Earlier today I wrote a new entry into the Super Simple Marketing newsletter about why I use Premium WordPress Themes instead of the gazillion free ones that are available out there in the blogosphere.

Thought I’d share 3 reasons why I avoid using free wordpress themes:

1. Free themes may well have malicious code in the theme – this actually happens more often than not. And often it’s not added by the theme author, but by the site distributing the theme! In this Super Simple Marketing Newsletter Entry I share a simple tip on how to spot malicious code in your free wordpress theme.
2. Lack of updates – imagine this, you’ve built a full fledged blog and a new version of WordPress comes out. You upgrade… and your site breaks and the theme author has stopped updating the theme. Now you have to re-design the entire site… wasting needless time on it when you could have prevented it by using a Premium theme that is constantly updated.
3. Lack of support – Free themes lack support. Period. Very few free themes developers will help you if something happens to your blog. With a premium theme

Make sure you check out my newsletter entry on the 6 reasons why you should use Premium WordPress Themes.

Have fun!

Post from: Affiliate Internet Marketing

3 Reasons Why I Avoid Free WordPress Themes

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I don’t know about you, but I use Gmail, Google Docs, Facebook, Flickr and a host of other social media platforms and “cloud based services” (like Google Docs).

I have hundreds of pages of documents and images located in the cloud and use these services constantly for both my business and for personal stuff (like my photo album and email).

The other day it occurred to me that I don’t have an easy way to backup these files (besides copying and pasting it all onto my hard drive), so I went searching… and stumbled upon a service called “Backupify”.

Cool thing about this service is that not only does it backup your Google Docs data, it also has a service that backs up your Flickr account as well as your Facebook Profile information. PLUS, it also backsup other information like your Twitter data, Blogger data (this is pretty huge), Linked In and Zoho profiles (pretty cool).

They even provide 1 GB of free storage for their “Social Media” backup service.

You can learn more about their service here: http://www.backupify.com/

Post from: Affiliate Internet Marketing

Backup Your Gmail, Facebook & More

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If you have a WordPress blog, you may want to double check your plugins. I’m a niche blogger, so I have gobs of WordPress installs… and one of the things I try to keep an eye on are security vulnerabilities in plugins and themes so my sites don’t get hacked.

There are 15 plugins that have been removed from the WordPress Plug-In directory recently due to SQL Injection Vulnerabilities in the plugin (which was considered one of the worst application vulnerabilities last year).

Here are the 15 plugins that just got removed from the WordPress Directory:

• WordPress Zotpress
• WordPress Facebook Opengraph Meta
• WordPress VideoWhisper Presentation
• WordPress Couponer
• WordPress PureHTML
• WordPress wp audio gallery
• WordPress Event Registration
• WordPress Advertizer
• WordPress Profiles
• WordPress mySTAT plugin
• WordPress Collision Testimonials
• WordPress Super CAPTCHA
• WordPress Ajax Gallery
• WordPress Easy Contact Form Lite
• WordPress IP-Logger

If you’d like more information on these vulnerabilites, check out the “Unconcious Mind”.

I’d recommend you double-check your plugins to make sure you don’t have any of these on your blog.  In the event you do, remove them to get rid of the security vulnerability.

Post from: Affiliate Internet Marketing

15 WordPress Plugins Removed From Directory

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3. Wow… It’s been crazy

Have you ever heard of bit.ly or tinyurl.com?

Those are link shortening services often used in conjunction with Twitter (and Facebook). Not to mention the fact that internet marketers often use them to cloak and track their affiliate links.

I use link shorteners for both tracking and cloaking reasons…

Last week I came across this interesting blog post on Aweber’s blog regarding email deliverability when using link shortening services with Aweber (and other auto-responder systems). You can read the article here:

http://www.aweber.com/blog/email-deliverability/link-shorteners.htm

Anyway, after reading this… I decided to take matters into my own hands and decided to create my own personal link shortening service using a free script called Yourls that you can download from yourls.org

(by the way, in case you’re wondering, bit.ly is blacklisted… which means you probably SHOULD NOT use their links in your emails).

Yourls.org provide us a free URL shortener script similar to tinyurl or bit.ly you can easily install onto your own domain / hosting. It’s pretty slick with some nice stats features to go along with it. All that’s necessary to set it up is to create a mysql database on your hosting platform and configure a simple PHP file (and of course run the install script).

I opted to not make my shortening script public but you can choose to set it up to be a public script if that’s what you want to do…

Anyway, I’ve decided to use my own shortener url for all of my emails and blogs now… it’s kinda cool, and negates the need for a regular link cloaker.

Another cool feature is that they have a WordPress plug-in that will automatically use your “yourl” in Tweets and such.

Pretty slick.

If you have the resources and have been looking at an alternative to expensive cloaking scripts or link shortening services, then this is definitely for you.

Have fun!

Post from: Affiliate Internet Marketing

Get Your Own URL Link Shortener

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Google just released a brand new ‘eBook’ (yes, you read that right) called “ZMOT – Winning the Zero Moment of Truth”. The book is written by Jim Lecinski,  the “Managing Director of US Sales & Service” for Google.

ZMOT refers to the “online decision making moment” by the consumer. The critical moment when it turns someone from a “researcher” into a “buyer” (the exact moment in time when they make the decision to buy the product or service).

Here are two interesting fact from Google’s research: a customer will use over 10 sources of information (10.7 actually) before making a purchasing decision; 84% of Americans who purchase products and services online engage in a ZMOT decision.

This book is filled with interesting facts and ideas regarding ZMOT, and since it comes at the price of FREE I recommend you pick it up and read it. It’s actually a pretty good read and fun to hear things “straight from the horses mouth” so to speak.

You can learn more about the eBook here: http://www.zeromomentoftruth.com/ (the book also is available on the Kindle, Nook and iBooks as well!)

Post from: Affiliate Internet Marketing

ZMOT – Zero Moment Of Truth by Google

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