How to give your customers products for free and get paid

This would be a dream come true for retailers. What if you could give your customers your products for a very small fee or even free, but still get paid for them? Imagine what your sales revenue would be. Well, a bunch of other people felt the same way and figured out a way to do it. But wait, it gets even better… they made it easy for you to do too. Here’s how:

There is a new payment service similar to PayPal or Google Checkout but with an interesting new twist. The service is called TrialPay. TrialPay allows you to pay for products but instead of using your money, TrailPay pays for your product using an advertisers money.

So whats the catch? When you sign up for TrailPay and purchase a product you agree to try another TrialPay advertisers product. Some of these products charge a small fee or no fee at all for the first month.  None of the trail offers I saw offered any penalty for canceling after the first month.

I tried TrialPay myself and was excited about the results. I ordered Trillian Pro, a amazing chat program that allows you to use AIM, Yahoo, MSN, Google chat, IRC and others all at the same time in the same window. The Trillain program costs $25 for the pro version.

I chose to purchase Trillian using TrialPay. I was given a selection of offers from top quality merchants such as Blockbuster, eBay, Real, Rhaposdy, Stamps.com, and others. I chose the Blockbuster offer. This offer cost me $9.99 and I got one month of Blockbuster Video Total Access. This service mails me 3 movies of my choosing to my home. I return them by mail when I am done watching them and there are no late fees. The movies come with a prepaid return label to mail back or they can be returned to your local Blockbuster store. I also got my Trillian Pro chat program for free (although I did pay $9.99 to Blockbuter). I now have the program that I wanted, saved $15.00, and got to use the Blockbuster service for a full month and received 7 or 8 movies. Once I factor in the savings on movies I would have rented anyway, I saved far more than the $9.99 I paid. When all was said and done I felt good having used TrialPay and would definitely use it again.

Now the great part about all this is that TrialPay has made it easy for other merchants to come on board and sell their products using the TrialPay service. You chose the minimum amount of a money you will accept for a sale and TrialPay will match you with the highest paying offers available. If a customer selects an offer that pays more than your products costs, you still get the higher amount. The sign up process is simple and easy and they create graphics and checkout icons that you can easily integrate into your existing website. Money for sales can be directly deposited into your bank account or a check can be mailed to you. If you are using PayPal or Google Checkout, you will want to add TrialPay as one of your checkout options. Want to learn more or sign up? Click the blue box to the right.

 

Want to try out TrialPay? Total Hosting is offering free domain names though the TrailPay service. Get a domain name you’ve been wanting or add a second domain name for your business and try out the service first hand before offering it to your customers. Click the graphic below to get a free domain name.

 

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Get your domain name for FREE

Yup, you read it right, we said FREE! Total Hosting has partnered with TrialPay to let you get free domain names. Click here to learn more.

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Get your domain name for FREE

Want to get your domain name for FREE! Sign up with TrialPay and we’ll give your a activation code for a free .com, net, .org, .info, or .biz domain name for free. If you want a different extension use the code for a $19.95 credit. TrialPay uses money from the advertiser to buy your product for you. It’s that
easy. We have tried trial pay ourselves and were so happy with the service that we wanted to let our customers give it a try. Click the picture below to get started. 


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Scripts currently supported by Fantastico Deluxe

The following scripts can be auto-installed using our control panel free of charge. Installation takes seconds and can be performed by anyone without the need of setting up MySQL databases, importing structure, setting file permissions, and other tasks usually associated with installations:

List updated Oct 18th 2011

Blogs:
b2evolution (4.0.5) (website)
Nucleus (3.64) (website)
WordPress (3.2.1) (website)

Classifieds:
Noah’s Classifieds (V8 (3.2.0)) (website)

Portals/CMS:
Drupal (7.8) (website)
Geeklog (1.6.1) (website)
Joomla 1.5 (1.5.23) (website)
Joomla 1.7 (1.7) (website)
Mambo Open Source (4.6.5) (website)
PHP-Nuke (8.0) (website)
phpWCMS (1.4.2 r345) (website)
phpWebSite (1.6.3) (website)
Siteframe (3.2.3) (website)
TikiWiki CMS/Groupware (6.2) (website)
Typo3 (4.5.6) (website)
Xoops (2.5.1a) (website)
Zikula (1.2.8) (visit site)

