In my last article “Start Successful Blog: Content Writing – Step 2” I discussed how you can generate ideas to keep writing and keeping your readers come back for more. Today, we will talk about what blogging platform is right for you.

One of the most important aspects of blogging is the platform. There are many blogging platforms available out there. Most free and few have fees attached to them. This article will focus primarily on the free platforms, because unless you’re planning on running a newspaper type of website you shouldn’t be paying a dime for the platform. In this day and age, free is as good, if not better, than paid services and products.

The two widely used blogging platforms are Blogger (by Google) and WordPress. Yes, you might have heard of others or you’re already using something else, but these two the most commonly used platforms on the internet. Plus, I use and love both. We will start with Blogger as it is an excellent first step into the Blogosphere.

Blogger

If you’re new to blogging and the whole online thing, Blogger would be an excellent choice for you to make that first leap into blogging. The main advantage of Blogger is Google, everyone knows and loves Google. This means that Google hosts and maintains Blogger. This is the primary benefit of a hosted blogging platform, it eliminates technical knowledge and skills required to maintain it. All you have to do, is make it look pretty and write, write, write. Also, another advantage of using Blogger is the easy integration with other Google services, if you’re using them (which you should!). Plus, you can extend its functionality with plethora of gadgets (extensions/plugins). The last benefit of Blogger is the easy to use, user-friendly interface. While having major advantages, hosted blogging platforms do have disadvantages that might not be suitable for your needs.

The major disadvantage is the lack of freedom to do what you want. If you want full control of your blog, hosted blog is not a way to go. You don’t get access to the “insides”, meaning you can’t make any changes to the files that run your blog. The next disadvantage is the limited layout and appearance settings. Sure they give you a lot of control of how you want your layout to appear, but that control spans from left or right column. The themes (appearance) are limited, too. The last limitation that I want to mention is user agreement. It might not be limitation to most, but I did want to mention that you do have to follow Google’s agreement. Some people might not like that, but that’s very rare.

WordPress

Before getting deep into discussion about Wordpress (WP), I want to mention that WP offers hosted service (free) on WordPress.com, which does offer more freedom than Blogger but I will stick with Blogger as my choice for hosted blogging platform.

WP is the free, open-source blogging platform that is very good at what it does. This website is hosted by WP. The main advantage of hosting your own blog is the disadvantage of the Blogger discussed above, having the freedom to alter code as much as you like. Whatever you want, you can do it or at least find someone who can. Even though WP is free, the people behind it are very good at what they do, updates a always on the horizon with new or improved features. A big advantage of using WP is the huge selection of plugins and themes. Plugins extend your blog’s functionality, and you can find a plugin for anything pretty much these days. Majority of them are free, but you can find some more advanced plugins that have a price. These plugins are developed by third parties, so they have a choice to offer it for free or charge. But, as I said, I’m yet to find a plugin that does what I need and I need to pay for it. I can always find a free plugin that does the job, but a good way to thank developers is either promote it on your blog or make a donation. The same applies to themes; WP community has thousands of free themes to choose from, and of course paid ones if you need more. You will definitely find a theme that works for you!

Looking at the disadvantages, the major one is the maintenance associated with it. You are hosting your own blog that means you have to learn how to run it from the technical perspective. Also, hosting your own blog means that you will have to pay for hosting service – unlike Blogger, which has no fees associated with it whatsoever.

I want to mention few things that apply to both platforms. The first one is custom domain. You can have your own custom domain in both, that’s not a limitation. The next thing is support. The support for both is pretty much the same, they offer support forum where you can get help from the community. It takes time and sometimes a bit frustrating, but it’s free. One important thing that I want to mention is, with Blogger you can’t fix a bug. You need to wait on Google to fix it; while on the other hand, your own blog can be fixed when you have the answer. Sometimes it might take a while for Google to fix it, so I just want you to keep that in mind. It’s rare though.

Before choosing what platform you want to use get a piece of paper and a pen, jot down what your needs are, budget, and goals. Once you have that down, look over the pros and cons for both platforms and see which one aligns with your needs, budget, and goals.

