19
Sep
2013

Project Email Part 4

My email client of choice is called ThunderBird and the good news is, like FireFox  it’s also available for Mac and Linux users. (There’s even a portable version for Macs too.)

Why do I think portable programs are the way to go?

Once upon a time, all Windows programs were portable. You didn’t install them as such, in effect you just copied them where you wanted them to run and away you went.

Then Microsoft introduced the concept of the registry which is a database of all program settings and in effect tied the program to the machine you’d installed it onto. If you wanted to run the program on another machine then you had to install it on there too.

Right from day one I didn’t think that was a good thing for us users.

The worst thing about it is the Windows registry is incomprehensible.

The old method utilised a simple text based .ini file with text entries for all the settings and I reckon it was a “jolly good idea”. You could read through these entries for the program in your favourite text editor and work out what was going on. You could also apply some useful undocumented tweaks by changing “false” values to “true” and seeing what happened.

Yeah I’m a bit of a geek, always have been.  😉

Portable programs by their nature can’t use the registry to store their settings, so they typically use the good old .ini files again. This means if you use a flash drive to store and run your portable programs, then those programs can write back any settings changes you make to the .ini files.

I hope that makes sense.

So. The PortableApps program is very cool and has a *huge* amount of free programs you can install including ThunderBird, FireFox, Chrome, Opera, NotePad++, Skype and OpenOffice and Libre Office.

It even has its own built in installer and program directory. Check for new apps, tick the boxes for the ones you want to install and off it goes and does it for you.

Yeah I’m impressed with it and I think you will be too.

Okay so back to email and ThunderBird.

I used to be an Outlook Express user until Microsoft killed it. Then I had to go looking for a replacement email client as I really didn’t want to use the web for ALL my email accounts as it would have taken forever to log in and check them one at a time. The assumption nowadays by companies like Microsoft and Google is we only have one email account, and that’s never been the case for me. It might be okay for the average home user, but I need lots of accounts thank you.

Luckily, with ThunderBird you can add a LOT of email accounts and I have at least 30 in my personal installation.

And they’re really made it VERY easy to add a new email account to it, including Google and probably Yahoo although I haven’t checked.

All you need to do is enter your email address and password and Thunderbird automatically tests the server to see what protocols it supports and goes for the most secure one it can find.

IF you’re thinking of leaving a comment on this post with your thoughts, then all I’ll say is that’s a good idea and it’s DEFINITELY in your interest to do so as I’d like to later reward all contributors for their input and views.  😉

-Frank Haywood

 

http://www.frankhaywood.com/tag/project-email/ <== Click this for a list of all Project Email posts.

Posted by Frank Haywood in internet business
18
Sep
2013

Contextual Widgets

Update: The sale at $10.00 for the very cool Contextual Widgets plugin for WordPress is now live. Included as part of this sale only is a full developer (client/flipper) licence.

Buy now

***

Today Wednesday 18th September at 7.00pm GMT (2.00pm EST), I’m kicking off a 48 hour sale for the Contextual Widgets plugin.

This is a control plugin and allows you to decide which widgets will appear on which parts of your site. It works with ALL standard widgets, not just the ones I’ve released.

Now I know you might still be wondering a bit at the moment, but I’ll try to explain.

You know how a WordPress theme allows you to drag and drop widgets into the sidebars?  Well it’s usually a case of all or nothing.  Once you’ve dropped them there, all you have is the same widgets in the sidebar on *every* page and post on your site.

There’s no way of saying you don’t want to see a particular widget on a certain page.

Until now.

With “Contextual Widgets” you can choose exactly in which context each widget will appear.

So you may decide that you only want to place a particular ad in a sidebar on a particular page (or context)…

Example #1

You write a blog page that discusses the importance of building a mailing list (the why), but you don’t put in any details about the steps they need to do it (the how). Over in your sidebar are your affiliate ads for an ebook on list building and an autoresponder service that only shows on that page, ie in that particular context.

Example #2

A visitor arrives at your site via a search engine and lands on one of your tag or category archive pages (this happens a lot). They see a call to subscribe and a special offer that’s nowhere else on your site.

Example #3

You’re running a series of tutorials on your site and you don’t want them on general view. To do this you create a set of custom menus for the tutorials and place them in the sidebar only on the tutorials pages themselves.

Aha! Make sense?

There are plenty of contexts built right in:-

  • Home – Your site’s blog page if it isn’t set to your front page.
  • Front Page – Your site’s front page which can be different to your blog.
  • Post – Individual posts, ie not your home/blog page.
  • Attachment – For your attachment pages, e.g. movies, audio and images.
  • Author – Author archive pages.
  • Category – Category archive pages.
  • Date – Date archive pages.
  • Tag – Tag pages.
  • Search – Search results pages.
  • Page not found – Your 404 error pages.

Plus every single page you create gets auto-added to the list of contexts.  So every page you write about any topic can be set to show its own unique content in the widgetised areas.

