Hacking, Viagra and Why I’m an Idiot….. Learn from My Mistakes

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Viagra Picture

Viagra Changes Everything

If you have visited my blog before, you may have noticed a few changes. There has been a big design change but also, you may notice that I have a much lighter load of content.

Well, the story started a few days ago, when I tried visiting my blog but received a warning stating that there was Malware on my site. Apparently, someone had hacked my site and posted tons of links to Viagra. No big deal I thought, I would just delete all mentions, export my blog, re-install wordpress and then import the content again. Can’t take me too long right? WRONG!!

Save Everything, Multiple Times

While it is true that I thought I had it fixed pretty quickly, I did encounter a soul crushing error. When i tried importing my blog content, the file was blank. In fact, the only backup file I could find that had any content was from June 2012. I had lost several months of blog content. t first I was fuming, how could I be such an idiot? What could have happened? What am I going to do?

Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff

I decided that I need to remain positive. Looking on the bright side, the majority of my site visits has been for content I wrote a long time ago, so to me the bright side is that I pretty much just lost crap content. No big deal. Yes, I did spend a lot of time posting items, I realize now that I was doing it just to say that I have written and posted something. Moving forward, I don’t want that to be my motivation.

Only Post The Good Stuff

I am making a promise now…..I will not post crap. It’s wasting my time if I do and more importantly, it wastes your time.

What Have I learned?

  1. Make sure my site doesn’t get infected in the first place
  2. Always make sure I have redundancy
  3. Don’t write Crap
  4. Promote the heck out of the good stuff

Dreaming Impossible Dreams – Book Review

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I bought this book due to the Amazon book description mentioning about how E.J. Ourso had “acquired 56 businesses in 48 years – the first 25 with no money down”. As an aspiring entrepreneur, this piece of information sold me on the book.
After reading the book, I made three notes of truths or pieces of information that E.J. Ourso taught me. They are ‘facts’ that I personally got from the book. If you read it, you may get something different.
The three facts are:

  • That belief and perseverance (over talent) will get you to almost any goal
  • If you make it big, you should give back when and wherever you can
  • It is God that helps us to make it big

I found the book difficult to read to start with, I am struggling to put my finger on why that is. I think it is because I had an expectation of the book to be textbook like after reading the description. This book was definitely ‘NOT’ a textbook it was a very relaxed discussion on the business practices that Ourso developed. It also was autobiographical. I was not expecting that.
At the beginning of the book, E.J. Ourso talks about how he would sometimes ‘teach’ an entrepreneurial class about how to be a business success, but he would struggle to fit it into the hour that he was allotted. This book was a collection of the items that he would have told that class if he could.
I also really felt an affinity with E.J. Ourso in that he was raised in a poor area and it was considered strange that he would become a success.
I would recommend that you buy it and try to learn from it. I am going to revisit this book often and try to improve my business acumen.

 

Negative SEO – Latest Hot Topic

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While Negative SEO isn’t new it is gaining new found prominence. In the last few days we have seen several sites get downgraded in the Google Rankings only to be told that Google made an error by assuming they were parked domains.  Many people were screaming that it must have been the new SEO Over optimization penalty. (Just as a little bit of background, Matt Cutts of Google recently announced that Google will be penalizing sites that are “over optimized” for SEO. )

At the same time, there has been several people talking about Negative SEO. This is the practice of creating a a link campaign with what can only be described as a dodgy link profile. That is a series of links that Google would or could count against you. Examples of these types of links are paid links, reciprocal links and links within a link network. Over on Traffic Planet, a user by the name of Jammy talked about a case where he used such tactics in order to get a site knocked down in the Google Rankings. I was initially surprised to see that Rand Fishkin of SEOMoz offered his own blog and SEOMoz.org as an experiment to see if it could get taken down by the negative SEO tactics of Jammy and other negative practitioners. At first it didn’t make sense to me until I realized that many people, such as myself would give links back to his site. Furthermore, I saw Cyrus Shephard of SEOMoz mention that Organic Google search is not their only source of traffic, so they have been very wise in that regard. So it looks as if they have done as much as is possible to “Negative SEO-Proof” their site. So this in itself will be interesting to see if what they preach in terms of White Hat SEO and Inbound Marketing actually helps them in this instance. I think it will, but I am going to keep an eye out to see if anyone can do it.

Anyway, back  to the point about Negative SEO, I think that this tactic is dirty and I can’t see myself ever doing it. However, I did talk to someone I know (name has been redacted) and their response kind of surprised me. They said that they have no issue with using these negative tactics and they think all is fair and love and SEO War. I disagree, but dug deeper to try and understand their response. They feel that if this happens more often and enough people complain then Google has to change the way that they look at rankings. I think this is already going ahead, but I am stumped if I know of a way that can’t be gamed.

Also in the last few days, it was interesting to see that SEER interactive, an SEO firm seemed to have their pages downgraded in the Google rankings for their own branded terms. They managed to get it back up a couple of days later, I would love to know why you guys think it was taken down. Let me know in the comments below.

 

Maryland Passes Bill To Keep Social Media Private from Employers – Commentary

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Way to go Maryland. I have read the press recently about several companies that have asked interiewees and new employees for access to their social media accounts. I personally think that is immoral, fine if you want to Google me or look for my Facebook profile, but you are not getting my log ins.

