SE Conspiracy

If you have ever dealt with getting an online merchant account in order to process credit cards directly, you know what a harrowing experience that can be. If you are looking at options for processing credit cards, perhaps you should save yourself a LOT of headache and read this article.

First, let me highlight the options available as of this post and then I’ll cover the pros and cons of each one.

1. Paypal (Visit Site) – built in credit card acceptance (business accounts)
2. Paypal Pro (Visit Site) – seamless online credit card processing
3. Clickbank (Visit Site) – affiliate marketplace; processes orders for you
4. 2checkout (Visit Site) – marketplace that processes on your behalf
5. Merchant Account – numerous “real” merchant account providers

Paypal (Visit Site)
Let’s start with Paypal since it’s first on the list and then we’ll make our way down. Paypal is the Internet’s basic payment processor. It has been around for so long that I cannot remember a time without Paypal. Well, actually I can but it was a really, really long time ago. Haha. Anyway, paypal is not without its flaws, but in general, it is a good system. For merchants, it allows you to accept payments and subscriptions and also offers to accept credit cards. However, not all credit cards are accepted and you’ll find that a good many people will not be able to buy from you using their credit card with Paypal. Also note that your customer must go to Paypal’s website in order to pay (i.e. cannot pay directly on your site).

Note: Please check Paypal’s policy on accepting credit cards -as it may have been updated since the date of this posting.

Paypal Payments Pro (Visit Site)
Next, we’ll cover Paypal’s newer “Payments Pro” solution. In actuality, this service has been around for years. However, it has taken until recently to get it to a point that it actually works and can be used. I’m not sure what Paypal did over there with all of their software engineers for so long. I guess they took a few …umm…years… off.

Anyway, this system looks pretty good but I haven’t tried it personally. It touts itself as an actual processor whereby you can have someone on YOUR site buy something on YOUR site and have the payment processed seamlessly by Paypal in the background. This would indicate they finally have a fully stocked online merchant account offering. If I had known this just a few months ago, I would’ve given it a try. Unfortunately, I went with Authorize.net –HUGE mistake (more on that later).

Note: Please check Paypal’s policy on accepting credit cards -as it may have been updated since the date of this posting.

Clickbank (Visit Site)
Clickbank is a huge marketplace of products that is built around the affiliate model. In recent years, they have begun offering the service of processing payments for vendors -even if the vendors do not use the affiliate portion of their marketplace. This could be a BIG thing for some of you, but I haven’t tried this one either and I hear they are quite picky about who they approve and which products/services are acceptable.

2checkout (Visit Site)
This company is a virtual marketplace that processes payments on behalf of its members. This is an unusual setup, and I cannot fathom how they talked their processing bank into processing their payments for them, but I imagine that they might even “be” their own clearing bank.

At any rate, this is a great service that I have used for many years. They are somewhat picky about who they will accept -based on the vendor’s product, service and website. However, if they will accept payments on your behalf, this is a quick and easy way to process most credit cards easily and relatively inexpensively. There is a $49.95 setup fee that will be refunded, if you do not meet their criteria. The drawbacks to using 2checkout.com is that they mandate that you place some wording on your payment page to the effect of “a Product of 2checkout.com” or something like that, not all credit cards will process for whatever reason, and there is no truly seamless integration (i.e. your customers pay on the 2co website). However, it’s good for a quick-and-dirty solution -especially if you don’t want monthly fees!

Merchant Accounts
I have had nothing but headaches over the past ten years when dealing with online merchant accounts. First of all, back in 1999, it took days and days of research and calling just to find out WHO all I needed to sign up with in order to process credit cards seamlessly on my website. It was a real test of my patience.

Unfortunately, things do not seem to have improved much over the years. As a test, I signed up with Authorize.net –supposedly the world’s largest online merchant account provider. Although, I cannot imagine they have any customers after seeing how they run their business and treat their customers.

First of all, there is still no one-stop solution. You still need a few different pieces of the puzzle to process payments online directly through an online merchant account processor. You need the “payment gateway” (i.e. Authorize.net), a “payment processor” (i.e. a special kind of bank), and a separate bank account of your own to be used for deposits to you and monthly payments to the various companies involved.

When signing up with Authorize.net, we were told some basic pricing and a $99 setup fee. Although a bit steep, we wanted to go with a solution that was streamlined and easy to set up. Boy did we miss the boat on that one!

It turned out that Authorize.net still outsources their “payment processing” to various banks and then tries to get you approved through various 3rd party processing vendors. I imagine that they still do it this way to create a bidding war for your business. So, they sell you off to the highest bidder and end up making it a cacophony of a process to get approved.

What is worse is that they take their “fee” up-front regardless of how long it takes to get your account up-and-running. In their policy when you join, this is stated somewhere, but I never saw it. I was told that once you log in, the clock is ticking. So, if you go with a merchant account, I suggest NOT configuring it until you have been completely approved.

