Jude’s Eclectic Resources

I know lots of people use Clickbank and I have had an account for several years, but I haven’t really been promoting my website that I sell e-books on for quite sometime. Every once in awhile I get a random sale and I have it set to pay out at 25 dollars. I never had a problem until the end of last year and now.

They require 5 different credit cards during the year before they will payout and many people use their paypal account instead of a credit card so they don’t count that toward the requirement. I now have 49 dollars in my account which they will start deducting a dollar every 2 weeks simply because they can.

Until there are more purchases by credit cards whatever money I have in that account I can just consider a donation to clickbank. In my opinion that sucks, but if I pushed for more sales then I wouldn’t have that problem. At the end of last year the same thing happened also and the few measly bucks dwindled fast and the last 2 payments instead of a dollar they took 4 and then 5.

I wonder what happens after the money in the account is gone. Will they decide to bill me every 2 weeks for a dollar just to keep the account open or will they delete it? I prefer using my paypal account over credit cards so I certainly think they should change their policy about 5 different credit cards before they will pay you. It should go by how many purchases.

I need to decide if I want to get rid of the account I have used for so long because all they seem to be doing with me is sucking up the few dollars that I make through using their system. I would then have to delete everything I have connected with them and that’s going to be a pain. I hate when you go through all that trouble to set stuff up then a couple years later everything unravels.

Just like with my original websites when I set up different ads through CJ and some of the others, lots of the companies that advertised through them would cancel their affiliate accounts and you have to go through and remove all those stupid ads, what a pain. I am going to soon go through those sites and move all the information to my main site and just delete them all. What a waste of time.

Some people have a talent for marketing, but I’m not one of them. I am so inept when it comes to making money, I’m good at spending it though. When I decided I wanted to make money online I tried lots of different things. One of them was affiliate marketing because I didn’t have to put any money out for most programs however some do require you to pay, but most don’t and those were the ones I went for.

I made very little money even the programs I paid to join and knew firsthand how the products worked I still couldn’t convince people to part with their money. One of the best programs is Bluehost and when you get someone to sign up and get verified you earn 68 dollars, but everyone out there that has a hosting account is also pushing it.

At one point I thought about offering a portion of that back to the customer if they signed up under me, but I decided it wasn’t worth it. I decided I was a horrible marketer and more or less stopped. I unsubscribed from many different places and lost interest. I think I still belong to one program that I spend 119 dollars a year. Last year I didn’t even break even and this year I might so I’m going to cut my losses and drop it.

Nope marketing just isn’t my thing, I’m very lazy and don’t put in the time to push it because it’s not very interesting to me. When I worked in the salon I never pushed products if someone liked something I was using and asked me about it I would explain what it did and usually the product spoke for itself and they would buy it, but I simply wasn’t a good sales person.

When I worked in the food business if I didn’t think something was good I told them my opinion and most times I would go get them a taste of whatever it was so they could make up their own mind and if they decided they wanted to try it then that was on them if they didn’t like it halfway through. If they had been sweet to me I sometimes took pity and would let them have something else.

The only product that I never had to push was alcohol and of course most times I had to limit that. We humans sometimes just don’t know when to stop so we sometimes need intervention. I hate when I go to McDonald’s and they ask me if I want french fries or an apple turnover with that, I know what I want so leave me the hell alone.

I know that’s how they are trained and they have to say it, but it gets monotonous after awhile especially if you go there all the time and get the same thing every time. When I worked at Lowe’s we had to say the same things over and over, but I did try to vary it with each customer so it didn’t sound so mechanical. I hated working at Lowe’s, I lasted 6 months then I quit.

Okay that’s enough about my inept marketing ability I have to get moving and get some other stuff done. Have a good one.

I can’t believe how many Google free blogs are in the Entrecard system and I never really paid much attention until Google went down right after Entrecard started working again after the fire. I think well over half of the blogs that were in my inbox were free blogs. So I had to search for blogs to drop on that weren’t connected with Google and that was a pain.

