Buy Your Email Lists, No Worries Thanks To Me!

Alright so this week I saw a few posts over at AffBuzz.com and wanted to comment on them. Firstly I saw it listed on Shoemoney’s site as one of his blog posts but then started noticing several people promoting it. This is the trick to know if someone is selling your emails to other people. I am going to debunk this trade secret right now and save everyone who was planning on buying email lists a bunch of worries.

Do I approve of buying/selling email lists. No not at all. I perfectly believe in say having someone like Frank Kern give you XX% of their profits for a program that you promoted in your email list, that’s basically what affiliate marketing is all about, so get over it people. This is the price you pay for signing up for someone’s list, you get to listen to their pitches as well.

So back to the point at hand, I saw this post on Shoemoney’s site and then saw this post referencing it from Jonathan Volk’s page. Why are these guys both pushing this idea? Well firstly it’s a great idea in concept. It is one of those things that you hear and go “Holy shit I am totally fucking doing this from now on!” It gets you so motivated you might very well sign up for their mailing lists that they have each been pushing pretty hard lately. So lets not blame them for sharing the secret to try and make us feel more comfortable signing up for their lists, I actually give them each props for that. They found a way to present us with valid info that might make us more likely to convert (sign up for a list) kudos to both of them.

However lets blow this concept right out of the water here.

1.) Shoe referenced it works on gmail and Most other email services. Well I tried it on gmail, lotus domino server, yahoo, aol, and my shitty web host’s squirrel mail. Out of those 5 relatively major email providers ONLY gmail accepted that command. This proves a couple things. First Gmail is obviously amazingly awesome here and we should all switch to it. Secondly Shoe’s claim is a quick info note that has a lot of flash appeal to us but not too much reliability.

2.) How reliable is having a stupid ‘+’ sign in there to track your emails? Well its about as reliable as my current affiliate campaigns (that aint saying much people)! I will illustrate in the below screenshots how in about say 3 seconds any email list seller/buyer can scrub their list of your attempts to track who is selling your emails.

Most list providers allow you to export to Micrososft Excel in some fashion (.xlsx, csv, etc). You basically open your list, no matter how large it is, and use the replace function. Where the box prompts you what you want to Find just insert “+*@” (no quotes) and then say replace it with “@” (no quotes) and say Replace All. There you go! This little quasi code says replace anything that starts with + and ends with @. In a matter of seconds it removes all those handy tracking ids we spent our time separating out. See the below images to get an idea how I did it with a quick list I typed up.

So as good as an idea this was to wow us and make us feel save to sign up for our favorite blogger’s email lists, it is absolutely worthless! So now that you are worried that Shoe and various other people are going to sell your email look on the bright side. If someone like Jeremy comes up to you and says “Hey I have this list of 100k emails you want to buy for $20?” you can now drop your hard earned cash and know that no one is going to know bought their emails! Ta Dah!