Forced Continuity – Friend Or Foe?

It’s a debate that shows no sign of slowing down, in the red corner you have the marketer using the “Forced Continuity” method, and in the blue corner you have the customer who has been stung in the past.

And before my analogy continues, here’s just a very quick explanation of forced continuity and how it is used in Internet Marketing.

Forced continuity has been around for a very, very long time. My first experience of a forced continuity program came through a direct mailing company that offered to send me a brand new DVD for just £1, so without reading the small print I decided I’d be a fool to miss it, so I filled out the form and ordered my £1 DVD.

Little did I know that by ordering the £1 DVD, I had also agreed for them to send me 3 DVD’s each month at the normal price. It was all in the small print, but of course I didn’t take any notice of it, I just wanted my £1 DVD!

This would have been 6 or 7 years ago, but forced continuity reared it’s head again when a high profile marketer, Mike Filsaime introduced forced continuity to the online world. I know there were others using this method before Mike, but I do believe that Mike “introduced it to the masses” – he seems good at that so kudos to him!

The idea behind forced continuity is simple, you are offered something of value for peanuts, usually less than a pound/dollar. But by accepting the offer you are also enrolled into a freebie monthly agreement, that starts to cost after the first month.

The problem that a lot of customers have is with the way everything is laid out. Many feel that they are often tricked into the forced continuity and the first they know about it is when they check their credit card statement at the end of the month.

There are also a few horror stories going around about how some marketers make it impossible to cancel to monthly subscriptions. *cough* Keith Wellman *cough* credit card charge back *cough*

BUT

And yes, there’s always a BUT!

Despite all of the bad press, forced continuity can still be a good thing for marketers and customers alike.

IMHO if a marketer has a new monthly product coming out, what better way is there to gage public opinion on the product than to offer potential customers access free of charge (or virtually free) for a month to see if they like it?

Surely that’s better than charging $x per month from the start?

With the free month offer, a customer has 30 days to decide if the product is worth the $x per month it would cost after that, if they don’t like it, all they need to do is cancel. The forced continuity can actually turn out to be a good thing for both the marketer, and the customer.

Let me take a real life example. I was actually asked to promote this product around 3 weeks ago, and I came back to look at it yesterday. I didn’t want to do a regular mailing because I know a lot of you are in the “blue corner” and the last thing I want to do is piss you off, especially as it’s nearly Christmas! 😉

So I thought I would come out and show you why it’s worth taking the time to look over products with forced continuity, rather than turning your nose up at them right away.

The product in question is called Quick Fire Income and it’s been put together by Lee McIntyre. I’m not too keen on the product name but that’s by the by! (Although I guess it does sound better than “10 how to marketing videos worth more than $200+ and we’re giving away access for just $1”)

So the deal to hook you into the offer is access to 10 (TEN) of Lee’s popular “How To” videos that usually retail at over $200. But as part of this special deal you can get your hands on the videos for just $1 – even with the USD/GBP exchange rate it’s still a bargain!

But there has to be a catch right?

YES! 🙂

The almost irresistible offer is designed to get you to try out Lee’s brand new “Elite Mastermind Club”. When you purchase the videos for $1, you automatically get 30 days of free access to the mastermind club and if you choose to stay a member you pay the normal monthly price after the free 30 days are up.

So if I break it right down, here is how it all works:

Step 1: Pay $1

Step 2: Download the 10 Internet marketing videos

Step 3: Check out the Elite Mastermind Club for 30 days, free of charge

Step 4: If the club isn’t for you, then cancel. If you like it, you pay the normal fee.

SIMPLE!

I say it’s simple, but the reason forced continuity gets a bad press is down to step 4, most notably word 8 in the sentence – CANCEL.

A lot of marketers seem to take the FORCED part of forced continuity way too far and make it almost impossible to cancel. Lee doesn’t do this, he has given me his word on it and that’s good enough for me!

So if you do have any problems in canceling, let me know and I’ll personally come over and act as the spit bucket man for you in the “blue corner” 🙂

I was about to sign off, but you know what. Here’s how confident I am in the product, I’ll show you the exact steps you need to take if you do wish to cancel at any time during your 30 day free trial, and as I said, if you have any problems let me know!

How To Cancel Quick Fire Income

You can either use the LiveChat option, or the email ticket option to cancel at any time, just go here:

http://www.aimhighersupport.com/

Not too painful was it 🙂

*Brain Fart* Calling the method “Forced Continuity” doesn’t help, it makes it sound so cold and unpleasant. Why can’t we rename it to something nicer like “Free Trial….something” *Brain Fart*

So there you have it, my views on “Free Trial…..something” exposed to the world! Are you still in the same camp that you were at the start of the article?

