Choosing an email service provider for newsletters and autoresponders

November 20, 2011 by John Dilbeck · 7 Comments
Filed under: Affiliate Marketing, Aweber Autoresponders, Dan Kennedy, Facebook, MailChimp, Marketing, Web Services 

The last month has been interesting. It’s been a lot of work, but it’s been interesting.

Newsletter marketing is smart and cost-effective

Part of my business plan for next year is to publish at least three newsletters and maybe more. One will be printed in color and sent by snail mail to my marketing clients to keep them informed of the services I provide and to introduce ideas for marketing to their customers and clients.

The other newsletters will be sent via email every month.

I may make one or more of them also available to paying subscribers via snail mail.

As more and more people use email to manage their mailing lists, I am seeing an opportunity to go back to using printed newsletters that are delivered by snail mail to make some of my newsletters stand out and to increase the likelihood that they will be welcomed and read.

This is especially a good way to reach paying clients and our best customers.

Since I’ll be doing several newsletters every month, I thought I’d better spend some time closely examining the services that are available and comparing them to see which will serve my needs so that I can choose the one service that offers the best mix of features that fit my plans.

I want to choose one service so I can concentrate my efforts and focus on getting as much as possible from the features they provide.

Why send newsletters?

I’ve used newsletters (and autoresponder series) in the past to good advantage.

When I was a computer consultant, I basically built my business with a newsletter that I gave to everyone who wanted it. It was printed on paper, of course, since there was no Internet and no email, back then.

In the early 1990s, I wanted to build an email mailing list, and there were no professional services available, so I spent some time and wrote some scripts in PERL that let me maintain a mailing list and deliver the messages via email. It was a pain to use and, when I quit consulting, I dumped it.

In 2008, I built a number of mailing lists for affiliate and network marketing, using Aweber. It did everything I needed and wanted, and the price was right. When I quit network marketing (MLM), I deleted the lists and haven’t used it for much since then, but I’ve continued paying the monthly fees to keep my account alive.

These newsletters, mailing lists, and autoresponders were helpful in bringing in new prospects and clients, especially when a satisfied client would pass along one of the newsletters to a friend who might be interested in what I offered. It’s a good, easy way to help clients make referrals.

Newsletters are also effective in reminding current and past clients the reasons why they chose me to help them in the first place, and to keep my name in their recent memory, should they need help in the future.

Dan Kennedy, in his book, No B.S. Direct Marketing: The Ultimate, No Holds Barred, Kick Butt, Take No Prisoners Direct Marketing for Non-direct Marketing Businesses, talks about customers and clients from a perspective I’d never before considered.

With no disrespect for the customers intended, he refers to customers as a business owner’s herd and he says that a business owner should focus his efforts on cultivating, nourishing, and caring for his herd. A herd of responsive customers is the single biggest asset that most businesses can have.

One important thing to do is to build a fence around your herd and to constantly maintain and improve that fence.

Dan Kennedy says, on page 172 of the book,

I try to teach business owners to think of themselves as I do, as ranchers putting together and taking care of herds of good, responsive customers. That’s the only real asset of a business…

Most marketers do a truly terrible job of keeping the fence around their customers in tip-top shape. Just like the farmer, they view it as an “expense of operations,” whereas I view it as “marketing.”

I believe you should spend at least as much, if not more, per year on the fence as you did on acquiring the customer in the first place.

Further, you should remember there are poachers and rustlers trying to steal your customers every single day. If you leave your customers alone for very long, if they feel ignored or underappreciated, they are more easily lured away.

He then goes on to describe how to build the fence and how to maintain it, using repetition, frequency, and quality of communications. He prescribes from 25 to 52 “touches” per year per customer. With virtually free email, the number of touches can increase dramatically.

If you think that is too expensive, he says,

If you can’t or won’t invest about $25.00 to $30.00 per year per customer in keeping your fence in tip-top shape, I suggest you get out of the ranching business altogether. Bluntly, frankly, either you’re a financial nitwit or you’ve managed to round up a spectacularly worthless herd.

Mr. Kennedy ends the chapter with this advice…

If you change nothing about your business as a result of this book, you would still have been well served if it succeeds at getting you to send a good monthly newsletter to your customers!

So, when one of the most successful marketers in the country gives time-proven, hard-won advice, I pay attention.

That’s especially true when my own past experiences validate the worth of the recommendations.

(In addition to reading his books and studying his marketing methods and advice, I am a member of the Glazer-Kennedy Insider’s Circle and look forward to receiving his newsletter, CDs, marketing examples, and more every month. I took advantage of his Most Incredible Free Gift Ever special offer and I’ve never looked back. The membership costs me less every year than one hour of his consulting time would cost — if I could even get the appointment. If you’re a business owner and are serious about marketing and increasing your profits, this is almost a no-brainer.)

