Recently, our good friend Tamara Gielen passed the Blog Olympics “stick” to us when she posted her favorite blogs. It was quite the task to narrow it down to 7 blogs, as there are about 20 of our favorites that we would like to include on this list. It is now our Blog Olympics duty and pleasure to share our 7 favorite blogs that we like to read:

• No Man is an iland
• EmailKarma
• B2B Lead Generation Blog
• Small Business Trends
• Techno//Marketer
• Techcrunch
• The Email Wars

Now that we’ve listed our favorite blogs, it’s their turn to step up. The blogs that we’ve listed should now pass the stick and list their 7 favorite blogs…see the trend? The favorite blogs do not have to be email marketing blogs.

Please note that the blogs are listed in no particular order. The only rule is that you have to link to the blog that passed the stick to you, but you cannot add this blog to your list of favorite blogs.

Enjoy and keep on passing the stick!

This week we held the third in our ongoing webinar series, Grow Your Subscriber Database.  We covered a variety of topics relating to getting new subscribers and keeping them happy, such as:

• Getting people to your site
• Getting the opt-in
• Following up with a welcome email
• Giving them options to change their preferences
• Spreading the love with viral marketing

To check out the presentation, click here.  You can also click here to view the notes.

If you didn’t make it to this session, we hope to see you next time! 

Today, I am excited to officially announce our acquisition of North Carolina based nTarget, an email marketing firm specializing in electronic communications, with a focus in the hospitality, travel/tourism, retail and ecommerce sectors.

We are very pleased to announce this partnership, and could not be happier with the fit with our organization. The nTarget staff shares the same values around providing stellar customer service, and working towards the best interest of their clients. We are excited to have them all on board here at Blue Sky Factory. As a result of the deal, we will now operate and maintain an office right outside of Charlotte, NC, where the nTarget team will remain.

nTarget has proven to be a market leader in the travel / tourism and hospitality space, a vertical which we also have great traction and a solid client roster within. As a result, our combined clients will benefit greatly from the knowledge and experience gained over the years working in these key industries.

All of the current nTarget clients, as well as all of our current clients, will soon be migrating to the latest release of Publicaster, our leading web based email marketing platform, due for release this August. We look forward to bringing the latest and greatest in email marketing and on demand communications to our combined client roster. We will be posting more on our upcoming Publicaster release over the coming weeks. Lots of good stuff to come.

From the entire staff at Blue Sky Factory, we say “Welcome nTarget!”

You can read more about this exciting news on the official press release from our website.

Do you ever find yourself struggling to find an email that you have saved in your Email Library? Do you have pages and pages of saved emails, creating a hassle when you need to find one? Do you thrive on organization and order?

Many of our clients have answered with a resounded “yes!” for these questions, so we have created a new feature for the Email Library: folders. You can now sort every email that is saved in the library into its own folder, just like in your Outlook or on your computer. This handy tool will allow you to keep similar emails together in an unlimited number of folders.

The days of endless searching in the sea of saved correspondences are behind us!

If you have any questions about this feature, please contact your Account Manager or email Customer Support.

If you are not a current client and you would like more information about this or any feature of Publicaster, please contact us at bsfinfo@blueskyfactory.com or call 866.216.BLUE (2583).

Today marks the start of a new series of BSF “issue briefs”—concise, one-to-two pagers spotlighting issues of critical importance to email marketers! Our issue briefs are available for download and will offer timely best practice solutions in a succinct and terse manner.

Our first installment takes on that growing elephant in the room, mobile email marketing. The rise and popularity of mobile devices has presented both challenges and opportunities for email marketers. Download Blue Sky’s perspective and advice on countering these new challenges here.

With email marketing being utilized more and more each day, we are always looking for ways to keep our fingers on the pulse of our burgeoning industry. The holidays are upon us, and we thought it would be both timely and informative to poll our clients and friends to help keep you “in the know” regarding trends and benchmarks as it relates to holiday correspondence - cards, invitations and other communications vehicles.

Please take two minutes to complete our Holiday Correspondence survey, which can be accessed by clicking here. In exchange for your time, we’ll offer you two things:

• Insight into what other pioneering companies are doing to communicate with their target markets this holiday season.
• A 10% discount on Greg Cangialosi’s (Blue Sky Factory’s president), newly released book “The Business Podcasting Book”, a primer on all you need to know about integrating the emerging social medium of podcasting into your marketing mix.

You will receive a discount code at the end of the survey so you can stay in the marketing know, at a discount.

We thank you for your time and we look forward to hearing your thoughts!

We have really grown over the past six weeks. One of the best parts of having new team members at Blue Sky Factory is watching them learn and also learning from them. Read as one of our newest team members shares his list of the top three things he’s learned about email marketing since arriving at the Factory.

Blue Sky Factory has recently seen monumental growth in the staff. In the past two months we have welcomed four new members to the team: Scott Palubinsky and Jennifer Schuerholz in Sales, Ilija Stevcev in IT, and Noah Kim in the Creative Department.

On behalf of all of us (relative) vets at Blue Sky Factory, I would like to welcome and introduce our newest additions. They have all contributed a great deal to the team in such a short time!

