Day 26: A Third New Site and Stupid Stupid PayPal – The Keyword Academy Scam Experiment


(Thursday July, 16th)

I forgot to mention yesterday that I got that other link exchange I was hoping for on my first site. That makes 3 links from exchanges and 1 link from the article distribution site.

Following the whole “planting a lot of seeds at one time” strategy (if you don’t know what I’m talking about read Day 23), I wrote one page of content for another site, and got it up and going. It’s nice because it’s related to the site I started yesterday, so I got to exchange links between those 2 sites. That was a nice little bonus.

So, for those of you counting, I now have 3 sites (excluding this one) and my wife has 1, for a total of 4.

I helped my wife put Adsense and StatCounter on her site today. She just needs to write one more page of content for it, then she can start link building.

I checked Adsense today, which I hadn’t done for a while and found that I had some more clicks! In the last 3 days I got 4 clicks. 1 of them was on this site and the other 4 were on my niche site! I’m really excited about those 3, since my goal after all is to make Adsense revenue from my niche sites. It doesn’t sound like much but results are results! Woo Hoo!

Near the end of the day I did something that seems completely unrelated to The Keyword Academy and my scam experiment, but stick with me. I logged into PayPal because I needed to update my payment method (I just got a new debit card and bank account number). So, I added a new bank account and a new credit card, went through the confirmation process for both, then I deleted the old ones. A couple minutes later I get 2 emails from PayPal letting me know that both my subscription to The Keyword Academy, and to Host Gator had been successfully canceled. SAY WHAT!?

I logged back in to PayPal, and sure enough, in my recent transactions they showed up as canceled. I tried to look for a way to reactive them on the website, but I couldn’t find one. So, I found their customer service number and called. I explained to the rep what had happened and asked if she could reactivate those subscriptions. Nope! Apparently that is the expected behavior when you delete an old payment method. Instead of switching to the new payment method, any active subscriptions are just canceled. Wow… what a stupid, stupid idea! She informed me that I would have to contact the merchants for each subscription to get them going again. Oh boy, sounds like fun…

I called Host Gator first. The tech support guy there told me that I will have to wait till the next billing cycle, then when my next invoice shows up on the billing site, I can just choose to pay it with PayPal again and that will allow me to setup the subscription. Also, I asked if they have a grace period before they shut off your account. They do; it’s 10 day from the day you get billed.

I then went to The Keyword Accademy site, logged in, and tried to open the support page. However, it must have already detected that my PayPal subscription was canceled, because it gave me a message that this page is only for active members. It did however have a support email address that you can contact if you feel that your account should still be active. I shot an email to them explaining the issue and asking how they recommend I resolve it. I’ll let you know what I hear back.

I thought about just going through the sign up process again, but I wasn’t sure if that would force me to choose a new user name, etc. I’d rather just keep the one I have. Plus I think it’s linked to the affiliate account I set up, and (hopefully) plan on using in the future.

So the moral of the story is: be careful with PayPal subscriptions! They are quite fragile and break easily. Handle with care.

I mentioned when I started the Keyword Academy, that one of the things that convinced me to join was the PayPal subscription thing, because I could easily cancel if I wanted to. Apparently, it’s easy to cancel even if I don’t want to!

Don’t get me wrong though, I am not faulting The Keyword Academy for this one. I think using Pay Pal subscriptions was a great choice. I think the blame for this design flaw rests squarely on PayPal. People have to change payment methods all the time. Migrating your subscriptions from a payment method you’re deleting, to another active one should be automatic. Or if not automatic, they should at least warn you that any subscriptions connected to that payment method will be canceled. How dumb is it to just cancel them and then tell you about it after the fact and not offer any way to undo it?

Well, after that little fiasco I’m done for today. G’night all.

Money spent: $0.00
Time spent: 2 hours

The Keyword Academy Scam Experiment – RUNNING TOTALS:
Costs:
Monetary costs – $192.76
Time costs – 47.5 hours @ $8.40 = $399
Revenue:
Google  Adsense – $7.72

GRAND TOTAL:
-($584.04)


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  1. Pingback: Day 30: More Article Distribution – The Keyword Academy Scam Experiment | The Keyword Academy Scam Experiment on July 21, 2009

2 Comments

  1. lol, July 20, 2009:

    ouch! that’ll put you back some time…
    Well I suppose you can still build content and link to the domain names even though the hosting isn’t up yet.

  2. admin, July 20, 2009:

    Well, thankfully canceling the PayPal subscription doesn’t stop my sites from being hosted (I would have been REALLY mad then!). Since my Host Gator account is still all payed up they will continue to host my sites. I will just need to re-setup the PayPal subscription when they send me my next bill, and even then I get a 10 day grace period to pay before they shut off the hosting. So, unless I forget to pay my next bill for 10 days, there should be no interruption in my web hosting.

    On the other hand, I still haven’t heard from the Keyword Academy about restoring my account there. It’s not a huge deal because I downloaded all the core videos, but I would like to have my access to the forums back. However, seeing as today was only the 2nd business day since I wrote my email to support, I guess I’ll cut ‘em some slack.