User's Guide - Getting Started

Getting Started

Overview: A quick guide to using your account for the first time. Create a quick sample newsletter from start to finish.

First Steps for New Accounts:

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Step 1 - Log In

Ready to start producing your own newsletter? Let's logon using the account name and password that you received in the email from us. Go to the home page and find the login box in the upper right corner. Insert your account name in the space provided, and click on the Login button.

Accounts

Forget your account name? Enter your email address instead.

You are now taken to the password screen. Type your password into the space provided. (If you want to skip this screen the next time you logon, check the box labeled, "Remember Password." If you forget your password, just click on the 'here' link, and we will email it to you.) When you are ready, click on the Login button.

To access this account please enter your password in the box below:

Password

Remember Password.

Forget your password? Click here and we'll email it to you.

Congratulations! You are now logged into your account.

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Step 2 - Welcome!

Once you have provided your password, you are taken to the 'Welcome' page. This page explains, at a high level, different features of the system. Besides general information, this page also introduces you to the help feature.

Whenever you see this icon, click on it to obtain further information about the current page.

(Tip: If you ever have questions about the system that are not answered, do not hesitate to contact the Support Department)

At the bottom of the 'Welcome' page is the word Continue. When you are ready to proceed, click this button.

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Step 3 - Choose Page Layout

You are now at the 'Choose a Page Layout' page (see below). This is where you choose how you want your newsletter to look.

CHOOSE A PAGE LAYOUT

Welcome. To start your newsletter, please select a general layout for the Web version of the newsletter from one of the options below. You can choose a three or two column format. Then, click the Continue button to proceed to the next step:

You have a choice between three template layouts for your newsletter. You can either have a column on both the right and left sides; a column on the left side; or a column on the right side. There is no overall benefit to one layout or another, it is a matter of taste and style. (Rest assured, you always have the option of changing your layout later.)

To choose a layout, click on the radio button next to the icon and press 'Continue.'

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Step 4 - Title and Headings

This is where you name your newsletter and provide copyright information. As with everything else within the system, you can come back and eaily change your selection later.

This step is split into three sections: 1) titles and logo, 2) publisher and copyright information, and 3) description.

Section 1 - Titles: This is where you give your newsletter a name and a subtitle (tag line). You can also upload your logo or banner graphic and have it appear across the top of your newsletter page. If you want your newsletter to be linked back to your website, enter the URL into the 'Web Site Address' box. You may use HTML in the Title, Sub-title, and Footer boxes, however it is not recommended that you use anything other than simple text formatting in the Title and Sub-title boxes. Generally all of the material in this section will appear at the top of the newsletter template page and will not change each time a new issue is published.

1. Title: (required)

Sub-Title: (optional)

Logo/Title Banner (Replaces Title at top of page):

Web Site Address: (Optional: This is the address (URL) of the Web site to which you would like this newsletter connected.)

Section 2 - Publisher and Copyright Information: This is where you identify the publisher of the newsletter, provide copyright attribution, and any other information that you would like to appear at the bottom of every page.

2.
Publisher Name:

Publisher's Email Address:

Copyright Holder Name (i.e. MyCompany Inc.):

Footer/Disclaimer:

Section 3 - Description: The Overview and Keywords boxes are used to supply information to search engines. This information will appear within the META tags of the pages that are generated when you post your newsletter to the Web. NOTE : Your newsletter will not be found by search engines unless you submit the pages yourself, use a submission service, or provide a link from your Web site. Leave this area blank to prevent this information from being found by a search engine.

3. Overview - This is a general description of your Newsletter that will be available to search engines and other directories.

Keywords - These are words or short word phrases separated by commas (e.g., 'marketing, email marketing, email lists'). These keywords are used by search engines to help people find your newsletter and should describe the content and theme of your publication.

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Step 5 - Begin Your First Issue

You are now at the 'Issues' page (see below). The information on this screen provides you with some background information on issues. When you are ready, click the Create a New Issue button to begin.

Issues
How often do you publish your Newsletter? Each time you publish a newsletter, you create an issue. Issues let you organize and archive articles and other content in your Newsletter over time. For example, if your Newsletter is published once a month, you would have 12 issues a year. If you do not want to split your Newsletter into issues, then just create a single issue that never expires.

