Wes Edholm
Campaign Manager at Pillar Marketing Inc

I have had negative experiences with the following website backup solution providers:

DropmySite.com Review – These guys have very attractive pricing however it is expensive if it doesn’t work. I gave the trial a try and immediately ran into a problem where I was unable to restore a folder that contained 1000 pictures. At the time of this writing may also did not offer direct database restore. I emailed their tech support a couple different times about the issue and have yet to receive a response after three or four days. Substandard performance and not trustworthy in my opinion.

ComCure.com Review – These guys also have very attractive pricing… In the beginning I had a good experience with this outfit… However as time went on I ran into issues backing up and restoring my websites and databases. Issues like: not being able to log into the dashboard, slow tech support response time (  multiple days  ), databases reporting as being backed up but not being backed up, websites reporting as being backed up but not being backed up, and other oddities. So I had to go through and change all of my passwords for all of my websites and fight with them about my last invoice where they were trying to charge me even though my websites were not being backed up. See my previous post on Comcure Backup Solutions

Searching for: Dynamic outlook signatures rss feed

http://www.exclaimer.com/..  Expensive corporate solution. Looks like it would work; but only available for 10 or more users… no individual license available.

http://redwax.wordpress.com/2007/04/12/dynamically-changing-the-contents-of-e-mail-signature-using-rss-feeds-in-c/ – If your good with C# this might be an option. From 2007.

After finding no solutions and just a bunch of spammy sites I had an idea…. I remembered that the signature data is actually held in txt, rtf, and html documents …. so I thought if I could have an external bit of software to process the rss feeds and spit them into my signature template then I would be in business!

So I searched for: outlook email signature html file location and found where my signatures were stored… : C:\Users\Wes\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Signatures . So I’m on to something here… now I just need that external bit of software to do the auto updating and feed option configuring. I’ll keep you posted!

Update: I think I am finally dumping Outlook and switching to Gmail… There were a few reasons why I was holding out… One of them was the ability to paste screenshots directly from you my clipboard into an email message which is something that Gmail just recently supported (  as long as you’re using the Google browser  ). So I started looking for ways to get RSS feed headlines into my Gmail email signature… Turns out there is a company called WiseStamp that almost does what I want… It falls short in that it only will include the latest blog post link and does not support adding more than that. So I am continuing my search.

April 22nd Update: I found a solution to get my multiple blog headlines into my Gmail signature ( also works with other mail clients ) … it’s called http://www.brandmymail.com/. 100 emails a month is free… $30 a year for unlimited… watch my video here:

Wes Edholm

how much bang are we getting for our buck?  Last year we paid $1000 for the advertisement and got 700 visitors from it… the year before we got 1400 visitors from it.  While the annual price is the same the “cost per visitor” has doubled. Of course what really matters is the “cost per acquisition” of a customer. Yes, we are rambling now.  The point is that dealing with annual fixed-price contracts where you pre-pay opens you up to potential issues.

Why is pay per click advertising a better option?  Answer: Basically everything that sounded inconvenient or negative in the above paragraph does not exist with pay per click advertising.

So is it safe to sign up for all pay per click advertising? Answer: I recommend you “test the waters” with anyone who calls up with a cost per click offering. After your listing is live you will immediately be able to see visitors arriving on your website in your Google Analytics reports.  You only need to see a hundred or so visitors to determine if it is going to be worthwhile. Just compare metrics like time on site, bounce rate, and goal conversions with your existing campaigns you know are working well.

Sept 2014 Update: I found a new tool that makes contracts easy; no printing, mailing, faxing necessary! Checkout www.echosign.com.

The tool gives you some suggestions on things to fix… I spent a couple hours fixing things and am happy to report that I now have a perfect 10 of 10 score!

Above: Look at that. All green check marks!

Below: My new score is a perfect 10 of 10. Now my email will be delivered to the inbox and not the spam box.

FYI, I wrote this post from the sofa area of the bean cafe in Friday Harbor. All Friday Harbor coffee shops should have a corner sofa area for those of us who like to hang around for hours on end!

If your not a coffee fan then you might find these restaurants in Friday Harbor a better option. Or if your on Orcas Island checkout this page on Orcas Island coffee shops.

The Bean Cafe in Friday Harbor is right next to the ferry landing. They have free wifi and plenty of wall outlets available. They also have magazines and some board games.  Feel free to get in touch with me if you’d like some help with your email.

Visit www.SanJuanSites.com to see it in action.

Ad from Hotels.com on my Facebook Timeline for hotels in Union City, CA.

It looks like something I’ll be experimenting with myself shortly for a couple clients. I’ll let you know how it goes! We’ve tried Google’s Remarkting before without much luck… very low conversions. I’d guess these timeline ads would also deliver quite low quality conversion ratios.  Time will tell.

The aweber “drag and drop” tool

Aweber.com has had their newsletter sending service for many years but they have recently made some improvements that make the process of sending a newsletter actually enjoyable.  Their new “drag and drop” format makes it easy to build something that looks great in no time at all. My favorite drag and drop widget is the “article” … it drops editable placeholders for the title, description, image, and link. Just click on any of those items to add in your info and photo and link. Once that is done drag and drop another “article” to enrich your newsletter.

I just whipped up and sent out a newsletter ( actually I scheduled it to go out tomorrow morning at 7 a.m.  fully recommend AWeber.com for newsletter sending!

http://www.Aweber.com