boxes. As a permission email marketer I see the implementation of filters and laws in 2004 as a good sign for email marketing. I also view the surveys results that show 90% of people are annoyed by spam, as a positive.

Why?

The laws, the filters, the complaints all indicate that spam is getting in the way of the email that people want to receive. As a society we are not giving up on email, instead we are trying to make sure we receive only the email for which we've asked. Thus the first key to success for email marketers in 2004 is permission.

If you're a permission email marketer delivering email that people have requested, those individuals will make sure your messages get through. The filters and the CAN-Spam law are designed to help them receive your email and stop the junk they never requested.

Getting results with email marketing, however, goes beyond the initial granting of permission. To ensure your email is read and looked for, brings up the second key to success for email marketer in 2004. Your email has to deliver information your readers want.

The best way to send interesting, valuable information, while still promoting your business, is to publish an ezine. Your emails will have the targeted content your customers and prospects like. These individuals will make sure your email gets to them, they'll be loyal readers of your ezine and they'll buy from you.

With the ongoing enhancements of filters and the new CAN-Spam law, my prediction for 2004 is that ezines are going to be essential to a business' email marketing success. People will subscribe to business' ezines looking for specific targeted information. They'll whitelist those ezines and the email will get through.

So as we head into the New Year, I ask again ... You are publishing an ezine aren't you? If not developing an ezine should be your number one New Years resolution! If you are already an ezine publisher then resolve in 2004 to make sure your ezine delivers the best quality content possible.

2004 will be the year of the ezine. Make sure you're a part of it!

Abbie Drew
DEMC Editor
mail@demc2.com

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2.

Email Marketing Insights:

"All Links Are Not Created Equal"
By: Terry Mickelson

There are two types of links. Inbound and outbound. Within your site it is important to link pages together. This creates an inbound link from page to page and an outbound link from page to page. Pages that do not have even one link to them are called orphan pages. Some search engines like Google will not index orphan pages.

When a search engine crawls through a page they look for and follow each link indexing the location and the topic or theme of the page. This explains why sometimes search engines have pages indexed that were not submitted to them. They just find them on their own.

Not all links can be followed by all of the search engines. For example, many sites use Java to create "rollovers" - images that change when a visitors mouse is placed over it to create links from page to page. Typically, search engines cannot follow these links. This is also true when an image map is used to create links or site navigation. Unless the search engines can follow the links on your pages they will never find the deep pages of your site.

When creating a linking plan for your site it is important to understand that not all pages are created equal. For example, if your site is a comparison-shopping site it will have many product lines. Each category of products is grouped together. In one section, camping for example, you may find tents, sleeping bags and coolers. Another section may be house wares. In this section you will find linens, pots and pans and knives.

It is important that each page within each section be linked together. This creates a theme within each section of the site. Each link should use a word that describes the theme of the page it is linking to. This theme allows the search engines to group sections of your site together and catalogs them all together making the house wares section more relevant when a search is done for linens than the camping section. The only thing that each section has in common with one another is that they have products for sale.

Inbound links from external web sites are very important to your search engine success. Some people think that the more links they have to there site the better. They think that the more inbound links the more popular your site must be. However the search engines are smarter than this and understand that more links does not mean more popular. It just means more links. Because of this several of the top engines actually penalize sites for belonging to "link exchanges". Link exchanges are simply a place for sites to exchange links. In most cases all they have in common is that they have a link from one another.

Search engines are looking for inbound links from popular relevant sites with the same theme just like they look for relevant links with the same "theme" within the site. A perfect theme will have the main keyword or phrase on your site the same as the main keyword or phrase on the sites that link to you.

It is important to get your site listed in the proper section of Open Directory and Yahoo. Search engines know that both of these directories use human editors to approve sites and that if it is listed in the directories it contains valuable content. For this reason it is imperative to get listed in Yahoo and Open Directory before you submit your site to the major search engines.

There are only 3 reasons anyone will ever give a link to your site.

