Ultimate Marketing Strategies Blog

I don’t know about you, but it since late 2010 and so far in 2011, the amount of emails being sent to lists with spammy or deceptive subject  titles appears to be increasing.

The “brilliant” idea behind these types of emails is to trick you or at the very least make you very curious to open them.

However, I would suggest these types of email are very deceptive at best and just down right deceitful at worst.

So what type of email subject lines am I talking about?

Ever seen some of these?

• You just made a commission
• Re: Your free download link [response required]
• Paypal you $100?
• Your download link (license youremail@example.com)
• RE:  Your username and Password
• Re: new password for your account
• Re: your download
• Activate your download
• Your members area login
• Congrats Peter – You got an affiliate sale
• Your order was processed

and so on…….

I’m sure you’ve seen this type of stuff.

Remember that I’m not talking about standard spam that you receive, I’m talking about lists that you’ve subscribed to, whether it be to download a free ebook or buying a product.

These people are abusing their list and you should not tolerate it.

At the very least, make sure you:

UNSUBSCRIBE FROM THEIR LIST!

and if they are using one of those really deceptive subjects (typically the ones that start with RE:), then report it as abuse.

The more people that take action, the less likely these so called marketers will use such tactics.

Cheers

Easy PayPal Shortcodes is great plugin that allows you to easily add shortcodes into your WordPress pages that will generate all the required code to display and set up the buy buttons, product name, price, paypal email account, thank you and cancel pages.

You are freed from having to generate multiple buttons for each product you are selling and having to copy/paste HTML into your WordPress page (which can be a real pain at times).

The plugin is very flexible and very easy to configure.

Overview of Easy PayPal Shortcodes

The video below shows you how to install, configure and use Easy PayPal Shortcodes.

Raising Money For the Red Cross Christchurch Earthquake Appeal

The main motivation for creating and selling this plugin was to raise money for the Red Cross 2011 Christchurch Earthquake Appeal.

After the plugin was launched, I donated 100% of proceeds raised during the donation period  (ending 24 March 2011) to the Red Cross.

Following up with my original statement that I would provide full financial disclosure, the details of the amount donated are below.

There were a total of 31 sales (some at the full price), which came in at $282 (includes DigiResults processing fees)

Then using the US to NZ conversion rate on 24 March 2011, this came to NZ$380 (rounded up).

A big thank you to everyone who purchased Easy PayPal Shortcodes.

Where to Get Easy PayPal Shortcodes

You can purchase Easy PayPal Shortcodes via:

* Easy PayPal Shortcodes Sales Page

Cheers

If you operate an email list, you probably take great interest in the statistics of your various email campaigns.

After all, it’s very important to know how successful or not, your email marketing efforts are.

You want to ensure you get the maximum possible open and click rates and minimal number of unsubcribes.

I found the following email marketing statistics on MailChimp and they make very interesting reading.

The statistics are compiled from over 273 million emails sent out by MailChimp users, so with a sample size that large, you have some really useful data to analyse.

Firstly an explanation of each column.

• Open Rate – The percentage of recipients that opened the email.
• Click Rate – The percentage of recipients who clicked on a link in the email.
• Soft Bounces – The percentage of email addresses that were temporarily unavailable.  For example a full mail box.
• Hard bounces – The percentage of email addresses that failed.  Causes can be email address no longer existing or spam filters rejecting the email.
• Abuse complaints – The percentage of recipients that click on the “This is spam” button in the email.
• Unsubscribes – The percentage of recipients that unsubscribed from the list.

Campaign Categories

Looking at the data above, I thought it would be interesting to highlight the highs and lows.  Note that I’ve excluded the categories “Other” and “Other Groups” as they are too generic.

The lowest open rate is Entertainment with 15.29%

The highest open rate is Food with 36.62%

The lowest click rate is Janitorial with 0.10%

The highest click rate is Food with 7.90%

The lowest soft bounces is Food with 0.84%

The highest soft bounces is Healthcare/Medical with 10.47%

The lowest hard bounces is Creative Other with 0.60%

The highest hard bounces is Self Explanatory with 17.33%

The lowest abuse complaints is Architecture with 0.00%

The highest abuse complaints is Healthcare/Medical with 0.23%

The lowest unsubcribes is Janitorial with 0.00%

The high unsubscribes is Construction and Beauty/Health with 0.85%

Analyzing Your Own Email Campaigns

These statistics are useful to know how you are tracking against these averages.

