Joel Comm Screwed Up
written by John Chow
Last week, AdSense Guru Joel Comm launched his long awaited 4th edition of his best selling AdSense eBook. Instead of selling the book at the standard $97 price, Joel decided to sell it at a price everyone can afford, only $9.95.
As you can expect, sales has been quite high. However, what many buyers may not have realized was the when they bought the book, they were auto subscribed into Joel Comm’s Top 1% newsletter. This normally wouldn’t be a problem with most people if the newsletter was free. However, it cost $29.95 per month. The piece of text about the newsletter was extremely easy to miss in the super long sales letter.
When Joel first contacted me about his new eBook, he never said anything about this “negative option” billing. I was under the impression that readers would be buying the AdSense eBook and nothing more. Had I known readers would be buying a book and then get auto subscribed into a $29.95 per month newsletter, I would have made sure the readers knew about it and tell them how to cancel it should they not want the newsletter.
While negative option billing is not illegal, they’re not the most liked or respected sales tragics. Most people like the option of saying no to the extra options at order time, not after the fact. As you can imagine, Joel received a huge negative reaction to the negative option.
Realizing his mistake, Joel has issued a public apology and has revamped the sales page to clearly show the newsletter options.
If you bought AdSense Secrets 4 before the clearer sales letter and don’t want the newsletter you got auto subbed into, then just tell Joel when your first issue arrives and you won’t have to pay for it. To make up for his wrong doing, Joel will be donating 100% of the profit from the eBook sales for the next two weeks.
For two weeks, starting on April 20, 2008, I will be donating 100% of the profits from direct sales of AdSense Secrets 4 to a very worthy organization, Hearts and Hands International.
Kudos to Joel for having the guts to admit he made a mistake and correcting it. Let’s hope Hearts and Hands International makes a lot of money in the next two weeks.
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Ouch, a little embarrassment, or was it planned link bait?
I don’t think it was planned. I think he’s just using some ‘nous’ to get the most juice out of the problem which generated some publicity about the new product.
Let’s see if it works or not.
Kenneth
At least Joel Comm had asked for an apology. Had he not he might create a problem with this later.
I think we planned that, because he is very popular and full of knowledge and he knew what he was doing.
I think it was well planned linkbait & revenue generating scam. Why else would he only charge $9.95 for a book that normally would sell for $97. And he used John Chows site to scam those that bought into it. John should be more careful of those he endorses.
That’s a good question. This whole thing could have been planned. Such a large negative reaction sometimes has the effect of attracting additional attention to your product. Getting sued, for instance, is a great way to increase sales.
- Earn more money
- Huge linkbait
…and its a mistake?
3 words -
Monthly Recurring Income
Lol… good thing John cleared it up though. I was going to buy one on the first post, good thing I waited for the mess to clear up first.
Lol… this “screwup” is giving him 100X more publicity then if he was honest right from the get go! Wonder if this was part of his strategy
It might have been. It’s like getting sued. Ask any business that has gotten sued, and you’ll see that their sales increased after the fact. (Provided, of course, they didn’t lose.)
Hey John. I guess everyone makes mistakes. It’s what they do when the realize the mistake that really matters. Kudos to Joel for fixing this and to you for telling us about it! I may have to go get his book now and maybe even check out this newsletter of his that is supposed to be so wonderful.
Yeah, just an honest mistake from the guy who created the Extremely Questionable Adsense Buddy
I immediately caught this right after your review. I was so eager, but I always read the fine print. I then posted about His E-Book on my blog. It got some attention, and and even Joel himself commented on my blog. He assured my readers to relax, that you can opt out, all you have to do is call him. We were wishing it was an option when purchasing. Finally he fixed his mistake. I guess he didn’t like his book being called a scam.
Shudogg Dot Com - Make Money Online Blogging
Don’t spam your blog here!
I can’t stand the spammers. Over at Shoemoney, some dude was doing the same thing: i.e., signing off every comment with his lame-ass URL address for his blog. Geez, offer something of value, for Pete’s sake. The good thing about the blogosphere is that it eventually weeds out the weaklings. If Joel Comm made a mistake, he offers an apology, and now the market will judge him and the quality of his work. If he’s worth it, he’ll make money. If he isn’t, the market will drive him out. With spammers, the market does the same thing. If they’re worth it (i.e., if they have something to offer), the market will give them a platform. If they’re not, it’ll weed them out.
Why even bother when you can read about this online for FREE?
That’s a good point. With targeted Google searches, I tend to find some very resourceful blogs with information about Google adsense. It might take a little more time so I guess the question becomes how much is your time worth? If it’s worth a lot, then it’s an investment to pay $9 for this book. If not, then search away.
I haven’t read it, but people keep saying that they’ve seen the exact same information right here on John Chow dot Com, ProBlogger, ect.
His apology is worse than his original presell page. Why does everyone care about this book? Is it worth the negative publicity for the $4 commission?
Nowadays, you do see more of such sales pitch coming up. Selling a cheap and affordable upfront product and auto-subscribing you to a monthly recurring newsletter or club. While this is a clever technique, it should be clearly spelt out in the sales letter or at least give the customer a choice.
