Commission Explosion

Many of you are resellers of one kind or another. What would you think of a company that solicited your hard-earned customers to sell them a product (via a different, non-trackable shopping cart)?

Would you feel slighted? A recent experience with a reseller account via iNeedHits did exactly that. It’s Google +1 program is setup to direct customers to a different shopping cart.

Frankly this seems a bit dishonest, if not misleading and deceptive to its resellers and therefore their clients. When I questioned their support team this is the response I got:

The Google plus 1s is not included on the Reseller commission as this is a Beta service and not in the ineedhits cart. Anything purchased from facebook.ineedhits is not included in the Reseller commission.

Clearly, at minimum they should have disclosed this to their resellers and refrained from soliciting reseller clients until the product was no-longer in beta.

The assigned head team or individual responsible for your companies Facebook profile (often you) launch the companies Facebook profile with big hopes, after-all, all you have to do is make posts about events, news and post some cool pictures like you do with your own Facebook page, Right? Wrong.

Above is an example of a post gone wrong. GREAT post, very informative and useful but it doesn’t direct the viewer or link to the website or location off Facebook.

Content, articles, tips, news or information should always first be posted on the companies own hosted blog, or company web page and then the link should be shared via a Facebook post. That way you still ‘own and control’ the content, and will over-time receive the maximum benefit of the post you shared with your FB fans.

What happens if Facebook goes away? Highly unlikely anytime soon but there is a chance you may lose access to a profile or some other event beyond your direct control in the future that could mean that all that content you fed Facebook would be down the drain.

You can either build content FOR Facebook or, build content for your company and then share it with Facebook liberally. Doing the first method insures that the only one to truly benefit from the content will be Facebook. Building and posting content to your own website, a blog on your own domain and then linking to that content as a Facebook post benefits both you, your potential customer and yes, Facebook.

Let’s covers some other ways you are probably doing posts wrong. Images! Everyone loves images on Facebook pages and with the new Facebook Timeline pages images are a necessity for the page to be engaging.

Are you watermarking your images? Don’t lose potential traffic from a clever, whimsical or beautiful photo that get’s passed around virally. Above is an example image watermarked using Google Picasa Editor (free).

Make sure you keep control of your content, first-and-foremost and then share it with your social media outlets. What are some ways that you believe most are doing it wrong?