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I saw a site promoting video products today and it had this ‘fact’:

The Industry is predicted to grow ten-fold in the next 5 years. By 2013, video will account for 2/3 of all global Internet traffic including mobile phones.

So I wonder where this prediction came from?

And even if it’s true, it doesn’t say, “2/3 of all internet marketing traffic will be video”. Yet that’s their premise in suggesting I buy their product.

As far as Internet Marketing (IM) goes, there’s been a massive increase in the number of video-only sales pages. Even video-only opt-in pages – I can’t know what I’m opting in for without watching the video. Well screw you, I’m not wasting 2/3 of my life watching videos when a few bullet points would tell me what I want to know and pique my interest enough to opt-in (or not).

You’d like to think these people have split-tested a video-only version against other pages – text only, text and video. I would bet my business they haven’t.

Video-only is a lazy way to do sales pages; yes, video is great for the psychological triggers that are harder to do in text. But I buy mostly on facts, not emotion. And yes, I know according to many, most people buy on emotive triggers, not ‘boring’ details – like facts. Well why not provide both, you lazy SOBs?

This is what I think happened:

Someone added video to a sales page and got good results. Then someone started selling the idea that video increased sales or opt-ins.

Next thing, someone’s doing opt-in and sales pages where virtually the only content is the video (e.g. most clickbank products now).

And crucially, many many other people thought “this is the trend, this is what I should be doing”. And it came to pass that video-only pages proliferated, no-one bothered to split test and sales depended on an emotionally laden, factually lacking video.

OK, I’m extrapolating a lot from my own feelings, my own loathing of video-only pages; I hate being forced to watch a video with a signal to fluff ratio of 5%. I didn’t set out to make this a promotional post at all but if it wasn’t for my trusy enounce video speed control (http://www.enounce.com/), I’d have gone mad by now. At least I can squander only 10 minutes of my life at a time rather than 20.

Am I the only one? What do you think? I’d love your comments…

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Here’s the solution, courtesy of howtogeek.com

It’s a very simple registry edit but if you’re not confident editing the registry then don’t attempt it.

1. Back up the Registry by creating a restore point.
2. Go to Start > Run (or Windows-key + R), type in regedit and hit OK.
3. Navigate to the key HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Cla sses\Local Settings\Software\Microsoft\Wi ndows\CurrentVersion \TrayNotify.
4. Delete the values IconStreams and PastIconsStream.
5. Open up the Task Manager (Ctrl + Shift + Esc), go to the Processes tab, select explorer.exe and click End Process.
6. Open the Applications tab and click New Task at the bottom-right of the window.
7. In the message box that pops up type in explorer.exe and hit OK.
8. Explorer.exe will reload, and the missing icons should now be back in the system-tray where they belong.
9. Then if the volume bar isnt there, go to taskbar properties (where the volume was gray) and simply tick the box.

My Itunes stopped being able to connect to the apple store some time ago, probably after an update. And while I don’t use Safari often (just for site compatibility testing), it wouldn’t connect to the internet either.

The solution:

I advise you to save any work and close all programs first – when I did this my memory went to 100% and the PC was unresponsive and I had to forcefully reset it – it didn’t cause any problem though.

Open a dos command box in administrator mode:

If your cmd box is in your start menu, you can right click and choose “run as administrator…”

you can also type cmd in the run box and press ctrl-shift-enter rather than just enter.

Now simply type:

netsh winsock reset

Followed by return of course. You’ll be told you have to reboot.

After rebooting, it will all be working!

Warning: this might seem a bit geeky and too technical for some but it’s actually really simple. And unless you’re someone like me that likes to go days without having to reboot, it probably isn’t relevant to you.

If you run Vista and tend to leave your PC on (I do because I hate waiting 10 minutes for it to start up) then you’ve undoubtedly experienced that feeling that gremlins are pouring treacle into your PC’s CPU!

I’m going to show you as simply and as concisely as I can what I do to extend my needed reboot time to days rather than being a daily occurrence.

I’ll also make the disclaimer that I have Vista Home Premium SP 2, 6GB ram and a dual 6600 2.4GHz core Intel CPU – so your experience may differ but hopefully you can benefit like I do.

