The Part I Played In Destroying The Global Economy

After a lot of soul searching I’ve come to the conclusion that I played a part in destroying the global economy.

Yep, Freddy Mac Daddy and Fanny Mae (Quoted from @TurnerDigital) have got nothing on me.

So what have I done to be associated with such good company, have I been short selling company stocks, lending money that didn’t exist in the 1st place to people who couldn’t afford to pay it back even if they lived for another 150 years, or something far more Dick Dastardly?

Well, here it is, my public admission, in true AA style:

My Name Is Dan Thompson, and I’ve Stopped Buying Things

Not things completely, I still eat and wear clothes, I also still buy random gadgets and crap T-Shirts, but over the past 2 years the amount on Internet Marketing products I have purchased in almost 0.

I say almost 0 because I’m sure I purchased something last year, but as you can tell, it didn’t leave a lasting impression on me.

So with my new “anti buy stuff” attitude, I’m slowly destroying the economy, the money I’d be giving to Marketer x for their brilliant new “How to rank 1st on Google whilst eating pizza with Cameron Diaz whilst she does Donuts on a remote air field in Southern England” is no longer going into their pocket, and in turn that money isn’t going to their local crack dealer, and that money isn’t then going into their local McDonalds….or wherever crack dealers eat nowadays, it’s a vicious circle.

If everyone was like me, imagine how much worse the economy would be.

But why have I stopped spending money in the IM niche, I used to spend money when I 1st started, so why stop now?

Well, I’ve come to this conclusion – since I’ve stopped buying all of these big launch eBooks that contain “an unmissable new secret that’s so secret I may have just made it up to sell this overpriced PDF” you’d have thought my earnings would have evaporated to nothing, I mean if I don’t use this amazing new technique then I’m clearly going to fail.

But that’s not the case, I still make as much, if not more now than I ever did when I was buying every IM product that I was offered.

Those initial products I purchased to help get me on my way were great, but there comes a time when you have to stop following instructions and think for yourself. I’ve realized that there’s only so much information you need to get started as an online marketer, so once you have that basic understanding the only thing that’s stopping you is yourself, if you have a basic understanding of how things work then get out there and put your plans into action, free yourself from the shackles of overpriced crap!

It’s like driving a car, when you first start you read up on the theory behind it all, and you then go for lessons, and eventually you take your test and are allowed out into the big bad world…..full of horse riders, cyclists and caravans……

Once you’ve done the theory and passed the test, you start to drive on your own, and if you make a mistake you learn from it and know not to do it again.

So basically what I’m getting it, is that once you’ve got the basic understanding of everything grasped, and your hosting and auto-responder in place, is it really worth buying anything else?

I can understand purchasing products and services that make your life easier – graphics, PLR articles, “make your life easier” software, and so on, but if you are a competent marketer already, do you really need any more theory guides, wouldn’t you be better going off and researching something on your own – and then you could be the one selling your “secrets”

For example, last week whilst foraging through the internet, I noticed that a highly popular script in a particular niche that I’m active in has no rampant affiliates promoting it, so I can get in there and make affiliate sales on the script, and also some hosting sales on top of that – hosting is a fundamental part of the script.

And to promote this, I’m not going to use a top secret technique from an eBook, I’m going to do something that I’ve tried and tested over the years and that I know works:

1. Create website where I share my experiences of the script with the readers, and post a few “how to use it” guides

2. Drive traffic to the site via organic Google results, as I’ve shown you how to do umpteen times on this blog

3. I’ll get affiliate sales from the product, and sales from the hosting

4. Bingo, job done!

5. Total cost of project – $8 for the domain name

I haven’t actually created the site yet, so I may be setting myself up for a humiliating fall, but I’d like to bet that if we come back in 6 months time, the website will have made me at least a few thousands dollars, none of which would have been possible if I’d have still been reading my way through a badly written PDF telling me “what I must do to succeed”.

End of minor controversial blog post, I think there’s a point in there somewhere, if not, just have fun looking at my illustration of a car driving into a wall, notice how I remained un-sexist by not implying the sex of the driver.

