Michelle Prefers

While I don’t consider myself a forum - message board junkie as I have better things to do with my time & life, whenever I need help on something, I just love going to message boards, assuming they are active & the people on there are nice.

Using forums to promote your business or a certain topic is good online business sense, & because I’m a netrepreneur, I know the differences between the good message board - forum software, & the mediocre forum software.

The old ones are terrible & yet there are still many around where in order to see the thread of your topic, you have to click a million links. Very time consuming, there’s no flow, & half the time I give up & just move away from the site.

There’s the free software which while good if you aren’t a professional, doesn’t have nearly 1/2 the features VBulletin (the software I recommend) has.

I always loved VBulletin because I knew exactly where everything was, how to tweak it quickly when I first joined, & I knew that when I started my first message board, I’d go with VBulletin. It’s not a busy board because it takes a lot of hard work to get tons of members there, but it’s definitely a start.

I have since started another message board that isn’t 100% tweaked yet & once again I went to VBulletin to get their software.

Note: I used this template design company when I wanted a nice design for my forum. Their prices are reasonable & I’m sure you can find a really nice design in there, even if you have to tweak it some.

I like the term message board much better than forum, but if you are going to search for keywords in your search engine, you will need to use the word “forum”.

If you have any questions about VBulletin before you decide to go with them, just ask away, it can be a bit time consuming to set one up, but it’s well worth it in the end. THE biggest message boards online use VBulletin, they wouldn’t use anything else because of the numerous features it has.

I’ll be starting a 3rd message board - forum soon, & I can’t wait.

Michelle

Aweber is one of the leading companies that develop e-mail marketing software so you can send out pre-scripted e-mails to your client lists, or do broadcasts.

As you are reading this, you probably have an online business and you know the importance of having one or more client lists. That’s what Aweber software is for, it makes it easier for you to create these lists and manage them!

Here’s How it Works

• First, you write the e-mails and tell Aweber when and to which lists to send your e-mails – a welcome e-mail upon signing up for your newsletter, reminder on the second day, promotion on the forth day, whatever you decide;
• Then you create the “sign up form” via Aweber software – it is easy and quick – write your questions, and decide in what order you want them to be (you can always change both the questions and their order);
• put the code on your website –  now it is ready to be used!
• Create more e-mail messages scheduled to be sent out for different reasons.

Aweber helps you to bond with your clients on your lists, find out what they need, and eventually to increase your sales.

In addition, I also send surveys that I create myself with this survey software – it is very important to know what your customers need and what they think of you.

And here is exactly why I use Aweber

• Aweber allows me to use a different address for every list. According to Can Spam laws, you have to use a snail mail address in order to be able to send out e-mails to your list. With Aweber I can change that address for each client list! I don’t have to create a different Aweber account for every company or website I own; I just tweak each list according to how I want the public to see it.
• Aweber also has ways to track who is buying from your list. This way you can send out different e-mails just to the people who haven’t purchased.
• Aweber gives e-mail web analytics – it tracks how many people open the e-mails, how many bounces I have, what time of the day e-mails get opened and so on.
• Aweber tells you which version of your e-mail (long or short) people like more.
• Aweber has also come out with blog newsletters for your blog instead of just using RSS Feed which not everyone reads.
• I believe that Aweber gets my e-mails delivered at a higher rate than 1shoppingcart does.

So as you can see, Aweber is one of the top notch list building e-mail delivery systems and they keep on adding new features.

For those reasons I recommend Aweber, as they are used by the majority of netrepreneurs.

I hope I helped educate you in some way.

Michelle