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In a world that becomes more and more aware of email spam, growing your email marketing list and sending out personalized email is as challenging as ever.

Country laws prevent marketers to clutter their recipients’ inboxes and often the simple act of sending a commercial email without the end user’s opt-in is considered unlawful. (That is how it works in my country, Italy, too.)

So you have to make the extra (creative) effort to grow your list while keeping your current subscribers loyal at the same time. (And that can be tough, too! Read what Rand Fishkin of MOZ has to say about it.)

In this post, I will give you 7 ideas to grow your email marketing list without triggering spam filters or getting the law against you.

1. Send Email Outreach Messages, NOT Marketing Messages

Don’t send out unsolicited marketing messages– besides being illegal in many countries, it’s also surefire way to get your efforts in the recipient’s Spam folder or, worse, Trash bin.

If you want to be taken seriously, you need to act like a human being.

Outreach to the recipient, don’t sell them stuff. Be human and generous, don’t ask them to join your list.

Ask recipients if they want to opt-in for a freebie or a special offer, but don’t give the impression that they will have to join a list, too. You can ask them to join your list only after they have received their free good or offer.

Your subscribers should always feel in charge of their presence in your list, never manipulated into it.

2. Leverage Transactional Emails and Support Emails

Transactional emails are all those emails you send out automatically every time a user subscribes or unsubscribes, downloads a freebie, joins a community, and so on.

Support emails are emails you or your team send to users who requested helpin a certain area. Automated emails in response to support requests also belong to this type of messages

The marketing power of these emails is often underrated.

I’ll tell you why.

When users receive a transactional email, they are usually in a relaxed state of mind, so they are more receptive of any gentle offers you may want to present to them.

Of course, you should keep the CAN-SPAM Act guidelines in mind, so such offers should appear after the transactional content, possibly in a “P.S.” at the end of the email, which conveys a sense of one-to-one intimacy that is characteristic of a letter.

You can leverage support emails, too, with support-related offers. For example, if you run a list where you share tips and tutorials for using your products and services, by all means add a note to your support emails to direct your users there!

3. Integrate Email Marketing and Social Media

Last year Bosmol.com co-blogger Lavinia Tauro wrote an interesting post about integrating social media with email marketing. I don’t need to repeat what she said (her post is great, by the way!) but I recommend you follow each social medium’s guidelines when it comes to business communications to avoid being flagged as a spammer.

Everything else is creativity on your part. What you really need to have is a knowledge as profound as possible of your audience.

And did you know you can actually turn your Twitter followers into list subscribers? One way to do this is to tweet special content and offers you know your Twitter audience loves, and to make it available by list subscription only (make it easy! Name and email are enough.)

4. Encourage Re-sharing Of Your Emails

Make it easy to your subscribers to re-share the emails you send them, especially when they come with incentives and free goods that may help attract new subscribers.

Simple “Tell a friend!” links or buttons will work, but you could work out something more complex like “Share this free E-book with 5 friends and get an extra bonus Tutorial!”.

You know your audience, so you also know what is more appealing to it and most likely to convert well.

5. Integrate Email Marketing With Other Opt-ins

If you already use other opt-ins on your website — for example, you ask your visitors to follow you on Twitter or fill a form to get a white paper or a coupon code, or even to place a comment on your blog — you can combine them with list opt-in.

An example from a WordPress blog I run:

6. Add Your List to Your Business Card, Not Just Your Website

You already have your business number, email and website address on your business card. Why not add your list address, too?

It is much easier for a prospect to subscribe and see what kind of quality you can offer before they actually hire you. (It’s called evidence of trust.)

7. Make Your Emails Pieces to Keep, Not Throw-Aways

Never go sloppy on the quality of your emails— subscribers may forgive one or two over the course of a year, but if you begin to deliver content of lower and lower quality, you are bound to see your unsubscription rate increase over time and put your list in danger.

Instead, make each email you send out to your list a piece to keep— and to share (see #4 in this post).

They will not just keep your current subscribers… subscribed, but they will also attract referral subscriptions through sharing and more subscribers through word-of mouth.

So growing your email marketing list may not be easy, but it can be done. What are YOUR tips to grow your list?

