A practical HowTo on Avoiding Email Marketing Boobie Traps

In times of economic downturns, where marketing budgets are being squeezed like never before, it’s tempting to buy-into unsolicited solicitations from email data providers to enticing you to purchase their b2b (business to business) or b2c (business to consumer) “opt-in, targeted, permission-based” email lists. The reason is simple. These lists brokers temp us with offers that appear to be a cost effective distribution platform to get our marketing message out to a large and targeted audience for a fraction of what it would cost to do a direct mail campaign or to use a reputable ESP (Email Service Provider). There is no doubt that a number of businesses use bulk email successfully to achieve high ROI or otherwise we would stop receiving the loads of unwanted emails that we all continue to receive on a daily basis.

That said, email marketing can be a great Internet marketing tool and when done properly, can increase your marketing ROI significantly. If done improperly, email marketing can damage a company brand for the long term, driving away existing and potential customers. Worse yet, done improperly, email marketing, in rare circumstances, can result in government imposed financial and criminal penalties. Therefore, using email marketing to promote a business, brand, product and/or service requires some basic knowledge of the relevant FTC (Federal Trade Commission) regulations on email marketing and using best practices applied with common sense to avoid email marketing boobie traps.

Email Marketing is Regulated with Severe Penalties for Violations

The first email marketing boobie trap to avoid is to having your marketing masterpiece become content for a SPAM submitted complaint against your business that gets submitted to the FTC online or possibly worse yet, to the Better Business Bureau. To avoid your email marketing communications from being labeled SPAM, it is important to first understand the legal FTC definition of SPAM since email marketing is regulated by the FTC through the CAN-SPAM Act. The acronym CAN-SPAM derives from the bill’s full name “Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography And Marketing Act of 2003” which was signed into law by then President George Bush on December 16, 2003. CAN-SPAM establishes rules for sending commercial email, establishes requirements for commercial messages, gives recipients the right to have you stop emailing them, and spells out tough penalties for violations. For more information, see the
CAN-SPAM Act: A Compliance Guide for Business
.

While enforcement of the CAN-SPAM Act by the FTC, in practice, appears to be sporadic, the FTC does provide the easily found FTC Complaint Assistant Form which enables anyone with an Internet connection and the desire to lodge a formal complaint based on a SPAM email received. Connected users can do so, in either English or Spanish I might add, making it easy for recipients of unwanted email solicitations to report those solicitations as SPAM. Penalties for violating CAN-SPAM regulations can be severe with each separate email in violation subject to penalties of up to $16,000 each.

Be Careful with 3rd Party Email List Providers Promoted Through SPAM

It seems like everyday SPAM email solicitations for targeted email lists end up in email inboxes. What’s interesting to note is that many of these email solicitations violate multiple aspects of CAN-SPAM regulations including failing to provide the physical postal address of the company or to provide information about how recipients can unsubscribe from receiving future emails. The question you have to ask yourself is how much are you going to trust the claims of an email data provider that does not follow the regulations of the industry they are in (i.e. email marketing)? SPAM offers should raise a huge red flag of email marketing boobie trap ahead.

SPAMMERS rely on widespread user complacency to avoid enforcement of any FTC imposed penalties. By sending huge numbers of bulk emails, even with a relatively small conversion rate, SPAMMERS will find enough buyers to justify sending SPAM email. Admit it, how many times have you taken the time to report an instance of SPAM you received to the FTC? The point is that the list owners claim that their targeted email lists are opt in (i.e. permission based), but the fact that they have your email and presumably you did not provide them permission to send you email, then how much faith do you have in their emails address lists that they are representing as opt-in (permission based) yet they are trying to sell through SPAM? Any offer received in SPAM email, email marketing lists or otherwise, should be ignored.

