Alternatives to Aweber
All bloggers know about Aweber, the famous $20 a month Auto respond company that allows your visitors to sign up for your program. The twist of the Auto responder program is that when a user signs up using Aweber, he’ll be automatically added to your Feedburner Feed count.
Most bloggers love to have a high feed count as it makes their blog way more valuable. Advertisers are always looking for blogs that have a high readership, and the higher your feed count is the more likely you are to have people begging to advertise in your blog.
The alternative
Since I recently released my Get started Blogging E-book, I needed a way to contact my Subscribers and have them in a mailing list. I searched on Google but I found nothing except Aweber, but since that was my first E-book I decided that paying the $20 dollar a month subscription for Aweber was not wise, so I decided that I would have to do something on my own, and indeed I did (Note that this only works with people that have Cpanel, or any other form of Auto responder.
- Log in to your Cpanel, and look for an Icon that says “Auto Responders” and click on it.
- Look for a button that says “Add Auto-responder” and click it.
- You will then be presented with a form. Fill everything out, and do not miss anything. You can add wathever E-mail address that you want, but make sure the e-mail was not used before or else you’ll start to get weird messages.
Fill out the form, and on the body simply add whatever you want. It could be a download link or it could just be a thank you. When you are done click on “Create/modify” and you’ll be done. - Now that you are done creating your auto responder Go to your Feedburner account and log in, then click on the “Publicize tab”
- Once you’ve clicked on the Publicize tab, look at the left sidebar for a link that says “Communication Preferences” under the “Subscription Management”. (If you have this feature disabled, then please enable it).
- Now you will see a form, you have to fill it out with the correct E-mail address where you’ve set up your Autoresponder.
On the box where it says “Confirmation E-mail body”, ask your visitors to please do a short reply to that E-mail, and when they do that, the E-mail will be sent to your Auto Responder, and the link to whatever E-book, or program you want them to download will be sent to them.
This should be saving you about $20 dollars a month. The only downside to this, is that your reader will have to work for 5 seconds to reply to the E-mail in order to make this work.
If you are not cheap like me, then just sign up for Aweber and save yourself the time.
June 8, 2008 at 4:15 am
That is a pretty cool alternative, but I highly recommend Aweber. It’s more than just an auto-responder. You can broadcast messages to your leads whenever you want, have scheduled broadcasts, it is great.
I do a lot of PPC marketing and I already have good conversion rates, but once I added Aweber to my landing pages, my conversion rates skyrocketed. Some people just need that little touch of personalization, and Aweber offers them that personalization.
MrGPTs last blog post..How to Create a Page of All Your GPT Sites
June 16, 2008 at 3:46 pm
I wish my site had CPanel, as I would certainly try this. However, I’m with GoDaddy, and there just doesn’t seem to be the flexibility I would really like.
I haven’t figured out whether to go with GetResponse or AWeber. But I’d better decide and implement fast… my new ebook minisite has been up for 2 weeks now. I’m still working on it, but meanwhile, I suspect I’m missing out on capturing lots of good names.
June 16, 2008 at 4:00 pm
Vigi I would suggest you go with Aweber, they integrate with Feedburner I am not sure about Get Response. I use Aweber I just had to sign up with them seem that they provide very reliable support and it’s very easy to get set up.
July 2, 2008 at 5:11 am
I was using Get Response, and honestly it gets a low low review from me, My deliverability was less than 40% and thats only mailing 1 time a day… I plan to go the aweber route and not worry.
Big Ben Pattons last blog post..SezWho To The Rescue!
August 28, 2008 at 8:20 am
I highly recommend Aweber, it can save you a whole lot of time
March 5, 2009 at 6:58 pm
Your solution was very creative and would still be useful for anybody who doesn’t want to spend the $20 per month on Aweber.
August 1, 2009 at 5:42 pm
Hello,
I use DLGuard software to process digital downloads. To handle my autoresponder/email marketing script, I found DLGAdvance. Its a pretty handy little tool that has most of the same features. It actually automatically works with DLGuard as an Aweber Alternative. Don’t know the rules on posting links, so just do a google search for DLGAdvance.
September 1, 2009 at 6:26 pm
There is also MailChimp.com – it is free for up to 500 subscribers.
September 28, 2009 at 8:45 pm
Hello all new to this blog, must say I like the design and everyone seems nice.
November 29, 2009 at 12:27 am
Thanks for the great info – I enjoyed reading it! I always enjoy looking at this blog.
December 1, 2009 at 9:50 pm
Thanks for this information. I would love to use aweber, but spending money for something that I can do myself seems to be a better way to do business. $20 a month there does not really do much for you if you want to have a big list, so Thanks!!
December 17, 2009 at 6:39 pm
GT2buy, I totally agree that if you can do it yourself for free and better there is no need to use these services. Some people would rather have them through a managed company though. Nice website by the way =)
August 9, 2010 at 10:07 am
It is a really nice alternative….to save 20 bucks…
August 12, 2010 at 11:45 am
if you are going to get a VPS server make sure that it has cPanel coz it makes server maintennance easier.:;;
August 24, 2010 at 1:38 am
Imnicamail.com looks just as serious as aweber does, while rates for beginners with low traffic are much cheaper.
Which helps indeed.
August 24, 2010 at 1:50 am
I was looking for alternatives to aweber and came across this post. Its a good idea. Aweber is good IF you have a serious mailing list and enough customers to justify the cost. Else you would be wasting money.
I like your idea, I guess I was looking for more
I do something similar. You can use twitter or a private (not publicly accessible blog) and use Feedburner to burn yourself a feed. Then use the email subscribe option of Feedburner to let people subscribe. To publish you can just tweet
or if you’d like you can also write to your private blog and only allow referral url of feedburner if that what you want.
This is what I use when starting out and once I have enough subscribers I can roll it over to aweber very easily. Because I want people in my list to learn how to save money first when starting a business and then use the income to improve the business’s image.
great post, bring more good ideas. Thank you
October 1, 2010 at 6:07 am
Cpanel is reall great for managing websites and server reources:,:
February 23, 2011 at 8:59 pm
Good post mate. News to me.