Since I use Aweber for my emailing needs, forgive me if this is very Aweber-centric. If you use another mailing list service provider that offers this feature , you might be able to solve it using this method as well. What in the world is she talking about? Bear with me in order to give a complete picture, I need to back up a little bit.

What is the Confirmation Success Page?

This is a page you can send people to after they confirm subscription to your mailing list. This is extremely useful for freebie delivery. Without this option, you will have to deliver your freebie via email as the first autoresponder message. The down side, this email can easily get lost/buried/spam-boxed. Using this page, people won’t have to check their email again, making the overall freebie delivery process smoother.

What is the Already Subscribed Page?

This is a page you can send subscribers to if they are already on the list. When delivering a freebie via the confirmation success page, you also want to make it easy on the off chance, people who are already on that list, forgetting that they are on it (People do it all the time – me included), re-subscribes to get the freebie. Why not use the Confirmation Success Page as the Already Subscribed Page?

Because the Already Subscribed Page is clearly visible in the form code. This means, anyone can just view source or view your Javascript source code and see the already subscribed URL to get your freebie without subscribing or confirming to your list.

So… why not use a different page for Already Subscribed people? Because these people have access to the freebie and they won’t be asked to confirm again since they are already on the list.

Phew! That’s a long explanation.

Solved!

After thinking about it, I figured out a way to resolve this problem. I created a PHP page with special coding for the Already Subscribed page. Here’s how it works.

1. If the page is accessed directly, they will get an error message, maybe asking if they are really subscribed or not.
2. If the page is accessed as a result of someone submitting the subscription form, they will get the freebie download.

Pretty neat huh? And let me tell you it is oh so simple too! I will be updating have updated our Andrzej Gdula