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There was a scare recently in a field I work in – whether a hoax or not, a hacker claimed to have all the usernames/passwords from a particular site.

That’s not an unfamiliar story – some sites are sloppy and almost deserve to be hacked (not that I wish harm on their members but those owners must always do their very best to be secure – sloppy definitely isn’t good enough); some sites are maybe unlucky and become the unfortunate victims of some 3rd party vulnerability.

The also not unfamiliar story was the panic of people saying, “shit, I use that password for my online banking, I need to go change it”

Ok, I dramatised that. But it’s 100% true that a lot of people panicked because they had the same password they used for the hacked site in many other places. Paypal accounts, clickbank accounts, twitter, facebook, their blog.

I can’t think of the term right now, I’m too old and un-hip (though I do know about planking and flashmobbing (some PG content in that one)) but it’s where someone leaves their facebook or twitter account logged in and a friend, family member or work colleague posts masquerading as them. Several of my friends have changed sexual orientation and they were the last to know!

If you have different passwords everywhere then you have damage limitation – if they hack one account, there’s no reason to be worried about your other accounts (unless you stored all your passwords in a notepad file somewhere someone got access to!)

This is an affiliate link – use it or go direct but do get this product – roboform or something similar. Depending on your circumstances there are different versions (free and paid). My version is on a dongle that I can take anywhere and also includes online backup should I lose my passwords. It easily generates random secure passwords like xLr4!R7C^KdW – you couldn’t remember that if I typed it front of you, much less guess it. But with roboform the other advantage is that you don’t type your password in – keeping you safe even if you had an undetected keyboard logger trojan on your computer.

If you don’t get roboform, at the very least use a system for creating passwords on each site. if your facebook password was kokatie99ob no one is likely to spot that your password is easy to remember for every site yet fairly unguessable and fairly unlikely someone would spot the pattern and be able to hack your other accounts – though they might (that one uses katie99 always but uses the last 4 characters of the site name in reverse order, 2 in front, 2 behind).

To be honest the latter suggestion is much better than the same easy password everywhere but nowhere near as good as having true random passwords.

If someone hacks one account, they do limited damage. If they hack one of your social accounts they could not only embarass you, they could trick your friends into all kinds of things – how would you ever recover from that!

And if they hack your paypal or other important accounts…

People online are too casual, too careless, too trusting or too unlucky – whatever the excuse, thousands of accounts get hacked every day. Chances are it will happen to all of us at some point, even the most careful. All the random passwords in the world won’t mean a thing if someone hacks into a site you use through a vulnerability – make sure the only damage you suffer is the loss of that account!

In the days before the internet and even before network marketing and franchises became popular ways for people to start their own business, being an entrepeneur meant something. You couldn’t really be a tire kicker. You either started and ran a business or you didn’t.

Franchises didn’t really change that – the kind of person that invests many thousand of dollars in a business is pretty serious. They may fail but the percentage of tire kickers is very low.

Network marketing made it easy for anyone to have their own ‘from home’ business – low start up cost (but still a few hundred dollars typically), no premises or staff needed. All you needed to do was work the business – get out promoting it.

And that’s when you see tire-kickers (the 1.0 type) first appear.

Despite having a ready made business with step by step instructions for success that, if they follow, will just lead to an ever increasing income – they do nothing. Or they do something but not what the plan says. And they moan – boy do they moan, about how the business doesn’t work.

It’s reckoned the moderate success rate amongst network marketing ‘entrepeneurs’ is around 2-10% – with nearer 2% being the norm for most businesses.

Bear in mind that these entrepeneurs had to make some investment and get off their butts to even get started.

Now the internet comes along and online ‘bizops’

Now there’s almost no barrier to becoming an entrepeneur. The number of genuine, hard-working entrepeneurs hasn’t decreased, in fact there’s many, many more.

But the number of tire-kickers has increased dramatically. Not just tire-kickers but people that don’t have, or won’t follow, a plan. The new breed of people that want results instantly whilst not needing to do anything or invest anything.

These are the tire-kickers 2.0.

