Jon Volk made a post today with a poll as to whether or not rebill offers were ethical, and whether or not you could promote them.

You can vote on the poll here.

Here is the reply I gave:

I voted ‘No- and I wouldn’t promote them’

Since you are talking about rebill offers that we see all over the affiliate networks these days, I’d say it is completely unethical. The point of the offer is to *clearly* deceive the customer and make them pay a lot more than they think. Think of it this way, if *every* customer knew that they are going to pay $5 now, and $50-$100 in 7 days if they don’t cancel, how many would actually buy the product in the first place? I bet very, very, few.

For rebill offers like subscriptions to magazines, the terms are clearly stated on what they will pay each month or each year, with no ups and downs. These are rebil offers I see as completely fair.

The fact of the matter is that rebill offers such as Acai are clearly there to “rip” the customer, and I don’t see how anyone can deny that. Yes, people should read the TOS, etc. But the only point of the free trail is clearly to get a customers CC so they can be rebilled, whether they know it or not.

What do you think about rebill offers?

Today I went boarding at the Great Sand Dunes in southern Colorado.  I took a couple videos to show what it is like (see below).  Anyone else ever do any sandboarding?

The summer has been great so far.  I started putting in a lot of time into my campaigns right after finals in early May.  In early June I went to Albuquerque, New Mexico for a wedding.  Between June 1 and June 13, I drove to Denver (about 4 hours from where I am this summer) about 5 times.  A week ago I flew to Dallas, Texas for another wedding.  It was a great time.  While I was there, my affiliate campaigns took off.  I was on pace to do well over $10,000 in revenue for the month of June, but I have paused them for the time being to setup some optimizations and prepare to expand.  I plan for July to be a huge month for me.

I plan to sell a house in July, and then I will move back to Denver just before the end of the month (at the latest) so I can move all my stuff out of a house I am renting and also attend a Speedsolving Competition in Aurora on the 18th.  The lease on the house expires July 30th.

In August I will fly to San Fransisco, California for the US Nationals Rubik’s Competition.  When I get back home from that, I will start preparing to head over to England for 10 months to study my Junior year of college over there in Leeds (Electrical Engineering).   I will leave early-mid September. In October I will head over to Düsseldorf, Germany for the World Rubik’s Cube Championship 2009.

So, that is my summer in a shell.  Aside from that, I plan to do some fishing, climb some fourteeners, play some ice hockey, board down the Great Sand Dunes, and expand my affiliate campaigns.  It should be fun.

Here is my list of the top 5 Google products that I use all the time.

Google Analytics

Provides high quality stats about website traffic.  Absolutely amazing, and 100% free.

Google Adsense/Adwords

Google advertising and it is enornmous.  The program alone brought Google over $21 billion in revenue in 2008, Google main source of revenue.  And it is only growing.

Google Checkout

Awesome service by Google for managing buying/selling products online.  Has small transaction fees, similar to Paypal.

Gmail

Google email – big, fast, efficient, easy, and free!

Google Maps

Find where you need to go; anywhere in the world.  Street view is just icing on the cake, it is absolutely amazing.

Google Ad Manager

I know this is six, but I had to add this in. Ad manager is a free utility to manage advertisements on your webpage. They not only provide this service to you, they also provide amazing reports to help you get the most out of your websites.

If you want to know the clickthrough rate of your landing page, here is a basic way to analyze it using Prosper202.  It can be a bit hard to find if you aren’t familiar with Prosper202 or Tracking202.  The clickthrough rate of your landing page is basically the amount of people who show up to your landing page and click through to the actual offer from your landing page.  So say you have 100 people show up to your landing page, and 25 click on the “call-to-action” button to get the actual offer,  your landing page clickthrough rate will be 25% (25% of the people clickthrough to the offer).

Once you have your landing page setup with all the Prosper202 code on it (the outbound link [cloaked or uncloaked], and the javascript), you will then be able to receive data on Prosper202.  To view the clickthrough rate, go to your Prosper202 > Click on Analyze > Click on Landing Pages.  This will pull up data for each of your landing pages, including the clicks, the clickthrough rate, leads, etc.  Below is an image that shows you exactly where this data is located (click on image for larger views):

If you have a Mac and want to connect to an internet chat relay like you would with mIRC on Windows, you can use a free program called Conversion.  It works great, and IMO is even better than mIRC.