There is a new A Weber Integration Plugin now (at least I just now noticed it) so I am going to switch back to A Weber.

$20 per month seems like a very reasonable cost considering the potential when you begin to put A Weber to use.

I will say that I had to dedicate at least 1-2 hours to educating myself on the functionality of A Weber as there are any options within

This was a good post to read as it confirms what I suspected.

i know you’re the problogger, and you do affiliate marketing, but i was wondering about the ethics of doing a write up of a program without disclosing the affiliate partnership.

not that it would hurt you, i’m sure many people would be more than happy to support your efforts, as you helped us so much, but i wondering how transparent one should be when it comes to affiliate marketing?

aweber sounds pretty good to me, however I guess monthly payments are not for everyone and the free service, whilst being less reliable can be a better option.

Personally I didn’t fancy the monthly payments nor did I want to risk my business with a free service. I opted for Sendblaster.com which is a one of payment and offers many of the features of aweber. The great thing for me is the system sits on my desk top and I can set it off and it just keeps emailing them with little effect to my system. If I don’t fancy sending a newsletter for a while I don’t get charged.

Unfair to compare free versus paid ‘anything’ in this world, but so long as it does the job, go for it.

I think that would be very helpful … Thanks Darren!

Why use paid service if we can get the free one? That’s a great idea. But, why using free service while the paid one give more advantage + satisfaction? :D

Like Mark (45n5) I started off with aWeber, but then decided i could totally find something free. I tried free autoresponder services, newsletter services and I’m a techie so I even did some DIY duct-taping to try to get what I needed. But when it really came down to it the ease, reliability and excellent customer service brought me back to aWeber.

Someone else mentioned using your own self-hosted solution. There are (at least) three major problems (or could be) with this.

First, you have to have the knowledge base to get this running. I haven’t found a self-hosted autoresponder/mailing list application that was easy to get going out-of-the-box.

Second, if you are running a small-ish or medium sized blog you really need to consider the server resources needed to run this sort of service. It’s a different animal than just incoming and outgoing traffic, especially if your list is large.

Finally, your own little domain isn’t necessarily the most trusted one in the world and that alone could make your messages end up in the junk folder. Also, if you fill an email with words like “free” “service” and “sign-up” your delivery rate can almost make it useless to even spend the time creating a newsletter in the first place.

One of my favorite features of aWeber is their little spam meter. It has taught me a lot about how to word things to get messages where I want them to go.

Sara

http://www.activecampaign.com/12all/

well another added benefit is that with blogs, you may get too busy to read them sometimes and eventually you could forget to visit for a period of time.

Having an email newsletter allows you to easily pull those readers who’ve gotten busy back to your blog again, since people check their emails more frequently than they read blogs. On top of that, it’s just another way to expand your reach and find new channels of communication like how you would with podcasting and videos.

An email subscribers list to which you regularly send out newsletters and have a good relationship with is a very powerful compliment to a solid blog.

Thank you for your response. I ask because I am signed up for both Aweber and GetResponse. I’m trialing both to figure out which I like better.

Aweber is nicer than GR. Better interface and usability. GR has a few awkward quirks.

GR upsells their product. In a GR confirmation email, the first paragraph MUST contain a reference to getresponse.com. Also, the default html subscription form code contains “Powered by GetResponse email marketing software“. You can edit it out, of course, but I find that quite unprofessional, both for your web page and for GR.

And to seal the deal, GR does not allows you to export your list, meaning you can’t switch services. A very unprofessional baiting marketing tactic.

These details might not tip everyone toward the slightly pricier Aweber — after all, GR *does* work as an autoresponder. Why spend more on just a few bells and whistles?

I will probably stick with aweber. :-)

Just thought I’d throw that out there since nobody else has yet.