Blogger is pretty self-explanatory once you sign up and begin to use it. So, the next article will focus on hosting your own WP. I will give you some good tips on how to optimize your WP installation to its fullest potential.

One of the most important and hardest aspects of maintaining a blog is to keep writing. Some people have a talent to keep writing, but a lot do have that writer’s block. When you write for your blog it’s very easy to get bored and skip a day or two – procrastinate. But it gets harder and harder to write the more you procrastinate. Eventually your blog becomes outdated without any fresh content. As I said in my first article in these series “Start Successful Blog: Brainstorming – Step 1”, you need to make a commitment.

2. Content Writing

When it comes down to writing you need to have stuff to write about, and sometimes it gets hard to know what to write about. This is where a lot of blogs fail.

You don’t want to start a blog with one post. That’s just not enough content for search engines and for your readers. You want to give them something to chew on. Before going live with your blog you should write at least 10 posts. You should change the date for each article to make it look like it was posted on different days. Your blog will have some good content for search engines to chew on and you readers will have more to read and brows through.

I want to discuss few ideas I’ve seen used all over the internet when it comes to writing content for your blog. It’s up to you to decide which one works for you and which doesn’t. Whatever you do DON’T PLAGIARIZE. For one, you will get caught; and two, it’s just unethical and you will face consequences. Plus, people like to read some original content.

Tips and Tricks

Some good articles that people like to read are tips and tricks on a specific topic. If you know some for the topic you’re writing than write about it. But don’t jam everything into one article, spread it out a bit. One trick or tip per article, then use some examples, stories, images, etc. to make your article longer. Articles don’t have to be long, a good article can have 4-5 paragraphs with 8-12 sentences each. Extremely long articles are hard to scroll and read through sometimes. If you do plan on writing a long article than think of a way to break it down into series of articles, this will be great for SEO and monetization when it comes down to that.

RSS Feeds

A good idea is to find a good RSS reader and start subscribing to sites and blogs that are related to your topic. This gives you a good flow of information in your industry. It gives you a great opportunity to write articles for your blog based on what others are writing, which gives you a better chance to be discovered through search engines.

When you see something in a feed that you like you have two options: 1. write a response to that article, citing it and linking to it. 2. Write your own article about what the other article is talking about, but do cite the original article and link to it. Give credit to the author. It helps establish your credibility, which will increase your chances of getting cited and linked to in other blogs; and get more readers.

Reviews

Another good source of inspiration can be found in reviewing. You can review practically everything, products, services, other websites, movies, albums, people, events, etc. This is a good way to draw traffic. Identify hot topics that people are searching for and see if you can write a review for whatever that is. This also applies to all other topics, try to write about hot topics and trends to generate traffic for your blog.

Write about hot topics and trends to generate traffic for your blog

Sponsored Articles

This is a sensitive topic. A lot of people feel that writing sponsored articles is unethical, especially when you write reviews about products of your sponsor. A good way to approach this is by writing articles that talk about services and products casually, you don’t have to endorse them unless you like them. Plus, usually you have to mention that the article was sponsored by XYZ business. If you’re interested in making money on writing sponsored articles a good resource is PayPerPost.com

Interviews

Why not interview somebody? Interviews are a good way to make connections and establish your credibility. You don’t have to meet face-to-face for an interview. In this day and age emails work just fine. People you interview don’t have to be celebrities, find small business owners or other bloggers. Sharing knowledge is very important. Most bloggers will love being interviewed; it gives them another opportunity to promote their blog and share their knowledge. One day you will be interviewed as well, who knows. Just keep interviews short, maybe 10 questions tops. Concise, to the point interviews help readers stay focused and interested. They will love it and will come back for more.

You are free to write about whatever you want. These are few ideas that might help you generate meaningful content for your blog if you ever get stuck, or when you’re planning on starting your own blog. Feel free to share your ideas and comments below.

Next time I’ll talk about setting up your blog for success, where I will talk about what platform is right for you.

Before I get anywhere further I want to tell you one thing. I like being honest. Blogging is about patience, especially if you want to make money on blogging. Patience is the most important virtue in this business. Not many people will tell you this, for the simple fact that it’s hard to sell it. Frankly, I hate waiting for things to happen. However, I bite my lip and wait.

