ReachCustomersOnline.com

Please note a version of this article is published at SitePoint which includes links to related articles on their site. Changes to this article are noted at the bottom of this article. This article has been online since 2004. HTML email newsletters have come a long way in the past five years since this article was first written. They’re still a useful way to get a web page delivered to interested... 
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A more recent version of this article has been posted at SitePoint, which also has links to related articles that might be of interest. The SitePoint article also has a review of Google Checkout. Selling online can be a great way to expand an existing business or start a new one. Sites like eBay and etsy let you sell within their sites and use their shopping carts. You benefit from their traffic and... 
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When a prospect or customer uses Google to find a product or service you offer, ideally you want your web pages to appear in the top 10 search results. There are many excellent articles online that describe different ways to improve the search engine rankings of your web pages. My goal is not to write yet another how-to article about search engine optimization. Today I want to describe basic steps... 
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New Year’s resolutions are cliched. Many people make them. Few people remember them months later. However, clear resolutions can be a powerful way to boost your business. And January, after the hectic chaos of the holidays, is the perfect month to develop simple measurable goals you can remember and keep throughout the new year. Goals are problematic. Some people love constraints; they eagerly... 
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Please note that I’ve written a companion article to this one, How To Code HTML Email Newsletters, that describes the subtleties of coding html email to work beautifully across almost all email reading software. This summer past my wife and I drove our kids cross country as part of a move from Connecticut to Arizona. In Santa Fe, New Mexico, my wife dragged me into a sculpture gallery off the... 
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If your business offers unique products, and you have a website, you may have wondered how to prevent competitors from copying your images to their computer. What made the web so popular so fast, the ability for average people to view the source code of any web page, including downloading images, can cause problems for some businesses. Locking down your images is not 100% possible. But you can take... 
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Run your business without customer feedback and you might as well burn your money. How do you dig out customer ideas that make a huge difference to all your customers? Lately online surveys appear to be an inexpensive way for businesses to easily gain customer feedback. To learn more about online surveys, I asked Vivek Bhaskaran, founding member of online survey service QuestionPro.com, to talk about... 
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Updates to this article are noted at the bottom of this page. You are a business person. You know customers, products, competitors, pricing, and how to make them make money. You do not have time to learn software programming. It takes years to learn, for one thing. But you do need to hire someone who can build a software application. Where do you start? How do you evaluate a skill set that appears... 
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Recently I read an article online that complained about the poor quality of content on internet and intranet websites. The upshot: too many web authors think getting their authoring technology right will take care of the publishing part. Without a publishing plan, deadlines slip and content is published haphazardly. While there is some truth to this argument, I found it simplistic. There are many reasons... 
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Earlier this year, and again this week, I had to configure a client’s email once they moved to a new web hosting vendor. In both cases, they had old webhosting contracts that cost too much, around $30 USD a month when $10 or $20 a month provides much more bandwidth, disk space, and other features. In both cases, I had to cobble together information to get the email configuration done. This article... 
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This website was recently relaunched in part to make all 600 plus pages searchable by the Google search engine. If you do not know, Google will not crawl and index pages that have id= in their URL, for example, www.bozotheclown.com/ index.asp?id=rednose&action=bonk would never be indexed. The original software I used to maintain this website generated URLs with id= and so Google only crawled the... 
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“Dirt bag soap” surely is an odd phrase. So is “My dog Mundi.” What do they both have in common? They showed up in my website log files recently. At least six visitors have used “dirt bag soap” to find this site. It turns out that a Google search on both terms results in this site being listed high in the results page. This column describes how that happens, what... 
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With millions of websites on the internet, you might think that there are almost as many ways to design and layout content on a website. In fact, so far there are no more than four styles of web pages and a dozen or so ways to lay them out. This column explores some common design elements of web pages to help when you have to ask for a website design or create one. Each style of web page layout has... 
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Last time, I wrote about a website and email strategy that would allow almost any business, especially small businesses like florists, heating oil companies, law firms, and hardware stores, use the internet for a modest $500 start up price. My first column explained how to build a one page website. This column describes how to use email newsletters to find and support customers. While there are reasons... 
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Three years after the internet boom, many businesses have not ventured past the brochure website phase. Even fewer use email to reach their customers and prospects. The question these companies face is whether to spend more on their websites. Many of them paid high rates for their static online real estate. Even more companies never went online because of the high cost of a static site. What are these... 
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Last time, I wrote about my goals for this twice a month column. This week I want to write about a business whose internet experiences provide a terrific example of how a business can use the internet to support their customers. They started small, proved value, then evolved as needed. As a result, they did not overreach. Nor did fear of the unknown stop their efforts. Imagine an American website in... 
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Today, on my wife’s birthday, I took our daughter to shop for a gift. We wound up at Cannondale Crossing, a local shopping area of sleepy Civil War era buildings. As we drove out of Cannondale Crossing, I noticed a cute shop buried in leafy vegetation, Annabel Green Flowers & Finery. Besides flowers, they sell silk flower arrangements and jewelry my wife would love. We bought her a nice... 
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Please note this article is a general interest piece that describes how a few small businesses have used no and low-cost email newsletter software to reach their customers. I’ve written how-to articles elsewhere, specifically, How to Build a Basic Email Marketing Capability. Potawatomie Indians, the Jesuit missionary Marquette, the explorers LaSalle and Cadillac, and more recently tourists in... 
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See how many of these questions you can answer about your website: Where is your website hosted? What do you pay per month for webhosting? Can you change content on your website easily (within minutes)? Or do you need designers and/or programmers? Do you have a written plan that defines audience(s), goals, budget(s), and resources for your internet projects? If so, when was the last time you read... 
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If you don’t know, “eat your own dog food” is American slang for using a product you sell. In this case, if I tell you that businesses can use internet tools for no or low cost to find and support your customers, then I should do the same for this website. So, woof, woof, woof. I think that is dog for “Hello, now let’s get started.” I should mention that none of... 
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