Click here to read the bios for our newbies!

In September, we featured a post about three ways to improve email deliverability. The feedback from our users regarding this article has been great and we have been able to help many people with their setup over the past month. However, in many cases, interested clients have not been able to modify their DNS, because either they could not get past the barriers presented by their networking staff or because they didn’t have access to their DNS.

I’ve thought about this problem and tested a solution with a couple of clients with very positive results. This solution was to register the client a new domain and used the very inexpensive mail and DNS services provided by today’s top registrars. In this particular example, I will use godaddy.com, but you are free to use any domain registering company you wish. Some of the other good ones are register.com and dotster.com.

In this specific situation, our client, ABC Company, needed to register a domain name for use in their Friendly From Email Address for email marketing. ABC Company decided to register the name abcCompany-news.com. Basically they just appended “-news” to the end of the existing domain. This keeps the name recognition to your subscribers and is something more friendly than the typical ESP type of domain you see in many places. After registering this name and setting up the DNS and email, they switched their Friendly From Email Address on their next campaign to use donotreply@abcCompany-news.com. They were very happy with the overall improvement in deliverability and are happy to have easy access to the account to collect bounces and challenges.

One word of warning: when you agree to use one of the large registrars, you must be able to backup the source of your subscribers. If you use that domain to send questionable emails and someone complains, you will be shut down and possibly fined. Over several hundreds of thousands of emails that went out in this case, one person complained to the registrar. The registrar contacted the client and asked for clarification. Luckily, our client kept good records and was able to respond with the detail of exactly how and when the subscriber opted into their list.

Now I’m going to walk you through step by step of registering a new domain name and setting up email and DNS. In our example, we are going to register the domain name bsffactorydirect.com.

Step 1: Go to godaddy.com, search for your domain name and register it. During the checkout process, be sure to include Email Hosting during your check process. As you see below, for a whopping investment of $22.18, I now have a new domain name and email hosting ready to go.

Step 2: Once your account is setup, log into your account with the information that godaddy.com provides. You will see a link for “Host and Email” where you can configure your email. This will launch godaddy’s email setup. Click on the “Add” email button and fill out the simple form they give you. I created an account called “donotreply”. I left everything default except for creating an auto-responder, as this is an unmonitored email account. You can use your favorite email client to send and receive email form this account. Refer to the godaddy documentation on the how-to.

Step 3: Setup your DNS with a SPF record and an A record. First step is to make your new domain name point to your corporate website. The first record in your DNS is called an A (Host). This is what controls where your name points. Click the Edit button and type in the IP address of your corporate site (this is the hardest part, I promise).

You are almost there! At this point, you’ll need to contact Blue Sky Factory support if you haven’t already to have us create a SPF record and Domain Key for you. Once you get that information from us, set up your SPF record first. Godaddy offers a “SPF Wizard” but that is actually more complicated than it needs to be. Instead, simply click on “Add New TXT Record” and in the TXT Name field enter a “@” character. Then in the TXT Value field, enter the SPF record we supplied you with, which will look something like: v=spf1 a mx ip4:69.63.151.0/24 ~all. Step 4: With the information from Blue Sky Factory, you are also now ready to set up your Domain Key. This step looks a little scary, but just follow the step-by-step instructions here and you will be fine. In the email you receive from Blue Sky Factory, you will be given the entries you need to add as TXT entries just as you did in the step above. Below are some examples of what these TXT entries will look like:

Click on “Add New TXT Record” again. For the TXT Name, enter “_domainkey” and for the value type in “o=~”.

Then, click to add another TXT record. For the value field, take the entry from your email (example from above is “factorydirect._domainkey.bsffactorydirect.com”) and copy all the text up to the “.” after “_domainkey” (factorydirect._domainkey) and use that for your TXT Name. Your TXT Value is the big long funny looking string without the “\”. Godaddy’s DNS doesn’t like the “\” so just leave it out – other ISP’s may allow its use.

And that’s it! I can now use donotreply@bsffactorydirect.com as the Friendly From in my Publicaster campaigns, and I’ve set up three new TXT entries - one for the SPF record and two for Domain Keys. Trust me, after you do this one time it will be much quicker to do the next time.

Does this sound a little daunting to you or are you having trouble finding your IP address? Feel free to contact bsfsupport@blueskyfactory.com with any questions you have about this and we will be happy to walk you through this process.

Running a growing tech company just isn’t busy enough for our CEO, Greg Cangialosi, so he decides he’s going to carve out time to become an author. Five months later, he’s set to officially announce the release of The Business Podcasting Book, a must-read for everyone interested in learning and applying the fundamentals of Podcasting.

Over the past several years Greg has become a respected Thought Leader and industry expert on everything podcast related. In addition to producing podcasts for a handful of Fortune 500 companies, he produces his own podcast at http://www.roiradio.com/, and regularly contributes and speaks at a variety of events.

We’re psyched that his hard work and energy have paid off with this sweet book, and can’t wait to see what’s around the corner!

Check out a press release on his book release here

And go get a copy ‘everywhere books are sold’ as they say, or make it real easy and just click here.

Congrats Greg!