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Technical SEO: The Ultimate Guide.

Note: if you want a video explanation of the below Technical SEO guide you follow it here. That being said; let’s get started……

So, what is technical SEO and how can you fix technical SEO issues that may prevent your site from appearing on the google search results?

Unarguably, SEO; if done right still remains one of the best but most cost-effective ways to drive traffic sales and conversions to Anything you are doing online. In this short guide, I will be pointing out some of the most important technical SEO issues that must be fixed on your site if SEO is a priority to you.

Configure SSL Certificate

Make sure you configure an SSL certificate on your domain. This auto-redirects your site visitors from the HTTP to HTTPS version. This will tell the search engines that your site is safe for your visitors. This can be done easily on WordPress with plugins like the Really Simple SSL and on a VPS server by installing the letsencrypt certificate. Whatever platform you are working with, it is all for free.

Configure only one version of your Domain

Ensure you have one version of your domain. You can choose either the www version or the non-www version of your domain. This tells google and other search engines to index only one version of your domain name. Assuming we chose the non-www version, anybody who types www.yourdomainname.com will be redirected to your root domain; for instance: anyone who types say www.J-insights.com will be auto-redirected to J-insights.com This is very important in SEO to avoid google or search engines indexing your site posts, pages and directories twice, hence you competing with yourself on search results.

This configuration is pretty easy to do. All you got to do is to head on to your domain registrar account and locate the DNS zone. Add a CNAME record with WWW as the host and @ as the value. The @ symbol implies that any www should be redirected to the root domain name.

Configure Permalink

Make sure you use a friendly permalinks or slugs or urls for your site directories and resources. You can configure this easily on WordPress by going to settings > permalinks > choose post name.

According to top SEO experts, post name is the most friendly permalink structure that is SEO congruent.

Note: These are just few of the many technical SEO fixes that must be done on your website. To learn more about Technical SEO, checkout the full technical SEO Guide.

[j-insights]

SEO still remains a great and cost effective way of driving traction, sales and conversion to your brand and business. 

But, the question is......., how can you do SEO the right way to ensure you get your site appear on not just google search results, but also on the search results of other search engines like ... bing, yahoo, yandex etc?

The above Technical SEO fixes will help you to fix all your technical SEO issues that may deter your site from appearing on search engines.

[j-insights]

Technical SEO Guide

In this short dive into technical SEO, I highlighted the importance of technical SEO and making sure all technical fixes are done on your website to ensure potential optimal search appearances on the google search results.

[j-insights]

According to campaignmonitor, the Return on investment in email marketing is 4400%. This implies a $44 return on every $1 spent. Also according to Direct Marketing Association, 66% of consumers have made a purchase online due to an email marketing message they have received in the past.

check this post to see why email marketing is so important and why you need to integrate it into your business now

https://j-insights.com/why-email-marketing-is-so-important/

[j-insights]

The reason why email marketing is so important.

According to campaignmonitor, the Return on investment in email marketing is 4400%. This implies a $44 return on every $1 spent. Also according to Direct Marketing Association, 66% of consumers have made a purchase online due to an email marketing message they have received in the past.

Check this post to see why email marketing is so important hence, the need to integrate it into your business now.

https://j-insights.com/why-email-marketing-is-so-important/

[j-insights]

How to land your emails in the inbox

We’ve already known email marketing as one of the best ways to increase traction, sales, conversions, and ROI.

As good as this may sound. There are some factors that must be in place if email marketing must work for you which begins only when you land your emails in the inbox.

Knowing, understanding, and putting these factors in place will save you from a lot of stress and wrongly assuming that email marketing is dead and has been replaced by chatbots.

And hey…… I’m not talking about writing good and highly psychological email copies. As important as a highly converting email copy is in the game of marketing, it is crucially important to wisely understand that no matter how good your sales copies are, you will never break even in your marketing efforts if your emails wind up in your subscribers’ spam folders or if don't land your emails in the inbox.

Aside from that, according to research and as part of email deliverability best practices, long copies are almost always identified by radical spam filters, especially Gmail, and sent to the hell of promotion tab or spam box (in the worst-case scenario)

And don’t get me wrong even when you are free anyway lol…… Long copies are very good, but unfortunately, your ways and reasoning are very much different from those of spam filters.

Your brain thinks that writing long email copies will help in converting a potential client or customer, and you’re very much right for thinking that way. You need to make your potential customers understand that you can really solve their problems, hence the long email copy.

To land your email in the inbox Conversely, you need to see things from the perspective of the spam filters. Spam filters think that long email has a very high tendency to be spam emails, because if they aren’t, what happened to you going straight to the point on what you have to offer and directing them to a sales page where you’ll have all the flexibility of expressing yourself fully about your offer. You are lazy to design a sales page or ….i don’t know??

You may be thinking where is this assumption coming from …. But I don’t spam? well, this decision came as a result of email clients’ ever-increasing AI which has analyzed spam patterns for years and is still 90% accurate today. So you may be among the 10% who are not spamming I don’t know lol. But you have to face the judgment anyway.

These are the reasons that made me not to be a big fan of long email copies, but I really love long and detailed sales pages.

Now my question is…Do you prefer writing very long email copies and having a very large chunk of your campaign delivered to the promotion tab or spam folder or psychologically hitting the nail on the head, having maybe 95%-99% of your emails delivered to the inbox? I believe that shot email copies can be greatly psychological and spark great curiosity too.

