Step-by-step hand-holding for AWeber novices: Love Your List

September 8, 2010 By

You’ve been told you Must. Have. A. List.

And that you really ought to invest in an email list management service if you want your business emails to look professional.

So you dutifully went out and signed up for AWeber — or you’re about to.

But now, you’re stuck.

That’s the bad news. The good news is, you’re not alone — and there is a way out. I’ve talked to other business owners in just your situation, I’ve listened to their questions and frustrations, and I finally got together with life coach and master perception-shifter Shannon Wilkinson to do something helpful, doggone it!

Earlier this summer, Shannon and I held a free teleclass entitled Three ways to get more out of your AWeber investment. You can get the recording of that class by clicking that link.

Then we taught a four-week workshop all about AWeber, which was a ton of fun and helped some complete AWeber novices get a solid start with their email marketing plans.

Now, we’ve turned that workshop into a home-study course, and everyone who buys it before September 21 will get invited to a follow-up bonus teleclass to get your AWeber questions answered live.

Love Your List: Cozying up to AWeber to build relationships with your right people

This home-study course is for you if:

  • You’ve got Aweber (or are about to sign up), and you’re asking yourself, “now what?”
  • You’re a do-it-yourselfer who wants step-by-step instructions and compassionate guidance as you learn the basics of AWeber.
  • You find yourself easily overwhelmed or frustrated by technology.

Each of the four one-hour audio recordings features help and tips from me and my fabulous co-host, Shannon Wilkinson. And the audios are accompanied by a PDF workbook chock-full of screen shots, instructions, and examples.

  1. Walk through each step with Wendy. During this portion of the audio, you’ll listen to a step-by-step explanation of a specific AWeber task. You’ll be able to follow along in your workbook, looking at screen shots that illustrate each step.
  2. Shift your perceptions with Shannon. She’ll lead a group exercise that will help address the anxieties, worries and fears that arise naturally when learning a new technological task. Instead of fighting these fears, or letting them dominate you, we’ll put them into perspective. We encourage you to listen to these confidence-boosting exercises as many times as you need to.
  3. Take action with handy checklists. Now that we’ve shown you the steps to take and addressed the questions and issues that have kept you from doing it so far, you get to actually do the steps yourself using our checklists as a guide.
  4. Get your questions answered on the course website (Premium Course only). You’ll get access to a password-protected website where you can ask your AWeber questions and see the questions others have asked (and the answers).
  5. Get live help during our Bonus Call (Premium Course only). On September 21, we’ll hold a bonus Q&A call so we can answer as many of your questions as possible, live and in real-time. Premium purchasers will automatically receive an email invitation.

The complete home-study course will be ready for delivery on September 14. If you order it before then, we’ll thank you by giving you a special discounted pre-sale price.

And remember, anyone who buys the Premium course before September 21 will get invited to our bonus follow-up teleclass, where we’ll be doing AWeber Q&A live.

Check out the Love Your List workshop page for details and ordering information. Got a question? Feel free to leave a comment here, or talk to me during Open Office Hour (that’s every Thursday from 10am to 11am Pacific time).

Filed Under: General How-To's Tagged With: , , , ,

Tomorrow! Delightful Newsletters class! With Tara Swiger!

September 7, 2010 By

I totally squeed myself with delightment when Tara Swiger asked me to help teach her upcoming class, Delightful Newsletters.

Do you know Tara? She’s amazing. Not only does she create handmade, beautiful, eco-friendly yarn, but she delights in figuring out — and then turning around and teaching — smart business-y stuff.

The kind of stuff that one-person businesses, like yours and mine, can really use. Like how to find the right people to buy your stuff, and how to find the right price for said stuff. Whether said stuff is handmade or purely digital.

And now she’s going to tackle The Newsletter Question, and she asked me to help with the technological side. Since I love teaching live classes, I was thrilled to say yes. And I am positive that I will learn new things from her part of the class, too, so count me double-thrilled!