Customer Support:
Crafty Syntax Live Help (3.1.4) (website)
Help Center Live (2.1.7) (website)
osTicket (1.6.0) (website)
PerlDesk (4.012.2) (Commercial, needs license) (website)
PHP Support Tickets (1.9) (website)
Support Logic Helpdesk (1.2) (website)
Support Services Manager (1.0b) (website)

Discussion Boards:
phpBB (3.0.8) (website)
SMF (2.0.1) (website)

E-Commerce:
CubeCart (3.0.17) (website)
OS Commerce (2.3.1) (website)
Zen Cart (1.3.9h) (website)

FAQ:
FAQMasterFlex (1.51) (website)

Hosting Billing:
AccountLab Plus (2.8 r14) (Commercial, needs license) (website)
phpCOIN (1.6.5) (website)

Image Galleries:
4images Gallery (1.7.10) (website)
Coppermine Photo Gallery (1.5.12) (website)
Gallery (3.0.2) (website)

Mailing List:
PHPlist (2.10.17) (website)

Polls and Surveys:
Advanced Poll (2.03) (website)
LimeSurvey (1.91+) (website)
phpESP (2.1.1) (website)

Project Management:
PHProjekt (6.0.4) (website)
dotProject (2.1.3) (website)

Site Builders:
Soholaunch Pro Edition (4.9.3 r41) (Commercial, needs license) (website)
Templates Express (website)

Wiki:
PhpWiki (1.2.11) (website)

Other Scripts:
Dew-NewPHPLinks (2.0.1.0b SEF w/Thumbshots) (website)
Moodle (2.1.1) (website)
Open-Realty (2.5.8) (website)
OpenX (2.8.7) (website)
PHPauction (3.2) (website)
phpFormGenerator (2.09c) (website)
WebCalendar (1.2.3) (website)

Fantastico Deluxe is included free of charge with our web hosting plans.

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Affordable Web Hosting

Total Hosting offers affordable web hosting plans, merchant accounts, domain registration, and web site design services for over 10 years. Learn more about our web hosting packages.

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Dedicated Server Updates

Dedicated Server customers with a manged service plan will be updated over this weekend to ensure that servers are running the latest kernel version, 2.6.18-53.1.14. Information
on the specific vulnerabilities being patched can be found at the following links:
https://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2008-0154.html
Additionally, there are security and enhancement updates available for various packages. These updates may have
already been applied to your system; if they have not, we will ensure during this session that they have.

Most users will not notice any interruption in service.
For the remainder, a reboot of the server, which entails approximately 90 to 120 seconds of downtime in most cases, is required for servers to run the new kernels.

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Design Store

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How come I am getting spammed?

I hate spam. You hate spam. We all hate spam. It clogs your inbox. It
insults your intelligence or sensibilities. It wastes your time. Today,
I am not talking about what the spammers send or why they send it. I
think most people know why they send it. This is about how it finds you,
in the first place.

Generally, there are four reasons:

1) Your website

2) Someone you know has a computer virus

3) "Dictionary" spam

4) You

The number one place your email address is harvested from, is your
website (this also applies, of course, to anytime your email address
appears on ANYONE’S website, not JUST yours.) Chances are you have (or
have had) your email address on your website, in the hopes of generating
business. While it was a noble gesture, it’s likely the email address
harvester spiders ruined it for you.

If you still do have your email address posted on your website, you
should consider obfuscating it, or better yet, replace it with a
"contact us" form. You can even have a form that gives your visitor a
choice as to whom to contact, if that helps direct traffic. The other
upside to a form is that you can make sure you receive certain
information from a sender.  This is when you use "required" fields. Make
sure to have good error messages when something goes wrong. Error
checking goes a long way.

You should make sure you have a "confirm" email (or other critical)
field option, so it will cut down on typos as they have to match. You
can also put graphics of numbers or letters on your form that someone has to type in a field
to make sure they are humans submitting the form and not automated email
address harvesters. This is known as CAPTCHA. It’s very easy to
implement. If you have never seen it, take a look at the comments section at the bottom of this page.

