March 30, 2020 is a historic date for Sergio Traversa – Follow-up Marketing On Line
After 13 years I continue with the arpReach autoresponder software, by Mutual Advantage Ltd, because I feel the need to face new challenges, feel that I am able to know, learn and apply new autoresponder software for e-mail marketing, I joined the program autoresponder Email Marketer at arpReach.
Due to this support I had to completely change everything related to marketing and image, and there are around 3000 pages, including courses and various articles.
I continue with my version of arpReach, even if it is dated 4 years ago, which worked very well then, and I don't see how it can't work now.
And I have integrated applications and courses with the Email Marketer logo, by Interspire, in part or on top of the arpReach logo by Mutual Advantage.
Therefore the brands of both software are present on all my courses and applications.
This is not the place to make comparisons between the two software, even if it can be said that the functions of Email Marketer are more numerous than those of arpReach, and yet, with the same functions, arpReach turns out to be much more.
It is simple to use, and it is also the one that can cause the least problems because it is much, much more stable.
Today May 4, 2020 I am first on Google out of 2,400,000,000 websites for the search phrase follow-up online marketing!
I recreated the sergiotraversa.com blog on March 10, 2020, in the sense that on that date I purchased some web space on the linux-unix VPS server, taken from HostGator and installed the most popular software in the world for creating blogs, WordPress.org.
In reality I have been present on the web with the same domain since 2012.
In the many years that I have been hanging out on the web, I have heard harsh things about all the systems and tricks to get to the top of the search engines.
However, after having only sent the map of my blog to Google in xml format, and having never been interested in optimizing descriptions or contents in the first 600 pixels of each page, I feel like fully confirming that the content of the pages of a site/ blog is the KING to get high in the SERP results!
It is certainly a result that Google gives as if it were a deposit or a credit of trust, in the sense that this position must be confirmed day by day, with improvements of all kinds, which mainly concern pages and articles already inserted, what you offer for free to create an audience of visitors, users and above all loyal subscribers, future customers, as well as new articles to be published and new courses being completed.
But this is not the only reason why I don't think we can rest on our laurels, which are not laurels.
There is a case in which there are many sites that sell a lot, because they attract tons of subscribers and have high conversion percentages, but they are not even first on Google, and they are not even on the first page.
However, the fact remains that, after just 50 days, being at the top of Google for the search key, which represents my core business, represents an excellent result, if you consider that those days were not dedicated only to content, but also to the dirty part of the work, which is above all that of trying and trying new autoresponders for the creation of the much-needed follow-ups, to the creation of the contents of the follow-up messages, which obviously do not appear on the blog, at least for the moment.
Clearly, in a now globalized world, and even if I carefully avoid that my blog can be visited in countries where information technology represents the main source of non-regular economic income, the 2,400,000,000 websites are a bit smile because, if there are around 7 billion of us on our beloved planet, it seems really difficult that, among the numerous citizens of the nations, which have been prevented from accessing my blog, and whose level of global computerization is not very high, there may be about a third of the Earth's inhabitants, with their own websites, who are interested in online follow-up marketing.
But it seems that this is exactly the case and I won't insist further! 🙂
Today, May 6, 2020, I accepted the invitation from Kevin Polley, owner of Mutual Advantage LTD, owner of the arpReach autoresponder software, to present a very advantageous offer to all those who have known me on the web for some time.
I renewed my relationship with Kevin Polley, after a period due to a simple misunderstanding.
I picked up the arpReach autoresponder software again and it was like going back decades.
The result of this return to harmony was that Kevin dedicated a special page to me, where those who know me personally, those who follow me, or those who just know the sector in which I operate, can take advantage of a very advantageous offer on the price of arpReach.
The page in question is part of the arpReach website, and is written in English, so before reaching it I preferred to build a page of my blog in Italian, in order to make the contents of the first understandable.
You can find my introductory page for Kevin Polley's offer in this link!
arpReach is increasingly easier to use, but it may also be due to the fact that I have known it since 2007, so I can say that I install it on the server with my eyes closed.
Having arpReach as the software to send your follow-up messages could be the ideal solution for all entrepreneurs who have now understood that their efforts can be crowned with success if they also use follow-up marketing in their marketing mix plan online, via arpReach.
What about Email Marketer from Australian Interspire Ltd?
It is an excellent software for managing dozens and dozens of contacts with functions that arpReach is not equipped with, so both have flaws and great qualities.
In fact, arpReach is truly able to plan your follow-ups even by choosing the specific days of the week on which to send your messages, which you absolutely cannot do with Email Marketer, as with the latter you will only be able to plan follow-ups very concise, where the intervals are defined by the number of hours, to be able to calculate the days, months, if not years.
