SE Conspiracy

I don’t know if it was due to a system update or if it was hacking (i.e. my typical conspiracy), but my baby, ShrinkTheWeb, stopped generating thumbnails for about 7 hours over this weekend. I was staying up all night to prepare a proposal for review later on tonight, but I ended up working on ShrinkTheWeb until 6:30am.

I’m just glad to have fixed it. I was at my wit’s end and beginning to think I couldn’t get it, because I absolutely have to get this proposal done. But, at the last minute –shortly after Leah got up and left for work, I got it.

Getting these captured screenshots of websites to happen automatically truly is a piece of magic. It is a work of art, indeed. I was going to be upset if I didn’t get it working again, because people would be forced to switch to a lesser service, if mine wouldn’t work.

My ShrinkTheWeb Thumbnail Generator

Anyway, I have to get to my proposal and just wanted to post a quick update. Here’s a copy of the email I sent out to the faithful webmasters that currently use ShrinkTheWeb:

“On Saturday, Jan 19th (evening) until Sunday, Jan 20th (6:30am),
ShrinkTheWeb experienced an unexpected outage.

I have been up all night working on it, and although I am still
unsure as to the cause of the outage, I have gotten the system
back online and generating thumbnails once again.

All of your requests for thumbnails during the outage were still
queued, and there are about 750 thumbnails in currently in the
queue -as of this writing. They should all be cleared within an
hour or two.

I wish I could say for certain that I knew what caused this
outage and that it won’t happen again, but it seems that the
server “conveniently” updated a critical piece of system
software that exhibited different behavior after the update.

Generating these thumbnails is nothing short of magic, and even
simple updates can cause horrific problems.

In any case, I will keep an eye on things and hope this did not
cause any great inconvenience for you.

Best regards,

Brandon
-ShrinkTheWeb”

I tried to build an online marketers’ club back in 2001 via marketinghwy.com, but it just never took off. I think the Internet was still too “new” to people back then and they all wanted a quick buck –which I guess that will never change.

Tonight, I posted in my forum about this and the title of the article is “We Need A Social Marketers Club“… I posted in my forum instead of on this blog, because I wanted to foster more of a feedback than a blog typically affords. I am really gung-ho about this, and if enough people are interested, I would really like to see what we can do.

-Brandon

I learned very early on that email not getting through spam filters would be a major hindrance to my online businesses. Unfortunately, free email providers have cracked down so much that hardly anything gets through those filters now. If you are a legitimate business that has NEVER even once sent spam, your emails probably still end up in the ‘Bulk Mail’ folders at Yahoo and Gmail. It’s sad but true. MSN/Hotmail tends to be a little more realistic -as of the time of this writing.

I haven’t had the time to keep up on whether my emails were getting through over the past several years, and I just now made the time to overhaul my sites in this area.

What did I find?

Well, *gulp* I found that my forum has discarded roughly 25 registrations per month that did not see our email. One of my other businesses that caters to people who mostly use free email services have lost an estimated $500/month due to abandoned confirmations. Still, another one of my companies has lost its ability to generate any revenue due to emails not getting through. That company was actually “spam trap poisoned” -meaning that someone put in special emails used to catch spammers who continuously send spam to emails they shouldn’t. These are emails such as “donotspamthisemail@groups.yahoo.com.”

Basically, a “spam trap” was a good idea in the beginning. It was an email designed to be picked up by email harvesters (automated programs that crawl the web collecting email addresses from websites), and when the spammer would spam that email, the group would automatically submit a request to all of the blocklists and get them shut down fairly quickly.

However, these days, spammers can pick out which email addresses are spam traps and they then turn around and submit those emails into competitor websites. So, in my case, someone kept putting in several “spam trap” emails and when I would send out my double opt-in confirmation emails to it, my site would get tagged for spam. Now, I’ve had to spend considerable time and energy to get removed from those lists.

So, that’s no good. What can we do about it?

Here’s what I did tonight to combat the over zealous spam filters that are killing my legitimate businesses while doing little to curb overall spam:

1. I wrote new code for all of my sites that specifically tells people the exact steps on how to whitelist our email addresses and then provide an alternate way to request the validation email be sent out again.
2. I modified the email code across all of my sites to put a one-click unsubscribe and made it to where I keep the email to avoid re-registrations from people trying to spam trap poison me. I make the email inactive so it will never be emailed, of course.
3. I double-checked the security of my code, website account security, server security, and updated my passwords. This was done to help prevent someone from hacking any of my databases and spamming my users without me even knowing. It has never happened and I want to make sure it stays that way!
4. I applied to the various free email providers and requested to be whitelisted (see below).
5. I will be adding SPF records to my most important domains.
6. I am also considering a service such as Constant Contact for some of my more important lists –although, that will be a bit pricey for my 25,000 subscriber database.

