I spent the better part (actually all of it) of my weekend on finding and removing bugs from WP Responder. There have been more problems in the plugin that I previously thought. I just couldn’t get myself to release the plugin knowing that these bugs exist in the plugin.

Some other bugs I have recently found and removed:

• In the new e-mail broadcast page, clicking on disable WYSIWYG editor and then click on enable again creates an additional text box below the WYSIWYG editor.
• All kinds of email delivery such as broadcasts,  blog posts, post series, autoresponder series are delayed by [offset of the timezone at which you - the user is  located].
• When the subscriber subscribes to your newsletter the Subscription Confirmed e-mail does not have the link to the manage subscription page (reported by a user).
• When you schedule a broadcast and then try to reschedule it, it always says you are trying to schedule the broadcast in the past.
• When you schedule a broadcast with HTML disabled and then edit the broadcast again, the HTML is shown to be enabled.
• When you select the attach images option in the new broadcast page, the settings is not saved and is set to enabled always.

What’s New In WP Responder 4.9.1?

I know I said there will be no new features in the plugin but a little foresight demanded that I implement these two features.

Update Notifications

Some of the users of WP Responder have been downloading the plugin from the WP Responder website. Some of you have been downloading it from the WordPress plugin extend website. Currently it is not possible for me to issue updates on the plugin to all of you. So I have implemented a new feature to automatically check for a new update periodically with my server and then notify you by e-mail when an update is available.

Tutorial Series

Apart from the update notifications I have also implemented a tutorial series feature. The plugin will automatically send you a series of articles by e-mail showing you how to use it and get the most out of it after you activate it. Optional of course.

When Will I Release This Plugin?

Some time this week. There is still a lot of testing  to be done. I anticipate the testing and debugging to be finished this week completely.

I want this plugin myself!

Here’s the strange thing. I am dying to get started using this plugin. This plugin is beginning to get awesome even for me. There is so much I can do with it. I am sure you are looking forward to it too.

Look forward to it! Stay tuned!

I released version 4.8 of WP Responder . Since then I have received may emails from users of the plug-in regarding problems in the plug-in. It has been one hell of a week for me. I have seen more than a 1000 downloads for the plug-in in less than 5 days.

What’s New In This Version

Below is a brief layout of the new features in this version:

1. HTML Email Templates
2. External SMTP Server Facility For All Outgoing Email
3. Customize Email Sent Out For Blog Posts

Missing Confirmation Link Download Problems

Many users have emailed me saying that when they filled out their name and email address in the subscription form on the plug-in website they received an email that did not have a email address verification URL. This happened almost entirely in Gmail email addresses. Gmail seems to strip out URLs that are very long. If the server where you installed WP Responder has a long domain name then many of your subscribers will not be able confirm their subscriptions.

This is a huge problem obviously. Rest assured I have fixed in and will be releasing a new version of WP Responder. Very soon. How soon? Read on..

Why So Many Bugs?

I don’t have a good answer to this question :) I started creating this plug-in in mid 2009 to learn how to create wordpress plug-ins. I wasn’t aware of a lot of of the wordpress API features and wasn’t as experienced in programming as I am today. I created this because I needed it for my own website. I was not old enough to get credit cards to pay for an Aweber subscription. It looked as if none of the other plug-in developers understood email marketing as well as I did. (pats sell on the back)

However, sometimes it ALARMS ME to read the code I wrote an year ago! Yes there are many bugs in this plug-in and I AM testing this plug-in in the time that I have available (which is obviously not a lot!) . I need to eat food and keep a roof over my head, go out on dates with my girl (as soon as I get one), and generally..have a life. Which is why I need your help to make this plug-in problem free. You can help by reporting as many bugs as you can as you find them through the bug reporting form within the plug-in ( WordPress Admin –> [Newsletters] –> Dashboard ).

Next Version

The next version of WP Responder will be released……tomorrow!

Version 4.9 will be released tomorrow. This is because I’m seeing a huge number of downloads for this plug-in. There are some really big flaws in the plug-in at the moment that will keep you from reaching all of your subscribers. I really really want to make this plug-in work for my users. I want you all to experience the most success you can with this plug-in. May all of your build insanely huge audiences and then make millions for yourselves and your family. With WP Responder you can finally do it without spending a single penny on an email marketing service.

Download Now!

You can download the latest version of WP Responder email newsletter and follow up autoresponder plug-in at its new website.

