Google does something similar with their “This web site may harm your computer” warnings. Although Google only does it when a web site has been infected. Technorati assumes that old WP blogs will be infected, it’s just a matter of time, so why not block them right away…

So if you haven’t yet upgraded to 2.3.3 (latest version in the 2.3 branch) or the brand spanking new 2.5, then your blog will no longer be updated in Technorati.

Although Technorati is no longer a “must-have” for bloggers, they still send some traffic.

Share This

Share This

I’ve been running the release candidates of 2.5 on another smaller blog for a while, and the code has become significantly more stable during that time. But as usual you should expect a 2.5.1 bug fix release within a few weeks (after the developers have had some time to catch up on their sleep).

The focus for this release is on the admin side of WordPress. The new admin interface takes some time to get used to, but now I like it. It has a lot of new features which simplifies the life of a blogger.

You can read the official announcement and a description of all the new features here.

Share This

Is was shopping for a new web host recently and I came across several companies offering “green” servers. I wondered if that was just Greenwashing, or if it’s a real benefit.

“Green” is of course a poorly defined term. The manufacturing of computers is a very toxic business. (Tangent: Cringely had an interesting column on how all our electronics are going to fail now that lead has been removed from the solder that holds electronic components together.) But for this post I’m going to focus on “green” as it relates to keeping a server running, i.e. reducing the amount of energy required.

Moore’s Law is an observation that computer processors become twice as fast and half as large every two years. One of the main challenges for chip designers to keep making chips faster and smaller is heat: the faster a processor runs the more heat it generates, and the smaller the chip is the more concentrated the heat is. This is why we have heat sinks and cooling fans on processor chips.

One way to reduce the amount of heat generated is to make the processor work less. This may sound like a pat answer, but when you think about it most processors probably spend most of their time just spinning cycles. For example, right now while I’m thinking about the next sentence I’m about to write, my computer could just as well take a micro-nap. Even between key strokes there is plenty of time for a processor to take nano-naps.

Chances are that your web server is not doing all that much most of the time. Even if you have 10,000 page views per day, most of the time the server is just waiting for the next incoming request. If you have a really large site with multiple servers to handle peak loads, that probably means whole servers are being underutilized at, say, 2 a.m. Several of the Fortune 500 companies I’ve consulted for had disaster recovery sites on “hot standby” (i.e. servers running, ready to go, but not actively doing anything) just in case a disaster would strike their primary hosting facility. Talk about energy waste.

A good way to approximate turning off your server between page requests is to use shared or virtual hosting instead of a dedicated server. On these hosting plans many web sites share the same physical server and it’s unlikely that all web sites are going to see a burst of activity at exactly the same time.

Green Web Hosting?

Since the web hosting company has to pay for the energy required to power all the servers in their data center, as well as the cost to keep them cool, you would think that it’s in their best interest to purchase the most energy efficient computers available. Unlike food, where green/organic can be more expensive to produce, web hosting services that are green should be cheaper.

But instead of using low cost in their marketing, green web hosting companies have gone a couple of steps further: some data centers are run entirely on wind or solar energy, some will purchase carbon emission offsets on your behalf to offset the pollution your server creates, others will plant trees on your behalf. Next time you’re looking for web hosting, take a look at the green alternatives.

How green is your web site?

Share This

Therefore math geeks are of course celebrating Pi Day today.

Share This

How exciting do people think is this? On the day of the launch Apple’s servers were totally bogged down by all the traffic. It took me 7 hours to just download the SDK… Four days after the launch Apple announced that the SDK had already been downloaded 100,000 times.

As the author of 101 iPhone Tips & Tricks, I’m fielding several calls per day from companies that want real iPhone applications developed today. To help developers and projects find each other I have created a new community web site called iPhoneIncubator.com. Here you can post your resume or project for free.

Not just for developers

My new web site is not just for developers. Do you have an idea for an application that you would like to see on your iPhone? Brainstorm with other community members. Maybe a developer will pickup your idea and make it reality.

If you have an idea for a new iPhone product that you want created for you and which you can sell, you can probably find a developer on iPhoneIncubator.com. (Now the site is just launched and iPhone developers are beginning to discover it.) The benefit is that the site is 100% focused on the iPhone, and you don’t have to wade through hundreds of PHP developers like you would on eLance, Rent-a-coder, etc.

