What’s the first thing people look at before deciding to click open an email?

It’s not the subject line… let me give you a hint –  it’s uncle Bob.

Uncle Bob gives you candy when you were a child, every you see him, he gives you stuff.

He may not be the smartest guy around the block but uncle Bob knows his stuff, he’s trustworthy.

Everyone of us has an uncle Bob… and we’ve got an uncle Jack.

Uncle Jack’s the smartest guy you know, ever since you knew him as a child, you hear him talking about his latest project and how much he’s making. He gave you candy too… but only when you wanted to play with him.

It seems all he ever wanted was to speak with your dad… you’re practically invisible around him.

Now, you’re all grown up and you’re working, making an income and making your mark in this world. One day, you receive a letter that says “I need your help” and you see it’s from uncle…

Uncle who?

…

Have you got the answer? It’s the “From” column in the email inbox. That’s the biggest determinant in getting a good open rate.

See, in most list building courses available online, they talk about building a huge list and making an income from there but quite often, they neglect the factor of making it worth the subscribers/customers time to be in the list.

I did an online check and I hardly found anything that supports my claims… but I’d be willing to bet I’m right.

Most of the online stuff I found are about email subject lines, about having it less than 50 characters in total, about having certain magnetic words in them like you/free/new, etc.

But those are easy to talk about.

Because you can always start anew with the next email… with a brand new subject title.

But the “From” column?

That doesn’t change.

Bob or Jack?

Shouldn’t we be paying attention to the kind of things we’re attaching to ourselves every time we send out an email?

See… if you have some hyped up email attached to your name, you become hyped up.

And when your new subscribers get a emails or pre-set autoresponder messages, that’s when you become either uncle Bob or uncle Jack.

In your early emails, your subscribers don’t know who you are yet and you’ve got to get your name embedded in their minds. The emails you send should contain stuff that’s helpful to them.

If you make it a point to send good content together with promotions, you’ll make more money than just sending promotions after promotions.

It’s like “buying” a kids obedience with candy. Some kids can be ruckus but when you’ve been good to them, they’ll pay attention to your words.

But if you’ve been bad… they’ll get it straight away. And forever, you’ll be uncle Jack. Fortunately, if you’re uncle Bob, you’ll be that way for a long time too.

But what about subject lines?

The Reverse Email Subject Line

One particular thing I like to do before I send out emails… is to write the content first and then summarize the email. After writing the email, I’ll actually spend a few minutes contemplating the subject line.

I ask myself…

1. Is there a way to say the exact same thing with lesser words?
2. Is the subject covered in the email?
3. Will it arouse curiosity/surprise or wrath?
4. Is the title “blind” or am I revealing everything in the title?

Think of the long terms aspects before sending it off… once it’s out there, it’s out there.

The simple goal is to get the click – it’s to get them to open up the email so they can get to the content.

But if the title (or your name) immediately pushes their “ugh” button, the battle’s lost.

Worse, they’ll unsubscribe and you’ll forever lose a potential client/customer.

Personalized Email

Another thing I try not to overuse is the first name and last name tags in the email autoresponder.

Back in the olden days when people would go “wow, he knows my name!” when they see their name in the emails, nowadays, it’s more common to see the tag misused and a follow up email saying “Oops! Sorry about that”.

The trick’s revealed… the magic’s gone.

The first name tag doesn’t work because it’s been abused over and over again.

HOWEVER!

If you use it once in a while, it can still do its magic of grabbing attention.

I remember getting an email from a well-known marketer who did not use my name until the middle of the email. I was surprised to see my name… even though I know it can be done.

But it was tastefully and beautifully pulled off.

If I see my name in the subject line or the early “Hi (firstname)”… I turn an immediate blind eye to that. Because it’s been abused.

If you apply these regularly to your email marketing and list building, I’m quite sure you’ll have a happy list who love hearing from you over and over again.

Uncle Bob. =)

“The bird has landed. I repeat. The bird has landed.”

Statistically Speaking

It’s official – I’ve finally nuked my Twitter following. A month ago, I made a post, setting a goal to bring down the Twitter following from 9,744 down to a hundred or so.

As it stands, it is now down to 190 following. I’m expecting the followers to drop after a while. After all, if it was reciprocal following that got them in the first place, nothing wrong with reciprocal unfollowing.

What’s interesting, however, is the number of lists I’m now on has increased.

A list is what other people “label” you as. So, you can get a good idea of what someone is focused on by checking out their lists.

