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You know I’m a huge fan of email autoresponders. For proof just check in my article archives for articles like - Using Autoresponder Emails to Grab New Clients and Keep Them Coming Back for More and AWeber Email Autoresponder Review.

For many organizations autoresponders are used as a tool to maintain and build relationships with prospects and clients. I use autoresponders as my main client database resource and to send broadcasts and automatic marketing emails out periodically. Just recently I’ve started to make use of automatic emails as a passive income tool and it is fast becoming one of my favorite ways to monetize an email list.

Combining Affiliate Programs With Autoresponders

Essentially what I am talking about is promoting an affiliate product or service within an email autoresponder sequence. You write your email series, make sure you provide a ton of value to your subscribers, and filter in a soft sell of affiliate products. You might actually be using the autoresponder for a more specific reason, perhaps marketing your own product or service, and every email you send out clearly has this focus, but the occasional soft sell link or once-off affiliate promotion can work wonders as a passive income stream.

Here’s an example…

Let’s say you offer search engine optimizations services to your local small business community. You create an autoresponder series of 10 short lessons on SEO, including case study examples from your past clients (credibility building etc). Each lesson focuses on providing education to your reader as the primary message and you end every lesson with a short sales pitch for your own SEO services. When appropriate you mention you make use of a great SEO software tool, Brad Callen’s SEO Elite Software (aff) and recommend it to your subscribers. You might also explain how you use it when performing SEO for previous clients. As a result you make a few sales of the software and earn a commission.

Over time more and more people subscribe to your autoresponder series and every now and then you make another sale of SEO Elite. Later you add additional lessons to the sequence and include more product recommendations increasing your affiliate earnings. Over time this builds up into a substantial income stream, and best of all once you have written your autoresponder sequence, it’s pure passive income. If you have natural search engine traffic coming in (you should if you work in SEO!) or another cost effective means to generate new subscribers, your affiliate income will continue to flow indefinitely.

You can work this formula over time to build up an excellent source of passive income. It’s also a fantastic way to further monetize a list that you primarily use to build your client-base. The extra affiliate income may not be massive to start with but it certainly doesn’t hurt and you will learn some interesting things about your subscribers. For example, perhaps your list isn’t converting well at selling your $297 consulting service but you do sell a few $37 ebooks via affiliate promotions. Maybe you can change the focus of this particular autoresponder sequence to only sell affiliate products and find other ways to market your consulting service. Perhaps this teaches that you need to refine your sales funnel for your own services by selling a $37 ebook of your own first and then later you upsell your $297 consulting service.

Repeat Exposures

If you are in business or you have been reading my blog for a while you know that it takes multiple exposures to a product before a person buys. It’s been tested to take between three and seven exposures before you close a deal, depending on what you sell, whether it’s offline or online marketing and all kinds of other variables. The important point is that it takes multiple exposures, once usually isn’t enough, and the same goes for affiliate selling. If you are planning on becoming a super affiliate you need to build marketing tools that expose your subscribers and readers to your promotions over and over again, and email autoresponders are perfect for just that purpose.

Here’s another example…

You can tell I’m pretty happy with AWeber (aff), the company I use to handle my email autoresponders (a full review is here). You can also tell I know something about using autoresponders - I certainly have ideas, this article is one - so I could put together a sequence of lessons on how to make use of autoresponders.

I would set them up to go out in an autoresponder sequence and of course in each lesson I would recommend AWeber and perhaps some of the other email autoresponders like GetResponse (aff) as an affiliate. Provided I made sure my lessons offered really good ideas and advice, people would spread the word and no doubt I could continue to bring in more subscribers. Best of all AWeber offers affiliates ongoing referral commissions for the lifetime of the customer you refer, so if the people I sign-up to AWeber remain with the AWeber service I continue to earn a commission month after month. Do the math - if I get recurring commissions and continue to sign-up new customers via my email course about autoresponders - the income will compound - and it’s all automatic, once again provided I have a means to sign-up new people to my email autoresponder series.

This idea is so good I’m actually considering it. If I wasn’t focusing my energies on blogging I’d be writing that course right now. Whether it would be more profitable than my other ideas I don’t know, but it’s worth testing since it’s so easy to set up with the power of autoresponders and the income opportunity of affiliate programs.

