Beginner List Building Advice and New AWeber Features

I just checked out the news from AWeber, the company that handles my email lists and newsletters, about the new features they are launching soon. The list includes:

AWeber Upgrades

• Completely new design: Theme colors that don’t get in the way of getting work done.
• Button colors: Green is good, red makes you pause before doing something potentially bad.
• Menu navigation: Get to any page in your account with a single click.
• Reports & Statistics: Hover over any graph to see specific subscriber numbers and rotate pie charts to get a better view.
• Drag and drop to reorder follow up messages.
• One click to turn click tracking on/off without reloading the entire page.
• Currently active list and change list option is more visible.
• Search leads displays faster and paging thru hundreds of subscribers is faster.
• Web form creation wizard steps you thru creating a new form for your website.
• Bookmark any page and when you login later you’ll go directly to that page.

You can read more here: AWeber: Easier & Faster Sneak Preview.

Sounds like there might be some nice Ajax injected into their control panel, which is great news. In particular the ability to reorder emails quickly is something I appreciate. While the current AWeber system is nice and easy to use, it’s a bit clunky and there are lots of inefficiencies. To be honest though I’ve never come across an email autoresponder system that is truly efficient, which is funny given the core function - sending emails - is so simple, yet the amount of options involved in running an autoresponder service makes things quite complicated.

I’m going to rely on AWeber more and more in the near future as I build email lists for different things, so it’s very important that Tom and his team are focused on updates, it shows me that they are not sitting back and resting on their previous successes.

Beginner Newsletter Advice

My mother is about to launch her first email newsletter to augment her counselling business in Brisbane. She is not very technical so I’m not sure she will ever be able to add newsletters to AWeber herself, so will probably pay someone to do it for her (or bug me about it!).

I gave her some advice that I will pass on to you too now if you are a beginner email list builder.

Before even starting, sit down and consider the who, what and why. You want to know exactly who you are attempting to attract with your newsletter and what they get out of it from you. You also need to know why you even need the newsletter in the first place - have a clear idea of what the newsletter does for you in your overall business strategy.

In my mother’s case, she wants to build a profile in the relationships counselling area and create some form of community with her newsletter and eventually a blog too. She has much grander plans, but I told her to focus on the baby steps today and see how the market responds to what you offer first. Right now she is focusing on writing the first newsletters in her email sequence, which is definitely a good place to start while you work to find someone to handle the technical implementation for you.

If you are just getting started in online business and are about to build your first email newsletter then AWeber is something you should review when doing your research (try GetResponse too). Check out my review of AWeber to help with your decision.