a quick-n-easy email marketing tip

A lot of people are using Gmail these days, which is one reason Google makes so much money (I think) off the little text ads they serve up into messages as they are being sent. It's quite the clever scheme, actually. I wonder who thought it up? But here's something else to wonder about. What if you could influence which ads get inserted into the mail you send? Well, the good news is that you can! But be careful how you apply this trick -- if Google catches you, they'll take away your email privileges for a whole year. You have to kind of disguise what you're doing.

For instance, suppose you're marketing an anger management seminar. For heaven's sake, don't write about that! Instead, you might write to your closest 10,000 friends about, oh say, some asthma treatment you've discovered or read about somewhere (it doesn't really matter if it's true). So you might write something like the following...

The results won't quite fit into this blog page, but you can click here to see what sort of ads this message pulls from Google. Do have a look. I think you'll be as surprised as I was!