This video is a tutorial on how fast and easy it is to incorporate autoresponder software on to your website:

Now, you may be brand new to online marketing, or you may be a seasoned hand.  Regardless, you should absolutely be using some sort of autoresponder software on your website, for three main reasons:

1. Database Building

Building a database is one of the most profitable things you can do for creating residual income and having a long-term asset.  At HBSA, we use always go into a new market with the mindset of building assets.  Different business models take different tools to execute, and our mindset has always been “long term”, and having a database is essential to building a long-term, profitable asset.

2. Automated Followup

Are you busy?  Got a lot going on? Yeah, we know.  We do too.  And the fact is that as much as we all love the “human touch” in business, humans make mistakes.  They overlook details.  The forget stuff.

And that’s why we love autoresponders so much.  We use this technology to take some of the “oops, it slipped through the cracks” out of our businesses.   It basically allows you to write up a series of emails that go out on an automatic “drip” timeline, so that each person who opts into your list gets a predictable, steady flow of content and information from you.  Helps to build relationships, and be of service to your clients.

3. Broadcasting

This is where you can send out an email to your entire list, just with a click of one button.  Makes sending out invitations to webinars and teleseminars a breeze.  It also allows you to advertise time-sensitive specials and updates to your list as you need it.  I sent out an email last week to over 126,000 people, and it took less than 15 minutes.

Here are some additional considerations when using an autoresponder:

1. Website

What is your website designed to do?  If you have an optin website (which you can build easily with Weebly) then an autoresponder works well.  If you have a blog, it works well.  If you have a corporate website, and no offer to give people who opt in, you probably won’t get much action.  Give people an ethical bribe (i.e., a good reason to opt in) and you’ll get better results.

2. Single Opt In Vs Double Opt In

This is a hotly debated topic in the permission-based marketing field.  Kinda like when you get a bunch of Mac fanboy’s in a room full of PC nerds, the inevitable argument can be well-stated and well-made by either side, and it’s ultimately a matter of opinion.

The process for a single-optin setup is:

Lead goes to website >>> Lead opts into autoresponder >>> Lead receives what was promised immediately upon first email

The process for a double-optin setup is:

Lead goes to website >>> Lead opts into autoresponder >>> Lead gets email from autoresponder asking lead to confirm their identity >>> Lead receives what was promised after they confirm their subscription

Email marketing purists argue that double optin helps keep spam rates low (sometimes true) and filters your most “serious” people up to the top.

Personally, I prefer single optin.  I prefer to let leads filter themselves.  Fact is, some people want what you have (they opted in already) but they won’t confirm a subscription.  Plus, those email confirmation messages sometimes get sent to the users spam filter…meaning they never even get a chance to double opt in.

I’m able to keep spam rates low by only sending broadcasts that contain value.  Seems to work ok for us

3. Setbacks

You’re going to have setbacks when using an autoresponder.  It’s a fact.  If you’re new to autoresponders, understand that it is definitely one of the most profitable tools you can introduce to your online marketing campaigns.  It’s also new – which means you’ll need to learn the system.  As goofs will occur, it’s important to understand the mindset for how to deal with setbacks.  At the same time, you can avoid a lot of the more common goofs by getting an autoresponder service that simply has quality training on how to use their products.

There are several autoresponder softwares available.  We personally like Aweber.com for autoresponder software.  They have the highest deliver-ability of any that we’ve tested (and we’ve tested a lot).   Feel free to test ‘em all out, but this is the autoresponder we use.

Questions? Comments?  Post ‘em up below.

Weebly is an up-and-coming website-building platform.  I’ve heard mixed reviews, and so I wanted to put out a list of the pro’s and con’s of this particular platform so that you have a good idea of what you’re getting.

Here’s a video showing a back-office tour of Weebly:

Weebly Overview

Back in the olden-days, you had to know html, css, and have a host of other technical skills in order to create a website.  However, that’s all changing.  The growing popularity of “drag and drop” solutions has touched multiple industries, and now Weebly is bringing it to the world of web development.

They are the first to create a drag and drop interface for building websites that is really simple, and easy to use.  For a newer company, they have integrated some really intelligent features that are important to note.

