The key to making money on line is to build a list. You will need an autoresponder to help automate some of these tasks.

When you look at autoresponders you can do it a couple of ways. You can use a third party service, it may come with your hosting account or you can buy a script to install on your server.

My advice is to use a quality third party service and here is why.

Unless you are very knowledgeable about email delivery and have the contacts at the various isps to insure your email delivery it will cost you much more to host your own script than what a third party will charge you.

Now I have my own dedicated server so I have already removed one of the problems with self hosting. I have the ability to control everything that comes off of that server.

I don’t have the knowledge and contacts nor the time to insure that the server stays whitelisted with the various isps. If you are on shared hosting it is even tougher.

When I first started I was on shared hosting and could keep my stuff clean but had no control over the other people that were on the same server. If they got black listed so did I through no fault of my own.

Now why do I say it costs you money? Let’s say you have a list of 5,000 people and you send an email out that gets opened and clicked on by 10% of your subscribers. The sales letter they go to converts at 1% this would generate you 5 sales with a commission of $20 each if all your email is delivered.

You send the same mailing and only 60% gets delivered instead of 5 sales you get 3 all factors being the same because less people received the email. This 2 sales on one mailing are worth more than the cost of the monthly fee. Multiply that by 4 mailings a momth and you can see how much this will cost you.

Now I use Aweber for a few reasons. First and foremost they have one of the best delivery rates in the industry. This is always the biggest reason.

Second they have a wide variety of sign up forms available. You can create unblockable slide ins quite easily allowing you to improve your subscribe ratio.

Third they have an easy way to split test your broadcast mailings and also allow you to track your open rate and click through rate. All these stats allow you to constantly and easily improve your mailings. Knowing what is working is invaluable.

Fourth you can integrate your RSS feed to send out notices of updates to your list automatically. Sign up on the form at the top right and they will automatically send you a notice each time I update the blog without me doing anything after the initial set up. A huge time saver for me.

All in all one of if not the best services available to handle this important function of your marketing .

The evil twins opinion

They are very strict and do not like co-registrations. If you use co-registrations they may not be your best choice.

Overall even I have to rate them highly and I hate doing that.

Summary

Except for the co-registration dislike Aweber is our number one recommendation for an autoresponder service. Your autoresponder is too valuable of a resource to not get the best and at less than $20 a month is a no brainer for most.

Check out Aweber here.