John Botscharow of 3R Marketing is, in my opinion and observation, one of the most agresive anti-e-mail and pro-direct-to-desktop publishing and marketing evangelists on the internet today.

If you remember we exchanged quite an "agreessive" debate over the subject some time ago. Now, he agreed to do let me interview him on the subject:)

This is going to be an ongoing interview, updated (more or less:) once per day.

I don't always agree with John, and I seem to agree less with him as time progresses, but I do have great respect for his work and for what he stands for (even though I don't agree with him).

Here's the first installement ...

Rok: John, you are one of the Internet's most aggressive anti-e-mail and pro-direct-to-desktop evangelists. From what I know you've given up on e-mail as a marketing and as a communicational tool. Why?

John: The main reason I gave up on email marketing was because I was not getting the results I wanted from it. Although the number of so-called subscribers to my newsletter the R Market Daily had grown over the first four years of it's existence, there was no significant increase in the return of my investment of time and money. In other words, no increase in profitability. As s guerrilla marketer, profitability is the only measure of success. Profits can be measured in units other than dollars, though. For the Daily. I am not so concerned with how many dollars it makes, but with how many actual readers I have and how many people visit my site and how I rank in the search engines.

One of the most significant changes in profitability has been my search engine rankings. When I was doing email publishing, I never had a top ten ranking for any keywords that were relevant either to the Daily or my 3R web site. Now I have very high rankings in several keywords that matter to my business.

The statistics for readership have also increased in the year I have been doing direct-to-desktop publishing. Although the numbers are not yet where I would like them to be, they are increasing steadily. Building readership takes time and high-quality content. Content is also the key to high rankings. All the stupid optimization tricks that people think will help their rankings are a waste of time and money. The search engines are looking for quality content that is updated regularly. Doing that is much easier and much more effective using an RSS-based system like the one I use.

The freedom to write the content I want to write is another reason I switched to direct-to-desktop publishing. With all the filters that ISPs have put into place, anyone who writes marketing articles has to watch what they say or play silly games to get their content through those filters. I refuse to play those games and I am never one to mince words. Switching to direct-to-desktop publishing has allowed me to say what I want using the words I want to use.

Finally, another major reason for the switch was the level of scam I was getting. A thousand messages a day offering everything from penis enlargement to stock tips, all things I am not interested in, was getting to be a huge problem. Although I did use my own internal filtering system, I did scan all those messages to make sure there was not a Dis-filtered message. That took me away from more important activities like writing and marketing. I decided that I did not need this crap anymore, So I set up things that, over a period of about six months, allowed me to disable all email for my business,

Because it is impossible, unfortunately, to get certain services and products I use for my business without email, I do have a web-based email account for those things. But I do not use that address for my own business dealings with my readers and customers. The system will not allow me to give up email completely, but I am getting closer to being email free. As more and more people do what I have done, the rest of the Internet will wise up and make the necessary changes that will give people a choice about using email.