As the rules of bypassing spam filters become tougher every day, I consider writing short and to-the-point copies to be a secondary rule of email deliverability. There are 3 technical configurations that have to be met for a mailing server to qualify for inbox placement if other conditions such as short and direct email body, no spammy content, subject, and warming up of mail servers ( in the case of custom email servers and dedicated IPs ) are kept constant.

And the good thing is that you don’t have to configure this yourself. You just need to know about them to know the right questions to ask when your emails start going to the spam box.

If you are subscribed to an email marketing company like getresponse etc they’ll surely help you to monitor your technical configurations unless you have your own brand IP or a custom email marketing system in which you will be the one to be responsible for your sending reputation.

You can check out and learn more about email deliverability, the most important configuration that must be put in place before you send out any campaign, and the deliverability best practices that land your emails in the inbox 95–99% of the time depending on the sending reputation of your server and domain.

#j-insights #spf #dkim #rdns #email deliverability #email inbox

[j-insights]

Postal SMTP Setup Guide: Everything You Need to Understand

Whatever reason that made you root for having your own custom Email sending server, just know that in this postal SMTP setup guide, you will be getting the right knowledge you need to get your own postal up and running in no time, and without any fear of technical hassle. Whether you want to reduce the ridiculously outrageous cost by the SMTP, or email marketing companies, or you just want to be more flexible and have better control over your campaigns and marketing, in this detailed tutorial, I will be walking you through everything you need in order to set up your own full-fledged SMTP server and custom email using postal without breaking your head on strange technicalities.

So, Let’s get Started………

What on earth is postal ?

Postal is a fully-featured open-source Mail transfer agent ( MTA ) for incoming and outgoing messages, that can serve your businesses and campaigns. The postal script is written in Ruby and javascript  ( these are programming languages ). There have been some arguments of being quite slow compared to PowerMTA ( Another mail transfer agent ). Anytime I receive an email concerning this I’m always surprised by such a question…….I’m also happy to publish this Postal SMTP setup guide as this is not just an integral part for you understanding the mechanism of SMTP and email sending, but also why things happen in email marketing as they do.

Postal Vs PowerMTA ?

To start with, the postal SMTP server is free and open-source whereas PowerMTA standard and enterprise license costs between  $500-$12000. So, there should be some kind of extra values such as higher network bandwidth, high processing speed, high performance, and other server resources. So, think of the reason power MTA is very costly, this is because it is used by big and established companies like getresponse, Mailchimp, and others.

Let me not digress from what we are here for today. I’ll write a detailed tutorial about power MTA and you can check back this site in a few days, but for now, let’s learn about postal. This is because you are not an email marketing company or a spammer who sends billions of emails per day. If for any reason you want to increase the speed of your postal server, you can do this by tweaking your cronjobs in your mailing application. Also, don’t worry if you have not heard anything about cron jobs. As I already promised you, I’ll talk more about these in my next tutorial on ‘installation of mailwizz application.

We are indeed moving swiftly. If for any reason you are confused at any point in the tutorial please submit the issue you are facing in the appropriate community in our forum or you can send me an email at support@j-insight.com.

What is an SMTP server?

Not just In Postal SMTP setup guide, the key to understanding any technical topic is in the ability to describe To use less technical terms, I will start by stating the full meaning of SMTP. SMTP is short for Simple mail transfer protocol. It is a networking system that allows your computer to send emails to other recipient email clients like Gmail, outlook, yahoo, etc over the internet. it is as simple as that. No point complicating issues. As I have said before; there are different mail transfer agents but in this guide, We will be using postal because it is free, easy to install, open-source, and backed by a good community of developers. The below diagram also clearly explained what the concept of SMTP should be.

Postal SMTP Setup Requirements

Just as in my ultimate guide to email marketing; An email marketing system is made up of two parts; the Smtp part which is the network; and the application. There are also three types of email marketing platforms or systems. You can go read it up here, but if you don’t have the time to read it now, this is the summary of the types of email marketing systems or platforms:

The done for you system

Please I don’t know if this is what it is called in the real world. I’m the person that came up with this name. I called it The done for you system simply because everything has been done for you. All you need to do is to signup for an account, verify your domain and start sending. Examples of such systems are getresponse, systeme.io, clickfunnels, convertkit, etc. when using these systems it is very important to be a genuine sender. This is important to keep to the email deliverability best practices including the can-spam act of 2003. Aside from that, it will help not to impact the shared IPs of these companies with bad reputations. This is because if you send spammy emails, you will be banned. It’s very important to use services like Debounce to routinely validate your email list before sending.

The Semi-custom email marketing system

This is a type of email marketing system where you can have your mailing application such as Mailwizz on maybe a VPS server and you can subscribe to an Smtp service like mailgun, Amazon ses. I personally like this system because you’ll have total control over your email list but you can still be banned if you don’t mail a good sending reputation.

The custom email marketing system

Wow, so this is the place we got to pay attention to today. For a custom email marketing system, we don’t need any company to help us send emails. we are the ones to build our own system from scratch. This is very important as it will help you to save more than 10x of the money you would have spent in email marketing companies. Since we are not depending on any system, this is where we need an SMTP server to help us send emails over the internet. There are different SMTPs or mail transfer agents (MTAs) but in this tutorial, we are going to be looking into how we can get our system up and running using postal SMTP.

