Boris Recommends

An Email Service Provider is an online service that enables you to:

• manage your email contacts (clients, leads, subscribers, etc)
• create and send personalized email messages to each contact individually
• your contacts can change their own preferences: change their email address, unsubscribe from your list(s), subscribe to other lists, etc.
• track how many of your emails were sent, delivered, opened, bounced, and how many (and sometimes who) clicked on links in your emails
• and much more

I am still surprised at how many emails from business owners I receive which are clearly sent to a group of people, using desktop email programs, such as Outlook. The usual clues are using words such as: “Dear All,” or “Dear Friends”. Very often the person sending the “email blast” puts all the recipients in the TO: field and we all can see each other’s names and emails. This may be OK if it’s a small group of people who all know each other, such as members of your local hockey team, but when it comes to strangers, then this is a serious privacy issue.

If you find yourself sending emails to large groups of people, your best bet is to sign up with an Email Service Provider. They are easy to use and very low in cost, sometimes even free.

For the ultimate in ease of use, try MadMimi, I highly recommend this very affordable service. MadMimi has the most easy-to-use email creation wizard that anyone with basic computer skills should be able to use it with ease. MadMimi’s customer service is top notch, so if you ever get stuck you can chat with them online, or if after business hours, they will reply by email.

If your list of contacts is under 100, you can continue to use MadMimi for free, until you reach 100 subscribers.

Watch the video then come back to read these related blog posts:
MadMimi Brings the Fun Back to Sending Email “Blasts”
New Feature at MadMimi: Automatic Social Links

Today, March 1st, was designated WordPress Plugin Donation Day.

WordPress is the best blogging platform available, and one of the things that makes it so awesome as a tool for developing rich web sites are the plugins. If there’s anything you need you blog site to do and it’s not available in the base WordPress system, there’s a good chance that there’s a plugin available to extend the usability of WP for you.

Best of all, both WordPress itself and most of the plugins are FREE. Thousands of developers donate their time for fame and glory developing these little — and not so little — chunks of code to make our lives easier, so today is the day to give some love back.

I just donated to:

• Jodi Diehl for her WP-Testimonials plugin which helps me manage a few dozen testimonials I received from clients. Thanks Jodi!
• Arne Brachhold for Google XML Sitemaps plugin which, for example, alerts Google and other search engines as soon as I publish a new blog post.
• Michael Torbert for his WP Security Admin Tools and All in One SEO Pack plugins. The SEO plugin lets me control one of the most important aspects of creating a web page.

If you donate to your favourite plugin developer, please tweet about it using the #wppdd hash tag, and/or comment on this blog post.

I must admit I was a reluctant blogger. I knew if I started a blog I would have to publish on it regularly, and being already busy with publishing my award-winning ezine and working with clients, I thought I’d never be able to keep up.

Good thing I found the time!

Now I not only love it, but I recommend it to all my business contacts and especially my clients. As an Email Marketing Coach I love email marketing, which still delivers a great rate of return on investment, but I’m the first to say: Don’t put all your eggs in one basket! If you’re a solo professional, or small business owner, you must publish an email newsletter, have an auto-responder, write on your blog, have a Facebook profile, do live business networking, etc.

Here are just three reasons why I love blogging:

1. It allows me to reach a much wider audience than by just publishing an email newsletter. Blogs have built-in features that basically “push” my content to search engines and blog directories. This would be hard, if not impossible, to accomplish by a “web 1.0″ web site. My blog site now allows me to reach out to my audience in 3 different ways: using RSS, RSS feed delivered by email, and via ezine subscription. This enables my audience to get my articles the way they prefer.

2. Deciding to build my new web site using WordPress, enabled me to create what I call a blog site: a combination of a static, web 1.0 web site, with the power and versatility of the Web 2.0 blog. My blog site is now search engine optimized, and every time I hit “Publish”, soon after, Google, Yahoo! and dozens of other services get “pinged” and my content gets indexed immediately.

