About a year ago I had a funny email forwarded to me. The email had two pictures — one of a piece of electronic equipment labeled “Man”, and another of another piece of equipment labeled “Woman”.

Take a look — here’s “Man”:

 

 

And here’s “Woman”:

 

While these pictures were intended to tickle the funny bone, there’s quite an element of truth to them, wouldn’t you agree?

So how can I possibly draw an analogy between these pictures and eCommerce software? Simple.

The “Man” is like a PayPal “Buy” button. If you want to quickly start selling something, all you have to do is slap the button HTML code onto your sales page. Or paste the email link into your email. Voila! With a single step your business is “ON”!

This simplicity comes at the price of flexibility . . . no possibility of “one click” upsells after the initial order, no affiliate program, no personalized “thank you” emails or web pages. But it’s fast and it works — and sometimes that’s all you need. (Fast and working is always better than “still tweaking the system”!)

Now, the “Woman” picture is like one of the “do everything” eCommerce solutions. InfusionSoft and FantaSos (a.k.a. Delavo with all the plugins) come to mind, and there are others as well. These solutions are indeed powerful but to some people they’re just “too much”.

I’ve had clients who used one of the “do everything” solutions who dropped them in favor of a simpler solution — they just couldn’t handle all of the perplexing options available to them in the other system.

I’ve also had clients report to me that their “do everything” solution had a lot of features, but some of the fundamentals were plagued with problems.

Obviously it doesn’t do you any good to have 100 features when the most critical features like affiliate tracking or order processing don’t work — so make sure the fundamentals are covered, THEN look at the additional features.

Usually there’s a solution that lies somewhere in the middle of these two extremes and fits “just right”.

I’ll be releasing a new version of my eCommerce and product launch software soon — I think it’s a nice “middle ground”. It may or may not be what you need — but watch for it and judge for yourself!

Best,

Paul

Here’s an interesting article by Daniel Levi about using confirmed optin vs single optin:

Test Results of Single- vs Confirmed-optin

Just happened to be on Alexa today and saw that they had some new features . . . made a short video for you using Jeff Walker’s “ProductLaunchFormula.com” site as an example of the new information available.

Check out the video here:

http://alexavid.s3.amazonaws.com/index.html

I think these new features can be useful when doing research on your own sites or your competitors . . .

Have fun with it!

Paul

In recent months, I’ve witnessed a few software product launches that I can only describe as “irritating”.

And what caused this irritation? The promoter’s expectation that I would spend between $497 and $997 to get their supposedly “whiz-bang” software WITHOUT EVEN SEEING IT FIRST!

These guys go through their well-scripted pre-launch sequence, telling everyone how much money this software will make them, how much time it will save them, how all their buddies begged them not to release it, and on and on . . . never revealing the price of course (wouldn’t want to put a damper on people’s anticipation).

Then on the launch day, they repeat all of the above. They are sure to point out how this software should be selling for thousands of dollars, but for a limited number of lucky schmucks, they’ll release it for a bargain-basement price of only $497 (or $997, $1997, whatever, as long as it ends with a 7).

But they do NOT show us what the software looks like or how it operates!

No demo site to poke around in.

No videos showing how the software works.

Not even screenshots of the software in action.

Sometimes they don’t even tell you what kind of operating system is required to run the software.

It leaves me wondering, “What are they hiding?”

These guys have the “selling on emotion” concept down pat. They’re selling the dream of making lots of money quickly and with very little effort. But in my opinion they fail to give their prospective customers a way to “justify with logic”, which is also a key concept in direct marketing.

One such promotion is live as I write this, the “Niche Socializer” software. I normally don’t reveal guilty parties by name in my blog or emails, but I’ll make an exception here because despite their marketing sins, I think their product may still be worthy of attention (I just wish I could SEE the dang thing!) . . .

I emailed the support team for the Niche Socializer software and asked them whether it was a hosted service or software we install on our own server. I also wanted to know if the software could be used for multiple sites. It’s puzzling to me that they don’t answer these questions on their site!

They replied (quickly, I might add) that it’s software we install on our own server, and that it can be used for 3 social marketing sites. Additional licenses can be purchased at a discount if more sites are required.

Unfortunately, they didn’t tell me what web server platform is required — I’ve sent them a followup email and will update this post as I get new information.

It seems like a pretty good solution to me . . . BUT it’s not the “only” solution. Here are a few other links for you to check out if you want to start your own social network:

Ning.com

KickApps.com

SocialGo.com

Collectivex.com

Kootali Software

Snappville.com Software

Elgg Software (Open Source)

One of the advantages I see with the Niche Socializer software (and some of the software packages listed above) is that you can host it on your own server — I like having that kind of control. Imagine if you built up a social network and then had the underlying company go out of business — ouch!

