Commission Explosion

People visit the Warrior Forum, a popular webmaster and developer (and sales) forum for a variety of reasons. Most first time visitors like with many forums arrive there seeking answers to a plethora of issues.

Today, I saw a question that was so GREAT, that many users should ask themselves the same or a similarly posed question when making a decision to purchase any number of WordPress plugins, scripts and software that are peddled on WF (and elsewhere).

Question(s):

- Does your protection software that’s included need to validate every time we open the WordPress Admin Panel and every time someone accesses the player?

- Does validation occur from one of your websites, and if so, must this website always be up and running in order to validate the software? (Will we be dependent upon software website access to this site?)

- Could recurring validation slow down Video Player access?

WOW, what great questions. This is one or should be of the big concerns with purchase, how long will you be able to access it without an upgrade and forbid the company dissolving and not having access to the validation server.

I, as have many people have purchased software, scripts etc over the years that became useless when the validation server went down temporarily, and sometimes forever!

See the original post (#19) here: http://www.warriorforum.com/warrior-special-offers-forum/662130-new-warrior-special-offer-hottest-video-player-hands-down.html

I was excited to hear from my Mother by phone. She is proficient at e-mail and Facebook so the calls are not as frequent unless it’s an emergency. So, this call was a surprise. Her voice was fast and pitched, excited that she had found this new website called Pinterest and she wanted to know if I heard about it?

After laughing to myself for a few seconds I continued to listen to her excitedly rosy description of Pinterest and how she is able to pin these images to a pinboard where she is organizing all these garden-ideas she wants to do, or at least dreams about doing someday.

This is news, and big news because though I am fully aware of the growing interest in Pinterest you can tell from earlier posts that Pinterest was not that exciting to me as a marketer, that is a marketer without a product image to ‘pin’.

What dawned on me however that Pinterest has reached a demographic that has so far been elusive to many marketers, the female 50+ demographic. Pinterest has that demographic in a nutshell and if properly used, many marketers have a great opportunity to reach that crowd.

What are you doing with Pinterest? Are your conversions (if any) from Pinterest trackable?

We all get them, invitations to attend a variety of conferences, training seminars or product introduction events.

Aside from the obvious networking opportunities which are hit and miss, you may be surprised at an event an actually learn something that could propel your enterprise to the next level.

We recently attended both an event by Google AdSense in Your City, and IBM’s BPM product, both of which were invaluable and added to our bottom line quickly after implementation.

Don’t pass up on your opportunities to attend an event near you, nor let the mistake of thinking you won’t find something useful for your business keep you from attending.

I recently read another timely article on Perform Insider about Pinterest a popular and fast growing website where according to their website “People use pinboards to plan their weddings, decorate their homes, and organize their favorite recipes”.

Nothing really new about the service that hasn’t been tried before by similar community share platforms but why is Pinterest suddenly raising eyebrows? Apparently, their practice of automatically replacing any user generated product or retailer links with affiliate links of their own.

From Perform Insider: “Several blogs have questions this, not only as being deceiving but a possible violation of FTC rules that require that disclosure when content is disguised as an advertisement. Pinterest’s argument could be that they themselves are not actually promoting the product, they are changing the code and thus it’s not a real placement. Either way, its something they need to address because the FTC has already shown they don’t appreciate when people hide advertising in content without telling users about it.”

My overall concern is built on the whole user-generated ‘content’ aspect. I can appreciate website monetization challenges but I believe I am right in my assessment that the practice without notifying your users in clear language throughout is wrong in my own personal opinion.

Pinterest responded to the building criticism on their blog: “Online communities need ways to generate revenue to support their operations, and the preference is always to earn this revenue without disrupting their users or detracting from their UI with flashy advertisements. Creating a beautiful, user-friendly site, as Pinterest has done, mandates a non-intrusive way to make money.”

