EzSEO Newsletter # 173

This week:

1. Paypal Language Settings - help please?

2. Complete Guide To Social Bookmarking Review

3. How to sell a product online - Part III

4. Other Stuff

Hi again.

It seems the forest fires here in the Canary Islands have been reported in many countries around the world. Thanks for everyone who wrote asking if we are OK. We live in the centre of a town, so were never in any danger, but unfortunately, that can’t be said for 1000s of others who had to be evacuated from their homes. Many lost their homes, and a large number of those had no insurance (many simply cannot afford it).

Here are a few photos taken from my house last week:

http://ezseonews.com/photos/fire1.jpg
http://ezseonews.com/photos/fire3.jpg
http://ezseonews.com/photos/fire2.jpg

Last I heard, a 15 year old boy hd been arrested in connection with the fires here in Tenerife, and I know that the fires in Gran Canaria (where I heard exotic species like tigers has been burnt alive) were started deliberately. It’s sad that individuals can do this, without any thought or care of the consequences.

The weather has cooled here, down to the mid-20s (centigrade) from the low 40s a week ago, so its much more comfortable.

OK, let’s get on.

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1. Paypal Language Settings - help please?
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One of the big problems I have had with selling products through Paypal is language. If I sell a product through Paypal, and setup a pay button, I can set the language at the time of creating the button.

However, for many of my products, I use aMember (see part III of the miniseries today) to collect customer details before they purchase. The aMember script sends the customer to Paypal to pay, and it seems that under these circumstances, Paypal defaults to the sellers home country language, in my case Spanish.

I know that this has been a problem for others who sell their stuff online and use third party scripts for customer databases, so I thought I would mention it here, and ask if anyone has a solution to this problem?

I notice that when you go to buy at Clickbank and elect to pay via Paypal, there is a language selection box. I wonder if that is something Clickbank have set up, or is it functionality built into Paypal that we can all use?

What I have found with my own Spanish sales pages, is that if I first go to paypal.com, and select English as my language on their homepage, a cookie appears to be written to my machine, so that when I visit my Spanish pages in the future, they are in English.

Anyway, if you know what I am talking about, and have faced this problem yourself, I would love to know what solution you are using.

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2. Complete Guide To Social Bookmarking Review
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A few weeks ago, I told you about AdSpy Pro, by Jean-Philippe Schoeffel.

That tool was a fantastic, affordable alternative to the Google Cash Detective, which really has allowed anybody to step into PPC advertising with very little risk. This tool allow you to spy on competitors campaigns, and find out which phrases in those campaigns are profitable, and which phrases are not.

As a big fan of JP Schoeffel, I decided to check out his book on Social Bookmarking. The Complete Guide To Social Bookmarking has been written to not only teach you how, but to educate you on the whys as well. If you are using social bookmarking already, then maybe you wont get too much out of this eBook.

The book starts out with a bit of a history lesson, looking at how the Internet works, and why it has been so successful in the exchange of information. It also highlights the problems associated with the “old ways”, and why the new era of social bookmarking is here to stay, and may even replace some of the older ways we used to find information. In short, this books tells you why you must use social bookmarking technology in your business now, or risk falling behind your competitors.

After the history lesson, Jean-Philippe goes on to describe some of the ways you can get involved in social bookmarking.

For those of you who don’t know much about social bookmarking, here is a quote from the book that I think sums up many of its advantages:

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“A submission to the Open Directory may take many months before being processed. Even when it is processed, its primary benefit is in the authority link it creates in the eyes of the search engines, as very few people (in relative terms) rely on directories to find materials.

Social bookmarking, on the other hand, operates much faster. You write. You tag. You ping. It appears. All of the intermediate steps disappear. It is an almost instantaneous way to share new information with other participants.”

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After describing the benefits of social bookmarking (e.g. increased traffic, credibility, etc), JP goes on to describe how you should build a portfolio of services to use in your site promotion. He even mentions some software that you can get to start your own social bookmarking website (although my own advice would be not to start something like that. It is likely to take up too much time, and be spammed on a huge scale).

