I've been running an experiment with some dark-hatted links for several months, consistently hoping Google will catch them and remove their value. So far… Nothing. Well, except top 3 rankings for all the anchor text pointed at those pages. Google's webspam team has all the incentive, brainpower and money in the world, yet their bets seem to be centered firmly on Google+ and the social graph eventually subsuming the "natural" results with those biased to what our friends and connections share/+1. Fine. I get it. Link buying isn't going away, no matter how much we wish it would.

Even if link buying is working in the short-term and webspam's being less aggressive, I still think it's a waste of money for three reasons:

1. Rankings are tactical: Earning your way to the top rankings is awesome, because it brings with it the branding, familiarity, trust, social sharing and dozens of other positive marketing signals that "earned" links carry. Spam and paid links just give you some more traffic (and not even as much as a trusted brand could earn in the same position). Conversion rates are lower than your peers, and the secondary traffic benefits from other sources, word-of-mouth, etc. never come into play.
2. It's Overpriced: My wife's travel site gets offers for several hundred dollars to put in a few links on a single post, and that's not even an efficient market like those created by professional link sellers and link platforms. Playing the link buying game in the big leagues takes thousands to tens of thousands of dollars each month 
3. There's Always Risk: You're already familiar with the horrific pain of Google's Kafka-esque penalties, but maybe you're banking on not getting hit, given their relative ineffectiveness over the past couple years. Problem is, Google+ has created two new kinds of risk for link spammers. The first is that social search results, which have virtually no ties to the link graph, will overwhelm "natural" results and make those purchased links largely useless. The second is that Google+ gains enough momentum and data to leverage for webspam analysis. If you've been pointing lots of links at sites and pages that earn no social traction, get ready to feel some pain. Maybe you're risk-tolerant enough to scoff off both of these, but I don't think Google+ is going anywhere, and I give them even-odds to have a social content/sharing graph big enough to pull off both within 24 months.

"Blah, blah, blah, I've heard your white hat evangelism before, Rand" Yeah, you have. Fair enough. So how about instead of just warning about what not to do, I give you somewhere to spend all those earmarked-for-spam dollars.

Here's some rough calculations on link purchasing in a moderately competitive vertical:

• Ranking goal: single keyword phrase plus some slight modified phrases
• Required: minimum of 50 unique root domains
  • 35 will be one-time payments, but are relatively low quality, $ 100 is the average price (like I said, low quality)
  • 15 will require ongoing payments to maintain the link, $ 100/month (on average) will probably do it
• Total cost over 12 months: ($ 100*35)+($ 100*12*15) = $ 21,500

So, for $ 21,500, you can probably buy your way into the top 3 rankings for a moderately competitive phrase in a vertical like niche travel, low-volume e-commerce products, etc. Many black hats I know would argue they can get it cheaper, and they can, but that's usually because they own networks and properties or have relationships for which they wouldn't pay directly. A marketing guy working in-house at a brand has none of the connections, no networks of spamfarms, nothing except dollars and a business model that can turn $ 21.5K in spammy links into $ 100K in CLTV at 50% margins for a net of $ 28.5K.

Now let's try an alternative: Buying a blog.

Say you're LastWear Clothing (a site one of my favorite Moz engineers, Marty, particularly likes). They could buy some links to key pages (in spite of all the many good reasons not to) and try to get rankings for queries like men's hakama or womens underbust corset. There's a small amount of existing search query demand, and they're one of the only sources on the web selling those precise garments, so there's a good chance that would turn into sales.

But, let's try another thought experiment. I'll head over to Google Reader and run a search for "steampunk" (the aesthetic of LastWear's clothing):

The second site that pops up has a blog with 6,647 subscribers… And it's talking about the fashion of steampunk! I think we're on to something.

The Steampunk Workshop blog has thousands of subscribers, and they're already clear proponents of LastWear (I know, at this point you're thinking I planned all this from the start, but I swear, it just fell into place as I was searching/writing). That Workshop site is also running ads on the sidebar and between posts, which suggests an attempt at monetization. While not every site like this is a potential option, many are likely to be interested in an acquisition.