They don’t think long-term; they can be ’100% committed’ to a program that promised them $10k a month within 90 days and they’ll switch to one that offers it in 60 days. Or one that offers it with even less recruiting. Or no recruiting.

Jon Olson recently blogged on HitExchangeNews about promoting ‘evergreen’ products.

I wouldn’t have chosen the term evergreen personally but he’s bang on the money (to me the term evergreen is already strongly associated with content that is always relevant rather than tools, but I’m splitting hairs)

A standard business model for ever has been the service / support industry. Don’t go digging for gold, sell shovels. Goldmines / gold-diggers will come and go like the phases of the moon but they’ll always need shovels.

That well-used cliche implies a selling type business. So if you have a shovel store next to a goldmine and the turnover of gold diggers is high, today it might be Joe you sell to but next week when Joe’s shovel breaks, he’s in another town at another goldmine and buys his shovel from another store. Not so bad for you – there’s always new diggers coming through.

But what if Joe was obliged to buy his shovels from you because you sold him the first one. It wouldn’t matter then where he went to dig, you’d get all his shovel business.

Pretty hard to make that analogy sound plausible in the context of gold-digging.

But online, in the service/tools sector it’s the norm!

You ‘sell’ someone an autoresponder and that has a monthly fee on which you get commission. Doesn’t matter how fickle they are jumping from bizop to bizop, so long as they keep their autoresponder, they’re rebuying that every month from you and you alone.

And here’s something that makes services like this even more attractive to promote:

Many of them ‘tie in’ the customer!

Now I know that doesn’t sound very customer-centric but provided the product you promote is sound, it doesn’t hurt that there’s a built in retention mechanism

Someone who builds a list in autoresponder X won’t switch to Y very readily.

Someone that has lots of tracking links of service A will know it’s a lot of work to change to B because they have links invested all over the place.

Just like someone that has thousands of business cards printed will be reluctant to change their phone number.

So doesn’t this sound like a really simple business? You join a service program as an affiliate and you promote it. Ideally you upgrade from the outset but if money’s tight you do everything for free till you’re getting enough commissions to cover your own upgrade. And then you just keep regularly getting new referrals so your commissions go up every month.

That is the the underlying principle of a solid business plan with an income that takes time to build.

Not sexy maybe but much sexier than believing you’re going to be rich in 90 days and then ‘shockingly’ not being!

There are many ways to make it work a lot better than the simple outline I described but that’s another post.

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Today I was pondering if there was code that I could paste on to a web page in order to allow someone to add themselves to one of my circles.

And it occurred to me how simple it would be for big G to launch at least a basic autoresponder service based on this concept!

I can’t wait! It’s so obvious, it’s bound to happen.

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It’s amazing how a different viewpoint can be enough to give you that ‘aha moment’.

I just read Seth Godin’s latest post ‘Naive or Professional’ and realised something profound. Or it least it seemed profound because it felt like something hit me smack between the eyes when I read his last sentence:

“Before you can sell a service, a product or an insight to the naive, you need to sell them on being professional.”

Wow!

It’s always amazed me how difficult I find it to ‘sell’ VitalViralPro to people. It’s a tracking service that can track 3rd party pages – no other service can do that (not reliably anyway) so why is it such a hard sell?

I tell people they should be tracking but still they don’t. The industry as a whole tells people they should be list building – yet still they don’t. And we wonder why our words fall on deaf ears…

Seth really made me realise why!

After the pain of the smack between the eyes subsided I realised that actually this had crossed my mind before but not in such a succinct way. Thank you Seth for that sentence because that insight is just what I needed.

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I dutifully upgraded to WP3.2 a few days ago (and then to 3.2.1 when I came to write this!) and my main admin menu disappeared!!

I guessed it was a plugin problem…but…how do I deactivate it if I can’t see my main menu?

After some googling I discovered the (now obvious) script I need – plugins.php – just manually delete the end of your url and type plugins.php and you can disable plugins till you find the culprit.

I’m not going to name the specific plugin – probably not fair, I just hope they fix it soon. But for now I have to disable it, write a post and remember to re-enable it. What a PITA!

There’s a lesson here for program creators that turn features on by default…yes Mozilla, I’m referring to you!!