Bye for now,
Dan

Posted In: General Chat | 28 Comments

1 Nugget That Not Even The Colonel Knows About

Following on from my last mega-post, I’ll bring you one final nugget of information that I’ve picked up on my travels. It’s one of those things that people love to speculate on, but nobody really has a definitive answer to it.

So what is the mysterious question?

Here you go:

Q: Does The Geographical Location of a Server Effect Search Engine Rankings?

A: Yes

**The End**

What’s that I hear you cry, you want proof?

The video below provides you with all of the proof you need, it’s a video made by Google for their Youtube Google webmaster channel.

*Any eager beavers reading this as soon as it’s been posted via the RSS feed may need to wait for the video to show. I suck at embedding Youtube videos on WordPress posts for some mad reason!

**Turns out the video works, but it covers up some of the links in the nav bar, but I don’t think any of you really use them anyway

So to summarize, if you run a site that is specifically targeted at a certain market, you stand a better chance of ranking well in the search engines if the server your site resides on is located in that country.

But lets not take the videos word for it, Google may be pulling a devious little trick on all us nerds, lets put it to the test.

Go to Google.co.uk (The UK Google site) and search for something along the lines of:

wellies free delivery

If you then check out the domain names that come up on the first page of the Google results using the Network Tools Express search, you’ll be able to see the geographical location of all of the top sites is the UK.

You can search again for something like:

plumbers in sheffield

And you’ll see that this time we have a lot of local business results from Google that appear, if you do the Network Tools search on a few of the domains, you should find that the sites hosted in the UK achieve a higher listing than those hosted in the US and elsewhere.

So if you currently host a site that targets the UK market on a US server, you may well find that a simple server move would increase your, or your clients search engine rankings.

You don’t have to just test it on Google.co.uk, feel free to try your own local version of Google and have a look at the geographical location of the server.

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I’ve turned into the devil, I’ve turned an informative blog post into a plug for D9 Hosting, but come on, if you are going to take my advice you may as well get the hosting from me as well

As I’ve been writing this post, another SEO myth that needs dispelling also came into my head, but I think I’ll leave that one for the next post – unless you all leave a comment telling me that these “nugget” posts are crap, in which case I wont bother.

So next week: Why spending loads of money on “different class c IP” hosting is a waste of time, and again, this is backed up by Google.

Just before signing off, here’s a chance to take part in a D9 Hosting/Internet Marketing fantasy football World Cup league. It’s free to play, and as well as the prizes provided by Fifa, we (D9) are offering existing customers 50% off their next hosting bill, and 50% off your 1st hosting bill if you fancy joining – all you need to do is win the league.

If you are new to Fantasy Football, here’s a quick overview of how it works:

• You have a “transfer kit” which you use to buy players

• Each player will earn you points every time they play, by scoring goals, keeping clean sheets, getting an assist, etc. (They’ll also lose points for getting sent off!)

• The points are then added up, and added to your team’s score.

• You’ll play in a league against myself, Paula, and other D9 customers

• There are also prizes provided by Fifa, including a brand new car, football shirts, and more

• It’s totally free to play!

So even if you have no football (soccer) knowledge, pick a random team of players and who knows, you may just get lucky!

It’s all a bit of fun and we’d love to see you in the league

Instructions on how to enter are below.

1. Sign up for free account at:

http://www.fifa.com/theclub/index.html

2. When you’ve signed up, log into your account and click on “Games” and then the “Activate” button under “McDonalds Fifa World Cup Fantasy”

3. You can then log in at the Fantasy Football site: (Bookmark this URL!)

http://en.mcdonalds.fantasy.fifa.com/

4. You can then go ahead and select your team

5. When you’ve selected your team, you can join the D9 league by clicking on “My Leagues” > “Create/Join”

And then enter the following league code to join our league:

187968-44949

The closing date for the 1st round of games is the 11th June, so try and get your team registered before then, and good luck!

Fantasy Football Tips

1. You’ll most likely find yourself running out of money, so my tip is to pick a solid foundation of 12 or 13 quality players, and then make the rest up with really cheap players from the teams that don’t have much of a chance – you only pick 11 players to start the game so start with your quality players and leave the cheap ones as substitutes.

