I was just going through one of my forums and noticed something I hadn’t seen in a few years. A 3 year old forum post was brought back from the dead by a brand-new member of the site, whose comment had NOTHING to do with the discussion at hand. While his post was not any form of SPAM, it was what I’d call a junk post . . . just some garbage posted for what you’d think was no reason. While I normally would move or delete such a post, I was curious if there would be some kind of follow up, so I decided to let it go for a bit.

Fast forward two hours
Another post showed up on the same thread, this time by another new member. This post, answered the non sequitur of the first new poster, but in doing so, pointed him to this awesome website that demonstrated what he was talking about.

Spammers will Never Learn!
Promoting yourself through forums is a great way to get traffic to your website, but pulling this crap isn’t the way to go. Its just amateur hour! Of course, upon doing a quick IP lookup, Tweedle Dumb and Tweedle Dumber had the same one . . . SHOCKER! The posts were removed, along with my two new friends (who, I’m assuming you now understand was the same idiot person).

How to Use Forums to Market Your Website

Forum marketing is one of the most simple, effective and FREE ways to market, period. Here’s how you do it:

1. Join a forum that is related to the niche of your website, and after doing so, be sure to read their site rules. Every site has a different set of rules or guidelines to work within . . . break the rules like the idiot I mentioned before and you’ll likely be booted. That said, 75% of the forums out there (I pulled that number out of a hat, but from what I can tell, it works!) don’t do any kind of moderating, so the entire thing is going to be a haven for spammers – posting here is a waste of your time . . . move on!
2. Create a forum signature. Again, be sure your signature complies with the rules of that forum. Make sure to include your website in your signature. I’d also recommend using your real name. People are more likely to have some kind of interest in you and your links if you’re willing to put yourself on the line by telling people who you are.
3. Get active by posting RELEVANT content on the forum and by participating in different conversations. Don’t just post a bunch of fluff. Engage in conversation and get involved. As you spend time on the forum, people will get to know you (make sure you’ve got a personal avatar uploaded), and eventually, they’ll likely want to visit the link in your signature.
4. It is that simple! You don’t need to post nonsense posts that link back to your site or manipulate the forums by posting a one-two combination like the aforementioned bozo. Just get involved and you’ll soon see actual gains in traffic from your engagement.

Good luck!

Tags: forum, forum marketing, Forums, spam, web marketing

I’ve been using the same mailing list software for close to five years now, a platform called Dada Mail, which is a perl script. While the software is free (GREAT!), it has a lot of limitations. I have little control over bounce rates, click tracking, and other essential bits of data which are important for any email marketer.

To be honest, I’m not much of an email marketer in the first place, and I’m guessing that if I had a more advanced platform, I’d likely be further on my way.

Shopping for a New Mailing List Solution

One of the most important features that I need in a mailing list solution is a software package or web-based system that will allow me to directly input data from my own forms. Most packages that I’ve found don’t allow it.

A Look at AWeber

Sadly, one of the most highly recommended email marketing software solutions I’ve found, AWeber.com does not have an API that allows this. Their package has EVERY other feature that I could want, including:

• Autoresponders
• Unlimited Campaigns
• HTML Email Templates
• Email Deliverability (NOTE: I’ve heard from a few people that their delivery rate is WAY higher than most other software)
• Blog Newsletters
• Email Web Analytics
• Subscriber Management

Essentially, they’ve got everything I need, and the price is decent ($19 for 0-500 subscriber and $149 for 10,000-25,000 where I fall in), but that API issue is going to keep me away. The only other downside I’ve found is that if you have multiple lists, duplicate subscribers count twice for their pricing schema. It isn’t a huge deal, but we often create lists that are subsets of our master list for marketing purposes and this could
end up costing some real money.

Is PHPList the One?

I haven’t found another web-based piece of software yet that does everything that AWeber does with an API so I can use it with my forms, so I’ve been hunting for server based applications instead. I hope to find something soon . . . there seems to be one called PhpList that has some promise, but I haven’t fully gone through and tested it yet.

