Jake Sellers

I’ve been asked “can I use free software for email marketing?” I’ve put together my reviews of free and open source software that can be used for email marketing.

The answer for everyone is “yes, if…” If your list is under about 50,000 subscribers, if your hosting doesn’t throttle your outbound email down to about nothing, if your host’s MTA isn’t blacklisted/untrusted, if your list is clean and you can live without VERP bounce processing, if, if, if. It is your classic iffy proposition.

Do the “ifs” add up for you? Only you can decide that. If you already have shared hosting, the best way to find out is to log in to your control panel, click on Fantastico or whatever your application manager is, and see if there’s an emailing application available, like PHPList or Pommo. If so, you have nothing to lose by trying it out. Read on to see evaluations of some of the shared hosting I’ve used.
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Yes indeed. I’m a big fan of CSS in HTML emails, as I wrote about in my CSS Email Tips article. Of course, in free web-based email clients, it’s important that HTML degrade gracefully, not conflict with the containing HTML, and not contain bad things (ironically like IE “behaviors”) that will be stripped or suppressed. I noticed browsing around eBay that the criteria for HTML that “works” in email is about the same for HTML that can be used in the description field on eBay…
<!–more–>
Browsing around the real estate on eBay, I found many listings that had incredibly beautiful layouts. They didn’t tend to rely overmuch on tables, but used inline CSS to good effect, and generally no markup that would be verboten in free email clients, like floats and absolute positioning.
Good ideas are often only a “view source” away. Take a look for yourself, see if you find designs you like, and try them in your favorite sender to your favorite seeds. You might be impressed with how well designs for eBay descriptions play in email.

First, “web 2.0″ linking. Those links can be “dofollow” all day but if they’re being generated with web-2.0 ajaxy javascript stuff a la Squidoo’s RSS google ain’t gonna see ‘em. 

The other missing spokes in the linkwheel concept? It’s no different from any nodular topology that can be expressed as a network. A 3-link dendrite network across 8 pages would be hundreds of 6 to 8 node “wheels” for the price of one 8-spoke. If an arbitrarily expressed “wheel” topology has value, and it almost certainly doesn’t, a more sophisticated arbitrary expression of a network that results in multiple wheels would be more valuable, no?

Not only that, but just because it looks like a wheel to you doesn’t mean it’s going to look like a wheel to Google. No, your webring 2.0 is yet another collection of low-value backlinks, you can visualize them however you want.

“SEO” as most people describe it is the adaptation of a set of principles to a particular goal, and the assumption that exaggeration of those principles will facilitate the goal. It’s an enterprise in engineering content, markup and backlinks
based on how we think search engines work, there’s no “optimization” because there’s no baseline to optimize from. Particularly bogus is the concept of “on-site SEO.” 90% of it makes no sense.

Google doesn’t tell us how google works, but it makes very clear the product of its work. It’s obvious any given page is ranked at a particular spot for this search. Optimization is about increasing your ranking for that search. Maybe more content will help, maybe some backlinks, maybe a title tag or title attributes. Google suggests all that. That’s
optimization. If you’re trying to impress google with “Put me in the top 10 for ‘make money online’ because my domain has those keywords my title tag spins every variation of that all my title attributes are every variation of ‘make money online’ all my images are named make_money_online_{keyword}.jpg and I have 5,000 forum backlinks with my ‘make money online’ signature”…can you hear the whistle blowing?

That’s the Failure Express, and that kind of “SEO” is your first-class ticket.

When I’m doing keyword research, particularly in the “make money online” pseudoniche, I run across countless blog posts, articles, comments, social bookmarks, trackbacks, and directory entries for all these obvious, stupid scams. How nice it was to see a realistic, genuine result high up in the SERPs for one of the newer scams. It’d be so nice to see it at #1. Google Ads for Free. C’mon indeed!

A project I’m working on has made me re-think SEO in general. The conventional wisdom seems to be figure out what you want to rank for, saturate your site with the phrase, litter it with title attributes, get all the anchor text backlinks you can, and try to fight your way to the top 3. This isn’t search engine “optimization,” it’s more like search engine “engineering,” engaging in action trying to convince Google you belong in the top 10. It’s a waste of time in some cases because the odds are extremely poor you’ll unseat authority sites and old sites.

The approach I’m trying is more like optimization than engineering. I’m taking the organic Google’s giving me, and reinforcing and increasing what Google says the site is relevant for and to based on what Google already knows. My early evidence indicates an adaptive SEO strategy would be more effective than trying to SERP up for any given thing - create a content-rich site, perhaps not even pre-niched so to speak, see what G gives you for organic, find something you can monetize based on the organic traffic, adapt your content accordingly to optimize your search engine placement that’s already generating traffic.

To me, it’s an interesting re-think on the organic traffic question with very interesting potential.

I don’t know about you, but I’m sort of sick of the term “viral marketing.” It’s one of those buzzwords that’s long since lost its buzz. The “forward this email to a friend” link is a fairly common and perhaps even abused addendum to the footer of many marketing emails. The concept is good, the value proposition tends to be a little limited. Fortunately you can make the process a little more painless…
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Many newsletter publishers are afraid to send a marketing-only email. They just attempt to monetize links within their content, which is fine, but is not as effective as a full email creative one-timer sent to your list. Think of it this way: in the newspaper, which stands out more, the full-page ads or the column ads? Which cost more? Which do you think are more effective?
You are the printer and publisher of your content, and the single email offer is your full-page ad. Don’t be afraid - if a subscriber is going to cancel their subscription because you send single email offers, the odds are pretty good they’re not going to convert on your content-embedded offers.

While there’s no magic bullet that equates to ROI online, I can tell you that email generates the highest ROI of any online marketing activity, as high as $45 for every dollar spent on average. On this site I’ll be sharing my experience in email marketing. I’ll cover everything from minimizing your cost per subscriber acquisition to maximizing your revenue per email sent. Feel free to subscribe, ask questions, and participate in the discussion.