So, it’s important to send a monthly newsletter. What’s the best way to do it?

I have put a lot of work into answering that question this month, and I reached a final decision this morning — and, frankly, I was a bit surprised at the outcome.

This may be an example of “the grass is greener,” until you examine it.

I will be sending monthly newsletters — at least three of them, two via email and one via snail mail. I’ll also be building mailing lists with sequential autoresponders for my clients, and for their major products and services.

The snail mail newsletter for my clients will be printed in color, double-sided on tabloid-sized paper (11×17 inches). A few years ago, I would have used PageMaker to create it. However, I haven’t used PageMaker on the last three Macs I’ve owned, so it is lost to me. Sometime next year, I’ll purchase InDesign and learn to use it.

In the mean-time, I’ll use Apple’s Pages application to create the PDF files that I’ll take to Jonathan and Tammy at Digital Creations USA, in my adopted home town. I looked at a number of national printing services and compared them with what Jonathan and Tammy offer, and they came out best in the comparison.

So, other than writing it every month, all the work on that is done.

On to the others…

I’ve had an account with Aweber for years and I’ve always been happy with their service, but I’ve been thinking that maybe they don’t offer the tools I need to integrate my marketing with the social networks I prefer.

Among other things, I use Aweber to make it easy for you to subscribe to this blog and to receive each new blog post directly in your email inbox.

If you’d like to subscribe, just fill out the form near the top of the right column.

I’ve also used Aweber, in the past, for creating sequential autoresponder messages and for broadcasts. However, I closed several lists in 2009, when I changed the focus of my business, and I was too sick the last couple of years to build new systems. Now that I’m feeling a lot better, I’ll be building a number of mailing lists and autoresponder series for myself and for my clients.

2012 is going to be a very busy year!

Let’s compare…

So, Aweber was the reigning champ, but I spent a lot of time comparing them to several other services. Since it had been so long since I’d done any of this, I invested the time to rethink the entire process and what I wanted to accomplish.

Let’s see what Constant Contact offers…

I’d been hearing a lot of good things about Constant Contact, so I signed up with them. They were looking really good, until I realized that each of their accounts can host only one mailing list. That won’t work for me, because I’ll be sending newsletters to different lists, from different companies, using different contact information and logos.

So, that eliminated Constant Contact.

Next, I looked at MailChimp.

I opened an account with them last year while I was undergoing chemotherapy, but never did anything with it. This month, I delved seriously into their system. I set up a new list, designed a new newsletter template, and started writing the first issue.

I read their multiple PDF reports that explain how to use their system and I watched a number of their video tutorials. The more I learned, the better I liked their service.

I was within an inch of selecting them for my needs, when I was cautioned by a friend to read their terms of service very closely. I had read them last year, but didn’t remember what they said, so this morning, I read the entire document and everything was going great until I read that Affiliate Marketers are prohibited from using their service.

There it was, in black and white, they think of affiliate marketers the same way they think of people who promote hate, porn, gambling, and other things.

What?!?

Ok, I must have read that wrong.

So, I re-read the list of prohibited uses of the MailChimp service and there it is. It was not my imagination nor sleep-deprived mis-reading of their terms. No affiliate marketers.

Hey, I’m one of those guys!

Affiliate marketing generates a nice percentage of my total income every year and I intend for it to generate more in the future.

So, scratch MailChimp.

I won’t bother to talk about the other services I looked into; none of them passed the first looks.

Aweber is the only contender still standing…

Aweber has a lot going for it. I like their service. Their prices are reasonable. Their support is superlative. They have outstanding delivery rates. They offer lots of features I need.

But, aren’t they behind on how they work with social networking sites?

That’s the question I had to answer to my own satisfaction.

(So, I’ve been gone for a couple of hours since I wrote that last sentence and I’ve been delving into how Aweber can work with my social marketing.)

Here’s some of what I’ve learned.

I can automate notices on Facebook and Twitter when a newsletter is published. That’s good.

I can generate subscribe forms for the appropriate mailing list for each of my Facebook pages (but not for my profile). That’s good.

I can generate subscribe forms for people who comment on my blogs using an Aweber plug-in. I don’t know if I want to use that, or not.

One that I had no idea I could do: I can automate subscriptions to mailing lists when someone purchases something via PayPal. This can be used to subscribe someone to a list based on the product they purchased. That’s good.

It can also be used to set up paid subscriptions to certain mailing lists. That’s better than good. That’s awesome. I’m going to look into this a lot more and test it.