Does anyone have any mailing list software suggestions? If you’ve read the post, you know what I’m looking for . . . let me know what you’ve got!

Tags: email marketing, mailing list, mailing list software

Ready for another rant? Seems like I’ve been doing quite a lot of that lately. This time, it is about something that I’m sure all the bloggers can relate to: Corporate Comment Spam. It seems that the corporations have indeed resorted to non other than comment SPAM to promote themselves

In the past 3 days, I’ve had to deal with comments from the flunkies of two large corporations: AOL and the The E.W. Scripps Company, which owns HGTV. I’ve chosen to leave out the identities of the perpetrators as the purpose of this post is to to expose what corporations are up to, not to call specific people out.

• HGTV Comment Spam

  I at least give a tiny bit of credit to the guy who has SPAMMED our Real Estate Investing for Real blog comments twice in the past 3 days. It seems that he tries to relate his spammy commercials to the topic at hand. Here’s the latest (I’ve colored the acceptable part in green and the SPAMMY Crap in red):

  Its funny that you should mention Los Angeles, I live there and you are right on. Since the average price of houses is so expensive the take for an agent is ridiculous. Btw, a $350,000 in LA will get you a fixer-upper. I wanted to ask anybody who is reading this…have you seen the show Bought & Sold on HGTV? I work with them and have been alerting people of the show because I think its worth seeing, if you’re into real estate at all…It basically shows 12 different agents trying to show houses and close the deal. It gives you huge insight into the way homes are marketed and how price levels are decided upon in the Northern New Jersey market – which is one of the toughest markets in the country. You can check out a preview – [VIDEO LINK REMOVED] – It’s on Sundays at 10PM e/p time on HGTV. Definitely worth checking out. It’d be funny to see them do one here in LA.

  I actually erased the first one he did, otherwise I’d also share it with you as well. I sent him an email asking him to immediately stop wasting both of our time (his writing and my deleting) and explained what netiquette was. We’ll see if he comes back for more!

• AOL Comment Spam

  AOL is also guilty of dishing out Hawaii’s favorite meat concoction. First I received a form email from someone at AOL trying to get me to blog about their new real estate section. It was impersonal, badly formatted, and poorly written (formatted as received):

  Dear Bloggers,

  I’m a Promotions Manager for AOL Real Estate, and have read your real estate
  blog. Your insights are thought provoking and often times right on the money.
  I
  would love to get your opinion about an “Inside Stories of…” series we are
  currently running. We interviewed various players in the real estate process
  for
  candid (some harsh) realities of the business. I know you’ve posted about such
  subjects, and thought you could take a look at what we’ve done, and offer a
  fascinating perspective; good, bad, or ugly.

  I’ve included our entire lineup for this original series below. If you decide
  to blog and need more info from me, please feel free to contact me anytime.
  Thanks for your time.

  We’d love to be involved on your site if you’d like to link to our home page,
  [LINK REMOVED] we have a lot to offer in exciting original
  content,
  listings, investing information, and staging/home improvement.

  Thanks,
  ~Name Removed

  After going through my daily SPAM scan, I noticed a message that my filters caught written by the same person, as a comment on my most popular post on the blog.

  Check out Unstructured, the official editor’s blog, AOL Real Estate.

  [URL REMOVED]

  Had I gotten the email or the blog SPAM, I would have just ignored it. In conjunction, the campaign to plug AOL’s new real estate site just hit a bad nerve. I decided to write the author back:

  Name Removed-
  A few things. First, It would be great if you had actually personalized the email you sent me instead of sending a form email that probably went to every other real estate blogger around. I’m surprised that a company of AOL’s financial backing couldn’t consider such an obvious move. It looks poorly upon you and your company.

  While the site you are looking to promote is good, your tactics are nothing but amateurish. I was quite shocked to look through my blog’s comments to see that you’ve also gone and SPAMMED us with your site’s link.