As always your comments are welcome, nay, encouraged so comment away, and do check out Lee’s Quick Fire Income videos, it might help change your perceptions on forced continuity, how else can you get something of such value for just $1? (And please don’t say the Woolworths closing down sale!)

Thanks for reading,
Dan

P.S. I upgraded to WordPress 2.7 earlier, and one of the main differences is that we now have “Threaded Comments” on the blog. So if you are leaving a comment to a particular…comment, you can hit the “Reply” button, and, well, try it out and see what happens!

The Results Are In!

Hello everyone, thanks for stopping by on your endless journey through the world wide web! Just a quick blog post for you today, to show you how I did on my last promotion.

If you take a look past the “Snow Pictures” post, you’ll be able to see that I posted an “Action Plan”, showing you how I was going to promote a brand new product that launched a week ago today – Total Web Traffic. The idea behind this was to show you, step by step, day by day what my “Plan Of Action” was to promote this new product. I hoped it would give you a better understanding of how I do things, and I hoped it would give you all some ideas so you can do the same!

My promotional methods were very straight forward and by no means ground breaking, some of you even thought I wasn’t doing as much as I should and the promotion would be a failure. So without any further deliberation, and whilst the snow is turning into precipitation (come on, it rhymes!) here are the results from my Total Web Traffic Promotion.

As you can see, I was the 3rd best affiliate during the launch period, and if you take a closer look at the chart you can see that I finished ahead of some of the “big guns”. That’s not all, take a look at what the creator of the Total Web Traffic Course, Dave Nicholson, said about my promotion:

He thought that my conversions were outstanding, and he didn’t know how I managed it….well Dave might not know how I managed it, but you do!

I did exactly what I said I was going to do in last weeks blog post. I kept everything simple, and guess what – it worked. There’s no reason why any of you can’t do the same!

All in all I’d say I spent around 2 – 3 hours putting the promotion together, and that 2 – 3 hours of work brought in plenty of affiliate commissions as well as a new i-Pod.

And before I go, this is a disclaimer for any of my close friends or family members that may be reading this post. If you get an i-Pod for Christmas, it is PURELY COINCIDENTAL, it does not imply that I’m a cheapskate in any way! 😉

And that’s pretty much it for today. All I’m trying to get at in this blog post is that it’s not always necessary to over-complicate matters. If you get the basics right, then you are on the right track, and I think my results in the Total Web Traffic competition prove that.

As always, feel free to ask me any questions and I’ll gladly answer them for you.

Dan

Watch Me Promote A New Product

Hello everyone, and welcome to what is a fairly overdue blog post. Is it just me or does everything start to take twice as long in the run up to Christmas, tasks that should only take me a few hours are taking all day, and tasks that should only take a day are taking a week.

The cold weather doesn’t help either. I’m actually sat here typing this on the laptop whilst resting my icy feet on an electric heater, who says Internet Marketers have it easy!?

Anyway, enough about the cold, I’ll try do a David Blane and put it out of my mind whilst I concentrate on writing this post. I’ll pretend I’m on a beach in Dubai and the sun is shining down on me. (There’s probably a joke in there somewhere but this is a family friendly blog!)

So with my surf shorts twitching in the warm breeze, the sun reflecting off my shades, and with my luxury cocktail in one hand, here we go with todays post.

One thing all Internet Marketers need to be successful is traffic. Without traffic there will be no product sales, no adsense clicks and no newsletter sign ups.

###— Editor Note —###

The first part of this blog post was written yesterday. Everything under this note was written today, when I happen to have caught a bit of the man flu, so excuse any grammatical errors, I’m running on cough medicine and paracetamol’s!

###— Editor Note —###

There are loads of different methods you can use to generate traffic, someone I was speaking to last week said he could think of 121 different methods. Now I don’t know if I can top that, but I thought I would show you what I’m going to do to (hopefully) generate traffic to an affiliate product that is launching tomorrow.

It all started about 10 days ago when I was interviewed about a certain traffic method that I’ve already mentioned on this blog. The interview is to be included as part of a traffic course that shows you loads of different traffic generation methods.

The creator of the course emailed me a couple of days ago to see if I’d be interested in promoting the product for him. As I was a part of the course (the interview) and I had seen the content, I knew it was a good product so I agreed to promote.

I then thought about what I could do to promote it, after a bit of deliberation I’ve decided this is what I am going to do. So you can take a look in “real time” and see if what I’m doing is going to work!

Before we go on, I should just mention the product is going to launch tomorrow – Thursday 27th November.

Step 1

Date: 26th November
Action: Go to D9 Hosting and purchase a domain name that is similar to the product name.