If you are performing better than average, then well done, you obviously know how to create effective email campaigns.

If not, then you need to pay more attention to the area in which you are under-performing.

If your open rate is low, then you should look at writing more compelling subject lines.

If your click rate is low, then you should look at the placement of your links and the call to action.

With soft and hard bounces, that’s mostly outside your control.  Generally the larger the list, the more likelyhood of higher bounces.

If your abuse complains are high, you definitely need to take a very careful look at the content you are writing.  There will always be a percentage of people who forget they have subscribed to your list, but that is always a minority.

If your unsubscribes are high, you should definitely be concerned:

Is your content too spammy?

Are you sending out emails too frequently?

Are you send out endless offers without any real value?

Cheers

What exactly,  is spintax?

That’s a question I get asked quite often, so I thought I’d write an article explaining what spintax is and what uses it has.

The term spintax is a contraction of “spinning syntax”.

Spintax is the format (or syntax) that is used by various software spinners and article submission sites that create or use spun articles.

There are various spintax formats depending on what software/services you use.  See the section titled “Spintax Formats” below for more details.

Article Spinning

Firstly, let me explain what article spinning is.

Article spinning is a method of creating one or more unique copies of an original article.  The level of uniqueness depends on the type and amount of spinning you do.

Typical uses for spun articles are:

1. Submitting to various article directories
2. Submitting to blog networks
3. Creating unique content for a website/blog

In general, the main purpose of spinning articles is to gain backlinks.

Spintax Example

Let’s look at a spintax example using the most common spintax format.

Let’s say our original article has the sentence:

Writing articles is a lot of fun.

Now if we format the above sentence with spintax, we might have something like:

{Writing|Creating} {articles|stories} is a {lot of fun|rewarding experience}.

Each of the words or phrases contained with {|} are randomly substituted in the spun article.  So for the above example, some of the variations generated would be:

Writing stories is a lot of fun.

Creating articles is a rewarding experience.

Creating stories is a rewarding experience.

And so on for all the combinations possible.  The number of variations depends on what software or service you use with your spintax.

You can spin articles at the word, phrase, sentence or paragraph level or a combination of all these.

Nested Spintax

Nested spintax refers to two or more levels of spinning.   Not all spinning software or services support nested spinning.

Nested spintax is probably best explained with an example.

Let’s say I have the following sentence in spintax format:

Article directories are {an important {element|component|aspect} of SEO|useful for {getting|gaining} backlinks}.

In the example above,  the first level spintax is in blue and the 2nd level is in green.  So some examples of the output this example would produce is:

Article directories are an important aspect of SEO.

Article directories are useful for getting backlinks.

Article directories are an important element of SEO.

Optional Words or Phrases

Another spintax function that is supported by most spintax formats is the facility to make a word or phrase optional.

An example of this is:

The best {|overall|general} product.

Note there is no word specified before the first pipe symbol.  The above spintax example would produce the following results:

The best overall product.

The best general product.

The best product.

Spintax Formats

Unfortunately, there is no standard spintax format.

In the examples given, I’ve been using the most common spintax format (sometimes known as Jet format) used by software spinners such as The Best Spinner.

This format uses {} to delimit the words/phrases to spin and the | symbol to separate them.

{word1|word2}
{word1 {level 2|level two}|word 2}

Probably the next most used spintax format is the one used by article submission sites like ArticleRanks.   The first level spin uses {~} and the second level uses [|]. For example:

{word1~word2}

{word1 [level 2|level two]~word 2}

Then there is the format used by article submission sites like the Free Traffic System which uses [spin]|[/spin] format.  For example

[spin]word1|word2[/spin]

Note that Free Traffic System only supports one level of spinning (also known as flat spin).

The Best Spintax Strategy

So putting everything together, what is the best strategy for creating the most effective spintax.