·They have seen it and they really liked what they saw,
·You agree to pay them or
·You agree to give a link back to them.

The more popular your site becomes the more people will link to it without any prompting from you. Buying links can be very expensive but in the case of some portals or industry trade sites it may be worth purchasing a link. The most cost effective way to get inbound links is to find sites with the same theme as yours and ask to trade links.

Many site owners are afraid that if they put a link on their home page to a page of links that includes sites with related, relevant information - even competitors - that they are inviting people to leave their site. If the people who come to your site are more compelled to click on "links" than they are to go deeper into the site to see your information the site has bigger problems than not being found in the search engines. There are several steps that can be taken to minimize this.

Create a page of links organized by category. If your company writes business plans have a link category for venture capital, start up consultants etc. ·Below the link categories, add copy explaining how to get their link added to your site including the description you want to appear on their site.
·Make the link to the page of links small.
·When a link is clicked on, make it open a new window so that your site remains open and they can return to your site.

It is very easy to check how many inbound links your site has. Go to www.google.com and enter link:anydomain.com and click search. You will see a list of all the pages that Google knows about that link to your site. Next go to www.altavista.com and conduct the same search. Chances are very good that the results will not be the same as the results of the Google search. Google and AltaVista are distinct individual companies and do not index the same sites. Sometimes your competitors are the best source of links. By doing the above searches using your competitors URL you will find sites that link to your competitors. This is a good pool to start asking for links from.

There is no perfect number of inbound links. Twenty-Five good quality links will do more for your site than hundreds of links from sites that are not same theme as your site.

There are several software packages that attempt to automate the process. In all of them you enter the keyword or phrase that defines your theme and the software finds sites that are being found under that same search term. The software gathers all of the sites and creates a page with links to all of them and in some cases a description of the site. You then write an email to the site owner (or whatever email address is listed) advising them you have placed a link from your site to theirs and that you would like a reciprocal link. For a free copy of Link Crafter, linking software go to http://www.pageviews.com. Navigate to the tool section.

Finding sites with the same theme as yours, asking for links, following up the requests, verifying the links have been added and in some cases teaching others how to add a link back to your site is very time consuming. Most sites will never put the effort required into it. You can gain a huge competitive advantage in the search engines if you take the time or put in the effort to get inbound relevant links.

###
Article by Terry Mickelson of LinkageXpress, Inc.,
specializing in helping clients acquire relevant links to increase the number of qualified visitors to their Web sites. LinkageXpress may be reached at (480) 556-9388 or sales@linkagexpress.com or http://www.linkagexpress.com .


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3.

Feature Article:

* Exclusive *

"New Years Resolutions for Your Business"
By: Gary Lockwood

As you look ahead to 2004, here are ten New Years Resolutions that will transform your enterprise:

1. Focus on vision and accelerate your progress - Establish a powerful picture of your preferred future as you want it to be in three years. Use this vision as a guideline for all 2004 decisions, plans, communications and actions. Progress is a result of a creative relationship between the present-day you and the future you. To achieve an extraordinary preferred future, something has to change. You can't just keep doing what you've been doing and expect anything other than what you've been getting. Performance guided by a crystal-clear vision leads to extraordinary breakthroughs.

2. Focus on free time and turbocharge your productivity - Free time isn't a reward for working hard, it's a necessary prerequisite for optimum productivity. We need free time away from the business to rejuvenate ourselves. Proactively allowing for rest, relaxation and rejuvenation, regularly and frequently, leads to increased creativity and productivity. The more free time we take, the more creativity and productivity we will experience. In order to make breakthroughs with finances, productivity and creativity, it is necessary to significantly increase the amount of free time away from the business.

3. Focus on cleanups and feel your energy soar - We all have messes in our lives. Messes are situations of disorder, conflict and incompletion that cause you to be distracted, lose energy, break concentration and reduce confidence. Messes can include finances, relationships, physical well- being, agreements and legal contracts. Each time you clean up a mess, you increase concentration, confidence and energy. For 2004, target a mess a month.

