There are no stumbling stones

THERE ARE NO STUMBLING STONES THERE ARE ONLY STEPPING STONES Jonathan Leger

COURTESY OF LEARNFROMJON.NET - PRIVATE BUSINESS COACHING FROM A MULTI-MILLION DOLLAR INTERNET MARKETER + ACCESS TO PREMIUM AND EXCLUSIVE TOOLS!

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I've had my share of problems in running a business online, let me tell you. Sometimes bad things happen and you just have to deal with them. It's been said that what doesn't kill you only makes you stronger, and I have to agree. Your ability to react and handle problems when they come up is key to running a business online. If you freak out when things go wrong you won't last long in this business.

And what could possibly go wrong when running a business online? Lots of things.

Google can suddenly change their search algorithm, and your site that was sitting pretty on page one of the results is now buried on page seven. Your traffic takes a hit and so does your bottom line.

When you have your own product, you can go from being the only kid on the block to being one of a dozen competing products in the market – almost overnight. Suddenly your soaring profits start to go south and you have to figure out what to do.

I've dealt with both of those situations many times.

The difference between the brick and mortar world of offline business and online business is primarily one of speed. Things happen much faster online because it's just so much easier to build things online. When you want to build a retail store in the offline world it costs you millions – or tens of millions – of dollars. It takes time

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and planning to find the property, make arrangements with the city, get inspections and clearance and plans and construction crews and on and on and on... it can take months just to plan before you ever get started.

By contrast, a website that sells retail items can be put up in a matter of a couple of days. That's the good side of the speed coin.

The bad side of that coin is that disaster can strike suddenly. Malware injected into your website can bring your business to a halt. Hardware failure can do the same. I once had a server hosted at a data center – one of the biggest in the country – and the data center went up in flames, melting everyone's servers down to nothing. Was I prepared for that? Yeah, I had backups. Did it take time to recover. You bet it did. Things happen fast online, for the good and the bad.

When things go wrong, what do you do? Rather than just lay out principles, let me give you a recent personal experience. I think that will better illustrate the mindset you need to get into.

This story starts with a little autoresponder company called Aweber... (okay, not so little, I know).

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WHEN YOUR AUTORESPONDER FAILS YOU This year, 2015, I am doing a lot of reorganizing and redirecting of my business.

I'm streamlining and getting back in closer touch with my email list and customers.

I'm putting a lot of energy and focus into training and coaching, working to keep everything under one roof (the www.LearnFromJon.net roof).

Things had gotten rather fragmented over the last 10 years. I used to use AWeber for my email list management. They weren't bad... I thought. And I guess they're not awful. But they are lacking.

Here's what happened: I wanted to combine all of my lists from all of my products and projects into one big list of contacts and customers. It just made more sense to me to get everyone onto the same follow-up sequence – sending lots of valuable information in between promotions. I want to educate people, and that's how I like to do it.

So I made one “master list” inside my AWeber account and started looking for a way to move all of my current, double-opted in list members into it.

I couldn't.

AWeber didn't offer any way for me to put all of my contacts into one big list while still keeping them on their individual product lists (for upgrade

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announcements and things specific only to certain customers). They didn't even offer a way to export all of my lists all at once. I was floored. I thought surely the biggest autoresponder company in the world would have an easy way to do this.

They don't.

As it turns out you have to:

1. Get a third party tool that will export all of your lists together (unless I

wanted to manually export almost 100 lists and merge them all into one big one myself) or write a script to do it yourself – which is what I ended up having to do.

2. You have to import all of those contacts into another list.

Okay, so step one was tedious and difficult (AWeber's API is slooooooooow), but I got it done. Then I went to import my list into a master list.

That's when I found out that you can't. Not without having every single contact opt-in again. “But wait a minute!” I said. “All of my contacts are already doubleopted in! Why do they have to do it again?”

I called customer support. No help. I talked to the manager. No help. I talked to his manager. No help. They won't let you do it. It's nonsense, but you can't do it.

So I figure well, okay, I'll just get as may people as possible to opt-into the new master list and get them on my follow-up sequence. Anyone who doesn't do that

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is already on my other lists and I'll just have to keep including everybody in the broadcast mailers together (*sigh*).

So I emailed my entire list and let them know that I would be sending them an invitation to my new, master list, and to watch for it in their inboxes.

Then I went to import the list. I had already done a small test run, so I knew thought everything would work out fine. It was only when I went to import all 60,000 people on my list that AWeber told me that it can't do that. Well, it didn't really say anything – it just choked and failed.

