Sitting here on Sunday doing my posting for the week and a scary thought came across to me. Am I being bitten by the assume monster once again?

Regular readers will know that assume is one of the words that I hate worse than some of the 4 letter words. Every time I start to use it it up and bites me. Not a fun thing.

So it made me stop and think. (Always a dangerous thing to have happen especially when you are old and bald.)

The thought was, am I targeting things wrongly. For the most part I tend to target the topics to help new bloggers. But…

Yeah I know another bad word but. Not as bad as butt which is what the assume monster normally bites but not a great word.

Before I get into the but let me step back to when I first started blogging a long, long time ago on a galaxy far, far away. Ooops going into Star Wars mode not where we want this to go.

Back when I created my very first blog I had help from a friend to get it installed. At that time I did not even have an ftp client and I loaded the whole thing via file manager in cPanel. (This was before WordPress was around.)

All of my sites at that point were in static html and I really had no idea what php was, what a data base was or any of the things that I take for granted today.

Move to today where I rarely if at all use any static sites. Everything is based on a WordPress back bone and I even take mini sites and skin them into my own themes. Night and day to say the least.

Now back to the but… Yes the one with just one t not the one with two.

The but is that there are probably a number of regular readers that would like more advanced items and I may be ignoring them because I assume (yes that bad word again) that most readers want just the basics.

So tell me am I right that most readers want just the basics and tips to make it easier (like Monday’s post on the new Aweber plugin) or should I be covering more advanced things too.

Leave your comments and let me know whether that assume monster has bitten me in the butt (yes with 2 t’s ) or not.

About the author

Mike Paetzold got started blogging in 2003 and has become an expert on using WordPress. He has become known as The WordPress Guy. After being an under ground niche marketer using his blogs he has surfaced to share some of the ways he uses blogs to enter various niches profitably. If you would like help in building your business check out my coaching offer.

Technorati Tags: aweber, back bone, bad word, bloggers, dangerous thing, ftp client, monster, static html

Building a subscriber list and letting your subscribers know when you have added new content is an excellent way to generate extra repeat traffic. I have used Aweber for this for a long time because of the ease of automating the sending of these notices.

You can set up the emails to happen at any schedule you make and they check your feed for new items for you. No extra work to login and set up an email it can al be automated.

Aweber has just made it easier to use their service to add a form to your blog. They just released a new plugin that will allow you to add your form without doing any html to your sidebar.

First you need to install the plugin. Search for “Aweber web form” then click the Install Now.

Once it is installed you need to set up the settings. This is a two part session. 1) Get your authorization code. 2) Once you get it paste it in the box and make the connection.

When you click the link you will need to log in to your Aweber account.

When you login you will get the code you need to put in step 2 above. Just copy and paste it and click Make Connection.

Now your widget is ready to work. Now you will need a list set up at Aweber and as they have good tutorials on how to do that I will skip that part here.

Go to Appearance Widgets and drag the Aweber Web Form to your sidebar where you want it to appear. That will open like this when you have drug it into place.

Select your list and you will get a drop down for your forms.

Select the form you want to display then click save and your form is added to your blog. No HTML needed.

Makes it very easy for anyone to add an opt in form to their blog. Add in the ease of their form designer and Aweber makes it a good choice for any blogger to use to keep their subscribers updated.

About the author

Mike Paetzold got started blogging in 2003 and has become an expert on using WordPress. He has become known as The WordPress Guy. After being an under ground niche marketer using his blogs he has surfaced to share some of the ways he uses blogs to enter various niches profitably. If you would like help in building your business check out my coaching offer.

Technorati Tags: aweber, blog, blogger, email, sidebar, step 2, subscribers, traffic, widget

Today’s rant is a pet peeve of mine. RSS subscribers are great and I use a feed reader to follow a lot of blogs. That said I often wonder why so many do not also ask for email subscribers.

It would be a good bet that just about every reader of your blog has an email account. So ask for permission to let them know when you have added new content. I do that here with a delayed pop up.

If you are using a quality autoresponder like Aweber you can add these by adding a single line of code to your theme. Aweber will also automate the delivery of email as it will read your RSS feed and send out on the schedule you set to let your subscribers know about new content.

So all I do is add quality content here and spread the exposure automatically.

As over 25% of my visitors are coming from email notifications it can make a big difference in your traffic stats.

You could use Feedburner to allow this and not get a separate autoresponder (and that is better than not collecting email subscribers) but you won’t have the option of contacting people without posting to your blog.

