I regularly visit Kenton’s blog because it’s one of those sites where you can click into any random blog post and you’ll find great information. Kenton has a unique gift for offering true value in whatever subject he’s covering.
Don’t just take my word for it, check out his online business blog and see for yourself. The “Internet Basics” category is a great start. Don’t let the category name fool you, there’s some great tips in there, even for the seasoned entrepreneur.
This guy is one sharp cookie, and I would recommend getting on his subscriber list right away. Trust me on this one, you won’t be disappointed.
In my previous post, I was ranting about the steep price increase and asking if you feel the new features are worth the difference in price. I received a very detailed response from Justin Premick from AWeber. As promised to Justin I am writing a follow up to his comment. His points were very well stated and I would like to share them with you here, along with my response.
Here are some excerpts from his comment that I would like to address:
I’d like to state here that we’re not trying to “stuff” you or sneak anything “in through the back door.” AWeber users who joined before May 20th will not be upgraded to the new features and pricing unless they ask us to do so. That’s the reason there was no email about a price increase… because for existing customers, there isn’t an increase. You don’t have to pay any more today for the same AWeber service and features than you did last month. We saw this as a non-issue, and felt that sending an email out about pricing “changes,” when in fact no customer’s pricing has changed, would just serve to confuse and cause undue panic.
I can see the logic in this, but I think the end result was the opposite effect. It caused an undue panic with many customers because of the surprise.
After receiving Justin’s response, I donned my hip-boots and went trudging into the forum cesspool to see what others had to say about it. Most of the “panic” that I saw from other subscribers was a result of this not knowing until after the fact. Apparently, I wasn’t the only one that missed the email.
With that said, I was shocked to find out how many people dumped AWeber because of it. Why?! AWeber didn’t force this on anyone with an existing account. I, as a current AWeber customer am free to keep my account just the way it is. This is a good example of that “forum junkie” mentality, which is the very reason I don’t let myself get caught up in these pointless debates. It must have been a great month for GetResponse though.
“The price increase is pretty steep. When you average out the cost per lead verses the benefits that you get with the analytics package, is it justifiable? These factors may depend on the size & quality of your list, plus the range of products that you have to offer.”
Well said, though I think it has more to do with quality than size, and with how you use the tools available to you - in other words, how much more effective and profitable can you make your email marketing using these tools?
We feel the answer to that is “a lot” (which is why we developed these tools). One example: you’ll know who did and did not respond which emails, and you can segment and deliver appropriate emails to subscribers based on that knowledge. This alone has great potential to increase your sales and profits far beyond the additional cost for these tools.
I have to say that the power of these tools would have to be impressive. You can compensate for having a small list with the ability to target and test your list with surgical precision. You can also segment by time zones!
Until now, analytic tools like these were only available to high dollar businesses with the budgets to pay the big fees to their ESPs. AWeber has now made these available to everyone. It seems that the segmentation ability alone would more than pay for itself. After all, quality will outshine quantity. In terms of traffic conversions, 5,000 untargeted visitors isn’t nearly as good as having 500 highly targeted visitors. The same applies to your list - quality vs. quantity.
You can now even get rid of those ugly AWeber tracking links from within your emails. By using a simple javascript on your website, you can put a clean natural link into your emails which look much less threatening to the paranoid.
Justin also pointed out that for those with lists under 500 leads, the monthly price is actually lower. $19 per month as opposed to $19.95 per month.
The only flaw that I see at this point is that the tracking features seem to rely on javascript. This could skew the analytics leaving out the subscribers who have javascript disabled in their browser. The tracking links in your email messages are also accompanied by an invisible graphic that “talks” to the javascript on your target website. Many of my own webmail accounts disable the “unsafe” images by default when I view them. That probably disables this invisible graphic popup as well, thus not allowing the tracking info to get passed along to your stats.
Taking this into consideration, the overall results are still going to give you a pretty accurate assessment of your subscribers, especially as your list gets larger. If we estimated a very high figure of 10% of your list having javascript disabled or email images blocked, You’d still have about 90% accuracy to work with.
In summary, I think that AWeber’s intention is to offer the very best marketing features possible to their subscribers. Testing and targeting your campaigns are a must if you want to be successful with your email marketing. It not only benefits you, but your list members as well.
AWeber has practically dropped this essential element of success right into our laps with this analytics package. Now there’s simply no excuse not to test and target. I believe that those who see the value and apply these tools, will be riding the new wave of success using email marketing 2.0. I plan to catch this wave… how about you? Land lubber, or surfer?
While jumping out to AWeber to check my stats, I happen to stumble across their pricing page and about freaked when I noticed that their pricing structure has totally changed!