2. Your captain earns double points, so select your star player as the captain

And that’s all for this blog post, but before I go, here’s a recycled post from 4 years ago, call me un-patriotic but the gist of it remains the same

http://www.elpassoblog.com/why-england-have-no-chance-of-winning-the-wold-cup/

Over and out,
Dan

Posted In: General Chat | 11 Comments

A REALLY GOOD AND INFORMATIVE BLOG POST AWAITS YOU

I’ve done the title in ALL CAPS to make this blog post seem really urgent, interesting and important. I haven’t written it yet so I have no idea if that will be the case, but at least it gives me something to strive towards.

I’m still not 100% sure what I’m going to write about, I’ve been way behind with blog posts recently but in the absence of my nuggets of gold/bull poop I’ve come across some interesting tit bits whilst stumbling around the Internet. So I think I’ll share them with you, and you can tell me if you agree, or god forbid, disagree!

Nugget 1: Meta Keywords & Descriptions – As Much Use as a *humorous metaphor goes here”

Since the dawn of time, people have been hung up on keywords and descriptions when it comes to optimizing their sites for the search engines.

Back in the good old days (pre-Google), this was a wise thing to do, the early search engines would base their results purely on the meta keywords for a web page. So you could basically spam the hell out of the keywords and rank for any given term with very little effort.

Since Google entered the search engine market and started to implement their algorithms, meta tags have become less and less important. People still say you should use them….but they just don’t carry as much weight as they used to.

After much (about 20 minutes) research, I say that’s a nonsense, in this day and age you may as well not waste your time putting them in there, but wait! I have 2 bits of evidence to back up my almost slanderous claims. I present to you the following your Honour:

Evidence 1

Do a search on Google for “John Thornhills Marketing Masterclass”, and you’ll see results similar to this:

The first result in Google takes you to www.johnthornhillmasterclass.com which is the “official” domain for the product, BUT take a look at the source code.

There are no keywords or meta tags to be seen, there’s also no content on the page at all as far as the search engine bots are concerned, just a video and an opt-in form. Yet that site out ranks all of the competition sites, which all contain nice fancy keywords, descriptions.

So is everything you’ve ever been told about SEO one big lie?

Maybe, who knows!

But I know what you’re thinking, of course John’s official domain will be top of the list. When people are searching for “John Thornhills Marketing Masterclass” Google wants to bring back the most relevant result which is going to be the official domain.

Evidence Verdict: Circumstantial

Evidence 2

When you are doing research on how to get to the top of the rankings, who better to ask than a professional SEO company?

So I did a quick Google search and typed in “UK SEO”, the results that came back can be seen below.

There are over 30 million broad results for that term, so you’d think the site that ranked number 1 must be some sort of SEO monster, and surely they must know what they are doing. So go ahead and click on the 1st result (which for me is www.davidnaylor.co.uk), and then look at the source code.

Yes, your eyes do not deceive you. No meta keywords or descriptions, but still out ranks all of those sites that do have them.

Evidence Verdict: Conclusive

Nugget 2: Server Location Does Matter

I think I’ll save this nugget for next week, there’s only so many SEO nuggets you can digest in 1 blog post, especially if those nuggets are made from chicken and come from McDonalds, 36 is my record.

Nugget 3: A Lot Of “Internet Marketers” Are A*Holes

Did I get that right? We don’t really use the A*Hole term in the UK, so I don’t know if the * is needed or not, some American readers please put me out of my misery – misery may be the wrong word, but I’ll allow it.

But anyway, it’s a sorry fact that a lot of people online are vermin, harsh but true. I’m sure the majority of you reading this will have come across these people, and some of you will have been “burned” (not literally?) by their scams. They’ll go something like this: (This is based on a phone call I received, so I’m guessing I’m not the only one)

Dan: Hello

Phone guy: Small talk

Dan: Small talk

Phone guy: So, how’d you like to make money online

Dan: I’d love that so much more than words can express

Phone guy: Cool, we can help you with that by coaching you

Dan: Ripper (I was pretending to be Australian)

Phone guy: What’s your credit card limit

Dan: £5000

Phone guy: Cool, let me call you back

Phone guy: Hi Dan, I’ve gone through your requirements and we can turn you into Donald Trump for only £4995

Dan: Sorry, I’ve never forgiven him for splitting up with Ivana

*puts phone down*

They’ll actually target vulnerable people (not that I’m vulnerable, but I must have somehow ended up on a lead list!), ask them for their credit limit and then take it all away from them in one swoop for some BS coaching program, anyone that does that “for a living” deserves to be called an A*Hole as far as I’m concerned.

