The money is in the list

I don’t know who said that first actually but then does it really matter who said it first. What matters is that once you have people on your list you can make money no matter what.

Your list is a group of people who have given you their e mail ids so that you can mail them.

Why would anyone give you their e mail id?

Legitimate question. My answer is that if you use a freebie to attract the attention of people then you will be able to get their e mail ids.

See I offer a free e book which will tell you the exact steps of making atleast $400 per month with just one page sites.

I will tell you some simple maths.

Lets say you have 100 people on your list to start with.

If you are on my list then you will get invaluable training borne out of watching a hell lot of internet marketers, watching what exactly are they doing to en cash their list.

So you have 100 people on your list and these guys trust you because you have only sent them out useful stuff.

One day you get a good offer which is not only useful for the people on your list but also gives you some cash in affiliate sales say $17.

You send out the offer mail and 10 people go ahead and purchase your product.

You have just made $170.

Next rinse and repeat.

You can make a lot of money from your list in this manner but be careful in sending out only good offers otherwise people wouldn’t buy.

Businesses are built on repeat customers.

Having shown you the importance of building a list and proved how lucrative an asset it can be I will also compare two popular services which are commonly used by people for sending out e mails to their list.

Why should you choose a premium mail service like Aweber from the start itself? Say you see the goodness of Aweber later on then you will lose 70% of your readership just in switching to Aweber; the reason is that Aweber requires that your subscribers double opt in to it and most won’t shake their bones.

See the price list:

As you read on I will discuss the factors which inspired me Aweber. Aweber allows me to send as many e mails as needed. The basic trial version allows up to 500 subscribers but unlimited e mails and its only $1 to start with. If you are not satisfied with what Aweber then you can cancel the subscription and Aweber will refund you even that. Aren’t they cool??

On the other hand the trial version on Mailchimp allows me 2000 subscribers but only few e mails per month.

Once I exceed that then I will be charged more than what Aweber charges me.

What do you need to consider when it comes to selecting an auto responder?

* Deliverability rate

* E mail tracking

* Whether it allows affiliate marketing…

All other factors are secondary.

Email tracking:

Undoubtedly Aweber’s e mail tracking has an edge when it comes to finding out who exactly opened your email and the tracking system works even if your readers open their e mails on mobile.

Aweber tells you which e mails were opened by which subscribers.

How many of those subscribers actually clicked on the links that you sent and how many times ?

How many of those clicks resulted in people buying the product- The conversions…

This is what I mean-

One thing with Aweber is that the urls that point straight to your domain are kept like that only and are not super cryptic as in the case of Mailchimp.

When I mean super cryptic, this is how it looks

http://seekdefo.us6.list-manage.com/track/click?u=6ef36319ad0463bea815e9039&id=ed0202a126&e=d4589b93ca

and the destination where I wanted people to go was a problogger article.

Now how many of you will click on that?

These are the small things that matter and Aweber takes care of them and when these urls look normal in Aweber they have a way of tracking them, telling you whether those links have been opened or not.

Click through rates depend on what users feel about your link. If they look spammy don’t expect high click through rates.

Again you have another trouble with Mailchimp’s tracking system that they only assign stars to subscribers and I have no way of knowing whether they have opened the email.

I too am a part of my own list and Mailchimp has placed only two stars against me even though I open all mails but from a mobile.

See…

Aweber tells me exactly how many subscribers have opened the mail. This is always useful for me if I am split testing like improvising on my titles. I can see the response right before my eyes. With Mailchimp this never happens. Almost all the users find that the tracking system was designed in heaven when they switch to aweber.

Kim Roach says that she makes 95% of her income from her list.

Deliverability rate:

The official website of Aweber declares that they have a 99.9% deliverability rate. They lie.

From experience I say that they have a 100% deliverability rate.

Aweber doesn’t let my precious e mail fall into the spam box. I subscribed to the lists of 35 internet marketers for over 10 months and never has any of their e mails from the guys using Aweber landed in the junkyard.

Never means never!

I have seen people with Get response, Turbo response and a myriad of other services taking it to the spam box but never an e mail from Aweber.

Ok once John Chow’s e mail landed in the spam box but within a few hours it was automatically placed in my inbox.

That’s what Aweber does.

I did not white list any of those guys’ e mail ids.

