A support request earlier this month started out amiably enough, with an affiliate asking "I was wondering how long it take for me to see payments to my paypal for my sales? I know I have made sales already, I was in person watching the book getting purchased."

Of course I was concerned, since payments on referrals of $7 Secrets are paid immediately and directly to the affiliate's PayPal account, so I asked the affiliate (let's call him "Jeff") to tell me who made the purchase and I'd look into it.

I had the opportunity to download Windows 7 Ultimate this weekend and install it on my Mac. You might not be aware that Microsoft is offering to let you try Windows 7 for an entire year for free; the Release Candidate is about as close to the real thing as we're going to get until October and won't expire until June 1, 2010.

A couple months ago my Palm Treo 650 finally ticked me off enough that I stopped using it and went back to my previous phone, a Sanyo that I stopped using when I upgraded to a smartphone. I had originally purchased the Treo despite poor reviews by existing users; I had used a Palm for years and wanted to stick with a hardware/software platform I was familiar with.

After reading a Macworld column today, I rushed to the App Store to download a copy of RemoteTap for my iPod Touch. This app is very useful; essentially, it's a VPN client for your iPhone/iPod Touch that, with a companion preference pane on your Mac, makes it possible to remotely log in to your Mac, viewing and controlling it from a distance.

When a subscriber (I'll call him Dan) told me the other day that he was requesting a refund for his purchase of Answer Analyst, a product from Jon Leger that I promote, because it was inferior to a free product he was using, I was intrigued. After all, even I like the best product at the best price.

Dan recommended the Ever Profits Toolbar; what follows is my response to him after I reviewed the software:

It's little wonder that Internet Marketing has a bad name, when marketers—big name and otherwise—pull the stunts they do. Today I'm ticked off by those that either pay their affiliates late... or not at all.

Yesterday I received an unsubscribe notification from my autoresponder, one of those messages that tells me a subscriber has left and gives me the reason if the subscriber has taken the time to let me know. I monitor those and, if someone takes the time to give me a reason, I take the time to respond.

It doesn't matter what type of online business you're in: it's important that your customers and prospects be able to contact you. Whether they're needing information or a problem to be solved, they want to know that they can reach you.

However, it's become quite clear that e-mail is unreliable. Not because e-mail is broken, but because many Internet Service Providers (ISPs)—AOL, Comcast, Hotmail and Yahoo are the worst—are blocking messages they believe are spam.

When you think about what subject to write about (talk about. etc.) for your information product, I don't blame you for being a little overwhelmed. You might be thinking,

"I'm not an expert!"

The good news is, you don't have to be an expert!

The fact of the matter is, the Internet has made it possible for your prospects to find information—in depth—on just about any subject you can imagine. For free.

Except they're probably going to have to put a lot of time into getting all that information together...

I commented recently on two separate blog posts which touched on a common theme: "Should I use a squeeze form/popup on my website?" (Using the squeeze form before any additional information is shown.)