Ever had the dream of starting and running your very own business?
If so, you’re in the majority. Most people have entertained the idea of becoming a business owner. At first glance, it’s a notion that has appeal on several levels.
First you get to fire your boss (that IDIOT!).
Then, you get to set your own schedule (I’ll work when I WANT to!).
Thanks to everyone for helping us to pull of a great training webinar! We appreciated the opportunity to clear the air about AdWords, and how to structure a proper campaign.
Enjoy the recording below. We also have some recommended resources below, and if you have any questions just let us know in the comments.
Gmail Riches – Highly recommended resource to use Gmail Marketing on AdWords
Marketing Sherpa – Compendium of case-studies, surveys, and online resources for marketers.
Pingdom – Checks your web page load time.
AdWords External Keyword Tool – Pure awesomeness.
I love getting emails that go something like this:
“Do I have to be ________ (talented, smart, brilliant, good looking, a technical genius, a great speaker, etc) to be rich / successful?”
The answer is no.
Most wealthy people are not that smart – and they are happy to admit it.
Many wealth people are not particularly talented – and they will admit that too.
The vast majority of wealthy people are not blessed with uncommonly good looks, a privileged background, or any other type of advantageous predisposition that would guarantee success, or even make it easier to acquire.
In fact, in my examination of the wealthy / rich / successful from the rest of population, there is really only two character traits I can observe that stand out:
As an entrepreneur, you are going to encounter setbacks. They are a part of the game.
Bad news: Setbacks are practically guaranteed. Factor them into your business plan.
Good news: Setbacks will cause many of your competitors to quit (yeah!), and create new opportunities for personal growth.
As Napoleon Hill said:
“Every setback has within it a seed of equivalent or greater benefit.”
And that’s true. Let’s take Pat as an example…
Pat is an HBSA student that has been advertising online for over a year now. A couple weeks ago, he was slapped by the big G.
He had every reason to feel sorry for himself. After all, he’d been an advertiser in good standing with Google for a long time. How dare they slap him!
But he didn’t go that route. Instead…he slapped back.
And a scant 17 days later, he’s back to generating leads online.
That’s an HBSA record – going from slap to mac in 17 days. I called him up and forced him to tell me what he did to make it happen. He cordially agreed. Here it is:
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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’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.
- 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)
- 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.
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.
- 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.
- 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.
Both systems are, overall, good systems. Both are also imperfect, and that probably won’t change. Our recommendation is that if you are in primary need of automated EMAIL followup, are new to autoresponders in general, or have a very small list, then go with Aweber. If you send frequent broadcasts, or use other marketing mediums (phone / mail) or have a need for customizing your sales funnel, then go with InfusionSoft. We use both – Aweber for automated email followup, InfusionSoft for everything else. And dats the way we like it
**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 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 your’e 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.