Since we have chosen postal as our mail transfer agent, here are the requirements needed to successfully set up your custom SMTP server

A Domain name

When you send messages or emails to your customers or blog subscribers using platforms like systeme.io or getresponse, you need a brand domain you can send from. The same thing is applicable here. we need a domain name we can send from. Something like support@j-insignts.com or admin@j-insights.com. You got the point now. When rooting to build my custom systems I always prefer to have a separate domain for mailing and setting up my SMTP server. This is not typical advice as pros in the game might want to use one domain, but I have some reasons for saying this. Here are my reasons:

Domain name system (DNS)

when using your brand domain as the same domain for your SMTP server, your brand Domain DNS might clash with the DNS needed to verify and configure your mailing server. In Namecheap for instance if your Webhosting DNS is hosted by Namecheap or Cloudflare you will need to change the DNS from Namecheap Webhosting (if Namecheap is hosting your DNS) or Cloudflare DNS (if Cloudflare is hosting your DNS)  to Namecheap basic DNS.

So, what this implied is that your host will be down for you to use the Namecheap basic DNS to verify your server technicalities like SPF, DKIM, DMARC, and others. If you try changing back to Cloudflare or your normal Namecheap DNS you will lose your mailing verifications, meaning your emails will start hitting the spam box. These are my reasons. I know that great guys in the game have some ways of bypassing this but hey guys, just go with a separate domain aside from your brand domain. Don’t worry if you don’t understand all this DNS stuff, as long as you remain my blog subscriber ill explain all these to you via my weekly broadcast. You can subscribe here.

Blacklist

According to Statista, a total of 300.4 billion emails are sent and received every day, and 45% of these emails are spam. All email clients especially Gmail are very serious against spamming and with billions of spammy emails and contents analyzed over the years, these email clients have developed intelligent spam filters that can detect any spam pattern. While it is good to prevent spam by these spam filters, what if your brand domain is mistakenly blacklisted. This means the reputation of your brand domain has been destroyed. This is the second important reason why I recommend getting a new domain for this tutorial. Don’t worry yourself if you have any issues you can open a question here in our forum and one of our experts will be glad to give you all the guidance you need.

What is a clone domain?

This is simply a separate domain which you have gotten for your mailing which is different from your brand domain.

Congratulations for making it this far, Let’s go and get our domain name now.

There are different domain registrars you can get a domain for this purpose. Here are a few examples of them:

Namecheap

Bluehost

Godaddy

Google domains

But, in this tutorial, I will be using Namecheap, Just go get one here or you can use any domain registrar of your choice but do ensure they allow you access to their DNS zone. These processes work the same way for any registrar that you use. And if you have any problems just submit your questions to our forum or send me an email at support@j-insights.com and ill be glad to help.

Congratulations….you got your domain! Great!! Let’s move fast, No time!!!

2. A Virtual private server ( VPS ) that has it’s port 25 open: The next thing we need in this tutorial is a VPS server where we are going to install our network server, in our case the postal SMTP.

Note that I have recorded a full video tutorial; about this topic, you can always watch it below where you have any issues. You can also send me an email or open a question here on the forum.

What is a VPS server?

I want to talk about VPS, just for the sake of clarity and for those who are hearing about it for the first time. VPS is short for a virtual private server. This is a computer running 24/7  in the cloud that you can use for any purpose you want. It can be used for web hosting services or any other purpose of your choice. In our own case, we want to use it for the purpose of building our SMTP server.

Just think of a VPS server as a machine in the cloud you cannot see but it is accessible to you through a public IP address. When you buy a VPS machine from VPS issuing companies like ovhcloud, digitalocean , interserver or contab you will be sent a public string of Ip addresses and passwords that you can use to connect to the server and manage installations and files of the server or machine.

There are different architectures of machines you can buy, it all depends on your business needs. You don’t expect to buy a dedicated server that costs 100s or even thousands of dollars when you have just 1k subscribers. You can easily go for a $5 VPS server that fits your business. The same way you can go for different hosting plans in your shared hosting is the same way you can for VPS plans for your mailing or for your VPS hosting.

let’s move more swiftly with this….

What do I mean by port 25 is open?

To make this simple to understand, just see port 25 as any internet protocol that helps mailing take place on the internet. Generally, sending messages to access the internet involves a network of computers. One computer must communicate to the next computer via ports. For instance;

Establishing an SSH  connection to a Linux machine or server is remotely communicated via port 22. An example of such an SSH client is the putty ssh which we are going to use in the latter part of this tutorial. You can check the screenshot below to see the status of port 22 in the putty server.

You see port 22 on the putty ssh above.

Surfing the internet and opening a website as you are doing right now on the J-insights.com site uses port 80.

To connect remotely to another window machine Via RDP is established on port 3389

SQL database system like MySQL establishes over port 3306.

To send emails from your server to other recipients’ servers you need the port 25 feature enabled on your machine.

Further description of SMTP port

At this point, it is also good to understand that By default, all cloud computers, servers, including your physical computers have a firewall running that blocks all loopholes or ports except the ones you grant access to that system. So what happens is that your system firewall by default did not support such installations. This will continue and go on and on unless you are off your firewall or allow access to such an app to pass through your firewall. So the same thing is applicable here; In order to use a certain service, we need to grant that port access to our firewall. Hope this is clear friends. Respond with a capital YES! in the comment section of this tutorial.

So, let’s stop here so as not to deviate from the purpose of this tutorial.

So, here are lists of companies with port 25 open for mailing:

Ovhcloud

Contabo

Digital ocean

Interserver

Ovh Cloud

Ovhcloud is one of the best VPS providers out. What is good about them is that they allow port 25 to open by default for mailing.

