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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