To begin a new issue, click the Create a New Issue button below. You will be asked to name the issue and provide optional information like a begin date, an end date, a volume number, and an issue number.

By clicking on the Create a New Issue button you are taken to the 'Create a New Issue' page (see below). You always have the ability to change this information later. A default issue name - "Issue 1" - has been chosen, as have default Volume and Issue Numbers. You can either remove or keep these. (Remember, you can change your mind later without any problem.)

The system allows you to choose when, and for how long, you want the newsletter to be public to viewers. If you want to ensure that your work on the newsletter will not be seen until a specific day, put a date in advance of today's date in the 'Begin Date' box. If you want to ensure that your newsletter's contents will not be available after a certain date, put that date in the 'End Date' box. Using these settings, the Issue you create will automatically appear or disappear from view. In any case, you must at least specify a 'Begin Date' in order to create the new issue.

If you want this issue of your newsletter to be archived and available for public viewing later, click on the Available Through Archive radio button. If you would prefer to keep the issue hidden from the archives (for example, it may be a special edition intended for a specific audience) click on the Hide from Archive radio button.

New Issue

Create a New Issue
How often do you publish your Newsletter? Each time you publish a newsletter, you create an issue. Issues let you organize and archive articles and other content in your Newsletter over time. For example, if your Newsletter is published once a month, you would have 12 issues a year. If you do not want to split your Newsletter into issues, then just create a single issue that never expires.

1. First, specify a name for this issue of your newsletter (e.g., Issue 1, March 2001, etc.). By default, this name will appear at the top of the page underneath the newsletter title.

Issue Name:

Volume:
Issue Number: (optional)

2. Begin and end dates are used to automatically determine which issue of your newsletter is available to your readers and when. The current, active issue is the one with a begin date that is closest to the current date. NOTE: Only specify an end date if you want to make sure the contents of an issue disappear completely after a certain date. Leave the end date blank if you would like the issue to still be accessible once it becomes part of your archive.

Begin Date:
End Date: (Leave blank for no end)

Available through Archive
Hide from Archive

3.

After you have made your choices, you are ready to move forward. Click on the 'Save' button to continue.

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Step 6 - Select an Article

It is now time to add content that your readers will find compelling. You have essentially two choices: 1) Add an article of your own or 2) select a pre-written article from one of our content libraries. In this lesson we will walk through the basics of how to find and enter content from the E-zineZ! content library. Later on we will give you details on entering your own content and the various tools we provide to create, edit, and manage all the articles.

Add New Content
Your newsletter can contain a mixture of articles that you write yourself and those created by others. To find a pre-written article that fits your newsletter, enter one or more keywords in the search box below. This will display a list of articles that can be purchased or, in some cases, used for free. If no articles match your interests, you can purchase custom written articles that are created according to the editorial outline you provide.

Contribute Your Own
To supply your own article, click the Continue button below. Available options include:

Compose Online
Use our online HTML editor to create and edit HTML formatted articles within your Web browser.

Upload a Microsoft Word Document
Write your material offline in Microsoft Word. Then, upload the Word document from your computer and it will be converted to HTML automatically.

Copy/Paste or Upload any Text or HTML
You can copy and paste any text that can be copied into the Clipboard. You can also upload any HTML that has been generated by an HTML editor like Frontpage, Dreamweaver, and more.

Search Content Libraries (46,104 articles available)
Below you will find libraries of professionally written articles that are available for purchase (of for free) from our partners. These libraries contain complete articles which can be browsed, searched, and automatically inserted into your newsletter.

Keyword(s):
Enter one or more words that would be contained in an article that interests you. To search for a complete phrase, surround it with double quotes. (e.q. "Computer Software"). You can also use logical operators like AND and OR to search for more specific combinations of words and phrases.

Libraries:  (Uncheck the box to exclude the library from your search.)