  I’ve had bloggers with 2 weeks of experience conduct themselves with more netiquette and web professionalism. I have no intention of supporting your site thanks to your tactics.

  I hope you reconsider how you’re approaching people in the future.

  Sincerely,

  A few of my friends and fellow bloggers recommended that I CC the email to her bosses at AOL. Sometimes I’m a jerk, but not that big of one. I’m not trying to get her fired; I just want people to learn what is and is not okay online these days.

Conclusion

We all know that people are spending more time online these days, corporations included. Apparently the online marketing teams for large corporations want eyeballs at any cost! I think the “street teams” of old, who kept busy handing out promo items on street corners, have given way to a group of young hired SPAM teams. They’re hitting the social networks, forums, and now, the blogs.

Apparently corporations still don’t understand online netiquette. Way to go! Piss off the whole online blogging community while you’re at it! Little do they know that the backlash from the internet can be fast and relentless (we all saw what Digg went through last week), and by ignoring the established “rules” of order online they are setting themselves for a fall.

Anyone think I’ll help promote HGTV or AOL Real Estate now?

5/11/07 UPDATE: Not a day after I wrote this post, HGTV has gone and sent a different person to once again SPAM our blog. From our comments:

May 11th, 2007 at 8:38 am
It seems more and more people are getting into the real estate business these days, without a clear understanding of how the biz really works. For those of you looking for a better understanding, I suggest checking out the new reality show Bought & Sold on HGTV. It’s a great show about the inner workings of the real estate and the lengths brokers will go to just to get the deal. Check it out: [LINK REMOVED]. I work with HGTV and you won’t believe what happens this season. Good luck, and enjoy the show! Don’t forget, the show airs Sundays at 10pm. I’m sure you’ll find it beneficial! Have any of you seen it yet?

I found an article through Kevin at BloggingTips about how to support your favorite bloggers. This article covered quite a few great points and I thought I’d go into 2 of them with some more detail.

Both of the steps I mention can really make a difference for your favorite sites, and spreading the word about them can make a difference for you as well!

The 2 Best Ways to Support Your Favorite Websites

1. Socialize the Blog or Site
   If you find a site, blog, article, etc. that you find interesting or helpful, one of the best ways to support it is to “socialize” it. Of course, the original form of socialization is word of mouth, but email works great too! Let your friends and family know about the site and tell them to let their friends and family know about it. Many of the most popular websites have all grown on word of mouth campaigns.

   In addition, by submitting it to different social networking and social bookmarking sites, you increase the exposure opportunities for that site. Sites like Netscape, Digg, Reddit, Del.icio.us, Ma.gnolia, MyBlogLog, MySpace, Facebook, etc. are all wonderful tools for sharing the love. I make it a habit of social bookmarking or Digging any article or site that I think is a great one, because I hope that someone will do the same for me. If we can spread the idea of helping one another out by doing this, I think we’d see lots of great, semi-unknown, sites climb to prominence. There are tons of these sites around, but people don’t realize how easy it is to do their part to help those sites out.

   If you like a site, an article, a blog, etc., then Bookmark It! It is that easy!

2. Visit the Site’s Advertisers
   These days, most websites have some sort of advertising. Many webmasters (like myself) support their work online soley through that advertising. While we all become semi-blind to ads these days, it is extremly important that we do our part to help our fellow webmasters by visiting the advertising on their sites. Imagine if even a small percentage of your users happened to visit the ads on your site (provided they are some kind of PPC ads)? Be careful not to overdo it, though. Clicking too often on a site’s ads can constitute click fraud, something you don’t want to do.

   Even visiting ads that may not be PPC is helpful to websites. Advertisers always look at the amount of traffic they get from a site when considering whether or not they will extend their campaigns. If you do your part by visiting these ads, you help the sites to retain advertisers and increase revenue. You also help the advertiser by finding their site . . . the more eyeballs, the better!