I figured I will write this article to give you something easy to understand, something that will actually help you look at blogging in a different way. Hopefully, this will help you start a very successful blog; or if you already have one and looking to improve this will give you some good pointers.

In order to facilitate understanding and flow of information I’ve decided to keep this to a 3 step process. This will help you get your own blog off the ground, but it will not cover monetization – making money. This will be another article, devoted to turning your blog into money-making machine. For now, let’s keep it simple and get you started.

1. The Brainstorming

Before you jump to the actual blog you need to take a step back and look at the big picture. What in the world are you going to blog about? Even if you already think you know what you will talk about, keep reading you’re not done. The bottom line is that you have to find your niche in order to maximize your profits later. If you’re planning on keeping a personal journal type of blog, it’s all fine and dandy, but unless your life is full of exciting adventures people won’t be interested. But, you can always prove me wrong. You have to find your niche, a focused set of topics. It’s not as hard as you think it might be. This is where the brainstorming comes into play. Let’s do this together. Get a piece of paper. No, don’t just brush me off. Go and get one!

We will make a table with several columns. Here are some general headings for the columns: Hobbies, Jobs, Interests, and Like to learn. You can always add more columns if you have a criteria that applies to you. But for the sake of the article, we’ll stick with those 4.

Hobbies – this basically includes anything that takes up a good portion of your weekly life, after work. This is where you can list stuff like video games, collecting stamps, collecting dolls, grooming your pets (if you enjoy it). Basically anything that takes up your time and you enjoy it.

Interests – this is something I would consider below hobbies. You are interested in a specific thing, but you rarely get to do it. Something like traveling, vineyards, yoga class, etc. Don’t worry, there’s no right or wrong. You can stick one in hobbies or interests, it won’t hurt you.

Jobs – well, this one is pretty self-explanatory. Don’t just list your current job, list all past jobs since high school and any future jobs (if any), too.

Like to learn – this is a broad category, so try to limit it to about 10 items. This can be anything, no restrictions.

Consider this list a map, a map to effective blogging. What you need to do now is begin looking at the things you have listed. Keep in mind few questions while examining your list:

• What makes me happy the most?
• What am I most passionate about?
• What am I most knowledgeable about?

Begin circling items as you think about these questions. See if you can tie items from different columns together. For example, you’re support specialist with video games as one of your hobbies and you want to learn how to create games. Well, you can tie these in into a possible blog about resolving technical issues dealing with video games, tell people what to ask and tell support specialist when they call with problems, talk about new games coming out, begin reading about how games are created, and write about your experience learning about it. Your niche would be video games, but as I said it’s a set of focused topics – support, game creation, news, etc.

Here’s a good advice, once you think you’ve found your niche – sleep on it. Just give it another day, another thought, and see what you think about it in the morning.

Not many folks will tell you this, but I will. In the beginning you get excited about a topic, create a blog and start writing. After 3-5 articles, you begin to think what you should write about. After 6-8 articles, your life begins to nag and you want to write something but that new movies looks so good, so you’re out watching it. Next thing you know it’s been a week since you’ve posted; a month; two months. You need to think long term before you begin blogging. Can you commit to writing? A good blog should have 3-5 postings a week. You need fresh content, so readers will come back for more. This ties in directly into monetization, which we’ll talk about later. It will happen; you will have days when you don’t want to write. But to be successful you have to overcome it. When you get lazy and stop working at work you will get fired, same exact principle applies here. You will lose your income if you let your blog become outdated and static. It’s a serious business, so you have to be serious… and you’ll have plenty of fun.

Next article will be Step 2, about generating content for your blog. You need to have some content before you start your blog so search engines and readers can chew on something. Feel free to subscribe to my feed, that way you’ll be notified when my next article is out.

Keep in mind – patience is virtue in blogging.

We want to make your web experience easy, free of clutter, and as simple as possible. Simple, usually, is the best. This is why we decided to create a very simple and elegant url shortening service (as they call it), but we prefer “link shortification”. Why? Because we shortify your links, that’s what we do at VXI.ME. We thought it might be neat to create our own words for this.

