While We’re On The Subject Of Aweber, Let’s Talk About How This Service Can Reduce Your Workload

You’ve probably heard that creating a mailing list is one of the best ways to reach out to your existing or potential customers and keep them coming back to your site. Everytime you send them an issue, they are reminded of you, and given a reason to visit.

I heard about mailing lists four years ago, even tried to setup a few, but keep falling back on my goals of producing a full-blown ezine every week or every month. It’s hard work — almost a job by itself!

But then I found out about sequential autoresponders. Basically, you sit down one day and write out all of your newsletter issues, plug them into the program and tell the autoresponder when to send the email out. For example, my “Seven Secrets to Starting A Successful Online Business” ecourse is set to send out the first newsletter immediately after the subscriber has confirmed their desire to receive the series. The next issues are all sent seven days after the previous one.

Now isn’t that nifty? Sit down and work once, never have to touch it again (other than for updates over time).

Even better — you can also send a “broadcast” message. This means that if something happens that is time sensitive, for example, and you want all of your list members to know right now, or next Thursday, you can tell the system to send this message to everyone on the list at a specific time.

Still, even with the industry leading sequential autoresponder, Aweber, I held back, because I couldn’t decide on the right design for the newsletter. And coming up with three or four different articles for each issue was still a pain.

But that’s when my friend, Alice, taught me about the RIGHT way to send emails.  Her advice:

• Ditch the fancy graphics and use plain text
• Write to your list members as if you’re writing to one person
• Keep it short

Those words of wisdom changed my mailing list life. (And if you want to read more of her advice, you can sign up for her free Email Marketing Tips newsletter. This is also a perfect way to see her wisdom in action.

After following her advice, I have setup an ecourse, my Watersweb BizTips newsletter, the Free WAHM Stuff newsletter, an ecourse for my Affiliate Partners and there are more in the works.