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Internet Communication Tips And Tricks For Massage Therapists

Hello, my name is Max Fanderl and I am an Internet Marketing Consultant with 2mDesign and DiscoveryWeb and Book24-7.com.  I am pleased to write Internet Marketing related articles for Massage Therapy Canada’s readers. 

This issue is the first of 4 articles providing Internet Communication Tips and Tricks. You will get insight into ISPs, E-mail standards, websites (do you really need a website?), E-commerce and E-business.

After reading the full series of articles you will be familiar with communication tools available on the Internet and how you could use them to grow and manage your business. 

The first article is on ISPs and e-mail standards. ISP stands for Internet Service Provider.

You need an ISP to get surf the Internet, check/send e-mail or host your website. Some ISP offer all services, however services are normally provided separately – Internet access ISPs and Internet hosting ISPs.

Let’s start with Internet access ISPs.

High-speed Internet provided by local cable or communications company is becoming more accessible. However, many users are on dial-up connections to browse the Internet, send e-mail and do online banking.

With so many services available on-line, I would recommend high speed Internet such as ADSL or Cable. Either one of them are the best options on the market currently. Dial-up works for most websites but once you start receiving or sending e-mails with pictures it becomes frustrating or may not work. 

Once you have a high-speed Internet connection I recommend a network router to provide better security than firewall software (still activate your Windows Firewall for additional protection). A network router costs about $40. If you have a Laptop use a wireless router which allows you to be anywhere in the house or office and be
connected to the Internet.

Once you sign up with an ISP you normally get a free e-mail address. I recommend not using this free e-mail address. The reason is simple, once you use this e-mail; you are pretty much committed to this ISP.

Imagine, you would move to a different location where the ISP does not offer their service or you simply would like to switch ISPs; you have to update all your friends with your new e-mail address.

For private e-mail this might not be to painful, but for a business you would have to update all your business cards, letterhead, advertisements let alone notify all of your business contacts! I recommend obtaining
your own domain name. This means you own your dot com or ca domain name (eg. www.Book24-7.com).
There are some very affordable domain registrars to register a domain and prices can be as low as $10 per year. As an example check out www.godaddy.com.

If you do not want to have a website and only use the e-mail for your domain, they will host your e-mail (with your domain name) for about $10/year. This way you have your own e-mail, which looks very professional, and you can use any ISP you like. If you do not like to go through this expense, look into one of the free e-mail suppliers such as Yahoo or Hotmail.

E-mail etiquette has become very crucial. The following are a few basics, which will help you and your e-mail reader.

• When writing e-mail, use the “Subject” field wisely. Do not leave it empty. Many e-mail filters might not pass your e-mail because of an empty “Subject” field. Secondly, if you use a detailed subject, it will be much easier for the reader to know what it is all about.

• As an e-mail standard, CAPITALS mean yelling.  It is only acceptable to use when answering e-mail within the original e-mail text.

• Using a “Signature” at the end of your e-mail is not only professional; it is a security check for your readers. A lot of viruses are being sent out with the hope you will open and activate the attachment/virus. E-mail without the usual “Signature” will make such e-mail suspicious. Your “Signature” can be as simple as your name and your company slogan – a great way to expose your company brand.

• E-mails are a good way to stay in touch with your clientele by sending newsletters monthly or quarterly. These are beneficial to inform your clients about service additions, staff changes or simply announce your seasonal specials. Be aware that your ISP allows you to send a limited number of e-mails. If you want to send your e-mail to a couple hundred people, you may have to purchase the services of an e-mail list server or newsletter subscription service.

So be careful who you send newsletters to and how many you send; the last thing you want is to annoy or bore your clients.

• E-mails are supposed to be very simple and should only contain text. If you like to send pictures, send them as attachments.

Sending pictures via e-mail is very popular but it can cause a lot of problems for recipients. Today’s cameras take very high quality pictures and will be up to 3 or more MB in size. 

When you send pictures of this magnitude, your ISP will only send a couple of pictures per e-mail because the average allowed maximum e-mail size is 5 MB. For a dial-up user, this could take a long time to download.

If the picture is to be printed, this size is required. (Average inkjet printers are about 1800 or 2800 dpi. This means; the more dots the picture has, the larger the file size will be). 

If the pictures’ purpose is only to be viewed by the recipient, then I recommend re-sizing them before sending. Viewing capabilities of the PC or MAC screen are not more than 80 dpi (dots per square inch). Most screen settings are set to display 1024 X 768 pixels or 800 X 600 pixels.

Once you compress a picture to 80 dpi and resize it to 800×600 pixels, the picture will be about 200 kb (0.2 MB) instead of plus 3000 kb (3 MB).

It is very important to know the basics about pictures if you like to create e-mails that look like a website. As a matter of fact, I recommend not sending e-mails that look like a web page. First of all, e-mail is not intended to be like that, secondly it can be very annoying to dial-up users because of download times.

If you like to have pictures within your newsletter, create simple text e-mail listing the topics and a link to your newsletter webpage. This will be fast to download, easy to read and you can use headlines to catch their interest and a “click here” link to get to the actual newsletter webpage.

As you can see, we now start to get into Internet hosting ISPs, WebPages and Websites – topics to be covered in the next issue. We will review website hosting and what tools can be used for designing a website. We will also talk about search engine optimization and rankings.

Future issues will cover Internet marketing and its role in your marketing and branding efforts.

•  Max Fanderl is an Internet Marketing Consultant, President of 2mDesign & DiscoveryWeb Inc. & Book24-7.com 

•  2mDesign & DiscoveryWeb has been in operation since 1995 and specializes in Internet Marketing, Website Development & Evaluations, Search Engine Optimization, Web Hosting and Online Database Applications such as Book24-7.com

•  Contact Max at max@discoveryweb.com or 1-866-342-0461. www.DiscoveryWeb.com www.Book24-7.com