You may have seen the news recently (it was on BBC1) … the US Government are trying to put through laws  (SOPA – the “Stop Online Piracy Act”) that will give them the ability to shut down any website they choose for extremely whimsical reasons, or even for reasons entirely out of the web site owners control.

Although that won’t directly affect my website here in the UK (or yours if you are also in the UK too) it will almost definitely affect the way you use the web every day.

Worse, if the US govn’t pass the law, you can be pretty damn certain that the red-tape-wallers in our U.K. goverment will want to do the same here too… and that very much would affect your website and how many sales and enquiries you get online.

I just registered my dissent on Avaaz – I hope you join me and do the same.

http://www.avaaz.org/en/save_the_internet/

NB: If you’ve not heard about this one the news and are wondering what this is about (very rare for me to do anything political on my website) then here’s some more info about it, courtesy of the BBC.

I hope you join me in taking action – even if it’s just a few seconds to register on Avaaz.

Thanks,

Ed.

Over the last 12 months I’ve noticed a marked increase in the number of small business owners who want to ‘escape’ from their business, either because they’re nearing retirement, or are struggling to keep their business afloat. Or because they’ve built a business they’ve ended up hating!

When people tell me they want to make money online — but not with any reference to their current business… well that’s not something I focus on, so I usually refer them to other people and resources.

One such resource is a book I read over Christmas . It’s one of the best I’ve ever read on the subject of how to earn passive income and live the ‘Internet Marketing Lifestyle’ so I wanted to quickly let you know about it.

Get Out While You Can – Escape The Rat Race so far has 158 four and five star reviews on Amazon, for a good reason.

The author — U.K. based Internet Marketer George Marshall – explains multiple business models, with the key focus being affiliate marketing — where you earn commission by creating Google-friendly websites that promote other people’s products and services.

I have done very little in terms of teaching or advocating affiliate marketing. It’s certainly not my core strategy (which involves list building using lead pages, and then e-mail marketing the list.)

However, as a business model I think affiliate marketing definitely holds a lot of appeal to the people who fall into one of the three categories I touched at the beginning of this article.

In his book George does an excellent job of explaining affiliate marketing in layman’s terms. And for more advanced marketers, it’s still a highly enjoyable read and contains dozens of references to useful resources and clever tricks of the trade.

However, there are the two big reasons why I like the book so much, and am unreservedly recommending it…

1) It’s honest.

George doesn’t talk about ‘Get Rich Quick’, or even ‘Get Rich Slow’ for that matter.

He explains how to create lots of small websites, each one of which earns a small amount of income, that over time build up to generate £60,000 a year or more.

Certainly not riches, but for anyone who is looking for a way to ‘escape the rat race’ as he puts it — that extra income will be a more than welcome addition to their bank balance.

While I’ve heard about this strategy before, what separates George from many other marketers who do this is that he advocates creating web sites that contain genuinely useful content – they’re not what I would call ‘junk content sites’ that unfortunately flood the Internet these days.

His book also contains numerous examples and links to actual sites he’s built, and he gives an insight into how much he actually earns from them. It’s an uncommonly candid account of ‘real’ Internet Marketing and the results you can expect.

Secondly, and critically…

(2) His book doesn’t just tell you what to do, it tells you HOW to do it.

In my own books I’ve always tried to not just explain what needs to be done, but also how to do things. In George’s book he’s done a brilliant job in this respect.

I could go on about how great his book is but at the end of the day it’s only £12.74 — not exactly a big deal if you’re already interested in Internet Marketing!

If you want to escape the rat race then grab a copy now, and I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

Bye for now,

Ed Rivis.

P.S. I don’t talk about the Internet Marketing Lifestyle much. Is this a topic you’d like me to talk about more in future? Leave a comment below and let me know - if enough people comment then I’ll cover this topic more in future.  Thx.

Last week I received a very helpful but rather shocking message from one of my e-mail subscribers, informing me one of my websites had been hacked!

That was a tad embarrassing, and I probably should keep schtum about it!

However, what I learnt as a result of the incident is far too valuable for me to not share with you. If you’re able to use my experience to prevent the same happening to you then all’s well in the World!

MALWARE!

First of all, I don’t know how or why (the investigation continues!) but a malicious hacker somehow had managed to ‘inject’ my website’s key files with ‘malware’ … a small piece of code that randomly sent visitors off to a web site somewhere deep in Russia.

Luckily for me the malware didn’t work.

As far as I know, the worst anyone saw was a big red warning message. (I never found out what the Russian website was about… I dread to think!)

Although I never profess to be an expert at web site security, I had a good idea of what the problem involved, and where to go to fix it.

Today my site is now one hundred percent malware free.

How can I be so sure?

Well, since I discovered my sites had been hacked I signed up for a brilliant malware scanning service, called Sucuri.