Industry Publications
($250.00)   [BROWSE]
Where to Start and Run Your Business
($200.00)   [BROWSE]
newsedge
($200.00)   [BROWSE]

E-marketing Intelligence for Intelligent Marketers
($250.00)   [BROWSE]
Business Cartoons for Newsletters
($100.00)   [BROWSE]
The Internet Leader in Company News Distribution.
(FREE)   [BROWSE]

Over 200 articles in 12 topics
(FREE)   [BROWSE]
The Daily Resource: Specializing in Telecommunications and Technology
($100.00)   [BROWSE]

Click on the E-zineZ! logo (or the [BROWSE] link underneath it). This will take you to the E-ZineZ content library.

In the E-Zinez! collection, there are over 200 articles in 12 topics. Browse around for a while to get the feel for how easy it is to locate articles in content libraries. If you want to read an article, click on the 'VIEW' button beside the article name.

CONTENT LIBRARY

E-zineZ! Article Collection
Over 200 articles in 12 topics
Published by Kate Schultz
The following material is provided by E-Zinez.com, an online e-zine content catalog. Use their Content Filler service to get 4 new articles for your Newsletter each month.

TOPICS:

Internet
Business
Health
Motivation
Training
Writing
Art
Women
Family
Internet Marketing
Computers
Other

All Topics

Articles Available: 273

Painless Marketing Using Autoresponders
(by Furgeson, Patty)
Painless Marketing Using Autoresponders by Patty FurgesonDo you have an autoresponder advertising your business? This is a GREAT way to market your business. When you submit to link exchanges, ...

Getting Lost in the Shuffle
(by Johnson, Jennifer)
Getting Lost in the Shuffle by Jennifer Johnson Playing the search engine game - virtually all webmasters do it in some form or another. Everyone vying for a coveted "Top 10" spot; ...

Personal Branding with Discussion Lists and Web Forums
(by Cortez, Bob)
Personal Branding with Discussion Lists and Web ForumsBy Bob Cortez Total Quality Marketing*What is 'Personal Branding'?In advertising terms, branding is the "image" created in the minds of ...

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When you are finished with your exploration, we will select a specific article to understand how the basic article management features work.

To begin, go back to the first article, "Getting Lost in the Shuffle". If it is not at the top of your screen, click on the 'All topics' link at the bottom of the left column. When you find the article, click on the 'SELECT' button.

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Step 8 - Review/Edit Article

We are now in the Article Entry screen. The article that you selected was automatically populated in the appropriate fields shown below:

EDIT ARTICLE

ISSUE: In which issue should this article appear? [RESOURCES...]

Date:
Topic Section:

Title:

Sub-Title:

Web Address: Link this article to the following Web address:

Author Name:
Johnson, Jennifer

Short Description/Synopsis:

Important Note If you are editing your article online, make sure you save your changes often. Your session will automatically expire after approximately 15 minutes of inactivity.

Article Body:

Getting Lost in the Shuffle by Jennifer Johnson
Playing the search engine game - virtually all webmasters do it in some form or another. Everyone vying for a coveted "Top 10" spot; experimenting with keywords; tweaking pages for a specific engine. You'll find lots of information online, sound advice and not so sound, instructing you on how to design your pages to rank higher.

That's all well and good; of course every webmaster would enjoy having his or her site rank high in the listings, but what about "the rest of us"? What can be done to boost clicks no matter where you appear in the rankings?

There are a couple of problems I see repeatedly on sites I'm asked to review. In my opinion, if these problems were corrected, the webmaster would enjoy a significant increase in traffic....

Picture: (GIF or JPEG)

Caption for the picture:

Article Position:
Show on cover page.
Show on topic page and in table of contents only.
Determine position later.

Side Bar
A Side Bar is an article that is related to another. A parent article can have one or more Side Bars related to it. The layout template can contain a Multiple Article element that is configured to display Side Bar articles. Generally, a Side Bar article is displayed when its parent article is displayed.
This is a Side Bar for the following parent article:

Article Lifespan: (optional)
Fill in a begin and/or end date for this article to determine when and for how long the article will be displayed in your Newsletter. NOTE: If you specify a begin date that comes after the current date, this article will not appear in your published newsletter until this later date.

