Factoring Instability Into Your Internet Marketing Business

One thing that’s been on my mind lately is how unstable the Internet is.

Not just Internet connections, which can go down without warning (we get a lot of lightning strikes here because we’re up on a hill, and we’re always having our phone, cable or electricity go out when a tree falls on the wires.)

But also everything we depend on when we’re using the Internet can go down.

Recently one of my email providers, Comcast, got hacked, creating some outages throughout the day. Gmail, another one of my email providers, has had slow load times recently, and sometimes I can’t access my email at all.

A long time ago I resorted to setting up lots of different email addresses with lots of different service providers so I can access email most of the time. You really need to do this if emails are critical to your business. If one of my newspaper editors needs to get a hold of me before deadline, or if a customer who has ordered one of my eBooks has a problem, I need to be able to get back to them ASAP. So reliable email becomes really important.

No website is guaranteed to remain 100% secure, and sites get hacked or have problems all the time.

I also use Statcounter’s website stats for many of my sites to track visitor data. (If you haven’t checked them out yet, you need to. Go to Statcounter.com and set up a new account for each website you want to track data on. They will give you a piece of code you paste into each page of your website - or onto the sidebar of your WordPress blog - and then you’ll be good to go.)

Recently The Planet, the hosting provider that Statcounter uses, had a fire at one of its data centers, and data for a whole bunch of sites wasn’t accessible for a while. Statcounter lost visitor data on some sites, so when I logged in and checked my stats on my sites, some were available and some weren’t.

Statcounter also has a paid version where you can pay a small fee via PayPal and get more detailed visitor statistics. I don’t use the paid version, but Statcounter has been having major troubles with their subscription plan through PayPal lately. They’ve been trying to resolve it with PayPal but things have been so screwed up, and PayPal has been so unresponsive, that Statcounter was forced to send out thousands (probably hundreds of thousands) of emails to Statcounter users explaining the problem.

And these are things that have happened just within the past few weeks.

On a regular basis, it seems, sites we depend on for our Internet marketing businesses go down or act wonky. The technologies we use are unstable, they don’t always run smoothly. And when there is a problem sometimes it can’t be fixed right away. Not everybody has the budget of, say, a Comcast, to address a hacking situation immediately. You never know when your own business might be affected by a technical glitch or a hacking attempt.

I worry about our dependency on some of the industry’s biggest, most popular sites.

For instance, I use both Clickbank and e-junkie, which are great for selling downloadable products. Clickbank is a publisher which collects and distributes payments. And I use e-junkie to handle my downloads. E-junkie has been great for me, and it’s very cheap - just $5 per month. But a few people at the Warriorforum recently reported some temporary outages with e-junkie and I’m keeping my eyes on that. I need people to be able to receive their order when they order it, and I hope that e-junkie has addressed whatever problems they were having before. So far (she says, crossing her fingers) I’ve had only great experiences with them.

Most publishers of downloadable goods are dependent on some combination of PayPal, Clickbank, e-junkie, or Paydot.com to make their businesses work. But what if one or all these services starts having problems? How quickly could you change your business setup? When they’re aren’t a lot of alternatives, what do you do? Google Checkout, 2 Checkout, and Worldpay are some alternatives to using PayPal to process payments - but most online shoppers have developed a certain comfort level with using PayPal and they might not want to buy from you if you use another payment method. Of course, you can also set up your own payment processing using your own private merchant account, which can be a bit of a hassle, but that’s another way to go.

Anyway, I’ve just been noticing lately how so many third party sites that Internet marketers use are having problems, and I’ve been scratching my head, wondering how long it will be before EVERYTHING changes for us. Things already change so rapidly as various technologies and sites become popular and are quickly tossed aside almost as quickly. (Friendster, anyone?)

How long will we be using sites like PayPal and Clickbank? How soon before they run into problems, or the businesses are phased out or sold, and we all have to switch to using something else?

Unfortunately, Internet marketing comes with a lot of built in obsolescence. One day, things are working. The next day, you have to change everything you’re doing to stay ahead of the trends or to adjust to something crashing and burning.

Some days, things change so rapidly, my poor brain just………hurts!

http://www.internetmarketingbadger.com/factoring-instability-into-your-internet

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Factoring Instability Into Your Internet Marketing Business