Contabo

Also, contabo is also one of my preferred options when it comes to buying a VPS server for hosting or mailing. It is not only the cheapest VPS provider with high performance but its servers are not always on the blacklist. This is because they placed a throttle or limit on their IPs to send specific emails, say per hour or per day. This particular feature made them a bad option for spammers. Genuine businesses will be happy sending say 5k emails per hour. A spammer will always want to send 1m emails within a short span of time.

This is the only singular reason ovhcloud site has more monthly visitors and maybe more user base than contabo site. People tend to use ovh because there is no limit to the emails you can send, say per hour. But, I think contabo is also great because I assume you are a genuine business owner and not a spammer.

Digital Ocean

Another great VPS service provider is digital ocean. This is because of the supersonic web services it presents to the world of technologies. Aside from the cloud hosting servers it presents to developers. It also provides dedicated VPS servers with port 25 open for mailing purposes.

Generally, Digital ocean VPS servers have port 25 open by default except for some accounts which possess spam threats to their servers.

You can use the coupon link below to get free $100 and try out digital ocean for free.

Digital Ocean Coupon Link

There are also a lot of other VPS providers out there on the internet that you can use. But, I recommend before you buy, the first message their support and ask them if port 25 is open on their servers for mailing.

You can also check out Interserver Vps here.

The above VPS providers are the ones I used and I’m sure that their port 25 is open for mailing.

Whichever way, make sure to use any VPS service provider you are pretty comfortable with.

I believe by now you’ve bought your VPS.  Let’s go into the real configuration of our VPS to send emails.

Starters VPS architecture.

Once you have concluded on the VPS company to go with. Just create a VPS with the following architecture:

Ubuntu 18.08 Operating system

1 vCore,2 GB,40 GB SSD NVMe,250 Mbps unmetered.

VPS server configuration.

The first step in your postal SMTP server configuration is called domain mapping.

VPS and Domain mapping?

This is simply a way of pointing your domain name to your server’s public  IP address and vice versa.  Recall that in web hosting; your domain name points to your IP address. But in setting up mailing services you need to point your server IP address back to your domain name. This is to properly authenticate your server for mailing. Don’t worry if this is too technical, but trust me it is actually very simple. See the video below to see how to map and configure a domain for postal.

All you need to do is to log in to your domain registrar account, in my case NameCheap.

Go to the domain you want to use for mailing and open the advanced DNS section as you can see in the picture below.

Adding A Record to your DNS Zone

Click on add new record. Select A record and point a subdomain of your choice to the IP of your postal server.  In my own case, I used mail.mydomainname.com. All you just need to do is to add any subdomain of your choice using A record. This is going to translate into Yoursubdomain.yourdomainname.com. In my own case, it translates to mail.digitalgiantsinteractive.art, where mail is my chosen subdomain. Just feel free to use any subdomain of your choice.

Rdns configuration

Rdns stands for reverse Domain name system. Establishing Rdns is usually done inside VPS issuing account. You can also do this via the command line by logging in to your putty server and running the following command:

You can first check the status of your hostname by running the following command:

hostname -f

So, if you don’t see your hostname. For instance in my case mail.digitalgiantsinteractive.art you can change it using the command below:

sudo hostname host.domain.tld

Here you need to be very careful. Make sure to replace the hostname.domain.tld in the code above with anything you want to be your hostname.

Congrats your hostname is now set……

If you don’t know how to log in to your server via putty, download the putty SSH ( download the one that is compatible with your system. ). Then open the email address you used to sign up for your ovh,contabo,digital ocean, or any VPS provider account. You will see the login details you will use to log in to your server via putty, both your VPS password and your VPS IP address.

copy your IP address and paste it in the IP section of your putty server, then paste the VPS password and login you will be on the command line of your VPS server as shown below.

The first thing is to type in your VPS username, which is normally ubuntu if you are using ovhcloud.

Paste your VPS password and hit enter and you will see yourself in the command line of your postal server.

Requesting superuser access for your postal VPS server.

By default, many VPS issuing companies restrict superuser access unless you request it… Run the following commands. First, run:

Sudo passwd

Type in any password of your choice. Note: this is different from your VPS password. This is just a password to request superuser access and manage the files of the VPS server.

…..Retype your password

Input your superuser password again

Run…

su

Then, retype your superuser password.

Run…

cd

This is to change to the root directory of the VPS

The next thing now is to configure your rDNS. There are basically two ways you can configure your rDNS.

Through your VPS account

Via command line.

So, we are focusing on the first scenario, as the first has been addressed…..

You should have known that I’m using Ovhcloud for this tutorial. Feel free to use the other VPS companies that I recommend. But the processes are all the same.

Login to your VPS account, locate the IPs you have running already in the account. Locate the postal server IP and click the edit icon as you can see in the screenshot below.

Type the hostname or subdomain you set in the DNS section of your domain registrar account. Then click on save changes. You will be greeted with the success message….. YOUR REVERSE PART HAS BEEN UPDATED

By this, you have updated your reverse part or your ptr record or rDNS. I always prefer this because it is very easy compared to using the command line. Feel free to use the command line if you want.

To set your hostname using the command line……You can scroll up this article to see the place I talked about how you can set your hostname.

Postal SMTP installation.

Postal SMTP server is run with the help of some set of important software. This implied that for postal to run successfully on your server you need to install and have that software running on your server. This software helps to run containers responsible for postal to be fully functional on your server. For instance: the installation guide on this tutorial is going to run postal using docker software. You can also use any software of your choice.

All you have to do is to run the below commands and you will have postal running on your server. By definition, run means to copy the commands and paste in your putty, and hit enter.

