Posts Tagged ‘Posting’

Facebook eCommerce May Have to Clear Security Obstacle

Security firm Trend Micro has been researching malicious practices on Facebook, and has discovered numerous rogue apps on the social networking site this week. They’ve been alerting Facebook of them as they find them, but apparently more keep popping up as fast as they are eliminated. Have you experienced security issues on Facebook? Tell us about them.

The apps come cleverly disguised as the most effective phishing attacks do. With all of the apps circulating around Facebook, it’s got to be hard to keep track of what all are legitimate ones anyway. Perhaps even scarier is that some seemingly legitimate apps are possibly being hacked into for malicious intent anyway.

All you can do is be careful where you click, and what info you’re giving away when you do click. Trend Micro offers the following advice:

Always check the URL displayed in your browser’s address bar before entering any sensitive information. Also check the true destination of a link before clicking it, by hovering your mouse pointer over it. If it looks suspicious, don’t click it. Also, if you’re a Facebook user, now would be a good time to go and review your privacy settings and clear out any applications you no longer use.

A report this week from the Web Hacking Incidents Database (WHID) found that 19% of hacking incidents occurred on social networks in the first half of this year. They were the most heavily-targeted vertical.

Perhaps the scariest part of this entire situation is that Facebook has just started allowing developers to sell physical goods through apps. This means, we are likely going to see a lot of businesses selling goods directly on Facebook. This has the potential to be huge for eCommerce, but security concerns are already one obstacle to successful eCommerce on the web in general. The more reports of malicious happenings regarding Facebook, the more scared people will be to buy goods through the network.

Facebook looks to be going after services like PayPal and Google Checkout in time, with regards to what platform consumers choose to pay for online goods. With the number of Facebook users already so large, and growing steadily, they have a viable shot at giving these services a run for their money.

Consider how often people are already logged into Facebook. They’re even taking it with them to other sites via things like Facebook Connect, the Fan Box, etc. There’s good reason for people to want to use Facebook to complete online shopping transactions, strictly from the convenience standpoint.

Trust is another standpoint however. It is good to see that Facebook is responding so quickly to known threats, but something will have to be done to eliminate them, or at least greatly reduce them for Facebook’s payment platform to really take off.

For specific details on the malicious Facebook apps themselves, check Trend Micro’s post, which has been continuously updated as more malicious apps have surfaced. Be careful out there.

Do you think online shoppers will be willing to buy goods through Facebook? Share your thoughts.

You Can’t Be Everybody’s Friends

Recently I saw Barry Ritholtz mentioned that he was selling video recordings of a conference he put on for only $69, and some of the people who commented on his site wrote garbage like this:

These people have enough capital to try to trade the markets, but spending $69 for one of the most in depth and most current pieces of information about their livelihood is completely out of the question. Imagine having the gall to register on someone’s site to leave a comment like “where can we steal your work from.”

And yet this is normal (and expected) behavior on the web, even in fields directly connected money / finance / investing!!!

Every day I get some non-customers who acts that way as well. The noise does wear you down, and it really does highlight the problems with free. When some people get hooked on free they have no end to the demands, and no respect or appreciation for the work.

I personally handle all customer correspondence, which is why I recently had to increase prices to slow down our rate of growth. I am only 1 person. Customers rarely wait as long as a day for a response. This guy never sent in 3 requests, was rude and demanding and demeaning, is not even a paying customer, and expects free phone support for software worth hundreds of dollars that we give away for free.

Why would I care if that guy used our tools for free? Since he is rude I hope he can’t use them, such that any competent competitor interested in SEO has a competitive advantage over him. And that guy’s rudeness shows that he probably lacks the social skills to be successful on a large distributed social network.

When you chose your customers you are picking how much you will enjoy your job.

There are a lot of potential bad customers like that, and you don’t even want to suggest they become a paying customer. The only ways to handle people that are that rude are to either ignore them or tell them off to let them know they are not welcome in your business. If you play nice with a person that treats you like a doormat then it will only get worse in time.

The person who needs a lot of support BEFORE becoming a paying customer rarely becomes a profitable long-term customer. The person who needs a price break today expects a larger one tomorrow. They keep squeezing margins until you are a commodity and the model no longer works. It is just a path to self destruction because if you cater to such people you do not raise them up to your level, you lower yourself down to their level.

This reminds me of an important business lesson from a Dan Kennedy book called The Ultimate Success Secret that a great friend recommended I read about a year ago.