So I cut my list down into smaller blocks and tried to import 10,000 at a time. That was when AWeber finally decided to inform me that I can only import 2,000 contacts a day. Wouldn't that have been a nice thing to tell me on the import page?!?! But they didn't.

So I got back on the phone and went back and forth with support. They weren't going to remove my import limit. Said it was against policy. I griped and griped and talked to managers and told them how long I had been with them and how much money I had paid them over the years and how I KNEW they could do it because I'm a programmer and am well aware of how software works and what they could do if they wanted to.

They finally relented and let me import all 60,000. Of which only about 5,000 got onto the new master list. Why? Because AWeber's delivery is not as good as you might think... how do I know this? Because I'm on my own system now and have

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reached many times more of my list members than I ever did when using AWeber – but more on that in a minute.

The lesson I learned from all of this is one I already knew but just hadn't faced in a while: being stuck with one company is usually a bad idea. You're at their mercy, and they can cut you off, shut you down or halt your business on any misunderstanding or whim they may have.

So be very careful when choosing who you do business with. Make sure that their goals align with your goals. And remember that the bigger the corporation, the less likely you are to get in contact with people that can make decisions quickly. Remember that discussion we had earlier about speed? That's a real pitfall with doing business with a big company online. Big companies move slowly, and when you need speed, they don't have it.

After all of this rigmarole I decided it was time to build my own autoresponder. I had wanted to do that for some time anyway, and this was the last straw that made me decide to push the project out of my head and onto my screen.

Little did I know that my problems were just beginning...

Creating the software to handle my email contacts was the easy part. It wasn't easy – many hundreds of hours of programming and planning went into it – but it was certainly easier than dealing with the other companies I had to deal with.

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When sending large amounts of email out to people, you have two choices: you can send it out from your own server(s) or you can contract with a third party to do the sending for you. I decided I would contract out the sending because that just made more sense at the time I thought.

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MORE BIG COMPANIES FAIL ME My first choice was Amazon Simple Email Service (SES). It runs on Amazon's famous Cloud. It's fast and reliable. It's cheap (10 cents per 1,000 emails). It had an API that was pretty straightforward.

So I integrated it into my system. At first things seemed to be going well. The testing was working out right, the emails were getting delivered to the test addresses and so on.

When it came time to move into production levels, I had to ask Amazon for a higher quota and daily send limit.

They wouldn't give it to me.

I asked them why – they gave me a canned answer from a form letter. I pushed and pressed and showed them that I was a multi-million dollar, A+ Better Business rated company that had been in existence for 10 years. I showed them screenshots from AWeber with my ridiculously low complaint rates.

I finally got a non-canned message back saying that they felt I would be violating their terms of service with the kind of email I sent. When I asked for them to be more specific, they wouldn't be. I read the terms – I wasn't in violation of them in

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any way that I could make out. Besides, I know for a fact that Amazon is used by some BIG spammers, so it really left me dumbfounded that they wouldn't let a long-standing, highly rated legitimate business use their services. But they wouldn't.

Remember what I said about the need to be able to react quickly when running a business online? Here was an opportunity for me to put that into practice.

Now, I already had a lot of hours into the project. Hours spent making it work with Amazon SES. I could have given up or let my anger and frustration over Amazon's decision prevent me from going forward. But that's not who I am. Sure, I was mad.

Sure, I felt unjustly treated. But Amazon is a huge corporation (remember what I said about those?), and there was no way they were going to budge.

So I moved on. That's a lesson you definitely need to learn. How to move on when something doesn't work. Don't keep beating your head against that wall. Your skull may be hard, but it won't break bricks. Better to find a way around the wall so you can keep moving, even if it takes a little while to make your way to the other side of it.

It was back to email service researching. After digging around I found SendGrid.

They seemed like the answer to my problem! They were just as cheap as Amazon and offered even better integration and tracking. Forget Amazon! I found something better.

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So I signed up with them and did some coding. Not a lot, just enough to make sure it was going to work. It was... until I needed some support from them. I had a question about something in the system. I emailed them. They didn't respond. I emailed them again. No response. I couldn't do this without a bit of help from them, so I had to research yet another email service provider.

And I was so glad I did. Because that's when I found Mandrill. Mandrill is owned

by Mail Chimp, and is super fast, super powerful and very affordable. The first 12,000 emails sent per month through their system were free, and it was very easy to work with their system and integrate it into my own. Their approval was automatic, and their system used an algorithm to determine reputation rather than a human review coming from somebody who had no knowledge of my business. If the emails that were sent were well received, your account reputation improved and you were allowed to send more.

