Introduction

In the previous tutorial, you have developed your html or plain text newsletter and learned how to distribute it to your email address list, but you might still have a question or two concerning how to go about collecting addresses for your list. This bonus tutorial will give you a hand by helping you set up an address collection system that works with your existing Web site.

To begin with, you will need a Microsoft® FrontPage® friendly host space and your own Web site. I use http://hostsave.com which costs $6.95 a month. I recommend this service as a great entry point for most small businesses, but there are many others from which to choose. Check out http://hostsearch.com for lots of alternatives. Just make sure your current or new host service supports FrontPage Server Extensions. You can also check http://www.microsoft.com/frontpage/wppsearch/default.htm for Registered Web Presence Providers (WPPs) for Microsoft FrontPage.

The remainder of this tutorial assumes you are working on a FrontPage friendly host space support FrontPage Server Extensions for Microsoft FrontPage version 2002 and that you have FrontPage version 2002 installed on your PC. If you do not already have this program, the fine folks at Microsoft will be happy to let you have a fully-functional 30 day free trial version which works great at http://www.microsoft.com/frontpage/evaluation/trial.htm .

Once you have developed a newsletter, you need a list of addresses to which you will send the newsletter. I have discussed this topic in considerable detail in The Essential Guide to Web Strategy for Entrepreneurs, which I recommend you get if you plan to get serious about using the Internet in your business (this is another shameless plug—I admit it{:), but the short version is that you can collect addresses in a variety of ways. Essentially, I recommend that you set up systems that insure you ALWAYS attempt to get the email address every time you make any kind of contact with your prospects and customers. One natural place to collect addresses is, of course, on your Web site. There are a number of ways to induce your visitors to give their addresses: contest entries, guest book postings, free information offers, etc.

To collect the addresses, we will go through 4 steps:

1. Design the promotion

2. Build a Web page with a form that will collect the address 

3. Configure the form to add each new address to your database

4. Download your collected addresses
     

Let's get started.

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