Technology is a funny thing. At first we resist it; then we succumb to it, then we’re mildly interested, then we get involved, then we become passionate. I’ve seen this digital diversion take over my siblings, then my Dad (who STARTED with his first computer at age 77), then my clients, and now our culture as a whole.

The same thing happens when you first get involved with marketing over the Internet. You put up a website, then you realize that if people are coming to your website, you probably ought to be collecting email addresses and maybe sending an email or two. But you don’t want to spend money on a service, so you sign up for an autoresponder or low-cost email service that doesn’t include a shopping cart.

Then it occurs to you that could be selling an information product or handling registrations for your local workshops over the Internet. That’s when you realize that maybe having a shopping cart is a good idea. You put up a PayPal button but you don’t really have a sense of what sales you are making and whether your emails outbound are bringing traffic inbound.

It’s usually at this point that clients come to me and ask for help. We talk about their use of a non-cart email service and decide whether it’s time to move up to a single solution where they can start separating out their hangers-on from real prospects and real customers; where they can track their results from their email list in one place.

Tomorrow night, the core of my “Online Marketer’s Guide to Building and Managing Email Lists” webinar is about this critical point in the development of your Internet business. If you have a list of people and you want to move it to a shopping cart system, how do you do that?

Some of my clients used a closed loop (double opt-in) system prior to switching to a cart; most did not. They may have a lot of people on their lists who they have added manually, but who may not be truly “engaged” with the messages my client is sending. If you’re about to move to a new service, how do you keep from losing them in the transition?

Being able to have your email list and your shopping cart work together is a HUGE advantage. I’ve got the real-world strategies to share with you in my webinar: how to set up the transition, what to say in the emails to the old list, and how to get them to your new list.

So join me tomorrow night for this 2-hour workshop (don’t worry, we’ll take a break in the middle). If you’re thinking about making this transition, this webinar will answer all your questions. As usual, I’ll give you the demo files I have prepared, and above all, you will have a recording you can keep and refer to again and again.

The webinar is just $37, a bargain considering my usual consulting rates for this kind of strategic support. I’m also throwing in 2 weeks of tech support through my “I Can Fix My Website” Monthly Membership along with the next 2 Monthly Group Webinars.

Read all about it and sign up for both the webinar and the 14-day trial at http://www.icanfixmywebsite.com/listwebinar/ or just click the big red button at the top right.

See you tomorrow night!

Toolie®

I truly believe that the Internet is a land of opportunity, that it IS possible to either supplement your income, or rely entirely on income from activities and sales over the World Wide Web. There are a lot of steps needed to set up the infrastructure for those activities, or as I described to a client recently, “a lot of moving parts.”

I think this is where the dream of making a living over the Internet breaks down; the realization that there are things you have to learn, and there are specific mechanisms that have to be in place before you can bring income into your business. This is precisely why I have set up MY business to address this particular need; to BE the someone who tells you HOW all this is done.

In recent webinars I showed my attendees how to create an HTML email template and how to create a salesletter template. I’ve been focused on “templates” because if you set them up well, you can do a lot of copying and pasting and reusing. This month in my 2-hour webinar on Building and Managing Email Lists, we’re going to put together the initial pieces as the start of the infrastructure I mentioned above. It’s based on actual work I’ve done with my clients plus my own 6 years of experience with marketing over the Internet.

Why am I charging for this particular webinar? Well, obviously because it’s good information, real-world stuff, not theory. But I am also throwing in 2 more webinars that I offer for members of my “I Can Fix My Website” Monthly Membership program. The first webinar, on May 6th, is where I will be teaching a New Technique based on member requests. The second webinar, on May 11th, is an Open Q&A webinar. We do critiques, we solve problems, we discuss strategy.

With your investment of $37 for the webinar, You’re also getting 14 days’ access to my website and blog support site where members get technical answers to their most pressing questions. Members can upload broken web pages or hurting blog posts (among other things), and I tell them how to fix them, usually within hours. You can also snoop through my personal list of favorite websites, tools, and other resources that I use to keep my business running.

Finally, I am throwing in a CD of the webinar recording which I’ll mail to you along with my Opt-In Reference Card that reminds you of the steps to setting up opt-in pages. You can refer to both the recording and the card when you need to set up for your next product to sell.

I’ve got a web page that describes the webinar in greater detail, and from there you can both invest in the webinar and get your 14 days’ access to the membership to try it out.

http://www.icanfixmywebsite.com/listwebinar

More tomorrow!

Toolie®

P.S. I think it’s a great value for the money, but do get all the details at http://www.icanfixmywebsite.com/listwebinar, or click the big red button on the right to get there.

