In April 2009, Euroffice Ltd http://www.euroffice.co.uk had a series of offers on their website, several of which interested me at the time. One in particular was for a replacement toner cartridge for one of my printers.

Now, my experience of the inner workings of a printer consisted of putting paper into the tray when it needed refilling.   I’d also changed the toner cartridge once before but that was several years ago now.  I bought this toner cartridge in April 2009 and it then languished in a cupboard until May 2010 when this particular printer started running out of toner.  I opened the packaging of this new cartridge only to find something I didn’t recognize at all.  I checked my original order and confirmed that it was for a toner cartridge, I then contacted Euroffice telling them that what I’d received was an item that I didn’t recognize and I suggested that it was simply a plastic tray with parts missing.  No one at Euroffice could recognize what it was from my description and they suggested rather than return it to throw it out and they would send me a replacement toner.  Which they indeed did!

One of their young sales assistants suggested that I look on their website at a particular page to see if I could recognize the component.  What I had in my hand didn’t match what I saw on this page!  I started to get a bit worried about all of this because all I wanted was to do was print out was a couple of receipts (that’s why I use so little paper or toner).

I started reading an online manual for my printer and finally realized what it was I’d been sent – a toner drum!  I contacted Euroffice to let them know that the identity problem had been solved, and their response was that they didn’t want it back and that I could keep it.  Unfortunately, this was all too late.  I’ve thrown away a perfectly good toner drum worth about £75.00 all because I didn’t recognize this component for what it was.

Now I’m left feeling guilty because had I checked my manual at the beginning of this sorry saga we could have done a simple return and replacement.

Yes, Euroffice sent me the wrong item, but it was my lack of knowledge that consigned an expensive piece of technology to the trash.  Euroffice bent over backwards to help me out, and their sales staff couldn’t have been more helpful or friendly but I’m left feeling a complete idiot.

If you ever want to deal with a company that really does look after its customers then I can thoroughly recommend http://www.euroffice.co.uk

I’ve been watching NicheProfitPress (NPC) for a while now and I can pretty much say  that even people  with no knowledge of IM can create a half decent website using their software and training.  Basically, a niche site is created using WordPress underpinnings.  NPC are doing well at the moment in that they’re attracting new members who want to learn how to create a website and have it be successful.

As part of the NPC package, each month each member receives, 3 PLR ebooks complete with articles, graphics and a 10 day autoresponder course, usually of reasonable quality. Unfortunately, if you search Clickbank on the term “Roses”, nine products appear and seven of them are the identical ebook that came as a PLR offering from NicheProfitPress.  You’d have thought that the second person who submitted it to Clickbank would realise that any potential profits would be halved with the first person to submit it, but 7 of them?  I suspect all of these people are all new to  Internet marketing, but the speed with which these books appeared then I doubt they really personalised them and they’re full of errors anyway.  I know this because I’ve been growing roses for over 40 years now.  Clickbank must be asleep at the wheel becaue they’re gonna ruin their reputation allowing this sort of nonsense.  These newbies haven’t realised yet that these ebooks should simply provide a road map? Or do they all intend submitting to Clickbank every month?

With a valid receipt you’d have thought it was relatively easy to get in touch with the software vendor and ask for another link to the licence.
Things aren’t always that easy though.

I had an earlier query about another piece of software that I’d also bought from this same vendor.
I duly filled in a ticket, outlining the method I’d used to install the software and the resulting difficulty I was experiencing .
I remembered to say please and thank you in advance!

When the emailed response came through – now I’m sure this guy think it funny but he opened his response with tl dr

Now being pretty naive I didn’t know what tldr meant.

I followed this guys advice, but alas, his solution didn’t resolve my problems with his software.

For me it was just a case of getting back to him and letting him know that I’d tried what he’d suggested and that it hadn’t worked. What else could I try?
As luck would have it (or not)

I Googled “tldr” simply out of curiosity.
You may know what it means – I didn’t.

Too Long Didn’t Read

Alas the software still doesn’t do what I want it to – it seemed a bit pointless to follow it up.

Now getting back to my licensing issue with this other piece of software, this same vendor seems reluctant to get back to me.
You’d have thought it easy enough to resolve my problem, maybe he’ll get back to me, maybe he won’t.
I don’t like being confrontational, so I guess I’ll have to suck it up and source another piece of software that’ll do the same job.