Well, the answer to that question depends on the purpose of what you want to use the spun article for.

However, let’s assume you want to use your article in as many places as possible, eg: article directories, blog networks etc.

Here’s the tips I use:

• Don’t be tempted to use an auto-replace option in your software spinner as you’ll just end up with a junk article that will take you quite a while to clean up.
• Manually spin each sentence or paragraph.  If you have a  large article, then perhaps spin ever second or third sentence.
• Then go through a spin at the word/phrase level by manually selecting the best synonyms.   This is an easy task with spinners like The Best Spinner.
• Make sure you proof read a couple of examples of the spun article to make sure it reads OK and doesn’t have any bad grammar or clumsy sentence construction.

By following these tips, you will greatly increase the chances of having your spun article accepted on the sites you submit it to.  Additionally, by having a high level of spin and uniqueness, it will help your rankings as the search engines will see your backlinks coming from articles with unique content.

Spinning Hyperlinks

The last part of spintax is spinning your hyperlinks.

Obviously, you don’t want to go to all the effort of creating a spun article and leave out hyperlinks to your site.

There’s no real difference between spinning plain text and hyperlinks apart from having to get the hyperlink format correct.  An example of a spun hyperlink is:

<a title=”{keyword one|keyword two}” href=”http://{example.com/page1|example.com/page2}” target=”_blank”>{keyword one|keyword two}</a>

The more keywords and URLs you add, the greater the potential for missing a quote or misformatted HTML tag.

If you need to generate spintax for hyperlinks, then you should check out my Free Spintaxer Tool.

Also, make sure you take advantage of my special LIFETIME 40% discount off The Best Spinner.

Cheers

A very important aspect of keyword research is gauging the number of competing sites.

Typically, almost everyone will do a keyword phrase search in quotes to get an idea of the number of sites that contain that particular keyword phrase.

On the back of that, doing an allintitle search, can be very useful as it will give you an idea of the number of sites that have that keyword phrase in their page title.  This is important as page titles carry more weight than the same keyword phrase contained within the article body.

However, if you are looking at the number of results that Google returns, then you could well be relying on incorrect or inconsistent data.

Video Overview

The following video shows you exactly what I’m talking about with the inconsistent Google allintitle results.

Allintitle Results With and Without Quotes

For the purposes of this article, I’ll be using the keyword phrase: search engine optimization

It’s important to note that the results will vary depending on your location and changes to the Google search algorithms, but as far as I can tell, the inconsistent numbers has been around for a while.

OK, so let me show you can example of exactly what I’m talking about.

First, I’ll do an allintitle search for search engine optimization without the quotes

Google reports there are 518,000 results:

Remember that without quotes, Google will be returning pages with any combination of the words “search”, “engine” and “optimization”.  For example, one of the sites listed on page one has the title:

Search Engine Submission Optimization

Now let’s do the same allintitle search, but with quotes:

Now in theory, as this is searching on exact matches, ie: titles with the phrase “search engine optimization”, we should get a lot less results than searching without quotes.

So, what numbers does Google give us?

Yep, you read it right.  That’s over 3.5 million!!

That’s 700% more than broad match allintitle search!

How’s that for inconsistent and misleading results.

OK, so what’s going on with the figures?

Well, it’s important to note that the search results figures that Google gives you on the first page is just an estimate, otherwise it would slow down Google search results if it had to search through the entire set of data for each search request.

A Better Method of Comparison

For any Google search, it will return a maximum of 1000 results.  By that, I mean if you keep clicking on “Next”, Google will give you a maximum of 99 pages (assuming you use the default of 10 results per page) of results.

Most of the time, the maximum number of results pages will be less than 99.

OK, so let’s go back to our example allintitle searches, and view the results in a different manner.

Let’s do our search with:

allintitle:search engine optimization

Now, you could keep clicking on the “Next” link to take you to the last page, but you’d soon get sick of all the clicking.

To speed up the process, click on “Next” to go to page 2 of the results, and then in the URL in your browser, look for where it has:

start=10

and change it to

start=990

and then press Enter.

This will take you to the last page of results and at the bottom of the page, you’ll see:

Now if we repeat the steps and do the search in quotes, you see the results:

So for the search without quotes, we get 857 results and with quotes it is 618.