But anyway, does this nugget have a purpose or am I just venting frustration? IT HAS A PURPOSE!

Not every marketer online that offers coaching is an A*Hole, one person that falls into that category is Dave Nicholson.

I’ve known Dave for years, and I can tell you one thing about him – he likes Breaded Mushrooms.

Breaded Mushrooms are like kryptonite to A*Hole marketers, wave a mushroom under their nose and they’ll be able to outrun Usain Bolt.

But in all seriousness, anyone who has ever dealt with him will be able to confirm that he’s a stand up guy, and that he’s one of the good guys. I’m not going to try and sell you the coaching (I’d be stupid to, it hasn’t even launched yet!) , but I will provide you with this free 24 page report that he’s written, that shows you “The Real Truth About Online Marketing”.

Click on the image below to read, or right click on it to save to your computer, no opt-in required!

Nugget 4: My Faith In Human Kindness Restored

I’ll finish off (don’t cheer to loudly) by telling you a little story that happened to me over the weekend.

On Saturday I was out on an end of season football……for want of a better word – pub crawl.

On Sunday I realized that I’d either lost my wallet, or it had been stolen. It contained a bit of money, my credit/debit card and my driving license. So I quickly cancelled them all and ordered a replacement license.

I phoned round all of the taxi firms, and pubs that we’d been in but none had seen it. I tried to think where I had it last, and remembered that I must have had it in the taxi, or how would I have paid him!

But another call to the taxi company proved fruitless.

Fast forward to Tuesday morning, and a package drops through the letter box. I open it up and it’s my wallet, complete with all the cards, driving license, and the money.

There was no note in it, so I can’t be sure who sent it. But I’m assuming it must have been the taxi driver.

I thought that for him to take the time to go to the post office, and send it back, without taking any of the money inside was a very kind thing for him to do, and it’s restored my faith in human kindness.

So a lesson for you all, treat taxi drivers with respect, you never know when you may need them!

Signing off – at last!

Dan

Posted In: General Chat | 29 Comments

How To Keep Your Website Secure

This is a belated follow on to my last blog post – How To Keep Your Computer Secure

This was supposed to be posted a couple of weeks ago, but it’s the start of lambing time so I’m fairly tied up with that at present, I have however found a spare hour this morning to write this blog post.

As a web host (amongst other things), we deal with hacked accounts on a daily basis, anyone that’s ever fallen victim to this knows how much of a pain it can be to get a website back to normal after it’s been infected. So here are a few steps you can use to help prevent the hackers getting access in the first place!

1. Keep Your Scripts Up To Date

This is the most common way for a hacker to gain access to your account, all it takes is one line of poorly written code and kablamo, the hacker can inject malicious code into your files.

That’s why it’s vital to keep everything up to date, script updates don’t just contain new features, but they also contain important security fixes.

Open source scripts such as Joomla, WordPress and OSCommerce are particularly vulnerable, as the code is, as the name suggests, open source, so the hackers have access to all of the code, making it very easy for them to go through to find anything that’s been badly written. Once a weakness is found, it spreads like wildfire across the message boards and leads to more infected websites.

So please, as soon as you see a new update available for any scripts you are using – download and install them, it’ll save you a lot of problems in the long run.

2. Remove Unused Scripts!

It seems obvious, but I know a lot of you don’t do it. (tut tut)

As I said before, all it takes is one line of badly written code for hackers to gain access to your account, so the more code you have uploaded, the more chance you have of being hacked.

