We're not looking at ROI on our newsletters, they are for alerting users when there's a new blog post, we release a new version of our software (about once a week) and our promotional email list which is a lot smaller.

I suppose we could move promo emails to mailchimp and then do the rest somewhere else as they are just links to the content

Simply divide up your mailing list. Send the newsletter to half of them one day and the other half the next.

"I r want thing free because I r not make moniez from it so no one else should"

Not at all, what gave you that impression? Happy to pay for something but $600 a year seems excessive for what we want.

have you checked out aweber? it's $20 per month and you can try the 1st month for $1. It's worked pretty well for me

Grunching in case someone has already answered with these, but I looked into this a few months ago and:

Amazon Web Services offer probably the cheapest alternative, their SES service, but, at least as of 2 months ago, their quota system was braindead and a deal-killer for me. When you first sign up, they let you send 1000 emails per day, and then they dynamically raise your limit as your volume increases. This is bad for someone like me who is launching a social networking site that I would love to go viral at some point, because if I get more than 1000 signups on the first day, a bunch will never get confirmation emails from me.

Amazon says the quotas will scale up based on your usage quickly, but I don't buy it, the scaling examples they give would have *definitely* results in lots of people not receiving email when my biggest previous site was having bursts of publicity here and there.

I also worry that AWS SES is in very early stages and hasn't been proven yet. It'd suck to implement it fully and then find out a bunch of people are spamming from it because it's cheap, and that getting their sending IPs on blacklists or whatever. Having email deliverability problems is so brutal because usually by the time you find out, a TON of damage has already been done.

A friend of mine with a moderately busy website (top 10,000 on Alexa anyway) recommended www.postmarkapp.com to me, and I am going to use them for my site, they seem okay so far, but my site hasn't launched publicly, so I don't have any real-world data to work from. I researched this quite a lot though and didn't find anyone saying anything BAD about them anyway. Also now I think of it, same friend recommended this small-looking DNS company who I went "ugh that looks shoddy" and sure enough they had some significant downtime recently, so I guess I can't assume he's done a TON of research into Postmark.

I also looked into www.sendgrid.com, seemed solid enough, can't recall why I didn't choose them, maybe price, dunno.

So yeah, for my purposes I am using Postmark, and after launch I want to integrate Amazon SES for less important emails ("John favourited your tweet" type stuff if it was a Twitter-like site), since SES is very cheap. I mean, Postmark is pretty damn cheap too though, $1.50/1000 sends, but I also like the idea of having everything set up to switch between services easily, should one go down unexpectedly one day or something.

I found a search term that I'm fairly certain I can rank #1 in. Google AdWords says it gets 6,000 global monthly searches. If you do rank #1, about what % of those searches do you expect to click through to your site monthly?

http://sendgrid.com/

42% on average for 1st rank on google.

SEOmoz has an infographic saying 18.2% which lines up more closely with my experience. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/a-tale-of...ckthrough-rate

80% of clicks go organic usually as well. 6000 searches exact match or broad match? Makes a huge difference.

I'm 8th or 9th for the last 2 months on the 1st page for a niche with 8k exact searches for a 2 word term and it's getting me 600 uniques per month.

I actually think that's high for 8th on the page but the name and description are much better than most of the others on page 1

9th for one that gets 2,740,000 searches a month globally and get about 60 visitors a month lol.

yeah it seems to go down pretty drastically the more searches. I did a bit of research in a niche with 40 million monthly searches and the #1 site which totally dominates everyone else was getting 2.5% of the traffic

2.5% of 40,000 is still nice

I honestly was expecting more traffic for being page 1 on this term. But oh well. It's been a grind getting it from page 15+ to page 1, and it's still trending upwards.

I've found for me that page 2 is basically equal traffic to page 15. No one ever really goes on page 2. I only ever really see traffic from page 1 results.

I'm 12th for a 3 word phrase that's searched 3600 times a month global. Works out to about 80 unique a month. Now if only I could get that 80 to work out to 4 clicks at $3.00 a pop.

I apologise if this has already been answered guys, but does anyone have much knowledge of Alexa website rankings and how accurate they are?

I was told that it only tracks those with an 'Alexa toolbar', although surely that's a very small number of people?

Alexa gets some of their data from ISPs. Generally it's pretty well accepted it is not very accurate outside of the top 10k sites even still (although below 50k its not too far off). I figured out a trick to juice your Alexa ranking by about 100% above 50k . If you pair it with other tools like Compete, Google Adplanner etc you can start to get a reasonable idea of how much traffic a site does. Another neat trick is if you look at the click stream for a website you can often discover sites employees go to (like which affiliate network, partners).

If you're selling an online service (tutoring) is it better to focus on optimizing the landing page for mailing list sign-ups or for people clicking on the register now button?

How much do you guys thing OutsourcingPhilippines.com domain is worth?

In terms of absolute value and potential.

There is nothing on it currently.

About $1

Test it! http://fivesecondtest.com/

I was actually told this "reveal" would happen when i started inquiring with new registrars i was not told that by DBP.

What i am concerned about is that even if the information is exposed for a small amount of time, it still becomes part of a record somewhere.

Why can't you do both?

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Hmmm, might have to try that.

Alex,
We do it that way at work and for any given month 25-33% of people that fill out the form opt-in. It also satisfies SaaS e-mail companies sniff test if they ask where you got your list.

Ubin,
I'd probably ask on one of the "domainer" forums for a definitive answer.