There’s more, but I’ve confirmed that I can do everything I need with Aweber, everything I want, and a couple of things I didn’t know I could do (or even that I might want to do).

Aweber is the winner and still the champ!

Yes, I’ve been out of touch for the last couple of years, and I’ve been listening a lot to people who use MailChimp because most of the services are free and their paid services cost less than Aweber.

That’s what I meant earlier, when I said the grass was greener. I was thinking that the MailChimp service could do more than I could do with Aweber, and that may be true.

However, I can do everything I want to do with Aweber, and a couple of nice bonuses I didn’t know were available.

So, as it is in many cases, even though the grass looks greener on the other side of the fence, it may be no better than what is right in front of my face.

(How’s that for a mixed metaphor and for tying it back into Dan Kennedy’s metaphor of building a good fence around your herd?)

My decision is made. It’s final. I didn’t have to give up anything I really want to do, and I already know how to use Aweber.

In the past, I’ve sent only text emails, so the next task on my list of things to do is to learn how to create HTML emails and newsletters using their service.

If you’re interested in knowing more about their service, you may want to watch this short video and try their service for yourself. I’ll be using it — a lot!

Send Your First Email Newsletter Today – AWeber Communications

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a new newsletter to design.

It’s time to invest the next few days into re-learning what I used to know about Aweber and their service, and to learn all the new things they’ve added over the last couple of years, while I was not paying attention.

I have made arrangements with an independent editor to work with me next year, and she is patiently waiting for me to design the template, decide on the regular contents of each issue, and get it to her so she can have the first issue ready to mail out when the second week of January, 2012 arrives. It’ll be here before I know it.

Back to work! (grin)

So, what do you think?

Do you do regular mailings to your customers? Do you make use of autoresponders to teach your customers how to use the services you offer? Do you keep in touch with them every month via newsletters and other contacts?

You know I’m always interested in your story and your approach.

Whatcha think?

Act on your dream!

JD

PS. Here’s another good book recommendation. I’m about half-way through studying it and I’m finding it to be a good read and it’s helpful: The Magic of Newsletter Marketing, by Jim Palmer.

(Those book links aren’t affiliate links, but they would have been if Amazon had not dropped all their affiliates in North Carolina two years ago.)

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An open letter to SendOutCards.com

May 28, 2011 by John Dilbeck · 15 Comments
Filed under: Customer Service, Opinions, Web Services 

A few minutes ago, I logged in to my account at SendOutCards.com in order to send a card to a friend.

I have been a satisfied customer for a number of years, and have regularly purchased points that are used for sending cards. I currently have over 800 points paid for and accumulated.

Today, I noticed that they have decided to expire all the points I don’t use by October 2012,

That’s just wrong.

And, that’s why I wrote an open letter to SendOutCards on my Facebook profile.

I am reproducing the text of that letter below, in order to have a copy where I can find it.

Here’s what I wrote:

I just logged into SendOutCards.com for the first time in awhile and was very confused by the change in the interface. I finally figured out how to use it to send a card.

I noticed that my points are going to expire in October 2012 and I’m very upset and disappointed by that. I paid good money for years to build up my supply of points and now SOC has arbitrarily decided to put an expiration date on them.

If my points expire before I can use them, I will stop being an SOC customer. I will stop recommending you to my friends and clients.

It’s just that simple.

I had big plans on using the service with Murphy Gold as I get stronger, but this definitely puts a damper on my enthusiasm.

I still like using the service, when I can figure out the changes, but I don’t like it when a company decides to steal from me, and that’s exactly what you will be doing if you expire my points.

Sincerely,

John L. Dilbeck

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Building a serious business website that gets results

March 17, 2010 by John Dilbeck · 3 Comments
Filed under: Advertising and Marketing, Attracting Visitors, Sitesell and Site Build It, Web Services, Webhosting 

I have people asking me all the time how I get so many people to visit my websites every month, and I think most of them think I have some kind of magic trick up my sleeve. That’s not it at all.

The secret?

Hard work, lots of content that people want to read, pages optimized on particular keywords and phrases to help the search engines know what they are about, and continually updating the information as it ages and things change. That’s all it takes.

No tricks. No fancy SEO techniques. Just simple HTML pages (on my big static sites) that are each built around a particular topic that fits within the site’s main topic.

As you may know by now, if you read my blogs or sites regularly, I learned what I know about this (over a decade ago) by studying Ken Evoy’s Make Your Site Sell ebook and putting into practice what I learned.

In the interim, millions of people have visited my sites and many of those visitors have made purchases based on my recommendations for what I think were worthy products and services. That’s how I’ve earned my living for the last decade or so.

