iVanBudimir.com

How To Change An IP Address With Your Router

iVan — Fri, 20 May 2011 22:06:48 +0000

In today’s How To Change An IP Address With Your Router video I reveal a simple way you can get a new IP address – rather useful when you’re trying to avoid a ban from certain websites like big G.

For your convenience I also included the MAC address generator to create a unique MAC address you can use with this technique.

So if you need a fresh MAC address to force an IP change with it, simply refresh this page and use the string below this video

Your new and unique MAC address:

Heads up!

iVan — Tue, 17 May 2011 21:51:17 +0000

The kanji for ninja

Hey gang

Admittedly I’ve been away from my blog all too long. But believe it or not, that’s good news.

See, about 8 or so months ago I’ve learned about a secret little technique that my then-marketing-instructor-now-close-friend Michael X has quietly been crushing with.

He’s the kinda guy that does everything. – CPA, traditional affiliate marketing, software development/sales, etc…

Well, almost everything – he won’t touch MLM with a 10-foot pole (not gonna get into that right now, but it will suffice to say that nobody is perfect, lol)

But this one technique was nothing short of a miracle. In fact – Mike is the real ninja behind yours truly

Picture this – rank #1 for ANY keyword in ANY niche with ANY product – in 30-60 days of… watching TV, busting the StairMaster, heck – even jumping on a pogo stick, for all I care!

Bullshit?

How’s this – a few months ago I leaked just a part of this technique to a close friend who then used it on his client’s website to score the first page for a word fish.

Yup – just one word, and it was for a fish market… shop… thingy (what are those things called anyway – “fish shops”? Sounds like bishops to my untrained borscht-grown ears)

Admittedly the listing stayed up for only a few days, but then again – that was just one part of the technique, and it was a single friggin’ word

The reason I’m posting today is to let you know that I just got off the phone with Mike, and I got a confirmation. After oodles of tests, we’re blowing the technique out of the water

There are two ways you can learn about it:

One, you have to attend the free webinar that Mike is putting up on May 19th* (yikes that’s in two days, folks!)

Or two, you have to attend the free webinar that Mike is putting up on May 19th =)

*NOTE: Due to a GoToWebinar crash that happened during this webinar, we’ve decided to do it again on Monday, May 23rd

Now, I’m gonna be perfectly frank with you – if we reveal every aspect of this technique on a freakin’ free webinar, we’d get murdered by Google.

But it will suffice to say you’ll learn the strategy, and I couldn’t care less if you turned around and did your own Ninjutsu to develop it for your own nefarious purposes =)

So if you really, really wanna get a good idea of how this is done, you’ll have to join us for the webinar

So be there (or no borscht for you!) =P

What Is An RSS Feed? (Using RSS To Boost Traffic)

iVan — Tue, 16 Nov 2010 00:14:30 +0000

As a marketing trainer I get asked a lot of questions: “who are you”, “which way is the bathroom” and “why didn’t you tip the waiter”?

Simply saying “I am your father”, “just follow the smell” and “Because he has three legs” just doesn’t cut it anymore (get it? “tip” the waiter?.. that’s friggin’ hilarious)

Aaah, you can always count on me to laugh at my own jokes

Recently I got a few WordPress RSS questions that involved a tad more tactful answers (after all they came from paying clients), so I decided to blast this out to the ether and play nice today.

So here they are:

What Is RSS Feed? Isn’t It When Anytime I Write A Blog Post, The Person Who Subscribed Will Receive A Link To It In Their Email?

It is and a bit more – it’s basically a way for web-savvy people to get your blog content delivered to a central location.

And for those of you with a dirty mind – I’m talking about an email, or an RSS reader (it’ll be a cold day in hell before you get me to say navel on my blog)

Navel Base?

The simple way of looking at it is this -if you pretend for a second your blog is like The New York Times, RSS would encompass all of the different methods your paper gets delivered to places where it can be read.

So RSS are like fleets of trucks that distribute the paper.

And following the same analogy, email accounts and RSS Readers would be like newsstands, libraries, hotels, barber shops and navel bases

No worries folks – there are unlimited opportunities for bad jokes like this (after all, this blog has its own RSS feed)

What The Heck Is “Submitting A Feed”, Do I Need To Do It, And Why?

OK, let’s use the same analogy

No Mojo

By default, WordPress has a widget that adds a feed button allowing your visitors to go to your feed so they can subscribe to it themselves. That’s like having a little outlet right in New York Times lobby where people can come and ask to get the paper delivered to their house from now on.

Now, if you wanted to make a life easier for your readers, you’d contact all the different distribution fleets and ask them to distribute your paper to the newsstands – that’s what submitting the RSS feed is like.

