Here's a secret for you - email marketing is more powerful than ever, and the more people talk about the death of email the more powerful it becomes.

Am I crazy to say such a thing?

The way I see it, the more people that give up on email marketing, the better chance you have of getting your email messages noticed by your prospects.  Also, many people send out complete junk to their lists - giving you even more of an opportunity to outshine them with your quality content, helpful advice, and occasional sales messages.  Most of the useful newsletters that I used to receive are now total garbage - nothing but ads and "buy this now" messages.  You can almost smell the desperation in the air as people send out more and more junky emails to make a quick buck.

The key to email marketing is to deliver valuable, interesting, and useful content to your subscribers - laced with the occasional low-key "check this out" type of promotion now and then.  When you consistently deliver excellent information, your emails will become anticipated rather than ignored.

Another way to stand out from the crowd of "average" email marketers is to have a technological advantage.  What if the email and subscriber management system you use had these features:

• Integrated HTML editor with automatic spell checking
• Broadcast to multiple lists without duplicate emails
• Powerful web form generators with built-in split testing and automatic subscriber and visitor tracking
• Crisp graphical statistics reports telling you your delivery rate, open rate, and most powerful subject lines
• One of the highest delivery rates in the industry
• Automatic rotation of your subscription boxes to maximize subscription rates

With this kind of power in your hands, you will dominate your markets online - giving you more money to expand and dominate other markets as well.  Long live email marketing - (although I will be loudly proclaiming its death in public forums!)

Yahoo now has a video search engine that will return a list of videos online for just about any search query you give it.  Very nice - very useful.  One of my first searches was for "dreamweaver" to find some good tutorial videos for Macromedia Dreamwearver MX 2004.

The important part of the Yahoo video search announcement for you is that you can now create your own videos and get them indexed in the search engines for common keyword searches.  I don't know about you, but I'm seeing dollar signs when I think about this...create some product review or "how to" videos, put them up on the web with some complementary keyword-rich text, and submit your video to yahoo using their proposed media RSS engine as soon as it becomes fully functional.