Blogging for cash using your own words
From Bill Mason at http://web-workathome.com
I’m sure you have heard the term” blogging for cash”, you can’t help but come across numerous bloggers that sing the praises of making Residual Incomemoney by blogging. There are so many ways to earn money from your blog, but today I want to take a look at writing posts for sponsors. This may not be for everybody out there, but for bloggers who are struggling to make ends meet; it can be a life saver.
Looking for alternatives
There are many paid blogging advertising programs available and one such company Blogsvertise comes to mind. To give you an idea of what they offer; first of all you will have to have been blogging for at least 60 days and be in good standing with the mighty Google. Signing up to Blogsvertise is painless enough, as long as you have a viable blog and have plenty of fresh content for the advertisers to see you shouldn’t have any problem.
Working Tasks
So what does Blogsvertise expect from you the blogger? Well for one thing they expect you to follow the rules and play fair, and believe me they will return the favor tenfold. It is very important that you login to your account at least two or three times a week to keep up with any queued writing tasks. The writing tasks which are effectively blog posts have to be at least 100 words containing a minimum of three links back to the sponsors’ website. Sounds simple enough, as for the content, well just visit the sponsor’s website and write about your impressions and what value it would give to your readers.
What you can expect to earn!
There are a lot of variables here, for example new publishers can earn between $4 – $25per assignments. The standard payouts are $5 – $15 again depending on your traffic and PR which is worked out by third parties. So if you can push out only 10 tasks a month, then you’re looking at earning between $50.00 & $150.00 per month, not bad for doing something that you do every day. On the other hand if you are a high traffic blog then you can negotiate a much higher payout per task.
As I said before this might not be for everyone but never the less is a useful addition to help boost your blog earnings and definitely needs careful consideration.
Find out for yourself, give Blogsvertise a try, they have a very comprehensive FAQ to guide you through the introduction and give you useful starting points. You can expect your blog to be accepted in 24 hours as long as it meets there guidelines.
Let me know what you think
Progress and Completion
From Shoemoney at http://www.shoemoney.com
Every day I get this question in my email:
Hey man help a brother out. I just lost my job. I have no technical ability or resources and I need to make $5,000.00 in 1 week and only have $100.00 to spend. What do I need to do?
My answer is always the same:
“Sorry I am not qualified to answer that. I focus on building quality services that take years to build and stand the test of time. I have zero experience about getting 50x return on my money in a week hours with zero technical ability or any resources what so ever..”
Then I always get something back like:
F*CK YOU THEN SHOEMONEY MY KIDS ARE GOING TO STARVE BECAUSE YOU WONT GIVE ME YOUR SECRETS
It used to bug me a bit but I have become numb to it.
Now – do I play around with affiliate stuff and sometimes make 50-100x my money in 24 hours? SURE but those times are EXTREMELY rare and its happen maybe 5x in a 6 year period to me. And that is only because it was something I stumbled upon while building our next thing.
Progress is a very underrated thing.
Why is it people are so unwilling to make small progress every day on something. Its really the key to success. It applies to all areas.
Right now we are working on like seriously 20 projects of which 3 are massive new ventures for us.
We just try to make progress on every one every day.
This is a HUGE challenge. And it requires something that does not come naturally to me – Management.
But the rewards of making progress every day are HUGE.
People think of affiliate marketing as some fly by night thing. And sure people are making some money flying by night but the biggest affiliate earners have build there systems over YEARS.
Completion is very overrated.
Completion or reaching the end many times means death. When you complete your life… your dead.
People win the lottery and feel that is all they need to complete their life and looks what happens to 87% of them. They go bankrupt. They stop making progress on LIFE.
The same is true in internet projects. If you are working to just complete the project and move onto something else then it has no chance to succeed.
I know its not the American way but start thinking long term and make progress every day. Trust me.
Affiliate Marketing During A Troubled Economy
Affiliate Marketing During A Troubled Economy
By The Super Affiliate Marketing Blog at http://www.aojon.com/
Affiliate Marketing
I’m no finance guy, hell, I suck at basic adding and math, but it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know that the US and many other world markets and economies have been on somewhat of a downward spiral type of decline. While most other industries are bracing themselves for what they think is the worst to come their way, as an Affiliate Marketer you should be embracing it. Whether the economy is up or down does in fact make an impact on your role as a marketer and your budgets too.
