Archive for the ‘webmaster’ Category

An email autoresponder (also called auto-reply, auto-responder, mailbot, autobot and email-on-demand) is simply an email program that runs on a computer server connected full-time to the Internet. It gives you an email address that automatically replies to any incoming message with the text of your choosing. This information is delivered anywhere in the world, to any person with email, within seconds, 24 hours a day–7 days a week.

The pre-written message can be a sales letter, vacation reply, a confirmation notice, or a response to a form submission.

Email autoresponders are a very useful email tool because they prevent the repetitive task of manually answering each individual piece of email you receive. They’re convenient, and saves you time. Not only won’t you have to keep manually answering your email, with the same message, you won’t have to stay at your computer to make sure your email is answered in a timely manner. The responder automatically replies to the sender’s email, within minutes.

You can include your autoresponder address on business cards, letterhead, flyers, classified advertising, your email signature line, and anywhere else you can think of.

For example, let’s say you mailed post cards to 1000 people and included your autoresponder address as the primary way for them to learn more information.  You would set your email autoresponder to mail out a letter that describes your product or service, gives a link to your web site, and/or an alternate way to contact you.  This is an excellent way to pre-qualify a lead, as opposed to handing out your primary email address or your phone number.  This way, you’re only spending time on people who act on the information they receive from your autoresponder, which shows they are more than just tire-kickers.

Most services offer what is commonly referred to as “smart”  autoresponders. This means that in addition to the first email your prospect receives, you can set up your account to send them multiple follow-up messages at timed intervals, such as every day or every other day.  This is a powerful tool and has proven to turn tire-kickers into customers if you continue to give them compelling reasons buy your product, visit your site, or use your service.

In the sales industry, it is a generally accepted principle that it takes an average of seven points of contact (the original letter and six follow-ups) to make a sale.  After that average of seven letters, your prospect probably has either made a decision or has removed himself from your autoresponder follow-up system.  Since the average is seven, it stands to reason that if you provide ten letters instead, you have probably squeezed all the productivity out of your autoresponder that you’re going to get.  However, there is no harm in creating more than ten letters, as your prospect can always remove himself from the queue when he’s made a decision.

Another way you might choose to use your email autoresponder is to send training materials or tips to those who request it from your site.  Offering something for free is an excellent way to build a prospect list and gives a compelling reason for someone to give out their email address.

On your web site, you might advertise that the viewer can receive your top 25 web marketing tips, or your top 50 ways to stay healthy, or any kind of information you can think of that is germane to the reason your prospect has come to your site.  You might break down those 25 marketing tips into 3 per email and set up your autoresponder to send out 8 emails over the course of 16 days.  If you’re selling vitamins, you might offer to send a list of every vitamin and mineral, along with what it does and the foods where it’s found.  Then every day for 12 days, the recipient would get these descriptions of two or three vitamins and minerals.  Of course, you would include a link to your web site, an offer to provide more information upon request, and even a testimonial on how wonderful your vitamins are.

The best way to approach how you’re going to formulate your letters is to pretend that you’re talking with a friend about your product/service.  This friend needs some convincing, so you decide that instead of bombarding him with all the information at once, you’re going to give it out in a slow drip.  And with that slow drip, you’re also going to give him some extra information that he can use (tips and tricks, useful information about your industry, or something you think he can use even if he doesn’t become a customer).  Give something for free, weave it into your “sales pitch” and make your prospect feel like he’s gotten something in return for giving you his email address.

In the post card example used above, you may decide not to include anything about your product, service, or business opportunity on your post card.  You could simply mail a postcard that offers a “free course in Internet marketing” or a “free guide to vitamins and minerals” or “a consumer warning on how long distance companies routinely sign you up for their service without your permission.” The list is endless!  Chances are good that whatever you’re selling will have some kind of related information associated with it that you can give out for free that will capture their interest.  All they have to do is send an email and they become your prospect!  Now you weave your product/service/biz opp into your series of autoresponder letters and you have a full-time salesperson working for you at no (or very little) cost!

