Your second choice is to disguise these words and phrases in clever ways by inserting keyboard symbols within them and/or replacing a letter in them with a symbol. The trick is not to make it too cryptic -- you want your readers to be able to understand what you're saying. For example, in my e-zine, I use "fr*ee" for free.

While some spam filters pick up on this trick and penalize you for doing it by adding onto your score, I've found that points this tactic costs you penalize you much less than using words and phrases themselves. It's not a perfect solution, but it's working for now.

<< TEST BEFORE YOU SEND >>

It's a great idea to test how YOUR e-zine stacks up before you send it out. The good news is you can do this for FREE.

Lyris' Content Checker (http://www.lyris.com/contentchecker/) tells you how your e-zine ranks in Spam Assassin. All you do is copy your e-zine text and paste it into box on their site. They'll run your free report and e-mail a copy to you. It usually arrives within minutes.

The report will tell you exactly which words are costing you points. Usually you should only be concerned if your score is over 5 points. If so, you can either delete those words or disguise them, as I mentioned above.

I test each issue of my e-zines in Content Checker before I publish them, and often I'm surprised (and relieved) that my score is low. That makes me a happy publisher. : )

(c) 2003 Alexandria K. Brown

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In my case, after fundamental changes in type of product I would offer and numerous changes to my marketing approach, I arrived at “8th idea”. After morphing 8 times, my original idea has panned out very well in form of my current business.

To make sure that you keep your ideas alive until reach 8th idea status, follow these two simple guidelines:

Never throw away an idea:

You just never know what a few changes can do to a previously unsuccessful idea. Don’t ever completely discard an idea for your small business. Instead focus on what could be done differently with it to enhance its success next time around. Had I given up on my original idea, I would not run business that I do today.

Evaluate your failures: Good ideas sometimes go bad. Remember “New Coke” In a recently published marketing book, author (a driving force behind creation of New Coke back in 1985) talks about how well they had planned for launch of new cola and how sure they were that product would be a hit. It wasn’t. However, they quickly reacted to situation by morphing their original idea (a new product) in a different direction (the re-introduction of Coke under label “Coca Cola Classic”.). The relaunch was a massive marketing success.

By keeping your ideas alive, you’ll give them new life every time you make a change to their original composition. Sometimes, 8 ideas later, you’ll have a real winner on your hands.