Laptop Security For Sales People

IBM ThinkPad R52 Gets Power But Won't Boot

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 20 Sep 2014 02:03:00 +0000

In a previous post I outlined how my IBM ThinkPad R52 finally gave up the ghost. It would get power, the fans would spin, but it wouldn't get past the POST. There was no power on tests, no beep codes, no boot screens... nothing!

I had tried multiple techniques outlined in posts from other ThinkPad owners with machines exhibiting similar symptoms. But at the end of the day, or week, my machine would continue to exhibit the same unstable behavior. Sometimes, I would be able to get it to boot up. But 90% of the time, it would just sit there with powered fans and a blank screen.

However, I seemed to have stumbled upon a solution that appears to have resolved the issue.

While repairing another system, I found that I needed more memory. And there were 2 Gigabytes sitting in that little IBM ThinkPad, doing nothing but collecting dust. So I pulled one of the sticks to put in the new system.

Yes, the new system powered up just fine without a problem.

To my amazement, the ThinkPad powered up without a problem as well!

Figuring that maybe the memory just needed re-seating, I put the old memory stick back in. And along with the memory, the problem returned.

That's when I remembered the specs for IBM ThinkPad R52.

It can handle a maximum of 1.5 GB. That's a 1 GB stick in one slot and a 500 MB stick in the other slot. When I put that configuration in the ThinkPad, the system powered up without a problem at the press of the power button, and it has powered up without a hitch for the past 6 months.

So if you are experiencing intermittent start-ups in your old ThinkPad system, check the speed and capacity of your memory. Your system may not be able to handle the parts you placed into it.

Now I just have to figure out what to do with a system that can only handle 1.5GB of memory, runs only Windows XP and is 10 years old!

5 Million Gmail Addresses and Passwords Leaked: What This Means for You

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 10 Sep 2014 23:04:00 +0000

Earlier today, news started making the rounds that a list of 5 million Gmail addresses and passwords was leaked on Tuesday, Sept 9 2014.

The list appeared on a Russian Bitcoin forum site and after some review, appears to be the result of a number of years of hacking and phishing campaigns as opposed to a direct assault on the Google mothership.

Some of the accounts also appeared to be quite old, and in some cases the gmail address appeared to be the username for another online account.

So what we are probably seeing is actually some hacker’s private stash rather than someone looking for help in cracking a password database.

Regardless, here's what you need to take away from this event:

1. Assume you have an account on this list. As I mentioned before, chances are good that if you have a Gmail account (as in your.name@gmail.com), it's on this list.

2. Change your passwords. If you are one of those people who gets married to your password till death do you part, guess what - It’s now time for the divorce. Change it.

3. Don't reuse passwords. If you like to keep the same password across sites, the bad guys will use this against you. The first thing they will probably try is to use it on other email accounts you own (like Yahoo, Hotmail, Live.com, and AOL) and then they'll try the paid accounts (like Amazon, Netflix, and other shopping sites). So your first order of business, if you reuse passwords, is to change the passwords on sensitive or vital accounts. All of those old passwords that you have hanging around, retire them.

4. Don't go to those "we'll check your account for you" sites. While there will be some sites that are legit and will run a search for your account, most of the ones springing up will be phishing sites taking advantage of the situation. My recommendation, avoid them all - change your passwords.

5. Invest in a password manager: If you have a lot of passwords and you keep them on post-it notes (not a good method), then it's time to look at some of the password managers out there. Dashlane has been advertising heavily. Lastpass is another good one to try.

Here's a shortlist from the Wall Street Journal:

The Best Way to Manage All of Your Passwords

Watch your six out there! Mind your online access.

Reviving A Dead Thinkpad Laptop

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 15 Feb 2013 06:33:00 +0000

Here’s follow up on my previous post dealing with an intermittent IBM Lenovo R52 laptop.

In that post, I outlined how I had possibly found a solution to my laptop’s unreliable operation.

Unplugging the laptop; pressing the power button 10 times at 1 second intervals; holding it down for 30 seconds… Seemed arcane, but it worked.

At least temporarily.

About a week later, I brought the laptop down to Columbus to do some work on the office router. Well, the machine failed to power up so I performed the ritualistic power-on dance. Only this time the machine failed to produce a image on the screen.

After several attempts and about 20 minutes, I finally gave up assuming the problem that plagued my machine was deeper than a static charge on the motherboard capacitors.

So for the past few weeks, I’ve been trying my hand at brining up the system using variations of the procedure outlined in my previous post, only with no success. Sometimes the machine came up; sometimes I simply gave up.

About 6 days ago, I was trying to bring the machine up again one more time when I accidentally hit the connection between the motherboard housing and the LCD screen. And the system powered right up.

Over the past 6 days, I made sure to tweak that connector when I powered on the system. I haven't had a problem yet.

I think it’s time to strip the machine down and reseat all of the connections, especially the electrical connections between the moving parts.

With a little luck, maybe I’ll get another 18 to 24 months out of this 7-year-old Windows XP system.

Breathing New Life Into A Dead Thinkpad Laptop

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 30 Jan 2013 07:54:00 +0000

If you own a Lenovo or IBM ThinkPad laptop, here is a tip I found that you’ll want to keep in your back pocket in case it starts to behave erratically or drops dead completely.

I have an IBM ThinkPad R52 running Windows XP. Since buying it over 7 years ago, I haven’t performed a restore on the system, kept the virus scanner up to date, and ran the disk defragmenter on it every morning religiously. The thing has been a solid performer. It ran like a champion.

I say “ran” because the battery finally gave up the ghost about a year ago. It wouldn’t hold a charge and I couldn’t run the system as long as the battery was in. So, I pulled the battery completely and simply ran the machine from the house outlet.

About 6 months ago, it started acting strangely. Pressing the start button would kick in the power, but the screen would remain blank and it wouldn’t run through the BIOS Power On Self Tests (the boot up tests that determine if the motherboard is operational before it starts to pull the OS from the drive).

After a few attempts, the system would eventually start, run through the POSTs, and then boot up Windows XP.

But the problem only got worse with time.

Also, leaving the machine off and in the carrying case for extended periods seemed to exacerbate the issue.

For a while, I thought the graphics controller had finally decided to call it quits, but the POST would have called that out with a beep code. This condition produced nothing but a spinning fan and a single power light.

After running a Google search and trying a number of different suggestions like dusting the system out, reseating the hard drive, pulling and replacing the memory, I was ready to finally bury my long-time companion.

That’s when I ran across this post by Mike Masnick, which, after thinking about some of the conditions involved, seemed to make sense.

Masnick had a Lenovo ThinkPad z61t, which exhibited similar behavior. He called IBM support and the tech support guy told him… well, you can read the entire exchange on Masnick’s blog here.

I don’t know if you need to do the whole pattern of pushing the power button 10 times in a row, but my little ThinkPad is operational again.

I’ll experiment with the resurrection pattern the next time I leave my ThinkPad in the bag for a long time and let you know how things work out.

Yahoo Email Shows Viral Behavior

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 25 Sep 2010 02:51:00 +0000

Yahoo Email Virus

Last weekend I received an unusual email from my sister.

She had sent the message to 6 or 7 people, some of them family members. The subject line was something unintelligible.

And the content was a sales pitch for certain male performance enhancing recreational pharmaceuticals.

Naturally, there was a link to a website that held the chemical answer to all of mankind’s ailments, or maybe just man’s ailments.

My immediate thought was, “You got hacked!”

So I sent a text message telling her of the amusing email I had received and that she probably clicked on some link that she shouldn’t have clicked on while reading her mail. If this email account was tied to her Facebook account, the offending activity could have just as easily come from there.

She sent me a text back, thanking me for the info and she set about changing her passwords on her various accounts.

I didn’t think anymore about the email, chalking it up to pilot error on her part.

Hotmail Joins The Act

Two days later, I get an email from a good friend of mine up in New England. Nothing on the subject line and again sent to about 10 recipients, some of whom I recognized. There was nothing in the body of the message either except for one really ugly URL.

Rather unusual, I thought, and a small warning went off in my head. I considered writing her a message, but it was late and I was in the middle of writing something else that I had to get out for the next day.

“I’ll send her something tomorrow” and continued on with what I was doing.

The next morning, I received a third email from a co-worker. Again, nothing in the subject line, sent to about 10 recipients, some of whom I recognized (I actually work with some of the people), and again there was nothing in the body of the message except for one really ugly URL.

That’s when the small warning turned into a blaring klaxon. Something was wrong.

I still had all of their emails, so I immediately set out to discover the common thread. That’s when I realized that two out of the three were from people using Yahoo mail and the third used Hotmail.

Yahoo Email, Hotmail, And Twitter Succumb To A Year Old Vulnerability

This immediately brought to mind the CSS Cross Site Scripting security hole that I had read about last week on Ars Technica. Returning to the site where I had read the article originally, I discovered that Ars Technica had a new article on how Twitter had succumbed to the CSS Cross Site Scripting attack earlier that morning.

A search on Google for Yahoo email Cross Site Scripting revealed a twitter timeline with lots of people complaining about their Yahoo email accounts sending out Spam emails and deleting contacts out of their address book.

It appears that somebody’s been busy!

All of this behavior was outlined in the paper from a research team at Carnegie Mellon. Everything from the way Twitter could be hacked to how this exploit would effect Yahoo mail and Hotmail.