Drag And Drop Interface

Weebly does it up right with an interface that is truly simple to use.  In fact, it’s so simple even a child could put out something that looks professionally designed.  You just click on an element, drag it into your site, and start using it.  Easy.

Free Hosting (With No Advertising!)

Some hosting providers will give away hosting for free, but stuff tons of ads on your page.   Pretty lame, in our humble opinions.  But Weebly doesn’t do that – in fact, they allow YOU to put Adsense ads on YOUR site, so that you can monetize it and make money off the traffic that gets to your website.  This is a huge advantage when building a website, as they have eliminated one of the expenses of overhead for website creation.

Professional Templates (Plus The Ability To Customize Your Own)

Not sure how to create a sharp looking website?  No worries – you can borrow one of their 70 professionally-designed templates to use, and still customize every word on the site to reflect exactly what you want to say.

Audio/Video/ Blog Integrated

You can upgrade to a pro account, and integrate audio or video clips on to your website.  Even the free accounts allow you to utilize the power of a blog on your site at no additional expense.  You have full moderation controls to keep comments in check, or allow open /closed commenting.  It’s totally up to you.

Use Your Own Domain

If you already have a domain, you can still host on Weebly for free.  You can also purchase domains through them for very reasonable rates, but the fact that they will let you use their platform, use their hosting…all for free…it’s pretty amazing.

Webmaster Tools

They have a suite of webmaster tools included to allow you to properly track and SEO the pages on your website.  Again, no real technical expertise is needed to leverage these tools – they’re all “point/click”.

Customization

Add pictures, create online yearbooks, customize favicons…you can do all this and more without website design knowledge.  Drag, drop, and done.

We have a lot that we like about Weebly, but there is one thing that we don’t like about it.  If you opt for the “freebie” version, they put a footer link on the very bottom of your page that says “create a free website with Weebly”.  Honestly, we can understand why – they are giving so much away for free, that we can forgive this one small blip.  They are a company that needs to make money to provide good service, so that one small bit of promotion is OK with us

Is Weebly A Scam?!?

Unfortunately, some skeptics have chosen to take the low road, and assert that Weebly couldn’t POSSIBLY give away all the great services that they do for free.  While they do have paid options and paid services, they certainly aren’t scammy about it.  They give away a superior product to what many web developers could produce, at a cost that is remarkable.

So while there is no free lunch, this is pretty darn close

You can check it out, and see that while others may charge thousands (or tens of thousands) for an inferior solution, Weebly is keepin’ it real and givin’ it away for free (that’s right, FREE son).

If you’d like to get more information, you can visit their website:  Weebly.com.

If you have experience with Weebly, please share below!

There Is An Author Update To This Post – See Below

Aweber and InfusionSoft are both considered tools for automating your marketing.  Aweber classifies itself as more of a straight Autoresponder (versus a gay autoresponder) and InfusionSoft classifies itself as more of a tool for automating all aspects of marketing.  I use both on a daily basis, and have so for years.  IMHO, they are different tools for different purposes, and both are great depending on where you are at in your business.  Lemme break ‘em down for you here:

Aweber – “Emailers Only”

Aweber’s system is the best for automated email followup.  Notice I didn’t say “broadcast” followup – just the automated stuff.  They have a pristine record with the ISP’s, and they aim to keep it that way.  What that means is that marketers who abuse their service (sending out spammy emails, etc) lose their accounts.  I like them for automated email followup, but I do NOT recommend them for broadcasting.

They stick to email only – they have no setup for direct mail, voicemail broadcasts, etc.  They do not claim to be a CRM tool, and offer none of the features to assist with that.  One could make the argument that they should add those tools to their system, but Tom Kulzer (their CEO) seems laster-focused on maximizing their brand in the email marketing vertical.  Good on ‘em.

The Good Stuff:

- Inexpensive (account starts at $15 USD / month)

- Easy for newbies (they have tons of free training, and the interface is simple)

- Dummy-proof (they make you comply with CAN-SPAM, which is good for people who don’t have  clue what they are doing).

