I’ve been using Google’s new service designed for small business for the last 2-3 months now…just for my email service. While it’s not perfect, I have found it more dependable than ANY domain-based email solution. The only thing I’ve seen that was better was Webmail.us, which was (as I recall) about $12 a month.

In my experience, email is treated as the bastard stepchild of most web hosting accounts. It’s not like they are all terrible, but if any little thing goes wrong, you may lose email service periodcally…which can be incredibly frustrating…especially when you’re using it to run your business. Add to that the fact that spam protection is always dicey…whitelists and blacklists that rarely function consistently, etc. Ugh!
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Back in the Olden Days, when the internet was new…and email was still in its infancy, I was the guy who was sending funny stuff to his friends. I loved doing it, and at one point, I had several hundred people who had contacted me and asked to be put on the list to receive any new mailings. And when I started building web sites, one of my first was a site to share clean humor called Made Me Laugh (which is still around all these years later…and better than ever). Why “clean” humor? Well, it’s pretty easy to find raunchy humor all over the web. I wanted to create a resource that was, for the most part, OK for mixed company and stuff you wouldn’t mind sharing with your grandma.
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There’s a new option for blog and web site monetization that’s just become available. It’s called WidgetBucks, and it just might be worth a look. Like AdSense (and Chitika and a few other options), it pays on clicks (CPC) rather than actual sales (CPA). Which model performs best on your site? You won’t know unless you test both options. I’m just starting my test, so I can’t yet report how well they perform…but I still have several observations at this point.
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