Thou Shalt Not Spam

A lot of non-marketers think of marketers as nothing but spammers. It's easy to understand why. We all get mountains of spam emails o a daily basis – regardless of whether or not we gave out the email address.

But unless you want to be prosecuted and condemned for sending spam emails out, you'll want to take precautions to be careful about who you email and why. Spam is defined as unsolicited email messages that are sent out to the masses.

True Internet marketers don't mess with spam because it hurts their credibility, risks their accounts, and doesn't convert as well as targeted, welcomed email does. You can have your ISP ban you for sending spam, and you can lose your autoresponder account, too.

It's far better to use an opt-in form where people willingly enter their first name and email address. In fact, it's best to utilize the double opt in option most autoresponders provide.

A single opt in is when you just let the person enter their information once. But what's to stop one person from going around entering another person's contact information for unethical reasons?

You want a double opt in to protect yourself. Here's how it works:

The user lands on your website and sees an opt in box, asking for their first name and email address. They enter it (usually in exchange for a free download or the promise of information at a later date).

Then the autoresponder tool automatically sends out a verification email. The end user gets the email alerting them that they've signed up to be on your list, but it asks them to verify their subscription by clicking on a link in the email.

This means if someone goes to your site and signs someone else up, that person will get a notification and have the option to decline if they weren't the ones who really opted into the list.

Make sure you abide by permission marketing standards. These people trust you enough to hand over important details, so don't sell their contact information or abuse it in any way. If you respect the people on your list, it will grow and you'll have a readymade list of prospects that can help you earn more money on both a short and long-term timeframe.

More on The Golden Rule of Online Marketing:

Here's another phrase you'll grow sick of: The gold is in the list. You might get weary of hearing it, but it's smacking you in the face for a reason – it's the truth! First of all, let's answer the question, "What is a list?"

A list in Internet marketing terms is a database of contact information for your prospects. So if you have a product or promote products about gardening and I sign up for your list, I'm a prospect that you can market to repeatedly until I unsubscribe.

So why is building a list so important? Let's say you start off as an affiliate marketer. You find a niche you truly enjoy and you start working what you've learned into some traffic for your affiliate links.

Over a period of 30 days, you funnel 5,000 prospects from the World Wide Web who are interested in your niche straight through your affiliate link to the product owner's site.

They even buy – yea! You've made a 50% commission with a 2% conversion rate. That means 2 out of every 100 people you sent bought the product, and your share was $26.00 (as an example). You earned a cool $2,600 this month – good for you!

But you're leaving money on the table. Those 100 people who bought from your 5,000 clicks? They're now on the product owner's list, not yours. So what he's going to do is send them more offers over the coming weeks.

After all, they are proven buyers. Over the next 30 days, those buyers fork over some more money for products that complement the original one they bought. That money goes to the product owner, not you – because you passed on building a list the first time around.

A better way to build an Internet marketing business is to start with a list from day one. Before you let a single person slip through your link without capturing their name and email address, have your system set up to build a list.

You can have unlimited lists for different niches using a simple tool like Aweber, which costs $19.95 a month. Every day you can log in and see how many people have signed up, and you can create automated messages to send out to help convert your list into more sales.

Why should the product owner get to cash in on that person again and again when you're the one who brought him the customer in the first place? Stake claim to each prospect and leverage your relationship with him for future sales and commissions.

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