Regular readers will remember my AWeber review not too long ago. AWeber is a mailing list provider that I've used since last November to host several different mailing lists. The price is great, only $20/month gives you what the industry calls “unlimited autoresponders”, which is a bit deceiving, actually. An autoresponder is a mailing list that sends a sequence of messages to each person who signs up for the list, according to a schedule you specify (say first message immediately, second message the next day, third message four days after that, etc.) But you don't have to use your autoresponders that way if you don't want. I have autoresponders that are just regular mailing lists — they just broadcast messages to the current subscribers. That's how some people read this blog, in fact — I use an AWeber feature that automatically converts new entries in my RSS feed into an email that is broadcast to the memwg-blog list (see the instructions at the end for subscribing).
Anyhow, I was poking through the AWeber support section and I see that they offer a free test drive of their system, and I now remember signing up for it myself and choosing AWeber because of it. If you're interested in trying AWeber for yourself, here's the form to subscribe to the test drive:
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One of the things you won't see on any of my mailing lists (the main one is my sort-of-monthly AdSense newsletter) are AdSense ads. If you read the AdSense terms and conditions, you'll see that Google refers specifically to “Web pages” and “sites” and prohibits you from displaying AdSense ads anywhere else. This of course makes perfect sense, because AdSense must be able to crawl your pages in order to figure out what they're about, and they can't do that with emails sent out to a private list.
So if you do manage a list and you want to make money from AdSense with the list, what do you do? Simple, you place content on your site and link to it from within an email that you broadcast to the list. You don't have to link to the page from anywhere else on your site, the AdSense crawler will find the page automatically the first time someone (which, as I've said before, should be you!) loads it in their browser.
Be careful, though, because as soon as the AdSense crawler gets its hands on the page's URL it will pass it to Google's main crawler, the Googlebot. If you actually want to keep the page private and out of the search index, you'll have to exclude that page from the Googlebot. Don't do a general exclusion, however, otherwise you'll block the AdSense crawler, too, so be sure to specify just the Googlebot. (If you use a robots.txt file, Google supports an extended syntax that disallows all crawlers and specifically allows only certain crawlers in. I can provide more detailed instructions in another post if anyone's interested.)
Of course, it's better to get most of your revenue-generating pages into the search engines, so normally a content page with AdSense isn't something you'll want to exclude. Sometimes, though, it's good to make your subscribers feel special by giving them access to stuff that the general public can't get. You can do a hybrid approach: make the content available to your subscribers for a limited time period, then open it up to the general public. They get first peek, you get the benefit of the long tail by effectively reusing your own content.
Eric Giguere is the contextual advertising expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and Uncommon AdSense. You can read this blog by mail if it's more convenient for you, just send a blank email to memwg-blog@aweber.com to subscribe.