First Run…….

sudo curl -L “https://github.com/docker/compose/releases/download/1.29.2/docker-compose-$(uname -s)-$(uname -m)” -o /usr/local/bin/docker-compose

2

sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/docker-compose

3

sudo ln -s /usr/local/bin/docker-compose /usr/bin/docker-compose

4

docker-compose –version

5

sudo apt update

6

sudo apt install apt-transport-https ca-certificates curl software-properties-common

7

curl -fsSL https://download.docker.com/linux/ubuntu/gpg | sudo apt-key add –

8

sudo add-apt-repository “deb [arch=amd64] https://download.docker.com/linux/ubuntu bionic stable”

9

sudo apt update

10

apt-cache policy docker-ce

11

sudo apt install docker-ce

12

sudo systemctl status docker

Type”Q”13

apt install git curl jq

14

git clone https://postalserver.io/start/install /opt/postal/install

15

sudo ln -s /opt/postal/install/bin/postal /usr/bin/postal

Ensure to copy the below code at once and paste in your putty and hit enter )

docker run -d \   --name postal-mariadb \   -p 127.0.0.1:3306:3306 \   --restart always \   -e MARIADB_DATABASE=postal \   -e MARIADB_ROOT_PASSWORD=postal \   mariadb

( Also copy the below codes at once and paste in your putty and hit enter )

docker run -d \   --name postal-rabbitmq \   -p 127.0.0.1:5672:5672 \   --restart always \   -e RABBITMQ_DEFAULT_USER=postal \   -e RABBITMQ_DEFAULT_PASS=postal \   -e RABBITMQ_DEFAULT_VHOST=postal \   rabbitmq:3.8

16

postal bootstrap postal.bettermetoday.us

Here ensure to replace postal.bettermetoday.us in the above command by your hostname.17

nano /opt/postal/config/postal.yml

Just scroll down and locate the option for DNS. Then replace all the sample hostnames with your own hostname.

18

Then press ctrl X to exit

postal initialize

This is to initiate postal on our hostname, the hostname we updated in the DNS area above.

19

postal make-user

Input the email address, username, and password that you want to be using to access postal.

20

postal start

This is to start postal on your server.

So, now postal is now active on your server.

21

docker run -d \   --name postal-caddy \   --restart always \   --network host \   -v /opt/postal/config/Caddyfile:/etc/caddy/Caddyfile \   -v /opt/postal/caddy-data:/data \   caddy

This is very important for the instant issuance of SSL to your server

Congrats, Postal is now active on your server…..

Now, copy your hostname and paste it into your web browser. You will see your postal server as seen below:

Log in with your email and password.

You can watch this video to understand practically how this is done from A to Z.

Wow ……… You are inside your Postal server…….Click on “create or add organization” to add your first SMTP organization

Click on Build Mail Server to build your first Mail server. Name it anything of your choice and set it to live mode.

Super Easy.

Now let’s move to domain configurations.

Postal Domain Configuration

Now, go to the domain option and click on “Domain” to add your first domain name.

Enter the domain you want to send emails from and click on create domain.

You will be greeted with a page that will show you all the technical details you need to properly authenticate and configure your domain for sending.

What you need to do at this point is to copy the DNS records given to you by postal to the DNS zone of your domain registrar. By doing this your domain will be properly authenticated and you will be able to send emails over the internet.

But before then, let me explain what is SPF, DKIM, and DMARC.

What is Dkim (DomainKeys Identified Mail)? :

As you already know DKIM stands for DomainKeys identified mail. it is a text record added to the DNS zone of your domain. This holds a public authentication/validation key. This key will be validated using a private key saved privately in your server.

All emails sent out of your server will be signed, this will avoid any compromise and protect your email originality. This is very important to give high sending scores and reputation to your server. Check the screenshot below:

As you can see from above, the DKIMis already pre-generated by postal. All you just need to do is to copy and paste the DKIM details from your postal server to your domain DNS zone.

What is SPF record (Sender Policy Framework)?:

SPF record is also a TXT record that is added to your Domain DNS Zone. This allows you to assign the mail servers that are allowed to send emails from your domain. So what do I mean by this?……

In a simple word……. Spf record helps to reject emails sent from other servers that are pretending to be You.

Very Simple…….

So, messages sent from a server that is not included in the SPF record will be identified as spam and sent to the spam folder or rejected completely.

For instance: you cannot expect to send an email from your own server and set your sending email as “mail@facebook.com,” you cannot use facebook’s domain email to send email from your own server. This simply shows you are a spammer.

Just like the Facebook example I gave above, you can authenticate your server SPF with your domain and prevent anyone from using your domain to send spammy messages. SPF is very crucial because it makes your domain trusted by email clients like Gmail, outlook, yahoo, etc.

To implement SPF for your domain. Open your DNS zone in and add the following record:

v=spf1 a mx include:spf.postal.example.com ~all

Remember that the SPF I displayed above is a sample SPF. You need to replace it with your own domain.

DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance):

This is a Protocol that employs the SPF and DKIM concept to determine the authenticity of the email sent from your server.

DMARC provides a layer for Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to block and sanction poor email practices like domain spoofing, phishing.

It allows legitimate email senders to specify how they want email clients like Gmail to handle emails that were not authenticated using SPF or DKIM rules. Senders can set the Dmarc to send such emails to the spam or reject it or block such emails completely.

MX Record (mail Exchange)

MX record is another form of record added to the DNS zone of your domain. This oversees the delivering emails to your domain email address.

