I'm Just Sharing

Finish Line Steals My Money Then Cancels My Account

Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Apr 1, 2011

Wow, talk about a “nice” wake up message. Yeah, I’m lying about the nice part. I post this not only to get back at the company that has basically lied to me as an affiliate but has then decided to cancel my account. Here’s the exchange, mine first:

Greetings,

I am one of your affiliates through the Google Affiliate Network. I recently purchased something for myself through the affiliate link and I’ve yet to get credit for it. I’ve never seen anything which states that affiliates can’t purchase items through their own links and get credit for it, so I assume there’s an oversight issue somewhere. The full receipt is below; I’ve attached a pdf of the same information in case what’s below doesn’t come through to you. My publisher ID is XXXXXXXXXXXXX. This is the fourth email I’ve sent; please let me know what’s going on.

You’ll notice I wrote “fourth”; that was over a 2-week period when they were ignoring me. Here’s the response I got earlier today:

Although it is allowed for affiliates to purchase shoes for themselves, we do require a site to look up to a certain standard and we do require a certain amount of sales per month. All that being said, I have reached out to our GAN team and we are not seeing anything on your transaction which means your cookie was not activated for your transaction thus why you did not get credit for it.

Good luck. Sorry for any inconvenience.

Wow, really? The site has been the same since they originally approved me, even updated some, and now suddenly they don’t like my site anymore? Would they have canceled my account if I’d never written them? What the heck; how bogus can an affiliate get?

This is the downside of affiliate marketing folks. You’re at the mercy of these guys who come up with arbitrary decisions as to whether you fit what they’re hoping for. And unfortunately, it often comes up when you make a sale, even if it’s you purchasing the product. I mean, it took them two weeks to come up with a reason for not giving my my legitimately earned money, since even the guy says I’m allowed to buy from my own affiliate program, and they weaseled out like this.

So, I’m done with Finish Line. I will obviously continue wearing the sneakers I ordered from them, but I’m cutting up my Finish Line card and I’m never giving them any more of my local business, which is close to $400 a year; they could care less. I can buy sneakers anywhere, and I’m sure I’ll find better loyalty, honesty and dignity from someone else.

All this for maybe $12 or so; wow…

Follow up: I have now been threatened by Finish Line for this post, and I have the email to prove it. I’m not removing it, but I have removed the guy’s email address and added this statement here:

“All personal messages express views only of the sender, which are not to be attributed to Finish Line and/or any of its subsidiaries or affiliates, and may not be copied or distributed without this statement.”

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New And Unimproved

Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Jan 28, 2011

Well, you never know what will or won’t be a hit, do you?

In testing out my webcam, following up on my first post where the video was way too large for most people, I decided to create a new video. This time I was thinking about a specific topic, that being how there’s been this trend of companies changing up things we liked and “improving” them, only those things often end up seeming to be worse.

I put the video up on Facebook as a lark, and man, I can’t believe the response it got, and still continues to get. Seems it hit a nerve against many of these companies. Well, why keep it to the people on Facebook, I’m thinking. So, here’s the video, much smaller and thus it should be easier for most of y’all to view. Let me know how it works for you, and of course comments on the content are accepted as well.

Update! Of all things, it turns out I have a YouTube account that I supposedly created in 2008. I have no idea why since I didn’t have a webcam at the time. I’m not allowing the videos to be seen there unless people have the link to it specifically, but it’s allowing me to embed code here. Will wonders ever cease!

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Traffic From My Campaign

Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Nov 30, 2010

As you know, last week I decided to take a shot at writing two posts a day, with the second daily post highlighting a product of mine. I thought that waiting a couple of days and then looking back at how it all went as far as traffic and analytics went would be an interesting thing to see.

I have to say that “interesting” really is the correct word for it; “well” definitely is not. Whenever you try something new, you need to have at least a couple of things you want to track as far as seeing what happened. In my case I wanted to see three things: one, would anyone actually read the product posts; two, would my traffic go up because I had two posts a day for a week (okay, six days); three, would I send any traffic to my other sites, where all my products ultimately reside.

