I signed up for CB Engine's 14 day free trial last night. Today I got an email saying their special $57 lifetime membership offer is expiring in a couple of days and will go back to $97. Does anyone know if this is a real offer, or is this the typical "BUY NOW" sales tactic? Will it still be $57 in a couple of weeks, couple of month? Also, is this a good investment tool for researching products? Thanks for your input.
lol Yeah, that's the first thing I did. In my reply I meant to say, "Now I'll go search, but I don't think I'll have to search too far <wink><wink>
I know you weren't asking me, but... I prefer cb-analytics too. The reason is it' fast. I can get the info I want now. If I want to see the new products for three days ago I know I can find the information most quickly at cb-analytics. Nichejunky's good too (especially for things like upcoming launches, extra affiliate material and being easy on the eye), but it is a bit slower. I have a cbengine subscription, but it annoys me, because it's really slow and a search on a product returns multiple results for one product because of the categories. Plus they only update once a week (criminal behaviour for a paid site I think). In short, if I need info fast I go to cb-analytics... If I want extra info I go to nichejunky... If I want to see what in the CB Insider I go to cbengine.
Can you expand on that a little? Would it be better if we increased the date range so the new products page showed more results from the past few days? Are there any other searches/categories that don't respond fast enough?
Sure. It loads faster, has a less cluttered interface, clearer information and is easier on the eye (subjective of course, but NJ is very flashy and brightly coloured). Just compare the homepages of cb-analytics.com and nichejunky.com. One is clearly about providing information that affiliates can quickly learn from, and the other is about promoting NCMedia products. Sure you may have some nice features in the site in various places, but for me they're too clouded by the self promotional stuff and other clutter. Compare also the product detail pages of the two sites. With cb-analytics virtually all the information I need is above the fold. With nichejunky, all I can see is a massive banner pushing Grant Secrets at me, then I have to scroll down and wade through lots of links and banners on the left and right, title, description, categories, a thumbnail and some other stuff before we finally get to the goodies - gravity and earnings per sale. Think about what information is of most value to the user when designing your pages. Put that information at the top, big and bold so they can get it quickly. Think "Google" - less is more. I don't mean to bash - you've got a good site there. I just think cb-analytics is better. Nichejunky was obviously built as a promotional tool, whereas cb-analytics was built as an informational tool. Just my 2c of course. (Couple of smaller points worth mentioning: #1 When viewing VIP publishers page, and clicking through to a product, I am taken to /resources/34, which is basically a page that says "Click this link to get to where you wanted to go". Get rid of this page = better user experience. #2 get_meta_tags on the product page is throwing an error for ROADTEST #3 How about a page where I can see all the products a particular publisher has claimed?)