How I Got 10,000+ Followers (and my name on the local papers)

Back when Twitter first came out, I signed up but did nothing with the account. After which, I bought an info-product which taught me how to increase my followers.

Increase it I did – I got interviewed and my name even appeared on the local papers as Singapore’s Top 5 Twitter Users.

Later, the secret “how to do it” was out – people started massive reciprocal followings.

(One fellow Singaporean decided to snub me by tweeting “Hey, I just overtook you in followers. It was easy.” I couldn’t snub him back because Twitter decided he was doing something funky and nuked his 60k followers account.)

As I spent more time on Twitter, I found it hard to build relationships with the people I wanted to connect to. It was like trying to have a decent conversation in a Death Metal concert mosh pit.

The Twitter Nuke

That was when I decided to do a mass unfollowing… what I call the Twitter Nuke. (It wasn’t a new concept, others were already on it)

After the Twitter Nuke, it was deathly silent.

I could no longer hear all the inane cacophony of senseless tweets. Whoever survived the nuke, they instantly became closer. I could hear them now.

As for the tools I used, most of them don’t work now. Twitter did not allow bulk unfollowing. I did, however, use UnTweeps – this allowed me to unfollow some of the dead/stale Twitter users. Unfortunately, the application hung on me often as I had too many to unfollow.

I ended up having to manually unfollow Twitter users. Which was, in a sense, paying my dues.

Social Media Marketing?

Let me say this upfront: I’m not doing this to get attention. This isn’t anything new and this post is more like “refer to my blog” if people want to know (or even care) why I changed my Twitter following/followers strategy.

There are other ways to increase Twitter followers and make money using Twitter – I believe it all boils down to creating real followers.

By using articles, videos, podcasts, list building, etc to build a real, natural following instead of hollow reciprocal followers.

Way back in the days when I was about to get enlisted into the army (it’s a conscript army here in Singapore), I was sent for a Divers unit for an interview.

Interesting because I thought… those who can swim go commando, those who can’t go divers – since they’re already natural divers.And I pretty much sink to the bottom when I hit water.

Anyway, here in Singapore, the 2 toughest units would most likely be the Divers and the Commandos. Thinking back now, I was pretty insane to want to get into the Divers. No, scratch that… I was VERY insane to think I can do it there.

Being the kind of “I’m up for a challenge” person, I almost never use my brain properly when I’m challenged (note to self: God gave me a brain for a reason, please use it properly or He’ll ask me why I didn’t use it when I meet Him due to stupidity).

Eventually, I got into the artillery unit and life’s been great during my year plus stint there.

The goal for most dudes is to get through their National Service and move on to doing what they want to do. Point is – there’s a goal even during the “glory” days.

Now that I’ve finished it and have ventured into the world of self-discovery, I made it a point to go deeper into the world of Internet Marketing. And the goal was… I wanted to create my own product, have my own affiliates, call the shots and do it all by myself… just to say that if I can do it all alone, anyone can.

… Insane.

I realized I was setting up myself for a whole lot of pain just like I was going to when I thought I should join the Divers.

Why should I place myself through the same headache again? Simple… because people said it can’t be done and I wanted to prove them wrong. No one told it to me and no one challenged me, I simply challenged myself. It’s a good thing I’ve got “lazy” friends who make money online the easy-er way.

And it was really just only recently when I spoke with a friend. I told him about how I wanted to create an amazing product which I can call my own just simply because I wanted something of my own. Then I realized how stupid that sounded and how ignorant I was.

Quickly after I finished my chat with him, I made up my mind to stop being stupid and foolhardy.

Not to say there are no benefits to doing it the hard way, I’m sure there are. But do I have the time to do it all by myself? Yes. Do I want to? Based on my past recorded results from the last 2 months… my mind wants to do it but the results are shouting a loud “I told you it ain’t gonna work”

Results don’t lie.

And so, I’m going to do what I should have done a long time ago – making money easily. And when I get the results I got from there, I’ll go onto other things. I’ve just been setting up myself for problems, without knowing it.

I’m gonna use affiliate marketing and thank God, there’s a challenge for affiliate marketing coming up which I’m taking.

In the coming months, I’ll make it a habit to get back into writing and taking action on the things I have learned. Nothing works unless I do. It’s a great thing I found a product which I can be proud of becoming an affiliate for. It’s a high priced product, has got mindset training and very good internet marketing training – all of which was something I wanted to have as my own product.