Do it right with Double-Opt in to Protect the User and the Brand

Now let’s take it a step further and look at the large brands that you interact with via email such as national retailers like Wal-Mart, Radio Shack and Best Buy. These companies, like any large, reputable, national brand, will only add your email address to their email marketing list if you double opt-in. Can you ever remember receiving SPAM from a large, reputable, national brand? Usually double opt-in works by providing an email address on a branded website while signing up for a newsletter or to receive special offers by email. This first user-initiated action is what is referred to as opt-in. This first action of providing an email address then triggers an email to be sent to the email address provided in the web form submission during sign-up. The email triggered to the subscriber typically states the reader must click a link in the email body to activate the requested email subscription. This second action is designed to ensure that the actual owner of that email address is the one who provided the address, to provide proof by the marketer of user intent demonstrated through a second action, your intent to receive marketing communications from that specific brand. This protects the consumer and the brand. There are many great email service providers who can manage the double opt-in process and unsubscribe processing to ensure that your business can remain CAN-SPAM compliant.

Is Email Marketing Worth the Effort?

Without question, email marketing done correct (roughly translated CAN-SPAM compliant with email marketing best practices applied) is definitely worth the effort. The key to successful email marketing campaigns is to provide quality content that is of value to the recipients. Send to only those who have requested that information and provided you explicit permission to send them email marketing on your offers. Email marketing is a great way to move prospects through a sales funnel while staying engaged with your current and future prospective customers. The beauty of email marketing is its scalability and low cost of delivery when compared with offline direct mailing. Saving a tree or two along the way is just icing on the cake. Email marketing has the added benefit of being integrated with websites through landing pages and other mechanisms which can be tracked and measured against marketing investments. While done wrong, email marketing can tarnish your brand through SPAM association. Why not begin developing your Email marketing strategy today to grow top line revenue while increasing marketing ROI?

Online Article Marketing Defined

Online article marketing is the practice of writing articles to give your business, brand, product or service a visibility boost . In fact, Article Marketing is a key component of an overall public relations strategy and is a tried and true marketing practice that has been around for centuries.

Prior to the emergency of the commercial Internet in the early to mid 90s, Article Marketing relied on print publications for article distribution and to achieve broad reach. This included newspapers magazines, trade journals and other periodicals. Article inclusion in these print publications is at the discretion of the editorial staff and the fit of the article with the editors needs at the time of submission.

Today the Internet has given emergence to a new Article Marketing distribution channel provides the opportunity for worldwide reach. There are a number of reputable online article marketing sites online that have editors who actively manage quality.

Benefits of Online Article Marketing

• Increasing reach for existing content: These article marketing directories increase readership of content by making that content easy to find for their millions of users and getting that content indexed quickly by the major search engines making it easy for relevant Internet users not currently members of these sites to also find your content. Another way that online article marketing directories increase reach is through syndication where other members can republish your content while providing you attribution and if included in your article, links back to your website.
• More cost effective than other forms of advertising: Online article marketing costs only the time to write and submit articles. If time is your scarcest resource, then it is possible to hire resources to write and submit articles on your behalf. The real efficiency and returns are achieved when publishing existing content you own, where the cost limited time it takes to post content to the chosen online article marketing directories.
• Establish expertise to your target market: Publishing quality articles through a trusted online article marketing site boosts your credibility with readers. Quality articles that enable readers to solve problems based on sharing your relevant knowledge is an effective way to establish yourself as an expert in your field. Your author bio box is the tool to promote your own website and personal brand that can be used to drive targeted traffic to your website. Satisfied readers will want to read more about the same topic that you have written about and the resource box is the place for links back to your additional content.
• Create Website Traffic: Since the top online article marketing directories enable you to include links back to your site, readers of your articles can follow those links back to your website, blog or a social media page resulting in driving targeted traffic to your website.
• Improving SEO efforts: Links in your articles back to your website boost online visibility of your website to the search engines. Since the top online article marketing directories support content syndication enabling other members to republish other members content under specific rules, links generated from reposts of your articles online will not only drive additional traffic from readers on those sites following your links, but also provide links back to your website, further improving your ranking within search engines. The top online article marketing sites track readership statistics so that you can view how many times an article has been viewed and what search terms readers used to find your content, thus providing insights that can be used to help guide future publishing and SEO efforts based on demonstrated audience interest.
• Build brand image: Getting published on a quality online article marketing directory can do wonders for boosting your brand. Having your article get picked up by high quality publishers can boost your brand even further.