On Wednesday night, April 28th, I’m having a webinar on setting up, building, and managing email lists. It’s a pretty comprehensive look at your most important online business asset, your email list. In preparation for that event, I want to talk about some of the more challenging aspects of building an email list. We’ll cover them in greater detail Wednesday’s talk.

Today I’m going to talk about the transition from emailing your business information to friends, colleagues and customers from your personal email account, to using some kind of email service that complies with US anti-SPAM laws.

In 2003, the United States passed a law whose acronym is CAN-SPAM. It is intended to require commercial email senders to comply with a specific set of steps when contacting prospects and customers, including providing an “unsubscribe” method, and not sending email again once that request has been made.

One of the hardest things I have to explain to clients who are ready to start marketing over the Internet is that they can’t just send email about their products and services without complying with anti-spam regulations. If they’ve been sending email to friends, colleagues, and customers from their personal email, then that’s got to stop! The law is pretty clear about what constitutes a “commercial” email. If you’re trying to sell something, or hope that your email will cause someone to buy, then that falls into the definition of commercial email.

The smart thing to do is to use some kind of email service that is set up to comply with the regulations AND which automates that process. So we set up an opt-in box, and ask people to sign up to receive emails about my client’s products and services.

The trick is, what do you say to get people to opt-into that first list? How exactly do you prepare that transition from just using your Gmail account to using 1ShoppingCart, for example? Do you convince friends and colleagues to opt-in — does it make sense to do so? How do you decide who to invite and who to leave out? Should you divide up the list into those who might refer you versus those who will actually buy?

On Wednesday night, I will have examples to show you of how I’ve done this with some of my clients. The webinar is a two-hour workshop, complete with demo files, a resources page, and a CD of the recording mailed to you. I’m charging $37 for those 2 hours. Plus, those who invest are also eligible for a 14-day Free Trial of my “I Can Fix My Website” Monthly Membership, which includes 2 additional training webinars, free technical support through the forum, and my personal list of resources, websites, blogs, and mentors I trust to keep my business going.

Read the rest of the details about Wednesday night here:
http://www.icanfixmywebsite.com/listwebinar

More tomorrow,

Toolie®

I can’t believe how quickly the last month has gone! My 30% Off Coaching Sale has kept me busy helping entrepreneurs improve their websites and blogs. What I learn from working one-on-one with clients gives me the opportunity to turn around and share with you new insights, shortcuts, and techniques that makes working on your websites and blogs much easier.

This month I want to talk about one-page salesletters. They can be a powerful tool in your Internet Marketing efforts if done well. The page itself can be very simple, and the best part is that you can reuse the design for different products. There’s no need to use a site-builder or install blog software just to have one page to work with. I’ve decided to set up a free webinar to show you how it’s done. We’re going to meet this coming Tuesday night, March 30th at 6 pm Pacific/9 pm Eastern.

We’ll see how to create the basic salesletter format, create a video frame, create a testimonial box, set up a stylesheet, and then learn how to change the appearance and layout with just a few clicks.

To sign up for the webinar, just click the big red button on the right! I’ll see you on Tuesday night, March 30th at 6 pm Pacific/9 pm Eastern!

Toolie®

HTML Emails (e-zines, newsletters, email broadcasts) can be a great way to showcase your business, especially for markets that care about a professional appearance in every aspect of the business. However, having an email template that doesn’t LOOK like YOUR business can be a drawback! With a little HTML and CSS knowledge, you can create an email template that delivers not only your message but also enhances your brand recognition.

Unlike creating an HTML page, you can’t rely on a Cascading Style Sheet to control the appearance of your HTML emails, so you have to do a little planning and embed CSS instructions in the HTML tags. It’s not at all hard to do, you just need to pay attention to details, as always.

On Thursday night February 25th at 6 pm Pacific, 9 pm Eastern time, we’ll look at exactly how you “Brand Your Emails with Custom Templates.” I’ll take you behind the scenes of those pre-fab email templates and show you how you can attach YOUR colors and images so your customer list recognizes YOUR message among all their emails.

If you’ve never attended one of my webinars, you’ll be pleasantly surprised at the practical, hands-on, how-to nature of my demonstrations. You’ll learn a lot, and you’ll feel empowered to handle tasks like this yourself.

I will also go over the details of my “I Can Fix My Website” training product, coaching program, and membership website during the webinar. 

Sign up for the webinar by clicking the button in the box on the right, even if you’re not sure you can attend. Don’t worry, this webinar WILL be recorded, so you can view it later, but I need your signup so I can send you the link to the recording.

