@dvocable

We bloggers always try to leave little bit of information of our blogs at popular sites where Internet goers and other bloggers frequent in a bid to get some of the traffic from that site.

This is one such new site that is going to become popular soon, and this is from Blogger itself. Called Blogger Play, this site will stream stream images that were just uploaded to public Blogger blogs. Visitors to the site can also ‘click the image to be taken directly to the blog post it was uploaded to, or click “show info” to see an overlay with the post title, a snippet of the body, and some profile information about the blogger who uploaded it.’

Well well, so if you keep posting interesting pictures with your posts on your Blogger posts from now on, chances are that people visiting Blogger Play might get tempted enough to click on it and visit your site. How’s that for a little thought?

If you use the Blogger ‘Header’ Page element to add an image in your header in your Blogger blog, and your image doesn’t show up in Internet Explorer, a simple placement option choice could be the solution.

For instance, I’m using a logo picture instead of the header title and description in this blog. (See header above).

Remember in the ‘Configure header’ pop up window, there are two options of how you can add an image – from your computer, and from the web. Choose the second option.

I tried this in some test blogs and found that if I upload a logo picture on the blogs directly from my computer, sometimes the pictures wouldn’t show up in Internet Explorer. However, if upload the logo picture on the web somewhere (like Google Page Creator) and link to it, it would somehow always show up in Internet Explorer as well as in Firefox. Maybe this will work for others too.

As a PR professional who needs to send out information to many people daily, I find myself in need of an email client through which I can send my emails to many people at one go and yet customise each mail – do the ‘Dear so and so’ in the body of the mail. Also on each of the email that goes out, the recipient’s email addresses alone should appear in ‘To:’ section without disclosing the other emails.

No, I’m not talking about spamming nor believe in that. But suppose you need to send out a news release to your contact journalists, send event invitations to a group of media friends, or send newsletters to subscribers on behalf of your client – such a tool is bound to come in handy. These are emails that the recipients anyway know that you are sending to other people also. So why waste two hours sending individual emails to everyone instead of just getting it done in one go. Of course I can ‘bcc’ to everyone but that looks rude to many people.

Forget about work, think about the time you need to send personal email invites to hundreds of people on a party that you are throwing, or on your wedding. Sometimes, all of us need some technology to simplify our lives, and if if is about reducing the number of email correspondence that we have to make, how nice it would be.

A lot of tools, called Email Mailing List Managers, that handles such tasks are available online. These come as independent desktop applications or as Outlook plugins. Desktop applications are like independent softwares that you need to run on your PC to send the multiple emails, while the Outlook plugins are small programs that you need to install so that you can mass mail from your normal Outlook client itself.

Choosing the right one is though not so easy. Most of those available are paid versions with some costing a bomb. Some are too complicated to handle. Some lack a few features that I wanted.

Some things I look for in my email campaign manager are:

1. Easy to use – I just want to type my message, select a mailing list and click ’send’. That’s it. No other complex stuff.
2. Customisation of each mail – Like I mention before, I want to greet each of my mail recipients with their names, and not send a ‘dear all’ mail.
3. Ability to import and export mailing list – If I have to create a mailing list consisting of hundreds of emails, imagine the pain if I have to type each and every email address in creating the list. Why not just import it?
4. Formatting options on the compose window just like I get in MS Word or Outlook – there are many cool mass email senders that I found but they lack the formatting option. Without that, my mails would just look plain simple text.
5. Templates – Are there some pretty templates available that I can use for my emails or newsletters? If yes, they would be such a delight.

After much experimentation, I decided on two tools – a free desktop application and a fee Outlook plugin.

Desktop application
The desktop application I use is SendBlaster. It has a free and pro edition that costs 75 euros. The free edition allows you to have two mailing lists and you can have 100 email addresses on each mailing list. However what I like about SandBlaster is that it a feature rich compose editor that allows you to format your emails – like the Bold, Italics, font family, font size buttons, etc. I found many other cool free mailing list managers but they lack this feature. SandBlaster even has an affiliate program that I am using :-)

Outlook plugin
This one is called the eAnnouncer. This comes completely free and allows you to send emails to unlimited number of email addresses at one go from your Outlook client.

Both Sendblaster and eAnnouncer have mail merger feature that allows you to customise each mail that you send.
Tags: India, PR, blogging, email, mailing list managers, public relations, social media