Give It A Go

If you already have an email list going via an autoresponder it doesn’t hurt to test out a few affiliate promotions. If affiliate marketing is your game, or you intend it to be, you must use autoresponders for maximum return on minimal effort. Remember autoresponders aren’t just lead generation tools for businesses - you can use them specifically to sell other people’s products as an affiliate. Imagine setting up ten high-quality online courses which are all delivered automatically through autoresponders and all sell affiliate products. Once you have set things up you can sit back and watch the affiliate income come in provided you have a mechanism to bring in quality subscribers. It’s almost easy…

Yaro Starak
Autoresponder Affiliate Marketer

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I realize there is plenty of advice online regarding this topic but this is one area where you can’t have too much advice so I’ll tell you my short story about how I cut the amount of spam I receive by about 75%.

It finally got to me last week. I’ve been dealing with about 200 to 1000 spam emails coming in each day and just filtering it using Mailwasher (aff) was turning into a job taking an hour or so a day - that’s what I call time wastage! The problem is most of it was coming to @betteredit.com email accounts which have been around for many years now since the website is nearly 6 years old. That’s a long time for the SPAM bots to get a hold of the domain name for spoofing and spamming.

Another problem was that I have the admin@ and yaro@ BetterEdit email addresses splattered on websites all over the place. The admin@ address was also the main BetterEdit email for all jobs and customer queries and had been so for the last 5 years. I was worried about changing it since so many clients are used to the email address.

I investigated my hosting control panel to see whether I could set up the appropriate mail bounce autoresponse and redirection process so as to minimize the risk of lost client emails and slowly phase out the current BetterEdit email accounts and set up new fresh ones. My PLESK control panel/hosting admin system once again delivered.

Here is exactly what I did.

1. I set up the new main email address for BetterEdit (contact@)
2. I set up a bounce message to go to anyone who emailed the addresses I was phasing out (yaro@ and admin@). If any real people sent email to the old addresses the bounce message would tell them about the change of emails address.
3. For the same two email accounts I am phasing out (yaro@ and admin@) I ensured that the email would also be redirected to the new addresses (contact@ for admin and yaroATblogtrafficking.com yaro). That means that any email sent to the old address is not lost since it is redirected to my new accounts plus any real people get notified of the change of address from the bounce message. I will eventually remove the redirects after a few months once I am sure everyone has realized the email accounts have changed. I want to keep monitoring the old addresses for a while yet just in case.

Encoded Email

That ensured the switch to new email accounts was complete. Now the next step - and I think is why the real spam reduction took place, so pay attention and do this yourself - was to encode all the email addresses I publicly place on my websites. To do this I made use of character entities and the fantastic free online tool at http://www.wbwip.com/wbw/emailencoder.html.

The encoding tool is just a web form were you type in an email address and it spits out the appropriate character entities to generate the website address. For example, this email address -

yourname@domain.com

In the source code would look like this:

yournam
e@domai
n.com

If I placed those characters into the code of a webpage they would appear as yourname@domain.com to people viewing the page through a browser.

This is supposed to help with reducing spam because those nasty spam bots which scour the web looking for email addresses to send junk email to don’t pick up the encoded addresses. Now I really believe the spam artists are smart enough to get around this technique, however I think a lot of them are just plain lazy so they don’t bother setting up a system that can pick up encoded email addresses. Most people don’t use encoded email addresses either so the spammers get good results from their bots regardless.

I set up encoded addresses for every instance of an email address on all pages of the BetterEdit.com website.

More Bounce Messages

If you are like me you may have purchased some top level country domain names for your business. For example I also have BetterEdit.com.au, BetterEdit.ca and BetterEdit.co.uk. Initially I had a catch-all email set up for these domains so any email sent to them would be “caught” and forwarded to my actual BetterEdit email address. I had it set up this way because I didn’t want to miss any legitimate email sent to my alternative domain names by mistake.

This set-up was responsible for more spam because my domains are being spoofed - that means the spammers are making it appear that the email they are sending are coming from my domain names. The result of this is that I get the bounce messages or emails from anyone silly enough to reply to spam thinking they can unsubscribe.

