August 25th, 2008 badger
Affiliate marketing doesn’t have to be hard. It doesn’t take much time to get a decent affiliate site up, either. And you can make huge money going after big markets.
All you need is a TINY PIECE of the money being spent on products in a huge niche to start making real money. You don’t have to mess around with tiny, obscure niches. They’re often a waste of time.
The problem is that there is a certain way to attack these big niches. It has to do with how you plan the content on your site and organize your articles or reviews in a certain way.
I’ve just released a new case study of how I launch sites and make them profitable in about five days maximum. I outline specific steps I took on my sites and show you how to easily reproduce everything I’ve been doing.
None of these techniques are complicated. You really just need a regular html website or a blog and about five hours a week to get going.
If you’re a subscriber, I just sent a message to you and if you check your email you can grab a copy of this new report at an insane discount.
If you’re not a subscriber, for a limited time I’m running a WSO (Warrior Special Offer) at the Warriorforum. You have to be a member there to take advantage of the discount, but it’s free to join and the WarriorForum is one of best forums out there for Internet marketers.
Here’s the link to my special offer at the Warrior Forum:
5 Days to Simple, Stupid Profits: How I Launched a Site in a Competitive Niche and Became Profitable in 5 Days — Oops!
I’ve love for you to check it out if you could use a boost in making your affiliate sites more profitable and easier to launch and maintain. I think my tips will help you.
Posted in Reports for Sale | 2 Comments »
August 20th, 2008 badger
Well, Chris Rempel has done it again.
You may remember Chris from his classic Ebook about how to make REAL money affiliate marketing - Confessions of a Lazy Super Affiliate. It’s a gritty, down to earth guide to boosting your affiliate sales in simple yet smart ways.
He’s always been great about responding to people’s questions at his blog, and over time people were asking him to release more reports. He’s been gradually releasing a series of “V.I.P. Confessions.”
I purchased the first two, and I’m already making money in surprising ways after applying the easy to use info he outlines in his first report. The report is called The Conduit Method.
The Conduit Method is perfect for affiliate marketers who have worked their fingers to the bone creating endless articles, reviews, and other content for their affiliate sites. How would you like to create a simple affiliate website really fast without really writing anything - and then the site will convert super well?
That’s what you get when you use the Conduit Method on a website. I created one site using this method and it made me sales within a few days, and it hasn’t stopped making money for me. Even though I’m way too busy with other projects to do much with the site. So this is a killer method that’s easy to implement.
His second report is equally as cool. It’s called Reverse Niche Selection. Without giving any secrets away, Chris gives simple ways to help you evaluate how much money is in a niche so you can know before you build your website what sort of profit potential to expect. This information is invaluable. Unfortunately, in following the steps he outlined I got so many ideas for money making websites that I have a bit of an ongoing migraine these days - there’s too many ideas buzzing around in my head!
But I think you’ll like Reverse Niche Selection.
Chris always overdelivers with his content. His latest addition to his VIP series is something that his customers were demanding. He’s provided a killer set of templates and tools to help you create your own Conduit style sites. So if you want to start creating Conduit sites using Wordpress or html, just use his simple templates and you can get up and running fast. No fussing around trying to design something in html or finding a WordPress theme that will work. He provides it all for you.
The package is part of his new V.I.P. Essentials series (Tools that webmasters can use to implement the techniques he outlines in his Confessions series.)
It’s called Site Layouts That Sell.
With Site Layouts that Sell you get an amazing amount of stuff. Some of the tools that are included:
* Wordpress Templates (to set up your Conduit sites)
*XSite Pro Templatees (If you’re going the html route)
*Regular Html templates (for people who don’t use Xsite Pro to build their sites)
*SEO cheat sheets (so you can get your sites indexed fast)
*Outsourcing cheat sheets (to make it easy to outsource parts of your work)
That’s an amazing amount of material. You can easily use one of his templates, tweak it with the SEO tips he recommends, and have your Conduit style site up and making you money fast.