Further email marketing ideas:

Top Six Ways to Grow Your Email Subscription List by Linda West at MarketingProfs.com

25 Simple Ways to Grow Your Email List by Andy Pitre at HubSpot.com

41 Tips that Put Over 10,000 People on My Email Subscriber List by Ramsay Taplin of BlogTyrant

Are you a human link builder? If so, ask yourself this: “if a robot link builder existed, what would I still be able to do that it could not?”

Analyze a complex backlink profile and distinguish quality links from spammy ones? Check. Write a funny personal email that gets someone’s attention in the right way? Check. Decide when a phone call might be the best outreach method? Check.

And what could the robot do faster and better than you?

Find every link to a site? Check. Automatically search through SERPs and connect each result to external data? Check. Automatically search for contact information on three different pages and score how closely it matched a person’s name? Check. Automatically pre-populate data fields in a CRM? Check.

If you’ve ever heard the phrase “build on your strengths,” the lesson for link building is this: that we need to automate as much of the routine, “robot work” as possible, and spend more time doing what we’re best at: being sentient human link builders.

In this post, we’ll look at tools that can help link builders shift their workload to computers as much as humanly possible.

Backlink Data

Let’s start with the most basic automation. You need tools to research sites’ backlink profiles. These tools crawl the web and build a database of raw data about backlinks.

Each tool provides, at minimum, the ability to lookup a list of all the pages linking to a URL or domain, and some include detailed information about each link’s anchor text, type (text or image), follow status, authority for the linking page, and in some cases the ability to group, sort, search, and filter the results.

Majestic SEO: A well-regarded index of link data with information about anchor text, authority, Class C IPs, and relevance, not to mention good sorting and filtering. My only complaint is that their pricing and user-interface is a bit confusing.

Open Site Explorer: A very user-friendly tool with anchor text data, follow status, and authority. The only downside is the index may miss some links in the “deep web.”

Yahoo Site Explorer: Known for being relative fast to find new links (other indexes are updated monthly), but very limited because it can only return 1,000 links per page or domain and offers no “extra” data such as follow status or filtering capabilities. But it’s free! Yahoo also offers an API (Yahoo BOSS), which according to many, is more current than the Site Explorer website.

Google: Yes, their “link:” operator leaves much to be desired, but just because it’s incomplete doesn’t mean it’s useless.

Blekko: This new search engine offers tons of free backlink data available from a very deep index.

Site-Level Backlink Analysis

Many tools offer backlink reports at the site or URL level, but are limited to only the data points they have available. So then what do you do if you want to filter a site’s backlinks down to only followed inbound links, with toolbar PageRank of at least 5, and no more than 50 outbound links?

Enter site-level backlink analysis tools. These tools gather traditional backlink data with a traditional set of backlink data, often pulled from one or multiple backlink data providers.

Link Diagnosis: Powered by Yahoo BOSS, Link Diagnosis uses a Firefox extension to pull up to 1,000 links per page and lookup metrics such as the toolbar PageRank of each URL, whether the link actually was found on the page, follow status, anchor text of each link, and aggregate level reporting.

BacklinkWatch!: Also powered by Yahoo, BacklinkWatch! pulls the first 1,000 links for a page (the most Yahoo will give up), and appends the number of outbound links on the source page along with any flags they find (nofollow, image links, etc.).

AnalyzeBacklinks: Simple and free tool that analyzes backlinks to a page and appends anchor text, total number of links, outbound links, title of the linking page. One feature I like is that ability to flag links that mention a keyword you’ve selected.

SEOBook Link Harvester: Shows backlinks grouped by linking domain, groups them by top level domain (TLD), and provides summary metrics about the number of incoming links and percentage of deep links to the page.

SEOBook Back Link Analyzer: A free downloadable tool that pulls backlink data from Google, MSN, and Yahoo, crawls the linking pages, and builds a table of information about each link including follow status, number of outbound links, page title, and more.

SearchStatus Plugin for Firefox: A free Firefox extension from iAcquire that pulls the backlinks from Google, Yahoo, and Bing.

SEOLink Analysis: Supplements lists of links produced by Google Webmaster Tools and Yahoo Site Explorer with information about each link’s PageRank, anchor text, and follow status.

