Setting Up Listwire Autoresponder

If you run your own business or are responsible for contacting a group of people for your church or sports team or any other group you are a part of, Listwire is a great little tool to automate the process for free.    With Listwire, you can setup a series of messages that can be sent out for a period of days.  For example, if you have a set of 200 newsletters that talks about growing indoor plants, you can allow a new subscriber to start with the first one and receive a new one every 2-3 days.  At the same time, you may have a subscriber that has read your articles for several months and perhaps they have currently reached newsletter 99.  This allows new people to benefit from your older newsletter while you continue to produce new newsletters for your ongoing subscribers. If you are a coach of a sports team or the secretary for a club, you can broadcast a message regarding future meetings.  You can set up a series of messages reminding your participants of practice or meetings and then setup a day and time for each message to be sent.  This is great because once it is done for several weeks, you can focus on other things and not have to worry about doing those each week. This video will provide instruction on how to setup a Listwire account at www.listwire.com In future videos we will review how to create a message and broadcast as well as a subscription form a subscriber can fill out to receive your information.  Be sure to check back for those.  To see an example of a Listwire capture form in use, go to: http://www.yourbusiness-yourfuture.com/ Our team strives to teach our members many different methods to advertise and promote their businesses for free or inexpensively and Listwire is just one such tool we use.  Why spend money on tools when free works just as well?!?

How To Create Animated Pictures

A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words

 

When advertising your business, it is necessary to get the attention of potential customers.  A text ad is probably not going to get many people’s attention.  A picture ad will be more likely to get a customer’s attention, especially if it is colorful and eye-catching; sort of like the old saying “A picture is worth a thousand words.”

However, the internet is full of millions and billions of pictures, so how do you compete?  Try an animated picture.

An animated picture is sort of like a flashing neon sign.  If you are driving down a busy city street at night, you will have lights surrounding you from all the businesses and the street lights.  Mentally, you will begin to block them out.  Flashing lights are more likely to capture someone’s attention.

An animated picture has movement within it to capture a person’s attention and, with a bit of creativity, they are easy to create.

Think about an animated picture like you would the cartoons you drew as a kid on the edge of the pages of a booklet.  Each page has the same picture with a minor change, but as you flip through the pages, the pictures seem to come to life a move.

To create an animated picture:

1.      Use your favorite picture software to create a series of 2 or more pictures you will group to create your animation.  You can keep it simple or make it as complicated as your heart desires.

2.    Name your pictures in the order you want them to appear in your animation so you can keep track.

3.    Upload your pictures to the internet.

4.    Go to http://www.myspacegens.com/handler.php?gen=animatedimage to put your animated picture together.

a.     Select the size you want for your animated picture

b.    Select the speed you want for your animation

c.     Upload your pictures by clicking on the ADD button and adding them in the order you want them to run.  After you have added your files, click the UPLOAD button.
 

d.     Click the Submit button.

e.     Depending on how many pictures are in your animation, it can take 30 seconds to several minutes for your picture to compile.  Once it is compiled, you can download it.

Note:  if you have trouble downloading it, simply retry.  That usually fixes the problem.

 

 

Once you have created your picture, read the post on how to use it to create a banner by clicking here.  

 

 

Advertising Banners

How To Create a Banner 

A banner is a picture that is associated with links to a desired website for advertising a product, service or business opportunity that can be used throughout many places on the internet, such as conventional websites or blogs.

Creating a banner is a four-step process:

1.      Create a picture:  utilizing whatever picture program you prefer, create a picture to use in your banner.

2.    Upload your picture to the internet.  Make note of the url address where your picture is uploaded to on the internet.

3.    Copy the following html code and place it in your own document.

<a href="address link to send visitor to"><img src="address link where picture is stored" alt="Very short description of picture" height="130" width="250" border="0" align=”left” /></a>

Within the code, replace the red text with the appropriate information.  Be careful to leave the quotes.

a.     The href section is for the url address to which you would like to send your visitor, such as your capture page or your business website.

b.    The img src is the url address where your banner picture is stored.

c.     The alt text is a very short description of what the picture is.  Do NOT stuff the alt text with keywords.  Search engines do not like that and it will be counter-productive.

d.     The height, width and border are in a measurement unit called pixels.  Pixels are very, very tiny.  Play with these settings until your banner is the correct size.

e.     Align is the alignment of the banner within the area the code is placed and can be “left”, “center” or “right”.

4.    Add the html code for your banner to your blogs or website if you have access to the html coding of either.

I suggest you save a copy of your banner picture and html code within a word document so you can reference them for future use.

For instructions on how to create animated pictures, click here.