I know Chris is planning other releases soon for his ongoing VIP Confessions and VIP Essentials series. I can’t wait to see what he brings out next! The guy rocks!
Posted in Affiliate Marketing | 1 Comment »
August 11th, 2008 badger
A lot of Ebay sellers and affiliates have been unhappy with the changes at Ebay over the past year. There certainly have been a lot of policy shifts with this new CEO. The biggest disappointment for many was when Ebay stopped permitting sales of digital downloadable goods (like Ebooks.) Many Internet marketers had built “empires” around selling Ebooks at Ebay.
It took a while for an Ebay alternative to come along, but it’s finally happened. Wigix.com is now live and open for business.
You’ll still use PayPal to pay for your transactions at Wigix. And some of the site seems a little clunky and non-intuitive from what I’ve seen so far. But they do seem sincere about trying to offer people a real alternative to Ebay. The scale of Wigix is a lot smaller - they’ve not yet expanded into selling products in quite so many categories as Ebay offers. But it will be interesting to see if it catches on.
If you’re sick and tired of Ebay but still enjoy an auction style marketplace, check Wigix out and see what you think. I’m all for giving Ebay some competition.
Posted in Product Reviews | No Comments »
July 28th, 2008 badger
Well, kiddies, it’s that time again - that once every three month time when Google updates its pagerank algorithms for websites.
Matt Cutts of Google talks about the newest pagerank update here:
Latest Google PageRank Update.
In case you’re unfamiliar with page rank, it’s an arcane and esoteric number that’s given to your website. Your page rank will influence how well your site is ranks in Google for various keywords. So older sites with more content and less advertising will tend to rank highest for keywords, and very new sites with things like paid links and other features Google doesn’t like very much will tend to be given a low page rank. About every three months Google updates page rank and sometimes if you’ve been a good boy or girl, doing all the things Google says you should be doing, your page rank will go up. This in turn brings your website more visiblity in Google’s search engine and, hopefully, more traffic.
The problem is that Google changes its mind constantly about what constitutes good content or bad content. And the search engine has a bias against any sites that are commercial in nature. It prefers to see content only sites, which are believed to provide a better experience for search engine users.
Which is bollocks, of course, since many people like to shop online, and if you have a site that sells something, you shouldn’t be punished for it.
This Badger site was launched in late February, and for a while I was coasting along with a nice page rank of three. I’d been dutifully posting content, trying to keep things meaty instead of just posting sales copy and crap. Plus I’d been submitting articles to directories and building backlinks gradually from other Internet marketing-related sites like a good badger.
Naively I expected my site to be upgraded to a page rank of 4 with this latest update, since that’s how things used to go with sites similar to this one. I have sites with much less content that are updated far less regularly that already have page ranks of 4 and 5, so I was certain that this one would bump up to the next level.
Well, apparently Google has done a big overhaul to its page ranking system, which pretty much sucks.
Webmasters can expect to see less traffic to their sites because their organic rankings are likely to bounce around and get a lot worse with this newest update.
This site went from a page rank of three to a page rank of two. This, after I’ve been doing all the “right” things for the last few months with updates, backlinks, etc.
Bleah.
It’s pretty scary sometimes when you realize that Google controls whether people will ever see or visit your sites, and it changes its rules so frequently that you don’t even know what SEO (search engine optimization) rules to play with half the time. They always tell you that if you update your sites regularly and provide decent content that your page rank will grow nicely over time.
But two of my high quality sites just went from a page rank of four to three, and this one went from a page rank of three to a pagerank of two - and I fail to see how this is going to help me.
I expect organic traffic to dip, which sucks.
In cyberspace nobody can hear you scream - especially when Google keeps messing around with its indexing policies.
Posted in Badger Wisdom | 3 Comments »
July 20th, 2008 badger
I correspond a lot with other Internet marketers. Some of them are “newbies” who have yet to make a dime online. I always try to give them user-friendly tips and tools that they can put to use right away.
Some of my pen pals are more intermediate marketers like myself. We like to shoot the breeze about the latest guru launch, the newest Google weirdness, and other industry news. And we compare notes about what’s working in our business and what isn’t.