I’ll see you on February 25th at 6 pm Pacific, 9 pm Eastern time!

Reason 1 – Saving Money on Your Monthly Online Budget

Now we’re down to the number 1 reason to manage your websites and blogs: money. It’s simply less expensive to learn how to handle most website and blog tasks than it is to pay someone to do them for you.

The most obvious cost to your business is any ongoing website or blog maintenance you’re paying to a web designer. I’ve heard from clients that they’ve spent anywhere from $75 to $600 a month on maintenance. The difference in pricing is related to the amount of work done in those contracts.

• A $75 a month charge included 1 major update a month, in this case, my speakers association chapter adding their monthly meeting to the site. 
• The $600/month charge was for website hosting, maintenance, and keyword optimization; that’s what my dentist pays to maintain his page 1 Google status in his geographic area.

I hope your webmaster costs are either zero or somewhere between those two numbers!

What other costs might there be? Well, you remember the true story of my client whose website was shut down by a disgruntled team member, yes? She directly lost revenue because her website wasn’t available. It would have been difficult on short notice for her to replace the site she had planned, but if she’d had control of her domain, she could have pointed it to an alternate site until things were resolved.

What about creating opportunities BECAUSE you have HTML and CSS skills? The Internet likes speed! Being able to come up with a custom page on your website or blog that specifically addresses a new opportunity provides a huge advantage over your competitors who can’t or don’t provide such targeted information.

In fact, imagine being able to send to a prospect in email the URL of a specially created web page on your website. Wouldn’t you sit up and take notice if I said I have a message just for you at  such-and-such a page? With a simple tool, I created custom pages with individual names on them  for the folks on my mailing list, using a simple HTML page and a tool that merges names into those web pages. Like so many other highly-targeted messages, custom web pages have a big impact. And this technique is easy and inexpensive to do. (sample here)

So with basic HTML and CSS skills, you can not only save maintenance costs, you can create opportunities for new business in targeted, memorable ways. I hope by now that you’re all out of excuses now for putting off  earning something that can make you money.

It’s time! The product is now available for purchase. There’s no time like the beginning of a new year to make a difference in your business by learning HTML and CSS. Head on over to http://www.ICanFixMyWebsite.com and
get all the details of this program. I look forward to working with you in our coaching sessions, and getting 2010 off to a great start.

The “I Can Fix My Website” program is up and running! Get your copy right now at http://www.ICanFixMyWebsite.com.

Toolie®

Reminder: Top 10 Things for 2010 Webinar is Tomorrow night! Click the red signup button…

Reason 2 – Saving Time on Quick and Easy Updates to Your Sites

One of the challenges entrepreneurs face when trying to grow their business is the point at which they begin to acquire helpers. Some use virtual assistants, some use their teenage or college-age children. Like any employment situation (virtual or contractual), the entrepreneur spends time managing the relationship as well as the work.

It’s no different when you’ve hired a web designer to maintain your website for you. It takes time to decide what you want, communicate your decisions, and manage the results. It’s a necessary part of delegating the work, and provided you have good communication, it doesn’t have to be time-consuming. I’ll leave you to imagine what it’s like when your web designer is NOT a good communicator. Perhaps you already know….

We’ve discussed how nice it is to have schedule independence from your web designer: that is, you being able to make changes to your site WHEN you want to, even if it’s after hours. Now we’re talking about how much TIME it takes to manage the relationship with your designer, and whether that time investment is appropriate for “the small stuff.”

I was on the board of my speakers association chapter for 3 years, and during that time I was directly involved with maintaining the website. We had a web designer who handled our maintenance for us for a reduced rate, and he was pretty good about handling the changes in a timely manner. But by “handling changes”, I mean we wrote everything out for him, and even formatted the text in Microsoft Word the way we wanted it to look on the site. We sent in a Word doc, and he reproduced the changes in HTML on the website based on the text we had sent him.

It took 2 hours to prepare that Word document, and it probably took him another 90 minutes to 2 hours to format the text in HTML and upload it to the site. So a total of 4 hours went into those web pages every month. If we’d had access to the site ourselves, we could have made the changes directly in HTML (in 2 hours), and had them visible to the public immediately instead of 4-24 hours later.

It was a better use of his time to work on tasks that we weren’t capable of doing, like the original design, or major updates to the look and feel of the site. The kind of work he was performing was simple edits that we were capable of handling. Consequently, our chapter switched to a membership site that better served our needs as an association, and one that we could manage ourselves.