The book is short. It’s only 44 pages in length, and by page 36, JP gets to his “I hope you enjoy reading this eBook”, so what about the remaining 8 pages?

Well, they contain a directory of 160 social bookmarking sites, with an indication of that sites PR. There is also a comprehensive Wordpress Ping list, that you can copy and paste into your Wordpress installation.

So, is this book worth the price? Well that depends on what you expect from it. JP gives a great education on social bookmarking, and why it has evolved into such a useful technology. The directory at the back is also a great time-saver. What he doesn’t give is a step by step action plan, which so many people expect these days from the products they buy.

If you are undecided on Social Bookmarking, and want to learn a little more about how this powerful technology can help with your site rankings, I recommend you sign up for JP’s autoresponder sequence.

For those who are convinced, and want to buy this eBook, you can get it here.

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3. How to sell a product online - Part III
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Last week, we ended by mentioning aMember.

As I told you last week, this script can:

* integrate with your payment processor.
* automatically add new customers to database after purchase goes through.
* allow you to protect your software products, and prevent sharing of your software.
* act as a mailer, sending out information to your customers via email.
* Integrate with forum software, help desk software etc
* has basic affiliate program built in.
* a lot more.

Today, I want to take a closer look at how aMember can be used as the central hub of your online sales process.

The power of aMember in the sales process can best be shown with this diagram.

Following the flow of the diagram, the following numbers refer to those on the diagram.

1. A team of affiliates promote your software. They use affiliate links provided by aMember.

NOTE: I actually don’t use the rather basic affiliate tracking system built into aMember. While for most people it will be enough, I am setting up my new affiliate program with a 3rd party script. It allows much more flexibility. The great thing about the affiliate tracking script that I am using, is that it integrates with aMember, with very little effort. aMember is a market leader, and therefore very well supported by third parties.

2. The referral goes to the sales page, and if they click the buy link, they are taken to a page that asks for their name and email address. After they fill these in, two things happen.

3. Firstly, those details are written to the aMember customer database, and marked as pending. That means, they are in the database, but do not yet have login details.

4. The second thing that happens is aMember redirects your customer to your chosen payment processor ready for them to enter their payment details.

Two things can happen at this point.

5. Customer decides NOT to purchase. In this case, the customer remains as pending in the database. They are eventually flushed from the database within a couple of days (depends on how you setup aMember, as you can define how long to leave them in your system until they are deleted).

6. Customer goes ahead with the purchase. When your payment processor has taken the order, it then sends a message back to aMember, saying the order is complete. aMember then changes the status of the customer from pending, to active. It also sends out an email to the customer, with download details of the product they just bought.

At this stage, you have collected the m0ney, and your customer has the product. However, aMember doesn’t stop working there.

7. When the user runs your software, your software can try to access a page on your server, only accessible to those marked active in your database.

9. If the software can access, then fine, the software is allowed to run.

10. If the software cannot access the page, you can stop the software from running.

NOTE: This functionality is not something that aMember was designed for, but it is easy to implement. Simply have a routine within your software that tries to open a customer only URL, passing the customers username and password as parameters, and check whether the page is accessible. If it is, then you know the customer is active. If not, then the customer is not.

8. If a customer does request a refund, you can delete them from the database. Then, when (7) the software queries the database, the customer is not found, and the software is shut down (10).

As you can see, aMember really is the central hub of your business.

Next week, we’ll continue with this series.

NOTE: aMember works with most payment processors. To see a list, go to the aMember site, and click the link to “multiple payment systems” under the features list.

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4. Other Stuff
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There was no Niche Blueprint in July. This was down to time-constraints, but I hope to have one ready in the next week, so if you want to be notified when it is released, sign up for the notification list at:

http://niche-blueprints.com

Well, that’s it for this issue. If you want to read the recent issues of this newsletter, you can read them online at my blog:

http://ezseonews.com/blog/index.php

For older newsletters, you will need to visit the old archives at:

http://ezseonews.com/archives

Have a great week!

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