The Blog For Entrepreneurs

When I was in my twenties I was an angry young man. Not to the point of fighting with everyone, I just had a short temper and did not suffer fools – even though I was probably one of them! Marriage to a beautiful and calming woman and a few years added I am now seen to be so laid back I am almost horizontal.

In the real world, I have found that nothing really affects me that much I am able to communicate my side of things and generally get the job done. This is why the web can be so frustrating, with the level of automation from Paypal to Adsense if something goes wrong or you want to make a point you have, frankly, no chance..

Today however, I am not going to have a rant on the evils of bad automation, I am going to turn John Chow’s automated bitch slap into a positive lesson to be learned by merchants.

The story is that I applied to John Chow’s ad network, TTZ Media, after having diligently read his eBook and implemented a number of his suggestions. ( I even got myself on his list of top commentators as I snuffled around his site for ideas and insight – yeah genius – I signed up under the name of ‘David’ – very SEO friendly of me!)

Anyway John was raving about TTZ Media on one of his posts so I thought ‘OK I’ll join’. A few days passed and then I get ‘The Slap’:

“Dear affiliate, your TTZ Media user account linked to your email, under the ID ***, has been removed or rejected from our system due to the following reasons:

Your website does not have enough valuable content, nor the traffic. Please apply again after your website has been improved.”

In other Words:

“Dear David

We have decided that you are a douche bag and your blog sucks. Also you are not as good at marketing as us. If (by some miracle) you are able to get lots of traffic and become super successful, we would welcome you with open arms because we would like to make some money off your success too.

Until then, Douche bag, zai jain..”

Nice…

Of course I say this tongue-in-cheek. TTZ have to maintain a certain quality of web site and traffic levels otherwise advertisers would not want to use that network and I know the message was automated, so I get why my blog with only 10 posts and 100 visitors a day would not be suitable, but for goodness sake take some of your own advice John!

For a guy who gives great advice in eBooks and on his site, this is a totally crappy way of handling the ‘rejection’. It wouldn’t take two minutes to turn this bit of communication into something more positive by re-writing the automated rejection message. For example:

“Dear affiliate, your TTZ Media user account linked to your email, under the ID ***, has been suspended at this time. The reason for this is simply this:

At this time your blog does not have enough content, it could be that your blog is new or you are just gearing up to create more content. This could also be a reason that your traffic is not at the minimum that our network promises advertisers.

We would like to help, however, so please see the link below to our free eBook; this will give you some great traffic tips and content ideas. When you have increased the content and the traffic on your site we would love to see you re-apply.

Regards
John Chow”

Now, I don’t know about you, but this seems more user friendly and less confrontational, it opens the doors for moving traffic through your eBook and ultimately, if the guy is successful, you have someone who will come back as a grateful user.

The reason I am interested in this so much (and if you sell anything online so should you) is that I have been researching the use of ‘declined’ pages on credit card transactions. The bottom line is that merchants suck when it comes to using this page. It is the same ‘sod off douche bag’ language that TTZ use above because of it they are missing a massive sales opportunity.

I mean who is more hot to buy your product than a guy who just went through the whole process and had his card denied? And you are going to say a useful ‘Card denied – come back later’ on your site?

The site www.checkoutwithcash.com, with whom we work have a solution to this problem and one that also helps merchants reach the 30 million people who don’t have credit cards in the US, for whatever reason. There are no ID checks, no credit checks and no age verification and best of all no set up costs at all for the merchant and you can do it quickly and easily.
Basically take a look here: www.checkoutwithcash.com/creative. At the bottom there are page creative’s for declined cards. Replace your crappy ‘sod off loser’ page with one of these creative’s that you have changed to show your logo and link it to the site. You have more chance of saving that sale now. Even if only 1 in 5 people do it, you have just made a sale you would not have made otherwise….

I wonder if John Chow will have the boys at TTZ change the automate message… I guess I will find out next time I apply…!

All the best
David
@themarketmaker