My guess is that quite a few of your current readers do not understand feed readers or adding an RSS subscription to their feed reader but they do have an email address and are used to checking it. That is why letting people get notified through email of your new content is important.

As always your questions and comments are welcomed. Just leave them below.

About the author

Mike Paetzold got started blogging in 2003 and has become an expert on using WordPress. He has become known as The WordPress Guy. After being an under ground niche marketer using his blogs he has surfaced to share some of the ways he uses blogs to enter various niches profitably. If you would like help in building your business check out my coaching offer.

Technorati Tags: autoresponder, aweber, blog, blogs, email account, email notifications, feed readers, quality content, subscribers, traffic stats

3 Ways Your Blog Can Help You Build Relationships [ 2:35 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Building your list is one, if not the best, way to grow your affiliate marketing business. If you are an affiliate marketer the majority of your time and effort should be spent doing just that. There is a reason you always hear the money is in the list even though those of us that have been around a while know it is the relationship with the list that is the real money maker.

Here are 3 ways that a blog can help you build that relationship.

The first way to build that relationship is to offer good content to your subscribers. The problem can come up though when you do not
have a call to action in your content and sometimes it just does not fit.

It is important to get your subscribers in the habit of taking action and clicking on links. The easy way to do that is to put your quality content on your blog. Send out a teaser email and link to the content. Your subscriber gets in the habit of clicking your links.

This can be the ultimate leverage of your content. You are providing it to your subscribers but you have put on your blog allowing others that aren’t on your list to access and want more from you.

Email deliverability can be a problem at times. Even when you use a quality autoresponder like Aweber with the spam filters it is very easy to get tripped up using words like free, make money, etc in your emails. If your email doesn’t get delivered and ends up in the spam filter it won’t make you any money.

Here is where a blog can help you.

Put your promotion on your blog. Here you can use the power words like free, automated money maker, etc that will get action from the reader but won’t make it through the spam filters to your subscribers inbox.

Just send a teaser email with a link to your blog post and you can get it past the spam filters and still have a powerful promotion.

The third way is that your content on a blog is drawing additional readers. It is much easier to get permission to continue to contact them when they have already sampled and liked your content style.

Add a way to opt in to your email list on your blog and take advantage of that fact.

For more ways to improve your affiliate marketing using a blog check out Profitable Blog Steps.

Technorati Tags: affiliate marketer, affiliate marketing, aweber, money maker, profitable blog steps, relationship, spam filters, subscriber

Aweber has a feature that makes it ideal to use with your blog. You can set up Aweber to automatically email your list every time you update your blog or at any time frame you wish to use. (Like a weekly summary.)

The advantage to this is that if you offer something you will have an easy way to remind people to stop back and visit because you added new content.

Now sites like Feed Burner have similar capabilities but by using an autoresponder you can also send out other broadcast messages to the list. This will allow you to deliver other items that can be list specific. For example I could put together a special report just for the subscribers which could be in a pdf or a special video. This allows you to have a stronger relationship with those that have shown they are interested in your content by signing up.

There are two things that usually cause problems for new people when setting these up. They are making the form fit which has been covered extensively in this post – Adding opt in box to your blog and setting up the automation on Aweber.

Once you have created the account for your autoresponder click on the create a blog broadcast button.

Then add your feed url in the box that says RSS Feed URL.

Then choose how often you would like to have them send to your subscribers. You can do it by number of articles or by set time frame.

I like to use automatically but that depends on what you promise people when they sign up.

Get your account set up at Aweber and check out their complete video tutorial

.

About the author

Mike Paetzold got started blogging in 2003 and has become an expert on using WordPress. He has become known as The WordPress Guy. After being an under ground niche marketer using his blogs he has surfaced to share some of the ways he uses blogs to enter various niches profitably. If you would like help in building your business check out my coaching offer.

Technorati Tags: autoresponder, aweber, list building, rss

The noise online makes it very easy for your message to get lost easily. Someone visits your blog, likes your content and bookmarks your site. They really do intent to come back but do they?

The answer is a great big maybe. If they grabbed your feed and added it to a reader like Google Reader they just may depending on how many people they follow. (My average new posts in my reader is huge). If they bookmarked your site the odds are much, much lower.

Think about it. Go check your bookmarks and see how many of them you actually use or even better remember why you bookmarked them. I have and if you were to force me at gun point I would be lucky to remember half of them and outside of a dozen or so have never used the majority of them even once.

That is one of the reasons that I like to have a subscribe form on my blogs. This lets me remind people to come back again and again.

