If you don’t have a way for readers to subscribe to your email list, you are losing a lot of repeat traffic. Think about it, how many blogs do you visit on a daily basis? There are too many blogs to keep up with - yes, even the good ones. Sometimes I visit a blog that I find interesting and I will check it frequently for a while until they start going off topic and I lose interest. However if I sign up for their email notification list and I get a “friendly email reminder” that a particularly interesting post has been written chances are I will go and visit that blog again.

Previously, I have written about capturing all your blog readers. Having an email subscription system is one of the ways to keep in touch with your readers. Of course, if you’re into social networking, there’s also Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, etc. Pick your poison.

Sidenote: By the way, if you use Twitter, Tweetscan is a great search engine specifically for Twitter.

My favorite autoresponder is Aweber. With Aweber, they claim you’ll get great deliverability (how does one check?). But the features I like are the ability to set up different sub-lists and transfer subscribers from one list to another based on certain actions. Suppose you’re selling your own product and you collect a list of prospects.

Now if someone on the prospects list buys your product, you can have them automatically switched to your customer list. This saves a lot of manual work.

Another feature that I like is the ability to do a split test on your email list. If you have a list of 6000 people, you can create a 3 way split-test message and you can partition it evenly (2000/2000/2000) or in any proportion that you like. This is a good way to test message titles (think direct marketing) and also message styles.

For those of you who are crazy about tracking, the reporting options are fantastic. You can keep a tabs on the daily trends of new leads, unverified vs. verified leads, countries, states, area codes, follow up status, etc. This is particularly useful if you want to keep a tab on how many people subscribe to your blog after a post that really appeals to your audience.

At $19.95 a month (if you have less than 10,000 people on your list) Aweber is unbeatable value!

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