Yesterday Firefox could have been responsible for a serious disaster on one of my sites. Anyone that uses PhpMyAdmin in Firefox should take heed.

I have (had) a table of over 5 million records representing nearly 2 years of data. The data represents daily use of VitalViralPro and I wanted to consolidate it into monthly data for an upcoming new feature.

I had tried different algorithms for doing the consolidation and being cautious, none of the algorithms was ever deleting the source data, just flagging it as processed so I could delete it later. That way I could unflag the data and try a different strategy (because some strategies we’re just going to take too long to process the data – it’s moderately complex).

After trying a few different strategies I thought I knew why my previous attempts were so slow and decided I needed to delete the data as I processed it, not just flag it.

Lucky for me I didn’t take shortcuts; I made a copy of the table with 5 million+ records and changed my algorithm to use that table for testing. The algorithm worked much better; it was still going to take several hours to create the new processed table.

Like anyone, when I’m working on the database I’ll typically have anything from 3-10 tabs open, all with different views or queries in so that I don’t have to keep retyping them. One of these was the one that empties the table being created before I try a new algorithm.

So, being sure this algorithm was the one (but still working on the backup source table), I emptied my destination table and started the script running. Knowing it would take a few hours, I closed firefox down and went and did something different for a while.

I came back a few hours later to check on it. I clicked on my Firefox shortcut and all my previous tabs came back – I remember thinking cool, that’ll save me some seconds. Until I looked at my data!!

My source table had less than a million records left (remember this strategy was deleting the already processed source data) but my destination table only had 100 or so records in (it should have had around 150,000).

Had I been working on the live data, this would have been a true disaster but I was calm and I almost instantly realised what had happened.

One of the tabs that Firefox thoughtfully restored was the one I used to empty my target table and so that MySQL query got executed again when I opened Firefox – doh!!

The annoying thing about this is that I didn’t set the option that makes Firefox restore my last tabs when I open it – the recent FF 5 upgrade seems to have done that (at least I’m 97+% sure I didn’t do it myself). Like many, I’ve appreciated the feature when it does it after a crash or a forced restart but I use Workspaces – and I just have a blank page as my start up page.

In the end the only disaster was that I wasted a few hours because I had to start again. Had this happened on the live data and I had to go to the site backup, I would not have been fun to be around!!

Note this might affect other browsers that are presumptious enough to set your defaults for you.

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If you’re a Gmail user or someone considering using it, you might find this article I wrote useful.

It describes how I use Gmail in a way that works for me – some of the ideas may help you if you don’t already use them.

And if you have anything to add or a different way that works for you, please add comments here.

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It’s amazing how many people won’t look twice at an honest email that says you have to look at this as a 3 year plan of consistent activity. Yet show them a glitzy sales pages that says they can be earning thousands of dollars hands free in next to no time and they’re in!

And all this against a background that unless they do something different to what they’ve been doing for the last x years, they’re going to still be in that 9-5 till retirement age – whatever that age is by the time they reach it.

There are three ingredients (at least) to becoming financially independent:

• time
• money
• effort

All three can be traded against each other depending on your circumstances but if you put enough of those 3 ingredients, in whatever proportion suits you, you stand a chance of being successful.

Notice I only said a chance.

You also need the right plan. I’ve done it myself and I’ve seen it hundreds of times already in my time as an ‘entrepeneur’ – both online and off: someone puts all their eggs in one basket, invests various amounts of those 3 ingredients, only for the opportunity to fizzle out or go bust or just disappear. And what are most people left with? Maybe some experience and a new lesson learned (or not).

If someone says you need to get in quick, they’re lying or it’s a crap opportunity. Investigate the business by all means but run a mile from that ‘sponsor’. To be fair, they’re probably just telling you what their sponsor told them.

