Why Internet Marketers Shouldn’t Use Godaddy
Ok so I’m talking to my buddy Tim, we go waay back to that DC conference. He’s thinking of moving his domain to Godaddy, and I’m like WHAT??? That’s crazy. Then I found out he doesn’t know about their Abuse department.
Well, in 2005 StartXchange was held hostage by Godaddy. Someone sent out what lookes like a newsletter to their members, and it included a link to StartXchange. A member then reported that email as spam to Godaddy.
Godaddy then told me that I needed to provide proof that the person was opt in, or pay a $199 “clean up” fee. I could also transfer to another registrar after paying a different fee.
What really got me upset, was not only did I have nothing to do with the email sent out, but that they kept referencing a “Abuse Enforcement Program” that was not defined anywhere in any of the agreement documents on their website. It was basically their word against mine if anything came up again.
I’m not exactly sure what happened to it, because it was a few years ago. I was on the phone a bunch too, but I have all my emails in place. The last email I sent was asking about the “AEP” and why it wasn’t in their terms of service, and no replies from them.
I did manage to transfer my domains out eventually, and I know I sent emails to the President of Godaddy (who knows if he actually got it) and ICANN and what not, so I don’t know if that did it or if I actually paid the fee. Either way, the whole experience was extremely stressfull and I would recommend you stay far away if you are doing internet marketing.
So that was my experience.. Not sure how often it happens now, but I’ll never go back to Godaddy. Too bad because I spent thousands with them, but I like NameCheap wayyy better so in the long run I win!
I’m using CloudFront, and it’s great!
Amazon has officially released the CloudFront Public Beta! What is CloudFront? It’s a Content Delivery Network (CDN). Essentially a CDN is a network of servers all around the world, so when you visit a site it grabs the content from the closest server to you.
So what does this mean exactly? Well I’ve been using CloudFront for about a month or so to host my video advertisements on the traffic exchanges. What this does is ensures my videos load quickly for viewers, which is crucial for traffic exchanges. If you’ve only got 10 seconds to view the ad, and it can’t load quick, well it’s pointless!
This past week I’ve also switched from CDNLayer (SoftLayer CDN) to Amazon’s CloudFront on much of the static content on StartXchange. And I’ll be moving over more content as time allows. I started noticing, and getting complaints, from surfers that CDNLayer was actually slowing surfing down for them. So far switching to CloudFront has been much better performance.
The main reason I’m excited about this is because it’s Amazon. They are truely innovators in this whole cloud computing thing, and they are doing it all with very good pricing. It is a bit more complicated having to get the files to Amazon, but once you figure that out it’s 100% off your server so you don’t have to worry about the disk space or resources or anything!
The Biggest Mistake I Ever Made
We all make mistakes from time to time, in fact I’ve posted on making mistakes in the past. But I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned the biggest mistake I’ve made. That is, deleting old member accounts.
I know, this sounds like such a nonsense mistake right? It’s old, they won’t come back, right? wrong. Jon Olson has been preaching this for years, but as stubborn as I am I thought it was just a nonsense way to inflate your numbers. Boy was I wrong.
Google Analytics Shows Increase In New Members
Accidentally this started happening the past few weeks. I couldn’t figure out why the membership numbers were stalling out. Google was showing an increase in new members per day, yet my total member count wasn’t even moving. I was really confused.
But the member count wasnt!?
Then today I received an PM from a member who told me it was crazy that I’d delete his wife’s account for inactivity. He said that him and his wife stopped surfing for 3 months for various reasons, and they are back to surf but his account was there and hers wasn’t. It mysteriously disapeared.
That’s when the light bulb went on.. Oh no! The script to deactivate accounts was deleting accounts! Yikes! That’s why we’ve been getting all these support tickets asking where their account went. I really thought everyone was clicking the new delete account link in the newsletter because I added that at the same time this started to happen!
Now is that my biggest mistake? Actually, no. My biggest mistake was that I used to have the policy to delete inactive users. You see I was very strict, I thought if they didn’t keep surfing then there’s no point in slowing the database down with useless information.
What I didn’t realize is that a good chunk of people do come back, and some even upgrade! If they can simply log back in and start surfing, they’re very greatful. If they can’t, many get frustrated and simply don’t bother signing up again.
At one point I remember purging thousands of member accounts from the database. That was back in the day when I didn’t know anything about optimizing MySQL. In my mind the only way to make it faster was to purge the old stuff. I didn’t realize it was designed to handle millions of rows.
So I’ll never know how much this mistake has actually cost me. I can estimate. And I don’t know how much this recent mistake has cost me either. But what I do know is that I’ll never go back to the policy of deleting old accounts just for the sake of cleaning up the database. And yes, I did find the problem, fixed it, and heavily rewarded the person who helped me figure out the problem!