To deal with this situation I changed the catch-all settings so instead of forwarding mail to me I have a bounce message directing any real people to my website to locate the current contact details. If anyone seriously wants to get in touch with my business they will go to the website and find the correct contact method.

Great Anti-Spam Results

As I write this I’m getting about 75% less spam than I was getting this time last week. Once I switch off the redirects on the old address it should become even less. That’s added an extra hour per day of valuable time to my business, not bad if I do say so myself! If you are finding yourself dealing with abundant spam perhaps some of my tips above will help you too.

Yaro Starak
Spam Assassin

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I recently made one aspect of my online business more efficient. This technique demonstrates the power of an email autoresponder. In this case I turned something that used to be a relatively mundane manual business annoyance into a resource. Best of all it took about 10 minutes to get set-up and it’s been doing a great job ever since.

What Are Autoresponders?

If you don’t know what an autoresponder is go ahead and read an article I wrote a few months ago about the subject - Using Autoresponders To Grab Clients. In a nutshell, autoresponders are email capture and broadcast tools that allow you to stay in touch via email with people that opt-in to receive communication from you. All the emails are set-up to be sent automatically at specific time intervals so you don’t have to do anything once the initial work is complete. They can also be used to manage newsletters.

My original article on autoresponders is due for an update and in fact I have plans for two more articles on autoresponders because I believe they are one of THE most crucial elements to success online. If you currently run any online enterprise then you need to be using them. My original article recommended the Marketer’s Choice system but I have since changed my autoresponder service of choice to Aweber. I’ll be explaining why in another article but put simply I believe Aweber to be the best autoresponder available by far and happens to be a lot more affordable than Marketer’s Choice if all you need is comprehensive email autoresponding (Marketer’s Choice also has a shopping cart, affiliate module and a bunch of other stuff that I currently don’t need).

A Common Problem

I bet a lot of online service providers have the same problem I had - random strangers soliciting for employment. Many a time I have answered my phone to the question “Is this BetterEdit?” to which I respond positively, excited about the potential new client I may be speaking to, only to be disappointed two seconds later when I hear the line “I’m looking for proofreading work” or a two minute life story that is supposed to convince me to hire them immediately. The same situation was repeated on email almost every other day with a random application sitting in my inbox.

I have nothing against people looking for employment, I think it’s great they are being proactive. In fact I can’t really label this a real ‘problem’ since every six months or so I do hire new staff. The issue was the random nature of the queries that often annoyed me and that I had no good way to control it. I felt bad for the poor (often literally) soles desperate plea for work that I simply couldn’t help. I hire only two times per year and while I wish I had enough work to always need more editors it’s just not the case.

The Solution

After signing up with Aweber and moving my old mailing lists to the new system I started hunting around for places where an autoresponder could enhance my current systems. The first place that came to my was the recruitment section of my website. I had in a place a page that described our hiring policies, stating we only look for new staff twice a year but that didn’t seem to stop the random queries. In most cases I kept the emails in a folder and when it came time to hire individually emailed each person that had contacted me. A laborious activity ripe for an autoresponder.

The implementation was easy. I set up a new autoresponder with a basic name and email address opt-in form that prompted potential applicants to join the announcement list for notification of when I hire new staff. Upon signing up the first email reiterates our usual hiring practices and they can rest assured they will know if any job openings become available.

Many Benefits

From my point of view I gained a fantastic list for recruitment purposes. I will never have a problem finding staff with a list of editors eager for work at my finger tips. I send a broadcast email to the list, collect applications and choose the best using our usual hiring process.

The amount of random employment solicitations has dropped significantly. I still get the occasional phone call from an extra eager bunny and direct them to the web form to sign up to the list. This makes the recruitment process much easier to control.

An unexpected benefit, one that I haven’t made use of yet but may one day be an opportunity, is the potential to monetize the list. Currently my job openings list is growing faster than any other list on my site. I get close to double the amount of people looking for work than potential customers signing up, which is the nature of the industry at the moment (the supply/demand relationship is not good for editors and proofreaders).

My list is not only great for HR but is also a steadily building targeted mailing list. Now I understand that I can’t abuse this list as a spammer and send out product announcements every week, but if I find something that can really help people looking for editing work it might be appropriate to use my list. For example I may produce an ebook designed to teach proofreaders how to land contract work online, a how-to guide to using Elance to get work perhaps, and sell it through my list. Or perhaps I could use it as a recruitment service for other proofreading companies, sending job announcements to the list in exchange for a commission for filling positions. These are hypothetical situations, but clearly the potential exists and I wouldn’t have had the opportunity if I didn’t use an autoresponder to control this aspect of my business.