While the team at Twitter fixed the problem within a couple of hours, I still don’t see any type of message, problem identification, or resolution for Yahoo mail or Hotmail.

And there are still people on the Twitter timeline tweeting on how they are receiving or sending out Spam emails from their yahoo account.

If you are using some version of Internet Explorer, you may be causing yourself extra grief since the hack seems to need the lax method that IE handles malformed CSS. You might want to try a different browser until some of this ugliness clears up.

Here are the two articles from Ars Technica on this problem.

Microsoft investigates public IE CSS XSS flaw; Twitter, Hotmail vulnerable

Twitter worms spread quickly thanks to blatant security flaw

Internet Explorer 8 Security Flaw Leaves Hotmail and Twitter Vulnerable

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 13 Sep 2010 18:10:00 +0000

As if you needed another reason to move from Internet Explorer to Chrome or FireFox.

Apparently this new flaw is a variant of an older security hole that was noted as far back as December 2009. It exploits the way browsers like Internet Explorer 8 and Firefox handles something called CSS cross-site scripting

The references here get a little technical, as they discuss the details of how this type of attack works. However, as a sales rep, here's what you need to know:

Chrome, FireFox, Opera and Safari have upgraded their browsers to minimize the impact of cross-site scripting, making the browser behave better. Internet Explorer 8 and its predecessors, however are more lax in how it handles cross-site scripting making it even more vulnerable to exploitation.

Web based email platforms, like Yahoo Mail and Hotmail can be used in the exploit and leave your Yahoo Mail or Hotmail accounts open to access from the attacker. So if you receive messages with strange looking subject lines (for example, subject lines that start with {}) or phishing requests from questionable senders asking you to visit their website, go to DEFCON4 and stay on alert.

Twitter can also be used in this exploit, resulting in the attacker posting to your account. So be on the lookout for ugly tweets that look similar to this: {}body{font-family: And as always be careful of clicking on those shortened links in any tweet. Some of those links will be pages that collect the compromised information.

If you are particularly curious about the technical aspects of this exploit, review the Ars Technica security article or the white paper from the Carnegie Mellon team below.

Microsoft investigates public IE CSS XSS flaw; Twitter, Hotmail vulnerable

Protecting Browsers from Cross-Origin CSS Attacks

Until Microsoft fixes this particular issue in Internet Explorer 8, you might want to download and run FireFox as an alternate browser to get peace of mind.

Who knows... you might even like it.

Detect Phishing Emails With These Online Apps

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 10 Sep 2010 23:03:00 +0000

Email Phishing

While cleaning out my phishing email address, I came across several emails that were apparently from the FBI.

While they all appear to be from the same user, a robertmueller at fbi.gov, one of these emails came from someone on the Villanova campus. Apparently the sender forgot to modify one of the fields in their bulk email spamming software.

Anyway, I'm not supposed to reply directly to Robert, but instead to Paul Smith at paulsmith4@gala.net. I guess the user wanted me to believe that Paul Smith didn't qualify for an account on the FBI network. So he had to use his home account at gala.net.

We've all seen at least a few messages like this, regardless if the message is from someone at the FBI, Western Union, UPS or Ebay and they all have pretty much the same format. Someone claiming to be from a large, well known company sends you an email from a web email account and requests that you send your personal information to yet another, different web email account. No matter which company it claims to be from, it all smells like phishing.

Avoid Being Hooked By A Phishing Scam. Check Your Email Headers

We looked at full email headers in the last post and determined that you probably won't be able to definitively identify who the sender is or where they are sending from. However, we can pretty much determine if the message is from who it says that it's from. And in a phishing email, this can be pretty helpful.

In this case, looking at the headers and looking at the IP addresses, I pretty much know that these emails are not from the FBI, even if they are identified as such. And while Robert Mueller may or may not be a real person and this may or may not be a valid email address, I think I can safely say that Robert didn't send this email out.

[see the post Identify Phishing and Spam Email Easily and Quickly and Phishing With Chase As the Lure]

Resources To Spot Email Phishing

I'm including some useful links here to peek at the particulars of the IP address embedded in the full header. Using these applications you can determine the geographic location of the mail servers that were exploited to get the message to you.

Yeah, most of these mail servers are victims, too. They are just doing their job getting messages to their final destination. The more circuitous the message route, the more servers need to be exploited in order to get the phishing message to the end user.

Ip-Whois-Lookup (http://ip-whois-lookup.com) is a clean, bare bones, ip geolocator. Pull the IP address from your header, throw it in the searchbox, hit the lookup button and you are good to go. Provides you with a lot of registered information about the ISP, the Hostname, Country, Region and City if available. Gives you a broadstroke idea if the email that you got should have anything to do with the servers on the list. Emails from the FBI should have no reason to use servers in Switzerland or France, for example.

Project Honeypot (http://www.projecthoneypot.org) is a distributed system set up to capture and track rogue spammers, spam bots, and phishing email. Putting a suspected email address in their IP lookup box will reveal the type of server is associated with the ip address and will give you a small history of the type of emails if the system is a mail server. For example, the server tied to this IP address has sent suspect email out in the past. It's also listed at the source of dictionary attacks.

WhatIsMyIPAddress.com (http://whatismyipaddress.com) provides a series of comprehensive checks on an IP address. Not only does it gives you the ability to find a geographic location for an IP address and to see if it is blacklisted:

But you can also run a check on the full email header. It will pull out the important pieces of the header and provide you with a best guess, first order approximation of the location of the sender. Simply copy the full header and past it into the text box, hit the “get source” button, an dyou are off to the races.

If you are looking at an email and you don't have a lot of time or patience to sort through all of the arcane looking information in the header, this could be the tool for you.

Remember that although these apps will provide you with a location where the email originated, chances are that this location won't be an accurate reflection of the actual location as spammers and phishers can make some modifications and use proxy servers to mask where the email is really coming from.

However, it does tell us when emails don't originate from where they are supposed to. It's an indication that whoever is sending the email is not who they say they are and a clear give away that private information should not be given away.

Stay safe. Watch your six.

Dale Carnegie Sales Trainers - Make Your Blog Posts Easy To Find With These Two Tips

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 06:18:00 +0000

Here's another post for all of you Dale Carnegie trainers and sales reps using Blogger.

In the last tip we looked at how you could optimize the blog title for your particular business keyphrases. Next, we're going to take a peek at optimizing the title page of each individual blog post. But before we address how Blogger creates the actual posts titles, you need to verify that your blog is creating separate pages for each of your posts and not just appending your text to a monthly archive page.

Searching Through Dale Carnegie Blogs Reveals Two Different Blogger Structures

While cruising some of the your blogs in Blogger, I noticed that a few were behaving differently from the majority of the others. Take a look at the following. Click on any screenshot to enlarge:

This is the Dale Carnegie blog I created on Blogger for the last demo. We see the Blogger Title at point 1, the actual URL at point 2, and the Blog Title again at point 3. Everything looks good until we put the mouse over the first link, the post title, “Sales Presentation Tips For Sales People”.

Like we pointed out on the Laptop Security For Sales People blog, putting the mouse over any particular link you are interested in will reveal the destination URL down below in the browser's status bar, as seen at point 4.

Notice what happens when we click the link:

Notice how the title has changed in point 1. Remember that whatever is shown in the browser title bar is reflective of the changes in the Title Tag, one of the the things that the different search engines look at to determine what your page is about.

Now notice the change in the URL at point 2. That hash mark (#) indicates a specific place on the page that the browser positions at the top of viewing screen.

The post title at point 3 is the specific location on the page that the URL is pointing to and is now at the top of the page.

And if you look down at point 4, you will see the destination URL of the next blog post that my mouse is hovering over. Surprisingly, the only difference between the current blog post and the next blog post is the number after the hash (#) mark.

This is important because it means that all of my blog posts on this blog are here on the same page only at different locations.

See what happens when the next link is clicked:

Now the URL that was in the browser's status bar is now the current URL in the browser's address bar, shown in point 2.

The new blog post title has been moved to the top of the screen view, shown in point 3.

And my mouse is positioned over the next blog post which is revealed in the browser status bar at point 4.

The only thing that hasn't changed is the Title Tag which is revealed in the browser title bar, shown in point 1.

So, what does all of this mean?

If your Blogger blog is behaving like this, then it means you aren't optimizing your post titles and your blog to be found by the search engines.

And you aren't optimizing your post titles to leverage your marketable keyphrases that your potential clients are searching for.

While your main keyphrase, “Dale Carnegie” is still in the title of your blog and prominently visible to the search engines, no other keyphrases ever enter your titles. These are keyphrases are significant to your overall business, such as sales training or leadership training or communication skills.

So how do you optimize your blog posts to be found on the search engines?

How to Optimize Your Blogger Posts

First open your Blogger dashboard and click the “Settings” link.

Then click the “Archive” link

The screen that comes up controls how blog posts are created in your blog. With the current structure, posts are grouped according to their creation date and appended to their respective pages. In this example, each page represents a month and holds all of the posts for that month. Naturally, the title of the page uses the date in its title.

Under the section entitled “Enable Post Pages?” changing the value in the drop down box from “No” to “Yes” will give each of your posts individual and unique web pages, each with their unique and individual titles. This will enable you to optimize each of your posts according to specific keyphrases.

Go ahead and change the value to “Yes” and then save the settings.

