Transcript continued from the Episode 060 Show notes
Message from Cliff Ravenscraft
The main topic for today is really backlink ethics. I want to talk about this because there’s a lot of talk on the internet right now about what kind of backlinks work and don’t work. We’ve often talked about making the internet a better place and so forth.
But before we get to that, I got some interesting from my buddy Cliff. Cliff and I are pretty good friends and we are in masterminds together. He’s the one who I attribute whatever is good about this podcast, Cliff gets a lot of credit for that. I really respect him.
If you remember, in the Dan Miller episode I put a question to Dan about this idea when you have a passion for something, I guess what I would call it is an indirect passion. Maybe I’m not really passionate about internet marketing, but I’m passionate about helping people and internet marketing is the way that I do that.
I wondered out loud and asked Dan what he thought if we were to ask Cliff, who Dan knows very well, is Cliff Ravenscraft passionate about podcasting and podcasting technology, what would he say? Would he say, “Yes, I’m passionate about the act of podcasting,” or would he say, “I use podcasting as a way to help people and I’m passionate about helping people.”
I surmised that maybe Cliff would say he was passionate about helping people and not so much about podcasting. Well, Cliff heard that and he loved the question, but he wasn’t quite sure that Dan exactly got what I was talking about. So Cliff was kind enough to provide his own answer. Let’s hear what Cliff has to say:
Hey, Mark. It’s Cliff Ravenscraft from PodcastAnswerMan.com. I wanted to respond to a recent episode where you did your interview with Dan Miller. I absolutely love that guy and find him so inspirational. I wanted to respond to the last question that you asked Dan.
I knew exactly the heart of the question that you were asking. Unfortunately, I think that Dan maybe missed just the heart of where you were coming from and focused his answer on how does he feel about podcasting and stuff like that.
Here’s the deal. You assumed if you were to ask me today if I’m passionate about podcasting, my answer might be no. Actually, my answer is very much yes. In fact, I wrote this to you in the Podcast Mastermind Forum and I was asked by you if I could record this in audio form.
I’m actually going to read to you what I wrote because I don’t want to change it up too much because it basically poured out of my heart as I was thinking about my response to this question, “Would Cliff say that he still has a passion for podcasting today?” So here’s what I wrote….
I do love podcasting and I do have a passion for it. However, I’m not super passionate about teaching the technical aspects of podcasting. What I do have a passion for, however, is entertaining people, teaching people. Yes, the tech side of podcasting is one thing that I’m able to teach, but I love teaching people about many things, not just the technical stuff.
I love encouraging others and inspiring others to take action. You see, podcasting is what helped me to uncover what I love most in life. Podcasting is what has allowed me to get the attention of hundreds of thousands of people around the world. I spent so much time learning how to do it for myself that I became a master of it.
The economic model came to me after I had already become a master at podcasting. When I decided that I wanted to leave my career in insurance to pursue a life where I could be paid to simply entertain, educate, encourage and inspire others, the economic model of becoming of becoming The Podcast Answer Man presented itself to me. That economic model presented itself to me naturally through slow measured growth in many stages.
I followed my heart and my passion for podcasting and what I could do with podcasting, and what podcasting allowed me to. I followed my heart and my passion and I did find that the money did follow.
I still have a passion for podcasting today, just as much as I did back in the early days of when I first got started into this. I do tend to burn out a little bit from time to time when I get way too many questions about the technical side of teaching people how to podcast. However, the cool thing is that I simply have created tutorials that allow me to teach that stuff once and get paid passively day after day for it.
This has freed me up to teach more about mindset and success and business. These are passions that are growing deeper and deeper within me. This is why I love the Podcast Mastermind so much, this is why I created something that isn’t simply focused on the technical how to hook up wires to a mixer and what is a mix minus, and how can I record Skype conversation, how do I get this static out of my recording, what’s this buzzing sound, and how to do this. I found ways to manage those things but yet leverage my time so that I continue with the economic model that The Podcast Answer Man affords me, but also frees up time for me to continue to do other things for which I’m passionate about.