I follow two very simple rules to stay ahead of the game, regardless of economic woes or highs. No, it has nothing to do with some bullshit real estate scam, although real estate is probably the safest place to be. Instead it goes as follows:
- When the market goes up, spend more on advertising.
- When the market goes down, spend as much as you possibly can on advertising.
Why am I so aggressive when the market goes down? Simple.. Everything is cheap as shit. Its like getting twice and three times the traffic and conversions for your dollar. Even when the dollar is weak offshore, it doesn’t mean you should give up and spend less, it means you should spend MORE… MUCH MORE!
See, being aggressive at all times gets you into the type of war mode that you want to constantly be in. It doesn’t let you be intimidated by higher prices and fees for less. In fact, the more aggressive you are with spending on traffic and acquiring more sales and/or leads through affiliate marketing practices, the more your competitors will feel it and thus be affected by it. Which is always a good thing of course. We want our competitors to be scared little shits who bitch and moan about pricing and ultimately cut back on their spending, giving YOU the upperhand in the space.
Affiliate Marketing Blog
These are just a few little tidbits I’m sharing because I figure everyone should know them to some degree. I am leaving a lot of the juice out purposely because let’s face it, many of you reading this are probably competitors of mine in the Affiliate Marketing Industry, and I’m not about to surrender all the goodies to ya without a fight.
So the gist of this post is to learn one thing. BE MORE AGGRESSIVE. Stop being a little bitch when it comes to pricing. Something costs $2-$3 more per click and it scares you off, well guess what fuck-o, I just swooped in and stole it away from you. You’d probably make the cash back anyway, and there’s a reason why GOOD and GREAT traffic costs so much anyway, well duh, because it converts! Then again you could spend your time trying to find those few really rare gems that bring in a few sales or leads here and there and cost only a few cents to do so, but you’re wasting your time. This is a volume game boys and girls, and the big players have the volume, whereas the small players don’t.
Its just that simple.
How to add “Tweet This” links to your Blogger Template
How to add “Tweet This” links to your Blogger Template (with short URLs)
From http://www.bloggerbuster.com/ Posted: 19 Mar 2009 05:00 AM PDT
Twitter has become one of the most popular ever syndication and networking tools for bloggers. A few readers have asked if it is possible to add a “Tweet This” link to our Blogger templates, and while this was possible, I had not discovered a method of automatically shortening the URL of our blog posts until now.
Luckily for us, Bit.ly have created a JavaScript-based solution which shortens the URL to just a few characters and enables bloggers to add a Tweet This link configured for their posts. In this tutorial, I’ll explain how you can add this to your Blogger template so your readers can Tweet your posts to their Twitter followers, enabling your Blogger posts to be syndicated to a wider audience.
Editing your template to add the Twitter links
First of all, you should make a full back-up of your existing template (which you can later restore if you make a mistake in the coding). To do this, go to Layout>Edit HTML in your Blogger dashboard and click on the “Download full template” link near the top of the page. Save your template to a location on your computer which you can easily access later.
Next, go back to the Layout>Edit HTML page and ensure you have checked the “Expand widget templates” box. The place where we need to add the Twitter code is contained within the Blog Posts widget.
Search for this section in your Blogger template code (or similar):
The 100 Hour Rule
By Kevin at http://www.nitromarketing.com/blog/100-hours/
What’s the “rule” for making the leap from “beginner” to “full-time online” this year?
I’m always talking with our customers who have made that leap and now work from home and make a full-time income with their online business. (You can read the case studies of some of these full-time online Nitro customers here.)
And what I’m about to share with you, at first may sound daunting, but that feeling will quickly be replaced with exhilaration.
It’s called “The 100 Hour Rule”.
My definition is:
“100 hours of REAL work focused on one outcome will give you an online business making consistent income every day.”
That’s the first step to full-time online success, is first achieving part-time online success.
That’s when you are waking up every day and knowing your online business is making you money that day.
And when you break that down, if you spend 10 hours a week, that is 10 weeks… or a little under 3 months.
If you follow the 100 Hour Rule, within 3 months your online business can be making you consistent daily income.
And then, to follow that up is the “500 Hour Rule”.
“500 hours of REAL work focused on one outcome will give you an online business making a full-time income.”
That’s when you are waking up when you want to, no job to go to, no commute to suffer through, no T.P.S. reports to fill out. And instead you get to sit at home, sip some coffee, play with the kids and decide what you want to work on that day.
