Last week I managed to play catch up, by completing week 3 of the Partnership to Success Programme in just one day.
The biggest challenge was not following John’s advice to the letter. His video talked about subscribing to Aweber, which is a tool that can be used to create lists of subscribers. There’s an old saying in the marketing world – “the money is in the list”, so a list making tool is essential to have.
However, Aweber pricing starts at $19 per month for up to 500 subscribers – and for a cash strapped newbie like me, I don’t like signing up for any ongoing payments until I can fund them out of the profits from the business. So instead, I opted to use Mailchimp, which is free for up to 2000 subscribers.
In his video John says something like “don’t think about it, just sign up.” Of course he would, because his link to Aweber will be an affiliate link which earns him commissions from whoever signs up through it. What’s more, the commissions are probably ongoing, because payments are ongoing. This is not a critisism about John. He is recommending an excellent product and why shouldn’t he be rewarded by another company for putting business their way?
My mentor suggested that it might be a good idea to sign up to Aweber, because the thought of having $19 per month go down the drain if I wasn’t using it could be a good incentive to keep me motivated. But I’ve been there before; I did sign up to Aweber once, watched the money go down the drain and it didn’t spur me into action; I just ended up cancelling Aweber!
So that’s why I went with Mailchimp; the challenge then was following on with John’s videos to integrate it with my blog and set up an opt-in form, because now I had gone ‘off piste’. All John’s videos talked about Aweber and I was using Mailchimp – but I was determined to succeed and, with some help from YouTube University (in other words I just searched YouTube for some ‘how to’ videos), I did it.
That was week 3 sorted. Now apparently I need to get my blogging frequency up so that I don’t get rejected by Adsense when I try to monetise this blog (at least 10 recent posts are recommended); so that’s my focus for the rest of this week, as well as sorting the content on my other two live websites.
Onwards and upwards.
UPDATE FEB 2017
It turned out that using Mailchimp wasn’t such a smart move after all, but I didn’t find that out until week 8. Read my week 8 blog post to see why.