• Shortification (n) – a process of compressing something extremely long into some extremely small.
• to shortify (v) – to make short

Ahh, we know, we need to get a life. Anyways. VXI.ME is a very simple process, we even minimized distractions in the page design. It is a very smooth process. No pages to reload, no logins, no flashing “in your face” ads. Just simple link shortification.

What are the benefits of VXI.ME?

• Simple, non-distracting interface
• Built with AJAX. No need to reload pages, gives you short url within fraction of a second
• Very short url, shorter than TinyURL. Here’s an example url:
• No logins or signups
• We offer very simple click tracking (If you need comprehensive link tracking we are not scared to recommend bit.ly, they are good at what they do)
• If you lose your short url, you can come back and get it back without making a new one. Unless you cleared all urls.
• We offer bookmarklet, that you can add to your browser and just hit it when you want to shortify a link. It’ll do the rest.
• You can customize your url to whatever you like.
• And the best part, it’s free. No charge for anything.

VXI.ME is an awesome, small tool that will make your life easier. Especially if you’re trying to tweet and you need something short, every character counts in Twitter.

Also, it’s a great tool for hiding your affiliate links. Yes, people don’t like clicking those long, weird affiliate links. But hey, it’s marketing and people are just trying to make ends meet. It’s an income, just like going to work. So take that nasty affiliate link and customize it into something pretty, something clickable.

We really hope you will like it and use it. It’s not about money for us, it’s about making life easier for everyone. So go, check out our new, free link shortification service – VXI.ME

Web Hosting

Caleer offers top of the line web hosting with an incredible features that include:

• FREE $50 Yahoo Credit
• Unlimited Disk Space
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You have a pick between Linux and Windows servers, you decide what’s best for you. For only $8.45 a month, you will get this and many, many more features. It’s the ultimate hosting plan.

Domain Registration

Over 40 domain extension! Why not take your business international and buy EU, ASIA, IN, or CN domain names. All at an affordable rate. Check out full list of domain extensions available and see which ones are on sale now. To top that, Celeer offers 7 free services with every domain name purchase. You’ll be glad you purchased your domain from Celeer, those services will come in handy!

Digital Certificates

Celeer offers 4 different SSL Thawte Certificates to help you protect your business and your customers.  Thawte certificates are the most reliable on the market, they were first to offer digital certificates in the early days of the world wide web.  You’re getting the most reliable solution out there just because we think you deserve the best.

Create a Steady Stream of Clients for your Virtual Assistant Business!

Learn how doing ten simple things every week can BRING YOU CLIENTS.

Isn’t it time you had a system for attracting new clients into your business?

Led by Jason Economides, an expert in sales and marketing, in two 1½ -hour kickoff teleseminars you will learn the universal principles of the marketing cycle, and you’ll design a marketing plan specifically tailored to your business and to your personal style and strengths.

Following up on these two seminars are five group telephone coaching sessions that will give you the support, structure and accountability to convert your plan into daily marketing activities. You’ll see those activities become habits and watch your marketing proficiency soar!

“Get Clients Now! Not only tells you the absolute truth about landing new clients but also can transform you from a marketing amateur into a marketing genius The beauty of its wisdom will be reflected in the beauty of your bottom line.”
- Jay Conrad Levinson -Author, Guerrilla Marketing series of books

What You Will Learn

• a system for evaluating what really works in marketing a Virtual Assistant business, and what doesn’t – and why
• a tool kit of proven strategies and tactics
• a road map for your own on-going marketing activities
• the means to discover what’s been blocking the success of your marketing efforts
• a list of 10 daily marketing activities that will bring you all the clients you need

What You Will Get

• a flexible system that adapts to the standards and culture of your particular business
• a relationship-based approach…no “hard sell” tactics
• a tool kit of tested techniques
• a marketing strategy that reflects your personal style and preferences
• a marketing plan that can be used over and over, incorporating new directions or priorities as they arise
• the accountability, perspective and support of group coaching to lock in your learning

