Breaking Free
How to Quit Your Job and Start Your Own Business
My Next Project, And Why Aweber Sucks
In: Business Ideas By: Brian Armstrong
27 Jul 2009WARNING: this post gets a little geeky talking about a tool for bloggers. Some of you might not have an interest in it but I thought I’d post it regardless.
About a week ago I was sitting around with nothing super urgent to do.
UniversityTutor.com has been running on auto-pilot almost 100% with new tutors signing up every day. I only need to answer about 1 or 2 emails per week on it, especially as the FAQ page has grown and becomes more complete. Sure there are a few little things on my list to add for it (for example, about 1 in every 500 tutors who signs up managed to enter an address which doesn’t come up in Google maps correctly, and it breaks some stuff.) But I couldn’t get excited about fixing it. It just didn’t affect enough people.
Similarly, BuyersVote.com is in a holding pattern as I wait for Google to index some stuff. I’ve been using it quite a bit myself and finding it much easier/faster now to fit into my workflow if I want to add something quickly. There are actually a bunch of things I’d like to eventually add there too (a demo video for the home page, make the vote-up and vote-down buttons more responsive, maybe a press release to get some PR for it). People are actually able to vote on what features they’d like to see next, so I can prioritize them. But nothing really struck me that day.
So I turned my attention to something that had been bothering me for a while: Aweber. Aweber is an email newsletter service that lots of bloggers use to offer email subscriptions. Aweber had been annoying me for a bit. I use it on HomeworkHelpBlog.com (the blog for UniversityTutor) and every month it had been costing me more and more. It was about to reach the point where I was paying $70/month for it, and this was just ridiculous. That was more than my web hosting, credit card processing, etc combined. For a simple email newsletter!
Worse still, the user interface to manage your Aweber is horrible and I could never get it to do what I wanted. The whole site was clearly designed by some very technical people who had no concept of how people would actually use it (and then threw a pretty coat of paint over it). For example, let’s say you were designing an HTML email and you saved some changes on Aweber. You might want to see how those changes looked before it got sent out to your entire list of thousands of people right? Well Aweber didn’t let you do this (for a blog broadcast). You have to wait until your next blog post and just hope it looked right. Or what if you wanted to send out your entire blog posts to people by email (and not just summaries which would piss them off by making them click through to your site). Well, Aweber didn’t offer this and provided an embarrassing hack in their “help” pages which would require you to do extra work on every single future blog post you made.
There were other little things. Aweber pulls the feed in a way that Adsense for feeds doesn’t show up. They charge you for subscribers who have UNSUBSCRIBED from your feed.
Aweber also prides itself on how there are “real human” beings there to answer customer support calls and brags about this on its site. This bugged me too – you do realize I don’t actually want to EVER call your tech support. Do you think I enjoy waiting on hold, answering phone prompts, and speaking with people who have no authority to actually fix the problem? Here is a tip for web businesses: If I ever have to actually pick up a phone to call you for tech support, you’ve already failed. If I’m calling it’s because you messed up, and your site is broken. Instead of paying for a huge phone center of support reps – why not just FIX your website. Look at Gmail, millions of users and not a phone number in sight.
Anyway, so how were they getting away with charging this much for a crappy service? The answer I think lies in their tiered business model, and the fact that it’s very difficult to move your email list. You can start out with them at a very low price. And once they have you locked in it keeps going up. The kicker is that if you ever want to try a different service they make it very difficult for you because all the newsletter companies out there require you to send another “opt-in” email to all your subscribers if you move. This annoying and confusing email basically ensures you will lose about half your subscribers if you ever move. So they’ve got you, and they know it.
A while back I wrote an article for ProBlogger on this exact topic, and complained about the lack of options out there for bloggers.
So I was sitting there thinking about how I could probably code up my own newsletter service really quickly, and save myself $70/month. And if I wrote it myself, I wouldn’t have to mess with this silly “extra opt-in” business. Then I started thinking that if I wanted this for myself, maybe other people would want it too. But then…wouldn’t it be a big hassle to open it up to the public, if people started trying to game the system etc and use it for spam or something like that.
So I let it marinate in my brain for a few days until I eventually came up with (what I think is) a great solution to this problem.
