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How Not To Treat People On Your Email List

April 18, 2016 by Rob Bazinet 3 Comments

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I received this email as a member of Nick Disabato’s list today. I read over, multiple times, and bewildered by its purpose:

My friend Kurt recently pointed out a search engine for plagiarized content and threw some of my letters in there. He came up with thousands of examples of people who had ripped off my letters, Draft Revises marketing page, Draft’s home page, and so on.

I always knew that people were ripping me off, but it hadn’t really hit home until I started subscribing to others’ mailing lists and saw my welcome letter, word for word, sent back to me. Not only were people ripping me off, but they were doing it pretty badly: the words Draft Revise even remained in others’ marketing pages. When confronted by others, they would then blame it on contractors they had hired.

So, I should speak about this. I will come right out and say it: As a designer and writer, I don’t care if you rip off my work. Go ahead and do it. Forward this exact letter to your own mailing list. Paste a photo of my face on the front page of your website. Print Cadence & Slang’s PDF out and conduct a dramatic reading of it from the roof of your office building. The world is your oyster.

And that is where my support for this ends. As a consultant, as someone who is here to teach you the best techniques for running a successful business, it will be absolutely disastrous for you to rip off my, or anyone else’s, work.

It’s good to use a specific marketing technique or sales letter, as it helps you build on the shoulders of giants. But there is no substitute for your own voice. You must write. You must. You must write and it must be your own words. There is no other way. You must think into a text editor, and then use the text editor to get the text into the brains of your audience. There are no shortcuts to the act of original, well-considered writing.

Even worse, it is bad business to rip off anyone’s work. Stealing work makes you look bad as a writer, consultant, and thinker. You need to get to making the clackity noise now because it’ll help you develop a strong, confident voice for yourself. Please don’t use me or anyone else as a crutch for not sitting down and doing the work. And then profit.

Don’t do this, it’s just a rant. What benefit can this email have to his readers? We should be delivering content of value. This is far from valuable, written in haste and anger.

Dear reader, would you find this offensive or a waste of your time had you received it? Do you find any value in the words Nick wrote?

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Filed Under: Business Tagged With: email, list

Subscribe to Posts Via Email

February 6, 2014 by Rob Bazinet 2 Comments

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It seems more and more web sites are offering users to subscribe to updates delivered by email. ?If you would rather have posts delivered right to your inbox instead of visiting the site or relying on RSS, you can now subscribe and forget.

Just add your email to the ?Subscribe to Blog via Email?, submit and confirm your desire to subscribe in the confirmation email and thats it. ?You can unsubscribe any time.

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Filed Under: General Tagged With: email, RSS, subscription

SimpleMailr Coming Soon to Make Email Newsletters a Pleasure

December 18, 2013 by Rob Bazinet Leave a Comment

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SimpleMailr med

I?ve been working on a SaaS application for the past number of months named SimpleMailr. It has gone through several iterations as I try to convey my intentions for the service. ?In a one-liner, SimpleMailr is intended to ?Get your newsletter in the hands of your readers easier.?

I?ve tried and used several services such as MailChimp, Constant Contact, Campaign Monitor and others but there is a certain amount of barrier to entry. ?I want something simple to setup, simple to get that first newsletter to readers and simple to do over and over. ?The end goal is getting content to readers and make it easy.

Using SimpleMailr you will be able to:

1. Easily add an existing list of email addresses. ?If you know how to type an email address, copy and paste a list of address or upload an Excel file with email address in it, you will be able to get your list into SimpleMailr. ?If you don?t feel comfortable with any means available..simply contact [email protected] and we will do it for you.?

2. Easily add newsletter content to get your first issue out the door. ?The content of your newsletter is the heart of what you have to share, even if you are familiar with HTML you can add your text and not worry about the details.

3. Send it. ?There?s really nothing more involved once you have something to say. ?Once your ready, just press the send button and we will do the rest.

4. If you care about stats, stats you will have. ?Know how many subscribers you have, how many were sent your content, how many received it and bounce details. ?If you want it, we will have it.

I would really like to get feedback on how you use newsletter marketing today as well as how you would like to use it in the future. ?What could be better? ?What?s missing with your current solution? ?Tell me about your ideal solution. ?Feel free to send an email to [email protected] and start the conversation. ?No obligation and I promise not to send any sales pitches your way. ?You will be helping me build the best and most useful solution I can.

If you?re interested in following along to launch, you can sign-up to be notified right here:

?

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Filed Under: Entrepreneurship Tagged With: aweber, campaign monitor, constant contact, email, mailchimp, newsletter

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