Here’s a tongue in cheek hierarchy of businesses for making you wealthy:

• Create the next facebook
• Run a paid membership site
• Have your own mailing list
• Promote a solid MLM business
• Create a website selling things
• Promote someone elses single level business
• Promote any old crap
• Chat on social networks all day but never use the relationships you build

Note in the top 3, you own the main asset, not someone else! The business may not last for ever but at least it’s you, not someone else that determines your fate. Don’t fall for the security blanket trap of feeling safer promoting someone else’s business because “they must know what they’re doing better than I would”

If you’re devoting all your effort to promoting even the best online business, how sure are you that they will be around till at least when you retire? Or even if they’re around, that most of your downline won’t go chasing after the next new thing in a years time?

Promoting someone elses business may be many peoples rite of passage in internet marketing – it’s often a necessary part of the learning curve on the way to being financially independent. But don’t get complacent – get into a rhythm, a daily routine, automate as much as you can and then use your income and freed up time to start considering and executing your next plan.

Because while your only asset is an income from someone else’s business, you’re can never hand on heart say you’re financially free.

For example, if you’ve joined an online MLM business (I love MLM businesses but you have to know the ones to pick) then chances are you’ll start out by sending traffic to them directly. And if you do enough of that, your downline will grow, your income will grow. But there’s no security. If they disappear tomorrow, you have nothing to show for your investment (unless you were banking 25% of your income in case of that eventuality).

Knowing that your income is in the hands of the Gods should scare you into rectifying that as early as possible. Start TODAY – it’s never too soon.

If you’re new then it’s fine to get started by earning or paying for traffic and sending it to your chosen business. Get into a daily routine doing that until it’s semi-automatic. Now use the time to learn about list building.

Now, instead of directing traffic to your business, you direct it to you first – on to YOUR LIST. You can promote the business to the members of your list and keep a good relationship with the people on your list.

And if the unthinkable (inevitable?) happens, you still have one very valuable asset that will mean you can hit the ground running.

And because you can get leverage from a list, it becomes viable, practical and desirable to build more than one online business.

In my next post I’m going to talk about what makes a very very solid way to grow an online business

And no, I’m not pitching any particular program – I’m pitching a principle.

Here’s to success for all

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I’ve spent a lot of time recently (in bursts) trying to move away from using a desktop mail client (Outlook) to Gmail. I love Outlook and I have years of emails in there but the advantages of having my mail online, accessible from anywhere is too great to resist now.

So bit by bit, I was changing newsletter and program emails over to gmail. However, I kept most of my mailers pointed to Outlook. At first glance, that seems surprising because of the volume. But I was able to whizz through credit emails much faster from Outlook than doing it in Gmail (click on a mail, find the link, click, click back to inbox).

sidenote: Jackie O’Connor-Hagood pointed me in the direction of a Google Labs add-in that gets rid of this problem – Google Auto-advance.

Before Jackie told me about that add-in, I joined ViralInbox – it seemed the ideal solution. It has so many great features and I really love the program.

What scuppers it is that so many mailers don’t have separate contact and list addresses grrrrr. Perhaps they think it’s clever and people will have to look through the credit mails to make sure they don’t miss a system/notification/owner mail. But it frustrates me big time.

I want to use ViralInbox for my list address for mailers – I don’t really want all those mails coming into my gmail account, with all the filters I have to set up. But a stronger motivation is that I want commission/referral notifications and important messages to go to gmail because I would only have ViralInbox open when I was wanting to earn credits. Gmail is open all the time of course.

So that’s part 1 of the rant – mailer owners, you are hampering my flexibility.

Part 2 is that many programs won’t accept an email of the format name+topic@gmail.com. I know not everyone is familiar with this format but it’s incredibly useful. I could have name+personal@gmail.com and name+business@gmail.com and then it’s much easier to set up the filters in Gmail.

But mailer after mailer won’t let me use that format of address. If I have to send all mail to my main name@gmail.com, the filtering is that much messier.

But I persevered. The mailers with separate contact and list addresses were easy of course (especially if they allowed name+contact@gmail.com) – I set the contact address to gmail and the list address to my ViralInbox address.

The mailers with only a single email address I had to direct to gmail and then set up forwarding filters to send (forward) just the credit mails to ViralInbox – so far so good.

That’s when I had a mini private rant at Google because only after I’d invested considerable time in setting all this up, did I spot a note on a Google help page that informed me I could have as many forwarding addresses as I wanted but I could only have 20 forwarding filters.

