Internet Service Providers have a MUCH lower threshold. While it is legal to send unsolicited email under CAN-SPAM, it violates the Terms of Service of pretty much every ISP and email subscription broadcast service in the country. Also most ISPs have limits on how many emails you can send per hour or day.

You don't want to come in to work one day and find out you have no Internet connection or your website's been taken down.

Or find out you've been listed in Spam Data Bases and your email traffic is all being automatically junked at the other end.

There are basically two solutions:

The first is to use only "double opt-in" email lists. That means no matter how you obtain an email address, you then send the person an email to CONFIRM that they want to receive email from you. If they don't reply positively, you don't send to them.

This is the only method that actually, fully complies with the Terms of Service of ISPs (so long as you aren't trying to send too many emails in too short a period of time), and of subscription email broadcast services such as Constant Contact.

However, it has a major liability to it. You lose by far the largest percentage of your email addresses. Even if someone would welcome your email, they may not notice or reply to your "opt-in" confirmation email.

So what is a person to do?

Read on in part 2....

Door #2 says, knowingly violate the rules but do it in such a way that you never come up on their radar screen.

I strongly recommend Solution #2, and it isn't hard to accomplish. There are basically two ways to do this.

If you are sending to a list of people who really do know you and the list isn't too large, go ahead send it out through your ISP. Or you can use a subscription service for larger lists. Either way, chances are the percentage of people who complain or ask off is likely to be so low as to not trigger labelling you as spam.

There is an alternative, which works just fine even with huge lists from dubious sources. You send the emails out from a domain other than your regular one; and you send out using an "SMTP service".

An SMTP service is simply a barebones emailing service. We use one located in England. If they get complaints, they simply send them to you to unsubscribe.

The problem with any other system is your ISP, if someone complains, will probably NOT tell you who is complaining. They'll just tell you to knock off the spam. It is so easy for AOL users to report your email as spam, you are going to get complaints. So you have to have a way of finding out who is complaining.

All this adds up to a system which is a bit complex. It is also more expensive than just broadcasting through your ISP or a subscription service.

It is still WAY cheaper than any other form of marketing, and if the list is any good at all, and your email is well designed, it will be VERY cost effective.

(At Fast Forward we have a turnkey email broadcasting system based on the above. We've been using it successfully for almost two years. Call for more information.)

One reason was because states were starting to pass laws - and they didn't necessarily agree with each other. You can imagine what it would have been like with 50 states having different rules, since email is by its nature, national or international!

It is vital to know the rules if you are sending commercial emails, since this is a reall, live, Federal law - it even has criminal penalties for violation. You can go to jail (of course only the worst offenders get that).

Contrary to what some people think, it is NOT illegal under this law to send unsolicited commercial email (it is in violation of Internet Service Providers' terms of service. But that is another story).

You can send all the unsolicited email you want without breaking the law, as long as you follow a few simple rules. I am not a lawyer, but this is a good general summary of the rules:

1. You can't falsify sending email addresses or otherwise try to pass yourself off as someone else.

2. You have to include your actual company name and address (can be a PO Box).

3. You need to include some kind of notice that this is advertising or a solicitation of some sort, if it is.

4. You have to provide a simple, easy way for people to request to be taken off your list. You can't require them to provide anything more than their email address in order to be unsubscribed.

5. You have to remove people from the list within 10 days or your being notified.

That's it.

These rules DO apply to non-profit organizations. If email is being sent by a third party, the rules apply to both the thrid party and the organization for whom the email is being sent.

Simple enough? So make sure you follow these rules (Note: If you use any of various subscription emailing services such as Constant Contact, iContact or Mail Chimp, compliance is automatically taken care of).

Three years ago, you could pay a company $1000 or so to send out 1 million emails to a targeted list.

Those days are gone, killed by spam and the CAN-SPAM act.

If someone is offering to sell you an email list at ANY price, it is almost certainly a scam. There are essentially no legitimate lists for sale. There are certain circumstances where you can get a legitimate list for free (see below).

Legitimate organizations that will broadcast your email to their list are usually magazines or associations. They will have to approve your email before sending it - and may have severe restrictions such as on size or content.