In summary here, and now I’m just going off the cuff, I would say that most people hear about me and say, “Cliff Ravenscraft is the guy you want to go to if you want to learn how to podcast.” Typically that means that technical side of podcast, but more and more today I get referrals for people that say, “There’s a lot of resources out there when it comes to podcasting, but not only can Cliff Ravenscraft teach you the technical ins and outs of podcasting, but this guy is going to help set you up with a mindset for success and building a business around your passion.” And I’m known for so much more than just the technical side.
That’s how I’ve been able to grow from the very strict niche of the technical go-to guy for podcasting and how I’ve allowed myself to expand my brand as my passions expanded as well.
Anyway, I thought it was a great question and I thank you for the interview that you did with Dan and I hope that you have a wonderful blessed Day. Thanks, Mark.
One of the things that I love about Cliff and his example is what it means for you. You, the person who has my voice in your ears at this moment at the gym or in the car or wherever you are. You can start on the internet messing around with something.
Maybe you build an affiliate site about walkie-talkies, or maybe you have a hobby like scrapbooking, or maybe you’re a “mommy blogger” and you’re just building a presence on the internet to talk about the toys that your child loves. Whatever it is, you get started doing what you’re doing. Eventually, that can grow into something much bigger than you started and much bigger than you.
That’s one of the reasons I get some criticism sometimes from the “follow the money” crowd and they tell me, “You can’t follow your passion, because you need to follow the money. Passion doesn’t pay the bills.” And I agree. You’ve got to pay the bills.
But it’s really cool when you can overlay this passion idea or just interest. Let’s don’t use that loaded word of passion, because that means so many heavy things to so many people. Let’s just talk about something that you’re really interested in.
If you can overlay something that you’re really interested in with the principles of internet marketing, sometimes you can get a synergy going there that builds something that is much bigger than it would have been otherwise. That’s kind of the magic of it and that’s one of the things about Cliff Ravenscraft.
To Cliff, I say thank you very much.
To you in the audience, I say look at Cliff as an example and dare to imagine what you might be able to do with your interests.
Late Night Listener Feedback
I told you I want listener feedback. I love listener feedback. I love questions from listeners. This isn’t a question, this is just some feedback that makes me feel good, so I thought I would play this call for you, I really appreciate these kind of calls. This call is from Daniel in Texas….
Mark, actually I was just calling as a word of thanks as a fellow Texan. I heard your interview on Pat Flynn’s show and I too am starting a podcast, it’s called The Profit Podcast Show. It was just nice to hear some of the tips that you gave and I just wanted to let you know personally – I’m one of these let you hear my voice kind of guys – how much I really appreciated what you have to say. Yes, I will be listening to Late Night Internet Marketing.
Daniel, thank you very much. I do appreciate the kind comments and I love the fact that you’re the kind of guy who likes people to hear your voice, and me particularly to hear your voice. Thank you very much. I’m really looking forward to seeing what goes on with The Profit Podcast Show. Best of luck to you with that, it’s definitely a very cool podcast title. Thanks for the phone call.
Ethics of Backlink Building
The main topic today, if I really had to describe it and lay it out for you, is the question of, “Is it okay to build backlinks?”
I tweeted the other day that if you only read one article this week, read this article from Glen over at Viper Chill. Basically what Glen does is he debunks this Google position that Matt Cutts will give you on YouTube and other places and other venues about how content is king and Google is rewarding great websites and you need to have a great website or you won’t rank.
Certainly that’s their wish. I think it is truly the wish of Google to rank the best websites, or at least the websites that lead to the best profit for Google – I think that’s really the goal of Google – usually that means the best websites.
The thing is they are not able to do that. Matt has said numerous times how they’re cracking down on people. We’ve had Panda, we’ve seen sites go by the wayside, we’ve seen panic and pandemonium in the SEO world in the last year. But the truth of the matter is things aren’t fixed, in fact they might be worse.
Glen has an outstanding article over on Viper Chill where he talks about the fact that backlinks still matter and spammy backlinks still work. He has the data to back it up, he shows five or 10 examples, he has 50 or 100 in his back pocket that he doesn’t show because he doesn’t want to out the whole world.