I have one website that attracts thousands of visitors per month and remains a profitable site, even though it hasn’t been updated in over a year. It remains my top-earning site for Adsense income and it is a basic HTML-only static site built on the principles I learned from Ken Evoy’s ebook way back in the 20th century.

Since then, I’ve built many websites, most of which failed, using a variety of content management systems (CMS) and blogging software.

There is a lure that’s hard to resist when it comes to blogging and using a CMS system. They are easy to install and start. You get a big rush from registering a domain name and putting up new information in a few hours or days.

The problem is that the rush you get from starting the site isn’t enough to keep up the enthusiasm for continuing to build the site, and there probably was not enough good planning and research put into the topic of the site to see if it was going to be profitable or not before starting it.

At least, that has been my experience.

I’m learning that the same thing can be true when hiring someone else to build a site for you.

I’ve talked to quite a few small business owners who have wasted thousands of dollars and years of their time because they hired someone to build their website who knew how to build it but had no clue about how to attract free traffic from the search engines.

A nice site with no visitors will never be successful. A large and growing number of visitors each month is the lifeblood of selling anything on the Internet.

So, what are you to do if you know nothing, or very little, about websites, but you need one that will help you generate income and not just be a constant money drain?

You could do what I did and spend ten or more years of your life reading and studying everything you could get your eyes on and building dozens of sites to test what you learned, or you could hire someone with the experience and tools to do the job right the first time — while you concentrate on running your business and satisfying your customers.

How much would you be willing to pay to have a website that attracts serious visitors — potential customers — every month for years to come?

As a serious business owner, you probably would not throw out a number at this point, because you’d want to know more. How many visitors? How much income? What are the initial costs? How much does it cost to maintain it? Who’s going to do the work? What are the monthly hosting fees? How much trouble will it be to modify the information on the site when things change?

There are a lot of things to consider and most of them have nothing to do with HTML, CSS, FTP, and all the other alphabet-soup of acronyms associated with the technical side of building a site.

(You might be surprised at the number of websites I’ve looked at in the last couple of years that did not immediately tell what the owner was offering and why you would be better off buying from him or her. People on the web have short attention spans and they are generally in skimming mode when they first visit a website. You only have a few seconds to state your case and give them a reason that will benefit them in order to get them to slow down and actually read what you have to say. Don’t waste your visitors’ time with non-essentials — give them a reason to consider buying from you so you’ll have time to persuade them. Of course, how you do this differs with the type of site you have — sales, informational, and so forth — and the type of business you run.)

One of the things I’ve learned about most of the small business owners I’ve talked to is that the most prosperous of them are not “do it yourselfers.” They don’t have the time, energy, or desire to take on more tasks and responsibilities, because they are already doing all they have time for just running their business.

Most of them depend on others who specialize in things they need.

If they want legal advice, they hire a lawyer, or have one on retainer — they don’t go to law school at night for several years just to learn how to write their own contracts or deal with litigation.

Most of them hire an accountant and/or bookkeeper to keep their business on track and help with financial issues and taxes — they don’t become a CPA just to do it themselves.

Most of the small business owners I know who have survived the recent economic downturn have learned the hard way that there are times when it just makes sense to hire someone with experience and expertise to get the job done quickly, efficiently, and right the first time.

Perhaps you’re one of those successful small business owners who knows how to prosper by running your own business, but who feels clueless when it comes to evaluating people who claim to be experts at building websites. After all, every town has people who claim to be able to build good business websites, and some of them really do know what they’re talking about.

Unfortunately, most of them don’t.

You don’t have the time and money to pay someone to learn what they’re doing at your expense.

How do you separate the experts from the want-to-be herd?

That’s the crux of the issue, isn’t it?

This can be especially difficult when you don’t have the experience to know whether what they tell you sounds reasonable, or not.

One way to separate the experts from the herd is that they tend to spend more time asking you questions about your business and the results you want from your website than they do telling you how good they are at building them.

Another way is to talk to someone who has already been vetted by others who do have the experience and expertise to know.

That’s why I’m personally recommending Sitesell Services to you.

Sitesell is the company that Ken Evoy founded and which has grown into a top-notch service over the years. The Services part of the business is for business owners like you who want to hire someone to build an effective business website that is custom-tailored to market your business around the clock.

The people at Sitesell hire only experts with demonstrated ability and experience, and they help you select the right person to build your site for you.

Here’s a short video about how they can help you…


Once one of these experts is working for you, they follow a time-tested system to build a custom site that will market your products and services to people who are looking for what you have to offer, and these are the hottest prospects.

Is Sitesell Services for everyone? Obviously, the answer is no.

Is it appropriate for every business? Again, no.

