Spam filters are responsible for deleting a high
percentage of legitimate business emails from
people who have no wish to spam. Here are some
tips to avoid spam complaints in your emails or
ezine.

Avoid the following triggers in your emails.

1. Excessive use of ALL CAPITALS in the subject line and body of your email.

2. The use of words like “free”(used alone or in combination with words like “trial”,”money”, “quote”, “sample”, “membership”, “access” etc.) Other more obvious word to avoid include “sex”, “XXX”,”spam”, “$$$”, “checks”, “money”, “extra income”, “as seen on TV”. Even seemingly harmless word such as “search engine listings”, “cable converter”, and “reverses aging” will get you in trouble.

3. Excessive use of exclamation marks “!!!”

Tips for Staying on the Right Side of Spam Filters

1. Use words like “news”, “newsletter”, “list” in your subject line.

2. Say how often your ezine is published in the subject line - weekly, monthly.

3. Put date of newsletter in subject line.

4. Put issue number in the subject line.

5. Ensure your newsletter is a proper ezine with some substance in the text.

To help identify spam in your emails/ezines use the
following spam checker always before you send
anything out.

http://www.merchant-account-service.com/stop_spam_mail.html

Above all, use your common sense. We know what spam
looks like, so avoid anything that resembles it in
your ezine.

(C) John Lynch

For a free spam test on your emails or ezines go to:
http://www.merchant-account-service.com/stop_spam_mail.html

A major event within the Euromillions Euro lotto is the Elgordo Lottery - and you would do well to learn about this part. Noted for offering one of the world’s richest jackpots, this simple wager offers pots that can run up to 2.6 billion Euros. Even that is not the only thing that’s special here. The chances of winning a prize of some sort are as high as one in six, and these prizes might be any of over thirteen thousand different amounts. When compared with the prizes being featured by other lottos, it has to be said that El Gordo’s offerings are very good.

To enter the lottery, one option is a full ticket, called a “serie”. There is also a cheaper option; called a “d©cimo” worth one-tenth of a full ticket. Unfortunately, both options are comparatively expensive ways to play nor will either ramp up your prospects of a win anyway. As a result many people playing the Euromillions Euro lottery instead use the e-lottery system.

There is one draw each month in the Euromillions Euro lotto. But three months a year are dedicated to special lotteries for larger prizes. The most substantial of all the draws is “fatso” “El Gordo” which is held around Xmas, while the other two special drawings take place in January (”El Nio”) and in summer (”San Ildefonso”).

Balls each numbered between 00,000 and 84,999 are not typical in lottery systems, but the Elgordo lottery employs an unusual approach taking full advantage of them. In this system, one ball is selected from a bowl to identify the winning number while a second is pulled out of the second bowl to determine the value of the prize.

With the e-lottery system, you are guaranteed a prize. Simply buy into the El Gordo Lottery syndicate where you’re sorted into teams. Each team is assigned a number ranging from zero to nine when the draw is held, the last number on the winning ball identifies which team will receive the money. All members then receive an even share of the money. Before next month’s lottery, the syndicate once again sells subscriptions and the e-lottery continues.

E-Lottery And The El Gordo Lotto: The 101

Please surf to this super webpage for elottery blog information.

So You Want to Be A Podcaster?

You think you have what it takes to compete in the exploding underground-industry of Podcasting and have a great concept for a Podcast?

Have you checked all of this off your list?:

* A Great Idea for a New Podcast! * A Killer Script (No the same as a great concept) * Recording Software * A Microphone * A Webpage (and plenty of bandwidth) * An Rss Feed for your Podcast episodes * A Well Laid Out Plan on How to Market Your New Podcast

So how did you do?

Were you able to check everything off the list? Most of these items are necessary to create and host your podcast, and if you haven’t bothered with a good marketing plan yet? Well, keep your fingers crossed that your family and friends like the sound of your voice because it is unlikely that many other people will ever hear your Great New Podcast show.

Don’t shoot the messenger. It is a dog-eat-dog world out there with too many businesses competing for the same Podcast audience. What’s that you say? We are not talking about businesses? Only a free, donation based, underground, podcast? Well, that may be true, but the world of podcasting has grown exponentially over the past year and that means there are a large number of Podcasters out there who are competing for the same listener base that you are. In fact, according to Forrester Research, by 2010 the multitude of podcast shows should have around 12.3 million regular listeners.

And don’t forget that the business world knows a good thing when it sees it; resulting in more and more businesses jumping on the Podcast bandwagon over the past few months.