4. Focus on delegation and increase your productivity - Business owners and professionals won't delegate because they "can't find anyone who can do the job as well as they can". With today's vast electronic networks, we now have the ability to link up with the best people in the world. Some may be contractors for you, some could be employees, some might be strategic alliances. Stop trying to do everything.

Superb results come not from a single individual, but rather from teams of individuals, all working within their own distinct areas of expertise toward a shared goal or vision. You've heard of the 80-20 rule -- 80% of your meaningful results come from only 20% of your activities. Each time you delegate some of your less productive activities, you multiply your effectiveness.... and you make more money.

5. Focus on new capabilities and boost your confidence - A capability is anything new that gives you increased ability to accomplish your goals. New capabilities can include: skilled people, use of technology, new skills and knowledge, new products and services, and new systems and methods. Whenever you feel frustrated by the complexity of your business, it means that you've gone as far as you can go with current capabilities. It's time to develop new capabilities. Target right for 2004.

6. Focus on value and deepen relationships - Your economic opportunities lie in other people's future. You will succeed in your enterprise to the extent that you help other people to exceed in their lives. Ask every person you encounter what they want to have accomplished three years from now. Focus your entrepreneurial efforts on assisting others in achieving their goals. By adding value to their preferred future, you not only deepen your relationship, you also create huge opportunities for yourself.

7. Focus on your strengths and delegate weaknesses - Conventional wisdom says we should work on improving our weaknesses. This is a terrible waste of time, talent and opportunity. Highly successful entrepreneurs, as well as top scientists, artists, athletes and entertainers throughout history have achieved greatness by focusing on their areas of strength. Everybody has a natural aptitude in certain areas. No matter how hard you try, it is unlikely you will ever be more than average in areas where you do not have an aptitude.

Continuously working on your weaknesses undermines yourself esteem since you will focus mostly on your deficiencies. On the other hand, developing your natural talents is self rewarding and motivating, allowing you to continually realize higher and higher levels of ability, achievement and success. This year, experience the immense satisfaction that comes with being superb at something.

8. Focus on habits and forget about discipline - Everyone is already completely disciplined... to their existing set of habits. We have work habits, relationship habits, health habits, and so on. Each of us has a full set of habits which regulate most of our behavior. Progress in life is not a result of more discipline, but rather of developing goal- directed habits. Are your habits working for you, or against you? As you know, it takes about 21 days of daily repetition to establish a new habit. Generally, you can develop only one habit at a time. Over the course of 2004, you can establish seventeen new, productive habits, thereby producing extraordinary results.

9. Focus on your attitude and improve your altitude - Our behavior, our decisions, our actions and our results are based on our beliefs and attitudes. When we feel strong, confident, knowledgeable and competent, we will act that way. If we feel tired, depressed, incapable or weak, our behavior mirrors our feelings. How do we change the way we feel? By changing the way we talk to ourselves, we can manage our feelings and therefore our behavior.

Most people verbally beat themselves up all throughout the day. When things go awry or we make a mistake, we criticize ourselves terribly. Let's remember that mistakes are the fuel of creativity. If we're not making mistakes, we're not doing anything worthwhile. Just say to yourself "OK, it happened. Now, how do we deal with it and avoid this next time?"

10. Focus on quality of life, and enjoy a life worth living - Researchers have said that only 4% of people enjoy both their their work and their personal life. Make 2004 the year that you create balance in your life. Use your skills in goal setting and your persistence in achievement to develop a higher quality of life. Set and pursue goals in each of the value centers of your life: family life, physical well-being, your spiritual journey, intellectual growth, social involvement, and, of course, your financial health. By developing balance in your life, you will increase your energy, motivation, and your sense of satisfaction. In other words, your happiness. Most people are as happy as they choose to be.

May you choose to be very happy in 2004!