Systematic Communication

I am totally convinced of the value of targeted mailing lists. Businesses thrive and grow on their ability to communicate with people. The more people you can reach with your message the more customers you can get. If as an online business owner you are still using manual communication techniques to stay in touch with your prospects and clients take a step back and see where an autoresponder could take over the job for you and create a valuable mailing list at the same time.

Yaro Starak

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***Update***

BONUS - I’ve just recorded a 10 minute companion podcast recording to go with this article. The podcast will only be sent to people that subscribe to the mailing list (it comes 24 hours after you subscribe), it will not be released on this blog. You can sign-up at the end of this article.

******

If you know anything about online marketing you know that an email list is probably the most important ingredient for success. Your email list is your list of prospects, people that are interested in what you offer, and some of them will hopefully one day become your customers.

The email list is a powerful marketing tool because it’s targeted. The process of signing up subscribers to the list should qualify your members as relevant prospects. What you offer therefore is very important because it impacts on the type of people that will subscribe to your list and how many will subscribe.

There is no magic formula for what you should offer for subscribing to a list and as with all marketing you should test to find out what works best. One of the most common methods, especially early on in the email marketing days, is the newsletter format. Periodically, usually once or twice a month, you send out an interesting newsletter to your subscribers. The content could be a single article or a collection of relevant news, articles and resources.

In the more recent history of email marketing the free report or e-course giveaway has been a common enticement to get visitors to sign-up to a list. This format is part of the early stage of what is called an online marketing funnel - a systematized process of collecting suspects, turning them into prospects, then customers then repeat customers. The report or e-course serves to give away some free information, valuable information, that demonstrates your skills and expertise as a teaser of what your full products or services offer, which are upsold to the email list automatically using autoresponders after the e-course or report has been delivered.

Another method to build a list is offering summaries of the content you already produce or other people produce, providing website links to the full articles. In this case the email list serves as a reminder to bring people back to the website so they don’t have to check in everyday. This method is often used by website owners that generate income from advertising. The email list brings readers back to the site to read the articles, increasing page impressions and hopefully click through rates and revenues.

Having an email list can also be a pseudo bookmarking tool. You may not offer any regular content for your list and simply call it a members list stating that you will send out announcements to the list whenever you launch something new, write a good article or come across something that readers would also like to read. This method allows readers to keep in touch without the list owner having to commit to producing anything on a regular basis. It’s simply a notification list when something of interest comes up that allows members to keep tabs on you and your website without checking in everyday.

Building An Email List - Follow My Case Study

If you are reading this article from the Entrepreneur’s Journey website you will no doubt see the big fat subscribe box at the top of the site and yes, you guessed it, I’m building a list. This is the first time I have attempted to build an email list on the topic of Internet business as all my previous lists have been related to my other businesses. I figured that most of my readers are interested in online marketing hence the process of building an email list would be a very interesting case study.

The Entrepreneur’s Journey email list is going to be my master list for all things related to this blog and my online business activities. As you can see at the moment I have positioned the list as a method for subscribers to keep up to date with the articles I write on this blog. I will be sending out a notification to the list immediately after I post one of my large instructional or commentary articles. I will not be sending notification to the list for every post made to this blog, only for the big articles I write (if you read my blog often enough you will know what I mean by the *big* articles), not the news pieces or small articles.

However list members will enjoy a lot more than just links to my articles. It will be a launch list, so subscribers will be the first to know exactly what I am up to regarding the launch of my online business projects, they will receive my information products first (I’ll be distributing my free whitepaper e-book to the list in the near future) and will also be the first to know about my e-courses or special articles and websites that I produce. Basically it will be the master list for anyone interested in the content I produce teaching and discussing online marketing and Internet business.

Market Testing

I’m going to be as transparent as I can be regarding this case study. Since you will likely be a participant if you join my list, as well as an observer if you follow this case study, it will allow you to gain a unique insight into the list building process from both sides of the fence.

