MaconMacGuy.com:

Putting the tech pieces together
for Macon & Middle Georgia
for "a good while now"

A friend has begun using a PR person for his music activities. I noticed the PR guy is using a cs.com email account for his business email contact (in the “internet olden days” cs.com was a sign of distinction – it meant you had a CompuServe account. Nowadays it’s really dying out).

In the interest of helping him out I sent the following email – which has been edited to suit my purposes here.

Another of the things I do is web hosting (at http://www.midgahosting.com ) and design and online presences and such for some of my clients – and I noticed you’re using a cs email account. Just wanted to mention that you’d really get some brand boost if you had your own domain, and use that as your email “base of operations”.

I’ve got a couple of real estate people who are doing that – they’ve bought their domain and hosting (under $4/month) and they’ve never done anything with the hosting part.

In your case I’d suggest getting the domain, and then setting up a wordpress blog (which is EASY using midgahosting) – use a couple of “pages” for company info, but use your posts for the releases you send out. This would amplify the search engine affect for each release.

[What they look like depends on the template chosen for the blog, but often pages show up as tabs at the top of the blog, and posts are the main part. Over at http://www.maconmacguy.com, for instance, pages are the tabs at the tops, but posts are the entries on the right under "news".]

Just thought I’d throw this idea into your bucket! I feel strongly that receiving emails from whatever@mycompany.com is stronger than getting it from whatever@cs.com.

–

The process:  head over to http://www.midgahosting.com.
Click on the “sign up” link, at the top.
Fill out the form. Decisions to make:

1. what username you want – for logging into your control panel area
2. Which data center (I suggest California, but there isn’t much speed difference between California and London from Georgia)
3. Which plan – for your purposes I suggest the cheapest! Easily upgradeable later if needed.
4. Pre-installed script – Select wordpress here. No charge – this just saves you a step later.
5. Your desired domain…. then the usual contact and payment info

==============================================
Tom Rule
The MaconMacGuy
Computer help, training, Websites, Processes

http://www.MaconMacGuy.com

Web Hosting under $4 a month

http://www.MidGaHosting.com

==============================================

I have a client – who is slowly migrating from using 4 different email services to using the webmail that comes with his hosting (SmarterMail Enterprise) – ask me about sending out one email to a bunch of his contacts. He couldn’t figure out an easy way to do it.

As with most things, this required him to do some setup before it would actually work. In this case, I shot a video of how to do it because that’s how my client best learns new information (typing up a long email with instructions isn’t of much help).

I suggested he setup an Excel spreadsheet and have his assistant type in all of his contacts (which are seriously scattered between several machines and webmail services like hotmail, yahoo, gmail, etc.). She would then save the file as a CSV, which SmarterMail can import.

The key bit o’ info was that you can add a category to each contact in SmarterMail. After adding a category (“mail list”) to the desired contacts, it’s easy to select all of the contacts in a specific category when typing up a new email.

This took a bit of research, but is a prime example of one of the services I offer my clients. I take an existing situation and try to connect the dots – showing them how to take advantage of the technology they have, or offering some alternative methods (In this case, I listed MailChimp as an option). There is often a “cheaper than inexpensive” service online that you can use to accomplish something.

Check with me an ask about what I can do for you!