Begin Date:
End Date: (use MM/DD/YY format)

Letter responses allowed for this article?

Allow readers to post new letters?

Display Rule:
The Display Rule is a TRUE/FALSE statement that determines whether or not this article is displayed for a particular subscriber. The statement compares the values of one or more fields in the subscriber record. If the complete statement is TRUE, the article is displayed. For example, if the statement is 'STATE EQUAL TO MA AND CITY EQUAL TO BOSTON', then only subscribers who are from Boston, Massachusetts will see this article.

You can then modify portions of this information to personalize it to your newsletter. For example, fill in the Short Description/Synopsis box with a short introductory paragraph.

When your edits are complete, click on the 'Save' button.

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Step 9 - The Main Menu

You are now at the Main Menu. The next time you log into your account this is where you will end up. From here you can get to every feature offered by the account level you have chosen.

In the middle of the Menu page you will see the following graphics:

Each of the 'green word' graphics on the Main Menu (shown above) are buttons that you can click. The buttons along the left side help you populate your newsletter with content. You have already visited most of these. Use this Main Menu to return to edit them. Let's review their function one more time and meet a couple of new ones.

Title/Headings - Click this button when you want to update your title or subtitle or logo/banner. This is also the place where you keep your copyright information, provide details on the publisher (including email address), etc. If you want to have your newsletter listed in the search engines, this is also the place to provide a short description as well as a list of keywords used in meta-tags.

Topics - Topics provide a way to organize your newsletter. If you have several articles that can be grouped together under a common topic (i.e. theme) then the Topic function will allow you to better organize your newsletter. Topics are also used in the page layout to separate information into differently formatted regions on the page.

Articles - When you have your own material to place into the newsletter, or are seeking outside content, this is where you go.

Content Library - We have partnered with many well known publishers who have made complete articles on thousands of subjects available for purchase (or for free) in our Content Libraries. You can browse and search this content here. To see a full list and description of each content provider, click this button.

Layout - This opens the Layout Editor where you can modify the templates that define how the newsletter will look and operate - both as an HTML email and a hosted micro-site.

Surveys - Create surveys to poll your readers. When you are ready to create a survey, click this button.

Preview - At any time you can preview to see what your newsletter will look like when published. Note that the preview is only accessible through your account and the newsletter is not available for anyone else to see until you click 'Post to the Web'.

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Step 10 - Preview the Newsletter

It's time to recap what we have done so far and then look at the results. We have logged into our account, choosen the page layout, created a title for the newsletter, started our first issue, selected an article, and populated the article into a newsletter. Wonder what it looks like? Click the PREVIEW icon found at the center of the Main Menu.

When we click on the PREVIEW icon, here's what the newsletter looks like, so far.

Our First Newsletter

Saturday, August 4, 2001 Issue 1 VOLUME 1 ISSUE 1

CONTENTS

Getting Lost in the Shuffle

Getting Lost in the Shuffle
http://www.promotingyoursite.com
by Johnson, Jennifer

Improve your searh engine ranking with a few quick tips.

[FULL STORY]

SUBSCRIBE

Enter your email address in the box below to receive an email each time we post a new issue of our newsletter:

Add Remove
Send as HTML

TELL A FRIEND

Congratulations! You have created your first newsletter. You have now learned how to logon to the service, saw an overview of what features are included, learned how to choose a page layout, specified a title, started your first issue, and added your first article. In the next chapters, we will show you how to further populate your newsletter and distribute it to your subscriber list.

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Back to Table of Contents

1.	Title: (required)
	Sub-Title: (optional)
	Logo/Title Banner (Replaces Title at top of page):
	Web Site Address: (Optional: This is the address (URL) of the Web site to which you would like this newsletter connected.)

2.	Publisher Name:
	Publisher's Email Address:
	Copyright Holder Name (i.e. MyCompany Inc.):
	Footer/Disclaimer:

3.	Overview - This is a general description of your Newsletter that will be available to search engines and other directories.
	Keywords - These are words or short word phrases separated by commas (e.g., 'marketing, email marketing, email lists'). These keywords are used by search engines to help people find your newsletter and should describe the content and theme of your publication.