But, you’ll never know if it could be a good match for your business unless you learn more about it and contact them.

Of course, there is no obligation.

If you’re interested in hiring someone to help you build your business online, watch the video and see what they offer.

Act on your dream!

JD

PS. If you’re a do-it-yourselfer, you can download a free copy of Make Your Site Sell! and learn more about what I’m talking about, or you can learn about SBI version 2.0 and see if it offers the tools you want to build and host your own site. I use SBI to build and manage some of my sites and it is easily my tool of choice for any new business sites I may build.

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Deleting old bookmarks on Delicious.com

August 18, 2009 by John Dilbeck · 8 Comments
Filed under: Act On Your Dream!, Musings, Web Services 

For the last several days, I have been diligently working to update and rebuild all of my Act On Your Dream! website.

This is one of my favorite sites and I was dismayed to see how much I’ve neglected updating and adding new information to the site. That’s something I plan to remedy in the coming weeks.

This morning, I was editing the Delicious Tag Cloud page and noticed that there were tags for things I’m no longer interested in and others that I no longer promote.

It’s been awhile since I’ve really worked with Delicious.com (used to be del.icio.us) and I realized that I had several dozen bookmarks that I needed to delete and others that needed to be edited to remove tags that were no longer appropriate.

It was a fairly easy process and I was reminded why I like Delicious.com more than the other bookmarking sites.

Do you use bookmarking sites to share your bookmarks with others? When is the last time you took a look to see if you’re showing what you want to share, now?

It took maybe an hour to update over 200 bookmarks and to winnow them down to less than 200. They make it easy.

Act on your dream!

JD

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What can Twittorati do for bloggers who are not in the top 100?

July 31, 2009 by John Dilbeck · 4 Comments
Filed under: Blogging, Twitter, Web Services 

I received an email this morning from Technorati telling me about a new service they have just introduced: Twittorati.

It combines the top bloggers with Twitter and currently ranks the top 100 blogs, as welll as tweets and tags.

I find it interesting to have a list of the top 100 blogs and there are a few that I’ve never seen before, so eventually, I’ll look at them and see what I can learn.

They say that other blogs will be added in the future. I wonder what Twittorati can do for those of us who aren’t even close to being in the top 100.

I haven’t had time to think about this, yet, but wanted to pass the word along and see what you think about this new service.

Act on your dream!

JD

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Twitter Grader – find local Twitter elite

January 13, 2009 by John Dilbeck · 9 Comments
Filed under: Communities, Social Networking, Twitter, Web Services, Western North Carolina 

This turned out to be an interesting morning. I just spent several hours doing something that wasn’t even close to being on my to-do list, but it worked out well.

It started out innocently enough.

Brian Hawkins left a comment and I went to visit his blog. I was reading his Extreme Ezine Makes The Grade post and it reminded me of Twitter Grader.

After visiting Brian’s profile page on Twitter Grader, I went and had a look at my Twitter Grader profile page.

I had been there sometime in the past, but never really paid a lot of attention to the site. I’m somewhat leery of sites that tell us how much our sites are worth and how we rank for whatever they’re covering.

This morning, however, I stopped and really looked over my profile page.

One thing I noticed is that the link next to the “Full Name” label is a link to my Twitter profile. That certainly makes it easy to follow someone.

I also noticed that it had a link to the Twitter elite in Murphy, NC. Of course, I had to visit that page.

When I visited the page, it turns out that I am the Twitter elite in Murphy. I’m the only one listed on the page. I guess that’s one of the benefits of living in a small town.

It’s also one of the benefits of listing your town and state in your Twitter profile, if you live in the USA. I’m not sure how it works if you live elsewhere.

It also is a good opportunity for others who live in Murphy to establish their presence by starting to use Twitter regularly.

I wondered who would be listed as the Twitter elite in Asheville, NC.

I found a list of 50 people and visited each of their Twitter profiles. I think I followed about 20 of them.

This is a good way to find other proficient Twitter users in your local area and to meet the ones with similar interests.

But the twisting path I followed this morning continued along to places I’d never seen.

One of the Twitter elite from Asheville had just joined a Twitter Group for Asheville, NC and I went to take a look at the group.

When I noticed the #asheville hashtag code for the group, something clicked.

If you’ve been following my blog for the last few days, you’re already aware that I’ve been looking at ways to use Twitter to promote what’s happening here in Murphy, NC. I’ve been experimenting with the #MurphyNC hashtag.

So, I read the FAQs at TwittGroups and decided to create a group for Murphy.

There was only one thing to do before creating the group.

