How To Make Online Money

One of the biggest mistakes I made when I first started selling my guide online was that I neglected to create a mailing list.  I sold thousands of copies to people and never captured their email addresses.

You can read all over the internet about the “power of the list”.  There are many money-making opportunities that come from having a list of people to email…especially a list of people who have “opted-in”, and chosen to receive your emails.

Technically, you CANNOT email someone selling a product unless they have opted-in to your list, or expressly given you permission to contact them.  If they don’t give you permission, you are breaking the CAN-SPAM laws.

For example, after I realized the power of the list (after years of selling my guide online), I could have gone to my PayPal account and looked up the history of all of those emails.  But if I were to email them with, say, an affiliate offer, that would be illegal.

Enter AWEBER.  Aweber is a company that handles your mailing list for you.  (Try to do a mass mailing from your own email address and watch how fast your IP gets blocked from everyone’s list!)  They create the code that handles the sign-up form, and they do the auto-response emails that let the person click a link to confirm they are opting in.  They also can do mass mailings, and handle all the people who opt out.

They cost about $50 per year for unlimited numbers of lists and no limit on the number of folks in the list.  For me, that’s worth it for the ease of use (considering I usually make more than that from just one mailing).  And knowing that I didn’t have to code anything to handle the forms and the list, or the mass mailing, and knowing that I am not breaking the law, helps me sleep at night.

So if you are going to do capture any kind of mailing list (and I highly recommend that you do!), make sure to check out Aweber.