I thought I would write today about something that happened to me in the early days that hopefully will help other people avoid the same sort of situation.
At the risk of repeating something you have probably heard a million and one times by now, in the making money online arena, the money is most definitely in the list.
The idea of creating a list, is that you have a ready made group of potential buyers that you can communicate with on an ongoing basis to build a relationship with and offer products and services that you think might help or interest them.
If you sell a product or service to a customer, it’s great, BUT, once that sale is done you have to go out and find the next customer, and then the next, and the next……….an
d so on.
However when you get the contact details of these individuals, you get an ever growing number of people that are viewing the things you are selling.
Believe me when you recognise the benefit a list brings your business will go from strength to strength.
No, I’ve not got to the lesson I learnt yet, but be patient it is coming 🙂
The place that you would store your list to enable you to communicate to your customers when you wanted, is in an autoresponder.
If you are not already familiar with the concept of an autoresponder, it does more or less what it name suggests. It stores your subscriber details and allows you to send mails either automatically at a predefined time or manually as and when you have something to say.
Of course they can do much more than this, but in a nutshell this is what they do.
Therefore they are very much at the very hub of your business, arguably the most important part of your business.
OK, so on to my story.
It was early in my online adventure and I had learnt the need for a list and for an autoresponder to store and communicate to that list.
But at the time cash was in short supply and I was trying to do everything on a shoestring budget.
I’m sure some of you may be able to relate to this if you are just starting out.
Anyway I found myself an autoresponder service that seemed to be an absolute bargain. It did all the stuff I wanted ,and at a fraction of the price of the established players.
So I signed up and got stuck into building my list, basically using an early naive version of the strategy I highlight in my Ultimate Sales Funnel Blueprint guide (get your free copy in the form at the top right of this page).
Everything seemed to be going swimmingly, my list was building, some sales were coming in and I was feeling like the cock o’ the north.
But as they say pride comes before a fall!
Out of the blue I got a message from the owner of the autoresponder service to say he was having problems. That, frankly was an understatement, as basically the service had gone tits up and with it had taken my hard earned list with it. Six months of effort down the old Swanee!
At that point I was extremely close to just jacking it all in. The reason I kept at it is a story in it’s own right and I’ll post that on here in the near future.
However I did carry on and this time I did what I should have done in the first place and went with an esta
blished autoresponder provider and have not looked back since.
I actually looked at both Aweber and GetResponse , the market leaders and both very good, but in the end I decided to go with GetResponse (if I’m honest I can’t even remember why I chose one over the other)
So back to the moral of the story. For the key elements of your business (especially your autoresponder), don’t scrimp! You get what you pay for and in the long run you could find your self paying for your cost cutting with your business!
If you would like to check GetResponse and Aweber out, they both do a free trial, you can get full details by clicking below:
