Hey Guys, Wanted to introduce myself. My name's Pete. I'm an entrepreneur that's been running mostly offline businesses up until about 2 years ago. The shit had hit the fan and I decided it was time to try my hand at the online world. I've tried a bunch of different things, testing ideas out and killing off the ones that wouldn't work. Stumbled into the hands of a great business mentor that I've learned a ton from. I never knew email went as far and deep as it does until a guy asked my mentor for some help monetizing his lead gen sites and I got handed the project. After some research, I knew that Aweber, icontact or any of those services wasn't going to cut it. I looked for some other systems and found that most were out of this cheap ass's price range. Settled on Interspire. That was a mistake. But I did learn a ton of stuff with it. I'll post in another thread some lessons learned and why Interspire is a piece of shit. I didn't have much data to work with (thought I had a ton at the time) the sites were only bring in about 500 subscribers a day. I quickly learned a lot of the basics of warming up ips and that inboxing mail is mostly a voodoo art form. After running that system for the guy and testing a bunch of different offers (on one ip no less) it became clear that his very narrow niche was not going to be profitable. All in all, over the course of about 3 months we made a whooping $70 in commissions, while spending about $2500 in software, server, ip. While I learned a lot, I couldn't justify spending the guys money on the system any longer and shut it down a couple of weeks ago. In the middle of all that my mentor asked me to help with his email system. He and his partners run a couple of rebill offers in the health niche and were just starting to collect some decent data. So I'm now running on a dedicated Imnica Mail system with 5 ips. (whitelabled OEMpro with PowerMTA, but fully managed on the backend). With this system I don't have to worry about too much of the technical stuff that bogged Interspire down. Right now my main challenge is email deliverability. Still only mailing around 70,000 records but its increasing at a decent rate and once we add in a couple of other products it'll ramp up pretty well. I have to thank all of you guys here, reading through the golden nuggets scattered through old threads have given me a lot of the answers that I haven't been able to find elsewhere. I also would like to apologize for not posting sooner, I really didn't have much of value to put out there. Because of you guys I'm defintely going to get a real system up and running with some good data and get some REAL testing done on some larger lists. ( only so much testing you can do on small scale without pissing people off) So thats my story for the time being. Thanks Guys, Pete
Pete - This forum will continue to get better with guys like you here, thank you for this post. I believe most noobs have the fear of posting because they don't feel what they have to contribute has value to the established members. But in reality it's guys like you with this kind of experience posting about it that helps the larger segment of this forums membership, which is the noobs. And trust me, this post WILL be of value to a lot of people here as will your continued posting as you learn. I for one appreciate you steppin' up and I look forward to watching you learn and helping you along the way if I can. Nice job.
Thanks Push. Means a lot coming from you as you're a well respected member here. As I learn more and more I'll try to post it here. Seeing as mailing is such a closed off industry it really is great to have a place where guys talk fairly open about what goes on and answers questions. As long as I'm not on the chopping block, I'll be sticking around for quite a while Thanks Again! Pete
