Category: Useful Stuff

This explanation applies to any other list builder (iContact, Constant Contact, MailChimp, etc.).

Why do we want an email list builder like AWeber?

A person’s email is the most precious item we can gather on the Internet.  Behind every “real person’s email” is a human being who may be interested or know someone who is interested in the material we are writing, selling or giving away.

This is the same reason why blackhat marketers will steal your email address only to spam you with messages.  They are using the law of numbers (they send emails to thousands hoping for that remote chance that someone might read it).

Think about an e-mail list of 300,000 – sending 1 message that sells a product with an open rate of say, 1% (just an example).  That’s 3,000 people that opened the email.  That’s a lot of people.  If the e-mail were selling a product, a certain percentage of that 3,000 would convert.  Seems like hard work but consider that someone was sitting on a computer clicking on a button…what did that action really cost them?  Not much, really.

Anyhow, building a list by asking people to voluntarily give it their emails to you – the attraction method – is what services like AWeber are all about.
Successful Internet Marketers swear by this method.  They have used it themselves to gain their reputation and make their money.

How does this work?

By providing value to people who need the information you are teaching, you exchange value for value.  Your valuable content for someone’s valuable E-Mail Address.

What is an Opt-In?

Opt-In is the action a website visitor takes when they type their First Name and E-Mail Address on the Subscription Box.  For example, ours is a box on the top right hand corner of our website.

We also have a similar subscription box on a page that gives away our Special Report:  “The 5 Essentials of a Kick-Ass Website“, what a website owner needs to be paying attention to – besides making their websites look pretty.

What is a Double Opt-In?

This is the action your new subscriber has to take to Confirm that it was really them who wanted your information, not some robot program that is running a macro typing email addresses.  This is the strictest method that will guarantee your Email List is actually populated by real people.

The AWeber default is actually a Double Opt-In.  You will have to manually set it to Single Opt-In if you do not want this option.

Did you know that Paypal lets you send money for free to the receiver?  The 3.5% Service Charge does not apply when you use this feature.
Reasons why you might want to use this feature?

1. You don’t need to send an electronic invoice to someone (a simple PDF invoice will work) – and she is willing to pay you through this method.
2. You are not using a shopping cart.  You are simply sending money.
3. You are sending money to friends and family and they don’t want the 3.5% fee to reduce the money they are receiving from you.

Two requirements in order to be able to do this are:  a)  You both have a Paypal account  b)  The money you are sending must already be in your Paypal account.

STEP One: Login to your Paypal account and click on the Send Money Tab

STEP Two: Make sure you are using the Personal Tab which looks like the screen shot below.

SendBlaster is a Windows-based software that is popular to many entrepreneurs who use the internet to start building their email lists.  It is a fine line between emailing and spamming so if you haven’t done so, read the article on CAN-SPAM compliance.

One of the reasons we use it, is a new feature called Track Report.  Track Report is an Email Analytics service.

What does Track Report track?

• Sent and read e-mails: it tells if each email has been read or if each email has been sent but not read
• Read and clicked e-mails: data refers to opened email messages only, and show how many of them were just read but not clicked and how many of them were clicked.
• Views and clicks: each one of your emailings will have its own unique ROI rate, views and clicks data. Looking at views data we understand when one of our emailings got read for more than one time per each single reader.
• Unique clicks: we know the exact number of people that read our emails. Knowing the emailing’s unique clicks will be mandatory to understand the emailing’s ROI.
• Repeated clicks: a repeated click on one of our email marketing email message testify a user’s interest rate about what we spoke about in our emailings and will help us understanding the best subjects, styles and ways to compose the next email marketing campaings.
• E-mail contacts tracking: It shows who opened your email message and who clicked on links.

Read Ed’s Excellent Adventures with SendBlaster to get more details on how this is done.

The January 2004 Federal CAN-SPAM law introduced a number of rules regarding the delivery of email. It’s important you have your legal counsel review your practices and ensure you are in compliance.

The two most important rules include:

1. having a valid postal mail address listed in all commercial messages and
2. a working unsubscribe link that is promptly honored to remove the subscriber from future messages.

A good book to read on e-mailing as a means of selling is Stephan Schiffman’s book “E-Mail Selling Techniques (That Really Work)”.  Page 29 of his book has a useful and concise summary about this topic:

Ten Things You Should Know About CAN-SPAM

1. CAN-SPAM applies only to commercial e-mail.
2. CAN-SPAM applies to e-mail for which a primary purpose is to feature your goods, services, or content even if you do not send the e-mail yourself; however…
3. CAN-SPAM does not apply to third-party advertisers who advertise in your mailings.
4. CAN-SPAM can apply to e-mail sent out by your affiliates on your behalf; however…
5. CAN-SPAM will not apply to e-mail sent out by your affiliates on your behalf unless you know, or should know, that the e-mail is being sent in violation of CAN-SPAM and you stand to gain from it financially, and you don’t try to stop it.
6. CAN-SPAM requires that all information in your e-mail headers and body be true, accurate and not misleading.
7. CAN-SPAM requires you to provide a fully functioning means of return Internet-based communication for the purpose of the recipient opting-out of your mailings.
8. CAN-SPAM requires you to honor those opt-out requests, and to immediately cease sharing the user’s address even with previously agreed-to partners.
9. CAN-SPAM does not require that you use confirmed opt-in for your mailings; however, it is one of the best defenses against an accusation of CAN-SPAM violation.
10. CAN-SPAM does not require ISPs to accept e-mail that is CAN-SPAM compliant.  In fact, ISPs are specifically exempted from claims that they must accept e-mail if it complies with CAN-SPAM.

