“I just received a ton of bounced emails that aren’t written by me. The email address is mine, but honestly, I did not send them. Has my email/website I been hacked?”

While hacking is always a possibility and I do not want to discount that at all, the reason is probably not that but rather email hijacking. You see, it is easy to change the “From” address. All you need to do is change it in your email program. Instead of your name and email address, you can change it to just about any email address. That’s what they are doing. They aren’t sending emails via your account or your server. Just using your email address as the “From” address. Because bounces go back to the “From” address, that’s why you are receiving them.

For a long time, there is really little you can do about this. I can send an email pretending to be you and vice versa any time. But if your web host supports DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM), you might want to have it turned on. What it does is only allow email to be sent from specified domain. This way, a hijacker who always sends emails from his own or any spoofed/fake domain, is prevented from sending any mail. The thing you need to watch when turning this on is to make sure that any other domain you may be sending email from is in this ‘whitelist’ or your own emails won’t go out either.

How do I build a mailing list?

That is a big, objective question with many different tangents we can go off into, but we will focus on the technical process. The overall big picture is quite simple actually. First, you will need a system (software) or service that lets you send emails out to the masses. Next, you need to create a ‘list’ within that mailing list system you are using. Depending on what you are doing with the list, but it is recommended you then create a welcome email inside that list. This will be the first email people get when they join your list. Finally, you get the code which will give you the sign up form and put it on your website. That’s all in a nutshell.

What can I use to build a mailing list?

There are a lot of email list systems out there. Some well known examples are, Aweber, iContact, Constant Contact and Mailchimp. These are all fully hosted, web based services. Which means you will have a monthly cost involved, but at the same time you won’t have to worry about what percentage of your emails get delivered (also called deliverability), you won’t have to worry about the software or emails slowing down your web site. I highly recommend the post Is Saas For You to get a better understanding why it actually costs you less in the long run to pay someone a monthly fee for mailing lists.

Why can’t I just use my current email account and send through Outlook/Thunderbird/Mail/Gmail?

The answer couldn’t be simpler. Because your Internet Service Provider who gave you the email account, Gmail, Yahoo or any other email account providers often have fine print in their terms of use that restrict you from using your account for mass email purposes. Sure, you can email your group of 20-30 friends and family without problems and they are often OK with that. But surely when building a mailing list for your business, you want as many prospects and possible. Besides, any business, no matter how small, you will find, hitting hundreds if not thousands of subscribers is not difficult to do. Once you start getting numbers, that’s when mailing through any of these accounts will violate the terms of use.

Ultimately, this means you could lose your Internet or email service. That is not what you want.

My web host includes an autoresponder. Why do I need to pay for another autoresponder service?

Because they are different animals altogether. One is simplistic, the other one is a little more intelligent. The one that comes with most web hosting accounts is simplistic. The only thing it can do is kick back a reply automatically when someone sends the address an email. You still see some people asking you to email them at a certain address and you will get a report or download instantly. It cannot capture the name and address of whomever is emailing it and put it in a list and it cannot follow up with the person who emailed at a later date. Autoresponder services often give you what’s called a sequential auto responder. Which means, you can create a series of messages – however many you like and tell it to follow up with the individual who subscribed to the list based on intervals that you set. Maybe you want to email the prospect everyday for a week or once a week for a year, or everyday for a week and 5 day intervals after, you can.

Big difference in features don’t you agree? There are some hosts who are exceptions to the rule because these hosts understand marketing online. Some hosts do give you web hosting accounts with sequential autoresponders so if unsure, always check with your host. Most of the time though they don’t.

What is a broadcast?

A broadcast generally refers to the feature that allows you to send emails to everyone on that list. Some services even let you schedule when the email is to go out.

I already have an Aweber account, do I need another autoresponder service or software?

Nope. Aweber can do both autoresponse and broadcast. In fact, many of the bigger names can do both but if you’re not sure, check with their help desk.

I’m sure you will have more questions as you dive into the process of building your mailing list. If you don’t there’s something wrong! If you find yourself confounded with technical road blocks along the way, feel free to ask me.

Image by T. Al Nakib

So what changed? Did I just start making more money and that suddenly meant I had to spend it monthly on software? No. If that is the case then it isn’t very good cash flow management. The sad fact is, it took a big loss for me to re-think and appreciate the value of using hosted third party applications and this is a story I tell people often. Not because I think you should always opt for software as a service solutions but because it really happened to me and I want to help you avoid a similar situation.

What happened?