On the other hand, it’s nice to let someone else worry about server scaling, bandwidth, network issues, etc. — as with most things, there are pros and cons either way.

Another thing I like about Niche Socializer is that it was created with monetization in mind — it includes an eCommerce module and allows you to have “paid” levels if you want. It also allows you to charge for classified ads. The other sites listed above didn’t have much to day about those kinds of things, so when choosing a solution be careful to make sure they have the functions you need/want.

That’s it for now, let me know what you think!

Best,

Paul

Okay, the holidays are over, time to get back to work! (Especially since it seems like everyone else already has . . .  Three quick items today:

1. Thanks for your Generosity

First off, THANK YOU to everyone who contributed to help out the Gentemann family after their house fire. You contributed $1380 to help them out — WOW! I didn’t deliver the money personally, but I’m sure they’re very grateful for all the help they’ve received. (For those of you who didn’t hear about this, it was a request I sent out via email about 3 days before Christmas . . .) Thank you so much.

2. Do NOT get this software.

Lately there’s been some emails promoting the “Placement Locator” software. (placementlocator.com) As my readers, I want to let you know I think there’s something out there that’s more powerful and costs less — and it comes with a free trial version too!

The software is called “Site Sniper Pro“, and it was first made available about 18 months ago. It’s up to version 2.5 and I believe it’s much more comprehensive software than the “Placement Locator” software.

I don’t get any commission for recommending it — I just think it’s a better deal for you all around.

3. Meet me Underground?

When I was going to school in Provo, Utah, there was a restaurant called “The Underground”. It was a 1920’s mafia theme, and really was in a basement with exposed ventilation pipes and beams, etc. — and you could sit in 1920’s replica cars to eat . . . I really enjoyed that place! But I’m talking about a different kind of Underground here . . . Yanik Silver’s “Underground Seminar” in February.

If you have to pick ONE internet marketing seminar to attend, this is the one I recommend. I’m not going to try and sell you on it, just check out the web page for yourself.

Bob Parsons from GoDaddy is going to be the keynote speaker — I can’t wait to hear what he has to say! I’ve been a fan of his ever since I bought his “MoneyCounts” software for DOS some umpteen years ago (that was before GoDaddy — he had a software company called “Parson’s Technology” . . .)

And if you want to meet with me for lunch and pick my brain while we’re there, that would be fun too!

Yanik left the gate a bit late on this year’s promotion, but I’m sure he’ll still sell out the seminar – get in while you can!

I hope to see some of you there — definitely let me know if you’re going!

Best,

Paul

Okay, it’s been almost a month since my last post. I’ve decided the reason it takes me so long to add new posts is because I wait until I think I have something substantial to say. Well, I’ve decided to put more emphasis on frequency rather than post size.

So here goes . . . if you’ve been here before, you may have noticed today that I have a new banner graphic at the top of this blog. (Which is to say, I HAVE a banner graphic now — I didn’t before!)

I went to 99designs.com and started a “contest” — cost me $40 to do so. Then I had a bunch of graphic artists competing for the contest. You can see the 33 designs that were submitted here:

http://www.99designs.com/contests/12284

I picked the one I liked most and paid the designer $125. There were a couple of other designs which I liked enough that I offered the designers $75 each for them — both accepted.

Personally, I think it’s a great service . . . for me it’s difficult to come up with a graphic design concept, so it’s nice to see the various designs these professional designers come up with.

Those of you on my mail list should get an email alerting you to this post — I just setup the Aweber RSS Broadcast feature. Within an hour of my posting a new message here, Aweber will detect the new post and will send out an email alerting my subscribers. Pretty nifty.

Of course, anyone who subscribes will get additional resource information not posted here — so if you’re not a subscriber, fill out the box at the top-right of this page and become one!

Let me know what you think!

Paul

Today I’m going to talk about the NOT SO FUN part of an online business:

Time Wasting Customers

Here’s the thing. I really go out of my way to help my customers. I call almost all of my customers to make sure they got their downloads okay. I spend way more time than the business experts say I should.

(If Rich Schefren was my business coach, he’d have a fit about the time I spend on non-productive tasks like customer support.)

So anyway, yesterday I got an order for a $47 product. I also got an email from the customer asking me where they could download the product. Apparently the email from my automated system hadn’t got through.

