This guide or checklist is for product owners to think about. Very few of the points raised are a deal-breaker.

Deal Breakers

• Junk products
• Don’t fit my primary target audience
• Poor treatment of customers e.g.
  • Support tickets unanswered
  • Major product issues not addressed in a timely manner
  • Heavily moderated forum – only “happy bunny” threads
• Poor treatment of affiliates e.g.
  • Lack of or late payment
  • Sneaky changes in payment options bypassing affiliates
  • Change of affiliate system without notification
  • Radical change in deal structure
• Generally dishonest sales pages
• Skimming Sales

Major Issues

• Tracking problems
• Disappearing accounting data with no explanation – if I made a sale, and then it is refunded, I need a record of it all. I need the numbers to add up
• I really need SubID tracking to be able to use PPC
• I love the ability to deep link to content
• Upsell Hell
• Viral Hell – (see previous post)
• Major Sales Page leaks
• Excessive promotion of 3rd party affiliate products in launch materials – if your free ebook is crammed full of affiliate links that I don’t receive a benefit from, it is effectively the same as if I was sending my traffic to a PPC review landing page using someone else’s affiliate links.
• Promoting 3rd party offers on a mailing list built with my traffic rather than focusing on the intended launch product during the launch period.
• Excessive promotion of 3rd party offers in general
• Teaching some methods I don’t agree with
• Promoting products I wouldn’t promote due to major issues/deal-breakers
• Integration marketing – sounds nice in theory, in practice if your added value is a load of free offers from your cronies, that I don’t get a piece of the action on, there is a problem.
• No way to export SubID data
• No way to export, or be pushed sales data
• Elements of Proof – proof used on the sales page that is possibly factually accurate, but misrepresented
  • AWStats for traffic measurement?
  • Your Clickbank / Paypal sales didn’t mention PPC costs, affiliate payouts, established list just from previous product launches in the niche etc.
  • The testimonials are from direct business partners
  • When you tested your sales page for conversion, was it with a very warm house list of buyers? Thought so…

Significant Issues

• Payment period – if I am paying for traffic, I want to be paid by you before I have to pay my traffic costs.
• Checks (Cheques) – especially if low value – I can still sorely remember receiving my first cheque from Linkshare, for something like $2.73, that my bank wanted me to pay a $20 fee to cash, and I would receive the money in 6 weeks. I have a better bank now, but offer alternatives.
• Paypal – whilst I hate the transaction charges, especially currency, in many ways it is easier for accounting
• No IBAN support – Having to qualify by receiving a number of checks is just adding friction. If an affiliate knows about the benefit of receiving funds directly, they are going to make this worth while. (I am not sure if there are international banking regulations forcing a few checks to establish identity)
• Private tracking systems – I appreciate the advantages of using Infusionsoft for a publisher with a refined sales funnel, but why do I have to have a separate login and accounting panel for every single program?
• Customer/2nd Tier/Opt-in For Life That Changes – often caused by changes in affiliate tracking system. Suddenly the residual you were expecting dries up, and you had been ramping up on PPC
• Pushed Data or API – I want to be able to offer incentives automatically with all affiliate offers that allow it (where there is a transaction), and I don’t want customers to have to wait for it. I know there are solutions by offering the bonus directly on the thank you page, but in some ways that is a little clumsy.

The following might be looked on by many as “par for the course” of big launches

Stealing Sales

Imagine I sent you 100 opt-ins for your product, but you didn’t get any sales. A few weeks later you offer exactly the same product as a bonus if the prospective customer buys an affiliate product.

• It could be looked on that I didn’t do a good enough job in preselling or boosting my offer with bonuses, thus it is your right to enhance your offer of another product with the original product as a bonus and take all the cash.
• Alternatively I sent you a great prospect who is now a buyer, yet made nothing from my efforts – the lack of initial sales could have been your own value proposition, sales letter, etc, things out of my control.

This is something that is really hard to prove, because there is so much split-testing and list segmentation going on – I might have seen you make the offer only because I am on your buyers list, and that the prospects were sent something else

Solutions?

• Have products that you only ever offer as upsells or bonuses
• Extremely complex cooperative tracking

Many respectable marketers do the first option, and have tons of loyal affiliates possibly because of it.
The second option I might eventually have a solution for, it has been a constant gnawing problem in my head for 4 years.

Servers and Launch Material Delivery

This I can break down into 2 phases

• Primary server stability – I don’t care how much unexpected traffic a launch caused, you should have been able to handle it if you really have the high quality support team in the background.
• Video delivery – You have no idea how bad Brightcove video delivery is from Europe, and also Ustream recorded sessions. They don’t support the ability to buffer a whole video. Amazon is a little better, certainly from the UK, but in Poland half the time I have to open a browser and go and make a coffee.