In a very simple concept, MX record functions to hello the world which mail servers accept incoming mail for your domain and where emails sent to your domain should be routed to. If your MX records are not correctly configured to the right location, you will not receive emails in your domain emails.

Great

Our Server is now ready for sending emails but; let’s test our server first.

Sending a Test mail

We have two ways to test our server, we can test it inside our mailing applications for instance; mailwizz or inside postal. for the mailwizz application just navigate to the campaign section and send a test campaign or email. But we won’t use this option simply because we have not added our postal credentials to the mailing application. Aside from that, we’ve not also installed mailwizz applications. All the same, you can watch this video to learn how to install the mailwizz application.

simply click on Messages, then on Send Message to test out the Free SMTP server! You can check the picture below to understand more….

Now let us see how we can relay emails using this SMTP from any application of our choice.

To achieve this; we have to create an SMTP credential inside postal. These credentials will be added to our mailing application to help us send emails.

Creating Postal Credentials to Send Emails.

To add credentials, click on Credentials, click on Add new Credentials.

Here, choose SMTP.

You may as well choose API if you want to connect to postal through the web API or develop your own application that integrates with postal with Postal. You can learn more about the postal web  API here.

Use any detail of your choice to create a user

set any key of your choice or leave it at auto-generated. This will generate the credentials automatically for you.

If you don’t have a mailing application, you can use a free Gmail Automation service called Gmass to send your emails.

That’s all you have to do. You can now use these credentials in any email marketing application such as mailwizz

That’s it! I feel we’ve done justice to everything. we are done setting up our Free SMTP Server!

If you have any problems, you can open your questions on the J-Insight forum

Wait before you send out your first campaign!

Great! you just finished creating your SMTP server and before you send your first campaign you need to understand a very important concept known as warming up. This is a concept where you accumulate a high sending score by sending emails slowly and rapping up volume afterward.

Warming Up your SMTP server

When you just set up a New SMTP Server with a new public Linux IP Address, Just before You send out your first campaign, you have to do a concept known as warming up your IP Address.

What is IP warming?

When you bought a public VPS IP from Vps companies, it has zero reputation and nearly 100% possibility of any message sent out of it going to the spam folder. We have to send Emails slowly and increase over time so that, ISPs can trust us and allow emails from our new server to pass their spam filters.

Hope you got the Point here …

The graph below shows how you can rap up the volume to build a good reputation.

Also, check the table below for a more interesting insight.

The sample above is for 1K emails per day. Please refer to my Warming up SMTP Guide for more details.

After generating your warm-up schedule. Keep an eye on the following to ensure you get the best result.

Avoid Spam Factors

There are majorly four main factors that determine your spam score:

IP Reputation

SPF, DKIM, rDNS, and DMARC.

Message content

Email List health.

I have already explained the first two above. let’s consider the last two.

Message content

This is simply the body or content of your message. Does your message contain spammy words or spam trigger words? If it does, it will affect your message scores which overall affect your overall sending score. So, always make sure your emails do not contain shocking words or words that compromise your email to be spam.

Also, ensure to apply this technique to your email subject to avoid this particular factor.

Check this article on Hubspot, to learn more about spam keywords.

You may Also check this article “How To Land Your Emails In Inbox? The Ultimate Guide!”

Email List Health

The two factors in place here are:

Bounce Rate: How many emails are valid in your list.

Spam Traps: does your list contain any spam traps?

To learn more about bounce rate and spam traps, you may be interested in How to warm up IP

You also check this video to learn more about warming up……

Conclusively, to set up your SMTP server, you need a domain name and two VPS servers. Then, after, configuring the necessary technical details, ensure to warm up your server by using the warm-up tips Given in other to get your emails in the inbox.

Thanks for stopping by and reading through my blog. It means a lot to me. make sure to follow the tutorial swiftly and comment on any issue you are facing below so that I can help you the way I can.

[j-insights]

#smtp#smtp server#email marketing#mail#bulk email marketing services#videos#digital marketing#email system

[j-insights]

How to improve email deliverability.

Statistics have it that there is a $44 return on investment on every $1 spent on email marketing. The above stat is a maximum result of the survey. Aside from good positioning, being an authority in your niche, and writing a good copy with at least minimal persuasion touches, there are still other factors that determine if the above survey is going to be feasible or not. One of such factors is your email deliverability. I see this as a very crucial player in the entire digital marketing game because without your emails arriving in the inbox, nobody will see your offers and patronize you to achieve the above ROI. So, if you are a digital marketer, or you work or sell on any niche online I recommend you read this guide diligently and watch your ROI skyrocket are a result of your improved email delivery.

So, let's go ooo

The number 1 in our list is...

What Is IP Warm-Up

IP warm-up is the process of sending emails slowly to build a reputation. When you set up a new SMTP server or you buy a brand Dedicated IP address you need to send emails slowly in order to gain the trust of internet service providers that you are not a spammer. You may be asking, why do I need to warm up my server before sending? You need to warm up your server and IP so that you can gain the trust of internet service providers that you are a legit sender and not a spammer.

There are approximately 3.8 billion emails across different ISPs. If there are no laws against spamming the internet will be filled with spam messages fatigued on people’s inboxes. You will be annoyed if you wake up and see your inbox filled with emails that you didn’t opt-in.

The rule here is that you must warm up your SMTP server to send emails to your subscriber’s inbox. If things are not like that, one spammer will set up 100 SMTP servers and start sending unsolicited emails.