No biggie — email’s like that. So I called her up and told her I would personally send her the download link from my desktop email. I told her if she didn’t get it to let me know and I’d try sending it directly to her or figure out another way.

(In retrospect, what i should have done was read the download link to her over the phone. Next time.)

Fast forward to today. I get an email from the customer and she says the following:

You and I spoke yesterday about emailing me The Internet Marketers Little Black Book that I purchased; today is the 25th almost 9pm and I have not received it in my email. Can you please just refund me the money, I don’t think this is going to work out.

Now, this is just plain irritating to me. Maybe I’m getting cranky in my middle age. Here’s what I wrote back:

Maude (not her real name!),

I have refunded your order as you requested, but I would like to comment somewhat on this.

My system sent you an email with the download link the day you ordered. For whatever reason, you didn’t get it.

Then I again sent the download link to you (manually this time, from my desktop email client), and again you didn’t get it.

I think you need to ask your internet service provider why LEGITIMATE emails are not getting through to you.

I told you on the phone that if you didn’t get it, I’d be happy to attach the file to an email and send it to you directly. Perhaps you would have got it, and perhaps not, but you apparently decided it wasn’t worth the effort. This is very frustrating to me as a merchant who goes out of his way to help my customers.

You stated you “don’t think this is going to work out” — the only reason it didn’t work out is because you weren’t willing to give it a chance. I would have even read the download link to you over the phone had you given me the opportunity.

Had you allowed me to find some other way to get you the eBook and then decided it “wasn’t for you”, I would have been fine with that. But to just give up in this situation like you have shows a lack of respect for me and the time I have spent (and was willing to spend) in your behalf.

You have wasted my time — please do not order anything else from me unless you are willing to work with me in getting around the limitations of your email system to get the product you ordered.

Regards,

Paul

Now I have to confess, there’s a part of me that feels bad for sending this “nasty-gram” but the bigger part of me feels justified in doing so (even though I realize it’s probably counter-productive). What do you think? Did I go too far? Am I just irritable?

So what’s the lesson here? For me there are a couple:

1. I should probably start placing a download link right on the “thank you” page after people order. I resisted this for awhile, because I figured if the download link is only in the email, I guarantee that nobody will get it without a valid email address. However, I believe we’ve reached the point where the inherent unreliability of email outweighs the security risks of providing the download link right on the thank-you page.
2. I should probably let someone else handle THIS kind of customer support for me. It’s one thing to answer technical questions, but this is very basic customer support (providing a download link) and something I obviously don’t have the required “patient and long-suffering” attitude to do myself.

If you’re in a similar situation, consider these services:

http://www.workaholics4hire.com/

http://shieffservices.com/

http://www.signatureworx.com/

And since we’re on the topic of customer support, let me say one more thing . . .

I’ve been “behind the scenes” on a LOT of launches — some of the biggest in the internet marketing circles. Quite frequently the people doing the launch are unprepared for the customer support. I want you to keep this in mind — if you’re going to do 2 years worth of business volume in 7 days, you should be prepared to provide 2 years worth of customer support in the same time frame.

This means you should hire extra help — lots of it — and have them trained before the launch begins. I have yet to witness a perfect launch. (On the last launch I was involved with, we had problems with the payment processor, the BACKUP payment processor, AND the email service. Yikes!)

There’s always something that goes wrong, so make sure you have people in place to handle the huge influx of customer support emails and calls.

That’s it for now!

Paul

I was looking at a website tool on this company’s page and saw something else interesting . . . went to check it out and it’s COOL!

I think it’s going to help me be more organized and productive, but if not, it’ll still be cool to show my brother when he’s visiting — that’s worth the price by itself.

Anyway, I had to share it with you! First, check out my little demo video showing how it works:

Then if you want to try it out for yourself they have a free trial), just click on this link . . .

In other news, I’ve decided to go ahead and try having a “chat night” on Wednesday at 9 PM central time. It’ll be text only (the voice broadcast system isn’t that great with the system I’m using), and the system only allows a maximum of 25 people. Let’s try it out and see how it works!

And finally, for a bit of inspiration, check out this video about “Team Hoyt”. I thought I was a good father, but I this guy taught me a few lessons . . .

That’s all for now my friends — I hope to see some of you on Wednesday’s chat!

Paul

P.S. Comments, I need comments!!

Wow, 6 months since my last post! That really is unpardonable in the world of blogs.

I won’t bore you with my various excuses, but I’m back now . . .

Even though I’ve been up to my eyeballs in product launches and other client work, I’ve still been buying all kinds of internet marketing stuff. I’m frequently amazed at the low cost for resale or private label rights these days. 20, 45, 100, or even 300 products with resale rights for just a few dollars.

