Hi Everyone,

Today I have a particularly impressive heads-up for you on a product that my marketing friend Nick Jolin released on the Warrior forum during the week called List Master Sensei.

Nick is the Blog Profits Pro and Power Leverage Sensei guy and if you already own either (or like me both) of those products you’ll know how exceptional his stuff is, well in my opinion this time he’s hit the ball out of the park with List Master Sensei.

So what’s included?

Well it contains as usual a piece of software plus a total of thirteen video tutorials on installation, set-up and use of the software which this time is a web based autoresponder script that you install on your own hosting account.

Nick is a brilliant teacher and his videos are superb, he walks you through the entire process so there’s no chance of you getting any of the steps wrong and as for the software which he’s named Sensei Mailer, well he’s based it on the popular phplist open source script adding in his own tweaks to give it better compatibility with WordPress and additional functionality specifically for marketers plus an added twist which I’ll come to a little later.

My thoughts on Sensei Mailer is that it’s easily the best out there for what it does, but unfortunately if you know about phplist then you’ll already know it’s a broadcast only autoresponder and doesn’t have a sequential e-mail delivery function meaning you can’t load a group of messages into it for “Drip-Fed” delivery so I think Nick has missed a trick with his choice of base script here.

Although pretty much every software product out there is designed (or in this case adapted) with the functions that the author themselves tend to use and as Nick has never used the sequential function of any autoresponder, hence his choice of phplist as the donor script for Sensei Mailer.

Now I think an autoresponder that doesn’t have sequential functionality for me is pretty much useless and so why I haven’t personally installed it on my own hosting but having previously installed several stand-alone scripts including many autoresponders plus the dreaded membership site scripts, I know exactly what’s involved and therefore can say how Nick’s videos makes that task exceptionally easy so if nothing else it’s excellent training.

But as I’ve said Nick has hit the ball out of the park on this one so you’ll know that something truly breathtaking is coming and that is to do with the twist I mentioned earlier, which is Nick has also included how to integrate Amazon’s SES e-mail delivery service with Sensei Mailer, but more importantly step-by-step videos on how to set-up an account with them and the do’s and don’ts of what to do once you have, which in my opinion is priceless.

Now most all of the top marketers use a dedicated e-mail delivery service choosing Aweber Communications or GetResponse because of the superior delivery rate that you get with them compared to that of a website script, because most all of the top ones guarantee over 99% message delivery rate, the most popular among marketers has always been Aweber closely followed by GetResponse, but I have heard that Aweber’s delivery rate has dropped off lately so many have been switching to GR.

Problem is where Aweber are concerned, they charge nineteen bucks each and every month for their basic service which is priced based on the number of subscribers you have rather than how often you mail them and that basic account allows for 0-500 subs and as soon as you get 501 opt-ins that price goes up to twenty nine and then up and up as your list grows.

I myself started out with GetResponse way back in mid 2003 and their service works along similar lines but back then they charged twenty five bucks for their basic account and that’s a lot of money to find when you’re just getting started and hence why I switched to installing a sequential autoresponder script on my hosting in early 2004 and have never looked back.

The downside of doing so was the service providers don’t allow you to export your list so I had to wave goodbye to the list I’d built there and start all over again from scratch, that’s why I vowed never to use a service ever again, admittedly saving on the monthly fees was great but it has meant that my script hasn’t been as efficient on the delivery side of things, still as my mother always said you can’t have your cake and eat it too.

But when I got Nick’s e-mail during the week about Sensei Mailer, I knew coming from him it had to be pretty special so when I got to his WSO thread I bought it instantly, I was a little disappointed to later find that Sensei Mailer wasn’t a sequential autoresponder but by that time I’d already watched his tutorials on Amazon SES so knew I’d struck gold (I’ll tell you about that in a moment)

I know I said I vowed never to use a service again but Amazon SES is a little different, with the usual dedicated e-mail service providers they handle everything and when you open an account with them you instantly get access to their script and they handle the entire delivery side too (and you pay through the nose for the privilege)

But where Amazon SES is different is, all they do is supply the actual e-mail delivery element so you still need your own script installed on your hosting to handle the mechanics of list management, meaning you get to keep all of your subscribers in your own system and you simply plug-in to it the Amazon SES service for the message delivery side matching (or bettering) the delivery rate of any dedicated e-mail delivery service out there,

While taking that function away from your host thereby eliminating the huge drain on their resources and also the limits they place on your account meaning you can build your list as big as you want without ever needing to worry about having to make additional arrangements.