- HIGH Deliverability (if the email doesn’t get delivered, then nothing else matters)

The Not-Good Stuff

- Limited customization (they don’t use triggers, they require double-optins to view one of their pre-written messages or require that they approve any custom messages)

- Limited features (it’s email only – no other marketing features included)

- They will spank you if your spam complaints get too high. This is good and bad – the idiots who spam people to death lose their accounts and therefore allow Aweber to keep deliverability high for everyone else.  Problem is that if you have too big a list, you can’t really broadcast at all, as even a small percentage of complaintes comes up as a flag.

- List segmentation is limited. You gotta get a shopping cart if you’re doing sales, and it’s tricky to do very sophisticated list segmentation.  For example, even if someone double opts for one list, they gotta go through the same process if they take an action and join another list.  It’s fairly redundant.

- Not big-list friendly. If you have a list over 20k subscribers, then you will have some special challenges.  List-importing is limited (they must all double opt to Aweber’s system when you import them) and if you make a change to your followup, then EVERYONE gets the change and cycles back through your followup again.  There isn’t any feature to make a change and integrate for new list joiners only – everyone gets it.  No big deal when you have a list of a few hundred or few thousand people, but it’s not so cool when you want to make a change and it affects 70k subscribers.

Get An Aweber Test-Drive Here

InfusionSoft – “IT Personnel Only”

Infusion was originally promoted by Dan Kennedy as the be-all, end-all of marketing automation.  It originally sold for $6k to set up, plus $300/mo for ongoing usage, and nobody knew what the hell to do with it after they got it.  Their training sucked, customer support sucked, and it was so damn complicated that marketers could barely send broadcasts without help from the IT department.

They have since upgraded their training, and adjusted their pricepoint to a sane level that actually reflects the value of the service.  They also got some customer support reps that knew what the hell was going on, which helped everyone out.

The “brains” behind the system is a tag setup, meaning that once a lead comes in, they are given tags to identify them for specific email followup campaigns, voicemail followup campaigns, or direct-mail followup campaigns.  Once you figure it out, it’s actually pretty cool – it offers much greater flexibility with your marketing in list segmentation, and you can make your segments much more action-oriented.

The Good Stuff

- Infusion is much more than email automation.  You can run affiliate programs, monitor and track leadflow through sophisticated funnels, integrate custom shopping cart solutions (or use theirs), run continuity programs, drop voicemails/direct mail, and manage fulfillment reports all from one interface.  It’s nice

- Much more sophisticated list segmentation.  By using triggers, you can be very, very specific with your followup marketing campaigns.  You can ensure that people who click a link get a separate followup series from those who do not, those who open a specific email can be separated from those who don’t, etc.

- Easy list importing and double optins.  You have much great freedom to customize your double-optin emails and links, and they allow the importing of previous lists (hot damn!)

- Much easier on Spam complaints.  They do not take the “marketer is assumed guilty” approach to broadcasts.  Really, this is good and bad (I’ll explain in a minute)

- Pricepoint is currently MUCH more reasonable.  It’s running $199 to start, then scales up depending on how much email volume you’re pushing.  When you factor in the other stuff it does, it’s pretty cost-effective.

The Not-Good Stuff

- Not for newbies. It’s not an easy system to learn (even now).  You don’t need an IT staff anymore, but you will need some time to get how the system works.  In order to make use of the additional customization features, you (or someone you know) will need to have some technical competency (comfortable working with html, API’s, etc).  Nothing too fancy, but it’s not “plug and play” like Aweber.

- Questionable deliverability. Their domain has been greylisted.  That’s not good.  I still don’t understand how they track spam.  They approached me several months ago saying our spam rates were way too high.  I looked in the system, and saw them chillin’ at 1.2% (1.2 people out of 100 were hitting the spam button when we mailed).  They said we were at 5% (which is crazy-high).  We said that the back office didn’t reflect those numbers – they said “tough – sort it, or we are shutting your account down”.  So we broke up for a little while (we have since been happily reunited).

- Good old-fashioned “dumb” in the system. Now, this is coming from a current InfusionSoft user.  I love many aspects of their system, and am currently spending several hundreds of dollars every month for it’s usage (and I happily pay it – saves us a bunch of time and money).  But there are some things that we have found that just don’t make a damn bit of sense with their setup.

For example – we needed to change merchant accounts for some of our continuity subscribers.  They had no feature to do this en masse - we had to manually go through hundreds of records one-by-one and update each to run through the new merchant account.