There are many places on the web that offer email autoresponders for small fees. The “cost” of free autoresponder services is that they usually add a one or two-line advertisement at the top or bottom of all your outgoing messages.  Most free services also offer a paid service that allows you to upgrade to eliminate this ad from your messages.  The paid service also usually comes with more features, such as more flexibility with your list.

Prepare your emails in text format (ASCII).  That means straight text with no bold, underline, or colors.  Format the text to be no wider than 60 characters. This will avoid word-wrapping problems and be easier to view on the receiver’s system.  You can use your word processor, Notepad, or a new email screen to create your emails. You’ll copy and paste the contents into the autoresponder online set-up screen.

You should keep your emails under 10k in size (10240 characters). Even though some autoresponders can handle larger files, some e-mail services block larger files or require downloading as attachments.

Email Autoresponder Resources

Aweber

GetResponse

Having your own website has become an essential item for most ‘netpreneurs, but you don’t have to pay an expensive web designer for the privilege of owning your own piece of virtual real estate. It gets your name out there and is a great way to promote your products. If you’ve never had need of a website before, it probably seems like a “web” of confusion.

Actually, you only need to worry about three things to procure your own website:

1. Design and content of the site – If you want to have a handsoff approach to web design, then you can go to a site like www.Elance.com and get freelancers to bid on the work. That way you’ll already have all of the bells and whistles in place.But, you can save money by doing some of the work yourself. There are free, high quality templates available on the Internet that make it easy to launch your own site.

2. Hosting your website – There are dozens of free or very low-cost website hosting services available on the Internet. The type of service varies from the amount of space you can use to the number of free enhancements, such as a guestbook and message board.

3. Acquiring a domain name – You must have a unique domain name and it must be registered. You can take care of this yourself by taking advantage of Internet help sites such as www.godaddy.com. It will guide you through each step of securing a domain.

Don’t stress out about planning a website for your business. With all the help that the Internet offers, you can easily do the work yourself and find ways to get what you need for a minimal cost. They key is to keep moving forward with your goal in mind.

Be Your Own Writer

You know your product or service better than anyone, and with the help of spell-check and grammar-check you can easily write your own sales copy and product descriptions.

Software is also available at a nominal cost that will provide templates for some of your writing needs. See what might work for you by taking a look at some advertisements and sales copy that you admire, and then pattern your own with what you’ve learned. However, NEVER plagiarize, or steal someone else’s words or design. Aside from the fact that it’s unethical and will ruin your reputation before you even have a chance to get started, it could result in serious financial consequences for you.

Do take note of the words that were used to make a dynamic statement about the service or product and use those words in your own writing style. Have a trusted friend or colleague look it over to make sure you got the point across.

Partnering to Cut Costs

On the ‘net, everyone is looking to link up in a way that benefits both parties. If you have a skill, such as writing, but you lack in another area, such as marketing, you may be able to barter your services or provide one half of the equation while your partner provides the other much needed input.

You can also go to www.sba.gov and work out a viable business plan and try to secure funding through more traditional means. Just because your business is in the virtual realm doesn’t mean it can’t secure a small business loan, especially if the plan is well thought out.

The great thing about launching an online business is that slow growth is rewarded. You can register your domain and start out slowly building momentum while consistently investing spare time as you continue working in the “real world.”

Then, whenever you’re ready, you can dedicate yourself fulltime to your online efforts and leave the comfort of a full-time career outside of the home. It may seem scary at first, but as you start seeing results, you’ll find the payoff is worth the careful planning that you put in.

You may not know this, but every time you register a new domain, you don’t necessarily need to buy hosting services to go with it. What registrars don’t tell you is that if you have plenty of space available on your original hosting account, then your other domains can share it.

You might want to launch five mini sites with information products – each with their own domain name. Although web hosting is relatively inexpensive in most cases, it adds up and multiple accounts are often unnecessary.