Let’s say some new user signs up and wants to import their list of 10,000 subscribers from Aweber. Why not trust them (by default) and test out the list in a programmatic way which doesn’t require a manual, human review process (which would never be 100% effective by the way – people can fake credentials if they want). Why not send the next email to say…10 of those subscribers on the list, and see how many (if any) come back as bounces, complaints, unsubscribes, etc. If all is well, send the next email to 100, and the next to 1000, and eventually you could be quite confident that the list is valid and start sending to the whole thing. If flags went up after you first few tests (in the form of lots of unsubscribes, complaints, or bounce) then the person is probably a spammer and you just close their account. If would be worth it for them to send out 10 or even 100 emails, when they deal in millions of emails. The whole process would take less than a week or two (however fast they sent out 4 blog posts) and the cool part is that none of the subscribers would actually have to “miss” an email. The ones who got later emails would just have more posts in those emails until the “import” process was done.
If that worked…then the rest wouldn’t be too hard. Make a user interface that actually, worked. Let people test their emails, import their list from whatever crappy provider their using now. Get rid f tired pricing and make the service a flat $10/month with the first 1000 subscribers free (the real cost to run this is almost nothing if you don’t have huge phone support centers and a broken site). It would be a freemium business model that would save people a ton of money over Aweber.
Then if I built it, I’m pretty sure I could get Darren to let me do another post on ProBlogger (which has over 100,000 readers – all bloggers, many of whom use Aweber). This would be an easy to launch the product to a ton of people. I could also set up a nice affiliate program so every blogger who tried it would probably blog about it to others…and wow, this could turn into a nice little business. Maybe a week or two of work to build it.
So anyway, that’s what I’ve been working on the last week or so. I should have a prototype out for you to look at later this week (you’ll hear about it first here if you want to be a beta tester). Some of the technical issues involved with running a mail server and the Can Spam Act are quite technical, but I don’t think it’s anything I can’t handle. I’m already running my own mail server for UniversityTutor and it hasn’t been too bad.
I could probably do an entire other post on the technical aspects I’ve gotten into actually. One cool part is that I’m modularizing the server which actually is going to do the mass mailing. The reason why this is cool is that if a problem ever does happen and the mail server does get black listed due to a bug in the code or malicious users, etc, I can literally just spawn a new server with a new IP in 5 minutes and have a clean server. I can also clone/spawn new mail servers on the fly to keep up with demand if this thing gets huge overnight. In this sense they are like worker processes, totally separate from the main server with the database and serving up the homepage, etc. Workers can get killed off without the whole machine coming down.
Suffice to say I think it’s gonna be awesome. I’ll send you link to try it out later this week!
Hopefully it will be a nice addition to my “portfolio” of sites out there, running on auto-pilot.
Until next time, keep breaking free!
Brian Armstrong
41 Responses
Leave A Comment
About this blog
Breaking Free is a blog for people who'd like to quit their 9-to-5, start their own business, and achieve financial freedom. It's written by web-entrepreneur Brian Armstrong. You can read more here »
Most Popular Posts
- 46 Ways To Start A Business With No Money
- How To Stop Letting Little Things In Life Piss You Off
- How To Understand (and Create) A Personal Financial Statement Each Month In 5 Minutes
- Early Adopters: 5 Ways To Get Users To Your New Website
- From New Idea To Business Launch In One Month (with pictures)
- How I Learned To Live With DSPS
- Entrepreneur/Hacker Meetup In Buenos Aires
- The Most AWESOME Interview I've Ever Done - With Captain Australia
- Making Progress...
- A Few Entrepreneurs You Should Be Listening To Today
Brian on Twitter...
- Adi: I believe this is a very misleading article, when one decides to make a change like stopping smoking [...]
- Brian Armstrong: Thanks Mike! [...]
- Brian Armstrong: Hi Mar, These I tended to read every word because they were good (although my regular reading rat [...]
- Brian Armstrong: Thanks for the comment....when you mentioned selling bits of paper I assume you are referring to the [...]
- Brian Armstrong: Cool...I think you'll enjoy them, and welcome to the site :) [...]
- Three Awesome Books I Read Recently
- Reader Question: I Would Like Some Feedback On A Business Idea…
- Behind The Scenes Numbers From UniversityTutor.com (Revenue & Expenses)
- I’m Moving To The San Francisco Bay Area!
