I got wind of this yesterday from another internet marketing friend who forwarded me an MP3 recording of the chat he had with PayPal about their decision to close all his accounts.

A 20 mins phone call proved fruitless and PayPal blankly refused to reinstate his accounts.

I believe Anthony to be a respected marketer. I personally don’t know the guy but reviews and product feedback seem to reinforce he runs a legitimate operation.

Unfortunately losing PayPal as a payment processor means that he may have to close down his entire operation.

PayPal have become the Google of today. And if for any reason they feel that you’re too high of a risk – that’s it, BAM! Shut down.

After all, they DON’T need your business do they? There’s plenty more fish in the sea.

In fact I have another Internet Marketing friend who had his UK PayPal account shut down last year.

From the 20 minute call Anthony had with PayPal (US) and what my friend reported; they both had products listed on the Warrior Forum when PayPal struck.

What I gather from the conversation with PayPal where they distinctly reference Warrior Forum and the products being sold on there as being “rehashed”, offering no new value to people that are already struggling to make a buck.

I get their message. But Anthony also puts a good point across back to PayPal (listen the the audio to hear).

However, PayPal’s response is very “generic”, almost scripted. Do we expect anything different?

Here’s an extract from the full article take from PRWEB.
 

“I’ve spent years building a team of dedicated and professional staff. However, I now have no way to pay them. The only option currently open to me is to terminate their employment – lowering the risk that the business will be forced into bankruptcy,” Anthony explains.

So that’s it. Anthony doesn’t seem to have done anything wrong but PayPal have decided that’s he’s “high risk” and have suspended all his accounts.

In tough economic times should payment processors like PayPal be allowed to shut down merchant accounts where people’s livelihood depend on it? Not only Anthony’s, but also his employees.

If no “rules” are broken, why be penalized? I’m not biased in any way but Anthony does state this in his argument to PayPal. Only to fall upon deaf ears.

Honestly, I was a little skeptical about such severe actions being taken without warning so I decided to go check out one of his products sites: http://www.prosperitypublishers.com

By selecting of of their products (http://www.WPMasteryTraining.com/) and attempting to checkout I was greeted with the PayPal message below:

“The recipient is currently unable to receive money.”

Testing more of their products revealed the same results!

This is a severe word of caution to anyone within the internet marketing space that PayPal do not like internet marketing products. It seems even more so apparent they don’t like sales generated via Warrior Forum.
 

I’d like to hear your take on PayPal’s decision:

No = this isn’t gonna interest you.

“Ooh, YES Mark I am!”: Then read on…

Let’s face facts. The Thesis Theme isn’t the prettiest, and it’s difficult to work with – right?

For the average online marketer Thesis is just freakin’ hard to customize the way you’d like it.

Now, don’t get me wrong…

When it comes to SEO and building authoritative sites the Thesis Theme is “KING”.

But…

It just isn’t pretty out the box. And believe me when I tell you; when it comes to websites…

“First impressions *DO* count.”

It’s OK to keep things simple. But I’ve seen really ugly sites. Sites I wouldn’t even show my mother.

It doesn’t matter what my mother told me either:
“It’s what’s inside that counts…”

Whatever!

It doesn’t matter how great your content is. A bad looking and poorly constructed website deters visitors.

They wont even give it a second look.

What’s worse is; it’s often seen as a reflection of the website owner.

And a LOT of these “mega fugly” affiliate/sales/presell sites have been created with the Thesis
Theme.

Look, it’s not their fault. Thesis is difficult, it should be easier by now…

But it’s not.

It’s doesn’t matter “what’s under the hood”.

If it’s ugly and poorly constructed – I’m outta there faster than a G6.

http://markacutt.com/go/G6

And so are their visitors!

That’s “the ugly truth” (not the movie).

.
.
.

Which brings me onto…

Lately I’ve been doing some research on “Themes”, what’s new and what’s out there.

Amongst my research…

I stumbled across something ‘pretty spectacular’ that Thesis Theme groupies and die-hard’s are
gonna LOVE.

http://markacutt.com/go/thesisskins

NICE! Right?

You can implement these ultra cool Thesis Themes and transform you site like “magic”…

Poof!!

All done for you.

I’m usually “anti magic bullets” (AMB) but this is a REAL “magic-bullet” for Thesis owners.

This particular one hits a “marketing” hotspot
immediately:

http://markacutt.com/go/thesisproduct

You get the picture.

Fancy skins aside…

The truth is; you’ve already forked out a lot of dough on buying the Thesis Theme, and it adds up with the cost of “extras”.

I know and understand that. It’s not cheap.

But on the flip side…

You also get what you pay for – true?

After feasting my eyes across these sexy Thesis Themes I decided to hit up the owner and see what
“magic” I could do of my own:

Tick tok, tick tok, tick tok…

NADA.

Tick tok, tick tok, tick tok…

EMAIL!

So what does this mean?

Right now you can get a personal license for $60 to use cross ALL your OWN sites or a “developer”
license that you can use across your sites AND client sites for $130.