Over time I’ve figured out that there are about five “fatal lies” that Internet marketers tend to tell newbie marketers, and these really are things that can break your spirit and prevent you from making any money online if you’re not careful.
I recently created a free 20 page report called The Five Fatal Lies They Tell You About Internet Marketing. It’s a sassy, politically incorrect report - complete with cartoons! It’s meant to be an easy read, but I also hope it will spark something for you - helping you to see through the myths and the hype so you can get more focused on the important stuff and just get started making money.
You receive the report for free if you sign up for Internet Marketing Badger News, my new free newsletter.
Now, before you groan and complain about signing up for yet ANOTHER newsletter, let me assure you that my newsletter is something different.
Remember when newsletters actually had useful content? Remember when they provided tips and free resources that you could actually use?
That’s what Internet Marketing Badger News is all about. I won’t bludgeon you over the head promoting the latest Clickbank product (unless it’s a high quality one that I’ve created!) Instead, you’ll get rants and articles and resources in every issue. I plan to publish it about once a month, maybe every two months if I get swamped with other projects.
I’ll also be archiving past newsletters for you to read here if you like. However, I encourage you to become a subscriber, because it’s the only way you can get my exclusive 5 Fatal Lies report. Plus as a subscriber you’ll get deep discounts on all future reports I publish (50% off at least) and advance notice of any cool WSO’s I’m running at the WarriorForum.
The premiere newsletter has already been published, and you can go here to download the first issue.
Enjoy it, and thanks for checking out Internet Marketing Badger News!
Posted in Free Goodies | 4 Comments »
July 17th, 2008 badger
I have a problem, I admit it. Maybe it’s because I’m an analytical Virgo, but I always overthink things. I tend to map out plans for these huge, honking big websites, sites that are extremely complex, without remembering that sometimes the simple stuff works best. And it works fast.
I always like to see what Chris Rempel of Confessions of a Lazy Super Affiliate is up to because he’s a “Cut to the chase and make money, dammit!” kind of guy. Reading his stuff is a nice cure for my usual funk of overdoing, overwriting, and overthinking.
Recently he has started to release a series of “V.I.P” reports talking about some important things. I like both VIP reports that he’s released, especially the first one.
The first one is called The Conduit Method. In this report Chris
teaches a simple method for creating profitable sites that are fast to set up, technically simple (done in html not in WordPress) and you don’t have to create a lot of complicated content, either. I built one of these sites as a test and it made me money within 24 hours and hasn’t stopped earning and I hardly have any backlinks or presence in Google yet. That’s how powerful this simple method is.
The second VIP report he just published is called Reverse Niche Selection. This one is a little more advanced because it’s all about giving you some tools and tricks to help you build out more “authority” type of sites over time by reverse engineering what your competition is doing and figuring out DOWN TO THE DOLLAR what they’re earning. This helps you estimate what you can do with a similar site. Brilliant stuff.
Both reports are cheap and I highly recommend them. I think the Conduit Method is $14.95 right now and he was offering Reverse Niche Selection for $9.95, but he may have raised it a bit by now. Either way they’re still a steal. Everything in the reports is “actionable” stuff you can put into practice right away. And none of it is overly technical or time consuming stuff, either. You can use these techniques immediately. The Conduit Method is especially inspiring if you’re not really feeling wonderful about bringing out yet another site with lots of articles and creating content for them - because the method involves using minimalist content that’s super fast to create for yourself.
Check it out!
Posted in Product Reviews | 3 Comments »
July 2nd, 2008 badger
I just found out about Firepow, the new blogging software from Andrew Hansen. This sucker is mega powerful - it’s like the Porsche of blogging tools.
When it comes to making serious money online it’s always smart to have multiple sites. These can be blogs, regular sites created in simple html, or a mixture of both. (Just remember - it’s always helpful to create a feed for your regular html sites because feeds give you faster indexing, better keyword domination, and more. Learn all about it in my user-friendly report: Feedify Your Site.)
