To most of us, a URL is a pretty straightforward thing. They usually look like http://www.something.com, but you’ll likely have noticed that there is a great deal of additional complexity that is added into URLs depending where you are on the web. The real structure of a URL, as Alan points out, looks like this:

<scheme>://<username>:<password>@<host>:<port>/<path>;<parameters>?<query>#<fragment>

That’s just the tip of iceberg though. If you go and read his article, you’ll find that he’s covered this topic in depth and you’ll come out of it with a much better understanding or the makeup of a URL and what mistaken assumptions you may have.

Left with no real recourse, I’ve started adding tags to posts by hand. It’s going to take some time so the tag cloud isn’t going to be perfect for a while still. It’s a great reminder though to make sure that things are in order on your blog. It matters.

Overall, I’ve taken the solid content approach to revenue generation and it still works. It’s not lucrative, but has been allowing me to build a small amount of savings. What’s really hurting though is the dropping US dollar. Since my revenue comes in as USD, a strong Canadian dollar has an immediate and significant impact on my revenue. Then again, that’s out of my control so there’s not much to worry about I suppose.

Slow and steady still seems to be working. I’m not getting rich by any stretch, but then again I don’t want to spend all my spare time doing this.

I wrote about iContact several months ago and the response has been quite interesting. A lot of people commented and the general sense was that it was nice to see a competitor to the major player in the market. At least one person had tried and liked it.

Much as I suspected though, there was a great deal of focus on their strict spam policy. Anyone looking for an email marketing solution wants to be sure that they’re with a reputable company because you don’t want to be associated with spam in any way shape or form. Seeing a strong stance against spam is vital in this business.

They offer a lot of other features beyond simple mailing list management. They have newsletter software to help you focus on your content rather than the technical details. Toss in a few things like a survey tool and you can really take advantage of your mailing list.

They now have 100 000 users and offer packages spanning from individual to enterprise. It’s nice to know that they can scale up as you grow. You can stick with them if they’re working out for you no matter how big you get.

I’ve also tackled tags. At some point during the upgrades, I lost my tags from UTW and have none with the new built-in tag support so I’m stuck tagging from scratch. That’s a bit of a drag, but the one bright side is that when I started blogging, I didn’t have spell checking built-in to my browser. As I’m editing, I’m having a few typos pointed out to me by FireFox and am able to fix them quickly since I’m going through all of the posts anyways.

It’s always worth the effort to give your blog software or other CMS a tune up though. You don’t really realise how much time you can waste when things aren’t as efficient as you’d like. A simple tune up can sometimes bring those minor annoyances into a realm where they no longer bother you.

So I recently wrote about cutting edge marketing to cellphones via text messages. Today, we cover something a little bit more traditional. Snail-mail mailing lists.

We’ve all had the mail outs come in and clutter up our mailbox. Some days we find them to be extremely annoying, but at the same time, we can’t help but check them out. Not all people are as curious as I am, but I know that I’m not the only one. It’s like passing by a traffic accident, even though you know you shouldn’t slow down and look because you’re slowing down traffic, it seems to happen even though you’re consciously trying not to.

The problem with snail-mail mail outs is that they’re expensive. Immensely expensive when you compare them to digital alternatives. So what do you do?

One of your options is to go find a company like The List Company that provides telemarketing lists. They are a US based company that offers all kinds of segmentation to help tailor the mailing lists to your products. Just look at the subdivisions with the mortgage mailing list category alone. With that level of granularity, you can make sure that you’re only sending stuff to those people who might be interested in it. That way you avoid annoying people who wouldn’t give two hoots about your company while still hitting the people that would.

Now a telemarketing list is always a little hairy from a marketing perspective. If done incorrectly, you can make a bad name for yourself if you’re not diligent. You want to know that the names and addresses were gathered legitimately. Now while the list company doesn’t go into specific details as to where the lists come from in their FAQ, they ensure that they are compliant with all of the laws that affect their business. While that may sound like a given, you’d probably be surprised to find that there are companies out there who sell these lists outside of the law. That’s something you want to stay away from.