Blogger Posts As Separate Optimized Pages

Now, the main page of our Blogger blog looks like it did before. The title, the URL and the page title all looks the same as they did in the first screenshot with one exception.

Wen rolling the mouse over the title of the first post, the destination URL looks different as seen in point 4. There is no hash marks seen in the URL and it actually has some pretty sweet keywords and keyphrases included in its makeup.

Clicking a post title link that talks about communication provides a different kind of post page:

In point 1, we see that the the phrase included in the Title tags now actually includes keyphrases that are relevant to the post topic. Not only that, but the URL in point 2 also has some very useful keyphrases.

The title of the blog hasn't changed as seen in point 3. However, the title of the post seen in point 4, is now included in some other vital points in our blog structure.

So here are your next two tips:

Change the way your Blogger blog sets up its posts pages and you'll increase your search engine exposure by increasing the number of Title Tags that the search engines can find.

Include your keyphrases in your post titles and you'll start attracting more of the people looking for your specialized topics.

Incidentally, setting your posts up as separate pages also gives you some measure of control over your other meta tags as well. We'll take a look at that in a later post.

That’s all for this post. In the next post we'll take a deeper look at the post titles.

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Good Hunting!

Identify Phishing And Spam Email Easily And Quickly

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 21:15:00 +0000

So you just received an urgent email telling you that you need to verify your Chase Account information.

Is it a legitimate request or is it an online phishing scammer trying to gain access to your online account information?

Is there a definitive method that you can use to distinguish legitimate email requests from online phishing scams?

Take a peek at this (simply click on a photo to expand it):

Here is an example of an email request I just received. Let's take a quick walk-through on some of the items that I look for to determine if an email is really a phishing attempt trying to gain personal account information.

First, notice that this email seeks to bypass all skepticism by leveraging:

The name of a large and recognizable bank—Chase
Implying that you need to perform some type of important action—account verification. Either you need to do it or someone has already attempted it and you need to check the veracity and integrity of your account.

Then it goes on to discuss the steps on how to verify your account information and how Chase values your business.

Here's what this message does right.

It's short. There is one line that describes what you have to do to verify your account. The rest of the message seeks to establish the credibility of the email by outlining how to contact Chase and stating how much they value you as a customer. All standard stuff that you can find at the end of any email from any big service provider.

Here's what makes this email stand out as a phishing email:

It's not really from Chase. Yeah, it says that it's from Chase Online, but the actual sender is someone from btconnect.com. You know, if it's from Chase, it should say something like xxx@chase.com. Chase is big enough to have its own domain and its own army of servers.
It's not to anyone. While the “From:” field has someone who is not from Chase, the “To:” field is empty. This is a tactic used by spammers and phishers to blast out emails to a large recipient list. It allows them to address the message to “Dear Chase Online Customer”.

Those are the easy identifiable signs that are enough to warrant a further investigation.

Now for the fun part.

If you suspect that you received a phishing email, first look at the full email headers. On Yahoo, you can get to the full header using the “actions” button and selecting the “View Full Header” option. This example is on my Yahoo! honeypot account.

In the window with the full header that pops up, we see a lot of undecipherable information which at first glance can be intimidating.

The highlighted section is the IP address of one of the mail servers. Running a search on the IP address through Google revealed a sight that tracks questionable activity called “Project Honeypot”:

Here we see that this site indicates that the IP address is associated with a machine that has the characteristics of a mail server, no surprise there:

Looking at another site reveals that the server is located in Great Britain. Again, no surprise since the service provider is btconnect.com where the “BT” stands for British Telecom.

The line in the header that we really want is this one, “Received from User [xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx]” This is the IP address the local service provider leased to the end user allowing them to gain access to the Internet.

As you can see, our “Chase” emailer was in San Antonio, TX using an expendable email account from British Telecom. This isn't surprising since spammers make use of free email addresses provided by Yahoo!, Google, and Hotmail all of the time. Spammers create phishing email addresses, use them and then flush them when they become compromised. You are never meant to return a message to these accounts. That's why there is typically another contact email address provided in the body text or they use the email to promote a phishing website to cull your information online.

Going back to the my email and looking at some of those Chase links, we see that they don't actually point to www.chase.com. They point to a file on the site hotelrandevy.com.

Anytime you have questions about the link in your email, hold your mouse over the link, but don't click it. The actual site address will appear in the status bar at the bottom of the browser. If it is not a place that you want to go, then don't click it.

So what does all of this mean to us?

Does it gives us the ability to really identify who sent us the email?

Not really.

The email information in the header can be manipulated, for example it identifies the sender as Chase.

The actual email address is expendable—any one of us can create the email address charliebrown123 on Google or Yahoo and start sending spam email out for the purpose of phishing.

The IP address is probably the only thing that the user can't manipulate, but with powerful laptops, reliable mobile computing and growing free WI-FI locations, the IP address can easily be from a Starbucks, McDonald’s, or an unsecured wireless router in a church. So we really don't know the location either (by the way, this last point makes it extremely important for you to secure your home wireless router unless you want to unknowingly participate in these kinds of activities).

So we are back to square one. We don't know who really sent the email.

But we do know something.

We know that the email is not from Chase and that it is phishing for personal information.

If you have an email that you suspect is not from who it says it's from, take a look at the full headers and then run a check on the IP address. You'll quickly determine if you should respond to the email or just delete it.

For another example on examining suspected phishing email, see my other post, Did You Get Phished By Chase?

Good Selling!

Blogger Title Optimization Tip For Dale Carnegie Sales Consultants

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 10 Aug 2010 21:38:00 +0000

Making Your Blogger Blog Easy To Find

As a Dale Carnegie Instructor or sales consultant updating a blog on Blogger, when we push that "publish" button and post our ideas on our blog, one of our objectives is to have someone on the Web read it and make use of the information we are providing.

As trainers, we publish our posts so that our participants can have access to additional ideas and explanations on what we covered in a particular session.

As sales consultants selling to a particular group of clients, we want to display how some of our other clients in a similar industry have gained specific benefits from some of the training programs that we offer.

And as a franchise owner , we probably want to highlight some of the additional benefits of a new program that we are offering, like a one-day seminar on cold calling.

Whatever reason we are putting our thoughts out there on the Web, one thing is certain—we have a certain audience in mind when we created the post. And typically this audience is a group of people that we’ve done business with in the past. They know us, they’ve received email from us, or they received a phone call from us. They know wd exist and they know about our blog.

However, there is another audience that you can get our information to, and unfortunately, there’s a little more research and tweaking that needs to be done on Blogger before you can reach them.

These are the people that don’t know about you, they don’t know that you exist, and they’ve never heard a peep from you, ever. They’ve never received a phone call from you, never received an email from you, and they have never received any type of direct mail pieces from you.

But they get on one of the search engines every day and they search for topics regarding “Sales Training”, or “Leadership Training” or sometimes even, “Dale Carnegie Training”.

Factors That Impact Your Search Engine Visibility

When your clients go online and initiate their search for something like “Dale Carnegie Training”, typically they will turn to Google for assistance. They will type in something like “Dale Carnegie Training” or “Dale Carnegie Training in Cleveland” or “Dale Carnegie Training for sales people” and tell Google to go off and find all of the pages dealing with the subject of their particular search. These phrases are referred to as the keywords or keyphrases.

Now, no one knows for certain what factors are at play in Google’s algorithm except the people that work at Google. However there is a mountain of empirical data suggesting that certain things need to be on your pages to make them relevant for a particular search.

So, if someone is on their laptop and types “Dale Carnegie Training” into the Google search engine, the Google search engine will run off with the keyphrase, check it’s database of indexed pages, and see which pages are relevant for the term “Dale Carnegie Training”. It will then rank the results in order of importance before displaying the results to the end user.

What kinds of things does the Google Search Engine consider relevent when culling though its indexed database in search of pages that reference Dale Carnegie Training? Well, things like how many times the term “Dale Carnegie Training” is referenced in the body of the page. How close to the top of the page “Dale Carnegie Training” occurs. The number of other pages that link to the page.

And if “Dale Carnegie Training” is in the title of the page.

Think of it this way. If you were to go to the public library (yes, Amazon hasn’t chased them all away) and search for books dealing with “Dale Carnegie”, you would consider a book entitled “Dale Carnegie’s 30 Human Relations Principles”, or “Dale Carnegie’s Effective Speaking Strategy” to be highly relevant. However, you would consider a book entitled, “Great Public Speakers of the Early 20th Century” or “Giants in the Field of Professional Development” as less relevant to your search, even if there are some references to Dale Carnegie inside the book. The Google search engine will do something similar.

How To Make Your Blogger Blog Friendlier To The Search Engines

So here is your first tip.

If you want your blog to rank high for a keyword or keyphrase pertaining to your business, put the keyword or keyphrase in the title of your blog. In your case, if you want your blog to be relevant in searches for “Dale Carnegie”, put “Dale Carnegie” in your blog title.

Now do you absolutely need “Dale Carnegie” in the title? Well, you don’t have to put it in. But the keyword or keyphrase that you select should reflect the general topic and theme of your blog.

So if you were to create a blog that dealt specifically with the sales process, having the keyphrase, “Sales Strategy”, “Sales Tactics”, “Sales Cold Calling”, or “Sales Objections” might be the beginning of a useful set of keyphrase for you and one of those will be the start of a great title for your blog.