Here’s what you will get with your enrollment:

• the principles of the universal marketing cycle
• a tool kit of tested marketing techniques
• your own customized marketing plan that you can use over and over
• the opportunity to lock in your learning with two 1½ hour training sessions plus five weekly 45 minute sessions of follow up group coaching
• the structure, encouragement and accountability needed to achieve your goals
• the opportunity to test drive your marketing plan and make necessary alterations
• the opportunity to troubleshoot obstacles and find solutions

“If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours” -
Henry David Thoreau

WHAT PEOPLE SAY ABOUT THE PROGRAM…

I have just completed working theGet Clients Now! program… I got four new clients, lined up five workshops and two speaking engagements, and had an article written about me in the local paper!”
Tifin Kutch
– Life Coach

“…the program is already helping me. Just writing out a plan makes a big difference. Of course a marketing consultant like myself knows that, but recommending it to a client and actually doing it yourself are two very different things.”
Ramona Rea
– Marketing Consultant

“This is my first week… and already I have scheduled speaking at several events and a potential client.”
Paul Metheney
– Internet/Multimedia Consultant

“It’s a perfect way to get in gear… a formula that is right on and uncovers every aspect that needs attention…”
Josiane Feigon
– Telemarketing Trainer Coach

“…shows you all the proven ways of marketing one’s business, and helps you figure out which of these apply to you. It made clear to me exactly what I should be doing — no more guessing.”
Karen Frishman
– Marketing Consultant

“Get Clients Now! gave me concrete answers to setting up a system that would work… I found a way to harness the leads I had and creatively pursue others.”
Judy Foley
– Dating Service Owner

Course Schedule
For the November-December 2009 course, the course takes place on the following days starting at 6.30pm. (All sessions are recorded and available for download and playback at your leisure, so if you miss a session because an urgent work commitment comes up, don’t worry you can still catch up.)

Kickoff sessions: (90 mins each)

• 3 November (Essential and Full Course Delegates)
• 10 November (Essential and Full Course Delegates)

Coaching Sessions: (45-60 mins each depending on course numbers)

• 17 November (Essential and Full Course Delegates)
• 24 November (Full Course Delegates only)
• 1 December (Full Course Delegates only)
• 8 December (Full Course Delegates only)

plus bonus:
15 December (Full Course Delegates only)

MORE ABOUT THE COURSE
The Get Clients NOW! program is designed to assist you in creating your own, customised, simple marketing plan, where you will regularly do 10 things every day to get you all the clients that you could ever need.

You offer a service that is of huge value to your clients – what are you doing currently to reach out to new prospects, and even to existing clients who are in great need of what you have to offer? The Get Clients NOW! program is designed to get you more business from prospects, existing and previous clients.

If you have any questions, or would like to meet up to see if this course is for you, please let me know and I’ll be happy to speak with you.
There are a maximum of 16 places per course, so it is an intimate and focussed 6-7 week business development training course with in-built professional coaching sessions.

Discounts are available for 2 or more tickets, just get in touch with me to discuss this.
Please note, this is a public programme. If you have your own sales force, consultants, team of relationship managers etc, then an in-house programme may be more appropriate for you. Please get in touch with me to discuss a tailored marketing training/coaching solution for your business.
100% RISK-FREE – MONEY BACK GUARANTEE
I am so convinced that this course will give you valuable knowledge, resources and most importantly a real tangible Return On Investment (this isn’t a motivational seminar, you will learn real methods, and create a real living and breathing marketing strategy for your business), that if you are not 100% satisfied, you can ask for your money back at anytime during the course, no questions asked.

CHECK IT OUT!

—-

This workshop is definitely worth it. You will learn how to create your own VA business and be successful. Check it out!

One of the biggest concerns and challenges for anyone who is trying to promote their website, be it business website or personal blog, is search engine optimization (SEO). Everyone wants to show up at the top of the search results. That’s where most surfers look for their answers as they ad deemed relevant by the search engine to the surfer’s search query. Before getting into the good part and the reason you’re reading this article I want to make a personal note about search engines. They are robots and they don’t always know what they are doing. I frequently find myself on page 15, 23, 34, etc. to find exactly what I’m looking for. Just because a website did a better job of SEO optimization doesn’t really mean it will be exactly what you’re looking for. Anyways, back on track with intended program.