And the biggest disappointment I had was when they explained to me, given that there was no data in their rather dated (2009) manuals, that I would never be able to send messages on certain days of the week, such as Monday, Wednesday and Friday, because their software does not provide it as a specific function, not even routinely.
The only way to create time intervals between one message and another is to calculate the number of hours.
It seems that for Interspire, the manufacturer of Email Marketer, the follow-up marketing function has been relegated to a corner, when instead all its other functions could be well aimed at analyzing openings, clicks and conversions, not only in e-mail marketing campaigns, rather aimed at branding, as happens in newsletters, which logically are almost never sent with the aim of direct sales, but also and above all in direct email marketing campaigns for the purposes of sales and profit.
But then if one thinks back only to 10 or 15 years ago, one can very well remember the explosion of newsletters, a period in which anyone tried to build one, drawing on the numerous materials that could be found on the internet, until people, and especially companies, have started to get a little tired of the hoaxes contained in newsletters.
It is therefore better to leave the newsletter field to truly competent people, capable of providing the necessary information within the expected timescales.
And in fact the last frontier is that of online follow-up marketing, where a multitude of people are trying their hand at sending information, which also contains promotions and sales offers, precisely because it is much easier to find on the internet.
The direct email marketing expert may not even be an expert on the subject matter of his messages, unlike the one who writes a newsletter, in which the expert must really work hard to find all the information that is part of his knowledge, respecting the sending times.
Furthermore, those who deal with direct email marketing have all the time necessary to create their messages.
Suffice it to say that those who create follow-ups, even of 50 messages or more, like myself, are certainly not creating dozens and dozens of messages to insert into arpReach, all in one go, before starting the sequence.
Instead, I will be able to conveniently insert them into the software during its operation, without this compromising its effectiveness towards the recipients, compared to the messages just received.
And so, in conclusion, those who create software to run e-mail marketing campaigns, giving away dozens of HTML templates, almost seem not to have understood how the market for bulk e-mail programs is moving, or at least it seems that it is completely disinterested in another market made up mainly of self-employed workers and entrepreneurs, who can't stand the idea of receiving emails colored like advertising flyers.
Today, September 19, 2020, I am first, second, third, fourth and fifth on Google out of 2,820,000,000 websites for the search phrase follow-up online marketing!
A result which goes beyond my expectations, because it also includes results dated over time, which confirm my credibility and correctness in using (or perhaps not using 🙂 ) search engine optimization tools, after decades of practice in building sites and blogs.
There is even someone who is trying to coin, to differentiate themselves from me, the search phrase follow-up for online marketing, or follow-up for online marketing.
Nothing to say, everyone is free to do as they wish, and yet this screenshot was taken at 6 in the morning, and it is still early for Google's paid ads to be present in the SERPs.
But the attentive searcher will realize that by mid-morning, or so, he will be able to see 3 to 4 paid ads, inserted both above and below the first page results obtained by the key online marketing follow-up research.
And this is a clear sign that this phrase, coined by me over 10 years ago, has caught on so much as to be recognized as deserving of a certain attention by both Adwords publicists and Google.
Sergio Traversa ends the collaboration with arpReach On March 5, 2021.
Sergio Traversa permanently closed arpReach, owned by Kevin Polley, owner of Mutual Advantage Ltd, after 14 years of using the software.
The greatest collaboration was actually with ARP3-arpReach, when its owner was Neil Morgan, a gentleman, who was successful because of his humanity, rather than because of his product.
We may all be capable of creating perfect and precise objects, software that works like a Swiss watch, but if we are not equally aware of how we treat customers, sooner or later we are destined to succumb or fail.
During Neil Morgan's ownership I was granted a software license to manage 24 domain names, I would have free software updates forever, my clients would have the opportunity to have their money returned, spent on the purchasing a license, after 60 days, without having to point out any specific defects, there was the possibility of obtaining a demo of the software.
Furthermore, the affiliation contract was profitable and stimulating, I could myself activate a license for a potential customer, on trial for 60 days, in order to convert him into a customer, after he had realized the validity of the software, and finally the price, even if it was high after the update, was absolutely not a problem, because two versions were established, one at 395 dollars and the other, more substantial, at 595.
All this, in the first year of all-round collaboration, even up to the updated arpReach version, earned me the acquisition of three Italian customers, who are mentioned on the what they say about me page and who purchased arpReach because I had composed an excellent sales page, placed as the homepage in AutoResponderFollow-up.net, a site that no longer exists, but which can be found in Alexa.
So the purchase was prompted first by the position of my site on the first page of Google in first place, for the search key autoresponder, and then by the description of the software in a rather long sales letter.
Furthermore, the product was also attractive due to its price and sales conditions.