WhoLinksToMe: Produces various detailed backlink reports with views by link, anchor text, country, IP, and more. Many charts and graphs to aid in the analysis. Freemium.

Many enterprise SEO packages also offer data-rich site level backlink analysis, includingBrightEdge, SecondStep, RankAbove’s Drive, seoClarity, SEO Diver, SISTRIX Toolbox, andgShift Labs, and link building specific tools such as Advanced Link Manager, Linkdex and Cemper’s LinkResearchTools offer powerful backlink analysis features.

SERP-Level Backlink Analysis

It seems like every link builder has a preferred set of data when it comes to competitive analysis. So don’t expect any single tool to pull every conceivable piece of data and put them all into same columns you’ve always used.

You still may find yourself exporting data to Excel and merging with other data sources. But any time saved from manually copying and pasting data into spreadsheets (or hiring and managing people to do so) can be spent on more human, value-added activities.

SEOBook, SEOQuake, and SEOMoz, offer helpful browser extensions that overlay a variety of backlink data directly on search results, so you can assess the backlinks behind each listing in the SERP, right when you’re looking at it.

Larger suites like Advanced Link Manager, LinkResearchTools, Adgooroo Link Insight,Wordtracker Link Builder, LinkDex, Raven, and SEOMoz, also offer detailed backlink data at the SERP level. SEOMoz announced an upgrade for their excellent Keyword Difficulty Tool to provide a more integrated SERP analysis.

Anyone without research tools for SERP analysis is at a competitive disadvantage.

Link Prospecting Tools

There are many ways to find link opportunities, and the tools listed below can only really scratch the surface when it comes to the universe of link opportunities that some creativity and insight can find.

Query generators are the original link automation tools. These tools take a keyword and automatically create dozens or hundreds of canned searches to find common link opportunity types (e.g. resource pages, guest posts, and directories). Here are a few of the most popular:SoloSEO, Ontolo’s Link Query Generator, SEOBook’s Link Suggest, BuzzStream’s Link Building Query Generator (disclaimer: I co-founded BuzzStream), and Webconf’s Backlink Builder. I would strongly caution anyone using a list of other people’s queries to weed out queries that don’t make sense for them – don’t just head down a link building path because a tool suggested you seek a link on every “inurl:links.html” page in your industry.

Link prospecting tools build upon the query generator idea, but automate the task of visiting each page in and compiling addition metrics (and in some cases, contact info). This can save link builders time by enabling them to prioritize prospects with the highest value. But you can’t just take everything the tools give you. Plan to review each prospect to assess its appropriateness to your link building campaign. Here are a few of the most popular: Ontolo, Adgooroo’s Link Insight, and Advanced Link Manager.

Cocitation or “hub finder” tools help you find sites that link to multiple competitors. Some look across all links to your competitors, and some analyze the top ranking sites for a given keyword. The best known offerings in this area are SEOBook’s Hub Finder, Adgooroo’s Link Insight, Raven’s SiteFinder, LinkResearchTools, Linkdex, WordTracker Link Builder, SEODiver, andShoemoney Tools.

Proprietary technique research tools use a combination of their own search queries and analysis rules to generate a list of screened, quality link prospect opportunities. Link Insight is known for integrating many of Eric Ward’s (a.k.a., “Link Moses”) research methods, though I wouldn’t call it an Eric-SaaS just yet. Ontolo offers a number of proprietary searches, but also leaves a fair bit of detail and control in users’ hands.

Checklist-driven link building tools give users bite-sized link building tasks, such as “Today you should request a link on DMOZ!” (except their suggestions tend to be more clever than that):LotusJump, Hubspot, DIYSEO, and SEOScheduler.

Next time, I’ll cover tools that address contact research, link management (CRM), link outreach management, and link monitoring.

A note about some tools I won’t cover: tools that scrape SERPs for sites and automatically extract email addresses and send blast mass emails, tools that automate directory submission, “article marketing,” and blog commenting, services that automate blindly placing link-laden content on an unknown network of sites, or tools to automate reciprocal link exchanges. These tools exist and some people use them, but I have yet to find them to be beneficial.

The best strategy for using link building automation tools is to first develop a good process for tracking your link prospecting data and managing your outreach via a structured workflow. Once you have data and process in place, you can start automating some of your routine tasks.