Before you apply for the various whitelists, you should read over their terms to make 100% percent certain that you are compliant. Otherwise, you will waste a LOT of time and get nowhere.

For instance, you might think you are compliant because you don’t spam but it’s not that simple. Typically, you have to have the following:

1. Reverse DNS set up for each domain that sends your emails.
2. Dedicated IP address or you need to identify what methods you take to ensure that you are providing tracking to differentiate your emails from someone else sharing the same IP address.
3. Proof of how you collected your emails. This includes a timestamp, name, and method (i.e. email subscribe, form subscribe, etc)

When you are ready to begin this process, you can visit the following links to read over the guidelines and apply:

1. AOL - AOL Whitelist Guidelines
2. Yahoo! -Yahoo Bulk Email Sender FAQ
3. Gmail - Google Whitelist Policy*

*Google does not allow whitelisting. So, if you want to tell people how to manually whitelist you for their account, use the following steps:

1. Go to http://www.gmail.com and login to your email account
   *just like you would to check your email.
2. At the top RIGHT SIDE, click the link that says SETTINGS.
3. At the top of the screen that says MAIL SETTINGS, click the link that says FILTERS.
4. On the FILTERS screen, click the tab that says Create a New Filter tab.
5. In the FROM field on the CREATE A FILTER screen, type: yourdomain.com
   *Change NO other settings on this screen.
6. Click the button that says NEXT STEP.
7. Check the box that says STAR IT.
8. Click the button that says CREATE FILTER.
9. That’s it! Sign out from Gmail.

Whew! As long as it took to write all of that out, it is nothing compared to how much work this will have been once completed. However, these are some of the ills of working online, and -for some of us- the benefits of being able to work from home are more than worth it!

I have several ventures (and joint ventures) going at any given time. Currently, I have a few ventures in a very good position to make it big but they need a lot of marketing dollars that I simply do not have at the moment. However, I do also have a couple of ventures that can be successful at a lower price point. These are what will become my “Cash Cows.”

This is basically how I made myself such a success before. I built up a company as a cash cow (i.e. to provide me sufficient, on-going income) and then I used those proceeds to “buy” myself time to work on other projects. Most people are familiar with the concept of leveraging wealth, but what if you have no wealth to leverage?

For those just starting out, I like to push the idea of leveraging time. If you can increase the “value” of your time in concrete dollar terms, then you will be moving closer towards the freedom of doing other things. At some point, those things should be recreational but while we’re still coming up in the world, we will use that freedom to build another successful venture (or two… or ten).

As I am about to write on how I determine the dollar value of my time, I am reminded of how people used to poke fun at me for the way I thought about these things.

These are things like how I would hire a maid to clean around the house and paid her $60 per visit for her work in helping maintain my house. My friends would tell me, “that’s too much to pay someone else. Why not just do it yourself and save that money?”

Well, that IS the question now, isn’t it? The answer is simple. Actually, it’s not so simple but I’ll try my best to make it so.

What makes this confusing is that we are not calculating your hourly rate. So, if you make $2500 per month and divide by hours worked, you’d have your effective hourly rate at $15.63 per hour for a typical work-week. However, that only accounts for hours you are actively working. So, we need to calculate the value of your time when you are simply “awake” -even if not working.

This will give you a gauge by which to compare things. You can quickly know if a price for a service it too high by knowing about how long something will take you to do yourself multiplied by your “awake hourly value” versus the rate being asked by someone else to do it for you. Be careful, though, and try not to become too obsessive about it. I had to force myself to go to the movies sometimes because I would think, “man, it’s costing me $75 in time to go out!” But, that’s part of life and living life is most important and more valuable than dollars.

Basically, most people don’t think about their time having a specific dollar value -despite the popular adage of “time is money.” In the past, for instance, I would justify paying my maid $60 to clean the house and do basic chores because her and her helper would take care of my fairly large home within two hours or so. That cost me $30 per hour, right? Right. But, it saved me $40. If I had done the work myself, it would’ve cost me at least twice the amount of time. At that time, my “awake hourly value” was roughly $25 per hour. So, even though my hourly value of $25 is less than the maid’s hourly rate of $30, it would have cost me $100 in my time (i.e. 4 hours of work) versus $60 to pay the maid. When it’s put that way, I think it makes a little more sense, eh?

