I’m a big fan of ViralURL. I use it for many of my marketing promotions and have been very happy with it. However, I’ve recently discovered a problem with it that could very well be affecting many marketers, including myself.
If you’ve been an Internet marketer for any length of time, you’re probably familiar with the $7 Script. The $7 Script makes it possible to promote a product by giving the affiliate promoting the product 100% commissions paid directly to their PayPal account. This is obviously very appealing to affiliates as they get paid immediately when a sale occurs rather than waiting for monthly commission payments. I promote a number of products that use the $7 Script and have had good success with it.
A customer of mine recently emailed me to say that he was trying to purchase a product I’d recommended, but when he clicked the PayPal order button, an error occurred and he wasn’t able to proceed further. After some back and forth with him we determined that the problem was only happening in Internet Explorer. It worked fine in Firefox when I tried it.
That particular promotion used a ViralURL redirection link, so on a hunch I tried accessing the site by using the actual affiliate URL instead of the ViralURL link. It worked fine in both Firefox and IE. So, we had isolated the problem to Internet Explorer through the ViralURL link. I reported the problem to the site owner and ViralURL.
To make a long story short, the site owner tried a change suggested by ViralURL and it didn’t resolve the problem. At this point it was a toss-up as to whether it was a problem with the site or with ViralURL. What bugged me about it was that it only happened in IE, not Firefox.
Last night, I found another site that uses the $7 Script and doesn’t work correctly in IE through a ViralURL link. When clicking the PayPal order button, there is no blatant error as in the first site, but the PayPal page comes up mostly blank with a Retry link instead of the login page that should appear. I’ve reported the problem to ViralURL and we’ll see where it goes from there.
The bottom line is: if you promote sites that use the $7 Script and you use ViralURL to cloak your links I recommend you use a different redirection method for those sites until ViralURL gets the problem resolved. Even if you test the site successfully on your machine, there’s no guarantee that it won’t fail on someone else’s machine. We ran into this while troubleshooting the problem. It was not a 100% failure rate. Sometimes it worked fine in IE6 and not IE7, sometimes neither one, and sometimes it worked fine on a different computer.
I’m going to identify all the links I have that use the $7 Script and use a different redirection method until ViralURL gets the problem fixed. I have no way of knowing how many people encountered the problem before the person kindly emailed me to tell me about it. I have to assume I’ve lost sales as a result.
Be careful out there!
I wasn’t planning on taking a look at Optin Accelerator because I’m not currently in a buying mode. I’m focusing my energies on a couple of specific tasks that I want to accomplish, so I’m not involved with the current frenzy of affiliates pushing this latest be-all-end-all marketing tool.
Well, I got an email from Mike Filsaime which had to do with his Viral Friend Generator software (which I use) and how Optin Accelerator is not only better, but will soon have a plugin that lets the two applications work together. So, I figured I’d go watch the video and see what OA is all about.
OA is a pretty cool idea on the surface of it. Basically, you install it on your web site, point your prospects to it and they are expected to dump their entire contact list into your database. Still a nice idea (for you) because people tend to have lots of contacts and you get maybe a couple hundred potential contacts instead of 3 or 5 or whatever you’ve set up your Tell-A-Friend page to ask for.
So, what’s wrong with this picture? First of all, this idea isn’t new, it’s been around at least 6 months in the form of another very similar application called UltraRefer. Obviously, this dude has done a much better job of public relations/marketing than the UltraRefer folks. More power to him and too bad for them.
I have a lot more problem with the basic concept of somebody coming to my web site and giving up their entire contact list to plug my site. Why? Because they have to give me their email user ID and password so my site, via Optin Accelerator, can go download all their contacts! Are you kidding me? People are really that naive and/or stupid?
Maybe I’m just getting to be a cranky old computer geek, but it just amazes me that somebody would give up their ID and password to a site the owner of which they don’t know from Adam. Not only that, they’re going to spam their entire contact base with news of my site/product? Even the most naive can’t believe that everybody on their contact list will be as excited about it as they are. At least with Viral Friend Generator, and similar applications, the user has to actually decide whether the people she’s referring will give a rat’s keister about what she’s referring.
It’s one thing when a site like MySpace is doing it, although there’s certainly the potential for abuse there, too, but when anybody can pay $97, grab a copy of OA, put it up on a web page, tweak the page a tad to save off the ID and password, not to mention all those email addresses, and use them for whatever purpose they wish, it’s enough to give even a modestly paranoid computer pro like myself heart palpitations. This is exactly the kind of thing amateurs do in their blithe ignorance of black hat thinking. Just because it doesn’t occur to the authors of these applications that it might be used for less than honorable purposes doesn’t mean someone else won’t think of it.
I hope the authors and promoters of OA make a ton of money. They’re going to need it to defend the lawsuits that are sure to occur when someone does take their product and use it with malice.
John The Geek
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