After the transition to management by Mutual Advantage Ltd, things changed a lot, as gradually, from the 5 domain names we went at most to the possibility of installing arpReach on just two websites, therefore only two domain names.
But not only that, because the affiliate program was closed, there was no possibility of returning the money spent to those who no longer wanted to use the software within two months, so I also lost the possibility of giving it on trial for two months.
The excuse given was that the software product was so popular that it had been pirated, copied and therefore used illegally, even though it was protected with insurmountable security and encryption systems such as IonCube.
But then the possibility of returning the money was excluded by stating that once sold, a software can no longer be returned, because it is an intangible asset in electronic format.
A price of $395 was set for the most complete version of the software, and customers were required to pay an annual fee of $120 to obtain annual updates.
Furthermore, with the new management it was established that, in the case of replacing a no longer used domain name with a new domain name, 35 dollars would have to be spent for each replacement.
So far it was bearable.
Apart from the incorrectness of such a practice, from a strictly marketing point of view, because deleting a domain from a database takes perhaps 20 seconds, the most regrettable fact was that, having to replace the domain name ariapurasalute.com, no longer active, with the new domain followupmarketingonline.com, I was asked by Mr. Jill, a close collaborator of Kevin Polley, to pay the sum of 305 dollars, instead of the one defined in the contract and in the instruction book, of 35 dollars.
As if it were my fault that in the previous management of the software by Neil Morgan, he had granted me, as predicted, 24 licenses, and I had committed 15 in total, without any additional expense.
According to that collaborator, properly instructed by Polley, to insert the new domain in the list of installable domains, which were only two, according to the new EULA licensing rules, they would have had to delete 9 domain names that no longer exist, but this one I don't think it's part of the contract.
For the goodness of Mr. Jill, I was given a discount, so the request was reduced to 200 euros!
However, this bothered me quite a bit, because I had to bear a lot of expenses for my blog.
The result was that I closed everything and now I operate for free with Blogger, while before I was with WordPress.org, installed on HostGator server, which unfortunately is no longer what it was 7/8 years ago, when its advisors were competent and responded immediately, while now they have a multitude of unhappy souls paid little or nothing, but who waste your time.
But apart from this, which I will discuss on another page, it was necessary for me to close, not so much because of the loss-making balance sheet, but also because the site could still bring positive results to me in other terms, such as diffusion of my brand and awareness. of people and general esteem for my performance, given that I was at the top of Google, sometimes on over 4 billion websites, for the search key follow-up online marketing.
Please note that my site currently built with Blogger will also continue to be first on over 4 billion websites.
The need to close the site on HostGator was primarily due to the fact that I didn't want to be blackmailed, since the request for 305 dollars, given the prospect of closure, has the appearance of real blackmail and also does not I wanted to be teased more by Mr. Kevin Polley.
And in fact now I'll explain the whole mystery to you.
He examined the market and realized that selling a product like arpReach, to be installed on one's own server, is no longer convenient for an online operator.
In fact, they are all moving towards autoresponder software that is installed on servers owned by those who provide the email marketing services themselves.
Just take a look at the expenses I would have had to bear to understand that an autoresponder like arpReach, as a self-hosted software, would no longer have a great future.
Therefore, following the example of large groups such as ActiveCampaign, and many others, Kevin Polley decided to create a club of loyal customers to gradually lead towards the goal of converting arpReach from self-hosted software to software installed on its own servers, precisely like ActiveCampaign, Aweber, etc.
Given also the costs he had to bear for innovation, and imposing high costs on all those who could have supported his initiative, he began to cut the dead branches that could not have yielded him much from the point of view.
Dati anche i costi che ha dovuto sopportare per l'innovazione, ed imponendo costi elevati per tutti coloro che avrebbero potuto supportare la sua iniziativa, ha incominciato a tagliare i rami secchi che non avrebbero potuto rendergli molto from an economic point of view, or to ask for exorbitant sums in the form of blackmail, because they need fresh capital.
So here's what Mr. had in mind. Kevin Polley when he instructed his thugs, to make sure that clients like me got out the money, but I didn't accept his game, what ever it takes.
An index that clearly proves what I am saying is also given by the fact that for the version of arpReach that I was selling, it no longer has an affiliate program, a sign that if such a program is created in the future, it will have only for the purpose of selling the new version of the software.
But Mr Kevin Polley, despite being, in his view as an entrepreneur, free to act as he sees fit, even using chocolatier tricks to line his pockets, probably believes that these strategies of his will work.
If you then try to search for arpReach on Google, in addition to finding my site, but I hope not for long, you will also find these websites of people who are quite disappointed by arpReach:
- Best alternatives to arpReach by SourceForge
- A bad experience with arpReach
- Why I don't use arpReach anymore