Like my cliche headline!

I recently needed to set up a fax service for my business. Hardly anyone I deal with uses fax, but for the occasional client that is in to fax I needed it in place. I have a multi-function printer that can handle this, but I honestly did not feel like giving the phone company an extra ounce of money to have a dedicated line, for a service that I would not use more than a few times a year. Almost all of my SEO clients are fine with swapping PDF proposals and even signed contracts if necessary.

It had been a while since I checked out online fax services. I know that there are several out there that have good reputations, and several that have great prices. I was looking for both — a fine mixture of price and service. My decision was ultimately based on the basic services that were must haves

Basic Services

The particular services I was looking for in an online fax service included:

• Toll-free number - I think I can spring for the cost, if I am getting a client to fax a signed contract back to me
• Complete web interface - I was not looking to have to install some desktop app. I want to be able to get to my faxes or send faxes even if I was not using my laptop (almost never happens, but occasionally when I go to the beach it does)
• Safe online storage - On the chance I lose a fax, I wanted to have an online location to retrieve the fax again
• Digital signature - I wanted to be able to store my digital signature online to send back in a fax
• PDF delivery - I store most of my corporate documents in PDF format, so this was the desired delivery method.

Internet Fax Services

The 3 services that I spent the most time looking at were:

• eFax - They offer a free 30 day trial! You can get a local or toll-free fax number. Of course they allow you to send and receive faxes by email.
• Trustfax - Like eFax, the also offer a free trial. The plans they have fit my specific needs quite well and I ultimately chose them. I prepaid for a year, just under $100 for a toll-free account, and have plenty of capacity for my faxing needs
• MyFax - MyFax actually offered the next most favorite solution for me, and I think I may have been fine with choosing them. It was a coinflip between MyFax and Trustfax. I thought about either their free sign and their buy two months get one free.

Solution

As mentioned in the list of online fax services that I looked at, I chose Trustfax. Again it was strictly because TrustFax was the most like what I wanted. I think I would have been just as happy with MyFax, but you have to make a decision sooner or later.

I’ve been reluctant to get in to tweeting at twitter for quite a while. I’ve been through the email is killing my time issues. Through the forum posting is killing my time issues. Through the IM is killing my time issues. Through the social media is killing my time issues. And now I wonder if I will adopt Twitter to the point of fighting through the Tweeting is killing my time issues.

By killing my time, I mean that I sometimes go overboard and don’t really grasp how much time an activity is consuming until it’s too late (missing other deadlines — a natural outcome for a procrastinator). I am going to try to keep using Twitter enough to really get a grasp on the power of tweeting, but stop short of just tweeting and reading tweets all day (or at least for hours on end).

You can check out my tweeting, critique my tweets, and follow me if you like!

I took a few minutes to look through comments waiting for moderation this morning, especially those that Akismet marked as spam. After moderation, I went to view the post on the page to see that I did not de-spam a really spammy comment or anything. At that point, I realized that I had completely typo’d the title of a post yesterday regarding MarketLeverage. Cripes! Worse yet, that led to a typo in the URL. MarketLeverage became MarketLeveral.

I was not interested in changing the URL in the off-chance that it actually had generated a link. I actually have a redirection plug-in installed on this blog so that I can handle affiliate offers when I do include them in a post. And while it may have been an obvious solution to most readers, it did not click for me until that point… use the redirection script to handle redirecting the misspelled URL to the new, correctly spelled URL and post.

It is a simple plug-in to use. You bring up the redirection screen from “Manage” -> “Redirection” (obviously once the plug-in is installed. Type in the mis-spelled url (/2008/05/06/my-marketleveral-publisher-signup/), then type in the location to redirect to (http://www.esoomllub.com/2008/05/06/my-marketleverage-publisher-signup/), save it, and all works great.

Another really cool benefit of this plug-in is that you can actually keep track of the number of clicks each redirect gets. Awesome.

Interesting fact… in the short time since I put this redirect in place, maybe 15 minutes, there have already been 3 hits on the old URL that were redirected to the new URL.

PS RTFM

It seems that if I had taken the time to really dig in to this plug-in I would have noticed that there is an option in the plug-in to auto-add a 301 for posts that have the slug change. So, my instructions above are not to click this option on, and not even worry about changed URL’s in the future.

I’ve seen just tons of posts lately about MarketLeverage and decided to check them out. a quick search on the internet archive shows me that the MarketLeverage network (they are a PrecisionPlay company) has been around for several years (indexed there in 2004). However, it appears that they may have re-incarnated themselves to some extent in that period. At one point they dropped incentive sites, and have now allowed them back in. A quick run of their site looking for the details turned up no details. Additionally, a search for MarketLeverage on Digital Point turned up nothing prior to late 2007. That’s good in that if there were issues, it surely would have been discussed. Bad in that I wanted to find out more about the history.

Site Usability

I always like to check out the website for usability before I sign up for any service. I figure, rightly or wrongly, that if a company that wants my business can’t have a site that works cleanly, they obviously don’t want my business (this goes for online stores and ad networks alike). It’s a pretty enough looking site, and I understand from other posts that this is a redesign from a previous incarnation. Looking back at the archived versions of the site, it is definitely an improvement, but to me functionality is more important that smoke and mirrors.

The site worked fine enough, and I could generally find my way around the site with just intuition. As mentioned above, I think a little more history in the “About Us” section would lend some credibility for someone who just stumbles on the site. I did like that they had a calendar of events, and I can see where I might find them at upcoming conferences (maybe Affiliate Summit east in August in Boston!).

Sign Up

Next step… sign up. Since I had done some prior research and saw nothing that led me to doubt their viability, I initiated a sign-up (about 9:40p EDT — 5/5/08). A simple form (I Like!), easy to understand and quick to fill out), pretty standard terms and conditions. I received the obligatory “we received your application” email which I think is a required step for all online forms of any significance.

Acceptance

I received a followup phone call on Tuesday at about 2p. The affiliate rep was friendly and asked enough questions to learn about my websites and to ensure that I was not some scammer. I can’t recall her name (a fault of mine), but she was pleasant and seemed pretty knowledgeable. She activated my account and then proceeded to update me on MarketLeverage (bonuses, referals, offers, etc) when I told her that I had done a bit of research before signing up.

The Service

While they have some nice exclusives, the offers they provide are not incredibly different from other affiliate networks and the payouts are similar, some higher — some lower. I’ve come to expect this from all affiliate networks, as they all seem to be fishing in the same streams to try and find the next hot offer. One can only expect this. So why pick any affiliate network over another? Service, reliability, comfort level, and the extras are what does it for me.

Their extras…

• Bonuses paid out for good performance. Amex cash rewatds based on the level of commissions generated. We’re not talking about for the super affiliates, but good affiliates to. I mean, with a $1000 monthly commission you can start earning an Amex cash reward. $1000 per month may seem like a lot, but if you really put your effort in to it I think you can blow past $1000 per month.
• They have a nice referal program. Lifetime 5% of your refered publisher commissions. Most networks (ad or affiliate) cap off at a year or less.
• Fedexed checks. While this is not of great importance to me, I see where lots of affiliates are pretty psyched about this extra.

Final Thoughts

It is going to take me a few days to really slide MarketLeverage offers in to my rotation as I like to make sure that I get the right offers on the right pages. I plan on doing a follow up post once I’ve sent them some traffic, seen some conversions, and received a check.