First of for those of you that don’t know what an autoresponder is a definition.

An autoresponder is a system that automatically signs someone up on your list and sends them emails. Boy that sounds a lot like spamming.

Now to be clear I am talking about follow up autoresponders. These can send out a series of message set to go out every day, every other day or whenever you choose. The onetime autoresponders that will send out the same message every time an email is received at that email address is a little different. These are only good if you have changed your email address or if you are on vacation or if you have some other information that needs to be delivered every time someone sends an email to that email address.

There are basically two types of follow up autoresponders.

A service where you will login to their website and set up your autoresponder and a script that you will install on your site that will send out emails for you.

Both of these will let you set up a follow up email sequence, for example if you wanted to send out a course on getting traffic you could put in four or five messages in the series and have them sent out every day or every other day to everybody that signs up. Everybody that signs up gets all the follow up messages no matter when they sign up.

Both of these will let you do broadcast emails. A broadcast email is when you want to send an email to your entire list today or possibly schedule it for sometime in the future but it is only sent once and if someone joins your list after it is sent they won’t ever see it.

What is the difference between having your own autoresponder on your site and using a service?

I won’t lie to you here, I used my own on my site to start out because it is cheaper. With that said I had my site shut down with my first broadcast email because I was accused of spam complaints. Not much fun.

Yes, they were double optin subscribers but they forgot they subscribed and I didn’t remind them in the email why they were getting the email. Since then I have been a firm believer in paying for the monthly services. Right now I am using Aweber and any spam complaints go to them and my site doesn’t get affected by them.

Yes, I might be a little tainted by my previous experience, OK a lot tainted. But if you ever had to try to get a site back up after it has been shut down due to spam complaints, you would be tainted too. The worse part about it is even if you get your site back up, you have been added to all the spam filters and none of your email will get through. I spent months trying to get this straightened out and never did get it fixed. I ended up with a new domain name and no list.

Besides the fact that you will have to ward off all the spam complaints (from double optin subscribers) there are other things that you should be doing to make sure your emails are getting through from your site. I don’t have all the things but here are a few:

• Your site needs to have its own IP Address. On a shared IP address (common with most hosting packages) you will end up being caught in the spam filters if anyone that shares that IP address with you is accused of spam. Great isn’t it. Because the guy next door does something wrong you get punished.
• You will need to have a Reverse DNS set up for your site. This isn’t that big of a problem if you have your own IP address. Just ask your host to set it up for you.
• You will need an SPF file. I am not even sure what this is but you need it if you are going to be sending a lot of emails. Again your hosting service provider should be able to take care of this for you.
• You need to constantly make sure your site is whitelisted by the major providers like AOL, MSN, Yahoo!, etc. They each have their own way of doing this.
• You need to make sure that you can send as many emails as you like through your site. Most hosting services put a cap on how many emails you can send through your site. This is usually limited to 500 an hour or something like that. Which is fine if you have a small list but if you have a list of 10,000 it will never get sent.

OR

You can pay a service to do it all of this for you.

There are two major services out there that have been doing this for years and know how to get it done. They are Aweber (the one I use) and GetResponse of course there are a bunch of other services out there but these two have the track records for deliverability and ease of use that I can vouch for and I am not sure of any of the others.

The decision is yours, of course, but in this day and again when AOL has a button on every email that says, “This is Spam” and email delivery rates are dropping for all that do it themselves how much time and effort do you want to spend trying to get your emails through?

To me this is one place you should definitely outsource. Isn’t all the work the services do to get your email delivered worth $20.00 per month? Yes I know you will pay more if you list grows but if you have a list of over 10,000 and you can’t make $20 per month there is something wrong there.

This post is just for fun but it comes because of a comment in the Tell Me What You Want post.

Those of you from Europe and Australia and anywhere else they speak the King’s English most likely already know what the word randy means. But for those of you that haven’t a clue why being called randy in the UK can be funny and embarrassing here is the scoop.

Randy means, well I can’t think of another way to put it, horny! Not with points coming out of the top of your head but the sexually excited type.

Picture yourself as a 20 year old military person going into a pub and saying, “Hi, I’m Randy” or if you are an American going into a bar and introducing yourself to some innocent young lady by saying, “Hi, I’m horny!” because that is basically what happened to me when I lived in the UK.

But it doesn’t stop there because my last name is Baustert commonly mispronounced bastard. Try to say that with a British accent and you will see it is even more so. Most Americans avoid saying my last name because they don’t want to mispronounce it.

Before I arrived in the UK I already knew about my name so it didn’t really surprise me to hear the giggles when I arrived at Heathrow airport and I was paged, “Will Randy Baustert please report to the information counter.”

I just put my head down and went to meet my openly laughing sponsor at the information counter.

Now, I have never been a pickup artist with a lot of smooth opening lines, before I got to the UK my pickup line was just, “Hi, I’m Randy” as you can see this did become something of an issue in the UK. But surprisingly it had completely different effects depending on the recipient.

Some women wouldn’t blink an eye and instantly realize that was my name.

Some women would laugh.

Some women would get offended.

And once, only once, I was slapped.

The weird thing was that it ended up being a great ice breaker for all the categories. Of course the women that laughed liked it. But even the ones that were offended (yes, even the one that slapped me) came around when I said, “I am sorry, it is a force of habit to introduce myself when I meet someone and I am a dumb Yank and that is my name.” While I show them my ID card that show not only my first name but my last name. So, now I wasn’t just randy but I was a randy bastard. But it is my name and I had it on all my id cards and credit cards so they had to accept it.

