Today I just wanted to share some useful tips on getting set up and established in the internet marketing arena.
With blogs becoming so classy and with so many plug-ins available, the interactive nature of them, many marketers are using this medium as their main web-site now. The advantages include:
It’s free to start, unless you want to create your own domain name in which case it will cost you a few dollars for the year and I would suggest this as it creates more individuality and helps to brand you 
It makes you easily accessible to your visitors as they can leave comments and if the comments require an answer it’s going to bring them back to find out what the answer is
There are masses of free wordpress templates available so you can easily personalise your blog without knowing about html or php programming.
It’s easy to log in and add content regularly without having to worry about opening a html editor and / or an ftp client.
If however you want to go the web-site route for any reason (I use both but developed my own web-sites way before I started blogging lol), there are some really useful open source products that can make your life a lot easier.
I use Evrsoft 1stpage 2006 as my html editor, it’s a little complex if you are totally new to this, but they have good tutorials in their support forum. It’s free and it can read and programme html and php files for you if you need it to. You can download it from Cnet.
Although my html editor can ftp files to my server for me (and indeed if you use cpanel with yur web host I believe you can ftp files direct from there, though I’ve never explored this otion), I use Smart ftp client, simply because I needed it before I found 1stpage , got used to it and carried on using it. You can download a free trial version but you will need to upgrade if you want to continue using it. It’s a one time payment and not expensive.
As a web host I am happy with Hostgator, I have used them for 3 years now, they are extremely helpful even if you have a bit of a dim question, which even now I occasionally do , their staff are unfailingly polite and helpful and they have 24 hour service available to help if you need it. They also offer great functionality in my view.
In fact hostgator also have their own site builder as do many of the web hosts out there so it may be wise to choose your hosting first and then see how you get on with their site builder before downloading the other software I have mentioned.
It is possible to access some excellent free templates which you can easily adapt once you have learned the basics of html and css, so again you are personalising these free templates by changing the colour schemes, logo and images used.
A great open source graphics pack is called Gimp and again you can download this from Cnet. It is a little complex but you can find free tutorials by doing a google search and it’s well worth the effort, it’s like a free version of photoshop and it works exceptionally well once you get used to it, (there are still a host of features that I haven’t explored as yet).
Another must have even when you are new is an auto-responder. List building really is an essential part of internet marketing. A good free one, which allows you to build one AR with as many members as you wish to add, is: ISO Responder which is part of the ISOR membership. This also includes a lead capture page maker which you can use to encourage people to sign up for your newsletter or give-away, whichever method you choose to tempt them
If you are new and uncertain, this can be a good way to start building a list with no cost attached, although many free auto-responders get bad press, this one is really pretty good, good tutorials to help you get started and good deliverability of your AR letters, which is definitely something to take into consideration .
When you create your lead capture page, you want it to be snappy, eye catching and to have all the must know info plus the sign up box “above the fold”. This means that when someone opens your lead capture page, they should be able to see why and where they should sign up with you without having to scroll down at all. You can add more info and another sign up box below that point, but always ensure that your why and your where are visible immediately on loading the page, this will give you a much higher ration of sign ups..
Well I think that’s probably enough for this post lol – it’s starting to look like war and peace and I don’t want to bore you
As always feel free to leave me a comment to tell me if you found this useful and / or what else you would like to know