An email marketing platform is a software or a service used to create a newsletter. The platform allows you to schedule email broadcasts to your newsletter subscribers, schedule follow up email messages to be sent to a subscriber after a pre determined period of time.

The home for your newsletter. Many consider it to be the foundation of an online business. The choice of service or software to use for email marketing is VERY important because once you start gathering subscribers, moving your newsletter to a new service or software may

1. cost money – you may have to hire a web developer to export the subscribers from the database. This is if your autoresponder software or service doesn’t have a export to CSV file feature.
2. cost time - you have to wait on your web developer to export the subscribers from your web application to a csv file.
3. cost subscribers – third party email marketing service require subscribers to confirm joining your newsletter again if you are importing them with a csv file. They do this to ensure that spammers cannot misuse their service by importing vast databases of email addresses that they don’t have permission to contact. This prevents their servers and ip addresses (which cost money) from getting blacklisted by spam directories. But requiring subscribers to opt-in again will surely cause you to lose some of them.

The choice of email marketing software is like buying a laptop. You do it once and hopefully don’t change for a long long time.

The Email Marketing Platform CheckList

Below are some features that are necessary beyond the very basic functionality of a email newsletter software of taking subscribers and sending broadcasts.

Exporting Subscribers – You don’t want your newsletter held hostage by a software or service. Make sure the platform you choose has the functionality to export your subscribers to a .csv file. The format (CSV) in which the subscribers are exported is important too because other software or services recognize that format.

Autoresponder – When running a newsletter you want to give your subscribers the feel that they are getting personalized attention. This can be done only if you have a follow up autoresonder feature with which you can schedule follow up email to your subscribers.

Custom Fields – As part of finding out which of your efforts are getting the most results, you would to attach some attributes to your subscribers. The attribute may be the website from which the subscriber landed on your website before subscribing to your newsletter. Your email marketing software should let you add single line text box, mulitple choice and hidden custom fields.

Scheduling Broadcasts – The email marketing software should not dictate your working schedule. You don’t want to be awake at 12am to send a broadcast to your subscribers for your product launch. This means the email newsletter software should allow you to schedule the email broadcast to go out at a particular time and go home.

Get HTML code for subscription form – To get as many subscribers as possible you want to put the subscription form on your blog, on a HTML landing page, within a blog post or anywhere. Your platform should allow you to do this. This means the email marketing platfom should have a screen where you can get the HTML code for the subscription form.

Third Party Autoresponders

Below are some autoresponder services that are highly reputed 2 of which I have used in the past.

1. Aweber – This is the most popular email marketing service. The de facto standard for online autoresponder service. Has the more features than any other autoresponder service. I terminated the account because I didn’t need it anymore.
2. GetResponse – Very similar in features and pricing to Aweber.
3. MailChimp - This is a very good email autoresponder service if you are just starting out. It allows you to have upto 500 subscribers for free. In the free account they insert an ad for their service in your outgoing email.

Which one is for you?

If you are short on cash go with MailChimp. Use their autoresponder feature judiciously to make some money, reinvest your earnings to upgrade your account.If you can afford to spend money, go with Aweber. They are very easy to use and have more features, especially the email analytics feature, than any other autoresponder.

Advantage of 3rd Party Email Newsletter Software:

Higher Deliverability: Paid autoresponder services have an agreement with the major ISPs so that emails that are sent by their clients don’t get blacklisted as spam. Emails that are sent using these services don’t land in the Junk mail folder or rejected on receipt.

Actually, the deliverability between a self hosted and a paid autoresponder service is the same. All email that is sent by a self hosted email autoresponder will get delivered, initially. However with self hosted email autoresponders, there is a higher risk of your server getting blacklisted as spam in some spam server directory like spamhaus. When that happens your email deliverability will go down as a lot of subscribers will either not receive your email or will get them in the junk email folder

Cost Can Be Predicted: With third party autoresponders, you will not have unforeseen expenses. The cost of Aweber for a year starting with 2000 subscribers and growing at 100 subscribers a day can be predicted.

Disadvantages of Hosted Email Marketing Tools:

Charge By Subscriber Count – Most autoresponder services charge depending on the number of subscribers in your newsletter. More the subscribers you get, the costlier it becomes. It used to be the case that it costed $19 a month whether you had 1000 or 100,000 subscribers at Aweber. But you can’t get that pricing anymore.

Importing Lists Require Confirmation From Subscribers – Sometimes you may want to import subscribers from another email autoresponder service through a CSV file. When you do this with paid autoresponder services like Aweber, they will send an email to each subscribers in your import file confirming if they want to be in your new newsletter. This is a problem because you will lose some subscribers as a result of this import.

