How to Stop Spam Email In Its Tracks - MailWasher Pro Review

Despite numerous anti-spam laws, the quantity of spam email floating around the Internet only seems to grow and grow. I must get 200 spam emails a day, and I’m know many people get even more.

Now I’m using a great tool called MailWasher Pro to stem the tide. MailWasher Pro is a program that you open prior to downloading your email that connects to your email server and allows you to preview incoming email messages without fully downloading them. So instead of waiting 5 or 10 minutes for a whole lot of junk email to download, you can view all incoming mail in about 15 seconds.

Then it uses a number of filters and learning tools to classify your email into “good” and “bad” groups. It also has a facility to easily “report” spam emails, which feeds back into a network of other users. This means that around 90% of spam emails are already correctly flagged when they appear in the program window.

Then you hit “Process Mail” and download only the emails you want to view - deleting, blacklisting or bouncing other emails non grata. I estimate that MailWasher Pro saves me at least 20 minutes a day - it’s definitely worth the nominal price and is a vital productivity tool.

From the Mailwasher website:

MailWasher works directly with your email server, exactly like your email program does. But there is one important difference: you can tell MailWasher to delete a message at the server, without downloading it - or you can bounce an email back to the sender so that it looks as though your address is not valid. MailWasher retrieves information about all the emails on the server. With that information (some of which is also processed by MailWasher) you can decide what to do with each individual email - download, delete, or bounce back. If you check your account with MailWasher first, you can delete or bounce the emails you do not want. Then, when you use your email program, it downloads only the remaining emails, those that you want to read. MailWasher can be thought of as a “first line of defence” which can weed out junk, large wasteful attachments, and potentially harmful viruses.

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Google Adwords Ad Preview Tool

I try to keep on top of new features and tools surrounding the Google Adwords and Google Analytics products because I use them a lot in my day to day work.

Here’s one that I didn’t know about until recently - this Ad Preview Tool that lets you see how your ads are being displayed in other regions besides your own.

The tool also returns natural search rankings as well, so you can see how your site ranks on Google.[country].

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Tony Robbins 101: 22 Minute Video

I’m a huge advocate of Tony Robbins and I strongly endorse his Unleash The Power Within and Date With Destiny seminars and other materials. People sometimes ask me to describe what Tony is about, but as the shortest seminar he does is 50 hours long, it’s pretty hard to provide a succinct answer

Below is a fantastic 22 minute presentation by Tony at the TED conference which explains some of his core principles…check it out, and look out for the interaction with Al Gore in the audience.

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Yaro Starak Launches “Blog Profits Blueprint”

Here’s an imporant announcement if you’ve ever wanted to make your blog more effective or profitable, OR you don’t yet have a blog and you’re interested in learning more about how blogs add value and make money.

My friend and colleague Yaro Starak has just released his Blog Profits Blueprint.

The Blueprint is a content-rich 55-page report that Yaro has put together to teach the core concepts and ideas that go into building a successful and profitable blog. It’s the culmination of what he has been through over the past two and a half years of blogging and reaching the point where he makes a full time income from blogging part time.

I read through the entire report yesterday - here are some of the highlights from my perspective as someone who is primarily interested in using a blog to enhance the reach and effectiveness of my exisiting business.

• What is a blog and why are they so popular? - pages 9 to 12
• How blogs make money - page 12
• Yaro’s “Pillar” strategy for creating blog posts that generate buzz, backlinks and pre-eminence - pages 18 - 23
• How to generate high-quality traffic for your blog faster and easier than you’re doing now.
• How to convert your blog traffic into value - either straight revenue from advertising and other sources, or pre-eminence for your business.

Bottom line: the Blog Profits Blueprint contains tonnes of usable information that you should at least be aware of, even if you’re not interested in direct revenue generation from blogging.

Yaro is also just about to launch a mentoring course called Blog Mastermind whereby a limited number of mentorees will be coached by Yaro in order to build their blogs up into serious cash-generating concerns. If you may be interested in this program (but even if you’re not), then the next step is to download the Blog Profits Blueprint.

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Your Wealth Profile, and, The Biggest Problem With Being Smart

I attended a very interesting presentation by Roger Hamilton last night on the recommendation of several people I respect [thanks Kris, Ray and Therese <-- no website?! What are you like?]