 

What do you think?

 

Read the article from Marketing Pilgrim here.

Book Review – How To Make Millions Without A Degree

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How To Make Millions Without A Degree

I was interested by the concept of this book as I have never believed that you needed a degree to become a millionaire. It’s kind of ironic for me though as I have a burning desire to become a successful entrepreneur and become a millionaire, but I am also about to finish my MBA. So I wanted to read this book to see if it would add anything beyond what I already know. The answer was, not really.

Does that mean that this book wasn’t a good read? No. It is more a reflection on me I feel, I know what was said in this book is true, I just need to go out there and do something for myself.

The basic gist that I got from the book is the fact that you need to build a company that can be duplicated and can be run without you there. Also, Simon recommends that you don’t have a business partner so you can have all of the profits for yourself. This last statement, I am not quite sure I agree with, but I am not the millionaire (yet!).

I also really liked the biopics that were given for several millionaires that became successful, especially The Healy Brothers since they are from the same city that I grew up in. I just wish that we were taught about these entrepreneurs while I was in school.

Would I recommend you buy this book? I would recommend you buy it on Kindle as it is way cheaper, it is definitely interesting, but you may be expecting some amazing genius and be disappointed. Just expect to be given sound advice that might seem to easy to make sense.

★★★★★★★★★★

Do you eat your own dog food?

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Eating your own dog food

Image kindly provided by Robert Hruzek

I have looked back at my blog and just realized that I haven’t blogged since November. I have been super busy with school, but that isn’t an excuse. Well it is but not a good one.  I think I need to make it a professional goal to blog more often, as a Digital Media Strategist, I understand the importance of blogging and doing so regularly in order to build my reputation.

But, understanding Digital Media Strategy and implementing it for myself is a completely different issue. I know when I worked at Sitewire, we had the issue of coming up with many great ideas for our clients, we didn’t ever seem to implement those ideas for ourselves. A lot of the time we didn’t even accomplish the basic ideas.

I heard the phrase many times about “Eating your own Dog Food”

So I have a question to ask….. Do you eat your own dog food?

I know that I don’t all the time and I have even heard others suggest that people shouldn’t, well what say you?

Free SEO Tools – InboundWriter

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Free SEO Tools - InboundWriter

Free SEO Tools - InboundWriter

 

 

I read an article today from Lee Odden. It was an interview he did with Bryan Eisenberg. The article was talking about free seo tools that Bryan would recommend. Some of them are free and some have paid portions so be careful of that. Within the article, he recommended using a tool called InboundWriter in order to help you with your Search Engine Optimization. Apparently, InboundWriter looks at information, such as your Google Analytics (although I still need to figure out if that is true) and lets you know what type of content you should write about in order to make sure you are doing effective search engine optimization.

I am using the free seo tools version, it seems to be working fine as of now. All I had to do was set up the plugin in through wordpress and then register my account with InboundWriter. When you register, they give you two version, the $19.95 per month option and the free seo tools option.

What I am intending to do is publish this post and see if I can see a noticeable increase in visitors to my blog thanks to the search engine optimization tool. I think it is worth reading Lee Odden’s blog. You might find some excellent seo solutions that you can use for your blog and/or business.

Oh, yeah. I forgot to mention, do you see the small button at the bottom? That is the price to pay for the ‘free seo tools’

Let me know what you think.

Book Review – The Big Enough Company

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As much as I really wanted to like The Big Enough Company, there was just something about it that didn’t resonate. The writing style, didn’t intrigue me and the examples didn’t give me anything to relate to.

One thing that is obvious from the first few pages, but not the cover is that this book was written specifically for women entrepreneurs. I have absolutely no problem with that concept, apart from the version of the book that I had didn’t mention that anywhere on the front cover.

While it may sound like I hated the book, which is far from the truth, it did give good advice on designing a business that fits with your goals. It talked about how you should create your business with your end goal in mind. This content is valuable; I would have just preferred it to have been presented in a different way. This is a book I would recommend reading first from the library and if you like I then buy it for your own collection.

I would rate this book as a 5 out of 10 stars

★★★★★★★★★★

Book Review – Nothing to Lose by Ryan Blair

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I think that Ryan Blair did a good job with his Nothing to Lose Nothing to Lose
book. I liked the fact that this book is instructional while drawing on very real and very recent examples. I liked some of the biographical details as well. If I am being critical, I think that they tried to create a combination of biographical and educational information and it didn’t work out as well as it could have. I wanted to read a little bit more of the biographical details, more of the inspiration and experiences behind the success. When I was reading the instructional  content, I wanted more of that too. Overall, I just wanted more. Now that is not to say that the book isn’t good, it is, but I am a very critical person ;)

If you have aspirations of becoming an entrepreneur, I would definitely recommend that you read this book, I think you will learn something from it, I certainly did. In fact, my favorite segment of the book is learning from Ryan’s “Million Dollar Mistakes”. Why make those mistakes if someone already has?

Update: a month after reading the book, I have talked to several people about what I most took away from this book and one phrase sticks out in my mind; “Don’t let anyone steal your milk”.

Read the book and find out what I mean.

I give this book a 7 out of 10 stars

★★★★★★★★★★