Self Hosted Email Newsletter Software

Self hosted email autoresponders are web applications that you install in your web server.

PHPList – This is a free open source software. It is the oldest and the most widely used one. Unfortunately it is extremely user-unfriendly. It can be difficult to use. The subscription form code cannot be generated and copied to your own web page if you don’t have knowledge of HTML as PHPList provides its own subscription page even which is a bit difficult to customize. You can use it if you are comfortable with editing HTML code.

WP Responder WordPress Plugin – This is the plugin I created for my blog. I needed an alternative to buying an autoresponder service and the available RSS feed to Email services like FeedBurner and FeedBlitz. With this plugin you can create newsletters, create follow up messages for subscribers to receive, provide email subscription to your blog, use blog posts as follow up email, provide subscription to particular categories in your blog.

Which one is for you?

I recommend using WP Responder to build a newsletter because it is much easier to install this plugin – you don’t have to create an additional database. The installation is the same as any other wordpress plugin. You can easily learn to use it even if you don’t know coding. I made WP Responder with Internet Marketers in mind. I took the best features from Aweber and added them to the WordPress dashboard in a way you would expect them to be there. Click here to download WP Responder.

One of the most important part of running an online business is making decisions. Our everyday work involves making many decisions – decisions on which market to target, which contractor to choose, which employee to hire, etc. These decisions, I am sure you agree, are to be made on sound logical thinking void of any bias or emotion to make the right decision, make more money and achieve our goals.

Our brains were not made to think. They were made to react. The first time we touched fire and burnt our skin we learnt what to do the next time we encounter fire. The ability to think is just a side effect just like the ability to play awesome 3D action games on a personal computer that was made to run word processors and spreadsheets. Back in the day this serves us well – we needed to react instantly. The world was a dangerous place and these reactions helped us survive.

Now We React Less, Think More

Today we don’t do as much reacting as we used to do. We do a lot more thinking. We are not in danger of being eaten by a tiger. Our brain is wired to find quick and dirty reactive solutions which are not always the best solutions. These are good when we are trying to survive in a rain forest but not so good when trying to negotiate a contract or forming a business deal.

Most people attempt to solve problems by playing around with the issues at hand and then making decisions based on faulty logic, biases, emotions, cognitive dissonance resolution and other shortcuts. We may rationalize our decisions afterward, but in reality our solutions are based almost entirely on gut feelings, emotional reactions, and hidden biases. As a result, our solutions tend to be no more valid than the architectural designs built by a child playing with blocks.

Almost everyone makes irrational decisions

Most people make decisions about a problem at hand based on faulty logic, biases, emotional and reactive thinking. A lot of time our decisions are just reactions. Once we make the decision and act on it, we rationalize our decisions after we made them gathering logical reasons to support the decision. But in reality our solutions came from gut feelings and emotional reactions and hidden biases which we are not aware that we have. As a result we make many irrational decisions in our professional and personal life.

One of the many reasons we don’t make well thought out decisions is because of biases. In this  post series I will go into the various factors that color our decisions and keep us from making correct decisions in our personal and professional lives.

There are many biases under which we act. One such bias is confirmation bias.

Confirmation Bias

It is a tendency of people to prefer information that confirms preconceptions, hypotheses whether or not they are true. It will cause us to reject and forget evidence that proves the contrary of our biases. It makes us ignore/devaule information/evidence that is in contrary to our beliefs. This bias causes people to prefer information that confirms their preconceived notions. It makes you see what you want to see. Confirmation biases lead to faulty decision making.

For example: you may believe that astrology actually works. As a result of confirmation bias you’ll remember only those instances when when the prediction in the astrology column came true and forget the majority of the cases when the prediction was very wrong. As a result you will continue to believe astrology has some base in reality.

What are the effects of confirmation bias?

1. Creates beliefs on false premises

If you act under confirmation bias you will believe claims that aren’t true – they have no basis in reality. We all get some vague hypothesis in our minds. When acting under confirmation bias you will seek only the evidence that proves the hypothesis to be true. Even if you come across evidence that clearly contradicts the hypothesis. You will come across evidence that will prove the contrary but you will ignore than and will not remember them. So you will believe a claim or hypothesis that is not true.

To make matters worse, our beliefs aren’t isolated. Our sub conscious mind forms beliefs by inference based on existing beliefs. Beliefs combine together to form more beliefs. More faulty irrational decisions.