Are you doing the same thing? Are sending your web designer text formatted in Word and then having them do it over again on your site? I can almost promise you that even if you’re exporting your text as HTML out of Microsoft Word, your designer is NOT using it directly. Word produces notoriously bloated HTML, so most designers ignore it or run it through a cleanup filter before posting the text on your website.

Do it right the first time; as an entrepreneur you don’t have TIME to do it OVER again! Learn HTML and CSS, and handle these simple updates yourself! With a combination of how-to videos, demos, website layouts, one-on-one coaching, and the support forum, the “I Can Fix My Website” program has what you need to learn these skills quickly and easily. You’ll save time by handling website and blog updates yourself, and leave your web designer (if you have one) free to concentrate on the big stuff they really enjoy.

Tomorrow: Reason 1 – Saving Money on Your Monthly Online Budget

Toolie®

Reason 3 – Controlling and Protecting Your Business Sites

“The story we’re about to tell you is true. The names were changed to protect the innocent.” 
(from the TV show “Dragnet”)

I wish I were kidding about that. What I’m going to tell you IS true; I’m just glad it doesn’t happen very often.

I got a call last week from a client; I worked on her website last fall. She is an author whose book wasn’t yet available at that time, but she was doing a number of things to prepare for the book launch. My client had a social media site created by one of her team members. After we handled a few updates to the site I had worked on previously, she shared with me the debacle that accompanied the release of her book.

After weeks of work on the social media site, the site was launched. A few weeks later, my client and her team member had a misunderstanding. This woman did not take the situation well, and in retaliation, shut down the site for 8 days right at the time the book arrived in stores. My client did not have the username and password to the site because it was hosted with other sites owned by other people, and controlled by the team member. She had no way of replacing the site in time for her book launch.

A third party intervened in the situation and got the site back up, but by then the damage was done. Fortunately my client has a loyal following, and she didn’t lose much revenue, but it was emotionally devastating. After all her diligence and hard work, losing control of her site when she needed it most was a situation she resolved to never allow again.

In the “I Can Fix My Website” product, one of the first things we talk about is the importance of having the domain registered in your name, with your contact information, and for you to have control of the domain account’s username and password. The same is true of the hosting account; it needs to be YOUR credit card and contact information on file so that you can change it if (God forbid) your web designer turns on you. (Some of my students have told me that I become somewhat animated when discussing this, but it is for good reason.)

In the Action Guide that accompanies the product, I have space for you to write down your usernames and passwords for all of your domain registrations and web hosting accounts. You can also note whether your domains are privately registered (where your personal details are omitted so that you’re less of a target for spammers) and which email address you used with the registration. I have had to help reclaim domain registrations for some clients because the domain renewal email went to an account that no longer existed.

I understand the importance of keeping good records for your domain registrations so that you don’t lose them! With these simple precautions (and some other advice I have for you), there’s no reason
why you can’t take control of your sites and protect your valuable online business assets.

I want to see YOU confidently switching to the Code view in your web editor and saying “Bring it on! I know how to use HTML…!” I look forward to working with you on these and other important items during our coaching sessions together in the “I Can Fix My Website” program.

Tomorrow: Reason 2 – Saving Time on Quick and Easy Updates to Your Sites

Toolie®

P.S. Remember to sign up for Thursday’s webinar (click the red button at right).

Reason 4 – Making Changes to Your Site on YOUR Schedule

I’ll tell you a secret about web designers: they like to design, not to maintain.

Design is fun. It’s creative. It’s self-expressive.

Maintenance is detail-oriented. It’s dull. It’s repetitive. But it’s also necessary.

If a web designer enjoys managing details, then carrying maintenance contracts is a good source of ongoing revenue and most web designers will offer to maintain your site for you. Regardless of what you spend on a webmaster though, the rub comes when you need something changed NOW. Right now. Not 2 days from now, not tomorrow, NOW. Scheduling, turnaround times, and your webmaster’s workload all come into play. Once the initial design is done, webmasters are usually not very interested in doing updates to their already-perfect creation.

You must think I hate web designers — I don’t, not at all! After all, technically, I AM a web designer. I do a limited number of site projects for clients who are in a hurry and who are happy to pay for me to do the work. But I don’t do maintenance for them. Any project I take on involves training package for them so that my clients do the maintenance.

It’s not that I don’t like maintenance; I too could make money as a webmaster. But I have a business of my own to run, just like you do. And I have found that my clients are happiest when they really own and run their own sites. (That’s also why my product includes 3 hours of one-on-one coaching time to get you up and running.)

In a previous installment of this series, we talked about making your website or blog a cash-producing machine. How are you going to do that if you can’t make updates quickly? With a site designed for easy maintenance, you can be in charge of those updates yourself and take care of them any time of the day or night. In the “I Can Fix My Website” course, I teach you what is “a site designed for easy maintenance,” so that you can create or refurbish yours with that goal in mind.