- Get Your Website To #1 In Google With Seoaholic.com
- How To Start Your Own Country
- My Business Will Take Off This Year, If ONLY…
- New Features On BuyersVote (Plus A Few Announcements)
- Early Adopters: 5 Ways To Get Users To Your New Website
- The Most AWESOME Interview I’ve Ever Done – With Captain Australia
Gordie Rogers
July 27th, 2009 at 9:33 pm
That sounds awesome, Brian. I’m currently using Google Feedburner which is free, but it seems I can’t seem to see anyway if I can get people to sign up first and then get a free ebook. When I tried it, the person who started to subscribe would get a confirmation email with two links. One to confirm their subscription and one to download the free ebook. This way made if possible for people to get the ebook without confirming the subscribing process. Everyone seems to rave about Aweber and told my I should get it before I have too many subscribers which I may lose if I change over later on. I’d be willing to wait a bit more to try yours out. Looking forward to it if it’s reasonably priced, secure, easy to use and has that function which Feedburner doesn’t seem to have.
Cheers.
Brian Armstrong
July 27th, 2009 at 10:27 pm
Hey Gordie, i think you’re right. Feedburner is actually great for about 90% of what I want and I use it here. Best of all it’s free. The only reason I had to use it on HomeworkHelpBlog.com was because I needed a way to automate sending of the confirmation email when tutors signed up on UniversityTutor (that’s how I’ve got so many subscribers there). And you’re right there are a few other little features like sending a “success” email after the confirmation email that you have to do with Aweber. I’m glad you mentioned that actually, I’ll be sure to add it.
I’m gonna price it as free for the first 1000 subscribers, and $10/month after that for unlimited subscribers and unlimited emails. Aweber has no free account and starts at $19/month for up to 500 subscribers, and quickly goes over $100/month once you’re locked in. So it’ll be a huge saving over Aweber.
Erica Douglass
July 27th, 2009 at 10:50 pm
Hi Brian,
I don’t think you have any idea what you’ve gotten yourself into here, and I say that as your friend and someone who wants you to succeed.
This type of service is one of the worst out there to run. I know because I ran a hosting company that supported email users. We hosted a 600K mailing list for the Democrats and people would *call us* (call US!! Not the people who ran the list, which had a clear unsubscribe link) and give us rambling threats about how we were spamming them.
All we did was provide dedicated servers for these guys. We didn’t do ANY of the mail list part. They were finding us through whois’ing our IPs.
Not to mention that you basically have to know someone personally at Hotmail and AOL to get emails reliably to inboxes there.
It is an ugly, ugly business and not one I would enter lightly. There are anti-spam crazies out there. I mean people I would not want to meet in a dark alley, who will find every phone number you own and scream obscenities at you in the middle of the night because one of your customers sent them an email *they opted in to.*
I am not making any of this up, and I’m dead serious when I say the money Aweber charges is well worth it. Their deliverability rate is second to none, and the harassment they spare you is worth it.
-Erica
P.S. Any hosting provider you have is going to shut you down lightning fast unless you know the CEO and have explicit approval to run these lists. Most hosting providers will immediately boot you once they find out what you’re planning to do.
Brian Armstrong
July 28th, 2009 at 4:35 am
Hey Erica,
You definitely echo many of the fears I have, and I really appreciate you posting this. Part of me debated this for a long time, whether it was a can of worms I even wanted to open. In the end I figured i was really just building it for myself, and if things got ugly I can always just close it to new members to keep it small.
I don’t plan on offering any phone support for it whatsoever, and have actually removed any personal info from the whois lookup as well. It just goes to a unmanned voicemail box from evoice.com. So I’ll be distancing myself from it in that sense.
I don’t claim to be an expert at it and some day I may end up calling to say you were right :) But I feel like it’s really not as difficult aweber would have you believe either. I’ve setup postfix mailservers. Can do SPF, RDNS, DKIM for yahoo, SIDF for hotmail, unsubscribe-header for google, monitor abuse@ account, bulk header, and bounces. I cleared it with my webhost too (it’s dedicated stuff so they aren’t as concerned).
It’s definitely not the simplest service to setup in the world, but it’s also no where near as complicated as say…hosting credit card data and becoming PCI compliant or something like that. Yet Aweber is able to charge HIGHER prices than payment processors just because of their “lock you in” in business model. There’s some truth to it, but they’re also using it as cover.
Anyway, like I said you may still be right and I appreciate you looking out for me. I know you have lots of experience here so don’t be afraid to let me know! :)
Erica Douglass
July 28th, 2009 at 4:56 pm
Hi Brian,
This is beside the point, but PCI compliance is dead simple! We used to offer it for our *shared* hosting customers (the ones paying $7/month.) Basically, you set up a separate dedicated MySQL server and make sure that dedicated database server doesn’t have any open ports other than SSH and MySQL. Then set up some protection on your web server and monitor it to make sure it doesn’t get hacked. Ta-da, PCI compliant!
