In my previous post about starting an online business with a newsletter I explained the necessarity and importance of a newsletter, when you start your online business. And I named the WordPress Theme OptimizePress* and I want to digg a little deeper in this short post about the features of OptimizePress and reasonable and cheaper alternatives. In this post I might use some techy terms and I know that many readers may have the fear, that WordPress, OptimizePress and all the other stuff is just for geeks and programmers. That’s not true at all! The prove follows: as employee I created a website for a little local community called „Groothusen“, mostly run by one 65 years old guy without any experience in using the Internet. After just 2 hours he understood completely how to use WordPress, create new pages, insert images into texts and all other functions for daily use. The website is active since 2009 and still run by this man. I’ve never heard of any problems, just because WordPress is so easy to use. So also when you don’t know how to program – which is totally fine! – WordPress is the system of your choice, so is OptimizePress. Of course you can contact me or leave a comment, if I’m getting to geeky.

Why OptimizePress is so great

I think for any online business, that sells a product (regardless which kind of product) should consider using OptimizePress. It’s a premium WordPress theme, which is incredibly easy to install and very well documented. The developer James Dyson puts a lot of effort in it, to enlarge the features and possibilities for you as a user. But let’s get to the point, what is OptimizePress about?

You surely know all these advertising pages where you can download a free ebook or a video after signing up to a mailing list. That’s exactly, what you can easily create with OptimizePress. Think about this for a moment. From the above mentioned blogpost you know the importance of your mailing list. And how do you get people to subscribe to such a mailing list? Exactly, if you offer them free value and content. OptimizePress comes with prebuild pages, that you can create with only a few mouse clicks, without the need to write code at all. All images and texts are easily editable in an editor.

Those pages are just what you want! You want to use a video or a free ebook as a gift to people, who sign up to your newsletter. That’s the absolute best start for building a relationship with your followers and use the mailing list for your next marketing campaigns.

I don’t want to explain deeper, what OptimizePress is about, because that would blow up this post immense. I suggest, that you check out the website of OptimizePress* to get more information.

Build your mailing list with other tools

Ok, so OptimizePress is a great way to sell a product or to giveaway bonus content to mailing list subscribers. But what if don’t have any free content to give away and sell no products? That’s two points, you should definitely work on, to get your online business up and running. But it’s another topic, so I don’t want to discuss this right now. You can benefit from another great advantage, that WordPress gives us.

For any mailing list you need a auto responder service like Mailchimp or Aweber. I’m using the free account of Mailchimp right now. It comes with some restrictions like the maximum number of mails I can send every month, but for the start of my online business, it’s totally sufficient. For both services exit plugins, that can be directly integrated in your WordPress blog. In my sidebar you’re seeing the WordPress Mailchimp Integration plugin from WPMU Dev. It costs $19, but it is totally worth it. And it’s a lot cheaper than OptimizePress, just compare the prices. This plugin can be placed in any widget area on my page. This is related to your theme, what widget areas are support, but mostly you are very damn flexible with this plugin. Then you create a list in Mailchimp, which will contain your addresses (I’ll cover that in my first newsletter) and assign this list to your plugin.

And that’s it!

The plugin is working and all subscribers will be automatically added to your list. The great thing is, that visitors who are already subscribed, won’t see the plugin anymore. So you don’t annoy visitors with irrelevant content. If you sign up for my mailing list (which I’d really appreciate) to get more valuable information, please don’t be irritated, that there’s an email address from Denksport IT showing up. This is my company that I founded in April 2012, which is behind my online business. So that’s no spam, scam, ham or whatever, it’s just me 😉

For people like me, who don’t have to sell any products (right now), this way is great to easily build a mailing list to base the business on.

I hope, this post is not to geeky, but if so, don’t hesitate to contact me or leave a comment!
* = Affiliate Links