I originally signed up with AWeber for 19 bucks a month which gives you unlimited autoresponders and 10,000 subscribers before having to increase to the next tier.
Their new pricing structure shows that $19 per month only gets you up to 500 subscribers. That’s a huge drop! Here’s how their new pricing structure works:
Naturally, the first thing that went through my mind was WHAT THE HEY! Is this their way of stuffing me because they know how painful it would be to migrate out my subscribers and probably lose half of them in the process? The alarm bells were a ringin’!
Fortunately, being a current member, I am still able to keep the same package. I do find it strange that there was nothing in my user area telling me about the change. I never received any email notifications either. Maybe I’ve just been so caught up in my recent projects that I’m just out of touch… hmmpf.
So what do you get in return for all this extra bank?
AWeber has added a powerful email analytics package that allows you to do things such as track sales generated from your list and then to be able to seperate the profitable list members so that you could, for example, target them for special rewards or offers in appreciation for their business.
You can also send broadcasts to the unresponsive members with special incentives as well, or just remove them from your list in order to have a smaller, but much more valuable list.
You can send out broadcasts specifically to people who didn’t click through on your previous one as well, to help crank those response rates up.
You can also track your responders after they click through to your site and see where they went and what they clicked on. This can be very useful to get more in touch with what your leads really want and what interests them. Personally, I always thought that simply asking them wasn’t such a bad idea either, but understanding why the majority seem to click on your leaky text link to an unrelated site as opposed to your payment button could be quite valuable too I suppose.
Overall, I think this looks like a great addition to the AWeber service. The problem that I have is that this seemed to have been slid in through the back door. Why wasn’t AWeber more forthcoming with this new package? Why did I have to trip into their pricing page to find all this out? An email announcement would have been nice. A note inside my members home area doesn’t seem like too much to ask either. I’ve looked everywhere inside my AWeber account and there is no upgrade option, nor any mention of the new deal… so what’s the deal? It appears that this started around the last week in May.
The price increase is pretty steep. When you average out the cost per lead verses the benefits that you get with the analytics package, is it justifiable? These factors may depend on the size & quality of your list, plus the range of products that you have to offer. I haven’t upgraded my account yet, so I can’t comment first hand on whether the switch is worth it or not.
I doubt that you can go back to your previous plan once you make the switch, so I’m not in a hurry just yet to find out whether this system can really justify dumping my current tracking methods for it. Given the circumstances in which I received the news, at this juncture, I’m underwhelmed.
How about you? Have you taken advantage of their new plan? Know somebody that has? I’d like to hear from you and get your take on this. Leave a comment.
Like a true nomadic free spirit, James Brausch has picked up and moved his blog once again. He is now located at http://www.diegonorte.com. So what’s up with all this moving around? Perhaps he’s so fed up with our current fascist regime that he’s decided to disassociate himself from us gringos here in the U.S. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, go read some of his recent posts. He’s hit upon some very good points.
Or perhaps there’s another reason behind it. Diegonorte can be branded without necessarily having to be associated with James Brausch. This makes the business very sellable without the personal name in the domain. I’ve been lurking around diegonorte.com for the past few days and I’ve noticed that the picture in the upper right corner of the blog has changed a few times. Hmmmm, another possible clue that this could be the case?
Maybe for a nominal fee, the Brausch team will be selling ready made internet businesses based on his own proven model to his clients. An online version of a franchise. Instead of seeing the big McDonalds “M” in every city, you’ll be seeing the big “B” everywhere. Maybe an internet franchise called Blogger King, heh-heh.
Ok, maybe I’m stretching my imagination a bit, and obviously I’m referring to the business model itself that would be “franchised”, but James has always been an innovator. I wouldn’t rule out anything, whether it seems too far fetched, or too obvious. I smell some big changes ahead in the Brausch empire. It will be interesting to see how this all plays out.
I got a flash of inspiration this weekend and made such profound changes to Xingla Pro, that we now have a major upgrade to version 2.0! Current users get the upgrade for free of course.
Running your internet business efficiently goes hand in hand with using top notch tools. There are countless numbers of marketing tools out there that are claimed to make you the next top dawg in your market. There’s a lot of hyped up horse crap out there, but there are a number of very good quality tools that can really be useful in building and automating your business.
One such example is James Brausch’s Nemeas. Have you noticed lately that James has been selling a ton of domains at around 500 bucks a pop? Have you noticed that the domain names are all relevant to some market or niche of one sort or another? This is a prime example of someone who has developed a useful tool and not only markets it, but uses it himself. In fact, he uses all the tools that he developed every day in his business.
