June 6th, 2012 2:39 pm
Well, it’s been one of those weeks. Having decided to start a newsletter and do a sweepstakes, I spent a couple of weeks getting things set up for a big launch Sunday, June 3rd. Which promptly fizzled for a variety of technical reasons.
The instructions that I had left out a few critical details in the setup directions for the mailing list service, and some of the links in the first registration form didn’t work. And the Rafflecopter service didn’t really integrate very well with the newsletter signup, so I had to drop that out. Plus, I managed to leave out some other vital steps just because they dropped in the cracks. So much for the “everything you need to launch a newsletter” e-book that I bought. Actually, it isn’t all that guy’s fault. After all, I’m a programmer, and I don’t really have any excuse for not being able to figure those things out. And, naturally, I really should have allocated more time for testing things.
So if it’s looking like a somewhat botched job, well, that’s because it is. However, I’m going to soldier on anyway, and try to get things fixed. I’m really glad that I set the Violin Giveaway Sweepstakes to run for 3 months, because that (I hope) should give me enough time to recover from my n00bie mistakes. I think I have almost everything working properly now, despite the apparent lack of organization.
Currently, probably due to the initial problems with Rafflecopter, I have some subscribers who have not completed the double-opt-in process. I’m guessing that the confirmation notice ended up in their spam folders. If you have not received an email with a confirmation link, please check your spam folder for a message from howard@musicalnotesnewsletter.com. If you can’t find it, please email me and let me know, and I will try to get the incomplete signup backed out so that you can re-submit it. Meanwhile, I will try to find the incomplete entries and contact those folks by email.
It’s quite probable that there are some folks that tried to sign up, and couldn’t. And then just gave up. I don’t really have any way of knowing, unless you email me and let me know.
The first newsletter is scheduled to go out this weekend. Please stay tuned! I will try to make it worth your while.