Features

Welcome to your Home Savvy eZine!

This site is designed to teach you how to best-use your Home Savvy eMagazine (HSM) to achieve maximum results. Please real through all of the pages provided to learn more about your HSM and how to make it work for you. Should you ever have any questions about your HSM, please feel free to email us.

HSM Features

Concept
Each issue of HSM contains an extensive amount of content compared to traditional a "e-newsletter". In fact, because each HSM issue contains so much content, we don't even consider it to be an "e-newsletter". Instead, HSM is what we call an eZine (short for electronic magazine). Like a magazine, your HSM contains multiple "article pages", and each article page is specifically written with the homeownership market in mind. Instead of creating a single eZine for a national audience, and then accepting advertisers, we've decided to allow you to re-brand HSM with your corporate identity so that our HSM actually appears to your audiences as your HSM. Essentially, you are your own advertiser.

Imagine if Bob Villa called you up one day and offered to removed his name from his Websites and allowed you to put your name on it. That is essentially what we've done with HSM. Instead of employing the traditional business model of creating a centralized Website and charging you to advertise on it, we are allowing you to make HSM yours to use while we manage the content, artwork, and technologies involved in keeping HSM fresh and functional.

It is also important to understand why we have chosen to use a Website format over the email newsletter format. In short, Websites with backlinks to your corporate Website contribute to Search Engine ranking while newsletters sent via email do not. Search Engine "spiders" cannot follow links in an email newsletter back to your Website. They can only index links and content that appear on the World Wide Web. HSM provides you with this advantage in abundance as your HSM contains multiple links back to your corporate Website for spider to "crawl". Additionally, using a Website format allows us to provide you with an array of features and benefits that are simply not available from email newsletter services.

When all is said and done, HSM is practically a turn-key online marketing system that can help your business to achieve significant credibility in the marketplace and subsequent sales. You get what you want out of the HSM system because it is "modular" thereby allowing you to use only the components you want to use. If you just need a simple online eZine so you don't ever have to develop your own content; we offer that. If you want a die-hard content tool that keeps consumers interested and involved while keeping your name in front of them, we provide you the tools and assistance to do that, too. Every HSM account is a reflection of its subscriber, and we give you the freedom to take your Home Savvy eMagazine as far you want to take it.

Features List

Articles
Most magazines are published on a monthly basis, and HSM is no different. Every month brings new articles to keep your readers interested and informed. More importantly, each article is written around the needs of homeowners, home buyers, home sellers, and the people who serve them. Listed below are the artcile page tabs and a description of the types of articles you can expect to find on each of those pages.

Home Life - Article about the homeowneship experience in general.
Outdoors - Articles about topics that happen outdoors.
Home Decor - Articles about home fashion and interior design.
Food - Articles about food history, food preparation, and cooking.
Lawn & Garden - Articles about lawn and garden management.
Home Tech - Articles about home-related technologies.
Home Tips - Articles about home repair and improvement.
Home School - Articles about homeownership education.
Realty Insight - Articles about real estate-related issues, facts, and strategies.
Surf - Directory of very useful Website for homeowners.

Bio Page
Your HSM is designed to help you build your brand name and increase market awareness of your offerings, but you still need to generate consumer confidence in your abilities and experience to capture new sales. Your HSM Bio page is designed to do exactly that. As a centerpiece of your HSM account, your Bio page provides consumers and business with just enough information about you and/or your company to make hiring decisions more quickly. The Bio page is laid-out in an easy-to-ready format allowing people to absord as much information about you and/or your company as quickly as possible without having to browse multiple pages on content to get the information they need to make an informed decision.

Web Form
To help you capture prospect data, your Bio page includes an integrated Web form. This form allows consumers, real estate agents, lender, or others to enter data about a property to be inspected to help you service them better. The information provided by the form gives you just enough information to engage consumers without overwhelming them.

Teasers
As you know by now, HSM is not an email newsletter, and that means you cannot send it by email to anyone. It is simply too big! Instead, we provide you with a teaser. A teaser is simply a graphical and textual index, or preview, of the main articles in your HSM. Each month (or whenever you feel like sending an invitation to someone to browse your HSM), you simple visit your personal teaser page, highlight the teaser content (using CTRL+A), copy the content (using CTRL+C), then paste the teaser content into your outbound email (using CTRL+V). Then, you can add your personalized text or images as you see fit. The links to your HSM pages will automatically be retained after pasting the teaser into your email. That's all there is to it! Click HERE to see a live teaser page.

Message Center
In order to keep you informed, your HSM account includes a password-protected ADMIN link that opens directly into your personal Message Center. From here you can read Global Messages that we post for all of our subscribers as well as private messages intended specifically for you. This is also the entry page that provides links to your Handshake and News editors.

Handshake Page
The Handshake page of your HSM offers you the opportunity to earn a significant amount of "extra income" through advertiser inclusions. Just as other eZine Websites and portals allow for advertising, your HSM also gives you space to invite other types of businesses to "piggy-back" on your marketing efforts using HSM. Additionally, your Handshake advertisers will benefit from the exponential growth of their ads being distributed via Sub-Accounts. A more detailed explanation of your Handshake page is provided HERE.

News Page
Though your HSM's article content is fully managed by us, we give you a way to include your own customized content. The News page of your HSM allows you to add, edit, and delete your own content at any time using an online WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor. A more detailed explanation of your News page is provided HERE.

Sub-Accounts
One of the most unique features of HSM is that it give you the ability to create Sub-Accounts within your primary HSM account. A sub-account allows you to invite your business affiliates to use your HSM with their markets for free while, in exchange, they help you to reach an end-market that you may not have otherwise been able to reach. A more detailed explanation of sub-accounts is provided HERE. For every sub-account holder you "recruit", a panel ad must be created for that account. Panel ads help to identify the account holder and offer prominent brand-building impressions on each article page. Because sub-accounts cannot contain blank or empty panel ads, someone has to create them. In most cases, your sub-account holders will not create their own panel ads and will seek your assistance in creating them. If that's the case, you simply submit an ad order through us and bill your sub-account holder for the labor involved. We charge you a flat $45 fee (wholesale) to create your sub-account holders' panel ads. In turn, you can charge your sub-account holders up to $75 and keep the difference for essentially brokering and managing the ad sale.

Personal Pages
Personal Pages allow you to start from a "blank" page or a Personal Page Template to create a more customized HSM for your readers. Your account comes with thirty Personal Pages, so you can feel free to let your imagination run wild.

Forums
Subsribers to HSM have access to a private Subscriber Community Forum where they can access useful tips, tricks, templates, and more in order to become expert HSM users. Subscribers can share ideas about marketing with HSM, opening new markets, and customizing HSM pages to achieve maximum results. Readers have access to their own Home Savvy Forum. (Both forums are brand new as of 02/21/08).