List Profit Email Marketing Blog

For those who don’t know, AutoResponsePlus is autoresponder software that you purchase and install on your own website or domain. Many email marketing professionals consider it the “cadillac” among autoresponders, and if you buy it or play around with the demo tour at their sales site, you’ll see why.

OK. First things first. Let’s talk tech support. After all, if you’re going to buy standalone software, you don’t want to be “left out in the cold” if something goes wrong.

Several months before I bought ARP, I emailed some questions to them. My inquiries were answered personally by owner/develop Neil Morgan, and in a very timely, courteous, and thorough fashion. He had no idea who I was, nor that I owned several sites related to email marketing.

When I purchased ARP, I found the installation instructions extremely easy to follow. Unfortunately, some of my files had become corrupted in the process of downloading, so after uploading everything, I couldn’t get the “install” routine to run. I applied for their complimentary installation service, and within a few hours their installer had my software up and running.

Great! I was good to go … or so I thought.

I promptly messed something up, and had to ask the installer to fix it. Again, he had it all set in only an hour or two, and he even answered a couple of additional question that I emailed him after the install was complete. He never asked for anything extra for having done the install twice, or answering my questions.

A few days later, I was having a problem getting one of my autoresponders to send emails. As it turned out, it was my fault. My requests for support were again answered personally by owner and developer Neil Morgan, and as before they were timely, courteous, and to-the-point. He still had no idea who I was.

So … if my experience is any indication of how these guys treat the average customer, I’d have to give them an “A+” for Customer Service. I couldn’t have asked for more from them.

Now for the software. I have to admit I was a little overwhelmed at first, since I didn’t bother to read the very comprehensive 87 page manual before I started experimenting with the program. Had I read the manual *before* venturing in there, I would have known where all the menus were, and would have had a working idea of most of the “bells and whistles”, which are numerous.

In spite of my failure to fully read the manual first, in a short time, I was moving subscribers around, sending out test broadcasts to myself, and had several autoresponders set up and ready to roll.

As I explored further, I discovered all kinds of additional features like customizable signatures, customizable ads that can be inserted into any message, and changed on the main screen, without editing the individual messages, customizable headers and footers, customizable subscribe and unsubscribe link text and confirmation messages … the list goes on and on.

I’d have to say that compared to hosted autoresponders, the learning curve for ARP is a bit steeper, but that is mainly because it has so many features. It does everything that most hosted solutions do, and quite a few things that they don’t do.

Want to sort your database six ways from Sunday? You can. Want to send a broadcast only to people who did not open your last email? You can. Want to send a broadcast only to people who have been subscribed to your newsletter for at least “x” months? You can. Want to “loop” your subscribers to a different autorsponder, or start your series over when they’ve received all the messages? That’s here, too.

The main advantage to something like ARP, however, is that it grows with you, without large additional fees. Most hosted solutions start charging you extra as soon as your database exceeds a relatively small size. The additional fees turn out to be substantially more than the cost of the base service. Ouch!

ARP doesn’t do that. If you end up with a large list, you simply move your installation to a hosting account with a larger bandwidth allowance, or go for a dedicated server.

The initial cost is comparable to most hosted autoresponders, and the yearly renewal fee for continued support and upgrades much less than a yearly subscription to a hosted autoresponder. You can add the optional RSS module, which is a feature not offered by all of the major hosted autoresponder services.

I’m a big fan of blogs and RSS, and feel they strongly compliment email marketing. In my opinion, it’s a big plus to be able to publish your email newsletter in RSS format as well.

Given the learning curve, this may not be a program suitable for someone who is brand new to autoresponders. But if you’ve worked with a free or paid hosted autoresponder at all, you’ll see the benefit to using ARP. Let me rephrase that … the many benefits to using ARP.

And if you’re a serious email marketer, ARP is the way to go.

Really the only drawback that I can think of is the fact that you have to do your own research to make sure your domain is not “blacklisted”, which is part of the service being provided when you use a hosted solution. You do also have to know how to set up a MySQL database, and how to FTP files and set permissions, if you’re going to do the installation yourself.

The bottom line? http://John-Suggests.com/ARP.htm

That link ought to speak for itself, but if it doesn’t I’ll say it in plain English … I give this software a great rating and my highest recommendation!

You’re about to enter into and learn all about the little known world of co-registration leads. Quietly, insiders have begun to focus on this method of building a list to market to because of speed, lower cost, and large quantities of opt in leads. Most people don’t know about co-registration leads, or co-registration services. They’re used by some of the biggest corporations, and the biggest internet marketing experts, yet not widely written about in courses or ebooks.

This gives you an edge — most internet marketers don’t know about or use co-registration leads.