Like Glyphius, Nemeas is fun to use. You can use it to come up with domain names that can have the best chance of ranking well in the SERPs. Obviously, James did this for quite a long time, bought the domains and is now doing some house cleaning by selling off some of his “real estate” investments. So far he’s raked in over $11,000 in domain sales, and I probably missed a few when I was counting. When was the last time you made 11Gs house cleaning? How long do you think it would take you to make your money back from Nemeas doing the same thing?
One thing that really defines a good tool is something that is going to offer you a tangable return for your investment.
You can bet that any tool or product that you purchase from James will give you a handsome return on your investment.
There’s only one hitch, whether you purchase from James, myself or anyone, you have to do one thing… USE THEM! How many tools have you purchased for your business and then shelved them before giving them half a chance? I see a few hands going up in the back of the room. Ok, mine included. Remember, even the best tools won’t do you any good if you don’t use them.
When you are considering a purchase on a tool that may help your business, do you know if the marketer is actually using it himself? That’s pretty important, because if the developer doesn’t use it himself, then its a pretty good sign that its just a cheezy outsourced knockoff of someone else’s great idea.
I’m not saying that you can’t make a similar product to something that’s already released, but at least improve upon it in some way to offer some value to your customers. If you come up with something original however, then you are a true innovator.
As far as I know, Xingla Pro is the only blog carnival submitter out there at this time, but I’m sure its only a matter of time before the “me too-ers” will have their copies out. I use both Xingla Pro and AmazingCloaker all the time because they crank my revenue and save me a ton of time, and time is money, lettuce, greeeeen stuff.
With that said, Xingla Pro will always be the original and there’s nothin’ like the real thing. Whatever business you’re in, there’s a quality marketing tool that can put your business into overdrive if you give it the chance. Just remember before taking out that credit card, if the person that created the tools aren’t regularly using them in their own online business, then the chances are very good that you won’t either.
Xingla Pro is almost 1 month old and I’ve been getting tons of great feedback from users and non users alike. Now Xingla has already received a great review from Mo’s online business blog at oibo.org. Thanks Mo! I really appreciate great and honest feedback like this. Mo also runs a blog carnival at oibo.org, so if anyone knows first hand how they really work, its Mo!
One thing that really impressed me is that Mo also has a blog Carnival submission service. Mo obviously understands the value that XinglaPro will provide for his service. He also went on to list other reputable services out there, which I consider mighty sporting of Mo to include these fine people as well.
You don’t have to have a service to use Xingla of course. Its for anyone with a blog that wants to build their search ranking and attract traffic to their blog / products.
Mo has even called me crazy in his review! Why?, you might ask… Check out oibo.org now and see what a real internet business blogger / blog carnival host has to say about it.
Firstly, I must apologize for not being more clear in my last post. I clearly gave the impression that I wanted to offer Xingla Pro as part of the James Brausch intern package. This was not only James’ impression, but also the same gained from my readers. Here’s a quote from a very well phrased comment made by Trevor Neuman in the last post:
“Jack,
I can’t see James going for this offer… a key aspect of his Intern program is that it doesn’t cost his interns anything at all… and a 50% off special simply doesn’t fit that criteria.
Cheers!”
Both Trevor and James are correct of course. But… the intention of my offer was to make my product available at discount to any intern member as a benefit or perk for being enrolled in the James Brausch intern program. This isn’t intended to be integrated into the program itself.
Blog carnival submissions are one of the intern tasks in the program, so I was merely trying to establish relevancy to the product and it’s application to intern members who may wish to incorporate blog carnival submissions into their own procedure.
The sticky point that I didn’t consider thoroughly enough before making the offer however, was how I would validate who was an intern member and who wasn’t. This would be impossible without James’ help and would require an arrangement via email with one of his staff members. -bad idea.
The purpose of the offer was two fold:
1. The obvious one - it would increase revenue & exposure for Xingla Pro
2. It would add an extra incentive for some to enroll into the James Brausch Intern Program
It seemed like a cool idea at first, but lesson learned… consider all angles first before tossing an offer out on the table. And be careful how you phrase things when creating an offer.
Taken in the context that the intern program would be changed with a paid product would certainly be breaking a promise to his members as James eloquently put it in his response. He’s right of course, if that were the case. The last thing James would ever do is break a promise to those who put their trust in him.
After reading back through my previous post, I can now see why people got this impression. James, I appreciate you taking the time to respond! Now it’s time to put my tail between my legs, skirt away, and get on with the business of internet business!
As you may or may not know, one very effective way to get traffic, and I mean targeted traffic to your blog is by article writing. When I first joined James Brausch’s intern program, I received a copy of Artemis which is an article submission software that contains an internal list of publishers in which you can submit your articles.
