What should you make sure you include in emails to ensure they don’t get picked up by the spam filters, besides an unsubscribe link?

Communicating with your list is essential in building your business. But if you don’t follow some concrete rules, it can kill your business.

Here’s some advice when sending your emails:

When sending emails out to your list you need to make sure that you have, in all your emails, not only an unsubscribe link but also an address and a phone number of who to contact. You also want to be careful on the wording you use to communicate with your list. However, lately a lot of times I really don’t care, although I’d really like to, I don’t really go and check my first spam checker before I send it out. This is not a good habit.

I suggest you do a spam check before you send out your emails. Sometimes I get lazy, but this is no excuse, I should do it. I had one email recently that got picked up pretty bad by the spam filters and I was aware of that, I knew it was going to happen before I did it. Well, actually, I should’ve known. Then as soon as I noticed it, I regretted not doing a spam check prior to sending it out. There are reasons for these rules and they should be followed. Always get into the habit of doing a spam check to ensure you make the most out of your list.

The debate between what words to use and what words or grammar not to use is forever ongoing, but there are software programs out there that can help you in this regard.

Another thing you should definitely do is keep your emails short, sweet and to the point. Use text and then have your readers click on links, go to a page, and get all the information off of that page. That’s going to be a better way to do it because for one, you are training your list to make take action, but also what’s going to happen is it’s going to get through the spam filters even better. It’s not really rocket science but any simple tweaks can be effective none the less.

Also, be very careful when using HTMLs. Know which colors to use that convert well. Read headlines have been proven to convert well. You also need to make sure you have clean code if you’re going to do that. If you are using code be very, very careful because you don’t want to have FrontPage stuff in there. The spam filters don’t like it for some reason.

As long as you keep your emails clean, use the right colors and words to make your list take action (not spam words like free), you’ll most likely see some excellent results in your lists response rate. Make these simple changes to ensure your emails are a success.

Warmest regards,

Matt Bacak

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So, how do you find local traffic?

I am in the financial services and have to be certified in any state that I offer the service. That is why I need such targeted traffic. How do I find it?” Very good question. Actually, I talked about this a little bit at a seminar. The first thing I would suggest you do when trying to find any traffic, including local traffic, is to optimize your site with the keywords most searched for in your area. By doing this it’s going to be very easy for you to take over the search engine rankings for particular terms in your area. What you want to do is, for example, is type in “financial services”. You might want to say “financial services Atlanta”, “financial services Georgia”, “financial services Duluth” and other keywords similar to those.

I would start optimizing my website specifically for, the towns or the cities or the major cities where people would probably be looking and also the state and counties. One of the great things is that most people in your niche are not doing this, so therefore you can take over the first page very easily in your state. So, doing SEO is going to be very good for you.

Craig’s List is also a great place to get started because you can advertise your services for free in the location of your choosing. Lots of people view Craigslist everyday, so this should help bring in some traffic.

Another thing you can do is search online to look for sites like county sites and stuff like that where you could list your company. For example, we have something called Gwinnett Network where I live in Gwinnett County where local businesses can advertise and network.

You can also look into joining the local Chamber of Commerce where you live to try to generate more business. If you join what’s going to happen a lot of times is they’ll put you on their webpage so you can get some local traffic from that.

However, if you really want to generate more traffic you’ve got to use Google AdWords because you can target specific zip codes. So instead of targeting specific countries, you can target specific cities and specific zip codes. You can focus on the whole state and that’s fine if that’s what you’re looking for. You can say, I want my ads to only appear to people searching in this specific state and then your ad will appear. So with pay per click, it’s easy.

Now you’re probably wondering, how in the world does it appear? Well, for the most part every computer has its own IP address. So, when you search for something through the internet the search engine will show you ads based on the area of your IP. If I took my computer and went downtown and logged in, it’s going to show up as a different IP address because of the internet location that I’m using.

Basically that’ll let the search engines know I’m in a different location. If you’ve ever gone to Canada, for example, or let’s say you live in Canada and you come to the United States, or you’re in the United States and you go to Canada or you go to any other part of the country, as soon as you log in to the internet, you’re like, “How in the heck did it know I’m here in Canada?” It just knows because it is based upon your IP address. Actually, I think it’s the second or third one that specifically states exactly where you’re at.  So you can focus on pay per click and can run ads specifically in your geographical area. This is an excellent way to gain local traffic and potentially dominate your market!

Warmest regards,

Matt Bacak

P.S. If you haven’t signed up for my Powerful Promoting Tips yet, then you are really missing out, go here:

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P.P.S. Do you want to be updated on the new things I’m doing to market my companies? Then you need to grab a copy of my ..Internet Marketing Dirt’. It’s now better than ever before!

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Producing an online product is a great way to make money online. It’s fast and there are no shipping costs simply because your product is downloadable. It’s a great selling feature to the customer because they can instantly have access to the information in no time. But what if they are not pleased with your digital product? Should you offer a refund?

Well, if you are selling a digital product online a refund policy is always good to have because it makes your customer feel as though they have nothing to lose. It also makes you look more professional because by offering a refund to unsatisfied customers, it makes you appear confident in the fact that you’re offering a high quality product that you know they’ll like. But of course, you can’t please everyone so a refund policy is always a good option.

So, what do you do if your customer wants a refund? Do they keep the download and you send them the money back or do you ask them to send it back or delete it?

Basically, there’s really no way to have them send it back in any form or fashion. You cannot ask them to delete it. It’s downloaded on their computer. You can’t stop that. Getting software to do that is too big of a customer support issue for you. You simply need a refund policy to establish trust with your buyer and it reinforces your credibility. If you see any digital product sold online there is a refund policy. That’s what you have to compete with. There will always be a similar product available that competes with yours and if you don’t offer a refund policy it’s most likely your potential customer may go elsewhere.

Offering a 60 or a 90-day money back guarantee on your digital products usually increases conversions. The longer you give them, the better your conversion will be. That’s just a side note. But really, you do need to offer refunds to your customers. It also depends on the price.

In any event just give them a regular PDF. And then if they ask for a refund then let it go and accept the loss. As for refunding the payment… You would submit the payment back via the payment method that they paid by. So, if they paid with a check, give their refund back via check. If they paid with Paypal, give it back via Paypal. If they paid with a merchant account, refund them via the merchant account etc. This is a very important point for anybody that’s ever doing any business online or any kind of business for that matter.

Doing this allows you to track back to make sure everything goes through correctly. If they paid you with Paypal or a merchant account, don’t send them a check. Send it back to them the same way they gave it to you, if not, that could cause some issues like I’ve seen in the past. Actually, in my case, somebody charged with their credit card, we sent them a check to refund them, and then they charged back on the credit card and they already got a check from us. So, they actually got double the money back. Of course, we didn’t exactly lose in the end because we showed proof, but problems like this still tie up your money too long. So use the exact payment method that you used in the beginning.

Always offer a refund policy but take into consideration what you need to do for chargebacks to ensure you don’t have a big headache on your hands.

Warmest regards,

Matt Bacak

P.S. If you haven’t signed up for my
Powerful Promoting Tips yet, then you
are really missing out, go here:

http://www.promotingtips.com

P.P.S. Do you want to be updated on the new things I’m doing
to market my companies? Then you need to grab a copy of my
`Internet Marketing Dirt’. It’s now better than ever before!

Go here and get a copy: www.internetmarketingdirt.com