Question regarding email responder..

I agree with Helisell. JUST DO IT! I've had my share of over-thinking and of 'just doing it' and 'just doing it' wins.

You can always change it afterwards. You can also test, i.e. see which e-mail format gets you more conversions.

I do send some links in emails, occasionally to "new material" on my site, and sometimes a (masked) hoplink.

But in general, I prefer to send content as email content rather than requiring recipients to click on it just to read something. I think the people on my lists prefer that, too - but as with all "list communications" the "right actions" inevitably depend on who the people are ("traffic demographics"), what they expect, and what attracted them to your list in the first place.

There's nothing wrong with using an article as an autoresponder email, but you may have to edit it slightly (especially for the beginning and end of the email).

I think just about the exact opposite of this.

As marketers, we rightly and understandably put enormous efforts into building our lists, because those become the primary income-producing assets of our business. If we get the communications wrong, what normally happens isn't that we get "feedback": it's that people stop opening our emails (or even unsubscribe): how counter-productive can you get? :confused:

Again, with respect, I think the exact opposite: the time to fret about the details is before you send it out, because the realities of the situation are that mistakes usually can't be corrected later: once you go wrong, the people for whom it's "gone wrong" are no longer accessible to you, because they're not still reading. :rolleyes:

This is one field of activity, for internet marketers, in which "Just Do It" is pretty poor advice, IMHO.

Many people who have adopted that approach are the ones who find list-building not all that financially rewarding. It's good to avoid making this part of the business a "learning-curve", if you can avoid it, because this is where mistakes undo all your previous good work, and directly cost money.

Split-testing is, of course, a different matter. But (a) you need a substantial list to do that, (b) you have to have compiled it correctly in the first place, to facilitate split-tests, and (c) you still need to decide exactly what to split-test.