I’ve Been In IM Hell!

I’ve had my hosting company suspend my account seconds after launching my very first JV Giveaway event… I’ve experienced server crashes, and lost loads of important data – more than once… I’ve had smoke coming out of my pc, lost a couple of hard drives and there was one time I wasn’t able to see my own site from my own machine – for three long months.

Still, these last three days have been – by far – the most frustrating days in my entire marketing ‘career’…

Here’s what happened:

Due to a misunderstanding with my credit card company, my Aweber account got limited – maybe ‘blocked’ would be a better word to describe what happened, since I wasn’t able to send out messages, nor receive signups.

I have never felt this lost as long as I have been in IM.

New JV Giveaway events came along, and I wasn’t able to let my subscribers now…
I had just launched the big holiday sale at Script-N-Software World, but wasn’t
able to invite my subscribers to enjoy the ‘50% Off Everything’ campaign…
My mailbox was flooded with messages from people complaining they couldn’t
sign up in order to receive one of the many freebies I’m promoting everywhere.
(An honest apology to everyone)…

I assume you get the picture…

Fortunately, the problem has been solved now, and I’m back up and ready to go again.

This is a lesson I won’t forget overnight.

Here are a couple of things I learned:

• ‘The money is in the list’ – I already knew this was true, but I never realized exactly how true. Even for someone who has a list of thousands of so called
  ‘freebie seekers’ (98% of my subscribers base is built through JV Giveaway events).

• Never put all your eggs in one basket. I already knew this was the golden rule for hosting accounts, but now I’ve learned it’s no different for your autoresponder
  account. You’ve got to have a backup plan.

  I’m intending to set up an account at another autoresponder service, just in case. Nothing fancy, nothing expensive – just to have a backup list in a situation like this. Not that I’m planning to let it happen to me again, but sometimes it’s just not in your hands…

  (I’ve had some bad experiences with self-hosted autoresponder scripts - 
  my shared hosting accounts won’t allow me to send out mail anyway – so
  I can’t say that’s an option. If you have some good tips, feel free to let me know!)

• I’m a louzy marketer – but I already knew that. Without my mailing lists, I’m nowhere.

  An example: in spite of all the work I put into my JV Giveaways site (and all it’s extra’s), I managed to get only 2 or 3 referrals for new events in three days.
  (I got these referrals through Twitter – I’m not yet a seasoned Tweeter, and
  I’m still learning the Twitter ropes, but with this I’ve seen a glimpse of the potential of Twitter as a valued marketing tool.)

• I really need to build an extra stream of automated, recurring income,
  so I don’t have to depend on emails in order to earn some money.
  The $3/month fee I charge at AdFactoryPro isn’t going to bring food on the table, for all that matters

But it was not all bad…

Since 90% of my biz was down, I had some time to spare – which I used to
work on some side projects, like my new Twitter-related blog.
(Check it out at http://twitterknowhow.com and let me know what you think)

And after all the campaigns about building a list of paying customers,
it was kind of nice to find out that my lists of so called ‘freebie seekers’ do bring in
quite some cash. You only know what you’ve got when you lose it…

And (almost) last but not least: I’m smarter than I was before…
I just hope I remember long enough to take all the precautions needed to secure
myself and my biz, and make sure situations like these don’t paralyze my entire business anymore…

And mainly I hope that the next time I consider something to be one of those bad things
that will only happen to other people, I will remember these last three days and
take action.

You’d think I should have learned by now, wouldn’t you?!