Mailing List

Mailing List

Building Your Mailing List with Downloads
A mailing list is the lifeblood of your online business. The old adage "the money is in the list" cannot be true enough -- if you had a targeted list of prospects to contact each time you have a new product, you will be able to save a lot of effort by marketing it to your existing list of targeted prospects.


You can actually build up a targeted list of prospects that are interested in your products by offering a relevant download on your website. For example, let's take a look at a very good example -- apple.com. When you download the free iTunes and Quicktime software from their site, they will ask you to fill in an optional name and email form so that they can send you offers on songs that you can purchase via -- guess where -- iTunes!

In reality, you do not need to offer such a "heavyweight" download such as a full-feature software like iTunes.  You can attract prospects equally well with some quality freebies such as a simple report, a free wallpaper, and so on. The important thing is that your download offers enough value for the prospect to be willing to give away his/her own email address to get it.

However, slapping together a simple download and putting a link on your website won't be enough to attract qualified prospects. You will have to do some homework in order for your lead-generating mechanism to work well for you.

First of all, you must place your download form prominently on your website. Preferably, dedicate a page to it and link to that page from every other page of your website. That way, there is no way your visitors cannot find the download page, and when they do, you'll get some of them converted into your prospects!

Also, you have to put a little effort into promoting your download. Explain and elaborate on the values of the download, and why your visitors should download it. You might think why would anyone want to pass on a freebie, but most of your visitors would be too lazy to take the effort to download it because most of their downloads just sit on the harddisk collecting virtual dust. It is hence important to show your visitors why they should download your freebie.

Free Email Accounts

Free Email Accounts

Once upon a time there were hundreds, if not thousands, of free email account service providers - everyone wanted a bite of the Internet pie, as it were. However, due to fierce competition and lack on continuous revenue supply (after all, how much money can be made from giving something free), most services faded into oblivion. This page has some of the most popular email providers that are still around and doing great.
Please understand that most of these free services are supported by ads. That is, text or banner (image) advertisements will be displayed once you log in at your account. In fact, services like Gmail will show ads based on the contents of the email message! However, most free services also have a paid version which is ad free and comes with additional features such as larger storage space.

Hotmail

Hotmail logoHotmail, now called Windows Live Hotmail, is one of the first free email service providers. It was started by two young entrepreneurs in 1996 and bought over by Microsoft in 1997 for an estimated $400 million. At the time of writing, Hotmail has the largest subscriber base - 364 million users.

• 5GB space (which increases with your usage)
• 25MB attachment size
• Free POP3 access for downloading Hotmail email on your local computer through email clients.

Themes to change the look and feel of the account, folders and categories to segregate and organize emails, email signature, autoreply, message rules for sorting emails etc.

Yahoo! Mail

Yahoo! Mail logoYahoo! Mail has been very popular with web users since its launch in 1997. Being part of the Yahoo! network helped the service gather millions of subscribers very quickly. Over the years, the company has put in a lot of efforts in making their webmail interface easy to use and intuitive.

• Unlimited storage space for the email account
• 25MB for email attachments
• POP3 access is available in most countries.
• Great tab based drag -n-drop interface, themes, folders to segregate messages

Gmail

Gmail logoGmail is a relatively new free email service which has garnered millions of users since its launch in April 2004. Apart from the fact that it's from Google, the world's best web search engine, there are many reasons why this service has been so successful in such a short time. When it was unveiled, Google provided 1GB storage space on all free Gmail email accounts. This was almost 20 times that of the competition and created quite a stir on the web. Also, new accounts could only be created through special invites and this put it slightly out-of-reach of the common man! This created quite a stir on the web and added a sense of mystique. Additionally, very soon after launch, tons of free features like free POP3 access were introduced and the features list just kept on growing. At the time of writing, Gmail has overtaken Yahoo! Mail and is the second most popular email service.

• The storage space on Gmail is ever-increasing. As of now (Feb 2012), it is 7.5GB.
• Email attachment size is 25MB.
• Both POP3 and IMAP access are available for free. You can download Gmail email messages to your computer using any popular email client.
• Slick no-nonsense interface, themes (you can even create your own) and much more.

AOL Mail

AOL logoAOL Mail was once very popular in the United States. However, somewhere along the way the company lost ground to the three big players - Hotmail, Yahoo! and Google. Personally, I feel AOL email service is still very good, easy-to-use and with excellent features.

