When you decide to have an opt-in list, it is not just a matter of sending your subscribers your promotional newsletters or catalogs. There are many things to consider in avoiding many complications. While there are so many ways you can make people subscribe to your list, there are also some things you must do to avoid subscribers from wanting to get off from your list.

Aside from that, you also want to avoid any problems with the law and your internet service provider or ISP. There are now many laws and rules that are applied to help protect the privacy of the internet users from spamming and unwanted mails. With the popularity of the electronic mail as a medium for marketing because of the low cost, many company’s have seized the opportunity and have flooded many people’s e-mail accounts with promotional mail.

more »

Don’t think you have to be perfect before you start a new task or enterprise. Everyone starts somewhere. So start wherever you are right now.

How to kill perfectionism

I have found that perfectionism and procrastination are two sides of the same coin. They are, in fact, twins. We frequently delay in tackling a task, we say, because we want to make sure that we doing everything perfectly. However, deep down inside, we have to come to terms with our own self-doubts and lack of confidence.
more »

The latest internet craze is the website Huppages.com. A site designed for people to write or blog about a number of various topics. There are many factions of the site for a wide range of different people to enjoy.  When users first go to the web site they can just browse around and read different articles by various people.

One can even go a step further, join the site, and become a member. Membership grants you a Profile page, with a summary for yourself and completes it with a picture. As a member or hubbers of Hubpages.com, you can now write your own articles and blogs and publish them on to the site. They have a topics page with topics like movies, fashion, automotive, food, health, sports, finance, travel, business, family, politics, animals, relationships and gaming.  I have personally read some great articles there. “Homemade soap-How to make soap at home” is one of the most popular articles on the site, along with “Winter Olympics 2010 Team USA: Women’s Snowboarding”.

more »

According to the New York Times, Twitter and LinkedIn have agreed to a partnership that will allow LinkedIn users to bring their tweets to the popular professional social network.

Adding Twitter updates to LinkedIn makes the site more dynamic and is a good move for both companies. For political and advocacy organizations, this is important because it will give LinkedIn a more prominent role as an aggregator and channel to reach potential donors. According to the NYT article:

LinkedIn’s 51 million members will now be able to send status updates — such as the fact that they are looking for an analyst on a certain topic, or posting a job opening — to Twitter on a case-by-case basis, and vice versa. People will also be able to add a section to their LinkedIn profile that contains their most recent tweets and view other people’s tweets when searching LinkedIn.

by VANA member Diana Ennen

For those of you who are still in the dark, a Virtual Assistant, or VA, is an executive level, administrative professional who works from his/her own office to support clients using some of the latest available technology. The Internet has brought many skilled professionals out of the corporate environment and back into their homes, enabling them to create a better work-life balance, while still performing in the roles they love. The VA is one such professional. Working from their home-based offices and making use of the Internet, telephone, fax and email, VAs are able to offer small and medium-sized businesses a quality of administrative support, previously only available to the corporate giants, in a cost-effective manner.
more »