Hi
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Thursday June 25th 2009: Update #130
This Update is normally published three times per week for opted-in subscribers only. Publisher: Rich Sale. Your comments are always welcome - to respond to anything you read here, please leave a comment
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Well here we are again at the back end of the working week. Thursdays seem to come around even quicker these days, but we have been there before. This week has been busy as ever in the Sale household. My boys’ played their first gig with their rock band on Wednesday evening, not only their first live performance but also live on the local radio and on local web TV as well!! They came across really well and got a few laughs when they were interviewed. The station were not used to having young children performing and were surprised that they were out in the back yard playing tag before the gig rather than standing around looking nervous. The second gig is on Saturday evening then we can relax a bit. I think I get more stressed than the kids but I guess that is normal for a parent.
This week had lots of plans attached to it that have just not come to anything for various reasons. But there are some useful learning points that are worth sharing.
Now I have always stated that Aweber is my autoresponder of choice (and it still is) but this weeks events have made me think.
I have recently been beta testing a new system for attracting people to sign up to your newsletter or whatever. Its a credit based system that displays a list of available newsletters on other peoples websites/blogs. So visitors to a participating site will see a list of newsletters to sign up to when the first visit the site. They can then tick the ones they are interested in and just fill their details in once to get whatever they asked for from the list. The more I display the list on my websites, the more it gets displayed elsewhere. Simple!
The problem is that at the moment it will only work with a few autoresponders and not Aweber. So I installed the free autoresponder they provide which was easy enough. But I needed to somehow add new members to my existing Aweber list or import the Aweber list into the new system. The trouble is that my lists within Aweber are all linked together. So that all subscribers to any of my Internet Marketing lists automatically get on my newsletter list. So it was not as simple as just taking the newsletter list and I was reluctant to move away from Aweber. So I needed a solution.
Aweber has the ability to sign up to a list by sending an email to that list. You can also tell Aweber which bits of the email you are going to send to use as the subscribers name and email address. The incoming email is then parsed to extract the relevant details which are then used to add that person to the list. A confirmation email is then sent back to the person wishing to subscribe asking them to confirm that they have requested the sign-up. I am sure that you have all signed up to something in the past by filling in your details in a form and pressing ’submit’. Then a few minutes later receiving a confirmation email asking you to click the link to confirm you intentions. Well its a similar process just started by sending an email rather than submitting a form.
So I thought this would be an ideal way to get any new sign-ups from the new system onto my Aweber list. I just get the new autoresponder to send an email to the Aweber list each time a new person signs up. Easy - Yes but No. I managed to get the new autoresponder to send a copy of the persons details to the Aweber list as an email and I managed to get Aweber to extract the relevant information and add the person to my list. This then triggered the sending of a confirmation email to the person wishing to subscribe so that they could confirm their intentions.
This all looked great and tested fine to start with. But then I noticed that the confirmation email was not always getting through, so some people were not being signed up!
So I started a support ticket explaining that the confirmation email was not always getting through when an email was used to sign someone up. Well all I got back was that email deliverability was not their problem and that I needed to talk to my ISP to get them to sort the problem.
Now the problem was quite severe only 1 in 10 confirmation emails were getting through whereas the standard web form sign up achieved 10 out of 10.
I replied to the support ticket asking what was different about the confirmation emails from the standard web form and those from an email sign up. The answer was they are identical and that the problem was due to the ISP’s blocking the emails and that I needed to talk to the ISP’s not Aweber about this.
So I sent another reply asking why the results from the 2 different sign up methods were so different. They just ignored this and asked me to talk to the ISP’s.
I was getting nowhere. So I devised a test that showed that if 2 identical email addresses were used (from the same ISP) one to sign up via the web form and the other to sign up via an email. The latter would fail. I ran the test and got the expected answer. I then went on the Aweber live chat Help and gave the person at the other end the reference to my support tickets and explained the tests etc.
He told me to contact my ISP because it was them blocking the confirmation email nothing to do with Aweber. So I asked him to explain why the web form sign ups always worked and he just kept on giving me the same answer (contact my ISP). I explained that this was unacceptable because I could not contact all the ISP’s in the world that may host the emails of people who might want to sign up to my list. But he was adamant that it was an ISP problem.
This went on for about 30mins and eventually he was just writing and pressing return all the time and not responding to any of my statements. He then went quiet and suggested that someone from the technical team should call me. But he could not think that this would make any difference as he had already told me what to do!
I got a call from a technical help person who told me that I was having difficulty understanding what her colleague had been telling me. She then launched straight into a spiel about ISP’s and filtering. I had to interrupt her to point out some of the facts that I had and I just asked the question of what was the difference between the confirmation emails for the two different sign up methods. She said they were identical. So I then asked her why the confirmation emails from the standard web form sign-up always got through whilst the others didn’t.
To which she replied
well the web form will always be more reliable because they record the IP address of the page where the form is. This makes it more reliable because it is traceable.
If you sign up via an email it will depend on the email provider you use as to how trustworthy it will be considered. So if you use a gmail email account then you will be considered reliable but if you use your own local email server (like I do) then you will not be considered trustworthy by the major ISP’s.
Of course I said that’s it - why didn’t someone tell me this before? No answer from them. So I relayed back my new understanding just to check I had got it and I had. I then thanked her for explaining the difference between the two methods and mentioned that it might have been easier for all if they had told me this earlier. She just said OK well have a nice remainin’ day and put the phone down!
So Ok its a long and dull story for you. But the sort of thing you will get in this business from time to time. Customer support tends to be over protective. So as soon as you start to question why/how something works to try and solve your own problem they go on the defensive. I also think that they support each other. I had several different people answer my support tickets and they all reiterated what had been said in the first response. Even the girl who phoned me was just going to shout the same message. They also don’t expect you to have any expert knowledge so dismiss most things you say.
The lesson here is to build a good set of tests and keep on going until they answer the problem. Or give you enough information to understand it yourself. Just imagine if I had tried to approach ISP’s as they would have me do. Do you think I would have got very far?
Aweber is still my autoresponder of choice for the basic features if you are just starting out or only have a small number of lists. But I can understand why many move away as their business grows and grows.
let me know your thoughts on Aweber or any other autoresponder you have used.
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Now I don’t know about you but I seem to be getting a lot more emails from so-called Gurus telling me I must have this and that if I am to make my fortune online. It’s quite noticeable that many are selling the same thing. Notice that there is always a huge urgency (why?). Many get sucked into these promotions only to get no further up the income ladder. This is usually because there is actually a lot of effort required to make it work or that the parameters for it working are so tight that you have to strike it very lucky.
The fact is that many of these people are totally reliant on the fact that many will fail but try again with something else. I have been there and thankfully come through to the other side. But the reason for my small but growing success is not down to some mystery package. It is down to sound understanding of the basics.
Many try to run before they can walk. But if you learn how to promote your business, to generate traffic and can do this on a regular basis. You will start to make money. Many of the techniques are not difficult but they can be tedious.
So if you want to start making money then learn the basics:-
We talked about article marketing training last week http://www.nofussinternetbusiness.com/articlemastery and how important it is.
We have the affiliate blogging course which you can sign up here for free http://bit.ly/ZH5Dw.
We also have the Silent Salesman series of eBooks that show you how to start to promote your site http://www.the-silent-salesman.com/wakeup.html
Obviously if you want to spend your money then go here to learn how to make some more http://www.nofussinternetbusiness.com/mmm
Until next Sunday
To Our Success!
Rich
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