2. Creates Outdated Beliefs

It can cause outdated beliefs. A belief you held would have been true at a time. But because of confirmational bias you will ignore evidence that built up over time that show that your belief is no longer true.

For example, let’s say you believe that creating and submitting youtube is the best way to market a blog. You tirelessly make videos everyday and submit them to youtube. Although it worked once or twice, you will ignore all the e

3. Keeps You Acting In Outdated Behavior

When you have outdated beliefs you keep acting in old ways. For example, long after buying television advertising isn’t working you may keep buying television advertising when doing so is not profitable anymore. Under confirmation bias. You will have forgotten all the instances when your company incurred a loss and will only remember the instances when there was some profit.

4. Shows you a pattern where there isn’t any pattern

Confirmation bias makes you see patterns where there are no patterns.

5. Gives you fictional experiences

Researchers at California Institute of technology conducted a experiement as a part of a research:

They scanned the brains of 21 volunteer wine novices. They were administer tiny tastes of wine, measuring the senseation in the medical orbitofrontal cortex, the part of the brain where flavor responses register. The subjects were told the price of the wines without their knowledge they tasted the same wine twice.

They invariably preferred the one they thought was more expensive.

Why should you be concerned about confirmation bias?

1. For A Realistic View Of The World – Our beliefs act as filters of reality. To have a realistic view of the world we must question our beliefs deliberately and consciously and find out if they are based in reality or are they just a result of having sought confirmation for some vague notion that entered our mind.
2. To Make Rational Decisions - Confirmation biases cloud our decisions. When we form beliefs on this kind of bias, we delude ourselves. We always form decisions based on beliefs we already hold

What are the real world products of confirmation bias?

1. Psychics – A psychic who claims to know about your deceased relative will give very general descriptions about the relative and their relationship with the client. They say something like “why do I sense this distance” and the client goes “yeah, ronnie didn’t like it when I talk about our relationship”. The client mistakenly believes that the psychic actually has “psychic” powers.
2. Lawyers – The job of the lawyer is to gather evidence and make the case for a particular side of a court proceeding. Whether or not that’s true. Gather evidence that proves it – confirms it and present it at the court.
3. Politicians – Politicians make a living by telling you what the public want to hear. Politicians appease the public sentiment even if the public supports and wants slavery. Politicians sell hope -”change we can believe in”. They echo the opinion of the general public and get the most votes.
4. Placebos – Placebo are medicinal tablets used to “treat” patients. These tablets are basically nothing. It is usually a capsule filled with sugar. The patient is told that the capsule is a very powerful medicine and they should absolutely take the course of the treatment religiously. The patient doesn’t know that it’s an inert tablet and somehow they get better anyway.
5. Magic tricks
6. Wine tasters
7. Conspiracy theories (moon landing, world trade center, etc)
8. Books like Outliers, The Tipping Point, Freakonomics, Superfreakonomics

What can you do about confirmation bias?

1. Ignore The polarized, Neutralize Your Customers/Audience

There are some people you simply cannot persuade, ignore them. As for the others, , put your audience and customers in a state of persuadability. That is why before you persuade your prospects to buy from you or trying to persuade your blog subscribers or newsletter subscribers, you must:

1. Establish Common Ground: Gain their attention and trust by establishing your common ground. Make it clear to them that you share their views and values.
2. Present Your Logic: present your arguments that logically lead your audience to the conclusion.
3. Call To Action: Ask your audience to perform the action that you want them to – buy your product or service, subscribe to your newsletter, donate to your cause or whatever else action you want them to take.

2. Clean out your belief system

You already have many beliefs made on confirmation bias. To  make sound decisions you must have a realistic view of the world. For a realistic view of the world you must form beliefs objectively without bias. You have to take the time to actively question your beliefs. It takes a great deal of courage and effort to question your most fundamental beliefs.

Examine your feelings closely and be brutally honest with yourself. Don’t worry about someone reading what you’ve written down. First get it out. The truth really does set you free. Sometimes we think we believe something that the majority of society believes but we really believe something else.

This means you must purposely set time aside for a few days, sit quietly, grab a pen and paper and start examining your beliefs consciously.

3. Analyze information objectively

We get information from all kinds of sources – television, friends, colleagues, newspapers, rss feeds, websites are some of them. We make decisions based on the information we receive. Start analyzing the information objectively – check the sources.

I’ve found that other people are a major source of illogical, distorted and biased opinions disguised as facts. Many people will not take it lightly when you question their every opinion and may get offended and shun from being open to you. Tread carefully.