Why would I?

I have already subscribed to you, downloaded your free e book after confirming my email. Now do not expect to go the extra mile in white listing your email id too.

And guess what? 90% of the people on your list will never whitelist your email id or re subscribe to you because of their laziness.

Why take the risk when you can have all the fun with Aweber?

Its a relief for me that when I send my e mails Aweber will take care of the fact. I don’t want to lose money for no fault of mine. Aweber sends e mails from the same mail address every time and if a user has to whitelist it he/she has to do it once and for all. With free autoresponders this is just not possible.

For example you receive the mail from a different mail address each time you receive a mail from the person who is using Mailchimp. There is thus a heavy risk of your mail falling into the inaccessible abyss of junk.

Whether it allows affiliate marketing:

Now read very carefully as this point is a sore to my eyes.

Affiliate marketing is not allowed on Mailchimp.

What for is then an email list. Yes I do have to send some quality e mails from time to time and also send them my blog updates but then how will I feed my kids( I don’t have kids but maybe you have).

Affiliate marketing has become an integral part of a professional bloggers’ income. AdSense is long dead, Panda beats the hell out of anyone and keeps on changing the rules by the week. I need to survive.

With Mailchimp the moment they find out that you are sending affiliate links they will ban your account and all your subscribers are then left for dead.

What this means is that everytime that you encounter some great offer that you would like to promote to your list you will first have to create a landing page on your blog and send the traffic to that instead of sending out the affiliate links.

So its twice the work with Mailchimp- “ The monkey does not get it”.

With Aweber that is not a problem at all. Send as many mails, put in as many subscribers as you want, send them as many mails anything.

The verdict is if you are no seriously into blogging or want to treat blogging as a hobby you need not even bother about either mailchimp( any free auto responder) or Aweber because its not for you. But if blogging is your business then I beg you to choose Aweber.

The following factors are not that important when it comes to e mail marketing but still I will discuss them.

Form Design :

When it comes to designing the forms of opt in pages Mailchimp provides more flexibility. But I am not a big fan of coding and that’s the reason that I love the pre designed, handsome custom forms of Aweber.

The size, wording, font and colour can be easily cutomized with Aweber. They love helping you design inbuilt opt-in forms. Now these forms can be hosted on Aweber‘s site.

MailChimp provides external opt-in forms to be used as opt-in pages hosted on MailChimp. Mailchimp gives you the raw code and the GUI can be used to design pop-ups.

But with everyone tending on services like Opt in skin for design of opt in forms sooner or later these tools tend to be useless. Again Mailchimp does do anything about on site forms and to make my code look the way it is one the side bar I had to take a run of many design websites.

They only have three forms- Naked, Classic and Super Slim and the first two are all but the same.

Drafting and Email Design:

Before jumping over to this point I will convince you the uselessness of this feature.

I will show you the sample e mails of a guy who makes $350000 from his list every month.

His name is not important but lets call him Matt lloyd.

This is how it looks-

See there’s no heavy html or pictures involved. With e mails you can’t afford to take the attention away from your message to html, to pictures. I hate the obsession which bloggers tend to have with mindless pictures.

Again its a fact that

80% of the e mails are now opened on mobile

If you plan to load the mail with pics and html e mail marketing is not for you.

I have just proven it.

Even then Aweber provides a good choice of email templates to choose from, but the text editing software sucks. It wreaks havoc with the html links of the e mail which you copy paste from your Word file.

Though they have said that they will be making a better text editor I see nothing new coming soon.

MailChimp however, supplies a large number of email templates, ranging from highly stylized to very basic. The interface for designing HTML emails is very flexible and you may even host images Mailchimp. But all of this makes Mailchimp slow and the site does not run on my chrome.

But I currently am with Mailchimp..

Why?

I am the only person(and now you) who knows all what Aweber has to offer but is still with Mailchimp because Aweber needs you to have a credit card to sign up.

Un till my next birthday I am not going to have one.

My father doesn’t have one and not even my good relatives have any, so I have no option but to bear all the losses and be with Mailchimp.

Once I exceed 2k subscribers I will need to pay with a credit card and at that point or even before that I will make my shift..

I am serious with my business and that’s why I couldn’t wait to get started on a mailing list.

So should you!

Sign up for Aweber now at $1