This weekend was really hectic for me. I wanted to create 2 websites this weekend and merge my auto responder service to Aweber. The 2 websites were not that much of a hassle, they were just landing pages for my PPC campaigns. The merging of my old service to Aweber was the annoyance.
This showed me not to go cheap and just go for the big guys who already took over this specific niche. Being a noob back in the day, I was cheap and I went for more features and a lower price tag. I soon later learned that is a wrong way of thinking and now I am paying for it. This weekend was really annoying just the fact that I had to re create all my list campaigns within aweber, get use to the aweber interface, import my leads - annoying, etc. There were just so many hurdles and repetitive work.
I needed to re create my follow up messages and re edit my HTML pages with the new aweber form. I personally got rid of a lot of my lead capture pages and report pages because it wasn't worth my time to do so. I only kept a small amount of my landing pages which captures leads everyday or had a high subscribe list. So I went from so many landing page that captured emails to just a small handful - not good I think.
Well now it comes to my experience that I should go with the more trusted brand name who already conquered the specific niche, in this case auto responder service. I went with a cheap service that provided more features at a lost cost, the down side to this are the following:
- The service can be shutdown with out you knowing
- The service can be bought or terminate their service because of pricing and competition
- Routine maintenance because it is their firs time in the industry
- Delayed customer support due to not being an expert in the niche
These are just a few but third party services are cheaper than the big guys because it helps them, but at what cost? Providing so many features for so little does not mean it will be beneficial to you at the end. It may bite you in the ass at the end as it did for me, which switching over to aweber. This switch was just annoying and very repetitive, especially the growth I have produce with my ever growing subscribers list. I should have joined aweber when I started seeing great increases and good growth.
The competition of third parties vs professional service attracts 2 different types of people. Third party services attract the noobs as it did for me because of price and the vast features. But this does not mean they have great customer support or even a god service. The auto responder service I was part of was pretty good until they switched their servers; it just went down hill from that.
But here is a video re-cap:
[googlevideo]http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6429803235757757015[/googlevideo]
