Software and Small Business

We are starting new simple web application: a free weekly menu planner. While the user interface and features are fairly basic at the moment we are looking to add a lot more to this little app.

Pyrostial will help you to manage your weekly meals and create a grocery list. There is a very nice function which automatically parses the ingredients and suggest you to add them to the grocery list.

Enjoy Pyrostia and let us know your feedback and suggestions.

The latest version of A.M.Y. is out.
In addition to some minor fixes there are 2 main updates:

• Send receipt to advertiser after payment or (optionally) after activating package from the administration
• Send automated reminders after a package expires. This will help you receive more ad revenue. This is also configurable for each pricing plan and each advertiser

Since some time we are getting requests for extra features of watu exam. While most ideas are good, they won’t be suitable for every user of Watu Exam. As a result I decided the split the product in two versions – one cheaper for customers who need the basic functionality and one more expensive for those who want all.

The two versions are accessible from the Watu Exam page.

Any feature suggestions and comments are always welcome on info@calendarscripts.info

What’s new:

- Limit exam by date range (option). If you select such date range, the exam/test will be accessible and displayed in students control panel only within the range
- Copy exam. A lot of users wanted to be able to copy existing exam into new one. Now this is possible.

As usual existing customers can contact me for the upgrade. It’s either free or 50% of the regular price depending on when was your original purchase.

We’ve made an important internal change in this version of our autoresponder software. While there are no visible changes, the way newsletters are scheduled is changed. This should allow scheduling a newsletter to very large mailing lists even on slow hosts. Until now the software scheduled all these emails in the DB, but when some people had lists of 100,000 subscribers this meant 100,000 DB queries. On slow shared hosts this often caused problems.

Now the new version runs one query for the newsletter regardless of your list size. While managing such large lists on shared hosts is asking for trouble, I wanted to make sure our software handles it.

If you have purchased less than an year ago you can contact me to get the upgrade for free. Otherwise upgrades are 50% of the regular price as usual.

With the current rate of spam and promotional emails people get all the time, all of the following is getting harder for legitimate marketers:

• Get people subscribe to your list. They are too tired of receiving crap.
• Get people open your mails. Even  if they don’t unsubscribe, they’ll often just delete the mail.
• Keep people on the list. After working hard to attract a subscriber you don’t want to lose them because you wrote something wrong.
• Get people click on links and buy what you offer.

People who tell you building a mailing list and using it as a source of customers is easy, are simply lying (and trying to get you subscribe to their list), or just have no idea what they are talking about.

Still, the mailing list is one of the most sustainable, most responsible, and least expensive ways to build traffic and have your offers seen and heard.

Here’s a list of good resources that will help you get the most of your list – from building it, to sustaining it and getting results from it.

While the resources in each category are not exactly ordered, I’ve tried to put the best ones first so in case you get tired by one topic, you’ll have learned the most important about it. Some of the advice may overlap or even contradict. Marketing is not exact science, you know.

All links open in new window.

List Building, Conversion/Opt-in

Building your list – that’s where you want to start. And if you are working hard or paying for visitors on your squeeze page, you want to make sure the conversion rate of opt-ins is good.

- 20 Giveaways For List Building – This Is Email Marketing On Autopilot – a great list of ideas. Just don’t forget that all these things require time and/or money to create.
- Why List Building WORKS & how I wasted 2 Years – includes a video
- 12 Lead Capture Squeeze Pages Elements of Success – basic but important tips
- Are Pop-Up Opt-In Forms Still Effective? Part 1 and Part 2. I’d be very careful with those as they can increase your site bounce rate. They are very irritating for me.
- How To Build Your Email List Without A Big Website (Video) – includes a video from Jim Cockrum
- List Building 101: Why And How To Build Your List
- How to Build an Email List – 7 “Cs” to Supercharge Your List Building
- 5 Steps You Can Start Implementing Right Now To Explode Your Subscribers Base
- Increase Your Subscriber Opt-In Rate With These Useful Tips
- How To Build Your Email List Fast
- How I Gained 200 Blog Subscribers Fast!
- Build a Email List? – Why & How
- How to Get More Feed Subscribers: 10 Tips
- 12 Ways to Build Your E-mail List
- How to build your email mailing list

Unlimited Mailing List
and Autoresponder Software

Newsletter Content

If you bombard your list with offers, most will unsubscribe, others will delete and some may even report you for spam. Make sure your newsletter content is useful and interesting or your offers are really amazing.

- How to Write Effective Email Newsletters
- To Write A Top-Quality Newsletter, Study Michael Campbell – a bit old but still valid
- A Way to Repurpose Content and Grow Your Email Marketing List – repurposing content is always a good idea.
- Electronic Newsletter (Ezine) Resources. Usually I don’t recommend using such kind of basic content for your newsletters. In some niches it may work however.
- How To Write An Email Newsletter

Improve readability and open rates

While good content is required, you need to make users open your mails first. Subjects and your reputation will play the big role here.