But now that someone has already done all the hard work, I’m going to make use of it and apply the best thing about affiliate marketing… leveraging on someone else’s hard work and making money for myself.

Go!

Recently, I saw a poster saying something like there’s more than a billion people in this world and sometimes, you only need one. I liked it. So I went and searched for it and found something even better… a video.

Someone had made a video about it and someone else made a clip and stuck it on YouTube. Good news for me and everybody.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQgYloaGhWk

It’s about the same with the internet, there’s a gajillion ways to make a bajillion dollars. But even if there’s a billion ways to do it, sometimes, you really only need one.

As I lurk around on an internet marketing forum, someone will create a thread and ask about how they can make money online.

And on that forum, there are countless threads expounding on the various strategies to making it happen. Some go into such excruciating detail that my eyes glaze over upon seeing the whole chunk of text. They just need to jump in on that thread and do what it says.

You know how some gurus say its easy to make money online and they can make thousands in just a quick push of the email send button? Its true.

You know how some gurus say you need a product to make money online and they can make thousands just by selling a simple less-than-impressive 20 page report? Its true.

You know how some gurus say traffic is the only real skill you need online and with it, you can make money anywhere? Its true.

However, you need to choose one and stick with it.

Also, on the forums, almost as frequently there will be threads posted by people who state they know how to do it but they don’t know where to start or they’re frustrated with little or no results.

I sympathize with these people the most because not only can I resonate with their problems, I also know it’ll be extremely hard for them to get out of the rut precisely because they know what they’re doing.

It’s like a student telling a professor there’s another way to solve the problem.

There are 2 large majority of people who struggle with making money online: those who know nothing and those who know everything.

Those who know a lot get trapped because they know how to do it but when it comes to executing, perfection kicks in and they start questioning themselves whether there’s a better way to do it.

Those who know nothing can’t proceed because they don’t know how and feel they cannot do it without the right information and preparation.

Fortunately, all these are learned responses and can be “un-learned” by simply taking action over and over until it becomes habit.

If you are stuck, get unstuck by choosing a business model, a method, a strategy and going FULL STEAM with it. Just run with it. If your shoelaces fall out while running, finish the race and then tie your shoelace. If you want to make some income online, pick a method and go with it.

That’s the only way to make money online.

You and I both know the internet is a huge place and that it’s an open field for anyone to come in to make some money for themselves.

Often, we’ll need to use some tools to help us out. However, the tools available to us can be expensive and filled with many extra options which we don’t really use, other times, there are free tools which aren’t perfect but they get the job done.

Today, I’m going to give you some free tools you can use to start “panning for gold” or “digging for gold”. No “Free 30 Day Trial” here, it’s all free and good stuff.

Remember though, these are tools. And like any tool, if you leave them in the shed for a period of time, gold will not magically appear on them. You gotta use them to reap the benefits.

So without further ado, let’s get started.

Office, PDF, Productivity Tools

1. OpenOffice (http://www.openoffice.org) – Don’t want to get Microsoft Office? This is an excellent alternative
2. PrimoPDF (http://www.primopdf.com) – A free, high-quality PDF creation utility that enables printing to PDF from virtually any Windows application.
3. FruitfulTime (http://www.fruitfultime.com) – This site was develops simple and effective productivity software to help individuals and small teams be more productive, as of 4 December 2009, all products are free for both commercial and private use.
4. FreeMind (http://freemind.sourceforge.net) – A free mind-mapping software. If you’re a fan of mind-mapping to structure your thought processes, this will be a godsend.
5. FileZilla (http://filezilla-project.org) – One of the best free FTP (file transfer protocol) software available.
6. Article Submission Helper (http://www.articlesubmissionhelper.com) – Unlike most “free” article submitters, this one actually supports automated account registration – so you won’t have to waste hours just signing up. It also has inbuilt article spinner. Great time saver if you use articles to market your business.