3. Having a blog has also enabled me to attract the right type of prospects. Before starting a blog, my whole web presence was a 1-page “squeeze page.” It served its purpose well — it created a lot of subscribers to my e-newsletter — but after a while I realized that I wanted to attract a different type of prospect, one who’d like to get to know me a little bit before considering hiring me. A visitor to my blog site can now read my articles which build my credibility, so I don’t have to “sell” my self, my content does it for me.

Finally, blogging makes it really easy and fun to connect with other great professionals in the wider blogosphere.

Here are five people I’d like to see write a quick blog post on this topic:

Charmaine Idzerda
Sandy McMullen
Dr. Kiya L. Immergluck
Grace Yvonne Attard
Cheryl Scoffield

I invite YOU, the reader, too, to share here by commenting or on your own blog! Please send me the link if you post on your own blog. BTW, this whole thing started on TypePad.com – get the “official” guidelines.

Thank you Patsi Krakoff, for inspiring me to write this entry.

The word “blog” itself comes from “web log”, so “blog” for short. Ever since Google acquired Blogger in 2003, this medium has been on the rise. Today even companies such as General Motors run blogs. Here are five reasons why you should have a blog for your small business or professional practice:

• Blogging builds credibility. As you get more and more into writing about your experiences on a particular topic, your readers come to realize that they can depend on your posts to provide useful information. This will establish you as an expert; as a consequence, more readers visit your site and more bloggers link to your blogs.
• Search engines love blogs. Because blog pages change very frequently, are content-rich, and easy to index, search engines just love to gobble them up. For example, if you noticed that your web site search engine rankings are slipping, this is most likely because the contents of your web site hasn’t changed in a long while. Search engines love fresh, new content, and by its nature, blogs are the epitome of freshness. To make the most of this, host your blog on your own domain, and use WordPress, or a similar blog system to run it.
• Blogging is simple. The simplest way to get a presence on the web is through blogging. If you can type and click a mouse, you can blog. It’s like having a virtual piece of paper and you just write your ideas, experiences, describe new products, and hope that the truth behind your articles comes out and entice your reader to also try your product. No knowledge of HTML is necessary, but will certainly come in handy to get some of the more advanced features set up.
• Blogging is authentic. In this day and age where advertising saturates our lives, we question the credibility of promoters’ claims. However, in blogs, real people share their real-life experiences, untainted by paid advertising. Reading blogs about first-hand product use is like talking to people about their first-hand experience.
• Blogging costs nothing. You don’t need to have any software, buy web hosting, register a domain, like you do for your web site. Any opportunity get something for free is definitely a bonus, especially to businesses that are starting up. You can start blogging for free at WordPress.com, although, to get the most benefit from your blog I recommend hosting your own WordPress-based blog.

Do you have a blog? A few days ago I started playing with WordPress for my blog. For weeks I’ve been trying to figure out which technology would be best, and have settled on WordPress for two main reasons:

1. It allows me to create “static” pages, so I can have a site that looks like a regular web site, with menus such as “About,” “Products,” “Services,” and so on, and at the same time have a blog going.
   and,
2. Second, I prefer to install the WP software on my own server, rather than use the hosted version of WP (i.e. WordPress.com) or other software, such as Blogger or TypePad, because it’s better for Search Engine Optimization. All the pages are sitting on my server/domain and are being indexed here, not at some blog hosting company.

Once word of advice, from my own experience: If you’re looking to save a few bucks and opt for a free blog, I wouldn’t recommend Blogger. Although it’s a good platform and all that, and being owned by Google can’t hurt these days, what I don’t like about it is the feature they have at the top of each blog, which is a link to “Next blog”: a few times I tried clicking it I ended up on blogs that I wouldn’t want my kids to see, if you know what I mean.

If you have a web site, consider re-doing it using WordPress, then you can enjoy the best of both worlds – and Google and other search engines will just love it so much more!

For professional audio solutions call Caleb Scoville of North Bank Audio Solutions, and tell him I sent you. He can record your live events, audio info-products and generally help you with anything related to audio.

Here’s a snapshot of Caleb and me at the 2007 Attract Clients Like Crazy Bootcamp.