The Top 5 online article marketing sites ranked by traffic at the time of this writing are:

1. ezinearticles.com
2. suite101.com
3. buzzle.com
4. articlesbase.com
5. articlesnatch.com

Four of the top 5 online article marketing directories have in excess of 1M unique visitors each month with ezinearticles.com, the top online article marketing directlory at the time of this writing, with over 10 million unique visitors each month.

Traffic of Top 5 Online Article Marketing Directories

If you are looking for a great way enhance your public relations strategy today, then sign up for an account at one of the top 5 online article marketing directories and begin increasing the return on your content investment.

According to a recent SpendingPulse May Retail Report release last week by MasterCard Advisors, eCommerce sales in May 2010 showed continued growth, far surpassing the growth rate in brick and mortar sales. May was the 8th consecutive month of double digit year-over-year growth for eCommerce sales, with May 2010 sales increasing 13.7% over May 2009. Acoording to the SpendingPulse report, the best performing eCommerce sub-categories were Children’s Apparel and Family Apparel, growing 30.4% and 26.2% year over year, respectively.

Additional commentary from Michael McNamara, Vice President, Research and Analysis MasterCard Advisors, SpendingPluse

In comparison, U.S. retail sales overall are expected to have also experienced consistent growth with eight consecutive months of gains through May 2010, attributed, in part, to consumers taking some comfort in a gradually improving US job market. US retail sales overall are estimated to have climbed 0.2 percent May following a 0.4 percent rise in April 2010, according to median estimates of economists polled by Reuters. The retails sales growth overall lag the nearly 14% growth rate enjoyed by the eCommerce sector for the same period.

If you are spending resources to create and publish content there are simple steps you can take to use the viral nature of the Internet and social media in particular to increase distribution of your content with little or no incremental effort. Does this sound too good to be true? Well it’s not and here’s how.

There is a company called AddThis, LLC that specializes in enabling publishers to make it easy for their readers to share their content with their social networks, whichever ones they use, without placing a large support burden on the publisher. Other social networks? You mean there are other social networks beyond Facebook? Yes Virginia, there is life beyond Facebook. AddThis is the market leader for social bookmarking and sharing services and aside from being among the 1.2 million sites that share content with AddThis social bookmarking widgets, I have no affiliation with AddThis.

You can add an AddThis social bookmarking widget to your website, blog (both WordPress or Blogger currently supported) or a MySpace profile in three easy steps:

1. Select your Service. choices include website, WordPress, Blogger and MySpace
2. Select you Button Style
3. Click the Get Your Button button

Once you click the Get Your Button button, you will be brought to a page with customized instructions based on steps 1, 2 above. The customized instructions for installing your AddThis social bookmarking widget are simple and adequately detailed for anyone who manages or administers a website or blog to implement. For WordPress installations of AddThis, no html knowledge is required and the AddThis widget can be installed from the WordPress administration interface in literally under one minute. I reserve the right to update this post with a short 60 second video just to prove the point.

The same is true for installation of the AddThis social bookmarking widget on a Blogger blog, however, for the Blogger template, if you want to have the AddThis widget associated with each blog post so that social bookmarking widget will appear at the end of each post and be associated with the post and not only the blog level, you will have to edit the blog html template to insert the AddThis widget for blog posts. Nonetheless, the instructions are detailed and if you get lost, AddThis has a step-by-step tutorial for adding AddThis to Blogger posts to guide you through the installation.

Free Social Bookmarking Analytics for Those who Register

Though not required, to get the full benefit of the AddThis social bookmarking widget, eBiz ROI recommends to clients that they register for a Free AddThis account to obtain access to analytics for their sharing buttons, weekly analytics email reports, and other cool features.