In December 2007, I created a half-dozen communities on Ning.com, but closed all of them in June 2008 for reasons I won’t go into here. Suffice it to say that it really pays to read the terms and conditions of a site before putting a half-year of effort into it.

When I was fully aware of the terms, I resurrected one of the communities for Squidoo Marketing and have been enjoying sharing with others in the community for the last six months.

One of the other communities I’d started was for Murphy, NC. This morning, I checked to see if the subdomain I’d previously used was available. It was, so I reopened the community.

Then, it was time to create the TwittGroups group for Murphy.

All of this took a few hours and it opens the door to much more work in the near future, but part of this was already in my plans for this year.

I’m not going to do anything with the Murphy community on Ning until I line up one or more businesses to sponsor the site. For the last few years, I’ve been promoting the area and some of the businesses for free, but it’s time to stop doing that.

As soon as I’ve lined up at least one sponsor for the site, I’ll start rebuilding it.

This time, however, there will be more tools thrown into the mix, including Twitter.

If you are in Murphy, NC, and you are a Twitter user, come and join the group for Murphy.

If you’re not in Murphy, you may find that Twitter Grader and TwittGroups may be tools you’ll want to try out, especially if you’re promoting a local area.

As with all experiments, part of this may prove to be worthwhile and part may be a waste of time. I won’t know for sure until I’ve worked on it for a few months.

Thanks, Brian, for linking to your TwitterGrader profile page. It made for an interesting morning!

Act on your dream!

JD

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Site Build It! Holiday Special Extended

December 28, 2008 by John Dilbeck · 4 Comments
Filed under: Sitesell and Site Build It, Web Services, Webhosting 

Recently, I told you about the Holiday Special for purchasing an annual subscription to Site Build It! Until midnight on December 25, 2008, you could buy one SBI subscription and get one free.

That offer has been extended until January 5, 2009. When it expires at midnight on January 5th, that will be it – no more extensions.

Do you know how many people want to work at home and create more options for increasing their family finances?

According to a recent Harris poll, 72% of American households are thinking about starting a home-based business. You are not alone.

But, how do you get started without wasting time, effort, and money?

There are a lot of people who say they know how to build a successful home business, but how many of them are really succeeding? Are they giving (or selling) you good advice? How can you be sure?

Thousands of people have learned how to build a business where they can work at home and increase their income by following the proven training that is included with Site Build It!

Now, I’ll be the first to agree that what works for one person may not work for another. I’ve read lots of websites, ebooks, and reports and I know for a fact that I’m not interested in doing what they advise. I want to build my home business and do the things that interest me, not necessarily what interests the authors of those books and reports.

I’m sure you feel the same way.

You want to build a real business that is all about something that interests you.

One of the great things about Site Build It! is that it includes a self-taught e-business building course that includes clear step-by-step video instruction and all the tools required not just to “learn,” but to actually build a profitable, evergrowing e-business.

Anyone can say build a website or start a blog, but how many of them offer a time-tested course that thousands have followed to build their online businesses – in many different countries and niches?

Still, even though many have followed the course and have achieved success, it doesn’t work for everyone. Nothing does.

What happens if you try it and it’s not for you?

Ask for a refund. It’s just that simple. Your success is guaranteed, or you get your money back. If you decide that this isn’t for you and you ask for a refund, you’ll get all your money back in the first 30 days and a pro rata refund after that for the remainder of your annual subscription.

Don’t miss the extended holiday special buy-one, get-one-free offer.

After midnight on January 5, 2009, this special offer will be gone.

Don’t you owe it to yourself to try and see if you have what it takes to build an online business of your own?

Site Build It! will not do the work for you. This isn’t magic. It’s a business. You’ll have to do the work, yourself, but SBI offers the education and tools that will give you the best chance that I know of to build your online business.

I’ve been doing this for years, and I owe a large part of my success to what I’ve learned as a very happy Site Build It! customer.

Why wait?

Isn’t 2009 a good year to start building your independence and diversifying your income?

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Instant Banner Creator Review

December 14, 2008 by John Dilbeck · 14 Comments
Filed under: Advertising, Poll, Traffic Exchanges, Web Services 

Right at the start, I want to say that I absolutely hate all the hype and commotion surrounding product launches in the Internet marketing field. I subscribe to lots of blogs, mailing lists, and follow quite a few marketers on Twitter. Today, I’ve been inundated with messages for Instant Banner Creator.

To be honest, I was prepared not to like it, but I thought I should check it out to see for myself.

The main reason I chose to do this, instead of just ignoring it, is because I respect the owners, John Merrick and Soren Jordansen. Soren has gone out of his way to answer questions I had a few years ago and he has always been responsive to my questions and suggestions. I’ve earned a bit of money promoting his traffic exchange, Dragon Surf, over the years, too.