With rare exceptions, the ONLY legitimate ways to obtain email addresses for your own use are:

1. Compile them yourselves, such as from lists of your own customers or prospects, or newsletter signups.

2. If you exhibit at a trade show, you will often get an email list from show attendees and/or exhibitors - sometimes with strings attached on their use.

3. If you are a member of a trade association of some sort, you will often get an email list of other members - sometimes with strings attached on their use.

Of course, no matter how you obtain emails, in broadcasting you have to follow the CAN-SPAM act rules, AND make sure you don't get on the wrong side of Internet Service Providers (labeled as a spammer). More about these issues in the next couple of days.,

If someone is telling you anything else, they are preying on your hopes and ripping you off.

So what do you do? Get busy and find ways to build lists using 1 to 3 above! Because email marketing IS one of the most cost-effective methods of marketing that exists. IF you can get or build a useful list.

For those who don't know the history of Google, there were other search engines and ways of navigating the web such as directories that were important in 1996 when two Stanford graduate students - now billionaires of course - came up with the idea that became Google.

How do you know what people consider important?

By links.

If other websites link to a page, and those links agree with page content - and if those links are from web pages which are themselves important - well then, that page is IMPORTANT.

That idea is implemented in part through "PR", "Page Rank", a number from 0 to 10 assigned to each page that Google indexes. A page with a PR of 10 is of the highest importance. A PR of 0 is the lowest.

Google then uses these PR values as part of its overall formula ("algorithm") for determining search engine rankings. In short, the higher your PR, the higher your search engine rankings are likely to be.

Different pages in a website will have different PR's. Usually the home page has the highest PR.

How do you increase your PR? You get links - but not just any links (see above).

To give you an idea of the scale of PR, Microsoft's home page is a 9, as is Yahoo.com and the home page of the New York Times. The Drudge Report is an 8. United Airlines is a 7. Tampa Florida's website is a 5.

For mere mortals, 0 to 3 is easy and not worth much. A 4 is not bad (our home page is a 4). If you can get a 5 or a 6, you are really cranking.

But that is not what I'm talking about today. I'm talking about "PR" as in "Public Relations" as in what does the world think of you?

If you are successful, people are going to start talking about you on the Internet, and if people start talking about you, some people are going to say BAD things about you. Maybe even lies.

Oh the horror! What is one to do!!

This is the down side of celebrity.

Well, first of all, realize that doesn't necessarily mean anyone is reading it. But they might.

The good news is it is possible to do something about it.

With rare exceptions you can NOT get the bad PR taken down. What you can do is to make it harder for someone to find the (as it is known) Black PR. How? Most of the time, the Black PR is found, if at all, by people doing searches on your name (or perhaps company name). If you add more high-ranking pages to the Internet, you can drive the black PR down onto page 2 or 3 on a Google search - where hardly anyone will find it.

Of course there's more to it than that. But the basics of it are that simple.

Here are a couple:

http:://seehere.blogspot.com

http://geekpress.com

You're welcome.

http://www.miss-vintage.com/marilyn/makeup.htm

I've written before about the first element of successful marketing: volume. There is no such thing as successful marketing that doesn't involve a volume of "impressions" - a technical term for the number of eyeball pairs you are (potentially) reaching with your marketing.

But let's say you ARE getting a volume of reach with your marketing, and little to no response? Here's a short checklist of the BIG REASONS why:

2. Product or service no one wants. I'm sorry but the greatest marketing genius in the world is not going to have much luck selling buggy whips in Detroit.

3. Bad choice of marketing channel. Not all impressions equal all other impessions. Good example: we were working on a new product release for Podiatrists (foot doctors). There's a magazine they all read, so you'd think ads in the mag would be a natural. Nope. Market research found that Podiatrists don't want to find out about new products in the mag; they want to find out about them at trade shows. They ignore the ads.

4. Poor choice of headline, composition or offer. Everyone is overwhelmed with all the advertising they are exposed to. If you don't grab eyeballs and hit them right away with something that makes them stop and look further... they are gone.

