Just because your paranoid does not mean they are not out to get you….

As glorious and magnificent as the internet is, there are people out there actively searching for other internet users to prey on, use, manipulate, impersonate (identity theft) and generally rip off (credit card fraud etc ).

It can be a dangerous place for an internet marketer (especially a new one) to make an honest buck, and even to well seasoned marketers and netrepreneurs (did I just make a new word up…?) these shifty eyed, nimble fingered  buggers can be at best a costly inconvenience and at worst… hell you could, albeit temporarily, lose your entire business over night!, and the little guy who has in many cases spent years learning and trying to make their ebiz work well enough to earn them a living it can be a frustrating disaster!, with potentially long term consequences.

Imagine having spent a couple of years studying, spending your hard earned money (often having to make sacrifices elsewhere in your life to fund your fledgling ebiz) on learning about and developing an internet business, getting to the position where you are generating an income and starting to see more and more gains, and as you finally see the light at the end of the tunnel on your journey to financial independance, your reputation as a decent and honest internet marketing go-giver growing almost daily… and then disaster strikes in the form of some spotty social misfit who happens across your website and decides to hack into your hosting account and cause mischief by installing some maliscous nasty… which you dont initially realise is there until a potential customer sends you an email letting you know there is a problem.

Just such a thing happened to a fairly new british marketer named Steve Wilkins, now I wont go on about who he is or give much background detail… if you want to know more about him then I recommend you visit his Blog, all I will say is that he was a student of John Thornhill’s Marketing Masterclass 2009, he completed the course and is now doing alright for himself.

I became aware of Steve when John Thornhill sent me an email promoting one of Steves products, ‘Build Your Ebiz With Resale Rights And PLR’ and because John said Steve was one of his Masterclass students I just had to go check out what he had released, and I’m glad I did because

‘Build Your Ebiz With Resale Rights And PLR’ is a cracking product, very proffesional and very nicely done, the only thing I dont like about it is that I did not create it myself!.

So anyway I clicked the link in the email, but was intercepted at the landing page by a warning page from Google, saying the site was unsafe as the intended destination had  maliscous activity/maliscous script installed, (good on Google for creating such an excellent warning system!)

Now I’m sure we have all heard of unscrupulouse individuals who put up bogus sites with the intention of causing michief along the lines of stealing peoples personal/bank account and credit card details, and perhaps some of the visitors to Steves product site might think (incorrectly) that Steve had installed the nasty himself, and this is where the potential for long term harm to a marketers reputation comes in to play, now as I had received news of this product via email obviously there was a promotion going on, so how many potential customers reached that site only to find it infected? and how many of those people who dont know any better wont ever trust Steve again? these bloody hackers have a lot to answer for and can cause untold damage to honest marketers business.

But hopefully most people will be able to see this unfortunate situation for what it is… a hard working and decent internet marketer falling victim to the unwelcome attention of some low life piece of scum up to no good!.

I dont know what this horrible little oik installed on Steves hosting account, or indeed whether this person was a hardened cyber crim working alone or as part of a gang, or if he was just some pimply faced pleb who cant get himself a girlfriend…except for money, who had decided to work out his frustrations at his own social inadequacies by hacking into someones livelyhood, whatever the truth, one thing that is for sure is that it cost Steve a lot of money in lost sales, and possibly more damage was done to his on-line reputation than might be known for some time.

I dont know what safe guards Steve has put in place to reduce the risk of this sort of thing happening again (if you read this Steve any comment on website security would be welcome) but on-line security is something we all need to pay attention to, I’ll be looking deeper into this sometime soon.

Right thats it for now… and in my next post i’ll recount how some bottom feeder of a hacker has read this and in a fit of pique decided to launch ‘hacker-kriege’ on my own fledgeling business… see you on the next post…

Shields up people they are coming to get us…

Pete

Continuing on with the ‘things that can go wrong’ theme i’d like to recount an unfortunate experience I had with Aweber.

Now first off I want to make it absolutely clear this post  is Not intended as an exercise in Aweber bashing,

I simply want to make people aware that even with the biggest and the best, things can go horribly wrong and if you are forewarned of possible problems you will be in a better position to deal with them should they occur, and even take steps to prevent them  rearing their ugly heads… there are lessons to be learned from my experience so read on…

Aweber are one of the best known and probably most popular of the Auto-responder service providers, they are at the heart of so many mega successful on-line businesses that it would not be fair of me to slate them out of hand, my experience with them was not a good one but I have to be fair here because I know the majority of Aweber customers do not have any problems with them, in fact they are so popular just about every major marketer and his pet budgie recommend them (if you dont yet know the importance of auto-responders in your business check out my related post).