Now sure, lots of the offers include products we’ve seen before, and much of it it total garbage. But there are definitely some diamonds in the rough. So I keep collecting it and someday I may actually get some sites up there and start selling the stuff.

Last week I found a pretty nifty tool for “Link Effects“, and was surprised to see it was selling for just 5 bucks, so I dashed off a quick email to my list. It had been 6 weeks since I had emailed my list, so I was curious what the response would be. I also tried a split test of a straight-text email vs. a text/html email. Check out the stats from my Aweber account:

Now remember that Aweber can’t track the “open rate” of a straight text email. But the clickthrough percentage was pretty comparable for both versions. What I found interesting was the number of complaints — the text-only email resulted in almost double the number of complaints as the text/html email.

That may be because the link was visible — it was an Aweber-tracking link, which is pretty ugly and has a certain “commercial” feel to it (in my opinion).

Aweber recently added the ability to track clickthroughs while using your own domain for the link URL — you do this by adding some Javascript to your page and notifying Aweber via your control panel there, as shown in the video on this page.

This is a step in the right direction, but Aweber still tacks some tracking code onto the end of your link, something like this: “?awt_l=9YfeG&awt_m=8WL4Mnm0rvusc”. So it still looks a bit on the ugly side, as links go.

Another thing to consider is how this appended code will affect your affiliate links. If Aweber’s algorithm is intelligent enough it will detect an existing query string in your link and just append to it with the common ampersand divider.

For instance, if this was my affiliate link:

http://www.biztoolsbrief.com/?12345

Then Aweber would make it like this:

http://www.biztoolsbrief.com/?12345&awt_l=9YfeG&awt_m=8WL4Mnm0rvusc

But even that might mess up the afiliate tracking system, depending on what it’s expecting to see.

So if you’re going to use Aweber’s new tracking system with an affiliate program, make sure it’s not going to mess up the affiliate tracking!

One more thing about Aweber I discovered a little while back . . . they allow you to collect “custom” data fields on their optin forms, and merge that data into outgoing emails. That much you probably knew. But what I found out is that you can’t include that merged data into a URL if you’re going to have click tracking turned on — the merge code is not translated to the correct subscriber value in that case.

That’s a shame, because we don’t always use their “meta_adtracking” form field to hold the affiliate ID — but that’s what you’ll have to do if you want to include the affiliate ID in the URL and at the same time use Aweber’s click tracking system.

With the new tracking system via your own domain URL, this may not be an issue . . . check with Aweber to find out for sure.

Okay, now I need your feedback . . .

I’m working on a book (to be published by Wiley this fall) and while I was reviewing various online communications tools, it occurred to me that it might be fun to have an online chat with my readers. I was thinking maybe every Wednesday night from 9 PM – 10 PM central I could open up my chat lines and we could talk — any question goes . . . is that something you’d be interested in?

Let me know!

Best,

Paul

P.S. In case you’re interested, here’s the latest (about a month old, actually) picture of our latest addition:

It’s been about 10 years now since I wrote my first affiliate “script”. And it really was a “script” – not a full-blown application.

I was an electrical engineer at Motorola at the time, trying to sell direct marketing books (hardcopy, not ebooks) over the internet for some extra income.

In order to add some interactivity to my own site, I learned the predominant web-server script language of the day, “Perl”, and I was on my way. Soon I started getting requests from other webmasters to write scripts for them

One of the first people to actually PAY me for a script was Allen Says, of “Internet Marketing Warriors” fame. As I recall, he wanted a script that would take an identifying code (“affiliate code” in today’s vernacular) and propagate it from one page to the next so that it would eventually be inserted into a hidden form field on the order form.

If I remember correctly, the script was 280 characters in size, and Allen paid me $250 for it – that was almost a dollar per character, which at the time was heady stuff indeed! (Actually, it still is – I don’t think I’ve ever been paid that much per character since!)

This was shortly after Amazon started their affiliate program, and it seemed like a great idea. So I decided to create a full-blown affiliate program system, which I started selling in 1998.

Back then, browser cookies weren’t used for affiliate tracking. Either the affiliate code was propagated from one page to the next, or static copies were made of the site pages for each affiliate – so their affiliate ID was hardcoded in these static pages. This was done automatically when the affiliate signed up.

