YBO Interactive Blog

Question: How much does it cost to spam?

The answer: Depends who you’re messing with. If it’s Facebook it might cost you $873 Million. Isn’t that nice?
I really doubt it if this Adam Guerbuez will ever pay, but it doesn’t really matter. The fact that his life is totally kaput might scare others from doing the same. The LA Times says that Guerbuez , “tricked its members into revealing their passwords to send out messages” and used to send them mostly drug and sex related spam.

Sam O’Rourke, senior counsel at Facebook, said to the LA Times that Facebook hired lawyers in Canada to enforce the judgment against Guerbuez and “locate his assets”. This is the funniest part. It probably sounds like this “Sir! We found an Ipod Nano and and electric guitar! Oh yeah! now he owes us only $872,999,680. Keep looking!”

Toll Free Forwarding is a service provider for (guess what!…) Toll Free Forwarding…

The reason they got to be the subject of this post is their sign up process. When Aviram told me I should look at their website I didn’t know that I will get to the best site I’ve seen in a very long time.

Excellent work. Except of the fact that they insist on entering a “province” as part of the address, and I’m a no-province-kinda-guy, everything is exactly in the right place. On top of the perfect landing page and signup forms, they also offer $10 credit for free trial which is pretty smart. Their Advanced Call Routing seetings are too complicated if you ask me, (I have some ideas how to make it simple) but this is done when you are already a customer, so although it is important, it is less critical.

If you need a good case study for Internet Marketing signup process, go to their site and do exactly what they did. It worked for me.

Just came back from Affilicon. The first day was great, with lots of interesting lectures.

My favorite were Ronny Horowitz, talking about email marketing and the Pijama Millionaire.

I took some videos, started to upload them to youtube, here is the first one, where the Pijama Millionaire is having some fun on stage

Here is another Video where he talks about Niche Research.

There is another video I took where he tells about how he started, you are welcome to see it in the YBO Interactive page in Youtube

Israel has a new Anti Spam law. It is so strict that it allows you to get a compensation of 1000 NIS for every spam email you get, without proving your damage.

Globes sent me today this message:

Are you sending newsletters to your customers? If you do, you must get their permission to send them your newsletter and keep the records, or else you might be in trouble.

Regarding the Globes email, I think that there are lots of marketing mistakes here. The header is irritating, the content is boring, and at the bottom line, they didn’t give the user any incentive to sign up. They didn’t promise anything, they didn’t tell me that I’ll be happier in one way or another or smarter if I sign up. So why would I click yes? “Do you want our spam? Say Yes!”

I would do something to make my users signup. May add a some examples of the best alerts they sent this year, maybe even something like the good old “sign up now and be the first to know” kind of slogans. There are many ways to do it.

I would never send such an email. I think that the conversion rate of this campaign will be extremely low. Maybe even lower than extremely low…

One more thing, their message doesn’t looks good without all the images that gmail blocks. Didn’t they ever try to see how it looks on gmail?

Update:

There is also a right way to do it. Take a look at the email from Eyron

Here is the incentive I was talking about: Wana win a free GPS? sign up to our newsletter…

Isn’t that a lousy picture? well, that’s the best I could do with my phone…

It was a very nice day at Google, I’ll write a few posts about what I’ve heard, it was quite interesting to hear what the Google guys think about what we do every day.

I also got quite a few $50 Adwords Coupons for my customers, so if you need one, feel free to contact me and I’ll send you the code. It was funny to hear that in Poland and Turkey the guys that got the coupons from Google sold them on ebay on the same day… so mines aren’t for sale, just giveaways

I have to say that when I looked at the Ben&Jerry’s freezer in the GooglePlex, I thought about that VISA commercial when Keren Mor says “Why do I deserve all that Good?…” It sure looks like it is fun to work there…