Aweber is an email list marketing company that helps you capture leads and email addresses for contacts in lists that you can then send messages and newsletters to. It’s permission eMarketing at it’s best. People tell you they want information from you by signing up then you send it to them. They can opt-out of your list at any time. The following is my Aweber review.

I previously blogged about the differences between single opt-in and double opt-in and concluded that double opt-in list marketing has many advantages over single opt-in list marketing. Aweber is the leading list marketing company that requires all users to double opt-in. This means that they provide their information to sign-up for your newsletter. They then receive an automatic email asking them to click a link to confirm their subscription. This does two things. First it insures that you have people on your list that want to be on your list and second it prevents spam subscriptions.

I previously had a single opt-in list that had low open rates (10%-15%), many email addresses bouncing (not getting delivered) and I would consistently be marked as spam. Once I switched to Aweber and had my double opt-in list, my open rates increased to 45%-55%, I have very few emails bouncing, and I am rarely marked as spam. This increases my effectiveness in marketing to my list, which increases my profit.

I know many of you may be thinking that this is all a little overwhelming and that leads me into a great feature of Aweber, easy setup. Aweber has a wizard when you first sign-up that guides you through setting up your first list. There is the list name and description setup, confirmation email customization, then your welcome email. Aweber includes many templates to use for this welcome email or you can easily setup a custom design. You are then taken to the web form wizard to create a web form sign-up to go on your website.

The web form wizard has recently been updated and I have to say I really like it. It’s easy to design a form that matches your website and all you have to do is drop in one line of javascript to put it on your web page. It’s all a drag and drop interface so if you want to add Name, Phone Number, and Email address, you just have to drag them to your form!

While there are great reports and other features that help my business, the best feature is called Blog RSS. Your newsletter can be configured so that each time you blog or post something on your website, it can easily be sent out to your list using your newsletter template. This automation is an absolute time saver for small businesses.

While there are many options out there, I highly recommend Aweber for your small business list marketing. You may be tempted by slightly lower prices but nothing beats Awebers deliverability, open rates, form wizard, and ease of use. Try Aweber’s email marketing or try the free test drive with Aweber below.

Related posts:

1. Single Opt-in vs. Double Opt-in List Marketing

As with an social media, the question eventually comes around to “Is this just simply a social medium or can it be used to enhance my business?” This answer for you is Probably… First off when using twitter for business you have to get out of your head the notion of advertising or you won’t be successful. twitter is about building relationships and sharing information. Businesses that are successful at using twitter to increase their online presence do not just simply “spam” their information out there. They build relationships, they interact with other users of twitter, and they share information. That information should include information about your company or services but for the most part will not.

First off when using twitter for business you have to get out of your head the notion of advertising or you won’t be successful. twitter is about building relationships and sharing information.

So how do I use twitter for my business?

twitter Username
Your first step is to get a twitter username. This is how people see you on twitter and will also be your personalized URL on twitter (i.e. http://twitter.com/JaredDetroit). It’s best to have a user name that can easily be recognized as you or your company as well as being easy to remember. This is not a time to create a clever alternate spelling or use cryptic words that can’t be remembered. Don’t create a sales pitch name (i.e. MakeMoneyOnlineNow)

Profile
You absolutely must fill out your profile to be taken seriously on twitter. Too many times I get someone following me that may be legitimate but they don’t have a picture and they don’t have a profile. Having your profile filled out lets me make a quick decision on whether I want to follow you back or not. Don’t try to cram everything into your profile. Keep it targeted and succinct. Say something about your business but have something personal or interesting in there.

WARNING! – If you want to be successful on twitter do not go out and follow 2,000 people on your first day without having any tweets. You WILL NOT get many followers back and you will look like a spam account!

Tweeting (after you have completed your profile)
It’s time to let the twitterverse know what you’re all about. They can see your bio, your picture, and your website address but their main opinion will be on what you tweet. Here are some quick tips:

• Download a client to get the most out of your twitter experience. I highly recommend Tweetdeck for organizing twitter
• Do not make it just about your company
• Put casual tweets out there (examples below) or questions
• Talk about someone else, your city or something your passionate about
• Shortening of words to get more space is very much accepted (i.e. your, you’re = ur, for, four = 4, etc)
• Follow a friend or a company that you like and interact with them
• Use the ratio of 1-10 for tweets about you and tweets about everything else for a rough measurement
• Try to keep your following-follower ration within 10% (unless you have more followers)

To be successful at following strangers, you should have at least 10 quality tweets. This will let you follow more than a couple of people at a time with success. Here are some examples of some good tweets.

• Talk about what you do over the weekend
• What do you think about @starbucks coffee
• What do you think about the weather?
• What’s a critical piece of advice for …
• Respond to someone’s tweet about …
• Tell a company what you think about their product
• Share a good article or website you found (use a URL shortener service like Bit.ly)
• Click on the Tweet This link at the bottom of this article

These tweets may seem silly or useless for business but it’s necessary to let people know you’re a real person and not just out to advertise/spam them. Now start following some people slowly to build your following. Start slowly and focus on people in your industry, people that interest you or people in your area. Don’t just blindly follow everyone. When someone follows you review their profile and their tweets and see if it’s someone you want to follow back.

Your now well on your way to building your twitter presence. Look for upcoming posts about about automating content in twitter and automating followers (the right way).

Jared Pomranky

Related posts:

1. How to Effectively Use LinkedIn for Business
2. Small Business Online Marketing

Single opt-in lists are more open to spam and people getting blacklisted from major ISPs for sending out spam. They do, however, generally allow you to have a larger list as people don’t have to opt-in to it. Open and click through percentages for single opt-in lists are usually lower (i.e. 15%-25%)

Double opt-in lists generally start smaller and you will have people that sign up on your web page and never opt-in. They do, however, have much greater open rates and click through percentages. Open rates are as high as 50%-60%, which means more people are actually receiving your e-mail and are opening it (i.e. not getting caught in spam or are actually interested in reading it).

When you look at open rates, you have to consider deliverability. This is the rate at which the e-mails actually make it into the recipients e-mail inbox. If the e-mail gets marked as spam by the email server and doesn’t even make it to the inbox, they don’t have a chance to open it. Also, if the e-mail makes it through but then gets marked as spam and sits in the spam folder, it has a lower chance of getting opened. There are many ways to optimize your e-mail message for deliverability but the best way, and often overlooked, is the reputation of the email list service. You can have the most optimized least spammy e-mail ever but if you’re sending it through a less than reputable company, it will still get marked as spam.

There is a lot that goes into the reputation of an e-mail list company. Email delivery companies work with major ISPs (Internet Service Providers) like AOL, Comcast, etc. to add e-mails coming from their servers to a “white list”. When email from a provider is added to this white list, the chances of the ISP filtering out the e-mail as spam before it even gets to the recipients email inbox is much lower. Yes, if you didn’t know before, there are e-mails sent to your e-mail address that you never see in your inbox or junk mail because they are filtered out by the ISP as spam.

The biggest contributer to the reputation of an e-mail delivery company, however, is the people and e-mail addresses that are sending the e-mails! When someone sends out an e-mail to their list, everyone on that list that has a spam filter through a service, has a choice to mark the e-mail as spam or not. Get too many people marking your e-mail address as someone that sends spam and it will increase your chances of getting marked as spam in the future. When a company gets too many people getting marked as spammers, what happens? There starts a bias from the ISPs to question whether any e-mail coming from the service provider is spam or not.

Now, back to single opt-in and double opt-in. You have a significantly less chance of getting marked as spam if you have a double opt-in list because people have clicked on a link in their e-mail stating that they want to receive your information after they signed up on your website. This gives you a good reputation and will make it less likely for you to get marked as a spammer. Now, what if you take an e-mail company that only allows double opt-in lists? That would make the reputation of the company much better than a company that allows single opt-in.

There are many good e-mail marketing services that are available. I have found the best deliverability in my experience to be Aweber Communications because of the points I’ve stated above and that’s who I continue to use.