This is much more consistent and along the lines of the results you’d expect for broad and exact match searches.

What’s the Bottom Line?

Probably the main moral of this article is to not rely too heavily on the results Google gives you.  By all means, do an allintitle search, but if you find the figures it is returning don’t agree with some of the other metrics you have checked, then it’s quite possible it’s just one of those Google quirks to keep us internet marketers on our toes.

A much better metric to check is how many sites in the top 10 results have the exact match title you are searching for.  If there are sites ranking in the top 10 that don’t use your exact search term in the title, then that gives you a reasonable idea it’s something you can go for.

If you’ve had a similar experience of inconsistent results from Google or have an explanation, please make sure you leave a comment below.

Cheers

ArticleRanks is one of the many content distribution systems that are currently around, so is ArticleRanks better than any of the other similar systems?

Firstly an overview of what ArticleRanks is:

In a nutshell, it allows you to publish your articles on a blog network in order to gain backlinks to your site.

ArticleRanks also allows you to receive content for your blog (if you want new content and/or to earn credits).

The process of submitting an article is:

• You create articles in spintax format (either pre-formatted or using the ArticleRanks article spinning options)
• Select your article category and tags.
• Select a distribution date and hit the publish button.

ArticleRanks Overview

How ArticleRanks Works

The best way to demonstrate how ArticleRanks operates is by watching the video below.

Advantages of ArticleRanks

In the past, I’ve been a big user of Free Traffic System (FTS), but after a while I found out that the total number of backlinks you gain is very minimal due to the limit on the number of sites your article is submitted to and the low quality of the blogs (that frequently disappear).

I tried out ArticleRanks early in 2010, as I was looking for an alternative to FTS.  I also considered SEOLinkVine, but the price really put me off.

It didn’t take long to work out why ArticleRanks was so much better.

The number one reason is the quality of the blog network and the quality of the articles.

Firstly, in order to gain credits for accepting ArticleRanks articles on your blog, your blog must have a Page Rank of one or higher.  This means that a lot of the blogs on the network are established sites with existing page rank that helps boost your link juice.

Secondly, there are various anti-spam mechanisms in place to help prevent junk or low quality articles on the ArticleRanks network.  This benefits not just the blog owners, but also the people submitting articles as it means the sites the articles are submitted to aren’t seen as low quality sites that are filled with mostly spam posts.

ArticleRanks also claim to add their own high PR sites into the network each month.

As a blog owner, if you receive articles from ArticleRanks, you have the options to limit the number of articles you receive, whether articles are auto-approved and auto-reject articles that falls below a set threshold of uniqness.

Another very good reason I like ArticleRanks is the number of sites my articles get published to.  Sites like FTS, have a quite low maximum number of sites your article will be published to.

With ArticleRanks, the lowest number of sites my articles has been published on is 72 and the highest is 145.  Also remember that your article can have up to 3 links in it.

Spinning Articles for ArticleRanks

While there are facilities in ArticleRanks for spinning your articles, they are a little clumsy.  What I do is spin my article using The Best Spinner.

However, for some strange reason, ArticleRanks doesn’t use the most common spintax format, so you need to export your spun article from The Best Spinner with the correct format.

This is easy to to with The Best Spinner.  It just requires defining an spintax export format for ArticleRanks.

The screenshot below shows what to define for the ArticleRanks export format:

Conclusion on ArticleRanks

ArticleRanks is currently my number one choice for article submissions.

The ArticleRanks interface is well designed and easy to navigate.

In general, I’ve noticed some good improvements in rankings from backlinks gained from ArticleRanks, and more importantly, most of those backlinks haven’t disappeared a few months later.

Click here to check out ArticleRanks

Cheers

Digi Launch Pad is the latest creation from Andy Fletcher of WP Syndicator fame and creator of DigiResults.

Digi Launch Pad is a specialized WordPress Theme that is designed to make product launches a breeze.

There’s certainly quite a few other products on the market at the moment like Kajabi and JVPress, so how does Digi Launch Pad stack up against them?

Read on to find out…