AWeber and MailChimp

Click here to get an AWeber account.

Aweber is a paid service that allows you to set up an opt-in box (like the one we have on the upper right corner of this page). This tool will help you collect and manage your list of email addresses from people who visit and subscribe to your website. Aweber brands itself as an email marketing software, email newsletters, and autoresponder service. Its pricing starts at $19.95 a month. Once you sign up for an account, you can set up your lists, and create your email campaigns or newsletters.

The Aweber service comes with sign-up form templates that you can use on your website or send out in your email newsletters. This saves you from having to pay someone to design them for you. Click here to get an Aweber account.

Mailchimp is a new email list manager that is gaining popularity with the WordPress crowd. It’s actually free up to 500 subscribers. It is a nice widget to start with when you are on a budget and you are not looking for anything fancy with your email newsletters. However, unlike Aweber, Mailchimp only comes with a grey (bland) sign up form. Also, the code they provided to add to a web or landing page was so convoluted! It gave us a headache when we tried to figure out how to modify and use the sign-up form (we are a fan of clean code). So unless you are up for tweaking XHTML and CSS code to make a decent looking sign-up forms, we recommend that you pay for AWeber instead.

Traffic Report Newsletter

What’s Next AFTER Your Website goes Live?

Okay, so you worked hard on building a website using the 5 Essentials. Now you have something you are proud of. It is something that demonstrates your mastery in your chosen field. It has all the functionality you need to keep adding meaningful content over time while fulfilling upon your SEO Strategy.

Now what?

We would like to bring you up-to-date information on the hottest topics in website marketing today. Since we are a technical group, our newsletter will focus more on the Technical-How-To instead of just telling you about it and leaving you alone to figure it out. We like explaining things (as long as people listen.) After 25 years of software development work, it’s been kinda lonely and we want to teach.

Topics:

Making Sense of Your Analytics Reports (What are all those numbers for?)
How to Keep Up the Keyword Research Process (SEO is not a one-time event.)
Take a peak at Your Competitor’s Keywords.
FREE Software worth downloading (Face it, most free software are not worth your bandwidth.)
PAID Software worth paying for (In the land of abundance called the Internet, only the best prevail.)

Subscribe to the FREE Traffic Report Newsletter to receive the First Edition on August 15, 2010. The subscription box is on the top right corner of this page.

Good Web Hosting

Criteria we used to select hosting:

Performance – We like Hostgator because of the performance of the sites. It is faster than the Godaddy sites we had built in the past (sorry Godaddy, we still buy domains from you though.)
Support - 24 hours, 7 days a week. They have so many tech support people online to answer questions. Plus, you can give immediate feedback on their form which has a survey.
Features – We like the Business Plan because of the Private IP and the Private SSL which comes with it. Other hosting companies charge extra for that.
Infrastructure -The hardware upgrade path is good because as your site grows, you will be able to move up to a better plan without switching companies. They have VPS (Virtual Private Server) and dedicated server hosting available.
Price – We’ve been burned by cheap hosting before so price is not our number one criteria.

Note: Their Business Plan comes with a 1-800 toll free forwarding number. Ignore it unless you want an 800 number. We checked into it and it’s not really free.

Having the Private IP and Private SSL is good enough to pay for. The sites load pretty fast and we’re telling you, that is worth 15 bucks a month.

Recommendation: Pay $14.95/month for a Business Plan if you have E-Commerce on your site. Otherwise, pick the cheapest plan. Also, take the monthly payment option. You can always upgrade later.

To get a Hostgator web hosting account, click on the Gator.

We get a bonus for your clicking through our site, so thank you in advance