If you are using your blog or twitter or other social media to sell or promote stuff you should read the new update, where the FTC addresses the many questions since the new vague regulations last December. Read that here:

http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/edu/pubs/business/adv/bus71.shtm

If you’re not aware, The FTC is the United States Federal Trade Commission and they are basically responsible for protecting consumers from predatory or deceptive marketing tactics.  e.g. smoking is safe and healthy! is a lie and as much as the tobacco industry might  like to say that to sell more, they can’t and it’s the FTC among others who try to keep things clean.

The FTC have been in existence for much longer than the internet, 1914 to be exact.   The underlying law hasn’t changed much in intent: Protect Consumers.     The rise of the internet new forms of marketing and distribution (e.g. blogging and twitter) have arisen and the regulations have had to be updated as there hasn’t been anything quite like them before. e.g. what can you say in a tweet of 140 characters?

Last year that updated the regulations to cover flogs (fake blogs), with fake testimonials, and also for normal popular bloggers that were getting free products, cash or other compensation for doing a review of a product.  If you have kids you can imagine how you learn to trust a fellow mom or dad to give objective advise, if they were a Schill, you should be aware that their motive for telling you about a product might be tainted with their desire to make money from it.

The problem for marketers/affiliates was that they FTC were pretty vague about what they actually wanted, and what the consquences were.  This lack of information allowed all sorts of hype and myths to arise.    This was so intimidating that many major courses chose to lauch early to bypass the regulation, and after the passing many pro bloggers adopted either a wait and see attitude to let other less cautions people get sued by the FTC first, or went hogwild with disclaimers bigger than the core message they were trying to deliver.

FTC they listened and compiled the common questions an answered them in that new post, that is a much saner picture, They aren’t a Big Brother watching every blog, if you get something wrong they aren’t going to take your first born, and will take problems case by case.

So if you are selling or promoting anything on the internet, please read it for your own protection. It’s a single page.  Read it here.

http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/edu/pubs/business/adv/bus71.shtm

Cloaking is one of the “dark arts” in affiliate marketing. It’s quite powerful if a little dangerous.

Tonight I was talking to my friend Nick tonight who is successful on Facebook and hadn’t heard of it, and realized others probably aren’t that familiar and wanted to know.

Nick wondered if Cloaking was a superpower .  For affiliates it actually is!, and can be very lucrative if used strategically and you’re willing to brave the risks associated with it.

I wonder what she is covering up?

What is Cloaking?

Cloaking is covering yourself to play both sides:   angel or devil depending on who’s watching.  If you drive a car you know the drill.  If a cop is following right behind you drive squeaky clean obeying all rules, if no one is paying attention, you probably talk on the phone while driving, roll through stop signs, or speeding to get where you want to go faster, at least that’s how it works in California.

Just like most driving regulation, most traffic sources (e.g. Facebook, Google PPC/SEO) have rules of the road, to create what they believe is the highest quality end user experience.      Rules like no lying, no adult/porn related, no promoting offers that lie, cheat or steal.  Just like police, these communities have various moderator teams to enforce these rules and police content and users.

Well sometimes these rules and moderators get in the way of what people actually want.  Sex/dating, drugs, biz ops, and alcohol , weight loss, are big money makers but not something you want in the community mall, nevertheless people selling them make good money and there is demand for them, when they can actually connect.

This creates a constant tension between marketers and moderators, and escalation of arms of sorts of the war of each trying to get  what they want.  Cloaking is a weapon used primarily by marketers  to sidestep the rules to get a competitive advantage.

Like undercover agents vs street cops. Cloaking can be used by moderators to infiltrate, but this is less common.

Page Cloaking

Cloaking means a script that sits between that shows moderator/reviewers what they page content want to see to get approved or ranked for a particular phrase, and end users a different page that is likely to convert to a sale. It actieves this magic this typically by looking at where the person came from. eg. if the user comes from an address known to be from inside facebooks review staff, it uses the safe url. If it comes from a random page inside facebook it’s likely to be a user so show them the sales page.

When setting up an advertisement you point the ad to the tracking/cloaking script eg.

yoursite.com/track.php?campaignID=123

that track.php scirpt internally has multiple urls, one for the safe page the other for the page you are interested in promoting, and some wizardry to sniff who is reviewer from consumer.

A key concern is if the the admin can find the hidden page.  Part of the solution is the cloaking is setup to store the ID or IP of the user , every time anybody goes through your tracking/cloaking script they always sure they always see the same page.

Another way is just not cloaking at all in the first setup of a campaign. Then switching on cloaking once approved. Safer as once approved you don’t have as many audits if your still complying, but still a period at the front you’re not making money.

Now it is possible that when they do come back or the reviewers change their footprint and the cloaking script is not kept up to date, that you could get caught.  Penalties might be just having your ads stopped (which could mean loss of revenue), or having your account banned. It depends on the network. Some don’t care, some are restrictive some are militant.

Cloaking for SEO

A variation on this deals with making Pages rank well in Google.  When Google bots drive by to inspect your page, The cloaking script shows them a wholesome complete page with all the right keywords the Google bots so love to see.  When it sees a normal user it will show them something else, like the NewYork times might require user to subscribe to see the whole article, or even a completely different page optimized on making sales.

Link Rotation

A variation on cloaking  is the ability to also redirect to multiple offer pages, like rotating competing product 1, product2, product 3 for the most clicks, that is very useful for Affiliate marketers.

This sidesteps the problem setting up a campaign you are limited to the original url you submit the ad to, and it’s against the rules to switch that later, even though they don’t always check.

Say you decide to enter the guitar chord training market, you know of 3 guitar training courses on clickbank, they each have very different feel.  You want to know which one is best, but don’t know initiallly.