But that’s okay; because there’s still plenty of room in the Podcast Empire and you can learn valuable lessons from the business world…

They know how to put together a classy Podcast. They know how to advertise.They know how to network. And possibly most importantly, they know how to market a Podcast. And you can scoff at the corporations invading the tranquil Podcasting Nirvana all you want, but the fact remains… If you want to get your new Podcast out to the masses, you had better bone up on some Marketing Basics.

So where do you start?

Well, one of the most important things that you can do is to understand and have a working knowledge of your business Value Chain. What’s a Value Chain you ask? Essentially it is the logical flow of your new Podcast business starting with your original concept and following every step through until the finished product hits your listener’s iPod.

Did you catch that? In other words, your Podcast’s Value Chain consists of all the steps you need to take to get your product into the hands of your listeners.

A Podcast’s Value Chain will consist of 10 steps:

Concept -> Pre-production -> Post-Production -> Publishing -> Hosting -> Promotion -> Community/Search -> Downloading -> Show Viewing

If you produce a podcast show, you will touch on each of these steps. And while each step may offer you a unique set of challenges, each will also provide you with their own opportunities to monetize and market your new show.

The Value Chain of your Podcast Show will always be at the core of your venture whether you utilize it or not. This being the case, the more aware you are of your Value Chain, the easier it will become for you to take advantage of and capitalize on each step of the process.

This is the first in a series of articles that explain how to take advantage of a Podcast Show’s Value Chain and help you to maximize your Show’s listenership. To see the following articles, please visit http://www.podcastempire.com.

Spam is out of control! I guess that would be the understatement of the year. Like any other annoying fact of life, you let it drive you crazy or you deal with it.

In the age of cyber communication, “Spam” has become the main way to get the message out to the masses. But if you think about it, I guess “spam” has always been with us. Before the Internet, when it came in our mailbox, we called it “junk mail”. On TV, we call it an “infomercial”. Over the telephone, it’s “telemarketing.

The determined marketer will always find an annoying way to try to get his message to the people, whether they want it or not. But to me those other methods always seemed more controllable.

“Junk mail”, a quick look and chuck it in the trash. I guess it was a lesser volume of mail because the advertiser was paying for it? You know, postage and real paper.

The TV “infomercial”, just turn off the Telly or change the channel. This form of bombardment is costly to the advertiser also.

Now “telemarketing” is a whole other animal. It doesn’t seem to matter what the cost to the advertiser is, the return is greater. The deterrents, like the national “don’t call me” doesn’t really work. My solution. Caller ID and don’t answer the phone if no name and/or phone number comes up. Oh yea! and an answering machine to catch the strays is helpful.

As an Internet marketer, with a web site, I get upwards of 500 emails in my inbox daily. What used to take minutes to sift through them now takes me hours.

When I am done and close my email client, a little window pops up and asks me if I am sure I want to delete the 450 emails in the trash? Over 450 of the approximately 500 emails I get daily are trash. That’s ludicrous!

You might say to yourself, why doesn’t he use a spam filtering program to get rid of the spam? Well so far all the spam filter software I have tried seems to throw out the baby with the bath water. I would rather trust my own internal spam filter, called common sense; and the “delete” key to get the job done.

None of the filters I have tried, no matter how fine tuned, doesn’t throw out the good email with the bad. In fact they are so fine tuned, that in trying to out smart the spammer they include many legitimate words or phrases in their list of no-no’s. So you still have to scan it.

The spam filters are even contributing to the amount of emails we get. Many legitimate Internet marketers have resorted to sending out a second email in case a spam filter stopped their first email from reaching you.

In fact, just mentioning the word “spam” in this article would probably keep it from being read by millions of people.

So what can we do about it? If I had a definitive answer to that question, I probably would get the Nobel Prize for Solving an Annoying World Problem. Do they have a Nobel Prize for solving an annoying world problem?

Anyway. Here is my humble offering in an attempt to rid the world of this cursed menace!

The best way, of course, would be not to buy any product or service offered by a spammer. If they don’t make any money as a result of their spamming, they eventually will get the message and stop. However, this solution would have to be undertaken on a global scale to be effective and there must be plenty of people who are reading and acting on the spammer’s message to prevent this from happening. Although I can’t for the life of me figure out why!

Another solution that you and I, as individuals, can do is delete the email and more importantly not buy from the spammer. Like trashing “junk mail”, turning off the “informercial” on TV or not answering the phone when it’s a “telemarketer”. You can take an individual stand.

Like the great actor Peter Finch, in his Oscar winning performance in Network (1976), tell the world your “mad as hell and your not going to take it anymore!”

