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May 21, 2005

Updating your blog

If you would like to prepare your posts in advance using MT and have them appear on a specific date, you can find the instructions to do this here.

Posted by Steve MacLellan at 06:50 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

May 07, 2005

Youth and Consequences

In the Spring of 1975 I got a call from one of my friends that a girl he was dating in a small town in Nova Scotia would like to have me accompany his girlfriend's best friend to their prom. I didn't think a whole lot about it at the time. I mean... really.... how many 16 year old boys pass up a dating opportunity?

We were at the prom, and things were going well... and then it turned ugly....

A teen just recently from Miramichi, N.B was cleared of a charge of running someone over and if you look at the archive post you will have a better understanding of what I am talking about. It says:

Several of the witnesses testified that the defendant's car was surrounded by between 70 and 150 people before it sped away.

The same thing happened to us. Apparently we were dating two of the most popular girls from the school and the young men took offense to the fact, and that we were "out-siders."

We got the young ladies into the car while several young men were grabbing at us. We fought off the few closest to us, and managed to get in the car and lock the doors. But it didn't stop there. A crowd of young men had gathered around the car, making it almost impossible for us to back-up so we could leave the parking-lot.

After we had backed-up, a good percentage of the crowd moved to the front of the car... to prevent us from leaving.

They were beating on the car with their fists and other objects. The four of us -- needless to say we were all terrified!

I said to my friend who was driving the borrowed car from a friend, "What are we going to do? We can't run someone over!"

My friend was as terrified as I was. He looked over at me and said, "Then they had better get out of the way."

He revved the engine two times (to signify to those in front we would be moving fast) and dropped the car into 1st gear and put the pedal to the floor.

We were on gravel. Those in front managed to push themselves off from the car.

Now it's 30 years later... and still there aren't any supervisors outside to help control these events.

Why is that?

Posted by Steve MacLellan at 11:07 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

May 05, 2005

My apologies

It has been a very busy week. I haven't had much time for anything but programming.

It seems most of you got a money back from your income taxes...

Guess I need a new accountant. I just seem to owe the government more each year...

Posted by Steve MacLellan at 03:49 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

May 03, 2005

Clickbank or PayPal?

It seems lately I've landed on a number of sites selling their products through Clickbank, but below the link to purchase the product at Clickbank is a PayPal button.

If you are an affiliate for a site/product that does this, then you're going to lose sales commission if the traffic you send to the site decides to use PayPal to pay for the product.

I had a couple of people write to me recently and thank me for referring a certain affiliate site to them that offered a digital product that would solve their problem. Just for the fun of it, I logged onto Clickbank and discovered I had not made a sale after these people had thanked me.

Well... now you know why...

So I wrote to the owner of the program and said, "Look, this isn't working for me. I like your product and don't mind recommending it to folks, but it would be nice to make the odd commission sale."

The owner of the program wrote back to me and said they do a lot of PPC advertising and find the conversion ratio at about 2.5% with 30% of their purchasers opting to use PayPal. Then he asked me if I had any suggestions...

The whole point of an affiliate network is you pay people to help promote your product. Naturally, if they aren't making any money doing this, then you're not going to have affiliates very long... which means you have to turn to other methods for advertising such as PPC.

So I wrote him a note:

I don't don't how many affiliates you have. Of course with Clickbank... you never know how many affiliates you have. But if they send people your way, they should be compensated for helping you sell your product.
If it were me... here is what I would do.

I would enable your html pages to be parsed for SSI by adding this to your .htaccess file:

AddType text/html .html
AddHandler server-parsed .html

then on the index.html page I would add this code:








If there is a query string on the end of the URL then an included file, "page1.inc" (which is just the html containing the clickbank ordering information) can be inserted into the page.

If there isn't any query string then "page2.inc" will be included in your page. This html would include both options, Clickbank and PayPal.

Yes using this method you would lose some sales. People being sent to your site from an affiliate wouldn't have the option of paying by PayPal.

But, if affiliates start getting their sales commission... then they will promote the program more and you will make more sales.

I've been promoting this program for a while and have made zero sales. If other affiliates have been finding the same thing... you aren't going to have any affiliates.

I think it is important that you use a tracker when deciding to become an affiliate of any program. You need to know how many click you are sending affiliate sites. But it is also a good idea to examine each one to see if there is a way you might be losing your commission.

If you find some of the affiliate site owners doing something similar, you can send them a link to this article.

If you are setting up your own affiliate program, use this code as your own. Make sure your affiliates get paid for their work if you want to keep them.

Posted by Steve MacLellan at 07:14 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack