FeedmailPro.com Is Live! (Help me launch it and make big $$!)

In: Business Ideas|Updates By: Brian Armstrong

13 Aug 2009

We’re doin it live!

Tonight I’m launching FeedmailPro! It’s been tested in the wild and is performing well after a handful of tweaks over the last week. Thanks to the folks who beta tested it and have been sending me feedback. I also added the final features which were needed before launch, namely billing, the affiliate program, and a bunch more spam safe guards (which could be an interesting post in itself). The site is also running much faster now that I upgraded the server.

This project has been a wild ride. It was less than 4 weeks ago that this idea even occurred to me. I was sitting there with no domain name (not even a company name), no billing system, no company bank account, no website, no technology, and not very much knowledge of what would be required. Now everything is in place – if I can get the first paying customer before 1 month is up that’ll be a new record (for me at least).

I love how technology has made things easier and easier for entrepreneurs. Ten years ago this company would have take at least a year to get started. I was able to plug in dozens of pieces of technology that are powering FeedmailPro and got them all for free. Open source software is amazing. Ruby on rails also deserves a shout out for this. Even the complete billing system and affiliate program are a combination of Paypal and code I wrote previously for UniversityTutor.com. The mail server components, the web server, etc. I’m using code from at LEAST 25 different projects and people to make it all work. Each would have been it’s own small project in itself. Truly amazing. It would actually be interesting to create a list of all the pieces that went into it.

The Affiliate Program

Ok here’s how you can participate in the launch and earn a bunch of money doing it. I’ve put together an affiliate program where you get paid $3/month for each customer you refer to FeedmailPro. You get paid this amount EVERY month for as long as they’re a customer so the recurring income potential from this is awesome (and totally passive, very appropriate for this blog).

All you have to do it create a an account at http://feedmailpro.com and click the affiliate tab on the right after you login. There is no separate affiliate account to signup for – every account on FeedmailPro has the affiliate option. Even if you aren’t going to use the newsletter functions you can still be an affiliate with the one account.

After you type in your Paypal email address where you want to get paid, you can start posting your affiliate link. The stats on the page will automatically update so you can see how things are doing in real time. You can see I even provided a sample message that you can tweet out with one click (your affiliate link is already inserted) to make it super easy. Blog posts would probably work great too since the target market is bloggers.

You can see how many people clicked your link, of those how many created an account, and of those how many became paying customers. You get commission for paying customers and your Paypal payments will automatically go out on the 1st of the month!

Moving Your Newsletter Over

Not only can it make you money, but it can save you money too if you’re currently using Aweber.

I’ve already moved my feeds over and sent my last payment to Aweber. Boy did it feel awesome to cancel, I am no longer beholden to their evil tiered pricing structure! Here’s how you can experience the same utter joy and save yourself a bunch of money:

Create an account at FeedmailPro.com and add your feeds (either the RSS feed or just type your blog’s URL and it will find it).
If you custom designed your own email template at Aweber and want keep it, just login to Aweber and go to Messages -> Blog Broadcast. Then click your feed and scroll down to view the “Source”. Highlight all the HTML and copy/paste it into FeedmailPro (edit your feed and choose the custom HTML template). All the fields will work exactly the same so you don’t need to change a thing.
Send yourself a test email to see how it looks. Nice!
To import your subscribers, login to Aweber and choose Subscriber -> Search. Under View Segment choose “Active Subscribers”. Then click the excel icon to save the file. In FeedmailPro go to Subscribers -> Import and upload the file.
Add your mailing address on the “Settings” tab of FeedmailPro. This is required for Can Spam compliance.
Finally, turn off auto-send in Aweber – you don’t want duplicates going out. Go to Messages -> Blog Broadcast then select your feed and scroll down to uncheck “send automatically”. Save it.

That’s it! You just saved yourself $50 or $100 a month in many cases.

After a few days when you’re comfortable using FeedmailPro, cancel your Aweber account and treat yourself to a nice dinner with the money you just saved!

Until next time, keep breaking free!
Brian Armstrong

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18 Responses

Adam

August 14th, 2009 at 2:13 pm

Hi Brian
Looks good , I am registering now,
I wanted to check if It only sends rss feeds of the website, or If I can send out any mail shoot that I want?

Brian Armstrong

August 14th, 2009 at 3:52 pm

It’s primarily designed for bloggers so I won’t be adding too many traditional newsletter features. But I’ll probably add a feature down the road for people who want to to a “one time blast” out to their email list. This can be useful for affiliate promotions or doing a special annoucement/gift only to people on your email list, etc. But in general it’s just a blog broadcast so there won’t be an follow up series feature or anything like that. Hope it helps!

Internet Strategist @GrowMap

August 14th, 2009 at 8:38 pm

I was really hoping it would replace the need for other email list management and autoresponder options. Any chance we might talk you into expanding it in the future?

How do you see this option being better or different than using the email option in Feedburner for email RSS subscriptions?