I can understand why certain bloggers don’t see the need to pay for their own domain, but people that are trying to convince other bloggers that they know how to make money online should certainly know better. Now who is going to listen to any marketer that can’t even afford to pay for hosting? Certainly not me, I can be naive at times, but I’m certainly not stupid.

What would happen if blogger blogs went away? Would Entrecard have to start all over again or would they have enough blogs in the system to carry on? I’m not an expert about EC so I have no idea. I have 2 free blogger blogs, but I don’t use them they were simply to practise on when I first started out and they only have articles on them that I bought a long time ago.

I can’t say I’m any where close to being a good blogger, but at least I do try to keep my blog updated unlike many blogs I drop on that always have the same post showing and I can see that they have dropped on me almost everyday or quite frequently so they certainly had time to throw up a simple post of some sort.

I know people go on vacation and bad things might keep them off line for awhile, but why in the world would they take the time to drop on blogs if they are not even going to update their blog? If I’m away for an indefinite period of time I surely wouldn’t make time to drop EC’s. I feel bad when I don’t update at least every other day.

I know on weekends I usually let it slide because I’m busy and I know others have a life outside of the Internet also. I am seriously thinking about not dropping on any blog that doesn’t update at least once a week. Sure you might get my visit, but you wont get the EC credit and stay popular. I usually drop from 3 blogs so that usually means 3 votes for you. Well, I have to run so have a good evening and happy dropping.

One of the few marketers that I still subscribe to is Eric Holmlund of Eric’s Tips and that’s only because he was not so blatantly pushy with the products he recommended and genuinely seemed like a nice young man so I stayed on his list while unsubscribing from the many that I had joined since starting online.

Eric is cutting back on the monetizing and intends to focus more on teaching others the techniques that he learned over the years that has helped him. Starting this week he will began 120 lessons that will be a step by step education free to help other people understand how to effectively achieve an online business.

He says he will hold nothing back and that they will be mostly screen capture videos. For those of you trying to build a business and just can’t get any straight answers I would suggest that you visit Eric’s blog and bookmark him http://www.ericstips.com/. He has always seemed pretty straight forward to me and I think after reading him you will agree.

Even though I am no longer interested in marketing because I’m not good at it. I will still be reading Eric to see if he tells and shows me something that will rekindle my desire to actually make more money online, instead of doing paid posting for a few bucks. Time will tell. If you are a newbie or have been at it awhile you might learn a few things to help you further along.

Sometimes I feel like I just crawled out from under a rock because I seem to be clueless about what is going on around me. Of course I was offline for about a week also and things happen very quickly on the Internet. It’s like my parents sent me to the store for milk and moved while I was gone.

I was checking my stats over at Clicky and there was a headline that caught my eye Paypal has been terribly broken for 10 days and no one’s talking about it so I headed over to the blog to see how PayPal was broken. If you’re like me and  haven’t heard they are having a big problem receiving payments from different countries.

I use PayPal as do countless others, but since I remember all the horror stories over the years about accounts being frozen and other people losing thousands of dollars and all the rules and restrictions, which for the most part is good I leave very little money in that account. As soon as it reaches a certain point then boom I transfer to my bank.

No way would I even sign up for a PayPal credit card because with all the phishing and scams it makes me very uneasy. According to Clicky the fix is a simple one, a drop down box that would enable people with accounts in other countries to be able to pay, but it is taking them a long time to rectify this problem.

Thank goodness I don’t depend on them mainly for my business, but many do. However I do receive payments from PPP through them and the reputation they have developed over the years at times make them an iffy option to use. I have never experienced any real problems, but many have.

So if you are like me and haven’t read the Clicky blog use the link above and head on over. The last comment someone posted yesterday said they received an e-mail from PayPal telling them that there was a  live site maintenance scheduled for Thursday, May 29 at 11 pm PST, but I haven’t received any communication.