Here’s how you calculate your “Awake Hourly Value”:

Those of you who hate algebra are gonna kill me for this… hehe.

A / (b * c * d)

A = Annual Income
b = number of days of week worked
c = hours per day awake
d = weeks worked in the year [usually 51])

Back in the day, I was earning roughly $140,000 annually, worked 6 days a week, and slept 6 hours per day. That yields the following formula:

$140,000 / (6 * 18 * 51) = $25.42 per hour

So, if we take a look again at someone making $2,500 per month, the effective “awake hourly rate” is about $7.35 per hour.

At one point -just before I had to leave the country- I was working about 4 days per week, so my awake hourly value went up to $38.13 per hour. Those were the good ol’ days!

Since I returned to the U.S. and began rebuilding my life, my “awake hourly value” has been dismal but growing. Currently, my awake hourly value is just under $9 per hour. So, I do a lot of things myself these days. In time, I plan to get back on my feet and jump back to the days when I had my freedom. For the moment, however, I like to say:

“Time is Money and I have Neither!”

So, my friend, how much is your time worth?

Today, I wanted to talk about how all webmasters are told they should not sell advertisements on their websites unless it is done the way Google wants it done. You know, I watched for years as other webmasters profited while I sat back and ‘did the right thing’ by not selling links. In hindsight, my sites in that market could’ve easily generated more than $7,500 per month in additional revenue. I had three sites at PR7 (naturally!), a couple of PR5’s and PR6’s, and several dozen PR4’s and below.

Over the two to three years that I refused to succumb to the pressure, selling text links would’ve netted me at least $225,000 in EXTRA income. Man. Now that I’ve actually sat down and done the math, I’m really disheartened.

So anyway, doing what Google told everyone was ‘the right thing to do’ cost me well over a quarter of a million dollars! But wait, wait! There is an upside and a benefit to doing the right thing, right? I -like a million others- believed that we would be rewarded for our good deeds in ‘trying to make the Internet a better place’ with traffic and visitors. Thus, we would be able to grow our businesses ‘the right way.’

“At the end of the day we are likely to be punished for our kindnesses.” - Ronin (1998)

So, how are my sites doing now-a-days? Hmm. Well, I have had ZERO traffic from Google for over a year and although I should have started looking out for MY best interests back then, I decided to wait it out and give them the benefit of the doubt. So, as of today, my portfolio of sites is still getting roughly …umm… ZERO traffic from Google and their value for selling links has diminished to the point of possibly generating $1,000 per month -if I’m lucky. And, even then, that could end at any moment when Google blindly wipes out another million websites from its ranking index, just for fun.

I’m sure many people who still have some Google traffic (by no doing of their own despite their beliefs) will swear by Google’s generosity -if you stay the course. I’m sure they would say that I must not know anything about marketing online or I must’ve employed some kinds of “black hat” techniques. Sadly, no, I never employed any tricks and I do know how to market online. I’ve made quite a bit of money marketing online for myself and others.

Ah well. Most people were born and raised to look out for themselves, but I guess I missed that day in class. For me, the moral of the story is that I must -to survive- start to look out for myself and myself alone. If I can better someone else or another business in the process, then great. If not, too bad. I am on the right path now, but is it too late?

If you have ever dealt with getting an online merchant account in order to process credit cards directly, you know what a harrowing experience that can be. If you are looking at options for processing credit cards, perhaps you should save yourself a LOT of headache and read this article.

First, let me highlight the options available as of this post and then I’ll cover the pros and cons of each one.

1. Paypal (Visit Site) - built in credit card acceptance (business accounts)
2. Paypal Pro (Visit Site) - seamless online credit card processing
3. Clickbank (Visit Site) - affiliate marketplace; processes orders for you
4. 2checkout (Visit Site) - marketplace that processes on your behalf
5. Merchant Account - numerous “real” merchant account providers

Paypal (Visit Site)
Let’s start with Paypal since it’s first on the list and then we’ll make our way down. Paypal is the Internet’s basic payment processor. It has been around for so long that I cannot remember a time without Paypal. Well, actually I can but it was a really, really long time ago. Haha. Anyway, paypal is not without its flaws, but in general, it is a good system. For merchants, it allows you to accept payments and subscriptions and also offers to accept credit cards. However, not all credit cards are accepted and you’ll find that a good many people will not be able to buy from you using their credit card with Paypal. Also note that your customer must go to Paypal’s website in order to pay (i.e. cannot pay directly on your site).