Brian Armstrong

August 14th, 2009 at 11:02 pm

Hi There,

I could be talked into it if the reasons are right, maybe even as a separate product if there is enough interest in it. I’m hesitant to throw in a ton of features for general newsletter stuff though since I think it will make the original product more difficult. They are two separate things in my mind at least.

Generally speaking I was just trying to make this a product for bloggers. People who were using Aweber for the blog broadcast and additional features that come with it.

I think Feedburner is the best option for most blogs since it’s free. Basically the only reason people would upgrade to Aweber in the past (and hopefully FeedmailPro now) is if they need one of these more advanced features:

1. If you want to schedule delivery to something other than daily

2. If you want a “thank you” email to go out with a free ebook or something like that after someone subscribes

3. 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 or for sending special stuff only to people on their email list.

4. Lots of people probably wish they could move back to feedburner’s free list and don’t use the advanced features in Aweber, 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. They can move it to FeedmailPro without another opt-in.

5. automating delivery of the confirmation email if you’re already collecting the person’s email address through some other sort of signup process (Aweber calls this automation). This is actually a really powerful way to get more subscribers to a blog if you’re already collecting emails elsewhere on your site. Most people don’t use it because it’s difficult to figure out in Aweber and not very customizable unless you know how to write regular expressions. I’ve hopefully simplified with a bit with API access on FeedmailPro.

Always curious how people want to use it though so I appreciate the feedback! Actually I’m using this to let people vote on what features they want, so time will tell:
http://feedmailpro.uservoice.com

Thanks!
Brian

Brian Armstrong

August 15th, 2009 at 10:23 pm

Almost forgot to mention also: Aweber doesn’t support Adsense for feeds. FeedmailPro does.

College Town Menus (CTM)

August 14th, 2009 at 4:27 pm

Brian,

I would LOVE a list of the other software packages you used. This could help me A LOT with my site. My problem is that I dont know WHERE to go for GOOD and reliable open-source packages. I’ve checked out hotscripts.com before, but not too impressed. Sourceforge has a lot, but hard to find what I need (or not know what I need or could benefit from). I need to figure out a way to integrate a central payment center, that’s hard also. I’ve shelled out a significant amount of $ for CTM and could have probably use more FOSS to lower costs; but I guess that’s what I get for not being a solid programmer.

Can’t wait to see more posts about your site!! Keep up the GREAT WORK! I cannot believe you’ve done all of this within 1 month. You’re much farther along than I am, and I’ve been doing CTM in free-time on side for almost a full year, haha. Time to get back in the swing of things.

Brian Armstrong

August 14th, 2009 at 4:31 pm

Yep good idea, I’ll put together a list for a future post. Don’t worry you are making great progress so far, I also had the benefit of working on this full time (probably about 40 or 50 hours a week) so it’s not fair to compare to someone working part time. Will let you know how it goes!

Chris

August 14th, 2009 at 8:19 pm

Hi Brian – cool idea. Do you have images/ads for the affiliate links, or is just a http address.

Brian Armstrong

August 14th, 2009 at 11:05 pm

Hey Chris, right now just links! But I should probably make at least a 125×125 ad you’re right. If someone ends up making one I’d love post it if you don’t mind sharing.

Gordie Rogers

August 15th, 2009 at 4:53 am

I’m really impressed at the speed you get things done. I’m in the process of changing my blog’s URL and am going to rebrand my blog by specialising a bit more as well as redesigning it. When it’s done, I’ll definitely jump into your affiliate program.

Cheers, Brian.

Brian Armstrong

August 15th, 2009 at 12:09 pm

Sounds good Gordie, hope it can bring you some cash. Are you changing http://www.gordierogers.com/ ? I like the domain. I guess it depends if you want to build a personal brand (like Gary Vaynerchuck) or business brand.

Dan Sharp

August 15th, 2009 at 2:57 pm

Brian,

Another awesome job!

I too would love to see your technology list, if for no other reason than to see if there are some RoR tools/plugins that I’ve been unaware of.

Keep at it!

-Dan

Brian Armstrong

August 15th, 2009 at 6:19 pm

Thanks Dan!

Jason

August 27th, 2009 at 2:28 am

Hi Brian,

I’m a pretty new reader to your site but was very excited when I read about this project! Congratulations on the release! My site’s very new, but I’m excited about implementing Feedmail, I’ve had some trouble finding and choosing a mail subscription service to use. I hope this is the solution I’ve been looking for!

Thanks again!
Jason

Gordie Rogers

August 27th, 2009 at 2:58 am

Hi Jason,

I’ve been using FeedmailPro for a couple of weeks now and I think it’s going very smoothly. Very happy with it. I’m sure you will be too.

Brian Armstrong

August 27th, 2009 at 2:50 pm

Thanks Jason, hope it works out! Obviously I moved my own blogs over to it as well, saving $70/month on Aweber has been nice :)