You set up a campaign on Facebook for people who like guitars, plus a a headline of “Learn Guitar”, with a pic of a guitar  and a link that goes over to your site learnchords.com/getlink.php?id=123 instead of the real product pages, or 3 different ads.

getlink.php is a rotation and cloak script. that contains urls for the 3 offers we are promoting that get equal amounts of traffic.

• first user gets sent to clickbank product 1,
• second user gets sent  to clickbank product2
• 3rd gets sent to clickbank product3

say you run it for 600 clicks, so that each offer gets about 200 clicks. So we have some certainty on what is actually working.  Given many good campains will only get 2 to 5 clicks out of 100 impressions, You need at least 100 clicks in most cases to know if it’s good or not. 200 clicks is better.

At the end you see that breakdown

• product1 got  40%
• product2 got 55%
• product 3 got 5%,

So now you know which to pursue. Typically stopping product 3 which is getting much lower clickthrough.

If you were super advanced, you’d try to create a hybrid of all the most successful elements with a tool like visualwebsiteoptimizer

e.g. take all the sales bullets, pictures from each rotate them too, see what produces the most sales
create a frankenstein get et a page that outperforms both
.

The Product Warning: Auto Traffic Avalanche == Bait and Switch

Part of what spawned this was an Clickbank product that was being promoted in my email box by Frank Kern and others, I ran across this morning that is centered around cloaking.

It’s called “Auto Traffic Avalanche“  Frank usually promotes good stuff so that got me to click over.

The marketing page was a good study, it had many of the hot buttons for the get rich quick niche:

• use of video and text, down to earth.
• hometown boy makes good,rags to riches story line
• newbie with no prior experience and hates computers makes millions
• discovers  exploitable glitch makes millions with a 13 clicks in just a few hours.
• this is only available to next ~23 people (if you see this on clickbank you should know this is most often a lie)
• do it for you script makes this all easy and does the work for you
• risk reversal double your money back if it doesn’t work
• big screen shots of proof (I guess they are in the UK so don’t have to be compliant to FTC)

The front door price was an impulse buy price for curiosity alone  $39 and supposedly amazingly included this magic do it for you software.

Given the front door price was low, and Frank was promoting it, I expected to see some major upsells. I was right and got one of the longest upsell grids I’ve experienced on clickbank.  Guessing 3 deep x2 wide.  Claiming one time offers (not true actually) and really vague on what exactly some of them did.

From it claiming to have “copy and paste” profits with an enhanced program with 10x the power I got the second upsell, despite it being very vague as to what it was, partly trusting clickbank knowing I could return it.

From all the hype, I was like most pretty excited to see what was in the inside.    Then I felt like I had hit a different world the friendly face man was gone and there was a geeky looking guy with a occasionally hard to understand british accent and slightly fuzzy screencapture movies.

The course was about 2hr long and after getting through it I felt like a bait and switch. I was so pissed I asked for a refund immediately.

It wasn’t that course was crap.  But it had almost NO resemblance to the pitch.  There is nothing Auto about it, it’s straight up affiliate marketing cloaked as a auto traffic machine when it’s not.

The secret glitch is actually a basic script for cloaking, not a do it for you as was implied.   I don’t even know how good it is as I didn’t test it, and of the cloaking it doesn’t directly do rotation.  If you are okay with the risks, it might be better than nothing.

The traffic education part was ok, core education: setting up ads, demographics ( this did have a gem ), tweaking them a few tips to scale them.

For traffic sources it used Facebook and PlentyOfFish.

• Facebook should need no introduction, it’s a highly targeteable traffic source and the largest social network with more people than many countries using it, often hours a day.  However it’s finicky.
• PlentyOfFish claims to be the worlds largest dating website, very high traffic according to Alexa with very deep demographic targeting and relatively not much affiliate competition on it relative to other sources.

With right offers, combined they do have enough potential traffic to compete with saturated or complicated Google PPC/SEO.

If you are curious about  Facebook, or PlentyOfFish and/or need a Facebook cloaking script, it’s ok value for $39 guide I’d just ignore the hype, and skip the upsells. Here is my link if you are so inclined.  if you are not interested in Facebook or PlentyOfFish primer please skip it completely on principal alone.

Do you use cloaking?   also If you know of a good cloaking script for other non-facebook purposes, sound out!

Everybody who wants to rank on the first page, has mastered the art of getting and more importantly keeping Google’s eyes on them.

When I say attention getting, if your website/blog was a bubble,  would it be like the mesmerizing  ones in the video, growing over time, people can’t just help interact with? or say a lonely beach ball half-flat sitting in the sand?

What does Google look for these days?

I’ve been studying several 5+Million a year SEO gurus (reading 3+ courses at the same time is good way to become an “instant expert” on a subject as people cover different ground!).  While all have the same goals:

• get ranked,
• get traffic,
• get money

and many have identical mantras:

more links, more content, more links, more links… more links!

As you may know that Google has changed recently and some of what worked 6 months ago is no longer working quite as well. The kicker is that somethings still appear to work initially, then 2 months in your site has dropped off.

One of the newest factors is what I call “proof of life” in particular that google can see.  The good news is you may already be doing some of this already, but maybe not for the exact reason you think you should be doing it, or the reason Google wants you too.

What is proof of life?  basically your website is a building of sorts -like your home , you can consider it’s rooms are your pages, it’s halls and doorways are links between them.   But what good is a building without people inside it?  Google is wondering since they aren’t allowed typically to go in, is anybody home?  So they listen for the sound of foot traffic, the raised voices, the sites of lights going on and off, the doors opening and closing, with people coming and going.  This evidence are what Google considers “proof of life”, and makes a home a home!

As omniscient as Google is marketed to be, Google can’t see very much really. Since they don’t own your site, they aren’t allowed to go inside unless you invite them (rightfully so).

