Entrepreneurs-Journey.com Down-To-Earth Advice For Bloggers and Internet Marketers

A double opt-in email list is like any email based newsletter or e-course where people can sign-up through the Internet either on a webpage or sending an email to mailing list management software. What makes an email list “double opt-in” is that any person who subscribes must confirm their request twice.

The first time is when the user submits their email address to the web based form. For example, anyone who submits their name and email to my Blog Traffic Tips Newsletter at BlogTrafficKing.com must enter their first name and email address and then hit the button to submit their request to join the newsletter.

After the initial request is received by the email list software a special confirmation email is sent to the address the person input into the form. This is the second opt-in. The email contains a link which the recipient must click to confirm their subscription request. Once they have done this they have “double opted-in”.

You can see an example of the confirmation email also on my BlogTrafficKing.com page here – http://www.blogtrafficking.com/thank-you.html. This is the page I present to people after they fill out the subscription form to make sure they understand how to double opt-in and to ensure the confirmation email doesn’t surprise them and they delete it thinking it is SPAM.

Why Is Double Opt-In Important?

There are several reasons why double opt-in is necessary, but a few key reasons I believe make it mandatory. The double opt-in confirms that the person who entered their email address actually wants to subscribe to the list. If this extra confirmation is not present (single opt-in) then any person could enter any email address to sign-up any other person.

Imagine if you upset someone and they decided to get revenge on you by entering your email address into hundreds of pornographic email newsletters. You would be forced to abandon that email account (unless you really really like porn) if these lists were single opt-in.

From the email list owner’s perspective it’s important that only people who genuinely want to be on your list are signed up. If you use a single-opt on method and, like the example I gave above, someone entered hundreds of email addresses of people who did not want to subscribe to your list, you would end up with a very poor quality list. Those “spam” subscribers wouldn’t respond to what you were offering since they are not your target market.

Do You Want An Effective Email List?

The whole point of an opt-in email list is to attract people who subscribe demonstrating that they are prospects for what you offer – their request for information signifies this. Using a double opt-in list is extremely important for keeping the quality of your email list high.

Consider you are selling advertising space in your email newsletter. You could boast that your email list has 20,000 members but they are all single opt-in and very likely many of the addresses on the list are not valid or go to people who never requested to be on your list. Your advertiser purchases some space in your newsletter but gets poor results so doesn’t buy again.

Now imagine a list contains 2,000, double opt-in hungry prospects that match a key target market. That same advertiser buys space in the newsletter and because of the more precise targeting and confirmed email addresses on the list, generates a better response. The result – a happier advertiser who becomes a repeat buyer of adspace in your newsletter.

Just being able to say “XYZ number of DOUBLE OPT-IN subscribers” is a much better selling point for any person attempting to monetize their list via advertisement placements.

Reduce SPAM Complaints

All email list owners get unsubscribers and spam complaints – it’s the nature of email marketing. People hate spam and anything that smells even a tiny bit like it or if a person can’t remember signing up to your list, may result in a spam complaint (AOL email subscribers are the worst for this in my experience). Even if you have a nice big fat area at the start of your newsletter that describes how to unsubscribe for an email list you will still get people who hit that complaint link.

By using double opt-in you can reduce spam complaints down to single digit percentages or lower. A single opt-in email newsletter lends itself to abuse, resulting in more spam complaints and potential banning of your domain name by the major ISPs. This is something you must avoid at all costs because once you are on an email blacklist it is hard to get yourself off.

One final point on spam – while double opt-in is not law yet I foresee in the very near future it will be. Using a single opt-in email list will be illegal and anyone found doing so may face legal prosecution. If none of the above arguments are enough to sway you, the threat of legal action should do it.

How To Set-Up Double Opt-In

I use AWeber.com (aff) to handle all my email lists (you can read my review of AWeber) and it has a switch you can flick on any email list to make it double opt-in. Be warned though, once you flick that switch there is no going back to single opt-in for that list, you will have to create a new one if you want single opt-in (you get unlimited autoresponder lists with AWeber though so it’s not that big a deal). The AWeber software handles the double opt-in process automatically and has plenty of customization options so you can determine what message is sent back to the user in the confirmation email.

GetReponse (aff) also has a double opt-in facility and I’m fairly confident that most robust third part email list manager/autoresponder services should have the double opt-in feature. If they don’t then they are not keeping up to date so I would recommend moving to a company that does.

If you use your own software, either custom built or purchased online, then you may or may not have a double opt-in feature. That’s a question for your technical person.