If you have a really big idea, the premier Silicon Valley venture capital firm KPCB has put up a $100M (yes, that is one hundred million dollars) to fund iPhone related development.

Check out my site at http://iPhoneIncubator.com

Amazing business opportunity

One Apple’s genius moves with the iPhone is the App Store. This will be the one central location where all iPhone applications will be sold. As an Internet business owner you are always struggling to get traffic to your site to sell your products. Here Apple is serving you 10 million iPhone owners on a silver platter.

Have you drunk the kool-aid? Are you jumping on the iPhone racehorse?

Share This

What’s New?

Here are some of the major new features:

• The admin pages have been extensively overhauled. They have a new, more “web 2.0” look.
• Avatars are supported in comments. By default Gravatars, recently purchased by Automattic (the company behind much of the WP development), is supported.

Not Another Upgrade…

I know it wasn’t long since you upgraded to 2.3.3 (I hope you did!) There are always bugs that slip into major releases and they are fixed in the next point version. Here’s a look at the history of major WordPress releases:

As you can see from the history there is a new major release every 5-6 months, and a bug fix coming about 30 days later.

I want to focus on blogging. Do I have to upgrade?

If you’re not worried about keeping up with the Joneses in terms of sporting the latest and greatest WordPress software and plugins, then by all means stay on version 2.3.3. (If you’re on a version prior to 2.3.3 you should upgrade immediately due to security issues in all prior WordPress versions.)

The WordPress developers typically maintain the two latest major branches. That means 2.3.x code will be kept up to date with the latest security fixes as long as 2.5.x is the most current release. Once 2.6 is released (planned for July 7, 2008) the 2.3 branch will probably be orphaned and you would be highly advised to upgrade.

I want to be on the bleeding edge

Ok, come along for the ride…

1. Do a complete backup your blog. See my video tutorial.
2. There are not many theme related changes in 2.5 so most themes should continue to work. But there are some extensive changes to the plugin API, so some plugins are going to break. Check your theme and plugins against the known working/not working lists: Theme Compatibility and Plugin Compatibility. If your theme/plugin is on the not working list, then you should change your theme and delete the incompatible plugins. If your theme/plugin is not listed as not working, then that’s not a guarantee that it will work. You may be the guinea pig for testing and reporting any issues.
3. I recommend that you don’t start with upgrading your live blog; you are bound to get some unhappy readers while you’re upgrading and fixing any issues that come up. Instead restore your backup to a new location, e.g. yourdomain.com/backupblog, and also restore the database to a different instance, e.g. wpbackup. Use this backup instance of your blog to upgrade and test things out first. Once you’re happy with how everything is working, then upgrade your live blog. I’ll have a video tutorial on this soon.
4. Disable all plugins.
5. Upload the new 2.5 WordPress files.
6. Run the upgrade script: /wp-admin/upgrade.php
7. Test your blog and enable plugins one by one.
8. Write a post telling the world that you are running the latest and greatest WordPress software.

Lorelle has another good checklist of things to do before upgrading to 2.5.

What am I going to do?

I will upgrade one or two of my test blogs to make sure that the products I’m developing related to WordPress still work with 2.5. I will wait to upgrade this blog until 2.5.1 comes out. By then most of the initial bugs should be fixed and the plugins I can’t live without should also be upgraded to work with 2.5.

What are you going to do?

Share This

This file is a QuickTime movie. If you don’t have the free player you can download it here.

Previously I’ve used Camtasia Studio to make video tutorials. I’ve now moved to the Mac and this is the first time I’m using Mac tools to create a video tutorial. Please leave a comment on this post not just about the content of the video, but also the quality. I’d really appreciate it.

Share This

But bad guys are fanatical tester too, and over time they have improved significantly. Here’s a recent one I received from “Chase”.

Here’s another one from “PayPal”.

Both emails have authentic images in them, and in the case of the PayPal logo it is served by PayPal’s own servers. If you click on some of the images you will be sent to the authentic Chase/PayPal site. But if you click on the “money link” you will of course end up on a phishing site. I haven’t examined these particular sites, but on this front they are also getting more sophisticated. For example the “Resolution Center” link goes to a domain called paypal-secure-login.com, which almost sounds like it could be an official PayPal site.

Neither email was caught by spam filters.

These emails are both in English. Recently there have been ads on underground message boards looking for people with specific language skills. Soon you will see phishing emails targeting specific countries in their native language.

