I’m writing this while waiting for the “Chat Agent” to come online and take care of canceling my account.

Like many people, I had a rare occasion when I needed to fax a document and not having a fax machine I decided to try out a “free” Internet Fax service.

There are a ton out there, but for whatever reason (the whole experience, like sending faxes, was quite forgettable) I chose Fax.com. I provided my credit card info and sent the fax. Fine.

A month or so later, I checked my credit card statement and there was a charge from Fax.com for $9.99. “Oh I better take care of that,” I thought and then immediately forgot about it.

A month after that, I checked my statement and saw the charge again. “I must cancel that,” I thought. This time I went to the site, signed in (thanks LastPass!) and hunted for several minutes for a cancel option. I didn’t find one and something came up and I had to abandon my search.

And then 10 minutes ago I saw the charge AGAIN on my statement. I’ve now spent $30 on this “free” service to send one measly fax!! I logged on and started clicking around. Finally while viewing my bill online, I clicked on the Help icon and saw a FAQ about canceling my account. I clicked on that link and was taken to another page when I had to chat with a support rep to cancel my account. Seriously, Fax.com expects me to chat with an agent to cancel my account?

… Well, apparently not. After waiting for the agent for a couple of minutes, the system has told me that it’s taking too long and had me fill out a form to cancel. (I wonder if there ever was an agent in the first place.)

To me fax.com’s business model is “frustrate the user so he stops trying to cancel.”

Fax.com provides a commodity service that is fundamentally similar to its competition. It sends faxes through the Internet. And it does a fine job of it. The interface is clean and simple to use and it works exactly as promised. But it’s obvious to me after trying to cancel the service, that in my case 2/3 of Fax.com’s revenue is derived from frustrating its users. I only wanted the service for one of the three months I paid for it.

Another online service that derives revenue this way is PayPal. Regardless of my preferences in the past, I still have to force PayPal to complete a purchase using my credit card rather than my checking account. I have to go through that extra step every time. And on those rare occasions when I forget, I’m pissed. It throws my whole accounting system off.

The result is that whenever I’m given the opportunity, I’ll use anything but PayPal to complete a purchase. Yep, that includes Google Checkout.

Both Fax.com and PayPal are guilty of the same practice: they sacrifice good customer interaction for the sake of a few extra bucks.

If you’re a product designer remember this: Your goal is to help your users easily do what they want to do, not what you want them to do. And if they’re not both the same thing, maybe you’re doing it wrong.

Cheeburger Cheeburger has moved up a notch in my book. I ordered my lunch online at Cheeburger.com and in the Special Notes box I added:

Please draw a picture of a monkey using a flamethrower on the wrapper/bag.

Here’s what I got.

"Please draw a picture of a monkey using a flamethrower on the wrapper/bag."

One caveat though – they did call to verify the order because of the unusual request. So I had to tell them that yes indeed I wanted a burger and yes, I wanted a picture of a monkey brandishing a flamethrower on the bag.

Luckily for me Christine picked up lunch, which I guess she’ll be reluctant to do in the future.

Dear Family:
Although I need nothing but your love (and my house and my laptop and my phone and my Jeep), you insist on buying me things for my birthday and Christmas. So here is the list of things that will bring a particularly wide smile to my face Christmas morning:

	Swiss Gear Backpack. Big, black, lot’s of pockets and zippers. (I liked Patrick’s bag at the cottage). Here they are at Amazon. I especially like this one. But I think you can find it cheaper elsewhere.
	I’d like a set of tools to keep in the camper. The tool set would be pretty typical of a home/apartment tool set plus some camping-specific things like duct tape, glue, paracord and the like. This one is hot.
	A charger stand for my phone. I like this one because it can also charge a spare battery.
	I’ll always need these.
	Weight Lifting Gloves, black, size large. Like these.
	A pair of work boots like these. Note: The image only shows one boot, but I will in fact need two.
	This Jeep knife is pretty cool. Jeep JP-4013 Multi-Knife
	Taillight Guard for my Jeep. Needs to fit a 2000 Jeep Wrangler Sport (TJ). Here’s one.
	Moccasin Slippers. Size 11. Target has them as well.

I’m an avid reader of Pat Flynn’s Smart Passive Income blog and refer to it regularly. One post that I keep coming back to is THE Backlinking Strategy That Works. You can spend as much as $2,000 on a back linking course and you won’t get as much information as you will in this single post. (I know this from experience.) It’s not just the original post that is valuable; the comments also contain some great discussion.

Simply put, article marketing continues to be one of the best ways to accumulate inbound links to your web pages. Even after the Panda update.

So yesterday I questioned Pat’s selection of Article Directories as I found some of them to have a low Page Rank and others were either no longer accepting articles with external links or were charging a fee. Joseph Archibald (the original author of the backlinking system) replied and confirmed my suspicions – those Article Directories were the best at the time the original post was written. But as with the fluid nature of the web, some are no longer on top.

Well, the long-and-short of it is I put together a list of Article Directories with a PR of 4 or higher and included their Alexa Rank and whether or not their links are rel=”nofollow”.

Here’s the list:
Top Article Directories By Page Rank

This list is based on the Article Directory list at Directory Critic – but the original list is woefully out of date (even though I dutifully reported many of them).

Obviously rankings will change and I’m sure there are many more Article Directories out there with a PR of 4 or higher. So, let me know in the comments if you’d like to help maintain this list.

A pretty handy guide to bring with you next time you’re out beer tasting. Plus it combines two of my favorite things, beer and infographics (not always in that order).

What awesome times we live in.

Behold…

Source: Pimsleur Approach