It was simple. I installed a mailing list script on my web site one day and within an hour, it flooded the web hosts’ email servers to the point it almost crashed. The web host tried contacting me. But of course I had to burn the midnight oil and had went to bed after the install. He unsuccessfully tried to email me for hours and eventually, shut my account down and deleted all my web sites. All in all, the script started sending thousands of emails every hour and I hadn’t even started building my list yet.

Imagine the horror and humiliation when I started work the next morning. Here I was, thinking I was so smart, by hosting it myself and saving a monthly payment. I realized then just how little $20 a month was compared to what was at stake. Many years have passed since but that memory is still fresh and raw at certain periods today.

• If you are in the same boat, considering a hosted software versus one you install on your own web server, consider these points.
• You don’t have to spend valuable time upgrading the software, better spend time marketing.
• You don’t have to worry about people hacking it – and the many hours cleaning up if they did.
• You don’t have to think about the software being compatible with the server or crashing it – a biggie.
• When the system goes down, you have someone in the know to ask and demand for answers – it is a good feeling to be able to let others work out a problem.
• When the system goes down, you don’t have to upset my schedule and delay projects to fix it.
• You also don’t have to hire people to fix it. You know that they have properly qualified developers working on their system, people whom we on our own may not able to afford to pay.

Does that mean you should completely outsource your software? That’s going to be a lot of monthly payments.

Absolutely not. What I recommend is, outsource those that you won’t normally have sufficient technical knowledge to handle yourself or you don’t have someone technical you can hire on a regular basis. If you’re getting started and don’t have much money to invest. I understand you won’t have that option. But at the very barest basics, for your mailing list or autoresponder, sign up with a reputable service. If you don’t spend on anything else, spend the  money on that.

Image by Karl-Erik Bennion

1. Must be able to control access to the video
2. Have a sharp looking player – Youtube is a little unprofessional especially if the video goes on the the sales letter
3. Not be hosted on their own web hosting account

The third requirement can be huge because bandwidth can get very expensive if you have a lot of hits on the video and videos are much, much larger which means one simple video can suck up all your bandwidth for the month in a heartbeat.

If you want to DIY – I’d probably say go with Amazon S3. I host all 50+ videos for the Blogging Starter Pack on Amazon S3. You can purchase a nice video player pretty inexpensively from places like FlashDen. However, this still requires a little bit of technical work. Many small business owners I talk to like and want the convenience of Youtube but with more privacy options and a better player is that really that much to ask?

I personally think no but from my research, there seems to be an unserved market here. Video hosting sites that allow business/commercial for small business use (read budget friendly) is pretty hard to come by.

My first stop was Vimeo because I liked the quality of the videos there but alas – this is what I found in their FAQ’s.

So scratch Vimeo. Next, there is Brightcove. This company has many high profile customers but they do not publish their pricing and while this is not a reliable method, it kinda leads me to think they may be expensive like enterprise level expensive and possibly beyond the reach of small and micro businesses.

Finally, after running through several video hosting sites that do not allow commercial use, I re-visited a system I have been testing out – Easy Video Producer. The people who created this tool made it for network marketers who want to use videos as a method of building their list or lead generation purposes. I’m just giving you fair warning that if the video and copy on the sites looks skewed towards that, it is. Actually, they confused me a lot too but I took a chance to get signed up since it is free to check out the video system. While their user interface could be improved, it looks a bit dated and at times confusing, if you focus on the tools itself, this thing is pretty cool.

Here’s what I liked:

If you want to put your video on a squeeze page or opt-in page, they have pre-made templates, some of them fairly nice looking. All you need to do is record your video – you can do this using your normal video recording tools or if you don’t have one, a web cam will work, EVP has a on site video recorder much like YouTube you can record on the fly. Then upload or save it. They do go through an approval process which can be a drag if you’re in a hurry. Hopefully they will remove this or have quicker methods of approval. Once your video goes live, then all you need to do is copy the link to the video, copy the embed code if you’re posting on to your own web pages. Or, you can push the video to a squeeze page template they provide.

Oh and yes, you can make the video private to their network and still embed the video on your own pages which fulfills part of the requirements.

There is just one caveat – they are right now re-launching their web hosting service – a sister site. So be prepared for emails in your inbox promoting that.

Image by Keenan Milligan

Jing – works on both Windows and Mac, is free and you can upgrade to Pro for only $14.95 a year. Meant for short videos, 5 mins max so it’s perfect for those who record infrequently and only need to do short videos.

Screencast-O-Matic – Very cool. It’s free and works from your browser which means it should work on any operating system. The only gotcha – the videos are public.

Wink – this has been around for a long time. Windows only. When I first started using it, it would not allow audio but I do believe it does now.