Delightful Newsletters class with Tara Swiger and Wendy Cholbi

What happens to the people who come by your website but decide not to buy?

Do they have something low-risk and totally free to DO?
Or do they wander away, forgetting all about their intention to return and buy their aunt that gift?

The easiest way to grab these potential right-people is to give them something.  Something free, something that gives them regular doses of your awesomeness that is totally risk free.

Often this is a newsletter.

But forget those notions of boring family newsletters or  corporate HR newsletters or spammy mcspammerson everyday buybuyBUY messages.

No, we’re talking about relevant, desired, down-right delightful love notes.

From you.
For your people.
To build trust.
To entice.
To delight.

You may already have a newsletter.
Or you may be too overwhelmed with the tech stuff to start.

In either case, we’ve got you covered.

Tara already has several different newsletter-ish things, each one thrilling her with the way it fulfills her business needs (whether that’s connecting with her people, making sales or growing her business).

On September 8, Tara’s going to teach you her best make-your-people-happy newsletter tricks.

And on September 15, I’ll explain the tech steps you’ll need to take to put those tricks into action.

Each class is $30, or you can get both as a package deal for $50. Go to Tara’s Delightful Newsletters page to sign up.

Each class includes:

  • Invitation to hour-long live teleclass
  • Chance to ask your questions before or during the class
  • Recording of the hour-long lecture
  • Pretty PDF Summary of everything we cover
  • Checklist on setting up newsletter (for How To Make class ONLY)

Filed Under: General How-To's Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Free Teleclass May 18: Love Your List

May 11, 2010 By

Love Your List free teleclass on AWeberYep, I’ve got another teleclass coming up, hot on the heels of WordPress Swimming Lessons (the first webinar session was yesterday and it was, as usual, a blast! You can still sign up, get the recording of yesterday’s session, and have plenty of time to practice before Friday’s Q&A session, if you’re so inclined).

For this next one, I’m partnering with my fabulous friend Shannon Wilkinson, who is an expert on helping people get out from underneath piles of should (and she’s a life coach and NLP expert and has helped me shift my perceptions to get past stuff that was blocking me).

We were chatting about how we use email service provider AWeber for our various email lists, and we realized that many of the people we’ve talked to are intimidated by the technological process of setting up an email list and using it — and at the same time they feel kind of icky about doing email marketing at all. It’s no wonder that they get stuck!

So we decided to put our heads together to help our peeps with these problems. By combining my step-by-step tech-teaching style with Shannon’s genius for helping people reframe difficult situations, we believe we can help you overcome both the technological and the emotional barriers to integrating email marketing into your business.

If those feelings of intimidation and ick are familiar to you, then you might dig our free teleclass, Love Your List: Three ways to get more out of your AWeber investment.

Teleclass details

  • Date: Tuesday, May 18
  • Time: 10am Pacific (what’s this in your time zone?)
  • Yes, we will be recording the call and sending the mp3 to everyone who signs up.
  • Cost: Your email address so we can send you the phone number and access code, and the mp3 afterward
  • This call is for you if: You have an AWeber account but don’t know what to do to get started using it, or you’re planning on signing up for a new AWeber account in the near future.

We’ll give you three steps you can take immediately to start using AWeber’s powers (for good, of course!), and we’ll address that “ick — email marketing is yucky” feeling with a dose of Shannon’s perception-shifting mojo.

We’re also planning a four-week workshop in June to delve into these topics more deeply, and we do plan to mention the workshop at the very end of this free call. But our intention with this call is to give you good solid action steps and a perception-shifting exercise that you can use again and again, not spend a lot of time giving you a sales pitch. We figure that if we give you something useful, that’s the best sales pitch of all.

Ready to sign up? Just fill out this cute little AWeber form (if you can’t see it because you’re reading this in a feed reader or in an email message, head on over to the Love Your List page to see the original form) and we’ll send you the dial-in number, plus the call recording afterward.

Filed Under: Announcements Tagged With: , , , , , ,

What’s an email list and do you need one?

