Why Aweber? by Richard Grady

Hi Folks!

Why Aweber?

In my last newsletter, you will recall that I explained the reasons why I was changing the service that handles sending my newsletter emails every couple of weeks. If you missed it, you can read it here.

I promised to let you know this week why I had chosen Aweber to host my mailing list from now on....

In fairness, there were quite a few reasons why I chose Aweber - easy to use, helpful support plus the fact that many 'big-name' Internet marketers have used this company for years (so they must be doing something right). But the absolute top reason for me was simply that my research showed that using Aweber gives my emails the best chance of getting to the recipient without being blocked or filtered off somewhere.

Whenever you are sending emails to multiple recipients, you run the risk that somewhere along the line, your email will be identified as spam or junk mail and with ISPs getting more and more aggressive with their filtering tactics, the harder it is to get your messages through.

Aweber work hard to ensure that your emails are delivered and one of the most important things they do is maintain excellent relationships with the main ISPs. Whenever someone subscribes to a list held at Aweber, they have to confirm their subscription (as you did when you subscribed to this newsletter). This means that there is no way that someone could subscribe your email address without you agreeing to it. The major ISPs know this and as such tend not to block emails from Aweber's servers just because one person has complained. They even have an agreement with AOL as to how spam complaints are handled which gives you an idea of how well thought of Aweber must be.

If you are thinking of starting a newsletter/mailing list or are having delivery problems with your current provider, I strongly recommend you take a look at the Aweber service.

Using a web designer instead of doing it yourself....

I built my first website approximately five years ago and since then, I have always designed and built my own sites. This process has served me very well and over the years, my web building skills have advanced considerably (mostly through trial and error!). I have always recommended to my customers and subscribers that they too learn how to build their own sites and this is for two reasons:

1. It means that you know exactly what is going on with your site and how it actually 'works'. As you have built it piece by piece, you know, quite literally, every aspect of it.

2. Doing the work yourself will save you a small fortune on web design costs.

During the past couple of weeks though, I have done something that I would have previously not even considered doing - I have started to talk to a professional web designer with a view to hiring him to build a new business website for me!!!

Why I hear you ask?

Well the answer is simple - because he can do a much better job of it than I can AND he will take on all of the stress that the project would have caused me.

I have an idea for a new online business (totally unrelated to Internet marketing/eBay or any of the other areas that I currently work in) and it needs a professional site with quite a bit of 'behind the scenes' functionality. There is nothing like it around at present which means that the functions I require are fairly unique to this project. I have spent some time talking to different programmers that I know around the World to see if they can pool their expertise and write different bits of the software required and link everything up through the website that I build but it was just getting too fiddly.

I was at the point where I was ready to toss the whole project out of the window when I took a step back and looked at things from a completely different angle. What I really needed was one person (or team) to take on the entire project and simply provide me with the new website based on the brief I supply them with.

So that's exactly what I have done. I have a rough idea of what the site will cost and admittedly, it isn't going to be the few hundred dollars that it would have cost me BUT the end result should be far more professional and will be produced to my exact specification. Most importantly though, it takes away all the sleepless nights that I would have experienced as I went through the process of trying to get everything to work together.

With this in mind therefore, I would like to amend the advice that I have been giving out for the past few years......

Learn how to design and build your own business websites BUT when you have learned how to do this, DO consider hiring professionals and outsourcing some of this work as and where possible :-)

Until next time....

Richard Grady

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