So how do you modify the title of your Blogger blog to contain your theme oriented keyphrase?

Glad you asked!

Check it out:

In this first frame, we see the standard Blogger dashboard when you log into your account and the number of Blogger blogs that you have control over. Here, I’ve created two test blogs, one specifically for all of you crazy Dale Carnegie Trainers and sales consultants to illustrate the point.

And here we see what the blog actually looks like. There are a couple of points to note here. When someone pulls up your web page or your blog, they will see the title reflected in (1) the browser title bar, (3) the current working tab, (5) the actual title on the blog, and (4) the taskbar menu button. The URL located in the address bar (2) is the actual web address of your blog. If you were in a hurry, like I was, then you probably created a blog with a URL that is the same or pretty similar to the title of your blog. This is ok unless you got in the game late and your title and URL are not reflective of the theme of your blog.

So head back over to the Blogger dashboard and hit the “settings” link. You are about to make a modification.

When you hit the “settings” link, the first section that comes up is the “basic” settings, which is good because this is where you want to make your change. The section that deals with the Title of your blog is the second entry. As you can see, the title of this blog is entered as “Dale Carnegie of Cleveland”. I’m going to change it to “Dale Carnegie of Akron”:

And hit the save button down below to save the change.

Now, refreshing the blog page yields:

Notice how the title of the blog has changed in (1) the browser title bar, (3) the active tab, (4) the taskbar button, although you can’t see it because it extends off of the button, and (5) the actual title of the blog. Also notice that the actual URL or web address of the blog (2) did not change. Like it or not, the web address you picked when you set up your blog is going to hang with you. But don’t worry. There plenty of other things to change that will help you in our quest to increase your blog’s visibility.

All of the changes you’ve seen in the browser depends on something in your blog called the title tag, which is also what Google looks for to determine your blog’s relevance to the phrase being searched. So if you want your blog to be relevant to Google when it begins to search for “Dale Carnegie Training”, putting this phrase in the title of your blog is the way to get it into the title tag of your blog and noticed by the search engines..

Now, will this make you immediately pop up on the first page of the search engine results pages? Probably not. There are a number of factors that Google uses to determine relevancy and we’ve only looked at one of those factors. But like I said, it’s a good start.

One more thing. Going back to the Blogger dashboard and looking at the basic section where we modified the blog title. You’ll see two drop down boxes:

These settings essentially allow your blog to be found in the Blogger blog roll and tell the search engines that you want them to index your blog.

If you make these “no”, your current clients can still find your blog because they know your blog address. It’s all of the other people, the ones that don’t know you exist but are searching for “sales training” or “leadership training” who won’t find you because you told the search engines not to consider your blog when the do their indexing.

So, seriously, you want these to be “yes”.

That’s it for now. Stay tuned for additional tips as they become available.

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Phishing With Chase As The Lure

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 05:13:00 +0000

This is a post I made back at the turn of the year, just prior to the Christmas holidays.

At the time, I had received several emails from… an organization that called itself Chase asking me to update my online credentials on their site.

Several smaller banks had propositioned me before. These were banks that I had never heard of. But they tried their scripted scams anyway and I knew they were a scam because I knew that I didn’t have accounts with any of these banks.

But Chase is a different matter. Almost everyone has an account, a credit card, or some type of dealings with Chase, one of the banks that are too big to fail. So when you get a message from an organization like this, your initial reaction is to pause and question it before writing it off.

As you’ll see from this post, the phishing filter in Internet Explorer 8 caught the scam. Phishing filters are one of the technologies implemented in newer browsers like IE8 and the new editions of Firefox and Google Chrome.

Give this post a read, make sure that you are using one of the newer browsers and turn on the phishing filter. You can find the details here at “Did You Get Phished By Chase?”

Turn on your phishing filters and watch your six.

Good Selling!

Malware Blog Boot For Sales People

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 03:20:00 +0000

The inaugural post for this site.

We’ll take a look at online security challenges including antivirus updates, phishing news, malware attacks and firewalls from a sales and marketing perspective.

These are things that system administrators and security people intuitively understand and address on a daily basis. But as sales people, we are usually tied up in generating revenue and don’t have time to review the latest malware news and stay up to date on the security bulletins to know when someone is trying to snooker us on a website or in an email.

Stay tuned, leave your ideas and let us know if you find something that looks like it’s buttering you up just to get your personal information or gain access to your laptop.

Did You Get Phished By Chase?

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 07:14:00 +0000

The holiday season is upon us. And with the usual holiday cheer and shopping rush, we can expect the usual host of… unsavory characters to make attempts at getting access to our online accounts and personal information.

It’s gonna happen so just expect to see it. I know I am.

I expect to see the email from an ebay participant telling me that they are anxious to complete the transaction and get the merchandise in question if I would just take the time and complete the conveniently provided form.

I expect to see the email from the “fake” Paypal company telling me that my account has been compromised and that I need to go to the account setup page to update my password. And they are even kind enough to provide a link to the page for my convenience.

I expect to get he occasional email from some “security professional” from a small bank telling me that my account has been compromised and that I need to use the supplied link to update my security credentials. Never mind the fact that I never heard of the bank let alone opened an account with them.

As the year draws to a close, more people will come under increased pressure between closing business at work and creating a memorable holiday event at home. Consequently, they won’t scrutinize those urgent and ominous looking email messages from “the bank” in their email inbox.

A Social Engineering Lesson From A Counterfeiter

When I was in college, one of the books that made the rounds in our class was an underground classic entitled “The Poor Man’s James Bond”. It was in the same class of books that included “The Anarchist’s Cook Book” so you can make a pretty good guess about some of the content.

I had obtained a copy of a copy of a copy, so you can imagine what the print quality and readability of this dog-eared document was like. Yeah, it was pretty ugly. There was one section, however, that was still in fairly good shape with no dropouts or additional markings, probably because it was the section that the past owners were the least interested in. This was the counterfeiting section.

I don’t remember all of the steps that the author outlined to create a passable counterfeit bill back then. In truth, I found it equally uninteresting and way too much work. However, I do remember the suggestions he made for passing one off.

His suggestion was to take the play money, roll it around in the dirt, and bake it in the oven to give it that well used look and feel. Then take it to a place of business during the busiest time of the day and buy something small with it. On checking out, get in the line manned by the greenest kid you can find with as many irate people as possible to make the purchase.

Now, when the counterfeiter is standing there with their dirty, smelly counterfeit $20 bill and a big smile, all the kid sees is a mile-long line of irate, rude people behind him. In an effort to get everyone out the door with as little drama as possible, the kid won’t put up much of a challenge to the counterfeiter.

I’m happy to say that measures have been implemented that make copying US bills extremely difficult if not impossible. But the social engineering piece is still out there and the phishers are making heavy use of the basic principles.

They are sending you email with official logos and lots of words implying urgency and importance in an effort to get you to react emotionally instead of responding logically.

They will do this at a time when they know you have will have lots of email from other companies making offers. And all of this will occur at a time when you are trying to juggle 7 different things while struggling under time and emotional pressures.

Email Phishing Example

Take this entry for example. Now I know that phishers have used banks in the past, but this is the first time I’ve seen them use bait this big.

As you can see, I’ve received what appears to be an urgent request from Chase asking me to update my security information (let's forget for the moment that I don't have an account with Chase, a dead give away that it's a phishing scam, and proceed with the usual shock and suprise). My guess is that the big oversized logo coupled with phrases like “site authorization”, “security”, and “strongly advise” will stir up some type of visceral response. The additional title of “Chase Security” is probably there to make me pay less attention to the name of the person encouraging me to change my security information. (John Edwards? Wasn’t he running for President of the US?)

They’ve even provided a convenient link for me to sign into my account.

Rolling the mouse of the link will give you the URL in the browser status bar (that bar down below that has the word “Done”). While I don’t have it shown here, the URL turned out to be a shortened URL, probably to hide the final destination. The URL was http//nuurl.us/97061.

Naturally, this thing stinks to high heaven. It has ‘phish’ written all over it. First there is the simple fact that I’ve received this email from a bank. Banks will never send out email regarding security. They may use email for marketing purposes and tell you about some new wonderful services they are about to unleash or some new shops where you can spend your money. But for any type of serious communication you can expect to get something in the USPS or a phone call. You can forget about email. They are wound way to tight for that.

Then there’s the URL, a masked URL that ultimately doesn’t go back to the Chase domain. Of course you can’t see where it goes until you click on it. But the very fact that it’s hidden is a very telling sign.

There are some other unspoken rules here as well. Nothing hard and fast, but it is something that I’ve observed. Banks are large corporations. As such, their IT department typically has a set structure when creating email accounts, and that structure is usually something like firstname.lastname@companydomain.com.

The other unspoken rule is the punctuation. Again, there is no hard and fast rule here on how someone in the banking industry should behave, but when was the last correspondence you got from a banker that had an exclamation point, let alone three? When someone in the financial industry is writing some type of correspondence, they tend to stick with the facts and figures. They leave little room for any emotional involvement. In general, if you get a correspondence from a bank punctuated with exclamation points, chances are it’s not from someone in the financial industry.

Now, clicking on this link results in the following:

So if you have the smartscreen filter turned on in IE8 (or Chrome or Firefox), you will see a screen similar to this. Congratulations! You’ve done your part to thwart the phishers.