So, Mailer owners – I don’t think having a single address helps you and it certainly doesn’t help us – we’re very likely to miss any important message and even your marketing emails. And please get with the times and accept name+topic@gmail.com addresses.

And Gmail – why this seemingly pointless limitation?

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Introduction

Whatever your marketing funnel, you don’t want it to have leaks. If you pour a litre of oil into a funnel while topping up your engine, you want to know that a litre of oil makes it into the engine, not half a litre.

Judging by many funnels I see, people are content to get just 1 drop in the engine from a litre bottle!!

In this post I’m going to show you a couple of free or low cost tools that you can use to plug leaks in a couple of typical scenarios.

Leaks

Every time you do something that directs a visitor to a page, you need to be thinking about leaks. If I send traffic to an affiliate page, most of that traffic will leak. In fact if I send 1000 visitors and 10 buy from the page, that’s pretty good – isn’t it? Well it’s not bad, but what about the 990 that leaked never to be seen again?

The only surefire way to have zero leaks is to only promote affiliate products from your list. That way if they go take a look, they may not buy but they’re still on your list so you can try something else in the future.

However, you’re going to be doing lots of other activities than just promoting products to your list – this is where you want to plug as many leaks as you can.

So how can you do that?

Well the first thing is that it very much depends on context so the pointers I give here should be taken away and adapted to your own funnels or pipelines.Much of this isn’t rocket science and much of what I’ll be saying is just pointing out something that may not be obvious to you right now (because you just haven’t though about it). But once it’s pointed out, you’ll slap your forehead, say doh! and never make the same mistake again.

Some Background

Just think of the number of different strategies for sending someone to a sales page to try to make a commission:

• You can email your list and ask them to visit the page
• You can send paid traffic directly to the page
• You can send traffic to a pre-sales page and from there on to the page
• You can send them via a forced opt-in
• You can send them via an optional opt-in
• You can have a passive optin on the page*
• You can create an SEO page that directs them to the sales page

And many more possibilities.

If you’re sending visitors that are not on your list then there’s the potential, no the certainty, that you’re going to lose most of those visitors. So let’s look first at two attempts to plug some leaks – the forced opt-in.

Forced Opt-In

Of course there’s no such thing – you don’t have a gun to their head. But a forced opt-in means the vistor either signs up to your list (and then gets to see the intended page) or they don’t see the intended page at all.

At one time, this was all the rage. But you’ll find now that it’s becoming increasingly unpopular with visitors. Visitors are on enough lists, they don’t want to opt-in or have to register just to see a sales page. After all, from their perspective if they don’t buy, they’ve just added themselves to another list for nothing.

However, done right it still works and can be done without annoying your visitors. For example, in the link or advert they click, explain why they should opt-in. A good example would be an advert that says ‘join my newsletter for a $20 discount on the RRP”. Now the visitor won’t get so annoyed.

It’s also reasonable and expected that someone should exchange their name and email in return for a free report. So forced opt-in has it’s place, just don’t use it unless you’re offering something in return. Don’t use it just to restrict access to the sales page.

Optional Opt-In

This is more visitor-friendly. Just ask them if they wouldn’t mind opting on to your list. Of course, the more you offer in return, the more likely they are to comply.

Optional opt-ins could be a gateway page (a page you send them to before the main sales page) that has an opt-in form and a ‘no thanks, take me to the sales page’ link.

It can also be an opt-in form on the sales page itself. This is a passive opt-in. They are totally at liberty to opt-in or not. To get good opt-in rates depends on having an opt-in form that catches their attention and a compelling reason to do something that is optional. Free gifts are the norm, be it newsletters, reports, ebooks, discounts etc.

The point is that you want to capture people that don’t buy before they’re gone forever.

Exit pop ups

Another popular optional opt-in method is to have an exit pop-up. This is a special form that appears if they attempt to leave the sales page. Sometimes these pop ups require a mouse click to dismiss them, sometimes not. Sometimes there is a fake live agent that might offer a discount. These work on newbies but not on anyone that’s been online two days or more.