At first it can seem daunting creating sites because you’ll probably have some “losers” where you’ve targeted the wrong market or products. But all you need is a few good performers and you can soon be on your way to doing this full-time if you keep at it. There’s a certain momentum that kicks in after you have a few winners in your portfolio of sites. For one thing, you stop picking stupid niches like ferret wrangling or hamster Zen or whatever. Believe me, I was in the dumbest, least profitable niches before I learned to go into hungry markets with proven buyers. DUH!
Anyway, one of the things that is a real bitch when you’re creating WordPress blogs is finding themes that look nice, that aren’t out of date, that work with all the right plugins, and that are customizable - so you can easily add or subtract elements like opt-in forms, Adsense code, search boxes, etc.
Well, one of the many cool features of Andrew Handen’s new Firepow software is an extensive array of WordPress themes that you can easily customize, along with all the plugins you’ll need to make your blogs perform the way you want. Just having all these things in one place is incredible! Usually you have to grunt and sweat and ”hack” your way into your theme, as I did with this one, to make it look the way you want. Then you have to fiddle around with css stylesheets to get the fonts right - bleah. I’ve wasted so much time with that stuff it’s not even funny. And I have the gray hair to prove it! (Actually, through the magic of Clairol, you can’t see the gray hairs. Thank God.)
Well, Firepow promises to make it a LOT easier. This software is all about giving you the exact tools you need to easily create a blogging empire of niche sites - without having to take three years of html or css or Photoshop classes. Everything is controlled from one user-friendly control panel. That means you can update, manage and change ALL of your blogs from within one control panel instead of logging in and out all the time from different blogs. Some days I think my brains are going to fry from trying to remember all my WordPress logins and passwords! With Firepow, you just set everything up from within the control panel and you’re good to go. That’s a huge timesaver right there.
The plugins that you can use are great ones, too - it includes plugins to help you with SEO (search engine optimization for your keywords;) a cool split testing plugin which is INVALUABLE (since you really need to test elements of your pages to see what produces the right conversions, and some of the WordPress plugins that are currently available are either clunky, hard to use, or completely out of date.) And there’s lots more.
But some of the most intriguing benefits of Firepow are all about what happens AFTER you create your site. Creator Andrew Hansen has some really cool tricks up his sleeve for Firepow users. It’s all about being able to easily promote your site, contact other webmasters for cross-promotion and easy backlinks, and making sure that the search engines know about your content. You can do all this from within the Firepow platform.
I’m not going to give all the secrets away here. Instead, you should check out Firepow for yourself to see if this powerful blogging megatool might be helpful to you as you build your own WordPress sites.
Since Andrew Hansen of Niche Marketing on Crack fame is the product developer, the quality on this is high, and it will also help you if you’re trying to create NMOC (Niche Marketing on Crack) style sites. You should be able to set up NMOC sites REALLY fast - much faster than you would if you’re trying to do them each manually. So this is perfect for building a virtual real estate empire and launching multiple sites per month (or even per week!)
Firepow from Andrew Hansen
Posted in Product Reviews | 1 Comment »
June 23rd, 2008 badger
I love my Niche Marketing on Crack sites. In case you’re unfamiliar NMOC, it’s a system taught by Andrew Hansen in his fabulous eBook called Niche Marketing on Crack. (And yes that is an affiliate link because you need to grab this report today if you haven’t got it already. This report will make you money. Period.)
Don’t be thrown by the title if you’re the type who is easily offended! This eBook is a gold mine of simple, easy-to-use information about how to set up affiliate sites that will bring you money month after month with very little effort.
I have a bunch of sites designed using the techniques taught in NMOC, and all told, I think they bring me about $2500 or so per month. That’s a nice chunk of change. I also have a lot of sites that don’t use his techniques, but I really love the simplicity and ease of setting up a NMOC site.
