Especially on autoresponders. And setting them up takes a lot more time than you might expect. I was recently trying to get my autoresponder working for my Budgeting site and spent at least 2 hours longer than I expected, even allowing for my learning how to do it. I kept having problems getting it to actually point to the pages I wanted and take the information properly. Finally, I gave up on getting it to point to my thank you page and have left it at the original page with GetResponse. Ah well. I’ll keep doing some research and try to find a way to make it work. I suspect that the issue is the way that WordPress labels pages and it won’t point to the specific page in a WP blog because it doesn’t have an HTML or php extension.

As soon as I get it all figured out I will put the information up here for others to learn from. Why not, eh? I already went through the headaches, and if I can save someone else a little bit of trouble, that makes it worth it to me. I have a script that I used to use for an autoresponder ages ago - it is all manual, and I sometimes wonder if I shouldn’t go back to that. It is almost as easy as the ones that we pay for, as long as you can figure out how to install it. The issue with that is that you have to copy the list yourself to back it up all the time, in case something ever happens with the server (which is why I don’t use it any more - lost a list of around 120 people - and that sucks!). I’ll think I’ll stick with the paid service… And with a paid servie, it is much easier to set up multiple domains and lists and send all kinds of messages to them - way simpler than doing it all manually.

I think every online business (and offline, for that matter) needs to keep a good contact list, and in the online world it is your subscribers, whether to a newsletter or who have downloaded a free budget spreadsheet, for example. Now the question is, will anybody actually subscribe?