   Remember not to just click on any and all ads. Visit those that look interesting to you.

   Like with socializing, if we can build this mentality around the ‘net where people support one another’s advertisers, I think a lot of people would be a lot happier. The advertisers would get increased exposure (which is what they are paying for) and you’d be supporting the owners of your favorite sites, blogs, etc. If only 25% of a site’s visitors supported its advertisers, I’m sure the resulting increases would be beyond remarkable!

   If you like a site, an article, a blog, etc., then visit its advertisers! It is that easy!

By following these two simple and EXTREMELY helpful tips, you too can support your fellow bloggers and favorite sites, and hopefully they will do the same for you!

Please bookmark this site and help spread the mentality! (click the Share This link below)

I was approached this afternoon by someone who was interested in promoting their real estate-related program to my site’s users. This advertiser wanted me to promote an online webinar and was willing to give me a commission for any sale made from people who went through the seminar and purchased their service. While the commission was fairly good, we felt that the odds of someone actually going through their entire webinar and then purchasing their product were not phenominal.

Choosing Between a Guaranteed Return and a Potential Greater One

We considered proposing a PPL (pay per lead) model to them, but felt that by doing so we were providing this company with tons of free branding for little in return. As a result, we decided that we would only work with them as pure advertises. They were welcome to advertise their program on our site, but would have to pay our full rates. If they generated any sales or leads, that depended on the users of our site.

What would you have done?

Do you go with the guaranteed advertising buy or do you provide free branding for someone on the remote chance that someone will go through all the steps (sign-up, webinar, sale) and buy their product?

In the best case scenario, we’d be able to charge for advertising and also get an affiliate payment per sale, but that isn’t ever going to happen. I tried to negotiate a few deals like that years ago and was simply laughed at. Was worth a shot, though!

One of the first things that you’ll need to do when starting a business is to create a logo to represent your company. It seems like this may be a simple thing, but it is often more difficult then you think!

Some Logos Are Timeless

There are certain logos we’ll never forget: Apple, CocaCola, McDonalds, Google, Nike, Target, etc.

I don’t even need to show these, because we all have them imprinted in our minds. Pretty amazing!

I wish I could write a post about what constitutes a great logo. I don’t have any magic formula, but I know one when I see it. Creating a timeless and effective logo is not an easy undertaking. Large corporations often times spend millions of dollars on their brand.

I recently found a great resource to help you out with any logo questions (which actually inspired this post) called the Logo Design Blog. According to the site, the 5 characteristics of a highly successful logo include:

1. Uniqueness
2. Relevancy
3. Appealing
4. Consistency
5. Contrast

For more details, read the post; it goes into detail about each of these characteristics. In another interesting post, the site discusses the various constituents of a logo, which include symbol, sign, emblem, or slogan. It is a great place to start learning more about logos.

What Not to Do in Creating a Logo for Your Company

While I can’t tell you the formula for a great logo, I can talk about what isn’t great. Since I’ve spent a lot of time in the real estate world, I have seen countless logos from companies who are all looking to create a brand for themselves. The interesting thing is that at least 90% of these logos have some kind of roof or home as part of the logo. While this seems logical, and we even played with a roof-esque logo, does it differentiate these companies from one another? No.

They all pretty much have the same theme and in my mind, are simply clones of one another. They do nothing to help people recognize the companies.

The Evolution of a Logo Design

I believe that an effective logo is one that instantly provides brand recognition. Lets compare the various iterations of my company, BiggerPockets, Inc.’s logos over the past several years.

This first version of the logo is nothing but disasterous. I thought that because the site was about making money with real estate, that money should be the central theme. This is nothing but an amateurish slapped together logo that does nothing to further our site’s brand.

Here we are making the mistake most companies make when it comes to designing a logo. They shoot for the obvious. Our little blue roof did nothing to differentiate our brand. We were yet another real estate related site . . . nothing more, nothing less.