You can either use a WordPress blog to implement his technique, or you can mix things up by following what he teaches but doing it on a regular html site. If you’re going to create a regular html site, it will work best if you set up a simple rss feed for your html site and ping it each time you update. See my Feedify Your Site report for an easy guide about how to create a feed for a regular html (non blog) website.
When I’m bored with other stuff I’m doing online I love goofing off for a day to set up a couple of NMOC sites. They’re profitable within a few days, five days at most, but I do a specific set of things each time I create a new website. This includes pinging the feed, bookmarking individual pages of the site at places like Digg and Technorati, and a few other simple traffic building techniques to get my new site listed in the engines quickly. (Hint: It all has to do with “pimping your feed,” a technique I teach in my Feedify Your Site report.)
After these NMOC sites are set up they just keep earning and earning.
You don’t need a lot of traffic to earn money with them - in fact, my Niche Marketing On Crack sites get relatively small amounts of traffic. But that’s the beauty of the NMOC system. You’re going after very specific keyphrases that have a high probability of attracting BUYERS instead of FREEBIE SEEKERS to your site. So you can get better conversions than you do for regular sites and start making money from the tiniest trickles of traffic.
I’ll show you an example of a NMOC site that I publish. Be forewarned, this is about the crappiest my sites get - it has atrocious, eyeball bleeding design, minimal text, and it’s kind of a horrible product, too. I don’t promote this site much and in fact, it doesn’t even have page rank yet because I’ve been too lazy to add new articles and it only has about 50 backlinks. Yet it makes me money every month. It did especially well around the New Year because so many people buy weight loss products when they’re making those New Year’s resolutions (which they break just as fast! But hey, at least they’ve bought some products from me!)
Anyway, I’m only showing you this site because I made the mistake a few months ago of telling a few people about it when they asked me about NMOC sites and making money from Andrew Hansel’s great eBook. It was pretty stupid of me to show it to people because in about a month several folks took me on as competition and knocked my little site out of the search engines pretty bad. It still makes me money, though, just not as much. So I’m not losing anything by showing it to you now.
So the site is Alli-Info.com, and this is a simple Niche Marketing on Crack site. I did some other things on it like adding a free report with an opt-in, and I also used a siloing technique as an experiment (which isn’t necessary.) I also created it in html instead of doing it as a WordPress blog as is recommended in the report. But this tiny little site earns me income every month and it only took about a day to create and get my first traffic for it.
If you give your NMOC sites more love and attention than I did with this one you should be able to average hundreds to thousands a month with each site. This Alli Info site was a bit of a bust because it was an experiment in trying to capture traffic right around the time the product was launched last year. There wasn’t a lot of information available about how the product would be sold, we were just told that it would be available over the counter. I didn’t realize that it would be sold EVERYWHERE - like at my grocery store, drug store, gas station, hairdresser’s, etc. I thought it would be more exclusive to GNC stores. So I signed up as a GNC affiliate to promote it not realizing that people would be able to buy it just about everywhere. I think Wall-Mart sells it, it’s so widely available now. Generally choosing a product that is available in local stores is a bad way to go when you’re picking an affiliate product to promote, but I didn’t know that it would be sold at so many regular stores when I launched the site.
The product came out last June and my site went up about the time the product came out. I made my first sales within a few days and had a nice burst of sales last summer. Then sales trickled off because some bad reports came out about the product. (Apparently, if you eat high fat foods when you’re taking Alli, it gives you a severe case of the squirts. Oops!) Then in the fall and winter sales spiked up for me.
So your Niche Marketing on Crack sites can go up and down in sales, just as with any site, but they are so simple and fun to set up that I highly recommend you grab Andrew Hansen’s report right away if you haven’t already. There are only three products that I enthusiastically recommend to people when they’re getting started with making money online, and his report is one of my three faves.
(By the way, I only recommend Internet marketing products that have produced nice income for me and that aren’t hard to implement. I believe making money online should be simple, not migraine inducing! And his technique is so easy, especially if you set your sites up using Wordpress, you should be very pleased with the results and you won’t have to wait months to see real profits come in.)
