After 4 Years of Fighting It

Did you recently – finally – begin to receive the Monday Morning Memo after having subscribed some time ago? We’ve been trying to get it to you, really we have, but the internet gods have not been kind to us.

We've known for 4 years that thousands of you have been unable to receive the Monday Morning Memo through no fault of your own.

Today I’ll tell you how we gained the gods’ good graces. Perhaps we found answers you can use.

If you manage a business, two things are certain:

1. You have someone in your life you consider to be an expert in all things internet.

2. That person doesn’t know nearly as much as you think they do.

You and I (and most other people) believe urban legends about the internet because the legends make perfect sense. Here are a few we were told:

“The ISPs have you blacklisted. You need to get white-listed.”

Reality: We never found an ISP that maintains a list of any color. Email rejections are based on codes within an ISP’s system and are mostly automatic and unmonitored. The ISPs rejecting us didn’t know they were rejecting us.

“Someone turned you in as a spammer to one of the SpamCop services.”

Reality: Never in 15 years have we sent an unsolicited email. Nonetheless, to keep an enthusiastic subscriber from adding a friend’s address without that friend’s permission, we implemented a double opt-in system 4 years ago to make it impossible to subscribe any address other than your own. Consequently, spam cops love us.

“Your emails contain too much promotional language.”

Reality: The language of our emails was not the problem.

“Your emails contain too many hyperlinks.”

Reality: The hyperlinks were not the problem.

“You’re using .jpg images. You need to switch to flash images.”

Reality: jpg images were not the problem.

“You need to use rotating servers.”

Reality: True spammers use this technique to periodically change identities. We were able to solve our problem without having to resort to this extreme technique.

Urban legends will keep you as confused as a termite in a yo-yo. My head was spinning. I felt like throwing up. I needed to find an outbound internet marketing tool similar to On Target, Jeff and Bryan Eisenberg’s inbound internet marketing tool that tells you exactly where the problems are on your website.

Jeff and Bryan were unaware of any such outbound tool. Likewise, none of the other internet experts in my circle had never heard of any concrete, outbound marketing tools.

When I tell you what the problem was, you’re going to say, “Of course, I could have told you that.” But hindsight is 20/20. The truth, once revealed, is always simple.

If you think you know the answer, write it down. Seriously, write it down. The clearest memory is no match for pale ink. In a moment I’ll give you a link to the answer and you can compare it to your guess.

I’ve written New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestselling business books but I was powerless to solve my email dilemma until someone finally came along with a tool – a software system – for identifying and fixing email deliverability problems. BANG. Facts and details to the rescue. No hearsay. No guesswork. Problem solved.

I fell into the answer when Sean Taylor walked into my office and asked if he could buy the hot, new 1-page shopping cart for WizardAcademyPress.com. Sean said he’d been researching ecommerce software for a long time and the hands-down winner was from a New Zealand-based company called Interspire. I told Sean I wanted someone from Interspire to come and spend a few hours with us. Sean said I was being ridiculous; the software was only a few hundred dollars. I told him to make the call anyway.

“Your boss is being ridiculous,” the consultant said. “This software is only a few hundred dollars.”

Sean said, “I know, but I need you to ask your boss anyway.”

The CEO of Interspire – Eddie Machaalani – just happened to be visiting his U.S. sales office that day and when he heard his sales consultant telling his manager about my request, Eddie said, “I was in the audience when the Wizard of Ads came to Sydney, Australia, 5 years ago. I’ve always wanted to meet him. Ask this Sean fellow what day Mr. Williams would like us to be there.”

If you want to know our problem and its solution, click here.

If none of this has interested you, I promise to make it up to you in the rabbit hole. You can go there now by clicking the image of the beagle and the dice at the top of the page.

Aroo.

Roy H. Williams