August 25, 2009 By

Last week I talked about some uses of autoresponders in managing your email. This week I want to talk about the idea of an email list.

Email lists: The conventional wisdom

If you’ve read anything about Internet marketing, you’ve probably heard the prevailing view, which is that you must have an email list. Apparently, you’re supposed to start collecting names as soon and as aggressively as possible — before you even have a product, before you even have a website, before you even know where your business is going.

You’re supposed to “capture” (yep, that’s a technical term) as many email addresses as possible, as quickly as possible. Then you’ll have a group of people who have given you permission to send them email. So as soon as you have a product, you can serve up a tantalizing advertisement to your captive audience. A small percentage of them will click through, a smaller percentage will actually buy the thing you’re advertising, and you’re in business.

This is what’s called a sales funnel. You start with the wide end (everyone on the Internet), and narrow it down to smaller and smaller numbers, until the few who drip through the bottom are actually bringing you money.

Why the conventional wisdom is exactly backward

The sales funnel is old-school marketing. It worked in old-school circumstances. I believe it’s time to not only treat people differently, but act differently as businesses.

Seth Godin wrote a free ebook called Flipping the Funnel three years ago in which he talked about the power of the Web and social media in marketing. I agree with much of what he said then, but what follows is purely my own take on the whole sales funnel metaphor.

Here are three reasons the conventional “sales funnel” wisdom fails to understand the real world, including the transformational online businesses we’re trying to build:

  • It’s mechanical. Each prospect at a given level is treated as an interchangeable cog. The whole process is viewed as a machine, which will produce the proper amount of a desired output (money) if you feed it the right number of cog-prospects and program it correctly. But the people you want to work with are individuals, not cogs. And your business is alive and growing, not a piece of machinery.
  • It’s violent. You’re supposed to “capture” these email addresses, then “target” people with messages that will “convert” them into cash for you. Ouch, I say! Do you want your Right People to feel hounded and hunted, or do you want them to feel like they’re getting the greatest gift in the world just by working with you?
  • It’s scarcity-based. This zero-sum system treats money as a precious, limited resource, and assumes that all your sophisticated marketing machinery is just a way to extract it from your customers. No matter if they’re empty husks afterward — you’ve got their money, so you win. What if, instead, you treated money as a renewable resource (to borrow an environmental term) and cultivated your customers into a sustainable ecosystem instead of a one-way trip through a funnel?

So what’s this got to do with email lists?

OK, back to the email list question. I love and use email lists; they are essential to my businesses. I believe you can collect email addresses with integrity and that both parties can (and should) benefit.

If I didn’t believe this, I wouldn’t be OK with asking people to subscribe to the blog. And I wouldn’t happily recommend email list provider AWeber and offer AWeber consulting services.

But an email list is just one tool, just one small branch of my small-business tree. It only makes sense to have it (and cultivate it by sending regular messages) if I’ve got a trunk to support it, and roots to nourish it.

That’s why the advice to start gathering names first seems backward to me. I believe that building a list is an activity that grows naturally out of providing a valuable product or service (just as branches grow naturally from a tree trunk).

What are you saying? is a much more important question than how many people are on your list?

With the wide availability of RSS, and the proliferation of blogs, an email list is no longer a one-size-fits-all must-have marketing tool.

Instead, an email list is only a good idea if:

  1. You have something to say
  2. You have some idea of who your Right People are
  3. Email is the best way for your Right People to receive this information
  4. Email is the best way for you to provide the information to your Right People
  5. You’re ready and able to invest upwards of $120 per year to manage your list professionally (that is, protect yourself from being labeled a spammer)

What do you think? I’d love to read your reactions. I know this is a big topic (and apparently I’m totally incapable of being brief!), and worth discussing further. So leave a comment and let’s talk!

Until next week,
Wendy Cholbi, your friendly neighborhood swim-goggle-wearing technology-to-English translator

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Filed Under: Heart-Centered Tech Tips Tagged With: , , , , ,
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