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Learn Blogging & Affiliate Marketing with Rosalind Gardner

Aweber Feedburner Integration

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Aweber announced yesterday that their RSS-to-email tool now integrates with Feedburner's tracking and publishing service.

By result, bloggers who use both services and convert their feeds to email newsletters using Aweber's Blog Broadcast will now see their subscriber statistics within the Feedburner interface. They will also see a spike in subscriber numbers displayed on the Feedburner ‘chicklet'.

Justin Premick, Education Marketing Manager at AWeber also predicted that “The more subscribers you can boast, the more likely new visitors are to subscribe to your blog, and the more likely companies are to want to advertise on your blog.”

This is excellent news for those of us who have wanted to connect with our Feedburner subscribers on a more personal level by customizing the email that we send out to them… and now with the help of my all-time favorite autoresponder service provider, Aweber, we can! 🙂

[tags]Aweber,Feedburner,email,rss,feed,blogging[/tags]

Holiday Greetings: Justin Makes a Great Point

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Sure… we all appreciate our clients and customers and want to send them our very best wishes for a happy holiday season.

But SHOULD we send those greetings as a separate email? Or, are our SinterKlaas, Christmas, Hanukkah and New Years greetings better received as an inclusion within a regular newsletter?

Justin Premick posted a great article on this topic at Aweber, titled “Holiday Marketing Tip: Don't Send Pointless Greetings!”

Although the title reveals Justin's slant and the article justifies his reasoning, I want to add a few thoughts of my own on the matter.

One of the commenters on the Aweber blog made a good point against sending denominational greetings because not everyone on your list will celebrate Christmas. That should be SO obvious, yet how many “Merry Christmas” emails did you get last year?

In a similar vein, email marketers should also make themselves aware of when certain holidays are celebrated in countries.

Case in point.

I received an Inbox full of “Happy Thanksgiving” emails on or about the 4th Thursday of November. That would have been nice except for the fact that I live in Canada and we celebrate Thanksgiving on the 2nd Monday in October… so those greetings came about 6 weeks late.

Those marketers need to figure out how to parse their lists geographically and send their messages accordingly.

For more reasons not to send pointless holiday greetings, read Justin's article here and check out the comments.

Is Your Site Ready for Paid Traffic?

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Don't Pay for Traffic Before Your Site is Ready…

New affiliate marketers often tend to fixate on getting “traffic, traffic and more traffic” to their recently launched content sites.

However, in their rush to start earning commissions, some affiliates make costly errors when they pay to drive traffic to sites that are not yet ready for visitors.

Before you spend good money on pay-per-click advertising, the following seven (7) conditions MUST be met on all your affiliate sites.

  1. Attractive Design – Use an attractive template that provides consistent navigation throughout the site. Request ‘no holds barred' feedback from friends and professional designers through webmaster forums.
  2. No ‘Under Construction' Pages – Avoid launching until all pages are complete, or remove links that lead to pages that are not ready.
  3. Legal Notices – Many affiliate programs require that affiliates post privacy notices to ensure visitors are protected from scams and spam. Depending on site content, disclaimers and terms of service pages should be considered.
  4. About Us Page – Builds trust by telling visitors about both the business and the webmaster. Make sure to include either your photograph or, if you are shy, replace the photo with a caricature of yourself.
  5. Contact Page – The presence of contact information enhances trust in you and your site. To protect yourself from spam, use a form rather than posting your email address.
  6. Ecourse / Autoresponder Series – Create a series of at least 7 messages on a specific topic relevant to your site's theme. Link back to appropriate content pages within the messages. An ecourse reminds visitors about your site and encourages them to revisit the site. Repeat visits also improves a site's search engine ranking.
  7. Email Capture Form – Placed an signup form for your autoresponder series in a prominent position (eg. near the top of the page in your navigation bar) on every page of your site to capture leads for your list.

Neglect even one of the above-mentioned site essentials and you may be wasting your money on pay-per-click advertising.

To achieve super affiliate conversion rates, be a Super Affiliate.

