Adam Jewell - Search & Affiliate Marketing

You probably know Morningstar & Morningstar.com. They have a lot of research on stocks and mutual funds aimed at helping the average investor make smart investing decisions. They have good content and some good videos to help investors learn about various funds and stocks. They’ve got print publications and an online version.

Last year I subscribed to the online version. They must have kept track of how many times I went to the site and didn’t subscribe since the subscription price dropped as time went on. I found the video series moderately useful and would check to see what they had to say about various 401K and Vanguard funds. Little did I notice when I signed up they opted me into an auto renew deal where they just bill my credit card when the current subscription expires.

Someone over there probably decided they would make more money if they set everyone to auto renew and made it impossible to do anything about it on the Morningstar.com website. They sent out an email to alert me that they were going to auto renew the subscription at a rate higher than the original subsription rate. I went to the site to try to cancel and couldn’t do it so just sent them an email response telling them NOT to renew the subscription. I figured that should be sufficient and they would cancel the subscription.

A month or so later a charge from Morningstar.com shows up on my credit card for the new increased membership fee. I didn’t want to be auto renewed in the first place, I sent them an email to request they not auto renew and told them what I though of the auto renew policy and they still renewed my subscription.

Finally, I had to call them during their business hours and wait on hold for a few minutes before finally getting to talk to somoene who offered a $79.00 anual rate to try to get me to stay on as a subscriber. I think that was about HALF the rate they originally billed me for, for the renewal. The operator was pleasant but I’m still going to get billed something for however long it took to get the membership cancelled.

If you want some decent research on stocks and mutual funds, Morningstar.com is an excellent place to go to at least get your feet wet. If you subscribe, it seems like they assume you want to be a perpetual subscriber and will just keep billing your credit card until you call them and tell them to stop. When you do that, they’ll offer you a highly discounted rate.

Bottom line, if you don’t want to have to deal with yet another company that thinks they have the right to perpetually bill your credit card when you pay them once for something then don’t subscribe to Morningstar. If you like the content and want to play their little games, then call up and tell them you want to cancel and chances ae they will drop the price of your membership by nearly 50% to less than $100.

In a sign that lobbyists in the US are not getting the respect and the favors they’ve paid for, a new report discusses how the politicians are failing our lobbyists. When you buy a politician, it seems like you should get the favors, sweetheart deals and no bid contracts that you paid for. It seems like things are amiss in Washington and the politicians are just not coming through. Should the lobyists instead just pay the voters? What do you think?

In The Know: Are Politicians Failing Our Lobbyists?

In case you haven’t seen the news, George Bush just took a tour of the damage the Bush presidency has caused over the last 8 years. No word if he intends to take any action of offer and type of assistance but the damage has been staggering. See this exculsive news story here:

Bush Tours America To Survey Damage Caused By His Disastrous Presidency

There is lots of hype in the social networking area on the Internet. Facebook is supposed to be valued at 15 Billion, MySpace got purchased for 500 Million a while back and now LinkedIn.com is supposed to be valued at a 1 billion. While all the values are probably questionable at best in this space, LinkedIn.com is actually a really useful site with meaningful interaction among members of the site facilitated by the unique Q&A section.

It was a few years ago that Bryan Eisenberg at FutureNow sent me an invite to join LinkedIn and since he’s a pretty smart guy and knows a thing or two about the Internet, I signed up for it. For the longest time, I didn’t do anything with it but then the site started to pick up some steam, people started to interact on it, the Q&A started to come alive and there was some engaging conversation taking place on the site. The profile for Adam Jewell is here and now when you search Yahoo! for Adam Jewell, they put the LinkedIn profile at the top of the page. I’m not sure if I like that or not but I guess it makes it easy to do research on people.

LinkedIn is probably a hotspot for recruiters and sales people. They’ll get your information and call you to try to sell you stuff or get you to take another job but my experience is that it has always been pretty mellow. You don’t get hounded and if you are not interested, they’ll probably stop calling you after a while. With LinkedIn, it makes one wonder how much you really need to deal with recruiters. Sure, some companies only take applicants from recruiters but others will go direct and LinkedIn makes it pretty easy to find people and look at their qualifications and what types of things they are interested in.

In any case, if you are going to participate in the social networking craze and put up some profiles here and there, there are two sites that I’ve found to provide some value so far. LinkedIn.com for professional networking and Meetup.com for real, live social networking.

Social networking is all the rage but for the most part it seems like a bunch of hype. My Space seems like yesterdays news, Facebook and privacy don’t belong in the same sentence and I haven’t found any compelling use for it. If you are going to dump all your personal information in a database somewhere it seems like you should get something for it. Of all the “social networking” sites out there, there seem to be two that are truely useful.

LinkedIn.com provides a great place for social business networking with their Q&A section and an intuitive easy to use interface. If you are looking for a job or business opportunities it’s a great place to be.

Meetup.com is more like a live social networking site. You know, not just somewhere where you dump a person information but where you find like minded people and actually go do things with them instead of just poking them or finding out what they are buying you for Christmas. Meetup puts the social in social networking.

How does Meetup.com work? Well, just like other social networking sites you sign up and create a profile. You don’t have to put in a ton of information but can put in as much as you want. Once you’ve signed up, you join groups. There are groups for just about anything you can imagine. Want to find a local windsurfing group? No sweat, there is one nearby in Wayne, PA. Hollywood Pete puts that one together. It doesn’t cost anything to join Meetup.com and get involved in one or more groups but it there may be an expense to actually go to the activities offered by the different groups.

Meetup makes money by charging people to create and maintian groups on the site. Prices range from $12.00 per month to $19.00 per month depending on how long you pay for the group. The $12.00 rate is for six months in advance, the $19.00 rate is if you pay by the month. Either way it is a social networking site with a business model that gets revenue from its subscibers. What a novel idea! There is some advertising on the site that may generate revenue but I’d bet most of the money they geneate comes from subsciption fees.

In addition to being a useful, social, social networking site, it can be a great place to start a business. When you create a meetup group, you set the price that people pay to attend events. It could be a dollar or two to cover the cost of the meetup group, it could be $1000.00 if you are putting together a group trip to go skiing in Colorado for a week.

So far, I’ve been to the windsurfing meetup and the local Plymouth Meeting Entrepreneurs meetup. Coming up soon are some other more adventurous events including a Zip Line canopy tour at Spring Mountain put together by TerraMar adventures, and a whitewater rafting trip up in the poconos also by Terramar. There are local Philadelphia salsa dance groups and there was a Segway football event last week. Whatever you want, you’ll find it on there!

So if you want to join or invest in (if they should go public) a social networking site that is actually useful and has a real revenue model, hop on over to Meetup.com, have a good time, start a business or make get some decent returns if they decide to go public!