Jared Pomranky

Related posts:

1. Aweber Review: How is Your Email Marketing?

A website hosting company is essential to a business that markets itself online and honestly who doesn’t do that nowadays? The worst thing that could happen is that your site is unavailable, slow or timing out when a customer that’s going to buy comes to your site. I kept this in mind on my search for the best website host when looking for my companies.

My main criteria for a website host is:

1. Consistent uptime
2. Performance
3. A full feature set
4. Ease of use
5. Excellent customer service and technical support
6. Large amounts of available storage and bandwidth
7. A cheap price

Looking at this list now you might say that I was a little unreasonable with my expectations. Well, that may be but I found the host! After going through many sub par companies and some pretty bad experiences (slow websites, website being down, customer complaints), I found inMotion Hosting.

Now I was a little jaded from some bad experiences so I did a fair amount of research on reviews both praise and complaints. The praise I found was very good and the complaints that I found tended to be far and few between or they seemed to be nonconstructive spam.

I started out with inMotion Hosting’s Power plan for $8.95 a month, which includes 6 domains but they do have a Launch Plan for $6.95 a month, which includes 2 domains and might be good for someone just starting out. They also offer an industry leading 90 day money back guarantee so I was willing to let them prove to me they were the provider for me. The Power Plan I got included:

• 6 sites
• 26 parked domains
• 100 sub-domains
• CPanel, which is an easy to use web management panel and seems to be the industry standard
• Data Backup
• Unlimited email accounts
• eCommerce support
• All script support like php, perl, etc.
• Easy FTP
• mySQL databases
• Business Class software that increase speeds upwards of 50%!

Now here’s where it really gets interesting!

• Unlimited Disk Space!
• Unlimited Monthly Transfer!

Are you kidding me! That’s huge for me as I have one site with pictures, videos, documents, and other files that not only take up a lot of space but also create high monthly transfer amounts. Even if you don’t have a real intensive website, it’s nice to know you don’t have to worry about being charged for overage on disk space or monthly transfer rates. You only need to get one $300 charge for overage on monthly transfer rate with another hosting company before you see how truly awesome these unlimited amounts are!

They also have features included like data backup, easy to use website development tools, support for blogging like Wordpress, Linux or Microsoft hardware, and a lot more! I would recommend checking out all of the features included, as I know I missed a lot, at the inMotion Hosting website.

Needless to say, they have the features and stats. Enough of that, I’m sure you’re saying, how was the actual execution?

My experience in the past 2 years with them has been excellent. The features and included tool sets have made it very easy for me to maintain my websites, implement new websites, and make any needed updates. With the included support of Wordpress through a tool called Fantastico, I was able to get my Wordpress blog up and running in literally 2 minutes. I’m not kidding! That tool is really user friendly and a really cool feature to have included. The CPanel is really easy to use and provides great functionality. I’m an advanced user and I find that everything is available that I need.

Customer Service

We have not had any complaints on our websites for being unavailable and we have a service that checks our uptime and hasn’t yet reported an outage. Each time we test our websites we get a fast response. I have not had to use customer service much but each time that I do I get a fast response by an intelligent person that is able to help me out each time. I absolutely hate when a company uses some auto-reply that tells me to read there support documents or support personnel that quickly glances at a support e-mail and replies back before reading through the whole thing. Thankfully inMotion hosting support is not that company and has great customer service.

My Constructive Criticism

Now, any good review wouldn’t be complete without a good constructive aspect to it and here it is. I was switching my Exchange hosting company to Google Apps so I required an MX records update. Usually with CPanel this update is available but I found it wasn’t there with inMotion Hosting it wasn’t. I had to contact customer service to get the MX records updated to switch over. Now I actually still met my timeline and I’m sure it has something to do with making sure the site isn’t getting hacked and reducing spam but… the option to update it myself would have been nice.

Conclusion and Final Summary
inMotion Hosting provides unlimited storage, unlimited monthly transfer, ease of use features for anything you would need, great customer support, and excellent performance. Not only do they have all of that but they manage to bundle it in very cost effective packages that can meet anyone’s needs and will appeal to even the very budget conscious consumer.