###
Gary Lockwood is Increasing the Effectiveness and Enhancing the
Lives of CEOs, business owners and professionals.
Get the CEO Success Report at http://www.CEOSuccess.com
Email: mailto:Gary@BizSuccess.com Web: http://www.BizSuccess.com

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~/~ SOHO Help Desk ~\~
http://www.demc.com

"Subscriber Acquisition and Whitelisting"

Today's SOHO Help Desk discuss tactics on how to acquire subscribers and ensure they whitelist your ezine.

If you have a valuable tip, promotional idea, question or answer you would like included in an upcoming issue of DEMC, all you have to do is submit it by email to - mailto:helpdesk@demc2.com

To start us off today, we have a DEMC contributor who would like to know about your experiences. Please take a minute to review this week's question and send your response to - mailto:helpdesk@demc2.com .


=== Help Request ===


From: Codrut Turcanu

Has anyone exchanged "thank-you" pages with other
publishers to GET a BOOST in their subscribers?

I'd like to know ...

1. what RESULTS you got using the above JV tactic?
2. how many subscribers do you GET daily to your eZine?
3. how many publishers do you swap with?

Thanks,
Codrut Turcanu.
http://www.BizMarketingSecrets.com

Send your answer to: mailto:helpdesk@demc2.com


=== Answer For Valerie ===


Valerie's Question:

> I offer a fr'ee ebook on my website in hopes of getting
> email addresses to follow-up, since this process is very
> important in internet marketing. Nobody has downloaded
> this book due to being afraid of giving out their email
> address. Do you have any suggestions?


From: Codrut Turcanu


Dear Valerie,

Only a few people are afraid to give out their e-mail address in return for a GIFT (e.g. your eBook) ... it's because you don't have a privacy policy on your site and under your sign-up form, am I right?

Just specify that their email will be safe, secure and never be rented or sold to any third party.

Plus, you should mention that they can unsubscribe at anytime from your list as well.

Add this info to your site and you'll be OK! :)

However, for better RESULTS you should make sure your eBook TOPIC relates to your Web Site TOPIC and your Site Visitors are targeted (e.g. they're truly interested in your Web Site)

Codrut Turcanu
Is this the best SE *TRAFFIC* tool?
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=== Reader Feedback on Whitelisting ===


From: Joe Halbrook


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===> Whitelisting Instruction Before Confirmation


From: Diane Dennis

As always I truly enjoy your newsletter and it has been very helpful to me. :)

I wanted to mention something about:

> You can see how I've set-up whitelisting instructions on
> the DEMC site for our new subscribers:
http://www.demc.com/Company/Subscribe/subscribe.html

I looked at that page and I'm assuming that that is the landing page after someone subscribes to your newsletter?

If yes... A "problem" may be that if their ISP or their own filter or whoever blocks their email then they very well may not get that "opt-in" email that they must reply to.

Also, shouldn't the goal be to get the subscriber to "whitelist" the newsletter email address BEFORE subscribing?

Here's what I've done so far:

http://eforms.optinpro.com/scripts/eform.asp?u=525&l=4761&f=961

It's very basic, and undergoing design changes etc., but I think it's important to attempt to have the subscriber "whitelist" me BEFORE they enter their info and click on the button.

I plan on adding in info about the subscriber needing to reply to the "opt-in" email they receive, and I plan on changing the landing page from the subscription form to reinforce the "whitelist" and "reply necessary" issues...

I haven't seen your subscribe box lately, it was quite a while ago that I subscribed, and you may already be doing what I've suggested but just in case you're not I thought I'd send my thoughts along to you... :)

Have a great day and thank you again for your newsletter!

Diane Dennis
http://www.thecontractorsgroup.com

---

Diane,

Thank you for the terrific feedback! I will definitely be making an update to our DEMC subscribe form to include your suggestion.

Wishing You Success!

Abbie Drew
DEMC - http://www.demc.com

------

If you have a valuable tip, promotional idea, question or answer you would like included in an upcoming issue of DEMC, all you have to do is submit it by email to - mailto:helpdesk@demc2.com

Be sure to include your SIG and contact URL with your post as we'll be sharing any viable ideas/information in an upcoming issue of DEMC E-Magazine.

======================

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