In my case, it took more than two months and a lot of time, effort, and money to get going. I really had to work hard to make it happen and I spent a lot in the process –not to mention paying the setup fee and two months of service during a time when I had no service. Upon my complaint, I was given excuse after excuse and, in the end, was only given credit for one month of service.

Once I got going, things weren’t too bad. However, after five months of paying for service, I haven’t once needed them to process a payment. So, it looks like I wasted nearly $200 and more than a solid week of my time for nothing. In the end, I am now canceling my Authorize.net account –which, of course, is also not a simple thing to do.

The moral is, of course, Buyer Beware!

This is by no means a revolutionary idea, but I’ve been wanting to turn my “get paid forum” -known as “Get Paid Hwy”- into a revenue sharing forum for quite a while. It’s perfect for doing so, because the community is the fastest growing on the Net within its niche and they are all looking to make money. So, what better way than to earn money while sharing ideas?

Finally, after more than a year of wanting to do this, I have finished integrating this feature into “Get Paid Hwy” (visit site) and will be splitting revenue from the forum with the helpful members there. This is one easy and quick way to earn from just being helpful in your spare time. So, I am glad to see it finally up-and-running in this way.

In short, Google Ads and Yahoo Ads are now being shown on the site pages. Anyone who joins is asked to input their Google or Yahoo publisher ID -which will then be shown on threads they started and a percentage of threads to which they last replied.

To learn more about participating or joining as a Google/Yahoo publisher, visit the explanation page (visit AdSense explanation page).

I will update periodically on my success in this venture, so that you may make an informed decision on whether starting your own forum might be something to consider.

Google must be in the holiday spirit, because they actually gave me some good news for once.

They have removed my forum, Get Paid Hwy, (visit site) from being disabled for serving adsense ads. Hooray. Surprisingly, I just took a minute to read through their policies and noticed that they disabled that domain more than a year ago because of an obscure policy.

I corrected the issue (i.e. removed a little content) and sent an email asking to have the domain ad serving re-enabled. Two days later, they agreed. Wow!

That’s really good news for members of my little community because I have finally been able to turn the forum into an Ad-Revenue Sharing forum. That way, helpful active members will be rewarded financially -directly into their bank accounts!- for their efforts in helping others learn how to make money online. That’s something I’ve wanted to offer for a long time, and I thought it wouldn’t be possible. But, Google has made my day today and now I can move forward and help a lot of people make even more money from my forum. Hoorah!

I will write a little bit today after all. We just checked the stats for Zakioo.com, our new online video game store, and even though it has not yet been launched; we are seeing more than 20 visitors per day from Google and a growing trickle from Yahoo and MSN.

This is a good sign. The META tags and content are doing their job -that’s with no backlinks (except from whois.sc -given automatically to every registered website) and no marketing. That’s not bad. We should launch in a few days and finally monetize that incoming traffic. Then, we’ll update on the success of that versus the affiliate traffic (probably a 1-month delay in reporting).

I am a bit of an entrepreneur, some might say. I’ve started numerous companies and built most of them from the ground up. Many companies I built simply because I was told it was “impossible” to do because of technology limitations. I love overcoming those barriers and experiencing the thrill of achieving something that no one else has been able to do yet.

Some of the niches I’ve built companies within include:

• Web Hosting – http://www.imagion.com
• Web Design – http://www.imagion.com/web_design.htm
• Travel – http://www.costaricabeachvacation.com
• Expired Domains – http://www.namecart.com
• Ad Marketplaces – http://www.javvy.com and http://www.linksmile.com
• Technology Consulting – http://www.neosys.net (my bread and butter)
• Search Engine – http://www.neobus.com (crawler and algorithm)
• Shrink The Web – http://www.shrinktheweb.com
• Affiliate Marketing – various niche websites (cash cow)

Doing the Impossible

I built a proprietary technology using Cold Fusion that allowed me to really make a dent in the travel agency web design business by offering low-cost websites with a ton of updated content and services using just one line of code in the page. It was a service ahead of its time. That was the one company that almost made me very wealthy but I had to leave the country (my short bio) and lost everything.

Doing the Impossible Again

Then, I built a proprietary technology to manage text link advertisements -even in HTML pages. It -too- was ahead of its time. Now, Google is trying to stifle competition by “outlawing” text link ad sales. It’s arguable about whether they are being effective or not. From my perspective, it seems all they are doing is changing a little color bar from blue to white (i.e. PageRank isn’t even close to being a reliable indicator of importance). I cover that a little more in another article about my NoFollow Marketplace.