Let me start with this; I never expected to sell a single product. If I’d gotten lucky maybe one or two sales might happen, but I wasn’t expecting it. That’s because this blog really isn’t for that type of thing. What I expect I’ll do is run the same exact series on my business blog, almost word for word, and see if it generates anything there, though that blog isn’t nearly as popular at this one.

Now, a quick look at my three things. The first was whether anyone would actually read any of the posts. Well, I think I knew someone would read them, but how many folks. It turns out not all that many. None of those posts made the top 10 visited articles for the week, though 5 of them made the top 20. That’s not so bad until you see the numbers overall.

That’s because now we have to look at the second thing, overall traffic. And my overall traffic was down for the week, even with two posts a day. It dropped precipitously after Monday, and by Saturday, I was showing visit numbers lower than normal. Okay, it was a holiday week in the U.S., so I’ll try to take that into consideration to a small degree, since most people still have internet access during holidays, but even I wasn’t as active online as I normally might be. I will say this, however; those folks that did read the product posts spent more time reading them than my normal average except for one post, so that’s a bright spot.

That brings me to the third thing, which is if I drove any traffic to my other sites. On this one I’d have to say that the word “drive” is ambitious. A couple of people came over and looked at a product, but left almost immediately; average page view time was 16 seconds. That’s on the business blog. On my SEO website, only 3 people clicked on the product, and it averaged 0 seconds; how does an analytic show 3 visitors and no time on a site? Well, it did; freaky.

What can I take away from this? Actually, I’m not sure. Do I go with my entry premise that almost no one would really care about my particular type of products on this site? Actually, I think I can say “yes” to that one. Is this an indictment against 2 posts on one day as being too much? I’m not as sure on that one, but it’s possible that it could have felt like overwhelm. Some folks might have seen two posts, been unsure which one to click, and just avoided both of them. Maybe Chris Brogan’s thought on multiple posts a day doesn’t work, but I can’t be sure about it. Will this type of thing work better on my other blog, where that’s really the audience I want to reach for at least some of these things? I’m not sure about that one either.

Hmmm, maybe this one wasn’t as scientific as I had hoped it might be in the long run. Too many extenuating circumstances to get a clear thought on it all. Then again, it gave me something to write about, and once again proves that one can find inspiration anywhere. You have any thoughts on it?

Casio Desktop Printing Calculator

I’m Supposed To Ask You To…

Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Nov 19, 2010

It’s Friday, and I figured it was time for something a little intriguing, more of a question and comment and a wish that I could remember what got me thinking about this.

Actually, that’s not quite accurate; I remember what got me thinking about it lately. I was reading a post by Larry Brauner of Online Social Networking, whom I mentioned as one of my early commenters, called Top 10 Ways To Get Facebook Page Fans. As I was reading each of the points, I smiled when I realized that half of them involved asking people to join in some fashion that was more direct than just writing about it on one’s blog, which I’ve also done, as well as adding a widget, which you see there to the right.

The thing that made me smile wasn’t so much that Larry had half of his points saying that as much as the reality that I’ve read often how we’re supposed to ask people to sign up for this or that, or help us out in some fashion. As a matter of fact, I did that very thing just over 2 years ago when I first stated that I wanted more RSS subscribers, and here and there I’ve asked that question again, adding a failed contest along the way.

It’s strange because days ago I wrote about how bad I’ve been in promoting my own products, and now I realize that I’m pretty bad at asking people to sign up for anything on this blog, or other blogs, or my website, or even to follow me on Twitter. What is this thing all about? What the heck is wrong with me?

Actually, I think it ties in with a conversation Sire and I were having in a comment area about talking ourselves up. He felt it was kind of unseemly, while I said if you can back it up and were actually telling the truth that it’s not such a bad thing. And I truly believe that; yet, here I sit, not really talking about myself all that much in the things I do for work, and the things I believe I could do for others.

True, this blog isn’t necessarily a blog to market myself, but it has been a component over the years. Early on, I used to talk about all these different methods I’ve tried in making money online, and I used to disclose my monthly income all the time; not so much now. The truth is that I believe I’m kind of a talented guy. Sure, you wouldn’t know it by that image above; yeah, I drew that for one of those online survey things.