However, with the smartscreen filter turned off, we see a page that looks like the following:

I imagine that Chase has a page somewhere that looks like this. The guys who are sending this one out probably just ripped off the template and modified it for their purposes. The phrase, “Chase.com Demo” is a giveaway.

Also look at the URL in the address bar. There is no reference to any legitimate business domain name, which is why the smartscreen filter kicked this thing to the skids.

The other thing here to notice is that this is not a secure connection. Anytime a web connection is transferring secure data, the connection will encrypt the data before it sends it. If the connection is secure, you will see something like the following:

This is for a Google Analytics account. The connection is secured using the https protocol. The quick way to tell if the connection is secure is to look for the “lock” at the top of the browser. If you don’t see the lock at the top and the site is requesting that you pass over secure or sensitive data like passwords or account numbers, it’s time to cut and run.

This site from “Fake Chase” is using the unsecured protocol, it isn’t locked down and it’s asking for secure information, like your User ID, the password to your Chase account, social security number…

And of course, no financial institution would ask you for this kind of information via email, ever. So don’t give it out.

This holiday season while you are out doing the “shop ‘til you drop” thing, remember that there are some unsavory characters who are also out there shopping… for you and your bank account numbers. Don’t let them get yours.

Stay vigilant.

SEO Tip For Bloggers using Blogger

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 08:28:00 +0000

Today I discovered one of those Search Engine Optimization challenges that you know about but you don’t realize how it affects you until someone points it out.

In this case, Google pointed it out for me and it involved the blogging platform, Blogger.

Since I started using Blogger, I’ve been using the default font style when I create my posts. Then I would select certain blocks of copy, and sometimes all of it, and change the font style from the default Times Roman or Trebuchet, to Arial.

So imagine my surprise when, after looking at the Google Webmaster tools, it indicated that two of my major SEO keywords were “span” and “family”.

In looking at the code in the “Edit HTML” window, I saw a new “span” tag for every paragraph with text that I changed to a different font family.

Clearly, when considering Search Engine Optimization, the better way to change the overall font family for the body of the post is through the CSS.

With Blogger, the best way to do this is through the “Fonts and Colors” menu under the “Layout” tab. From there you can control a variety of variables like the “Page Background Color”, the “Blog Title Font” and “Post Text Font” to name a few.

And the modifications won’t interfere with your SEO efforts.

By using the “Fonts and Colors” menu under the “layout” tab, Google’s webmaster tools won’t show that your main SEO keywords are words that are actually a part of your site infrastructure. Then your Search Engine Optimization efforts can really make an impact.

Of course, if you are using one of the customized templates, you may have to modify the HTML before the Blogger platform will have access to the appropriate CSS variables. Just one more thing to be aware of.

Twitter Application Hootsuite Is Now A Social Network Communication Hub

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 19:14:00 +0000

Hootsuite Updated To Interface With LinkedIn And Facebook

Last night, I noticed that the 3rd party professional Twitter application Hootsuite went offline for maintenance. I really didn’t think much of it initially. Services like this go offline occasionally for routine maintenance and upgrades. But after 6 hours of not being able to connect to it, I knew something big was in the works.

Over the past few weeks, Twitter has made some major additions, one of them being the addition of lists. Professional Twitter desktop applications like Tweetdeck, and Seesmic recently made modifications to accommodate these updates, everything from the new way Twitter handles retweets to connecting with other social networks like Linkedin.

When Hootsuite came back online this morning, there were plenty of changes integrated into its structure. Now, not only does Hootsuite manages and organizes your Twitter lists, but it also interfaces to your Linkedin and Facebook accounts. This opens a host of possibilities which I’m sure we’ll explore in the coming weeks.

I’m sure that there were some other changes and upgrades integrated into Hootsuite to make it more stable and increase its flexibility. And I’m also fairly sure that there will be a few… surprises that we’ll stumble across as we move forward—you can’t make a major upgrade like this without a few oversights. But, these latest upgrades, coupled with some of the other features that were already integrated into the application, turns Hootsuite into a powerful social network communication platform.

You can find more descriptions of the Hootsuite upgrades on their blog here.

Free Social Media Icons For Your Blog

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 05:49:00 +0000

In a past post, I demonstrated how to acquire a badge from Linkedin and install the HTML code in your Blogger blog.

A number of you out there made good of that code and put it to immediate use.

Here’s what you need to know.

Facebook also offers a badge.

Plaxo offers a badge as well.

And Twitter gives you the opportunity to create a window into your tweets right on your blog.

The downside for some of these badges is that they take up a lot of real estate on your blog.

In perusing some of the other blogs out there and getting some insight from my friend Lewis Howes, I discovered a way to shorten down the badges into a few well recognized icons that will still allow your followers to follow you on your favorite social network.

For an example of what I’m talking about, see the sidebar on the right hand side with my social network connections on Linkedin, Facebook and Twitter. I’m still working on YouTube.

Before we talk about putting the connections into your Blogger blog, you will need to collect the social media icons. You can find these icons at a site called Iconspedia. These icons are subject to the creative commons license. While you can use them free of charge, don't alter the image as the logos belong to the respective companies. Still, for promoting your own personal brand and expanding your social networks, they can't be beat.

When you pull up the site, you’ll notice a bunch of different icon classes. The ones that we will use are the social media icons. You can find them by going to the catalog on the left-hand side and locating the “Internet Icons”. When clicked, it will expand to show your options. Click on the entry entitled “Popular” and then you will see a bunch of selections in the middle window pane.

The ones that we’ll use in the next blog post are in the “Social me” entry. Of course there are a number of other interesting entries and you can get innovative when creating the look and feel of your blog. What we will discuss can be transferred to any of the other icons.

But for now, hit the download button and you will begin downloading a zip file with all of the icons listed. For the “Social me” pack, that would be thirty, including icons for Linkedin, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube.

Be sure to place the zip file in a location where you will have easy access, and after it has finished downloading, go to the file location, double click the file and unpack the icons out of the zip file. This should be fairly straight forward, but if you have trouble, leave a message below and let me know.

You will end up with four variations of every icon: one file will be an ICO file type, and the other three will be of file type PNG in three different sizes, 32 pixels, 48 pixels, and 64 pixels wide.

The ones I’m using on the right side bar are 32 pixels wide.

Once you have these icons extracted, come back for the next post when we’ll look at how to put these into your Blogger blog with the appropriate social network.

Good Selling.

Open Multiple Yahoo Accounts In IE8

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 23 Aug 2009 04:26:00 +0000

Gaining Access To Multiple Yahoo Accounts Using IE8

Check out the update to this post on my other site, larryprevost.com.

OK. I logged into my second Yahoo email account recently. I typically login to my catchall account everyday to look at the spam, check email marketing samples, and look for anything of value that may find it’s way into the account. But I login to my “technical” account about once or twice a month.

For the longest time, if you had multiple Yahoo email accounts, you had to log out of the one that you had opened on your machine because Yahoo only allowed access to one email account per machine.

So before I could open a browser window and log into my Yahoo email tech account, I had to log out of my Yahoo catchall account, even if I had the “stay logged in” box unchecked.

Well, I made a mistake two days ago. I was on my laptop logged into my Yahoo email catchall account in IE8 and I opened a second IE8 window and opened the Yahoo site. To my amazement, it didn’t come up with my catchall account logged in.

Out of curiosity, I signed in to my Yahoo email technical account and it allowed me to do that. Furthermore, I was still logged in on my Yahoo email catchall account in the first IE8 browser.

What happened?

I mean, for the longest time, when IE7 was in full bloom and IE8 was nothing more than a sparkle in an engineer’s mind, I could only login to one Yahoo account per machine. Which meant that while I could open up multiple browsers and login to multiple Google accounts simultaneously, Yahoo only allowed me to login to one account on one machine regardless of the number of IE7 sessions I opened.

Now, my Yahoo accounts were behaving almost like my Gmail accounts.

First, I thought it was the new IE8 browser configuration that accounted for the change.

But that didn’t wash. I had another machine still running IE7 and I saw the same behavior on both configurations with Yahoo email accounts.

Then I thought that maybe it was because I also had Firefox and Chrome loaded on my test rig.

But that didn’t make sense either because I had no other browsers on my machine that was running IE7. My Yahoo email accounts still behaved like my Gmail accounts on both machines.

Eventually, I determined that regardless if I was running IE7, IE8, Firefox, or Chrome in combination with Windows XP, Windows Vista Ultimate or Vista Business, Yahoo mail was now behaving more like Google Gmail.

After much brain wracking and gnashing of teeth, I came to the conclusion that it was nothing that I had done. It was something that the good people at Yahoo had done.

Was it a result of the new portal look?

Did it happen after they killed off their personal blog and briefcase services?

Or maybe the team up with Microsoft had something to do with it.

I’m still waiting to hear something from the Yahoo team.

For now, know that if you configure your IE8 browser using the “nomerge” flag, your machine will handle multiple Yahoo email accounts the same way that if handles multiple Gmail email accounts.

Optimizing Blogger Titles For Keywords – Quick Tip For Increasing Your Blog’s Exposure

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 23:46:00 +0000

I came across this little tidbit while doing some other searches on the web concerning lead generation and cold calling.

If you are a sales person, an affiliate marketer or a job seeker, then you probably want to have your blog posts pop up on Google for certain keywords so prospects can take notice of your expertise.