Get Serious About Email List Building

Last week I was checking my subscriber stats in my AWeber account and noticed that one of my email lists had over 80 subscribers in a 24 hour period where the average was usually 10-20. I was hoping it was because of a traffic spike from some exposure on a website or blog, but unfortunately it was not. A spam bot of some kind had submitted over 60 email addresses, all very similar, and clearly not from real humans. Thankfully none of these email addresses will be confirmed because of the double opt-in protection my list has, ensuring the integrity of my list is not adversely affected.

If you are serious about building a quality email list, and you should be if you are in Internet business, then double opt-in is a must. Even if it means you lose a few genuine subscribers because they don’t follow the double opt-in process, it is worth it to protect you from all the negative things that can occur reducing the quality of your list.

Yaro Starak
Email List Builder

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

Review of Marketer’s Choice – 1ShoppingCart.com Shopping Cart/Online Marketing System

1ShoppingCart Online Shopping Cart, Email Autoresponder, Affiliate Manager and more.

Name: 1ShoppingCart/Marketer’s Choice
URL: www.1shoppingcart.com or www.marketerschoice.com
Purpose: Shopping Cart, Email Autoresponding, List Management, Affiliate Management

Let me start out by saying I was very excited when I first started my 30 day free trial of 1ShoppingCart. I logged in and was blown away with the potential – the possibilities – my young Internet marketer’s brain started churning away thinking about the products I could launch and all the cool things I could do to market them, all through 1ShoppingCart.

The problem, which I must admit even as I write this is still a problem, is that I didn’t have any of my own products to sell! However I signed up for 1ShoppingCart because I was looking for an email autoresponder to start managing my Business client lists with and I figured since my path was taking me down the Internet marketers road then no doubt I would make use of the rest of the 1ShoppingCart features eventually.

What Does 1ShoppingCart Actually Do?

Okay, let’s cut to the chase – what can you actually do with 1ShoppingCart?

Online Commerce

First, the obvious – it’s a Shopping Cart – which means you can set up products for sale and copy and paste forms into your website to set up a fully functional ecommerce system. 1ShoppingCart works with a whole range of payment processing providers including the ever popular Paypal and 2Checkout, so you shouldn’t have too much difficulty setting things up to start taking orders.

The actual shopping cart module in 1ShoppingCart is quite robust and you can stipulate all the tiny details about your products, including shipping, taxes, recurring payments, commissions for affiliates, landing page, thank you page – everything! I feel comfortable telling you that almost any product will work fine with 1ShoppingCart. There is a learning curve though and I was certainly intimidated initially looking at all the customization options, but the 1ShoppingCart team provide a ton of help files and videos. It’s all very intuitive and after the initial set-up and I doubt you will need to make very many changes again.

Client Management

1ShoppingCart is not a CRM system but it does have a fairly standard client database management system. You can see which autoresponder clients are on, search the database by different fields, import and export client lists and all the rudimentary features you would expect. It’s not exactly a relational database, so beyond seeing which autoresponder clients are on you won’t be able to do much analyses, but it does the job well enough for a small online business.

Email Autoresponder

1ShoppingCart has a very good email autoresponder. This is the main module I made use of until I switched to AWeber. I switched because I only needed the email autoresponder module and I was paying a high monthly fee with 1ShoppingCart for all the additional features, which I didn’t make use of. AWeber offered a specialized email autoresponder service at less than half of what I was paying for 1ShoppingCart. As I have stated previously, if you just want an email autoresponder, go with AWeber or GetResponse.

The 1ShoppingCart autoresponder is a little bit clunky compared to the dedicated email autoresponder providers I have used but it’s not really a fair comparison since 1SoppingCart isn’t *just* an autoresponder. The fact that you can plug it straight into the shopping cart and affiliate management system is fantastic and if you plan to need all these features I would strongly recommend choosing 1ShoppingCart. As I have recently discovered it’s damn hard to integrate different third party providers if you want to have different companies handle your email autoresponder, shopping cart and affiliate system – at the moment it’s not really possible at any price even close to what 1ShoppingCart charges.

The 1ShoppingCart email autoresponder will do exactly what all good autoresponders do – you can set up a sequence of emails to go out at set time intervals. You can automatically move clients from one autoresponder to the next as they take different actions, for example from the “prospects” email list to the “clients” email list once they make a purchase.

Top Internet marketers have been using the 1ShoppingCart email autoresponder for many years. That was the original reason I chose 1ShoppingCart. When I saw at the end of emails from Alex Mandosian and Perry Marshall (etc) that they were using using 1ShoppingCart – that was all the recommendation I needed.

