Here are three great services that can help you market to your audience via email:

Campaigner – The Campaigner service really focuses on making email marketing easy.  You can pick from predesign templates for your email messages, get statistics on who is reading your email announcements you send out and save some money too.  While the service is not 100% free, you do get a 30 day free trial and the average cost after that is only $10 per month.

MailChimp – I am a big fan of what MailChimp does, because they seem to be a company that is really staying up to date with all the latest and greatest ways you can reach your customers and they provide you with great tools to do so.  They give you all the same basic email marketing tools Campaigner does, but you can also sign up for a free account.  The free account is limited to 1,000 subscribers a month and 6,000 emails per month – but that should be enough room to help you decide if it is the right tool for you to use in your own business.

RatePoint – The RatePoint service takes the cake when it comes to providing you both free and premium email marketing services.  It does not just stop at email marketing though.  They also give you business review tools, online survey tools, and social marketing tools too.  Using the free service, you can send emails out to 550 contacts and the premium services start at $25 per month.

Which One is the Best E-mail Marketing Tool?

That is a hard call to make, but I think the fight would be between MailChimp and RatePoint.  Where MailChimp gives you more bang for your buck when it comes to the number of people you can contact, RatePoint gives you more tools to use to grow your business. 

Need a handy guide to WordPress?  Try out some of these great links!

• 9 WordPress Alternatives
• Using WordPress for Static Web Sites
• WordPress Plugins for Regular Folks
• 10 Tools to Turn Firefox into WordPress’s Little Helper
• A Better WordPress Admin Layout?
• How to Get Rid of WordPress Comment Spam
• 37 WordPress Theme Databases and Blogs
• 20 Best Multimedia Plugins for WordPress
• Sticky Post Help in WordPress
• WordPress Plugins for Regular Folks

Let me know which ones are your favorites, and what type of WordPress lists, tutorials or more you would like to see in the future!

Are you one of those people who are just more interested in posts and articles on web sites if they are in list form?  If so, ListCamp wants you!  This new resource promises to be a new way to discover and share resources from anywhere in lists.

There is no real science here, it is a web site with lists.  Lists such as:

• Most Useful Firefox Add-ons
• The Best Beatles Albums
• Useful WordPress Plugins

Another nice features include the ability to vote a choice up and down, and also the ability to sign in using your Google account.  If you feel the itch to create a list (or just read one), visit ListCamp.com.

I always love to try out new to-do list applications and web sites, because I am a ‘bit of an organizational nut.  With that in mind, I recently started checking out ForcedDo and I am pretty happy with the results.

ForceDo is much more than just your common to-do list.  The thing that is special here is that you set mini deadlines in minutes for yourself.  Once you hit the “play” button for a to do list item, your clock starts and you see how much time you have left right there on the screen.  You can kind of think of it as forcing yourself to become more productive.

Here is a little more information about how to get started from the ForceDo web site:

The key is to split a BIG task into smaller tasks + set priorities + set the (estimated) duration of a task. Lets say, you have a task "Write a blog article". You may have all the plan and ideas in your head about the article, you simply start writing. Thats OK, but if you are a perfectionist you may write the article for 5 hours or never get ready.

Need to organize your time better?  Check out ForceDo.com and get yourself motivated to get some things done.

Want to know a little more about the world of CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) and design?  Here are some great places to get started.

• CSS Zen Garden
• Free CSS Templates
• CSS-based Navigation Menus
• Clean CSS – A CSS Optimizer
• CSS Basics
• Sitepoint CSS Tutorials
• CSS Design – Gallery
• Listamatic 1 – Styled Lists
• Open Design Community
• CSS from the Ground Up
• CSS Layout Techniques
• Ruthsarian Layouts
• W3C
• HTML Dog – HTML and CSS Tutorial
• Position is Everything

Know of anymore great links?  Leave a comment on this post, and share with the rest of the group.  Really looking forward to seeing which ones you like the best.

One good way of getting more productive is to make yourself a list.

Now I know some people poo-poo this idea because it sets a goal that you can not reach. Your to do list might be really huge, and looking at it might discourage you from moving forward. For me though, a list is a good way to help me remember what my daily tasks should be and what my weekly tasks should be.

