Have you already got a business? A conventional, bricks-and-mortar business, I mean. Or are you trying to make some money advertising generic sites with only an affiliate link? Both of these types of business usually have something in common: that is that their online presence is disappointing.

Too many business owners and affiliate website promoters do not realize that a poor website does a lot more harm than good. A business owner who has himself tried to create a website on Geofreebies or one of the other free webspace providers is essentially doing the same as someone who only promotes an affiliate link on an automatically-generated, replicated affiliate page.

The problem is that it is all too obvious that those websites are cheap and nasty and, unfortunately, that reflects on the business and the business owner both. The same goes for free email addresses. Just consider, what looks better to you:

http://www.geofreebies.com/memnbersites/Amiable-Dragon.html

amiable-dragon123456@yahoo.com or

http://amiabledragon.com

owen@amiabledragon.com

It is all too obvious which looks more professional; which gives more confidence and which would bring in more customers and so more sales and Im sure that there is no one in the world who would disagree with that.

The next thing to think about is the extension ” ie the letters after the . or the @. .com probably surely still carries the most prestige, but it no longer has the lead it used to have. .tv, .biz, .info have their places, I’m suppose, but they do not really have the same cachet as ‘dot com’. However, there is another problem with .com and that is that it has been around since the dawn of the Internet and very many of the name combinations have already been taken up.

I suggest that .ws is a very viable solution to this problem. You can imagine it standing for web site, although it actually stands for Western Samoa! It is a relatively new suffix and many, many combination names are still available. I am sure you could still get the address you want. Something else you may not know is that when you buy your own domain name, you can make any email address out of it by substituting anything for the http://www and replacing the DOT with an @ sign. Look at the address above for an example.

Then you have to host your domain and administer the site and email addresses. The fees are usually paid annually in advance for the name and monthly for the hosting, both payments going to separate companies very often. However, there is a very professional company on the market at the moment offering a website, with a name of your choice and ten email addresses and a free website design service AND you pay only $10 a month to one firm. There is no contract and you can leave at any time or change the email or website addresses.

I think that that represents a very good deal for a business website (you can imagine: sales@….; info@….); a family website (everyone can have their own individual, private email address) or an affiliate website (using redirects and multiple email addresses: for PayPal etc.). But that is not all there is to it! You can actively promote that new hosting company or just put a referral link to it on the bottom of your website and make cash, month after month for ever more from referrals on autopilot from your visitors! And if you use the link below, you will get a free weeks trial, but fully operational account and three paying members in your downline, subject to a condition, or your first months $10 paid for you by us.

That cant be bad, can it? Five weeks free trial of your own domain, hosted on your own site, with 10 email address or a free week with three members paying you $3 a month to get your business off to a flying start with!

Phishing Scams

Phishing scams are created to fool you into giving out secret information that can be used for the con artist’s benefit. They are looking for things like your credit card number or passwords to websites, and sometimes even things like your bank account number and social security number. This information is intended to swipe your money.

One phishing scheme that you may catch onto is the official looking email supposedly from your bank or credit card company or some other financial company you may do business with. It asks you to update or modify your personal information, providing a link to take you to the site. Since it appears quite official, many people click on the link, go into the site and log in with their password, unaware that they are at a fraudulent site, not the bank or credit card site. After all, the site does appear to be the actual, official website. It’s harder to spot these scamming emails for this reason. Everything looks correct. You should know, though, that most financial institutions would never request that you update your information in this manner.

Tax Refund Email Scam

The IRS has issued a warning about a tax refund email scam. You get an email allegedly from the IRS saying you are due a tax refund. You are told to click on a link to the “IRS” website. On this page, they request your social security number and other personal information, so you can gain access to your account. The email is a scam and it was created to steal your personal information.

IRS Does Not Use Email

According to their website, the IRS does not contact taxpayers through email. They don’t use email to discuss your tax refund. The only approved forms of communication between taxpayers and the IRS are by telephone or via the US Postal Service. Avoid falling for this scam.

Other Email Scams: The email from Nigeria scam.

The email from Nigeria scam — Obviously this is somewhat different, but the main point of the scam is an email is sent from a person who claims they are trying to transport money out of a certain country — commonly Nigeria — but there is trouble with taxes, crooked law officials, or other problems that require a big amount of money or stop this money from being taking out the country completely. At this point, you are asked to help. In exchange for your help, you will be offered a large portion of up to millions of dollars.

Other Bad Email

Another type of dangerous emails are email attachments embedded with viruses. Or emails that tempt you into clicking on a link where your computer is infected with a Trojan Horse or some other virus.

Avoiding Losses

Your best weapon in protecting yourself against these scams is your own common sense. What is the most helpful is to tell the authorities about any email that looks strange. If you have any emails from people telling you do something that sounds strange, report it to the officials.

Unless you specifically joined the sender’s mailing list, be very cautious about clicking any links in emails. Keep your anti-virus protection current all the time, keep it set to scan emails that are coming in, and stay protected when you are surfing. If you don’t have it already, install malware blocking software on your computer. A good product for guarding against malware installing itself without your knowledge is Windows Defender.

Identifying a person’s email address from their name, can be fairly difficult. Likewise, identifying a person’s name from their email address, a process called a reverse email lookup, is also not easy. This is made harder yet if the objective is to eliminate costs, ie, only use free research tools.

Here are some of the more effective resources to track down a name from an email address or an email address from a name, while not spending money:

The largest research resource on the web are the search engines, which includes Google, Yahoo, ASK, and a number of others. This is the first place to try to find a person’s email address. Unfortunately, this is a general resource, so you will have to sort through a lot of information to find someone’s email address.

