List management and Content Management Systems: CMS
9 May 2007By Len Latimer, President, Lynx Media, Inc.
If your lists are being collected on the web, the two most popular list managers used by web marketer are 1ShoppingCart.com and Aweber.com. 1Shopping Cart also offers a shopping cart with which you can link to your web site for selling products. It has special capability for recurring charges (beautiful for web subscriptions) and for digital downloads (ebooks, special reports, mp3, etc.).
1ShoppingCart offers optional double opt-in while Aweber requires double opt-in. Double opt-in means that a opt-in subscriber is sent an email which contains a link they must click to verify the opt-in. Double opt-in results in the cleanest, highest quality of lists. Most network marketers give Aweber the nod for best email delivery. Neither, of course, will put up with spam of any sort. And neither is free.
Both 1ShoppingCart and Aweber also offer unlimited autoresponders which most marketers use for relationship, drip marketing. Either can handle email blast to selected lists –such as newsletters or special offers. Both also offer easy to use scripts generators that create unblockable pop-ups or forms to paste into your web site for opt-ins. You can choose the fields for the forms such as basic name and email fields, or choose to get the entire mailing address as well as custom fields. The submit (you can and should change the text) button subscribes the reader to your autoresponder and then takes the reader to your “Thank you” page. Aweber is $19.95 a month and 1shoppingCart is $29/monthly for the autoresponders only and $59 for the basic. I’ve used 1ShoppingCart about 4 years and can highly recommend them.
I’ve been looking playing with open source CMS packages for a while now. And the two I like best are:
DotNetNuke
http://www.dotnetnuke.com/
and Drupal
http://drupal.org/
They both are solid frameworks, have tons of modules as well as third party support. Drupal is LAMP based (Linux/Apache/PHP/MySQL) and DotNetNuke is Microsoft (ASP and Microsoft SQL Server). Both are open source and free.
My favorite, DotNetNuke supports multiple parent and child portals (great for a parent publishing company with multiple publications) with a single install. And it supports Microsoft’s membership model which means that users can be assigned roles that allow them access to certain areas that you specify. Examples would be Print member/Electronic member/Newsletter Subscriber, etc. The roles can also be used to allow writers to submit articles under one role, and for other chosen roles ( such as editor) to edit and approve for publication. This works nicely for the publishing business model. DNN has won the Visual Studio Magazine Editor’s Choice award several times
DNN Modules, both included and sold by 3rd parties fairly cheaply, include shopping carts, CMS modules such as news ticklers, article management and document libraries, image galleries, surveys, RSS feeds, Google custom search, forms, wiki, Events, SEO optimization, help desk, forums, stock quotes, dynamic user directory, opt-in email, and hundreds of others. It’s pretty amazing.
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From Len Latimer, President
Lynx Media, Inc.
Web
Email: len@lynxmedia.com
Voice: (800) 451-5969 ext 107
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Subscriptions Strategy uses the Textpattern Content Management System.
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