Do you need it? No, but without it your blog won’t have the mojo.

More mojo = more fun, and ultimately this is all about getting traffic, so do it!

How Do I Submit My Feed For Free?

Rather than give you links to software that may not be around tomorrow, I recommend Googling ‘free RSS submit’ (sans quotes). You’ll inevitably find a number of programs and/or websites (some free, some paid) that will notify the appropriate “fleets” automatically

Whichever one you choose, all you have to do is paste the URL of your feed (that’s the URL of the page that your feed button takes you to)

Choose as many sites as the program/website allows and hit submit.

That’s simply going to let those “fleets” know your feed is alive and should be included in their hit list

You only have to do this once, it’s well worth doing it, it only takes a few minutes and will bring additional traffic

Plus – Google likes feeds, which equals even more mojo, man!

What Is A FeedBurner, What Does “Burning A Feed” Mean, And Where The Heck Is The Bathroom?

A FeedBurner is a free feed service that is part of Google universe. It’s just like a feed thingamajigy on your WordPress site, only it’s not on your site, and it’s nothing like your feed

Simply put FeedBurner = more mojo

In a few more words, FeedBurner can bring more folks to your site

Say you decide you wish to track the number of subscribers to your feed, the easiest thing would be to move your feed away from your site and to Google’s FeedBurner (“burning” a feed).

That allows Google to better estimate the readership of your site, and if your content is good, there is a greater likelihood of getting more subscribers and therefore better ranking with Google.

To do this, go to http://feedburner.google.com and “Burn” a feed (you’ll get instructions plus a plugin for your WordPress that will take care of the transfer for you)

Bathroom is down the stairs… just tip the waiter before you leave…

Any topic ideas or questions for the next post, folks?

Smart Update Pinger – User Warning

iVan — Sat, 30 Oct 2010 19:35:54 +0000

Hi Gang!

If you’re using a Smart Update Pinger WP plug in (especially important to those who have been recommended to use it through TrafficFormula 2.0), you might want to disable this plugin as soon as you read this.

Here is the scoop – the original Smart Update Pinger WordPress plugin (at the time of this writing) has been abandoned, and has disappeared from WordPress plugins page – for a good reason as it turns out.

In certain situations, it was discovered, it ended up doing the exact opposite of what it was intended to do, and a number of blogs ended up being banned due to ping spamming.

No fear-mongering, just a friendly warning .

Now, I’m not the kind of guy to stand on the corner with the “The End Is Nigh!” sign, so I got a solution for you guys.

The solution is another plugin, but the installation requires extra two steps in order for this to work.

And rather than write a lengthy post, I simply cut a short video that will guide you through the process

Do comment if you dig it

Preventing Comment Spam

iVan — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 00:55:20 +0000

Preventing comment spam or using it to boost your on-page SEO; which one is it going to be?

(hint: you can do one or the other)

I just got an email asking about preventing comment spam on a WordPress blog.

I’m lazy, so rather than paraphrase my reply, I’ll just paste what I wrote back (I’m omitting the the sender’s name)

Using Others’ Comment Spam To Boost Your Rankings

“Hey there, (name omitted)

Yup, that’s spam, all right…

When it comes down to on-page SEO, there are several things that get you Google juice. By now you probably know all about keywords in URLs, Title tags, meta descriptions, etc…

But one thing you and I never discussed is incoming links (links from other sites). When you get a link from, say, hubpages.com coming to your site, in Google’s eyes, that’s basically like someone else saying your site is ‘spongeworthy’ (if you weren’t a Seinfeld fan, that means very valuable)

And if the link comes from a relevant authority site, that’s like having Seinfeld himself say your site is cool (and if the link itself is a relevant keyword, that’s as if he said it while being a guest on Oprah).

So, blog spammers use comment-spamming bots to seek out any WordPress blog and post a fake comment in order to obtain a backlink.

Now, the rule when spamming blogs is to try to keep the blog moderator (you) from deleting the comment (and therefore a link), so they’ll typically try to post a compliment of some kind.

Bust since they’re using spamming bots to send out a comment to hundreds, or even thousands of blogs, they have no way of customizing the comment to what you’re actually talking about, so they make it as broad and vague as they can

And THAT is how you can tell if the comments marked as spam really are spam

Now, your site was built to automatically turn each outgoing link into a ‘nofollow’ link, so their comments aren’t leaching much Google juice from your site. So even if your spam tool didn’t catch the comments, they wouldn’t be getting much juice from you anyway.

But how do you turn spam to your advantage?

Google likes content. Better yet, it likes frequently updated content.