Roger has developed a fascinating and instructive “Wealth Profiling System” that combines Jungian psychological models (think MBTI tests etc) and the I Ching as it relates to individuals’ wealth attraction styles. I have done my wealth profile here and discovered that I am predominantly a “Mechanic”.

Roger also shared a couple of seminal distinctions that resonated with me. Here they are:

On taking action: To know, and not to do, is not yet to know.

On traps for smart people: One of Roger’s mentors once told him, You think you’re smart. You try to do everything yourself. That’s why you’ll never be really wealthy. I know I’m stupid. That’s why I employ smart people like you to do everything for me.

Food for thought…

Two Types Of Leverage

I have recently been focussing on employing two types of leverage to increase my personal effectiveness and productivity.

Systematic Leverage: Using systems to do the heavy lifting for me. These include CRM automation, automatic billing systems, automated data backup systems and so on.

Personal Leverage: Engaging people who are much better qualified to do specific tasks than myself - designers, bookkeepers, technical people and so on.

So far the results are pleasing — I’ll report back with some more detailed results at a later date.

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The Most Important Lead Generation Tips You Never Heard Of

I recently finished re-reading Brian Carroll’s excellent book, Lead Generation for the Complex Sale. Unlike most books on lead generation, this book doesn’t feature an in-depth look at the tactical side of lead generation (it’s been done to death anyway, right?).

Rather, it covers the “organisational” side of lead generation from a 30,000-foot perspective.

This includes defining what a lead looks like (and getting sales and marketing to agree), instituting closed-loop tracking (tracking a lead from the first contact through to the sale) and ensuring that lead generation and sales capacity are closely aligned.

I have always focused on the marketing side of lead generation - getting qualified leads in the door in the first place - but I’ve realised that the approaches outlined in Lead Generation for the Complex Sale are just as important for producing outcomes and another source of leverage in your sales and marketing process.

If your sales and marketing process involves multiple contacts, I highly recommend that you read and apply the information in Lead Generation For The Complex Sale.

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MailWasher Pro Review - Recommended Anti-Spam Program

Have you noticed that email spam is getting beyond a joke? Many countries have instituted anti-spam legislation but judging by the state of my inbox every morning it’s not doing much good, and I know I’m not alone.

Have you actually calculated how much time spam email costs you every week to download, sort and delete? 15 minutes a day is over an hour per week of lost productivity…

Recently I came accross and Anti-spam program called MailWasher Pro that is already saving me hours every week.

Why I like MailWasher

Many anti-spam solutions that I’ve seen suffer from one or more of these problems:

1. They’re too agressive - they eat up legitimate emails
2. They’re not agressive enough - they allow tonnes of dodgy emails through
3. They can be circumvented and rendered useless by inventive spammers

MailWasher overcomes each of these problems. Here’s a quick summary of how it works:

Sorting Emails and Nuking Spam is Fast!

Because you only see a preview of incoming emails without downloading the whole message, MailWasher is lightning fast - no more waiting for dozens or hundreds of rubbish emails to clog up your inbox before you get a chance to delete them.

Reduced security risk

Because you don’t actually download emails to your computer until they have been sorted by MailWasher, malicious emails with viruses attached never even reach your computer.

MailWasher is a fast learner

When I first purchased Mailwasher Pro after previewing the Free Version, I found that for the first week or so I had to keep an eye on the automated sorting function to ensure that mails were sorted correctly.

But ever since flagging most of my “friendly” email addresses and blacklisting others, the learning filter has taken over and the program functions brilliantly. Previewing and sorting 100 emails now takes less than 1 minute.

MailWasher Versions and Prices

Even if spam email is costing you only 15 minutes a day, that’s 50 hours you’re sacrificing every year based on a working year of 200 days. Then multiply that by how much your time is worth to you (your hourly rate)…

Convinced yet?

So, how much does this little baby cost? Well, there are two versions, the Free Version and the Pro Version. Here’s how the versions compare.

Why I use and recommend the Pro Version

• MailWasher Pro allows multiple email accounts
• It has a built-in “learning filter” which increases speed and accuracy.
• It integrates with the First Alert global spam database which allows automatic screening and flagging of 95% of spam email
• It is an absolute no-brainer at only USD $37.

So if you want to free your inbox of clutter and claim back countless hours every year, grab MailWasher!