The truth of the matter is that the data is convincing. I’m seeing this too. When I do a competition analysis sometimes I’m just totally baffled about what’s ranking where. Even on my own sites I’m able to rank things when I think, “Wow, I shouldn’t even really be able to rank that.” So there’s all kinds of weirdness going on.
If you have a question about whether or not spammy backlinks are still working, just go read that article from Glen, that will clear it up for you. But I think the question is; is that okay? Is it okay to build backlinks? And particularly spammy backlinks.
The thing is we all know that rankings bring customers. It’s rankings really in the search engines that often make the difference between profit and loss, even success and failure in internet business. If you get your website ranked, you’re a success. If you get the traffic you need, you’re a success. If you don’t, your website is a failure. That means there is a direct financial incentive for you to do whatever you need to do to get rankings.
In Episode 58 I talked about this and I argued that backlinks were the most important part of ranking your site in Google. That’s still true. Glen’s data certainly shows that. It even shows that the backlinks don’t even have to be all that good.
But Google has said very publicly that they don’t want you to do that, they don’t want you to do anything that is manipulating the rankings. That means if you do anything to build a link, you are kind of violating the idea of what the Google algorithm is supposed to do. After all, the Google algorithm considers other people’s linking to your site as an independent argument that you have a good site. If you’re doing anything to influence that, then you’re tainting that data and you’re messing up Google’s algorithm – they don’t want you to do that.
So the question is do we care what Google wants? Is it okay to build spammy backlinks? If I go have some Russian SEO company build 5,000 websites on separate Class-C IP addresses and have them all with garbage content link back to my site, which adds absolutely no value to the internet, is that okay?
Now, let me give a disclaimer before the phone starts ringing.
Great content in general is the best tonic for SEO headaches in the long term. I think in general it’s true that if you have a site with great content, like WebMD, in general on average you’re going to outrank other crummy websites. If you build a really great authority site, like Security Guard Training Headquarters, you’re going to be rewarded for building that, in general. Not in every case. There are lots of counterexamples. I’m just saying on average Google’s search results are sort of okay a lot of the time.
It’s certainly not true all of the time, but in general content is still really important. I’m not advocating that you run away from good content.
I like to quote my friend Nicole Dean over at NicoleontheNet.com when she says, “It’s good to make the internet a better place.” Whatever it is that you’re doing online, it’s good if what you’re doing makes the internet a better place. That’s my disclaimer, that’s what I really believe.
I also recognize that there’s this question, “What about if I just want to make some money? I’m just a normal guy, I want to do something that makes money and that’s really my primary objective.”
Well, then we have to work through this and decide what we think is okay or what’s not okay.
Let’s talk about who cares. Who are the stakeholders in this whole spammy backlinking thing? Is it okay for me to generate thousands of spammy backlinks and rank sites that aren’t as good as other sites? My site maybe is a five page website and it’s not as good as the established 50 page website that I’m about to beat. Who cares about that?
Google cares, of course. Google needs the best content to come up in the search engines so that people will use them, obviously. If people don’t use Google then people don’t click on Google’s ads, and that’s important to Google because when people click on their ads Google makes money. I’ve said this many times, that’s what you need to remember. You are not Google’s customer. The searcher is not Google’s customer. The advertiser is Google’s customer. They have to keep people using their search engine and they think the best way to do that is to present the best content.
If something happens and Google can’t differentiate between the crummy sites that are supported by spammy backlinks and the great sites that really help people, Google will die. The reason that Yahoo died was because Google could help people better than Yahoo – that’s it, end of statement. If Google can’t get it right, there will be lots of other competition and Google will lose money, so Google definitely cares.
The second group of people that care are website visitors. Obviously when I go to Google I want the best site, I don’t want the site with the best SEO guy. As a visitor, I don’t care about SEO. 99.9972% of the people that use the internet don’t even know what SEO means.
