Entrepreneurs-Journey.com

A lot of people come to my blogs looking for advice and help to start their own Internet business. In order to help you make more informed decisions I’m producing a series of reviews of the software, web services, e-books and other online resources I use to manage my business and educate myself.

You can find a listing of all the reviews and links to the products and resources I use in the Resources Section of this website.

AWeber Email Autoresponder

Name: AWeber
URL: www.aweber.com
Purpose: Email autoresponding, list management

I’m starting my review series with probably the most important component, the glue that keeps my business together - my email autoresponder and list builder.

A few people left comments in my recent podcast interview with AWeber CEO Tom Kulzer asking whether the podcast would help them decide to use AWeber or not. It was not intended to be a review of AWeber, rather an insight into the CEO entrepreneur behind the company.

This article is intended to help you reach a decision on whether AWeber is the right email autoresponder for you and whether you need one in the first place.

Before reading on if you have no idea what an email autoresponder is or why you would need one or how you would use one please read my introduction to email autoresponders which you can find at my other blog about Small Business Marketing.

A Brief History

The reason why I first decided I needed an autoresponder was two fold:

1. As I educated myself in online business I realized that I needed to build lists of my customers and prospective customers so I could keep in touch and soft-sell my services. Thinking long term, if I wanted to sell my business my customer list would be one of my most valuable assets, so I needed to be collecting the email addresses of my target market from day one.
2. My student essay editing business, BetterEdit, was running with a rudimentary text-to-email contact form which I was manually printing to keep contact records. This was not an efficient manner to control my client files and it made it very difficult to email all my clients at once.

I went out looking for an autoresponder and was blown away by Marketers Choice (aka 1shoppingcart). What excited me was how all-inclusive the service was. It includes a shopping cart, autoresponder, affiliate manager, a click-tracker and much more, all linked together. It’s basically the best all-in-one online marketer solution. As you would expect there is a hefty monthly subscription fee broken down into different tiers.

My problem was that I really only needed the autoresponder but I didn’t let that discourage me and figured eventually as my online business empire grew I would make use of all the extra tools. I signed up for the cheapest plan at $29 USD per month and used that for about a year.

A Mini Review Of Marketer’s Choice

I know this is slightly off topic but it should still be relevant for you if you are deciding on which autoresponder to go with because Marketers Choice should be a major contender. There is really only once question you need to ask yourself (and no, it’s not “do you feel lucky, punk!”) -

Do you need just an autoresponder or all the other modules that Marketers Choice comes with?

If you have products you can affiliate sell, if you need an online shopping cart and an autoresponder and you want it all nicely linked together under the one system using the one database then Marketers Choice is for you. It’s a good system, used by some of the top online marketers (including Perry Marshall who I recommend a lot on my blog) and it’s very convenient to have all the services under one roof.

However if you break each module down individually they do have issues. It’s not the most intuitive system to use, although there is extensive documentation and instructional videos when you need help, and I found it a bit “clunky”. As a whole you can’t compare it but when you break it down module by module there are better options out there. This is one of the reasons I eventually decided to switch to AWeber.com.

Why I use AWeber Autoresponders

In a nutshell there were three reasons why I choose to move away from Marketers Choice.

1. I wasn’t using all the extra features.
2. Therefore I was being overcharged so I wanted a cheaper option.
3. I heard good things about another autoresponder called AWeber and I noticed many of the newsletters I signed up for from professional Internet marketers seem to be using AWeber mailing lists. The “street cred” was good.

As usual I did some due diligence first and looked around forums to see what people were saying about AWeber and it was very hard to find a negative comment. Most of it was glaringly positive, in fact it felt in most cases that AWeber was the de facto standard email autoresponder, which only happens when a product keeps its customers very happy.

Email Deliverability

I have no way of proving this, but since I read it in many places from different sources, I’ll mention it here. There is a big concern in email marketing circles about mail deliverability, which refers to whether emails sent (broadcast) to your lists make it through. The problem is a lot of mail servers block mass emails sent out and unless the email responder service provider has pre-arranged to be whitelisted your mail won’t get through. That’s pretty detrimental to any online company.

AWeber has the enviable record of the highest percentage of email deliverability, which means AWeber is doing a pretty good job to make sure your emails make it to your customers. This fact alone is enough of a reason to choose AWeber.com.