Now that that’s aside let us move onto the service they purportedly use called Skimlinks (affiliate link). Datafeed programs and javascript offerings tried in the past (albeit not exactly like this) have been around for a number of years, mostly small operations with a few dozen merchant offerings like Goldencan (who you still have to have an established merchant relationship with).

No program as far as I know has the reach of Skimlinks with a stated merchant program base of 18,000+ merchants and 32 affiliate Networks. Another enticing feature is that as a publisher, approval into Skimlinks then gets you ‘instantly approved’ to promote so many different merchants with just ‘one’ simple javascript placement. The cost to use the service is a straight 25% revenue share from any sales resulting from your publishers link.

What is your opinion of Skimlinks. What about the disclosure process? Even more important does it work for your website, blog and your content type ? What about the programs transparency? Do you feel confident sending your traffic through them as a provider? Do you only send select traffic or go all-out?

+Nick J. West

CPV can be an excellent model to generate interest in a new website, blog, product or service. Did you know that StumbleUpon Paid Discovery is a CPV platform?

So, what’s better about StumbleUpon as a CPV engine? For one good content is rewarded with additional free traffic from StumbleUpon and other related high value websites through cross-promotion.

Two, and probably most important is the eyeballs that will see your website with StumbleUpon want to be there, they aren’t paid, they are real humans and they are opinionated as hell. (That’s a good thing).

I also believe that StumbleUpon Paid Discovery a great arena to introduce something you think might have the potential of going viral or, to help establish a following with a new blog.

Make sure that you always present clear opportunities for your visitor to like or fan your offer, page or blog (like below).

Don’t rush into launching a new campaign without first researching your niche within StumbleUpon to see both what others are doing and what others find and mark useful. If they aren’t clicking the thumbs up your Stumble Upon campaign will more than likely be a failure, and you will be missing out on the free cross-promotion.

Testing the water with StumbleUpon is easy with a low entry cost and low per view costs as well.

Give it a try by clicking here and let us know what you think. Already have tried or currently use StumbleUpon Paid Discovery let others know about your experiences (good/bad) in the comments section below.

+Nick J. West

Content is king, consistency is queen and so on. With all the rules here’s another to add to the list. Video equals traffic and trust. Simply put, adding video to your website makes it just that much better.

I met briefly with an upper level executive from a major leader in the text link marketplace last summer who said: “We make a video or two and blam the site or page has increased linking and traffic, heck it doesn’t even have to be a good video”.

One thing that does ring true, despite their misguided philosophy on the importance of quality is that Google simply loves video. YouTube is the second largest search engine and when you think about it that is a lot of potential free traffic you shouldn’t/can’t pass up.

Incorporating video into your website does not need to be hard, often an inexpensive production demonstrating your service or product can go a long way to establishing the trust factor with any potential clients and customers that reach your website.

And while the video doesn’t need to be perfect it does need to be well thought out and executed to match your companies vision and mission statements. i.e., no comedy that may touch on offensive or references that may harm the brand by reaching an audience that is not compatible or even aggressive.

Having a personality to represent your company is an easy way to connect with your audience, look no-further than the owner(s) and principals where possible for that public “face”.

No-need for an expensive setup, many small cameras like the Canon PowerShot work just fine but if you want a more professional appearance you can outsource a cameraman, including equipment, lights, initial editing and final production edits for $100-$150 using your local classifieds or Craigslist.

Post your new video on the YouTube platform, add any relevant tags, embed video on your website/blog (using the YouTube embed links), post to Facebook and other social media platforms. Rinse, and repeat!

+Nick J. West

Your small business accounting just got easier and less expensive with the Free Wave Accounting module for Google Apps users here.

If your business is in need of an accounting system and you can’t or don’t want to spend a fortune and the time getting up to speed simply to bill your clients (read=Quicken). Wave Accounting offers intuitive features that any small businesses will appreciate and it couldn’t be easier to use.

At the time of writing this review Wave Accounting is free and works seamlessly for Google Apps users. Let us know if you like this recommendation.

