AUTOMATING YOUR E-ZINE

July 12, 2009 Written by Mr X 0 Comment

In the early days of your e-zine, you’ve got maybe what, 20 subscribers? Certainly this is a manageable list. And it’s certainly easy enough to handle emailing them and taking care of all requests for opt-ins and opt-outs.

But what happens when your list hits 1000, or worse, 10,000?

There is no way you can keep up with the emails, opt-ins and opt-0uts. Remember, people are going to be opting in at different times. You may get one person on January 1 and the next person on January 14. If you’re publishing a monthly e-zine, you’re going to have to make note that John Doe gets his email in the 1st of every month and Jane Smith gets her e-zine on the 14th of every month. And of course, if somebody opts in on the 31st of a month, well then you’ve got a real problem because some months have only 30 days and…

See the situation we have here?

Over time, there is just no way to handle your mailings manually. You will literally drive yourself nuts and everybody on your list nuts as well when they either don’t get emails when they’re supposed to or get them way too often.

So what’s the solution?

Automation, that’s what.

That’s where autoresponders come in. They make running an e-zine an absolute breeze.

Each autoresponder service is slightly different as far as the interface, option and how they operate, but for the most part, all good services have the following things in common.

  1. Automatic opt-in process – Simply have the person go to a web page form online, fill in their information and click submit. The service will then send them an email telling them that they have to confirm this, if double opt-in, which I recommend. This way you don’t have to keep track of who opted in and when.

  1. Automatic unsubscribe process – At the end of each email that gets sent out, the service will put a little blurb that says something like “If you wish to unsubscribe, please click here.” This way, you also don’t have t worry about removing people from your e-zine.

  1. Delay settings – Each person who subscribes to your e-zine has a subscribe date attached to their account. This makes it easy to determine when the next message goes out the subscriber and you don’t have to do anything other than type in your message into the area where all your messages are stored and designate when the message will go out in terms of number of days after previous message was sent. This way, if a person subscribes on the 7th of March and you are sending an email every 7 days, you simply just indicate for each message to send it out 7 days after the last message was sent. This way, each subscriber will get their message EXACTLY when they are supposed to.

There are more options than these, but these are the main ones that control the whole process. This way, you never have to worry about when to mail or anything when it comes to your e-zine, other than to just create your content.

Yes, autoresponders can greatly automate this process for you.

I’d be dead without mine.

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CREATING YOUR OWN E-ZINE

July 2, 2009 Written by Mr X 0 Comment

Now that we have established that creating your own E-zine is actually a good idea, we’re going to begin the process of actually creating the e-zine itself. The first step in doing this is deciding exactly what kind of e-zine you want to create.

Remember what we said in the previous article? There is more than one way to create an e-zine.

One is to offer what we call an e-zine newsletter. This is an e-zine that will be emailed to your subscriber base on a regular basis, whether it be daily, weekly, monthly or whatever frequency you choose.

In creating an e-zine newsletter that will be emailed, you also need to decide on the format of the newsletter itself. Are you going to send out text emails or are you going to send out your e-zine in HTML format? Just a word of caution; HTML emails are many times flagged as spam by Internet service providers, so you may want to stay away from them unless you have a really reliable autoresponder service that has an excellent delivery rate and reputation with the ISPs.

While we’re on the subject of autoresponders for your e-zine, there are a couple of ways you can go with this.

The first, and simplest, is to go with an autoresponder service like Aweber or GetResponse. Both are good services and you can’t go wrong with either one of them. They will both make sure that the bulk of your emails get delivered to where they need to go. The advantage of having an outside service is that you don’t have to worry about spam complaints, as they will handle all of them, including all opt-ins and opt-outs, or as is most commonly referred to as unsubscribes.

The downside to going with an autoresponder service is that you are pretty much at the mercy of their system. If there are things about it you don’t like, well, you either have to live with them or switch to a new service.

The second option is to have an autoresponder script set up on your own server. The advantages of this are that you are in complete control of your list and how your autoresponder works.

However, there is a HUGE downside to going with your own autoresponder script. Should one of your subscribers happen to scream spam (yes, it DOES happen), the complaint goes to your ISP. If you get enough of these complaints, your ISP can pull the plug on you and you’ll end up losing your hosting.

My personal recommendation is to go with a service like Aweber or GetResponse. You will save yourself a ton of grief.

Aside from offering your own newsletter through email, you can choose to offer your e-zine in the form of a web page that you would update every so often.

There are pros and cons to this as well.

The pros to having your e-zine on a web page are that you don’t have to worry about spam complaints. No emails are sent. The person just goes to the site, signs up for membership, gets his login and password and then accesses the site whenever he wants to. This makes for very little work for you as far as notifying members.

A good idea would be to have the last time the site was updated somewhere on the main page with what the update was so that people don’t have to go looking all around for the new information.

The cons of having your own web site e-zine are numerous.

For starters, maintaining a website is a lot more difficult and time consuming than typing up a 2 page letter and sending it out to subscribers. If you’re not an expert at web design, updating your site can be quite a painful process.

Another negative of having a member’s e-zine is that, unless you still have them opt-in, you have no way of contacting these people to let them know that the site has been updated. Many people, if not reminded about the e-zine, will simply forget that it exists and as a result will not come to the site at all after a period of time.

Another negative about having a website e-zine is security. If you want to keep the site only open to members, you’re going to have to have certain scripts written to keep people from hacking into your site. All of this is going to cost a lot more money than just sending out a newsletter, even if you do have to pay monthly fees to some autoresponder service.

Regardless of which format you decide to go with, there are going to be administrative headaches with each. Because of that fact, I strongly recommend staying away from the website and go with the email newsletter, at least when you first start out. As time goes by, you can “graduate” to a web based e-zine.

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Why Subscribe to an Autoresponder Service?

October 11, 2007 Written by ProIMer 0 Comment

Autoresponders are one of the more effective marketing tools you can use. With an autoresponder, you can build a leads list and create a schedule of follow-up emails you can send them automatically with links to the products you offer.

With an autoresponder, you can schedule the emails ahead of time and just sit back and watch the sales come in after scheduling your mailings.

There are different types of autoresponders. There are softwares you can set-up on your own hosting servers and there are the autoresponder sites that does everything for you. No need to manually set-up any softwares. Just subscribe to their service and everything is good to go. This one is the more preferred choice of the two.

The reason why you should subscribe to a web based autoresponder service rather than hosting your own are varied but the most prominent benefit is the ability to deliver. Of course subscribing to an autoresponder is not cheap but it will pay off in terms of deliverability. Most professional autoresponder services are known to large email hosts and you’ll be assured that more readers will receive your emails. The result is definitely more than sending them through your own domain.

Most autoresponder services have a beginner’s subscription plan which is usually less than 20 dollar for a leads list not larger than 500 subscribers.

There are even some that offers free subscription for those who have less than 500 leads list.

If you are really serious about building your list then try the following services Aweber.com, Getresponse.com, mailchimp, and emailaces.com. There are others out there so you are free to try, but before investing heavily in a particular autoresponder make sure to test their deliverability.

There’s no use spending on a service that won’t get your messages across to most of your subscribers. Enjoy!

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