Note: Amazon also isn’t an ideal solution for premium membership content – I haven’t seen an Amazon implementation yet that didn’t reveal the download location in the Http headers, though it is possible to secure more effectively, probably requiring an EC2 instance to feed unique expiring links.

Reciprocity, Karma & Great Stuff

There are tons of counter arguments – amazing free value can win against almost any issue. There are a few more I could add, but let me know your “pet peeves” in the comments.

Watch out for another post tomorrow, I won’t be pulling any punches

I have just been reading some disturbing news from Trisia – she has been going through hell because her web host, Lunar Pages was claiming that her server was being a CPU resource hog, yet she wasn’t running any particular plugins that were an unusual drain on system resources to her knowledge, and Trisia is much more WordPress savvy than your average blogger.

This saga has been going on for weeks, Lunar Pages shutting off her site for CPU overload, and whilst Trisia does get a fair amount of traffic, it is nothing compared to sites that Diggbait and have intense social media surges in traffic.

She had asked for some indication from Lunar Pages of which script was causing the problem, but no help was given, just an insistence to upgrade to a VPS.

Trisia was actually willing to do that and pay a monthly fee, but it appears Lunar Pages tried to charge her for a 2 year subscription up front ($642), and wanted to charge $75 per hour for the move over to a VPS.

Lucia tried to help diagnose the problem, and wrote a special plugin to monitor plugin CPU load with WordPress, but to use such a plugin, you really have to have your site up and running for a period of time.

If webhosts are going to offer hosting for WordPress blogs, they also should invest resources in helping to diagnose problems which can happen from a rogue plugin, but can also be caused by a spam attack or something as simple as deleting a few spam comments from your database as recently happened to Paul.
Paul was using One.com for his hosting, and he is very technical, and isolated the fact that One.com shut down his hosting because he deleted some comments from his database that had been caught by Akismet.

So now what happens is word continues to spread about problems people are having, I ping Vlad’s post on Lunar Pages over at Web Hosting Review so that an additional opinion is on record there, and the viral nature of the blogosphere passes on the bad experience that bloggers are having with their webhosts.

Now I am thinking of moving this blog over to a dedicated server, but I am looking for one that is pre-configured with cpanel, and as many optimizations for a high traffic WordPress site as possible.

Any suggestions?

Many of my readers will be familiar with Meg and her Blogpond, but many probably don’t realise she runs a website for online obituaries in Australia.

Keep Your Obits in Safe Hands

I just discovered that my father almost disappeared from the face of the internet. Whilst he had been online for 12 years before his death 2 years ago, for him his homepage was that of his computer club, and so when they posted an obituary after his passing, even I looked on it as the “official” obit site, and linked to it.

They gave the obit page an amazing amount of respect, and it featured prominently on the home page for almost 2 years in the primary navigation.

Sudden Changes In Websites

Accidental mistakes happen when you are in a rush…

Yesterday I found out that a legend among Commodore Computer Users, Jim Butterfield passed away over on Untwisted Vortex.

Today I went browsing to see if any of my fathers friends at the computer club had mentioned it, as Jim was a “friend of the Commodore family” so to speak, and had actually spoken at their computer club over in the UK a number of times.
It is actually quite likely I met Jim, though I don’t fully recall it – I recognise the photo, but that might be from one of 1000s of magazines I used to read.

As I expected, they have posted a short obituary about Jim and his time spent with the club in the UK.

After reading it I clicked through to the home page, and noticed that there was no longer a link to my father’s obit. Fair enough, he passed away almost 2 years ago. I then tried to find a link to his obit and couldn’t. Strange…

It turns out that in haste the obit to Jim was placed on the same URL as my fathers. I was lucky I found out about it now and grabbed a copy from the Google Cache.

Here is a link to Jim Butterfield’s official Obit which I found in Wikipedia.

I really hope some of Jim’s historical recollections don’t disappear off the internet, such as this piece about the history of Commodore.

The primary purpose of this post – I spent 10 minutes registering a domain for my father’s obit, checking the code from the Google cache, and uploading it, and it now needs to get indexed.

Len Beard

I am in a little bit of a rush as I will be doing some travelling, but I wanted to make sure I had this wrapped up. It is exactly how it appeared on the original site, and have dropped an email to the webmaster to ensure I have permission to use the words and pictures, and I have no idea of the source. I don’t expect there will be a problem, I have known him half my life.

Memories are important… respect them.