When you get a comment on your page – that, in effect, is an update to the entire page. If Google sees new comments every time it crawls your site, it comes back for more, and it does it more and more frequently.

Now, the last thing you wanna do is turn off your Akismet and let all the spam get through. Comment spam doesn’t provide a value to your readers, and it – well, it looks spammy.

So this is what you do: quickly scan through your comments, and find a few that are ‘almost spongeworthy’.

The first step is to approve them.

That solidifies an entry in your logs showing where the comment came from (meaning it shows you didn’t create a comment yourself)

Then tweak it. Get rid of the link to their site. Add a little value to their comment and (if you can) use a keyword or a semantically related phrase. Then update the comment, and voila – you have updated your page with more relevant content, and it only took you a second.

Unethical? Hey – those dirty buggers spammed YOU; never forget that!

Of course, never do this to someone who provided REAL value. If someone actually commented on something you wrote and placed a link to their site, let them keep it. I don’t consider that spam.”

Now, some of you probably don’t have the time for that, so, here is the alternative

Preventing Comment Spam

Simply put, if you want to stop blog spam, you simply need to make yourself invisible to spambots that look for blogs to post comments to

The way a lot of spambots find your site is by doing web searches for default text in your comment box that ships with Popular WordPress themes or WordPress itself.

So by changing the text that identifies your comment box, there is no way for the less sophisticated spambots to find you.

After I did this on one site a while back, I saw roughly an 80% drop in blog spam within just 4 weeks

Which ain’t that shabby at all!

However I’m no longer preventing comment spam if I can help it. I say bring ‘em on!

No Opt-In Leads? Here’s What Might Be The Problem…

iVan — Tue, 25 May 2010 23:30:58 +0000

OK, for months you kept your head buried in the books; you built a great website and it’s just the way you wanted – all the bells and whistles are working just fine, but you’re not getting any traffic, opt-in leads, conversions or cash.

What’s wrong?

A few days ago I taught a group of local business owners how to set up their first cash-producing website (that’s me standing in the picture below).

I said BELOW, not the guy with the head in the book

Yesterday one of them approached me asking for advice.

This was a sharp dude; he knew about the “love affair” between WordPress and Google, wanted to leverage that to get opt-in leads, so he was building entire site in WordPress.

Smart!

But he was keen on building a site with a static-look home page. The rationale was that he didn’t want to waste visitor’s time, and wanted to show them what he does and “what he’s all about” by decking it out 20^th-century-style.

He wanted to know if this was possible to do that with WordPress.

“It is, but if you’re building a leads list you’re dead”

No, that’s not what I told him, but those words paint a pretty good picture.

Why?

We often forget why it is that visitors come to a site in a first place. They want information, and they want it now.

They may very well need what you have to offer, but they don’t know that.

So when you create your site around your business, you end up with a site that appears self-serving and without any value to the visitor.

When targeting opt-ins, it’s all about the value

So if you focus on the content that is asked for, and wrap “what you’re all about” and what you have to offer INTO what they’re looking for – you’ll have a winner every time.

It’s like giving your dog a medicine. You have to give it what it wants, or else you’ll find yourself shoving the friggin’ pill down its throat.

(Coincidentally, that’s how I was fed my medicine when I was a kid, so now I wet my bed and like to hide in confined spaces…)

Take a look at your site and ask yourself if you built it just to screw around with Google, or are you really serving your readers.

It’s great to have a pretty website that you can show your friends, but that’s not what’s getting the opt-ins or putting the money in your bank.

Don’t reinvent the wheel – stick with what’s working right now and you’ll be fine.

If your site isn’t getting any opt-ins, it’s likely not talking to them in their language.

KeywordSpy Issue: Can’t Change The Country In KeywordSpy

iVan — Thu, 06 May 2010 22:25:54 +0000

This morning, as I booted up, I got a nasty surprise – Google put on a new shirt which seems to have caused a KeywordSpy issue where you can’t change the SERPs by country.

Apparently, Firefox users are the most affected.

Good on you Google for making things better, but what about us SEO geeks?

Well, I shouldn’t gripe at Google; it’s really an issue with KeywordSpy.

And while I’m sure they’re working hard to fix the issue, I decided to play nice and post a hack that will solve this problem for you.

So if you want to see the SERPs from other countries, all you have to do is click on the appropriate country in the list below.

You’ll notice that your KeywordSpy issue has been circumvented, as the toolbar will now have changed the flag. Google will greet you with the text in its search bar saying “replace this text and hit search”

I’ll leave it to you to guess to do next

Unfortunately this doesn’t permanently fix the KeywordSpy issue - until the good people at KeywordSpy fix the plugin, you’ll have to resort to using the shortcuts listed below.