Note: Please check Paypal’s policy on accepting credit cards -as it may have been updated since the date of this posting.

Paypal Payments Pro (Visit Site)
Next, we’ll cover Paypal’s newer “Payments Pro” solution. In actuality, this service has been around for years. However, it has taken until recently to get it to a point that it actually works and can be used. I’m not sure what Paypal did over there with all of their software engineers for so long. I guess they took a few …umm…years… off.

Anyway, this system looks pretty good but I haven’t tried it personally. It touts itself as an actual processor whereby you can have someone on YOUR site buy something on YOUR site and have the payment processed seamlessly by Paypal in the background. This would indicate they finally have a fully stocked online merchant account offering. If I had known this just a few months ago, I would’ve given it a try. Unfortunately, I went with Authorize.net –HUGE mistake (more on that later).

Note: Please check Paypal’s policy on accepting credit cards -as it may have been updated since the date of this posting.

Clickbank (Visit Site)
Clickbank is a huge marketplace of products that is built around the affiliate model. In recent years, they have begun offering the service of processing payments for vendors -even if the vendors do not use the affiliate portion of their marketplace. This could be a BIG thing for some of you, but I haven’t tried this one either and I hear they are quite picky about who they approve and which products/services are acceptable.

2checkout (Visit Site)
This company is a virtual marketplace that processes payments on behalf of its members. This is an unusual setup, and I cannot fathom how they talked their processing bank into processing their payments for them, but I imagine that they might even “be” their own clearing bank.

At any rate, this is a great service that I have used for many years. They are somewhat picky about who they will accept -based on the vendor’s product, service and website. However, if they will accept payments on your behalf, this is a quick and easy way to process most credit cards easily and relatively inexpensively. There is a $49.95 setup fee that will be refunded, if you do not meet their criteria. The drawbacks to using 2checkout.com is that they mandate that you place some wording on your payment page to the effect of “a Product of 2checkout.com” or something like that, not all credit cards will process for whatever reason, and there is no truly seamless integration (i.e. your customers pay on the 2co website). However, it’s good for a quick-and-dirty solution -especially if you don’t want monthly fees!

Merchant Accounts
I have had nothing but headaches over the past ten years when dealing with online merchant accounts. First of all, back in 1999, it took days and days of research and calling just to find out WHO all I needed to sign up with in order to process credit cards seamlessly on my website. It was a real test of my patience.

Unfortunately, things do not seem to have improved much over the years. As a test, I signed up with Authorize.net –supposedly the world’s largest online merchant account provider. Although, I cannot imagine they have any customers after seeing how they run their business and treat their customers.

First of all, there is still no one-stop solution. You still need a few different pieces of the puzzle to process payments online directly through an online merchant account processor. You need the “payment gateway” (i.e. Authorize.net), a “payment processor” (i.e. a special kind of bank), and a separate bank account of your own to be used for deposits to you and monthly payments to the various companies involved.

When signing up with Authorize.net, we were told some basic pricing and a $99 setup fee. Although a bit steep, we wanted to go with a solution that was streamlined and easy to set up. Boy did we miss the boat on that one!

It turned out that Authorize.net still outsources their “payment processing” to various banks and then tries to get you approved through various 3rd party processing vendors. I imagine that they still do it this way to create a bidding war for your business. So, they sell you off to the highest bidder and end up making it a cacophony of a process to get approved.

What is worse is that they take their “fee” up-front regardless of how long it takes to get your account up-and-running. In their policy when you join, this is stated somewhere, but I never saw it. I was told that once you log in, the clock is ticking. So, if you go with a merchant account, I suggest NOT configuring it until you have been completely approved.

In my case, it took more than two months and a lot of time, effort, and money to get going. I really had to work hard to make it happen and I spent a lot in the process –not to mention paying the setup fee and two months of service during a time when I had no service. Upon my complaint, I was given excuse after excuse and, in the end, was only given credit for one month of service.

Once I got going, things weren’t too bad. However, after five months of paying for service, I haven’t once needed them to process a payment. So, it looks like I wasted nearly $200 and more than a solid week of my time for nothing. In the end, I am now canceling my Authorize.net account –which, of course, is also not a simple thing to do.

The moral is, of course, Buyer Beware!