In the above logo, we started to realize that the roof shouldn’t play as prominent a role. We wanted people to focus on our name, BiggerPockets, which represented what people would get from our site. This began an evolution towards our differentiation.

This logo actually came from one of my high-school students (I taught school for several years). I wanted something fun and unique involving money and a big ‘ole pocket. While this design certainly stood out and let people know more about who we were, it was a bit amateurish as well. We were going in the right direction, but hadn’t quite done it just right.

This final and current logo of the company, I believe, hits the nail on the head. It is certainly unique, and represents who we are. By itself, the iconic man in the pocket, representing how big your pockets can become, is symbolic of our site. I am extremly pleased with this logo, as I feel that it is clean, unique, and expounds a message. Does it have what it takes to become timeless? I suppose that is up to you and everyone else out there!

A Great Resource for Creating Your Logo Design

After I knew that my student was on to something with our logo, I decided to have some professional graphic artists clean it up for me. To do that, I found a great service that everyone should utilize: SitePoint’s Logo Design Contests. All I did was give the brilliant (and not so brilliant) graphic designers on Sitepoint (a huge and amazing webmaster forum) some ideas of what I was looking for, and let them run with it. There were many wonderful ideas put forward, and I was able help the designers modify and clean their logos up until I had somthing I was happy with. The best part about running one of these contests is that it is affordible and you do get many ideas to choose from.

Last week, I wrote an article about good customer service and used the example of how EzineArticles.com failed to live up to their promise to contact me about a situation. I am happy to report that I have finally been contacted by the company. The interesting thing is that the company broke another cardinal rule, research first and accuse later.

Don’t Assume You’ve got All The Facts Until You Do!

Here is the content of the email I received:

Hi Joshua,

Your account is suspended because your article “Hiring the Right
Property Manager for Your Rental/Income Property” has content that is
exactly the same as this piece:

http://www.wcrt.org/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=1526

…and is not attributed to you. We require that all submitted
articles be either original articles written by you or articles to
which you have an exclusive right to. Please keep in mind that to
have an exclusive right to an article, only your name may be
associated with it. If you purchased this article as part of a pack
or received it from a distributor/affiliate site, so have others so
you do not have an exclusive right to it.

Can you please explain the above? What is the source of your article?

Abby

http://EzineArticles.com/

A few things . . . first, wouldn’t it make more sense if they had contacted me last year when I submitted the article with their inquiry? Instead, I was flatly banned WITH NO EXPLANATION. They assumed I was the one who was not the original author instead of doing 1 of 2 things: 1) contacting me asking me to prove I am the author or 2) doing 1 minute of research to see if I was the author. A google search of the first line of the article in question reveals the truth:

A little article I wrote back in October of 2005 called: Things to Consider when Interviewing Property Management Companies comes up immediately. It would be very clear to see that the duplicated article that they were talking about was written January 30, 2006, 3 months later.

In addition, the email assumes that I was the one committing the copyright infringement, when in fact it was someone from another site doing it. I was guilty until proven innovent! This is certainly not the way to run a service.

What Can Be Learned Here?

• Don’t assume that you have all the facts until you actually do.
• Choose your words wisely. In tone and content, it apears as though the people at EZineArticles are accusing me of stealing someone else’s articles. Accusing someone is not the way to make them happy customers/users.
• If you say you’re going to respond to someone in 24 hours, then do it.
• Don’t get on my bad side! (just kidding . . . kind of . . . )

Further Implications of The Situation
I am somewhat thankful for the whole controversy for one reason: I was able to discover that one of the users of my company, BiggerPockets’s forums was stealing our materials and posting them as his own. As a result, I emailed him asking him to immediately remove the article from his site, and warned him that I would contact his host if he failed to comply. We shall see what happens . . . back to my 7 Steps on How to Protect Your Website’s Copyright When Someone Steals Your Content.

I’ll keep you posted of any further developments!