Learn more about Niche Marketing on Crack by Andrew Hansen
Posted in Affiliate Marketing | 4 Comments »
June 18th, 2008 badger
Everything on the Internet takes time. It takes time to do keyword and product research. It takes time to set up a good website or blog. It takes time to test conversions as you are promoting different products. If you’re running Adwords ads, it takes time to create and tweak your ad so you get enough clickthroughs and purchases and Google doesn’t deactivate your ad.
When it comes to Internet marketing, time can be your biggest enemy.
Very few people get into Internet marketing because they’re already millionaires with lots of spare time on their hands and few bills to worry about.
Usually, people turn to Internet marketing either to supplement income from their “day” job or to gradually build up enough consistent monthly income so they can quit their regular job and transition into doing Internet marketing full-time.
And it’s easy to get impatient with the process, especially since it can take a while to hit your stride and find what’s going to work well for you.
In the beginning, you’ll probably learn more from your failures than your successes. And nobody can “cheat” their way through the learning curve. You’re going to have things that work and bring you some money, and you’re going to have a whole lot of other stuff to learn, and you’re also going to fall flat on your face numerous times.
That’s the nature of Internet marketing.
I think the biggest problem time-wise is waiting that endless three months after you’ve launched a new website until your site finally gets decent page rank in Google.
For the first few months after your website goes live, unless you’re running Adwords ads to bring traffic to your site (or doing JV’s with other web publishers) you’ll see trickles of traffic coming in. And that can be discouraging. But you need to keep updating your site consistently because if you do so, with Google’s next update, you’re likely to achieve a Google page rank of at least three. (That’s if you’ve been updating your site about twice a week.) At that point your site will probably show up nicely in the search engines for many of the keywords you’ve been targeting, and you can expect more traffic, more sales, and some evidence that you haven’t been wasting time with your new site.
You can also boost your traffic when you first launch it with techniques like article marketing, posting on forums and listing your website in your signature file, and other simple techniques. But if your intention is to build organic traffic to your site you’re simply going to have to be patient and play the waiting game.
When I launch sites they’re profitable within five days at most, but the larger profits tend to come in after three months once my sites have achieved page rank in Google. I’ve just gotten into a routine where I launch a site, keep updating it, and keep getting backlinks throughout that whole first three months. At the three month mark traffic and sales start to spike upwards since my site becomes more visible in the search engines at that point. And after six months my sites usually have a page rank of four if I keep updating them, which allows me to really dominate the search engines for my keywords in most categories.
Six months can seem like forever when you’re slaving away at a horrible job or dealing with pressing money concerns. But if you’re going to build sites that have a real presence in the search engines, bringing you organic traffic, you’ll have to learn how to deal with the time element of the equation.
If you update a new site at least twice a week and build at least 100 backlinks to your site within the first three months, you should be able to achieve a page rank of three with Google’s next update. And if you keep updating it at the same pace and build another 100 or more backlinks over the next three months after that, you should be able to get a page rank of four about six months after you’ve launched.
From that point on, everything gets easier. People find your sites more easily, you’ll make more sales, you’ll get more traffic and signups for your newsletter, etc.
During the six months post launch you will probably be biting your nails a lot and wondering if things are going to work with your new site. Try to take action as much as you can by doing some article marketing, forum posting, and social bookmarking your newest posts at sites like Digg.com to bring in some short-term traffic. You should start to see sales in the first week post-launch if you take some simple traffic building steps. And then you’ll see larger results over time if you keep building out your site.
Time can seem like the enemy, but you just need to understand that sites need to age a bit in the search engines before Google and the other engines start giving your site more respect. “Woo” the engines as much as you can by posting quality content and building back links to your sites gradually, and you should see a nice transition around the third month after you’ve launched - more traffic, more sales, more encouragement that you really CAN get the hang of this whole Internet marketing thing!
Posted in Badger Wisdom | 1 Comment »
June 13th, 2008 badger
One thing that’s been on my mind lately is how unstable the Internet is.