At just 10 hours a week, that’s less than 1 year and you are at the full-time online level.
Imagine this time next year you’ve DONE IT, you’ve turned in your 2 weeks notice, cleared out your desk, threw away your alarm clock and are now working from home because of your online business.
It’s a great feeling, isn’t it?
OK, right about now you’re mind is telling you “I have been working 10 hours a week and that hasn’t happened yet… what are you talking about?”
I understand completely. When I first got started online I didn’t understand this either. Nobody ever told me, “Kevin, this is the way it is.” Instead I had to figure out the HARD way… all of those ways that don’t work to discover the ones that do.
And I’m sure you’re experiencing the same. You are doing what you think is best because nobody helped you by showing you a better way.
That’s my goal, to share my lessons learned on what REALLY works instead of what DOESN’T work.
Two Key Distinctions
Let’s dig into the definition to see what it REALLY means because the power lies in the details with this one.
And then will give you a powerful yet simple tip you can put to use.
Here it is again: “100 hours of REAL work focused on one outcome will give you an online business making consistent income every day.”
There are two key parts.
100 hours of REAL work
and
focused on one outcome
Its human nature to be looking for the “greener grass on the other side of the fence”. A common term is “shiny object syndrome”.
I’ve been guilty of this just like you.
Something new comes out, the marketing is hitting all of those psychological triggers and product launch hot buttons, and our Shiny Object Magnet switch flips on to full-power.
Next thing you know, hours, days, even weeks have passed chasing the shiny object to discover you are the same place you were when you started.
Where as, if you stay focused on one outcome your business and the steps to make it successful. And only looked for things that would make that business more successful faster. And wasn’t a distraction from your outcome, or sent you down yet another shiny object rabbit hole.
You would of course be much further along today. Seems simple and obvious, but in the day to day
The tougher question to ask yourself, but one you deserve to ask yourself is…
Are the things I’m spending my time doing “REAL Work” or “Busy Work”?
Here are some examples of “busy work”…
- having an inbox full of 539 marketing emails and reading them, just because they are there and engaging, with no purpose for doing so
- buying an ebook, skimming through it, then never doing anything
- watching more free videos somebody posted online giving you more shiny objects to think about
- dabbling, doing a little here, a little there… with no plan on what you are doing, where you are going, the steps you need to complete to get there
Is this your typical day working at your online business?
Turn on computer, download email, read the latest emails you got from all the lists you are on. Clicking on a few links, watching a video for 30 minutes, going back to email to see what new messages came in you need to read. Going back online to check out your favorite site because you deserve a break from work. Thinking about a new blog post you could write but never putting those thoughts into writing. Opening up your aweber account to see how many new subscribers you got, only to be disappointed yet again that you have the same 23 people on your list. Download more email and spending the next 45 minutes reading and clicking on links.
Whoops, its getting late, time to close up shop after another productive day working on your business.
The problem is…
During that entire time, there was not a single action taken that moved your business forward. Nothing that made your business better today then the day before. Yes, there was a lot of time spent on activity, but no time spent on action.
How do I know this? At one time that was my life, and my results… or more like no results showed it.
Of course that example “day in the life” was an exaggeration, but compare yourself with that list and this next one.
To contrast that, I kept a running list of what I accomplished in one 8-hour day last week.
- wrote 21 autoresponder or broadcast emails
- wrote 2 blog posts
- created 3 new pages for a new sales funnel
- recorded a 45 min camtashia training video
- started work on a new sales video
- put together a new offer for a promotion we are running
- checked stats to see how the business is performing
- answered 2 dozen emails from people I’m working with (either in our company or other companies)
- spent 15 minutes answering questions on our customer forum
- and went through part of a product I purchase to learn a new skill
- and 15 minutes browsing through my folder of emails from all the lists I’m subscribed to, checking to see what’s up in the online world.
Here’s the million dollar question to ask yourself…
If you spent 10 hours a week, that look like that second list, how great would your online success become over the next few months?
Obviously the answer is you would run circles around the person who spends their time doing the “busy work” stuff.
Maybe that second list seems daunting, like you could never do that.
If that thought even remotely entered your mind, not a problem.
I started off just like you and over time learned some tricks to get the full-time online results I now see.