Will Swayne On-the-warpath-against-spam

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Google Maps Launched In Australia

Google launched Google Maps in Australia this week and I went over to check out the functionality - from the perspectives of both a consumer and a marketer. While Google Maps has been viewable in Australia for some time, the latest updates have fully localised the service and provided additional features such as more detailed topographical images, driving directions and business listings.

That puts Google Maps in direct competition with the Yellow Pages, and the YP people must be none too pleased, because Google Maps is, well, a lot better.

The Consumer’s Perspective

Mmmm…..mappy goodness. Google Maps has gone straight into my favourites. One of the reasons why I like it is that it combines some of the best features of Google Search, whereis (direction finder) and the Yellow Pages into one site.

I’m having a smash with a friend at the golf driving range tonight so I did a search for “oxley golf course oxley rd oxley brisbane”, which returned the following results:

I was impressed by the variety and depth of info returned, including:

• Addresses, phone numbers and websites
• Other related businesses in the area
• Driving directions
• “Golf” and “Oxley” related contextual ads
• Links to related categories

Enough said - give Google maps a try.

The Marketer’s Perspective

From a marketing perspective, I believe that Google Maps is significant because it more deeply integrates search with purchasing context. Let me explain…

One reason why Google Adwords produces such a solid ROI is that the ad appears exactly when a user is searching for a product or service - the search and the solution (ad) are closely connected in time.

Now, Google Maps results enable searches and solutions to be more closely connected in time and space. For local businesses, this should mean an even higher return from Google Adwords.

Obviously, any effect will be proportional to the number of people who use Google Maps, so it will be interesting to see how quickly Google Maps is adopted in Australia.

This comparison of searches for “Google Maps” vs “Yellow Pages” reveals that in Australia at least, the YP has a solid lead [note that the data are around 3 months old at the time of writing] - it will be interesting to see what happens over the coming months.

Other services just round the corner

Google Maps is the first of the Google “local” services to reach Australia - others are no doubt in the pipeline (e.g Google Local integrated with Mobile services). I believe these will have a significant impact on the Internet search space when they arrive.

Looking out for them and thinking about how you will use them before they arrive is an excellent way to get the jump on your competition.

Will Swayne Internet Optimiser

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The Theory Of Constraints, and its Application to Sales & Marketing

This just in from Wikipedia:

Theory of Constraints is based on the premise that the rate of revenue generation is limited by at least one constraining process (i.e. a bottleneck). Only by increasing throughput (production rate) at the bottleneck process can overall throughput be increased. The key steps in implementing an effective TOC approach are:

1. Identify the constraint (bottlenecks are identified by inventory pooling before the process)
2. Exploit the constraint (increase its utilisation and efficiency)
3. Subordinate all other processes to the constraint process (other processes serve the bottleneck)
4. Elevate the constraint (if required, permanently increase bottleneck capacity)
5. Rinse and repeat (after taking action, the bottleneck may have shifted or require further attention)

The Theory Of Constraints can also be applied to sales and marketing. Your typical lead generation and conversion scenario is a series of interdependent processes that goes something like this: Generate a lead… Convert the lead into a firm enquiry… Produce a proposal or Action Plan… Follow up… Close the sale… Fulfil the work or order… Rinse and repeat…

And it’s very common - almost to be expected - that one area will get out of sync with the others. It seems that you either have too many leads and not enough “closing” or fulfillment resources, or else a sales team who are desperate for qualified sales leads to turn into sales. (They spend the majority of their time on relatively UN-productive prospecting work and only a small proportion of time doing what they should be doing - closing sales). If the “fulfillment” part of your business is time-consuming (as it can be in the case of service providers), this can upset the apple cart further, as you switch priorities from lead generation, to sales, to fulfillment - either as an individual or as an organisation. There’s no easy answer, but the TOC certainly supplies some valuable ideas. On the TOCCA website, there’s a fantastic flash video that demonstrates the key principles of the TOC. It’s a little hard to find: click the link on the bottom left that says Click Here to View 3 Minute Flash Demonstration.

Eliyahu Goldratt’s work in another great source of information on this subject.

Will

P.S. What’s the secret to evening out your lead flow and bringing a measure of control back into your sales process? Automated lead generation systems of course! Ones that utilise “pull” marketing and the web to build a herd of interested prospects that you nurture over weeks, months and years to generate an even, steady stream of sales leads that YOU can turn on and off like a tap. Is it easy? Nope. But it is possible.

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