This isn’t your typical article submission software. With Artemis, you make some changes in each paragraph of your article at least three times. Now when submitting your article, Artemis will randomly shuffle the corresponding paragraph versions in your article for each submission to a publisher in the list. For example, one of 4 versions of paragraph 1 randomly shuffled, one of 4 versions of paragraph 2 randomly shuffled, and so on.
This in turn creates thousands of unique variations of your article instantly which allow you to avoid any duplicate content penalties by the search engines. The results is an 1875% increase in your article marketing efforts. As if this wasn’t already effective enough, you can turbo charge Artemis by using a large external list of publishers. But how do you get them?
Well, you could trudge through the search engines and spend hours putting a list together (not a great idea), you could outsource the job to someone else, or you can pick up a list of 1000 publishers from James Brausch’s web site who just happens to be running a 24 hour special right now.
This is an amazing deal and well worth the 30 bucks! I’m going to pick up a copy right after posting this blog entry. Another thing that James mentioned was that he would recommend products or services to new businesses that follow his methods. Well I’m going to boldly stick my neck out and make an offer to James. If James agrees, I will make my Xingla Pro Blog Carnival Submission software available exclusively to James Brausch intern members for 50% off the normal price! Blog Carnival submissions are one of his intern procedures and I feel that it would benefit them greatly. James, if you’re interested just let me know at admin[at]jackkeifer.com and we can work out the details for getting a special order link available to your interns, and a copy of Xingla Pro for you to check out.
Article Submission and Blog Carnival submissions are the two most powerful traffic and back-link building methods on the planet. If you’re an Artemis user, I would highly recommend taking advantage of the publisher list being offered at James’ Internet Business Blog now. If you’re not a user, quit screwing around and get a copy now so that you can build your business. Taking action now could be the turning point in your internet business.
Around the end of April I made a blog post referring to some cool wordpress plugins to add to your arsenal of useful stuff. One comment I had received was from Annie, who right away took advantage of the KeywordLuv plugin that I am using.
She later left a second comment recommending another great plug-in called CommentLuv. Being the type to try out new things that may be useful to me and beneficial to my readers, I decided to look into it. Thanks Annie! I’m glad I did…
CommentLuv benefits your readers by automatically inserting their last blog post title into their comment. This way, if you have a blog and you want to leave a comment, CommentLuv will scrape your last blog post and insert it into your comment. You can really benefit from useful keywords such as “internet business“.
Here’s an example of what my comment would look like on someone else’s blog using CommentLuv:
As you can see CommentLuv scraped the last blog post (in this example) from my web site which I added into the comment form. Now I have a great back link for “Internet Business” on Homer’s website, who just happens to have a PR 8.
Without CommentLuv I would only be back-linking for “Jack Keifer”. Not a very useful back-link. Sure, I could type “Internet Business” in the name field, but more than likely I would be flagged as a spammer and my comment would be deleted. Even though I left a useful comment, the blog owner may never look past the keyword stuffed name field.
CommentLuv is a great way to get back-links to your own blog with targeted keywords. To find other CommentLuv Blogs out there, you can Google using the phrase “Enable CommentLuv” + your target keyword. For example, if you wanted to find blogs related to internet marketing, you could Google for “Enable CommentLuv” + “Internet marketing”.
You will get back all the indexed CommentLuv blogs that are using CommentLuv and related to internet marketing. Now go leave some useful comments and get some nice relevant backlinks to your blog.
You can potentially generate a lot of extra traffic to your blog as well, because readers of other blogs will see your cool headline and click on it to see what you have to say.
CommentLuv is also a great way to get more people commenting on your own blog as well. Remember back when your blog was new? It probably took awhile before you got that first comment. You may not have had more than a handful of readers.
Blog posts with comments shows your visitors that you are creating interesting and useful content that people want to respond to. Comments also validate that you have a following and decent traffic which encourages others to come back and eventually contribute. This adds to the credibility of your blog.
A majority of readers rarely, if ever, comment. CommentLuv just may be a great way to encourage your readers to chime in and contribute to your blog. It’s a win-win for both the blogger and reader. Give it a try!
Kenton Newby has some great suggestions on automating your blog submissions in 4 easy steps. He covers the value of submitting your blog posts to blog carnivals and has done a review of Xingla Pro as well.
While jumping out to AWeber to check my stats, I happen to stumble across their pricing page and about freaked when I noticed that their pricing structure has totally changed!
If you don’t know what I’m talking about, go read some of his recent posts. He’s hit upon some very good points.
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