According to an emarketing study, the ROI on email marketing is 4400%. Without your emails arriving in your subscriber’s inbox, the above research will not hold water for you. Make sure to warm up your server. Don’t be in a haste to send emails.

How Long Does It Take To Warm Up Your Server

There is no specific length of time to warm up your server. It all depends on your need and the size of your email list. Consider a 1k email list, it will take you less time to do warm-up to send 1k emails. Consider a 10k email list, it will take you more time to warm up your server to send 10k. But, generally, you can warm up your server between 2-12 weeks.

Ip Warm-Up Generator

As hinted before; warming up your server requires you to send emails slowly. For you to know the number of emails to send per day you need to schedule your email for sending. You can determine emails sent per day either by using your head or by using an email warm-up generator. In a nutshell, this is a sample of a warm-up schedule for the warming-up 1k list.

IP Warm-Up Tips

Here are few tips you need to get your server up and running and shut your emails in the inbox.

Bounce Rate

This is the measure of the number of emails that bounced back from the receiving server. You get a high bounce rate when you send campaigns to email addresses that do not exist. Email addresses not existing could be caused by the following reasons:

Expired Domains

There are a lot of domain emails out there whose domains are expired. Since the domains are expired, sending emails to the domain emails will lead to a high bounce rate. When you send emails to expired emails, it will return an error from the server the email is non-existent.

Before you send an email from your newly built SMTP, validate your list to remove non-existent emails. Sending to non-existent emails will increase your bounce rate and your server will be destroyed. Take a look at the picture below to see what a high bounce rate looks like:

The picture above shows a 21% bounce rate. You should try as much as you can to keep your bounce rate between 0-1%. The email from the server above may never see the light of the inbox. The campaign has to stop, the list validated and all other warm-up rules are obeyed.

Once again, make sure to keep your bounce rate very low or maybe between 0-1% bounce rate. Make sure to keep your email list healthy by using great services like debounce to remove non-existent domain emails.

Spam traps

Spam traps are virtual email addresses created by ISPs and spread over the internet to help lure spammers. This helps ISPs to filter spam emails and send them to the hell of spam folders. In a real sense, spam traps are email addresses not owned by anyone. They are placed in different parts of the web. Most spammers, especially bulk mailers, on their quest to harvest emails online will harvest these spam traps together. Once you send emails to a spam trap using your new server your server will automatically be blacklisted. You will just have to start from square zero again because that server will be irredeemable.  

Recycled spam

These are emails abandoned by their owners for so long that they are now being converted to spam traps. When you send emails to non-existent email addresses it will bounce back from the receiving server recording spam trap. By this, you will be identified as a spammer and your server will be blacklisted.

Recipient interaction:

The interactions of your recipients are very important for your SMTP reputation. If users or subscribers are reporting your emails as spam you will accumulate a very bad reputation. This sends negative spam signals to the different ISPs that you are a potential spammer.

Make sure when you send an email, you keep track of your recipient’s interactions. If they are reporting your emails as spam, stop the campaign, check what you are sending, see what was wrong. If it contains a spammy subject or message, change the content of your messages and continue. Another great tip to improve on your recipient interaction is to use some form of personalization. Don’t use it too much. Utilize the FNAME feature on your mailwizz application or any application you are using to create some form of familiarity.

There are other factors that determine which folder your emails arrive you can check this article to see the full guide

[j-insights]

How to create a clickbank account in blacklisted countries

How to create a clickbank account in Nigeria

There is no doubt that Clickbank is one of the top affiliate networks on our planet; if arguably not the best. As a result, many beginners and top affiliate marketers all over the world are always craving to milk from the huge commission potentials that the platform has to offer them. But the bad news hitting the shores of some affiliate marketers especially those from third world countries like Nigeria or Ghana is that we can’t create a ClickBank account in this part of the world.

I want to assure you in this fast-moving read if you are a beginner hoping to work in affiliate marketing or you are already into affiliate marketing but, Clickbank has constantly sent a quiver down your spine due to them endlessly banning your account and you’ve been looking for an extensive tutorial or guide to put the on how to create Clickbank account, you are at the right place and if you stick with this short read and follow my strategies you will be in your way to having an untouchable Clickbank account in Nigeria or any blacklisted country at all. So, keep reading………

Note: This strategy works for any country at all that is on the ClickBank blocklist but I used Nigeria in this tutorial because I’m from Nigeria. So, feel free to apply this to your own country and you will be fine.

Just like any other affiliate from a third-world country like Nigeria, I have had my own fair share of Clickbank’s strikes and frustrations. From the onset of my affiliate marketing journey, I’ve heard about and seen proof of the huge commission opportunities Clickbank has to offer but the first day I went to the clickbank.com website to register as a Nigerian, I got a big denial.

Clickbank account in Nigeria

This has led me to embark on a rootless search on how to bypass the Clickbank security algorithms, not for illegal purposes but to have a working account that can make me money legitimately.

Disclaimer: All strategies mentioned on this blog are solely for the ethical use and pitogy.website is giving out this strategy so that genuine folks from these third-world nations can grab their own share of Clickbank commissions and change their life for the better. That said! Let’s get right in.

Before diving into the real deal, below is the table of content and road map that we are to follow in order to arrive at our goal of having a working Clickbank account.

TABLE OF CONTENT

1. Create a Payoneer account

2. Why you shouldn’t create a USA Clickbank account

3. Get a premium

4. Head on to Clickbank

5. Download a browser specifically for Clickbank.

6.Go to fake name Generator to generate fake identities for your registration

7. Add your payment method

8. Alternative to open a Clickbank account in Nigeria or any blacklisted country ( most secure than the VPN strategy)

If you don’t want to go through this blog post you can just watch the embedded video below and you will be good to go.

Create a Payoneer account

As you might have heard about Payoneer before, but for the sake of clarity, Payoneer is a global payment platform or service that gives you the ability to receive payment from any marketplace fully integrated with it in any part of the world, it gives you virtual bank accounts denominated in dollars, great British pounds and you can request for other currencies if you want… It also has the flexibility of you requesting payment as a freelancer from your clients in any part of the world, all you need to do is, go to the request payment option and create an invoice to send to your clients and you will receive your payment in your Payoneer balance. So, as said before….. We are going to be creating a Payoneer account to pull our commissions as affiliates, maybe later on if you have the services you can use the request payment options. Make sure to sign up as an affiliate, verify your emails to confirm your account.

Then you will have your account up and running.

Why you shouldn’t create a USA Clickbank account.

Unarguably, I’ve seen a lot of folks advising newbies to create a USA Clickbank account, but the issue with a USA Clickbank account is that you won’t be able to withdraw your commissions if you don’t have a tax identity or a social security number. When you want to withdraw your commission you will be prompted to provide those documents, and failure to provide them means you will never get paid your commission. So, you wouldn’t want to be investing your time, money, and energy in something that won’t possibly yield results. If you want to stick with opening a USA Clickbank account you have to look for someone staying in the US to help you to open the account with their details and send you the logins and when it’s time to withdraw your commissions they will provide their tax identity and social security number on your behalf and you will receive your money in your Payoneer account. Generally, before you open a USA Clickbank account make sure you surf the Irs official website and learn a little bit about how taxing works in the US.

But, my question is… why go through the long route while there is an alternative to cut off the middle actor as in creating a USA Clickbank account. The solution to all these is by creating a UK Clickbank account, where you don’t have to present your tax identity or social security number before you have your commissions.

Get a premium VPN

Yoo, this is also one of the main reasons your Clickbank account always gets banned. I spoke with some sets of frustrated folks some time ago and they all complained that they have given up on Clickbank totally, because of the frequent account ban. Some already earned some cash on their accounts before the bad news reached their inbox. But, when I got close to them and asked them…. Which IP address masking strategy are you using? Some said they used epic browser with VPN addon attached to it, some said they used windscribe and other free VPN services while some are not just able to withdraw their monies because of the wrong orientation of opening a USA Clickbank account as I highlighted above.

You may want to check out this full blog post on more complex reasons why you should not use free VPN services

Download a browser specifically for Clickbank

This is very important to preserve your Clickbank account. When you visit websites, their tracking files and cookies are often always ejected in your browser. These ejected cookies and snippet files are used to profile and estimate your online activities and track where you are coming from. As a result, it becomes so crucial to always download a separate browser for the sole purpose of accessing the Clickbank marketplace. So, if you want to browse other websites, make sure to have a separate browser for that which is different from the browser you use to access the Clickbank marketplace.

Head on to Clickbank

Just go to Clickbank and fill in your details and when you click on that signup button you are going to be greeted with this bad message lol

Clickbank account in Nigeria

But don’t worry, because that is what I am here to solve. Turn on your VPN to any available UK locations on the Namecheap VPN preferably London because that is what I use a lot. After that ……let’s Go ooooooooooo

Go to fakenanegenerator.com to generate fake identities for your registration

In this stage of the registration make sure you choose your country like the UK, then select your gender and name set as shown in the video, and the picture above, you can refer to it if you want. Just fill in the signup fields with the equivalence from the fake name generator. Note: you can use the fake name generated or you can use your real name, it doesn’t matter. You will always have the flexibility of updating the payee name to your name within the Clickbank dashboard. Just refer to the video above and you will be just fine.

Add your payment method

I believe that by following these strategies you will be inside your Clickbank dashboard by now.

Clickbank account in Nigeria

To manage your payment information, just navigate to account settings and enter the UK account details provided to you by Payoneer.

Clickbank account in Nigeria

Wow, you’ve updated your payment information and it is time to generate hoplinks and start promoting your preferred products. By default, you won’t see any product on your Clickbank dashboard. What you have to do is to hit on the search bar and you will see all the list of trending products, sorted by descending order of gravity. You can create any filter you want in order to filter products of your choice. Make sure to check out my youtube channel to understand better how to select products.

You may also want to check out the role of email marketing in driving conversions, as this will help you a lot in remarketing Clickbank products in the long run and reduce your advertising cost.

Alternative to open a Clickbank account in Nigeria or any blacklisted country ( most secure than the VPN strategy)

This is more of a complex process than the VPN strategy just discussed. It does require some level of technicalities but it is highly safer. Here you have to buy a VPS server from VPS issuing companies like ovh cloud or contabo, then configure the VPS to your taste. On the configuration dashboard, you have to choose a VPS machine hosted in the UK and configure it. After the configuration, you can then download your configured RDP and repeat the processes above to create your Clickbank account. This is a kind of stronger and much safer because when you configure the machine to a specific location which makes it have a public static IP address. So, if you are connecting to the Clickbank marketplace this time around it will be with a non-fluctuating IP, unlike VPN which has a lot of precautions to follow.

You can refer to this video below where I addressed this strategy alongside the Vpn strategy.

Conclusively we talked about all the processes and paths you have to follow to be able to have a working Clickbank account and you have seen me demonstrating it both here and on my youtube videos. Just make sure you follow strictly and hope you will be definitely successful with Clickbank affiliate marketing.