SEO helps you be more visible in search results

Briefly, SEO optimization is making your site appear at the top of the searches for specific keywords. It’s a free way to promote your website. Yes, it’s free. The money spent on SEO is not spent on the service itself, it is spent on consultants, webmasters, and software to make it work. So, if you’re a real estate firm located in San Diego, CA you would show up as number one search result if someone searched for “real estate San Diego” – in an ideal world. But that’s not always the case because there are a lot of real estate firms in San Diego, this means you have to stand out among the crowd for search engines to notice you, and call on you when someone needs you.There are a lot of different strategies on how to optimize your website. In this article I concentrate on the insides of your site and how to make them look attractive enough for the search engines to notice it.

The first plugin is called All in One SEO Pack.  It is definitely pretty impressive pack of features that helps you a lot. It is easy to configure and implement. It can help you remove duplicate content, auto-detect keywords, help you with titles, and descriptions. I like it and use it. It gives me an ability to add custom description, title, and keywords to each new post I make, which gives me greater flexibility to manage what surfers will see in their searches. It helps you personalize what search engine sees and indexes, which gives you some control over your search engine marketing.

The next plugin is Google Integration Kit. It’s a sweet plugin that makes life a whole lot easier. It doesn’t really optimize your website. It optimizes your workflow with Google tools, which are very important to SEM. First, it makes it easy to verify your website on Google Webmaster Tools website. This is where Google magic happens and you can have some control over it. You can control crawl rate, submit sitemap, review crawl statistics, get alerted when you have broken links, and much more. This is where you keep your site in an excellent condition for Google to like it. Next, it makes it easy to integrate Google Analytics into your blog. Analytics provide detail reports on visitors to your blog, referral urls, search terms, geographic location, etc. Plus, it helps you with adWord campaign tracking, whenever you get to it. Lastly, if you plan on using AdSense (which you should) this kit optimizes your blog content to help Google provide relevant ads. It places special tags before and after posts and comments to help Google identify content. Also, everything is customizable so you can turn it on and off as you please. The reason I’m including this tool in this article is because without a way to track your marketing results how will you know if it works? Plus, it helps you mold your marketing strategy based on statistics you receive. And, with Webmaster Tools you get some control over Google search engine.

The third plugin is related to the second plugin. It is Google XML Sitemap. I want to note right now that this sitemap plugin does not generate visual sitemap that you can use as a page on your blog. No, this plug in generates XML-Sitemap compliant sitemap that is used by Google, Yahoo, Ask, and MSN/Bing. The awesome feature that it offers is automatic ping. This means it will notify above services whenever you add new content. This is where Google Webmaster Tools and second plugin come into play. You should submit your sitemap on Webmaster Tool website anyways. The main reason for this is link verification. When plugin notifies search engines it tells them, “Hey, I got new content.” It doesn’t tell them if all links are good. When you submit your sitemap to Webmaster Tools it verifies links and alerts you when something is wrong. Sitemaps help search engine crawlers index your blog by going to the links you provide in that file, think of it as a road map with places crawler needs to visit. When sitemaps are generated automatically it saves you a lot of time and helps you get better results in searches.

With the right tools you can take your website to the top of search results, but don’t forget: you still have to provide rich content for search engines and people to munch on! At Viktorix Innovative we install these plugins whenever we install WordPress for a client and optimize entire blog to help it kick search engines’ butts right from the beginning.

Good resource to check out is Patrick Gavin’s blog. He has some good SEO tips. Also, an excellent SEO article is 55 Quick SEO Tips Even Your Mother Would Love.