Unlimited use and half price. Membership is still 1 year before this offer expires.

$60 is less than the price of some individual Themes. You get them ALL for 60 bucks.

You can’t say I’m not good to you

The only way to get this deal is to use the link below – yes it’s my affiliate link, but this offer
IS exclusive.

– STEP #1 –

Click this link:
http://markacutt.com/go/thesisawesome

– STEP #2 –

Select if you want the “Personal” or “Developer”
license, enter your details and enter the coupon
code below:

Coupon Code –> FB2C

EXACTLY like that.

– STEP #3 –

You’ll be sent a link to complete your checkout
with the 50% discounted price.

Done.

You’ll be a member for 1 full year with access to some of the best looking themes available
created using the Thesis theme.

I NEVER thought I’d say that!

And there’s more being released shortly (Thesis Awesome theme is meant to rock!).

Enjoy

Take care,
Mark Acutt

PS:
–
You DON’T have to renew your subscription. You can cancel anytime and still have access for a
full 1 year until your membership runs out.

You also keep ALL themes during your membership.

PPS:
—
Make sure you use this link when purchasing or you WON’T get the discount checkout link sent
to your inbox.

http://markacutt.com/go/thesisawesome

Coupon Code –> FB2C

Offer Expires 15th February 2012

This is NOT a sales pitch and I don’t have any affiliate links in this post. I stumbled across ManageWP when I was looking for an alternative to BackupBuddy.

Or even Robert Plank’s take with BackupCreator.

Importantly, does it do what it says on the tin without unleashing a new host of problems? I’ll find out, but first…

What does ManageWP allow you to do?

Plus a LOT more!

The best thing with MangeWP is that at the moment it’s totally free. It’s in final beta testing stages but the final pricing when released seems well worth the time and hassle it will save us all when installing new blogs, updating WordPress, Themes, Plugins etc.

Well, I signed up and gave it a trial run (still in Beta stage), lets see how I got on…

As you can see below it’s easy to just add a site by clicking “Add Website“.

All you have to do is enter the Website URL and Admin Username.

PS: Click the images for the full size.

*NOTE: I’ve found that occasionally the wordpress plugin needs to be deactivated and reactivated in order for Manage WP to pick it up in the dashboard correctly. Below is my initial error…

After I had disabled and re-enabled the plugin the site was successfully added – see images below:

Tried again –> Success! 

Manage WP then automatically added my website (as above).

You can see it’s been successfully added to my dashboard with my other domains.

So there you have it.

Once you have your site added there’s a whole host of things you can do including more that I have haven’t mentioned here.

VERDICT:

So is Manage WP a worthy contender of what else is out there?

Simple answer is: YES!

I think it’s a great way to backup, clone and upgrade your wordpress websites. Yes, there may be some teething problems, but doesn’t everything have these?

UPDATE:

There’s a new “final version” out and the final plans and pricing of Manage WP has been revealed (not an affiliate link).

You do get a 14 day free trial to test it out yourself.

It’s worth it for the time and headaches it saves managing multiple sites.

I’ve been meaning to write about this for a couple days now as a policy update from ClickBank hit my inbox.

To sum up: Vendor accounts with a refund rate at or above 15% will incur additional fees or penalties.

So what does this mean and how will it affect you?

AFFILIATES:

If you’re an affiliate it’s great news. It means as an affiliate you can be sure vendors are going to be scurrying to make sure their  products have a low refund rate.

That means less refunds for affiliates and more cash in their pocket.

The problem is; people expect MORE now than they did a few years back. If they’re going to fork out $37, $47 or even $97 on a book or video training it has to offer a lot more value than what they can find

[A] For free
[B] Elsewhere for cheaper (Take a look at Amazon Kindle as an example).

So what does this mean for Vendors?

VENDORS/MERCHANTS:

Wake up call time. Far too often I see vendors selling high priced items that just don’t cut it. They don’t deliver value on what is expected. Fair enough if you’re paying less than $20 for a product, that’s more than reasonable and you don’t expect much for 20 bucks.

But when an affiliate promotes a $47, $97 or $197 product, people want something of substance. Something they will learn from and say: “Wow, that was awesome”. Even if there is one good “take away” from the product, it lessons refunds.

Think about it…

If you learn one good thing that you can use and implement into your online business for the better, would you ask for a refund?

Usually not.

But a lot of products just don’t deliver. They promise to help you achieve all sorts of “magical” things – but in reality they just don’t work. They don’t help you (the customer) achieve the required result.

Bundled with regurgitated content that more often than not is easily found by searching online is a massive downfall.

Read the full ClickBank Policy Update.

Conclusion:

ClickBank are making a smart move. Vendors will be persuaded to providing better value at the risk of being penalized. In turn will help keep their affiliate retention.

This is great news all round for affiliates. Products with high refund rates will be lessoned and affiliates don’t have to learn the hard way by driving traffic (especially paid) only to find out the high refund rate at a later date.