Here is the full breakdown courtesy of Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payment_Card_Industry_Data_Security_Standard#Requirements
Then you give your customers some info, including things like “Don’t email credit card numbers to your staff for processing” (yes, we had customers that did this)
Yes, the technical stuff is the easiest part. Believe me when I say I have been there. I built all of our hardware by hand, installed Linux, set up all the services, had to figure out how to compile a sendmail.cf file (this was many years ago), etc. So technical…no problems. It’s the people issues you aren’t considering. Like the AOL scomp bullshit. And having only 1 IP that can be whitelisted by Hotmail (you’re never going to be able to jump servers like you think you will; that’s an old spammer trick.)
We had a customer that was stuck on a single IP address because he sent over 1 million emails a day (think Facebook for a different country) and Hotmail would only whitelist a single IP for him.
Anti-spam folks don’t give a **** about what IP you use; they’re going to blacklist @yourdomain and anything with that domain name in it won’t even get bounced. It just goes away. Doesn’t matter if you have all the right SPF, reverse DNS, everything.
In the beginning it will look simple. Then one day it will all come crashing down. I know because I hosted many folks like you who thought the same thing you are thinking. I would always warn them away from it, then they would do it anyway, then they would say a few weeks later, “Ha! It’s working fine!”
Then one day they would get a single spam complaint from someone who had opted in and all of a sudden no one at AOL would be able to read their email because they hadn’t set up the feedback loop or responded within a certain amount of time. Then the same thing would happen at Yahoo and they’d find out that Yahoo wanted them to pay for guaranteed delivery (not sure this is still the case.) Then Hotmail. Then they’d spend hours tracking it down.
We had staff members who would spend time on the phone nearly every week with some provider who blacklisted our hosting company because of the *invoice* emails we sent to our customers.
Took us 3 weeks of calling every day to get off SBC’s black list, and then it was because I had a contractor who knew someone personally at SBC who then had enough administrative powers to get the block lifted. And he said, “Don’t **** it up for me because then they will never lift another block for me again.”
That’s my story.
-Erica
Brian Armstrong
July 29th, 2009 at 6:21 pm
This is huge and you’re making me reconsider.
I’m wondering if it would work to outsource the mail server part of it, or with an accreditation service.
From reading online this one appears to be popular
http://www.isipp.com/
Interview here:
http://meetinnovators.com/2008/09/25/anne-mitchell-from-suretymail/
Brian Armstrong
July 29th, 2009 at 7:29 pm
Interesting, supposedly Aweber is a customer of theirs!
http://www.isipp.com/email-accreditation/testimonials/
Lar Van Der Jagt
July 28th, 2009 at 12:02 am
I just wanted to comment that I think it’s hilarious that this post shows up in both my feed reader and your site plastered with Aweber advertisements from google. Might want to add them to your blacklist!
Brian Armstrong
July 28th, 2009 at 4:37 am
Why would I blacklist it, those ads are very relevant! :)
Joe Gaines
July 28th, 2009 at 6:10 am
Hi Brian,
I definitely hear you, and the sad fact is Aweber is the best option out there right now (IMHO). There are many more email list services out there that offer less and charge more. I think there’s definitely a niche for your business idea and you could blow it up.
One factor Aweber has on all other email list sevices (including those that cost 10x’s more), is the open rate. From what I’ve seen and heard Aweber emails get through filters at a higher percentage, and a small percentage increase in open rate means a lot of money for some businesses. Just something to consider…
Brian Armstrong
July 28th, 2009 at 11:17 am
Good idea, and I agree they are probably the best option for bloggers right now. Ironic, given that it wasn’t even originally designed for bloggers and their blog broadcast feature was added on after the fact.
I’m going to target the service only to bloggers. It won’t be a newsletter for any other purpose.
I’ll def be checking into open rates too. Thanks for the tip!
Chris
July 28th, 2009 at 2:13 pm
Hi Brian – I like AWeber. I use them for my site. But I certainly don’t pay $70/month for them, which seems a bit hefty. Seems like AWeber’s good for the beginning bloggers trying to reach critical mass. But after that, something else may be necessary.
Looking forward to the new site. Thanks!