Done the wrong way, these are becoming quite unpopular with visitors. If they click away from the page, they don’t always want to see another offer and it can simply antagonise them. However, if the offer is genuine and worthwhile and, most importantly, closely related to the original advert (or link and description) that got them to the sales page in the first place, this works moderately well; “ok, you don’t want to buy this gizmo, how about you grab my free ebook on how to care for your gizmo – just give me your details and I’ll send it to you.”

Hedging Your Bets

Another way to capture more of your visitors is to have a related offer on the page. This can be done in a wide variety of ways. The idea is that if one product doesn’t appeal, the other might.

However, this can be counter-productive; it really depends on a lot of factors.

Peel away ads are a very good example of this. They are so eye-catching that they can get a good response rate. The theory is that if someone is interested in the sales page, they’ll ignore the peel away ad. But if they aren’t interested, they might just peek at the peel away ad before they leave for ever. And the peel away adcould be an opt-in or lead to an opt-in.

Doing It Right

There isn’t really one right way, though a few ways would certainly be considered definitely wrong. As mentioned, don’t force them to opt-in to see a sales page without giving something in return – you opt-ins will be negligible and so will your sales.

Done right then hypothetically your sales page should do no worse than it would have done originally but of the 990 visitors that previously would have just disappeared into the ether, you’ll get another 20 opt-ins to your list.

The Tools To Achieve It

Firstly, you do need an autoresponder to plug leaks. I recommend Aweber or TrafficWave.

Secondly you need to implement your chosen method of leak-plugging, i.e. opt-in strategy.

If you own the sales page then you could consider designing an opt-in form into the page. Just grab the form code from your autoresponder and design it in.

However, there are a couple of specific scenarios I’d like to show you because they’re very powerful…

A WordPress Blog

Do a search for “wordpress optin plugin” or “wordpress autoresponder plugin” and you’ll find many possibilities, many of them free. I haven’t reviewed extensively because I already have two that I found that work well for me. Neither are free but considering the potential value of plugging your leaks, they’re very worthwhile. However, once you grasp the principle then you may be able to find free alternatives.

The first one is Digi List Builder. I really like this and it’s really easy to add to any WordPress blog.

You can actually see this in action on this blog – the opt-in form at the bottom is one aspect but there’s more. You may also have by now seen a timed pop-up. This is part of the same plugin.

The second works differently in that if someone moves their mouse out of the area of the page (like to hit back or click on a toolbar bookmark), a visitor friendly opt-in appears. I say visitor friendly because they’re not forced to click anything to carry on. You may also see this one in action if you try to move away from the page.

It’s called wpLapDance but please don’t be put off or offended by the name – it is a seriously good product. At the moment I run both because they plug leaks in complementary ways and if I had to recommend just one or the other I’d find it a tough call right now.

Pages You Don’t Own

This is something that gets me really excited because it is so easy to implement.

Suppose you really want to tweet an affiliate link. You do know you shouldn’t do that, right? It’s rarely very effective. Well the following technique can be used to plug a leak on an affiliate sales page but works best if you create your own gateway page, like a review page.

The two tools I recommend can both do what’s needed (and a whole lot more besides).

Take a look at this link to an article I wrote on the IMfaceplate site. Now ordinarily I would send a visitor to the article with an IM Faceplate URL – in fact it’s this link here. But what would they do if they like my article? If I’m lucky they’ll browse around IMFP and maybe join under me or find my twitter follow link.

But by using the first link where I use my BZ9 tools to create the opt-in bar at the bottom I’ve given the visitor an easy and clear way to sign up to my list if they like the article.

Another similar set of tools I highly recommend is Widget Quik

Both of these tools can do so much more than just this. My preferred tool right now is BZ9, particularly for  the opt-in form at the bottom of a page. But you can use either of these tools to create exit pages that can capture the visitors details and a host of other things. I’ll be creating an article in the future on each of these tools. Both tools have great demo pages so you can see what they’re capable of.

Conclusion

Most people have a leak the size of a dinner plate in their marketing funnels. Use the tools on this page to significantly plug those leaks and stop throwing so much traffic down the drain.