Does anyone fall for these phishing scams? If it costs $100 to send out one million of these emails, and we assume that 1 in a 100 is sent to a recipient who actually has an account with the target bank. If the proverbial one-in-a-million falls for the scam, then the scammers would have to clean out $10,000 from that bank account to break even. After many years of testing and tweaking I’m sure the bad guys have achieved much better conversion rates than my conservative estimates, making it a very profitable business.

Here are some tips to spot phishing attempts and to avoid getting robbed:

• Banks never send out emails asking you to confirm your account information.
• Never click on a link to login to your bank account. Always type in the URL into your browser every time.
• Don’t trust the phone. Using cheap VoIP technology phishers are now asking you to call a phone number to verify your account information. There are also reports of outbound calls.

Should you report these phishing emails to your bank? I don’t think that’s a worthwhile effort. According to a recent security report, shutting down individual phishing sites is as futile as the whack-a-mole games at amusement parks.

Update: For more details on this particular PayPal phishing email see: F-Secure and thoughts.com.

Share This

I know you have heard all this before and you’re probably paying as much attention to me now as you did the other times someone told you to exercise more. So why am I telling you this? I’m one of the developers behind a cool little program called xFit. It’s a complete workout program in your phone. It contains 50 exercises that use your body weight as the resistance. No equipment is needed.

Incidentally one of the company founders is currently in Antarctica. Down there it’s obviously a little bit hard to get to the local gym. And bringing your own Bowflex or Stairmaster is not really an option either. Here’s a picture of Joel doing one of the xFit body weight exercises in a very remote location:


To check out if xFit is available for your phone and to download a free trial of xFit goto: www.mobileXware.com

If you decide to purchase the program, use the promo code “nick” and you’ll get a 20% discount. I’m not sure how long they’re going to run this “friends and family” promotion, so if you’re interested in a new and easy way to get some exercise into your daily routine, check it out now.

Share This

Jay is a legendary marketer who coined the phrase Guerrilla Marketing and is the author of over a dozen books. The idea behind Guerrilla Marketing is to get great results with a very limited marketing budget. Jay thought his book “Guerrilla Marketing for Free” was the final say on the topic of low budget marketing.

But the Guerrilla Balance Sheet takes this to a new level by encouraging you to get paid for your marketing. The report is 61 pages long and contains a lot of fluff and build-up to get to the point. The core idea of the report however, is quite interesting.

The main idea

You should look at every expense on your balance sheet and turn it into an income instead. Now this may sound redicilous, but it’s something most major marketers have been doing with their marketing costs for years. They have a front-end offer, for example a low-priced report, that is designed to just break even or turn only a small profit. The main goal of the front-end offer is to get new leads to which they can sell their very profitable back-end offers. And instead of giving the front-end report away for free, they charge a small fee for it. Thus turning a marketing expense into an income.

Who’s doing this?

Here are some other examples from the report of companies turning their expenses into income:

• Las Vegas casinos used to have the $1.99 buffet as a loss leader just to bring people into their casino. Now they charge a reasonable fee for the buffet so they can afford to serve good food and turn a profit.
• Ever seen the little Black Jack cheat cards you can buy in the souvenir shop? First you pay money to buy the cheat card and then you go to the casino to play Black Jack with your “new skills”, and probably loose more money.
• A company needed to buy new and expensive equipment to comply with new environmental regulations. Instead of viewing this as a huge expense, the company rented out the equipment to neighboring companies who also needed to comply with the new regulations. Thus turning a large expense into a new stream of income.
• The Transformers movie - a two and a half hour commercial for toys and GM cars that people happily paid $10 to see.

Front-end, Back-end and Never-end

The URL for the report is www.FeBeNe.com which stands for Front-end, Back-end and Never-end. Of course the report itself is a perfect example of a Front-end marketing piece that generates a profit for the authors. It’s not clear yet to me what the Back-end and Never-end (continuity, subscription, membership, etc) offers are. I’m sure the authors did not put in all this effort in order to just sell a $7 report.

Who is this for?

I enjoy reading about new marketing ideas so for me it was a worthwhile time-investment to read the report. If you’re just starting out then you should focus on more fundamental things to get your business up and running. If you have some income coming in and you want learn how to start thinking about turning all those pesky expenses into income, then I recommend this report.

