“When I hear someone calling themselves the something King or Queen it reminds me of those tacky local commercials for local businesses, like ‘the Mattress King’  or some used car lot just outside of town.  The one where they say they’ll ‘treat you like royalty’ or whatever riff they can make on the king thing.  Trying to stand out so they can hype up their %50 off sale.’

If you really are the best at what you are offering, might be better to just say it upfront.

Peace Out

Chev
Simply the Best

Turns out, their advert is a really cute stamp with a monkey on it.  That’s it.  So if you have less than 500 people on your list, I suggest you give this a go.  The rates after 500 people are very competitive too.  If you are just starting or if you started recently, think about moving over.   If you have a current database of people, you can import them without having them re-subscribe so you wont lose out.

Other great things are the videos, most people when they get into database mailing list software are often overwhelmed at how much they are supposed to know and how to get something simple set up, MailChimp has a boat load of video tutorials to get things started.

The other thing that really appealed was the amount of control you have over the sign up box.  A couple of the list companies have no control, the others have some if you know html, playing around with MailChimp however was a blast.  They have the html version, but they also have a fantastic tool to let you design how your sign up will look with images, borders, backgrounds, sizes, everything can be tweaked to how you like it.  They also have variations on the way it appears, either a link to a page (hosted by them, designed by you using the earlier mentioned design tool) or a standard sidebar / header opt-in box and a nifty little thing that appears as a sort of hover over the page after a set number of seconds of the potential client landing on your website.

There are also options for full campaign marketing, multiple lists with sign ups, follow up emails and auto responders.

I really did love the MailChimp, I have a soft spot for monkeys as many of you know, the software has simply re-affirmed this!

This is a genuine opinion, not a sales pitch, I don’t have an affiliate with them, I truly believe they offer amazing service for what is tantamount to a free service for people that dont need the extra expense while they try to get their business started.

www.mailchimp.com sign up and have a play around with it.

Let me give you an example and let you in on a little secret.  I’m a closet goth.  I never really grew out of it.  Inside, Im still wearing all black with panda like eyeliner while scowling and lamenting the cruelty and injustice of a world that just doesn’t understand me.

Thankfully for all concerned, this is no longer reflected on the outside.  If it was, this website would be similar to Marilyn Manson’s and most people that dropped by to see if they wanted to hire me would run screaming to the hills clutching garlic wreaths.

So whats the point of that?  Its not about YOU, its about your potential paying clients.  If you are selling a healthy eating lifestyle, you need pictures of food in your banner.  Not a deep Indian sunrise reminiscent of incense sellers.

Healthy fruit eating people will leave.  They will take their money with them.

No matter what you like, ask yourself  “what does my next client like?”

And make your design match.

Then of course you had to get it online, hooking up the code, matching the site color. Its very laborious that most people stopped using the most powerful tool they had at their disposal. Oratory skills.

You can sell your product better than any text or image, you know what it is and what it means. Using these simple audio files you can really breath some life into your copy again.  Sadly my microphone is packed (I hope) so I have used music files instead, but the effect is exactly the same.

As you can see, you can have multiple audio files on the page, they don’t stop when you press pause, they pause, so you can carry on from where you left off listening, no matter how many others you open. It doesn’t slow down the page load so you can describe every product on the page in more detail if you so chose.

Watch how to set your own up

It’s because Microsoft Word is a web pretender and thinks it can write HTML code for websites.  So when you attempt to copy and paste, it pushes into the html section reams and reams of bloated useless code that ultimately affects your layout and your post.

Up until recently, the only way around that was to writing directly into wordpress.  Not an ideal solution, Wordpress has a dictionary, but it isnt the level of Microsoft’s Word.  Thankfully you can now do both, type away in Word, spell check etc then look for this button in the group of buttons above the enter post window.  Now you can paste your Word content in there and voila, no more symbols and mismatched type!

If you dont see the symbol above, look for this button  called the kitchen sink, click that, it drops down or hides all the buttons.

What this will achieve, is that you can bold, underline, italicise, add links, indent all within Word and it will come across intact.

You shouldnt use this to paste images, images should always be entered directly into Wordpress, however once you have the text done, adding images is the easy part.

The great thing about this particular script compared to some of the others, if that you can write your own sales pitch in the script that the person sending doesnt see, try it out, send it to yourself and see what I mean.

Also this is a self hosted form, which in laymans terms means no ad’s complete privacy, no pop ups.

So, what is this? Its the same as yousend it or send this file, if you need people to send you files for what ever reason, larger than 4 meg is considered bad form. It can clog your email account and crash your email client if there are problems trying to get it. The way around that would be to use yousend it or sendthisfile or you could be posh and have your own!