Step 2

Date 26th November
Action: Create a video that shows people what they are going to get if they decide to purchase the product. The way I’m feeling today though, it’s likely to be a silent video!

Step 3

Date: 26th November
Action: Submit the video to Youtube, Google Video, and other similar video sharing networks.

###— Editor Note —###

The video will contain a link to the domain name I purchased in step 1

###— Editor Note —###

Step 3

Date: 27th November
Action: Send an email to my email lists, only send to the lists of people that have websites. (Is that you?)

Step 4

Date: 1st December (25 days until Christmas!)
Action: Send a reminder email to the people on my mailing lists that the price will go up by 30% on the 2nd December.

Step 5

Date: 2nd December onwards
Action: If the feedback is good, I’ll add the product to my autoresponder email series, and I’ll make sure my videos continue to get good exposure.

So there you have it, that’s my plan, do you think it will work?

I suppose only time will tell. If you are on my mailing list and have a website, keep an eye out for tomorrows email, you’ll then be able to see the product I’m promoting, and you might be able to see some of my other plans in action!

I’m going to sign off now, and see if I can bring myself to create the video.

Thanks for reading!
Dan

I’m Now On Twitter

I’ve finally managed to stumble my way into the world of Web 2.0 and am now the proud owner of my very own Twitter page. So if you have an account and fancy following me…in a none-stalkerish kind of way then you can do so here:

http://twitter.com/D9Dan

You can also see my latest “Tweets” in the Twitter widget to the right of the page.

There Are No Secrets To Running A Successful Blog

Greetings everyone, I hope we’ve all managed to get over the US election buzz and that things are starting to get back to a bit of normality. But on the subject of the election, did anyone else notice there was a massive drop off in promotional mails received on election day – I thought my email had stopped working until I realized what day it was!

Although if you cast your mind back to last week, I’d like to bet the vast majority of you received an email promoting a certain blogging eBook – blogging to the bank. (No affiliate link because I don’t recommend you buy the product!)

I’m sure that the author sold loads of copies, so well done to him, but it got me thinking. Are there really any “secrets” to creating a successful blog?

Now without wanting to sound too big headed, I’d say this blog was fairly successful. It averages around 200 hits each day, has a loyal following of regular readers (I know who you are!), and receives around 1,000 visitors each month from Google alone for various different keywords. Take a look at the screen shots below.

Now I didn’t achieve these results by using any sort of secret method, so here are my 3 main points to running a successful blog.

1. You Need Good Content

This is the most important aspect of ANY successful blog. You can install all of the fancy plugins you like, but they will all be worthless if your content is rubbish!

As an example, just take a look to your right and spend 10 minutes looking through the archive of this blog. You can see that I’ve been posting content on a regular basis for over 2 years now. This content has gradually built up over time and I now have a huge website full of valuable information that people want to read.

It’s also helped me to get a steady flow of search engine traffic to the blog, and to turn the new readers into regular subscribers. (Like you)

People won’t come to your blog if all they see are sales pitches thinly disguised as product reviews.

Writing good content not only brings you traffic, but it also allows you to throw in a few promotional posts every now and then. People don’t mind seeing promotional posts if you have given them something back in return. (The content)

2. Time

No blog is ever an overnight success, so don’t get disheartened if you have just started out and things don’t seem to be moving along. It takes time to build up a solid base of content and regular readers, but if you keep posting information people need to know, you will get there in the end!

One tip I would give you is not to make your very first blog posts “promo posts”. I wouldn’t post any sort of promotional pitch until you have made at least 10 informational posts. If a new visitor lands on your blog, and sees very little content and just a pitch for a product, the chances are they will go off your page and find another source for the information they are seeking.

3. Sort Out Your Links!

This is going to be the only “secret” that is technical in any shape or form.

If using WordPress, it’s important that you change your link structure from the default:

http://www.yoursite.com/?p=62

To:

http://www.yoursite.com/my_really_cool_post

You can do this easily by:

1. Logging into your WordPress admin area

2. Click on “Settings”

3. Click on “Permalinks”

4. Select “Custom Structure” and enter “/%postname%/” (Without the quotes!)

This will give you search engine friendly URL’s and will increase your chance of getting some traffic from the search engines.

So there you have it, my top 3 secrets revealed. Now I know they are not very secret, but in all honesty they are the top 3 things that have worked for me over the past 2 years. Of course there are other things to consider such as the theme you are using, the number of commenter’s you can get, the adverts and so on, but they are not as important as the 3 points above.

If you only take 1 thing from todays blog post, then let it be point 1 – WRITE GOOD BLOG CONTENT!

Thanks for reading,
Dan

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