Web Authoring, Image Editing Tools

1. PSPad (http://www.pspad.com) – A freeware editor, useful for people who like to code by hand
2. NVU (http://net2.com/nvu) – One of the most well known free WYSIWYG (What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get) web editors available on the net. A free alternative to FrontPage or Dreamweaver
3. Gimp (http://www.gimp.org) – This is a free software for photo retouching, image composition and image authoring. For people who don’t want to spend money on Photoshop.
4. Paint.net (http://getpaint.net) – A free image and photo editing software for computers running on Windows. It started development as an undergraduate college senior design project mentored by Microsoft originally intended as a free replacement for the Microsoft Paint software.
5. Picnik (http://www.picnik.com) – An online photo editor. If you only have a browser to help you do image editing, this site is amazing.
6. MyECoverMaker (http://www.myecovermaker.com) – An amazing  resource to help create your online ecovers. Mark Monciardini creator of CoverActionPro has revolutionized the way ecovers are presented. Here, at this site, you won’t get Mark but you can create amazing ecovers at drag-and-drop simplicity.

Multimedia Tools

1. CamStudio (http://camstudio.org) – A free alternative to TechSmith’s Camtasia software.
2. BSRSoft (http://www.bsrsoft.com) –  Another really good free screen recorder
3. Audacity (http://audacity.sourceforge.net) – This free, open source software can be used for recording and editing sounds.

Image Resources

1. Stock.xchng (http://www.sxc.hu) – One of the best sites for free stock photos.
2. Photos8 (http://www.photos8.com) – All photos here are free for any use.
3. morgueFile (http://www.morguefile.com) – This site contains lots of high resolution photos and graphics.
4. FreeDigitalPhotos (http://www.freedigitalphotos.net) – Tons of great stuff for web use but if you want to use for print or graphic design, you’ll have to buy the higher resolutions.

Other Useful Resources/Tools

1. Wikipedia (http://wikipedia.org) – Of course, Wikipedia is known as the web’s largest free encyclopedia. But did you know there’s a page where there’s a list of free and open source software packages ?
2. DupeFree (http://www.dupefreepro.com) – This software is fantastic if you are using it to check for plagiarism, unique content.
3. Empressr (http://www.empressr.com) – This online site can create 3D presentations for your otherwise boring “click to go to next slide” presentations.
4. Zoho (http://show.zoho.com) – Another online site to create presentations but very much like an online Microsoft Powerpoint, also allows you to share presentations and lots more.
5. Mint (http://www.mint.com) – One of the safest places for accounting of where you’ve been spending your money. The site’s headline is “the best free way to manage your money”
6. Sugar (http://www.sugarforge.org/content/open-source) – Sugar is an amazing free CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software. Watch the demo videos to be amazed.
7. BrowserShots (http://www.browsershots.org) – This is a great resource to see how your webpage looks like across 6 commonly used browsers at 800×600 and 1024×768 resolutions.
8. Osalt (http://www.osalt.com) – This site will list various open source alternatives to the already existing commercial software. Got software you want? You’ll likely find an alternative here

I could go on for a lot more but then again, too much may be… well, too much.

Check out these resources and tools, use them to your hearts content.

Photo by spike55151Some time back, I had a bit of a revelation – it goes something like this…

Whenever anyone buys a house, a car, or anything and they pay in installments, they are expecting a return for their money. So they continuously give and give… but what happens when they stop paying/giving? Will the car come? Will the house be built? Don’t think so.

So it got me thinking and this revelation came.

Is that how we give our tithes and offerings? Many people stop giving their tithes and offerings because they don’t see the point of giving their money and getting nothing back in return.

Is it because they don’t know what they’re giving for in the first place?

Back in the days when I worked as an assistant manager for a company and I was doing some interviews, one guy told me “I gave up Christianity because I keep giving but I get nothing back. But the very first day I joined another and gave, suddenly, I got something when I gave my offering there!”

Short-sightedness?

What if the continuous tithes and offerings are down payments and installments but just when you’re about to receive the whole package, you gave up and go somewhere else? So the manufacturer/owner only gave you in part of the complete package… of what you rightfully deserve.

God loves a cheerful giver.

Can you imagine going to someone (a property agent or the constructor) and saying… “Man, I want the house but I sure hate paying for it” and you hand the money over? What kind of reaction should one expect from that? That’s about the same when people give their monies to God.

Imagine if you say “Man, I CAN’T WAIT for the house – when will it be finished? Could you hurry up?” Will it be better accepted? Depending on the tonality of how you said those words, you could either imply excitement to get the house or just asking for it to arrive/complete faster – which many people often pray for.

… or maybe it’s just me.

“Dear God, send me your blessings… faster, like now?”

So, it’s the 1st day of this month and it’s time to tithe. Whenever I tithe and give offerings, I remember that I’m putting a down payment and I will eventually be receiving my due rewards.

How do you view your tithing?