We use AWeber for just about everything email marketing and lead generation related at our web strategy consulting company and for all of our sites like this one. All of our mini courses use the AWeber forms and autoresponders. And our email newsletters rely on this service as well.

Today they’ve released a brand new form creator for users to design lead capture and subscription forms for AWeber.

Check it out!

Need an email marketing, autoresponder, or lead capturing system? Check out AWeber today for a $1 Trial Offer.

Have a Look at the New Web Form Generator

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So you’ve been working hard on the internet marketing plan for your web strategy but have you stepped back to look at it from the user’s perspective? Are you a spammer? Online marketing is very community focused and it takes time to build a trusting relationship. You need to seriously reflect on your internet marketing campaign to avoid losing that trust. Last Friday at a Lunch & Learn session my company co-sponsors, our speaker Brett Trout said “Reputation takes a long time to build and a second to diminish” in regards to business ethics. The same idea holds true with a community building and internet marketing strategy.

Here are two examples of mistakes I’ve made where I developed what I thought were value-added marketing campaigns – which turned out to be the opposite.

In an effort to increase email subscribers on GetANewBrowser.com I implemented a modal popup feature of aWeber. I thought this was a value-add feature that provided a call to action to some extra content I was giving out. Even though this subscriber drive was a resounding success – it frustrated users. So I turned it off. Conversions went way down, but my readers are much happier.

The second example I want to share is the practice of auto direct messages on Twitter. Before I switched it – you would get an auto direct message whenever you followed @WebStrategyShop or @abrudtkuhl on Twitter. This means I sent you something like the following message “Hey thanks for following me have you checked out my Internet Business Podcast at ManagingTheEdge.com?” In one instance Aaron Houssian sent me a direct message follow up alerting me to my spammer behavior. At that point I realized my marketing campaign was indeed spamming people and they did not appreciate it. So, after much debate, I turned it off.

In both instances my community alerted me to the issue at hand and, thankfully, stuck with me after I addressed the issue transparently and followed through with their requests. This brings up another lesson – you need to listen to your community. Not only can you crowd source ideas from them they will give you immediate feedback if they feel you are spamming them.

If you are interested in hearing more discussion on this topic – we covered it in the latest episode of our internet business podcast Managing The Edge.

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When we discuss content strategy one of the recommendations we give in almost any circumstance is to create content outposts so your content can be consumed in many formats. One of the greatest distribution mediums for your content is RSS – which by now is universally supported in any technology platform you should choose. Even though RSS is readily available and highly consumed – there are still many people that prefer email delivery.

As you know we are advocates of creating and automating processes – and email delivery of your blog content can be handled this way, so you don’t have to manually update your email subscribers. Now if you use FeedBurner it is easy to setup. When clicked on, your users will simply need to enter their email addresses to receive your RSS feed in their inbox.

However, we prefer to use aWeber – which has two complementary features for creating automated content outposts. First of all you get an extremely customizable tool to send out your RSS feed to email subscribers. We prefer using aWeber for many reasons and their Blog Broadcast tool is one of them.

aWeber allows you to schedule broadcasts based on time or number of entries to send. Furthermore it will automatically send out a message on Twitter for your readers to view posts.

Here are some hints when integrating your blog’s rss feed to email subscribers…

1. Don’t send them too many posts, maybe just your “Featured Posts”
2. Send a digest rather than single emails per post
3. Provide a call to action at the end of these digests
4. Add value to your email subscribers as incentive to subscribe
5. Don’t just dump content on your subscribers – it’s an easy way to lose them

A lot of these techniques and tips have come from a lot of experimentation and tweaking. Again – this is why we prefer using aWeber as it allows us full customization for delivering RSS to email subscribers.

image via Annette Schwindt

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