So what are you waiting for? Why not start increasing your content reach virally today through the addition of an AddThis Social Bookmarking widget to your content, while giving content the added bonus of generating inbound links from popular social network sites, all with just a few clicks!

Free web conferencing software can be used to drive sales while boosting your ROI. Web conferencing software provides businesses with a cost effective a global platform to communicate in a more intimate way than is possible on a voice sales call. As any successful sales executive knows, there is simply no substitute for face to face sales meetings, but if the alternative is to delay a meeting or limit the customer interaction to a conference call, then web conferencing software is a great enabler to selling into large, dispersed, and even global markets. Web conferencing software is a must have tool for any sales organization.

My experience with web conferencing software is fairly extensive, having used WebEx, Microsoft LiveMeeting, Centra, Citirx GoTo Meeting and other web conferencing solutions to train an International sales force and global system integrator partners such as Accenture, IBM and T-Systems while using web conferencing platforms to support selling to clients on the other side of the world (being in the USA, that means primarily India and China).

When launching eBiz ROI, Inc. as part of the communication plan, we were on a mission to find good free web conferencing software application to use in sales calls with national and international clients where we find it useful to share our desktops, reports and applications.

It was a short search (one Google search for free web conferencing software) until we stumbled upon a company called DimDim, which was ranked #1 in the Google search results:

As an SEO practitioners, we appreciated the fact that DimDim is ranked #1 in the search results for the query free web conferencing software which gave us the confidence to click through to their website and sign up for a free web conferencing account.

After signing up for a DimDim free web conferencing account and installing the DimDim thin client, we were up and running in no time. As a new business, we have started with the free service level, in addition to which, DimDim provides a number of enhanced paid service levels including DimDim Pro and DimDim Enterprise. We were pleasantly surprised that the DimDim free services supports such features as:

• short, permanent vanity URLs used to conduct meetings,
• public meetings profile page,
• instant screen sharing, white board and document sharing, co-browse web pages,
• Multi-platform support for Windows, Mac and Linux users,
• integrated free audio conference and automatic meeting widgets
• Supporting web conferencing meetings of up to 25 participants

To date, eBiz ROI has not yet outgrown the DimDim free service level. For those interested in learning more, check out the DimDim feature comparison which compares the different DimDim service levels against WebEx and GoTo Meeting, two of the leading, paid web conferencing infrastructure service providers.

In terms of ROI, managing costs is a key part of the equation and it is hard to beat free. I strongly encourage readers to give DimDim a try. I am not currently associated with DimDim, but like the product so much, I am thinking about participating in the DimDim affiliate marketing program managed through Commission Junction.

Stay tuned for upcoming posts on additional free tools that you can use to fuel the growth of your business while increasing your marketing ROI.

Video for the web is familiar to most who own a computer with Internet access . Online video is all the rage, fuelled in large part by the huge popularity of social media and in part by broadband ubiquity. Statistics such as 400 million Facebook fans sharing 5 billion pieces of content shared each week accentuate this. Video for the web provides affordable opportunities to promote businesses online while realizing ROI.