Functions

I won’t lie to you, there is a learning curve to using an email autoresponder, but you will find that with any system and you just have to learn your way through. I find AWeber’s system a lot less clunky than Marketers Choice. It’s simple in design with all the core features available through tabs at the top. It took me about an hour of playing with the system to get the hang of it.

One feature that’s not available that I would like to see is a one click back-up of all your mailing lists. I’ve emailed the support crew and it’s apparently on their to-do list, but for the moment backing up is a painfully slow manual process with lots of clicks.

One of the best features is when someone unsubscribes for one of your lists. Yes this is not a good thing but what makes it a good thing is that they are given the opportunity to leave a comment telling you why they choose to leave your list. As a business owner I’m sure you know how valuable feedback like this can be. It’s so nice to know why someone doesn’t find what you do satisfactory and often leads to some big improvements in what you do simply because you didn’t realize there was a problem until someone told you about it.

How I Use AWeber

Currently I use AWeber for all my online promotions and it controls all my email lists. I use it to distribute a Free Report at BetterEdit.com, which collects the email address of any person who downloads the free report and I then keep in contact with a series of autoresponse emails. I also collect the details of anyone who submits the contact form at BetterEdit and of course of all clients that register to use the editing service.

AWeber is behind my latest project, Blog Traffic King. AWeber allows me to distribute my traffic tips newsletter to all my subscribers on a week-by-week basis and I can do once-off broadcasts whenever I need to.

A new feature AWeber recently implemented is an RSS-to-email service. This service is very helpful because I can create an email mailing list for people who want to stay up to date with my blogs via email. I just plug in my RSS feed, tell AWeber how many blog articles to send out in each broadcast and it will automatically control the mailing list. The service is not branded either and I have complete control over the presentation of the broadcast emails which makes it superior to almost all the other RSS to email services out there.

I also have various other small lists to keep in touch with certain groups. It makes it a lot easier to control your email contacts. From a sales point of view it’s a very powerful resource because it keeps you connected with your prospects and clients.

How Technical Is AWeber?

It took me about 1-2 hours collectively to master AWeber. I’m not a programmer but I am very fluent in HTML and online business. AWeber has been built to be as “cut and paste” as possible and you certainly do not need to know HTML to implement it. Most of the interface is simple forms you fill out and once you have a play you will understand how everything works. Of course there is a very good helpdesk and live support if you need it.

If you are not familiar with web basics like online forms you may need help. Read through the instructional materials now and then until you get the hang of it - I did a few times when I first started using the system.

Price

You can find AWeber’s pricing breakdown here. Since I knew I was going to use email lists extensively in the future I chose the yearly option with the heaviest discount (it works out to be $15USD per month). There is a money back guarantee so if I didn’t like the service I knew I could get a refund.

Choosing An Email Autoresponder

I don’t think of email autoresponders as the most complex programs yet they are a vital tool for successful online business. The main considerations for me are email deliverability, reputation and ease of use - AWeber satisfies me on all counts.

I recommend before choosing an autoresponder you do your own due diligence and read forums and ask for opinions from current customers. Narrow down your list of potential providers based on your most important criteria and then test one out. Remember making a purchase doesn’t lock you in, most online companies offer 30 day money back guarantees (just make sure there is one before buying).

*** UPDATE ***

July 2006 - Due to demand AWeber has created a one-step back-up function to back-up all your email list and autoresponder data. Hence the one complaint I had about AWeber is no longer a problem at all!

******

Yaro Starak
Online Marketer

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The Paypal Wars: Battles with eBay, the Media, the Mafia, and the Rest of Planet Earth
by Eric M. Jackson

Amazon: When PayPal launched its online payment service and set out to overhaul global currency markets it successfully weathered the dot-com bust and a fierce competitive struggle with the auction giant eBay. But hordes of government regulators, trial lawyers, and organized crime rings soon targeted PayPal for destruction, turning its quest to make Internet history into a desperate struggle for survival.

Review

Ever since I finished reading The Perfect Store - Inside eBay by Adam Cohen I’ve compared other dot.com business books against it. It’s the bar that other books must strive for. The Paypal Wars was high on my ‘to read’ list because of PayPal’s tight relationship with eBay, first as a competitor to eBay’s Billpoint service and then replacing Billpoint as the official payment system for eBay after being purchased by the auction giant for 1.5 billion in 2002. I had high hopes this story would be as good as eBay’s but I also knew from my own experiences and familiarity with Paypal that the background story wasn’t quite as rosy as eBays.

