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A Few Quick Sunday Thoughts

January 13, 2008 Posted under: Miscellaneous by Caroline Middlebrook

Just a quick post today as I’m feeling ever so slightly tender from partying too hard last night!

A Thought About my Ebook

Lots of people have been telling me that I should be using the release of my free ebook as an opportunity to capture email addresses and built a list and I said that I didn’t want to do that because I did not want to place any barriers to the download of the book.

I’ve just realised that I can still build a list - but I just don’t force people to subscribe to it. The usual method of building a list with a free resource such as an ebook is that an email address is required for the download. I don’t want to do that but what I will do is offer people the option of subscribing to a list to be notified when there is an update to the book.

See as I described on Friday, there is not an easy way to keep a PDF file updated so anyone who downloaded an early copy now has an out of date version and I have no way of letting those people know that there is a new version.

So another thing to add to the list of things to do next week will be to build an email list. This was something that I was supposed to do recently for an affiliate challenge that I was doing but I never got round to it. I said back then that I would try to do it using the free Phplist and maybe do a tutorial on it afterwards. That sounds like a really good idea to me now…

A Couple of Links to Share

Secondly, I have not managed to do all my usual blog reading recently but I have been sent a couple of interesting links that I wanted to share with you all.

The Blogger-Proof Workout - A simple workout for fat ass bloggers! And that’s the authors words not mine! Israel from FatManUnleashed has released a short free ebook containing a workout for bloggers and he knows what he’s talking about since he’s lost over 40lbs himself so far!

How I Received 850 Visitors Without Using Social Media - you remember a while ago I was interviewed by Patrick of PiggyBankPie… well that interview actually sent Patrick 99 visitors from the mention that I gave it on this blog. In this post Patrick explains how he got 850 visitors and none of his methods involved social media. A very interesting read.

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You might also like these similar posts:

What an Amazing Week! :-)
Taking a Few Days Off Work…
Ebook Project: First Round of Edits Done, Book Re-Released
Thinking BIG - Going After the High Paying Products
Possible Posting Break for a Day or Two

7 Comments:

Peter
January 13, 2008

Just a thought Caroline that meets your soft approach.

I would be happy to opt-in to an advanced info list.
Even just knowing more suggested/recommended plug-ins would be great. You can have my email for that!!

Also I would obviously love to subscribe to know what part 2 of the WP ebook was out.

AFAIK I have no way of doing that currently?

I really would add a page to the book, promoting that.
They can just ignore it if they want.

JM0CW
Peter

Israel
January 13, 2008

Thanks for the mention, it is much appreciated. I encountered the same situation with releasing my free ebook. I decided against collecting emails, because I wanted the book to be downloaded with out barriers too.

Maybe next time I will focus on building the list…

Nobody
January 13, 2008

Hi Caroline

Today most people are going for aweber or getresponse especially on the Internet Marketing niche, but I think phplist make an excellent choice for beginners knowing that with a good tweaking no need for paid list manager.

There only one black point, the auto responder feature is missing, the good news is that some users has developed custom mods to these functionalities, but you need to have a strong php skills to implement them, and since my php skills are like my old shoes, your future posts about phplist will be more than happily welcomes, many thanks in advance :-)

and thank you for sharing these url, especially the one for piggybankpie post, I found lot of useful information on it, I will certainly use these techniques (not the paid one) along with the techniques I’m learning on the January Thirty Day Challenge.

Regards

Mark
January 14, 2008

Agree with Nobody, aweber & getresponse seem to be the choices (and have been for a while). One thing to consider is deliverability - the major email services like these put a good deal of effort (and $$s) into making sure their emails get through spam filters. If you send emails from your own server you could get hit by spam complaints, and being blacklisted ain’t pleasant!

BTW - congratulations of hitting 1,000+ subscribers! Great job.

Cheers
Mark

What Sells Online
January 14, 2008

Congratulations on your book. I’ve downloaded it without needing to provide my email address. Anyway, I think it’s a comprehensive resource for new internet marketers who are just starting out with their first WordPress blog.

I’ve reference to it in my latest blog post - Building a niche blog for top search engine rankings

Cheers!
Samantha
http://www.what-sells-online.com

Caroline Middlebrook
January 14, 2008

@Peter, yeah I really should have thought more about a possible ‘update’ list before releasing the book but we live and learn.

@Mark, hmmm I hadn’t thought about the blacklist issue, I most certainly wouldn’t want to be marked as a spammer! To be perfectly honest, if i was going to start a list for myself then I would definitely use AWeber, but I wanted to have a go at using Phplist simply because it’s free and it’s then something I could write about which gives me good content for the blog :)

Mandy
January 19, 2008

I haven’t visited for a while so I would just like to say I really like your new design, very sleek and easy to read.

And I am looking forward to reading your new ebook!


2 Trackbacks:

Fighting Scrapers With Your Left Jab

[...] started 2008 with a post that went viral on StumbleUpon and BloggingZoom. Even Skellie and Caroline Middlebrook took the story back to their respective blogs. For those interested, the post in question was How I [...]

Fighting Scrapers With Your Left Jab | Calvin Harvey dot Com

[...] started 2008 with a post that went viral on StumbleUpon and BloggingZoom. Even Skellie and Caroline Middlebrook took the story back to their respective blogs. For those interested, the post in question was How I [...]

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