Here are the Top 5 Reasons why Video for the Web means ROI

1. Consumption of video for the web is on the rise. In fact, according to Comscore (www.comscore.com) Video Metrix service, U.S. Internet users watched 31.2 billion videos in March, where nearly 85% of the total US Internet audience viewed videos on the Web. Just for fun, let’s do some math. According to Internet World Stats (www.internetworldstats.com ), there the US Internet audience is currently 248.2 million users , so 85% of the US Internet audience equates to 210.9 million, which means, on average, US Internet users watched 148 videos on the web. For your demographic, the numbers maybe higher.
2. Video for the Web builds users engagement because, lets face it, us humans are visual creatures who crave interactivity. That is why television remains an incredibly popular medium for both consumers and advertisers. If a picture is worth a thousand words, then what is a video worth? Communication models exist that say only 7% of what is communicated is through words, the remaining 93% comes from things like appearance, body language, voice volume, voice pitch, facial expressions. All these communication components are supported in video, thereby increasing user engagement while strengthening the communications and messaging
3. Videos for the web can go viral as you know if you are one of the 400 million Facebook users. Not a day goes by where at least one (usually many) of my Facebook friends share an online video that they found of interest. Sharing a video on the web is as easly as cutting and pasting a link into your Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn (insert your favourite social network here …) profile page and pressing the share button. If your video is of interest to your social network, it is very easy for them to share with their friends, who can easily share with their friends. This is how popular videos can accumulate thousands or even tens of thousands of views overnight, though thousands of views overnight is definitely the exception and not the rule.
4. Video for the web can establish and reinforce your brand especially if you are small services business, independent consultant or sole proprietorship where often times, the individual is the brand or at least a key component of the overall brand. Large companies use online video to reinforce brands promoted through other channels such as TV. A recent example is the Priceline.com commercial where “The Big Deal” negotiates a $65 room rate right after the snooty desk manager informs William Shatner, we on’t go lower than $130.
   

Within 10 minutes of seeing the Pricesline video for the Web on YouTube, I saw the same video on network TV, both instances for the first time and within minutes of each other. Talk about using video for the Web to establish and reinforce a brand. Way to go Priceline and Ocean Media, The AOR (Agency of Record) for Priceline.com.

5. Video for the Web is affordable and therefore, within reach of most businesses, especially for those businesses that already have video assets that can easily be brought online. For a lot less than $1000, a small business can buy the equipment to shoot their own video and upload online. A key point to consider is time and money as not all businesses have in-house capability to direct, shoot, produce and promote online video, but as you can imagine, there are a number of choices in these areas for business to outsource online video production for less than most would think.

There are numerous other benefits of using video for the web to promote your business such as search engine visibility and ranking, online video ads and potential to syndication of video content across many channels (reach) or vertical search engines (contextual targeting) to name a few. Isn’t it time you gave your brand a boost by launching your online video?

Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, Oh my

Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, Oh My. Repeat this to the cadence of Lions, Tigers and Bears, Oh my. Do you know the line? It’s from a scene in the wizard of Oz where the heroines are following the yellow-brick road on the way to fulfill their dreams and desires. In the wizard of Oz, lions, tigers and bears are things to fear. Social media should not be something to be feared by businesses of any size or from any industry. Anyone interested in learning social media can do so by investing time and energy in learning about these new, hugely popular social media marketing and message distribution platforms.

To that end, I joined a local New Business Club that I found through my social network on LinkedIn, which was a social network in 1994, long before YouTube, Facebook and Twitter where even a twinkle in any visionary’s mind or even before the term social networking was coined. Tonight’s presenter at our New Business Club meeting is a successful health coach and entrepreneur, who, according to her, was directed by her business coach to begin embracing social media in support of growing her busienss and establishing her brand online. This person, by her own admission, is not computer savvy and intially resisted her business coach’s direction to embrace social media. At first.

Now, less than one year later this person has a Facebook fan page for her business with several hundred fans, a Twitter account with several hundred followers and a mechanism to syndicate content between YouTube, LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook, integrated through Ping FM. Ping FM? WTF? Don’t start muttering Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, oh my. If a self-confessed computer novice, initially opposed to Social Media can do it, so can you.

With so much buzz about Social Media, its easy to become overwhelmed by these social media icons that seem to dominate mentions on all forms of traditional media and just put getting started on the todo list. That would be a mistake. Do you know why? Because your customers are spending more of their time online, specifically on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and Linkedin. Facebook alone has 400 million subscribers with users sharing 5 billion pieces of content each week. Facebook users spend 55 minutes on Facebook everyday! That makes for good odds that your target market is on Facebook, probably becoming fans of your competitors right now.

