Website Optimization Techniques

It seems like Aweber.com is the #1 email list management system chosen by Internet Marketers. But it costs more than most people’s web hosting and is only an email service. With most email services such as Yahoo and Gmail being free, why pay $19+ per month to send emails?

Let’s go through some of the reasons people subscribe to Aweber and how we can do the same things for free.

Manage multiple lists of email subscribers

In most email applications, it’s easy to tag and group people into categories of subscribers.

For opt-in confirmation you can force them to send you an opt-in email with a mailto: link which opens their mail program. This way you don’t have to have a double opt-in process. Or you can send them a reminder that they opted in with your first email with an option to unsubscribe at the top. Subsequent emails would have the unsubscribe instructions at the bottom of the email.

Your unsubscribe link can include the word “unsubscribe” in the subject line so your filters pick up on it and you manually delete their email from your list.

Get your emails delivered

This is only applicable to bulk mailing where many emails coming from one IP address in a short space of time to a particular ISP (such as Yahoo!) will cause your emails to go into the spam folder of recipients. Also, if any spam reports arise that are traced to this IP address, the emails may be flagged as spam.

So, the risk of having your emails automatically filtered to a spam folder is high if you share a bulk mailing service with many other people. So, the answer to this problem is to not use a low quality bulk mailing service.

Aweber, whitelist their site with ISPs which means they negotiate with them by showing the schedule email delivery, perform a spam score check on emails before they are sent and such like.

But, if you use your own email account, you are the only person sending email from that account, so if your emails are not spammy and you don’t send them in bursts, they should get delivered reliably to your subscribers.

You can send 100’s of emails easily

You can do this with a large BCC list, but the emails will be sent too rapidly and be blocked by ISPs.

The main advantage of using Aweber seems to be the scheduling of email sending so they reach the inboxes of your subscribers. Also, there are other nice features such as personalizing each email with the name of the recipient.

So, it looks like we still need the services of Aweber for large lists, or do we?

Well, we can connect to Gmail and Yahoo! from software on our computer. This software could them send emails to our lists at timed intervals, even random intervals to make them appear like manually sent email. Speaking as a programmer, I think this software is easy to write as long as you don’t want fancy input forms and graphics.

The easiest way to do it may be to incorporate some macros into office software. You would write your email text in a word processor. Your list would be in a spreadsheet. And your email client would connect to the web-based mail service. Then, the macro would be run to loop through your list sending the emails.

So this approach could save you around $190 a year!

The downside is that your unsubscribe requests would be difficult to automate, I think. However, they should be a low percentage of your list size.

For my DOT com hosting I generally use Hostgator.com having purchased the basic reseller plan. This allows me to host 100’s of small sites. It’s a really flexible plan where I can create my own hosting packages so I don’t waste resources such as bandwidth allocation on small sites that are expected to get low traffic.

Another interesting feature is that you can let external sites use a database on your Hostgator account. This means that you can utilize free hosting that maybe has PHP but no database.

But why would you be bothered about that Mr Multivar? Good question…

The answer is that I wanted to set up a UK site hosted in the UK so that the IP address is GEO-located in the UK. I believe that this will help with search engine rankings for UK specific searches.

DOT CO DOT UK domains are cheap and I buy them through Heart Internet. Today I purchased a domain for around $12 for 2 years, plus I took advantage of their free hosting offer. So I have a hosted website for just $0.50 per month. So can I make a profit with it? Plus, what will it be worth in 2 years time? I think I may do OK

To get a better chance of finding an available domain name you may want to consider .eu but that does cost more but it also makes sense to use this TLD where you are considering having multi-lingual versions of your pages e.g. in German, French, Spanish and Italian.

The features of the control panel are like their paid hosting plans apart from the lack of a database. AW stats, email and all the usual good stuff is there. One major limitation is the monthly bandwidth of just 100MB so you need to avoid lots of large images and forget video streaming

The domain has separate DNS management so it’s easy to change the nameservers to point at Hostgator if need be.

Now I am waiting for the Domain name to resolve to the hosting which always takes ages for UK domains for some reason.

Update: it took about 10 hours, now it seems to be up at:

Win Money Online - winthemoney.co.uk

So there you go, some tips on setting up very cheap hosting for your domains.

Getting things done is the secret to success for many successful people. But there is so little time I hear you cry!

It’s actually very easy to get many things done, the way to do it is to focus on the most important things and get them done first before you do anything else such as web browsing or checking email. Also, do these things when you have the most energy and alertness.

For me, this is mid morning. Even so, I get up from bed and the first thing I try and do is something highly beneficial to my business before I eat breakfast. This may only take 30 minutes but it is a great start to the day to get this thing, whatever it may be, done and achieved right at the start of the day. To get ideas for what to do, you could plan them at the end of the day before or think about what you will do immediately before springing out of bed, this is what I tend to do, after brewing my mug of tea (#1 priority).

After completing the productive task, I will shower and have breakfast. Then I am ready for my mid-morning session of productive time. Then, by lunch time I often have made great progress and relax by checking out blogs by inspirational people over lunch. I don’t need to check news since I have a rotating news RSS headline in my browser which will show me if there is anything majorly important going on that I need to check out.

In the afternoon I will often not work but go for a run, go 10-pin bowling or more work, but it is often less productive work than in the morning.

Now it is evening and I am writing this post since I can do my miscellaneous tasks such as blog posting. Even, this is work-related but fun and relaxing.

I like to watch downloads of mini-series of sci-fi or action dramas but these are treats so I limit these to when I feel that I deserve these treats. Today may be one of those days

Of course, I don’t have the time waste of a commute to work, meetings and a forced time frame to work to, so it is easy for me to make every day highly productive. But, like normal people, I do have my unproductive days where I stayed up too late the night before etc. But I hope I gave you some ideas for how to prioritize and get the important things banged out early in the day or whenever you are personally most energized.

When you have expertise in the area of Internet Marketing there is plenty of scope to leverage income out of clients for your services.

I have a danger here to reveal my tactics to current clients so I will only present a few ideas here and expand on them in future posts.

First off, you can mostly save them time: you can do your coding and web design very fast, so you can quickly debug and respond to requested changes by the client.

This makes them happy. Every day lost to them is revenue down the drain, also they need the expert to make sure their money-making site runs smoothly.

But you need to make sure that you get paid. The way to do this is to host their code on your site and only transfer it over once they paid you the money.

To ensure that you get future business from them, over-deliver on expectations. So you go the extra mile outside of your contract to complete the job.

There is more to this strategy, but I will leave it for later.

- Mr MultiVar … the man with the tips for maximizing your profits online