Every day they automatically scan every file across my entire website, making sure it hasn’t been compromised.

When I first signed up for their service, they initially scanned all of my web sites, and here’s a screenshot of the rather unsettling results I got after one of their scans… (the handwritten annotation is mine)

Results of malware scanning service (click to view)

Once their scan detected a problem, the Sucuri team then fixed every infected file, on every infected website. (Unfortunately I had a few — all injected with the same malware.)

This all happened over a weekend, and the cost of fixing the infected files was included as part of the same service… it didn’t cost me any extra. To say I’m impressed is an understatement.

PREVENTION BETTER THAN CURE

In future I will be the first to know of any security issues, before my valued subscribers ever become aware there’s a problem.

Of course, in hindsight this type of service is something I should have had in place a long time ago, but ain’t hindsight easy!

So, first takeaway — if you want to avoid a Russian hacking nightmare – check out Sucuri.

The other big thing I learnt from this experience is the important of taking incremental backups.

HOW TO BACKUP YOUR WORDPRESS WEBSITE AUTOMATICALLY, EVERY DAY.

Soon after I discovered I’d been hacked, I accidentally deleted an important file on my edrivis.com website — and broke the entire site. It literally disappeared. If you visited the site immediately after I did that you would have seen a picture of a Yeti in a snowstorm. (I.e. A blank white screen!)

Now anyone will tell you – backups are important. But in this case restoring a backup would not have done me any good, because the very last backup I took contained the Russian malware. In other words I would have reinfected the site that had just been fixed. Not good.

Thankfully some time ago I did have the foresight to register for a brilliant WordPress backup service – that not only automatically takes a backup every 6 hours… it keeps a history of those backups too.

To get an older copy of the file I accidentally deleted, before it was infected, I simply logged into my WordPress backup service, (called Blogvault) and downloaded a slightly older version of the file.

I copied it onto my server, and voila… I was completely up and running again.

Once all my sites were Malware free, the next step was to make sure the hackers couldn’t reinfect the files. My decision here was to move my websites to a more secure server, and once again it was BlogVault to the rescue.

Normally moving a large WordPress website can be about as much fun as watching paint dry, with lots of time-wasted downloading files to your computer and then slowly uploading them all to the new server.

Thanks to BlogVault I didn’t have to do any of that.

I just used the ‘Move Site’ feature and in literally just a few minutes my website (more than 1GB of files) was installed on a brand new server.

All I then had to do was change the nameservers of my domain name and voila… job done.

HOW TO AVOID MY RUSSIAN HACKING NIGHTMARE

If your business websites run on WordPress, take a look at Blogvault. Knowing that you have access to automatic incremental backups gives incredible peace of mind.

And definitely take a look at Sucuri — regardless of how your website works, because it seems to be compatible with any type of website – Windows, Unix/Linux, etc.

For as long as I run my websites on WordPress I’m going to use these services. They’re an essential part of my web marketing infrastructure now.

UPDATE 30th Nov 2011: This great service is now BACK ONLINE… hurrah!

My favourite domain checking tool at AjaxWhois appears to have been taken offline. It looks like the developers have discontinued what I felt was a fantastic research tool which I frequently referred to in my books and training programmes.

The service was so useful because unlike normal services that told you whether a domain name was available for you to register, AjaxWHois actually checked while you typed each character of the domain name – meaning it was a really fast way of finding suitable domain names for lead sites.

I’ll try and find an alternative service to recommend as soon as possible.

In the meantime it’s back to the ‘old way’ of researching domain names using sites like DomainTools.com and UkReg.com.

Ed.

UPDATE 30th Nov 2011: This great service is now BACK ONLINE… hurrah!

I read Crush It! by multi-Millionare social media success story Gary Vaynerchuck a while back.

It’s a quick read, and yet contains loads of great ideas and takeaway tactics so I made the following notes, and thought I’d share them with you. You might find these useful.

First of all, the central message of the book is this…

“Any business which doesn’t embrace social media will be dead on their feet over the next few years.”

Now I can’t see that happening for every business.

For example my local plumber is busy, but doesn’t have a blog or Twitter or Facebook account. And I can’t see his lack of “social media savvy” affecting his business for quite a long time.

However, I do totally agree with this in respect of businesses that find work based on reputation, trust and authority. Especially professional service providers, like consultants, advisers and trainers, who can all use social media to generate high quality sales leads and expand their reputation and influence.

On page 24 Gary talks about the best types of content to share with your social media subscribers and followers…

“Storytelling is by far the most underrated skill in business.”

And on page 51 he has a great list of ways to generate ideas for social media content. I’ve tweaked them slightly – check out the book to see the original list.

