It’s been a good news/bad news day for TOG Solutions. The good news, as many you have seen, is that The Statement, our free newsletter, is back and was sent out to our subscribers. If you are interested in receiving out newsletter, please feel free to submit your e-mail address on the form on the right.

The bad news, it would appear, is that all of our recipients that happen to use AT&T as their e-mail provider didn’t get their copy of The Statement. Why? Because evidently, AT&T has taken the liberty of blacklisting the togsolutions.com mail server.

Normally, we’d go ahead and let this slide, submit a request through the AT&T Postmaster and be done with it. Unfortunately, we can’t really stay silent, especially since AT&T is the e-mail provider for a great deal of users in our services areas.

So, you can imagine our surprised to see the same error message dozens of times, including a bounce-back message from our personal e-mail addresses (We’ve been an Ameritech/AT&T DSL customer for several years).

Trying to grow as we are, it’s essential that we have the opportunity to maintain contact with everyone who is interested in learning more about TOG Solutions and the services we provide. Having our e-mail server blocked, however, hampers our ability to do that.

With that said, for our customers and subscribers who use AT&T for their e-mail, we apologize for the inconvenience that this may have caused. And to AT&T, I hope that we can clear this mess up as soon as possible!

Follow-up: Well, it would appear that we’ve got some resolution here, and that whatever blocking issues we had during the newsletter send-out have been cleared up. Just to be on the safe side, though, we have made some modifications to our e-mail list software so hopefully, we don’t run into this issue again.

Years ago, while still working in Career Services at a Cleveland-area technical school, I had built a database of businesses and organizations that could have an interest in what we had to offer. At the same time, students were completing their programs. The question for me then became how do we communicate with both groups without being too intrusive, but at the same time keep us fresh in their minds.

Answering this question laid the groundwork for our monthly newsletter, which was our first effort in e-mail marketing. Over time, we also utilized e-mail marketing to announce on-campus events.

My lesson learned during my technical-school years? No matter what other Internet marketing you do, the best first step is creating an e-mail marketing campaign.

These days, creating an e-mail marketing campaign is as simple as ever. Sites such as Constant Contact and iContact allow users to, for a fee, utilize their e-mail services. If you’re more tech-savvy, you can also set up mailing list programs such as Xigla or, for Linux users, Dada Mail to build your marketing internally. You customer relations management (CRM) software may even have a mass e-mail function as well.

For those starting from scratch, make sure to export your contacts to format that is easy to upload to your platform, generally CSV, and build from there. Again, based on technical ability, you can opt to use the editor from one of the e-mail marketing sites or build it from a Web editor.

You e-mail campaign should be about information about and related to your organization. Ultimately, you’ll want to save the hard sales pitch to your Web site. But starting out, you’re looking to generate more interest.

As you continue, you’ll find new interest by giving readers exclusive offers on your products or services. Also, you’ll have the ability to announce other parts of your Internet marketing efforts that can include Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and other social media outlets.

So, are you ready to start building your foundation?

In the spirit of starting fresh, February 2, 2009 marks the day of a change to TOG Solutions…

First, the TOG Blog is born, replacing the Crossroads Career Transition Guide blog will no longer be in service. Now, we will also include news and information about TOG Solutions, along with related articles about topics that are relevant to all the services we have to offer.

And there’s more. For years, the TOG Solutions site has been relatively faceless. That all changes with the About Us page, with brief profiles of myself and Jessica. We feel that it’s important to know something about the people you’re working with, as opposed to looking at an arbritrary Web site that could have been done anywhere.

Finally, we’re offer something new and completely FREE to all visitors to TOG Solutions, The Statement, a monthly newsletters with featured articles, offers and other great information! All you need is a valid e-mail address, and you’re all set!

As always, thank you for visting TOG Solutions, and we hope that we can be of assistance!