"The Desktop Global Marketer" (tm)



   A free on-line newsletter of Sidereal Designs, Inc.,

   for Internet Entrepreneurs, and those who are

   considering becoming one.

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                 April 2001



In this issue: "Suppose that you had an email address

at your web site that was forwarded to a personal

secretary who never slept, but watched vigilantly 24

hours a day, seven days a week to respond to mail

that arrived at that address."





_____________________________________________________



   "The Desktop Global Marketer" is free, and may be 

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_____________________________________________________



In this edition we present another of our occasional series on

"The Basics" for those who are new to the Internet and its

features. One of the most useful and yet least-used and

least-understood of the items available with most web sites is

the "Autoresponder." Many people who think they understand what

an autoresponder is don't, and most don't really understand how

one works.



Suppose that you had an email address at your web site that was

forwarded to a personal secretary who never slept, but watched

vigilantly 24 hours a day, seven days a week for mail to arrive

at that address. Supose that whenever it did they noted the

return address of the sender and immediately sent back a reply

consisting of whatever you had told them to send. For example it

might be instructions on accessing your next event, or a white

paper on your products or services, or your current price list.



Now suppose you had a whole fleet of such wonderful secretaries,

each watching a different email address at your site, and each

prepared to reply on a different topic. That's about what an

autoresponder does. It's a piece of software that plays the role

of that secretary, monitoring an email address continually and

sending off the specified reply whenever an email arrives.



The uses to which they can be put are almost limitless, but

perhaps their best use is as "information expanders." Suppose

that you have a flyer or an ad concerning a sale, an event, or a

new product. You probably have limited space to present your

story. Just put in a line that says "For further details, send an

email to more-info(at)mydomain.com" and people will have an easy

way to get the whole story. If you have a radio spot and want to

put some hardcopy into peoples' hands, it's a terrific method.



You could instead send them to your website for the information, but

then you'd have to put up a new page for what may be information of

time-limited relevance, and the autoreponder is more focused. It puts

exactly the desired information in their mailbox immediately without

having to search through your site and without having to dowmload

anything.



The address can be anything you please, so it might reflect the

topic of the information available, such as

"price-list(at)mydomain.com" or "Wednesday-Schedule(at)mydomain.com" or

"Z53-Widget-Specs(at)mydomain.com."



On the other hand it might be that the response is information

you wish to make available for a fee, or only to a specified

group, and you will wish the address to be secret except to those

to whom you provide it. Then we might give it an address such as

"ThF33-ZcQp(at)mydomain.com" and give it out selectively. The

autoresponder addresses can be anything you wish. (Note that this

does not provide military-grade security. We have other

approaches for real secrets.)



Most hosting services provide autoresponders for free, at least

for some levels of account. In some cases you can set them up

yourself through a control panel they provide. In other cases you

will need to have your webmaster set them up for a small fee

unless you feel comfortable with configuring such things on a

remote shell account.



Once the autoresponder is set up it has to be loaded with the

text you want it to send out. This is just like the text you

would send as an email by normal means, except that most

autoresponders will not send attachments. 



The text of your message has to be in a file on your web site

that the autoresponder looks to to see what it must send. There

are various ways of getting it there. On some hosting services

this can be put in place through a control panel. On others it

can be dropped in by FTP. (If you don't know how to use FTP and

don't wnat to learn, your webmaster can do this for you for a

minimal fee.)



That's about all there is to autoresponders from a technical

perspective. After that you just sit back and let them work for

you. 



If you want to get really fancy your webmaster can integrate web pages

and autoresponders so that web site visitors can get the information

sent to them by putting their address in a form, while the

autoresponder will also work in the usual way. (The email version is

more reliable because people make mistakes entering their email

addresses, while with the direct email route it's obtained from the

sending computer.)



Hopefully this will have given you some ideas for making use of this

cheap, useful resource that works for you night and day. Let us know

if you have further questions on autoreposnders or any other topic.



Best,



Jamie







_____________________________________________________



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"Sidereal" is pronounced sy-DEER-ee-all, and means "of

or pertaining to the stars, the heavens, etc."



_______________________________________________________________________

Sidereal Designs, Inc.               "Putting your business on the web"

http://siderealdesigns.com    301-916-5702   info(at)siderealdesigns.com