It doesn’t matter if the code is uploaded to some obscure place, or to a site that is no longer online, if the code exists on your site the hackers will find it, so if you have any old scripts on your account that you are no longer using, delete them, leaving them on the account is asking for trouble.

3. Do You Really Need That Plugin?

As well as removing unused scripts, it would be a good idea to go through the scripts that you do use and get rid of anything on there that isn’t a fundamental part of your site.

Take WordPress plugins for example, if you have a WordPress blog, go into the admin area and click on “Plugins”, and I’d like to bet there are a lot of inactive plugins on there, why?

If you aren’t using a plugin, delete it from your webspace, all it’s doing is sitting there waiting for someone to find it so make sure you get rid of any un-used plugins and themes, don’t make it easy for them

4. Use SFTP

SFTP stands for Secure File Transfer Protocol and works in the same way as standard FTP, but with SFTP all commands and data are encrypted.

Here’s a graphical example of Pete the packet sniffer stealing your FTP password “sexybeast4321″:

As you can see, the password is sent in plan text, meaning Pete now has your password.

Now compare that to if you were using SFTP:

You can see that the password is now encrypted, meaning Pete can’t get access to your details.

So, How Do You Use SFTP?

Most FTP clients now support SFTP, and it’s just a case of selecting SFTP as the protocol instead of standard FTP, here’s what it looks like in CuteFTP Pro:

There are bazillions of FTP clients out there, so it’s impossible for me to show you how to set it up in every one of them, so if you just look in the help files for your FTP client and do a search for “SFTP” you should be able to find what you need, and as always, Google is your friend for things like this.

One final thing you’ll need to know if the SSH/SFTP port of your web server, to find this you can either contact your host, or if you are using a cPanel based account, log into your cPanel, click on “FTP Accounts” > “Configure FTP Client” and you’ll see the port listed on that page.

If you follow those 4 steps you should minimize the risk of your account being hacked, it wont turn your account into Alcatraz, but it will go a long way to securing it. Most of it is down to regular maintenance of your scripts, SFTP helps add an extra level of security but if you have insecure scripts on there, it’ll do no good.

There’s also the obvious things like changing your cPanel/FTP password at regular intervals, but I’m sure you all do that anyway

Even after this, there’s still a chance of getting hacked, so what do you do if you get hacked?

Contact Your Host

It may be possible to restore your account from a backup, so contacting your host right away is a good course of action, if they can restore to a point before the hacking, it gives you time to go in and clean up the old scripts that allowed the hackers to gain access.

If there are no clean backups available, then unfortunately there’s nothing for it but to clean out the infected files manually. If you have a copy of your sites on your computer (which you really should have), you may find it quicker to delete the site on your web space and re-upload from the copy on your computer.

You should also take into account that when hackers do get access to your site, they won’t just infect the website they gained the access to, they’ll infect everything on your account. So even if you have 1 bad WordPress installation and 10 good, the 10 good will be infected as well.

So to minimize this you can get yourself a reseller account and run each domain on it’s own cPanel, meaning if a site does get hacked, you only have 1 site to clean up, not every site you’ll ever run. In general you’ll find reseller accounts are only a few dollars more than what you are currently paying so it’s well worth the upgrade, if only for the piece of mind it’ll bring you.

I think that covers everything, I hope I haven’t scared you too much

If you have any questions, or any other security measures that you use, please feel free to bombard the comments section.

Regards,
Dan

Posted In: How To Guides | 26 Comments

How To Keep Your Computer Secure

Why is an Internet Marketing blog talking about PC security, surely this has nothing to do with me making money, I’ve a good mind to un-subscribe from all your mailing lists, call you lots of rude names, and report you to the FBI for providing misleading free information, you…..you…..der brain!

There, I got it out of the way for you, so please don’t send me any daft emails complaining about the wide range of subjects, think how boring it would be if every post talked about tracking, conversions, statistics and sales. Besides, this post is much, much more important.

As an Internet Marketer it’s vital to keep your computer in tip top shape, neglecting your computer would be like a taxi driver neglecting his car, so it’s not something you can sit back and forget about.

So as a fully qualified geek, I thought I’d show you how I secure my system, and my websites.