Parked out in front of the house,  they can see people going in the front door..or sneaking in a side window, often they can’t see them leave through the back be it in disgust or full and happy.    They can’t see the party going on in the living room.   Even though on the floor plan the master closet is bigger than the bathroom, they can’t tell the later is way more important (regardless of what women say…).

Worse when driving down the street looking at one house after another,  they can’t tell the guy who’s on permanent vacation with the home automation  that turns the lights and stereo on/off, sprinklers to keep the plants alive, from the couch potato who is actually home but comatosed on the couch.   From the street they can only go with what they see on the surface.

Google wants to asses each site right,  as they want to see proof that you take care of the traffic they send you, it costs them a lot to get those eyeballs and in the right hands it is worth a lot of money.  There are also many thousands of others wanting to get the precious few 10 spots.  It’s no longer good enough to just get content and some links as that’s what most everybody else is doing.

Show Google you know how to abide by their rules, know how to throw a continual party, demonstrate to take care of people and keep them coming back for more, they give you a good quality score.  Contrarily if they see a big empty lifeless vacated building you get a low quality score no matter how impressive it looks, how much marble and gold and how much you attempt to pay them.   In paid traffic this is you may have heard of the “Quality Score” same thing now matters for SEO as the PPC world and SEO have ALREADY merged.

Let’s take an example.

Two people searches for the latest Harry Potter book, Google shows them a bunch of pages which have been out for awhile, they hope are what the user wants one of these is Amazon.com, the other is HarryPotterBooks.com

First user clicks through Amazon.com and see the paperback at this point google can no longer see what’s going on, the user is in the private proprietary world of Amazon.com’s store.   The end user decides like many others to get the brand new limited edition hardback version instead, which ideally they would have liked found first. Google and we would love to have that happen but it can’t see that, as it’s not allowed inside.

Second user clicks through HarryPotterBooks.com which has Google Analytics on it’s pages, and finds the same paperback and the same ad for the hardback. So clicks through to that second page. This time Google sees that and the hundreds of other people that day who did the exact same thing and starts boosting that hidden hardback book in the search engines.  Eventually because it has the HarryPotter in the domain name it eventually beats Amazon.com for that search term, despite Amazons awesome brand power and bazillions of backlinks, primarily as Google can see that the inner “hidden” page has value to real people by evidence of the repeat traffic to it.

NOTE: you shouldn’t put trademarked terms in domain names unless you get permission or like cease+desist letters from lawyers.

In order to see this Google has to see this traffic via it’s “eyes and ears”

I think most people think of Google like a giant brain.  Did you know Google had eyes and ears too?

You may already use these sources for your own purposes, then if so, congratulations you are ahead of the game!    What you may not have known is Google is watching those too to keep an eye on you! (whether you want them too or not).  This is to be able to find the people creating crap sites with no value, from the ones creating real value.

These poweful tools have cost millions to develop, the best part is that these are all free to use as theyare subsidized by google, as both you and Google need the same data to make heads or tails of your site doing well or not.
Google Analytics is direct sensing the viewers entering each room.  The javascript based, cookies can see people coming back multiple times, see if people are spending lots of time.  Spending time or not, they can even track what parts of a video are watched most often.
– Feedburner is basically it helps keep google in touch with what’s going on in your world.  Be instantly notified when things changed on your site as they change, rather then them having to go door to door.

By signing up for feedburner, wordpress automatically notifices it when things (new content, changed content, comments etc)happen. This entrices the google search bot back to revist your site other wise it might not get back for weeks or months.

Unlike other rss aggragators, google can see the number of subscribers and the changes to subscribers this is another form of relevance..are people listening talking about or even stalking you?
- Alexa is a 3rd party that they can hear the sound of footsteps across the internet. Alexa looks at the ISP traffic to get a first hand feel of the pulse going across the wire, to know say that AOL has more people than a small college ISP and that people on AOL like walmart, and college kids like facebook etc.  Like analytics they want you to claim your site is yours with a special

UPDATE this correction from Jonathan Van Clute, thanks Jonathan!

JONATHAN: Alexa as far as I know, only knows about
traffic that has the Alexa toolbar installed.  That’s why its data is
always so damn screwy and skewed towards internet marketing stuff,
because it’s mostly IMers who install the toolbar.

TROY:  You’re right!   I did a check and none of the various Alexa/compete have direct access to the traffic, thus use browser plugins to sample this data hoping to generalize and extrapolate to the whole web. This has limits.   All the Alexa/Compete/ are far from the actual pulse of data that say mobile networks and ISP’s see, which I’m sure google will eventually find a way to have anonymous access to.  Can’t help but wonder if that’s why they are also part interested in OS Android/etc.

Alexa is also owned by Amazon not Google doh!

How to keep Google’s Attention?

• The fundamentals are more important than ever. Links are still important, content is still important.
  • with millions of pages, you need more links, higher quality keyword rich links and relevant links from relevant pages to relevant targets.
  • you still need a base of original valuable content that is well structured to catch keyword traffic. It’s not enough to write about whatever you want as that’s what 100,000 are doing the exact same thing.
• Google needs proof of life on your website. This is a new one. Websites are living breathing creatures, Google wants to see proof of life with their own eyes and ears (google analytics, alexa, feedburner).  So signup for those services and get it integrated on your sites (you shouldn’t have anything to hide right?) When you start dipping in rankings, or just starting out get traffic anyway BUY your way or BRIBE your way, paid or not, until google is convinced you are still living and have value.
  
• Constant content of value, again websites are living growing creatures, they should grow and change.  This isn’t too hard – 2-8 new articles/posts a month or more just enough keywords, outsource this if you have to. The better you do at this, the less you need to rely on tricks or hacks that stop working to get all you want.
• Be human!, casual conversational even controversial as at the end of the day the net is all about people talking, thinking, linking and clicking! websites are a conversation just captured on the web, keep the conversation going!

Why Proof of Life became necessary and is way of the future.