Hey, if this helped, connect with me using the Google Friend Connect and let me know (just installed it on this blog yesterday).

Cheers!

Australia; Brazil; Canada; France; Germany; Greece; India; Ireland; Italy; Mexico; Poland; Singapore; South Africa; Spain; Switzerland; UK; USA

PS. In the light of this KeywordSpy issue, I’m curious to find out which browser you use and how do you compare it to something else you tried in the past, so do leave a comment.

And The Bad Marketing Award Goes To…

iVan — Mon, 03 May 2010 10:18:19 +0000

In my daily meandering online I stumbled across a perfect example of how as some companies get bigger, they get dumber then a sack of doorknobs.

In a book of the 100 bad marketing moves, this may not float at the very top. But it’s definitely a do-not-attempt-this-at-home kids.

Here’s a very biased scoop, decide for yourself:

On March 18th, Nestle decided to throw caution to the wind and do exactly opposite of what every self-respecting marketing company strives to avoid – spit in the face of some 92+ thousand of its fans.

Nope, that wasn’t a slip, I did say a marketing company. One doesn’t become a big-ass company like Nestle if your main business is anything other than marketing.

Glad we settled that.

In short, in the light of recent debate over their use of palm oil, some Facebook users have replaced their avatars with a modified nestle logo (below)

And as a benevolent company that Nestle cares to portray itself, they decided to put a stop to that by stating the following:

“…we welcome your comments, but please don’t post using an altered version of any of our logos as your profile pic – they will be deleted“.

Uh… that’s fresh!

Someone out there ought to read “Power Vs. Force”

As some users have pointed out, it would have been so easy for Nestle to nail this with a positive, environmentally friendly spin.

One user in particular has struck me as someone that Nestle should hire as their PR dude:

“psst – Nestle – Damage control, just get rid of this post entirely. Come up with a message or make a contest where people can play around with your logo and win a prize.”

Instead they chose to treat their fans by puking their kind and loving nature all over them.

Without drawing any parallels for you, does this remind you of anything? I’d love to hear what you have to say

Flip Video Battery Won’t Charge? Three Ways To Fix It…

iVan — Sun, 18 Apr 2010 05:38:03 +0000

Your Flip video battery won’t charge? I’m guessing you too got the “Check battery pack-Charging paused” message?

Well, as it turns out, you’re not alone.

Two weeks ago I bought my own Flip Ultra HD camera to do some video marketing with.

Unfortunately it conked on a first attempt to use it.

In a nutshell, the Flip seemed fine, but the battery just wouldn’t charge.

Which in itself is not a big deal considering the hilarity of the session I had with the tech support.

It all started when the battery symbol got jammed on empty, even after charging overnight.

I tried charging it again, but eventually that screen was replaced with a “Check battery pack-Charging paused” message.

Electronics don’t scare me, and Flip isn’t something a granny would sweat about, but I didn’t want to waste the time trying to figure it out, so I called the tech support.

In a course of 1½ hr, the tech got me to try everything from resetting the device to virgin sacrifices on a night of a full moon, but to no avail.

“Check battery pack-Charging paused” message loomed.

After some obscure attempts to revive the now obviously deceased battery (sounds tragic, eh?), I felt like the damn thing was actually recording me for the latest edition of Punk’d.

Finally, after the procedure manual required me to hang of a pear tree by my toes, even the tech gave up and said “It looks like the battery is dead!”

“No kid’n'?”

Since they don’t replace just the battery, I was asked to return the whole shebang to get a replacement within two days.

Hmmm; this is where my Twilight Zone radar tends to come alive. Two days???

I think not. Heard that before… I prefer to try my luck with it first.

What To Do If The Flip Video Battery Won’t Charge:

Today I decided to unleash the fury and tinker with it myself.

Is it just me, or is this battery givin' me the flip?

And so after gefutzing with it for 45 min (and numerous consults with YouTube, Google and Cletus-the-Slack-Jawed-Yokel’s finest moonshine), I was able to get the persistent “Check battery pack-Charging paused” message off the screen.

The only problem was that I tried so many things that I don’t know which one produced the results.

And so, with my Flip battery charging, I decided to post them all here before further virgin sacrifices were required.

Consider it my little contribution – saving virgins one Flip at the time:

Procedure 1:

Take out the battery from your Flip Ultra HD
Plug the Flip into the USB
Once the “connected” indicator comes on, stick the battery back into the Flip
Choose the safe remove hardware option on your PC (or the Mac equivalent)
Once safe to remove, pull the Flip out of the USB port
Plug it back in – it should charge without a hitch now.
If the battery won’t charge, give it 5 minutes before trying the second procedure.