My script works wonders in that you can have files sent to different people in your organisation, and if you dont have different people well then you can pretend that you do, and impress your clients. Or you have things send to your VA direct.

Its very customisable.

So for example, if you sent this for the design dept, a thank you will be emailed to you from “design” and the design teams email address.

Go play in the support area, just let me know that you dont actually want me to do anything with it!

Maybe its the amount of affiliate links about to it, but I wonder why so many use it.  Its very expensive, for the cart function and the mass emailing function, its about $60/70 per month.  Most solo and entreprenuers sell products or services to people that know them.  The likelyhood of anyone “browsing” your site and adding random things to thier cart is unlikely, and unless you use a merchant account you end up going via paypal anyway, so its not for the professional look.

If you really think that people will be adding to the basket nonchalantly, consider using e-junkie, another popular and easy to use cart.

So why not have a simple “buy now” paypal button and use something like Icontact or Aweber or Constant Contact for your mass mailings.

Most of these have a ton more features than the shopping cart anyway as there sole purpose is to mass email.  Also some of them, aweber, will allow you to set up a trickly little thing whereby someone pays with paypal, the email goes to aweber and it starts sending a series of auto-responders that you have previously set up.

Its not simple to set up, but one of my clients, Gina at VedaSun (she sells gorgeous anti-stress natural aromatherpy products by the by you could do worse than drop by) and I set something up like this at aweber for a teleseminar she was running and it was a great success, all with not a hint of the bloated $75 per month that is shopping cart.

If you are using it, think about why and if you could save a lot of money by swapping over.

Not sure?  email me your situation, Ill give you my 2sense/cents!

NB I am not affilated with any of the email marketing companies, if you follow a link, I get no recompense for it.   I will sing thier praises now, as I truly think they are good companies to work with,  if that changes tomorrow, my opinion will change with it.

Think about how you feel when you see that email address from someone else.  Are you impressed?  Or do you immediately think that its a “one man band” outfit that you shouldnt take seriously.

Maybe I’m an internet snob, but I go with the latter.

There isnt much of an excuse, most of the domains come with free email, so you can have at least onename@myname.com if not more.  And setting up?  Usually a peice of cake and if cake causes you problems, the help line will talk you through it.

The last argument for it comes back to SEO.

Ah that old chestnut!  You should be using Outlook or Outlook Express, you should have a signature attached to it and that signature should include your domain name and you correct email for that domain.   Why?  Cos when you email people your brand or your name should follow you.  The more you get your name and message out there in the same format, the more will remember.

When you email a response to a list or a group from your email, it should include the above signature, so that your domain name gets on as many reputable sites as possible, these all count as backlinks.

So, why are you using Gmail?

I can do it, but I wont.

Im actually pretty good at it, but it is not something you can just “pop into”  it is a constant organic growth that needs to be monitored and tweaked and compared with stats.

People bandy the phrase “I need some SEO on my site”  like thats all that matters.  We just add some code and voila!  Google loves you!

For starters, let me ask you the first simple question before you even attempt to delve into the murky pond that is optimisation.

What phrase or keyword are you aiming for?

Nine out of ten of you are already stumped.

Its all well and good to say I want to be in the first page of google when someone searches my site.  That’s what I hear so often.  Searches what?  If they are going search 2dragons.net in google, they will find me on the first page.

But no one is going to search that, I have to decide what phrase I want to match my site.

For example, I am a florist, I am based in New York.  When someone types in “Flower Delivery Newark”  I want to come up on the first page.

Thats my “phrase” or my “keywords”.

And before you get carried away.  That one tiny phrase is going to be a full time thing to get on the first page.  It’s not just adding a few phrases.  You pick your keywords, you add them to the META tags, you change your copy to match them as much as you can, you sign up for as many forums and blogs that you can, leaving comments with your site address in your signature to get your backlinks in place while you talk about the subject of “Flower delivery Newark” you have a site map, a google webmaster account, preferably a blog with some cunningly title permalinks, you compare your competitions keywords with their ranking, you check their backlinks, you study thier copy in comparison to the positioning  and you do it every day.

Every, single, day.

And you monitor your place against your actions that day to get a feel for things.  And you keep posting on the blogs and the forums, the more well know the better.  Then, 6 months later, if the Gods of Google are willing and havent penalised you, because a site you were back linked to was cheating on something, or the algorythm they use that no one really understands, changes again.

You will be on the front page.

So with that in mind.  Best you pick ONE set of keywords/phrase, not a half dozen.

Cos you have a lot of work to do.