As you know understanding what makes search engines tick can be worth millions or even billions and in this economy the difference between food on the table and rent paid, from no job. For shrewd/smart people it also means the difference from living the “internet” lifestyle with no job to working in some oppressive 9-5 work environment, with crappy commutes, bastard bosses, lame coworkers.

The web is largely machines trying to sort filter the mess of people scribbling whatever pops into mind at any given moment, that the web is.

Since it’s a machine, it can be fooled, so what has also happened is shrewed people have gamed and/or spammed every loophole they could so that Google would be “tricked” into getting better rankings to get big paychecks, with no real care for sustainability.

This unfortunately created a lot of disposable crap sites, that people like us hated. Google had to evolve defenses and grow more sophisticated to defend itself.

In the beginning backlinks were all that mattered (that’s what Google’s PageRank patent is about), Now links can be manufactured or gotten by the 10 of thousands via numerous legitimate or spammy ways. Obviously Google spends a massive amount of time walking over those links one by one so wants as few of them and as high quality of them as possible, but how do you tell if it’s a good link or not?

Links with relevant keywords in the anchor text were better than no words but still not much information there to know if the millions of people linking with the keyword “dog training” are good links or bad links.

Looking at the contents of the page would help, which took quite a bit of brainpower as that meant Google had to start reading the webpage much as you do, looking for “good”, “relevance”, “value” which can’t easily be measured objectively as Google being a machine doesn’t get. With the endless stream of pages this also is very expensive to process.

Really at the end it’s really about content right? we spend most time reading rather than clicking. Google figured this unlike links is also harder to fake, as it cost money and time to create good content. So they changed algorithms to focus on content.

But google isn’t a human, it can’t really understand much.  So content too was gamed and automated by smart people. By techniques of spinning content and ripping from others via data feeds and searches, it’s easy to create thousands of sites without any original content (aka autoblogs).  While this isn’t 100% bad, as some sites (e.g. newspapers) also use datafeeds (e.g. associated press)

This also gave rise to hundreds of thousands of crap sites, just enough structure to clumsily rank for a term, almost no content to qualify for adsense ads.  Basically a adsense classified ads.   However this is largely google’s fault as they incentivized this entire industry, and probably aren’t too put out as they have made billions off of it.   But still it’s gotten out of hand.

Even without the spam sites, with 100,000+ to millions of pages, having good content isn’t good enough to stand out.  So Google upgraded their content requirements again: now to be considered a serious player you need to also have a matching keyword rich domain name, and various other organization that makes it easy for Google to digest and understand your whole site.   Thankfully these things that are built into Wordpress like tags and categorization..you again get for free and a little effort while posting.

Basically domain names are a part of content gauntlet. Getting new or aged is expensive and only a finite number of them exist.   You should think of the domain name as a part of your paid strategy and most probably should be looking into having more than one domain/site to reach all the keywords that are relevant, as the farther away from the main domainkeyword the harder it is to rank well. This tactic is are called by others feeder sites and is a more intermediate to advanced SEO trick.

This is basically where we are this year.

So where can Google go from here? what’s left.

We all generally want a smarter web, so we all find what exactly we want faster, as the problems get exponentially harder as you get up there. it’s easy to add to 10 with fingers, easy to multiple triple digits on a calculator, apparently next to impossible to balance the national debt.

For links you may have heard of the famous Travelling Salesman problem?  Wiki describes it as

Given a list of cities and their pairwise distances, the task is to find a shortest possible tour that visits each city exactly once.

Google has to deal with problems that are massively more complex every second of every day. As unlike the travelling salesman, google ’s map grows massively everyday

Part of Google’s job is to travel every link it can across every webpage it can, grading and keeping score add up in a popularity contest who has the most legitimate links.   This is hard work! the more links that are added just finding your way around becomes…impossible.  The more chance for endless loops or no right answer to be found or at least at a affordable cost as there are bazillions of pages and links constantly coming in and being removed every second.

Even with Google’s massive resources, the web is much bigger than they are and growing exponentially. We are actually just at the dawn of the web.   Google already spends huge amounts on electrical power beyond many cities ability to supply, bazillions of computers to process all this data and PC’s are only so fast. There is only so much sense google can afford to make out of this never ending tangle of links so it takes shortcuts when it can.

Content-wise same difficult issues.   Google is at the core a machine, and while that machine is created by some of the brightest on the planet, Google bots still don’t get knock knock jokes, they can’t get the emotional truth of a song lyric and aren’t likely to anytime soon.  Even if google were perfect, there are limits to what google or *any of us* can do without more “real” data, take 1000 YouTube comments on Lady’s Gaga’s latest video saying “I love this song!” .  How do you tell if they are real or faked as they look the same!

Solving these are hard to potentially impossible problems with current hardware, and there is no likely breakthroughs for decades as they are that hard, some have been around for almost 100 years!

But as the web grows we still need a way to sort the 10 best out of the millions of possible contenders. You need to explore this proof of life to compete..it’s one of the few methods left and most aren’t using it strategically!

If you are aiming to get results SEO or PPC ask yourself if an how Google can see ALL your content activity and that of your viewers as it happens, to keep Google coming back for more. Show them your site is bustling with life. They will reward you for it.

So what do you think about this “proof of life”?

I know some feel that being transparent is evil, and in someways it is, it can in some cases allow your competitors to spot you in the crowd, and in any competitive niche, being #1 is like having a target painted on the back of your head to take you down.

UPDATE: I’ve had one SEO Guru tell me privately that so far he has 0 proof that this “proof of life” is a ranking factor, and has some sites that rank #1 by quality links alone with no measurable activity from google.

I think it’s inevitable though that the web heads this direction.    With content and links being gamed and limits in there’s basically nowhere for Google to go by purely content and link approaches in deciding what is good and what is not. It has to measure activity, see proof of real human life.

Going to use it? if not why not? Sound off in the comments.