You can see this when you’re shopping online for stuff. As an affiliate marketer I am very sensitive to phony affiliate sites with phony reviews – and I see these all the time. It makes me want to not do affiliate marketing some days because I can’t even wade through all the crap enough to get a good review for a product that I’m trying to buy because it happens to be particularly profitable and lots of guys like me have gone out and built spammy websites and ruined the search experience.
I see this particularly in travel, when I go to look for hotels. I’ve given up trying to use Google for travel, I go straight to Travelocity or I use my company’s internal corporate website for corporate travel, because I can’t sort through all of those hotel affiliate links that come up whenever you search for a hotel in the middle of downtown New York, it’s just crazy. So website visitors definitely care.
Webmasters care too, because there are webmasters out there with great content and they want to be recognized for their content, not their SEO cleverness. They’re trying to get a message out, the legitimate webmasters who are trying to do some good out there. They would prefer not to even have to worry about SEO, let alone spend thousands of dollars hiring an SEO firm to go build backlinks out of some sweatshop in the Philippines or Russia or Armenia. Who wants to do that? It doesn’t add any value.
Webmasters with a strong profit motive also care, because they want to be able invest whatever they need invest to get their stuff out there in a predictable way. If you’re going to build a website and a business and you’re spending money to do that, whatever it is, you want to have some idea of what your return on investment is going to be. If you can’t tell ahead of time how you’re going to do in the search engines, it’s really hard to predict what your business is going to be like.
So there are a lot of legitimate people who care about this backlinking question and how SEO works.
What does Google say? In a nutshell, what Google says is you should not do anything – and I think Matt has literally said that, I didn’t take the time to go back and review the hundreds of Matt Cutts at the podium webmaster of the week videos that he spews out, but my recollection is that they’ve at least once said that you shouldn’t do anything to manipulate rankings. Don’t do anything.
I got to thinking about this. One of the traditional ways that SEOs have manipulated rankings is with forums. There’s a couple of ways to do that, you can make spammy forum posts and you can create forum profiles with a backlink to your site in the profile, there’s lots of things you can do.
Let’s think about these scenarios and you tell me which ones violate the Google Webmaster Guidelines.
Let’s say that someone that you absolutely don’t know, never met before, sees a question in a forum. They take the time to answer that question because they had recently visited your site and the answer to that question is on your site. So in order to answer PersonA’s question, PersonB posts a link to your site in a forum, and you do not know PersonA or PersonB, and the only thing that you did to influence PersonB was create awesome content.
That’s case one. In that case, that is Google’s ideal case, that’s exactly what they want. That’s perfectly legitimate. I think that is exactly what Larry Page was thinking about when he first came up with this algorithm.
Let’s take case two. This is a pretty innocuous situation, similar idea. You are the one who runs across a post in a forum and you want to help a person, and you happen to know that the answer to that person’s question you wrote a fantastic 2,000 word article on your website and you post a link to your website in this forum saying, “Hey, I’ve answered your question, it’s right here. Here’s the link,” and you save that girl or guy on that forum three days of frustration.
That’s great. You helped them. That’s completely legitimate in the intent. But, it’s not quite exactly clear to me that it meets Google’s Webmaster Guidelines, because you’ve gone out and sort of backlinked to your own site. I’m not really sure that that’s okay.
I think it’s even a little bit less okay if you went looking for that question so that you would have an opportunity to post a backlink to your site. You’re still helping somebody, and in fact you’re searching for people to help so that you can get paid with backlinks. I think that’s a little further down the continuum away from what Google says is okay.
What about the next step? If that’s okay or not okay, what about the case where you pay five guys in the Philippines to search for similar questions? In fact, you give them a list of 10 blog posts and you tell them, “Go look on the internet for these 10 questions that are raised by these blog posts, and I want you to post in those forums and answer people’s questions, help them out but point them back to my blog.” You’ve got a small army, a squad if you will, of hitmen in the Philippines and they’re running around the internet helping people, but they’re doing by leaving backlinks to your blog exclusively. Is that okay?
That’s certainly starting to get way far away from what Google intends, because that’s an unnatural level of effort to get backlinks back to your site.
