Solving Technical Problems – Tech Support Angels

Solving technical problems seems to be a bit of a trend for me recently. It began last week with a Google Hangout I take part in with some other SFM guys. We were discussing “Do you need to be technical to run an online business” and were ironically beset with technical problems. That actually worked well as I wrote in a previous blog but today’s problem might not end so happily…

The email management system I use – Aweber – have decided to make a change to the way their system integrates with their customers systems. The effects of that decision have been pretty huge for most. It could in fact mean that massive numbers of links created before Aweber decided to do this will no longer work.

For me this might involve manually checking and changing hundreds of links on my blog, my website, my Youtube videos – anywhere I have created links. For bigger businesses this will mean thousands or hundreds of thousands of links could be affected.

Solving Technical Problems Before They Cost Money

I know that SFM are trying to work out a patch of some kind with Aweber, which might avoid this and am sure that a great many companies will be doing the same. I have everything crossed that they can sort this out before I have to undertake this massive task. The only upside for me is that I didn’t have any expensive advertising running at the point when I found this out. Many people and businesses won’t have been so lucky. I also have a great resource for solving technical problems – the SFM tech support team.

Aweber and systems like them are invaluable to Internet marketers as they are core to building and keeping in touch with lists of subscribers. The SFM system allows affiliates to create custom links using a variety of landing pages. These links integrate (or did) with a series of emails and videos that are set up in Aweber to go out automatically over 8 days to anyone who subscribes via a custom link placed in an advert, blog post, video or banner.

Blog posts, articles and videos sit out there indefinitely so any broken links they contain make them kind of useless. The same goes for ads and banners but they at least can be stopped or amended – a headache for sure but financially worthwhile.

Help With Solving Technical Problems

It’s simple enough to set up a new Aweber list to ensure that new links are working as they should. Leads and sales however, sometimes come from a blog or video posted months ago so it’s worth the slog of going through all of these and changing the links to ones that will work. Sometimes solving technical problems – or at least recovering from them is just a matter of patching up the damage.

Suffice to say all this has caused something of a shit storm for online business owners, technical support departments and customers alike. I have no idea what reason Aweber had for making changes to a vastly complicated system that have had such an adverse affect. I just hope they can either reverse or revise the move.

I have to say a huge thanks to the person who clicked on one of my Facebook ads and took the time to let me know the link to Aweber was not working. I wouldn’t have known otherwise as the company themselves didn’t bother to alert me. Given the amount of tedious work that lies ahead I might rather not have known !

Anyway these things happen unfortunately and it’s the job of entrepreneurs to find ways to get past them – solving technical problems or otherwise.  It’s summer – everyone will be on holiday so I might as well put the peace and quiet to good use !

Addendum:

Since writing this post yesterday the SFM technical team and Aweber have largely solved the problems I described. Following some correspondence with both It looks like a fairly small proportion of my links will need deleting and replacing. So its a very big thanks (again) to the incredible tech team at SFM (you know who you are !) in particular for getting on the case, keeping me in the loop and saving me from a load of tedious, time consuming work. I’ve come to expect this level of support from SFM when solving technical problems which why I have no hesitation in recommending them to anyone interested in getting involved. To investigate further the link below (which works!) will let you sign up for the SFM complimentary video series.