If you want to reach 100% of your audience in a reviewer style content you can still use the 4 different learning styles, just in a different order.

I was recently asked how to create content based on the 4 different learning styles but for celebrity news, by a user who just didn’t know how to apply the rules

The basics are the same, the order is different as the news reader intent is different.  You are writing looking backward “What just happened and what does it mean” vs looking forward “why and how to do something” when educating.

In particular for news I’d model the Associated Press they are everywhere, and for celebrity news I’d mirror Yahoo OMG http://omg.yahoo.com/)

they roughly switch to the order of the 4 different learning styles to:

1. What
   
2. How
   
3. Why
4. What If (optional for objective reporting, great for controversial)
   

Let’s take a look at this news article http://omg.yahoo.com/news/teri-hatcher-sued-by-former-business-associate/45435

1. What: Teri Hatcher sued by former business associate  (Headline)
2. How Months after former “Desperate Housewives” co-star Nicollette Sheridan sued ABC Studios and creator Marc Cherry for assault and discrimination, now co-star Teri Hatcher, ABC and the Walt Disney Co. have been targeted by a woman who helped run Hatcher’s production company and claims that she was pushed aside and denied a promised 50% cut of revenue from the venture. Jennifer Glassman, an industry marketing vet who has worked for the Paradigm talent agency, New Line Cinema and her own branding/PR shingle, alleges in the lawsuit that she went into business with Hatcher in 2006 to run her shingle, ISBE Prods., in exchange for 50% of the profits generated. But after pouring her heart into the venture, Hatcher and ABC have worked to “intentionally exclude and eliminate (her) from the picture in terms of revenue sharing just prior to the successful launch of a prominent website supported by Disney,” according to the lawsuit.The nine-count complaint for unspecified damages was filed Tuesday in Los Angeles Superior Court.
3. Why Glassman says she played a big role at Hatcher’s ABC-based company, selling projects like “Burned Toast” to Lifetime and two scripts, “Fried” and “Mercury Rising,” to ABC. Disney also recently launched a Hatcher-branded site called gethatched.com through its family.com website. During the run-up to the launch of the site, Glassman says Hatcher abruptly soured on her and sent a mass email in February alerting business contacts that Glassman was no longer working with her. Disney-owned Touchstone TV then allegedly followed up and terminated her.Glassman “never knew or had reason to know that (Hatcher and Disney) were concealing the fact that they intended to try and treat (Glassman’s) business and employment relationship with them as an ‘at will employee’ relationship, and ultimately ‘terminate’ her without cause while trying to eliminate (Glassman) from the picture, business-wise,” the complaint states.”This lawsuit is based upon ridiculous fabrications and is completely without merit,” Hatcher’s rep countered. “It is unfortunate that the many opportunities Ms. Hatcher afforded the former employee are now being so implausibly twisted and contorted. The suit will be vigorously defended by the Walt Disney Co. and by Ms. Hatcher’s attorneys, who also intend to file substantial counterclaims against the former employee for her reckless and premeditated misconduct on her departure.”Glassman attaches to her complaint emails from Hatcher promising partnership, although there is no formal agreement alleged. The only employment contract alleged is a 2007 form deal that Glassman calls a “mere formality” because it doesn’t include terms of employment, compensation, job duties or title. She has sued for breach of an implied-in-fact contract.

   She also claims she handled duties above and beyond the usual, including running errands and handling Hatcher’s “mood swings and unusual requests.”

4. What If (insert your own controversial conjecture,) what if Hatcher was bipolar or an pregnant? sound off in the comments!

I loved this video from the design agency Jess3 on stats of the internet.

The amount of spam, botnets, malicious code was eye opening. Mostly these are marketers at work.

I like everybody else hate spam, I wonder how successful/profitable spam is relative to a legit business. Clearly very given the huge amount of servers / efforts required to produce it.

JESS3 / The State of The Internet from JESS3 on Vimeo.

• I love automation, fully configured blogs+plugins+themes in <4 seconds. How long does it take you? #

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It’s 4am and can’t sleep, head full from 2 days of packed content and networking at Marty Rozmanith’s Wordpress Direct University figured I’d share some of what’s going through my head on a personal level, and a few take away tips, but mostly the former, so consider yourself warned.

First up, it’s 4am.  I’m sitting crosslegged in the sofa at the Hostel,  with a hint of the cool san diego breeze coming rhouhg the 4 giant windows. The fun gaslamp district is a ghosttown, contrast this to 9pm-1:30pm when it feels like Mardi-Gras.  The ONLY reason it stops at 2amish is city mandated that EVERTHING close round 2amish.  I’m pretty sure that even the clubs at the hotel  (e.g. the Hard Rock Hotel ) are subject to this curfew.  Of course that just means the party moves to the rooms. I’m actually greatful for the silence as I can get quite hypersenstive to

To be honest conferences are a giant pain in the ass,

doesn’t matter how good the last one was, it’s hard for me to get out of the house, they almost always happen at the worst times.

First  I have to drive which if you’re familiar at all with Los Angeles is generally more like synchronized braking.   I structure my life so I don’ t have to drive as I’m convinced that next to TV that driving is the biggest time sink.     Google maps with traffic does it’s best and recently got better by showing intown traffic, It typically takes about 45 minutes to even get to the freeway and that is plenty of time for the roadsystem to turn into a sea of life sucking red lights that mean your trip time may be doubled and your time sleeping halved.

Being the ace strategician, Generally between last minute preps and road dred, aim for 7pm and manage to put out of the house round 2am…

Of course once I’ve left the habit trail   it’s easy to get commited and enjoy. Smooth Driving is very meditative, all sorts of thoughts percolate up  that you don’t normally get to see.