My earliest files suggest I installed Vista in Nov 2006 – that surprised me! No reinstall since then. Being a programmer, I have a gazillion licenced programs I depend on and I’m hoping I won’t need to until I go to Windows 7 or 8 and do a clean install.

So it’s fair to say it’s accumulated junk, my registry has errors etc etc etc but it is totally reliable so as it’s my bread and butter, I don’t mess with it too much.

So here’s my regime, starting with power on…

I wait for the login screen and I usually wait longer until the intense disk activity has stopped – I like to give windows time to warm up and settle down before I log in. I log in and again, wait patiently (well, I go off and do something else) and eventually, everything that’s going to load has loaded and the disk has stopped thrashing again.

CPU Meter

Now here’s how I check my memory: I use the sidebar widget that comes with Vista (if not, you’ll find it) but you could use any tool that will tell you your ‘used’ memory. This is only for reference so I know the figure includes pre-fetch programs that Windows has cached etc etc but that’s not the point. The point is I know after a fresh power on, patiently waiting for everything to load my CPU meter will tell me I have about 36% memory used (the graphic was not a snapshot of my machine). You can also use windows task manager and note the physical memory figure from the bottom status bar.

I have 3 screens so I usually have this icon visible all the time.

Like I say, all you want is the benchmark figure directly after your system has booted and settled down and mentally make a note of it.

Skype starts automatically for me because I need it constantly as I work as part of an international team and that’s our interactive means of communication. Then I start my other indispensible tool, roboform (my secure password manager, the 2 Go version on a memory stick so I can use a laptop when I need to).

Then my day starts: I fire up my programming environment tools first because they will tend to be open constantly. I’m old school and I still think of each newly started program sitting on top of the last started program, so I want to fire up the ones I leave open first.

And finally, I open FireFox. I have a useful plugin installed called Memory Restart that shows in the bottom right hand side of the status bar, how much memory FF is using. But it’s more than that – if that memory figure goes much above 600Mb (it climbs the longer FF is open, even if I’m not opening more tabs) then I can just click on the memory figure and it will give me the option to restart firefox – but it restarts it with all my tabs and windows restored and usually still logged in – only the memory is now much lower – like < 50Mb (though that quickly climbs as I start working again). But the benefit is FF is snappy and responsive again.

So that’s one part of the strategy.

Other programs I tend to open as I need them and then close them again – things life office programs, word, excel and Photoshop. And as the day goes on, while I’ve been opening and closing programs, opening and closing tabs in Firefox, my trusty CPU Meter will be climbing.

If it gets above 85%, I know I may have left it too long so I have a personal trigger level of about 75%. If I’ve closed all the programs I don’t use all the time and the memory is around 75% or higher then I do my ‘purge’ regime – it’s far quicker than a reboot and will get my system back to a much more responsive state…

The Purge!

I close every running program (I don’t bother closing roboform and I’m not talking programs in the system tray) – just the programs I fired up manually when I started so firefox, the programming tools and (importantly) skype.

My CPU Meter will often now show something like 45% and I want ideally to have it back to my 36% or close as.

I open Task Manager (Alt-ctrl-del to get the windows options screen) and the applications tab should be empty. Switch to the processes tab.

This may not be relevant to you but I use Firefox and sometimes, even after waiting for firefox to do its cleaning up, frefox is still running. That’s not good so right click and end process tree (end process works too with FF but end process tree might be needed with some programs).

I sort the programs by Image name by the way to make it easier to find programs.

Beware that you shouldn’t close any program that you don’t recognise that seem to be taking a lot of memory – mostly they’ll be system processes that you shouldn’t touch.

I use one program that I won’t name but it makes database connections and when closed, I get any number of instances of the same .exe running so I close them down – that’s pretty specific to me so you’re not likely to find that problem.

I’m maybe at 43% CPU – certainly above the 36% I started with. May not sound a lot but the difference between 43 and my trigger of 75 is significantly less than 36 – 75. And while it may sound a very anal thing to do, the closer I get to 36%, the longer it will be before I have to give in, beaten and do a full reboot.

