There is a great article over at InsideCRM that lists 101 fixes for your website to help your communicate better and take advantage of your traffic. They very in ease and value, but all of them are worth looking at. Many of the tips, such as #1 - tell readers why they should perform a task, are applicable to emails and other forms of communication, not just websites.

While reading this article, think about the sites you do and don’t like. More importantly, think about the sites you find easy to use versus the ones that you hate going visiting. I will bet you that many of the reasons for those differences are listed here, such as “never ask for more information than you need.” If you aren’t going to use the requester’s pet’s name, why are you asking for it.

Again, a good article and well worth the read. 101 Five-Minute Fixes to Incrementally Improve Your Web Site.

Reputation is an important thing. Often, especially on-line, your reputation is about all you have. With email it can be a make or break proposition. If your reputation goes downhill your email servers can be put on “blacklists” causing many mail relaying servers to refuse your messages. Hopefully you don’t do things that can get you flagged; the problem though is that you may not know that you have garnered a bad rep.

There are a number of services out there that can tell you if you have been marked as a spammer. These services will also mark senders that have a habit of sending out virus laden emails. Instead of going to each individual blacklist owner and finding out if you are on their list, the best thing to do is go to a site like MX Tool Box. Here you will find the most important tools you will need to assess your reputation. First is a tool that will tell you your “MX record“. Since most blacklists are done by IP address, not domain name, you need to know what IP address is really sending out your email. Depending on your setup this may or may not be your IP address as seen by websites. If you go to the MX tool at MX Tool Box and enter your domain name, it will tell you what IP address is registered to send out your email. Note that this can be your first hint. If you have other addresses sending out mail than the one specified some servers will refuse the mail.

Now that you have your IP address, go over to the “Blacklists” tab and put that IP in and hit “Blacklist Check”. This tool will go out and check most of the main lists to see if you have been flagged. What you want to see is all “OK”s. This lets you know that your reputation is still in tact. If you are flagged by one of the services, you will need to go to that service and find out why and what can be done to fix the rating. Know that fixing things is not always a quick or easy thing. Be prepared to do some work that will will talk about in future columns.

Assuming that everything is OK, you can also use some of the other tools on MX Tool Box to test the speed of your servers, the responsiveness, and best of all you can set up a proactive monitoring service that will check all of this stuff regularly and alert you if there is a problem. The monitoring service can even send you a text message if you email server goes down or becomes unresponsive.

Knowing what your reputation is, keeping a good one, and monitoring how you are perceived by others is just as important in the world of the Internet as it is in your personal relations. What’s more, in the world of electronic communications news travels fast so you most remain ever vigilant. There are lots of other services in addition to MX Tool Box, such as Habeas, Blacklisted Domain and others. They vary in price and effectiveness, so look around and see which one is best for you. What is important is that you use something.

In future columns I will be talking more about email integrity and other methods, such as identity verification and whitelists, that are being introduced to combat spam and increase email reliability. Please subscribe to the site feed by either RSS or email to stay on top of everything coming out. The links for those subscriptions are up in the top right corner of this page.

This should have been a no brainer, and I can’t believe I am having to write it at all. But after dealing with a client this last week, I guess that it isn’t so obvious. Here is the rule: If you don’t want to be perceived as spam, then don’t spam! That is rule number one. OK, you think everything you have to say is valuable and that everyone should hang on your every word. Goody for you. You customers don’t agree, and it is their decision.

If you send out 5000 emails per day to the same 5000 prospects, you are spamming. I don’t care how interesting that message is. By the third day, of fourth day if I am slow, I am wanting off of your list. There is no way you are fine tuning a personal message to that many people in bulk. Oh, and if you are a smaller company the numbers are smaller, but you are still spamming.

Beyond that, a brief review:

• Don’t contact me every day unless we are in the middle of a frantic negotiation. Even then, you had better have something very important to say.
• Don’t send me the same message as you send to a thousand other people and expect me to consider it a personal interaction. You are just fooling yourself.
• Don’t put all of the email addresses for the hundreds of people you are sending the email to in the “To:” line. You just broadcast everyone’s emails, gave away your contact list, and invited more spam into your prospects inbox.
• Do use a subject in your email that is clear and accurate. Don’t put it in ALL CAPS, and don’t use words that are spam triggers like “free”, “great deal”, “viagra”, or “sex”.
• Do be aware that if you act like a spammer, the anti-spam services will conclude that you are spam and will start blocking your emails.

OK, those are some of the very basics that you should keep in mind all the time. Beyond that there are lots of other things to do and not do, but that is what this entire blog is for and what I will be talking about in the future.

If you want to make sure to stay up on getting your message across, getting your email read, and keeping your company off the spam blacklists, then make sure to subscribe to this blog through the RSS feed or through the email.

There is a great post over at ProBlogger entitled “How to Write Better Posts, Every Time“. What is addressed here is the value of your message to your customer and how to keep them coming back for more. I want you to read the entire article, but let me just give you the little bit.

Whether you blog about internet marketing, parenthood, karate or ballpoint pens, there are certain things you can do to make each post better. This week, I want to share several strategies you can use to make your posts more gripping — regardless of their length or topic.

Omit any sentences or paragraphs in your post that don’t fall under the following two categories:

1. Words that persuade visitors to read the article.

2. Words that visitors will want to read.

Now, this can be applied to all sorts of writing, not just blog posts. Think about these points as you are writing your next email. Think about the purpose of what you are writing. Is persuading the reader to do something? Or is it providing information that the reader will find valuable. If it is doing neither, then it is wasted breath and a waste of your readers time. And, in this day and age when time is at a premium and your message is battling thousands of others for a shrinking share of attention, you cannot afford to waste anything.