AWeber – Setup

Now let’s take a look at how to set up your first list in Aweber.com. Now, assuming, of course, that you have no list and you just got a brand new Aweber account and you can always click on “Create and Manage Lists” at the link above or you’d probably be prompted to create your first list and you would be looking at a screen, something like this. And at the bottom, you should also be able to see the setup result, which is a simple pop-up screen here that shows you the progress of your new list and also the setup percentage; if I could just – let me just scroll this.

[evp width=”640″ height=”480″]tutorials/wpvideos/aweber-setup.swf[/evp]

And at the bottom here, you can see the percentage setup progress of this particular list. In this case, it’s 17 percent set up, and by the time you’re done and by the time you start getting new email addresses and names through your opt-in form, then this list would be 100 percent complete. So let’s go to the setup stages.

Now, the first thing you’d want to do is give your list a name. Right? And Aweber would check and let you know if this list is already in use. So, if a particular name is already in use, you could just change the name entirely or you could just add some numbers to make it more unique. And now it says there, the list name “mydefaultlist12” is available. And I’m gonna put in a description, and this is the description that your subscribers would see on the opt-out page. And then I’m gonna put in my name and email address. Okay? And you can choose to receive new subscriber alerts, but this is entirely optional. In any event, if you want to be notified of new subscriber, then you can just put in another email address here. And then, you can also put in some company name, company website URL, and logo URL to customize your opt-out page and also to add some branding features there; but if you don’t have any of these then you can just leave this as it is and click on Save List Settings.

Okay, and of course, you will get a message here saying that, “For best results, avoid using a free address at sites like Yahoo.com and AOL.com.” But if you only have a free email address, then you could just use it at this point. And next you would want to edit the confirmation message. You can just do that by clicking here. And you see that this is the default message. So you may want to put something more meaningful instead of the default message here. And here, you would see the confirmation link. Now, this section here cannot be edited. So, at most, you can just add a closing paragraph you can choose from some of the variables here. So you can put in your name. Alright? And when that’s done, close that, and click on Save Confirm Message.

Okay, so, I just want to run through all the information here, and make sure it’s exactly what I want. And I can also put in a confirmation success page. Okay? Something like that, and click on Save Confirm Message first. Okay, so basically it says that my URL doesn’t exist, so I’m just gonna leave it blank and click on Save Confirmation Success Page.

Okay, so once that’s done, again in the Set-Up Wizard that you see at the bottom here, you can just click on Next. And it says that you need to create a welcome email, so okay, let’s do this step. Okay, so this is the welcome email which is basically the autoresponder email, or the first email the subscriber will get once they’ve confirmed their name and email address. So I’m just going to put in a title here. Right? And I’m going to enter a message. Now, you can either enter an HTML message, you can enter a plain text message, or you can choose to enter both. I’m going to start with a plain text message.

Okay, so what I’ve done here is basically entered a very simple message for new subscribers. Now, you don’t want to make your emails too long, because these people have just subscribed. So you may just want to get straight to the point and if you have offered something for free, for them to download and just put in the download link here, right? And then you can also put in the HTML email if you want to, and when that’s done, you just scroll to the bottom and you can see here, you can attach a file if you want. Right?

So, if you want to deliver a free ebook of free report directly from this email, you can also do that. But if you have uploaded the free report to your web host, then you just put in your actual download link, and then click on Save Message. Okay, so my first email has been created and I can always add new follow-up messages if I want to. But for now, to get this list completely set up, I need to create a web form. So, I’m going to do that just by clicking on “Do This Step”.

Okay, so now I’ll be taken to a page like this and I just need to enter a form name – I’m gonna enter a name called “Default” – and then I can select the type of opt-in form, or opt-in script that I want to use. In line basically means that it appears within the current web page body. This is just a very simple opt-in or subscribe form there, you will see almost everywhere on the Internet. And then you can also choose to have your opt-in form pop up in a new window. You can also have it pop-under, and exit pop-up, pop-over or hover at, and also a lightbox hover at.

Now, if you’re a new user and this is the first time using Aweber or any type of subscription or autoresponder service, then I recommend you just select as in-line. Alright? So now, there’s a Thank You page, so again, you can customize this to put in your own link if you want to, or you can just leave it as the default Aweber page. Now, sometimes a particular subscriber may have already subscribed in the past, but they may have forgotten about it and they may have just entered their name and email address again on the same form to download the same report, in which case they’ll probably get an error message. Now, if you want to avoid that, then you need to enter a new URL for the Already Subscribed page.

I’m just going to enter the same URL, the same default Aweber URL. And if you want to track your subscribers, for example, if you have many blogs…right? And you want to see which blogs the subscribers come from, so you can always add a simple ad tracking here, and of course, you start with the default message. And one of the most important things here is that you can also include the current subscriber totals. Now, this is very important and you probably have seen on a lot of popular blogs that they proudly display, or they proudly acknowledge the amount of subscribers that they have to their blog. So, you probably want to do that as well. It adds a lot of social proof and credibility to your blog, and as a matter of fact, if I am a new subscriber and I see that a lot of people have already subscribed to your blog, it would mean that the blog is popular and at least has some kind of value that I would be interested in, so make sure you always display the current subscriber totals and there are a few additional options you can edit.

Alright. So here you can see that you can change the image color if you want to. And you can also change the text color. So you can sort of match the overall look of this little icon here to the overall layout and color of your blog, and when that’s done, click on Next. And here, you will be able to preview how the form actually looks like, and you can always click on the individual elements here. So, I’m gonna click on name, alright. And I’m going to make sure that everyone must enter a name, and if I want to change this label I can always change it to something else. Alright. And click on OK. And you can see that this is updated. I’m gonna click on “email”. I can also change the label, and click on OK. So that’s pretty much done, but if you want to add more HTML, you can always add it in this section here. Or, if you want to add a headline, you can do it here, and if you want to add some other information, you can always add it here.

Okay. Save changes. And when that’s done, I’m gonna click on Save. Okay, so you can see that my new web form has been created, uh, default here, so I can always preview the web form. I can get the HTML codes to put in this web form onto my blog or my website. So that’s pretty much how you get started creating your first list in Aweber, and if you have not set up anything for this case, it looks like I’ve not properly set up my new subscriber verification message. In any case, you’ll always get a note from Aweber, and you can always click through to that particular function and continue to set up your first list in Aweber.com.