I hope the start of your new business year was powerful enough.

Last time I promised to tell you about my 5 top newsletters online, so without further ado, here they are in alphabetical order:

1. Clayton Makepeace Newsletter http://www.makepeacetotalpackage.com
2. Dan Kennedy Newsletter http://www.dankennedy.com
3. Gary Halbert Letter http://www.thegaryhalbertletter.com
4. Paul Hartunian Newsletter http://www.paulhartunian.com
5. Ted Nicholas Newsletter http://www.tednicholas.com

Four authors are top-notch copywriters and direct-response marketers. Paul is an established expert in publicity and public relations, so you will be doing yourself a big disservice not to learn from them. When I read their newsletters I get this feeling like I’ve just ordered another $19 (sometimes $997) special report. Believe me they are that good.

Well, they are not angels, so they do promote their stuff from time to time, but even their sales pitches I read with the same enthusiasm as they are literally theory in practice, they prove and show you how their copywriting studies and theory influence you

Remember me telling you about developing your own article directory? Have you set one up? If yes, let me know about it. Mine is here http://NeoArticle.com
Instead of make it about everything in general and nothing in particular I decided to focus it around themes like “Computers”, “Internet”, “Business” and everything in between. It is alive for about a month so far.

The only thing I dislike is manual approval of all incoming articles, otherwise they wouldn’t have been added to the database, but this helps keeping the directory nice and tidy.

What I like about ArticleDashboard script is that it has a well thought-out inner design, structure and perfectly fulfills its tasks.

There are also several scripts that allow you accept articles from article distribution services, by the way very helpful for growing your article database starting from day one.

So far article distribution services added about half thousand articles and about hundred authors to my database, although I managed to confirm maybe 20 of them. I’m looking for a solution to optimize the whole confirmation process before promoting the directory to the world. Anyway the real fun is ahead and I will let you know the details of my promotions and tests.

If you’d rather promote your own articles, there is a web-based article submission script and a desktop application available. Both are free and designed to submit articles with one click to all article directories powered by Article Dashboard script.
Grab the script from http://www.articles-submit.com/article-submitter.htm
And the app from http://www.after5webdesign.com/software/articledistributor.zip

Make a good use of them and promote everything you’ve got until my mega software bomb explodes online.

Another tool I wanted to share with you today is “Performancing” Extension for the FireFox browser. If you publish a blog and use a Firefox, this extension will let you write and submit your blog post right from the browser window and turn into a non-stop blogging machine Just press F8 in Firefox and a nice looking resizable window will appear at the bottom of your browser for you to write and submit your next blog posts right from within.

Very cool. Read more and download it from http://performancing.com/firefox FireFox ver.1.5 is required for this extension to work properly.

Make sure to download a free set of flash videos on how to setup and manage your own WordPress blog from http://anesbo.com/members/. It’s in the “Resources” section.