Diane Merriam, The Internet Diva

Quick Update on the Rileys

Thanks to your generous support. Abra was able to get Joseph home and buried where he wanted to be laid to rest. Once again, thank you.

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They Always Helped Others, Now They Need Our Help

I’d like to tell you about Joseph and Abra Riley

Joseph Riley was a lung cancer patient who gave everything he could to others, primarily through Kiva.

He and his wifa, Abra were in the US helping Abra’s mother who was very ill. In the middle of August, as they were getting reay to head home to Sydney, Josepth’s remaining lung collapsed. He was released after about 2 weeks and the were getting ready to head home again when the lung collapsed fr the second time. On the 12th of October, he passed away. For more details on his story go to JosephRileyMemorial.com.

Having spent everything on travel and medical expenses already, Abra no longer has any way to get him back home to Sydeny, is last wish and her last promise.

The funeral home and travel will cost about $10,000 and we have been going non-stop for 5 days trying to raise it. We’re almost halfway there from donations ranging from $1 to an anonymous donation of $1000. Anything you can do to help is appreciated. Even if you can’t help financially, just spread the word to your friends and social groups.

We’ve been running a 24/7 chatroom since Saturday night, now at the SWAT Conference Room.

Once again, the website to go to for information or donations is JosephRileyMemorial.com

Thanks in advance for whatever you can do
Diane Merriam

Banner info:
Link: http://JosephRileyMemorial.com
Banner URL: http://www.kymrobinson.com/Riley/460-60.gif

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One Of, If Not The, Greatest Motivational Video I’ve Ever Seen

Earlier tonight at the SWAT conference James Holmes queued up this video. I’d seen it before but lost track of it. I wasn’t about to lose it again. Whenever you feel like you’ve done all you can do, watch it again and see how much farther you can go.

Let me know if you think it’s as good as I think it is.

Diane

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My Ultimate Email Contact Management System

Here would be my ultimate eMail contact service:

There are 3 types of mailings
One time broadcast, like announicing a sale for this weekend
Ongoing broadcasts, such as a newsletter (extra points for tieing it in with an RSS feed)
Autoresponder, sending a pre-written series of emails over a given time schedule

Recipients. Whether you call them separate lists or segments or whatever other terminology to break them down into smaller groups. For any given mailing, set which group(s) will receive that mailing and also make sure they only get it once if the recipient is in more than one of the selected groups.

When a person finishes an autoresponder series, there should be the ability to automatically add and/or move them to a different group(s). If you’ve left people in their original autoresponder group as well and you add a new mail to that series, those who have gone through the original series should also receive it … or a check box as to whether to or not.

Plenty of custom fields that can be evaluated at any time and be useable for creating a one time group on the fly as it were.

Split testing, tracking stats on opens, clicks, or whatever other metric you can think of.

Surveys and reponses

Direct or easilbly worked integration with at least the most common payment processors and content management systems.

HTML/plain text versions for each eMail. Automatically create the text version from the HTML but allow edits to it (or don’t use HTML at all)

Automatically breaking line length at a given column

Multi-media integration

Comments welcome as well as additions to the list of features it woudl be great if it had.

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The Proper Care And Feeding Of A Mailing List

What to do with a mailing list once you have started building it

The first thing is to remember that you are writing to real
people, people who are taking time out of their day to read what you
have written. Make what you write worth their time.

This doesn’t mean that it has to be Pulitzer Prize winning prose
but it does have to be something useful to most people on your list.
Do NOT just send things you want them to buy. You’ll find your
list shrinking as fast as it takes to build it. This can be
information, downloads, sites to see, or even a bit of entertainment
or any combination of them.

You also need to mail on a fairly regular schedule. It depends on
what you’re writing about, but at least once or twice a week. On the
other hand, as you probably know yourself, mailing too often can be
the biggest reason to quit a list. If you eMail me 3 or 4 times a day
and it’s not valuable, actionable content you’ll be gone within the
week. Don’t treat your readers with any less respect than you expect
to get yourself.

It is a good idea to have at least one link in each eMail so your
readers get accustomed to clicking on your links. Again, make sure
that where you sent them to is useful information.

Another good idea is to have a PS in most eMails. Even if you
don’t, there’s a large group of people who first look at the heading
and then immediately go to the bottom before they decide whether or
not to read what’s between them.

Repurposing (using content more than once) is a great way to save
time and effort. For example, write a blog post and then pull a
excerpt out to use as the content in your eMail with a link to the
post in the eMail.

On the other hand, make your eMails your own. Don’t just copy
standard eMails as is and send them out. If you do you’re probably
sending exactly the same content as everyone else. Unless you’re
lucky enough to be the first one they receive, that’s both an
irritant and a downgrading of your readers’ interest in you.

I hope this has been helpful to you.

Diane

PS: A PS can work with blog posts too so read the rest of it