From Barfield Management to all of our readership, we would like to wish you a very Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Happy Kwanzaa, Merry Festivus, Happy Lunar New Year, or what ever your particular celebration is between now and January 1st. We wish you joy, happiness, love, and success. And we thank you for your continued support and participation.

I recently joined the Rich Life Club. The monthly subscription is $20 per month. I will admit that when I joined, I was skeptical about the membership returning $20 worth of value to me. Other sites have promised value and failed to deliver. I was pleasantly surprised by the Rich Life Club. The audio and video archives alone are worth the $20 per month. You will spend more than that on one audio book. Click the banner on the left and give it a try.

Customer service is a vital role to all businesses. Typically, the better your company performs excellent customer service the more revenue you earn. Our friends over at The Toilet Paper Entrepreneur have put together a list of 60 helpful customer service tips. No one expects you to learn them all in one day. So take it easy and start with the first one on the list. Practice the first one all day. Then the second on the next day, etc. Repetition and action will make these items second nature. Read the list and get started.

I recently read about the Visa Business Network and Facebook in an older issue of Entrepreneur magazine. If you have a Facebook account, you can join the Visa Business Network and get $100 worth of Facebook advertising for free. One thing you must keep in mind, they require a credit card before they issue your $100 credit. After you setup your ad, simply be sure to set your daily budget dollar amount and the number of days you want the ad to run that equals $100. At the end of the run, if it made you more than $100 in profit then continue on. Else, just disable Facebook ads. For more information, visit the site and watch the video.

I would like comments from anyone who has input on Facebook ads. Have they worked for you? Are they worth the effort? Please share your experiences.

This is a word of warning to any of you who have a blog or a website and are considering becoming an Amazon Affiliate. This may matter to some and be disregarded by others. But recent events have led me to learn that Amazon will not pay you commissions on any purchases that you make through your own affiliate links or store. You earn commissions when others make purchases that originated from one of your affiliate links or through your affiliate store. But if you make a purchase, you receive no compensation. In essence, you actually have no incentive to purchase through your own links or your own store. You would be better served by trying to negotiate an affiliate relationship directly with the stores that supply Amazon. The following is an excerpt of a communication directly from Amazon:

I apologize for any misunderstanding to our personal orders policy, but Associate members do not receive payment for referral fees on any personal orders placed. We operate a referral program rather than a discount program. Our goal is to have our members refer new customers to us, and we then pay you for this effort.

It states this in their Affiliate Agreement and is apparently overlooked by many. I personally find this as odd due to the fact that a sale is a sale. People, more often, will continue a behavior when rewarded. And this system is counter intuitive to building this type of behavior from the very people they rely on for future sales.

If you know of another Affiliate Program that covers the variety of products that Amazon does and rewards its affiliates regardless of who makes the purchase, please contact me and I will evaluate and possibly post about it as a follow up to this post. Stay tuned, if Amazon changes their tune I will notify you.