When I first started in the “success education business,” one of the few people in the country who was consistently effective at selling self-improvement audiocassette programs direct, face-to-face to executives and salespeople, gave me what turned out to be very, very good advice – he said: “Don’t waste your time trying to sell these materials to the people who need it the most. They won’t buy it. You should focus on selling to successful people who want to get even better.”

Over the years, I’ve demonstrated the validity of this to myself a number of different ways. And I’ve developed an explanation for it. There is what I now call “the self-esteem Catch-22 loop” at work here: in order for a person to invest directly in himself, which is what buying self-improvement materials is, he has to place value on himself, i.e. have high self-esteem, but if he has such high self-esteem, he is probably already doing well and does not have a critical need for this type of information; he will get marginal improvement out of it; but the person who needs it most does not place much value on himself, i.e. has relatively low self-esteem, which prohibits him from buying, believing in or using self-improvement materials.

I used to be all about making everything (or as much as possible) free because I liked helping people, but really most people won’t act on advice or respect it much unless they pay for it. Human nature is what it is, and there is no point fighting it.

At some point we may need to test moving from offering any tools for free to making everything paid just to filter out that noise. Such a move would likely cost us exposure, but most of that exposure is not leading to any tangible business anyhow.

Pixars Cars 2 Quick Funny Video

If you  love Pixars Cars, then I suggest watching the video below.  Any Automotive buff will enjoy it. Cars 2 is currently in the works, but you don’t have to wait until 2011 for a fix.  I suggest you find six minutes and thirty seconds to watch the video below and, you have to enjoy it.

Facebook anyone? with R.W. Casandra

Well we are on Facebook now, come visit us >>>>  “r.w.casandra”

Thanks,

R.W.

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Automated Blog and Ping Uncovered

We have seen an insane amount of blogging software on the market today. This seems to be a well established ”automated” process to start your turnkey blogging business. If you want to learn the basics to blogging at an affordable price read through below.  Good Luck,  R.W.Casandra

Blog and Ping Uncovered by Joseph Tierney,

I get tons of emails everyday asking me:
1. What exactly is blog and ping and how will it help my websites?
2. What programs do I use?
3. How often do I post to my blogs?
4. How often do I ping my blogs?
5. Does blog and ping STILL work?
6. What is better – Blogger blogs or my own blogs on my server?
7. What content do you post to your blogs along with the links?
8. Do you recommend any content generator to use with my sites?
9. Where can I find a bigger ping list?
10. Where do I recommend to hire Indians for Blogger blog creation and other outsourcing?
11. Did I make the majority of my money from Blogger blogs with Adsense or using Blogger blogs to
index my Adsense websites?
So, without further ado (fluff)… What exactly is blog and ping and how will it help my websites?
The simplest way to put it is with a step-by-step example:
1. Collect links from your website(s) that have not yet been indexed by the search engines.
2. Post those links to your blogs.
3. Ping your blog.
4. When your blog is pinged, search engine spiders come running to it, and in turn follow the links that you
posted to the blog.
5. Now the spiders will start to crawl your un-indexed website and start to index it at record speed.
So the whole blog and ping process will help your websites because they are most likely not receiving any
traffic unless they are in the search engines. If you blog and ping them you can get them indexed in record
time, which will in turn start to send you traffic.
Sounds easy, doesn’t it?

What programs do I use?
I actually use my own programs to blog and ping that I offer for free for everyone, you can check them out.
The first program is GrabLinks. All you have to do is enter your sitemap URL into the program and a list of
links from your website will automatically be saved to a file for you, which saves a heck of a lot of time.
The second program is BlogPoster which can post to Blogger and Wordpress blogs. All you have to do is
enter your blogs’ usernames, passwords, and URLs into a text file and use the links file that you created with
GrabLinks. Now all of your links will be randomly posted to your blogs.
The last program is BlogPinger. For BlogPinger all you have to do is enter a list of your ping services into one
file (it comes with 25 ping services already), and a list of the URLs to your blogs. Now all you have to do is
enter the interval for pinging the blogs and click start. All of the blogs will now be pinged to the ping services
at whatever interval you set.

How often do I post to my blogs?
I post to every one of my blogs every 720 minutes if they are on my own server and post 10 links at a time.
However, if I am posting to Blogger blogs I post 10-100 links at a time and I post every 720-1440 minutes (12
hours, 24 hours). Why do I post at these intervals with those drastic different number of links?
The reason is the blogs on my own server I control. They can never be deleted and I will be okay posting only
10 links at a time because they WILL always be there, gaining PageRank and trust, never being deleted.
However, Blogger blogs DO get deleted and they DO get “CAPTCHA ‘d”. This means that you can no longer
post to them automatically, you must enter a special image code for EVERY SINGLE POST.
So, for each post that is why I post more than just 10 links at a time. If I was only posting 10 links at a time
and I got CAPTCHA’d right after that post it would basically be a waste of a blog. If I am posting 100 links at a
time that is equal to 10 posts, do you understand the logic behind it?
You might think that because Blogger blogs have this issue that they would be a complete waste of time, well
they aren’t. I will explain why they are actually BETTER than using your own blogs on your own server later
on.