Here's one way I might structure it:

• Steampunk Workshop moves their blog to LastWear.com/blog
• They continue blogging about all the things they normally would – no editorial interference or direction needed
• LastWear helps with a more professional design, subscription buttons, some marketing polish, etc. to help the blog earn more traffic, visibility and fans
• In exchange for the move, LastWear offers a monthly stipend to the blogger(s) and a lump sum payment at the end of 3 years. After those 3 years, they own the blog and the content therein, and both parties can decide how they'd like to proceed with the relationship.

If LastWear went down this road, I can promise two things; #1) they'll get far greater short and long term ROI than buying links and #2) it will be less expensive in the long run.

To my mind, this is a no-brainer. When you buy a blog or any form of online community, you're not simply acquiring links, you're getting:

• An engine for brand building and indirect customer acquisition
• An ongoing methodology to pull in links, tweets, shares, +1s, likes, etc.
• Brand evangelists who will help expand your reach and credibility
• A PR opportunity like few others, even in fields where PR is hard to come by (acquisitions are talked-about, blogged-about, and make the news, even those of relatively small blogs)
• Content that's already been proven to attract an audience
• All the organic signals that search engines love to see – from links to social to usage to content to branding

I honestly don't understand why this problem exists:

It makes you want to yell, "Why don't you just go get married already?!"

Here's five questions I'd ask brands considering online marketing (marketing online) to answer before choosing link purchasing tactics over a blog investment strategy:

1. Which is more likely to be scalable in the long term?
2. Which is more likely to work across multiple channels (content, social, SEO, referring links, etc)?
3. Which carries a greater risk->reward ratio?
4. Which is more likely to increase conversion rate and customer lifetime value?
5. Which is more likely to earn you accolades from your community and which is more likely to earn you a rankings penalty one morning when you really need to hit your quarterly traffic numbers? 

To be fair, there's plenty of challenges and hoops to jump through in these types of transactions and some won't work out. But, I see a huge disconnect between those who are naturally earning all the signals engines say they want (blogs and online communities) vs. those need them (commercial sites) and no reason the two can't co-mingle. If you're a marketer looking to invest dollars into earning a presence in the search, social and web world, you can either build it yourself or you can buy it. I hope to see lots of dollars flowing to the content pioneers who've already proven themselves effective earners of inbound marketing signals — the bloggers.

p.s. In the future, I hope to cover this topic in more depth and detail and provide tools and methodologies to structure discovery, transactions, value-creation, etc. but for now, I hope this post offers at least a little inspiration and an alternative use for capitol that can do far more good in the hands of bloggers than fly-by-night spam operations.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!

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SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog

Not getting the rankings you want? Hire us for Search engine optimisation

Key Linkbuilding Strategies Presentation from SES London

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Blogstorm

Last week we announced quite an innovative tool we are working on: the Infographics Gallery that lets content marketers easily get traction for the infographics they promote (provided they have unique content to go with the infographics).

Our tool is in no way the linkbait-generation machine – there’s no way we can fake the viral effect, that’s true (and my experiment below only proves that). What it can do though is to help create the momentum or let you gain at least some traction for those infographics that fail to.

Going viral is really complex: you can’t fake it, you can’t predict it (with 100% certainty) but you can still help it, to some extent. Our tool is unique in many ways.

As the graphic content creator you get the full control over the infographic spread:

• You are able to choose which bloggers will publish your infographic (and choose the strongest publishers);
• You can get your infographic re-published as many times as you want (provided you have a unique and interesting description each time);
• You control the links and credits that accompany your infographic.

Here’s a quick case study on how I promoted my infographic on Social Spam and got it re-published 10 times in two days!

Step 1: Publish an infographic on your own blog

That’s what I did. The easiest part of that one is that it didn’t even require any indepth research or work. I simple re-packaged my Mashable guest post.

Step 2: Create interesting descriptions (mini-posts)

That doesn’t take much time especially if you did your own research before creating the infographic. Now, just brainstorm different ways to mini-refocus your research results in a number ways and get it done (while being an easy part, that’s the most complex one in the whole process).