Next week (on Thursday the 26th) I will be doing a completely free and in-depth webcast training focused entirely on the topic of…
How to Go Full-Time Online This Year, Even If You Have a Job, Family, Kids And No Spare Time.
By the time that training is over, you will be on a brand new path, you will have the steps to take, some real-life examples, and a bunch of tips and tricks that lands you at the Full Time Online pot of gold this year.
Keep an eye out for emails over the next few days on how to register for this webcast.
-Kevin
Affiliate Blog Theme
By Paul of www.UberAffiliate.com
They’ve been working for months and have finally launched their Affiliate Theme. There’s honestly not even that much I have to say, go to the site and check it out yourself. Aside from the awesome looking design of their sales page/site/whatever, the theme itself looks awesome.
I actually was in on producing this theme in the beginning, I told them what to include and gave ideas on what should be done. So this wasn’t developed purely by designers, she’s got some affiliate blood in her too.
The best thing about it is the customization and ease of customization. You’re paying $100-200 and getting unlimited landing pages for it. With a click of your mouse you can change the background, the layout of the page, the images, the buttons, the affiliate links, everything. It’s all so simple to use. Check out the test drive page and see for yourself what they can do with a basic WordPress theme, pretty wild.
I’m not going to sit here and try to sell you on at least picking this up to have when you want to try a new niche or build a page of your own. Just go to the site and see it for yourself. I’d say it’s hands down worth it if you can front the $197 for the highest package, you get unlimited use, header graphics designed by them (huge perk), and a bigger affiliate commission.
Peace and love.
One Blog and Many Topics, or Many Blogs with One Topic?
By Daniel Scocco on March 12, 2009 at http://www.dailyblogtips.com
Arun Basil asks:
Suppose one blogger has got multiple interests , like Books, Gadgets and Cars. Will he get more readers and traffic when he writes about them in separate blogs, or if he writes about all of them on a single blog?
Both strategies can work. Let’s analyze the pros and cons of each of them.
Pros of One Blog with Many Topics
The largest advantage of this model is that you will have a very strong domain, since it will receive the link juice from all the different topics and content channels. Over time it will become relatively easy to rank for keywords because of the high trust that the root domain has. That is why websites like Wikipedia or Digg rank so well in Google.
Another advantage of this model is the unlimited potential for expansion. Provided your domain is a generic one, you will be able to add and remove topics over the time without needing to rework the brand.
Cons of One Blog with Many Topics
The main disadvantage of one large blog covering many topics is the fact that it will require a huge amount of time, energy and money to become successful.
Why? Because you would need to shape it as a content portal. That means that you should have a design that supports the portal structure, different channels inside it, and different writers to keep each of the channels updated regularly.
Trying to do a content portal by yourself and with no investment would probably yield mediocre results.
Pros of Many Blogs with One Topic
The advantage of having many blogs, each with a niche topic, is the fact that it will be easier to attract loyal visitors on each of those sites. The sharper your focus, the easier it is to convince a first time visitor that he should come back tomorrow or subscribe to your RSS feed.
Secondly, niche websites are also easier to be monetized. Advertisers like to be able to control the audience that is going to see their ads.
Cons of Many Blogs with One Topic
The disadvantage of having many blogs, each with a niche topic, is the time and energy that you will need to spend managing them. You will inevitably need to worry about the web hosting, web design, software, maintenance so on. The higher the number of sites you have, the more time they will consume with those tasks.
Additionally, there is always the risk to spread yourself too thin. If you can’t keep up with the content production and promotion activities on all the blogs, they will probably tank over the time.
Conclusion
As you can see there are pros and cons related to both strategies. Choosing one over the other is a personal decision.
My preferred strategy is to go with niche blogs. You just need to make sure that your niche is not too narrow. For example creating a blog about “Nepal Photography” would probably not be a good idea. If you choose “Digital Photography,” however, you should be fine.
I also prefer to focus on the development of one website or blog at a time. Trying to do too many things at once is one of the most common business mistakes.
What do you think?
How Much is My Site Worth?
From http://www.dailyblogtips.com/
Daniel Scocco on March 5, 2009
Will asks: People regard the amount of subscribers a blog has as a good indicator as to how successful the blog is in terms of popularity and monetary values. However I was wondering what your view on a blog’s value.
I am not sure if people really regard the number of subscribers as a good indicator of the monetary value of a site or blog. At least they shouldn’t. I think the number of RSS subscribers is a good indicator of popularity and reach, but not of the monetary value of a website.