The really annoying thing is that I’m in a program (I’m in a lot of programs) where as an affiliate this guy is getting $35 out of my pocket, month after month after month.
I’m reluctant to leave this program because I like what they have to offer, but I’m only going to suck up so much!

What are your thoughts?

Software I’m using to help me create articles.

When I first started Internet marketing I looked at the variety of methods I could use to get my name out there and drive traffic to my sites.

The problem with Internet marketing is that, for the inexperienced, traffic isn’t easy to come by, and without traffic we can never hope to build a business.

Despite what some would have us believe, generating traffic is not easy for the inexperienced just entering Internet marketing.

There are many methods of generating traffic to our sites, and common sense says they should all work, – although some better than others -

But, they will all rely on TWO things –

PERSEVERANCE and CONSISTENCY!

We can learn to write better, we can improve our effectiveness when it comes to our “Google Adwords” campaigns, but in the early days PERSEVERENCE and CONSISTENCY are what count.

No method will work straight off the bat, which means we all have to put in the time to develop our skills!

One of my preferred methods of driving traffic to my sites is article writing. I write an article and then submit it to various article directories. Once they approve it, they will publish it online for others to read. Although few of these directories will allow hyperlinks to be placed within the body of the copy, we can usually link back to our site from the resource box below the article.

When I write articles I always use several tools to help me.

None of the tools I use will write the article for me, but they can make the process a lot faster and more efficient.

I use “Instant Article Wizard” to help me with basic article research and recently I’ve started using “Mass Article Creator” and “Mass Article Submitter”

One of my favorite software authors Jon Leger created “Instant Article Wizard”. I use “IAW” for all of my research and then my basic article writing. “IAW” works by taking a group of keywords that I provide and then sources subtopics around those keywords, from there it’s relatively easy to create a coherent and knowledgeable article about virtually any subject even if I know little about it initially.

All the text I select from the mountains of information “IAW” provides, I then copy across to my word processor where I make the final edits to my articles. “IAW” saves me a great deal of time and frustration when gathering subject material for my articles whether I then go on to use them on my blog or publish them in article directories. The one thing I must emphasize is that “IAW” will do most of the work for me, but when it comes to the finished article, I still spend time tweaking it, I wouldn’t consider publishing it “as is” because the software isn’t really designed to give me the highest quality I expect, but that is my own personal preference. Others use the software, apparently with great success whilst doing a lot less editing (horses for courses I guess).

A couple of years ago a succession of programs came onto the market claiming to produce any number of articles out of the one I’d written.
In effect I’d create a single article, feed it into an article spinner and the program would spit out 10,20 even 30 articles.

I bought several of these article “spinner” programs but they never lived up to my expectations. They all suffered from the same weaknesses in that they were all blunt instruments, and any documents they put together needed a lot of editing otherwise they read as though they were put together by a computer program (which to some extent they were).

For the last few weeks I’ve been trying a new program called “Mass Article Control” which again is a “spinner” type program but with this one I have a lot more control over the output and it also “learns” as I use the software. “MAC” has a built in thesaurus that improves and gets ever larger with my usage. “MAC” allows me use specific keywords that are explicit to the particular niche I’m writing the article for. “MAC” allows me to edit and replace single keywords or even entire keyword phrases.

I can put my original article into “MAC” and then (depending on the length of the article) I can reformat it into maybe 30 or more different articles all needing the minimum of editing at the end of the process. Again, I always read and final edit by hand, although many others don’t – but that’s just me!

This is saving me loads of time and increasing the number of articles I can submit. The software is also growing with me and my business because of the dynamic thesaurus it incorporates.

Things such as:

1. Article Marketing – Where I’ll be writing articles and posting them to article directories such as Ezinearticles.com
2. Blogging – Obviously
3. Search Engine Optimization - I understand that SEO can take a ton of work, but I’ll give it a go anyway.  Basically  this is all about making the site attractive to the search engines like Google and Yahoo thereby gaining a high ranking in  their search pages and hopefully getting organic traffic from them.
4. Pay Per Click – This is where I pay Google or someone else to run a small ad for me so that when someone searches on Google using a particular term my ad is shown and Google get paid each time someone
   clicks on my ad.  This can be very expensive and again it’s not easy to do it effectively.
5. Link Exchanging – I have links on my website or blog that direct my visitors to someone else’s blog andin exchange they have a link on their site whereby their visitors can link back to me.

As time goes on I’ll be trying these methods and anything else I can think of.