Now there are multiple ways to do this and you can use a service like Feedblitz but I prefer using my own autoresponder (Aweber because they automate delivery off of my feed). The reason is that I can easily send other messages too with an autoresponder.

This allows me to offer an ethical bribe for signing up to receive updates. For this blog I use a piece of software that most bloggers would find useful. As my topic here is WordPress and blogging that is something of value for my readers.

Previously I gave away some tips on generating blog traffic. Both of these target the reader that will want to come back again and again.

As people return and get value they are more likely to comment and take part in the discussion. You build trust and loyalty by continuing to provide valuable content. The comments create even more valuable content for my blog and build a community here.

I can also use the list to get questions as that is the primary focus of my content here. On another note it is almost time to resend as the questions have slowed down but because I am using Aweber I can send out a gentle nudge to get the questions coming in again (hint, hint use the survey form above or comment).

In conclusion if you are looking to increase your blog traffic (and who isn’t?) then you really need to be asking people to subscribe and giving them a reason to do so.

As always your questions and comments are welcomed.

Mike Paetzold

Technorati Tags: autoresponder, aweber, blog traffic, feedblitz, rss feed

RSS is probably one of the most confused areas for people starting to blog. Everyone has heard the term either RSS, feed or the two combined RSS feed. Quite a few though don’t understand them or the power that having a feed gives you when using a blog.

Lets start with a definition from Wikipedia of RSS.

RSS is a family of Web feed formats used to publish frequently updated content such as blog entries, news headlines, and podcasts in a standardized format.[2] An RSS document (which is called a “feed,” “web feed,”[3] or “channel”) contains either a summary of content from an associated web site or the full text. RSS makes it possible for people to keep up with web sites in an automated manner that can be piped into special programs or filtered displays.[3]

The benefit of RSS is the aggregation of content from multiple web sources in one place. RSS content can be read using software called an “RSS reader,” “feed reader,” or an “aggregator,” which can be web-based or desktop-based. A standardized XML file format allows the information to be published once and viewed by many different programs. The user subscribes to a feed by entering the feed’s link into the reader or by clicking an RSS icon in a browser that initiates the subscription process. The RSS reader checks the user’s subscribed feeds regularly for new content, downloads any updates that it finds, and provides a user interface to monitor and read the feeds.

I am not going to cover the technical aspects of the various modes. For most it is only important to understand how they work and what they can do for you. It is a transmission that is sent automatically when you update that others can subscribe to through a feed reader. This allows people to see in one place all of the new items from various sources that they wish to use.

Here are just a few of the more popular feed readers and is far from being an inclusive list.

• Google reader
• My Yahoo
• My MSN
• My AOL

All of these will allow you to get the latest information on any RSS feed you may want to keep track of easily.

Most blogs will either have little icons that list various readers like My Yahoo, My MSN, etc (like you will find in the sidebar of this blog) or you will see the image that is shown to the left. If you click on them they will give you the necessary information to add the feed to your reader.

A feed can also be used to trigger an email alert to those that have subscribed. There are a few different services that will do this. We will cover two of the more popular here.

The first is feed burner. Go to Feedburner and create your feed with them. Then click publicize and select email subscriptions. Then you can create the feed and they will give you the HTML to add the form to your site.

This is good if you are using Feedburner for your stats. This is important if you are selling advertising based on the subscriber stats. Because I don’t sell advertising on my blogs this is not important for me.

The other option is to use an autoresponder and I recommend AWeber. They will allow you to automate and send an update each time you add a new post to your blog.

This is easy to do by just creating a new list and then click on the messages – blog broadcast button. You will then add in your feed and edit the template to send each time that you post your blog.

The big advantage to using a service like AWeber is that you can send other messages to this list besides just your blog updates. You can also use the automation to deliver an e-course or other series as your gift for subscribing which you can’t do with the Feedburner option.

This should give you a better concept of the power of RSS, what a feed is and how it can benefit you but…

If you have questions or comments they are always welcomed here.

Mike Paetzold

Technorati Tags: aweber, feedburner, rss feed, use rss feed

Today’s question:

Hey Mike–I have a two part question about list-building. First, I know you like AWeber as an autoresponder, but are there any free or cheaper services that would suffice for someone who is frugal? And if someone did use an alternate autoresponder, is it possible/reasonable to transfer your list to a different autoresponder down the road after building a decent list?

Yes there is no doubt that Aweber is my favorite.

Feedburner has a service that will allow you to collect emails and have your updates emailed for you like AWeberr does. To the best of my knowledge you can’t send any other emails through it though.

