Christmas was a blast, but now it’s time for me to start working hard again. I have my new, beautiful computer that is so much faster than the old one, and it’s working beautifully.

In the new year, I plan to (finally) launch the newsletter to this site. I’ve been meaning to do so for such a long time, and now I’ve finally decided I just need to get it done! I think I’m going to take advantage of AWeber’s ability to broadcast from an RSS feed so that all I have to do is post that way. It will save me a good bit of time and make it possible for people to decide which version of the newsletter they’d rather subscribe to.

My goal with the newsletter is not to constantly present the latest hyped up products. I rarely buy such products, so I don’t see any point in promoting them unless I think they’re worth your while. I’d rather present information to help you build a solid business online. I may discuss the occasional product I truly believe in, but then it will be something I’ve tried and approve of.

I’m also planning a variety of ecourses to help people at various levels with a variety of skills needed to run a business online. I really have to get writing!

I found out about a site called Future Me on a discussion board, and I really think the concept is an interesting one to encourage yourself to look at how well you did in the past year. Basically, you compose an email to yourself and they’ll send it to you on the date you specify.

This just strikes me as a fun way to keep track of how you’re doing with your business goals. Type them in the email, and at the end of next year you can see how well you did.

This is kind of interesting. AdSense now lets you choose to have seasonal themes. These are kind of interesting, as they have background images as well as appropriate colors.

Turning them on is kind of tricky. You go to where you select your ad type and change your setting there. There’s a checkbox to turn on seasonal themes.

I’m giving this a quick try, although I have my doubts about it. I’d really prefer that it be set by ad unit, rather than the account as a whole. I’d really like to be able to track the effect. I am not terribly optimistic on its impact on some of my sites, while it would be entirely appropriate on others.

Depending on who you listen to in the SEO world, reciprocal link exchanges may now be dead, at least for Google. True? Maybe, maybe not, but I’ll still exchange links with quality relevant sites.

Just today, however, I’ve heard of two services starting to help with content exchanges, something I’ve tried in the past, but it’s very hard to do on your own.

A content exchange means that you have another site post an article of yours, including appropriate link(s) to your site, and you post one of their articles on your site. It’s a great way to keep links very relevant.

One of the services is very new. It’s called Content Relay. Yes, you can do traditional link exchanges there too, but the focus is to be on content exchanges. The other service you may be familiar with. It’s Link Metro. They’re the link exchange service started by Brad Callen, who created SEO Elite, quite possibly the best SEO software currently available. However, you can now also do content exchanges through Link Metro.

Now, the same rules apply for content exchanges as for link exchanges. You want your link partners to be of high quality. I won’t post just any pointless, rambling, yet keyword optimized article on my site. It needs to be appealling to my visitors. I also won’t post quality content unless I feel there is some merit to the site I am linking to through it. I’m in business to please my visitors, and while that means some things must be done to please the search engines, their needs come after those of my visitors. Call it a personal preference if you will.

Will content exchanges work as well as link exchanges? It’s hard to say. They bring a new level of challenge to monitoring your link partners, certainly, another reason to decide on quality rather than quantity. It’s not too hard to monitor traditional link exchanges with the right link directory installed on your site, but monitoring whether or not your content is still posted will be more challenging. Still, so long as what you’re putting on your site is of good quality, you’re likely to get some benefit from it, even if your partner drops your content. There’s always AdSense!

The cost of stamps is going up. If you mail your customers regularly, you should get ready now before the change takes place.

You can see the rates on the post office’s website. Obviously, if you ship packages and calculate the cost yourself, this can be an important change for you. Ditto if you send a lot of postcards.

You can already buy the new postage, but make sure you don’t use it until you have to! The new rates start on January 8, 2006.

Talk about making life easier! I’ve generally done very little article submission because it was just such a tedious job. When I did do it, I submitted to very few article directories.

I think I’m ready to change that now. As I noted in a previous blog, I’ve been using Article Submitter Pro, and once you have all your logins set up for the various sites, it really makes life easier. Setting up the logins… well, that’s tedious, but now that I’m all set up I love how easily it all works.

One of the great things for me is that even with kids this is easy to do. Submitting my article today to all the sites it was relevant to took a few hours. That’s far, far less than it would have taken to do manually. It’s also not as fast as I could have done it, but with two kids, one a nine month old baby, the other a very demanding three year old, I think you’ll understand that my full attention was not on my submissions.

I have a new goal now - two article submissions a week. One for one of my main sites, the other for one of my secondary sites. I define main versus secondary mostly by traffic and income, and of course I have more secondary sites than main. Hopefully this process will bring up my main sites’ traffic even more and build the traffic to my secondary sites.

It’s just so nice to have a thorough job of article submission done in such a short time!

Now, I’ve been using AWeber for quite a while now… something over a year. I have to say I like this newest offering they have. I’ll probably take advantage of it with future newsletters, and see if I can get it to work with one of my current ones.

Feed Broadcaster’s basic principle is quite simple. It makes it possible for you to send out an RSS feed as a newsletter. I can quickly think of two applications for this:

1. It’s a way to get people who aren’t familiar with RSS to subscribe to your blog.
2. It allows you to more easily post your newsletter through RSS and email.

I don’t doubt that there will be some creative uses of this new feature by marketers in the coming months. It looks like it will be pretty easy to change over an existing list - although I’ll have to experiment with that one first before doing that to one of my well-established lists. There’s just a Feed Broadcaster button when you click the Messages tab. One thing I’d want to know is how easy or difficult it is to change templates around. They provide a good number, but what about trying to match a site? There’s no obvious way to save a template, but editing it is certainly possible.

The number of features is just one of the things I love about AWeber. I really can’t imagine changing services. If you want to run a newsletter or an autoresponder, they have my highest recommendation.