If you do move to a form-based contact system (Total Hosting has these built into your control panel), you should also change
the email addresses for everyone involved. Instead of "fred@" make it
"fred.flintstone@" or something else. Then wean your contacts off by
sending everything to them from your new account. Attach vcards, and put
a notice in your signature file, so your legitimate contacts can update
their email address books. Then, put autoresponders on the old accounts,
alerting people to the new addresses (written out like "fred dot
flintstone at mydomain dot com") so that anyone you legitimately want to
hear from will get the idea. Hopefully the spammers will not.
Eventually you should shut off the old account as it will fill up with spam over time.

2) If the spam is coming from an address you recognize, then try to
alert them so that they can run some antivirus on their computer. Keep in mind that spam viruses try to trick you by using fake addresses when they send spam so it may not have really been from your someone you know at all, even though it may appear that way.

3) Sometimes the spammers will just send out blasts to common words and
names. So if your email address is "sales@" or "fred@" it will be very
easy for the spammers just to guess. Like above, consider moving to a
more specific email address system. "fred.j.flintstone@" is much less
likely to get hit with random spam than simply "fred@." Instead of
"sales" make it "salesteam" or "domesticsales." Again, how you exactly
wean people off the old account is up to you and your levels of email
activity. Power users may want to run concurrent accounts for a while,
still trying to move people away from the old address.

4) If you ever get a piece of spam, DO NOT CLICK ON ANYTHING in the
email. Do NOT "CLICK HERE" to try get them to remove you. All you are
doing is letting them know you are there. They will not honor the
request. They are spammers after all.
Often using the "CLICK HERE" to be removed link will increase the amount of spam you receive because you have confirmed that a human has read the message. This makes your address more valuable to the spammer.

Now, don’t confuse "spam" with 3rd party mailers from companies you have
done business with. If you subscribe to any newsletters or magazines,
make sure you opt out from getting emails from "partners," if you want.
If it’s an email solicitation from a legitimate company, then they will
most likely honor your request to removed from future mailings.

I tend to personally distinguish between businesses trying to
legitimately leverage email (through use of third-party senders like
Constant Contact or other similar services and based on my own
subscriptions to newsletters and account set-ups) and the "spammer" who
is just annoying me with untargeted, or simply obscene, emails.

If you ever get an email that you think is legitimate, do not click on any links. Look for signs that the
URL may be fraudulent. Directly type into your browser the name of the website you want to go to or try doing a search for just the domain name. Often the worst kind of spammer, known as phishers, will send emails claiming to be from your bank or credit card company. These emails look very real and contain links to websites that may look exactly like the bank website. My advice would be to NEVER click on a link in any email to take you to your bank or credit card company website. Always type the name of the website directly into your web browser.

There are some other things you can do, to help reduce spam.

1) Use a good anti-virus program at home. I personally recommend Symantec Norton 360. It has anti-virus, spam filters, a firewall, a backup program, and a phishing filter for your web browser (IE only at this time).
2) Use the filters that come with your web hosting plan. Total Hosting screens all email and filters out the majority of spam and viruses. You can fine tune these settings for each mailbox via your control panel.
3) Set-up whitelists/graylists. They are a pain, but once set-up, it
certainly keeps your in box clean. Make sure to set yours up so that
anyone you send a first email to, is automatically added to your white
list. And if you subscribe to any newsletters, or do any ecommerce or
send an email from a form, where you expect a receipt or reply, manually
add those domains to your list, so they get through to you.

4) Get browser plug-ins. Internet Explorer and Firefox both have built in Phishing filters. Make sure they are turned on. If your current browser of choice does not have
any plug-in/customization options, consider switching to something like
Firefox. You can get lots of tools to make your surfing safer and more
enjoyable.

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Wayside FC

Tinton Falls, New Jersey-based Fire Company Fire District #1 turned to Total Hosting to design a simple, easily managed website for them to promote their events, provide public fire safety information and to commemorate their own proud history.

Visit WaysideFireCompany.com  

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Ivy League PTO

The Ivy League school PTO needed a way to get their information out to the parents of students enrolled in their school. While the audience would never grow to huge numbers, the PTO administration knew that they had to be responsive. Total Hosting delivered a solution that busy, non-technical administrators and volunteers could manage.

Visit IvyLeaguePTO.org  

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