The next step then of course would be why don’t you get five women in the Philippines that you hire, maybe you hire them each for $250 – $400 per month, pay those five women to create forum accounts across the internet and post the questions that are answered by your blog and pay five more people to come behind them and answer the questions.
Now you’re not helping anybody, you’re just creating spam on the internet. Maybe you could argue that you’re accidentally helping somebody from time to time who searches Google and finds this legitimately stated but illegitimately placed question and answer. That whole thing is artificial, but there’s truth in the content, so maybe you accidentally help a searcher down the road. But you’re not helping anybody by placing that stuff out there.
That definitely seems like that’s way against Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. That gets me to the last spot on the continuum. This is what a lot of people are doing and this is the kind of thing that Glen is pointing to and he is saying this works still.
Let’s say you use a tool like ScrapeBox. I don’t know if you’ve heard of ScrapeBox, but it’s a tool that you run and it goes around the internet looking for websites that match a pattern that you give it. You can tell it “go find all the forums that are talking about internet marketing,” or “go find all the WordPress blogs that are talking about goat milk soap,” or something like that. You use this robot to find those websites and then post spam.
Let’s say you find this goat forums and post spam content to the forum; nonsense content with no real information in it. Maybe it’s heavily spun, it doesn’t make much sense, but what it does have is a link to your website. You do thousands of these across the internet.
That’s clearly spam. That does not make the internet a better place.
That is kind of the continuum of the ways that you can violate the Google Webmaster Guidelines. Out of all of those examples, my contention is only one of them where you completely avoided influencing someone who was posting your link – that first case where PersonA has a real problem and posts in a forum, PersonB who you do not know posts a link to your website in answer to PersonA’s question, you do not know PersonA or PersonB and didn’t do anything to help them find that answer – that’s the only case in there out of all those real legitimate cases that are happening in the hundreds of millions of times a month or day or however fast the spam is growing on the internet, that’s the only legitimate case.
The question is if you are the guy or gal who is creating the spammy blog posts on blog networks or spammy link wheels, whether they’re small private blog networks or big spammy blog networks, whether they’re in Russia, the Philippines, or right here in the United States, is that okay or not?
I think it’s a really good question. Full disclosure: Either by way of experiment or because I was really trying to rank a website for real, I’ve done almost every spammy content creation thing on the planet. I’ve paid hundreds of dollars for people to build link wheels full of content, thousands of pages of content that people will never read. I’ve participated in blog networks. I’ve done forum content and automated forum posting.
All this kind of stuff, I’ve tried everything over the last five or six years and sometimes not felt all that great about it. Yes, somebody asks you what you do and you say, “I build websites so that I can make them profitable by artificially inflating their rankings in Google.” That’s just not a very good story.
It’s a much better story to say, “I create awesome content and the rest takes care of itself.” That’s what you’d like to be able to say. That’s what I try to do at LateNightIM.com.
But it’s very tempting, and I have in the past done artificial promotion of certain blog posts, even on LateNightIM.com. Why? Because all the other internet marketers are doing it. Well, not all of them, but many of the people that compete in the space that I compete in are using these techniques. Why are they using them? Well, Glen told you why they’re using them. They’re using them because they work. So it’s really hard to decide whether or not this is okay.
Let me give you an analogy. Let’s say that you’re a plumber and you’re buying an ad in the Yellow Pages and you decide that instead of Smith Plumbing you’re going to name your company AAA Smith Plumbing, and your name is Charlie, not Albert. Well, basically you’ve done something that really doesn’t directly hurt anybody, sort of in the same way spamming the internet with content that no one is ever going read doesn’t really hurt anyone directly (usually, most of the time) to get your plumbing business to the top of the Yellow Pages listing. Are you the best plumber in town? Well, I don’t know. The Yellow Pages is not purporting to list plumbers in the best order. But Google is purporting to do that and so is Yelp.
What if you are a restaurant and you give a free appetizer to people who leave a review on Yelp? You’re not telling them what kind of review to leave, but you’re telling them, “If you leave a review on Yelp, we’ll give you a free appetizer.” Is that okay?
