Building and growing your own list should be the top priority for every internet marketer. But getting subscribers on that list is just the first step. Building your autoresponder out with quality content and product offerings and managing it with segmentation and automation are the keys to creating consistent, sustainable income. It takes time and effort and some practice, but with a little experience a well-managed list can provide significant, sustained income with a lot less effort than chasing your tail trying to buy and sell product after product.
Downline mailers and safelists let you send the same message to a certain number of people on the list at certain time intervals. Obviously, the bigger the list you can send to, the more likely it is you’ll get a response. The problem with this “shotgun” approach is that in order to create a reliable and sustainable income you would have to send messages by the boxcar load every day, using as many mailers as you have time for.
Log in, send 1,000 messages, log out. Log in, send 5,000 messages, log out. Pretty soon it’s a full time job. And you’re making HOW MUCH money this way?
Once you have your own list, you can customize your content and offers to individual subscribers, using segmentation and automation, instead of flinging the same message at larger and larger numbers of possible readers and hoping some of them are interested.
Obviously, there are other means of driving traffic: PPC, video, social media, SEO, and more. Any of these methods will take considerable expenditures of time, or money, or both. And unless you are building a list of the visitors you attract, you have to keep doing the same thing over and over again to keep generating traffic.
With your own list and an autoresponder, you can load your content, with well-placed offers, in advance, funneling ALL your subscribers along automatically, and use broadcast messages and segmentation to offer customized products or services as you have them available. Meanwhile, you can concentrate your time on BUILDING YOUR PRE-MONETIZED LIST.
The goal is to build a list of subscribers to which you can send any number of different offers, over and over again. That’s why “the money is in the list” and an autoresponder with your own list is so much more powerful than all the downline and safelist mailers in the world.
A good quality autoresponder doesn’t have to be expensive, and there are lots of options out there.
First, If you’re brand new to this, be sure to understand that when internet marketers talk about “autoresponders” they don’t mean the “unlimited autoresponders” included in most hosting packages. Those are basically “vacation” responders that send a pre-written reply to any email sent to the responder’s email address. As you should be able to tell from the discussion above, a professional autoresponder is a much more sophisticated tool.
Second, realize that while all quality autoresponders offer similar, but not identical, capabilities, there are three different basic “types” of autoresponder, and they function very differently. For many years “self-hosted” and “third-party” options have been available, and lately the “cloud-based” alternative has become popular.
A “self-hosted” autoresponder is installed on your own hosting account. The database is stored, and all mail functions handled, on your host’s servers. Unless you get clearance from your host ahead of time, just don’t do this. Many hosts specifically prohibit it, and if you are on shared hosting sooner or later (probably sooner) it will be a problem. It will likely also be a problem moving a self-hosted list later, after your webhost insists you get a dedicated server or go elsewhere, or trying to move your hosting account to a new provider with your self-hosted autoresponder attached. Trying to hang onto a self-hosted list once it gets much beyond a couple of hundred subscribers is the problem.
Even if you have a dedicated server or a very cooperative webhost, properly maintaining your database, handling bounced mail and spam complaints, and keeping (or getting) off blacklists is a lot of work. With an autoresponder service, this is a big part of what you’re paying for. We believe it’s money well-spent and suggest that unless you really, really know what you’re doing and have tons of time on your hands, you should stay away from the self-hosted option.
Cloud-based autoresponders are, obviously, a fairly recent phenomenon, and some offer an impressive selection of “extras” like no monthly fee (pay once and you’re in forever), “list cleaning” and superior deliverability. But look before you leap, and be sure you know what you’re getting into. Most of these services store your database but do not actually process your mailing.
They require you to subscribe to a third party SMTP service, like Mail Gun or Mail Jet, or connect your account to your own webhost’s SMTP service, which can be a problem on shared hosting. While some third-party SMTP services offer free trials or free subscriptions with limited features or list sizes, the increasing cost as your list grows approximates the cost of a third-party autoresponder, erasing the savings of the cloud-based service.
For most marketers a traditional third-party service that hosts and maintains your list is the best option. Big players like AWeber or Get Response can look pricey, and if you have a bloated list that doesn’t generate income you can overspend on an autoresponder to maintain a large list. These services sometimes offer free trials, or a free version, but be sure you know what you’re getting. When the free trial ends, you’ll either have to upgrade or find a way to move your list without losing most of your subscribers. And the free version is usually limited by number of subscribers and restrictions on the features available.
The “Send Steed” autoresponder at Leads Leap gets a lot of buzz among newbies, but unless you upgrade you can only use it as a downline mailer, you can’t pre-load messages. The upgrade is $27 per month. Leads Leap has a lot to offer, and if you are going to upgrade anyway Send Steed is a good option. But if you only want the autoresponder upgrade, the price is pretty high.
If you’re just starting out with an autoresponder and list building, we suggest you consider the following options. Each of these sites offers a large-capacity, professional quality autoresponder as part of a bundle of other additional tools and services for $15 or less per month.
One thing we have learned the hard way is to consolidate wherever possible. If you are using one site for rotators, another for splashpages, a different one for cloaking, or linking, you are wasting time and effort. In evaluating these sites you should consider the suite of tools available as well as the price. All are well-established, reliable, and have quality administration and support. These sites also offer various commissions on your downline, but we urge you to consider that as a bonus. The real value lies in the tools available, not a few bucks in commissions.