Second, as is typical for most conferences I go to, I usually get about 8-12 hours of sleep spread across 3-4 nights, AND I have to use an alarm clock. WTF is this internet lifestyle?!?  I don’t wear a watch, don’t have any clocks in my room other than those embedded into the device.  For the most part I operate outside of time by design, as freedom is important to me and it’s just how I operate best.  e.g. if the team is cracking or ideastorm, I work all night I do, if I have to sleep 15 hours I do.

Conferences are like mini job, you have to conform to a schedule,  have to sit in the chair, pay attention (else why did you come), and get to and from lunch/break on time else miss something.  WPDirect starts at 9am! Damn those east coaster boston peeps didn’t they see the sign “entering california?!”     But to augment caffiene,  Marty has been the opening speaker both days and has a deeply knowledgeable brain and a gift for conveying complex information and is almost registers -10% hype and bullshit meter.  Which makes it totally worth it.

What I like about these conferences that are organized around a real product/service is you get to put a face on the company in this case WordpressDirect and see the culture behind it.   It’s easy when everything is through the web to imagine that these companies are giant vending machines with unlimited robots, with impersonal email with various tracking tickets to forget that behind that, every reply is answered by a real living person.  n Companies like really everybody can fit into a single van.  Briefly if you’re not familiar with them, Wordpress Direct is a way to quickly build keyword optimized blogs they host and they start at free. They are decent sized and have over 30K users.

Back to the story, I work out of my home, and between automation and outsourcing, most of my team I’ve never met live, and some I don’t even know what they look like.  We have great communication and reort Skype and Basecamp is MORE THAN AWESOME but it’s not the same flavor of seeing people light up, and the banter that happens when you least expect it.   Basically at times I miss the live part.

One of the other consequences of this internet, even if you sandbox your work and personal identities as I do is that the lines between life and work blur.  I’m always working, I’m also always on what others consider vacation. Just things are chopped up, an hour of 100% fun in the middle of the day, an hour of work when you should be sleeping.   Like right now some major projects some brand new some months in and near completion are in critical phases with many unknowns, so I have to constantly guide it here and there and do things only I can do else I become the bottleneck.   This is actually a great problem to have when your team is delivering christmas every day, it’s hard NOT to open your presents even if they are wrapped in email instead of wrapping paper, when they are asking you whether you want to get metaphorically a Million Dollars more in your business or a Year off, it’s impossible not to want to answer the questions, even if that means you are giving up sleep that will make it harder to pay attention tomorrow.

I’m not alone in this.  One of my favorite speaker (and hella funny Texan) Keith Baxter is in the middle of the major “Epic Traffic” launch. I guess the point I was making is that most the successful people I meet have intense freedom, but there are times when they work their asses 16hours a day for weeks on end and end up far more burnt out than you see in a normal job because there are no boundaries placed there and so much drive.

But for even all that. What I at least gain in these conferences is totally worth the sacrifices.  It’s counter intuitive, but honestly I think that for all the thousands of dollars of material I’ve bought, I get more far mroe from going to these conferences even when I have no idea what I’m going to get out of it.   For one there is a force feeding of content, be honest how often have you bought a product and it just sat there on the shelf. In a conference in a locked room it’s a bit like drinking from a firehose.  Second there is a dialog, you can ask critical questions directly, especially after. Thired you have to breath the same air .

After a year, I kinda feel like most infotraining is a perpetual industry to milk and sort of a hidden trick question, the only way to succeed is to counterintuitively stop learning especially from infobook. To be sure there are several awesome courses and you have to get your start somewhere, but I believe most pale in raw impact as some of these  live conferences -even the pitchfests-, and this one classifies technically as one, as every speaker is pushing something, but generally every presentation was the equivalent of a $397 course or more so value is being delivered every hour, so times say 5 presentations per day x 2 days = 10 presentations * 400 == $4K of training value alone. Often the way that these speakers are coordinated on complimentary areas, some of that you’d never voluntarily buy as you don’t think you need it, or worse you don’t even know it exists so wouldn’t ever find it.

Conferences are a bit of a secret society, the door admission price is the secret passphrase. I’ve met some who know this and have spent $2k on product they have no intent of using just to get access to right people in the right place, because major deals happen here.   Especially at smaller events like this, where else can you talk to the CEO and major gurus at length? share a beer with them, get candid answers?

Everytime I go I learn things that aren’t taught anyplace else, and probably won’t ever be.  Again live conferences are a sort of graduation from conventional do it yourself training.  Advanced levels are unlocked.  Rightfully shouldn’t in some cases as they are either super powerful and likely to be abused, and some are super complicated and so far beyond that it would take a year or so of training to be able to fully understand the impact, or that if everybody did it would completely fail.  Others are gems that are dropped in various conversations, either things you’re generally not supposed to know, or “common knowledge” they just don’t ever think to teach, things you didn’t know you REALLY need to know, like perhaps everything you are doing (that everybody else is doing) is either wrong or a poor use of time.

Damn the sun is coming up, I’m getting super sleepy  and the Day3 (which I was VERY kindly comped on…again the power of attending these sorts of things) is starting in a 3  hours, so hopefully I’ll continue this later, so much to talk about, so much has happened.

Troy.

• Zeus controlled the elusive lightning of the heavens.
• Hades controlled gold and the underworld.
• Poseidon controlled the ephemeral water covering most the planet.

• Lightning is SEO (aka) organic, it’s free as rain, very powerful if you get right..and damn ellusive to catch.
• Gold is Paid Traffic, get it right buy your way anywhere, get it wrong and you endup broke in Hades, with no easy way out.
• Water is Social Media, always changing, always flowing, everywhere.

This could be Epic Traffic..

1. Find hot targeted prospects using Twitter Search
2. Get your offers in front of them PROPERLY then drive traffic.

This article is inspired by three concrete problems I had this weekend, where I had premium content locked in a paid membership site and wanted a local copy of.  That content was often a rather large complicated site consisting of 200-300 files of 500-1GB of size.  While possible to do manually, getting it all, would have been time consuming and tedious to do so, regardless if I did it or one of my staff.  So in this we are going to review and cover 3 automated solutions I tried to get a copy and keep it safe.  So like the pharaohs of old you can take it with you.