Gray Areas (also known as areas where you may not know that could get you in trouble)

AWeber, Constant Contact and other mailing list builders most likely will not let you broadcast to a list that is not subscribed to you.  You can call them and argue that after all, it is your list which you collected personally but they will stick to their rules.

For example, Constant Contact will disable your account if you try do this.  You will need to contact them to unlock it.  How do we know?  <grin>

You will not be able to do a broadcast to a list you already own – outside of the list builder service -  until the people on your list agree to Opt-In to you using their provided widget.

How to get around this limitation?

Ask your people to subscribe to you.  It’s not the easiest solution but it can get the job done.

If you want to send out an “email blast” to a list you already own that have not subscribed to you, you can read this article about SendBlaster.

Click here to get an AWeber account.

Aweber is a paid service that allows you to set up an opt-in box (like the one we have on the upper right corner of this page). This tool will help you collect and manage your list of email addresses from people who visit and subscribe to your website. Aweber brands itself as an email marketing software, email newsletters, and autoresponder service. Its pricing starts at $19.95 a month. Once you sign up for an account, you can set up your lists, and create your email campaigns or newsletters.

The Aweber service comes with sign-up form templates that you can use on your website or send out in your email newsletters. This saves you from having to pay someone to design them for you. Click here to get an Aweber account.

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Mailchimp is a new email list manager that is gaining popularity with the WordPress crowd.  It’s actually free up to 500 subscribers.  It is a nice widget to start with when you are on a budget and you are not looking for anything fancy with your email newsletters.  However, unlike Aweber, Mailchimp only comes with a grey (bland) sign up form. Also, the code they provided to add to a web or landing page was so convoluted! It gave us a headache when we tried to figure out how to modify and use the sign-up form (we are a fan of clean code).  So unless you are up for tweaking XHTML and CSS code to make a decent looking sign-up forms, we recommend that you pay for AWeber instead.

What’s Next AFTER Your Website goes Live?

Okay, so you worked hard on building a website using the 5 Essentials.  Now you have something you are proud of.  It is something that demonstrates your mastery in your chosen field.  It has all the functionality you need to keep adding meaningful content over time while fulfilling upon your SEO Strategy.

Now what?

We would like to bring you up-to-date information on the hottest topics in website marketing today.  Since we are a technical group, our newsletter will focus more on the Technical-How-To instead of just telling you about it and leaving you alone to figure it out.  We like explaining things (as long as people listen.)  After 25 years of software development work, it’s been kinda lonely and we want to teach.

Topics:

• Making Sense of Your Analytics Reports (What are all those numbers for?)
• How to Keep Up the Keyword Research Process (SEO is not a one-time event.)
• Take a peak at Your Competitor’s Keywords.
• FREE Software worth downloading (Face it, most free software are not worth your bandwidth.)
• PAID Software worth paying for (In the land of abundance called the Internet, only the best prevail.)

Subscribe to the FREE Traffic Report Newsletter to receive the First Edition on August 15, 2010. The subscription box is on the top right corner of this page.

Criteria we used to select hosting:

1. Performance – We like Hostgator because of the performance of the sites.  It is faster than the Godaddy sites we had built in the past (sorry Godaddy, we still buy domains from you though.)
2. Support - 24 hours, 7 days a week.  They have so many tech support people online to answer questions.  Plus, you can give immediate feedback on their form which has a survey.
3. Features – We like the Business Plan because of the Private IP and the Private SSL which comes with it.  Other hosting companies charge extra for that.
4. Infrastructure -The hardware upgrade path is good because as your site grows, you will be able to move up to a better plan without switching companies.  They have VPS (Virtual Private Server) and dedicated server hosting available.
5. Price – We’ve been burned by cheap hosting before so price is not our number one criteria.

Note: Their Business Plan comes with a 1-800 toll free forwarding number.  Ignore it unless you want an 800 number.  We checked into it and it’s not really free.

Having the Private IP and Private SSL is good enough to pay for.  The sites load pretty fast and we’re telling you, that is worth 15 bucks a month.

Recommendation:  Pay $14.95/month for a Business Plan if you have E-Commerce on your site. Otherwise, pick the cheapest plan. Also, take the monthly payment option.  You can always upgrade later.

To get a Hostgator web hosting account, click on the Gator.

We get a bonus for your clicking through our site, so thank you in advance