- How to Write The Best Email Subject Lines. This one is good. Subjects matter the most so I would pay the most attention to it.
- Email Marketing Design – Helpful Tips To Improve Your Email Open Rates
- Write the Perfect Email Subject Line – and again on subjects
- Increase Email Click Through: Avoid Distractions
- 10 Email Newsletter Design Tips
- 6 Rules to Improve Email Deliverability
- Improve your email open rates
- How to Improve Your Email Newsletter Open Rates

Unlimited Mailing List
and Autoresponder Software

Testing (A/B Testing)

I’ve been stupid not to test for years. In 2010 I started A/B testing and discovered how many of my assumptions were so wrong.
- A Beginner’s Guide To A/B Testing: An Introduction. A must read article by Kissmetrics. Don’t miss it.
- Optimize Your Email Marketing Newsletter through A/B Split Testing
- How to Measure the Effectiveness of E-mail Newsletter Ads
- A/B split testing

Monetization of your newsletter

If you are running a content site maybe you don’t have a product or service to offer. Then read these articles:

- Monetize Your Blog’s Subscriber List
- 4 Ways Video Makes Email Marketing More Profitable
- How to Run a NON-Scummy, Profitable Email Marketing Campaign
- Five Strategies to Monetize a Mailing List

Unlimited Mailing List
and Autoresponder Software

Miscellaneous and General

These posts don’t fit to specific category or cover more categories at once. They are also good:

- Email marketing: A Beginner’s Guide (PDF inside)
- Email Marketing Census 2011 (PDF inside)
- Internet Marketers’ Dictionary – a good list of words and language you may want to use too.
- What the Gmail Priority Inbox Means for Marketers. With the increasing number of Gmail users you definitely need to read this.
- The Problem With Autoresponders (Video)
- 5 Uncommon Ways to Use Auto-Responders to Grow Your Business
- Email Marketing – Is it Still Effective?. The short answer is yes. For the long answer read the article.
- How to Handle User Unsubscribe to Your Advantage?
- Affiliate Emails: How To Prevent Spam Complaints – very important. You really don’t want to be labeled as spammer.
- Is Your Email List Really Small? Read This Now.
- 6 Goals You Should Have For Your Email Marketing Campaign
- Why Successful Affiliate Marketers Use an Autoresponder
- eMail Marketing Tips – Valuable eMail Marketing Information
- 22 Rapid Tips On Email Marketing For Bloggers
- That’s not SPAM, That’s My Newsletter!

That sums it up for now, but I may add resources over time. If you think there’s anything missing, feel free to comment.

A quick note that our autoresponder software is updated to version 2.6. Here’s the new:

• Improved UI
• Customization of double opt-in email and unsubscribe text
• Easier upgrade from previous versions

As usual, customers who have previous versions can contact me to get the upgrade either for free or for 50% of the cost depending on the time of their last purchase.

Polls are very simple things and yet so many people don’t get them right. I looked into many scripts and didn’t like most.
Watu Ajax Poll is an effort to make one that is really simple and just works. We are giving it 100% free without any obligations.

For the moment it’s self-hosted, i.e. you need to download it and install it on your site. If I get some good feedback, we may offer free hosted version so people will be able to just sign up, get their code and embed it in any site.

Feel free to fork us an mods! The source code is open and while not on Github yet, it’s available to poke.

Here is a little quiz which will help you to find out how well is your site optimized for receiving traffic (and generating revenue). I don’t claim the quiz includes everything you could do to optimize your site, but there are for sure some very good ideas that will come to your mind after taking it. At the end you will see the number of points you received (from maximum of 60) and the best answer to every question.

If you want to create such exams on your website, engage visitors and attract links, check out our quiz and exam software. This quiz has been created with it and all calculations are done through it. The software allows also collecting taker’s contact data, creating unlimited exams, splitting users in groups and more.

I have not chosen to require email for this quiz, so if you want, please share your results in the comments!

I’ve been interested in membership sites for long time – they are really a great business model allowing you to sell your content to premium members instead of releasing it to public and hoping to earn from ads. Of course you need high quality content to build a good membership site.

And after you have created the content, a new pain appears – how to make it so only paid members can access it and even to give different access to different content to different members…

There are some (actually plenty of) membership softwares, but most I have seen are very hard to set up, bloated with features and too expensive. Perhaps the most popular of them is aMember. $180 for membership site that looks so 2002? No, thanks.

I’ve built a simpler, cheaper and modern membership site software called E.M.M.A. and am offering it to you for just $39. Free support, unlimited domains license, instant delivery, money back guarantee. You already know my stuff, no need to explain further.

Yes, it doesn’t have all the features of aMember – in fact it lack mostly those that you will not need anyway.