Internet marketing and customer service

I seem to have been busy with everything except doing any real work for a while, and the lack of new posts on my blog is indicative of that.

One thing I have done since the summer though is to go through John Reese’s Traffic Secrets 2.0 and Stompernet’s Stomping The Search Engines 2.0. As a reminder, TS 2.0 cost $500, caused me a few problems and had lousy customer service, STSE 2.0 cost $10 or $20 postage when I subscribed to The Net Effect, Stompernet’s new magazine, so while there is no contest in terms of price it is interesting to compare them side by side.

Traffic Secrets 2.0

I must admit I was expecting big things from John Reese, as I’ve benefited from some of his pearls of wisdom in the past dispensed in interviews etc, but TS 2.0 didn’t do it for me. There is far too much filler and quite frankly I couldn’t concentrate on the videos for long because of that. The content was added to the website in MP3 format, which at least allowed me to listen at the gym, but still, it is all too vague and lacking the killer content I was expecting to find although maybe I’m not who it’s aimed at, so perhaps there are people who have genuinely benefited.

I also got a couple of DVDs from Frank Kern with Traffic Secrets 2.0, which are quite something. If you’ve come across Frank in the past you’ll pretty much know what to expect, but he really holds your attention and has a completely off the wall sense of humour.

Stomping The Search Engines 2.0

I’ve had issues with Stompernet in the past and for me they come across as being far too corporate for their own good, but I thought I’d check out STSE 2.0 anyway – for that price I’d have been stupid to miss it. I had listened to the original course, so had an idea of what to expect. The course is far more compact that TS 2.0, and better for it IMHO.

Among other things it really gets down to the nitty gritty of keyword research, on page factors, off page factors and a very strong section on link building by Dan Thies. I’ll also say that I had no problem with the order process and delivery of The Net Effect and STSE 2.0, although there are many people who have had issues and are really fed up with Stompernet for it – one of my big complaints previously.

Why is good customer service so elusive?

It seems to be a common problem for internet marketing companies to have extremely poor customer service, and I don’t know if it’s genuinely because they are taken by surprise by the number of orders they receive, poor planning, scalability issues, they’re let down by delivery fulfillers or they just don’t care, but one essential piece of the marketing jigsaw is customer service – get this wrong and it can crucify you.

And I’m amazed that it isn’t talked about more, until just recently I came across Lynn Terry through Internet Marketing This Week, also with Ed Dale, Paul Colligan and Michelle Macpherson. Lynn’s big bugbear seems to be lack support for both customers and affiliates, the latter of which resonates with me as I have been unable to sort out an issue with the Immediate Edge affiliate program that I first raised in September. To be frank, that is pissing me off and I really hope that it is sorted soon and while I value my membership of Immediate Edge, I certainly won’t continue to promote it, let alone push it more.

Categorised in: immediate edge

This post was written by David