How to get started? Open a Facebook account and create a company page. It is free to do. If you are more interested in promoting your business through videos, sign up for a YouTube account and upload a video. Want to promote your business in realtime, then sign up for a Twitter account begin Tweeting. If this sounds like too much trouble, that’s fine, maybe you are ready for retirement soon anyhow. If you’re you’re a believer or don’t know where to start, request a free Social Media assessment.

Web Analytics are essential to marketing on the Internet. Macro economic conditions have led to a surge in new business startups over the last few years with a large percentage of them just beginning to come online. Most new business owners understand the promise of accountability in Internet marketing, and clearly a large percentage of businesses now view web analytics as a key component of their Internet Marketing strategy. Web analytics provide the underlying infrastructure and capability to track Internet Marketing ROI.

Here are 10 reasons why it is essential that every business deploy web analytics, which in lay terms, are simple to use mechanisms used to track and report on key website performance metrics such as number of visitors, traffic sources of visitors, keywords used by searches who were referred to your site by a search engine to name just a few. Web analytics can also be used to define, capture, track and measure business and website goals such as newsletter sign-ups, product and services sales and other user interactions which can be valued at some monetary amount and then used to calculate ROI (Return on Investment).

Why Web Analytics are Essential for all Business Websites

1. You can’t improve what you can’t measure: Without having the ability to capture , track over time and report on the number of visitors to the website, the engagement level of different visitors segmented among various dimensions (by source, content, keywords, etc.), it is difficult to know if your website is adding value to the business and what steps are required to improve the return on a website investment.

 

2. Track key website engagement metrics : Web Analytics provide the ability to track engagement metrics such as bounce rate, return vs. new visits and number of pages/visit, average time spent on site, just to name a few.

 

3. Provide traffic sources overview illustrating visitors segmentation between direct traffic, referral traffic and search engine traffic. The three traffic source segments in Figure 1 below show that 49.87% of the traffic of this website, over some user defied period of time, originated from Search Engines. The Direct Traffic of 14.24% came from visitors who entered the (URL) web address in the address window of the browser and the remainder of the traffic, 35.93% came from Referring Sites that link to this website, with visitors originating from links on those sites.


Figure 1 – Traffic Sources Overview Example with Search Engines, Referring Sites and Direct Traffic Segments



 

4. Provide and understanding of visitor geographic distribution which can drive website language requirements if your business is international and potentially uncover new market potential based traffic originating from Geographies that are currently either under served or not serviced at all. This information can be presented through an interactive map overlay which can be used to drilled down into Country, State/Province, County, City , and other defined marketing areas. You can imagine the power of the marketing intelligence this kind of web analytics information presented in this interactive visual format, can provide.


Figure 2 – Map Overlay Example Showing Visitor Origination Geography



 

5. Understand which content is viewed most/least often : This information can help focus and prioritize scarce development resources supporting many competing needs based on an understanding of which content is most consumed (i.e. most in demand) versus content that is less consumed and may be viewed by visitors, your target market, as less valuable. In the example in Figure 3, we see that this site, like many other sites, has the most page views on / which is typically the default homepage for the domain such as index.html or default.php, etc. We also see that the glossary and blog are the second and third most visited sections of this website. This information could potentially focus development efforts in those content areas to maximize return on development investments.


Figure 3 – Web Analytics Content Overview Example


 

6. Measure online impact of multi-channel marketing: The power and promise of Internet marketing and the measurability and accountability that web analytics can provide can be extended to evaluate the impact of traditional media used in multi-channel marketing campaigns which often drive website visits, registrations and online engagement. Often times, lifts in key website metrics are driven by a website mention in a print, radio, television or billboard ad. Using web analytics to track traffic to the website, dates of offline campaigns can be compared against online metrics. For example, a broadly distributed TV commercial with mention of the website on April 18 could drive a traffic as seen in Multiple Channel Marketing Impacts Example shown in Figure 4.