Procedure 2:

Take out the battery from your Flip Ultra HD
Plug the Flip into the USB
Once the “connected” indicator comes on, stick the battery into the Flip
Empty your recycle bin (yes, it sounds silly, but there is actually a good reason for this)
Pull the Flip out of the USB without the safe remove
Plug it back in and check out if it’s charging. If it doesn’t start charging within 5 minutes, try the third procedure.

Procedure 3:

Take out the battery from your Flip Ultra HD
Plug it into the USB
Empty your recycle bin
Pull the Flip out of the USB without safe removal
Put the battery back in and try to charge.

Battery still won’t charge? OK, the following may seem drastic, but it’s guaranteed to produce results (even if just a pulsating vein on your forehead)

Procedure 4 (supplemental):

Curse
Resort to heavy drinking
Shout
Curse while drinking and shouting
Find a pear tree and dangle by your toenails

Ya. That’s it!

Actually, there are quite a few reports of this problem (try Googling for “Flip Video Battery Won’t Charge”, and count the hits).

Which is too bad, because the Flip is cheap, simple to use, and has great video quality (a dream-come-true for making tons of cash like my good friend Michael – way to go Mike!)

I digress… hopefully the first three steps solved your problem. If not, leave a comment and I’ll send you some moonshine in a damp envelope.

P.S. I’ll check the status of my battery tomorrow morning. Right now everything looks good, but if I get another “Check battery pack-Charging paused” message, I think I’ll just get some AA rechargeables instead.

Amazon Virus Email “Your Order Has Been Paid” Scam

iVan — Sat, 10 Apr 2010 22:28:58 +0000

This is both a heads-up about an Amazon virus email as well as a valuable marketing lesson.

But I’ll tell you right now, this post is going to cause some stir, so let me be clear on one thing – I don’t condone scamming, spamming, hacking, phishing and other black-hat-personal-data-collecting crap that the internet is full of.

Yet, from a marketing perspective, this scam is just brilliant, man!

Yesterday I received an email that lit a major fire under my ass. For a second anyway… I was quick enough to realize the potential for a ducking fizaster if I followed through.

Here is the email I got:

Your order has been paid! Parcel NR.5087.

Hello!
Thank you for shopping at Amazon.com
We have successfully received your payment.
Your order has been shipped to your billing address.
You have ordered ” Sony VAIO VGC-LV240J ”
You can find your tracking number in attached to the e-mail document.
Print the postal label to get your package.
We hope you enjoy your order!
Amazon.com

The email sported a zip attachment. In it there was an .exe file that was cleverly disguised as a word doc.

Yup, the creator actually embedded the word icon into it!

After some checking I learned this is a nasty banking data scraper that is as persistent as a yeast infection. The Amazon virus email attachment is to be avoided like a plague. Yet I love it!

So Why Would I Admire The Dirty Bastard Who Created The Amazon Virus Email?

Well, here is the thing. If you stop to think about it, you’ll see brilliant yet short copy with a killer call to action.

The title calls for attention like a teenager in heat:

“What order? I never ordered anything…”

The next part says you just bought an expensive toy and the money is already gone. Yikes!

At this point, this email commands your full attention as you’re led to believe someone stole your identity.

(I’d love to see what kind of conversions this bastard gets)

As you start looking at this more carefully, the address checks out. Email seems legit:

And then what does he do in the end?

A call to action that promises to move you closer to the solution – print the attached file to get your tracking number.

He doesn’t even have to say it, yet he makes you think “I have to get this tracking number so I can fix this”

Who Does The Amazon Email Scam Work On And What To Do About It?

Sure, you’ll say that the Amazon virus email would never work on you, just like it didn’t on me.

But you and I aren’t this dude’s target market.

I may be giving him too much credit, but I think he has his target market well defined.

If I were to hazard a guess, I’d say the Amazon virus email creator is targeting a male baby boomer who has little to medium experience shopping online; does online banking, fears identity theft and uses one of four major antivirus programs

Brilliant!

I just hope he hasn’t learned that from my marketing eBook (shameless plug)

Anyhow, if you did get the email, and you did open the attachment in the Amazon virus email, make sure you don’t log into any of your online accounts. Contact Amazon for instructions on how to get rid of the program (Amazon Virus Email doesn’t self-replicate so is not technically a virus, btw)

P.S. If you want to learn the legit Jedi marketing, grab your free copy of The Shark Report in the form in the top right corner of this page (as soon as you get rid of that Amazon virus email crap)