5. INSUFFICIENT REPETITION. Marketing is not a one-shot proposition. The other part of making it through the noise of the some 3000 advertising messages a day the average person receives, is repetition. You have to repeat your message over and over for it to come up on people's radar screen.

Overall, you have to have an approach that takes the reality of these points into account. If you don't have the budget for a lot of repetition in a TV ad, don't run TV. If you don't know what to offer your potential buyers, don't know what will make them respond, don't know if they even want your product - you'd better do some market research before you blow money you can ill afford to waste, on advertising that is little more effective than if you wrapped the greenbacks in a brick and threw it overboard.

An obvious answer is get a professional onto it for you. Of course, nearly every businessman has been frustrated by hiring someone who was supposedly a marketing professional and going to give them great results, only to have it fail miserably. Unfortunately, most marketing companies are selling smoke and mirrors. But if what they have to offer doesn't pass the test of sheer volume plus these 5 points, chances are you should take your business elsewhere.

What made it happen was brilliant marketing. Marketing Guys have been writing articles and talking about the Obama campaign for months - and will undoubtedly do so for years to come.

This article by Al Ries, one of the true gurus of modern-day marketing, is the best I've seen yet on the subject. Here are lessons for all of us to learn:

What Marketers Can Learn From Obama's Campaign

That is certainly true of the Internet in general and blogs in particular.

The whole idea with a blog is to generate repeat visitors. But you have to get them there the first time somehow.

So here are a few tips on how to traffic to your blog.

2. It may sound silly to have to mention this, but it is amazing how often it is forgotten: TELL PEOPLE ABOUT YOUR BLOG. Whether that is by sending out mailings, mentioning it to the cashier at the local diner, or hiring a plane to do skywriting, get the word out.

3. Add other blogs in your subject area to your blogroll. Don't have a blogroll? This is the list of blogs YOU like and read which usually is located along one side of your blog. If you list a blog, you are linking to that blog. Some of these will notice, check out your blog and may write about YOUR blog on theirs. And some of their visitors may check you out.

4. Visit other blogs in your subject area which allow comments. Comment when you feel like it. Some people will find their way back to your blog.

5. Do something worthy of grabbing attention. Of course not everyone can always do that. But if you have original reporting or a very well written opinion piece on a hot topic, or something so unusual (especially pictures or videos) as to be a real eyeball grabber, this can spread virally.

6. Make sure your blog shows up in indexes and directories and social networking sites (more about that in another post)

You can see from some of these points, such as #3-5 why I've said don't bother blogging if it isn't going to be fun, if you even do manage to grind out some posts, no one is going to be reading them.

When blogging started about 5 years ago, blogs got read by at most perhaps a few thousand visitors a day. They (especially the political blogs) got a huge boost during the 2004 presidential elections. Now top blogs regularly get 100,000 or more visitors a day. But they all started out as labors of love and that is what made them good, interesting and worthwhile.

Amazon has a website www.windowshop.com. Its a sort of virtual bookstore shop window. But with the capabilities of the web utilized to the max.

If you zoom in on an album cover, you hear an excerpt. If you zoom in on a book cover, you see and hear an excerpt from the text.

Like a shop window, they change it once a week. And of course, you can just click and add it to your Amazon shopping cart.

Brilliant!

That is with Blogger, another one of Google's fine and free services.

If you create a blog on their hosting platform, Blogspot, it doesn't cost a thing, and they make it really easy to get started.

Later, you can host a blog elsewhere or add it to your website, even use different blogging software, and do it in such a way you don't lose your existing posts, nor lose any links to your blog.

It's a great way to get your feet wet in the world of blogging.

Am I going to have fun doing this?

There's a very simple reason for that. If it isn't fun, you aren't going to do that. We seen this clearly over the years. It is just one of those things. It doesn't matter how good an idea it is, it just isn't going to happen otherwise.

You want to get into the habit of regular blogging, the emphasis being on regular - not on any certain frequency. Whether you do one post a week, a day, or multiple postings over the course of the day, don't try and force it, but start out easy so you keep doing it.

You can always work up into more frequent and more sophisticated posts (with attachments, pictures, links, etc.) as you get more into it.