Okay so, the next question is what’s the bottom line, how much does it cost to use the Amazon SES service? .. Well you need to be sitting down before I tell you (health and safety and all that) – ready?

Amazon SES is a pay-as-you-go service (so no monthly fees! Yeah) you only pay for the number of messages you send out and that works out at …. 10 cents per thousand, I know if you’re good at math (maths) then it’ll likely you’ll be reaching for the smelling salt right about now, but if you’re not then let’s take a quick look at the numbers.

If you have an account at Aweber and have built you list to 1,000 opt-ins then you’ll be paying out $29 to them each month, every month no matter if you mail them once a month or once every day, paying out that kind of dough you’ll want to use their service to the full so let’s say you mail your subs every single day (even just to say “Nothing to report, just checking in”)

So if your list remains at the 1,000 mark for an entire year, you would have paid Aweber $348.00 in that twelve month period, in comparison if you did the same using your own script and the Amazon SES e-mail delivery service then that will be ten cents times 365 which works out at …. $36.50 (or a shade over $3 a month)  

Although as there’s no monthly fees then there’s no reason to bombard your list so you can throttle back to a more acceptable schedule of say once per week, so now that expense drops to $5.20 a year or half of the cost of a .com domain name at Namecheap.

However the whole point of building a list is to grow it as big as possible because the more contacts that you have to present your paid offers to, the more income your business can generate, so let’s take a look at some higher numbers.

If you manage to build your list to 25,000 it’ll cost you $149 per month at Aweber the last time I checked so for an entire year you’d be looking at giving them $1,788.00 in that time, in comparison sending a weekly message to your subs via Amazon SES would cost $130 for the entire year or $10.81 each month (remember, as good or better message deliver-ability plus you control your list entirely!)

I picked that last list figure because on Aweber’s price list they state “25,000+ call us” so I don’t know how much that would cost but going on their pricing structure so far it’s a safe bet that it’ll resemble a telephone number, and GetResponse are more expensive (cringe)

There are a few services out there that just handle the e-mail delivery side to plug-in to a website script, most have similar costs to the Amazon SES service but Nick has found Amazon to be about the best, … and here comes the truly outstanding bit, you can also use these services with the sequential autoresponder(s) included with the Plug In Marketing Super Easy Website Script !!!

However there is one minor drawback, these services are a bit tricky to set-up as they are aimed at software coder boffins so you really need to be armed with Nick’s videos, as I said he’s a brilliant teacher and unlike me he’s really good when it comes to shooting video so his tutorial videos are superb, plus he is a friend and I owe him one.

So I will include the link to his offer but will say it’s running as a dime sale meaning the price rises with every sale so don’t let the grass grow, although given those figures above it’ll still be worth ten times whatever that might be when you get there, here’s the link :-

http://www.warriorforum.com/warrior-special-offers-forum/599434-list-master-sensei.html

Be sure to read the comments on the thread once you’ve bagged your copy, especially on page two!

Regards
David.

P.S.
Just checked and at the time of writing Nick’s List Master Sensei package is $13.13 (but it did also make WSO of The Day yesterday!)

P.P.S
He will be closing this WSO on May 25th so the window to grab it isn’t very long (so sorry if you missed it)

P.P.P.S
If you’ve never heard about list building before then chances are you’re one of those people who have bought a bunch of infoproducts to get your online business started but have found none of them worked and have realized something had been left out, a piece of the puzzle that the author didn’t let on, well congratulations because you’ve just found it!