‘Nuther example - when you unsubscribe from an InfusionSoft email, they ask the person unsubscribing if they would like to flag the message as spam.  Yes, they actually present a “yes or no” push-button option to mark email as spam if a subscriber wants to unsubscribe.  That may have something to do with their greylisting issue…

‘Nuther example - they accidentally charged a bunch of our clients an unsolicited charge on their credit cards.  Yeah, I know – DUMB.  We refunded everyone, apologized to all of them because it lokos like we did the charge when IS was the culprit.

Good news is that they have gotten progressively less-dumb as they have developed as a company, and they are the first to make apologies when need be.  But they have had to apologize a lot.

>>>Author UPDATE (See Below)<<<

**NOT RECOMMENDED**

Listen, it takes a real stinker to get on my “not recommended list”.  But here are a couple that we simply don’t recommend under ANY circumstance:

Lyris

Lyris is a huge company chock-full of non-marketing morons.  Seriously, they don’t get it.  Their system is near-impossible to use, takes FOREVER to set up, and has terrible deliverability.  They do offer triggers, but they don’t work most of the time.  On top of all of it, they charge several thousand to get set up, and several hundred to several thousand per month.  Their customer service is lame, and they try to lock people into long-term contracts.

We simply don’t recommend them unless you are looking for a tax write off (without any emotional gratification).

“Free” Autoresponders

In the autoresponder world, the axiom “you get what you pay for” isn’t always true.   Sometimes, you get way more for less money.  But every free autoresponder software that we have used wasn’t even worth the time it took to download.  If you’re going to be mailing, you gotta pony up and treat it like a real business.  It doesn’t mean you need to get the most expensive solution out there, but you want to be paying for something if you’re going to be mailing on a consistent basis.

I know there are exceptions for everything, and we may get a thousand hate mails talking about how their free service rocks.  If you find a great freebie, good on ya.  In our experience, shelling out $15/mo for everything you get with Aweber is more than worth it.

>>AUTHOR UPDATE<<<

Alright, we are officially revising this update.  Infusionsoft is just awful.  This week, they did some sort of crappy update to their email builder that forces you to customize your emails to the point that it takes much, much longer to hit send now.  They added this feature in the name of helping me to double my sales.  As if they would know better than I how to double my sales.  Now we have to take twice as long just to broadcast an email to our database.  Twice as long means I can only send half as many broadcasts.  That’s HALVING my sales, not doubling them.

Then, we find out that it’s messing up the emails that we send on behalf of our Affiliates for followup positioning (our goal is to help our Aff’s make followup sales to our Intro-product clients).  Turns out that the variables they should be forwarding are invisible – no affiliate contact info at all.

Finally, we discover that some of our emails aren’t even going out at all.  As in – someone purchases a product, and they don’t get the intended followup emails to access the product.

I’m just done with InfusionSoft.  DONE.

I can no longer in good conscience endorse InfusionSoft.  We are in the process of moving all of our marketing over to Office AutoPilot.  They integrate in with Ultracart, and together, provide a solution that we believe is easier to use and much more powerful than Infusion.

We will use InfusionSoft as a CRM only – just because we have a bunch of client payment plans tied up in their system, and it would be easier to just let them run their course than try to extract them all.  Over the years, I estimate we’ve paid in about $17,000+ for Infusion.  They have disappointed time, and time, and time again.  Yes, they do have some good features.  Yes, they do some things that Aweber does not.  But Office AutoPilot does more than Infusion, and (in our humble opinions) it’s a million times easier to use, they have  an actual SATISFACTION GUARANTEE backing them up, their email deliverability is better, and they are less expensive.

And frankly, at this point, the disappointment factor is just too high.  It has officially become more painful to stay than to move.

We’ll keep you posted, but at this point, we suggest Aweber for newbies and email-only automation, Office AutoPilot if you need to automate other aspects of your business or use offline marketing.

Microsoft Bing has a sense of humor.

Watch this, and tell me this type of situation hasn’t happened to you during a search:

But the question is – can they really challenge Google?

You can compare the two search engines here {link}.

To quote a famous philosopher (or Ron White):

“You can’t fix stupid”

Barry Schwartz illustrates this point in a poignant video: