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Whether you have a good-sized customer base and email list or you’ve got a nice blog following going, at some point you’re going to want to blast out an email campaign to everyone. It’s not as easy as writing out a nicely formatted email in Outlook and sending out a big BCC to everyone. Don’t do that. Seriously, don’t.
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Not too long ago, I wrote a lengthy post called “I’m Your BlackBerry” where I explained how great my BlackBerry is for getting business done. I was at that point shopping for a new BlackBerry to replace my aging one.
Then a little over a week ago a buddy of mine was showing me his new Droid Incredible. It was mighty impressive. It was fast, beautiful, had a polished user interface, and did everything my phone did (camera, wi-fi, web browsing, multiple email accounts, etc) but better.
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In the last article on advertising, I introduced you to the complexity of Adwords and the promise of Trada. In this article I’ll go over a few more services to help get your startup marketed, this time covering display ads.
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Google Adwords is a force to be reckoned with in the online advertising space. According to IAB Internet Advertising Report conducted by PricewaterhouseCoopers for the year 2009, search advertising is 47% of all online advertising efforts, and of this Google has the lion’s share. So when it comes to advertising your startup by being in front of the most people, many agree that Google is your best bet.
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Making money on your site with ads pretty much sucks nowadays. Unless you’re pulling in lots of traffic and your site has a focus or product connection that advertisers can target users to, you’re not going to make very much. In this article I’ll give you some advice on what works and what doesn’t, from my experience.
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Today I’m going to discuss two more services for handling your startup’s email. These options are for those of you who need a little something more in your email hosting. Looking for Exchange and Sharepoint hosting? Got it. Need tons of mailbox space because you never delete email or attachments? Covered. In addition, I’m trying to keep your costs low. Let’s dive in.
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My first startup involved hosting websites and offering email accounts to users, so I had to set up an email server and programmatically add/remove email accounts, filter spam, and knock it with a wrench then mail got stuck in its innards.
These days setting up an email server is pretty easy. But just because it’s easy doesn’t mean you should do it.
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Like any “real” company, you’re probably publishing a phone number for your customers. For the stealth startups out there, and those who are running a business from your home, services like Kall8 or Grasshopper make this easy by providing an 800 number that can ring your home number or cell when people call. you may be dumping these to voicemail and calling customers back later. If so, you customer sees your home number or cell number on caller ID. Doesn’t sound too good, does it?
So how do you keep your real phone number anonymous and still your customers from your home or cell number? Read on for the solution.
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Back in my first startup where we were accepting credit cards, we purchased an SSL certificate in order to assure our customers that their credit card information was being transmitted securely.
We bought that SSL certificate from VeriSign for $495 per year. That was 2003.
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Back when I did my first startup, we were pretty hardcore about data privacy. We had an overpriced SSL certificate, we encrypted credit cards and other customer data, encoded our PHP code with Zend Encoder, and disallowed SSH connections except from specific IPs. We were in charge of security.
Nowadays, PCI Compliance is the boss. If you store or transmit credit card information in your organization or site, you will have to conform to the PCI DSS rules in order to do business.
