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Yes, that’s right I didn’t do what you are supposed to do when you are maintaining a blog.

What is this cardinal rule of blogging that I broke?

It is really quite simple, I didn’t keep my blog updated. You need to add new content to your blog or site at least once per week to keep the search engine spiders happy.

Of course I have an excuse as to why I didn’t keep it updated, but then again we always have an excuse for the things we do or don’t do.

Even though it isn’t worth the paper (cyber-paper?) it is written on here is why I haven’t made a post recently.

Most of you that know me know that I am a techno-geek and I like technology and learning how to do all the technical things on the internet.

Yes, I can hear you groaning and saying, “How can you like the technical side? I hate the technical stuff!” But aren’t you glad that there are people like me that do like the technical stuff and make it easier for you to get things done.

What I have been doing is actually learning how to write programs in PHP from start to finish.  A lot of you will know that I was familiar with PHP as far as installing the programs and tweaking them to do what I want. But this is a long way for actually creating a script that will run a website.

There were a lot of empty spaces in my knowledge and although I didn’t need to fill in the missing pieces to accomplish my goals there were just some things that I wanted to do that I couldn’t do.

For example, I wanted to create a site where you as a customer could choose from 100’s of products and pick only the ones you wanted to download but you could get the “big package, special, limited time, limited quantity, grand opening, holiday, one time offer” price.

In other words you could buy a package of 20 products and choose any 20 of the 100 products available on the site or you could buy just one product or you could buy 100. This means that you wouldn’t have to buy a package of 50 products to get that one product that you want and leave all the other products collecting digital dust on your hard drive.

I looked around and there is no script that will do this on a site that I could find. Yes there are shopping cart scripts that will let you purchase a number of products but each product has to have its own price and it becomes a cumulative total of all the products with the price going up and up and there is no discount for quantity.

I wanted to provide the quantity discount you find in the big packages where you pay very little per item and the price per item would go down when the number of items goes up.

So, I though about outsourcing the script and having someone else create it for me. But to be completely honest with you, I haven’t found a PHP programmer yet that knows what they are doing and would be willing to get tied down to putting my work first. This means that if there is a problem with the script I might or might not be able to get support.

With this in mind, I decided to create my own script and let me tell you I have spent a lot of time running down errors in the script and learning new things about PHP. I learned how to integrate PayPal’s IPN into the script to ensure that the package was actually paid for. I learned how to have PHP count the number of files in a folder. I learned how to protect a download link and right now I am learning how to create a search function for the script so that you can search through all the products to find that particular product that you want.

I doing this I actually set a goal to have this script up and running by June 3 and when I set my goals I go after them whole heartedly. This means that I have at times lost track of what day of the week it is.

But I do have a working version of the script done (except for the search) and when it is completed you will be able to see it in action at www.YourChoiceProducts.com (nothing there right now)

So, there’s my excuse for not posting but remember it is only an excuse. I could have created a post similar to this earlier to let you know what I was doing and helped keep the search engine spiders heading this way.

I have to keep telling myself, “Keep posting, don’t stop, keep posting, don’t stop” The only advantage I have is that this blog is not about making money it is about providing information to you.

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.