Click Hamilton wrote:
Is iContact still popular for email marketing?

I still get spam from a lot of places I have visited in the past from them.

JJMiller wrote:
Lets see, there is webs, wix, shopify, web.com, godaddy, plus things like wordpress, drupal, etc. if you want to get more geeky about it. I know there are more just can't remember at the moment- I'd advise looking at the plans and seeing which suits you best.

I know there are bazillions. I'm asking here for personal favorites that mm members use themselves.

I definitely don't want to get geeky. I want to be simple, to-the-point and effective. I want my customers to input their information with their credit card, and I want auto-responders. I want my job to be organizing in advance, preparing the product for instant shipping, then slapping a label on the box as soon as the order comes in.

I'm trying to choose my services carefully to avoid wasting time trying fix bugs and solving problems. The more off-the-shelf these products are, the better.

I prefer to avoid the bells & whistles in favor of straight forward marketing effectiveness. I want my product presentation to dominate the website, and not the other way around.

I'm looking for the most popular current marketing tools to automate as much as possible. Since these things are always changing, I'm looking for the current popular industry leaders for online shopping, designed for small businesses.

Having good application software set up properly can make or break a business.

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Back in the DOS days when I was graduating from my Radio ShackTRS80 with 8" floppies for printing Avery stick labels to a couple of slick ATT6300's, I was morphing my business from more traditional mail order advertising, trade shows and trade publication display ads to computer based contact management, mail list massaging and orchestrated telephone sales.

I met a guy named Michael McCafferty who was selling his TeleMagic ver 1.0 out of the trunk of his car for $100 a pop. That was an amazing relational database that filtered and organized my sales, mail campaigns and phone calls for me. His software literally made millions of dollars for me in the mid to late 80's with products I designed and manufactured myself in Taiwan during the so-called "Golden Years." That was before Mainland China opened up to Americans in a similar way. With TeleMagic, I was able to build and manage 11,000 wholesale customers myself with all the intimate details at my fingertips. Yee-haaa!

For 2015, I want to retrench, reorganize and simplify again. This time with little personal time involvement. I love talking with my customers, but I don't want to be a salesperson. I would rather write and post ad copy, then leave and let Internet do it's thing 24/7.

I want something easy and low key. I prefer small income streams from multiple sources, diversified. I would like to cut my own time involvement to something like 5 days a month. The rest I want to package so it can be run by an executive assistant, part time. For the other 25 days I prefer to travel somewhere, meet people, work on other projects, play with my photography, or explore new opportunities.

I always enjoy pondering what's over the next horizon. Hence, this thread. I want to draw upon our collective wisdom and build a fresh new structure for the 3-5 years to come.  Maybe we can help each other.

A walk down memory lane:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TeleMagic