Instant Banner Creator Review

Yes, you can use Instant Banner Creator for free, but there are some advantages to upgrading. When you first sign up, you’ll see several OTO pages (one-time offers). The first offers a life-time membership (at a pretty good price if you’re going to be using this tool a lot). The others offer discounted memberships.

Once you get inside the site, everything is well laid out and easy to use.

Tutorials

Instant Banner Creator offers two sets of tutorials. You can choose to watch video tutorials or download a written tutorial with screenshots in PDF format.

I did not watch or read either tutorial before starting, but I’ll download the PDF version right after posting this review.

Creating a banner

As you may know, I live in an area where I’m surrounded by broadband Internet access about three or four miles away, but I’m still on a very slow dialup connection. I was expecting a frustrating experience.

When I clicked the link to create a banner, I got what I was expecting.

The first time, I had to endure an excruciatingly-slow download of the available banner templates. I’m sure it is much faster if you have broadband, but I went and did something else for 10 or 15 minutes while the graphics loaded.

Once they were cached in my browser, however, the system was nice and responsive.

On many sites, when I’m downloading lots of graphics, the servers time out and the pages don’t load. There were no timeouts nor errors when using this tool.

I was disappointed with the quality of the banner templates. Most of them are dull and uninspiring, even most of the templates that can only be used by upgraded members.

Another thing that I did not like was the fact that the graphics don’t show their exact height and width, something that I think would be very important.

I didn’t find a banner template that I liked, so I went into the do it yourself section and created a simple two-toned gradient graphic template and used that as the basis for creating my first banner using this system.

I didn’t see any clipart I liked, so all I did was add some text to the banner.

The text editor offers lots of fonts, and you can easily select the size and color of the text you want to use.

If you don’t have the tools for working with graphics and/or you don’t have the talent and experience, I think you’ll find this tool to be pretty easy to use.

For my first banner, I used a large font to show the name of the product, and a smaller font for the call to action.

When adding the text to the graphic, I did not see any tools to help space things properly on the template, i.e., I didn’t see any tools for centering one on the other. So, i just eyeballed it and centered them approximately.

The programs I normally use (Photoshop and TypeStyler) offer precise alignment tools, but perhaps for most uses you really don’t have to be that accurate.

After placing the text on the template, I could drag it around until I was satisfied with the placement and then click a button to have it added to the graphic. There is one level of undo if you don’t like it.

When I was done, I saved the new banner. At that point, the system told me the link I’d need to use to show the banner somewhere. Graphics can be stored on their site or downloaded to your computer and uploaded to wherever you want to store them. The benefit of storing them on their system is you don’t have to FTP the files around or pay for the bandwidth.

I chose to leave the banner on their site.

The system then gives the option of linking to a target destination, and, since they offer an affiliate program, I chose to link to my affiliate page. When I entered the URL and clicked the appropriate button, their system gave the complete link for showing the graphic and linking to the destination page.

I choose to open off-site links in a new window or tab, so I added the target code to the HTML they provided.

Now, it’s a simple matter of copying and pasting that code anywhere I can put HTML.

Like so:

I think you’ll agree that I’m no artist. Even though I have the professional tools and have been doing graphics for over 20 years, I don’t have the artistic and design talent to make the eye-popping graphics that a professional artist can produce.

Still, in just a few minutes, I think I have a serviceable banner and it is hosted and ready to go.

The banner graphic they host on their site after I saved it does not look like the banner shown above. On their site, the text is centered more-or-less and not truncated on the right as it shows here. I downloaded the graphic and it still looks right. Hmmm. I wonder if this is a problem with the CSS design for this blog. I don’t think it is, because the other banner shown a few paragraphs lower looks fine. Let me test that. I’ll get back to this later, in the comments. This center column should be wide enough for a standard 468×60 banner.

I think anyone with a modicum of talent can produce banners that get the point across, but if you want the best, hire an artist to create them for you.

While I’m unimpressed with the banner templates, I give the system for creating and hosting them a big thumbs up. I think just about anyone can work with this system and create banners you can use just about anywhere.

Of course, I’ve just scratched the surface of what this system can do. You can upload your own templates and clip art and use the system to create a new banner with different text. So, even free members aren’t limited by what’s available.

I decided to try creating a button.

Creating a button

Again, there was a very long wait while the template graphics loaded in my browser window. Once they were cached, everything sped up, again.

This time, I liked some of the graphics, especially some of the templates that are available only to upgraded members.

I’ve already described the process for banners, and it works pretty much the same for buttons.

Here’s a button I put together in a few minutes. It’s hosted on their system.