All of these questions are sort of similar. Is it okay to manipulate these ranking systems in order to create a situation where more people come to your website?
I think there are two kinds of okay.
There’s the sense of right and wrong, morally okay. I’m going to set that aside for a second, because that’s the hard one.
Then there’s the business risk okay.
I was talking about this a little bit in my big mastermind group with Cliff and Pat, and Michael Stelzner from Social Media Examiner, and learning with Leslie over at BecomeaBlogger.com. That guy is awesome, I cannot wait, he’s coming on the show. I’m so very excited, you guys are going to love Leslie. Anyway, I digress.
We’re talking about this and of course these guys are serious business people. Their concern immediately goes to that’s not a stable business model, because those spammy links will eventually be ferreted out by Google and then that business will go away, and whoever built that business on that shifting sand of spammy backlinks will no longer be able to pay their light bill.
So this is a really important point that I want to make sure we stress right here. That’s this idea of business risk. I think it is not okay to use spammy links to build your business if you need that business to continue or if that’s somehow going to put you in jeopardy if the new Animal algorithm comes out the next week and takes your business away. That’s the first thing.
I think it is okay, however, to accept a certain amount of risk. If you look back at our continuum of risk, I think it is okay to make a judgment about whether or not it’s okay to hire someone to find people that you can help and go help them in those forums, and to go post legitimate answers to legitimate questions in the forums, even though that’s an artificial manipulation of links. I think that’s okay. I think it’s probably an acceptable amount of business risk, unless your virtual assistant is just pretending to be you but is not speaking English in the same way that you do or something goofy like that that tarnishes your brand in some way. I think it’s perfectly legitimate from a risk standpoint to go do that.
I also think that’s sort of legitimate. I think as long as you’re helping people and, as Nicole says, making the internet a better place, I think that stuff is all okay. Certainly in terms of business risk, if something that it seems like Google if they were to review it manually would look at it and it wouldn’t bother them, then it’s probably okay in terms of business risk.
I have had sites, one site in particular – my brother and I built a law school admissions website. My brother is a lawyer. I’m sorry, I know, please don’t stop listening to the podcast just because my brother is a lawyer, it’s not my fault. We had this website about how to get into law school called LawSchoolRequirements.org. You could probably go into the Way Back Machine, but we’ve taken it down since then.
That site we put it up, it had 10 pages of content, really good content that he wrote. I artificially backlinked to it, it did not have one natural backlink. It made $5.00 per day for two years. It was unbelievable. We spent something on the order of a week putting the site together from idea to we’re done working on it forever and it made $5.00 per day for two years.
Then one day Google made an update and the site went completely unranked. It got uncovered in that it had a lot of blog network backlinks to it and one of the blog networks that was supporting it got uncovered and it got flagged. I was never able to recover it.
So it’s a good thing that I wasn’t using that $5.00 a day to pay my light bill, because that would have been really bad. That can happen to you and that’s the kind of business risk decision that you’re going to have to make.
The moral decision that you’re going to have to make, I think goes a little bit like this. If you have the best content on the internet for whatever topic, for your keyword, and you’re doing whatever you need to do to get your content to people because it helps people and it is legitimately true, some international authority on content agrees that four out of five content experts surveyed that you have the best content, and you do whatever it takes to get to number one in Google, that’s probably sort of okay.
It’s probably sort of okay if you’ve really got excellent content to do whatever you have to do to get that in front of people. Who are you hurting by doing that? Maybe you’re doing something to Google, but Google is not the law. It’s not like Google is the federal court system. Google is just a company and you’re not their customer anyway. And by the way, they’re profiting from your data. I don’t know if you’ve thought about that very much, but the only reason Google has a search engine that makes money is because people like you are out there creating content for them to index.
So I’m kind of thinking that, at least from a morals standpoint, it’s probably okay to work hard and do whatever it takes to get good content ranked according to the rules that Google is setting out by deploying this very complicated and obscure algorithm that they use.
