Stay up-to-date via RSS!

Aweber is a brilliant marketing tool, no matter your niche or your business segment.  In fact, I try to offload as much data as I can onto our own servers, but I just can’t get away from using Aweber for one very simple task – autoresponders.

Aweber is a email marketing service that lets you collect email addresses and names.  Using those email addresses, you can send them weekly newsletter or whatever else you want.

There are all kinds of services and open source apps that do the same thing.  Constant Contact has a great service if you are looking for aesthetics in your email marketing.  PHPlist and Pommo are great open source utilities for setting stuff up on your own server.  None of these options, though, allows you to automatically respond to a new user!

What Aweber does is provide all kinds of tools for helping you collect email addresses.  There are popovers and inline forms.  You can even do popunders and that sort of stuff.

Basically this is how it works:

1. Someone signs up for your email newsletter or campaign.
2. They get an optin in their email.
3. Then the receive an email message immediately after confirmation.
4. In that email message, I like to include a link for a free download.  Something of value that will help them in their lives.

And then it starts…

You can now send them email newsletters or promotional material whenever you like.  It goes without saying – if you send them too much, they’ll unsubscribe.  But the beauty of it is you can write out 5 email messages and schedule them!  So your readers can get one every 2 weeks or once a month or whatever!

I have found that every 7-10 days is usually best.  It’s not long enough for them to forget about you, but it’s not short enough that they get pissed…

Let me know what you think about email newsletter promotion…  Does it work for you?  What are some of you tactics?

In today’s market, finding buyers and clients is difficult.  Money everywhere is down.  The stock market sucks.  People aren’t leaving their houses because it costs too much to eat out or to put gas in the car.  And a stimulus bill is supposed to fix this?

I have seen it in a lot in my endeavors, and it sucks.  As a business owner you are faced with the tough decision of cutting expenses, letting employees go, or totally closing up shop.

Within the last 4 or 5 months, I have had to experience all of these issues.  And with them comes the thoughts of hopelessness and failure.  But more than any of that, it’s the thought of being a disappointment that upsets me the most.

One thing you do is pull some cash together and do a mailing.

For those of you who follow me on Twitter, you might remember that I posted something to the effect of stamps being so damn expensive!  Well, what I was doing was a small direct mailing from a list that I had.  The mailing was simple – a 2 page letter that was written as personal communication and hand addressed. 

For those of you doing math in your head, that’s 500 hand addressed envelopes with a letter and my signature on it.  All told, it took close to 40 or so hours to get them in the mail.

Just so you can get a look at the letter and the way I did it, I’ll post a download and pics below..

Basically, the letter just posed a problem, suggested a solution, and introduced myself.  It was meant to be read by a business owner or someone directly related to a company’s website.
After about two weeks, we compiled the results.  Of the 500 letters that were sent:

• 82 came back due to bad mailing addresses.  I know it’s advisable to clean a list with a postcard which is cheaper to mail, but money was tight…
• I got 13 special report downloads.  The special report was ironically about lead generation using your website.
• We received 2 direct phone calls about our services
• We also got 3 direct emails about our stuff

Total, that’s 18 responses out of 418, or 4.8%.  Now, 18 leads might not sound like a lot, but it’s better than none!  And when you are selling a product that costs about $4,000 on average that has potential to equal some significant revenue!

Once one of those deals close, we’re going to dump some of the proceeds back into the same marketing effort and see what kind of results we can get from our total list of over 2700!

Have you had any experience with direct mail?  Good?  Bad?

This last few months has been hard on millions of people.  Between the news, all of the stories I’ve heard, and the holidays – people are looking for a break.  They want to break out of their existence and start living their lives…

Starting in 2009, I am going to introduce something that I have been planning for a while – Entrepreneurship Training.  It’ll have a much more appealing title, but that is going to be the core of the courses.  I am thinking it’s going to be community oriented with training and business creation at it’s core – but you are going to have me and my team to work with.

Over the past couple years, I have been collecting and generating a ton of stuff on starting profitable businesses.  What I am going to do is assemble all that into a membership site, build in some community type tools and webinar access, and go from there.

Ideally, I would love for it to be a place that people looking to start a business can go, learn, find great ideas, and ultimately build them out…

So, look for it in the next month or so.  I am going to be using Christmas break to build it out.  And be sure, you, my closest blogging friends, will be the first to know about it.  Hell – I’ll even give you free access :0)

JD

This is just a quick note giving you a heads up that Tony Robbins has started filling up the pages of his new blog – Tony Robbins Training.

It’s video-centric so grab a cup of coffee or try to find it in iTunes and have a listen.  This guy is amazing.  I have bought his products and they’re worth every penny if you actually take the time to listen.

If you want success – this guy will help you find it.

Blink and The Tipping Point author Malcolm Gladwell talks about the decision-making process and uses the ‘Pepsi challenge’ to explain how fragile a person’s judgment can be.

Gotta love his hair too!