I’m definitely not an artist by any means. But I have been a songwriter, have written two books now, helped a hospital make more than $700 million in revenue in one year, helped a guy get an $80,000 contract two weeks after just one business coaching session, had articles in many magazines over the course of the last 8 years and gave a keynote presentation at a health care conference in 2007. And I make a mean meatloaf, even if I might mess up tuna every once in awhile (only once; read the story).

Other than writing the books, who knew any of that other stuff? For that matter, what else don’t you know about me? And trust me, there’s plenty more. That’s my fault because, though I feel I disclose a lot, I really don’t promote myself all that much. It’s one reason why next week I’ll be having those evening posts about my products; gotta promote something, right?

Anyway, Larry’s right, and it does me little good to go out kicking and screaming against it because, well, overall it’s just not my style. But I did talk about wanting to be known as a big time blogger, so it behooves me to just come out and ask. In my way, of course.

So, as humbly as I can, I’d like to ask that, if you participate, you assist me in this fashion, and of course I do it as well when I can, and we can all win:

1. Hook up with my Facebook business page (I hate that it’s still called “fan” page, but oh well), and of course hook up with me on Facebook as well.

2. If a post grabs you enough, whether you comment on it or not, and you’re on Twitter, click that “retweet” thing at the top right of the post and share it with others. I went with Topsy because it doesn’t make you add an application to your Twitter account to use.

3. If you like a post, whether you comment or not, think about clicking on that little “like” thing at the end of each post. If you want to know the truth, I really have no idea where that goes or if it shows anywhere else except on the post, but it’s there looking pretty lonely most of the time.

4. If you’re predisposed to do so, ask me to write a guest post for you. For this one, you’ll have to send me an email, which is under the “contact” tab at the top of the blog. I refuse to ask people if I can write a guest post for their blog, but I’ve asked people to write guest posts for this blog, and I have written a few here and there this year, but nowhere close to as many as I had thought I would. And I know the guest posting rules since I wrote some, and our friend Pat wrote a wonderful one last week on someone else’s blog and has responded to every person that’s commented; great job Pat!

That’s all I have. Now, other than next week, watch me go another year before remembering to ask for something; oh well… And be on the lookout closer to the end of the year, because next year I’m going webinar crazy; well, for me at least.

Advantus Decorative Vision Motivational Poster

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Talking About My Products Again

Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Nov 16, 2010

You know, I’ve mentioned often enough that I have products that I’ve created. Most of them are regarding management and leadership, but still, they’re products I’ve created.

The funny thing is that whenever I’ve talked about my own products, what usually happens is that I hear crickets in 3-part harmony. It’s as if I’m okay to talk to if I’m talking about what’s going on in my life or talking about blogging or something else that fascinates me, but when I start talking about things I’ve created I’m suddenly an insurance salesman.

The last time I wrote a full post about all the products I’d created at the time, I only had one comment, that from my buddy John, and he asked why I thought people didn’t comment; heck if I know. That was on this post in 2009 called Creating Your Own Products; Let Me Talk About Mine. Before that, I had written a post on my book Embrace The Lead, which got 9 comments, my CD series Embrace the Lead, which got 10 comments, and my ebook Using Your Website as a Marketing Tool, which got zero comments; ouch! Oh yeah, on those other two, realize that half the comments were mine responding to the few comments I received.

Actually, some of this might be my fault. I don’t promote myself nearly enough. It’s a part of what I talk about often enough here, promotions, influence, and marketing, and I have these things that I’ve created and not talked about all that often. That’s just a shame. I’m lucky to have made some sales here and there, but it’s certainly not because I’ve promoted enough.

So, next week, which is Thanksgiving holiday week in the United States (since I have a lot of visitors from elsewhere), I’ll be having two posts a day. The morning post will be a regular post. The evening post will highlight one of my products. Some will be a second round obviously, but I’ll introduce the rest of my products as well. Will I make any sales? Probably not. But I will drive some publicity to my products, and by extension to my businesses, and after all, sometimes that’s what it’s all about.

Of course, if you want to get a jump on three of my products by visiting those links showing my products, I won’t be depressed one bit.

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