About the Author —- Jim Capobianco, the author of “10 Steps to Your Own Home-Based Business”, has been self-employed for over 25 years, both on and off line. At his web site, Cap-Tech.com and in his newsletter, The Cap-Tech Times, he shares his experience and expertise when it comes to owning your own business. Come pay a visit at: http://www.cap-tech.com

If you’ve been around the interenet any length of time then you probably know what spam is. However, if you’re new to the internet you might be asking yourself the question “What is Spam?”

The best place to begin would be to explain to you exactly what spam mail is. Spam is basically just unsolicited commercial emails that companies send to your inbox.

There are a lot of ways these companies get your email address. You may have signed up for a newsletter or promotions with one of them, or you may have ordered a product or service that requires registration from a website first.

It is common for companies to share their mailing lists with their affiliate companies. It’s one of the benefits to having affiliations. The only problem is that most companies hide this knowledge in their “terms and agreements” of their websites. They count on the fact that most people do not read all the way through them. Of course since it is mentioned somewhere in their website, it is perfectly legal.

The average person can expect to receive anywhere from ten to twenty spam’s a day in their inbox; depending on how many promos and registrations they fill out. Once a person accepts or opens an unsolicited email, they become plagued by receiving six more in its place. It is a vicious cycle.

As the internet has reached its peak popularity during the past couple of years, so have companies followed suit and expanded their abilities to advertise. The biggest problem is that they don’t know when to stop advertising.

The best place to begin with this manual is to give you a list of some of the things that you may do that will leave your inbox vulnerable to receiving spam.

• Filling out a registration for an online newsletter is a common way for companies to use your inbox to advertise.

• Registering your inbox for promos and contests.

• When installing new software it is common to register your email address for updates, but it is also leaving yourself open to spam.

• Signing yourself up for just about anything online is leaving yourself open to receiving spam.

• Reviewing books online generally requires that you provide your email address.

One Common factor in all of these things listed is that you have to volunteer your email address to a company before it can be used. Of course, there are ways for a company to get your email address without you having to give it to them directly.

It was not too long ago that email mailboxes were so full of junk mail and spam that they threatened to render electronic communication useless. When you opened up your email you were bombarded with poorly written advertisements for $ex, V!agra, and tons of other intentionally misspelled products, designed to evade any spam blocking devices. Those interested in consumer protection knew the ultimate goal, to eliminate and block spam, but as soon as they created a product designed to do just that, the spammers evaded their efforts by getting more creative. That is, until modern anti spam software was developed. Antispam software comes in a variety of forms, with the obvious ultimate intent of stopping unwanted emails from reaching you.

Blacklist

One of the primary anti spam methods is known as blacklisting. This software identifies the IP address of the spam sender, and then communicates with the Internet Service Provider of the sender and instructs the ISP to block mail from that IP address to your email account. In theory this is a fool proof solution. The reality, however, is that there is a lot of money to be made in spamming, so forcing a spammer to switch his IP address frequently is not too high a price to pay to evade blocking. That said, this practice does, over time, start to close down doors to spammers and all but eliminates amateur spammers who do not have the capability to frequently switch IPs.

Spam Votes

Many individuals who frequently use their email accounts will be familiar with this device. Spam voting software works through the participation of users. When you receive email you have the option of classifying it as spam, usually by pushing a button which says, unsurprisingly, ’spam’. Once enough people classify a piece of mail or an IP as spam it falls in trust until ultimately it becomes completely blocked from addresses.

Profiling

Profiling involves learning the common characteristics of spammers and spam mail. It is software that looks for things like bugs, invalid message ID’s and other traits and uses these characteristics to evaluate incoming pieces of mail. Each piece of mail is then given a score depending upon how it fares against these criteria. The user is then given the option of how high or how low to set the bar with regard to which emails are let in. This method has been shown to be immensely effective against amateur spammers and many professional spammers. However, it relies upon a ready team of professionals to identify new traits used by spammers and to incorporate those traits into the profiling algorithms.

Bayesian Filtering

The most promising spam blocking software follows no rules. Rather, it constantly learns new techniques to fight spam by scanning the mail you’ve read and comparing it to the mail that you have rejected. This highly sophisticated software uses the data that it gleans from thousands of users to identify which items are spam and which are not. It then has the capability to adjust its standards to your particular preferences. Over time, it becomes adept at sending you only the emails that you want, and blocking the emails that you do not.

Sara Anderwahl recommends that you visit www.barracudanetworks.com for more information on anti spam software.