I have added a subscription to my blog. When people click SUBMIT they are supposed to go to a THANK YOU PAGE that thanks them and tells them what to expect to confirm and all that.

I have it set up correctly with AWeber (the subscription company).

However, rather than new subscribers going to http://www.eyeonannapolis.net/thank-you (the address of the thank you page), many have been redirected to :

http://www.eyeonannapolis.net/2009/0...u-jeff-barlow/

Which is the title of a post and not the right page.

Now I do not want to publicly display the THANK YOU PAGE and up till a few moments ago, I had the page saved as a DRAFT to prevent it from displaying. I do not want to select PRIVATE (as that requires people to be signed in) and PASSWORDED is a hassle.

I just discovered that I can not display pages via the Atahualpa options. What I have done is make THANK YOU a child of ABOUT US, made it PUBLISHED, and then selected that page to not display in the options.

Does this sound like it will solve the problem?

If I can ask a favor, can a few people go subscribe and go thru the process--all I require is email and then if you can PM me here I will delete you, but the process shoudl be

Sign up, click submit, go to THANK YOU page with no ads and an explanation of what comes next, receive an email to confirm your address, once you click confirm transported to the main page of the site, and finally shortly after the confirmation receive a follow up that looks like a newsletter with three photos in the top and a smiling picture of yours truly.

Thakns
John

seems to work fine but I haven't gotten the 'newsletter' yet. I'll upate if/when I do

I signed up and it all seemed to work, up to the point of receiving a newsletter. I'll let you know if/when that happens.

Thanks guys.... I am showing that the newsletter shoudl have been sent. Now I am not sure if there is a lapse between when it is triggered to be sent and when it actually is.

Thanks

The newsletter arrived just fine.

Are you happy with the newsletter service? We are currently doing it in-house, but we have over 2,000 subscribers, and it's becoming a pain to do it ourselves. Constant Contact wants $50/month to handle it.

All in all I am very happy with A Weber. I found their pricing to be less than Cons Contact and under $2500 I believe is only $29 a month. Constant Contact seems to have more templates, but if you know a wee bit (and I know a wee bit) of HTML and are willing to put some time into it, I really like this.

They do offer an affiliate link---so if you are so inclined... http://spt.aweber.com/ will give me a spiff. Not sure what it is but....

Thanks for the heads up on the newsletter. I am pretty confident it is now working well--I was going utso here wondering if my cache or IP was doing it etc.

Thanks for your help and I will delete your name now,

I was in Annapolis last May for a sailing course. Nice town! I stayed at the Inn at Horn Point and had a terrific time there, and in the JWorld class. Lousy weather that week, very cold and rainy, but I learned a lot.

How are you handling your ads on the site?

The site is brand new (March) and is not pulling in too much. I am seeing about $300 a month in google ads and then I am selling the display ads on the left. Limited to 8 displays at the top (rotated in order weekly) and then ultimately 8 for the 125 displays as well.

I am like Monty Hall and will make deals on the ads for pricing, etc. But am approaching local targeted businesses and networkign via FB and Twitter. Right now we are in an election season, so there are plenty of candidates, but that will end in November.

Inn at Horn Point is nice. I toured it one time. I have some friends that live down there. I am across the creek.

John

$300/month for Google ads isn't bad! Is that Adsense?

Yes, AdSense. It fluctuates though. I am running them on three blogs (2 WP and one Blogger) and my total monthly is usually about $900 to $1200 with this site anywhere from under $100 to $400 (high).

I figure as soon as someone wants to pay for a banner that will replace my adsense revenue by 150% I will take it, but for now, Google seems to do ok

We have too many ads on our site from small local businesses, and they all want to be on the front page, 24/7, so we've put them in slideshows rather than updating to a new ad upon page reload. This makes for a lot of busy-ness on the page, something I hate. It's a real conundrum to come up with a pleasing design that also satisfies advertisers.

Well, this is not a main source of income for me, so I am essentially restricting the income. I woudl like to get to the point where the site could command $200 a month for the 8 ads (most all pages rotated weekly 300x300 max) and then $100 a month for 8 of the 125x125 ones that pop in different spots when reloaded. Then a few google ads int he posts and a few affiliate ads on the bottom below the paying ones and let it go from there.

But for now, we take what we can get. What is your site.I will go take a look

http://www.larchmontgazette.com
You can see our rates on the Advertise page.

We also do some Monty Hall deals, like a dinner for all of our editors at the restaurant advertiser, on the house. (We are an all-volunteer community news site, so we take folks out to eat and buy them computers in lieu of salaries.) We have a couple of higher-paid ads like the bank and real estate ones in the right sidebar, that don't swap with others. And the obits and garden guide categories have exclusive advertisers.

I have not yet found a WP plugin ad manager that does everything we want, including the slideshow effect you see in the long top banners and the 3rd-5th boxes in the right sidebar. I'm doing those with Sponsors Slideshow plugin/widget.

Wow, It really does take longer for the bits to get to New England than NY, Paulae got her copy at 10:28 and mine just arrived at 3:45.