General News

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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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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I have some news that may shock some of you, certainly surprise you I’m sure…

But before I completely spill the beans, there are a few things I’d like to say…

It’s been great knowing you all, I’ll miss you all…sob sob sob

Oops, wrong piece of paper – that was from my goodbye speech when I gave up my day job 2 and a half years ago to dedicate my time to VitalViralPro. And I’m happy to say, I never looked back!!

Everyone that knows me well knows that I’m passionate about what I do and passionate about helping people succeed. And I’m deeply passionate about VitalViralPro.

I’ve reared it from birth, it’s had bad times, sad times, it’s gone through big changes and it’s survived it all and is now bigger and better than ever before and thriving!! And apart from my bit, that’s all down to YOU – my loyal members – and I thank you for hugely for helping make VitalViralPro what it’s become today.

So what’s the news?

VitalViralPro is joining forces with another site and I am *SO* excited about it, I just can’t wait to get down to business and start working on all the things we plan to do together…

It opens up a huge window of opportunity and I believe it to be definitely one of those situations where 1 + 1 = 5.

The site I’ve partnered with could be seen as a competitor – we already do some very similar things (we also do some very different things and cater to slightly different markets).

Most importantly, we (the other owner and I) both have the same philosophies: we both care passionately about our members above anything else and about helping those members succeed. It’s what makes both of us tick and it’s what led to this being an easy and natural decision for us to take.

So while we might have been friendly ‘competitors’ before, by joining like this we just become bigger and better, still with the same passions and ideals as we had separately but with a much greater ability to do things that benefit you !!!!

This is not a merging into one situation – both sites will keep their identity and their differences. But we’ll be able to combine in key areas to bring something far more powerful than
either site could alone.

The site I’ve been holding back is Affiliate Funnel. Some of you may have seen that recently Jon Olson and Paul Kinder effectively did a kind of swap between a couple of businesses they owned such that Paul became the exclusive owner of Affiliate Funnel.

Well this latest deal means that Affiliate Funnel gets my programming and tracking skills and VitalViralPro gets Pauls marketing skills and the value of his huge circle of influence
and between us, we make both programs stronger than they ever could be alone and as competitors.

Our plans are not finalized yet – we’re still reeling from even a first ‘meeting of the minds’ to share all the ideas we each had individually before we partnered up – and boy are there some ideas!!

You’ll be hearing a lot more about all of that soon…

In the meantime, it’ll be business as usual at both sites for a few days but login regularly ’cause there’s gonna be stuff happening regularly !!

We have a few things we both want to get in place quickly and then there’ll be a steady succession of smaller jumps as we add in our plans over the next 12 months and beyond.

Watch this space.

Google has always had Beta projects and this week, Google opened another one to the public.

Known as knol – which they say stands for ‘a unit of knowledge’ – a neat concept. Superficially, knol would look much like a squidoo lens or a hub page. Google’s blog states ‘A knol on a particular topic is meant to be the first thing someone who searches for this topic for the first time will want to read’ – which sounds ominously like a knol ought to be at the top of the organic SERPs.

They go on to say that knols can contain ads from which the author will receive a substantial share! They won’t be moderated, only ranked so there is no censoring and marketers will flock to get their affiliate links in this new format.

It certainly seems like it would be worth trying to get in early and write some definitive knols about your pet subjects.

Perhaps this is why squidoo lens fell from favour!

Here is an example knol from the big G – they have a more serious and business-like feel to them than lenses.

While there will no doubt be plenty of rubbish appearing, community tools like ranking will help to make sure the genuinely good ones get to the top.

So go forth and nab your knols.

You can find the service at http://knol.google.com

Coolest plugin I’ve seen in quite a while. I post to my blog and I tweet without moving my lips (methaphorically speaking).

See that ‘My Twitter Feed’ on the right? That’s part of it.

The coolest things is when I post and my automatic tweet is generated. Twitter users following me or somehow seeing my tweet see an automatically shortened url to my blog post. When they click on the URL, they see my blog post but in a frame with a prominent ‘advert’ for TweetMyBlog at the top – which is of course my referral link for TweetMyBlog.

And if they join TweetMyBlog, I get their email address (via the TweetMyBlog back office) so I can always send them a welcome email with an invite to follow me or some other kind of link.

Sweet!

You can get it for yourself here

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If you’ve tried Google Adwords then you may have come across the frustration of having one or more of your keywords getting a poor quality score. All Google will tell you is that your landing page should be related to your keywords and your advert.

Well there is a way to make sure that your landing page matches your keywords in Google’s eyes – use the keywords Google thinks are right for your landing page!

After all, if they suggest the keywords for your landing page, they can hardly give those a low quality score, can they? This works really well. Of course the keywords might not include the ones you wanted. So instead of trying to add the keyword you want, try editing the landing page so that Google suggests that keyword. Bingo!

This is not a great secret but a lot of people haven’t been made aware of this really simple and cool way to keep your Adwords campaigns in great shape.

Having used the excellent free service for generating sitemaps (xml-sitemaps.com) I decided to but their full product today for just $20.

I am used to installing scripts but their documentation looked pretty good even if you’re not so experienced.

The bought version has several advantages over the free one notably no restriction on sitemap size and the ability to have your sitemaps updated automatically. It even has the facility to ping Google when your sitemap is updated, though if you genuinely do update your site frequently then I would not use this option – I think it’s always better to let Google decide when to crawl.

The license gives me unlimited use on my own personal sites too so all in all I’m very pleased and give this a thumbs up.

By the way – as with any script, do follow the security steps. Failure to do so could leave a security hole for your site.