Brian Armstrong
July 29th, 2009 at 4:57 pm
Yup, they are the best out there right now.
College Town Menus (CTM)
July 28th, 2009 at 2:38 pm
I’ve heard nothing but solid reviews about Aweber. I’ve compared them to Constant Contact, iContact, and MailChimp; and I agree, Aweber’s UI definitely insn’t the easiest to learn and use. Though I dont use an email list right now, if I were to do one, I’d probably check them out first. I agree that the prices they charge are relatively high starting off. Anyone can get 500 emails with not much work, and to pay an upfront fee of $19/month is a lot with no guarantee that your users are going to buy any of your products/referral links. Though if you ARE able to leverage your list and turn sales, the $70+ a month will be pennies for a reliable service that will generate you over $40,000 each month like blogger John Chow.
I also agree with the huge difficulties you may face, but I think that your virtual servers is a sweet idea. Thats probably the best thing I like about your blog; you understand business and are also very techy and can explain both which many of us need. My friend made an iPhone app and instead of buying physical servers, he’s leveraging Amazon’s cloud computing which is working great for him.
I’m interested to see how your progress goes with this. Keep up the posting!!
Brian Armstrong
July 29th, 2009 at 5:01 pm
Yeah Aweber is the best option for bloggers right now, despite it’s flaws. Thanks!
Gordie Rogers
July 28th, 2009 at 3:11 pm
I have to say that the people who comment on this site are some of the greatest blog commenters I’ve seen. You guys write comments the length of blog posts, which is great, as it show that Brian’s post stimulates thinking and discussion. This blog may not have lots of comments, but the quality is probably the highest that I’ve seen on any blog.
Brian Armstrong
July 29th, 2009 at 5:02 pm
Yup I agree, Erica owned her own hosting company and sold it for over a million bucks, so she knows what she is talking about. In fact, I think she convinced me not to pursue it. I’ll make a follow up post soon. I may still use it for myself, but if the business model isn’t going to be passive it’s not a good fit for me. Thanks Gordie!
Steve
July 28th, 2009 at 5:26 pm
$70 for lots of subscribers would be justified if the revenues they brought in were a lot greater. but if your margins/sales are a lot lower, i can see how paying $70 to manage these emails could bite into your profit margins. so for huge/good blogs the extra $70 could generate thousands.
Brian Armstrong
July 29th, 2009 at 5:03 pm
Yeah, it’s a bit steep. You can generate more revenue than that from it, but it doesn’t mean their entitled to such a big portion. Thanks!
Aaron
July 29th, 2009 at 3:38 am
Brian –
Interesting idea. I was actually researching email newsletters for my blog this week, and looked at Feedburner and Aweber, so it’s interesting to read your comments on them. I agree 110% that when you have to call customer service the site has already failed. There are a lot of user experience considerations that most sites out there completely ignore.
It sounds like Erika has a ton of experience with this though, so it’ll take a lot of consideration. If you want to try to do it for your own site, see how it goes and if you get blacklisted, then try opening it up to everyone that could work and minimize any impacts. If you decide to go for it let me know, I’ll be interested in giving it a beta trial both as a email recipient and blog user.
– Aaron
Brian Armstrong
July 29th, 2009 at 5:05 pm
Hi Aaron,
Thanks for the comment. Feedburner is the best (and free) unless you need some of those obscure features. Then Aweber is your only option. I agree with Erica’s comment, and may just use it personally at this point. I’ll do a follow up post soon here. Thanks!
Brian
Mike CJ
July 29th, 2009 at 6:46 am
I agree if you are only using a little of Aweber’s functionality, that the service is expensive. If you want to deal with multiple lists, using multiple autoresponders, and actually MARKET to those people then it’s good value for money, in my opinion.
You say that you can’t see changes you’ve made to an HTML mail – you can, simply use the “Test” feature and it will send a test copy to any address you want.
Also you mention that blog broadcast won’t send a full feed. I have it set up to do so, and I don’t remember having to “hack” anything.
Brian Armstrong
July 29th, 2009 at 5:11 pm
Hi Mike, agreed…basically they started as a newsletter service and any features for bloggers were thrown in as an afterthought. The testing html emails like you mentioned works for regular newsletter emails, but not on the blog broadcast. You may be getting full feeds out if you’re using Blogger, but for wordpress blogs at least it doesn’t work out of the box.