It can be frustrating if it is hidden away and you end up having to go through the trouble of stopping the subscription.
That’s messed up, but at least he apologized for it & didn’t blow it off like it was nothing.
Some times we have those “what was I thinking” moments! I know I do on the field all the time! It think, “it sounded good at the time”. Hindsight is always 20/20 and at least he fixed it and then some.
About what one would expect form Joel
I think he’s worth of some sort of forgiveness. It was quite the sneaky thing to include that newsletter, but he had the guts to stand out and admit he screwed up. Not to mention offering some clarity and penance (i.e., donating money). I’ve never seen anyone do that before, so it creates some valuable goodwill for him.
This is the reason why I don’t buy those ebooks when they are just new.
[...] I was a bit surprised to see were two post this evening in my RSS reader. One from John Chow and the other one from Zac [...]
Joel Comm must be upset with this thing but it’s done. The best thing to do is apologize for the mistake.
He did just that. I guess we have to commend him for that.
I have an offer for this POS Joel Comm.
Offer $25,000 (Will Pay For his Screw Up)
BOXING MATCH (Date: TBD)
Joel Comm
vs
GolfSpy X
He wins = $25K
I win = $1 ans satisfaction of beating up a marketing bully.
PLEASE CONTACT ME
golfideas@gmail.com
Sneaky…really sneaky.
Then again, any publicity, is still publicity as the cliche goes.
Some people are wondering if his apology is sincere, saying he’s only sorry because he got caught. What do you lot think?
Most of these direct marketers use these sorts of tactics and don’t think twice about. It is nice that he’s apologizing, though.
Any publicity is good publicity. It got him this post on here and quite possibly a few more sales of the ebook. I wonder how many people will pay for the newsletter anyways?
~Terry
True. I wonder if he was thinking about the publicity thing.
I dont think there is a big mistake here by joel.
Nothing embarrassing
He made the mistake of not making the fine print bigger. It was damn near the bottom.
The way he has it set up now is how it should’ve been done in the first place. I’d like to think that anyone with common sense knows this. I think he was trying to pull a fast one, but it’s done & over with.
It certainly was a fast one, but he seems to have regretted it.
Common–Joel is a big talker. Kind of like scam…
If they do cheat like this then simply do a charge back on your Credit Card.
Was waiting to see this post.
look at his apology..
http://www.adsense-secrets.com/apology.html
it still looks like long sales page…He is big talker/writer once again
I guess he is what he is. Let the market judge him.
I wish he give out another option to buy his book. I mean why not letting us buy the book from using Paypal? instead of Credit Card.!
I wish it had this option as well. I don’t like to use Credit Card in this type of transaction.
That’s absolutely right! We want paypal to buy this kind of things, no Credit Card!
If I were his lawyer, I would have advised him that his billing method is legal, but I think it would generate negative goodwill among his readers.
I love the way you explained it above, as it takes the high road, YET still makes the sales pitch.
I know that whenever I market my e-books I would not consider a negative opt-in for something that is going to cost my client money if they don’t affirmatively opt-out.
This is an excellent learning experience for all serious bloggers.
Thanks
MrAchievement
Stanley F. Bronstein
Attorney, CPA, Author & Professional Motivational Speaker
I think he just got caught. Look at it this way. If he’s such a huge, throbbing marketing genius, how could he have “missed” this?
Perhaps there is more malice to his approach than we thought.
He was trying to be slick.
This really pisses me off. I actually bought this book, and now I learn I may have subscribed to some stupid newsletter! If this is the case, then Joel has lost all credibility in my eyes. If he intended to do this to get publicity, then he’s a fool. How can pissing off your customers ever be a good marketing strategy. So much for him being a good guy.
- Dave
This guy is absolutely shameless. He tries to scam us and then he wraps the apology in another scam. Actually, it is not really wrapped up… it’s in your face…. He is dodgy and I can’t believe John would vouch for him.
http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=37317
Love the photo of him in the apology. He is so false!
It does look rather magazine press-like.
Hey Gang,
I thought I’d address a few of the questions and comments on John’s blog…
1) We don’t have paypal set up because of the way our shopping cart communicates (or DOESN’T communicate) with Paypal. It also has to do with affilliate commissions. Believe me, we don’t like turning away customers so we’re working on a way to implement paypal option.
2) This was NOT a publicity stunt. Forced continuity is as old as marketing and is done daily thousands of times. As I said in my apology letter, we were up front with the offer both in the sales letter AND on the order form. It was right there for all to see. But after reading Deb Gallardo’s post on Clicknewz,com, I understood that I needed to bend over backwards to make sure the offer was directly in the potential customer’s face. And so I did. I’ve made things right as best as I can. There will always be cynics and nothing will make them happy. But my conscience is clean. I learned and move on…
3) I never claimed to be a “marketing genius”. I’ve just had some success in my 12 years online. Everyone makes mistakes. Some own up to them and some don’t.
Thanks to John for posting the apology link.