Here’s the URL: www.FeBeNe.com

Share This

Search existing posts

1. Goto Manage Posts in the WordPress admin section.
2. In the “Search terms…” field enter one of the following:
   • iframe
   • script
   • href
3. Click “Filter”

This will show any posts that contain the above HTML keywords. Unless you’re writing about HTML your posts will probably not contain these keywords. If they do show up in a post and it’s something that you wrote, don’t worry about it. The presence of these keywords are an indicator that someone else may have injected something into your posts. But if you wrote it, then you’re fine.

The reason I search for these particular keywords is that an attacker usually wants to gain something from your blog: a way to install badware on your visitors’ computers (iframe), a blanket way to manipulate your blog output (script), or a simple link (href).

Search existing comments

Repeat the above procedure for comments on the Comments admin page.

View HTML

Visit your blog and view the HTML source. Search for the same iframe, script and href keywords on a couple of different types of pages:

• Home page
• And individual post
• Your about page

There will be a lot of matches on the href keyword, but the links should all go to your own blog or other places that you know you have linked to. If you find links to web sites that hawk various body enlargement pills, then you have probably been compromised.

Google AdWords and other advertisement networks often use JavaScript includes. So does BlogRush. If you trust the network, then there is no reason to worry about these script statements.

Iframes are sometimes legitimately used by affiliate promotions, for example Amazon product links. Again if you trust the vendor you’re fine. Earlier in the week I wrote about a current exploit which adds an iframe to the wp-stats-php.info site. If you see any such iframes, that’s really bad.

Google Webmaster Tools

Google supposedly marks pages that have been banned from their index due to malware in their Webmaster Tools. You should definitely have a Google Webmaster Tools account to get information on how Googlebot sees your web site and lots of useful search statistics. The banned page indication is an extra bonus.

Repeat Often

You should repeat all the above procedures on a regular basis. I know that’s a pain! But dealing with a compromised blog is much worse. Compared to the countless hours you spend on writing great blog posts and engaging in conversations with your readers, it doesn’t take that much time to keep your blog safe.

Share This

Over the past couple of weeks this is what has happened to many WordPress blog owners. Forums are filled with desperate and bewildered bloggers who don’t know what happened or how to fix the problem.

The root cause of these problems is a bug in a WordPress file called xmlrpc.php. This is not the first, nor the last, WordPress security issue. But in this case the bad guys are systematically exploiting the bug.

Automated scripts scan the Internet for vulnerable WordPress blogs. When they find one, a small snipped of HTML is added to an old blog post. This HTML snippet is an IFRAME that retrieves data from a server with the innocent looking name wp-stats-php.info. At first glance this may look like some server collecting WordPress stats. It isn’t. This web site, seemingly based in China, is part of the growing underground economy of badware. Their role in the ecosystem is to install IFRAMES on as many web sites as possible. They will then most likely sell their “iframe service” to another company that wants to install a small piece of bad software on as many computer as possible. Currently it looks like the payload they are distributing is a virus. But it could easily be changed to a trojan keylogger or a program that turns your computer into a node in a botnet. Pretty bad stuff; so Google is right in warning users from visiting hacked sites.

But what does that mean to you as a WordPress blogger?

With the millions of WordPress blogs out there, these criminals have found fertile ground for their exploits. Unless you have updated your WordPress blog to the latest version - 2.3.3 - you are exposed to this threat.

I know that I may sound like yet another security expert crying wolf again. In this case the threat is very real. Just ask one of the many bloggers who have been affected. In the very linked blogosphere it’s just a matter of time before the bad guys follow the links to your blog.

Here are some recent horror stories, should you need more convincing:

• Lost Art Of Blogging
• papaflyfilms.com
• BPWrap
• Tom Sommer’s Weblog
• Richard Palace
• More…
• Yet more…

Even if the current outfit behind wp-stats-php.info is shutdown, there are others who are gearing up their operations.

What should you do?

1. Backup your WordPress files and database
2. Upgrade to WordPress 2.3.3
3. Check your blog to make sure you haven’t already been infected

If you have done many customizations to your blog (theme and/or plugins) and you’re afraid something will break with the upgrade to 2.3.x, then at least install the latest version of the xmlrpc.php file. You can download it here and just FTP it over the existing file in your root WordPress directory.

