Sneak Peek: Interspire Website Publisher 5.0 (Coming Soon)
Hi everyone. I thought I'd take some time to blog about the new features in the upcoming release of Interspire Website Publisher 5.0. We've been working on version 5.0 since March 2008 and it's easily the biggest upgrade we've ever worked on.

Most of the core engine has been rebuilt from the ground up, the entire system is modular and if you thought design mode was great you'll love the new features we have that allow you to create and position items on your website.

How to Win Any Job on eLance, oDesk or Guru.com
This article was originally published on FreelanceSwitch but I decided to republish it on our blog because a lot of our readers are freelancers too.

As an employer with over 30 staff at Interspire, most of the time when I need something done I can call on a staff member in the office and they will take care of it for me. However, sometimes I need the skills of an experienced freelancer for one-off jobs, such as writing a user guide or putting together a product overview video in Flash. In these situations I turn to freelancers on eLance, oDesk or Guru.com.

After posting a job ad, the responses start to come in within a few hours. 95% of the time the candidates have no idea how to reply to the job ad and will either send over:

• The same old copy-paste reply which they use for every job ad
• A vague reply in which they don’t sell themselves to me
  

Video: How to Quickly Design an HTML Email Using Interspire Email Marketer 5.5


Different marketing vehicles have different design needs. In email campaign design, it’s important to extend and reflect the artistic qualities of your brand as well as showcase your service, professionalism, and innovation. Good design must include the look-and-feel along with the technical specifications for multiple email clients and ensuring the emails avoid spam filters.

Video: Statistics and Event Logging in Interspire Marketing 5.5

Learn how campaign statistics and event logging go hand in hand

When you’re ready to use email as part of your marketing and communications plans, it’s necessary to have web-based HTML email software at your ready, such as Interspire Email Marketer 5.5.

There are many reasons to upgrade away from a home-based system such as Outlook, whether you’re connecting with ten people or 10,000. One of the obvious benefits is quick and useful analytics.

How to Find Free Images to Use on Your Website, etc
For a while it looked like most of the world’s photo collection was going to be owned and managed by two billionaires: Bill Gates and Mark Getty. Their stock photo house companies, Corbis and the aptly named Getty, were neighbors in Seattle that built a $2 billion a year industry. They gobbled small film agencies, digitized everything, added online automation and search functionality. Their work basically revolutionized the business of photos as they managed millions of pictures for publications and ad agencies around the world. But that was in the 90s.

Today there are numerous online stock-photo houses with constant open calls for submissions, mostly from amateur photographers, with free or inexpensive royalty-free photos. Now creative commons licensing and photo sharing sites are shaping the new direction of the industry. Facebook’s stats page claims 700 million photos are uploaded monthly. Yahoo’s photo-hosting giant, flickr, along with Photobucket, account for millions of new photos each day.

Of course, great quantities of family snapshots don’t equate to usable photos for commercial work. The new challenges are how to navigate and mine these vast archives for stellar, licenseable work. Armed with a little patience, a few tricks, practice and experience, you shouldn’t have to sacrifice too much in the way of quality artwork. Of course, this depends on your needs, search terms, and standards.

Video: Event Logging in Interspire Email Marketer 5.5


The new event logging feature in Interspire Email Marketer 5.5 is an extraordinarily useful business tool for anyone who is not yet ready for a full blown CRM, but still needs basic contact management tied into their email marketing software.

Interspire Email Marketer 5.5 is Here!

Click here to watch a demonstration of new features in Interspire Email Marketer 5.5

After 6 months of development and testing I'm pleased to announce the immediate release of Interspire Email Marketer 5.5. The new release includes a number of advanced features (such as split testing, triggers and automatic event logging) and was designed to give you the tools you need to automate more of your email marketing efforts.

Video: Triggers in Interspire Email Marketer 5.5
I'm proud and delighted to say that Interspire Email Marketer 5.5 is now officially available for download! Mitch is working on the "official" launch blog post and will publish it later today, Sydney time (GMT+10).

Of course as your user eduction manager, I'm here to extol the many virtues of the new version. With Interspire Email Marketer 5.5, my job is easy - there simply is not a comparable email software program on the market providing this array of features without spending upwards of 5 figures...

Video: Driving More Holiday Sales with Promotional Banners in Interspire Shopping Cart


Attracting folks to your site is one marketing challenge. Once on your pages, you need to engage visitors with targeted, relevant information, to capture their attention and encourage the sale. One easy and effective way to turn cost researchers and browsers into customers is by adding promotional banners to the pages of your store. You can share news for sales, discounts, free shipping, you can promote products, services, discounts and more.

Twitter for Business Still Asks: What Are You Doing Now?
With each post in this blog, I take about 20 seconds to “tweet” about it. Do you use Twitter as a personal or professional information channel—perhaps both? I’d love to hear your experiences. Are you following Barack Obama, Shaquille O’neal, or Interspire co-founder Mitchell Harper?

Our preoccupation with staying “hyper-connected” (as Twitter named it) and the technology that it fosters are helping blur the lines of our personal and professional lives. While some non-tweeting voices of an older generation have argued that such online technologies interfere with “true” connection, Twitter fans prove these judgments are an anachronism. We are in fact more communicative and tighter than ever, globally linked in dozens of online communities, spreading Internet meme faster than sociologists can record.

Twitter is among the fastest growing social networks. About 3 million times each day, the 140-character limit “tweet” attracts some percentage of Twitter’s 200,000 weekly users. According to TechCrunch, Twitter has 1 million total users. And Popacular.com runs a GigaTweet counter, claiming over a billion tweets and counting since Twitter launched in 2006.