Although it is very effective, it is also very time consuming and very soon you will get extremely exhausted, unless you use some automation to help you. RSS Bookmarker comes as a very strong help making most of your social bookmarking completely automated. I tried setting up 300 accounts with services that don’t use the no follow directive for the links and get very good results even when some sites like Furl.net banned my postings because probably they are actively analyzing patterns and probably detected an unusual activity from the IP that I was using.

Even with the banning of some sites (with anti-spam departments) the products performs very effectively and the price is very low for such help.

With RSS Bookmarker you can automate most of your bookmarking.

• They don’t want it.
• They can’t afford it.
• They don’t trust you.

The first two reasons are out of your control and can happen maybe because you are targeting your market incorrectly, but if you fail on number 3 then you are leaving big money on the table.

People Buy From You Because They Trust You

Trust is what moves people to buy things from you over and over again. It is easier to sell something to past clients than sell stuff to someone you don’t know yet. Also, you may know that it is 5 to 10 times easier to sell something to people who already know you.

The other part of the equation is that it is very difficult to build trust if you don’t communicate much with people. It’s a know fact that in average, it will take seven contacts to build trust, but once trust is built you can communicate with your clients at will, and if you don’t disrespect them, you will always be fine.

To Personalize or Not.

Autoresponders are a preprogrammed sequence of emails that could be personalized. Because personalization can increase response in more than 30%, and there is no reason to choose software that doesn’t support it, all programs reviewed in this page include this feature.

By using autoresponders you can create this trust much easier because emails are automatic. Be sure you don’t overuse them because once you have gained trust from people, it’s not necessary to use them for this purpose, but autoresponders can be used for many things:

• To remind something (payments, answers, etc.)
• To deliver a very huge course.
• To deliver a newsletter to your subscriber base.

All examples above can be used effectively on clients and non-clients.

It is easy to become an autoresponder addict and let me tell you one example of mine. I wanted to deliver a large course to my clients and the first idea that went through my brain was “use an autoresponder sequence”.

The sequence worked fine, but wasn’t necessary. A simple PDF file would do the work and without some of the hassles that autoresponders impose. One of them is that if you want to change messages, then it is better to create a new sequence because changing anything when people are receiving a sequence can make your life miserable. Many people will email you asking why they don’t received that lesson or complaining that they can’t open that web page and you will lose precious time answering administrative questions.

How Many Emails?

How many emails are enough? Many people send autoresponder sequences of 5 or 7 emails. My largest autoresponder sequence is 68 emails, sent out on a daily basis and this has proven to be the most profitable of my tests to date. If you ask: What the hell are you writing in all those messages? I’ll tell you that I write about everything imaginable on this topic, but you should know your niche well to write so much about it!

You must test the frequency and the number of emails that maximize your profits because every market is different.

It seems that more emails beats less emails and the reason is simple. People who subscribe to your autoresponder want information about the topic and want a lot of it. Also, take care to avoid giving away too much for too much time, because that could backfire you, as some people could perceive that your information isn’t of value because they receive so much of you for free. Give away free information so your clients can profit from it, but keep something for you so you can profit too, this way people will respect you more because of the mutually beneficial relationship.

The Services

You have 2 kinds of autoresponders:

• Hosted in your domain
• Hosted Remotely.

Spam filters had made too difficult to deal with bulk email, so much that we no longer even explain why you shouldn’t use your domain hosting or your PC to send bulk emails. If you do, a large percentage of your emails will be filtered and will disappear in cyberspace.

The email hosters have deals with the email service companies so your deliverability is closer to 100%. The one that I use and recommend is Aweber because of its many features and affordability.

Technorati Tags: Autoresponder, Aweber, Emails, Newsletter

Although the capability to measure your web site audience is available without any special development since every access to a web site is recorded in the server logs, it’s true that there are some points to consider to get more accurate metrics.

Web Server Log Analysis

Every time a visitor loads a web page, some information is written in a file that tracks all activity. Here is an example of this file:

• 217.25.131.67 – [24/Nov/2002:08:45:35] “GET /host.htm HTTP/1.1″ 200 13713 “-” “Mozilla”
• 217.25.131.67 – [24/Nov/2002:08:45:37] “GET /host.htm HTTP/1.1″ 200 13713 “-” “Mozilla”
• 64.156.198.74 – [24/Nov/2002:09:21:21] “GET /index.htm HTTP/1.1″ 404 287 “-” “Mozilla/5.0 (X11)”
• 64.156.198.85 – [24/Nov/2002:16:01:25] “GET / HTTP/1.1″ 200 10702 “-” “Mozilla/5.0 (X11)”
• 200.82.41.144 – [24/Nov/2002:16:29:23] “GET /host HTTP/1.1″ 301 319 “-” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible)”
• 200.82.41.144 – [24/Nov/2002:16:29:23] “GET /host/ HTTP/1.1″ 200 338 “-” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible)”

The first 4 numbers separated by dots is the IP address. Every computer connected to the Internet has a unique IP number, which helps to identify that visitor. The problem of IP addresses is that they are not always fixed, since in some computers they change every time the computer connects to the Internet, which doesn’t make it an exact form of metric. For example, watching the log you could end up thinking that you got many different visitors when in reality there is only one visitor that got to your site with a different IP address every time.Next, we have the date and hour of the access, next the word GET, the page or image requested followed by the page from which the visitor got, followed by the browser version. The page from which the visitor got is key because if your site is new, most of the people will be getting to your site from other places. For example: when www.BeTheFinest.com had little time online I decided to participate in a forum and few days later, some people got through the link that still is there, increasing a little bit my link popularity in the search engines, but this is a topic for another article.

Each line in the log is an element of your page that could be an image for example, the page requested or other element of your web. For example: if you have a page with 4 images, there will be 5 lines in the log file, each of this lines are called a “hit”.

It isn’t required that you read this file directly to know when you have been visited and from where, because there is software that help you browse through the information gathered in the log such as the free ones (included in most hosting packages): Analog, Webalizer, Awstats and more sophisticated software such as Web Trends and other tools much more expensive only at the reach of very big corporations with deep pockets like Netmetric’s XOS whose license starts at $49,000 yearly.

Getting more accurate metrics with cookies.

A cookie is a little piece of information that can be placed by the page developer to have a very detailed tracking of the activity of visitors. We use them to show a Pop-Up window asking to subscribe to our newsletter. Even if cookies are an excellent tool to track visitor activity they are not perfect because those could be deactivated or your client could be inside a company that have a Proxy Server in place (as a security measure) set up to disallow cookies.

Exact Tracking is Possible

An exact form of tracking is possible requesting a login and password. Once done it, you can be sure about the identity of your visitor (if his password hasn’t been compromised). This system isn’t used much because it requires that the provider have a strong case to ask for identification or else this could be a pain to the visitor.

Take a look at Yahoo. Not always you have to identify yourself, but if you do it, for example at Yahoo Groups, you could use other email address to receive your emails from the forums, with which Yahoo got the perfect excuse to benefit with exact tracking of his visitors.

Anyway, whether you stay with the basic statistics provided by your web hosting company or you decide to use more accurate methods, these statistics will be very important once your site increase his audience and sales.