• e-Marketing Your Business Workshop is scheduled for Tuesday, May 14 at the KEDCO office. Market Me will help you understand how the web can help your business.

If you are planning to have a website built or re-built consider what functionality you might want to incorporate into your website. Ask your self: How difficult is it to instantly add items to the website?

If your company is like most, making the day to day changes on your site are causing some grief. The answer is to create a site where information is updated and displayed easily. Event listings, news items, and featured articles are all great ways to add functionality to your web site. Using specific tools (Cold Fusion, ASP, PHP) web site developers are capable of building web sites that can be easily updated by the sites owner. One example of this is www.truenorthgems.com. In the truenorthgems.com website, the staff of True North, using a simple template, fill out each news release and then send it to the website. Once there, the web site autmatically adds the new news listing and discards the oldest item. This effectivly allows the company to have instant control over late breaking information displayed on their website. And it is so simple everyone in the company can do it.

Beyond simple site maintenance, tools like Cold Fusion are great for adding secure password protected sections of your website, and collecting, storing, and displaying information in a database.

So, if your out to get a new site or you are re-building an old site just imagine what features you might like to have and you probably can.

Spam - Electronic junk mail or junk newsgroup postings. Some people define spam even more generally as any unsolicited e-mail. However, if a long-lost brother finds your e-mail address and sends you a message, this could hardly be called spam, even though it's unsolicited. Real spam is generally e-mail advertising for some product sent to a mailing list or newsgroup.

I'm sure everyone of you has heard of spam. In fact, some of you may even consider this newsletter spam. But is all email communication classified as spam? No of course not, but where do we draw the line?

People communicate everyday through email, and not every email is a reply. Some emails are generated and distributed without consent of the receiver, such as a Happy Easter one to your family, etc.; and nobody cares. What people do make a stink about is emails that are unsolicited, waste their time and are of no interest to them. You'll never hear someone complain about an email advertisement that worked and got them to buy in, you'll only hear about the unsuccessful ones. Or, are they really unsuccessful, when they have everyone talking about them?

Everyday we get 'junk' mail, and at first people grunted at these, but now they go unnoticed or even saved. And that's where 'spam' is heading. People are getting used to it, and will begin to weed through it and eventually start buying in.

I'm sure I have some people out there saying she's crazy, that will never happen, people are too busy and their inboxes are too full. Well, I'm out to prove them wrong. Take this newsletter for instance; when we started InterConnected 1 year ago, we 'spammed' 450 local businesses with it. We have had 19 people request to be removed from the list and over 382 people have independently registered for it since. You can't tell me that spam doesn't work. If you still don't believe me, have a look at our stats, www.marketme.ca/stats. Look at sessions, you'll be able to tell by the patterns which days we've sent out the newsletter, and there is no direct link to our site, so people are actually clicking thru.

When trying to reach your market, email advertising is the way to go, just remember to be smart about it. So, if you're wondering what spam is and how to cook it right for your business...Don't be afraid to throw it in the pot and start frying - you'll be sure to get something out of it.