If you find a better website hosting provider, let me know. I haven’t found that company yet and I doubt that I would switch as I’m a big proponent of finding what works very well and sticking with it.

Check out the inMotion Hosting website for the specifics on packages. Don’t forget that they do offer their industry leading 90 day money back guarantee. I guess when you have a great product, you can offer a great money back guarantee.

Jared Pomranky

No related posts.

Guy Kawasaki, business genius, wrote about Ten Ways to Use LinkedIn. His 10 ways are:

1. Increase your visibility

2. Improve your connectability

3. Improve your Google PageRank

4. Enhance your Search Engine results

5. Perform blind, “reverse,” and company reference checks.

6. Increase the relevancy of your job search.

7. Make your interview go smoother.

8. Gauge the health of an industry.

9. Track startups.

10. Ask for advice.

Can you tell the four that I like the best? LinkedIn was described to me by Terry Bean with Motor City Connect as your online business card. It’s a way to get the stats of your company out there, what you’re doing, links to your websites, and a quick bio on yourself. This is good for people trying to find you and for people looking to make connections with what you’re doing.

Search Engine Results – This is all fine but it doesn’t work well if no one can find you, does it? Well, LinkedIn is always ranked high in Google. You will find that once you start a LinkedIn account, it will be on the first page (if you have a lot of content out there) or will most likely be the first result found. What does this mean for your sites that you put on LinkedIn?

PageRank increase – LinkedIn has such a high ranking in Google that when you put your website on there with relevant content, it will get a boost in ranking. This alone is not going to take your site from being listed on the 10th page of a search on Google to the first, but it will help. It also helps if you have good relevant information on your profile for what you want people to find you for and what your website is about.

A complete profile helps people find you - Your profile is very important to fill out and very important to have a photo. People like to see who they’re networking with and it will help to make more connections on people you have met before. Your Summary should be a good summary of your experience and what you’re doing. You can add some keywords in here that you want ranked high on Google but make it mostly about the content. The specialties area is a great place to put your keywords that explain your business and that people would search for to find you.

How to Use LinkedIn -LinkedIn is a great place to make connections. Seek out old classmates, colleagues, and friends using the search tool and add them to your network. Completing your bio will also help people find you and get recommended to you. As your network grows, you will be able to search through and meet new people in your industry or an industry you want to go to. It’s a great place for making an introduction.

LinkedIn Answers – Answers are a great place to ask questions and read good content but they are most importantly good for you answering the questions. This helps raise your visibility and will help you be seen as an expert in your area.

When you get signed up for LinkedIn (or if you are already), check out my profile Jared Pomranky and add me to your network.

I hope this helps you out a little in figuring out LinkedIn.

Jared Pomranky

Related posts:

1. twitter for Business: How to Make it Effective

Many small business owners I know are already burning the candle at both ends, which leaves them with no time to figure out how to get their website ranking better in search engines, how to get started with social media for their business, how to get content to write a blog let alone even get a blog created, and how to manage all the leads once you get them all in. I’m here to tell you that you don’t need to do any of this yourself.

All of the websites and blogs can be created with almost none of your time invested. You can also get blog posts and articles written from short bullet point lists and topics provided by you. This content, which can also be used for your website, is written by professionals that create content for a living and allow you to put your name as the author. These are called ghost writers, which we have on staff, and they make providing fresh and professional content for your websites easy!

Better yet, there are also great online and technical solutions for small business that save you time and automate processes like lead management. You can not only automate and standardize your processes but you can also do this for your employees. When this happens, you get more successful and productive employees.

There are many ways to get people coming to your site but that does little good if you don’t convert them into a lead. Keep in mind with any Internet marketing solution you look at that simply driving traffic to your site and not looking at how they will be converted to a lead will not help. You need a full solution that focuses on results and your bottom line.

Let me know if you have any questions.

Jared Pomranky

Related posts:

1. twitter for Business: How to Make it Effective