There seem to be two trends I am encountering often lately in my marketing ventures.

First is the “forced continuity” tagged on to product purchases. It’s quite the rage and many customers are pretty rageful about it.

This involves a marketer selling a product from a sales page and then attaching an ongoing newsletter or membership program that the purchaser is likely to be unaware of. Most of the time, the language on the sales or order page that describes the continuity program is veiled in weird language or made to sound like something else or is altogether non-existant.

A recent example is Joel Comm’s Adsense Secrets v4.0. He was selling the ebook for around $10, which is a steal for the quality of information he offered. Lots of people jumped on the opportunity. What they didn’t realize was that in the bonus section, Joel was offering a free month subscription to his hardcopy newsletter, and they would ultimately have to cancel or be charged $30 a month automatically.

I was alerted to this arrangement before I even visited the sales page and I chose to make a purchase anyway. I wanted the book and I knew I could cancel the subscription and Joel’s people would honor it. (Joel might send too many emails, but he is honorable. I really trust that.)

Apparently that is not true of all marketers. I’m reading that many fail to cancel their customers’ subscriptions when they request to be let out. Not cool and a huge hassle for the buyer.

After an uproar, Joel has revised his offer and has now made the newsletter subscription an optional addition to purchasing his book. I may have been tempted to change the price of the book if I changed the terms, but Joel didn’t. The ebook is a steal. At least I’m enjoying it.

Two other programs interested me recently that also turned out to have membership fees attached ongoing but did not mention this part on the sales page. At least I couldn’t find it anywhere. These two programs are Players With Money and 4MinutesMoney.

I did invest in PWM and learned of the membership from the Clickbank receipt. I was shocked and felt duped. Now I have to decide whether to continue with the program ongoing or not. It looks fabulous, but it’s a monthly fee I was not counting on and don’t think I want.

What I’ve learned, hopefully, is to go over sales pages with a fine tooth comb before deciding to purchase, and then go over the order page with an even finer tooth comb. Take nothing for granted.

Another option is to quit buying products, but that’s no fun. I want to learn everything I can about affiliate marketing, site building, adsense publishing, and you name it. I enjoy the learning process tremendously.

Enough about that…and I’ll save the second trend for tomorrow (or sometime soon).

So, what’s the best way to handle it when you join a membership and then the creator does not deliver as promised?

The easy answer is just to say “quit,” but that’s not how I want this to turn out. I purchased a wso on the Warrior Forum a short time ago that promised 2 rewritten sales letters a month for some popular Clickbank products. Along with this are some graphics and an autoresponder series designed to encourage the reader to purchase the ebooks.

The quality of the product is excellent and the copywriting is outstanding. I am extremely please with it. The problem is that the product creator is now behind on delivering the monthly packages and is non-responsive with email or the forum. This person is a pretty well known and respected marketer, so I am quite surprised.

But, since I got in at the beginning, I got a great price, and I love the product, I plan to hang in there for awhile and hope he straightens things out. I have a number of ideas for marketing these products and see the membership as a good long term investment. I will keep my fingers crossed.

I don’t want to get all cynical here, but it’s not the first time a big name marketer has not followed through on what was promised and it probably won’t be the last. I’m definitely learning who to respect among these folks and who is promoting garbage. I guess that’s a good place to be and I guess I’m officially not a newbie anymore.

As a side note, someone who I respect a lot is Eric Giguere, who I have mentioned before. He writes the “Unofficial AdSense Blog” and he digs a little deeper in sharing tips and insider info about adsense and more. Highly recommended.

Enough for now. Have a good one!

WordPress blogs have continued to be my focus.

I have a number of niche blogs that I use to display eBay auctions and I have been updating these. I really, really like how they’re turning out. I guess you could say I’m synthesizing much of the information I have collected over the past months about optimizing WordPress.

These are some really fun plugins that I’ve started using on my blogs:

Adman – allows you to automatically input some text or code at the beginning, middle, or end of all your posts. I’m using it to insert an optin form at the end of each post.

Counterize – basically counts visitors and hits on your blog and give all sort of other tracking information. There’s a quick snapshot of recent and current day activity on the dash board. It’s much easier than running to Google Analytics to get an idea of where your traffic is at.

Excerpt Editor – automates the process of dividing all posts on the front page into excerpts without messing with the code in the templates.

Tomorrow is the day that the new eBay affiliate program is unveiled. For those who haven’t heard, eBay is creating their own affiliate program and will no longer be associated with Commission Junction. It really doesn’t make any difference to me either way. What does make a difference is that I’ve been sort of on hold for a couple weeks waiting for the transition to happen. I didn’t want to create a whole bunch more links that I would have to go in and update. I’ll need to get very busy updating links and then putting finishing touches on the sites.

And this blog got another facelift. The Cleaker theme just didn’t do it for me. I really, really like this one. Very clean looking. I have lots of plans for this blog. Maybe it will be next in line for some serious renovation.

That’s it for now. Thanks for visiting.