But if you are cluttering up the search engine results with inferior content designed solely to make a profit that’s actually harming consumers, that’s probably not okay.
The way to rationalize this comes back to always trying to create the best content. Where I’ve come to on this is create good content and take an acceptable amount of business risk, whatever you judge that to be after reading SEOmoz and listening to people like me who wax philosophic for hours on hand about the morality of backlinks. Whatever your internal compass tells you do, do that. But do it in support of really good content and avoid the kind of websites where the content is really substandard and when you rank it you’re not helping people.
In the end, as I’ve said many times, value is the glue over the long run that holds this stuff together. I agree with Glen (and I’m going to try to get him on the show) it’s perfectly fine, it definitely works, if your moral compass allows you to build spammy backlinks and make money on the internet. I’m not judging you if you’re doing that.
But I think the healthiest thing to do is probably to do both. Create awesome content and then do what you need to do to rank it based on what the competition is doing, what Google itself is forcing you to do because of the system that they’ve set up. Just make sure that in the end you’re helping people and I think you’ll really like the result.
Late Night Tech Tip of the Week
This week I’ve been struggling to get down to inbox zero. I’ve achieved it. I had 6,500 email messages in my inbox, many of them unread. I used some tools that some friends of mine over in the Podcast Mastermind have been talking about to analyze that. I figured out that most of that email I didn’t really need. I wasn’t reading it at all.
So I got to looking around and over the years I’ve been using Gmail, since 2006 or something like that, I’ve accumulated hundreds of these inbox rules and they were all conflicting and a big mess. That’s not a very scalable tool, the inbox filter tool is just a flat list of rules, the rules don’t talk to each other and it’s just a very poor implementation. If I were Gmail team, I’d be very embarrassed by it.
In any case, it was a mess. So I deleted all of those rules and I used a tool called Unroll.me. You feed Unroll.me your email inbox and it analyzes all your messages and tells you where your mail is coming from. It finds all the newsletters and all the subscriptions in your inbox and it asks you whether you want to do one of three things to each of those classes of newsletter. Say it finds the Late Night Internet Marketing Newsletter, it says, “I see you’re subscribed to this. Do you want to A) unsubscribe [please don’t do that] or B) roll this up or C) leave it alone and let it come to your inbox.”
B) roll it up means that it accumulates all of these and at the end of the day it sends you one email with these cool thumbnails of these newsletters that you can actually read, or at least I can read them on my retina display. You can decide if you want to read that newsletter or not. Most of the time I don’t. It’s that I want those newsletters and I want to be able to glance at them and glance over the headlines, but I can knock out 30 or 40 of them in one email message.
Of course, I unsubscribed to a truckload of stuff that I absolutely never read. It turns out that I really don’t need the Dominos Pizza newsletter. There was just a lot of other junk. It was amazing. Women’s clothing newsletters from when I had bought my wife gifts for Christmas last year and just all kinds of junk that I just never bothered to unsubscribe to one-on-one. But with this mass tool from Unroll.me I was able to do that and that was a huge help.
I highly recommend that tool. Go check it out over at Unroll.me.
Wrapping Things Up…
That wraps it for today. The last thing I wanted to mention to you was if you haven’t done it, go sign up for my totally revamped newsletter.
You can read about it over at LateNightInternetMarketing.com/list. It will tell you all about what’s in there. You get a five day internet marketing e-course that’s absolutely exclusive and unique content from me, written specifically for the newsletter. You can’t find anywhere else except for LateNightInternetMarketing.com/list.
After that you can expect exclusive content from me once a week for the rest of your life. My goal for that is to make that the best internet marketing newsletter on planet Earth. I’m really trying, I’ve studied many very good newsletters, and I have been many very bad newsletters. This is a very simple attempt to send exclusive content to people that adds value and that’s what I’m trying to do. I’m trying to make this into a newsletter where people are excited to see it in their inbox every six or seven days.
Go ahead over to LateNightInternetMarketing.com and sign up for that and give that a try until I see you again next week. See you then.
Thanks for listening.