Just remember this when it comes to marketing and advertising:

For a business not to advertise is like winking at a girl in the dark. You know what you are doing but no one else does
- Stuart H. Britt, US advertising consultant

Email marketing newsletters can be very effective if implemented correctly

How can you spend less but get more in marketing? In this turbulent economy everyone is trying to find different ways to cut their expenses while maximizing their profits. Frankly, economy doesn’t have to be bad for anyone to try to do that. That’s the basic principle of money-making. Marketing is one of the most important aspects that should not be dismissed. You have to spend money to make money, but that doesn’t mean you have to spend a lot. There is very affordable, yet extremely effective way of marketing yourself and your business.Online newsletter is one of the most effective marketing strategies out there, BUT it has to be done correctly to propel your business to the new heights. You don’t want to rape your customer’s or client’s inbox; online newsletter should be a gentle and passionate kiss to make them want and come for more to you.  Let’s take a quick look at how you can ensure your online newsletter campaign is doing you more good than bad, plus I hope you’ll learn a tip or two on how to improve it.

Before going anywhere, I want to mention few things about platforms used to send out newsletters. Yes, there are free newsletter scripts that you can use if you own your own website. They are open source, developed by volunteer contributors. It saves you money in the short term, but if you look at the big picture it might not be beneficial for your business. It might be a better option for personal, blog use but definitely not for business use. Here’s why I think businesses will definitely hurt themselves, at least the small ones – big ones got enough resources to do it. First, with increasing concerns about spam a lot of ISPs and email providers create blacklists that do mark legitimate emails as spam from time to time. Yes, you can try negotiating with these large corporations to be added to their whitelist, but it is highly unlikely that they will add you – not because they are large corporations trying to hurt little people, but because they have to keep their own customers and clients happy and secure, so they can’t trust everyone. Second, you offer very little to no support from free newsletter script and sometimes it takes time to get replies on support forums that some of them offer. In business, you cannot afford wait several weeks to get newsletter working – you have to stay on schedule.

When it comes to paid services, such as iContact (our preferred, inexpensive newsletter service), you are not only paying for the features and service but you are also paying for the relationships that they established with ISPs and email providers. This means higher deliverability of your newsletter, which in turn increases your marketing dollars and helps turn subscribers into loyal, returning customers. Plus, unlike with free scripts you get an abundance of awesome features that save you time and money in the long run. Oh yes, and quality support!

I would highly recommend you read free whitepaper offered by iContact, which was written by their CEO Ryan P. M. Allis, Best Practices for Email Marketing (PDF file). It’s full of tips and information to make your email marketing campaign successful.

Few things you want to consider are schedule, contents, and subscriptions.

You have to create some sort of schedule for your newsletter, be it a daily, weekly, monthly, or whatever suits your needs newsletter. The frequency of your newsletter is directly tied to the contents. You can’t send daily newsletter when it’s always the same information and it doesn’t provide any value to your subscribers. When you do send one out, you should include some sort of incentives to come visit your site and maybe even purchase something. You wouldn’t go fishing with an empty hook, would you? You need some sort of bait to get fish. This is true with newsletters, you need to create urge of action in your subscriber; an action to go to your site and buy your product or service now, not later, now! Otherwise they will hit delete, and move on.

When you know how often you will send your newsletter out and what will be in it, you are ready to begin collecting subscribers. There are several ways of doing it. The easiest way is to place subscription form on your website. Viktorix Innovative can help you not only setup newsletter service we will also help integrate subscription form on your website. Hell, we can help you create basic business website if you don’t have one. Also, if you have a real store where you interact with customers, you should definitely have sign up form visible. Here’s a quick form you can print for your store, it’s very generic and gives you an idea of what you should have at your store. Don’t forget, incite action! Have a banner or poster tell customers why they need to sign up for your newsletter, provide incentive.

One last important note about newsletters: you need permission to send out newsletters to people. Don’t go out and buy some list that can hurt your business and reputation when people begin to complaint and report you for spamming. When you use service such as iContact, people voluntarily sign  up for your newsletter giving you permission to send them your newsletter – that’s the way to go! Just because someone gives you their business card or emails you with a question, does NOT mean you should automatically add them to your newsletter. Some people think that’s the case. No, that’s spamming! Ask them for permission, otherwise it might come back and bite you pretty good.

All in all, enjoy your newsletter and offer your subscribers something that will incite action to visit your website.

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