Here is their hack: http://www.aweber.com/faq/questions/420/How+Can+I+Send+Entire+Posts+in+My+Blog+Newsletters%3F
Or another way to hack it: http://www.davidrisley.com/2008/07/02/how-to-putting-the-full-blog-post-into-an-aweber-blog-broadcast/
(however you lose your Adsense for feeds this way)
Satollo
July 29th, 2009 at 7:45 am
Since I don’t want to spend money to pay a newsletter subscription and sending service, I worte the Newsletter plugin for WordPress (in a day). This plugin let me to collect subscribers with double opt in and customize every message will be shown or sent.
The plugin is not professional, but can grow. To send emails, one can use the internal features to compose and send, but having 3000+ subscriber, sending newsletter from the WordPress admin is difficult. So I wrote a simple Java program that connect with my blog, downoad all the settings (subscribers, test email, newsletter body and so on) and I send the newsletter from my PC via SMTP service I have with my blog hosting.
I think this solution can be decent for many bloggers. I’m receiving a lot of new features request every day, but they’re hard to implement “for free” and in my spare time. May be with little steps I can realize them all.
The plugin is here:
http://www.satollo.net/plugins/newsletter
(and there are coders that want to collaborate)
Brian Armstrong
July 29th, 2009 at 5:17 pm
Hey there, nice work! This is for writing your own newsletter right? (As opposed to converting your rss feed). I think this could work well for reasonable volumes of email and it solves the email server problem by having everyone send their own off their own server. That’s a pretty good idea. Would be awesome if this could report subscriber counts to Feedburner too and some other feature requests you are probably getting. Keep workin on it I like it!
Tylor
July 30th, 2009 at 9:30 pm
Just make it and see where it takes you. Maybe even start off with just the “Free Account” and don’t let people get past 1,000 subscribers.
If it’s too much of a hassle, then forget about it. But if it turns out into something huge, run with it.
I personally have confidence in you. I would love to see where it takes you. What’s the worst that could happen?
Brian Armstrong
July 31st, 2009 at 10:08 pm
Thanks Tylor, after doing some research I think it’s feasible if I outsource the “managing relationships with ISP’s so you don’t get blacklisted” part of it. I’ll be using http://www.isipp.com/email-accreditation/ and we’ll see how it goes, thanks!
Brian
Chris
July 31st, 2009 at 4:03 pm
Hi Brian – was wondering, if Aweber’s so expensive, why are you using Aweber as opposed to Feedburner (free). Thanks!
Brian Armstrong
July 31st, 2009 at 10:15 pm
Hey Chris, actually Feedburner does 90% of it for free and I really like Feedburner (I use it here on SBF for example). There are only a few reasons I and others switched to Aweber in the past. Usually it’s if you need some specific feature not offered by Feedburner, like:
1. automating delivery of the confirmation email if you’re already collecting the person’s email address through some other sort of signup process (I use this in HomeworkHelpBlog.com)
2. If you want to schedule delivery to something other than daily
3. If you want a “thank you” email to go out with a free ebook or something like that after someone subscribes
4. If you want to send out the occasional email blast to your list that isn’t blog post. Lots of bloggers use this for affiliate promotions.
5. Lots of people probably wish they could move back to feedburner’s free list, but they’ve built up an email list in Aweber and have no way to move it now without losing half their subscribers (another opt in) so they are trapped with every increasing Aweber fees each month.
There are tons of bloggers out there giving “positive reviews” of Aweber because of their affiliate program. In other words, they aren’t real reviews, and a lot of bloggers start using Aweber because they keep hearing about it from other bloggers. Many of them probably don’t even use the additional features but are now stuck paying Aweber fees because it’s difficult to move your list once you’ve built it up there.
Hope this helps.
Leslie Nicole
August 8th, 2009 at 12:54 pm
This has been interesting to me. I’m just starting my blog after reading about internet business for over a year. Everything I’ve read said use Aweber. I noticed thought that on of the most famous writers on blogging is sending things out via feedblitz – but his site recommends aweber. I wonder if the tide is turning? I need to get a subscription / automated email system up and running this week, so I want make sure I’m getting into the right system.
Brian Armstrong
August 8th, 2009 at 1:48 pm
Interesting, who is using Feedblitz? When I tried it a while back it was HORRIBLE. So difficult to use. Like I mentioned to the above commenters, just be aware that 99% of the reviews you are reading for Aweber are affiliate links. Those people are posting about it so much (even if they don’t use it themselves) because they get paid $3/per month if you click their link and sign up.
