This post was originally published on Websites and Webhosting at Email Marketing Free Trial.

While it is simple and free to allow people to subscribe to your blog, it is even more valuable to have your own email list and subscription service.

This allows you to build up lists of subscribers whom you can email whenever you want. There are numerous possibilities with such a service, such as the following:

1. Allow your visitors and subscribers to sign up for your website or company newsletter, and send it to them via email.
2. Create an series of emails with tips or training, and allow you website visitors to sign up for it as a free course. In this way, you can add more names to your list. You can use this email service to build up trust, create an interest in your own products, and get repeat traffic to your websites.
3. Offer a series of emails to customers after they have received one of your products or services. Use this series to educate them on how to use your product or service to their best advantage. Where applicable, you can also recommend follow-up services or products which will complement their earlier purchase.
4. Offer a free gift (such as a digital download) to newsletter subscribers, and then follow it up as per #2 or #3 above.
5. Send important news or updates to subscribers, which you want to keep separate from your blog,
6. Inform subscribers of new events, updates, contests, celebrations, etc.
7. Maintain different lists of subscribers for different purposes and send them tailor-made email series
8. The list goes on and on …

Probably the most reputable and reliable company for this purpose is Aweber. This service is used by some of the most professional Internet Marketers online, as well as small businesses and large businesses alike.

Aweber will host all of your email lists, allow you to send emails to your contacts and customize your settings, and it also helps you to ensure you are compliant with anti-spam laws and other related regulations. You can also customize your emails with special formatting, banners, branding, and more. This is an extremely affordable service and very professional.

If you would like to try out this service for free, you can do so at this link.

Another very popular email marketing and subscription service which is also used by many professionals is GetResponse. This company is a competitor of Aweber and might be worth looking into as well.

This post was originally published on Websites and Webhosting at Email Marketing.

Email Marketing and Subscription Services

See this page on email marketing for full information.

SEO and Traffic Creation

• Brick Marketing – Professional SEO Services for companies and small businesses. Also offers email marketing services, blog writing services, article marketing, affiliate program management, consulting, email marketing, social marketing, and more.
• Article Submission Service: SubmitYOURArticle.com – Article syndication service, excellent for SEO (Search Engine Optimization).
• Comment Kahuna – This is a free tool which will help you quickly find blogs related to yours so that you can leave relative and insightful comments on them. The links you leave in your comments will help you get traffic to your own blog and will encourage others to comment on your blog as well.
• SEO Elite – This software is used to analyze your own websites or websites of your competition, to see what you are doing right and wrong in your Search Engine Optimization tactics. It also allows you to quickly find good potentials for link exchanges (websites with whom it would be valuable to exchange links).
• Traffic Kahuna – This is not free, and there is a considerable monthly membership fee. I have found it to be an excellent tool for SEO. It merits a whole page of its own, so if you would like more information, please visit their site and/or sign up for their mailing list.
• Squidoo – This is a giant and incredibly popular website where you can create your own webpages for free, make friends with other people of similar interests, drive traffic to your own site, and make some money as well. It is free to join, very easy to use, and can be a lot of fun.

Accept Payments Online

• Accept Payments Online
• Painless Invoicing and Time Tracking

Website Design and Creation

• StoreStacker – Allows you to create an entire store full of the products of your choice from Amazon, eBay, Clickbank, and other eCommerce sites. You can choose your categories and layout and fill up your store with hundreds of products (you will receive a commission whenever a site visitor buys from your store). The store can be set up to pull in RSS Feeds from other sites, as well as related videos from YouTube, and it can be set up to update itself automatically. Software and travel-related products can also be sold, with more options being added as time goes on.
• WordPress Cloner – Once you are creating several WordPress Blogs, this tool can save you many hours each time you set up a new blog).
• Web Media Toolkit – For one low price this package gives you an enormous library of stock photos, music, sound effects, and more which you can use on your websites. At the time of this writing it costs $47 and includes:

• 4719 Stock Photos
• 7048 Clip-art Images
• 1,500 Classic Pen and Ink Illustrations
• 1,200 Web-ready Business icons
• 7,387 Designer Fonts
• 75 Royalty-Free Music Tracks
• 101 Podcast Intros and Outros
• 2,500 Professional Sound EffectsTotal: 24,530 Web Media Elements.

• Coffee Cup Easy Website Builder – A very inexpensive and easy to use website builder and html editor. I use this to format my own content with proper html code before I insert it into my blogs, Squidoo pages, etc. You can also use Coffee Cup to build entire websites. It is probably the best website building software besides Dreamweaver, but it costs under $50 at the time of this writing, and there are free versions as well.
• Dreamweaver Creative Suite 3. Design, develop, and maintain standard-based websites – If you are going to get serious about building websites, this is a must – but it is also pricey.
• VideoStacker – - A free tool which allows you to create a widget on your blog with YouTube videos displaying according to the keywords of your choice. Very simple to use but requires that you set it up on your web server (not on your computer).

Web Hosting

• Host Gator – Web Hosting – This is my #1 Recommendation. The best web host there is, in my opinion. I tried four web hosts! With Host Gator – Web Hosting I have not only had almost zero technical problems, but their customer support is the best of any company I have ever dealt with. They are extremely fast and routinely go above and beyond what they are required to do, in order to help you resolve any difficulties or issues you might encounter.
• Blue Host Webhosting – This is my #2 Recommendation. Bluehost also has a very good reputation but I still found Hostgator to be superior in speed and quality of customer support and service.

Keyword Research

• Google Keyword Tool – A free but authoritative and reliable source of keyword research and information.
• Keyword Elite – This tool works in conjunction with online keyword research websites (such as Wordtracker, Google, or other free and paid services). It allows you to zero in quickly on the best keywords for your website, or to help you find the right market or niche to get started in. The tool can compare hundreds or thousands of related keywords and help you find the best ones. You can also use this tool to generate huge lists of keywords with related data as to searches versus competition, average monetary value of different keywords, etc. With this tool you can spend fifteen minutes doing work which would normally take you a week full-time.
• Word Tracker Free Keyword Tool and the Word Tracker Free Trial – One of the best keyword research websites online. There is a free version, and there is also a paid version which gives the best and most accurate results.
• Keyword Discovery – Another very popular keyword research tool with free and paid options.

General Resources

• Free Business Cards
  
• CoffeeCup Software
  
• Free Return Address Labels from VistaPrint.com. Click here.
  

This post was originally published on Websites and Webhosting at Webmaster Resources.