maiThis next step in my attempt to use free blogs and hosting along with custom domains is to set up a newsletter. When you have your own hosting account, you could set up PHPlist, your own email or newsletter script or a plugin for your content management system. You could also use a service like Aweber, ConstantContact, Mailchimp, etc.
Since I've recently canceled my hosting account and moved my sites, I'm still waiting for the pages to be reindexed and get regular traffic. I don't want to pay $19 per month for 500 subscribers at Aweber just yet. I'm not an experienced e-mail marketer and I don't have an autoresponder series planned out. If I did I'd probably go ahead with that from the start.
Instead, I decided to first experiment with Mailchimp. Mailchimp seems to offer everything I was looking for:
Autoresonder (for e-mail series, welcome message, etc), Facebook signup integration, simple signup forms to add to websites and blogs, Google Analytics integration, and premade forms. There are some other interesting features I'll test if the first month goes without any trouble.
The interesting thing is you don't have to pay at first for the service. You currently can send to up to 2000 subscribers (I assume in total not per list) and send up to 4000 messages per month without paying. That is a good motivation for trying the service first. I'm hesitant about newsletters and how well they work. What if I sign up with a paid service for $20/month and no one signs up for two or three months? Perhaps I get a list, but there is no increase in advertising clicks or sales not even a dollar? While I suppose it helps bring people back to your website or blog, I wonder if it is worth it.
There is one problem which I e-mailed them about. The Terms of Service seem to state that they don't allow Affiliate Marketing yet unless you are selling your own products directly from your home or site, almost everything goes through an affiliate or referral link including most artwork I promote even if it is my own although it isn't necessary to do so I'd rather take the chance that someone might click on one of my artwork links and buy something created by a friend.
The confusion in the terms is the wording. It makes me think that perhaps they are confusing affiliate marketing with MLM or perhaps they mean you can't be using your list for managing an affiliate program as a merchant.
I e-mailed their support last night and tried creating three e-mail lists and added signup forms to a few blogs and Facebook pages and RSS to email "campaigns" for those three lists. I won't try anything else until I get a clear reply.
I'll write a new post with the reply and if allowed the results of the experiment. If having affiliate links in a blog post is not allowed because they'd be passed on to the RSS to email summary, I'll only be able to test the autoresponder feature.
I had previously tried a WordPress script on my art site, but I know many times the e-mail didn't get sent out or the confirmation didn't go through so perhaps it is better to use an e-mail list provider since they'd have everything optimized and set up on the server for good delivery and confirmation whereas in your own script you have to deal with hosting limits and server configuration that isn't optimized for sending e-mail letters.
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