Here are the variables of concern when you are using Google’s publishing tool, Blogger:

Blogger uses the title of your post to create the page file name (the piece of the URL that is right that is between the “/” and the “.html”).

When creating the page file name, Blogger limits the name to the first 39 characters.

After you save the page out with the first page name, you can change the page title to something more catchy to grab people’s attention but it won’t change the page file name.

Search engines look for keywords in the post title, the domain name and the page name, so when you first create your Blogger post, you need to have your keywords within the first 39 characters.

Search engines also determine keyword relevancy by their location in the page title. So you also need to keep your keywords really close to the front of the page title in order to have high relevancy.

So what you find yourself confronted with is a sales engineering problem.

On the one hand, you can write up a page title with all of your keywords within the first 39 characters. The result will be a page name and a page title that will rank very high for your keywords. However, it will look really ugly to people and your audience will probably be more enticed to click on your competitors’ items instead of clicking your entry. And the title broadcasted in your feeds will not induce people to click and read your post either. So what good does it do to get top billing for your keywords if no one wants to click on your post?

On the other hand, you can write a title that looks really enticing to your reader base and makes them drool with anticipation when they see it. However, such language tends to induce a sense of mystery or incite a sense of shock and awe. Such language needs a little more freedom in word placement. The result is that some of your keywords may be placed beyond of the 39-character limit. Net result, your feeds will look enticing, but your organic placement will stink.

So you see the engineering dilemma. You can have very high placement with a title that doesn’t excite your audience very much, or you can have a title that makes your audience drool with excitement if they are willing to skip over to the 10th page of the search engine results.

So needless to say, when you create your Blogger post pages, you will have a little bit of work in front of you.

Here is another challenge. In Blogger, the title for all of your blog posts is preceded by the blog title!

Take a look at this:

This is a test blog I created on Blogger with the title, “The Business of Job Searches”. Notice up on the title bar of the browser is the title of the page. This is typically the same text that’s in the HTML title tag. It's also what the search engines like Google are looking for when determining search relevance.

Notice what happens when I click on a post.

If my keyword is leadership, I should have good organic search results. The word “leadership” is first in my title putting it within the 39 character limit for Blogger page names and way up front in the title. However, notice what is on the browser title bar, “The Business of Job Searches: Leadership Principles in Dale Carnegie Training”

In order to have 100% relevancy as far as the title is concerned, my keywords must appear as the first word of the title. Relevancy will drop to below 60% for keywords that have fallen to the 4th position or further. So the further along in the title a word is located, the less relevant Google considers it. If what I see in the browswer title bar is what’s in my HTML title tag, then I’m in trouble. The relevancy for my keyword, leadership, is going to be below 60%. And it’s all because Blogger places the blog title first before the page title where all of my keywords are located.

I guess there’s some wisdom to having short blog titles.

Turns out that there is a way around this. But you’ll have to do some editing of the HTML that makes up the framework of your blog.

First, get to your Blogger dashboard. As you can see here, I’m back as the ‘EPW Test Dude’ with my blog I created back a few posts ago. Look, it even has 5 posts.

Go to the Layout section:

And then to the ‘Edit HTML’ section

Now you’ll see some pretty ugly stuff. Don’t wig out. The piece that you want to edit is right there in front of you. You don’t have to scroll down or do any kind of search. The piece you want is the following:

This is the piece that essentially writes the blog page title right there in the HTML title tag and puts the title in the title bar of your browser.

What you want to replace that piece of code with is the following code:

<b:if cond=’data:blog.pageType == “index”’>

<title><data:blog.title/></title>

<b:else/>

<title><data:blog.pageName/> | <data:blog.title/></title>

</b:if>

What this piece of code essentially says is, “if the index page is pulled up, also known as the home page or the first page of your Blogger blog, then go ahead and use the blog title in the title of the page and inside the HTML title tags. Otherwise, put the blog post title down first, followed with a "vertical bar" and then with the blog title, stuff all of that inside the HTML title tags and use it as the title of the page.

The result looks like this:

Save the template out by hitting the “Save Template” button below the edit box

Now, when you go look your post, you will see a slight change:

Notice that the blog post title is now first in the title and “Leadership” is now the first word in the title as well as in the page name.

It will take about a week for the results to make their way into the search engines, depending on how often you post and your current traffic. Of course, to increase it relevancy, we’ll have to add some text into the body of the post that has the word leadership. To make it really relevant, we’ll have to add some surrounding text that actually discusses leadership in a way that people find interesting. But for now, celebrate the fact that you now have some power over what’s getting placed in the title tags of your Blogger blog and possibly increasing your organic search results.

Kudos to the guys at Eblog Templates for finding this snippet of code and making it available -- and I’m sure that there are other, more exotic entries out there. I'll let you know as I find them. And I'll keep you updated on what kinds of changes I see in my search results.

Put A Linkedin HTML Signature In Gmail To Make Your Message Stand Out

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 04:40:00 +0000

While perusing my web stats, I noticed that a search kept coming up regarding how to put a LinkedIn button into an email signature, Gmail in particular.

I’ve seen these queries in the past and had even looked into putting some kind of LinkedIn button into the signature file of my Google Gmail messages. While there are email apps that will allow you to use html tags in the signature file, the one downfall of Gmail messaging is that it will only accept text characters in the signature box. It won’t accept HTML tags.

Today, however, I decided to take a quick spin on Google to see what was actually out there. And while I didn’t find a clean solution, I did find “A” solution and a Linkedin function that I had previously forgotten about.

However, this is truly a case of “buyer beware” because this workaround is more of a hack.

While it is simple to do and it will integrate your Linkedin signature with your outgoing Gmail message, this is not a push button configuration.

Here’s what I mean.

With your typical text signature, like the one you’ve typed into the Gmail signature box, the minute you hit the “compose message” button to create your next message, your signature file is automatically loaded into the body of the message before you even start typing.

You set the signature up once and you don’t have to worry about it ever again, until you are ready to change it.

With this particular hack, you have to install it every time you send off an email.

So if you have 15 emails to send off, this activity is what is commonly called overhead and it can be very high, significantly impacting your time management activities.

Do you want to do this activity every time you send out an email? Probably not.

But if you are trying to impress a client, or if you want to push your LinkedIn profile to encourage your certain clients and prospects to connect with you, this could be a useful hack.

Still game? Then read on.

Getting The Linkedin HTML Signature

Turns out that some email apps will allow you to compose a rich signature file. Unfortunately, Gmail is not on that list. Gmail doesn’t support HTML tags in the signature file – yet. However, Gmail will allow you to drag and drop HTML objects into the compose pane. So you can create an email signature that looks real nice in LinkedIn, highlight the whole object, copy it and then past it into the body of the Gmail message.

First, get the signature.

Log into your Linkedin account and scroll down to the bottom of the page:

When you get to the bottom, you will see menu items that are more utilitarian. You want the “overview” link under the “Tools” heading. This will take you to the Linkedin Tools overview page. On this one, get down to the “email Signature” section and hit the “Try it Now” button:

When you hit the “Try it Now” button, you will be taken to the “Create Email Signature” page where you will have an opportunity to create your signature.

Linkedin provides several layouts that you can choose from.

Select your layout that you like. Linkedin will also backfill some of the information, like your name, headline and company. But you will need to supply some additional information like phone number, the address or your company’s website, any additional websites that you have, and your company’s address.

Once you have it set up the way you want, you can transfer it over to your Gmail message.

Bringing over your Linkedin Signature over to your Gmail Message

In another browser window, open our Gmail account. Here we again are using our old standby, the EPW Test Dude.

Go ahead and compose your message as you normally would:

When you have your message composed, go back to the browser holding your Linkedin session and highlight the signature that you just made:

Then, copy the highlighted section:

And then paste it into the body of the message that you have finished composing in your Gmail browser window:

Then, it just a matter of sending it off. When it arrives, it will look something like this:

You’ll notice the funny little boxes in place of the missing graphics. The graphics aren’t gone. They just aren’t being displayed. As with most email programs, the default setup is to not display graphics, so count on your recipient not initially seeing your pictures. However, by merely clicking the link “Display images below” you can make the app display them.

See?

Quick, simple and easy.

However, this is by no means automated. So as I said at the top of this post, you’ll have to repeat the process for every email that you want to send out with the Linkedin profile signature. Not exactly the most heartwarming of thoughts, but it is possible to include a Linkedin profile in our outgoing email.

Kudos to Amit Agarwal at Digital Inspiration for discovering the hack.

How To Add Your Linkedin Profile Button To Your Blogger Blog

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 22 Feb 2009 19:32:00 +0000

In my last post on promoting your Linkedin profile using the Linkedin button, I explained how to grab the Linkedin button code from your profile page. Even had pictures showing how you can make that happen.

Sales people found it very instructional and appreciated the clarity. It saved them time and they didn’t have to go searching around their account looking for stuff. They could go straight to where they needed to go.

However, many of my fellow sales reps have since come to me saying, “Well, I got this code. What do I do with it now? How do I get it into my blog? Why do I want to do this? Can you do it for me?”

If you’ve created your own blog, then adding the Linkedin profile button is very easy. It’s even easier than creating your blog using Blogger. We ran through the steps of creating your blog in the post entitled How To Create A Blogger Blog And Start Creating Sales Leads.

Here is what you do to add your Linkedin profile button on your Blogger blog.