For example when you sign up here I send out a series of blog traffic tips along with the updates from the blog. I also have the capability to send a broadcast when ever I want to. I don’t but I could.

The problem of moving a list from any autoresponder service to another is a different issue.

Any good service will require an imported list to re-confirm. This will cause you to lose the majority of the list usually. Now that is not necessarily a bad thing.

It will allow you to sort out those that are really interested.

Now the final point is about being penny wise pound foolish. My personal feeling is that if you can’t make the cost of AWeber work for you in very short order you need to really look at what you are doing. I have been doing a whole series at Mike Paetzold Recommends on business building and setting up business systems.

As always your questions and comments are welcomed.

Mike Paetzold

Technorati Tags: autoresponder, aweber, build system, feedburner, list building, rss feed

Today’s question:

From reading your blog and others, I have learned it is important to build an opt-in e-mail list to keep in contact with readers via an e-mail subscription. Can you talk about how to set up your blog to optimally to collect e-mail addresses? Also, once you have promised the reader periodic e-mails (such as tips or advice, etc), where would you start in creating these newsletters. Is there a step-by-step process you use as far as collecting e-mails for your list, sending out a regular newsletter, and automating it?? I’m sure it depends on what you’re trying to do with your blog but I’m assuming there are some basic similarities that apply to all bloggers.

First I am glad to see that you understand the need to have an opt in list. Having the ability to stay in touch with your readers and get them to return can and will drive quite a bit of traffic.

There are a few different ways and many tweaks that you can make to adjust this to your niche.

The offer…

First you need to really consider what you are going to offer to your subscriber of value for their email address. If you know who your ideal subscriber would be (and you should) this becomes relatively easy.

This is the most important piece of the puzzle. If your offer is something that a reader just has to have the structure of how you present it becomes less important.

Where and how to put it…

This is something you need to test and keep adjusting. Usually right at the top of your sidebar is best. That way it is always in view for everyone coming to your page (as long as your blog displays the side bar on all posts – The standard Kubrick does not on WordPress.)

Depending on the service you use or have access to you can also add it as a pop up, a slide in, an exit grabber or as a floating action button. It is important that you actually test all of these because in different niches you will get different results.

Now before you tell me I hate pop ups etc.and they get blocked etc. think about this. I have found that for me when IE went to automatically blocking pop ups they actually made them more effective for the targeted viewer.

Have you ever gone to a page, heard the sound from your pop up blocker and then reloaded the page to allow it so you could see what you missed?

I have but…

Only when it was a page that I had a real interest in. That is the real key. Is your reader interested or just passing through? You won’t offend the people that you are really trying to attract.

Delivering your message…

Personally I use AWeber to send out my email and because it allows me to automate things. For example on this blog I offer a series of 5 Blog Traffic Tips which are already loaded to go out automatically. Once you sign up they automatically deliver them in the sequence I set up and at the time frame I have set.

Then for continuing updates I have AWeber read my RSS feed and automatically send out a notice for me whenever I post. Love this feature.

Now I don’t have to do anything other than what I normally do – Post to the blog. They automatically let everybody that has signed up know that I have added more information. I do nothing after the initial set up.

Testing your positioning…

This will take a bit of that W word – WORK. You will need to be tracking your visitors and if you are using AWeber you will need to create a separate form for each method. Now you can see which method is getting you how many subscribers.

Check the signups versus the traffic you are getting and you will quickly see which forms are working and which ones aren’t.

As always your question and comments are welcomed and appreciated.

Mike Paetzold

Technorati Tags: aweber, blog, blogging, email marketing, newsletter, testing

One of the things that I like for increasing traffic to this and other blogs I have is to use AWeber to automate the broadcast updates of this blog. If you have signed up for the update list you get an email each time I add new content. The cool part is that I don’t have to deal with that.

I just add my post here and AWeber checks my feed every so often and says “Aha that Old Bald Guy added more content let’s tell the people that asked that he has done that”. (Not really but they do automatically send out an update for me. Not quite sure that a computer goes Aha or even cares that I am old and bald;) )

Well AWeber has gone one step further. Feedburner keeps track of the number of people that have subscribed to a specific feed. This can be great social proof that people like your blog. Now they will also add in the number of people that have been added to your AWeber list to the total of people that you have subsacribed. This will give you even more social proof.

You can check all the details on the Aweber blog.

Another way to add more traffic to your blog.

Mike Paetzold

Technorati Tags: aweber, aweber-feedburner-integation, feedburner