For me these were, for example:

• Spam Free: Social Marketing Without Spamming
• Are Your Social Media Accounts at Risk?
• 3 Types of Social Media Spam You Didn’t Know You Created
• etc

Step 3: Upload the infographic to MyBlogGuest New Articles Gallery

The process is still being refined, but for those who are used to our tools, that’s no-brainer. Just upload your infographic and publish all your unique descriptions (Pst… sorry for repeating “unique descriptions” again and again, but that’s the part many people still don’t seem to quickly understand).

Step 4: Wait for the Offers: The more unique descriptions, the more offers!

The offers from bloggers will start coming to your email inbox as well as to your PM inbox at MyBlogGuest. You can check each one or you can wait for the offers to accumulate and come back in 6 hours to accept some while rejecting the others:

Step 5: Choose one offer per description (e.g. 10 descriptions = 10 offers)

If one description seems to be getting more traction, feel free to only accept the offers for some of them and let the rest hang in the gallery until you get an offer you can’t miss!

Step 6: Wait for the posts to go live!

This can take a few minutes for some blogs and a few days for others, but they all will get published. Again, PMs and emails will notify you of each published post for you to go ahead and help promote it for even more traction!

Step 7: Keep all the data online or download as CSV file!

At any point you can access all your published “guest infographics” within MyBogGuest (Published) folder as well as download all the data and keep in Excel file (if at any point you decide to discontinue the paid service, you’ll still have all the records to pitch the bloggers with your future guest articles or infographics)

Not all of my articles are live yet, but I have ten of them already in two days! Not bad at all considering most of the work is being done on auto-pilot!

What are your thoughts?

→Feel free to join My Blog Guest for free to give it a try!←

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by Krikit ♥

Related posts:

1. The Strategy of Blog Commenting – Case Study
2. Baiting for Links with Fake Websites

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SEO Consulting Blog – Seo Smarty

It’s been a while since I teed off. But every now and then you read an article so blatantly wrong you feel compelled to respond. That moment came for me last week when I read an opinion piece on Mumbrella declaring that “Australia’s traditional agencies can’t manage to put out anything remotely passable as digital work”. Which is quite possibly the most ill-informed opinion I’ve heard this year. But rather than relying on sweeping generalisations to support my claim, I’ll respond in the manner appropriate of a strategist – with insights and data.

Before I get into that though, I should make it clear that I have no personal agenda linked to my response. In fact, I’ve spent the last 4 years working within a pure-play digital agency. And I’ll admit that when I first came into the role, I had an opinion similar to Daniel's. Traditional agencies did do digital poorly at the time. But that was 4 years ago. And as anyone working in digital knows, the speed of change in our industry is immense. A lot has transpired since, and the traditional agencies have rapidly bridged the capability gap.

To prove so, you only need to look as far as this year’s AIMIA award finalists. The AIMIAs are widely regarded as the pinnacle within our industry, recognising the best digital work our country has to offer. If Daniel’s assertion was correct, there’d barely be a traditional agency on the radar. Except that there is. Plenty of them. From Leo Burnett to Ideaworks to Whybin/TBWA/Tequila the traditional agencies are representing.

In fact, almost half of all AIMIA finalists came from beyond the pure-play digital environment.  I analysed the complete list of AIMIA finalists and identified projects whereby an agency was engaged. Here’s what I found:

• 53 finalists (52%) emanated from a pure-play digital agency
• 37 finalists (36%) emerged from traditional agencies
• 12 finalists (12%) came from a hybrid style agency

Which seems to be fairly conclusive proof that Australia’s traditional agencies are perfectly capable of producing high quality digital work. And to be honest, I’m not sure how anyone involved in the industry could still think otherwise…

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Online Marketing Banter

Here are 4 reasons why it’s important to organize your blog commenting:

1. You don’t want multiple people commenting on the same post.
Having multiple people from your company post comments on the same blog posts looks bad for a couple of reasons. First off, it looks like you might be trying to spam the blog and squeeze out a few extra backlink (posicionamiento web)s. Secondly, if the two comments disagree with each other you are sending conflicting signals. What stance is your brand actually taking on the issue? It can actually undermine your authority in the long run.

