Setting-Up A Mailing List

Anyone who reads my blog or follows me on Facebook or Twitter knows that I've been planning to give away my Molly Handbag pattern for free when its finally ready for the world. Well, it's finally ready so now I have to set-up a mechanism to make it available for download. I have decided to create an R. Kay Design mailing list and as a gift for giving me your email address and allowing me to send you emails (which I will not abuse, I promise), I'll give you Molly for free.

Anyway, last night I started to work on setting up the sign-up form and all the pages and emails that go hand-in-hand with collecting email addresses for a mailing list. Believe it or not, it's not totally simple. Well, it's not hard either, but it is a lot of work. I thought I'd write about the process in case some of my readers are interested in doing something similar. And next week, I'll post about why I made this decision and the benefits a business gains by having a mailing list.

I decided to use Aweber for my mailing list management provider. The reasons I decided to use them are:

1. I used Aweber before on other websites and I have an account
2. Well known and well respected mailing list management provider
3. Good instructions on how to set-up a list with videos, templates, etc.
4. Affordable and expandable

After looking at Aweber's system I determined that I need to create the following:

1. A form to enter the subscriber's name and email that sells the list and free gift (Molly!)
2. A web page to land on after the name is entered
3. An email that the subscriber will receive after entering name/email where there will be a link to click to confirm subscription
4. A web page to land on after the link from the email is clicked that has a link to the download and instructions for how to download and extract the zip file
5. An email that the subscriber will receive after the confirmation link is clicked that also has the download link.

So far I have the sign-up form done and it works. I also have the page in # 2 done. Nothing's on the site yet since none of the other pages are done. Hopefully later today everything will be in place. I'm so excited! Can't wait to get all this detail done so people can start working on their very own Molly Handbags.

Till later ~

Reba