Combine this plugin with “Widgets In It” and you have a very powerful system of control that a standard WordPress installation doesn’t.  😉

From today 18th September at 7.00pm GMT (2.00pm EST) and for the next 48 hours, you can get the Contextual Widgets plugin for just $10. This sale includes a full developer (client/flipper) licence.

 

-Frank Haywood

Posted by Frank Haywood in internet business
13
Sep
2013

Project Email Part 2

As I said yesterday, today I’ve created a short video showing how you can enable email authentication on your domain with cPanel hosts. It’s very easy to do in a couple of clicks, but if you don’t have cPanel then I guess you can ask your web host to enable it for you.

Start the video then change quality to 720p and go full screen.

Why should you do this?

Simple. Email is increasingly becoming REPUTATION based.

In the past there were systems set up called blocklists which in essence were just a big list of bad IP or email addresses that were used by known spammers. Except these lists have always been rubbish and poorly maintained (the trouble is many ISPs and free email providers still rely on them).

But there’s something better now that’s been widely accepted (the chances are you haven’t joined the party yet) and that’s email authentication.

This system relies on you enabling a couple of things on your server that authenticate email coming in (DKIM) and also going out (SPF) to make sure the email is from who it says it is and not from a spammer.

The SPF part of it makes sure that the receiving server can check to see if the email really did come from you. Over time this will improve your reputation so that the ISPs and email providers are more willing to accept email from you even if the odd user marks it as spam. (A whole topic in itself.)

So this stuff is quite important to know for any small business owner – I wouldn’t be bringing it up if it wasn’t.

IF you’re thinking of leaving a comment on this post with your thoughts, then all I’ll say is that’s a good idea and it’s DEFINITELY in your interest to do so as I’d like to later reward all contributors for their input and views.  😉

-Frank Haywood

 

http://www.frankhaywood.com/tag/project-email/ <== Click this for a list of all Project Email posts.

Posted by Frank Haywood in internet business
12
Sep
2013

Project Email Part 1

If you use email at all then I expect you’ll find this useful.  😉

This series of blog posts, videos and emails will eventually become part of a saleable product so pay attention if you want to see how I go about creating a learning product. Then you can use this methodology as a guide for your own product creation.

Start the video then change quality to 720p and go full screen.

Gradually over time there have arisen some situations related to email that I think need to change. I’m certain that the changes I’m going to discuss in this series of blog posts and emails will prove to be a substantial improvement of your business situation.

This will arise from both different methods of handling email that you may not be doing at the moment, and also with your email marketing – autoresponders.

So let’s get started with a discussion about email clients and then we’ll move onto autoresponders.

I’ve noticed over the last 6 months or so that an increasing number of small business are using free email services such as Yahoo, Hotmail, Gmail.

I don’t think this is a good idea for two reasons.

#1 – It looks unprofessional to your customers to be receiving a business email from fredbloggs @ yahoo.com, or studly111111 @ gmail.com etc.  😉

#2 – You don’t own the email account, the free email provider does. And they can close you down any time they like.

Ask yourself what it would do to your business if a spam complaint resulted in your free email account being closed.

Nightmare?

Consider Gmail.

Yes we all have Gmail accounts but only because we have to if we want to use any of the Google services such as YouTube, GDrive or Gdocs.

But… Google have a history of closing without warning any service they lose interest in.

They did it with a really useful online graphics editor a couple of years ago, and more recently they closed their RSS reader service too, annoying a whole load of techies out there.

Email could be next if new legislation requires a tax on email addresses, or makes free email addresses illegal to prevent the increasing amount of spam. I don’t think that last one would be a bad thing, and sooner or later a politician is going to have that idea too.

To the public it wouldn’t be a big deal. They’d use their ISP email addresses instead.

But as a business owner, you should *really* be taking charge of your own email and not trust it to chance.

I’d also like you to consider that many free email providers don’t care if the email gets to you or your clients and customers or not. It simply isn’t critical to them. What do they care if they filter 2 million emails out of their network today and yours happens to be one of them?

As far as they’re concerned they’re providing free not business email services, and you can’t afford to rely on them as part of your business.

So learning point number 1 is:-

You shouldn’t rely on free email services as part of your business.

All make sense so far?

In a couple of days or so I’ll show you how *easy* it is to set up an email account within cPanel, and also set what are called DKIM and SPF records – very important!

Now then. To make this whole exercise doubly useful, I’ve created a first video – an overview that explains how I’m going about creating the learning product and what it’s going to be about and where it’s leading to. And iot also explains a lot of things not covered in this email.

If you watch the video and like it, then feel free to give me some love back by sharing and even embedding it on your own site. And of course let me know what you think by leaving me a comment on the post.

IF you’re thinking of leaving a comment on this post with your thoughts, then all I’ll say is that’s a good idea and it’s DEFINITELY in your interest to do so as I’d like to later reward all contributors for their input and views.  😉

-Frank Haywood

 

http://www.frankhaywood.com/tag/project-email/ <== Click this for a list of all Project Email posts.

Posted by Frank Haywood in internet business, list building, Product Ideas

Frank Haywood


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