Not just Internet connections, which can go down without warning (we get a lot of lightning strikes here because we’re up on a hill, and we’re always having our phone, cable or electricity go out when a tree falls on the wires.)
But also everything we depend on when we’re using the Internet can go down.
Recently one of my email providers, Comcast, got hacked, creating some outages throughout the day. Gmail, another one of my email providers, has had slow load times recently, and sometimes I can’t access my email at all.
A long time ago I resorted to setting up lots of different email addresses with lots of different service providers so I can access email most of the time. You really need to do this if emails are critical to your business. If one of my newspaper editors needs to get a hold of me before deadline, or if a customer who has ordered one of my eBooks has a problem, I need to be able to get back to them ASAP. So reliable email becomes really important.
No website is guaranteed to remain 100% secure, and sites get hacked or have problems all the time.
I also use Statcounter’s website stats for many of my sites to track visitor data. (If you haven’t checked them out yet, you need to. Go to Statcounter.com and set up a new account for each website you want to track data on. They will give you a piece of code you paste into each page of your website - or onto the sidebar of your WordPress blog - and then you’ll be good to go.)
Recently The Planet, the hosting provider that Statcounter uses, had a fire at one of its data centers, and data for a whole bunch of sites wasn’t accessible for a while. Statcounter lost visitor data on some sites, so when I logged in and checked my stats on my sites, some were available and some weren’t.
Statcounter also has a paid version where you can pay a small fee via PayPal and get more detailed visitor statistics. I don’t use the paid version, but Statcounter has been having major troubles with their subscription plan through PayPal lately. They’ve been trying to resolve it with PayPal but things have been so screwed up, and PayPal has been so unresponsive, that Statcounter was forced to send out thousands (probably hundreds of thousands) of emails to Statcounter users explaining the problem.
And these are things that have happened just within the past few weeks.
On a regular basis, it seems, sites we depend on for our Internet marketing businesses go down or act wonky. The technologies we use are unstable, they don’t always run smoothly. And when there is a problem sometimes it can’t be fixed right away. Not everybody has the budget of, say, a Comcast, to address a hacking situation immediately. You never know when your own business might be affected by a technical glitch or a hacking attempt.
I worry about our dependency on some of the industry’s biggest, most popular sites.
For instance, I use both Clickbank and e-junkie, which are great for selling downloadable products. Clickbank is a publisher which collects and distributes payments. And I use e-junkie to handle my downloads. E-junkie has been great for me, and it’s very cheap - just $5 per month. But a few people at the Warriorforum recently reported some temporary outages with e-junkie and I’m keeping my eyes on that. I need people to be able to receive their order when they order it, and I hope that e-junkie has addressed whatever problems they were having before. So far (she says, crossing her fingers) I’ve had only great experiences with them.
Most publishers of downloadable goods are dependent on some combination of PayPal, Clickbank, e-junkie, or Paydot.com to make their businesses work. But what if one or all these services starts having problems? How quickly could you change your business setup? When they’re aren’t a lot of alternatives, what do you do? Google Checkout, 2 Checkout, and Worldpay are some alternatives to using PayPal to process payments - but most online shoppers have developed a certain comfort level with using PayPal and they might not want to buy from you if you use another payment method. Of course, you can also set up your own payment processing using your own private merchant account, which can be a bit of a hassle, but that’s another way to go.
Anyway, I’ve just been noticing lately how so many third party sites that Internet marketers use are having problems, and I’ve been scratching my head, wondering how long it will be before EVERYTHING changes for us. Things already change so rapidly as various technologies and sites become popular and are quickly tossed aside almost as quickly. (Friendster, anyone?)
How long will we be using sites like PayPal and Clickbank? How soon before they run into problems, or the businesses are phased out or sold, and we all have to switch to using something else?
Unfortunately, Internet marketing comes with a lot of built in obsolescence. One day, things are working. The next day, you have to change everything you’re doing to stay ahead of the trends or to adjust to something crashing and burning.
Some days, things change so rapidly, my poor brain just………hurts!
Posted in Badger Wisdom | 3 Comments »
