I did and interview yesterday with Mike Cliffe Jones for his Beyond Blogging course and was asked a very pertinent question, what is the most important tool you use in your business?

The answer could be one of many that I use, the Pomodoro technique I used when writing this article with a Pomodoro timer on the iPad, the AMA article submission service for getting backlinks or a huge range of others that give me all sorts of leverage but the most important for me in terms of return on investment must be my autoresponder sequence provided by aweber.

Currently in the Valencia Property aweber autoresponder there are 142 messages. Not one of them is time sensitive, I hope, and the links are usually working fine even though the post may have been written a year ago.

So what is aweber for those who don’t know and how can you use it?

Aweber Autoresponder

There are many autoresponders out there but I recommend aweber because it does one thing extremely well, it gets your mail delivered! You can check open rates by clicks on any links you put into it and it works seamlessly once you get a handle on the basic usage. I ignore all of the bells and whistles it has usually, templates for mailings etc… but constantly put out a series of messages that help my potential clients along the road to when they may make a purchase of a property in Valencia or elsewhere.

I have incorporated a popup onto my site that you can put the aweber code into and any signups from the pop up will go into the aweber mailing list easily and without any work on my behalf.

However I still haven’t told you why aweber is the most important tool in my business and it all comes down to one thing, I am absolutely useless at organising myself and aweber does it for me. Mike was surprised when I said this but it is a simple fact. Usually I am so busy that I do not track potential clients as I should. The number of times that I have missed a client because I eventually get round to looking at my excel file supposedly tracking clients only to find that I missed a visit last week is innumerable, or rather was before I got aweber working for me. By having them on the aweber mailing list they get a message from me every three days of something that is very useful to them usually so when they are planning their visit over to view properties or see the area I am still fresh in their mind and one of the first things they do is to make sure they contact me.

Did you get that?

They contact me just because they are on the mailing list. I don’t have to do anything in general.

So what is the investment and what is the return? Initially aweber costs just $1 for the trial for a month. However after that they have got you by the short and curlies as this rises to a massive $19 at the end of the first month, oh that is American dollars by the way. Once you get above a certain number of subscribers it goes up to 29 dollars and then there are further increments according to numbers.

What’s the return?

Well selling a property to one client means an average return on a property at an average of 200,000 Euros of 6,000 Euros, not dollars. So if aweber manages to get me one extra sale per year at the higher rate I have paid out $348 for a return of 6000 Euros. I won’t go into the percentages but you get the idea.

Suffice to say, I credit aweber with more than just a single client per year.

I really think that if I had managed to incorporate aweber into my business say in 2002 I would have been living on easy street by now! However neither it nor I were ready. You should be now.

If you have a fledgling website or an established business the correct use of an autoresponder is essential to grow your client base and revenues even if you are not selling directly to the client through the autoresponder itself, I know I don’t.

Now I know you are asking a very simple question and Mike asked me the same, why is there not an autoresponder on Entrepreneur Solo?

Well, this blog started up as a hobby to write about stuff that didn’t fit into Valencia Property and Houses for sale in Spain. It still performs that function, however there is one slightly hidden autoresponder here.

If you go to our Domaining page you can get a free chapter of our, soon to be published in the real World, book about working online. You will see that there are nowhere near 142 messages in that one because it serves a single purpose. That has not been developed in the same way. Eventually this site will have an autoresponder for you to sign up for updates as now it is becoming something more than just a hobby.

Meanwhile get your copy of aweber and plug it into your business or websites. You will not regret it.

Further Reading

1) Why Aweber Makes A Huge Difference

Aweber Autoresponder

2) You Cannot Sell The Ticket Once The Plane Has Taken Off

Plane Taking Off

3) Why Spain and Websites Don’t Mix

Spain and Websites Don't Mix

Originally posted 2011-03-19 11:20:09. Republished by Blog Post Promoter