This book recounts the story from Eric M. Jackson’s point of view, a senior marketing employee with Paypal from the very early days. Jackson appears to be privy to most inside goings on within Paypal but didn’t quite have all the top level secret knowledge as say the executive management team or founder would have had, or an extremely investigative journalist as was the case in the eBay book (he didn’t learn about the eBay buyout until it was reported by the media for example). Regardless he still manages to tell a reasonably comprehensive tale but not quite as detailed and polished as I would have liked. I must say that one thing really bothered me - the standard cliche sentences he constantly used at the end of sections. He re-used “this was only a taste of things to come” style of teaser over and over again. It’s okay to use these, but because he constantly used them in each chapter it made the book read a little bit amateurish.

The Paypal story is a good read if you want a feeling for what goes on behind the scenes in an entrepreneurial, innovative company riding the dot.com wave. I was amazed at times that a company could operate on such huge negative cashflow. At one point well above $20 million per quarter was lost. What made it worse was that the negative cashflow was not just because of credit card fraud, the mafia and other types of fraud, the business model itself was a contributing factor.

The business was not built to make profit, it was built to sign up new users by offering a free $10 sign up gift (later reduced to $5) and a referral commission system to entice a viral word of mouth. In hindsight it worked out okay and they later slowly managed to tweak the system and instigate a model that turned cashflow positive but still it was a very ballsy way to grow a company. Paypal was one of the lucky few that managed to do it and survive.

During this period the concept of network effects was driving many dot.com business models. If a company could be first to critical mass by gaining traction quicker than any other company they would be first over the line and eventually win a monopolistic position in the industry (much like eBay and PayPal have now). This goal was funded by venture capital groups and angel investors so many very very unprofitable businesses were cash rich and spending big. Paypal was one of these and it was interesting to read what went on behind the scenes at a business built for speed and growth at all costs.

The fact that Paypal was the first post September 11 dot.com IPO is tantamount to what a good idea it is. In essence it allows people to trade funds simply and easily over the Internet using email. It succeeded fundamentally because it was a good idea that met a clear need in the new world economy.

Early on Paypal did not target online auctions because they assumed it was mismatched targeting. Eventually they tested auctions and found that users were very keen and in one brief period they steered the Paypal ship squarely at eBay (and Yahoo! Auctions at the time) changing their strategic direction entirely. This was followed by an eventual war with several other online payment start-ups and a merger with one of them, X.com, that led to a clash of cultures and internal strife. These matters were resolved with some top level management culling and a realignment of goals. Finally as competitors dropped away only eBay’s Billpoint was left and a long hard fought struggle ensued finally culminating with the purchase of Paypal by eBay and the closing of Billpoint.

This book is worth a read because it gives a great window into a start-up business culture. The author clearly describes his work environment and later in the book proclaims the differences in culture between Paypal and eBay as one of the main reasons why Paypal was able to out manueveur Billpoint on so many occasions. It’s a great book if you enjoy stories of Internet business companies that grow excessively fast using venture funding. It also mentions some of the interesting marketing ploys Paypal employees used to outfox the competition, which are practical real-world examples of entrepreneur-driven company competitiveness.

Rated: 3 / 5

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The Perfect Store - Inside eBay
by Adam Cohen

Amazon: From its beginnings as a hobby site on a Silicon Valley PC, to its maturation as a real company under the burgeoning fiscal pressures of cyberspace, to its present status as one of the few original e-business practitioners to survive the dot.com implosion, eBay has always been part of the crowd while managing to stand out from it. Cohen helps us understand why by taking us inside the heads of major players like Pierre Omidyar, the co-founder who imbued his site with a Libertarian philosophy responsible for its heart and soul, and Meg Whitman, the seasoned manager who brought business savvy and a Harvard MBA to its roller-coaster world. What helps make the book so readable and informative, though, are Cohen’s accompanying observations of the many other people and events that also helped eBay develop its trademark direction and characteristic personality: the company that formulated its distinctive logo, the Kansas City clothing-iron collectors whose pastime was transformed by the upstart Web site, the quirky listings that generated controversy (and publicity) like the one in 1999 for a “fully functional kidney,” even detractors who decry its big-business underpinnings. Fans of the site, along with students of the online world in general, will find Cohen’s account both instructive and enjoyable.