Leslie Nicole
August 8th, 2009 at 2:05 pm
I’m new to this whole subject and what the etiquette might be on talking about other blogger’s practices, I just noticed that the subscribe by email from someone who writes about writing copy (is that vague enough:-) is coming through feedblitz. But maybe it’s just the subscribe feed that handles this. Like I said, I’m new to understanding this, so I may just be misunderstanding the whole situation.
So, given the lesser of 2 evils, would you advise a beginning blogger who wants to monetize their site to start with Aweber? Thanks for the post.
Brian Armstrong
August 8th, 2009 at 4:20 pm
Ahh copyblogger.com :) Interesting I didn’t know he used it. Btw, this is public information on his site so there wouldn’t be anything wrong with sharing it.
I’m not 100% sure what you have in mind to monetize your email newsletter. If it’s just adsense for feeds, then you can stick with Feedburner for free. If you want to do some other stuff like embed your own ads and do affiliate promotions, then I’d say start using FeedmailPro. It’s going to be way cheaper and easier than Aweber and Feedblitz. But then again I’m biased, so take it with a grain of salt :) Good luck!
Brian
Liz Ryan
December 2nd, 2009 at 6:02 pm
I use Aweber and IContact and I find Aweber very confusing and frustrating at times. Today I talked to a very nice tech support guy and I asked him whether he gets this feedback (that Aweber is harder to use than its competitors) and he said, “Well, if you don’t invest the time to learn it, it might be hard.” That made me feel as though Aweber has an employee-training problem. Who would say that to a customer?
Brian Armstrong
December 2nd, 2009 at 8:51 pm
Hey Liz, it’s true…in theory at least software should never require “taking time to learn it” or reading a manual. The fact an entire industry of Quicken certified professionals exists shows how bad that software is.
Although, in Aweber’s defense, software usually gets worse over time…as you slowly add more and more features over time (as Aweber has) it’s nearly impossible to keep it clean and view it from the perspective of a first time user.
Sharon Rosen
January 29th, 2010 at 3:28 am
Brian,
If I could kiss the ground in front of you right now, I would. This past week I have tested several services and walked away from each one in frustration. As someone who can pretty much hack my way through most things, I found them all overly complicated. I don’t want to watch a video to figure out how to setup a service properly. It shouldn’t be *that* hard to setup an easy RSS-to-Email blast, with full summary and image inclusion.
As I walked through each setup, I came to the conclusion that an affiliate program really didn’t matter. If it took me more than 20 minutes to setup what I needed, and there was no way I could possibly recommend them to new bloggers.
I had your service up and running in less than 10 minutes (including adding code to my web site and Facebook Fan page). Your site is exactly what is needed. It’s clear, clean, easy, fast to load, and just simply “works.”
You should actually claim the site though! I googled a bit to find you – as FeedMailPro doesn’t appear on the Google front page (I found it via a web comment for an Aweber article), and, I had no idea who was behind the company. As it turns out, I found you, and, have been reading your blog! I just wasn’t aware of this service.
Anyway, thank you very much. I lost several business days trying to fight with horrible services and yours wins hands down.
Brian Armstrong
January 29th, 2010 at 3:37 am
Sweet! I had just responded to your email. Glad you found it :)
Btw, not sure what you mean about coming up in Google. I tried searching “feedmailpro” in google and it came up. What did you mean?
Sharon Rosen
January 29th, 2010 at 3:43 am
Sorry, I should have clarified. FeedMailPro does not come up in the first page (10 responses) for “RSS to Email” – which, is what I had been searching for before I saw someone mention FeedMailPro by name.
I just accidentally found your service, but had been looking for RSS to Email, Aweber Alternative, etc. And… since “RSS to Email Made Easy” is your tag line, it would be cool if that came up :-)
Brian Armstrong
January 29th, 2010 at 2:53 pm
Yur right, that’s disconcerting….it looks like I’ll have to do some more linking building for that. Perhaps with Seoaholic! If you end up posting an affiliate link to it, maybe you can include that in the link text :)
Sharon Rosen
January 29th, 2010 at 6:38 pm
You’re just full of tricks aren’t you ;)
I just watched the demo for Seoaholic. I love how clean your designs are. So many apps/services don’t have a clear flow (which, for at least the US population should absolutely go from left to right) and you do that. Such a simple thing, but it’s really important for clear navigation.