A few days ago I was lurking on a popular marketing forum where someone asked for autoresponder tips and what they should include in that first autoresponder message after someone signs up for a report.  Apparently, this person already had the rest of the messages pre-written through PLR or some other means and they just didn’t know what to write in that first email.

Surprisingly, one particular person answered the call for help by posting a very long sales letter type email template where they repeatedly asked to be whitelisted, were told that they would be receiving many more messages about a particular product, and where they were given a very detailed pitch for their product.

This template was just dripping with pushy salesmenship.

But the guy who posted it claimed that it worked very well for him… go figure!  What do I know?

Anyway, the post prompted me to create a post of my own where I outline how I usually go about the whole autoresponder/free report thing…  As you might imagine, I go about things a little differently.

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You probably never really thought about all the pre-selling tools that are available to today’s online entrepreneur, but technology makes it possible to connect with your potential customers in tons of new ways!

I’ve written about what pre-selling is before, so I won’t go into the details again.  Here’s a short definition to make sure we’re all on the same sheet of music:

In the online world, pre-selling is the art of warming up your visitors, building trust, and putting them in the frame of mind that they want to do business with you.

If you need a more in depth explaination, check out the article, “What is Pre-Selling?”
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Recently I received this question from the Ask Arvada Question Line:

“How do you make an ebook from your own PC?”

I figured a video was worth a thousand words… so I created the video below to show you how it works step-by-step:

The Steps…

In the video I assumed that you would want to create an ebook that was in PDF format… which I highly recommend. PDF files can be read on any kind of computer, the reader is free and usually already installed on most computers, and it’s a format that most people are used to using.

Here are the steps that I lay out in the video for those who don’t want to actually watch it:

1. Create your ebook in Microsoft Word.
2. Print your document to Cute PDF Writer.  This is the program I use and I love it.
3. Open up Cute PDF and add your links and other enhancements.
4. Save your changes to the PDF file.
5. Open you ebook up in Adobe Reader and make sure it looks the way you want it to.
6. If you want to make changes, go back to Cute PDF and make the changes.
7. Get your ebook out there!

The whole process is surprisingly quick and easy.

If you have a program that you think is better than Cute PDF, please let me know.  I’m always interested in new and better products that make my life easier!

Well, it looks like I spoke too soon about the great customer service over at 1ShoppingCart.com when I did a 1shoppingcart.com review a few months ago.  As a matter of fact, I seriously doubt that I’ll ever do business with them again.  Let me tell you what happened.

You may recall that I signed up for their autoresponder service last November (Here’s a link to the previous 1ShoppingCart.com review). I needed the new autoresponder for a list building method I was testing.  To make a long story short, I ended up having to close the 1ShoppingCart autoresponder because it wasn’t compatible with the test… through no fault on the 1ShoppingCart side.

In order to close the account, I had to call them on the phone and cancel.  In fact, I actually called them to cancel the account the same day that I ordered it.

As I said in my previous post, the young man that I talked to was a pleasure to talk to and said he cancelled the account effective immediately.  He also said that I would never even be charged because I cancelled the same day.

Hindsight is 20/20

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Complete hype.  You now that, but that’s what got my attention in the first place when I was browsing the Warrior Forum yesterday.

So of course I clicked on the forum post and found out that the post was meant to be sarcastic.  Then I started reading the responses from other Warriors and was completely appalled with the lack of integrity of some of the posters.  The video below is my rant on the subject: Read the rest of this entry