Newslettah!

2000 I was running a multimedia business called Carradale Associates and had the opportunity to vend it into a new IT support business. I pretty much let all the contractors I was employing go, other than the oldest one who I really wanted to look after. Unfortunately he and I had a difference of opinion. I wanted to make a lot of money, and he wanted to work in a New York style loft office, with a cool coffee shop downstairs.

Slight disconnect.

Anyway fast forward 8 years and my friend now has his own IT business. Amongst the product set he has developed is an email marketing solution. And everyonce in awhile when we get together, he suggests I should be using it to send out my Churchill Club emails (at about $200 a go). Traditionally I kind of wanted to, but the CRM system I was using on my windows based laptop was working just well enough and it was free.

However, now that I have moved to a linux based netbook (as discussed in previous weeks blogs), I had to come up with a new solution.

Unfortunately for my friend, a quick look around the open source solutions, and I came up with a free product called PHPlist . PHPlist seemed to be the goods, and when I compared it to my friends solution, I knew I had to give it ago. (My features comparison table is below).

Getting it going was easy and took me around 10 mins to setup (note the more you mess with this stuff the easier and quicker it gets). The steps (using only a web browser) were:

1. Download the zip files from http://www.phplist.com/download (actually it flicks you across to sourceforge then automatically downloads the product).
2. Logged on to one of my unix based webhosting services Bluehost (www.bluehost.com) and used the graphical control panel there to upload the zip file.
3. Used the control panel to unzip the PHPlist package and install the files into their own subdirectory (which I cleverly called /phplist ).
4. I then went to the website I used and typed in the address for the installed phplist package. In this case it was a work area I happened to call http://churchill.l2i.com.au/phplist
5. I then followed the instructions on the screen which involved creating a database (sounds scary but that the graphical control panel made this easy to do).

This PHPlist appears to be pretty cool and the concepts behind using it are fairly easy to understand.

1. You have email templates that you can put content into.
2. You have users whom you can put on one or more mailing lists.
3. You send the email (template & content) to a mailing list and chack the stats fior what happened.

So, I can now send out the fortnightly newsletter from a web based solution which costs me nothing. The best things is though that other directors of the churchill club can now add or delete members from the list with out me getting involved = forces me to be a better collaborator.

And in regards to my friends email marketing solution? Sorry mate– but at least you’ve still got the funky office.

Next week I thought I might go through how I am handling documents: without paying for software, freeing up my time, and becoming a better collaborator.

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