A large RSS subscribe can add a premium to the valuation, but it is not the main factor affecting it. So how much is a website or blog worth? The basic answer, which my friend Yaro Starak gave a while ago, is the following: Your site is worth as much as someone is willing to give you for it. I agree with this definition because value is something subjective.
For some people the ticket for the final match of the World Cup is worthless, because they don’t like soccer. I am a soccer fan, and therefore I would be willing to pay quite a sum of money for the tickets (especially if Brazil was playing in the final!). The same is true for websites. A specific site might be worth $1,000 for someone and $10,000 for someone else. It depends on how well the site fits with the person’s business and future plans.
That being said, there is one factor that will have a large impact upon the valuation of your site: its earnings. The most common mistake that I see people making is to assume that their site is worth a lot just because it has “potential.” Potential does not sell websites, earnings do. Of course there are extreme situations where the potential could be taken into consideration. For example suppose you have a website that generates 50,000 daily page views but does not make any money because the owner never monetized it. That site certainly could be sold based on a estimation of how much it could earn. But even in that case buyers would get suspicious. They would ask themselves how come the owner never tried to monetize such a huge traffic, and they would also need to estimate the potential earnings on the lower side.
Earnings equal revenues minus costs. Most websites have a really lost maintenance cost, though, so usually the revenues and the earnings will produce almost the same valuation. Now, if my sites earns $x monthly, how much is it worth? A good starting point is 24 times the monthly earnings. That is equivalent to two years of earnings. If your site earns $2,000 monthly, therefore, its initial valuation would be at $48,000. Notice that this multiplier is usually applied to established websites, though.
If your website is less than one year old, then you probably would need to consider a smaller multiplier, say 16x or even 10x monthly earnings. A site that was launched six months ago and makes $500 monthly would therefore be worth around $6,000. Premium websites, on the other hand, can use larger multipliers, including 36x or even 48x monthly earnings. On top of that initial valuation you can obviously include other factors, including the quality of the domain name, the existing brand, the number of RSS or email subscribers, the amount of organic traffic and so on.
5 Things Every Internet Marketer Should Know
5 Things Every Internet Marketer Should Know
From Paul at http://uberaffiliate.com/. March 5th, 2009
1) Offers come, and offers go.
You can spend a load of time on a campaign and get it profiting great, only to have it die the next day. The advertiser can pull the offer, your payout can get cut, you can be completely cut from the offer, etc. Don’t flip out, realize that this is a part of the industry and move on. Search for a similar offer to promote. If you can’t find anything, quit struggling and just call it a day and start on something else. Trust me I know how great it can be to have an offer running well, and I know the feelings I get when something bad happens to it. I still get pissed off and want to save it, but now I just accept it and move on to the next thing.
Most of the big money making offers are come and go, accept it, and rape it while you can.
2) Expect PPC traffic to be extremely stressful.
Getting traffic really isn’t all that easy as it sounds. I know firsthand especially with Google. I had an offer running great for like a month, and then it got slapped. I recreated the campaign…got slapped in a week. Recreated…slapped in 3 days. It’s a major pain, but Google slaps are something all affiliates deal with. No matter how legitimate you think your site is, it can be slapped.
Same thing goes with Facebook and Myspace. Well with Facebook good luck getting anything even approved, and then with Myspace good luck getting volume with your approved ads. Back when Facebook was approving all my ads I would have to make 50 ads a day just to keep volume levels sufficient. Thank goodness for my slave worker.
What I’m basically trying to say here is: just because you’re having trouble getting traffic from Google, YSM, Facebook, etc., don’t give up on it. It just takes a lot of work and figuring out the best way to get the traffic.
3) Affiliate networks are greedy.
Sure every network will tell you that they don’t shave, it’s a shame it happens. Don’t pick an offer from Network A and then run it exclusively there without ever trying the same offer anywhere else. Test out the same offer on EVERY network you can and compare conversion rates. Sometimes you’ll find the results to be very surprising. Greed doesn’t have to mean they’re purposely shaving, greed can also mean a network doesn’t want to take the time to either a) set up their own tracking system and getting off DT or b) pull the resources to fix the issues in their current tracking system. Networks are greedy with payouts as well, so never settle without negotiating with all networks.
Business is business, and I’ve found that most networks/affiliate managers take things way too personally. Don’t let this affect you, just do your job and make as much money as you can.