Like the pharoahs of old, you can take it with you, provided you know these tricks...

The problem with online courses:

1) your course is only available online in some password protected site. Lose the password, downgrade your membership you lose access to it all.

2) you can’t take the course with you on the road or in places with poor internet connectivity, often which is a perfect time to learn and review this.

3) courses get outdated, and taken offline. E.g. gurus retire, or retire courses.  You spend $2k on the information it’s only fair that you get a copy of it, regardless of what the guru does with it in the future.

If you could get a copy for later for your “Learning Library” you could keep a copy even if you never use it. I still keep copies of my university books just occasionally to refresh my memory on certain subjects. Can’t say that they’ve gotten much use out of (e.g. Linear Algebra and Chemistry) but I spent like $200 on some of them when that was a LOT of money to me (as in a full month of rent) and years later…still… can’t… quite let them go in the trash

My Inspirations

First, I own Jeff Walkers Product Launch Formula 2.0, which was $2k or so when I bought it about a year ago.   Jeff is retiring PLF2.0 in favor of PLF3.0 in just a couple of days. That means he’s deleting ALL of the excellent content and sites surrounding that product, partly to push people to buy the upgraded “redone from the ground up”.  Much of that pricey but good content I just don’t remember OR worse have paid lots of money for but haven’t gotten a chance to view yet, which come to think of it, is true for many of the courses I have bought, even if I have been working my butt off the entire year!!!.   While I could manually download files one by one, I wanted an easier way and one that would make sure I didn’t lose anything,  and being so busy, I put it to last few days…and just realized I only had a few days left.    I had planned originally just to download the core modules files, but getting into the site after almost a year ofnot seeing it,  I realized there was a huge amount I haven’t seen, and most available in several formats like PDF transcripts, that would benefit me more than just the video. It would be rather insane downloading the entire site that way so I went with the automated approach.

Second I am canceling one of my $300/mo mastermind groups, as over the 4 months, I’ve gotten most the value I need out of it and would rather have that money going someplace else -that’s about what I pay for a month of some of my Filipino workers!  As soon as I cancel though I lose access to ALL the information in the premium mastermind section. Which kinda sucks.  A much better way to go would be to just stop allowing me access to things I haven’t paid for but their membership software doesn’t do that.

Third one of the other membership sites  I wanted local copies of the videos, as they way they organize the site, you can’t watch a video and actually see the slides and take notes at the same time unless you use a spare PC, which make it hard for me to learn the site.

In every one of these cases downloading the videos is perfectly permitted and encouraged, as it’s for personal -not pirated use.  You almost never have the permission to reupload the site to make it ‘your’s” but in some cases (like in the case of employee training) it’s borderline, just make sure you only grant permission to authorized parties.

How to get a copy of that website for safe keeping.

The good news is there are a few different ways to go about this important if somewhat daunting task.

Manual This is great if you only need a few files, pick and choose style.  You can just use the browser to right click over a link and hit save as, or  from the main menu choose File>Save As> Webpage Complete.  This however won’t download video files on say S3 or youtube to keep them safe.   The reason for this is that it’s saves the html file verbatim, and keeps the links intact pointing to the web.

If it’s a video on say youtube there are a few different websites services for this like keepvid and  FireFox plugins like Orbit downloader.

In a pinch when people make it hard to find the video (e.g. EZS3) you can often use the firefox plugin firebug to see where the files are coming from and open the the file in new tab then save it. Firebug is meant as a web development tool (and it kicks butt at this).  Basically how you use it, look at this 9 step picture.

9 Steps to Using Firebug to download a Video

Last I should say there are some times when people stream video, that video cannot be saved via any of these approaches, as the video never hits  your harddrive ever. In this last case you can use any screen capture program (Screenflow on a Mac, Camtasia on a PC) to do a capture of everything.  This is particularly great for webinars on gotomeeting.

Automated: If you have a lot of files special software is website rippers, that basically behave as you would viewing the site, except instead of saving it to a local cache they save it permanently to a folder of your choice.

So there are many tools to help you automatically download entire website for later.  They have basically have the responsibility to automatically follow each and every link from a given start page and download each and every file much like google’s search engine bots crawl your site, and once downloaded rewrite the links to something local and not still on the web.   This can actually be relatively complicated job given most sites link out to many other resources (like amazon S3) to host media files, or cross promotions. You have to sometimes setup boundaries on what you do and don’t follow, you don’t want to download the entire web!

Generally you first start a “project” that will contain all the files (e.g. 1 project might be 1 website) , so in my case I needed 3 projects, one for each site.  These projects can exist in various formats: the raw files as they exist on the web, or various compressed archives like zip folders or “chm” help files, which saves space and makes them say easy to share with mastermind or employees.   In all cases these tools try to download everything at a fast rate so will both hog the netconnection and consume significant CPU, so I recommend doing this when you aren’t trying to do something super important at the same time, or better yet start it when you go to sleep etc and check it in the morning.   Also it’s generally a good idea to make sure these files are virus checked in case the site got hacked.

