One of my favorite tweets is by Mark Twain, “Continuous improvement is better than delayed perfection.”

But building a business foundation on theory that sucks is not the place to apply this aphorism.  You want the foundation to be fairly solid.

One of the foundational pieces of an information marketing business implemented on the internet is List Building.  All the gurus talk about making continuous improvements in the process, and I’ve been doing a bunch of experiments with varioius autoresponders to find / figure out the best.

And, working on my most recent paid project, I noticed that MailChimp and aWeber were getting up to 1/2 and up to 1/3 of attempted signups not confirming that second email.  Now, that is one heck of a big hole to have in the foundation of your business.

So it got me to thinking, why do we have double-optin?  So we can’t be accused of spamming, right?  But everbody gets accused of spamming anyway, despite the double-optin.  So what if you did single optin?  Do any real businesses use single optin instead of double optin?

Boy was I surprised at the answer to that one!  A lot of really big businesses, and several very successful information marketers, use single optin, not double.

So, my next report will be an evaluation of single-optin autoresponders and how to use them responsibly.