4) Don’t believe all the crap you read, and don’t read too much of it.
I’ve been victim to this myself a number of times. I’ve read something where people are talking about something that works awesome. Either on a blog, forum, or someone personally tells me. I’ve then gone and tried to do the exact thing I read…and failed. Different marketers have different strengths, and it’s up to you to find what niche you’re best at driving traffic to.
I know a bunch of people that couldn’t get traffic for weight loss/acai stuff when about a million people were raping it. But they did just fine in other verticals, because they were better at getting traffic to their own stuff.
So just don’t believe everything you read. Because if something was that good, why would people be talking about it?
5) Harden up.
This ties in with some of the previous points, but is a good general statement. Expect to feel absolutely HORRIBLE some days in this business. I’ve had days where I would run $10k profit per day for over a week. The very next week, I’d be grumpy and totally pissed off…even after all the money I made the week before! This kind of stuff just happens, and you have to learn to accept it. Once you do, you’ll get mad less and less, and your productivity won’t dip down during those stressful periods.
Seriously, if you’re not ready to feel like you’re going to lose everything and everything will fall from under your feet, apply at your local Radio Shack. Affiliate marketing will bring the highest highs and the lowest lows, expect them.
Off to bed for me.
Switching To Google Apps For Your Company’s Email
by Jeremy Schoemaker
For over 10 years now, I have either ran or had control of my own mail server. Well, at least it was that way until 2 weeks ago. Google’s apps includes hosting premium applications (of which the biggest thing is Mail) for $50 per user per year. I have been curious about switching for quite some time but thought the flexibility of having my own server outweighed the benefits. Well, 2 weeks ago I finally decided to make the switch.
And now I have to say that although things have been great for the most part… there are still a few quirks that frustrate me. Like most things on my blog, I will take you through my experience in switching over. Hopefully it can help you if you decide to convert one day, too. Step 1) The setup. Setup is SUPER easy. I started out by purchasing 5 accounts. At first, you have to specify 1 of the accounts as the administrator. I made the mistake of making an admin@ and using that for an administrator instead of just using my own email. (Later I figured out that I could just use my own email as the administrator.)
With Google’s really simple walk-through on what to change for your DNS, I was able to quickly make the right changes. (But if you have already run your own mail server, this should not be a big deal anyways.) During the setup process, you can also make a catchall account. (A catchall account means that you can specify 1 user as the catch-all for anything you forgot.) I started off using Brienna’s email for that but it got so much junk that I used info@ for this instead. Also for the Auto-Responder (out-of-office) purposes, it’s much better to have a seperate account for catch-all email rather than just using filters (which I will cover in a bit). Step 1.5)
Special NOTE If you are an IMAP email user and do not store mail locally right now, you’ll have to remove all accounts from your desktop client. Your mail will be on your old server and you’ll have to migrate it. (But if you leave desktop clients setup, it’s going to be a clusterfuck – trust me.)
Step 2) The Migration The administrator can setup the old mail server and then start to migrate all your folders. *IMPORTANT* Gmail does not let you make new “folders” as you know them. They have an all mail folder which ALL MAIL goes into then things can be labeled (which will appear like folders and ACT like folders on your desktop client). All of your newly imported mail when you first import it will look like INBOX/Travel or INBOX/Sample.
Once your import is complete (it took over 24 hours for mine to fully complete), the only things you still need to do is move/delete your old sent mail and trash. (DO ALL MOVING ON GMAIL!) Then rename your labels … instead of INBOX/Travel just rename it to Travel. Repeat this for each label. With Gmail, the email is not stored in these “labels” – it’s just organized there.
Essentially, all your mail is set in the All Mail folder. These labels will appear like folders in your desktop client later, but just know that if you delete a label, the emails with that label will not be deleted. They will still be in the all mail folder. You are just deleting the label. Also, you can have more than 1 label per email (which really makes this cool). I know, I know… some of this may seem redundant to you if you’ve used this for a while – but it took me some time to fully understand how this works. I had never used Gmail before. Step 3) Contact Migration Even if you are going to use a desktop client 99% of the time, it’s very handy to have all of your old contacts available. There are guides on Gmail for everything under the sun except for Apple Mail.app users. Don’t worry – there is an easy converter (like stupid easy).
