Dominate Your Local Market!

In our last post, we stated that to begin a successful email marketing campaign, you need to do two things:

1. Build a quality list of prospects or customers.
2. Email to that list in a way that achieves maximum deliverability.

In that last post, we covered #1, building a quality list. Today, we’ll cover #2 – emailing to that list in a way that achieves maximum deliverability.

Read more…

“The much-loved Firefox Web browser reached a milestone Friday morning — its billionth download.

“Quite a feat for a browser that, unlike Microsoft’s Internet Explorer or Apple’s Safari, is run by a nonprofit organization with fewer than 250 employees.

“Firefox, the free browser built on open source software that debuted in 2004, consistently gets high marks for speed, efficiency, adaptability and user-friendliness, and has become hugely popular worldwide.”

Source: Los Angeles Times via San Jose Mercury-News

Download Firefox here

If your answer was “Internet Explorer” only, you may be antagonizing huge and growing parts of your market. I never understood the “one browser” web development philosophy, even back in IE’s hey-day.

Back then I used to hear some non-forward-thinking developers say they only tested in IE because it had some 75% or the market, the rest of the contenders divided up the other quarter of the pie, there was only so much time in the day, blah, blah, blah.

But thumbing one’s nose at 25% of web browser never made any sense – at least to me.

But the nose-thumber’s lot has grown worse with time. Over the past year, IE’s segment of the market (combined IE6 and IE7) has shrunk from 53.2% to 46.6%. IE 5 has all but disappeared.

In the same 12 months, Firefox’s share of the market has gone from 36.4% to 44.2%, Safari’s from 1.9% to 2.7% and Opera’s from 1.4% to 2.3%. So anyone now developing for IE and ignoring the others is building for less than half of the market.

But I still see websites and applications that misfire or completely fail in Firefox, Safari or Opera. For a personal website, it’s just dumb. For a commercial website, it’s suicidal.

If the current trends continue, it won’t be long before Firefox assumes the #1 position, a mean feat considering you need to go get it, download it and install it. But Firefox is gaining popularity for a lot of reasons – not least of which is that it’s extensible.

There are Firefox extensions that add all sorts of useful features to the basic browser. One of my favorites is the Foxmarks bookmark extension that allows me to keep all of my bookmarks automatically synchronized across four different Firefox installations on two OS X Macs, a PC running XP and a Linux laptop on Ubuntu.

I also installed extensions such as the Google toolbar, the Web Developer Toolbar, ColorZilla (tells me the value of any color on my screen) and a Del.icio.us bookmarking button.

Add to that the fact that Firefox is Open Source (free) and very crash-resistant. If you’d like to try out Firefox, here is the link to download it:

There are a lot of tools on the market to help you make edits to your own web pages. The problem is has always been that they are both expensive and difficult to learn.

Editing and creating new pages from scratch or from a template just got a whole lot easier… and less expensive. KompoZer is an Open Source (free) WYSIWYG (What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get) HTML and web page editor. If you can use Word®, you can use KompoZer.

And to make using KompoZer even easier, there is a complete video tutorial series that will take you from total newbie to expert in a few, short, entertaining lessons. The Konquer KompoZer Video Series is now available and you can view a sample video from the series here.

KompoZer is available for Linux, Mac and Windows systems. We use KompoZer on an almost daily basis here at BobStovall.com and highly recommend it.

You can download KompoZer for FREE here

More info on the Konquer KompoZer Video Series here

I’m often asked about what programs I use to handle images… you know, do the routine cropping, resizing, basic retouching, etc. that many images need before they are put on a website or into a video.

I own Photoshop® CS3 and have found it be an invaluable tool. But not everyone is thrilled about the prospect of dropping $650 for the latest version of Photoshop. But how would FREE sound?

As it happens, there is an Open Source (free to use) clone of Photoshop called the GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program). It is a very powerful application and can do pretty much anything Photoshop can do.

But like Photoshop, it has a fairly steep learning curve. So learning by trial and error can be a long and frustrating process. The 7DollarVideoStore.com has just released a 27 video Creating Stunning Graphics Using the GIMP tutorial set that makes learning the GIMP a simple and entertaining experience. Watch the video to get the coupon code for $10 off the video set.

The first video in the series shows you how to download and install the GIMP for free. The remainder of the series hows you step-by-step how to use the GIMP to create stunning graphics and enhance your photos to make you look your best. You can download this video and others for free here.

Download the GIMP here