Hi Mark,

> I notice that the newsletter is actually
> emailed out as a PDF attachment. Does this
> cause any problems? Are there ISPs (AOL
> comes to mind) that strip all attachments?

We haven't had too many problems. Different email accounts do treat things differently, so you have to become aware of how different email accounts treat different types of email. I have several email accounts which I use myself for "testing" purposes, to try to make sure the email gets through for several different types of email systems.

By the way, I went to a lot of effort to figure out a system which would work with many different email systems.... So I don't want to give the impression it's necessarily easy.

> I also see that there is no archives
> available and I understand the reasoning
> behind this. Do you think that this is a
> "turn off" to not have a private
> site with archives and other special
> features. I also understand that what is
> being sold is the information in the
> newsletter not a lot of bells and whistles.

We wanted to give people the opportunity to "try" it out at a low price - that's why we have the monhtly subscription rate. People can just subscribe for a month if they like, then unsubscribe if they don't like it.

If we had all the archives available, then some people would subscribe for a month, get all the back issues then unsubscribe. Then they might wait a year, and do it again. That wouldn't be fair to the other subscribers....

There's a little bit more about this topic on our Frequently Asked Questions page at http://www.sowpub.com/greatideas/TGIL-FAQ.html

By the way, I print out and keep all my issues of The Great Ideas Letter in a big 3-ring binder. That way, it's easy to leaf through the earlier ideas.... Quickly leafing through all the back issues is a great way to "inspire" new business ideas in what you're doing! Seeing a lot of different and unusual business ideas in quick succession helps to "stimulate" your brain to think along similar lines.... (For subscribers, try it and see!)

> The reason I ask these questions is that I'm
> trying to launch my own paid newsletter (not
> a competitor to Great Ideas) and it has
> literally been one problem after another.
> The majority of the issues are problems with
> web design, setting up the owners area,
> content management, etc.

Well, ours is not a "membership site" - it's really a newsletter (delivered via PDF format), so we don't have some of the problems that you seem to be mentioning. Of course, sending out many emails with attachments has its own difficulties to overcome!

We did set up a small "membership" section here on Sowpub once - this was a couple of years ago, when Gordon Alexander ran the "Study Group Forum". Buying one of our products at that time gained you access to our special members-only forum, where Gordon would share with us a practical daily lesson in marketing. To help set that up, I used Locked Area Lite http://www.locked-area.com . It's very basic, though - to set up a full membership web site today I would probably use a full software solution for the whole site....

Maybe others know of some good software you could use to set up a membership web site?

- Dien Rice


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