For instance, if you register a domain name at Godaddy and buy web hosting services for it, you don’t have to buy hosting the second, third, fourth, etc. times you register a domain. The only time you need to pay for more hosting is if you exceed your allotted bandwidth (caused by an excess of traffic) or storage space (the amount of data stored in your account).

Check to see how much bandwidth and space is available in your original hosting account. If you’re running out of either, check to see if your hosting company offers upgrades or add-ons to your account. That’s usually less expensive than a second hosting account.

If there’s room to spare, then you might want to use a parked domain, subdomain, or add-on domain. A subdomain is part of a larger domain, delineated by a dot, such asnewsletter.yourdomain.com, or a forward slash, such as yourdomain.com/newsletter. In this example, “newsletter” is the sub-domain, where yourdomain.com is the primary domain.

If your online empire has a steady growth, then you may want to employ  subdomains to separate the elements of your product line. Let’s say you own www.WebDesign.com. A sub-domain of that primary domain name might be www.Hosting.WebDesign.com or www.Graphics.WebDesign.com. You’re just dividing the primary domain name up into different categories.

You can also create it this way: www.WebDesign.com/Hosting – it doesn’t matter if the sub-directory comes before or after the primary domain name. You’ve probably seen this all the time and didn’t think anything of it. Yahoo uses it for separating their categories, like music.yahoo.com or news.yahoo.com.

You may have a primary domain with subdirectories to house your online courses, newsletters, and articles. You could register a domain for the newsletter and park it so that it points to the directory within your site. For example, if you owned the domain mynetbusiness.com and you bought mynetnewsletters.com, you could park the mynetnewsletters.com domain and point it to the sub-domain of ,newsletters.mynetbusiness.com.When someone visits mynetnewsletters.com they are immediately taken to newsletters.mynetbusiness.com.

That way, your newsletter gets branded with its own domain name, but it still shares hosting with the original site. Many affiliate marketers use this strategy to cloak their hyperlinks to other affiliate websites to avoid having their commissions stolen. Some consumers are turned off buying from affiliates, so sending them to a unique domain is helpful so they don’t bypass your link.

For example, using the domains above, if you are promoting a company’s web hosting as an affiliate, you might set up a sub-domain on your site of hosting.mynetbusiness.com and have it point to your affiliate URL with the hosting company.

A parked domain means that you buy all the versions of your most popular domains to keep others from stealing traffic that’s rightfully yours. For instance, let’s say you go to GoDaddy.com and register Site123.com.

You also register Site123.net, Site123.biz, and Site123.org so that nobody else can buy these domains and capitalize on a consumer’s error in typing the wrong domain extension. You don’t need to actually put a website on those extra  domains. Just “park” them on your existing hosting account and just have them redirect (or “point”) to your primary site at the dot com address.

An add-on domain is a new domain name that you set up to point to a sub-directory of your primary domain. If you own www.MySite123.com and you also own www.My-Site123.com, then you can make the second one an addon to your original domain.

When a web user types in the My- Site.com address, they’ll be redirected without them knowing it, to a web folder on MySite.com, but their browser won’t display the new address. When you set up an add-on domain, you get the advantage of a cgi-bin and the statistics you need to evaluate traffic to that domain.

Always remember to ask your current host if any of these options are available to help you reduce the cost of doing business online. Some companies will charge a one-time fee to set up your addon domains. Some charge nothing, and others charge a monthly fee. Steer clear of those charging you on an on-going basis when you could get a better deal elsewhere.

Just remember that once you have a hosting account, you can maximize its use before you either upgrade to a larger server with more bandwidth or buy another hosting account. Don’t get sucked into the notion that for every domain you register, separate hosting is a requirement.

If you’re shopping for Ecommerce web hosting services make sure to check out VodaHost. They probably have the best offer available today. On top of the quality hosting they offer you also get an award winning website builder(this one’s realy amazing) and the recently introduced Soholaunch eCommerce Builder.