Category: News & Trends

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PayPal Changes Fees for Recurring Billing Use

PayPal cannot seem to figure out what to do with their new recurring billing service. At first they said it was like setting up a subscription but with a separate control panel and greater payment control you and the client shared and that in January 2011 you would only pay $19.99 a month to have the service.

However, clearly this has changed as just this last month they decided that to get recurring billing you had to have web payment pro or virtual terminal set up in your account which is a $30 per month fee plus then the $19.99 billing on top of that monthly starting 1/1/11 for the recurring billing option. That’s a whooping $49.99 a month to use recurring billing. Talk about a changeroo! I had to phone PayPal to get the $30 removed from my account and am now no longer offering recurring billing as an option to customers.

Additionally, when they set up the recurring billing in my account they moved all my subscription customers who pay a set fee monthly into the recurring billing control panel. When I asked for the $30 credit they deleted all my subscriptions!

Hey, I thought subscriptions were different from recurring billing and recurring billing was only $19.99 a month. So what gives PayPal? As for me this is just way too expensive of a monthly fee for me to use the service for just a few customers so I am going back to the free subscription set up. Too bad as I did think recurring billing from PayPal was a really good idea.

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Getting Banned on Reddit!

Wow, Reddit is tough! If they don’t like your content or you don’t get enough article views, just plan on getting your account closed, all your links dropped, and your user account banned. All without letting you know anything short of “we don’t like the quality of the content you are linking to.” In my case, the content was in real estate!

What I have found is that Reddit will not like you if you are using their service to create backlinks to content that although may be unique is not catchy, trendy, or from their view point newsworthy.

Although Reddit has a Google PageRank of 8 and does allow dofollow links, be very careful what you ad. You can identify if they are targeting to drop you by the note that says you are adding too many links when you are simply adding three links a week. Additionally they will display a note you are adding links too fast add this link in one hour. Hey, the last time I added a link was Monday and it is now Wednesday, how is that too fast?

Well enough on my rant on Reddit. Just be cautious what you add is your very best quality and you may want to consider not using this service for clients where you can’t control content.

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AdWords Makes It Hard to View Reports

Effective September 15th AdWords is changing who can be emailed reports. In fact after that date AdWords won’t even be emailing you a report, rather will email you a link to view the report online.

For me this has totally wreaked havoc in the way I do reporting. I have an assistant who does reports for me. She takes the Excel data and pastes it into a letter where I have noted important comments about an account monthly. Previously she was emailed a zip file by AdWords on the first of every month.

Now I will have to add her as a read only user on every AdWords account so that she will be able to now manually and repetitively login and download a report. Worse yet is that there is no real column control on the report as there was before which means that adjusting the columns in Excel becomes a task that must be done for each report for each client.

Man, I hate this change! I have tried inviting her to my My Client Center, but that does not give the report access she needs, so I will now need to add her to each individual account. I understand the security issues involved but AdWords should have polled professionals such as myself before making this seriously bad change!

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SocialPoster Making Social Bookmarking Easier

Social bookmarking can be time consuming, but if you break adding your links down into manageable posting chunks you can receive the link benefits with less effort. I like www.SocialPoster.com for my posting help.

First, I prepare my links and descriptions in Notepad. Make sure to turn off word wrap to prevent posting spacing issues.

Second, make sure before you start that you have logged into all your accounts and set your login cookies.

Third, copy and paste your posting information from Notepad into the SocialPoster interface. Tick off the social bookmarking sites you will be using and then click “Start Posting”.

No submissions are automatic, but for some sites, SocialPoster will autofill your submission allowing you to work more quickly. You may only have to enter the tags or a description instead of the full link submission.

P.S. Social Poster has not paid me for this blog post. I just think that their free online application is a real help and wanted to share it with you.