Introduce Your Business to 4733 Readers
First time I did this, I got 20 comments. Second time, I got 18. This time, let’s shoot for 100. The point of this post is for YOU to introduce yourself and your business to fellow readers.
I’ll try my best to read them all, and check out as many links as I can. To make it more worthwhile though, I’m going to require something of you before you can introduce yourself to the rest of us…
The Rules:
- You MUST be subscribed to the blog. (It’s not too late to subscribe now, top right of blog!)
- You MUST reply to one other person’s introduction before you can introduce yourself. (click the reply link under their comment, and it’ll nest the comments correctly)
- You MUST put your link as the URL in your comment. (You can put more in the text but note that it’s likely you’ll get caught in the spam filter if you do and have to wait for me to manually review the comment which would mean less people viewing your intro)
Pretty simple right? If there are no comments showing when you come to the blog, then you can reply to another person’s introduction after yours. Anyone who comments without following the rules will most likely get their comment sent to the spam bin ;-) I added in a topic for those who need it.
Topic: What are you promoting, and Why?
How to Advertise Blogs on Traffic Exchanges
So you’ve got a blog, and you want people to subscribe to it. You stick it in a traffic exchange, you get a bunch of comments, but no subscribers. What went wrong!?
What ends up happening (and this is how I tried it before my current method, shame shame..) is your readers are temporary. They’ll only come back if you assign enough credits and it happens to randomly pick them to view your page again.
On top of that there really only is room for one action. What happens after a surfer looks at the content? They might leave a comment, great! Or is it? After they leave that comment they’ll most likely see the counter is down and click to view the next page. Gone forever.
Really, what you should be doing is making a lead capture page. Make that one action them entering their name and email address into an opt in form to subscribe to your newsletter. I use Aweber for mine, because you get complete flexibility. If you are on a budget you can use Feedburner (free but very limited features).
Now you might not get as many subscribers as you did comments sticking your full post into rotation, but those subscribers are yours. They’ll be way more loyal and worth it in the long run. (I know it’s more fun when you get comments, but loyalty brings long term commentators you’ll get to know).
Is it Important to cloak Affiliate URLs?
This is a question that has been on the ask list for quite some time. I’ve been debating on how to answer it, because it’s not a simple answer. I’ve looked at the different types of cloaking scripts and they all don’t work the same. So the question is, what are the reasons for cloaking, and do they matter to you.
#1 Some people don’t like affiliate links, and so the thought is if you change the link they won’t notice in their browser that it’s an affiliate link and will click it. This has no affect on traffic exchanges because you are sending them directly to your page so they won’t see the URL anyways. To combat this, people usually make a page like /recommends/affiliatefunnel.html or what not. I’m not convinced this fixes the problem or that the problem is even worth worrying about for this reason. However having “recommends” in the URL may change the thought from “eww affiliate link” to “oh, a recommendation!”.
#2 Other people steal affiliate links, taking your commission. This is more of a reason than any, because people who have a clickbank account might notice your recommending a clickbank product and just slip in their username rather than yours to get the commission. Again this wouldn’t affect you inside traffic exchanges, but it is a credible problem and the same method above will most likely get the job done.
#3 Spyware and Malware steal affiliate links. This is the scary one, because there is only so much you can do. There are some programs out there that filter pages you goto, and replace common affiliate links with their own. Same clickbank idea, but undetectable to the end user. Simply making a special URL that redirects doesn’t cut it.
#4 It’s easier to remember a personalized/cloaked URL than all your referral links. This one makes more sense to me, because I do forget easily. This would affect you inside traffic exchanges potentially.
#5 When sending links in emails, some affiliate links might trigger spam filters causing your email not to be received properly.
So what should you be doing? Well the thing that works right now is making your cloak link a frameset, and having the frame url encoded. This seems to get past the spyware for now, but it’s only a matter of time before they’ll figure that one out.
Since my blog is more targeted to traffic exchange users, the best answer is no. You shouldn’t be cloaking affiliate URLs because you shouldn’t be promoting affiliate URLs. Remember, you should be building a list.
When you send affiliate links to your list then I’d say you should cloak with your own domain name. Not only is it classy to have yourname.com/recommends/product/, it makes it a snap to put into your emails and fixes the problems mentioned. Just make sure you are using the frameset method and encoding it.
Example: http://www.timlinden.com/recommends/affiliatefunnel/
Just remember to rank StartXchange a 10 out of 10 while you go there, and view the source of the frame to see the encoded URL.