It’s important that you do both, a lot of people will secure their system but leave any old junk on their webspace, and vice versa – BOTH NEED PROTECTING!

As a web host, we deal with web based exploits on a daily basis, 99% of the time these are down to weak, out of date scripts that are on the account, but more on that later on. I’ll start with your computer first.

How I Secure My Computer

Yes, I said computer. I’m not nearly smug enough to have a MAC…..it’s a joke, don’t go un-subscrbing you MAC users, I love you really! But this part of the guide is aimed at those of us that are still supporting good ‘ol Billy G.

First of all we need to know what our computer needs protecting against, there are loads of different threats out there, and unfortunately it usually takes more than one program to keep you clean. No one program will ever be able to detect 100% of viruses and exploits, but we can do our best to minimize the risk by using as much protection as we can.

*Insert Naked Gun Condom Joke Here*

We need to make sure our machines are protected against Viruses, Malware, Spyware, Trojans, Keyloggers, Crapware, and loads of other cool stuff.

So without any further tasteless jokes, here’s what I use to keep me protected. And I’ll also point out that none of these links are affiliate links, infact most of the things I recommend are free!

My Anti-Virus Protection

I use NOD32 for my anti-virus protection, I’ve been using it for as long as I can remember and it’s always served me very well. There has been the odd thing that it’s missed, but no anti-virus software will ever find 100% of the threats that are out there.

NOD32 provides me with great protection (too soon to reuse the Naked Gun joke?) against Viruses, Malware, Trojans and other exploits. It protects me when I’m surfing the Internet, reading emails, or just generally larking around.

It manages to do all that in the background, without slowing the machine down, so it certainly isn’t a resource hog. (Yeah, I’m looking at you Norton)

Runs: All the time

Price: Free trial, then around $50/£30 per year

My Anti-Malware Protection

Malware does really come under the same heading as anti-virus protection, but sometimes your anti-virus software wont be able to get rid of every little trace of the Malware/Virus. So at times like this an on demand scanner can come in really useful.

For this, I use Malwarebytes Anti-Malware (free version). It allows me to run a scan at any time, and gives you that added bit of protection. It’s almost like getting a 2nd opinion when going to the Doctors, NOD32 may tell you you’re fine, but Malwarebytes may be able to tell you otherwise

Runs: On demand

Price: Free (Paid version also available)

My Anti-Spyware Protection

Spyware can be a massive pain in the….hard drive. It generally gathers information from your computer without your knowledge, and then uses that information to bombard you with advertisements. It can also be used in a much more sinister way, such as stealing credit card details and other personal information, so it’s important to be well protected.

I use Spybot Search & Destroy to keep my machine clear of Spyware. Not only does it remove any Spyware that has found its way onto my PC, it also “Immunizes” the machine from the most common threats for added piece of mine. For me, Spybot is a must have piece of software!

Runs: On demand & in background depending on the configuration

Price: Free

Anti-Crap Protection

Anti-Crap is a technical name for all of the junk files that build up on your machine over the course of a day/week/month/eternity. These includes things like temp files, cookies, history, unused reg keys and much, much more.

Using a piece of anti-crap software is a great way to improve your PC’s performance.

To get rid of all the crap on my machine, I use CCleaner (used to be called Crap Cleaner before the PC police decided it was offensive…..).

CCleaner can be configured to run every time your PC boots up, so each time you start the day you can be safe in the knowledge that all the crap from the previous day has gone, and you can start a fresh

Runs: On startup and On demand

Price: Free

So there you have it, the 4 programs I use to keep my machine clean. And just incase you missed the links, if you click on the product images above, they’ll take you off to the applicable websites.

I know a lot of you will use other programs, and I’m not suggesting those listed are any better, or worse, but it’s what I use to very good effect. Although if you do have a different configuration, feel free to leave a comment and share it with the rest of us.

I was going to go on and talk about website security, but I think that if I did, the post would drag on for a bit, so I’ll leave it there for now and I’ll talk about how to secure your websites in the next blog post.

So as always, thanks for reading and please do leave any questions of comments below.

Cheers,
Dan

Posted In: How To Guides | 26 Comments

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