Thanks for the comment.

In this post I was only talking about adding an optin form on the upsell page. An upsell page is definitely not necessary and is certainly not necessary at the beginning. Now that I think about it I probably shouldn’t have added it because I wouldn’t want to make people think they need it and then discourage them from starting out selling blogs. I only just started using the secure download/upsell page approach very recently myself. Get a hold of me and I’ll give you a password to check it out…but again, don’t think it’s something you need to do on your first blog sale.

I’m not aware of any free autoresponders myself. If there are I’m sure some extra marketing that isn’t yours gets added to every email that gets sent out. AWeber isn’t specific to WordPress either. You simply add an AWeber opt-in form (or other similar service) to your web site or blog. AWeber will collect the leads for you. You can redirect to a monetized thank you page automatically. You can send out an email immediately upon signup. You can send them a free ebook immediately. You can send a broadcast email anytime to anyone in your list. You can have an automated sequence of messages sent out to new subscribers, and the list goes on. I’m only scratching the surface. It’s a great service…but there are others. I’ve never tried any of them (except a custom one I made about 6 years ago with Active Server Pages..which a friend of mine still uses! lol)…
Hope that helps.