More to come on this topic…

Share This

This is an example of an AWeber link with several personal information fields added as parameters:
http://www.tipstrickstoolstechniques.com/aweber/personalize.php?n={!firstname_fix}&e={!email}&c={!geog_city}&r={!geog_region}&o={!geog_country}


Use the “Personalization Field” drop-down in AWeber when you’re composing your message to insert the special {! } codes. The exact spelling of these codes is important. But the names of the URL parameters are arbitrary. I like to keep them short, hence the “n”, “e”, “c” and “r” in the example above. If “name” makes more sense to you, then use that. Just make sure that the names you use in the email match what your landing page is expecting.

Since this link is pretty long an unsightly it’s best used with HTML emails. The complete HTML link may look like this:

<p>Check out <a href="http://www.tipstrickstoolstechniques.com/aweber/personalize.php?n={!firstname_fix}&e={!email}&c={!geog_city}&r={!geog_region}&o={!geog_country}">this page</a>.</p>


On your landing page you need to grab these URL parameters and insert them into your text. Here’s an example using PHP:

<html>
<head>
<title>Welcome <?php print $_GET['n'] ?></title>
</head>
<body>
<h1><?php print isset($_GET['n']) ? $_GET['n'] : 'You' ?> may be missing sales every day...</h1>
<p>Internet business entrepreneurs in <?php print isset($_GET['r']) ? $_GET['r'] : 'your state' ?> are already using our system to improve their business.</p>
<p><?php print isset($_GET['n']) ? $_GET['n'] . ', will' : 'Will' ?> you be the first in <?php print isset($_GET['c']) ? $_GET['c'] : 'your city' ?> to take advantage of this new system?</p>
<p>Thousands of customers all over <?php print isset($_GET['o']) ? $_GET['o'] : 'your country' ?> cannot be wrong...</p>
</body>
</html>


And this is what the customer would see when they click on the link in the email:

Nick may be missing sales every day…
Internet business entrepreneurs in CO are already using our system to improve their business.
Nick, will you be the first in Denver to take advantage of this new system?
Thousands of customers all over United States cannot be wrong…

The isset code is used to display a default alternative should the parameter not be set. This way you can use the same landing page for other traffic sources than emails sent by AWeber. Here’s what the page looks like without any URL parameters:

You may be missing sales every day…
Internet business entrepreneurs in your state are already using our system to improve their business.
Will you be the first in your city to take advantage of this new system?
Thousands of customers all over your country cannot be wrong…

You can also use this technique to pre-populate a form. The code looks like this:

<form method="POST" action="#">
<table>
<tr><td>Name</td><td><input name="name" value="<?php print $_GET['n'] ?>"/></td></tr>
<tr><td>Email</td><td><input name="email" value="<?php print $_GET['e'] ?>"/></td></tr>
</table>
</form>

Now all the customer has to do is click the submit button to sign-up to whatever you’re selling. Some customers may find this level of personalization too creepy. So you’d have to test it to make sure it doesn’t hurt your conversion. Or you can take it even further. Add a little bit more code to the page and you can have it autosubmit if the right parameters are passed in on the URL. The customer would see a link in the email like “Click here to sign-up to this free webinar”, and when she clicks on the link, the page shown would be the thank you page saying “Thank you Jane for signing up”.

Note that there are a couple of drawbacks with this technique:

• You cannot combine personalized links with AWeber’s link tracking.
• If you add an email address inside a link, that gives you a 0.4 penalty in Spam Assassin.
• Always test any changes against a control. Personalization is no exception. In some markets it will likely increase your conversion, but in others it may very well turn off some of your customers.

This was the second preview from the upcoming special report on AWeber Tips and Tricks. Sign-up to the blog notification list (by the big pointing hand in the top-right of this page) to receive a special offer when the report is released.

Share This

One campaign I was running was doing fairly well, or so I thought until I happened to see the confirm opt-in rate: more than half of the prospects who entered their name and email address on the lead capture form did not confirm their email address. Ouch!

Here are two ways that you can check the confirmed opt-in rate in Aweber:

Search Leads

1. From the Home page first select the list.
2. In the table “Quick Lead Stats” on the Home page there are two columns called Today and Yesterday. The numbers in these two columns are links for the selected list. Click one of them.
3. On the following page you will see a list of all your new leads for that day along with their confirmed opt-in status. Leads that have not confirmed their email address are indicated with the text “Unverified” in bright red. Here you can eyeball the ratio of confirmed leads. To get the exact number you can do an advanced query using the field name “Verification Status”.