First login to your Google account. After you get logged in, go to www.blogger.com/home. This will get you to your Blogger dashboard where you can select your blog. Once you select your blog, select the “Layout” tab and then click on the “Page Elements” heading.

The Blogger Page Element Layout Section

Find the link that says “Add a Gadget”. You will be adding an element to your blog. Click the link:

Gadget Selection

As you can see, a new window will appear. You will select the type of element to add from what appears in this window. In this instance, hit the plus sign (“+”) next to the element entitled "HTML/JavaScript". This will open up a new window to add in your HTML code:

The Configure HTML/Javascrip Window

Go collect the HTML code from your Linkedin profile page as we talked about in the post entitled Linkedin Profile Enhancement In Less Than 3 1/2 Minutes and paste the code in as shown:

Adding The button Code from Linkedin

Then add a suitable title:

Adding An Appropriate Title for Your Profile

And hit the save button. Your layout page will look like the following:

The New Gadget is Now In The Page Layout

And if you hit the “View Blog” link, you’ll be able to see your blog with your new Linkedin button:

What The Linkedin Profile Button Looks Like On Your Blog

And you are ready to go. Just like I said, so easy even a caveman can do it.

We’ll talk about adding other elements later. But for now, realize that this is yet another step in starting your personal sales lead generation program and promoting your expertise.

How To Create A Blogger Blog And Start Creating Sales Leads

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 04:15:00 +0000

Times are getting tough and we’ve seen the unemployment numbers growing.

I’ve seen more and more people out there on the job market and at job fares looking for something, anything, to keep them moving forward.

Incidentally, I’ve also seen a number of questions from sales people in the Manta sales community asking the same questions about finding suitable leads for prospecting. Questions like, “Where can I find real estate leads?” or “How can I get viable leads for cars?” or “How do I sell my stuff when no one is buying anything?”

This tells me a couple of things.

Sales managers are coming down hard on sales people to produce and increase revenue.

Sales people are looking for ways to increase their production.

Sales people are looking for ways to find viable leads.

Sales people are using the same old tired and unproductive methods of generating those leads.

There are no quick fixes or shortcuts that sales people can take to get them to the top of the mountain. There are no magic words or phrases that a salesperson can utter and have their prospect eating out of their hands. But I do think that there are words and phrases that salespeople can utter that will cost them the sale. I do think that there are things that salespeople can do that will cause their prospects to run to the competition. It’s less about finding shortcuts and more about eliminating bad, inefficient behaviors or ineffective activities.

Here is something to do that will help establish your credibility and reduce some of those bad and inefficient behaviors.

Write a blog.

Yes, maintain a blog. I’ve recommended to several people that if they are looking to generate leads, increase their visibility and enhance their credibility, the best and fastest way to do that is by getting themselves published on the web. When your prospects go to Google looking to solve their problems, you want your name and your solution to pop up. You want their mindshare when they are on the web looking to solve their problems. And these ‘problems’ can be anything from “what should I look for when buying a used car?” to “Where can I find a prospective employee?”

Unfortunately, most sales people don’t write or maintain a blog because they associate blogs with technical wizardry. It takes to much time. It’s too complicated. There’s too much technical trouble involved.

Well, this just isn’t true.

The tools available today make web publishing so easy, even the proverbial caveman can do it.

So if you are just starting out in sales, a seasoned sales veteran, an entrepreneur running a small business or unemployed looking for your next gig, here is a quick and dirty start to blogging using the Google web-publishing tool, Blogger to promoting your ideas and get yourself known.

First, you will need to access your gmail account. Google centralizes all of it various services around specific accounts. So if you have a gmail account, you can access several other Google services and Blogger is one of them.

So sign in to your Google account as if you were signing into your gmail. Then when the Google page comes up, open the page www.blogger.com and sign in using your Gmail name and password. Here I am logging in as my favorite defunct login, epwadmin.

Logging into Blogger

When I get in, you can see that this is my first time. I have no blogs created. The first step is to begin to create your first blog so hit the “create your blog now” button to get started.

The First Step, Getting Started

The next step is naming your blog. Here, you can see that I’ve taken the job hunting route and called the blog “The Business of Job Searches” (hey, job hunting is a sales exercise as well. And very popular right about now).

For the Domain name, I’ve taken the name “Findmeajob”. Here’s where things get a little tricky. You want the Domain Name to reflect the type of business or the interest as closely as possible. It will have a big impact on how your blog pops up on searches when searchers type in their search query.

Creating The Name and Domain Name of your blog

The tricky part arrives when you have a popular search term and someone else has already grabbed that domain name

If your Name is taken, Blogger will tell you to create a new one

So a different Domain Name has to be selected.

Name and Domain Name creation

Domain Name selection can be a critical factor in determining your blog placement when your prospects perform their searches. If I were writing a blog on my expertise on selling cars, then having a domain name containing the words “car” and “sales” would be preferable to a name like “moondog.com”.

Once you have the Domain Name set, type in the word verification. This essentially tells the system that a human being is setting this up and not an automatic bot.

Word Verification

Once you all of the information set up, click the continue button to get to the next page.

Template Selection

Now you have an opportunity to pick a template. This supplies the general look and feel of your blog. Once this is selected, all you have to do in the future is type in your content and not set up each page separately. Don’t worry. You can always select a different template at a later date. For this example, we’ll just select the first template. Once you have the template selected, click continue:

Blog is ready. Time to get started.

And you are done. Now when you click the “start blogging” you are ready to start.

Blogger Content Form

At this point, you can start putting in your content supply a title for your posts in the “Title” box and your content in the bigger box below. And you are in business.

If you click the “view content” link, you will see what your blog looks like to the rest of the world:

The way your Blogger blog appears to the online community

This will get you started building the skeleton of the blog. There will be other considerations such as titles (see the post on what needs to be in the title to make the search engines happy) and content. But it’s been my experience that sales people have more of a challenge just getting started. Why? Because they feel that starting a blog is a technical exercise and they use that to keep them from exploring this avenue for cultivating leads.

Another recommendation here. Under your account, you can set up multiple blogs. I would recommend one of the first domain names you set up be your name.

Next step is to begin writing on your expertise to attract those looking for solutions.

Little Known Blogger Secret That Will Drive The Search Engines Absolutely Bananas!

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 21:58:00 +0000

In working through my last Lotus Notes post here, I noticed something that may be of use to you if you are using the tool, Blogger, to run your blog.
This is where you really start to appreciate some of the work performed by your Friendly Neighborhood Search Engine Marketing Team.
And if you are an independent sales rep, consultant or small businessperson maintaining your own blog for promotional purposes, you definitely don't want to let this optimization tip pass you by.
Check it out.

A Quick SEO Overview
First, a couple of things so you can appreciate and understand the workaround you are about to perform. This section is for the sales rep or the businessperson who knows very little about Search Engine Marketing. If you are familiar with Search Engine Optimization terms, skip down to the Ugly Filename section. But if the mere mentioning of terms like “Keywords” or “domain name” causes you a certain amount of angst, then give a quick glance through the following section.

When you first start talking with a Search Engine Marketing professional, the first thing they will ask you about are your Keywords. These are the words that you are targeting as “yours”. The words that you want to be associated with your business, your website and your blog.
When someone in your target market types these keywords and phrases into the search box on Google, it means that they are looking for something that involves this phrase. You want the search engine to find your site or blog as “extremely relevant” and put it right on the first page of the returned results. For example, let’s say that you are a real estate agent promoting yourself and you are offering prime real estate in San Jose. You want your site, and specifically a page on your site, to pop up when someone types into the search engine, “prime real estate in San Jose”.

Here are 4 things you need to look at to help make this happen:

Your domain name: First secure a domain name that has some collection of your keywords in it. This is the site name that your prospects will type in, and is a part of the URL. In this example, our hypothetical real estate agent would try to secure a name with a combination of real estate and San Jose, like www.sanjoseprimerealestate.com.

Page filename: The next thing to do is to actually have a page on your site with a filename that has some collection of these keywords. You’ve seen this before when improving your profile with Linkedin. Using your name in creating your public profile URL, such as www.linkedin.com/in/dalecarnegie makes your profile a lot more relevant to searched key phrases that include your name, over a profile like www.linkedin.com/in/345892.

Page Content: Then there is the content inside your page. You want to have a good mix of these keywords when you create your copy while making it readable for your clients, visitors and prospects.

MetaTags: Lastly, put your keywords in your Meta Tags. This will have an influence on search engine performance, albeit a small one thanks to some unscrupulous behavior back in the late ‘90s.

That’s a quick overview of using keywords to optimize your online presence and becoming relevant in your prospect’s online search. If you are selling your product or services and you want to take advantage of some of the ‘easy to use’ online publishing tools available to get your business going, these are the first things to look at.

Naturally, there are some other things to consider, but we’ll save those for another day. For now, these 4 elements are enough and the second one in particular, will enable us to improve our performance with Blogger.

Using Blogger With Pretty Titles And Ugly Filenames

Now let’s look at how to increase our site relevancy with Blogger.

First, find the “Enable Post Pages?” variable and set that to “Yes” in order to increase your search engine exposure. This will turn every one of your posts into it’s own page complete with it’s own page filename.

You will find this in the archive menu under the Settings tab in the administrator’s dashboard of your blog.

Once you have this done, Blogger will create a separate html page for each post and it will use the post title to create the filename for that page.