And I have a culprit – sidebar.exe. This program for some reason likes to just accumulate more and more memory the longer it’s been running. It’s nothing for it to be over 250 Mb over the course of a day. So I do the end process tree on it and then restart it (I do it through Task Manager just by going file -> run and typing sidebar) and then it comes back at a disgusting, but much better 48Mb.

And if I’m lucky my CPU meter may now show less than 40% – it rarely gets right back to 36%.

But I find the more frequently, and the earlier (in terms of not waiting till the memory usage gets too high) I do it, the more times I can do it and get the memory usage back close to 36%.

And it takes a minute or two to do at most.

Eventually, the figure I can get back to after ‘purging’  climbs, 37, 39, 41, 45, even 50. At 50, I can still work ok if it’s an inconvenient time to reboot but if I need to eat or be away from the PC, I’ll tend to do a reboot.

And for me that might be now be only every 4 days instead of twice a day. That’s 160 hours or rebooting saved over the course of a year!!

Anyone who knows anything about me knows how much I nag people about the importance of leverage, about sticking with something long enough for it to reap rewards, about how powerful and valuable multi-level programs are.

It’s just a few days away from my 5 year anniversary with EasyHits4U, a program that exemplifies all the above points of importance, so I thought I’d put pen to paper, figuratively speaking, and share some of my ‘vital statistics’.

My first referral was gained on the 17th March 2007 (that’s the only reason I know my join date must have been round about the next day or so because my first referral was a long term friend and would have joined right after me).

I’d already created VitalViralPro a few months before so naturally EasyHits4U went into the Downline Builder.

I never ever promoted EasyHits4U directly, everything was done through VitalViralPro – as I promoted VitalViralPro, so some of those incoming referrals would join one or more traffic exchanges below me and then in time, others would join below those referrals.

Also, it’s easy to think that I had an advantage because I owned VitalViralPro; not so! I promoted VitalViralPro like all the other members. I had no more advantage than you have when you’re the sponsor and your referral is…well, your referral.

So my EasyHits4U downline grew. It’s interesting that even now, after 5 years, I only have just under 400 direct referrals. That’s less than 7 referrals per month. But here’s where the magic happens…

Those 397 direct referrals have referred 1356 people; they in turn have referred 2087 people!

Those 2087 people have referred 4016, who’ve referred 6531 who’ve referred 6714.

That makes a staggering 21101 people in my downline!

That’s all well and good but what’s in it for me?

Well EasyHits4U is a 6-level program (if you’re upgraded, and I of course would be mad not to be!). I earn credits from my referrals (15%-10%-5%-3%-2%-1%) – so if a first level referral surfs and earns 1000 credits, I get a bonus of 150 credits. If a level 6 referral did that I’d get 10 credits.

I always explain this the same way to people that have yet to grasp the importance of getting referrals in traffic exchanges; most traffic exchanges pay 10% from direct referrals so having 10 referrals that surf the same as you is like having another you working for you for free.

So with my downline, 400 (approx) at 15% is like having 60 free surfers. On level 2, 1350 (approx) at 10% is like another 135.

Without showing all the math, it turns out my downline is like having an army of 617 surfers!!

If that isn’t leverage, I don’t know what is!!

Of course we all know that many, many of the downline will be inactive or surf very little. Even so, it’s enough to bring me in 22k credits a month for free. At EasyHits4U prices ($5.95/1000) , that’s $130 of credits I’m getting every month without needing to lift a finger. I can’t remember what I pay per month for membership but it sure isn’t $130.

My downline grew by 21 members in the last 24 hours too – so the whole this is really starting to compound now.

It’s grown by 18% in the last 9 months and it should keep growing at that kind of rate. And remember, I have promoted this program quite passively. If it was my main business and that was multilevel, I’d be promoting a lot more actively.

And that’s one of the key learning points with anything multilevel. All of the benefit comes later – often quite a lot later. And for a lot of people, that’s unpalatable – they want results now!

Well I didn’t sit on my backside doing nothing while I waited for my EasyHits4U downline to grow – I did lots of things that had a more immediate effect. But I have always planted seeds in multilevel programs where I see them because they’re your passport to an easier life!

I hope this post inspires you to plant your own seeds now – the sooner you do it, the sooner you reap the rewards.

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!