Reports

1. Select the Reports tab.
2. The default report “Daily New Leads” will show you both in a graph and in table form the number of Subscribed and and the number of Unverified leads per day.
3. The “Verified Leads” report shows you Subscribed and Unverified leads for the past 30 days, along with their percentages.
4. The “Verification Times” report is an interesting graph. It shows how quickly leads verify their email address. In the example below 50% of the leads verify their email address within about 5 minutes, and within 12 hours 90% have done so. Keep in mind that these percentages do not include leads who never verify their email address.

This AWeber tip is an extract from an upcoming special report.

Share This

This month’s report focuses on the task of keeping affiliates and partners engaged and fired up to promote your product or services. If you have ever tried to recruit affiliates for your products you know how difficult it is. Yanik gives several good tips on what really motivates top affiliates. No it’s not money…

To bring it from the theoretical to the practical and actionable, Yanik gives a full insider view of one of his latest campaigns, and a peek into a few other high-profile launches. All the JV emails are listed (some of it feels redundant) with his commentary and explanations of why he used certain incentives and specific phrases. All in all, it’s a great lesson in psychology.

Next topic is going from testimonials to case studies in your sales letters. And Yanik gives you the exact wording you should use when you’re collecting testimonials to allow you to use them the right way.

Finally there are a few pages on how to uncover hidden benefits and letting prospects sell themselves on a product. Rich Schefren used this technique in his latest launch, as have many others, so it’s not really a secret. But now I understand the psychology behind it. Very smart!

Unfortunately I cannot reveal more details about the contents, because you have to sign a non-disclosure agreement when you become a member. So far I’ve received two monthly dossiers and they have both provided a lot more value than the (rather hefty) monthly fee.

You can get a one month free trial here: www.undergroundsecretsociety.com

Share This

All previous customers have already received this update for Free. Now is your chance to get it before the prices go up (knowing any future updates are also covered).

Here are some of the new things you will learn:

• Customizing Your Home Screen
• How to make a Web Clip of a section of a web page
• A cool way to use photos of your friends as Web Clip icons
• Creating a Web Clip as a speed dial
• A great source of over 600 iPhone web applications
• A new feature in the Text Application that can be rather costly
• Two surprising restrictions with iTunes movie rentals
• The first DVD that implements iTunes Digital Copy
• How to automatically find and import lyrics for your iTunes songs
• The Gmail update that could inadvertently delete your emails

The 1.1.3 update is probably the most significant change to the iPhone since its release. With an update of this magnitude some bugs naturally sneak in. Here are some of the most common problems:

• You’re unable to upgrade to 1.1.3
• The cryptic error message "Pairing Record Missing"
• Text message conversations getting out of order
• Voicemail is silent
• Sound from the iPhone is missing altogether
• Some Bluetooth devices no longer talk to your iPhone

The 101 iPhone Tips & Tricks ebook has the solutions and workarounds for them.

To celebrate this 1.1.3 update I’m offering a special price on the ebook: a 42% discount! But only for the next 113 hours. So hurry and get your ebook now and start learning the insider tips and tricks of the new features of 1.1.3. Here’s the special URL to get the discount:

www.iPhoneTipsTricks.com/113

Share This

Tip of the hat to David Krane.

Share This

• Andy Jenkins, Anik Singal and Nathan Anderson on Search Engine Optimization
• Rosalind Gardner on Affiliate Marketing
• Brian Voiles on Copywriting
• Jack Humphrey on Critical Mass Promotion
• Willie Crawford on Article Marketing
• Mark Joyner - “What’s Coming Soon… Profits or Disaster?”
• And about 20 others

There is no such thing as a free product, so don’t spend the next 100 hours of your life listening to all this audio content just because you don’t have to hand over any money for it. Use the just-in-time learning methodology. For example: If you are just about to host your first teleconference then look at the available content and you’ll find a presentation by expert Gary Nuckles. Search for and use the information only when you need it.

You can sign up to The Impact Factor here.

Share This

Unless you send your emails as HTML most autoresponder services cannot report how many of your emails were opened by their recipients. I know that this tracking is not very accurate since many email clients block the tracking image or HTML. But we’re not primarily interested in absolute numbers; trends are more important.