ScreenToaster – Nice. Like a merge of Youtube + social network + screen cast software all in one. Works on your browser, any OS.

CamStudio – a free screen cast software list is not complete without it. Long time screen recording software, Windows only.

Screenjelly – Browser based as well, has Twitter integration.

BBFlashback Express – Windows only. Upgradeable to paid version.

CaptureFox – A Firefox plugin. Looks pretty interesting and it is free.

Now, I don’t claim these tools are sufficient to fire your graphic designer. Far from it. Keep your designer at all costs – I know I do mine. Keeping them real close. But sometimes when you want a quick button or graphic just to fill a space or get the task done, these can be helpful.

FreshBadge – I so love this one. One of my first finds in fact. Love the badges. I’ve noticed once in a while it gets flaky on me.

Tabs Generator – very handy for web designers.

My Cool Button – pretty neat.

Quick Web Creations – not free Been quite useful to me.

Why only may? Because, a lot of the tools and methods to retrieve the content from a PDF depends on the security settings of the PDF. If you have locked down your PDF to disallow copying, many tools cannot get past that and if they did you’d still have to remember the password.

Assuming you have not locked your PDF, one of the easiest ways is to simply open the file in a PDF reader and click on Save As from the menu. This will extract a text only version of your work. If your document has a lot of fancy designs and images, you won’t be able to retrieve them using this method but if it’s mostly textual content this is probably better anyway to allow you to work from a fresh copy.

If you’d like something that resembles the final result more, you could try:

• PDFtoWord
• Koolwire
• Advanced PDF to Word Converter Free
• Zamzar

Keep in mind, you may not get an exact reproduction. In other words, don’t expect your original document. Some converters choke on the alignments and  images, overlapping them but hey, the idea is to salvage as much as you can so you can’t be too picky.

Now all of that no longer frustrates me. I’m a long time Delicious user. My bookmarks are with me all the time, as long as I have Internet connection OR my phone. I’ve never had to consider other online bookmarking software but I have been looking at Xmarks lately. The one feature I like about it, if you have the plugin installed on your browser, when you search it will also tell you how many if anyone bookmarked the site. That’s a good way to zero in on search results without clicking them one by one.

Perhaps what’s nicest about it is the ability to sync bookmarks across computers. That way you will always have the complete set. You can also sync passwords. Although nice option, I’m not so sure I want to put my passwords on a third party server. The password sync is turned off by default. If you’d like to experience having your bookmarks accessible anytime, anywhere and just about any mobile device, maybe Xmarks could be your answer.

Sparkplugging is starting a new tradition called ‘Spark an Idea Thursday’. Each week we’ll be sharing some great ideas for a topic of interest to our readers. We invite you to grab our image and carry the tradition through to your own blog! If you do, please link back to this post so we know where you were inspired!

This week’s Spark an Idea deals with making a new business ally.

Most who read this (and other blogs in the Sparkplugging network) know full well how important it is to have a tech person whom you can call on for help and guidance. Technology powers much of our world and business – if not all of it. Being one of those tech persons, I generally feel good about what I do and being in the background, in the support role doesn’t bother me much. I was just thinking the other day how much I like being the one who makes things work behind the scenes.

But what if you thought of your tech people or friend not as a support staff but a real partner. I’ve been working with clients and talented programmers alike for many years now. One thing I do know is if you have an idea but not the technical skills to achieve it, take the idea to a true blue tech person and lay it out for them. 9 out of 10 times they’d get really excited over it. Especially if the idea is a good one because it allows them to stretch, learn new skills and practice the ones they are good at.

Plus, if you give them the opportunity to be a partner in the project, it helps them break out of the trading hours for dollars role and flex their muscles as an entrepreneur.

I am very blessed to have clients who looked at me that way. As a real part of their team and someone to do joint ventures with, not just tech support who gets called on to bail you out only when trouble comes knocking. For me and those clients – now business partners, it has been a very profitable venture in more ways than one.

My natural reaction is “How do I get my blog on there?” And voila! Found the link.

Unfortunately, they are working through a backlog but I’m very pumped about submitting.

For example, Firefox stores it’s user data – that’s your preferences and favorites – in the folder

C:\Documents and Settings\User\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\

So make sure you get the Application Data folder too. In Mozy, you can do this by selecting the File System tab and select the C:\Documents and Settings\User\Application Data folder.

Here’s another thing I like to do to make sure you get all your files in one place. Many applications allow you to select where it should store the data. For example, Evernote defaults to C:\Documents and Settings\User\Local Settings\Application Data\Evernote. What I do is create an Evernote in the My Documents folder and tell Evernote to store the data in there instead. That way, when Mozy does the My Documents backup, it’ll get Evernote too.