Technology Barriers are Old Hat by Now

Perhaps my own personal crowning achievement was getting Shrink The Web to work. This service is a website thumbnail generator service much like Alexa thumbnails. One difference is that it is free and will remain so. There are now a good many sites popping up and offering thumbnail services. However, I wanted a service that I knew would always be free and I could integrate into Flash, PHP, HTML, or anything I want. I also needed to be sure that the service didn’t disappear like so many other failed attempt fly-by-nights on the Internet. The only solution was to create it myself.

The difficulty in that, though, was that nearly all code written to support such a venture is made to run on the Windows platform. Since I have all Linux servers, that posed a bit of a problem. I also didn’t have the financial means to pay for an expensive Windows server when I have half a dozen dedicated servers sitting around at 2% utilization.

So, I began my quest. I ended up finding a nifty little open source utility called “WebThumb” that is offered for free at boutell.com. The address (to learn more) is: http://www.boutell.com/webthumb/

It didn’t work on my RedHat 4 installation for some reason -even after I installed every requirement. It would almost work but would crash constantly. I don’t know Perl code, but I’m a quick learner and that kind of stuff comes naturally to me. So, after a day or two, I did manage to get it working. The problem was that it kept crashing and seemed to have a memory leak. Now, I’m not saying the code isn’t well-written. It probably is well-written, but I honestly wouldn’t know. As in most cases, the problem most likely is simply the limitless variety of server configurations.

In the end, I decided to write my own variation from scratch. I know PHP really well now that I’ve built so many sites around it, so I chose to write it in that code. After fourteen (14) intense days of coding, I got a working prototype. I must say, I almost gave up on this project. It would’ve been the first project I ever failed to accomplish in all my years of consulting and developing technologies. I thought I had been beaten, but then I had a little breakthrough and the rest -as they say- is history. Once I got it working, I also had the same problems with firefox eating up memory and then crashing the server.

Now that I think about it, I figure that was the original problem -some bug or memory leak with the firefox version; not with WebThumb itself.

In any case, I spent the next several days coding in routines to monitor server health and firefox resources and eventually got a very stable, working version of “ShrinkWeb.” Surprisingly, it not only worked, but my server is running so much better than ever! lol.

My Bread and Butter

For years before I left the US for personal reasons, I made my living off of security and network consulting. I completed projects for bio-pharmaceutical, large telecom, cellular, software, and banking organizations. I was literally at the top of my game. I had achieved certifications such as: CISSP, CCNA, MCSE, MCP+I, MCT, and A+. I won’t go into what those mean, because you might already be drifting off to sleep from this long post! haha.

Suffice it to say that I did very well for myself with consulting and it funded all of my other ventures and developments. Here is my resume‘. Unfortunately, the government has unfairly “branded me” with a scarlett letter otherwise known as a felony. As ridiculous as the charges against me were, they went to great lengths to coerce me and force me to plead guilty. Now, that little piece of paper serves as my death sentence. I am fighting against all odds now in an attempt to change the fate that two crooked cops have given me (my bio).

My Affiliate Marketing Cash Cow

In the end, it was affiliate marketing that got me through the hard times when I was unable -through no fault of my own- to generate a normal income. Like so many others, I turned to the Internet and discovered Internet Marketing. But, unlike so many others, the veil had already been lifted from my eyes and I could see through the lies and deceit surrounding the BIG money claims.

So, I knew who to avoid and I would only buy a program, if I couldn’t figure out what was the gimmick. My sole purpose in buying any program is always to tear it apart and find the flaw or catch. I haven’t looked lately at what’s available, but back in 2003-2004, I know there wasn’t much in the way of honest ebooks/services to help you make money. Mostly, people on the Internet get rich by telling other people “how to get rich”. Hmm.. where have I seen that before??

I started up a couple of websites and spent a lot of time writing quality content to help people decide which insurance to choose, how to fix and build their credit, how to take paid surveys, etc. I employed a variety of marketing tactics to generate traffic (no black hat SEO, though) and I found that the most successful was buying expired domains with existing backlinks (i.e. existing traffic) and also buying links (hard-coded or javascript) in premium spots on related sites.

I went from $0/month income and spending $500/month in advertising to generate more than $10,000/month (i.e. sometimes $700+ per day) in just 3-4 months time! That lasted for about two (2) years, but after more hardship had befallen me, I was unable to manage or maintain my companies for seven (7) months. My companies eventually began to fail. For most of last year, I saw my income drop to just under $1,000 per month. Now after three (3) solid months of rebuilding efforts, my income from affiliate marketing is up to but still only $2,000/month (as of this month) and although that sounds great to many people, it barely covers my business expenses. I still have living expenses to pay, so it’s not really that great.

But, the point of telling you all of that is to let you know that there is potential and there is money out there. You just have to be careful who you choose to listen to and trust before you lose all your money. You gotta find your niche and make your money before you run out. Spending all your dollars, euros, or whatever currency on worthless ebooks or promoted programs will quickly put you in the poor-house.