Why Building A List Wins

Tim 9 Comments

Many people under estimate the importance of building a list. It takes work and sometimes a bit of trial and error to get it right, but once you’re in the groove it’s way easy and way better than other methods.

If you look at instant results, building a list isn’t there. I think that might be why so many people don’t bother. Say you can get someone to sign up to a program, or subscribe to your list, in 100 page views. At the end of the day one person is a referral, and one person is still a prospect. Short term, it’s not as juicy.

Long term however is where the money is at. For instance this blog, I now have 9,500 subscribers. I could stop advertising today and still have all those subscribers.

On top of that I can tell you about multiple products and services over and over. So rather than sell one thing to each person, I have the potential to keep on selling indefinitely.

It gets even better, when you build a list – it’s your list! You can download it, move to a different auto-responder, whatever you want. If your auto-responder service goes out of business, you still have your list. If a site you promote goes out of business, well your referrals are their list and you lost them.

So whether you are on a team or going solo, a list is a must. And doing it properly is a must. It’s not OK to just put a bunch of email addresses into your email editor and click send. It’s got to be done properly, with the unsubscribe link, etc. Sound difficult? It’s really easy if you use a system like Traffic Wave which handles the techy parts.

The only part you’ll have to worry about is writing of the emails, and making pages that have the subscribe form. You don’t have to be a great writer to do it. The people on your list will either like your style or not, no matter who you are. So if you write the way you naturally write, you’ll stick with it in the long run, and people will see you aren’t faking it.

Then the squeeze pages part is easy. TEtoolbox lets you copy & paste the code into a simple editor. So the fear of setting it up is just a fear of something new. The tools are out there, the help is out there, just get on and do it already!

How To Select All Friends in Facebook [v2]

Tim 24 Comments

Looking for a fun game to Invite all your Friends on Facebook to? Check out Sitizens! See if you can become King of Facebook.com!

When you are trying to invite your friends to your page, it can be tedious. So here’s a quick javascript to select all your friends in Facebook so you can invite them all in one quick motion.

Simply copy and paste that into the address bar when you have the friend selector window open. I have a video to show you exactly what I mean here:

So now you know how to select all friends on Facebook for an event, the easy way. You can use it to invite friends to your facebook groups, pages, anywhere the friend picker window shows up!

As of 3-29-2011 this method works. If you can’t get it to work on your end, try again. I use this method myself so if it stops working I’ll update the code.

Can’t get it to work? Try right clicking in different places in the select friends window. I found right clicking on a photo worked for me. Also note that it can take a long time for your browser to select them all, and after submitting it appears to do nothing when it actually is.

4-13-2011 This method is not currently working. However a Firefox Plugin does this very well. I will post an update when I’ve got a new code figured out ;-)

I’m using CloudFront, and it’s great!

Tim 10 Comments

Amazon has officially released the CloudFront Public Beta! What is CloudFront? It’s a Content Delivery Network (CDN). Essentially a CDN is a network of servers all around the world, so when you visit a site it grabs the content from the closest server to you.

So what does this mean exactly? Well I’ve been using CloudFront for about a month or so to host my video advertisements on the traffic exchanges. What this does is ensures my videos load quickly for viewers, which is crucial for traffic exchanges. If you’ve only got 10 seconds to view the ad, and it can’t load quick, well it’s pointless!

This past week I’ve also switched from CDNLayer (SoftLayer CDN) to Amazon’s CloudFront on much of the static content on StartXchange. And I’ll be moving over more content as time allows. I started noticing, and getting complaints, from surfers that CDNLayer was actually slowing surfing down for them. So far switching to CloudFront has been much better performance.

The main reason I’m excited about this is because it’s Amazon. They are truely innovators in this whole cloud computing thing, and they are doing it all with very good pricing. It is a bit more complicated having to get the files to Amazon, but once you figure that out it’s 100% off your server so you don’t have to worry about the disk space or resources or anything!

How To Backup MySQL to Amazon S3

Tim 6 Comments

There are all sorts of ways to backup MySQL to Amazon S3 floating around the interent, but the only problem is that many of them require all sorts of things. I wanted to have my MySQL database on my WHM/cPanel server backed up automatically to Amazon S3, in the easiest way possible. Here’s what I did:

Get Amazon S3

It’s dead cheap and way easy to signup. There is a button to the right of this page. Once you have it all ready to go, hover over the “Your Web Services Account” and click the “AWS Access Identifiers” link. This is where you can get the secret code and access key needed later on.

Install Net::Amazon::S3

This you may or may not have to do, but it’s way easy with WHM. Just login, on the left menu find “Install a Perl Module”. Then enter Net::Amazon::S3 and click search. It found 3 items for me, just click on the one that says “Net::Amazon::S3”. Hard wasn’t it?

Install BackupManager

Note that I’m using the Devel 0.7.9 version because it supports S3. The commands below were via SSH logged in as root.

  1. # wget http://www.backup-manager.org/download/backup-manager-0.7.9.tar.gz
  2. # gzip -d backup-manager-0.7.9.tar.gz
  3. # tar -xvf backup-manager-0.7.9.tar
  4. # cd backup-manager-0.7.9
  5. # make install
  6. # cp /usr/share/backup-manager/backup-manager.conf.tpl /etc/backup-manager.conf

Configure BackupManager

There is a whole bunch of configuration options available, but I’ll only go through the options to *only* backup a MySQL database and *only* send it to Amazon S3. This should be enough to get you started.