AWeber Live Webinars

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Aweber logoOne of the biggest mistakes affiliates make is that they aren't building subscriber lists – and the main reason (excuse) appears to be that figuring out how to build an autoresponder series is either too much work or too confusing.

Well, no more excuses.

Whether you're just starting your site and need to know how to begin building your opt-in list, or you're want to learn more powerful email marketing techniques, you should check out Aweber's Live Webinars.

Aweber is holding one live webinar per week and those taking place over the next few weeks, include:

  • How To Get Started (x2)
  • Create and Send Effective Email Newsletters
  • Get More Subscribers With Optimized Opt-In Forms

The webinars are free and include a toll-free telephone call. Sign up for Aweber's Live Webinars today!

[tags]email marketing, Aweber, autoresponder, list building[/tags]

Are You Alienating Your Subscribers?

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How irritating is this? You get an email offer or see an offer (for something you actually want) on a website, click the link and end up on a page that says something like, “Offer not available in your area”.

Otherwise, you send out an offer like the Maxim magazine offer (pictured left), and your non-U.S.-based subscribers get redirected to SurveyScout instead.

Residents of Canada, the U.K., Australia, New Zealand (or anywhere else that isn't the U.S.) end up on those pages far too often when marketers send U.S.-only offers to their entire list of newsletter subscribers.

There are two big downsides to this.

First of all, you may lose those subscribers through alienation.

Secondly, your affiliate manager may terminate your affiliation with their program when they receive thousands of invalid clicks which then wrecks their EPC.

If you accept newsletters signups from all over the world, subscribers from countries other than the U.S. probably represent a HUGE percentage of your list.

Here are a 3 ways you can avoid losing those subscribers and your affiliations. [Read more…]

Don’t Get Held Hostage by a Webmaster!

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Many folks are surprised when they find out that I do most of the design work on my web sites and have been doing so since I started my business in 1998.

You may think that doing your own design is a waste of time and that it is better to outsource it all. And sure, I have outsourced some of my design work, particularly the ebook covers. But I personally find it frustrating to wait for site and logo designers.

Sometimes you fork out $199 for a logo or header graphic which ends up looking like a 2 year-old could have done a better job; or, you hire the same designer that everyone and his brother in the niche uses, and your design ends up looking like the ‘same old, same old' with only color and text variations.

So, I don't wait for designers… especially when I can do a good job myself in 10 minutes to an hour. Not to mention that it's fun! For me, it's a break from the ‘work' of writing. 🙂

What's ‘fun' for me however, is a a DAUNTING prospect for others. For newbies especially, designing or building their own website may seem absolutely impossible..

Quite frankly, however, I think it is a far worse prospect for your business when you let someone else have control over every aspect of your site. Too often the webmasters I talk to have been ‘working on their sites' for six months to a year and more, and they still don't have a clue how to FTP a page to the server, let alone insert a table into an HTML page.

As far as I'm concerned, that's like making your auto mechanic responsible for making sure that there is gas in your car and air in your tires.

For example, one webmaster, with whom I spoke recently, spent a THOUSAND Aussie dollars, (about $780 US) to a company for initial hosting and design work. All she got was … [Read more…]

Whose Customer is She Anyway?

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Here is an email that I received regarding my affiliate policy for the Super Affiliate Handbook…

Hi, I promote a lot of ClickBank products, but when I clicked on your affiliate signup area on the Super Affiliate Handbook website, I came across something I've never seen before:

“Customers who purchase products and services through the Affiliate Program will be deemed to be customers of SuperAffiliateHandbook.com.”

ClickBank provides all affiliates with the name and e-mail address of the individual who buys through our affiliate link.

I've typically imported people who have bought through my affiliate links into a database and have treated them as “my” customers and as legitimate leads for similar offers in the future. The truth is, aren't these people *CLICKBANK* customers?

I already wrote to ClickBank to ask them about this, but also though I'd ask you where you're coming from in saying that ClickBank affiliates can't legitimately make use of the information that ClickBank (not you) provide us regarding people who buy through our affiliate links.

I look forward to your response,

Max

Here is my take / response on the matter for Max and all other Clickbank affiliates…

[Read more…]

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