DISQUS

>> ... you’ve opened up a whole wave of trouble for me and I just love it!

That's what I'm here for, Rick.
:-)

Wow, Rick!
Thanks for the recognition. It means a lot to me.
Just noticed it. Feels bloody, damn good to be
a *STAR* :-)
Tonight, I'll have an extra beer or two (or whatever
you drink) for you at the beach party here. Okay?

Yours
John -- Mr.BlueEyes

PS. Links above are a bit messed up (.biz missing in one;
"/" instead of "." in the other) People can figure it out, though
... I guess.

<abbr>John Fursts last blog post..Email Marketing Needs To be Personal</abbr>

Strange, Michel!

I am not on any of your email lists, but the word about your blog post still got through to me. Already looking for the culprit. Could it have been Perry Marshall? I bet, it was him. Now I have to ... Just kidding.

The same holds true for RSS feeds in your reader by the way.
Cleaning them out from time to time helps enormously, too.

And it's absolutely not a
personal thing.

Yours
John W.

PS. I'm watching you via RSS and Twitter. Keep behaving.
PPS. Feeling funny today.
PPPS: 2 PS don't look good, so I add this third one.

Finally. That makes sense now. I did not quite understand why they would do it the way it was implemented earlier.

Thanks for letting us know.

Was so much fun working on this with you. Only a shame that I had to drop 95% of Marty's awesome illustrations and 99% of Becky's words.

Yours John

http://www.JustLikeMyChild.org

Why them?

I know the people running this non-profit organization. I trust them. Their goal is to help families especially children in rural Uganda to become self-sufficient.

Hi Jim!

Good topic! Here's my humble opinion:

(1) The most important ingredient for spammy content is crappy, non authentic content and duplications of it. I see some 99% lack of that crappy part in your videos (1% goes to the fact that there is always someone complaining;). No need to worry about that part.

(2) Web2.0 lives from duplicate content! News sites around the globe publish duplicate content. Google itself IS duplicate content. ...this is about content aggregation and making it accessible to different tribes.

(3)...You might want to think harder about submitting each and every video to places like sclipo, howtovideos, ... , and stupidvideos, ... but most sites are pretty broad in terms of topics and possible target group. Just obey the terms of those sites and they will be more than happy to get good content from you.

(4) Remember the non cross posting rule in the usenet/newsgroups. That basically was/is one system -- a distributed system -- but still one system. Those video sites are competing with each other. The situation is quite different today.

P.S. I had to reload the page in order to get the blip player playing

P.P.S. I guess you could check the stats and concentrate on those sites that work best for you.

Hi Jim,

Just watched your Flip for the first time and liked it. Very good point that Shoe's readers might
need to be fit for a job and get the thing with the "l", "e", "t", "t", "e", "r", "s" right.

Yours
John

P.S.: I am not a native English speaker. The hardest part for me is, "comma or no comma"

Thanks for the "Security Alert!", Andy.

I'm not a fan of any sort of "Tell-A-Friend" promotion, but asking for account credentials to import contacts is even somewhat more intrusive, isn't it. A while ago I added a line to my personal email's signature "This is an unlisted, private email address. You must not share it with anybody!" Well, my friends are 'smart' and I never had problems,... but just in case.

My advice to programmers, marketers, and service providers:

* Give the user a choice of creating a login ID, which does not show up anywhere (different from screen name, different from email address). I say "choice" in reference to Guy Kawasaki who said on his Blog, "I don't use services that don't allow me to use my email address as login." Okay, if you want to (dear user, you can). I guess you could be proud, if someone like Guy uses your service ... no need to lock him out.

* Don't store passwords in plain text. Therefore you cannot send them via email as well! But don't forget to implement a password recovery procedure.

* Continuing with what you wrote, Andy. Don't ask for too much information anyway. At first earn the users trust and respect, then an kind of 'tell-a-friend' will work much better for you.

Yours John

P.S. I hope that was not too long Andy, but I think security (technical) and ethics (marketing,promotion) is very important for the Internet marketplace. As you do.

Obviously a controversial subject. 'NY' says it's not a new tax, just the attempt to collect an existing one. Whoever expected consumers to do bookkeeping on out-of-state in the first place , e.g. 3.77, 10.59, 45.23, 1.23, ... $ and alike purchases was a fool. It's certainly in a whole different dimension in the X0,000.00 $ jewelry business, but people are people and will always look for some 'savings' unless they are stopped systematically. Even before the Internet people bought in 47th Street in Manhatten and had their diamonds shipped to an out-of-state address, hadn't they. As mentioned earlier, I think this calls for a federal solution applicable in each and every state in the same fashion otherwise it just is not fair to some residents and unfair to businesses, who will be forced to comply with a myriad of different standard.

The second issue I 'hear' is obviously that more and more folks disagree with government misspending. For sure that's true everywhere all over the globe. I join your outcry, too.

Hi Andy!

Let me say upfront that sales tax is not value-added-tax (VAT) as we know it in Europe! It's a different tax system. They both have in common that the consumer pays it, but collection is different.

Sales tax has many loopholes for tax evasion, which have been closed by French economist Maurice Lauré, who invented the VAT system in 1954 at the cost of high administrative burden.

NY will fail (hopefully), because it cannot fix a federal problem (sales tax principle) with local state law.
Go for it Amazon, sue the hell out of them!

By the way: Is 50 millions out of a 122 billion budget worth so much fuzz. I doubt it. It's the declaration of bankruptcy by politicians, who don't have a clue about economics. It's greed. Not good!

