PANDEMICPRENEUR CHRONICLES Sept 21, 2020 & TASK LIST: WEEKEND UPDATE
I need to give you a quick update before I fall too far behind. (If you missed the previous installments of the ongoing chronicles of how I (will have) conceived, created and completed The Pandemicpreneur, visit the Saipan & Guam writers forum at https://groups.google.com/g/saipanwriters and ask to join the group)
DATELINE: SAIPAN, CNMI: It’s Monday morning at 7:30am, and I just returned from running 4 miles, barefoot, on the beach, in the rain here on Saipan. Here’s how the weekend went:
FRIDAY, SEPT 18
DONE- udate 10 posts on the jamaicans.com blog
DONE- set up siteground account based on this review https://www.whoishostingthis.com/hosting-reviews/siteground/#reviews
DONE- clean apartment for tomorrow’s 8:00am meeting
done- add mention of pandemicpreneur to Walt’s CV/media kit
DONE- set up https://www.waltgoodridge.com/store/product/pembroke-hall-primary-donation for donations to my old school in Jamaica
DONE- set up Paypal pembroke hall donation button https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_s-
SATURDAY, SEPT 19
DONE- upload Mautic 3.1 to SiteGround server
DONE!- get Mautic autoresponder to function correctly!
DONE- modify Skyline template for sending emails
SUNDAY, SEPT 20
As you can see above, on Saturday, I FINALLY got a specific feature of the Mautic software to function!! This is major! Here’s why:
Mautic is a contact management software program. Among other great features, it allows a pandemicpreneur like yourself to create and manage multiple subscriber email lists. Since I have 52 websites and about a dozen separate email lists, I need such a powerful software tool.
The power of Mautic–the feature I am most interested in–is the scheduling feature–often referred to as an “autoresponder.” In other words, a feature that allows you the ability to schedule a series of emails to be sent to a subscriber at predetermined intervals. Say, for example, someone joins the “How to Become a Pandemicpreneur” campaign mailing list at https://www.thepandemicpreneur.com. They’ll receive a “Welcome Email” 5 minutes after joining, then a “Step 1:…” email 2 days later, then a “Step 2:…” email 72 hours after that, and so on. I can achieve this scheduling through the power of a feature called a CRON JOB.
Before cron jobs, you could send emails to your list manually, or alternatively, you needed to have an “inciting incident” to activate a “send email” command in your contact management software. In other words, someone (you or a random visitor) would have to visit a site, or click a button, or open an email that included a code that activated a “send email” command in your server-side software. That’s how I accomplished this in the past.
Nowadays, however, you can simply schedule that “send email” command into a cron job located on your hosting company’s server, go to sleep, walk away (or even escape the country) and voila! the clock on the server keeps track and activates the command without human intervention. Mautic has that feature!
My website and Mautic software were previously hosted on a hosting company’s server that I now realize simply doesn’t have the features necessary to have Mautic’s cron jobs function optimally. So, I searched online for “best hosting for mautic” and discovered a great recommendation for SiteGround. (This isn’t an ad for SiteGround, but they do have an affiliate program, so if you wish to check it out and sign up, please use this link through which I’ll receive a commission:
https://www.siteground.com/index.htm?afcode=2aa60fbd5cb1bfa8e88d770df63fbfd8
Thanks!)
I set up a basic Siteground account and pointed one of my 93 domains to the new account (this requires a little bit of DNS (Domain Name Server) knowledge and manipulation, but it’s not difficult. Siteground has instructions).
Then, I downloaded the latest version of Mautic (3.1; available at https://github.com/mautic/mautic/releases/tag/3.1.0 to my laptop, unzipped the file, then uploaded it to my Siteground account, and installed it. I followed the installation instructions at
https://www.mautic.org/getting-started
and and also here:
https://docs.mautic.org/en/setup/cron-jobs
and, badabing badaboom (that’s Jerseyspeak for “voila”), IT WORKED! FINALLY!
So now, I’ve got a new situation. I’ve been using Mautic for over a year now, but have been putting off setting up the planned scheduled email campaigns for all of my lists. So, I spent most of Saturday and all of Sunday and plan to spend today (Monday) as well, catching up (planning, writing, uploading, scheduling) email campaigns for ALL of my mailing lists!
So, when I’m finished, when someone joins the PassionProfit.com, or HipHopEntrepreneur.com, or WeLoveSaipan.com or SaipanWriters.com or LifeRhymes.com mailing lists, they’ll receive a once-per-week email with tips, resources, interviews, updates and more to help them achieve their goals.
So while the creation of these cron jobs represents a slight distraction from writing content for The Pandemicpreneur book, this very email update you are reading will be modified and included in the “How to Set up a Global Mailing List as a Pandemicpreneur” chapter of the book, as well as in the associated scheduled email campaign for people who sign up to the Thepandemicpreneur mailing list (thanks to Mautic)!
Until next time, it’s back to the Cron Job mines!
Walt F.J. Goodridge
Originator of the Passionpreneur, HipHopEntrepreneur Nomadpreneur, and now Pandemicpreneur philosophies and formulas!
https://www.thepandemicpreneur.com
p.s. Don’t worry if some of the above information was a bit too technical for you. I’ll have more step-by-step details in an email course that you’ll be able to follow! Alternatively, until I create my own “how to” video of the process, you can search Youtube for “how to set up Mautic” for some great ones!
p.p.s. Remember, the universe is perfect! I need no convincing that this mautic-cron-job success, happening now, right at the outset of The Pandemicpreneur book project, is occurring for the express purpose of making the final product a bit better!