Here are some important findings you can learn from the tracking data:

• If fewer and fewer of your emails are being opened over time or as your autoresponder series progresses, then you are probably not providing enough value in your emails for your readers.
• The subject line of an email is your sales letter that tries to convince the recipient to open the email. Look at your subject lines together with the percentage of recipients who opened the email. This will help you craft better subject lines.
• What is the optimal frequency of sending emails to your list? Keep an eye on the open rate to get early warnings of email fatigue.

2. Real Links

Instead of having to resort to text like http://www.something.com/page.html and hoping that the email client will automagically convert the text to a clickable link, you can create normal HTML links just like you do on your web site.

With normal HTML links it’s easier to embed web analytics tracking code. It looks better and you don’t have to worry about the link text breaking across two lines.

3. Looks Better

Hard line breaks made sense in the 60’s and maybe the 70’s when terminals had a fixed character width. But who has a screen these days that can only display 65 characters per line?

Even my phone displays HTML emails better than preformatted text with hard line breaks. Lines and paragraphs flow they way they should, and don’t suddenly break off in the middle of the screen.

With HTML you can use headlines and emphasize text without having to resort to ALL CAPS, stars or other unreadable characters. Would you have made it this far in this post if there were no headlines or other normal typographical items to rest your eyes on?

4. Branding

Without going overboard with HTML you can add the color scheme of your website to your emails, reinforcing your brand identity. If you decide to add your logo or any other images make sure that the email looks ok without the images since many email clients block images by default.

In a world where 99% of the marketers only send you plain text messages you have a chance to stand out with professional looking emails.

Example

To see a very simple example, sign up to the email notification list in the top right corner of this page. Each time I publish a new blog post you will receive an HTML announcement email.

Are you sending your autoresponder emails as HTML? Why not?

Share This

Remember: A business is a profitable system that works without you.

To get where you want to go you need a plan. Not a complicated fifty page document that takes months to write. Just a single page business plan that crystallizes your offerings and keeps you on track towards your goals. One of the few business planning books that Terry recommends reading is: The One Page Business Plan by Jim Horan.

Finding your audience

Spending a lot of time and money on creating an information product that nobody wants to buy is very frustrating. Believe me; been there, done that. You need to identify a market where people have a problem, they know they have a problem and they are willing to spend money solving it.

For this I highly recommend Virtually FoolProof Method of Choosing Slam Dunk Markets. It’s only $10. A small price to pay for avoiding going too far down a dead-end path.

Develop your core message

The Internet business marketplace is becoming increasingly competitive. Why should anyone listen to you? Why should they give their hard earned money to you?

Take a closer look at the blogs that you read most often. Does the author have a distinct personality that comes through in the writing? Strong opinions about something? A good background story? You might even call it a brand.

Any “me too” message is not going to get you very far.

Develop your product base

Have you already developed your first information product? Congratulations! That’s a great start, and it puts you ahead of 99% of the wannabes. But one product is not an Internet business.

Here are the four different types products and price-levels that Terry recommends every information business should have:

1. Entry Products
2. Bread-And-Butter Income
3. High Ticket Items
4. Continuity Income

Analyze high-profile marketers

The newsletter finished with an analysis of four well known Internet businesses, breaking down their brands, products and offerings into the categories described above.

• Dan Kennedy
• Ron Legrand
• Jimmy Brown
• Stephen Snyder

The verdict

As usual Terry delivers great, actionable content. The key here is action. Information without action is worthless. If you take action and answer all 17 questions in the newsletter, you will be well on your way to creating a real Internet business.

This month’s newsletter felt a little scattered. The information is there, but I had to read it a couple of times to put it together and create my own action plan.

Instant gratification

Typically monthly newsletters like this are only delivered as a physical product. Starting this month Terry is experimenting with digital delivery in addition to mailing you the newsletter. When you sign up now, you get the instant gratification of being able to download the January newsletter immediately. But back issues will still not be available. So if you want the information on how to create a real Internet BUSINESS, then you need to go to www.MonthlyMentorClub.com now.

Share This

As an Internet business owner you’re probably used to the reputable email services run by companies like Aweber and Get Response, to name just two. They are very strict on their double opt-in requirements to lock out any spammers thinking about using their services. Their initial fees when you have a small list is a very reasonable $20 per month (approximately). But if you want to send emails to one million recipients were talking over $1,000 per month.