As I stated above, at the moment the list is pitched as a means to keep track of my big blog articles. This will be a test to see how many subscribers can be attracted with this angle. I will also test nearly every method I mentioned at the start of this article to attract new subscribers. The focus will always be aimed at attracting people wanting education and information on Internet business and online marketing but I will test out different sign-up methods.

My e-book whitepaper on Internet business is almost finished. Once it is ready I will use it as a free giveaway for people that subscribe to the list. The same thing will happen with a free e-course I will probably have ready early next year. I’ll also have limited offers on special podcast audio recordings, article packages and other free content. I’ll place sign-up boxes on other websites, and some will focus only on getting sign-ups using techniques like the namesqueeze and micro sites (landing pages only).

It will be an ongoing process that I hope will help me to establish an email list of at least 1000 targeted prospects within 12 months, maybe more if things go well. I’ll report back the milestones to this blog from time to time but for the moment if you want to get in on the action there is only one thing you need to do - subscribe!

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A common question asked when you first set out to write an email newsletter is whether it should be a plain text email or HTML (web page style). This is an important consideration since your choice impacts on how many people read your newsletter and how they respond to it. Let’s look at the obvious pros and cons of each format.

HTML Emails

THE GOOD

• Interactive - active elements can be inserted into emails limited only by what email clients can handle. May include movies, games, surveys or any active content.
• Metrics - Code can be placed into emails to provide detailed statistics on whether your email newsletters are read, for how long and which links are clicked and followed.
• Formatting can be controlled to the finest details including fonts, spacing, and design.

THE BAD

• Creating HTML emails take a lot of time and technical proficiency.
• Not everyone has an HTML capable email client in which case you will be excluding some people.
• Your basic message may be lost by the excessive content and “eye candy”.
• The range of options available in HTML are extensive and can lead to what I call “TMOS” - Too Many Options Syndrome, which is the antithesis of the concept “KISS” - Keep It Simple Stupid. TMOS can stop you from functioning efficiently because you are bogged down with how many things you could do, you end up doing nothing.

Plain Text Emails

THE GOOD

• Easier to create - just type words.
• Less chance of formatting problems making the email display incorrectly.
• Less chance of a SPAM filter blocking the mail.
• Message will be easily digested by the reader provided you write it well.
• No distractions from graphics or over stimulation from too much content competing for attention.
• You sell with words, the most powerful sales tool available on the web if used correctly.

THE BAD

• Harder to capture statistics.
• Hyperlinks may not be active (most text based email clients convert HTTP links to clickable but some still don’t).
• Limited to text to convey your message.
• No multimedia can be included.

Why Do You Have a Newsletter?

Let’s cut to the chase here. Why do you have a newsletter? If you are running an Internet business your newsletter functions as a customer retention tool, sending out periodic reminders to pull your prospects/customers back to your site. Newsletters themselves also function as a direct sales tool. It doesn’t matter if you are selling affiliate products, your own products, a service or information, your newsletter is meant to do one thing - illicit a response from its audience.

In order for your newsletter readers to feel compelled enough to take action your newsletter must clearly state it’s message AND create enough of a pull, usually via emotional tugging, to get the reader to do something. The same rules that apply to websites and copywriting apply to newsletters except you have even less time to convince your reader to do something.

Newsletters fall into the domain of email, the most popular web activity. Email is mainstream, it has penetration and people of all ages and backgrounds know how to use it. Consequently the learning curve is a little higher and your readership knows how to at least complete the basic functions with email. This means that they are quite capable of giving each email about 1 seconds worth of attention before clicking that delete button. That’s not a lot of time to convince them that your email is worth reading.

Should I use Plain Text or HTML Newsletters?

In my opinion, plain text should be your choice for email newsletter format. Why? Because of the numbers. Email newsletters are a form of direct response marketing and in direct response marketing the numbers matter.

From the point of view of a small business owner with limited time and resources you want to maximise the results you get from your newsletters. You want a lot of responses to whatever your newsletter is trying to do. You should be able to easily test different copy and see which works best so you can maximise the numbers. It’s all about the numbers…

Your newsletter must hit the reader quickly and compel them to read on. Any delays or presentation errors are going kill your chance of capturing the attention of the reader. While plain text emails are not immune to display errors (more on this later) they are a lot more likely to be digested by the reader even if things don’t format exactly how you want them to.