It’s not great, but it’s not bad, either.

Again, an artist could do much better, and many talented amateurs could, too. Here’s an example of one of the banners an artist designed for promoting the site:



For the rest of us, Instant Banner Creator does a good job of creating and hosting the graphics we need.

I’m giving the button creator a big thumbs up, too.

Headers and Footers

I didn’t have much more time for looking at this and decided to see what the header graphics look like. These header (and footer) graphics can be used as part of your template for creating websites, and I’m sure they can be used on most blogs, too.

Again, there was an excruciatingly long wait as the header graphics loaded. Once, again, however, when they were cached, everything sped right back up.

I played with a header, but didn’t save one.

One thing that is a big difference between the banners and the headers is that I loved most of the headers. They are beautiful. I think that’s one of the best parts of the system, out of the parts I had time to look at.

Even the free headers were very nice.

If all you want to do is create a header and footer for a new website, that would be reason enough to join and use this system.

Animated Banners and Peel Away Ads

I did not try the animated banner or peel away ad creators.

While finishing this review, I did start loading the large peel away templates, and most of the ones I looked at are beautiful, in stark contrast to the very low-quality banner templates.

I do plan to give the peel away ads a try when I have more time. When I do, I’ll talk about it in the comments to this post.

Conclusion: Thumbs Up

Yes, there was a lot of hype about this all day, and yes there are several OTO pages to go through, but I believe this system is sound and very useful. Toss in free hosting and bandwidth, and what do you have to lose?

If you plan to use this system a lot, pay close attention to the OTOs, because you can save a lot of money over what you’d have to pay with a regular monthly subscription.

Of course, I’m using my affiliate links to link to the Instant Banner Creator and I’ll earn a commission should you decide to upgrade. You can, too.

Unlike many of the tools I’ve looked at over the last few years, I feel good about recommending this service to you. Free or upgraded, it offers a valuable service to its members, and the owners are honorable, reliable, and helpful.

I have no doubt that Soren and John will be adding more features to this site over the coming months.

Hopefully, they’ll add some better banner templates, especially since that’s part of the site’s name.

Give Instant Banner Creator a try and let me know what you think.

Do you like it, dislike it, or prefer another tool or software?

Act on your dream!

JD

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Happy Birthday to EzineArticles.com!

November 19, 2008 by John Dilbeck · 7 Comments
Filed under: Article Marketing, Success and Failure, Web Services 

Chris Knight announced a few minutes ago that EzineArticles is Nine Today.

Congratulations to him and the entire team at EzineArticles.

Over the years they have risen to the top of the article directories through hard work and innovation. They have earned the right to celebrate this milestone.

Best wishes for nine more years – at least.

Act on your dream!

JD

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Can AWeber and Squidoo Work Together?

November 17, 2008 by John Dilbeck · 7 Comments
Filed under: Aweber Autoresponders, Marketing, Squidoo Lenses, Squidoo Marketing, Web Services, email marketing 

Why can’t active sign-up forms for AWeber mailing lists be added to Squidoo lenses?

Is there a solution?

Today, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about this subject, because the ability to add AWeber subscription forms to my Squidoo lenses is very important to my plans for next year.

I don’t believe there are any unsolvable technical problems stopping these two companies from working together.

It is very easy to add active AWeber subscription forms on other sites. They provide two easy-to-use methods: Javascript and HTML forms. You can see an example of the HTML version of a subscription form on every page of this site, right below my photo in the right column. You can see an example of the javascript version of a sign-up form on the Subscribe page on this site.

In both cases, I accomplished what I wanted in just a few minutes.

Unfortunately, I’ve been looking for a way to do this simple task on my Squidoo lenses for months. I thought I found a solution last week, and it worked very well, but it is being killed by Squidoo.

I just created a new lens with an open letter to Tom Kulzer, CEO and founder of AWeber.com, and Seth Godin, Founder of Squidoo.com, asking if they can find a way to work together to make it possible for us to do something that I believe will have a relatively easy solution. I also emailed each of them and invited them to view the lens.

You are invited to come read the lens and express your opinions:

Can AWeber and Squidoo Work Together?

Perhaps this isn’t a technical problem. Maybe it’s just a lack of motivation on the part of both companies to develop a solution. I don’t know.

Tom and Seth, I hope you’ll find a way to make this happen.

While it may not be important to the vast majority of Squidoo lensmasters, it is important to some of us – possibly many of us. I believe it may be important to many AWeber customers.

I’ve added a couple of polls to the lens and I invite everyone who reads this to come and voice your opinions and help spread the word to others who may want to combine the power of the services AWeber and Squidoo provide.

Act on your dream!

JD

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