We Americans suffered yet another postal increase a couple of weeks ago. Of course it was to be expected, and is even understood, given what is happening presently with our national economy. I read a story this week about a couple of fortunate folks who have profited in a big way through postage stamps, but I’ll save that for later in this article.

Internet marketers and businesses, and of course people in general for personal use, continue to enjoy the benefits of email communication. We can only wonder how long totally free email will be available, although efforts to change that in the past have not brought success (thankfully).

There are various ways to market a home business online that involve mail (email), and there does not have to be a cost associated with them. Let’s think about the differences between physical mail and email when you want to send a piece of marketing material. For a physical mailing, you need to either prepare, copy or purchase the material to be sent. You need to have an appropriate size envelope. If you are doing bulk email, there is time associated with preparing all of these individual pieces. And then there is the postage to mail it. All of this can add up to a major expense if it is a large mailing.

The same type of campaign can be conducted online possibly with no cost at all. You have the time invested in preparing your list of email addresses. If you are going to be re-sending to the same list of people the email addresses can be saved in a folder for an even quicker send in the future. Internet marketing information can be loaded into the email and there are options here of course, depending on how you would like the material presented (graphics, etc), if you want live links and if you prefer plain text or html. Information on how to do what is mentioned here can be found online through a search engine at no cost.

There is another way that online mail (email) can be a time saver and a money saver. For items such as newsletters there can be a tremendous savings in the online version. A form to register for the newsletter can be placed on your website, and the email addresses who register are then sent to an autoresponder which sends out the newsletters. There is a cost to such a service, but it is minimal in comparison to sending material to large lists.

Other email campaigns can be set up in addition to newsletters. Other informational products can be offered and even training materials can be sent through autoresponder sets after people register.

The introduction of email and the subsequent use of it has drastically changed the quantity of postal mail. While I don’t see it ever being completely eliminated, there are ways to save money spent on postage stamps by utilizing alternative online services. Making payments of all kinds online, communicating for both personal and business use, and marketing in general (hopefully saving junk mail) all combine to save us money buying postal stamps.

Back to that story that I mentioned. I enjoy reading these short pieces of history and hope you do as well. On the same day of this month’s postal increase, back in 1918, the first airmail stamps were issued. Apparently there were a few sheets printed with the picture upside/down. Before this was discovered some were released. One guy who bought a sheet of 100 of the 24 cent stamps noticed the mistake while still at the local post office. He knew he had something of value but also thought there would be many more of the same ‘out there’. He sold the sheet that cost him $24 for $15,000.00 and felt pretty good about it.

The person who bought it already had a $20,000 resale bid in hand. But the really interesting part is that it turned out only eight other sheets had been printed when the error was discovered and they were all destroyed. And sixty years later, just one of those .24 stamps traded for $198,000.00. What would that make the whole sheet worth? You do the math!

Maybe most of us have not experienced a windfall from a valuable postage stamp, but we certainly can prosper from the email system when we use it successfully in our home businesses. And while the email deliverability might not be as good as its offline (postal) counterpart, there are certainly choices (life Veretekk’s Veremail) that come pretty close!

To learn more about how you can build monthly residual income with a targeted marketing program, visit ‘starting a home business’.

To learn more about Veretekk and Veremail, sign up for a Silver Veretekk system. Once inside, everywhere you click, there are these great training screencasts that instruct you on various online marketing tools and services (including email from Veremail). Take a look for yourself here: www.vzerb.veretekk.com

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