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.