Switching from Blinksale to Zoho Invoice
I am making another switch in my life. This time I am switching from Blinksale to Zoho Invoice.
The reason for this switch is because I currently have a free account with Blinksale that gives me 3 free invoices a month and this month I needed more invoices. Normally in the few times that I have hit the limit I would switch to the paid version for a month and then step down to free account the next month. This time though they no longer have the free account so if I trade up I cannot go back down to the free account.
This caused me to evaluate what my options were…
After looking at several different solutions I am opted for Zoho Invoice for the time being. With Zoho I get 5 free invoices a month. Another cool thing with the free account is that I can send invoices as a PDF attachment. You have to pay $24/month with Blinksale to get that feature. If I need more then 5 invoices for the month I can step up to the $8/month plan and get 25 invoices. At Blinksale I only get 6 invoices for $6 (and still no PDF attachments).
I still get to accept payments online with Zoho via PayPal and can even use Google Checkout or Authorize.net if I want with my free account. I have to admit that the Zoho interface is not as simple or intuitive as the one at Blinksale but for the price, it is worth it. I hope Zoho Invoice works out so I don’t have to switch again.
Oh, a note about switching from Blinksale
Unfortunately they do not have an easy way to export your clients from you Blinksale account. They allow you to export you invoices but it only has the client’s name, not their contact info that you input in Blinksale. Even if the prices were competitive the fact that my data is not exportable is a deal breaker with Blinksale. With Zoho this is not an issue.
Another issue I just discovered is that their invoice export only gives the invoice total – not the line items and descriptions. This is also something that Zoho does for you. Unfortunately I now have 4 years of data locked into a system that I can now not get out. 
Update 5/4/10
Another confirmation that I made the right decision to switch from Blinksale to Zoho Invoice. I sent an email request to Blinksale yesterday asking for help on how to get my data out. I also sent them a Tweet but as of today there is no reply.
But, although I did not contact them Zoho Invoice saw my Tweet and my post and reached out to me offering to help get my data out of Blinksale. Now that is customer service!
Update 5/5/10
Today I got an email from Zoho Invoice Tech Support with instructions on how to import from Blinksale (still nothing from Blinksale ). The instructions were pretty simple to follow and it only took about a minute to do the import. I as interested to see whether I would just get invoices only or if I would actually get my clients as well. I got both!
As good as getting my invoices and clients imported into Zoho Invoice the import wasn’t completely smooth. For some reason I had information from one invoice from one client that showed up on several of my other client’s invoices. This caused these invoices to marked as “Overdue”. Along with that the line item descriptions on the invoices did not seem to import either.
I do consider these issues but honestly I am not to concerned. I have seen the responsiveness of the Zoho support staff and I am sure they will respond quickly with a fix. I have to say I am really impressed so far though Zoho and completely under-impressed with Blinksale.
Update 5/14/10
In one word this issue is resolved. Zoho fixed the issue on their end on 5/12 and I tried the import out today. It worked great. In all fairness Blinksale did send me a direct message via Twitter on 5/5 (after my above update) and asked me to contact them. I opted not to since I new Zoho was already working on the issue.
I have to say that I am extremely pleased with the way that Zoho handled this issue for me especially since I am currently a free customer. I do plan to upgrade to a pay subscription here in the future as they have won a very loyal customer. Thanks Zoho!
2009 State of the Small Time Blogger Address
Well 2009 is upon us and everyone is doing their 2008 roll ups and 2009 predictions. I thought I would chime in with what I saw in 2008 and what I am expecting in 2009 and beyond. The idano Blog Network consists of around 15 blogs that spans various topics and subjects so I have a pretty good window into the overall state of the blogosphere for the small time blogger.
The first thing that I noticed through the holiday season was that sales were really down. I made about 33% of what I did last year in Amazon sales and Adsense compared to 2007. Here are a couple of contributing factors for this decline:
- The economy and the fact that people were just not spending as much. The items that I was selling were kind of pricey for Christmas presents and I think people went for more practical and safe presents.
- Stores were overstocked for the holiday season. In 2007 the items that I was selling were sold out in brick and mortar stores so that pushed people online. This year there was plenty of stock through the entire season.
- The market was saturated. Last year there were 2 major products in the market I was selling to. This year there were at least 10 from the main manufacture that I sold for. Also, everyone and their brother was selling the same thing, you could get them anywhere and everywhere now.
Going into 2009 I have already seen a pretty big drop in advertising revenue from December. I am trying to be realistic in the fact that this is probably going to be dropping more as the year goes on. I don’t expect it to go away completely but I am already adjusting my budgeting to not count on this money anymore. Read the rest of this entry »
Sometimes You Shoot Yourself in the Foot and Don’t Realize It Until Later (Affiliate Marketing)
I have been having a phenomenal month with Amazon.com
There was another helicopter that I reviewed called the Air Hogs Reflex . My review of this helicopter was not as positive as the other two reviews. On top of that I did not place a link to the Reflex on Amazon but instead to the Havoc. I did this because at the time I thought the Havoc was better then the Reflex.