The free email services have many members, so this is another good place to start. Each webmail service asks its members to register their email addresses, so looking in Yahoo, Hotmail, AOL, and Googlemail will yield some results. However, these directories are incomplete so your search will not stop here.

If the person you’re looking for lives in the USA or Canada, Reunion’s Free Email Search Service is a great bet, since they have collected 30 million profiles.

If you know the educational history, professional affiliations, or interests of the person you’re looking for, you may find them listed in one of the smaller, subject-specific specialist directories.

If you know where the person you’re looking for is living, try looking for them in one of the many regional directories, which are especially useful outside the US. Each directory focuses on a specific country or region.

One place to look is the professional social networks such as Plaxo, Linked In, and others. Most people who are looking to network professionally will make a valid email address available in these networks. Unfortunately, you will have to join these networks to effectively search them.

As you can see it is very possibl to track down a person’s name based on their email addresses and a person’s email address based on their name. However, the data is not all in one place, and requires significant legwork.

Fortunately, there are also a number of fee based directories that are far easier to use and more complete than the free databases. Because they do charge a fee, they are organized to cross the boundaries of a single email system. They collect email addresses for hundreds of millions of people on an up to date basis across the major consumer email systems such as Hotmail, Yahoo, Googlemail, and AOL as well as the major ISPs. They also collect work emails from the professional networks and from various other directories.

The net effect is a much easier to use single interface, a 1 stop shop to lookup people based on the email address or to lookup email addresses based on the person’s name.

Database marketing is using the power of technology to keep in communication with your clients, prospects and sphere of influence (SOI). An effective database is the best tool that a marketer can have in their arsenal, bar none! It allows you to keep in touch with your Sphere of Influence, prospects and past and current clients.

No one likes to do data entry; so setting up a web form that will allow your users to add themselves to your marketing database is the perfect answer! These web forms will allow your database to start an auto-responder campaign, sending out messages to your users over period of time without any effort on your part.

The very best aspect of a database is the ability of it to personalize your outgoing message. Most databases will allow you to send out some sort of blast message (either by email or direct mail) which can start with Dear Client Name. I am sure most people realize that we are using technology to personalize the message BUT that does not decrease the effectiveness of using someones given name.

The most important thing you can have for your database is LOTS of people. These should be people who are interested in your product or service and who you have at least a small connection with. They can be member of a professional organization that you belong to, a member of your church, your friends, your dentist, past clients, or anyone with whom you would like to communicate. If you will commit to adding a fixed number of people to your database daily (five per day is realistic), you can guarantee that by the end of the year you will have at least one thousand, two hundred and fifty people to talk with on a regular basis.

The best thing about the internet is the ability to market affordably, and no where is that more apparent than with email marketing! Using just a little time, you can send a message to your entire database with just a few mouse clicks. A great message that is helpful to your clients can be sent once or twice a month without burning out your list.

Direct mail marketing is a great way to communicate with your customers. A targeted, multi-part campaign can make a tremendous difference in your sales volume and how your clients think of you and your product. That having been said, if you are only planning to send out one marketing piece, you may want to consider using another medium as direct mail requires a number of touches to be effective.

Autoresponders or drip marketing is another way to communicate with your database. This involves sending out a series of messages over time to your new clients or prospects, telling them about aspects of your business or service. Instead of yelling at them about your business, you tell them about it gradually through a series emails sent once a week or even every few days. Two great services for autoresponders are AWeber and Constant Contact, both of which supply a great service at an affordable price.

Make sure to have a plan for your marketing message to your database and stick to it! Nothing will cause you to lose touch with your list faster than sending out unrelated marketing messages that differ from your core product or service. If you are not careful, all those users you spent time adding will unsubscribe and reduce the number of people you have permission to market to!

To stay in business these days you have to prospect for new clients, get those prospects to buy and keep in touch with your past clients. Email newsletters will allow you to do that and more, easily and without breaking the bank!

Many small business owners fail to recognize the power of constant communication with their clients. Your clients are probably not actively seeking someone else to provide the service that you do, BUT if they do not hear from you regularly, they might be tempted to change vendors if another company comes along with a powerful message.

Email newsletters give small business owners the power to maintain contact with their clients and prospects even when they are not actively searching for that product or service. By communicating with their past and potential clients on a regular basis, the consistent small business marketer will stay top of mind, without having to beg for business.

A powerful email newsletter includes things like a relevant article about your industry, advertisements for your goods or services, related vendors who could help them and any kind of industry statistics that are available. It is vital that your message be timely and relevant to your industry. Do not send unrelated information out in your email newsletter or your clients could become confused.

While there are many companies that will help you send out your email newsletter, I recommend using a company like Aweber or Constant Contact. Both of these companies offer easy to use interfaces and will make sure that you are in compliance with all anti-spam rules. They also will make your deliverability rate go up and offer information about your open and bounce rates.

I often get the question, how regularly should I send my email newsletter. Well, every business is different, but I would not recommend sending more than two times per month unless you are very good at generating content, highly relevant content. Because of the low cost, it is easy to get carried away and send lots of emails out, but it could tire your list and you could wind up with a bunch of unsubscribes, not a good thing!

The easiest way to grow your email list is to ask everyone you meet for their email address! Check out any associations you belong to, and if you are a member of your local chamber of commerce you may be able to get the member email addresses also. You can also hold a contest for new newsletter subscribers, giving away an item of value in exchange for them giving you their email address.

While you are busy writing your email newsletter, make sure you are also growing your email list by asking your past and current customers if they have anyone they can refer you to. Let them know that you welcome the opportunity to provide great service to their friends and family and that you would love to add them to your informative email newsletter list!