Well the last two posts have addressed two of the threee must haves for anyone looking to create an online business. The third is hostiong for your web site or sites. Yes you need some type of site no matter what the ad copy says.

Yes you will most likely need more than one. If you are just starting out that may seem a daunting task but believe me that will change. I average at least a couple new sites each month and will quickly put up a site for a single promotion.

Now there are a few things that I look for in hosting. First is cpanel as it makes everything much easier to deal with and has more features. It must have multiple MySql data bases. You don’t need to understand why but most scripts for things like a blog, a forum, a help desk etc. need their own data base.

Finally up time and service response time are key. Hey, this is my business and if the server is off line I am effectively out of business. My website is my store or office and having it available is extremely important to me.

This is one of the reasons I have had a site on Kiosk for years. It is almost always on line (nothing is 100%) and I can reach someone 24/7/365. This is extremely important to me. They have an online conference room where I can get help during the day but more important I can reach somone at 1 am Sunday morning.

I know that is true because the only time I had a major problem that is when it happened. I was getting ready for bed and went to check something and got the dreaded site not found on my browser.

Well here the hard drive on the server it was on went bad. This can happen to any piece of equipment. Well at 1 am on a Sunday morning I hit their pager and had someone get back to me within 5 minutes. Wish it would have been that quick to fix it but having a new hard drive installed and everything added back to it takes time. I was running about 9am the next morning and for a hardware problem in the early hours of a weekend I was quite happy. At least as happy as you can be when Murphy gets you.

They do supply some other tools which are quite helpful but do not use their autoresponder for the reasons stated in the article on Aweber. It is an add on for them and they don’t take care of keeping it clean like the major autoresponders do. The delivery is fair to poor instead of excellent and that will cost you a lot of money as you grow.

For webhosting though their service and support are second to none so they get a 5 star recommendation.

The Evil Twin

Well I hate to agree with the wuss but there service is up there. Their price could be better and you know me I am cheap, cheap, cheap. Really wish their delivery rate was better cause then their overall price would be cheap too.

Hate to do it but except for price they get a good rating here. Don’t you just hate when we agree. Damn I am getting soft.

Find out more about Kiosk here.

The key to making money on line is to build a list. You will need an autoresponder to help automate some of these tasks.

When you look at autoresponders you can do it a couple of ways. You can use a third party service, it may come with your hosting account or you can buy a script to install on your server.

My advice is to use a quality third party service and here is why.

Unless you are very knowledgeable about email delivery and have the contacts at the various isps to insure your email delivery it will cost you much more to host your own script than what a third party will charge you.

Now I have my own dedicated server so I have already removed one of the problems with self hosting. I have the ability to control everything that comes off of that server.

I don’t have the knowledge and contacts nor the time to insure that the server stays whitelisted with the various isps. If you are on shared hosting it is even tougher.

When I first started I was on shared hosting and could keep my stuff clean but had no control over the other people that were on the same server. If they got black listed so did I through no fault of my own.

Now why do I say it costs you money? Let’s say you have a list of 5,000 people and you send an email out that gets opened and clicked on by 10% of your subscribers. The sales letter they go to converts at 1% this would generate you 5 sales with a commission of $20 each if all your email is delivered.

You send the same mailing and only 60% gets delivered instead of 5 sales you get 3 all factors being the same because less people received the email. This 2 sales on one mailing are worth more than the cost of the monthly fee. Multiply that by 4 mailings a momth and you can see how much this will cost you.

Now I use Aweber for a few reasons. First and foremost they have one of the best delivery rates in the industry. This is always the biggest reason.

Second they have a wide variety of sign up forms available. You can create unblockable slide ins quite easily allowing you to improve your subscribe ratio.

Third they have an easy way to split test your broadcast mailings and also allow you to track your open rate and click through rate. All these stats allow you to constantly and easily improve your mailings. Knowing what is working is invaluable.

Fourth you can integrate your RSS feed to send out notices of updates to your list automatically. Sign up on the form at the top right and they will automatically send you a notice each time I update the blog without me doing anything after the initial set up. A huge time saver for me.

All in all one of if not the best services available to handle this important function of your marketing .

The evil twins opinion

They are very strict and do not like co-registrations. If you use co-registrations they may not be your best choice.

Overall even I have to rate them highly and I hate doing that.

Summary

Except for the co-registration dislike Aweber is our number one recommendation for an autoresponder service. Your autoresponder is too valuable of a resource to not get the best and at less than $20 a month is a no brainer for most.

Check out Aweber here.

This will be the first post in the new series. We will be starting with the primary tools that any marketer needs to have and understand how to use.

Tracking is the key to improving your profitability. Knowing and understanding which ads are converting into sales or opt ins is a key to being able to improve your results.

Now Hits Connect is a monthly membership site that allows you to track these ads and also to follow them through to the thank you page if you control it. For example on my squeeze pages I can implant a small image that will tell me exactly which ad source generated the specific signup.

It also has a built in rotator so I can split test pages to see which converts better. Doing these little thing allows me to constantly improve the response that I get from each campaign. If you would like more information on how to use a service like this and what tracking can mean to your bottom line check out my free report – Tracking Your Way to Profits.

Whether you use Hits Connect or another service tracking is a must have for any serious marketer.

The Old Bald Guy

Okay you tell em all the good stuff and I’ll tell em the bad. Unfortunately and I really hate to say this but tracking is important. Hits Connect does a good job but you can find free alternatives if you want to work a bit harder.

The OBG likes it but he can be a bit lazy and doesn’t mind paying a bit to make things easier. Just a contrary opinion.

The final word – Hits Connect is a good service we both agree. The price is affordable to me but the evil one would rather spend more time and save money. My opinion is that the cost is negligible for the time it saves. It comes down to what your time is worth.

You can find out more about Hits Connect here.

Okay time for one of many mea culpas I have had here over the last few months. One of the things with working from home seems to be that there is always somethig that keeps you from doing the fun things and despite the way it may seem I do like to argue, debate and even get cussed out by my evil twin.

Well I can surely do that for leaving me locked up here and you even changed the damn login or I could help keep this going you ass.

Yep you are right. I changed the lgins to keep you locked out before I end up with constables at my door serving me with a lawsuit with your wild accusations of others at times.

hehehehe…. Yep I would do that too if you let me loose but if you don’t start coming around a bit more often you will find that I can and more importantly will go out of my way to have that happen.  You really think I can’t hack this??? You friggin nuts???

No you are not only eveil but extremely adept at getting into things you shouldn’t so that won’t surprise me at all. I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I will get here at least once a week and let you out. Maybe more but no problems. Especially this week because Word Press just had a security update and you know that will have me being busy updating blogs. This one will get done once I am finished with this post.

Well get rid of that damn blog order site and people won’t contact you and you’ll have the time to come here.

Well as that helps pay the server bills so this blog can be online I don’t think that is going to happen. How about the next time I let you rant on people who should not have a paypal account or credit card. Think you could have fun with that. We can start the coffee table book of stupid support requests. You game?

Damn I can’t even be pissed at you if you do that. Shit that will be fun but I’ll find something else to get pissed at you for.

Okay til tomorrow. No make that Thursday tomorrow I’ll be doing a teleseminar with Bob Jenkins about using Squidoo but Thursday would be a good day to start.