And that’s great!

Except that Blogger will only take the first 39 characters! Any spaces between words will be replaced with a dash and they still count towards your 39 characters!
Complicating matters even more, Blogger only takes full words when creating the filename. So if your title has a word that starts at character 33 and goes to character 41, Blogger will not pick up the first 6 characters of that word for your title. It will remove the word completely, which means your file name is now only 32 characters long.
So here is the challenge. When most of us are promoting our posts through email or an RSS feeder, we typically make the post title presentable to attract people. We want them to click, to read further, and to take some kind of action.
As a result, we typically create a headline for our post title like, “5 ways to create compelling value for your customers with Dale Carnegie Training” or “5 Little Known Sales Secrets using Dale Carnegie Communication Techniques”. While these titles may incite some curiosity from your prospects or visitors, the file name will look something like:

Title: 5 Ways To Create Compelling Value For Your Customers With Dale Carnegie Sales Training
Resulting filename: 5-ways-to-create-compelling-value-for.html

and

Title: 5 Little Known Sales Secrets Using Dale Carnegie Communication Techniques
Resulting filename: 5-Little-Known-Sales-Secrets-using-Dale.html

This is not what you want if your keywords are industry specific words or phrases like “Dale Carnegie Training” or even “sales communication techniques”. These particular keywords never made it into the top 39-character window and they won’t make it into the filename of the post page. Remember, if my prospect types in “Dale Carnegie Training” on Google, then my post will have relevance if “Dale Carnegie Training” is in the copy, but it won’t be nearly as relevant as a page that has relevant content and a filename that includes the phrase “Dale Carnegie Training”.

So you take your key words and you stuff them all in the front of the post title like, “Dale Carnegie Sales Communication techniques” or “Dale Carnegie Sales Training Creates Compelling Value For Customers”. Then the filename of your pages will look like:

Title: Dale Carnegie Sales Communication Techniques
Resulting filename: Dale-carnegie-sales-communication.html

and

Title: Dale Carnegie Sales Training Creates Compelling Value For Customers
Resulting filename: Dale-carnegie-sales-training-creates.html

This is better. The industry specific keywords “Dale Carnegie Sales Training” or “Dale Carnegie Sales Communication” are right there in the page name. Good for optimizing the pages around specific key phrases, but these titles really don’t motivate people to click. They read like the ingredients on a soup can label.

So your Friendly Neighborhood Search Engine Marketing Team has to run a delicate balancing act between people and machines. And if you are a sales rep writing your own blog for self-promotion, then you are that team.
You have to create a title that is optimized so the Search Engine will index it favorably for certain phrases, yet it has to be compelling enough for human beings to take some action when they see it.
Sometimes these two things run counter to each other, especially if you are using the curiosity approach to getting your prospect to click on the title. What you need is a way to insure that your keywords are in the filename, but gives you the freedom to create a compelling headline for your prospects.

A Quick Workaround

Here is a way to get around this challenge and make the system work for you.

When creating your post on Blogger, optimize your post title for your key words so the search engines will find it easily and index it appropriately. That is, put your keywords in the first 39 spaces that you have available. Blogger will use them in your title when you hit the publish button.

Create you content as usual. Use compelling copy but also include your keywords in the body of the copy.

Publish the page as you typically do.

After successfully publishing the page, go back and edit the page. This time type in a title that potential prospects will find interesting and compelling.

Republish the page.

Now your post will have a filename that is different from your post title. For example, I could have a filename like:

Dale-carnegie-sales-training-creates.html

But I can rewrite my post title to read like:

5 Explosive Techniques To Drive Your Sales! Dale Carnegie Sales Training Reveals How!

So now there is appealing candy for the Search Engines and appealing candy for human prospects as well. This should give you an edge when you publish your blog posts.
Oh, one more thing to keep in mind. Search Engines also place a high degree of importance on where your keywords are placed in your copy.
So that title that you just rewrote to make more compelling for your human readers still needs to have those keywords somewhere in it.
Isn’t balance fun?

Convert DOCX Files to DOC Files Using These 3 Quick Methods

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 06:00:00 +0000

The other day, one of the Inside Sales Team approached me with a request. He said that a client of his had sent him a document in a format that he couldn’t open on his system. He said, “I got this document that I can’t open, my computer is asking to go online to find a program to open the file. It’s in a DOCX format. What the heck is that?”
Well, boys and girls, DOCX is Microsoft’s new format used by MS Office 2007. The format is XML compliant and can’t be opened by the older versions MS Office, in particular, older versions of MS Word.
However, if you have MS Office 2007, you can save the document out in the older DOC format to be backward compatible. Since the DOCX format is the native format for Office 2007, you’ll have to make a conscious effort to save out your document in the older format.
Now, it’s not always convenient to say to a client, “Hey, I’m still using the older version of MS Word and don’t want to cough up the $500 bucks to buy the latest version of MS Office. Could you save your document in the older format?” Doesn’t leave the best impression in the minds of your client.
However, there are some options you have at your disposal:

Download and install the Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack for 2007 Office. If you are using Microsoft Windows XP or Vista with an older version of the Microsoft Office suite, you can load the Compatibility pack from here to give your older version of Word the ability to open the newer format. Get it here at the Microsoft website.
Use Gmail. For all of you Lotus Notes users out there, you probably received a DOCX document at some point in your life, saved it to your system and said, “Great! Now what?” Here’s what you can do. Forward it to your gmail account (or if you are already forwarding all of your Lotus Notes email to your gmail account, simply login to your gmail account) and open the email. Because the DOCX format is based on the XML standard, gmail will let you open the document and view it in a browser window. Yep, if you need to see that document right away, simply open your email in gmail, scroll down to the attachment, click on the link that says, “View as HTML” and the document will open in a browser window. It won’t have all of the pretty pictures and if the document uses textboxes, those text boxes will be treated as images and you won’t see them. Not exactly the best solution, but it will retain some of the formatting and it will give you a quick peek at what your client is sending you allowing you to respond quickly.
Use one of the online conversion tools. A few of organizations out there that have recognized a need in the online community. I’m talking about how to convert files from one format to another without spending $200 or more to buy the original software. How valuable would it be to you to have the capability to convert a DOC file into a PDF file to send to one client, a DOCX file to send to another, and then turn it into a JPG file to drop onto your website? The good folks at Zamzar have recognized this need in the community and have created a service to allow you to do exactly that type of conversion. And, it’s free, with certain restrictions, of course. If you are plan on doing over 100 MB of file conversion, you’ll have to pay for the service. But for those few documents that we sales people need, this service can be a godsend. And it’s pretty simple and straightforward to use. Seriously. Even a caveman can do it. You can find the site here at zamzar.com.

New Internet Explorer Security Exploit Update

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 02:57:00 +0000

Microsoft has released a patch for Internet Explorer. Apparently, there was enough of a concern for them to move outside of their regular patch schedule.
If you are using IE7 on Windows XP with SP2 or SP3, you can find the patch here.
If you are using IE7 on Windows Vista or Vista with SP1, you can find that here.
If you are running Internet Explorer on any other configuration, you can find your configuration on the Microsoft Security Bulletin MS08-078 here.
If you are running any combination of Internet Explorer on a Microsoft Operating system, you are strongly encouraged to install the patch.
Original article update here:
Microsoft Releases Critical Internet Explorer Patch

New Internet Explorer Security Exploit

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 16:03:00 +0000

When I was a kid, I remember reading a story about a chicken that got bonked on the head by a falling acorn and she thought that the sky was falling. Chicken Little then went around to every animal she could find proclaiming that “the sky was falling”. The result was a small panic spreading throughout the farm, until one of them looked up and saw that the sky was still exactly where it started that morning.
I’d like to say that this report is a “Chicken Little” event, but it has just the right amount of paranoia that says, “maybe, this time, the sky is falling”. I’m talking about the new flaw found in Internet Explorer.
Originally thought to be confined to IE7, it now seems to encompass everything from IE5 to the latest beta release of IE8. This exploit also appears to have been bought, sold and employed since about October.
If you are into the technical details from Microsoft Technet or looking for sites to avoid, you can find them here.
If you are running IE7 MS suggest that you turn on Data Execution Prevention. What this essentially does is marks certain memory locations as protected (as in locations that only the OS should have access to) and if a piece of code attempts to write to those locations (malicious or otherwise) DEP will shut the program down and send you an alert.
To turn on DEP in your Windows XP system, open your control panel and click on the “System” icon. The "System Properties" window will come up.
Click on the "Advance" tab, go down to the "Performance" section and click on the “Settings” button. This will bring up the "Performance Options".
Under the "Performance Options" window, click the "Data Execution" tab. Make sure to select the radio button next to “Turn on DEP for all programs and services except those I select”.
Then hit the “Apply” button. Your system will request a reboot before the changes take effect.
While this may be a stopgap measure, I don’t think it is a true solution. If it were, we wouldn’t see the level of concern from the security experts or even Microsoft.
Current recommendation is to use one of the other browsers out there (Firefox, Chrome, or Safari) until MS issues a suitable patch.
Current projected assumption, based on Microsoft’s past patch schedule puts this at Jan 13, 2009.

Reference articles are here from washingtonpost.com:

Microsoft Investigating Reports of New IE7 Exploit

Microsoft: Big Security Hole in All IE Versions

Article from Chris Null on Yahoo