Prof Web Marketing

Well, it’s been a heck of a ride.  I was thrilled last week to finally be able to promote the magicJack since I have had a site up and running, dedicated solely to it for about 6 months.  I built the site after taking a gamble on the product that could well have been a piece of junk.  Much to my amazement, it worked as it was supposed to and was a pretty cool gadget.

I guess I should have expected this from the company seeing as how they do business.  But, here is the story of how marketing it has been and after the story you can read some reasons why I should not have promoted the piece of junk.

The magicJack Nightmare

Last Thursday I opened up my email to find the latest offers From Motive Advent.  At the top of the email was the offer I was waiting to see- The magicJack.  I applied to the offer and was accepted immediately.  After that I had a chat with my affiliate manager and found that I couldn’t do ppc on Google or Yahoo, but at that time MSN was allowed and nobody was promoting the offer on MSN.  So, I signed up on Adcenter and got a campaign running and pointing to my homepage which I had a merchant supplied creative banner in the upper left corner of the page.

Friday morning I got up and got to work on my landing page for the offer.  Before I got to upload the landing page on Friday, I already had 2 conversions.  At about noon, I uploaded the landing page and changed the destination URL in my adgroup on MSN.  I then went outside for he remainder of the day.  At about 10 P.M. I checked my reports to find that I had 8 conversions.  Then I checked my email to find an email from motive stating that NOW ppc was not allowed on MSN.

I checked the remainder of my unopened emails, replied to the Motive email, then paused the Adcenter campaign.  By midnight,  I had 10 coversions on the campaign for a total of $104.

I didn’t let this get me down, I had watched The Black Ink Project session on email marketing and came up with some ideas to promote the offer this way.  Then yesterday I get this email:

Good Afternoon,

My name is XXXXXX and I am with Proactive Event Marketing, Inc. We are the
national distributor of magicJack. We manage the authorized Reseller
Program through which individuals and companies can obtain permission to
resell the product.

Please note that the listings for magicJack on www.getamagicjack.com, and
the site itself have not received the appropriate authorization for
magicJack resell. Accordingly, until such authorization is provided any
listings or reference to magicJack should promptly be removed.

Please note there are a number of great opportunities to resell this
product. We would be glad to review them with you. Please contact me with
any questions.

Thank you for your cooperation.

xxxxxxx
xxxxxxx@proactive-events.com

xxxxxxx xxxxxx
Proactive Event Marketing
1800 JFK Blvd., Suite 220
Philadelphia, PA 19103
xxxxxx@proactive-events.com

So I replied:

xxxxxx,

I’m not reselling the magicJack through my site, I am an affiliate promoting the magicJack offer(offer #1705 at Motive Interactive). Please note that this offer is also available at Hydra Networks . Once a user clicks through my site on the magicJack banner, they are taken to the authorized magicJack website where they then can purchase the magicJack.

Also, note that the reason I decided to promote the product is that I own it an think it is a great product. I have had none of the issues with it that many others are reporting on the internet and thus am a happy customer. It’s starting to seem as if I’m wrong about the prouct and its parent company Ymax. If I continue to come up against these issues, I will be more than willing to quit promoting the product and also make the focus of my website about reasons NOT to purchase the product. There is no shortage of content available on the internet to achieve this.

I have sent a copy of this email to my affiliate managers at Motive and also to Dan Borislow himself.

Sincerely,

Brian Weaver

Earlier today, I got an IM from my affiliate manager telling me to I had to pull the offer from my site, and wasn’t given a good reason for it. I don’t believe it’s my affiliate managers fault, but I do believe that Motive Advent is telling me the whole story. Plus, in my opinion, Motive needs to come up with a set of terms and conditions for thier affiliates and also Ymax needs to give a better set of thier own.  However, I have the feeling that it is Proactive-Events running this program and not magicJack/Ymax themselves but I couldn’t seem to find that out either.  Whomever it is, there is a CLEAR lack of communication going on here.

Why I shouldn’t have promoted this junk

I ignored all of the bad things out there that people were saying along with the problems that others were having and built my site and also never failed to recommend  the product to anyone I happened to discuss it with.  Maybe I shouldn’t have, personally I have had none of the problems with the product that others have.  However, I also have not tried to uninstall it from any of my computers either.  Apparently the novice PC user can’t uninstall this as it requires some advanced edits to Windows registry.  Also, it doesn’t come with an uninstaller, so now I begining to believe the claims on the internet that the magicJack is indeed, spyware. For more information on this read Rip-off Report: Magicjack Destroyed my computer through acknolwedged and known to them, software conflicts.
Also, here are the instructions for uninstalling the magicJack courtesy of Digital Nomads .

This is also a good read on Boing Boing gadgets:

MagicJack’s EULA says it will spy on you and force you into arbitration