Now if you have a legitimate mailing list of one million people, then you have yourself quite an Internet business, and $1,000 per month to communicate with them is probably pocket change. But if you’re a spammer with a click through rate of one in a million, then these economics will definitely not work.

Where there is a business need and money to be made, there are sure to be companies willing to provide the needed services. The global market of the Internet almost guarantees it. Enter the botnet business model.

A botnet is a network of thousands, in some cases hundreds of thousands, of compromised computers. These machines have at some point in time been infected by a small program because the user clicked on a link in an email or visited a web site in the wrong neighborhood. When a computer has been compromised this way there are no visible signs of it. Gone are the days when virus writer wanted publicity or bragging rights for displaying silly messages on as many computers as possible, or caused them to erase their hard drives, or just grind processing to a halt. Now these infections keep a very low visible profile.

Once in a while the infected computers “call home” for instructions. A popular, and profitable, task for these computers is to send out SPAM emails on behalf of a paying customer. Previously it was not that difficult to trace SPAM emails back to the server sending them. ISP:s would then block all emails coming from that server IP address. With emails coming from a botnet, there could be a hundred thousand different computers sending ten emails each. This is impossible to block by IP address.

According to this article on Dark Reading a price war has broken out between competing botnets. And the going rate is $100 to send out one million SPAM emails. At this price level all it really does take is one sucker in a million to keep the “business” profitable.

With SPAM services on sale, prepare your email inbox for new avalanches of SPAM emails in the coming weeks. Gmail has one of the better SPAM filters in the free webmail category. For non-webmail accounts you can use the SpamArrest service.

Note: As an Internet business entrepreneur I’m always interested in learning more about other business models. Learning more about the business described in this post does not mean that I endorse marketing through SPAM emails, nor do I encourage you to join this “dark side” of the Internet.

Share This

The 12 Month Internet Millionaire sales page is still way over-selling this product. Click over to the sales page and compare it with the actual contents of the product as I reviewed it. Can you even tell that it’s the same product?

If you are looking to expand your business into direct mail, then Vincent James has some good information for you in this product. If you are just starting out with your Internet business, then this product is probably not for you.

Share This

The Starship Titanic is the most magnificent starship every built.

However, many corners were cut during the construction, several individuals were bankrupted and the economy of an entire planet was destroyed. As a result of the drastic cost cutting measures, several vital components are completely missing, and things don’t quite work the way the designer envisioned. This is the setting when three earthlings “accidentally” board the ship and their hilarious journey begins.

Come to think of it, the Starship Titanic is not all that different from many Internet marketing products… A lot of time and money has been spent on the exterior, the package has a massive thud factor, the sales page is slick, etc. But inside the product things seem a little bit out of order, certain key elements are glossed over or completely missing, and the help desk is as helpful as the robotic table lamps on the Starship Titanic.

Share This

But there is one other major type of ranking factor that doesn’t fit neatly into these three categories: time, or how recently the web page was updated. Google, especially, is obsessed with indexing and returning search results from new web pages. From a user’s perspective this makes sense since you often want read the very latest information on a subject.

However this poses a problem for Google since new web pages do not have any links pointing back to them, and therefore their traditional Page Rank algorithm would never rank new pages very high. So it appears that Google is giving new web pages the benefit of the doubt for a short period of time. Yaro has dubbed this the Google Honeymoon Period. After this period of time, your web page will slide back in ranking to it’s position based on the other ranking factors.

Here are four steps to take advantage of the recency ranking factor:

1. Get a blog. There is no better way to continuously publish new content and alert the search engines to it.
2. Publish new blog posts as often as you can manage.
3. Make sure your blog pings Google Blog Search. Add http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2 to the list of Update Services in WordPress Options > Writing.
4. If you’re trying to rank for a specific keyword phrase, then use that often in your blog posts. If each post gets its honeymoon period you will constantly have one page ranking well for that phrase. Over time the search engines will recognize that this is a topic that you frequently write about and therefore you’re probably an authority on it.

I attribute most of my recent page two Google ranking for “internet business” to on-page ranking factors. The home page RaSof score for “internet business” was at the time 1,274 (very high). It has since declined somewhat due to recent posts not mentioning “internet business” as frequently. I’ve currently slipped to page three, so there is more than likely a bit of the recency ranking factor at play too.

Have you enjoyed the Google Honeymoon for your web site? How long did it last?

Share This