I read a lot.  Aside from a few books I read when I’m not on the computer, most of my reading is done online.  When I come across something real good, I tweet it.  Here are a few good reads of the last month that I’d recommend:

Internet Ad Revenue Reaches $31B In 2011, Mobile Up 149 Percent (IAB Report) 

Stop Working More Than 40 Hours a Week

They Ain’t Making Any More of Them: The Great Engineering Shortage of 2012

[VIDEO] Awesome video on startups (by the 2 Instagram founders). 54 min video at the bottom of this page.

Research: $1.5 Trillion In Mobile Revenues In 2012, U.S. Accounting For 40% Of All Smartphone Sales

Slow-loading e-commerce sites cost global retailers more than £1.7b in lost sales

[VIDEO] TED-U Talk: Gary Kovacs: Tracking the trackers

comScore: Google Sites Top Facebook On Mobile; 4 Out Of 5 Mobile Media Minutes Spent In Apps

Nielsen: Smartphones Used By 50.4% Of U.S. Consumers, Android 48.5% Of Them

Americans Now Spend More Time On Facebook Mobile Than Its Website

The Coming Meltdown in College Education & Why The Economy Won’t Get Better Any Time Soon 

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This is an experience I had with HasOffers over the last month. They have the 30 day free-trial offer, which I signed up for a month ago. It basically allows anyone to checkout their affiliate network platform technology for 1 month, free.  When you fill out your credit card, they say if you don’t cancel in 30 days, it will bill you $279/month. After doing this, I logged in a couple times to play with the platform, but didn’t use it. I planned to cancel it at the end of the month to avoid paying the fees.  After all, I never had plans to buy it, just wanted to check it out for 30 days.

About a week ago, I was out of town on a small trip. The day after I got back I was working online, and I got a notification saying I was billed $279. Mistakenly, I didn’t cancel (it was on my list but my trip threw me off). I immediately contacted their support and told them that I forgot to cancel (literally 2 minutes after the charge was processed), and that I wasn’t interested in using it. All of their support basically said that I’m SOL and they won’t refund the $279.

So, I made a mistake, I know that. But looking my account, it was obvious I was looking at it just to play with it, and that I made a mistake in not canceling. As a company like HasOffers, isn’t it courtesy to honor a refund in this case? I understand their refund policy for people who run a network and cancel halfway through the month, but the reality is that I never used this or had intention to, which is obvious when you look at my account.  It is absolutely terrible customer support to not refund the $279.  In a worse case scenario, they could at least refund $250 of it and take a $30 admin fee.

I understand the agreement says I am billed and I am responsible, but it seems like most companies that care about their customers would honor a refund in this case due to a mistake like this on my end. I am shocked that a company like HasOffers wouldn’t do this.  Because of this, I will never support using HasOffers again, and I would suggest you do the same.

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I rarely watch TV, but when I do, it is either for sports or 60 Minutes.  I try to limit sports to once a day, or once every other day, but often I only watch once a week for a couple hours.  60 Minutes is on once a week, every Sunday, but often they feature repeat stories so I don’t watch them all.

If you haven’t heard or watch 60 Minutes, you should.  Not only does it provide a nice break from sitting at a chair on the computer, but it provides interesting insight into the world around us.  I often find that news in general is a waste of time.  It isn’t necessarily important to watch the local news or national news (I never watch the news, I browse Google News once a day and check Digg once a day, in addition to being subscribed to the TechCrunch blog for tech-related news).  60 Minutes does investigations into politics, the economy, and the world, and also does in-depth interviews of different people around the world.  Taken from the 60 Minutes Wikipedia article:

“The format of 60 Minutes consists of three long-form news stories, without superimposed graphics. There is a commercial break between two stories. The stories are introduced from a set which has a backdrop resembling a magazine story on the same topic. The show undertakes its own investigations and follows up on investigations instigated by national newspapers and other sources.”

I always finish an episode of 60 Minutes thinking to myself about all the things that the episode enlightened me on.  For example, there was an episode a few months back on medicare/medicade fraud and how easy it is to steal millions of dollars from the US Government (the tax payers).  60 Minutes featured a man who stole $22M.  The people that were interviewed said the people who are stealing this money are the people who would be stealing cars if they weren’t frauding medicare/medicade.  The means in which the fraud happened opened my eyes to how easy it would be, and how vulnerable much of our government system is (this fraud alone costs $60B/year).  This is just one segment of one episode, and it was quite interesting.

All the episodes are available to watch online at anytime on the 60 Minutes site.  There are minute long adverts throughout the episode, but it often only takes about 45 minutes to watch an entire episode.

If you’re interested in the world around us, the major events that affect us, and quality insight into worldwide political and economical happenings, 60 Minutes is a great show to watch, and only takes about 45 minutes a week.

Some of my favorite segments, even though there are many more:
- Birdmen – Base jumping and with wing suits
- Alex Honnold – Free solo rock climber – probably one of the world’s best

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So you own a store and you accept Paypal payments (which is a good option).  Throughout the course of your business, you’re going to want to remarket to existing customers.  You can do this in a variety of ways, such as setting up a retargetting campaign in Adwords or some other major network.  Another excellent way is to setup a mailing list, where people can subscribe to list for you to send coupons, updates, new products, etc. to.  In addition to having an opt-in on your website, you might want to consider adding all the previous customers you’ve had to your list.  If you accept Paypal payments, this is quite easy to do for those customers that paid with Paypal (this includes any items you sold on eBay and accepted Paypal payments).  You can easily export all customers that sent Paypal payments using these simple steps:

1) Login to Paypal, nagivate to My Account / History / Download History.

2) Select the date range you need. You may need to break it up into quarters if you are going back further than a year.  We normally do go back 1 month, as we send a newsletter each month and want to collect the new customers from the last month.

3) Under “File Types for Download: “, select  ”Tab deliminted – Completed Payments”, and download that file.  This will give you a .txt file.

4) To open this file into a spreadsheet, open Excel, and go to File > Open and open the .txt file.  This should popup a Text Import Wizard.  If it doesn’t try to drag the .txt file onto an open Excel workbook and it should pull it up.  Once that wizard opens, choose “Delimited” then Next, in the “Delimiters”, choose Tab and then click Finish.

5) You should now have a file with many columns full of data.  Find the “From Email” column, this is your list of emails.  What we normally do is delete all the columns except Name and Email, and then save that file.

6) So there you have it, you have a big email list of previous Paypal customers.  Now import those into your mail client such as MailChimp or AWeber and get an email list going.  It takes less than an hour to get something going, and could mean a lot of repeat customers.  If you’re not using a mailing list for your customers, you’re missing out.

Feel free to let me know if you have any questions.

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