Ask anybody that’s been around the IM game for a while and you’re bound to hear stories about the old days… Now the main difference between old school IM and the stories Bill Cosby tells of back when he was in school is with internet marketing there was no “uphill, both ways, in the snow…” Things were easy.
- Adsense was almost immediately profitable and scalable
- clicks were 5 cents on Adwords and there was no quality score or keyword grouping to worry about
- direct linking was allowed (and even when it wasn’t it was easy enough to get around so it was)
Well, you’re not in Kansas any more Toto and the world is just a different place. Take this week:
Clickbank tightens TOS
Clickbank decided to get the Trust-E certification seal and along the way made a few minor tweaks to their privacy policy… Umm, and they basically killed off at least three popular affiliate products and made it almost impossible for affiliates to delivery bonuses to verified customers.
You see… your clickbank affiliate reports no longer have the buyer’s name, email, and transaction information in the record. So scripts like Adrian Ling’s automated bonus delivery system (and the original CBBonusDomination, and Joe Lavery’s, etc.) DO NOT WORK ANYMORE.
So we’re back to having buyers email their receipts to us. But that’s not too bad, right?
Except the receipts no longer contain the full transaction code in them. They are starred out.
Now, if you’re selling “How To Clean Your Pinkie Toe Before Prom Secrets” there probably isn’t going to be a problem. But IM products? On top of the serial refunders it’ll be plenty easy to just fake the receipts. Given the serial refund issue this faking of the receipts isn’t actually that damaging. But losing the bonus delivery sucks.
aweber hacked again
Every heard of Aweber Communcations? They host a bazillion optin email lists for internet marketers and business owners of all kinds.
This past weekend a hacker got in and got access to all the email lists. YOUR email lists. With your subscribers and your AR messages. Now the good news is that they didn’t get the AWeber customer database with credit card numbers, etc. “Just” your lists and autoresponse messages.
Is this the end of the world? No. But it is mighty inconvenient when your lists start getting sold to spammers and people get unsolicited email. It’s a matter of trust and if your subscribers think you are selling their information – or that the information they give you – isn’t safe, then it’s lights out.
And finally we have our friend at Paypal. They are updating their buyer protection policy and trying to tighten up on false and misleading claims on sales pages.
As of 11/01/10, your customers who pay with PayPal are protected for items they receive that are “significantly not as described”. This means that you may be liable for the cost including the original shipping charges should they file a claim. However, by offering this protection, PayPal helps encourage customers to shop on your site.
We recommend that you make sure that photos and written descriptions on your site are as accurate as possible, to help avoid these types of claims.
The change to our buyer protection policy will take effect from November 1st, 2010 and won’t apply to transactions made before this date.
Overall, this is a good thing. But you just know that with internet marketing products there is going to be a new spat of refund requests and claims filed. Again, the intent here is good but if you’re in the diet, wealth building, or debt elimination markets — or really any large consumer market — you are going to have to be extra careful about your testimonials, images, and wording in your claims. Again – not a bad thing but a tightening of the rules for all marketers.
Bottom line here – just like the FTC changes from earlier this year, it’s time to evolve or die. Actually, that’s good advice for most situations.
{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
Hi,
Thanks for the heads up. I now know why I all
of a sudden starting getting spam in 2 of my
email accounts this week.
Fran
… and the screws tighten, yet again. I can hear the screams.
Andre
The game is constantly going to new levels. Within 3 to 10 years — the only people that will be able to thrive online are people that:
1. Have great products and services that people truly love and respect and that deliver great results.
2. Are great marketers and are masters at: getting traffic and converting traffic into buyers.
3. Build strong businesses with all the elements that the big boys have.
For the record — I don’t understand why people don’t get their own merchant account. Clickbank is a great beginner solution. Paypal is another great beginner solution. But as your business evolves, I believe you should get your own merchant account.
Keep elevating your game!
Matt G.
Clickbank is a good resource for beginners and even long term marketers. It takes commitment to get it going and making money from it.
The reason people stay with Clickbank year after year is 2-fold:
1. (from Jonathan Mizel years and years ago) They process the payments.
With a merchant account you are always on the lookout for chargebacks, complaints, and capping the account with too much incoming cashflow compared to your normal volume…
By and large, Clickbank doesn’t have this problem. They are a good service when you want to run a VOLUME transaction business.
2. The affiliate network can’t be beat.
Now, this isn’t a big deal for probably 90% of all the merchants on CB. But for the others (and the aspiring), it’s huge.
If you aren’t doing launches with your own semi-private syndicate then Clickbank gives you a chance to get more affiliates even when you have a smallish list.
I completely agree with you Matt that most product owners should have their own merchant account and cultivate their own lists, etc. But there’s a place for Clickbank in the information publishing world regardless.
Thanks for the insite, yes it is a changing world. Also paypal cancelled their plugin, which was really cool for generating a credit card number for one time purchases and not giving out your real credit card to some website hosted who knows where.