How often do I ping my blogs?
I ping my blogs every 720 minutes, which is every 12 hours.
Why do I ping at such a long delay?
I don’t want the ping services to ban my IP address, which means that I wouldn’t be able to ping them AT ALL
anymore. This would completely ruin the blog and ping process.
However, there are some people that ping every hour or 2 hours. This is not needed and will only ruin the
blog and ping process in the future by flooding the ping services with pings.
Does blog and ping STILL work?
Blog and ping definitely still works even though “guru’s” will say that it doesn’t. I have been using this
technique since August 2005 even though they said it was dead then too.
However, the process does have it’s ups and downs. One month blog and ping will work extremely well and
fast, the other it will still work – just not as fast as the month before, then back to normal the next month.
So if you see that your sites aren’t getting indexed as well as they were before, do not worry. Things like this
fluctuate with the search engines.

What is better – Blogger blogs or my own blogs on my server?
The answer to this is simple – Blogger blogs.
You might ask me, how on earth could Blogger blogs be better than hosting blogs on my own server when
they are getting deleted or CAPTCHA’d and I have to make more of them every day?
Well, the reason is because Blogger blogs get your websites indexed EXTREMELY fast and MORE pages
overall. You can be posting your website links to blogs on your own server and pinging them, but you won’t
see any real effect for 2-3 weeks+.
With Blogger blogs you can have your website start to get indexed in 2 days. That is why there is a huge
benefit to using them. The only problem is that you HAVE TO create them everyday. And by everyday, I
mean EVERYDAY unless you want to see bad results.
Creating a new account, logging in, creating new blogs by hand, and changing the correct settings for each
one will take FOREVER. I have created a program called BloggerGenerator that helps create the blogs
extremely fast compared to by hand. Buy your own copy of BloggerGenerator here.

What content do you post to your blogs along with the links?
I do NOT post any content besides the links to my sites. That is right – nothing, just plain HTML links to my
websites. Why do I do this? There is absolutely no point in gathering data from some search engine based on your keyword to post along with your links to that your blog looks more “real”.
Any real person can still see that your blog is made only to get your websites indexed. I’ve said it once and I
will say it again:   “It is like throwing crap on top of more crap.”
Gathering content to post along with your links is just a waste of time. Time is money, and money is the
whole reason you are trying to get your websites indexed.

Do you recommend any content generator to use with my sites?
I only recommend using ONE content generator and that is RSSGM (Really Simple Site Creator Modified). I
use this myself personally even though in the past I have used DSG (Dynamic Site Creator), also free.

Why did I stop using DSG and now only use RSSGM?
Because DSG has a problem with it’s MySQL queries (they aren’t optimized) and I couldn’t get enough of the
scripts installed on my servers. The MySQL queries that it currently uses slowed down my server and caused
it to crash at random times – at least this is what happened to me on 3 different servers.
With RSSGM I can install up to 3000 copies of it on one server, plus the script is free! What do you have to
lose, check it out at:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/rssgm/

Where can I find a bigger ping list?
This is one thing that can make or break your blogging and pinging process…the bigger/better your ping list is
the more exposure your blog will get, you can find an ever-updating list on some of the forums. Here is the
one that I recommend:
http://syndk8.net/forum/index.php/topic,2060.0.html

Where do I recommend to outsource Blogger blog creation?
The only place that I have used to find Indians to make my blogs for me was http://www.getafreelancer.com,
this is the only place that I recommend.
Did I make the majority of my money from Blogger blogs with
Adsense or using Blogger blogs to index my Adsense websites?
I made the majority of my money off of using Blogger blogs to get my Adsense websites indexed. The money
lasts for a longer term than if you were just creating Blogger blogs with your Adsense code on it, because
Blogger can delete your blogs at any time. However, this is not to say that there is no money in creating
Blogger blogs with Adsense on them.
BE CREATIVE, don’t just create a blank template with your Adsense code on it (which is also a violation of
TOS). Make a decent looking template that will get you a nice CTR. You can also create the template around
high-paying keywords to make your CPM go up.

Resources:

Automated Blogging Software, Click Here!