Here they are…

• Tell me everything about what you offer the marketplace that makes it unique.
• Tell me a story that makes me care about your product or service as much as you do.
• Tell me about interesting conversations and events that happened recently.
• Tell me about the industry trends you’re seeing, and predict how it may change.
• Tell me about your favourite tactic/technique and the benefits it provides.
• Tell me about your most interesting clients, and how you helped them, before and after.
• Tell me your biggest challenges, and how they relate to your customers and clients.
• Tell me your story… why you do what you do?

Not only are Gary’s ideas great for generating social media content, they’re also great ways of coming up with email content too.

Interestingly, Gary says (on page 72) the best business tweet of all time is “What Can I do for you.”

I say ‘interestingly’ because I’ve found that one of the best emails you can ever send your prospects is…

“Tell me your #1 biggest challenge”, or words to that effect. More or less the same question.

On page 74 of Crush It! he also gives us an insight into how he started pre-selling his book, which got to #1 on the Amazon Best Seller list for Web Marketing books within the first few weeks of its release…

1. He posted an announcement video on his blog about the book and why it meant so much to him.
2. He gave links to buy his book on book retail websites.
3. He asked his readers to pass his book on to their friends.
4. He put a button on blog labelled “Support Gary’s Book” – which linked to a page thanking them for their interest.
5. He gave them a ‘Widget’ they could add to their own website or blog.

And more. (Again, read the book for the full list. Just a brief summary here.)

However, one thing he said which – for me – raised a ‘warning flag’ was on page 80, where he says…

“Analytics are not important for social media.”

Now I’m a huge advocate of tracking and testing everything we do to market and promote our businesses.

So, to spend a lot of time on social media marketing and yet deliberately not track it all seems like a dangerous activity.

However, I do understand why he says that statistics and analytics can “mislead and prevent you from ever gaining foothold” where social media is concerned.

To borrow a line from The Shawshank Redemption, I know that all it takes to get traction with social media marketing is “pressure, and time.”

However, just for record, the advice on “not tracking stats” should very much not be applied to standard direct e-marketing, using tactics like e-mail marketing, lead pages, pay per click and so on.

In fact, not tracking your statistics with non-social media marketing is one of the fastest ways to lose your shirt – I’ve seen people lose a fortune in PPC for example, simply because they weren’t tracking it carefully enough.

Anyway, back to the book.

On page 99 Gary says…

“The ultimate goal of social media is to get people on to your blog.”

… and that you need to place “calls to action” on your blog to ‘capture’ people when they visit.

Now I’ve talked about this in all three of my books.

Capturing visitors is super-critical, if you want to optimize what the Internet does for your business.

Some of the calls to action Gary lists include…

• Allow people to subscribe (opt-in) to your email newsletter.
• Asking people to “Follow” you on Twitter.
• Asking people to join your “Fan Page” on Facebook.
• Asking people to “Share” content on Facebook, MySpace, etc.
• Having a “Tweet This” button for blog posts and other content.
• Having an “Email This” button.

And Gary also recommends this page for a comprehensive list of social media tools and resources, and also the following blogs…

• http://www.TechCrunch.com
• http://www.ReadWriteWeb.com
• http://www.GigaOm.com
• http://www.SocialTimes.com
• http://www.Endgaget.com

And here’s a really interesting piece of advice from page 95…

“Creating content should be the least time-consuming part of the whole endeavour – creating community is where the bulk of your hustle should go.”  (n.b. the bolding is my own.)

That’s something I know I’ve got wrong in the past – I’ve spent a lot of time over the years on creating content, and not enough time getting leverage on said content, so that’s salient advice indeed.

Finally, here’s a list of all the steps he recommends, based on the list he gives on page 135…

1. Identify your core passion. (But see my comment below about this)

2. Make sure you can come up with a list of at least fifty excellent blog topics on the subject.

3. You must be able to answer Yes to the following two questions (1) Am I sure my passion is what I think it is? And, (2) Can I talk about it in a more authoritative and compelling way than anyone else?

4. Name your personal brand.

5. Buy your own name as a web address (domain) in .com and .tv (Gary recommends going for firstnamesurname if possible – like EdRivis.com for example. I use KnowEm.com to show my clients where their name is still available. It’s a great tool and the basic functionality is free.

6. Choose a format (medium) that suits your personal style (audio, video or written). Gary favours video.

7. Start a WordPress or Tumblr account (personally I have both – cover your bases)

8. Hire a designer (I’d add that your need to be choosy and hire a great designer so your websites look truly professional.)

9. Include a Facebook Connect link, Call-to-Action buttons, Share functions, and a button that invites people to do business with you in a prominent place on your blog (p135)

10. Create a facebook fan page (he recommends not using standard profile page – if have one put a link on that to Fan page)

11. Sign up for an automatic distribution service: If you’re mainly going to be posting written content then sign up for a Ping.FM account. Or if video’s your thing then sign up for a TubeMogul account.

12. Post your content.

13. Start creating a community by commenting on other people’s blogs and forums and replying to comments to your own blog posts.