Affiliate Management

Here is one of the areas 1ShoppingCart really excels. The affiliate module, while once again a bit daunting at first to comes to grips with, provides a powerful suite of options that even a single individual can make use of to manage their entire affiliate system. I know many online marketers, including Andy Wibbels, Joel Comm and Brad Fallon, who use the system to affiliate sell their products. In fact many of the affiliate promotions I run through this blog go through 1ShoppingCart.

In a nutshell the affiliate module allows you to take on affiliates, manage them, and set up promotional tools for them to use to promote your products. You can set up banners, text links and the usual range of affiliate resources. You can also customize the look and feel of the affiliate area and brand it with your own custom logo in the header (etc).

For me the best feature of the affiliate program is the fact that you can integrate it with the autoresponder module. That means that you can seamlessly use your affiliates to build your email lists, pay them commissions on sales and keep everything all in one place in a nice and tidy interface. There aren’t many other services out there that can boast this feature at the price 1ShoppingCart charges.

Other Features

I’ve covered the main features and now I’ll just briefly mention what else 1ShoppingCart can do. It has a solid ad tracking system which you can use to track and test any online advertising campaigns using media such as text links and banners. It has a custom form builder which you can use to create the input forms for your customers and email list subscribers to join or purchase from. There is also a pop-up generator which you can use to have an input form pop-up on your website.

Most of these features are available in other places, for example Google has a fairly reasonable ad tracker in it’s Google AdWords program which is handy because you can use it alongside your AdWords PPC campaigns to test PPC against other online advertising media. The thing with 1ShoppingCart is once again, it’s all integrated in the one place, so when you combine ad tracking with email autoresponders and affiliate promotions you have a pretty powerful set of tools for optimizing your online sales process.

The Good, The Bad and…Well that’s it!

The only problem with 1ShoppingCart is that it does a lot. It’s a complex system that requires some learning to get the most out of, but as I stated there are plenty of help files and audio and video teaching tools too. One potential risk with a “jack-of-all-trades” service like 1ShoppingCart is that the individual modules may fall behind in overall features and quality when compared to specialist providers, which is the argument you could use when comparing the AWeber email autoresponder to 1ShoppingCart. However the gap is not that big and if you do want the extra features 1ShoppingCart wins hands down.

And herein lies the true strength of 1ShoppingCart…There is no other completely integrated set of tools like it for the online marketer. It really is the “marketer’s choice” when it comes to selling goods online. If you know how to make use of all the bells and whistles, you actually have a need for all the bells and whistles or you plan to in the near future, it is actually mind-boggling to think about how truly powerful 1ShoppingCart is.

That being said – for me, it’s too much right now so I don’t need to spend the monthly fee for all those bells and whistles. If you are in the same situation and you really only need a shopping cart or perhaps an autoresponder there may be cheaper alternatives. However if you plan to grow, which I am sure you do, and no doubt will eventually need an affiliate module, ad tracking and all the other features then perhaps starting out day one with 1ShoppingCart will save you from the pain and anguish if you have to later move your email lists and client database into 1ShoppingCart.

Trial Period

The best thing about 1ShoppingCart is that you can try it for a 30 trial period so you can make the choice whether it is right for you after actually playing with it. You can sign up right now from here – www.1shoppingcart.com or www.marketerschoice.com

I hope that helps with your decision making and good luck with your online business.

Yaro Starak
Online Marketer

When I originally wrote my review of the AWeber email autoresponder you may remember my only major gripe with the system was the lack of an easy backup facility.

As you would expect from a great company like AWeber (aff), they have listened and added a Backup Data Feature. From the AWeber announcement -

Your opt-in subscriber list and the long term relationships built with subscribers is priceless. Having this data backed up in a safe place can let you rest easy at night.

We backup your account and list data on a daily basis to separate computers at our data center as well as off site locations in a secure encrypted manner. With the addition of AWeber’s backup utility you can now make regular backups of all your account data in less than a minute.

This backup utility will create a compressed zip file you can download which will contain all of your accounts different subscriber lists, follow up messages, and broadcast newsletter messages. To create a backup, login to your customer account and click “Create & Manage Lists” in the upper right corner of the page. Click the “export all” link and select the email address to send the backup notification to.

It’s your data and you should be able to easily get it at any time.

This one new feature has added at least another hour to my month since I used to manually backup every list one-by-one, which was not a fun job.