  1. # pico -w /etc/backup-manager.conf
  2. Use CTRL + W to find the text below, and change accordingly. Bold text is what you want to change to your specific settings.
  • export BM_ARCHIVE_METHOD=”mysql”
  • export BM_MYSQL_DATABASES=”dbname1 dbname2 dbname3“
  • export BM_MYSQL_ADMINLOGIN=”mysqlusername“
  • export BM_MYSQL_ADMINPASS=”mysqlpassword“
  • export BM_UPLOAD_METHOD=”s3″
  • export BM_UPLOAD_S3_DESTINATION=”s3bucketname“
  • export BM_UPLOAD_S3_ACCESS_KEY=”s3accesskey“
  • export BM_UPLOAD_S3_SECRET_KEY=”s3secretkey“
  1. Press CTRL + X to close and “Y” to save

Sneaky Secret

This will only work if you have *all* InnoDB tables. If you do, and you want backups to not stall your server, let’s get your hands dirty:

  1. # pico /usr/share/backup-manager/backup-methods.sh
  2. CTRL+W (search for –opt)
  3. Replace “–opt” with “–opt –single-transaction”
  4. CTRL+X to close and “Y” to save

This will turn on snapshot backups. InnoDB is able to take a snapshot of the entire database and dump it without locking the tables. This is the difference between your server database holding up the entire server and things running as if no backup is running. Some day I’ll contact the backup-manager people to have them put it in..

Run Configure BackupManager

The first time you run it, you want to do it while you are there with verbose turned on. This way if any errors happen, you’ll know right away. To run it simply type:

  1. # /usr/sbin/backup-manager –verbose

Setup the Cron Job

If that runs without any errors, then the next step is to setup your cron jobs. Type the following, substituting the bold 45 for the minute you want it to run, and the bold 1 for the hour you want it to run. Remove –verbose if you don’t want to get emails with all the details.

  1. # crontab -e
  2. press o
  3. type “45 1 * * * /usr/sbin/backup-manager –verbose“
  4. press esc
  5. type ZZ to save or :q! to quit if you make a mistake
  6. # crontab -l

The last command should list all your cron jobs. If it looks good, your golden. Just don’t forget that the quotes are not part of the command. You are typing what is inside the quotes.

Accessing your Files with Firefox

Well this is the kicker..  Accessing the files with S3 Firefox Organizer is way easy. It’s a plugin that sits in your bottom status bar of Firefox and you can just click it anytime and see your files. You can easily use it to synchronize folders on your computer too (so you can easily download those backups anytime!).

Never Ever Ever Send Emails Like This

Tim 9 Comments

The screenshot is difficult to see, but basically its the TO line being maxed out. This happens periodically, and for me twice this week, so I thought it would be a great time to remind everyone. Program owner or not, this is not acceptable. Essentially everyone see’s everyone’s email address. I’ll go over why it’s bad first, and then how to not send emails that way after.

It Increases Spam

I received a peice of spam from someone once.  I seemed to recognize the address but couldn’t remember where. I did a search and sure enough I found it in an email sent by Hacker Safe a year before. This email was from an affiliate manager who sent out an email to all the affiliates. Me and the spam originator were both in the TO field. I would have canceled my HackerSafe account but shortly after this person no longer worked for them. Whether or not that was the reason, I’m not sure.

It Increases Viruses

This is similar to the spam area above. Although spam some people may do themselves, typically viruses will scan your emails for other email addresses. Nothing like finding an email with a few hundred victims.

It’s a Violation of Privacy

“We will not sell, share, or rent personal information to others.” Yeah that’s worded somehow in pretty much every Terms of Service/Privacy Policy. Accident or not, violating the privacy policy is a huge deal. If slip ups happen where it can be prevented sooo easily, then I wonder where else they are happening.

Average Joes: How to Prevent It

It’s simple. Put the email addresses in the BCC field. You’ll usually have to put your own email in the TO field, but the rest can go in BCC. In Gmail you just click the “Add BCC” link and bingo their’s the box!

Program Owners: How to Prevent It

Never Ever (repeat 10xs) send out mass emails with your email client. This is just setting yourself up for failure. Use a system like Aweber or have a script developed that sends out the emails individually. I recommend Aweber 200%!

What to do when it happens to you

Well I’m not really sure there is much you can do when a website breaks their privacy policy with you. I drop the program immediately and prepare for an increase in spam. What do you do?

How To: Create a Blog with DreamHost

Tim 2 Comments

I use DreamHost to host my blog. It is incredibly easy to setup a WordPress blog, and it is incredibly easy to upgrade them too. For this tutorial, you’ll need an account with them. Use the coupon code TIMLINDEN to get $50 off a year!

Step 1: Login to the Web Panel, Goto Goodies then One-Click Installs.

Step 2: Enter the Options:

What Software..? WordPress

Install To? Select your domain. If you want it in a folder, enter the folder name. Leave it blank if you only want a blog on the domain. Note that it won’t install if the folder you enter has things in it.

Select Database? New

New Database Name? Make one up!

Existing Hostname? Create new

Create a New Hostname? Make something up, and select your domain. Most common is to use mysql but you don’t have to. Just make sure it’s not www, or a subdomain you’ll want to use later.

First User? Create new

New Username? Make one up! Preferably something hard to guess/never used before.

New Password? Make one up! Again, something hard to guess, never used before!

Step 3: Click install it for me!

Now within 10 minutes it’ll be installed, and you’ll get futher instructions via email. Basically that’ll be a link to your website saying to go create an admin username.

Upgrading WordPress: Simple. Go back to the One-Click install page. You’ll see your wordpress install listed. On the right under Actions it should say “Already vX.Y.Z” – If it doesn’t, click the link to upgrade it. It’ll do it within 10 minutes.

Note on Editing Templates: When you upgrade, it will overwrite the installed templates. If you want to tweak the template to your liking, I just rename the template folder. Then it leaves it alone!