To understand why co-registration is such a powerful tool for Internet Marketing, let’s review what your other choices are when it comes to list building.

1) You could drive traffic to your site and encourage people to opt in to a newsletter or ezine or a site updates notification. However, the challenge here is getting your site ranked in the remaining free search engines and receiving enough targeted traffic to build a list within your lifetime. No kidding, it can take months for the search engine spiders to visit, let alone rank your site. There are solutions to this challenge,
but they are time consuming and require some expertise to do effectively.

2) You could pay on a per click basis at Overture or similar pay per click search engines. These are fee based traffic generators. This works, of course, but you have to maintain a competitive ranking without over spending your budget. Again, you can do this, but often you may have to pay .20 or .50 or more per lead just to stay with the pack. If you don’t pay up, you risk dropping out of the top listings, significantly reducing your traffic.

3) Publishing articles in targeted ezines and websites, with a catchy signature line or web address below the article is often a good source of traffic and subscribers. This works well. Many top marketing gurus have reached their level by publishing information that built credibility for them. The challenge here is there is a lot of competition, there are tons of ezines to choose from, and there is a no assurance you’ll build a list very quickly that way, either. Besides, there is widespread phobia about writing that holds many people back from attempting this proven route.

4) You can rent email addresses of a particular demographic or customer profile. The cost varies, but the main drawback is that you often can only mail to the list once, rather than being able to send a series of emails until people have responded to your offer. So, after your expensive effort, you will only have added to your list those who respond to that *one* email, making list building a slow and expensive process.

5) You could publish an ezine or newsletter, but then you simply have shifted the need for a list to offer your products and services to the publication you are writing. You still need to find people who want to subscribe. This works well if you have a viral aspect to your offering where people pass it around for you, but not everyone can count on that.

There is a faster, more cost effective way to build a list of any size you desire, no matter what your budget or your target audience — use co-registration services.

Here’s how it works. You can contract with owners of sites (or a network of sites) with traffic to collect a list of names of people visiting their sites who request information based on your offer. You pay per name for each person who responds, and you tell the site in advance how many names you want (or can afford). Some sites will have a minimum order, but that can be as low as a few hundred dollars.

You decide how many fresh email leads you want, and what you can afford, and place your order. Depending on how much targeted traffic the site has relative to how big your order is, you will have your order filled within a few days or weeks.

Sometimes these ads appear on “popups” or “popunders”, while other sites prefer to use the technique of getting their own subscribers first, and then offering additional subscriptions from their own “thank you” page. Still others will place your ad right on their site. Techniques vary, but the concept is the same.

These opt-in leads can be quite targeted because the visitor is already on a site that has something to do with your offer, they will have read about your offer, and, if they like the idea, they’ll elect to ask for more information.

The website will then collect the information from all those who want more information, and charge you per lead. This fee can be as low as a few cents, up to a dollar or more each, depending upon the quality of the lead, how targeted the visitors are, and the size of your order.

The benefit to you is simple: you don’t have to concern yourself with getting traffic or getting a banner clicked, you just have to insert your offer on a site that already has people on it seeking more information on related topics.

The end result? Using co-registration, you can get a targeted, fresh email lead for much less than it would cost you in time or money to create the same result on your own.

Here’s the best part: some of these sites can get you thousands or even tens of thousands of names very, very quickly, according to your budget. As soon as you have received the amount that you need, they pull your listing and you stop getting new leads.

Once you have your list, then you provide (via autoresponder) the free information you offered in your listing.

In future articles, we’ll go over what it takes to make money with these lists of co-registration leads.

For now, just imagine how much simpler your marketing can be from here on out.

You won’t have to fuss with search engine optimization, pay per click positioning, banner design, or list rental. You can simply determine what your budget is, pick one of the vendors in the directory, and within a defined period of time you’ll have a list to market your offer, ezine, or newsletter.

Then, instead of wondering how your site is listed in the search engines today, you can focus on improving your offer, setting up JV deals to hit your list with, or simply take the day off and let your autoresponder make money for you.

If you want to market a product, service, or affiliate program, you simply must at least explore this opportunity. You could rather quickly have list of 500 to 5000 names, even on a limited budget.

Remember, the money is in the list, and it’s a numbers game. The more people you have reading about your offer, the more money you stand to make with the right offer, and a good presentation of that offer.

Imagine having a list of 100,000 people who are interested in making money online, all waiting to receive more information from you. If you are offering an opportunity or network marketing or anything related to making money online, visit my opt-in leads site. I specialize in
large lists of “opportunity seekers”.

If you’re looking for a very large list of business opportunity leads of any kind, check out my site. You can also do some “comparison shopping at my co-registration leads directory

Make it a great day!

John