2. No wasted time looking for places to comment.
One of the most time consuming aspects of blog commenting is research. Finding 20-50 new, related blog posts every month to leave a 2-3 sentence comment on can take hours of searching. By staying organized and keeping a master list of possible blogs, you eliminate a lot of the research time. You can just work your way through the list of blogs and comments on the ones that have new posts. A little extra upfront work to make that list will save you hours in the end.

3. You want to know where you’ve left comments so you can see if they went live.
Don’t waste your time commenting on blogs that never let your comments go through. It might be because the blog owner doesn’t monitor the comments, or maybe one of your comments was filtered as spam so the rest are automatically spammed as well. Whatever the reason, it isn’t worth leaving a comment on a blog that will never let it go live. By keeping a running list of everywhere you’ve left a blog comment, you’ll be able to quickly check up on those comments and see which ones went are good.

4. A schedule will help you stay on top of the latest posts.
Most blogs posts keep the first comments directly under the post, which is why you want to leave your comment as soon as possible after that post goes live. It adds an extra level of brand exposure and can help drive more traffic and engagement—how many times do you read the first comment versus the 25th? By keeping a schedule of which blogs that post daily, two times a week, bi-weekly, etc, you’ll know when it’s time to check out that blog.

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Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Journal

Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu or “Bjj” as often nicknamed online is a martial art, combat sport and self defense system that focuses on grappling and ground fighting. It’s been made widely popular by the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) and is a very important discipline that Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) fighters must master to be any good.

I’ve been a long time UFC and MMA fan, but I had never really considered training in Bjj. I met Chris at Ad-Tech San Francisco, Ian Fernando had introduced us and Chris had got me hooked on the idea of trying it out. It took me most of the summer to actually pick a school and go to my first lesson but by the end of August 2011, I started.

And so it began. I was pretty much hooked from the minute that I started. I was training about 3 times a week (sometimes more, sometimes less) and I quickly started relating a lot that I was learning in Bjj class to my marketing.

The first major breakthrough I had was learning how to truly stay calm in any situation. Right from the very first class, which I was rolling (they call sparring rolling in Bjj) with a guy that was 100 pound heavier than me and I quickly realized that I was not going to be able to over-power this guy and that my mind was the only thing that was going to allow me to win. In marketing terms, I couldn’t just go and buy a bunch of traffic wildly, I had to actually dissect several different traffic sources and figure out which ones I could tweak here and there to get the sales that I needed.

This became a recurring theme in my earlier days of starting Bjj. I was rolling with people much heavier than me and I had to use my mind to figure out how to win. My ego got in the way a little bit in the early days and even though I was 100 pounds less I tried to use my strength to overpower the bigger opponent. It worked sometimes, but usually I would just tire myself out. It’s like buying up a ton of un-targeted traffic and hoping that it converted without having the proper tracking tools or analytics in place.

So, here I am going to Jiu-Jitsu class 3 times a week and these guys that are 100 pounds bigger than me are climbing on me and trying to choke me out, break my limbs off, you name it. Ok, they weren’t literally trying to break my limbs off, but pretty close to it with some of these crazy submissions that are out there!

I had to come up with a new game plan on how I could conquer this new traffic source… err, martial art venture. I had to do something better than these guys that were bigger than me and stronger than me and trying to take my head off.

The one thing I realized quicker than most people that start off Bjj is that often times it comes down to which guy remains the calmest, uses the least energy necessary to accomplish what they want to accomplish. I quickly started to adapt a minimalist approach where I would only exert energy when I absolutely had to or saw a opening. That’s not to say that I was always playing defense, I try to stay on the offensive constantly just like I do in Internet Marketing.

This approach of using the least energy allowed me to last longer than my opponents that were 100 pounds bigger than me as well as much stronger. Essentially I was tiring them out and letting then use all their energy, then going in to finish them off if I hadn’t already. This calmer smarter approach started to work better and better and I quickly was beating guys right off the bat that were so much bigger than me without having to tire them out.

It’s like a human chess match, which to me marketing is the same way. You are constantly trying to outsmart or out maneuver your competition, or strategically setup some crafty advertising campaigns while having a plan B and plan C in place if your ads get declined or if the traffic runs dry.

Either way, I think a lot of marketers would benefit from joining a Bjj class. When you start off the day having another person trying to choke the life out of you, it only goes up hill from there. I’ve learned to stay calm under even the toughest situations.

My marketing mind is at an all time high. I’m calm, confident and even the worst of problems are not going to frustrate me or cause me to deviate from technique. Reckless power or speed solely to beat an opponent or make money online is probably not going to work. If your technique is the best you will probably be the victor. Technique over everything.

Here’s a video that Chris sent me that I thought is a good representation of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu.

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Daily Conversions

Good writing matters in marketing; being able to articulate ideas clearly is key to capturing the attention of prospects. Let’s take calls-to-action as an example. If the copy you craft doesn’t draw visitors in, that can hurt your click-through rate, lead conversions, and ultimately, sales.

“People looking for information are looking for text, not pictures,” writes copywriter Dean Rieck, analyzing the results of an Eyetrack III study. Visitors focus on the words in text ads more than on the graphics. So in this blog post, let’s discuss some key copywriting lessons you should apply to the process of crafting successful calls-to-action.

1) Begin With Subjects & Verbs

The very first piece of advice in the classic book Writing Tools encourages writers to start sentences with subjects and verbs. In the English language, we read from left to right, and verbs and subjects help us to quickly glean the meaning of a sentence. As basic as these facts may be, acknowledging this when crafting your online call-to-action is crucial when the attention of readers is more elusive than the shadow of a flapping bird.

Surprisingly, a lot of companies don’t seem to consider this in their call-to-action copywriting. A quick visit to The New York Times‘ website revealed a bunch of paid ads that were hiding their verbs in the bottom right corner, or were missing them altogether. For example, check out the screenshot of an exhibit ad from the site’s Arts section. This call-to-action copy could be drastically improved by adding a vibrant verb at the very top, maybe something along the lines of ‘Peek into the world of dead sea scrolls.’

By not including a verb in the CTA copy, you aren’t prompting readers to take action, which can hurt the click-through rate of your call-to-action and negatively impact conversions.

In fact, verbs are the part of speech that generate the most shares on Twitter, which HubSpot Social Media Scientists Dan Zarrella reported in his Science of Social Media research. It turns out that verbs beat adverbs, adjectives, and nouns in terms of their potential to attract Twitter shares!

2) Include Numbers

The internet overflows with guesswork and vague statements. That’s why using data and numbers is a great way to demonstrate that your message is clear and straightforward.

Numbers are a great way to break through the clutter of ambiguity, be specific about your offer, and set the right expectations. A number tells visitors exactly what they’re going to get, how much of it, for how long, etc. This technique has proven successful not only for call-to-action copy, but also for blog post titles, press release headlines, and email subject lines. In fact, in The Science of PR, Dan Zarrella discovered that including digits in your press release headline can help increase total views.

What numbers can you include in your CTA copy? You can add the page length of the whitepaper you offer, mention a specific discount, or list the numerical impact or benefit of a particular resource you are providing. For instance, HubSpot’s call-to-action for joining our email list is “Get the world’s best marketing resources right to your inbox! Join more than 817,000 inbound marketers!”

3) Use Adverbs Sparingly

Most adverbs can be recognized by their “ly” ending, e.g. “finally,” “unfortunately,” and “quietly.” However, there are different types of adverbs (in relation to direction, time, degree, and manner), and their function is to modify “constituents other than nouns.” They have no fixed position in a sentence. For instance, you can place the word “finally” at different places in the same sentence.

Marketers should use adverbs in their call-to-action only if it aids in the understanding of the message. For instance, adverbs could help you shorten the copy: you can replace “to the extreme” with “extremely”; “with ease” with “easily”; and “in this place” with “here.” Some of the most frequently used adverbs by marketers in calls-to-action include terms like “now,” “fast,” “today,” and “here.”

Actually, adverbs are the part of speech that gets the fewest number of shares on Twitter, according to Dan Zarrella’s Science of Social Media research. They are behind adjectives, nouns, and verbs in shareability.

4) Keep it Between 90 and 150 Characters

The standard advice for calls-to-action has been to keep them short and concise. Don’t write convoluted copy that will take your visitor a long time to read. (Not surprisingly, this holds true for other marketing activities, such as emails and press releases.) “With plenty of competition in the inbox, on the web, and elsewhere, it is wise to assume you have a limited opportunity to catch and keep a recipient’s attention,” writes Simms Jenkins, CEO of BrightWave Marketing, about emails.

However, your CTA should contain enough information about the benefits and specifics of your offer. Don’t shorten it for brevity’s sake. In fact, start by writing out a few full sentences that clearly convey the offer’s appeal. Then, remove words that don’t contribute to your core message.

In The Science of PR, Dan Zarrella reported that the most engaging press release headlines are between 90 and 150 characters. Try to fit your call-to-action copy in these limits, and see how readers react.

5) Make Language Less Technical and More Practical

The language in your call-to-action will most likely reflect industry-specific knowledge. However, there are some best practices that hold true for all CTA copy regardless of industry. As with the other points we’ve examined so far, this one also borrows from the best practices of other marketing activities.

The terminology that works well for attracting views to blog posts implies expertise and thought leadership. According to The Science of Blogging, some of the words that are most viewed in blog posts include “insights,” “analysis,” “answers,” “questions,” “advice,” “review,” “why,” “product”, “top,” and “best.” These words suggest that the piece of content can improve the reader in some way. The same logic can be applied to crafting call-to-action copy. Emphasize the benefits of the offer and how it can make your prospects smarter.

Stay away from overly technical jargon. Some of the words that attract the fewest views in blog posts include “franchise,” “investment,” “virtualization,” and “conferencing.” These terms imply forced complexity and are less appealing to readers. If people don’t even want to view content that includes such technical jargon, you should definitely not include it in your call-to-action copy.

Finally, don’t be boring in your language, and don’t simply copy what the competition is saying. How much value does the standard “click here” and “submit” button convey? Not that much. Instead of gravitating toward the uniform CTA language, use some creative copy that stands out. Make a list of vibrant verbs that suggest benefits to the reader (e.g. “browse,” “compare,” “jump,” and “grab”)

What is the best performing call-to-action you have crafted? Share it in the comments below so that we can learn from more real-life examples!

Connect with HubSpot:

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HubSpot’s Inbound Internet Marketing Blog

Email marketing seems like an easy win for your inbound marketing strategy. Write an awesome email, put in some snazzy images, fire it off to your opt-in list, and watch the customers roll in.

Even if it all was that easy, though, the step marketers often overlook is just how difficult it can be to actually get your email into a recipient’s inbox in the first place. Seems basic, but there are tons of moving parts involved in email deliverability, and a huge one is the reputation of the email sender. Luckily, there’s a service called Return Path that has a metric called Sender Score, which gives you insight into your reputation as an email sender. Have you checked your Sender Score? If you do know your Sender Score, do you know what it means for your reputation as an email marketer? If you’re interested in your reputation as an email sender, read on to learn everything you need to know about Sender Score.

What is Sender Score?

A free service of Return Path, the Sender Score algorithm rates the reputation of every outgoing mail server IP address on a scale from 0-100. Gathering data from over 60 million mailboxes at big ISPs like BellSouth and Comcast, Return Path records if people frequently unsubscribe or report spam from certain email senders, and then assigns you a Sender Score based on that monitoring. Your Sender Score will continue to change depending on your email sending habits and the responses of your recipients.

It’s a crucial number to stay on top of, because mail servers will often check your Sender Score before deciding what to do with your emails. The lower your Sender Score, the harder time you’ll have getting into someone’s inbox. There are plenty of things that can impact the deliverability of your email, but Return Path reports that 83% of the time an email is not delivered to an inbox, it is due to a poor sender reputation.

Even if an email network or ISP doesn’t query your Sender Score to determine whether they will deliver your email, the factors used in determining your Sender Score are similar to those used by email networks and ISPs to determine your sender reputation. As such, the score is a great, free email sender reputation tool to ensure you are aware of and have the opportunity to fix any deliverability problems.

How Do I Interpret My Score?

To check your Sender Score, visit Return Path’s registration page, and you’ll soon have a report that looks something like this (but with different data, of course!)