Since the review I got my hands on some other heli’s and also another Reflex. I was pleasantly surprised with the Reflex and it was much better then I remembered it was. The problem was that I never updated my review with my newly acquired experience.
Today I logged into my Google Analytics account and noticed that my Reflex review was number 3 after the other 2 heli reviews. The Reflex review was pulling in over 10% of the traffic that my site was getting but I was getting zero sales from it . I had been sitting on my more positive view of the product for a couple of months and now realized that I was paying the price for it.
Needless to say I quickly updated my review and provided the appropriate links for BOTH helicopters mentioned in the review. I may have missed a chunk or change for this month but hopefully December is just as good for me.
There’s the Reflex on Amazon to the right if you want to check it out.
Technorati tags: Amazon, RC Helicopter Reviews, Air Hogs Reflex, Air Hogs Havoc Heli Laser Battle, Air Hogs Havoc Heli, Cyber Monday, Black Friday, Christmas
Text Links Ads – Cleaning Up The Code for Prime Time
I just got done doing a round of maintenance on the various blogs that I have. The main reason for the work was that I had been approved to sell links on those blogs through Text Link Ads.
The real work in adding the link code was cleaning up the code that renders from the Text Link Ads plugin for links in my sidebars. Their plugin would add it’s own <ul> tag that would break my other lists in the my sideba. Also, the had inline styles that were ugly that did not go with the CSS that I already had on my site.
With a little bit of elbow grease I was able to get nice clean lists so that Google and and the other search engines can get right to my content.
As a note – If you have a blog or website that gets alright traffic and has a Pagerank 4 or better you should check Text Link ads out. I have been selling links through them since the beginning of the year and have gone from making $65 my first month to making over $500 this month. I never thought that I could make money like that but I am and it is great.
Anyway give them a lookup and see if you can score some cash too – Text Link Ads.
Technorati: Text Link Ads, Monetize, Make Money Blogging, Money, Passive Income
Amazon Does it to Me Again – This Time Worse!
I had posted before about Staying Up on Your Affiliate Links and I am glad that I have made a practice of it. On Saturday morning I checked my Amazon stats (which up until now have been smokin’!) and found that I did not sell any of the Air Hogs Havoc Heli helicopters the previous day. This was strange because even on my worst days I would sell at least one.
A quick check of my page with the link to Amazon on it revealed that the vendor was no longer available. “No problem” I thought, as I logged into Amazon to search for another link as there had been plenty of vendors selling them.
Boy was I in for a surprise.
Making Money From Blogging – Getting Started
So you want to make money from blogging? Where do you start? With a blog of course. Unfortunately a lot of people want to jump into making money without getting the basics down first.
But before you even get your blog you need to decide what you are going to blog about? If we take the stance that you are going to try and make money from blogging then you need to have a subject that you know about and that can open the door for you to make product recommendations to your readers.
How do you do this?
Look around your house, what is it that you do? Are you a mom with a couple of small kids? You could blog about being a stay at home mom and offer tips and ideas to other moms on what makes your life easier. Are you a guy that is really into RC cars and Airplanes? Start a blog about that and share your experiences and ideas. The sky is the limit.
Staying Up on Your Affiliate Links
I have had more interest recently on making money from the couple of well ranked pages I have for some “As Seen On TV” products. One of these products is the Hercules Hook which I currently have a # 8 spot on the first page of Google results. From that spot I get about 30-40 people a day that hit my site looking for these little miracle hooks (which are quite cool by the way).
The Original Affiliate
Anyway, I had these pages linking to carolwrightgifts.com as an affiliate through Commission Junction but was only seeing about 1 sale every other day. I was making $1.20 off each sales which is nice but my conversion rate was less then to be desired.
Changing To A More Reputable Company
I then remembered that I had signed up for an Amazon.com associates account Read the rest of this entry »
Getting Better Conversion Rates for Affiliates
Wow, I just learned one of the most valuable lessons in improving the conversion rate of clickthroughs to affiliate sites.
Stumbling Upon Traffic
It all started when I started getting traffic for the “Hercules Hook” for a simple paid post that I did. I figured that there may be some money to be made so I updated my copy and got a little traffic and some conversions rolling in.
After a week or 2 the traffic tapered off as other competitors upped their copy and pushed my down the natural search results.
Then I found a service called hittail.com which gives you suggestions for long tail search phrases that you should write copy for. I took the information that it had which said that I was getting hits for “Hercules Hooks” with an s and that I should try “Hercules Hook” without.
Good Resource for Starting a Web Hosting Company
I have a reseller account that I use for the couple of customers that I have design sites for over the years. It makes me enough money to buy some toys throughout the year and I also get to host as many of my personal sites as I want for free.
I have be tempted to to open my account up so that other could sign up but not have been sure on what it takes to get it going. Today while browsing around I found Reseller Hosting Guide which is a site that is dedicated to helping you start a web hosting company. Read the rest of this entry »
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Me on Twitter...
- I just moved my first file to SkyDrive. #iDisktoSkyDrive 2 days ago
- A nice outdoor bench http://t.co/GVLFbI4m 2 days ago
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