Frank Haywood

I don’t believe in co-incidences, I firmly believe everything happens for a reason.

I use a tool called Camtasia Studio to make desktop videos.  I also use Demo Builder 5 for some videos where I think the content will change often enough for me to need to edit individual segments without having to make the whole video over again.

I find them both useful in different circumstances.  And I also have my eye on a couple of other video tools.

Well, I just received an email from a SmartDD customer telling me that what made the sale of SmartDD to her was the video on the home page.

And *then* I received a forum message from someone else who said he *would* have bought SmartDD JUST ON SEEING THE VIDEO ALONE if he had more than one product to sell at this time.

He decided to use the free version – that’s what it’s for.

And that got me thinking.

See, this year is no doubt going to be the year of the video. Thing are changing and now there are lots of free or near free video (and audio) tools available which will do what some of their more expensive counterparts will do.

Anyone can use video to create a product, just by recording their desktop actions and describing what they’re doing.  Just like my PayPal button generator video.

It’s just another form of info product.

Consider this.  While a lot of people like the good old ebook, there’s an equal amount of people who like to learn by being *shown* how to do things.

So what if instead of using just desktop recording tools, I used my camcorder to video stuff in the real world, and present it just like you see on the TV…

I think I could do that.  The problem as I saw it was where and how to get started.  So I started looking around to see if there was anything out there that would help me learn more about it.

And here’s the kicker…

While I was searching, Jason James contacted me *out of the blue* to let me know that he has a new product launch this coming Thursday which explains how to use  audio and video to create info products.

If you have any interest in this topic at all, you’re going to want to see this!

Jason James Audio Video Riches.

Watch Jason as he does his sales pitch, but then hang around after he stops talking.  It certainly made me chuckle, and got me thinking even harder.

I could definitely do that.

And if I mixed video footage with slides and desktop video, that would make for an impressive presentation or learning tool.

The problem’s been that in the past it would take a studio and some very expensive kit to produce quality video footage.  But that’s changed…

See, I’ve now had a sneak preview of Jason’s new product.  Thanks Jason!

It’s a total audio-video tutorial in video form, with everything you need to know, from what DV camera to buy, what software to use, and how to put it all together. Watching it made the subject very clear to me.

Now this may not be for you.

As straight forward as I thought it was, I *am* a bit of a propellor head, and it just clicked with me as I watched it.

So you should take careful consideration before making a decision.

At any rate, it’s well worth a look to see Jason "doing his thing".  Very professionally done.  This should give you a good idea of what can be done after learning from his course.

It’s just too damn complicated! I’ve had an AdWords account for about 3 years now, and what started off as a nice and simple way of paying for traffic has turned into a no go zone.

This is my latest experience with Google.

A few days ago I started a new campaign. I did a little research, found some low priced and well related keywords and put them all in one campaign. I figured to leave them a few days to see which were working and which ones weren’t, and then do a "peel and stick" into another more highly targetted campaign.

I set my budget low and started it all off. I checked after the first day and increased the bid on some of the keywords, and deleted a couple which had mysteriously jumped to 50p (USD $1.00), and another one which had jumped to £2.50 ($5.00).

This just set the trend.

I now find that most of my keywords are inactive for search as they have all increased to either 50p or £2.50, with a cryptic message telling me to improve the quality of the words.

Well last time I checked in the dictionary, a word was a word. And if there’s somehow a new and mysterious way of increasing the quality of that word, it’s beyond me.

After already spending a couple of hours setting it all up in what has become the most tiresome interface I have ever seen, I now can’t be bothered any more.

Google, you’ve lost my business. Forever. Your PPC is just a waste of space, and it now matches the increasingly poor quality of your search results.

Take a hike. There are plenty of other ways of getting traffic without you.

Wow!

This is completely amazing.  This is a tool that every serious eBay seller should be using.

Imagine being able to type in a few keywords for an item you want to sell on eBay, and have results come back that tell you:-

I’m not kidding here folks, this is going to make eBay a VERY different place to sell on.

Go and take a look now at this little baby, there’s a movie, plus you can choose from either the web based version or a desktop version.  Just click the image below.

Spam has been on the increase the last week or so, so it’s bound to stop completely in the next month as the spammers get closed down.

Yes, I’ve noticed this cyclic trend which last about 4 months.  Increasing amounts of spam and then nothing as someone out there looking after our interests closes the spammers down yet again.

The spammers shrug and move on.  It’s part of their job.

Now there’s one type of spam mail that always makes me smile, and that’s the kind with the unusual sender names.  It could just be one person doing it, but I guess it’s a program that several spammers have.

You must have received them "Dangling J Hoosegow", "Atrocious P Fieldmouse" and so on?

Well today I received a PayPal spoof mail from someone who’s sent me $93.50 with a clickable "View the details of this transaction online".  I get one of those every couple of days.

