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When it comes to email marketing on the web, you have many choices. Two of the most popular hosted services for internet marketers include aweber.com and getresponse.com. They both offer good service at an affordable price (at around $20 per month). But if you are just starting out and prefer to run your own email marketing software, here is a free script for you to use. It is called Phplist from phplist.com.

It is fairly easy to install and configure. You could be ready to run your first email campaign within an hour. Here is a quick lowdown on how to install the free email marketing software.

Since Phplist is based on Php and Mysql, you can be pretty sure that you can install and use it on just about any shared hosting account. Before you start, it is advised to read up on its official installation instructions located here http://docs.phplist.com/PhplistInstallation

The first step is to download the latest stable version of the software. If you use Linux and have access to SSH, you will download the tgz file. If you are a Windows user, you will download the zip file. In either case, you will need to unzip the file and upload the entire lists directory over to your hosting server. In my case, it was simple as:

cd www (i.e. my root web directory)
tar xzf phplist-2.10.4.tgz
cp -r phplist-2.10.4/public_html/lists .


The next thing is to create a database for Phplist. But you can skip this step if you are running Wordpress and you want to use the same database for both, you just need to specify a different table prefix for Phplist.

With your database credentials handy, you are ready to edit the main config.php file for Phplist which has quite a long list of configuration options. You may want to check / reference Phplist’s online documentation while going through the list.

After all this preparation work, you can start the install by pointing your browser at http://YOURDOMAIN.com/lists/admin. The first time it runs, it detects that you have not created the Phplist tables yet. A simple mouse click will generate all those tables for you. The following screen capture shows the list of tables created.

The next step is to setup the clean install, including changing your admin’s default password (very important), configuring some basic email marketing attributes etc. Phplist admin console actually shows a check list of tasks, which is really handy, as shown below:

Now you can go straight to ‘manage lists’ to start creating your email subscription lists and engage your prospects like never before.

I hope you enjoyed this little setup Phplist tutorial.

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