When I first started building my website I spoke about domain names and the struggles I had to get my first site up. Due to the lack of understanding of what I was doing, as you may recall, as you entered my website you would receive a warning sign cautioning you about clicking or entering my site. Today, I have a much clearer understanding of what took place and that the domain name I chose may never have been the problem. Today I am going to give you some insight of what happened and how you can avoid what happened to me.
First, you have to understand there is a difference between your domain and an IP address. A domain name belongs to me and is my responsibility to keep the integrity of this name in good standing. I will explain later on how this is accomplished. The IP address is associated to the so called host or the sender of your emails or the content being sent out by you. Now they have a level of responsibility too. So they are going to take precautions in order to protect themselves from people doing less than scrupulous things.
So, how can this happen. When you start out with a new name or business, no one knows who you are. They don’t know if you are a good guy, someone sending out information that is helpful or a bad guy, someone who is sending spam or content that isn’t useful. The best way to explain this process is to think of it as a game. You get points added to your total for positive actions and you have points removed from your total for negative actions. To score points one of the following must occur:
- the email campaign that you are sending out is being opened,
- points for them reading it and somehow they know if you are opening and actually reading the information,
- where you get huge points is when someone goes into their spam folder and either whitelists it or move it into their inbox basically saying I want to receive this information. At this point your reputation is good and now everything you send will be delivered to a receipients inbox.
But at the same time it is possible to lose points,
- when your mail is not opened,
- it is being deleted without being opened and if it ends up
- being reported as spam by someone receiving it.
The way to avoid this, if you already have a mailing list, is by warming up your domain. On day 1 send a few, day 2 send some more and so on until you go through your list. Word of advice is to start with your best people. These are the people who order from you frequently and that you know will open up and read your email. Now, if you purchased a mailing list from someone this is not what I am talking about here. This is a list you have built through your own work.
In my case it was ignorance. I was so excited about getting my site up and running and not knowing what I was doing. I would keep sending out emails to myself and friends over and over again. My reasoning behind this was I was trying to test if my site was working properly. I was not aware that by sending and sending and not opening the emails I was creating a negative situation for myself. Then the warning sign came up. Then I made another no no by replacing the previous domain name with a new one. Now the internet thinks I am not putting worthwhile content out there and consider me a bad person. This is the hurdle that I’m dealing with Builderall at the moment and are in the process of showing me how to fix this issue. I will keep you posted.