• Unlimited space for storing messages
• 25MB email attachments
• Account can be accessed for free through both POP3 and IMAP email protocols
• Simple and clean interface which loads quickly, nice choice of domain names like @love.com and @wow.com etc.

Mail.com

Mail.com logoMail.com in its present form was launched quite recently in 2007. It is a superb service with some great features like simple account creation process and a neat tab-based interface.

• Unlimited storage space
• 50MB of email attachments - double that of the other popular services
• You can use both POP3 and IMAP to download email to your local device
• Tons and tons of domain names to choose from.

RediffMail

Rediffmail logoRediffMail is an Indian service which held the bull by the horns in the race for providing the largest space for free email accounts - they upgraded the storage to 1GB when Gmail was launched. However, over the years, it seems RediffMail has not been able to get new subscribers at the same rate as the competition.

• Unlimited space on all free email accounts
• 25Mb of attachments
• POP3 and IMAP support are available for a small fee
• Local Indian languages support

Free WYSIWYG HTML editors

Free WYSIWYG HTML editors

Amaya Web Browser and WYSIWYG HTML editor from W3C
The free open source Amaya WYSIWYG HTML editor comes from the World Wide Wed Consortium (W3C). It started as an HTML and Cascading Style Sheets editor but now supports XML and XML applications such as HTML, MathML and Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG). You can both browse and edit web pages with this nifty program, which is especially helpful if you want to cut-paste information from other pages into your own. The free WYSIWYG HTML editor can run on Linux, Windows, MacOS X and can edit HTML 4.01, XHTML (1.0 and 1.1), CSS 2.0, XHTML Basic, MathML 2.0 and SVG documents. XML documents can also be displayed and partially edited. Since it comes from the people who set the standards on the web, I definitely recommend Amaya over any other free WYSIWYG HTML editor.Click Here To Go Homepage

Nvu

Nvu (pronouced N-view... what else?) is a free WYSIWYG HTML editor for Windows, Linux and Mac users. It is indeed a very good program and so... so very simple to use (thinking of putting my 5 year old on it). Now you can quickly make web pages - it almost works like a word processor (Microsoft's Word, for instance). Also, you can edit pages by directly connecting to your server; which means that you can actually edit web pages ON your web site!

In addition to the WYSIWYG interface, Nvu also has a tab for HTML code display. This in my opinion is a great feature if you are in the process of learning HTML but don't want to keep web site development on hold; thus, you can create web pages visually and also check what the HTML code looks like.
You can open several pages at one time (they appear under separate tabs) which is such a cool feature. The program supports HTML frames, tables and templates. The Nvu can actually rival commercial programs like Microsoft FrontPage and Dreamweaver and the best part it that it's free!

Nvu WYSIWYG HTML editor

AceHTML Freeware

AceHTML is a free HTML editor from Visicom Media. It offers a whole range of features including HTML syntax checker, spell-checker (MS Word required), an integrated viewer, international alphabet support and much more. The software comes with a library of 175 JavaScripts and DHTML scripts, custom buttons, code templates and a powerful style sheets editor.
Creating HTML forms, frames, tables, lists and even image maps a simple affair. The interface comes with code coloration and code highlighting. With AceFTP (a sister program), you can even upload files via FTP. The AceHTML is a stripped down version of the AceHTML Pro.
Visicom Media AceHTML Freeware

Trellian WebPage

A free WYSIWYG HTML editor that can important pages compatible with the latest browsers. WebPage offers absolute positioning of HTML elements with drag and drop interface. Color highlighted HTML and Meta tag editors are included.
Trellian webPage WYSIWYG HTML editor

Web Weaver EZ

A free WYSIWYG Web page editor for Windows systems. Includes drag n' drop for images and other items. However, does not create tables and forms - for that you need to purchase Web Weaver EZ PLUS.
Web Weaver EZ free WYSIWYG HTML editor
Netscape's free WYSIWYG HTML editor - Netscape Composer
Quite old, easy-to-use and free! The Netscape Composer is a fully integrated web-based word processor which comes along with the Netscape browser. With it you can "create richly formatted text, tables and graphics in HTML format" - which is just a fancy way to say that you can develop web pages with this free HTML WYWIWYG editor. Publishing on the web is very easy using the Composer's One Button Publish feature. It is a good program for beginners and those who want to create web pages quickly.
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