But what made this one unusual and also made me laugh was that instead of it being sent from PayPal or even the name of the peson mentioned in the email, it was from "Check K. Pederasty". 

Obviously, whoever had sent it has no idea what a pederast is or they wouldn’t have used that particular word as a last name…

Recently I received an email from UK2.net who I have a few domains hosted with.  I don’t host websites with them, I’ve just used them as domain registrars.

The email had some bulleted information:-

Now on the face of it, it seems that some of their customers have lost domains because they didn’t renew.  Probably because they hadn’t set their spam filters correctly, or relied on them to magically work, and then the reminder emails didn’t get through.  Or maybe they just forgot to renew.

And it would seem (on the face of it) that UK2 are trying to remedy that, by automatically renewing domains instead of letting them expire.

There is another angle to this of course.

I stopped using UK2.net as a domain registrar because they don’t give what I consider a proper service to their customers.

I’ll tell you exactly why I think that.

I decided over 12 months ago that it was time to upgrade to a dedicated server to host my domains on.  The hosting company I went to said that I needed to go to my domain registrar and register nameservers against the domain I wanted to assign to the server.

Fair enough, I checked it out and it yes I did need to register nameservers.

So I went to the UK2.net control panel for one of my domains that I decided to use as the home for my dedicated server, and tried to register a nameserver.  No luck there.

So I contacted their support, and they said I needed to buy their "Professional DNS Management" package at £35.00 / year.

Hmmm.  I wasn’t happy about that, something didn’t seem quite right.  But I paid up and waited for it to be activated.

When I received the email to get access to the "Professional DNS management" (their words remember), I eagerly logged onto the domain, and registered the nameservers.

That was when my trouble started.

After 7 days of seeing my nameservers flicker from one IP address to another, I decided it didn’t work.  During this time I contacted UK2.net support many times and received replies from people that clearly knew less about it than I did by this time.

I was also in touch with my server host during this time, and they were very helpful.  They suggested I go to 123-reg.co.uk who are part of Pipex as they don’t charge extra, and the registering nameservers definitely worked as they’d used them too.

Well, I already had a lot of respect for Pipex, techy friends had told me how good they were.

So I went to 123-reg, and took out a new domain with them.  I then went into the control panel, and registered the nameservers and the IP addresses.

24 hours later, everything was working perfectly, and I’d learned a lesson.

I then decded to transfer my other domains registration and hosting to 123-reg.

Woah!  Guess what?  UK2.net charge you to do that. £12.99 per domain.  What’s more you have to FAX their billing department.

Well, who uses FAX now when we all have scanners and email?

So in order to transfer MY domain to another host, I have to pay for it, and buy a fax machine or service in order to do it.  And even then, in their small print, if I don’t follow their process EXACTLY, then the transfer may not take place, but I still get charged for it.

What’s more, to get at the information I just described above is extremely difficult to say the least.  And when I did get to the page on their site, the links weren’t obvious at all, they just blended in with the rest of the text on the page so that it wasn’t easy to see that there even were any links.

No blue underlines at all. 

Sorry guys, but that sounds like severely dodgy practice to me.  It seems like deliberate barriers are being put in my way to stop me from moving.  Ring a bell with AOL at all?

So, okay, I decided I just wouldn’t register any new domains with them.  And over time as I decide to let some of the domains die quietly as they were for projects that never saw the light of day, eventually I’ll be left with 3 or 4 domains and then I’ll bite the bullet and move them to 123-reg.

That seemed like a reasonable plan until I received the communication at the top of this page.

Now, my domains won’t ever be allowed to expire unless I keep on top of them, and set them so that they won’t "auto renew".

I’ll tell you why I think this is dodgy practice and extremely unethical, and you can be the judge for yourself.

I logged onto the control panel to set all my domains to auto expire.  Guess what?  If the domain has more than 3 months to go, you can’t set it to auto expire.  Gosh, that’s conveniently been programmed in for UK2.net’s benefit.

Er, why?  Well I think it’s so that there’s a chance that I might forget to do it, and end up paying a domain registration fee for a domain I no longer want.

And if the email reminder from UK2.net happens to not reach me because of a "spam filter" (I don’t use spam filters at all, but that’s another story), then that’s not UK2.net’s fault is it?

How bloody satisfying it must be for them, laughing as they take domain registrations fees from "over 1 million domains", many ( I think I read somewhere an estimated 90%) of which are never used.  Normally these domains would gracefully expire, now they’ll be kept going by this practice of UK2.net.

So I contacted their support people again.  Here’s a transcript of yet again another very unsatisfying conversation with them.

So now I have to check each domain hosted by UK2.net that I want to expire and put them in my diary so that 3 months before I can set them to auto expire.

As I pointed out to Mat (sic), the real trouble will start when people start doing chargebacks.  I certainly wouldn’t like to be in charge of the UK2.net merchant account when their bank freezes it for investigation.

We’ll see what happens…