The problem with both of these approaches is that affiliate site “templates” were required. They were just standard HTML pages with some “merge codes” added. For instance, if I wanted the affiliate ID to show up in a certain place on the page, I’d use the merge code of AFF_NUM in that location in the template page. Or for the affiliate’s name, I’d use “AFF_NAME”

It wasn’t difficult, but it was more than most people wanted to deal with, especially if they had a lot of pages on their site.

In order to prevent “affiliate abandonment”, the entire site would need to be templated, OR a portion of the site would need to be templated and designed such that no links led to pages outside the templated pages.

With the widespread adoption of cookies, these things were no longer a concern. You merely “tagged” the visitor with an affiliate cookie when they entered the site, and then read it back again at the time of the order to determine which affiliate got credit for the sale.

At least that’s how it worked in theory . . . as long as someone had their cookies enabled (which most did).

But in the years since then, the browser environment has become more and more hostile to cookies. The default security settings are more discriminatory and various applications designed to “protect” the consumer delete cookies on a regular basis.

In this day of dynamic IP addresses (I’ve seen my own DSL IP address change while in the middle of a shopping session!) using the IP address as a cookie-backup system is hit-and-miss at best.

It seems that as soon as new tracking methods come out (such as the “flash cookie”), new methods are devised to defeat them for the consumer’s privacy and security.

Natural consumer behavior is another factor to consider. For instance, in a recent high-profile promotion, I tracked the orders that didn’t get attributed to the correct affiliate. I actually picked up the phone and called a couple of the customers, asking them about the circumstances surrounding their order.

One person had received the promotional email on their work computer, but had waited until getting home to place the order. The 2nd person had used a different computer for their order as well. What kind of affiliate tracking technology is going to overcome that? Ironically, it’s the “old” technology.

If you want to make absolutely sure the correct affiliate gets credit for a sale, provide them with a static page hard-coded with their affiliate ID. And have that page link to an order page that is also hard-coded with the affiliate’s ID. Make sure their affiliate ID is coded visibly on the order page for cases where they FAX or call in the order. And don’t have any entry or order pages OTHER than the affiliates’ – that way it’s not possible for someone to make an “end-run” around your affiliate.

In this case your promotional home page (e.g. “www.example.com/widgets”) might have something like this:

Oops, you didn’t type the complete web address! Your link should be something like this: http://www.example.com/widgets/abcde Please enter the correct web address exactly as shown in your email (or on your postcard)

This of course means that your own promotions will need to link to an “in-house” affiliate account rather than linking to the home page itself. And you can’t have any links on your home page to the “widgets” promotion – if you want to guarantee accurate affiliate compensation you must force people to use the affiliate links to access the product.Now I understand it’s not practical to create static pages for each affiliate when you have 10000 of them unless your affiliate system has that feature built in. So this might be something you offer only to your best affiliates or JV partners.

Alternatively, you could create static pages for all of your affiliates for a particular promotion using one of the available “site replicator” scripts. You’ll have to do a bit of work to import your affiliate list and “replicate” the promotional pages for each one, but using a replicator script should at least make it feasible to do so (doing it by hand is NOT feasible if you have more than a couple dozen affiliates).

In fact, I just remembered I created a free “feature limited” version of my affiliate software some time ago – it will replicate pages just fine, and in fact is very similar to what I used for a couple of past high-profile client launches to create static pages for the VIP JV partners. You can download it here:

http://www.paulgalloway.com/utilities/yoapfree.zip

This will probably be part of a paid package at some point in the future, so download it now while you have the opportunity.

Note: Please don’t ask for support for this free software unless you’re willing to pay for my time ($150/hour, 1 hour minimum).

Keep in mind that this software was designed to replicate pages in real-time as people filled out and submitted a “signup” form. If you already have a bunch of affiliates that you want to replicate pages for, you will need to populate the affiliate data file first, then run the “Update” utility to create the replicated pages.

If you’re handy with a text editor, you can sign up using the included signup form, and then examine the “adm-dealers.txt” file to see how the data is stored. You can then add your existing affiliates to that file using the same record formatting.

The above “home page” example can also be used if you’re using standard cookie-based affiliate tracking – at least you’d make certain the customer comes in through an affiliate link.

But there will still be “breakage” in cases where people have cookies disabled or have their browser security set to reject cookies – so if you can capture and propagate their affiliate ID from one page to the next, that would overcome the cookie deficiencies.

The free software provided above will also do this kind of propagation for you, even without importing your affiliate list – just read the section on “dynamic pages” on pages 22-24 of the user guide.

I don’t know about you, but I’m very curious about where affiliate tracking will be in 10 years. I really will not be surprised if using old, boring “static pages” is still the most reliable way to track, even then!

Best,

Paul