[chrisbrogan.com]

Sponsored Post- Online Shopping?- Pay Cash and Feel Secure with eBillMe

Posted: 01 Dec 2008 01:30 AM PST

This is a sponsored post. My pledge to you is that I’ll never take a sponsorship from someone I can’t endorse, or from someone that doesn’t match the interests of this community. I also disclose every affiliation on my About page.

Do you pay your bills online? Do you do online banking? Have you ever wondered about how secure online payments are? More interestingly, are you wondering about how to NOT use credit this holiday season and pay cash instead?

I think this might be interesting to you.

When I talked with Samer Forzley from eBillMe about his product, I admit that I didn’t understand it the first time I went to the website. That’s because it’s actually a lot more clever than I thought it was when I learned what they’re doing.

eBillme is like the middle man between your online purchases. You can use it at places like Buy.com or Tiger Direct or a bunch of other places (they’re signing up new ones as fast as they can, I’m told). The site has a really simple For Her and For Him section of gift ideas for Cyber Monday and Holiday shopping, by the way, which made for some interesting browsing for me. (I ended up on Buy.com because there was more to see.)

How It Works

(and if I’m wrong, Samer will help me fix this):

You buy something from Buy.com. For a payment method, you select “eBillMe.” When filling out the form to buy whatever, the merchant gets your email address, and so does eBillMe. Then, eBillMe sends you an email with a special code.

Take that code to your online bank of choice. You know where you pay bills, like the electric bill? Go there and put in that code and make eBillMe the payee. Then, just complete your purchase that way.

Then, eBillMe pays the merchant, and you get your stuff, without much fuss, and with lots more security.

Why This is Cool

Think about this: In this model, eBillMe gets funds from your bank, but from the BANK, not your direct account. In this model, eBillMe pays the merchant, which doesn’t pass any of your banking data through for the transaction. In this model, you see a deduction on your statement that says you paid “eBillMe” some money.

Compare that with paying with your debit card, where you give the merchant your bank info. At least two bad ideas in one there, right? Now compare it with paying through PayPal. Not bad, except that you have to give PayPal all your banking info. Right?

So eBillMe has this wrapped up in a fairly neat way, from the secure and anonymous point of view, eh?

Hoping The Idea Spreads

In 2009, with the credit crunch on, and with more people looking to protect their data online, I think an idea like eBillMe is pretty clever. I hope Samer and the team can get more people to accept it as a paying option (my guess is he’ll chime in for the comments and tell us what’s up there). But for now, I plan to use it for some holiday purchases, especially the For Her one, because one can always use help finding the right things to buy. (Okay, *I* can always use the help.)

What do you think?

The preceding was a sponsored post by eBillMe. My opinions are definitely my own, and this post was written by me with no external influence.

Why Faceless Untargeted Ads Will Exist For a Long Time

Posted: 30 Nov 2008 03:46 PM PST

This is from a 7 day test:

Whatever Google Adsense felt like showing you above my posts via RSS:
adsense

Hand-picked stuff I think you might like from Amazon:

amazon

AdSense paid me $50. Amazon paid me under $20. One took no work. The other was me trying to find what mattered to people I care about.

As I explore the different ways people make money from the web, it’s interesting to see what works and what doesn’t. I’m on the advisory board of Izea for the same reason. I want to better understand this. I follow Angel Djambazov’s work on Revenews for the same reason. I learn from smart people like Jim Kukral, Darren Rowse, and by going to shows like the Affiliate Summit.

But that result above merits noting. Not that one should festoon their site with ads. There are lots of ways to make money. I’m learning about them a bit at a time, to share with you, so that I have more to give to interesting causes (like buying some bricks), and so that I know how others are using the web. So, what does this mean for it all? How will ads be more relevant, less relevant?

And how does this affect the way companies look at the online space in general?

What do you think?

Here’s a Hint- Don’t Whisper

Posted: 30 Nov 2008 09:30 AM PST

Here’s a brilliant move: place your customer service department in Bangalore, on VoIP lines to cut costs, and then have them call me to make a business transaction.

Thank you, GMAC, keepers of my car loan. Because I really heard what “Susan” was trying to tell me this morning. Oh, I can guess: “You didn’t pay your bill. Want to pay it?” And so I said, “Yes, I’d love to pay my bill. Can we do it right now?” But oh no, I have no idea what came next, because your cost-cutting efforts dealt me a crappy phone connection to a quiet-voiced woman who couldn’t help me transact a basic business process. Brilliant.

So then, just to top it off, when it became clear that neither of us could hear the other, I asked her to call back. Well, that won’t happen, because “call back” isn’t in their protocol.

Customer service isn’t a chore. It’s the new PR. Do it right, please. (But then, we all know they don’t have to. It’s not like I’ll move my car loan somewhere. Will I?)

photo credit, Tuftronic10000

Small News Reporters

Posted: 30 Nov 2008 07:41 AM PST

Riffing off “Are You a Reporter?” by Christopher S. Penn, and a little bit from All Tomorrow’s Armies, I’m thinking about “we are reporting smaller news.” What would that look like?

The answer is ridiculously simple. You know who’s training tomorrow’s reporters? Steve Garfield is on his Off on a Tangent blog. Look how Steve reports things. It’s simple, brief, to the point, and loaded with appropriate links. If you ever wanted to learn good link journalism, learn from Steve. (He’s also teaching journalism now at Boston University, because they know he’s brilliant.)

But YOU, without much training, can report small news. Maybe it’s not meant for your very specific blog, but a side blog, a side project, with a few other reporters. I think realtors are actually figuring this out from a slightly different perspective.

It’s not too tricky. We have the cameraphones. We have the Flips. We have the distribution. This is as simple as putting up a blog, adding media to it, and reporting on small news that matters to you. And you, in this case, is whatever vertical matters to you: .NET reporters in Glasgow, people who live in Park Slope, the folks of OMG Pittsburgh.

This is as important as Brian’s Alive in Baghdad, only different. It’s a way to bring small to the people in a meaningful way.

If I had time, I would do this in 2009, but I don’t. But YOU might. You might be exactly the person to set up a site to show people how to report small news. You might show them how to embed videos, how to ask enough questions to make a story at least a little more balanced than a typical blog post. You might invite professional journalists in to share their experiences, and to weigh in on how to make small news reporting better. You might link to the sites who are doing small news out there, so that we build a small news network.

This is a pirate ship waiting for a captain. Are you the leader of the small news movement? Report back to us, would you?

Photo credit, Ninjapoodles

An Ignoble Experiment

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2008/12/01

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