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

Over the last few weeks I’ve been listening to recordings of Perry Marshall’s Live Workshop on email autoresponders held in Chicago. It’s some really great content, direct from one of the online marketers I trust the most.

Perry really hammered home a point that on some levels, I haven’t fully taken to heart in the past.

That point is, for long term success, you can’t expect to survive the changing online business environment, without fully cementing your place as a leader by constantly delivering trust-building quality content.

This isn’t anything new of course, but realizing how to truly embed this ethos into how you run your business, and in particular for us online entrepreneurs and how we market through email, is more difficult than you might think.

Why? Because it’s so easy to fall for the lure of the quick buck.

It’s too easy to be lazy, and most people aren’t prepared to wait and put in the effort to establish themselves. They want a return on their work in a matter of weeks or a few short months, not the years it’s going to take to build your following, set up systems and ultimately, establish a quality business.

Perry sums up this idea using a great example in how to operate an email marketing campaign using autoresponders.

Most online marketers in recent years have built email lists that they essentially use to constantly promote affiliate products and launches. Finding a marketer who sends content out to their list, even as often as 50% of the emails they send, is rare.

As Perry explains, once customers get sick of the spam, it’s those marketers who built an autoresponder system that uses quality content to foster trust, and not hit their customers with excessive pitches, who succeed.

When the water rises, only those who have built a strong fortification survive. The rest drown.

The water is definitely rising right now in the Internet marketing industry.

It’s pretty clear, in the make money niche, the majority of marketers, even the best ones, have at times abused their lists by sending out too much pitch and not enough content, and I’m including myself in this claim. This could have worked in the past, but we’re reaching a saturation point. It’s safe to say that long term, you won’t survive by sending only emails that ask people to buy something.

I know this is true, because I’ve felt the change in my business. Email response rates are down. I choose to say no to promoting new launches now more than ever before because I know each promotion I do damages relationships with my list. People are sick of the same pitches, from the same people using the same trigger points. Our customers are getting wiser to fluff and consequently gravitating towards substance.

Perry really emphasized this point throughout his workshop, and he’s not alone, I’ve taken the idea to heart in the last few months so much that it has shifted my entire focus in 2010.

I plan to continue to be about substance even more so than in the past, which considering most of my current marketing is about content, says a lot about how important I think this change is.

The Emotional Bank Account

Read the rest of this entry >>

I’d like to thank Simon Grabowski and his company Implix (the parent company behind the Get Response email autoresponder), who have been a long term sponsor of Entrepreneurs-Journey and have just renewed for another six month campaign.

Get Reponse has supported this blog since it was less than half the size it is now and without help from sponsors like them I doubt I would still be working as hard as I do at my blogging.

Get Response is an industry leading email autoresponder service and worth investigating as one of your top choices if you are looking to start email marketing.

Talkstream Video and Audio Streaming Service Launches

Implix’s latest offering, Talkstream, launched last week and on first inspection looks pretty good. Simon and his team are really following the trends, this time offering a video and audio subscription service designed to make multimedia production accessible to everyone, even absolute amateurs.

TalkStream offers -

Audio & Video Tools – All you need is a microphone for audio and a webcam for video. No special software, no expensive hardware, no programming skills are needed.

Podcast Tools – Communicate with your visitors more effectively. Syndicate, distribute and promote your content on iTunes and other podcast networks, automatically.

Phone Tools – Client testimonials recording.

It’s worth visiting the Talkstream website just to see the wonderful talking lady who gets very excited about all that Talkstream has to offer . You can’t offer a video service without using some kind of video to promote right? – Although I would have preferred to see Simon there talking to me because I like the personal touch, but maybe that’s because I’m a blogger.

If you have been thinking about podcasting and/or video blogging, perhaps Talkstream is the answer to break down the technical barriers so you can get started.

Check it out here -

www.talkstream.com/

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.

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.