Those that were offended usually became apologetic when they realized that it was truly my name and that my last name was Baustert made them even more apologetic. Yes, even the one that slapped me bought me a pint.

This just goes to show you that sometimes the things you don’t expect to work can actually work very well.

At least I wasn’t a cheeky bastard! Ok, maybe I was at times.

Add to Onlywire

This is my first post in response to a request from the Tell Me What You Want Post.

The request was to provide help that would keep people on track.

The answer to that is focus!

Let’s start with your to do list. You don’t have a to do list?

Well that is a problem right there. I recommend you create a daily, a weekly and a monthly to do list.

Create the monthly list first and put everything you can think of on this list. If you create the monthly list like I do it will be daunting. I have never finished a monthly to do list in one month. But it is more to remind me what I need to do.

Next break down the monthly list to a week list, the stuff you plan to do in one week. The week list should be what you actually think you can get done in one week plus one or two other items. This list should be put in order of what you think is the most important. This list should be one that challenges you but doesn’t give you that feeling of despair when you look at the size of it.

Next break down the week list into your daily list. Put the most important items first, you should already have these sorted. Now you do the items on your list. Make sure you do one item at a time and only one item at a time and this should be the first item (the most important one) on your list. DO NOT go to any other items on your list until you finish the first one.

Your daily list should be enough to challenge you but not enough to give you a reason to avoid the list. You might know what I am talking about, sometimes you work so hard to get the things done that need to be done that you get “burnt out” and you start looking for excuses to avoid the work. You know like, “I will do it right after I watch my favorite TV show.” Or “I am not in the mood to do this now.”

If you are having those types of thoughts you are probably working too hard and you are probably working in burst.
I know I have done this is the past, work a 20 hour day building a website and get it 90% done but then when it comes time to go back to it I remember all the aggravation from the 20 hour day and I tended to avoid it. I use to have tons of unfinished projects because of this.

Now I make my daily list smaller instead of having the one item building a website I break it down to things like:

• Get Graphics
• Install script
• Upload Products
• Start Sales Copy

Then I set my time limits by deciding how long I am going to work that day. Some days it is only one hour other days I will actually schedule a 10 hour day (that is because I like what I do and I take pride in the fact that I answer almost all the emails that come to me but I limit my responses to 2 hours per day. You add that 2 hours to 8 hours of work and you will get my 10 hour day)

Start with the first item on your list and don’t do anything else until that is done. Then go on to the next item. When your time is up, stop working, and whatever you didn’t finish will go to the top of the next day’s list.

If you are almost done with one item on your list it is OK to work past your time limit a little. Please note the little part. Don’t put in an extra 2 or 3 hours or you might end up in the “burnt out” category and dread going back to work on it. But an extra 15 or 20 minutes won’t hurt.

Tell people what you are doing and when you expect to be done.

By declaring to other people what you are doing you are making yourself responsible for achieving what you say. No one likes to be taunted with, “You said you were going to do this and all you did was sit on the couch and watch TV”

You would be surprised at how effective this is to keep you on track.

Get an accountability partner!

An accountability partner is just finding someone, preferably someone that is doing a similar project, and getting in touch with them every day or every other day. This can be a short phone call or email all you do is ask what are you doing, what do you plan to achieve and what did you do.

I would go something like this:

(Jerry) Hi Randy, time to be accountable, the last time we spoke you said you were going to get the script set up on your site. How are you doing?

(Randy) Hi Jerry, the script is installed but I haven’t tested it yet.

(Jerry) Ok, so I will assume you will be testing the script before our next call. What is your next step toward reaching your goals?

(Randy) Besides testing the script, I need to start rounding up JV partners.

(Jerry) OK that sounds good. How many people do you plan to contact before the next call?

(Randy) I will contact 5 people.

After this Randy would ask Jerry similar questions. The next call would follow up on the script testing and the contacting people.

As you can see the question asker doesn’t set the goals, you set your own goals, but they are there to remind you that you have these goals and that you need to take the steps to reach your goals. Again when you are accountable to another person it has a tendency to create a greater desire in you to achieve.

Remember: Desire + Action = Success

A little while ago I wrote a post telling you about on page Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and the the two most important items were the Title tag and the Domain name.

Well, I just took a look in Google to see if this blog was being indexed yet and I searched the phrase Starting Steps. Guess what, it is on the first page of Google out of 5,000,000 + pages that turn up for that term. Which isn’t bad at all. But that is just the beginning try searching for, making money starting steps and internet marketing starting steps. I was pleasantly surprised at the results.

The one that surprised me the most was internet marketing starting steps. I had 4 of the top 10 places and one of them doesn’t even have any content on it.

Click the image to see it larger.

But it’s not just Google check out these from MSN Live Search

This is all from the title tag and the domain name. Like I said the last one for coaching in the Google results doesn’t even have any content on it.

What does all this mean?

It means that if you are planning to get a majority of your traffic from search engines you should work the keywords into your domain name or create another domain with your keywords that can be used to drive the traffic to your site.

Oh, by the way check the page rank of this site. It is 0 That’s right a big fat zero, nothing, nada!

That is right, I got these placements without any page rank. Remember that when they tell you that on page optimization doesn’t matter that all you need are back links. I will undoubtedly be writing more about page rank in the near future.