GetResponse

A couple of years ago, I decided that I wanted to allow people to get my articles on a daily basis. You see, I usually write at least one (and oftentimes two) articles every single day. I got into the habit a long time ago on the advice of a teacher in high school. He said that the way to become a "real writer" was to write something, anything, every single day. His point was that writers write. That's what they do and they should do it all of the time. It was excellent advice and it's served me well through the years.

Of course, I am making all of those articles available on Internt Tips and Secrets (and a collection of other related web sites) on a constant basis. As I write articles they get posted, and if someone visited my sites regularly they would read the newest articles all of the time.

However, I concluded there are many people who do not want to take the time to visit the web site just to read a new article now and then. Many people are on slower connections or do not have the time or motivation to surf the web regularly. I wanted to do something to deliver information to those people as well.

I decided that the best way to do this was to create a daily email newsletter. Yet, I didn't really want to spend a lot of time maintaining such a thing - it could be a real pain. You see, my goal is to educate people in various subjects (especially the internet), not to spend a lot of time on the mechanics of doing so. In other words, I want to write, not put together newsletters or other similar things.

After some research, I concluded the correct tool was something called an autoresponder.  The idea of this tool is to allow people to sign up for the newsletter, then receive one issue per day forever afterwards. All new subscriptions would start from the beginning. Thus, my subscribers would get a series of daily tips, just like I wanted, and my only task was to make sure enough tips were entered into the autoresponder to stay ahead of the oldest subscriber.

Now that I knew what I wanted, I researched the various autoresponder packages available. My first choice was to self-host the list on my web site. This worked well when I had a few hundred subscribers, but as the number climbed the web hosting company complained and the list became cumbersome to maintain.

Some further research and I determined that only one remotely-hosted autoresponder package would serve the need. This was a product called Getresponse.com.

This system was the most complete package that I found in my researches (and I checked out a couple of dozen different companies and methods). Here's how it worked.

I purchased a one year subscription for a little over a hundred bucks. This gave me an email address and an account. Next, I defined the introductory message to be sent immediately when an email is received from someone. After that, I entered a couple of dozen daily newsletters, each set one day apart in the autoresponder.

Thus, when a person wants to subscribe, they simply send an email to my getresponse account. A message is returned welcoming them to the list. Every day after that, they automatically receive the next tip in the series. 

At any point, they can scroll to the end of the message, click a link, and be unsubscribed immediately. This method seems to work very smoothly, as I only get a query or two a month asking me to unsubscribe them from the list because they cannot figure out how to do it themselves.

It's very simple, very straightforward and incredibly functional. The price is about right (the price of a pizza a month) for the power gained. I would recommend this package without hesitation for anyone who needed a fully functional, commercial-class autoresponder.