Figure 4 -Multiple Channel Marketing Impacts Example


 

7. Define and track sales funnels with multiple conversion levels: Online goals often tracked include opt-in email sign ups, contact request form submissions for lead generation and completed sales for ecommerce applications. These events add value to the business and can be tracked within the web analytics tools. Monetary values can be assigned to individual goals based on their value to the business. For example, each valid email address from a user Newsletter Signup is worth $2.00.

 

 

8. Track and measure top referring sites : Including number of visitors from each, pages/visit, average time spent on site, % of visitors that are new visits and bounce rate. Enlarge Web Analytics Top Referring Sites Image (will open in a new window)

 



Figure 5 – Web Analytics Top Referring Sites Example


 

9. Understand Visitor Browser Segmentation : Used to drive technology dependent features and compatibility testing , especially if providing content that is browser platform dependent. Web developers know that each browser has their own proprietary nuances Can also be used to drop support for older browsers if the segment of visitors using a particular outdated technology is small or non-existent. This can be useful when making design and technology decisions. Enlarge Web Analytics Top Browser Segmentation Image (will open in a new window)


Figure 6 – Web Analytics Top Browser Segmentation Example


 

10. Understand which search engines are driving the most visits: This can be a key input into search engine optimization strategy. Enlarge Web Analytics Search Engine Referrals Image (will open in a new window)

Figure 7 – Web Analytics Search Engine Referrals Example

The Best Part – Google Analytics is Free to Use, Easy to Install

This is by no means an exhaustive list, but rather is the top 10 reasons why web analytics are essential to any online marketing efforts. The best part of all is that there free web analytics packages, such as Google Analytics, that are easy to install and use. Installation is as easy as adding a snipped of code to each web page that you wish to track. The following code is real code for use with Google Analytics:

Enlarge Web Analytics Google Analytics JavaScrip Code Snippet Example (will open in a new window)

Figure 8 – Web Analytics Google Analytics JavaScrip Code Snippet Example

If adding code to html pages is not your thing, many professional Internet marketing service providers will install Google Analytics packages for as little as $200 with no recurring fee. Isn’t it time that you claimed your free web analytics package today?

What is a WordPress Blog Ping List and what do I do with it? While reading a post about whether Google likes blogs better than websites, a comment was made that a blog provides mechanisms to let Google and other key directories and search engines know when a blog post is published. For instance, this Internet Marketing Blog is a WordPress blog and therefore has an update service.

What is a WordPress update service and what is it used for you ask. When a a new post is published on a WordPress blog, WordPress automatically notifies the list of sites in the update services configuration. This list of sites is what is referred to as the WordPress Blog Ping List.

The ones used to configure the eBiz ROI Internet Marketing Blog include:

1. http://rpc.pingomatic.com
2. http://api.feedster.com/ping
3. http://api.moreover.com/RPC2
4. http://api.moreover.com/ping
5. http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2
6. http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping
7. http://www.blogdigger.com/RPC2
8. http://www.blogshares.com/rpc.php
9. http://www.blogsnow.com/ping
10. http://www.blogstreet.com/xrbin/xmlrpc.cgi
11. http://bulkfeeds.net/rpc
12. http://www.newsisfree.com/xmlrpctest.php
13. http://ping.blo.gs/
14. http://ping.feedburner.com
15. http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php
16. http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php
17. http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/
18. http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
19. http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2
20. http://www.feedsubmitter.com
21. http://blo.gs/ping.php
22. http://www.pingerati.net
23. http://www.pingmyblog.com
24. http://geourl.org/ping
25. http://ipings.com
26. http://www.weblogalot.com/ping

The ping list was added to the WordPress Update Service, from the dashboard > setting >> writing.

There are longer lists out there, but the danger is that some of the services in these WordPress blog ping lists are intermediaries, forwarding update notices to multiple sites, often creating unintentional overlap which can result in 3 or more pings to the same service for every update. The impact could be that your blog gets labeled as Spam.

Why not update your WordPress Blog ping list today to get your content the visibility it deserves?