It is a super easy process, only takes a few minutes each time. This video will illustrate how I do my backups and should equip you or your assistant with the knowledge how to do yours.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IsJBIBs-V1c&feature=player_embedded[/youtube]

There’s nothing wrong with TinyURL in fact, this is not a post bashing the service. I like it and it’s certainly very handy. I also like my new favorite URL shortener, Bit.ly. But sometimes I can’t help but think Twitter will soon if not already be used to spread viruses and other nasty wares because it’s easy and there are lots of people on Twitter who have come to expect a shortened URL and don’t normally think twice about clicking them.

One way to protect ourselves is by using a tool like Long URL Please. If you’re not using Firefox, you can drag and drop the bookmarklet to your bookmarks then just click it when you want to see the URL. The page will refresh and instead of shortened URLs, you’ll see the actual URLs. If you are using Firefox, you might want to install the plugin.

Photo by Dan Shirley

Before there was Google Voice, there was GrandCentral. The big G came around and bought it up, sat on it for a while and only a few short weeks ago, they turned it into Google Voice. I’ve been using GrandCentral for a while and I loved it. Really did. I was pretty sure I’d be happy with Google Voice when they said they were switching everything over but when I logged in for the first time after transferring my account – I don’t know.

You see, I loved GrandCentral’s interface. It was simple, easy to understand and it looked pretty too. But Google Voice’s interface seemed old fashioned and clunky to me. I couldn’t find what I was looking for. But on the up side, the design is more Gmail like which has it’s good points. Of course I love the fact that I don’t have to export or import and do any of that crazy stuff because my Gmail contacts are already in there.

The transcribe voicemail also seems pretty cool. Now I really need to get in there to do some voicemail recording or hire a pro. The call recording is definitely a plus although you can only record calls you receive not ones you place – talk about a wet blanket. However, the ability to call International numbers is nice. I call International more than local. Not sure it will replace my Skype yet but who knows?

Basecamp – this is like the holy grail for some. Not my personal choice. Not saying that it’s bad. The system is good and it works, just doesn’t work for me, but it might for you. Manage your own business, your team or add clients to it so everyone can communicate in a safe environment. A little pricey.
5pm – I’ve found this pretty interesting. Feature wise it is comparable with Basecamp. Also pricey although the starting package is lower than Basecamp.
Goplan – Can’t find a detailed feature listing on their site. Seems simple/straight forward. I just wish so many project management systems didn’t mimic the Basecamp screen which is one thing I don’t like about it. It’s more affordable and has a free basic account. I don’t know if it can track time though with for me is a biggie. Don’t want to use another time tracker to manage time and billing.

Lighthouse – Presents themselves as an issue tracker more than project management. In one sense, I do like issue trackers that way I can integrate my help desk right into my workspace but am not convinced… yet? They have a free basic account and several paid premium accounts. Again with the Basecamp user interface, what’s up with that?

activeCollab – This was originally an opensource project. Unfortunately it no longer is. You can still get the opensource version but it’s quite different from the premium version. Touted to be the Basecamp rival without monthly fees because you host it yourself. There’s good and bad to that. First is, you got to maintain any software on your own and if you want secure connection you have to get your own SSL certificate and do a whole bunch of technical setup. Good if you have a tech manager to handle things like that for you, pain in the butt in the long term if you don’t. Still the system itself is supposed to be pretty good, be prepared to pay good money for it. Small Biz version starts at $199 and Corporate version is $399, support is $199 yearly.

Wrike – I’m so intrigued by this system because it centers around emails which is where I practically live in – my inbox. The added time tracker helps of course. It can also get pricey because they charge per user account so if you have two people and you’re both using the basic account that’s $9.98 a month. Not bad I suppose, but the basic account really is basic, without time tracker. Still, I find this may probably suit my work style best and if I do try anything next it’ll probably be this.

Gmail or Google Apps- Surprised? Don’t be. This is exactly what I use to track my projects – well sort of I also use it conjunction with Google Calendar and Docs. Labels and Filters are used to help me keep projects together. I use labels like tags to group the emails and filters to help me automate things. I also use Gmail Labs features a lot like Super Stars to help me prioritize each email which I consider as tasks. The ability to chat is great as well. Just to be clear though, I use Google Apps for my day to day business management and not the normal Gmail.
OnStage – Looks pretty vanilla although I’m sure there’s something to love. They have a basic free account which is pretty generous as far as project management sytems go.