You shouldn’t put things on your list like “brush your teeth” or “take a bath”. Hopefully those are given tasks that you know that you will do by the time the day is over with. Things marked on the lists should not be everyday goals you set out to do. They should be the odd little things that take up your free time.

I want you to create two notes to yourself. One should be what you want to get done in a day (normal day to day tasks that you need to make note of). The other should be things you need to get done by the time the week is over with (these can be bigger tasks or jobs that you do not need to do every single day).

For example, if I know I have to write five articles, I could try to write them all in one day – but then they would probably be a little suckstatic in their quality. Instead, I have five days in the work week, so I can write down on my daily to do list – write an article. This way one job that would take several hours can now be spread out through the week and take only a few minutes.

Now what is a good way to write these notes to yourself? Here are a couple of program that should help you out in that department. Both allow you to put little sticky notes on your desktop to write things down on.

+ StickyPad
+ ATnotes
+ Stickies

The great lesson to be learned is to not overwork yourself. Instead of doing one big job today, make it into several little jobs you can spread out through the week. This way you can have more hours of your day to do other things you need to do.

The numbers have grown enough to where I can actually do a top five list without feeling like I have to make half of them up.

The WHIR Blogs

OK, so maybe this isn’t just one blog – but I am going to sum them all up together, because they do give you the nice option of subscribing to all of them at once if you would like. Now what is so great about The WHIR’s Blog?

Well they give you a lot of interesting voices and views from the Web hosting industry. They have some voices from one side and other voices from another. The thing some people don’t understand is Web hosting is a really big tent – and the WHIR Blogs try to fit a lot of the industry biggest spots under their feed.

Amy’s Blog

Amy Armitage (from Lunarpages.com) has a nice blog that I would say is the closest thing to a professional blog Lunarpages has got.

I like the feeling of the whole thing. It has a much more personal feeling to it, and shows that Web hosting doesn’t always have to be about servers and uptime. You can create interesting Web hosting content without feeling like you are putting folks to sleep.

FastServers’s Blog

The folks over at FastServers.net also have a blog for both industry insiders and folks interested in the world of Web hosting to check out and read. Now the content here usually is a little more business focused, but that is OK too.

It gives you a secret window to look through when it comes to running an impressive data center. With multiple authors and interesting content – there is a lot of promise for this company blog to do great things in the future.

Inside ISPCON and HostingCon Blog

The two most important conferences inside of the Web hosting industry both have blogs as well. Now some of the content might be more relative the closer you get to the events, but there is more than enough content to read through and keep you happy all year long.

Both also have podcast content of the conferences as well.

Now sure, that isn’t all of the Web hosting blogs out there – but most of the best ones have been listed. If you need some more hosting content in your RSS reader, check out these Web sites as well. If you have one I didn’t mention, please leave a comment and I will add it to the list.

• HostingFu
• DreamHost Blog
• MattHeaton.com
• Web Hosting Finds Blog
• NullMind’s Lair
• Joyeur

Oh yeah, just as a final reminder – you can’t forget about one of the best blogs/podcasts out there today for the Web hosting industry, the Web Hosting Show!

Well so far, making lists of things for me to do has been working. I have a daily to do list with all the things I need to do every single day. For other tasks that I do day by day, I have a daily to do list for each day of the week.

So I might have five things I need to do every single day that is on my daily to do list, and everything else gets spread out on smaller to do lists for the days of the week.

So far it has been working out. The only hard part about it all is making myself stick with it, so I don’t have a boatload of work left for me at the end of the week.

The first thing I did was I searched multiple search engines for multiple Web hosting top ten lists. I wanted my subject lists to be totally random, so nobody could claim as much favor. This mixes real lists in with the fake ones, I know. To defend the paid-placement lists though, I have this to say. If a Web host is financially stable enough to pay for advertising, then they must be doing something right.

So now I am left with ten different top ten lists. From there, I took each one and averaged out the scores and number of times a Web host was mentioned. What was I left with? Here is your top ten of ten Web hosts out there today:

1. IPower
2. Bluehost
3. StartLogic
4. Lunarpages
5. Dot5 Hosting
6. Yahoo
7. XI Web Hosting
8. Apollo Hosting
9. Peer1
10. GoDaddy

This might not be the perfect way of organizing the best of the best out there, but at least it is something a little less biased to do your research from. If you have a comment about any of these hosts, feel free to share!