Review

This book is amazing. It’s by far the most inspirational book on web business that I have ever read. Besides being a great story which is now a part Internet folklore, the eBay journey provides many lessons for any person starting up a web business. If you want a great e-business story, rich with unique characters and personality, this book is for you. If you are a fan of eBay, the culture and the community this book is for you. If you are an Internet entrepreneur, and you want to learn from one of the biggest success stories online, this book is for you.

Pierre Omidyar the french American that built eBay became, at the time, one of the top 10 richest men in America when eBay did their IPO on the stock market. His share of the business was valued in the billions of dollars. Much of eBay’s upper management became billionaires and many of the staff millionaires. Omidyar commented that the amount of money he had was impossible for one man to ever conceivably spend in a lifetime, even all of his friends and family combined probably couldn’t spend it all. During most of this time he kept driving around his beat up old VW Volkswagen bug. Classy.

Full credit must be given to Adam Cohen the author of the book. The story is complete and meticulous in detail without being boring or repetitive. What made it even better were the little side stories interspersed within the main eBay history. He recounts tales of business that formed as a result of eBay, other websites and communities that developed to discuss eBay matters and even a story of how eBay staff entered a third world village to set up the equipment to allow the locals to sell their gift-wares on eBay. Mr Cohen carefully goes through every stage of business development, discusses all the important characters and explains all the major events. It’s a top class book that I enjoyed from start to finish.

The eBay story is very relevant to anyone that has a web business, or even just a website. We all want lots of people to visit our site and dream of becoming rich as a result of e-commerce. The eBay story starts out just like this - a guy sitting at home that builds a website that allows people to auction items. EBay started in the golden “untapped” early days of the world wide web when the concept of online auctions was new. Because of simplicity, first mover advantage and the addictiveness of online auctions eBay spread like wildfire mostly through viral networks - friends telling friends about a cool new website. In fact the site was so successful many times it buckled under the sheer demand and popularity. A unique and enviable position to be in when starting a web business or any business for that matter.

This book tells a great story about what can be accomplished online when you have a simple idea that just works. It clearly demonstrates the human aspect, detailing the characters and motivations behind the business and what they did well and did not do well. It outlines the challenges eBay faced at each stage of growth. It provides practical insights into the marketing methods that eBay employed. It outlines what happens to an organisation as it grows from a two person start-up business to one with hundreds of employees, shareholders, a board and an executive management team. It talks about the mistakes made along the way. It outlines the techniques and methods that had the most impact on business growth. As you can imagine, all this information is extremely valuable for any person interested in succeeding at online business and entrepreneurship.

I highly recommend this book.

Rated 4.5 / 5

Yaro Starak
eBay Fan

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Google And The Mission To Map Meaning And Make Money
by Bart Milner

Amazon: This book is a brief history of Cyberspace and Google’s fundamental contribution - a new search method that gives almost immediate access to the contents of billions of web pages.

It covers the rivalry with Yahoo! - once their closest partners, the competition with Microsoft and the success that made Google’s 2004 launch on NASDAQ inevitable and the struggle by the company’s founders to prevent that success from ruining their vision of how a 21st century engineering enterprise should be organised.

It traces the origins of the Internet in the work of Vannevar Bush, Ted Nelson and Tim Berners-Lee and the serendipity of the Google founders’ breakthrough discovery of a technology of hypertextual and contextual search developed at Stanford University, after the failure of dozens of earlier Search engines, and their subsequent development of targetted advertising which is already fundamentally transforming the future profits of both the Internet and printed newspapers and magazines industries.

Review

I just completed reading this book. It was tough to finish because it’s not written like a conventional story with biography-style narrative. It’s more like a patchwork collection of ideas about the search industry and Google’s impact on it. A word of warning, if you want a nice background story of the people and the events behind the Google Internet company, this is not the book for you. The author actually states this in the book. I didn’t know before buying the book and perhaps if I did I would not have made the purchase in the first place, however I feel it has been worth my while to finish the book.