Scores are calculated on a rolling, 30-day average and represent the rank of an IP address against other IP addresses, much like a percentile ranking. The closer your score is to 0, the worse it is, and if you’re close to 100 like Return Path is in this sample report, well you’re in pretty great shape! Now let’s break down what each of the items you’re being scored on in this report mean:

• Complaints: How complaints about that IP address compare to all other IP addresses. Complaint rates are calculated as complaints divided by accepted mail, and complaint scores are a rank based on your complaint rates.
• Volume: While not an indication of a good or bad sender reputation alone, it is an important part of the overall reputation algorithm. For example, an IP address which sends 100 messages and receives 99 complaints is problematic, while an IP address which sends 100,000 messages and receives 99 complaints is probably okay. A higher score equates to larger volume monitored by the Sender Score Reputation Network.
• External Reputation: How the IP address compares to all other IP addresses on a variety of external blacklists and whitelists.
• Unknown Users: The rank of the IP address’ unknown user rate compared to all other IP addresses. Unknown user rates are taken directly from incoming SMTP logs of participating ISPs, tracking how often an IP address attempts to send a message to an address which does not exist.
• Rejected: This represents how often messages are bounced compared to other IP addresses.
• Accepted: The number of email messages accepted for delivery, this number is expressed as the number of messages seen minus the number of messages rejected.
• Accepted Rate: The ratio of email messages accepted for delivery compared to email messages attempted. This is the number of messages accepted for delivery, divided by the number of messages seen.
• Unknown User Rate: The ratio of unknown users, or invalid email addresses, compared to the amount of email seen.

So, what’s a good score? If your score is over 90, congratulations! That’s a very good Sender Score. If your score is between 50 and 80, something isn’t right — move on to the next section of this blog post to see what you could be doing wrong that’s impacting your email deliverability. If your score is less than 50, well… looks you’re probably a spammer.

What Do I Do If I Have a Bad Sender Score?

The first step is knowing, so good job on checking your score. It can take weeks or months to fix a low Sender Score, so the sooner you’re aware of the problem, the better. There are several aspects of your email marketing that you need to check and possibly change to improve your Sender Score and email delivery rates — here are the ones that Sender Score takes into serious account:

• Inconsistent Volume of Email Sends: See the graph in the top right corner of the Sender Score report? Their email send volume goes up at a pretty steady rate, and as a result, their score maintains a pretty even number. However, if you were to send 5,000 emails on Monday, 200 on Friday, nothing for a week, and then suddenly another 15,000, you would likely get dinged for sending inconsistent volumes of emails.
• Frequency of Sends: Just as the volume of sends should be consistent, so should the frequency with which you email recipients. Email every day, every other day, every week — whatever your needs are. Just make sure you don’t jump on the email marketing bandwagon, abandon it after a month, then hop back on and expect no deliverability penalties. As you perfect your email marketing machine, you’ll be able to test the optimal email sending frequency for your recipients.
• Cold IP Address: If you’re new to email marketing, you may have neglected to warm up your IP address. Start email marketing on a new IP address with small batches of the best people on your email list — you know, the ones who love you and won’t mark you as SPAM or unsubscribe from your communications. Progressively increase the amount of people you email to warm up your IP and prove you’re a safe sender.
• Being Blacklisted: There are about 50 known blacklists out there that denote which IPs are spammers. Return Path has a service that lets you see if you’re on a blacklist. Assuming you’re a legitimate email marketer who just didn’t know some of the rules for good email deliverability, visit the sites of those who have blacklisted you to consult their information for being removed from their blacklist. If you contact them for removal, they will help you understand why you were blacklisted in the first place and what you can do to improve your email marketing methods.
• Getting Caught in a Spam Trap: A spam trap is an email address that was once valid, but no longer is, and will thus garner a hard bounce notice when you email them. However, when a mail server sees consistent traffic going to the dead email, they can turn the email into a spam trap that will stop returning a hard bounce for the known bad address, and instead accept the message and report the sender as a spammer. The moral of the story here is, if you’re not monitoring your hard bounces and removing them from your active email list, you could be perceived as a spammer.
• SPAM reports: Finally, if your email recipients think you’re a spammer and identify you as such via a SPAM report, your sender reputation is going to suffer. Check the rate at which your emails are marked as SPAM — an acceptable rate is 1 in every 1000.

