Receiving 100s of emails daily can create a nightmare! If you are like me, you dread the menial task of deleting, sorting and handling of these emails.

For some time now, I have used a great system that combines the same principles the relate to physical mail.

Here are a few tips that will help you with an inbox that is out of control.

1. Make sure you have a good spam filter. Handling spam is an absolute time waster.
2. When you get email, try to handle it only once. If the request takes less than a minute for response, then it is the best practice to handle the request immediately. Revisiting emails that require minimal action causes that email to become an unnecessary time waster.
3. Microsoft Outlook provides a way to flag important emails with a color so you can go back to it. You may find that only a handful of a 1,000 emails really require this flag.
4. About once every 4 months, I clean out my inbox. I go back 30 days delete everything older. Voila! Now you have accomplished a great deal! If you have a good handle on steps 1, 2, and 3, then you have little concern about losing good emails…
5. At this stage, I can go through the last 30 days in a matter of minutes.
6. It is my practice to leave 6 months of deleted emails in my delete folder just in-case I lost something important or overlooked something.

These are my suggestions and they have worked well for me. Do you have any to add?

Did you know that editing your website is now possible as long as you have an iPhone/Smartphone? With well over 100 clients, we specialize in teaching website management. This is critical. While we do provide contracted services to make updates, many like to have a more “hands on” approach.

An effective website is one that is updated frequently. Making frequent updates can be costly if you contract. Since our website programming provides a very user-friendly option, consider our company for all of your website needs.

Want more information or have questions, please call or email!

This week, we are purchasing a new server which improves the hardware and software. We are happy with our current server, but things have improved to such a degree that we chose to implement a new server instead of upgrading our current one.

As a result, this new server will be faster and more secure than ever. There will be no downtime for either website or email. We will take care of everything “behind the scenes.”

This will be a month long process for us. There will be no cost increase for hosting. We may ask you for access to your domain name to point it to the new server, but for most of our hosting clients, we have that information. You will simply be notified by email when we change.

We anticipate only one change that will affect you—strong passwords.

If you have access to the CPanel and/or use WordPress for your site, we will increase the security of passwords. The days of simple passwords are about over. This is unfortunate, but unavoidable. With scammers and hackers, no amount of advanced technology can ever replace the need for a strong password. Of course, having a notebook full of passwords and usernames may not be your desire, there are online password vaults and browser tools (e.g., Roboform) that can store these for you.

Email marketing is very effective! Did you know that one survey, research company finds that email marketing is now ranked above the search engines for helping your business. Let us introduce you to iContact, a very easy-to-use email campaign management program.

For some time, we have recommended AWeber and Constant Contact as our favorite campaign resource. However, a new company is now offering better rates and has some advantages.

iContact Fits Budgets Better

From the table below, you will find that iConstant is either cheaper or the same price as the cheapest solution. The great thing is that iContact offers more flexibility due to more pricing levels.

iContact is Easy-to-Use

With pre-filled templates, you do not need to know how to code. You can choose WYSIWYG [fn1 “What You See Is What You Get] templates.

The charts and reporting features are very clear. You can see instantly how many email subscribers added and dropped as well how many opened your email.

Constant Contact is as easy as iContact, however you will pay more for that service. AWeber needs to make some progress here.

Summary

We are very happy with the flexibility and pricing structure of iContact. Consider enhancing your marketing with iContact. Click here to start a free trial!

Drop down the “Tools” menu

Select “Account Settings”

Add “New” under the Email tab.

The next screen defaults with the radio button on “Microsoft Exchange, POP3, IMAP, or HTTP. Select Next >

Complete the fields below and SELECT “Manually configure server settings…”

Complete the form below replacing “yourwebsite” with your website address.

After completing the fields above, click More Settings…

Replace the number “25″ with “26″ in the Outgoing Server field.

Click on “OK” and follow the prompts to finish the email setup.