Maybe it’s just because I’m a night-person, but I get my greatest ideas in the evening. The phones settle down, we’ve had dinner, I kick off my shoes, and suddenly in the evening, my head is buzzing with ideas. I do most of my writing then, and I want to be able to set up new pages as soon as the writing is finished. If I had to wait until the next day for a web designer to install my updates, I’d go crazy. Being able to create and install new pages, new features, new opt-ins when I need them is the best of possible worlds for me, as business owner of cash-producing websites.

Even if you are not the one who creates your site, it still belongs to you. It’s your business at stake, so it pays to know how to operate it inside and out, even if you ultimately delegate some of the work to others. When it’s 7 pm on a Sunday night and you want to add something to your site before Monday morning, I can almost guarantee that neither your virtual assistant nor your web designer will be picking up the phone when you call them for help.

The Internet loves speed. Those are customers whizzing past your site. Get them to stop by and view your latest creations: products, writing, services, all described and made available on YOUR schedule, because you know how to wrangle your site yourself. My website training product plus coaching program will teach you how.

Tomorrow: Reason 3 – Controlling and Protecting Your Business Sites

Toolie®

Reason 5 – HTML/CSS Skills for More Than Just Web Pages and Blog Posts

When I showed the first draft of my website training product to my mentor 2 years ago, he sent it back saying, “where’s the Internet Marketing information?” He was absolutely right. There’s no point in putting a business website or blog on the Internet unless you plan to do the necessary homework and preparations to turn your website or blog into an Internet cash-producing machine. The days of “having a website to have a website” and “if you build it they will come” are long past. You must be attentive to and proactive with your sites to attract the customers you want. You want to make it easy for them to contact you, and if applicable, enable them to buy online.

In my “I Can Fix My Website” training program, we start with HTML and CSS skills to learn how to build a website (the skills also apply to blogs). Before we even begin, though, we start with keyword research. When someone types a search into Google, Yahoo, or MSN (the big 3), they’re typing the words and phrases that are meaningful to them. You’d better know what those phrases are before you build your site. You don’t need to subscribe to a keyword research service like Wordtracker (though I’d recommend it for at least one month while you’re planning), but you must know what words your customers think of when they go looking for you. They don’t always use the right vocabulary for your product, service, or profession, so you must include the words and phrases THEY use, as well as the correct keywords and phrases.

But there’s more to Internet Marketing than just keywords. And there’s more to having a website or blog that markets for you than just the site itself. The initial “currency” of your site is your email list. How are you going to collect your emails and build your list without the opt-in box AND the sequence of pages that ensure that they complete the opt-in loop? What if you decide to give away a free report or downloadable product? Do you know how to create a squeeze page, and its accompanying thank-you page and autoresponder?

These are specialized pages that you could create using your existing web page template. However, one of the keys to a successful opt-in sequence is not allowing for other choices on the page (with certain exceptions). You will have a better opt-in rate if, when they arrive at the “squeeze” page, you limit or eliminate other things they could do on the page. If they see your website or blog navigation and can go elsewhere on your site, you miss out on capturing their email while their curiosity is highest. Do you know how to create a custom page for this purpose? You can learn how. It is NOT difficult: my course will teach you how.

HTML email templates are another item that many marketers use online. They’re an attractive way to deliver your message, but those templates are also fraught with layout problems. I learned recently in working with one of my clients that some of the online web-based email programs almost shred the layout of a typical HTML email if you don’t know how to set up the template to keep it together. Because of my skills, I was able to research the issues and set up an HTML Email template for my client (and one for myself) that still look good in programs like Gmail, Yahoo Mail, and Windows Live Mail. (Those of you who read my emails using those programs have probably already noticed how much better my HTML emails look now!)

The “I Can Fix My Website” training product comes with a free 3-month membership to my support forum. If you have questions or problems with your email templates, your site, your squeeze pages, your autoresponders, your graphics, or anything else related to building your site, you’re going to be able to post your issue online and get answers right away. You can also research solutions that I’ve provided to other members, not to mention having access to my virtual “Rolodex®” of website and blog tools, links to good scripts, and lists of recommended utility websites to support you as you build and customize your sites.

It just makes sense to learn HTML and CSS: they’re your ticket to building and maintaining the websites and blogs that work to bring you paying customers. My course will teach you those skills quickly and easily.

Tomorrow: Reason 4 – Making Changes to Your Site on YOUR Schedule

Toolie®