But, after you’ve delivered that first bit of information to your prospect, do you send him any further information?

If you are like most businesses, you don’t.

When you don’t follow that initial message with additional information later on, you let a valuable prospect slip from your grasp! This is a potential customer who may have been very interested in your products, but who lost your contact information, or was too busy to make a purchase when your first message reached him.

Often, a prospect will purposely put off making a purchase, to see if you find him important enough to follow up with later. When he doesn’t receive a follow up message from you, he will take his business elsewhere.

Are you losing profits due to inconsistent and ineffective follow up?

Following up with leads is more than just a process – it’s an art. In order to be effective, you need to design a follow up system, and stick to it, EVERY DAY! If you don’t follow up with your prospects consistently, INDIVIDUALLY, and in a timely fashion, then you might as well forget the whole follow up process.

Consistent follow up gets results!

When I first started marketing and following up with prospects, I used a follow up method that I now call the “List Technique.” I had a large database containing the names and e-mail addresses of people who had specifically requested information about my products and services. These prospects had already received my first letter by the time they requested more information, so I used the company’s latest news as a follow up piece.

I would write follow up newsletters every now and then, and send them, in one mass mailing, to everyone who had previously requested information from me. While this probably did help me win a few additional orders, it wasn’t a very good follow up method. Why isn’t the “List Technique” very effective?

• The List Technique isn’t consistent. Proponents of the List Technique tend to only send out follow up messages when their companies have “big news”.
• List Technique messages don’t give the potential customer any additional information about the product or service in question. He can’t make a more informed buying decision after receiving a newsletter! If someone is wondering whether your company sells the best knick-knacks, what does he care that you’ve just moved your headquarters?
• List Technique messages convey a “big list” mentality to your potential customers. When I used to write follow up messages using the List Technique, I was writing news bulletins to everyone I knew! I should have been sending a personal message to each individual who wanted to know more about my products.

What follow up method really works?

Following up with each lead individually, multiple times, but at set intervals, and with pre-written messages, will dramatically increase sales! Others who use this same technique confirm that they have all at least doubled the sales of various products! In order to set this system up, though, you need to do some planning.

First, you’ll need to develop your follow up messages. If you’ve been marketing on the Internet for any length of time, then you should already have a first informative letter. Your second letter marks the beginning of the follow up process, and should go into more detail than the first letter. Fill this letter with details that you didn’t have the space to add to the first letter. Stress the BENEFITS of your products or services!

Your next 2-3 follow up messages should be rather short. Include lists of the benefits and potential uses of your products and services. Write each letter so that your prospects can skim the contents, and still see the full force of your message.

The next couple of follow up messages should create a sense of urgency in your prospect’s mind. Make a special offer, giving him a reason to order NOW instead of waiting any longer. After reading these follow up messages, your prospect should want to order immediately!

Phrase each of your final 1 or 2 follow up messages in the form of a question. Ask your prospect why he hasn’t yet placed an order? Try to get him to actually respond. Ask if the price is to high, the product isn’t the right color or doesn’t have the right features, or if he is looking for something else entirely. (By this time, it’s unlikely that this person will order from you. However, his feedback can help you modify your follow up letters or products, so that other prospects will order from you.)

The timing of your follow up letters is just as important as their content. You don’t want one prospect to receive a follow up the day after he gets your initial informative letter, while another prospect waits weeks for a follow up!

Always send an initial, informative letter as soon as it is requested, and send the first follow up 24 hours afterwards. You want your hot prospects to have information quickly, so that they can make informed buying decisions!

Send the next 2-3 follow up messages between 1 and 3 days apart. Your prospect is still hot, and is probably still shopping around! Tell him about the benefits of your products and services, as opposed to your competitors’. You will make the sale!

Send the final follow up messages later on. You certainly don’t want to annoy your prospect! Make sure that these last letters are at least 4 days apart.

Following up effectively seems complicated, but it doesn’t have to be! So many potential customers are lost because of poor follow up – don’t you want to be one of the few to get it right?

I’m going to assume a few things before beginning: that you already understand the benefits of piping your emails from bluehost over to Gmail and that you already have your gmail and bluehost email accounts setup. With that out of the way let’s get into the details of how to make this happen.

Let’s handle the Bluehost side first.

• Go into your cPanel and down down the to mail section. Click on email forwarding
• Click on Add Forwarder
• Next screen in the Address section, enter the address that you will be forwarding in the Address to Forward field
• In the next section Destination, make sure the Forward to email address radio button is selected and enter your gmail address here
• Click the Add Forwarder button
• I would send a test email to the address you’re forwarding now and make sure that it makes it.

Now let’s handle the Gmail side
This is going to allow you to send mail from your gmail inbox, through your bluehost mail server. This way it will maintain all of your domain headers.

• Once logged into gmail go into Settings (top right)
• Go to Accounts and Import
• In the Send mail as section click on the Send mail from another address button
• This will pop up a new window. Enter the name you’d like displayed to others when you send from this address as well as the address of the bluehost email account.
• Click the Specify a different “reply-to” address and enter your bluehost account email again. Just to be clear, each address should be the same.
• Click Next Step
• On this step you decide if you’re going to send through your SMTP (bluehost) account or not. We’re going the SMTP route to maintain a more professional appearance. Select “Send through yourdomain.com SMTP servers.
• If you’re not using bluehost here then you will probably need to go to your account to find this information.
• For Bluehost enter
• SMTP Server: box###.bluehost.com (you can get the number by going into your cpanel >> email >> and clicking on the “more” off to the right of  the email account >> picking configure client >> and copying the line next to Outgoing Mail Server: (SSL) etc..  just make it look like what is in italics above with the right box number.
• Username: enter the full bluehost email address (test@yourdomain.com)
• Password: email password
• Check always use a secure connection
• Submit the information
• The last step will send a verification email to your bluehost email account. Just take the code that comes in that email and enter it into the field on the right and click “Verify”

A few final points. You can choose which account you want to be your default sending account in the Settings >> Accounts and Import section. Just click “make default next to your new address if you’d rather always send from it. At any time you can choose which address to send from though and here’s how.

When you are composing a new message look up at the very top. What’s different is that now you have two accounts you can select who you want the “from” field to be. Choose either.. EASY!

That’s it! I would send a few test messages back and forth just to make sure everything is working easily but there’s nothing more to it. Expect maybe a one minute delay as emails move from gmail, through your smtp and to your recipient.

In older versions of WordPress I believe this was easier, but here is how you can do it now.

1. Go into the WordPress admin panel then go to Pages.
2. Then hover over the page that you want to know the ID of.
3. You will see the ID in the status bar on the bottom of the browser (see below).  If you can’t see the full address try another way (further below).

1. Go into the WordPress admin panel then go to Pages.
2. Then you will see the ID in the address bar.  It will be the number after the equal sign.
3. Click on the page that you want to know the ID of.

That’s it!

Fatal error: Call to undefined function the_content_limit() in

After a bit of searching around I was able to locate a fix created by Alfonso Sanchez-Paus Diaz y Julian Simon de Castro. The fix generates a link to read the full content of a post if that post exceeds the set amount of content for your theme.

This is a fix it and forget it solution.  Many thanks to these guys for making it so easy.

To apply this fix:

1. Go to this page
2. Copy the content of the page
3. Open up notepad or your favorite text editor
4. Paste the copied content
5. FTP to your WordPress server and navigate to the wp-content/plugins directory
6. Transfer the file
7. Then go to the Plugins section of your WordPress Admin panel
8. Sort the ‘Inactive’ plugins and find the plugin titled “Limit Posts”
9. Click ‘Activate’… and you’re done!