I have a different view of spam because I make a living by sending email that some might consider to be spam. Commercial e-mail is a great way to sell and you can successfully use it for internet marketing. Spam is anything you receive that you are not interested in. It's the electronic version of paper "junk mail". If you are interested in the product or service being offered, you probably don't consider it spam. This article discusses how to send bulk commercial emails that are welcomed by the recipient and that sell.

Complaints & How They Affect You

When you advertise by bulk email, some people may complain. It could be people with nothing better to do, it could be people you offended with your message etc. If enough people complain, you can lose your ISP (the company that allows you to connect with the internet), your telephone number and your web site. There are ways to make the chance of harm form complaints less probable.

Comply With The Law

If you are in the US, you must comply with the laws about unsolicited commercial emails. Luckily, these laws are not hard to obey. Be sure find out more about the laws that are in effect and comply with them. Most laws ask for reasonable things like not stripping headers, not using misleading Subject Lines, having a working unsubscribe system and disclosing your name address and phone number. These are reasonable and easy to comply with.

Harvest Names That Fit - Use Specific Pages If Possible

First, you need email addresses. I have never successfully bought a list. That's because people that have worked hard to accumulate a list of customers and prospects would probably not allow anyone else to mail to them. The list is more valuable than the revenue they can make by renting or selling the list.

The best way to get email addresses is to use a harvester program. These are reasonably priced at about $30.00 to $99.00. You key in key words you want to find and the harvester travels the web and harvests email addresses on any page with those key words. For example, if you are looking for attorneys in Texas, you key "attorneys Texas" into the harvester and it scours the internet and harvest emails. You need to be cautious with the results as any page with those words will be harvested. For example, if I had a page that said, "My wife is using an attorney in TX" the harvester would add my name to the list even though I am not an attorney and not in TX.

You will get far better results if you a harvest from specific web sites that you know contain your targeted prospects. For example, you may find a web site that lists every attorney in Texas. It could be the Texas Law Association, a state page, a referral service etc. This method is much more accurate but it takes time and effort. To find such sites, key in things like "directories of TX attorneys" and you will find directories of there are any.

Verify & Purge List Before Sending

Another factor leading to complains is contacting people who have nothing to do with your product or service. For example, any email address ending in ".mil" is a military site. Any address ending in ".gov" or ".us" is a government site. I also avoid any ending in ".edu" and ".org" as I have found that people in schools and organizations complain more than others.

To purge you list, open you list in a program line "notebook" and use the search and replace feature to find all addresses of a certain type and eliminate them. Most bulk email sender programs have a way to purge duplicates and this is important. Nothing makes people madder than getting multiple copies of an email.

Before you send emails, we suggest you verify the list. To do this, you need a bulk email verifier. You can find these by keying phrases like "bulk email verifier" into your browser bar. These programs are inexpensive. They send out a "ping" to every address in your list to find out if it is working. By only mailing to working addresses, you will not have thousands of returned emails flood your box and huge numbers of returns tell you mail account owner that you are sending large volumes of commercial emails.

Space Out Your Sends

We suggest you only send about 250 emails at a time, wait a few minutes and send another 250 email packet. Many bulk email senders have this feature built in. This is important to stay under the radar of mail services. Some services automatically delete and emails sent in large batches.

This article covers just a few of the things you need to do in order to be successful with bulk emails. You can succeed. It works for big companies and it will work for you.