A plain text email is more likely to reach a larger amount of people than a HTML email simply because plain text is more compliant to standards. Plain text emails are less likely to be blocked by SPAM filters. Plain text emails will display immediately, there are no download times waiting for graphics to finish loading. Plain text emails are more likely to display properly regardless of what email client your subscribers use. All this adds up to plain text emails being read more often…better numbers…see a pattern here?

Words Sell

Bells and whistles are nice. Interactive toys and flashy lights and sounds are great. But ultimately it’s words that sell. If you write compelling newsletter copy aimed at your target audience that have been carefully selected by the methods used to acquire newsletter sign-ups, you have the perfect vehicle to illicit a response using words that sell. Why dilute your message by wrapping it within colours and images or overstimulating your readers by providing too much information when a few paragraphs can create your desired results more effectively.

Why Not Use Both Plain Text and HTML?

Good idea! If you have the resources and skills to produce a quality HTML and plain text newsletter then by all means offer both to your audience and let them nominate which they prefer, or better still have the email automatically display the appropriate format by detecting what type of email client they have. If you offer both be sure to test to make sure it’s worthwhile. Are more people responding to plain text emails? Well in that case send everyone plain text.

In my case I’m a small business owner and I’m going to be writing the newsletters myself. I do not have time nor the skills to create a new HTML webpage for every newsletter I produce. I could perhaps have a nice standard template designed which I use for newsletters but as I wrote above, I believe that is a waste of time. Words sell, so I’ll focus on creating emotionally compelling words for my newsletters rather than waste time trying to get a box to align right correctly.

Tips for Better Plain Text Newsletters

TELL A FRIEND

Remember how I talked about the numbers? Your efforts should be focused on ensuring the maximum number of people are exposed to your email so your emotionally compelling and convincing newsletter can work it’s magic. This doesn’t have to be limited to just your newsletter subscribers — your subscribers can be turned into evangelists for your newsletter. Make it easy for your subscribers to forward your newsletter on to friends and associates - suggest it to them at the end of the newsletter. Of course for this work you better be creating a damn interesting newsletter.

WORD WRAPPING

Plain text can format incorrectly and one of the most common problems is line breaks. Either lines breaking too early causing your sentences to look
disjointed and
clumsy, or no line breaks at all, causing one of those nasty horizontal scrollbars to appear and your reader to read off the page to finish a sentence. The screen resolution of your subscribers computers can also impact how your text wraps causing these problems.

You can’t control the monitor resolution of your readers or what email client they use, all you can do is try and account for as many variables as possible. To compensate for this problem you have to set a characters-per-line limitation. I’ve researched into newsletter formatting and different people give different suggestions, from 68 characters per line to 63. I’ve decided to recommend to you the round number of 60 characters per line. This will give you nice compact paragraphs made up of nice compact sentences that are likely to avoid most word wrapping (or lack thereof) problems your readers might experience. On extremely high resolutions there will be a lot of white space and your email might look like one big long tower of text but that’s still a lot better than broken sentences or horizontal scrollbars and won’t be too common a problem.

How To Set Characters Per Line Limitations

You didn’t think I would tell you what to do without giving you practical advice on how to do it would I?! Of course not.

I have a script on my site that you can use to format text that will handle email newsletter formatting to any character width you specify. Better still it can even undo the current character spacing on any text you have, so it’s definitely a tool worth book-marking.

Newsletters Are An Important Tool For Your Online Business

Many of the most successful Internet entrepreneurs are wealthy because they have massive (10,000+) lists of highly targeted subscribers that they have been building for years. One well written affiliate product email to a good list can create thousands of dollars of sales and you don’t even supply the product.

Better still once you have a solid list you can contact similar focused online marketers and carefully select the right cross promotional activities that can double your exposure with one email to their list. Of course you have to have your own list to make available for cross promotions before you can expect to work with other people - the smart/persistent/rich help each other to get richer.

Even if you are using your newsletter as a step in the conversion process to generate sales of your own products or services it’s a wise to stay up to date on good newsletter management techniques. By focusing on the numbers you can maximise direct responses that will lead to more sales as visitors become prospects and prospects become clients.

Yaro Starak

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