Ordinarily Aweber are the best of the best, but as my experience shows even the best can have room for improvement…

I’d opened an Aweber account in January, received three emails straight away… the usual welcome to…, account details etc, a few days later I had a 5 email auto-responder sequence linked to an opt-in page setup, I received the sequence approval email from them, tested my opt-in page and email sequence and everything was fine, fast forward a couple of months during which time i’d put that on the back burner whilest I worked on something which would run  in tandem, then one day i’m explaining to a friend about auto-responders and showed him my opt-in page… but something looked different… oh my opt-in box had gone…! well obviously you cant opt-in if there is nowhere to put your name and email address…

After much head scratching I tried to log into my account at Aweber, but no joy, login not recognised!, so I sent an email to customer services asking where my account had gone…

A reply came that my account had been suspended because they had been unable to contact me to confirm my home address details, I thought that strange because I am not a difficult guy to get hold of… so I re-submitted them in an email and asked that my account be reactivated… the reply I got shocked me because it said my account could not be reactivated as it had apparently been more than 30 days since my account had been suspended so my account along with all my data had been deleted!!!.

I read that email in disbelief!, so I asked them how they could justify deleting an account with email sequence set up, subscribers in place…(well actually just two but what if it had been several thousand?) and no problems with the billing, but they just said they had made several unsuccessful attempts to contact me (they said they sent an email, did not mention trying to phone me but I assume they did oh and left a message on my account so if I had logged in within that 30 days I would have received it)… hmmm now I cant be certain but Im sure I did log in within the time frame given because I did update a couple of details and change my password, anyway what has annoyed me is that I really dont think they made enough effort to contact me, now as we all know on occasion the odd email may go astray (John Thornhill cleverly anticipates this on his Marketing Masterclass course by having his students register two email addresses so if one email regarding a weeks studies goes astray there is a second to a different address that is certain to get through) now I personally dont think sending just one email requesting contact is enough… when they did not get a reply they should have sent at least a couple more just in case the first did not get through.

We have an answerphone which is always on when we are unavailable to take a call, now I do know there were several ‘blank’ messages on there about the time Aweber were apparently trying to contact me… but the whole point of having an answerphone is so anyone trying to contact us, especially urgently, can leave a message and a number to call back… at least then we know to get in touch, but if no one bothers to leave a message then we dont know who called do we?.

And finally why, if emailing and phoning did not work, did they not send a letter…? you know those old fashioned thingies we used to send before we had the internet and email…

So because Aweber could not contact me by email (and I’m sure they must have only sent one because that email address receives mail every day, so theirs must have been ‘the one that went astray’) and because they allegedly could not reach me by phone…(it obviously did not dawn on them that perhaps if i’d known they were trying to contact me urgently to avoid deleting my account that  I would have contacted them, you see thats why answer phones are so useful… so we never miss an important call), and because I did not log into my Aweber account again within 30 days of it being suspended to find the message they say was waiting for me… my account gets deleted along with all my data…

Now personally I think that stinks and does suggest there is some improvement they can make to their standard procedure with regard to dealing with their customers, it almost feels like a lack of dedication to the customer… and maybe there is a little of that, and maybe because this probably is such a rare problem they have perhaps not had to deal with this sort of thing before, whatever the case is it is a big shame it all unfolded like it did because I wont use their service now, but Like I said at the beginning of this post I dont want this to be seen as an Aweber bashing session, whatever my experience and my personal feelings it has to be remembered that Aweber are a world renowned auto-responder service, their reputation is second to none and hundreds or even thousands of highly successful marketers swear by them… but every diamond has it’s flaw  and I’m the unlucky bugger who found it!.

So what am I using for my Auto-responder solution…? AutoResponse Plus, I want to have full control over all my data and this provides that, it is a full featured auto-responder program which installs on your domain, you dont have any monthly fees just a one off purchase cost of just under $200, the license allows you to install the software on up to 10 domains, gives you full support and upgrades for two years oh and also includes professional installation on one domain by one of their guys. I’m still getting used to AutoResponse Plus but I’d have to say so far I’m very impressed, there is a lot to it and once I’v mastered it I’ll write a full review. Oh it is also recommended by British marketer Nick James so it cant be bad.

