I have used Campaign Monitor for the past 3+ years.  Before Campaign Monitor I used various other providers (ExactTarget, SilverPop, MailChimp) as well as some homegrown solutions.

Please don’t ever use Outlook or regular email to send out a newsletter to more than 10 people.  The risks are not worth the tiny amounts of money you “save”.

Why I use Campaign Monitor

1. Easy to add signup forms to your site.
2. It’s cheap -  $5 per send and 1¢ per recipient
3. They have really nice reports - the reporting is similar to Google Analytics
4. They have built in auto-scrubbing of lists.  Old emails are automatically cleaned out of your lists.
5. Emails are easy to customize - I can either use my own html/images or pick one of their existing templates
6. There is free preview & testing of emails.  Emails are hard to get right across all the different clients (don’t even get me started on lotus notes )
7. There service is reliable.  I haven’t had any issues in the 3+ years I have used their service.
8. They are experts in their industry.  Their blog is top-notch.  They often post research & tips that really and truly help.  For example, check out this post about CSS support in email clients.
9. They have a powerful API. 
10. They have serious reputable clients (this can help if you ever need to justify a decision to someone).

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It’s both cheecho. Especially in these early months, I am struggling more with personal issues, like motivation and managing my time, and less on the more practical issues of starting a business.

The biggest source of inspiration for me right now is Steve Pavlina. If you haven’t read any of his stuff, do so right now. His posts are insightful and in-depth. He approaches blogging like he is a genius that is making a living from his blog. There is a good reason for this, as he does have smarts and he is making major cashola. Another bonus is I am sure that you could read his site for a decade and never come across the term cashola.

After I think of a business idea, one of the first thing I do is I check for available domain names. For me, finding a great domain name is one of the most fun parts of starting a project.

Lately I have been using NameWidget (or instant domain search) to do all my searches. These new AJAX search tools are by far the fastest and simplest way to check to see if a domain is available. They are also really really fun to play around with. You enter in a search term and you get immediate feedback.

Did you know that flanface.com is available? Can you believe that?

My wife and I have a wiki that we use to keep track of our projects and our business ideas. It’s a great way that we can collaborate anytime/anywhere over the magical global intarweb.

We have a section for each of our active businesses as well as an area that has a laundry-list of all of our potential ideas. Its also a great spot to keep lists of potential domain names.

If you need more info about starting a wiki, wiki books is a great resource. They even have a list of sites that let people create a free wiki. If you want to have a password protected wiki, you could try PB Wiki.