There are several other factors to getting your email into a recipient’s inbox — the content of your email, email infrastructure, recipients’ personal filtering preferences — more of which you can learn about in this email post about email deliverability. But if you’re looking to start email marketing on the right food, establishing and maintaining a reputable email sender reputation is one of the most important qualities of your email marketing program.

Do you know your Sender Score, or have a gauge on how good your email deliverability is?

Image Credit: 10ch

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HubSpot’s Inbound Internet Marketing Blog

Courses in Online Marketing

This week for our courses in online marketing (marketing online) we are going to be taking a look at Pinterest, the new social media craze that is taking the web by storm.  Pinterest is a social media site where its users can create digital categorized bulletin boards that they can share publicly or with their friends.  Pinterest is attractive because it gives its users an outlet to express themselves through sharing pictures that define their lifestyle.  Popular pins are centered around fashion, design, recipes, and other aesthetically pleasing pictures.  This is important to include in our courses in online marketing (marketing online) because including pictures that include your products, infographics, or just company lifestyle could bring back great links to your site if your post goes viral.

Courses in Online Marketing | Stories of Successful Pinsters

For our first section in courses in online marketing (marketing online) for Pinterest, we just want to show you the basics and some tips that will make it really easy to access from your favorite browser whenever you need to post a pic.

We make a note to include how to use these social media sites as a user in all of our courses in online marketing (marketing online), because you need to know how your customers are using the site in order for you to dominate.  Here’s a crash course in getting started with your Pinterest account by Salon:

Once you’re in, simply install a “Pin it!” bookmarklet in your favorite Web browser. From that point on, any time you see a gorgeous photo online, simply click “Pin it!” and a popup window will appear, allowing you to add that photo to one of several photo collections, or “boards,” you maintain on Pinterest.

Pinterest operates on a follower-following basis, just like Facebook and Twitter. You can jump-start your Pinterest network by connecting your FB and Twitter user names. That will populate your Pinterest wall with your friends’ pinned images, and show your pins to people who follow you.

If you’re a business, it might be best to try and add all or many of the fans that liked your Facebook page.  You could easily get this work done by using Fivver and contracting it out to an outsourcer for cheap.  Go ahead and search for people that pin images that are related to your company’s niche market.  Lets move on to step two in courses in online marketing (marketing online).

Courses in Online Marketing | Don’t Make it Obvious

If you take anything away from courses in online marketing (marketing online) for Pinterest then remember to never make your bulletins too sales related.

Mashable explains why in their courses for online marketing (marketing online) for Pinterest:

Pinterest calls for a more holistic approach to marketing, and it can be more effective and engaging than traditional advertising because the consumers can really see how your brand fits into their lives. For example,Bon Appetit can’t just pin pictures from the website or magazine, but it can pin images of cooking appliances, beautiful kitchen decor, cutlery, dinner parties and delicious creations or recipes — basically anything related to cooking and food. Seeing these culinary items will continually drive home the Bon Appetit brand, thus making pinners more familiar with and more likely to trust the brand, visit the website and maybe even subscribe to the magazine.

Courses in Online Marketing | Designers This is For You

Pinterest is all about the images and therefore this is a place where designers can shine.  These courses in online marketing (marketing online) recommend that you find someone in your company that with a creative sense or design talent to make your images stand out amongst the rest.

Salon gives us their strong opinion about the importance of design on Pinterest.

While many of the good moms using Pinterest aren’t clued in to the latest design looks, they are a madly appreciative crowd — if you offer up your gorgeous images, you will be met with copious applause. Anyone posting their portfolio to Behance or Core77 should double up with a little Pinterest test. After all, Pinterest users are well-educated, affluent females who likely wield serious hiring power in between Pinterest coffee breaks.

http://www.salon.com/2012/02/21/your_pinterest_cheat_sheet/singleton/

If any of our readers have anything to add to our courses in online marketing (marketing online) for Pinterest, please leave them in the comments below.

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If you enjoyed reading “Courses in Online Marketing: Pinterest” then read more right here at BlackBoxSocialMedia.

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Social Media Marketing And SEO For Business