14. Use Twitter Search (Search.Twitter) to find as many people as possible talking about your topic, and communicate with them.

15. Use BlogSearch.Google.com to find more blogs that are relevant to your subject

16. Join as many active Facebook fan pages and groups relating to your topic possible.

17. “Repeat steps 12 through 16 over and over and over and over and over!” [I've left that quote intact - exactly as Gary says it in the book. I get the feeling he wants us to repeat this process?]

18. Do it again…

19. And again…  [Yes, he definitely wants us to repeat the process!]

20. When you feel your personal brand has gained sufficient attention and stickiness, start reaching out to advertisers and monetizing – although he does mention selling your own products if you have any (his books targeted at a wide range of people – not just business owners.)

These are for me some of the highlights of Gary’s book.

I highly recommend you read it a.s.a.p.

Just one thing to bear in mind — the target audience for Gary’s book is ‘anyone’.

So, his advice on things like “finding your passion” hopefully probably don’t apply to you, because given that you’re a business owner, you’re hopefully already “following your passion” in your everyday work?

Anyway, hope you found this useful?

Leave a comment below and let me know what you think — not only about this review — but also, Gary’s book if you read it. What were your highlights?

And best of luck with your social media marketing. It’s certainly something I’ll be focusing on more in future, starting by making my social media icons more prominent on this blog.

All my best,

Ed Rivis.

I’ve just launched a brand new website in conjunction with my colleague Alexa Whitten – The Ultimate Expert’s Publishing House offers a range of services that help professional service providers – like consultants, advisers, trainers and coaches – quickly write their books, become a published author and gain far higher level of recognition as an expert in their field… and earn more money as a result!

Check it out — there’s a very special free report available on that site too — well worth a download if you’re wondering how to write a book in less than 7 days like my last one!

Visit The Ultimate Expert’s Publishing House for more information, and to check out the snazzy new site.

I look forward to seeing your book on Amazon alongside mine shortly!

Ed Rivis

Thank you for following my blog over the last year, and I wish you a happy, prosperous and successful year in 2011.

All my best,

Ed Rivis, author of E-Mail Marketing Dynamite and Massive Traffic

Yesterday I was informed that delivery of my new book will be delayed due to a fatal crash somewhere between the book printers (Biddles) in Norfolk, and my fulfilment company (Post & Packing Warehouse) in Kent.

I’m not exactly sure what happened, but I’ve been informed the driver of the vehicle operated by the courier company used by Biddles was killed in the accident. It’s terribly tragic news.

If you’re waiting for a new book from me, I sincerely apologise for the extra delay.

My colleague Alexa is currently in contact with Biddles to try and find out what we can do to get the books shipped out a.s.a.p..

Aparently the Police Accident Investigators have impounded the vehicle along with all it’s contents, so unless they release those soon Biddles will be reprinting.

I’m hopeful the books will all ship next week, but thanks for bearing with us while we find out more.

Kind regards,
Ed Rivis.

My new book E-Mail Marketing Dynamite launched yestersday.

At the moment I’m giving it away FREE!

If you want a copy all you have to pay is a few pounds to cover the cost of postage and packing to anywhere in the United Kingdom. (Overseas costs a little bit more but the book is essentially still free.)

As the name implies this one’s all about e-mail marketing – how any small business can get massive leverage on the incredible power this medium provides to boost sales and profits.

Click here to grab a free copy of E-Mail Marketing Dynamite — but do it now before I regain my commercial sensibilities and start charging for it!

I wish you the best of success with your e-mail marketing – let me know how it goes.

Ed.

P.S. The book also features interviews with 11 small business owners who are successfully using email to grow their businesses — and they even include a plumber and a ‘high street’ retail shop — so hopefully this book will once for all dispel the myth that only technology companies can use email marketing!

A friend reminded me about David Ogilvy last night, and I remembered this video where he describes brand/vanity advertising versus direct response.

I wonder what he’d be doing differently in these days of the Internet? Probably not much!

The direct response principles that were his ‘first love and later became his secret weapon’, and which allowed him to grow his agency at record speed translate directly to web sites.

In my book The Ultimate Web Marketing Strategy I explain how to utilise the principles of highly-effective direct response advertising — how to change a website from “all about you” to “all about your visitor” to dramatically boost enquiries, sales-lead generation, opportunity creation, and sales and profit!

If you have a web site that focuses on your brand (you know, the kind that start with “Welcome to our website. We’ve been in business ‘x’ years and won all these awards”) maybe you should consider why the visitor has actually come to your website… probably to get information on — and the solution to — a pain, challenge, problem or opportunity they have.

Probably not to learn about you and your business. It’s a bitter pill to swallow, but it’s true in most cases.

Give visitors answers… not branding… and you can have a successful website.

Ed.