This has not been a good week.
Work has been pretty stressful, and what with leaving do’s, birthdays and trying to organise a friend’s stag do, I haven’t had a whole lot of time for my sites … which isn’t good.
That’s not to say that I haven’t been able to get the ball rolling on a couple of things, I just haven’t been able to find the time to implement them quite as much as they need to be.
A good example of that is probably Aweber and my implementation of newsletters. I’ll dedicate a post to Aweber and my experience of newsletters at a later date, but for now it’s sufficient to say that last week I finally took the plunge and opened an account with Aweber in the hope of taking my newsletter marketing to the next level.
Since then, I’ve managed to play around with the backend enough to get a couple of forms up on my websites and I’m pleased to say thay seem to have attracted a handful of registrants.
However, things aren’t quite as I’d like them. While the initial forms are live, the sign up process hasn’t been implemented properly and is something I need to focus on.
I’m using a double opt-in method with Aweber meaning that a user needs to submit and then confirm their email address before they are added to my mailing list.
Now Aweber seems to be quite a flexible tool and as such it will allow me to:
- Direct the user to a specific page on my site to thank them for submitting their address and telling them to check their email to confirm their subscription
- Send them to a “Thank you” page once they have confirmed their email address.
Now my problem is that while I have incorporated the registration forms into my site, I haven’t properly set up either of these landing pages yet.
Instead, registrants are just re-directed to a dull looking blank page that Aweber sets up by default.
I know some people would argue that the the important thing was getting the forms into the page, and to a certain extent they’re right.
What bugs me though is that the people who have signed up to the newsletter haven’t had a good experience of my website so far.
I want my site to get a reputation of being an authority online poker and while it looks good on the surface, I don’t like the though that that reputation could be tarnished once somebody has interacted with it.
What’s even more frustrating is that it would probably only take me half an hour (if that!) to get all the problems sorted out but any time I’ve been able to find this week has been taken up with writing content, sorting out hosting problems and setting up some testing.
This week was also supposed to be the time that I set up a bit of Geo Targetting on my poker website. But again, it’s a tale of two halves: I’ve purchased the database, and know what I need to do (ish) … I just haven’t done it yet.
My problem is that I get too excited about the number of possibilities for my site. As a result, I often end up starting one task before I’ve finished another.
I’m sure I’m not the only person to have this problem – I just need to keep reminding myself to focus on one task at a time and see that through to completion.
With that in mind, this weekend I’m finally going to have a nice lot of time to myself and so this will be the time when the newsletters and the Geo Targetting finally get sorted!