The application I used is called A TO G and it’s free (although donations are appreciated). I still think that dude should charge $50 for it though, because without it the process sucks…
Step 4) Client Setup Now you have all your mail setup how you want it INSIDE Gmail and your migration is finished. (You can now delete the migrated mail label if you want – it has just labeled all the mail that’s migrated.) On each of your desktop computers, set up a new IMAP account with: incoming server: imap.gmail.com (secure port) Username: username@yourdomain.com Outgoing (SMTP) server: smtp.gmail.com Username: username@yourdomain.com Password: the password for the user you’re setting up (DUH). Step 4.5)
Don’t set up all your desktops at once. I currently have 6 different computers I could possibly check mail from. 2 laptops, my office mac, home mac, home/office mac, and Windows PC. I made the mistake of trying to set them all up the same day and started getting errors… it turned out I was exceeding my daily bandwidth limit (who knew?). So instead, I setup 1 per day and since then they have all been fine. Step 5) Don’t forget to check in on your old stuff.
Inside Gmail, go to your accounts and pop mail from old accounts or other accounts. I setup a .forward on my old mail server for each of our users just incase something goes there. Step 6) Setting up the cool shit. Be sure to check out the Google Labs. I would suggest enabling the following “must have” labs: Canned Responses – I try to answer every email I get and 95% of the time I am just repeating myself. Canned responses have dramatically sped up my email response time. You can also use canned responses in your filtering. It’s kind of like an Auto-Responder/out-of-office message but only for certain people. For instance, let’s say someone emails me through the Contact Us form and somewhere in that message the terms ”paid links” or “paid review” are found. I can then make a filter that will allow me to reply with a canned response stating that we do not sell paid links but we do occasional do paid reviews with no follow links for a particular price. And bam! Just like that I’ve answered the email. That’s nice. Send and Archive – This is probably one of my favorite features. It gives me a extra button inside my mail window next to the Send button. This feature allows me to both send a response and then remove the mail from my Inbox.
How many times do I really want to save something I have already responded to?? Yea, never. Also, archiving is NOT deleting. It’s simply putting it into the All Mail folder. Offline – This app let’s you access your Gmail (the last sync of it) without an Internet connection. This is pretty hot. Reply To All Default – Setting this up makes it so the default button to reply/forward is actually “Reply To All”. For about 99.9% of all my emails, I WANT to reply to all.
With email, I often forgot to do this so I’m loving this feature. So … pretty big step for me. I migrated myself and 4 other users (dillsmack is still not convinced yet). Am I glad I did it? Well, in the beginning I was not so sure. At first, I didn’t really get the labels idea and man… when I first saw that crap saying my bandwidth had been exceeded, I started thinking, “Oh, great!” (Thank god it hasn’t happened again.) Other things that still bug me include: 1) Flakey connections. While checking or sending mail, occasionally I am asked for my password. (But hey, maybe it’s because I leave myself logged in on multiple boxes? Not quite sure.) 2) Return path header. After racking my head trying to use the filter/canned response and out of office/vacation feature, I noticed it was replying NOT to the reply-to or reply email, but rather the return path header. Dillsmack made a thread in Google groups and while this is against the RFC, it looks like Google is keeping it (as retarded as it is!). 3) IMAP Downtime.
Occasionally the IMAP servers are just unavailable. It doesn’t seem to last long and has not happened much. Maybe it’s just been a fluke. I can always tell I am not alone just by asking on Twitter or using Twitter search. 4) It’s also $50 a person. Let’s look at the positives. 1) 1 less server to maintain. This is huge IMO.
It’s one less machine we need t0 * Maintain Hardware * Update spam rules * Update software for security * Administrate 2) Spam filtering – AMAZINGLY AWESOME. I now get 1-2 spams a day. I used to get between 20-40 a day. 3) Simple things. Before, doing a out-of-office meant writing a special rule…. Nothing too hard but the more our business grows the simple things start to have a big expense in time and what it’s taking time away from. 4) Mobile application. The Gmail Blackberry application is SO NICE. In fact, I’ve given up on the default Blackberry and now this is the only one I use. Searching through folders/labels and looking up contacts is so slick. It also integrates nicely with the other applications. 5) Branding – no need to say more: If you are thinking about switching to Google for your domain…. I say go! *
-
Archives
- March 2009 (10)
- February 2009 (15)
-
Categories
-
RSS
Entries RSS
Comments RSS
