15 Days To Building A List - Day 4

Setting Up Your Autoresponder and Opt-in page

For those of you who are new to internet marketing, and email lists here's a bit of an overview. Whenever you go to a website, and you see a sign up form and you put your name and email in it you receive an email. In that email you are welcomed personally, and then given all the information about the list that you signed up for. Some of you may think that there's a person doing this manually, but in reality it's just a computer sending out emails to people who fill out the form.

You may be wondering how they include your name in the email also. Well, there's certain coding that you can put in your emails through your autoresponder that includes the name of whatever the person puts when he/she is signing up for the list. It's a very simple process that only takes seconds to do if you have the autoresponder service.

Without an autoresponder service, you would have to manually record all the sign ups, and send out each email to everybody in your list. Trust me, that would be the biggest waste of time in your internet marketing career. The first step to building a list is to sign up for an autoresponder service.

There are two choices here. There are free autoresponders that you could use, but you are limited to everything, and it's not the greatest service that you would receive. I would highly recommend using a paid unlimited lists, campaigns, follow ups, and newsletters autoresponder. The service I highly recommend is Aweber. The service is great, and it only costs about $20 per month.

Now that you're signed up with your autoresponder, let's set up a opt in form. But before we do that, let's get an idea of what some successful ones look like. Take a look at the following sites. Pay close attention to where the form is located, what intices the viewer to sign up, and where the sign up brings you after you sign up.

Rosalind Gardner's Net Profits Today
Jim Edward's I Gotta Tell You

and there are many other great ones out there.

In this example, we're going to be using Aweber.

Sign into Aweber

At the top right of the screen click on the link that says customer & affiliate Login. Now sign into your account. Once logged in click on the tab that says 'Leads'. This is where all the information about your sign ups are, and the link to the web form generator. Below the tabs you'll see buttons. Click on the 'Web Form Generator' button. Now you'll be taken to the web form generator page.

Click on 'create new web form' in the middle of the page. The first field is form name. You can name this whatever you want, because nobody's going to see it. Now there are many different kind of forms that you can choose from. In this example we're going to choose a form that's on a webpage. For this we choose in-line (which should already be chosen). Next you're going to fill in the headline field. This is what is going to appear on your page. This is your form. So make it look good, use an attractive headline, bold, colours, but don't go overboard. Remember to keep in the line of the examples I showed you earlier. Don't worry about the boxes, because they will appear automatically below your headline.

The next field is the input fields. You'll want 2 fields on this one. A name field, and an email field. I like to put the name field before the email field, but you can switch it around if you want. This next step is very important. If you're hosting your own website, you'll want to change the 'Thank You Page'. One thing I don't like about the Aweber thank you page is that all it says is Thank you for subscribing. I know they didn't mean to make it spectacular in anyway, but I highly recommend creating your own unique thank you page. Also, on the thank you page remember to tell the subscriber to check their email because they will have to confirm their subscription. When I made my first web form for one of my newsletters I used the aweber thank you page. The results ended up that only half of the people were confirming their subscription. Then I came out with a mini-course, and made my own thank you page. The results were drastic. Out of about 40 subscribers 1 didn't confirm. So creating your own thank you page will help you out a lot.

Now you need to save your form, and now it's created. You'll be taken back to the web form generator page, and all you have to do is click on the 'Get HTML' link, and paste that code into your website. Simple as that.

So now you should have a good idea on how to get started with your list. Aweber provides a great load of useful information for email lists, promotions, and a lot more so take a good look around the site, and you'll find a lot of useful information.

Well, that's all for today.

See you tomorrow.

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