Google And The Mission To Map Meaning And Make Money teaches you about Internet search and the dream of creating meaningful search. Meaningful search technology’s goal is to provide the perfect meaning-within-context answer to every question a user may ask of it. This is not an easy goal because computers, and the technology behind them, have no way of accounting for meaning which is vital in human communications. Google made a solid step forward providing context and relevance using technologies such as PageRank, but it is still a far away off from mapping meaning.

The main reason this book is a beneficial read is to gain a better understanding about Internet search and Google methodology. If you are interested in Internet business and/or run your own business website this book is well worth a read to familiarise yourself with why and how Google changed the Internet search industry and why other sites such as AltaVista and Lycos fell behind and eventually faded from prominence. It also explains how Yahoo! survived and evolved from it’s original incarnation as a human built directory of links.

Considering the majority of web business site traffic comes from Internet search and will most likely only increase in the future as more and more people come to rely on the Internet to find things, keeping abreast of the developments in this industry, including an understanding of how it has changed in recent net history, should be a priority for any Internet entrepreneur. For this reason alone I recommend this book. If you want a good story, with interesting characters and entertaining events, I suggest you look elsewhere.

Rated 3 / 5

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The Student Success Manifesto is written by Michael Simmons, a young entrepreneur from New York. Michael contacted me directly and offered me a copy of his book. I gladly accepted and recently finished reading the book, so that means it’s review time!

The blurb:

The Student Success Manifesto: How to Create a Life of Passion, Purpose, and Prosperity is an unconventional and effective blueprint for planning, prioritizing, and pursuing your own vision and in so doing becoming one this century’s agents of change. Students who read and apply this book’s lessons will achieve the following benefits:

• Make massive amounts of money and enjoy doing it
• Find or make your dream job
• Make yourself irresistible for prestigious scholarships & awards
• Get into your first choice school and make the most out of it
• Make your bio top-tier talk-show worthy
• Meet and learn from mega role models
• Start NOW without paying dues

The Student Success Manifesto will help you leverage the entrepreneurial mindset to define and achieve success regardless of your career path. The entrepreneurial mindset is an extremely powerful force and it has been proven to account for the majority of innovation, job-creation, and philanthropy in America. Use this same force in your own life today!

I must admit I was sceptical when I begun reading this book mainly because Michael is a young guy. I have nothing against young people, especially being young myself, but I wondered how much I could learn from someone that is only starting off their business career and had already written a book. Needless to say I was pleasantly surprised and by the end of the book I had learnt a few things and had that motivated “buzz” feeling.

Michael’s book is clearly aimed at young people facing life choices. At it’s core it is a motivational book that hopes to inspire young people by opening their eyes to options they may not have considered because it’s not what’s done or what society expects them to do. The book challenges certain assumptions young people might have about their life path and offers them alternatives and teaches extreme techniques (Michael runs the Extreme Entrepreneurship Education Corporation) they can employ to lead them to financial and life success.

I found the Success Manifesto, while not containing a lot of new ideas or concepts I hadn’t read or learnt previously, did reinforce a lot of techniques and attitudes that I sometimes forget and often don’t practice. I enjoyed Chapter 12: Extreme Endeavors the most because it detailed very practical advice that individuals can implement in their own life to work towards the kind of success that Michael teaches. Some examples include:

• Starting a business - My favourite action of course. Michael outlines some of what I believe are the most important benefits about undertaking this task, especially at a young age.
• Shadowing - Learning from the best by monitoring what they do, for example by spending a day with the CEO of a big company. Michael offers some great advice to maximise the benefits of this exercise.

• Strategic Volunteering - A lot of young entrepreneurs have fears about starting a business. So much fear and indecision that they never start anything until it’s too late and they end up entrenched in a job that has them psychologically and financially trapped. The best way to get over these early fears is to take action and build confidence. If the idea of starting something is too much for you to handle at this time, volunteering at an organisation is the perfect way to build your self esteem and confidence so you can make the leap into your own project.

The Success Manifesto is a quick read that is ideal for young people just starting off in their business life. It offers practical advice and attitude adjustments that if absorbed will give young people a competitive edge. For the more experienced entrepreneur this book offers some timely reminders and lessons that you may have forgotten about and may even reignite that spark of motivation if you have lost it.

Michael Simmons has a blog as does his business partner and girlfriend, Sheena Lindahl.

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