How I Got Started With Aweber

I realized today that Aweber’s 10th anniversary has come and gone. These guys seem to be the service that is used by most Internet marketing gurus on the WWW. So I thought it’d be appropriate to share my story on how I got hooked on Aweber so maybe you don’t make the same mistakes I did.

A few years ago, I bought a package from Frank Kern about Internet Marketing. I believe he was charging about $50 for that package, and it included a whole lot of videos and audio files about the importance of building lists. Naturally, I ignored what Frank was talking about as I thought list building was a waste of time. I was thinking to myself, “I can be more productive doing other things than building a list.” It did take me a year to realize that I needed to build a list. But of course, I hadn’t learned anything about the do’s and don’ts of e-mail marketing by that time, and I had what you can call a catastrophic e-mail marketing campaign.

I remember signing up with Constant Contact at the time. They were charging a super low fee that was based on the size of your campaign and not the number of e-mails that you want to send to your users. So I read the manual and created my campaign. Unfortunately, things weren’t as easy as I thought they’d be as I made way too many mistakes with my e-mail campaign:

• Leads: when I started my e-mail campaign, I had zero leads in my database. You can’t just send e-mails to yourself. So I decided to add all the people who I knew to the list and play the waiting game. Now that is very dumb, and it is absolutely not recommended. When you add people to your list without their permission, you are going to get yourself in a lot of trouble, and it is just plain dumb. After adding 400 people to my list, I thought I was set, and I was going to make money. I don’t think I made a dime out of that campaign, and a whole lot of people were upset (not that upset as they knew me).
• Content: I was running a deal site at the time. I was posting tech deals to my site, and the site was very successful. However, people who signed up for my newsletter were not looking for more of the same. They were looking for good solid content, and I failed to provide that, miserably. I often created daily recaps of the same old deals and sent it to them. I thought by doing that everyday, I can help people remember my site. The fact is, you can get flagged for spamming if you send too many emails to people. Besides, a lot of people get overwhelmed by the number of emails they receive everyday, and you are not helping their cause by sending them even more emails.
• Overselling: It’s one thing to try to sell something to people. It’s another thing to pretty much beg people everyday to click on your links. That certainly didn’t help my cause either. I did get a couple of clicks, but they were charity clicks.
• Design: when I got started with Constant Contact, they had all these pretty templates that you could use for your HTML e-mails (Aweber has that too). But in reality, text e-mails work much better than graphic-heavy e-mails, at least based on my experience. My e-mails were too pretty for my leads.
• Frequency: as I mentioned earlier, the number of e-mails that you send to people in a week matters. I was sending too many e-mails and that got me nowhere. I can’t emphasize this enough, but going on extremes (too many or too few emails) can seriously hurt your e-mail campaigns.

So there you have it. I had bad content, no real leads, and too cool of a design to make it with Constant Contact. Worst of all, I didn’t understand e-mail marketing at all (I thought I did!). That’s when I decided to buy a book on e-mail marketing and learn the trade from the experts. That’s when I signed up for Aweber, and I have been with them since. Now I am not saying that they are the best e-mail marketing service out there as I don’t know that. But I have been with them for a while now, and I don’t see any reason to switch. But regardless of who you are with, if you don’t realize the whole philosophy behind e-mail marketing, you are not going to make it. And believe me, e-mail marketing is one major source of revenue that you don’t want to lose.