There are MANY programs that do this, I tried the first 3 that caught my eye searching google for “download website offline viewing“, alternate search terms to try are “download entire website”

3 Website Software to Download for Offline Viewing

• Htttrack, this is an open source free, near the top of the results.  It appears to be a command line utility minimal UI.  It worked fine for normal sites, but I couldn’t figure out how to get it to work with the password protected websites requiring a non popup login.  Though looking at it’s logs I was able to see that one of the sites was using the WP membership site plugin Aweber which I couldn’t have known before hand. It was the cheapest as it was opensouce/no cost.
• SpideSoft’s Webzip:    this is not free but it has a fully functional 30 day trial, which for my purposes was good enough as I didn’t need this for more than a week.  They’ve been out for it seems a couple of years, various copyright dates on the software.  This is based on InternetExplorer so it’s workflow is different, and it worked better than Httrack for the password sites.  Basically with it’s built in browser, you browse like you would normally to the part of the site you want to copy, login if needed, and then hit go.   If needed to purchase they were also the cheapest of the 3. at $39.95 for the normal version.  The UI is reasonably polished and fancy feeling, some questionably graphics showing all the bytes in an bytes out.  I found running on Windows XP that it crashed a few times but was easy to resume from where it left off.  Viewing the results it added a extra note at the top about where the files came from, and the date. There is also a resync website so for example if the contents had changed and you wanted to only download the new ones. By default it stores the site in a conventional file/folder.
• Bimesoft’s SurfOffline:  this is not free but has a 200 link trial, which for my purposes on 2 of the sites wasn’t good enough. It had a polished UI, good reporting on what it’s doing, it also had a visible browser so I could log into the sites before downloading them.    It did not crash like Webzip, but it’s not a fair comparison it also didn’t go as far as the trial version stopped at 200 links.  I found it a bit more limited and market/nagware. After you complete the download pops up a message to upgrade to the full version it had four different versions $39.95 for the standard ‘non-commercial’ version and $69.95 for the non-commercial professional version, commercial versions in both would run *significantly* more.  I couldn’t really figure out what the difference was between the standard and pro version.   It by default stores files in a compressed archive which is a great space saver but I didn’t like, as I prefer to be able to jump to movie files I want.

Screenshot of Webzip, after downloading the PLF website for offline viewing.

At the end I was pretty happy with the trial version of Webzip, it did the job I needed, without costing anything.  If I needed this on a regular basis I would probably investigate some of the others out there, that didn’t require restarting. In any case I imagine that most tools like this run $40, and a 1TB harddrive is about $50 as of this writing, which is nothing compared to the price of one of these pricey courses and the peace of mind having the ability to consume it however you want, whenever you want, however long you want, without being dependent on those pesky gurus.

ADVANCED:
I have what I call a Learning Library currently about  1.5TB in size. It contains ALL the courses I have bought to date, some $10K or so.  In particular it contains on the harddrive, copies of  DVD collections and OCR printed materials I get in those “big box courses” as harddrives are cheap, and DVD’s can get easily damaged or lost in the hustle of life and piles of stuff. OCR the swipe files makes them actually easy to copy and paste from.     Even better is once ripped and converted most are compatible with web browsers, I can tag, organize and even search the files and create hyperlinks to relevant courses on relevant subjects which i can’t easily do with my DVD collection collecting dust on the shelves. Not to mention most IM courses are kinda ugly, not exactly something I like having a showcase of..

As a person starting out in Internet Marketing, especially to those not used to it, it’s easy to be taken back by how much an alternate universe Internet Marketing (and making money in general) is.

1) how much all these courses cost, it seems like it’s every other week that some $2k software is being released as the next cure for all evils. To be fair my local community college also charges $1K for a course but these are taught live, they are instructor lead and there is homework and tests to some form of accountability to get stuff done. In contrast many gurus are clearly knowledgeable but horrible inconsiderate teachers, who are often rarely if ever accessible to answer questions.

2) how much there is to know, SEO, PPC, Social Media, Copyriting, Domaining, Product Creation, Outsourcing, Incorporation, Finances, the list goes on an on. When you first get into the game and even a year later there is quite an astounding amount that it takes to have a business that has reached it’s full potential. The good news of course is you don’t really need but a fraction of all this to get going.

Anyway, I generally think that it’s a bad trap to get into the mega course de jour, especially when that same money could be getting products or websites on the market. But not to worry took part of it too, had I had the ability to do things differently I totally would llike the following.

So here are two tips to get that money to work IN your business rather than on your self.

1) Share the price with a friend
One is get a mastermind, preferrably local. Buy the courses under a shared identity, and pool them in a learning library. Better yet watch the courses together and talk about them.

2) Go Secondhand
Pick it up used. There is a thriving market for, often by people who have been suckered into spending $2K who would like to get some of that back. Just do a search on ebay for any of your favorite Guru’s, bet you’ll find something.

A valid warning is there are certainly courses that don’t age that well, e.g. I wouldn’t buy a book on Facebook from two years ago, too much has changed. But things “classics” from big name gurus like Frank Kern, Eben Pagan, that are delivered on DVD more often than not do not age that much. Don’t buy the hype about it being completely written from the ground up, if the course content is that brittle so will your business be by building on top of it. Just like a car, last years model will still get you where you need to go.

3) Get to know these Guru’s better.
Spend more time searching guru’s blogs and cross promotions, if necessary stalk them online. Here they give away a ton of free content that will get you 70-80% of what they put in these premium products. Odds are most are on yearly cycles. PLF1.0 becomes PLF2.0 becomes PLF3.0. Names and metaphor change the core concepts do not. Often by looking at last years blog entries you can find tons of useful info for free. Do enough research often the gurus leak enough useful but incomplete so that there really isn’t that much left to be incomplete.

4) Just don’t buy it.
Have to bring up this option. Your life will not likely implode or business fail or success typicaly by missing one of these products and odds are you can find the same information in a $2K course in a $200
course somewhere on clickbank. Quite the opposite by unsubscribing from the constant onslaught you might get things done. Having watched the gurus for a year, you may have finally found out, and they don’t hide this. They are a vampire mafia of sorts, they meet a few times a year to figure out what is working, coordinate and make sure that their launches don’t compete with each others, you are the cows they milk on a schedule for a very lucrative business that is often ungrounded in anything near reality as defined by the you can do this too. For all the value in each of these courses, if you live paralized life and never