AirSet – I’ve been using this for close to 2 years, maybe even more. They recently updated and did total revamp that honestly makes me close to giving up on it. I really liked the old system but I guess that’s not so much about the system being good or bad rather my inability to change with them. They approach things from a virtual desktop view. You can create multiple virtual desktops. I like the fact that I can keep those desktops totally independent of each other and you can have multiple users on each desktop with pretty good access controls for each user. That way you can have both your personal and business agendas and projects on there and yet are separated. They were 100% free until a few short weeks ago, they began to charge for a premium version for $9.95 per web computer. You can still get it free but with ads and no secure connection.

ActionThis – If you’re a big Outlook user this might be just the thing for you. Unfortunately, I can’t tell you much more than that since I don’t use Outlook. They have free basic accounts and an affordable monthly plan starting at $10/month

DeskAway – Yet another Basecamp like system but more affordable, starting at $10/month and a free 3 project, 5 user basic account. I like the project templates and Export so you can always keep a copy of your own data.

MyIntervals – I so love the idea of integrated invoicing. Most systems have the time tracking but not invoicing which is a drag but this has both. Plans start at $20/month but they do have one for individuals and freelancers for free – limited to one project and no secure connection on free accounts.

Project Pier – Remember activeCollab opensource? Well this is a fork of activeCollab’s older version. Self hosted. I think it works OK but you’ll have to be prepared to manage this software yourself and also put up with incomplete features which is to be expected. The good news is, if you have a technical team to help you, they could tweak/modify the coding to do what you want so it can behave exactly how you want it to.

ClockingIt – Completely free. Seems pretty feature rich. They have the hosted version or, you can also get your own copy and install in on your servers. It is open source.

Project2Manage – Another Basecamp like system, and it is free.

Twitter trends are nothing new. Twitter itself has introduced trending topics in their search or you can look up the current hot topics on TwitScoop.com while those certainly are interesting and gives you some idea what’s on people’s minds, it doesn’t really tell you how people feel about those topics. You’d have to watch it for a while to get an idea what people’s sentiments are. Even then it’s more or less guess work.

Twendz attempts to calculate how people actually feel about the topic by comparing keywords in a tweet with a “dictionary” of words which are typically associated with positive or negative sentiments. Each keyword is given a score and that score is aggregated. So as you watch a topic, you’ll actually see the percentage of positives (green) and negatives (red). While this may not be scientifically accurate, it does seem like a good at-a-glance method to gauge the interest of the market. Of the few topics I’ve checked out on it, it seems to reflect the overall mood well.

Now that is smart use of data and technology for their marketing. This technology is known as Recommendation Engines. Of late, I’ve been deeply interested in recommendation engines and took time to research what solutions are available to small, home based businesses like ours. Recommendation engines are technically complex and you need a lot of data so the results can be accurate.

With almost non-existent technical resources plus small data pool compared to Amazon, can we take advantage of recommendation engines? Here’s what I found.

Content Publishers

I was very excited to find the WP Recommender plugin. It works in two ways. First, it tries to match relevant content you have already written to recommend to readers. I already do this with another plugin on my blog but that’s not all. WP Recommender also calculates the user’s browsing history and aggregates that information. Over time, the recommendations are fine tuned based on what people actually read which is more relevant than keyword matching with other posts. This should keep readers on your site longer or at least expose them to more of your great content. The nice thing about it, you can use Google Analytics to measure how recommendations influence your content consumption.

For e-stores

I found MyBuys which looked really interesting. It integrates into your shopping cart and makes recommendations based on purchase history, web site activity and shopper preferences. As for setup, you only need to copy and paste some simple code to your web site templates.

Paul Rosenblum, MyBuy’s VP of Products and Strategy says, “[MyBuy] is a pay-for-performance service. That means that online merchants have no upfront fees — no licensing fees, no consulting fees, no set up fees.  We get paid for the performance we generate for them.  This is a nice low risk proposition for the merchant — they only pay for revenue we actually drive for them.” Now that sounds sweet. Something that I’d definitely look in to if I had an e-store.

Recommendation engines have been receiving a lot of attention in 2009 alone and it’s only March. Fueled by the slow economy, it makes sense for marketers to use this technology to dig deeper into user preferences and behavior to increase orders and sales amount per order.

Then voicemails started piling up and my ‘inbox’ got full. What a pain – I didn’t notice it for weeks!

With Vonage, you can get your voicemails delivered automatically via email. But for cell phones, there’s not many options out there, especially if you brain is hardwired into your email inbox, like mine.

But GotVoiceoffers voicemail –> email delivery for all major cell phone providers, and they offer a 14-day free trial to see if it’s worth it to you.

Like I said, if your email inbox is your central organization spot for all things to do, getting voicemails delivered via email is totally worth it!