Marketing No Brainers | Cost Effective Internet Marketing |

Centralize and Integrate To Simplify Your Marketing

November 24th, 2008Strategy 1 Comment

If you want your Internet business to grow painlessly, centralize the key elements, like email, payment processing, customer support, and your affiliate program, from the beginning. If you are a one or two person operation, these are tasks that can eat up a lot of your time and keep you from doing the things that keep your business growing.

For incoming email, I use a simple system. I have quite a few domains, but I forward all of the email addresses for them into one gmail account. Among other reasons, gmail is has a rich feature set, has excellent search, spam prevention, allows multiple label categories, automatic filtering, and lets you use a different email address as your “from” address. Only having to check one email address for any and all important email is a huge benefit and time saver.

I use PayPal for payment processing, and have since the year 2000. I have had no problems or issues with the service. Ever.

Let me talk about 1shoppingcart first. It seems to be the solution of choice for many online marketers. And it offers bells and whistles galore. For clients, I’ve worked with 1shoppingcart extensively and can tell you this: you probably don’t need it if eBizAC (detailed below) looks like it will work for you. If you need the extra functionality that 1SC offers, beware the email autoresponder: from time to time, there are extreme deliverabilty issues. Because of that, almost everyone I talk to that uses 1shoppingcart eventually ends up using Aweber for their email blasts if they have a list of any size.

So it will be no surprise to you that for outgoing email blasts and autoresponder sequences, I use Aweber. On content sites - all of them are WordPress blogs now - where I just need to let users know there is new content, I use the free Feedburner email notification service instead.

As a 1shoppingcart alternative, I have used both Kavi’s eBizAC and Sam’s DLGuard for product management, payment collection, and delivery. Both integrate easily with PayPal. Kavi’s eBizAC has the bonus of having an affiliate manager, a support desk, web hosting, membership site functionality, and a built-in autoresponder, so it wins the race if you need any of those functions. Kavi’s service is a monthly fee.

Sam’s DLGuard has grown over the years, and works very well for what it does, and has the advantage of being a one time purchase. It offers simple payment collection integrated with PayPal, Clickbank, and a host of other payment processors. Digital downloads are protected and limited as to number and time periods. Automatic emails for digital product delivery are sent to buyers. It also has some limited membership site functions but in reality they are difficult for casual users to implement.

If I was inclined to simplify my business even further, I could manage it entirely with just Kavi’s eBizAC system, my gmail account, and PayPal. So why don’t I? Simple answer: I have been with Aweber for years, and I think I would lose too many subscribers if I changed over completely to eBizAC. If you start with it you won’t have that problem. The bonus of the extra services eBizAC offers is icing on the cake, so eBizAC is my number one recommendation for an integrated system.
*

Politics, Religion, and Marketing - Just Don’t

November 7th, 2008Rants 2 Comments

Politics, religion, and marketing: they don’t mix. Yeah I know the election is over, but….

If you feel compelled to discuss politics, religion, or both (yeck!) take it to some personal space you might have. Keep it out of your sales funnel.

If you feel compelled to vent your opinions on politics or religion, which high percentage of your prospects and customers do you want to offend, and possibly lose? If you decide to further your politics in your marketing, you’re at best only going to get 60% of your prospects or customers who might agree with you. What about the other 40%?

Politics is a bad enough topic for marketers, but think about religion, where you are bound to have fewer people in your court and bound to offend even more prospects and customers. Yet every once in a while I get emails from some marketer who has suddenly found religion and now wants all of the rest of us to become a true believer in whatever they found.

I’d guess selling religion is a bit tougher than selling a product, as a lot of us already have some system of belief in place. So heed my advice: don’t sell your religion, whether it’s newfound or something you’ve believed in for years, to people on your product lists.

I suppose I should have written this a few weeks ago, but it’s never too late to keep this in mind. Politics, religion, and marketing: in my opinion, any combination of the first two with the third is a no-no.

Make Amazon S3 Painless With EZS3

October 9th, 2008Audio and Video 1 Comment

Amazon S3 is a data hosting service provided by that web retailing giant, Amazon. If you have lots of large files to store or deliver, it is extrememly cost-effective. S3 is free to join, and is a pay as you go service. S3 offers datacenters in both Europe and the USA, and prices are dependent on your location.

If you have hesitated to use audio or video in your marketing process due to server limitations, with S3 you can remove those limits. A typical web host might allow you a gigabyte of storage and 5 or so gigabytes of transfer on a shared server. And you’d pay around eight to ten bucks a month for that. Hosting just a few videos could eat up a major portion of your allotment, and if a hundred people viewed your 50 megabyte video, you’d be out of transfer for the month.

If you are a USA customer (rates in Europe are just slightly higher,) on S3 you could store 10 gigabytes of audios, videos, any kind of file really for $1.50 a month. It will cost you $1.00 to transfer it in. 10 Gigabytes of views or listens of a 50 MB file (200 views or downloads) will run you about $2.00. So for less than five bucks a month you can host all those and NOT use any of your existing web hosting resources.

Amazon guarantees 99.99% uptime. The guarantee is right in their service level agreement. Using S3, you’ll have a no limits, scalable, and reliable data hosting service for peanuts. Let’s say you transfer 100 gigabytes out in a month. You have 10 gigabytes stored. You’ll pay Amazon less than $20 for this.

But there is a downside. The downside is interfacing into S3 for file transfer, both up and down, and making media players for your content. Thankfully there is a no-brainer solution, EZS3. This is an affordable monthly membership service that offers a very easy to use interface for the S3 service. You can start a two week trial at EZS3 for just a dollar, after your trial a single user account is just $20 a month. Of course you’ll need to have an S3 account as well.

With S3 and EZS3 you’ll no longer need to consider moving up to a dedicated server just because you need the storage and bandwidth to host your media files. You can continue to use a reliable shared hosting provider for your website html or php and then deliver your audio/video media with through EZS3. Using our example above, your monthly cost would be around $42 plus the cost of your shared hosting. Contrast this with a dedicated server at around $175 a month and you’ll see the advantage to going the S3 route.

How WordPress Changed A Life

September 29th, 2008Doing Good No Comments

Glenda Watson Hyatt is a very with it blogger. But it wasn’t always so. You see Glenda has cerebral palsy, and has had a tough go of it in the real world. Her video explains how WordPress literally changed her life for the better.