Andy, what you observe with Clickbank and Godaddy is those 2 giants rushed to comply with EU VAT laws quickly out of fear. Probably after watching what the EU did to Microsoft. For those who don't know, European resident consumers are charged an extra 15-25% VAT by those vendors and they pay this back to the European governments. Crazy, isn't it. There are no 97$ ebooks, they start at 111$. Now US companies have to deal with European tax authorities directly. What's next??

Do you see the similarity Clickbank :: EU == Amazon :: NY ??

1984 - Big Brother - George Orwell was a Genius

Yours
John

Great post Michel.

The harder you negotiate to maintain the perceived value of your service, the more respect your clients will have for you, and the more likely you will get profitable orders from them in the future. The penny counters are not worth it anyway. I think you are right Michel, when stating it might be more worthwhile to spend your time marketing your service rather than adding a low profile project to your portefeuille.

Wasn't it Gary Halbert, who coined the term "Players With Money", and who taught you should aim for those? They are ultimately easier to sell to, they recognize value, they can make decisions, and they have the money to spend.

Have a nice weekend.

# Andy Beard: It is still against the published ToS of Aweber.

# Ken Reno: Viral Optin Generator has no interaction with aWeber.com, and aWeber.com, nor any autoresponder is used for this script.

Ken,
so what? Did you read Aweber's ToS, policies, and comments from their top level executives on their Blog? I personally did, and I had correspondence with AWeber in that matter.

Bottom line: Everybody, who uses TAF in any way to drive visitors to an AWeber opt-in form bears the risk of loosing the AWeber account. It's not YOUR definition Ken, it's AWeber's.

It drives me mad that so many TAF script/service providers claim, "This works with AWeber...", and herein put their users in a potentially dangerous situation. That sucks, sorry.

On the other hand I have to blame AWeber for not stating their TAF terms precisely enough! There is indeed some room for speculation and interpretation. --John

I never would share any of my account data with any third party service. Not a big Web2.0 platform nor an unknown provider.

Your notion about that this referred traffic will be most likely not targeted is a very good one.

Regards to AWeber: After having correspondence with AWeber support about a specific tell-a-friend service (TAF) I got the subjective impression, one can do much more with AWeber, IF one is a very profitable affiliate of theirs (more than the published terms allow). That's all I can tell as an outsider.

Thanks for your post.

Thanks for the great tips with XACH.

Getting paid by cheque in US$ is probably the worst form of getting paid, when you live outside the US.

Well, I just wrote a post myself saying, "BlogRush Is Not So Hot!"
Yours John.

@Michel Fortin:
Thanks. I mistook your link list of headlines for the related posts section, jumped all the way down to the comment form, and skipped your text on personalization totally. Uups! Sorry.

Hi Michel!

When you write, "most people check email first", you are right. I see it in Internet cafes, ... , and every weekend guest visiting us wants at least to check their email from my home office.

Would you share your opinion and experience on personalization in the subject line?

Some marketers use the 'first name' and a welcome phrase. I have seen dates as well, and you begin the subject line with '[Michel Fortin]' (for your Blog announcements).

In 25, 30, 40 characters there is not much room? Would you rather use it for personalization (probably not) or to create the much needed urgency, curiosity, or controversy.

Yours
John
P.S. Happy and successful new year.

Hi Andy!

I knew about "Rich Schefren" before I got to "know" you. Actually I gave you credit for promoting Rich. His face on your blog gave me a good feeling about you, before I even had read a single post.

About responsiveness: You know about the 66 second video contest of Rich. When I got to the page days after it was launched. I was amazed that I still was the first one who discovered that page on StumbleUpon. Yes, that's how lazy readers are.

As Alex Mandossian puts it: ~~ "Moving the 'free line' is essential, but everything has to move towards asking them for the money on a consistent basis. His business model with teleseminars is just incredibly compelling as well as the way he captures the demand of the market. Check out this guy, if you haven't already.

Yours John

Thanks you for submitting your article to my latest edition of "Webmaster Articles" Blog Carnival. It was my pleasure to include it.

Yours John
E-Biz Booster Blog
at http://blog.fcon21.biz/

Hi Semmy, I agree. Once you own your domain you have a real choice of who is handling your emails.

I "love" advertisment like this: "Go to www.mystore.com or write to mystore_4637XYU[at]googlemail.com". Very professional. I don't get it, what those people are thinking about.

The ultimate choice of what is spam should lie in the users hand. I actually wrote an article about that, too (inspired by yours).
What is more important? Email Deliverability or Spam Free Inboxes? I guess, the answer depends on what side of the fence you are sitting. --John

Aren't most comments (on average) either too long or too short. I tend to write fairly long comments myself, too. It's not easy than to come up with a concise to the point small piece of text. On the other side writing a valuable, complete article that stands on its own as source for a trackback is not always possible (time wise or line of the blog).

Did everyone every try to limit the comments to, e.g. 300 characters ? Did it hurt the quality or #Reader-to-#Comments ratio?

Bottom line: Quality blogging, commenting and trackbacking requires more time than most people are willing to put into.
--John
P.S.: Some say, you shouldn't ask questions in a comment. I say, why not. It can add value.

That definitely degrades the meaning of PageRank to an even more arbitrary number. Google is not exactly a non-profit organization, is it. They are probably prelaunching a new commercial product:

Google AdWords -> AdSense -> Ad(d)PageRank

That won't be cheap, I guess.
Just my humble 2 cents. --John

They banned *a friend of mine* , too. Even though that friend had very good reason to believe that he's complying to the rules.

Several attempts to get feedback fro digg failed. No response, of course. Kind of the opposite problem. This friends account page is still up and says. This user has been banned due to misuse. He asked for re-opening or removing it altogether. Acyually I think you have a right that your data is being removed. However, no response.

As always, they act up because of nothing, but still there is so much garbage dugg.

Cheers.