So for a couple of weeks that's who I used to send out emails to my list in my awesome new system. I couldn't have been happier! Mandrill's system gave my account an Excellent reputation, and my quota was 1.4 million emails an hour. Yup, their system was so happy with my sending reputation that if I had 1.4 million contacts to send to in an hour, they would let me. Wouldn't that be nice...

And then one day, out of the blue, all of a sudden, I get an email from Mandrill.

They were closing my account. There was no explanation, no request for additional information from me, nothing. Just BOOM, you're gone! And I had just sent out a big follow-up mailer. So all kinds of people got emails from me with links that weren't working. Nice...

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I emailed them asking for an explanation. I got no reply. I emailed again. No reply.

There's no phone number to call, so that wasn't an option. Just a “so long sucka!” and that was it.

So now I'd gone through AWeber, Amazon, SendGrid and Mandrill. You would think that I would just give up, right? No freakin' way! That's not who I am.

This was exactly the problem I had with AWeber. They were too big, too slow, too limited in their understanding of how the Internet Marketing business works. The same was true of Amazon, and SendGrid, and – much to my disappointment – Mandrill.

Now, I'm not saying Mandrill is a bad company. They're not. In fact, my General Manager, Amin Motin, still uses them for his list. Maybe it was the size of my list?

Maybe it was the industry I'm in that they felt was risky (despite my A+ Better Business Bureau rating and almost flawless account reputation with them). I'm not sure. But whatever it was, they were the last nail in the coffin.

I knew that I had to manage this entire operation myself. I needed to be in 100% control of the system. No third parties, no APIs, nothing.

And that's another lesson to take from this. It's an old saying, but sometimes it's just so true: If you want something done right, you have got to do it yourself!

That was yesterday morning. It was a Monday morning. I had a dentist appointment. I was getting a tooth removed. Not exactly a fun time for anyone,

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and Mandrill dropped this bomb on me just before my appointment. What would I do now?

More research. I got back from my appointment, took some ibuprofen and got back to work. This time I wanted to find out what I would need to keep the entire email system in house. I learned all kinds of awesome things about how to improve the deliverability of your emails to people, and how to let big mail providers like Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail and AOL notify you when somebody complained about something you sent. I learned how to write software to automatically remove people who complained, or people who's email addresses “bounced� (meaning the email addresses were permanently undeliverable).

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A SMALLER COMPANY TO THE RESCUE! Here's where working with smaller companies can be a powerful asset. My hosting company is www.AQHost.com. I've been with them for many years. When I need something I can talk directly to the owner of the company.

I told him that I needed an email server fast and asked him what he could do. He had a server available and was able to have it ready in less than a day and had it tied into the server where my autoresponder software resides.

Smaller companies can be more flexible and act more quickly than large ones.

That's an important lesson to remember, too. They may not have the same resources, but they're more willing to lend you the resources they have.

Sometimes getting anything done by big corporations is impossible – especially if it's even slightly out of the ordinary. Smaller companies don't have that problem.

While the new email server was being commissioned I was busy reworking the software to support both Mandrill (for the smaller accounts like Amin's and, in time, my LearnFromJon.net members), and also my own in-house email system.

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THE PHOENIX RISES FROM THE ASHES Hundreds of hours, four email delivery companies and one nimble hosting company later and my autoresponder was born. It's what I'm using now. I'm still putting the finishing touches on it before I make it available to my LearnFromJon.net members as a free part of their subscription, but it won't take long.

Every problem I ran into along the way could have been seen as a stumbling block. I could have thrown up my hands and given up at many, many points along this path. I could have beat my head against the brick walls of these giant corporations, wasting my time and energy with people who would never budge because they're just too big to care.

But I didn't do that. I found my way around them and made everything that I wanted to happen, happen.

If you don't take anything else away from this story, take away the title of this report:

There are no stumbling stones – only stepping stones.

A failure or problem often turns out to be a blessing in disguise. That was certainly the case with this situation. I am so much happier with the system the way it is now. And I have learned so much along the way that I would not have learned had

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the problems not occurred.

Was it stressful? Heck yeah!

Did it cost me time? Yes!

Money? Yes!

But in the end would I have traded any of it? No. Because the experiences have made me that much better at what I do, and reinforced what I already knew was true. There are no problems that can't be solved. You just have to be willing to step up on those stones and skip your way into success!

Remember that, and always try and do the same.

Here's to your success!

Jonathan Leger

COURTESY OF LEARNFROMJON.NET - PRIVATE BUSINESS COACHING FROM A MULTI-MILLION DOLLAR INTERNET MARKETER + ACCESS TO PREMIUM AND EXCLUSIVE TOOLS!

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