Portal Feeder – Reviewing The Pros And Cons Of Being A Member … Part 2

I recently experienced a problem in one of the sites I had generated using the Portal Feeder web site building application.

This was in fact a pretty serious problem for me, as the site is one of my best income perfomers.

In order to understand the problem and why it was a serious issue for me, let me briefly explain to you how the Portal Feeder application works:

1. You create templates for all the pages you want to have in your site (e.g. index page, article pages, product pages, directory pages, etc …)
2. You create “tokens” which you then embed in your templates (don’t worry if you don’t understand this part right now!)
3. You create “assets” containing the content you want to add to your portal sites. These can be sets of articles, product description pages, etc …
4. You specify what content should go into each of the tokens, then press the “generate portal” button. When you do this, the content in your “assets” (e.g. articles) replace the “tokens” in your templates and you end up with a content-rich website.
5. You can then add more content to your “assets” (e.g. articles), turn on an “auto-drip” and every couple of days or so, depending on your “drip” settings, a new article, or product review gets automatically added to your site. In other words, your sites are now growing nice and steadily on auto-pilot.
6. Rinse and Repeat (steps 3 – 5 only) to build new sites.

All of the “data crunching” work happens in the Portal Feeder server, then it uploads the finished web files to your web hosting account (which resides outside the Portal Feeder servers). What this means, is that if you ever decide to cancel your Portal Feeder membership, you will keep all of the websites you’ve built (they’re hosted on your own web server account), and simply lose some of the functionalities of Portal Feeder, such as having your web site continue to grow automatically through the “drip” feature.

Okay, so here’s what happened …

The site in question contains about 10 sub-topics. Each subtopic has its own separate articles and product description pages. This allows each category on my site to provide tightly-themed content to visitors (e.g. visitors to a “crafts”-related site who are only interested in “scrapbooking” can read all the articles and view products on “scrapbooking”, while visitors who are only interested in “jewelry-making” can read all the articles and product descriptions related to “jewelry-making”.)

What happened was, I created one “article” pack for one of the subtopics that contained almost 300 articles. Now, if I set the Portal Feeder application to “drip” one new article every 3 days, that’s almost 3 years worth of content being automatically added to this one category alone.

Every time Portal Feeder regenerates this particular site, it fetches content from 10 different “article” packs, 10 different “product description” packs, all the keywords associated with each articles, RSS feeds, etc …, then processes all of this information through almost 100 tokens, and inserts the resulting data into around 50 template pages before uploading everything as HTML pages to my web hosting account.

Well, for some reason, the Portal Feeder application couldn’t handle the load of processing this much information and so it stopped regenerating.

Now, if you’ve been following this post and it all sounds like mumbo-jumbo to you (like … what’s this got to do with the rising price of fuel, the war in Iraq and Lindsey Lohan’s latest shenanigans?), here is all you need to take away from what I’ve just written …

I had a problem that was out of my control to repair, it was affecting my business and my profits and I just wanted it fixed as quickly as possible. Can you relate to this situation?

Now … here’s the whole point of being part of a membership site like Portal Feeder and paying $297 a month:

As soon as I logged a ticket with support (marked “critical” which I have only done once before with my hosting provider, after all data in my dedicated managed server was mysteriously wiped out!), the technical support department was onto it in a flash! I got an email straight away from Paula, Portal Feeder’s customer support manager telling me that James from technical department was looking into it.

For the next couple of weeks, I was kept in constant communication. In fact, I even received an email stating that I had been classified as a “power user” and that they were going to upgrade and transfer all of my account data to more powerful servers, which they did as a matter of priority. My membership fee for the month was also waived.

My business is now operating smoothly again. The example I have just given above is not an isolated incident. I have logged tickets with support several times and I always get consistently great service. Ask any member of Portal Feeder, in fact, and they will tell you that Portal Feeder customer support is more than excellent … it is superb!

Portal Feeder not only over delivers in the area of customer and technical support … they also provide excellent training, tools and resources. The active forum community alone is worth the subscription money you pay each month – it’s like having dozens of expert consultants in all areas of online business development at your service.

So … these are just some of the pros of being a member of PortalFeeder.com!

Now … are there any cons?

Well, as I stated earlier, I have been a paying member of Portal Feeder for almost two years now. If I wasn’t happy with what I’m getting for my money, I would have quit a long time ago. Therefore, I am fairly biased towards seeing and saying only positive things about it.

There is a site I came across recently, however, which is owned by a fairly reputable and respected blogger in the online community, and he had some criticisms of Portal Feeder. His name is Andy Beard and he did join Portal Feeder and remained a member for about 9 months before deciding it was not really for him (before Portal Feeder completely redesigned itself and relaunched as Portal Feeder v2.0) .

In the spirit of objectivity and balance, I’m providing here a link to Andy Beard’s personal comments about Portal Feeder:

Andy Beard Blog

If you are serious about building a profitable business online, PortalFeeder is a “must-have” membership you should consider investing in … if you can get in!

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To view the Portal Feeder site, go here: PortalFeeder.com

To view the Portal Feeder blog, go here: Portal Feeder Blog

For more articles, posts and reviews on the benefits and features of being a member of Portal Feeder, click on the “Portal Feeder” category of this blog.

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