Startup Next Door

So you’ve likely noticed I haven’t posted in quite a while. Blogging is hard work, and takes a ridiculous amount of time to write even a short, quality post.

I’ll be back to posting soon, but wanted to share what I’ve been so busy with.

Several months ago, I joined a small team of amazing individuals. The goal of the team was to create a new product that would save online advertising, help the online publishing industry, and most of all, save the consumer from annoying, awful and downright abusive advertising practices.

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Whether your site is a content site, an e-commerce portal, a museum site, or something else completely, you’ll likely have fans.  Fans come in two types: sneezers and non-sneezers.  The word “sneezer” comes from Seth Godin’s Purple Cow.  A sneezer is someone who wants to tell others about your site or product.  Usually because there is something remarkable to talk about.

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When I first moved from a shared host to a dedicated server, and had my sites set up to send email (to customers), I immediately received rejections from Yahoo, Hotmail, AOL, and many other email servers (this was before there was Gmail).  The rejections all shared the same reason.  The IP block my server was in was blacklisted.  That means that the IP address of my server was within a list of neighboring IP addresses that was blacklisted.  It seems people grabbed dedicated servers and used them as spamming machines.

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You may not be aware that placing your email address on your “contact us” page is a sure-fire way to get yourself truckloads of spam.  As we speak, there are bots traversing the web, looking for email addresses that have been published publicly on web pages.  These email addresses (and items that resemble email addresses) are stored and sold to spammers.

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In this day and age, faxes are still surprisingly widely used.  Should you have a fax machine to run your business?  Not necessarily.  I’ve got the solution to all your faxing needs and it’s not expensive.

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It’s been a while since I’ve posted under the “stealth” tag.  If you’re unaware, these stealth posts are for businesses made up of just one or two people that try to give the illusion of a thriving office environment, instead of just a living room/office.

Most businesses have 9-5 business hours.  It’s not necessary that you post business hours on your site.  And responding to customers during business hours may be difficult, depending on your day job, service or technology.

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On June 30th, Rasmus Lerdorf, the creator of the PHP programming language, joined Earndit as advisor.

You may remember my interview with Earndit back on April 7th.  The free service tracks members’ exercise (jogs, runs, walking) and offers rewards in the form of discounts on great products.

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Don’t use photos of people pointing at computers

You’ve come up with a brilliant startup idea, and perhaps have even completed the site, but at this point it’s just working wireframes.  It’s ugly.  It’s time to employ your design skills to make it appeal to people.  But if you’re like me, your design skills are not up to the task?  So what do you do?  Hire a design firm at thousands of dollars?  That could work but it kind of goes against the cheapskate theme I have going here.  What you need are some attractive, ready-made site designs!

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As I mentioned a few months back in I’m a Startup Rancher, I tend to create startups, let them run for a while, and see if they have any traction.  Some flop due to difficulties in the business model, or in the marketing, or just because I didn’t solve a problem that many people had.  So the failed startups get taken offline and are heaped onto the compost pile.  But once you have paying customers, turning off a service that people depend on can have big consequences.

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My last post covered getting your email campaigns out on your own.  Today will cover all-in-one email services.  These services will handle subscribes/unsubscribes, email composition, CAN-SPAM compliance, will keep your email looking consistent across many email clients, send email for you, and keep analytics on opens, bounces, and clicks.

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