ARP or Auto Response Plus is self-hosted auto responder software designed by Neil Morgan. Frankly, I personally considered it a top of the shelf product that was highly recommended, even by myself in another Commission Explosion write-up here.

The ARP3 product was reasonably priced, meant no monthly or per e-mail auto responder fees and silly sender limitations like with aWeber and other list services. Or, even worse having your customer list held hostage as in the example here.

So, when an advertisement from Neil came along about a new upgrade, with promised ground-breaking new features and business building product in partnership with famed entrepreneur and legend Mark Joyner I was intrigued to pre-order the product with delivery promised later in 2009.

Here was the first paragraph of the e-mail teaser from Neil received on 11/8/2009:

Earlier this year we formed an alliance with internet marketing legend Mark Joyner. Since then we’ve been working hard on an exciting new automated “business building” product. It will be launched later this year. Order AutoResponse Plus *today* and it’s yours free!

After waiting nearly an entire calendar year for the upgrade I began to wonder, along with what I am sure are other customers who also pre-ordered the product. Even if I were to give him the benefit of meaning 2010 it has been over 2 full years from being first promoted.

Unfortunately, despite incredible patience the promised upgrade has still not been delivered. In-fact it has been another entire year and besides a now closed Twitter feed here that seemed to welcome dialogue and provide occasional updates not much communication has been received but I did recently receive another sales pitch to “buy now” to receive the current version and to also receive the free yet elusive Gold Unlock Code which allows current users to receive the upgrade.

Now to be fair, as best I can tell this is an upgrade to an upgrade so instead of being ARP4 it’s more like ARP5… or so I am told in the sales pitch at ARPReach along with an explanation of sorts about the incredible resources and hurdles that came along, primarily with Apple dropping support for Flash. Now written entirely in PHP and Ajax it promises a superior product.

After the Twitter updates page closed a couple of months back customers were told to expect pre-launch access in December (2011). We are still waiting and a promise is only good if it’s kept.

What is your opinion on software delivery dates being moved back? How long do you wait before you say enough is enough?

+Nick J. West

There are your competitors and then, there are your customers. What happens when your customers are also part competitor?

The retail department store model of the 60′s- 70′s was slanted to empower the retailer. Offer the best and newest products in mass presentation, actively demonstrate those products and their can’t live without features and they were often sold at markups that would make today’s retailers drool.

With discounters and do-it-yourself and bulk warehouses rise in popularity through the 80′s and 90′s the shift for pricing control moved in-favor of the consumer being firmly in-control of actual sales price.

Amazon recently introduced an App (smart-phone program) designed to get customers into your store, but the app strongly encourages them to not buy by dangling a discount above offering or locating a better price if they order via Amazon after leaving a brick-and-mortar business.

In addition to recruiting a customer, the Amazon App utilizes crowd-sourcing to collect pricing and product data from smaller retailers. This alone is a powerful tool and one surely to be explored by other retailers looking to capitalize on the wealth of data that can be generated in this fashion.

So upset about the Amazon App is one small business advocate that she took to the website Change.org to launch a petition denouncing the App and asking Amazon to remove it and apologize to America’s Small Business owners. See Jasmine Johnson’s petition here.

Though smacking of unfair competition tactics like this are sure to become commonplace as technologies advance, just look at the mass number of tools and similar apps currently available to consumers everywhere.

What is your opinion on this new Amazon App, does it hint of unfair competition? Is this a win-win for the consumer? What about the idea of using crowd-sourcing for data collection?

+Nick J. West

Though I am personally against using a paid service to handle e-mail newsletters, not everyone has the technical skill to manage a list on their own server, or, may not have a server capable of e-mail list management.

In those cases I would highly recommend the services of VerticalResponse. Their e-mail marketing blog is packed full of specific tricks of the trade that you can utilize to begin or, to grow your fledgling e-mail list.

Hop on over and check out the most recent blog post: Growing Your Email List Can Be a Piece of Cake.