To conclude I’d suggest you check out all the auto-responder service providers and choose one you like the look of yourself, find a few customer reviews to guide you to what may be best for you… if you want a self hosted solution where you really do control everything yourself then AutoResponse Plus is the best of these… you should check it out before you make your final descision…

Until the next one…

Pete

You’ve read about it in computer magazines and on internet forums, the guy in your local computer store has advised you to do it as has your tek savvy mate… ‘back-up all your computer data, keep at least two copies, use software to enable regular back-ups of your computer system, if you make any changes to your computer system, system registry etc back it up first… before you install any new software make sure you have a recent back-up of your system just in case anything goes wrong…’.

But how many of us actually do it…?, how many of us are guilty of thinking ‘…oh it’l never happen to me, it’s only the people who actually do something wrong who screw their computer up…’ or ‘I’m only making a small change/installing a small program what could possibly go wrong…?’

And most of the time nothing does go wrong… we install/delete programs, sometimes make hardware changes and get these nifty little useful or quick fix shareware programs which are supposed to make life easier for us, but when something does go wrong… well let me tell you about my little experience…

It was a tuesday evening, I had a little bit of time to kill before leaving for work for a night shift, I have two blog sites… one I am developing weekly through being mentored on the John Thornhill Marketing Masterclass, and the other which although I am kind of developing in parallel I am also using it as a test platform for various scripts. Eventually that second site will take on a style and business function of it’s own but for the moment it will serve as my experimental site.

Now earlier that day I had just received the header and footer graphics from Steve at Planet Divinity, and I wanted to get them uploaded to my site before leaving for work… so I logged into my wordpress control panel, saw there was an update available so decided to do that first. I was prompted to back-up my blog first, now part of me just thought about skipping that ( I must have been having a lazy moment) but I thought I had better not chance it and backed up to a folder on my desk top.

The update went smoothly, as most do, then I uploaded the header and footer graphic images using fileZiller ftp, that went fine, edited the footer graphic and saved changes ok, but when I tried to delete my blog name and tag line (the original pre graphic, which was displayed over my new shiny header) and clicked update… something went wrong and it all went pear shaped and appeared to have corrupted the data base, so I could no longer access my blog! or wordpress admin panel… talk about panic… I think I forgot to breath for several moments… i’d say it seemed like my life was flashing before my eyes, but I think it was just the memory of hours of work just evaporating into nothing, and that god aweful ‘…oh no what have I done…?’ feeling.

I didn’t have much time, so I did a quick google and came up with some info, I logged into my site cpanel, went into Fantastico, brought up wordpress and found where there was a button to ‘repair database’ ‘YES’ I thought… clicked it, got a message saying database was successfully repaired, tried to go to my blog but still no joy, the repair had not worked after all, ‘Shite’ I thought… what now? I figured I needed to uninstall wordpress from my domain, that done I had to re-install it again.

Thankfully Fantastico is good at what it doe’s and in no time at all wordpress was up and running on my domain again, now I just had to import the data i’d saved before my ‘little’ problem occurred.
…..and that is when I had a bit of a disappointment, you see the wordpress backup feature only actually saves your posts and link categories, so even after you have imported your saved data you still have work to do up loading your theme, graphics and redoing your links to other sites… hardly what I would consider a proper backup!.

After redoing what needed to be done I closed my laptop, kissed my wife and headed off to work feeling in a pretty good mood, and why would I be in a good mood after experiencing near disaster? after witnessing first hand one of those ‘it’ll never happen to me…’ moments where I pictured my whole internet marketing world come crashing down around my feet? because in the space of just forty minutes I had turned disaster around , re-established my blog and internet presence, swopped fear and frustration for an incredibly valuable and positive lesson, become that little bit stronger through my experience and may well have set in place a slightly altered mindset which will keep my internet business that little bit safer in the future… the fact that I have managed to increase my knowledge of cpanel, fantastico, wordpress and exporting/importing backed up data also leaves me with a good feeling too, you see I just love learning… even when it is done the hard, scary way!.

And when I got home after my shift? I went on a back-up frenzy!.

Now if you take one thing away from my experience let it be this… BACK UP YOUR DATA…ALL OF IT, DO IT NOW! because you never know it could be you who disaster strikes next, and if and when it does you want to be damn sure you have everything you need to get you back up and running as quickly and easily as possible, learn from this because I dont want you to feel like your world is about to end…

To you CAREFULLY BACKED UP success…
Pete.

***After this episode I discovered a wordpress plugin called myEASYbackup… this backs up your entire wordpress installation, everything including your theme and graphics, and downloads and saves it to your computer, I now have this installed on both my blog sites***