Home Business Recommendations

Starting a home business or looking to market an existing product to make it more profitable? Don't learn the hard way like we did! Many of the products and services we recommend here, we chose based on the advice of established Christian publishers on the Christian Self-Publishing Yahoo! group.

Web design

We tried Microsoft FrontPage and then migrated to Expression. Not bad, but learning HTML was a B-I-G learning curve and it was slow and painful to build our sites at first. Not to mention, they were not as professional and search-engine friendly as we would have liked.

Then we found XSite Pro, and we were hooked! Version 2 came out recently and it is full of wonderful features specifically designed for Internet marketing: AdSense tools, search engine optimization, easy audio and video, and more. It is really "SO" easy--no code knowledge required to build a professional-looking and optimized site. There are a lot of fabulous templates included so you can get a site up and running in no time!

Web hosting

EMWD came highly recommended by several folks on the Christian Self-Publishing list. We had been using one of the more well-known companies but their customer service was, as you might guess, not stellar. Not only that, but more than once our server crashed when we had excessive traffic from special promotions. Not good!

EMWD is owned and operated by a Christian homeschool father of six children. The customer service has been wonderful, and we have every confidence in their architecture and ability to handle significant volumes of traffic.

All that, and their pricing is competitive, too!

Email Marketing and Autoresponder

When we were shopping for a newsletter service, we went with one that was user-friendly and promised solid results in terms of deliverability, open rates, and click-throughs. The service was good, but we got a lot of bounced emails and eventually (when our list got large), it was cost-prohibiitive.

In shopping for an alternative, Aweber was the hands-down winner on the CSP list as well. They have a double opt-in process that helps maintain list integrity, and their deliverability is bar none. We also love the autoresponder feature, which allows you to set up automatic email communications with your list of folks, including attachments if desired. We have appreciated the ability to automate more of our marketing. Others have even used the autoresponder feature to set up special "membership lists" for a recurring monthly fee.

We have set up multiple lists and have an unlimited number of autoresponders as well--all for less than what we were paying for our original service! (Wish we had known then what we know now.) Take a test drive, if you'd like:

You can also read more about the service and how to make it work for you through these articles:

Do your Potential Customers forget about You?

A New Breed Of Autoresponder, Auto Message Setup

 

Shopping Cart

We use Pay Pal as our payment processor; however, one thing we didn't like about it was having to re-direct to our ebook downloads and have those documents and download pages stored on our server. We wanted a bit more security, and less hassle. It seemed like folks were always closing their browser before the re-direct completed, and then they couldn't get their product. Not the best customer service situation!

Also, we liked the idea of being able to use promotional sales codes, which Pay Pal did not allow us to do.

A couple of people on CSP said that they used e-junkie and were pleased with it. We've been using it for a while now, and love it!

You can use it for tangible products or electronic downloads, or any combination thereof. You can upload electronic files and customers get download links for them via email, so there's no accidental closing of browser windows. The links also automatically expire after the number of hours or downloads that you select. We appreciate this added level of security and convenience for our ebook sales.

The use of unique promotional codes has helped us track the effectiveness of different marketing endeavors and is a neat way to offer a spur-of-the-moment discount.

Finally, we recently launched our affiliate program with e-junkie, and have found it to be just wonderful! We have supplemented the general e-junkie affiliate links with an Affiliate page on our site, where we provide our affiliates with product text and images, freebies, and articles. It's been a very nice system so far.

Although we are now paying Pay Pal and e-junkie fees (because e-junkie is not a payment processor but rather integrates with other solutions), we have found e-junkie to be reasonably priced and think it's well worth the cost for the services that they offer.