Monthly Archives: January 2012

Did You Protest SOPA and PIPA?

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Did you protest against SOPA and PIPA on the 18th? Or were you just in the dark wondering what all the fuss was about?

I know a lot of people didn’t understand what all the fuss was about. It was rather inconvenient to have so many web sites unavailable. But I was concerned enough to join the protest myself (I’m sure you both noticed 8=) even though I’m not in the United States myself.

If you’d like to see a bit of results from the blackout the SOPAStrike website has an informative infographic: The January 18 Blackout / Strike in Numbers and Screenshots.

The fight against SOPA and PIPA is not over, but the enemy has been pushed back. Perhaps we’ll see some serious attempts to solve the problem of piracy while still protecting free speech and the security of the internet.

Integrity Marketing – Is This The Internet You Want?

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encourage integrityI had a very disturbing experience yesterday. And it got me to thinking about the state of things on the internet, in particular, marketing on the internet.

And I boiled my concerns down to one basic question:

Is this the Internet that you want?

We think about the internet as being some intricate web of information and entertainment that is out there. But we need to take a step back and realize one very important fact.

We are the internet.

More than any other medium in recent history, individuals like you and me have a say in what goes on in here. We write the news. We create the stories. We build the relationships.

So if the internet is a sorry mess, who do we blame for that? Google? Microsoft? Q?

A Bitter Taste

The experience I referred to in my opening paragraph was a bit disconcerting. It was a site the promised traffic. And we all know that traffic is the life blood of earning a living online. It was recommended by someone who’s list I’ve been on for a long time. Someone who I have a certain level of trust in. Well, had might be a more appropriate way to phrase that.

So I signed up, even though they wanted a phone number. What the heck for? I hate to admit it, but 999-999-9999 is not really my phone number 8=)

Immediately I’m presented with a garishly coloured site. Tiny text crammed everywhere. A chat screen in the middle and two live video feeds — one of which is someone calling out my name. “Watch the video and then come back here” they said.

Very off putting to say the least. I watched the sales presentation for their upgrade. Apparently this presentation was a recording of one of the top guys, but not the founder. I found the presentation to be okay. I felt comfortable with the guy presenting.

But afterwards, the video calling out my name, trying to get me to sign up. I haven’t even seen what the site is about and already they’re pestering me to upgrade. When I was balking at jumping on this fantastic offer, the founder himself (in another video window) jumped in to talk to me.

Things went downhill pretty fast from there. Apparently I’m a loser because I won’t jump in with both feet simply because he says so! Looking around, doing some due diligence on the site (which turned up bad when I did do it) makes me a loser. I don’t know if these guys are a scam (I doubt it) but they are definitely overly hyped. And their tactics could use a breath mint.

Well, I’m pretty happy being a loser if that’s what he thinks I am. But unfortunately, because of sites like this, we’re all losers. We lose the trust of people out there because of charlatans and high pressure hucksters.

I’ve seen this type of sales pressure in the offline world before. Usually with scams masquerading as the next big MLM opportunity.

What Can We Do?

That’s the next question. I hope that you are with me in wanting to have an internet that you’d be proud to have your kids visit. But the next step is how do we do it?

I don’t have any quick fixes or pat answers for you. I’m hoping that we can all dig together and come up with some ideas. Here are some general ones to think on:

  • Don’t be part of the problem. Make sure you don’t act dishonestly and don’t promote anyone who does.
  • Educate your friends and family. Help them to know what a scam looks like. Help them to learn how to filter out the hype. Show them where to find marketers of integrity.
  • Spread the message. Write blog posts about integrity. Teach people how to use scarcity without lying about it. Help them understand the power of building and maintaining trust.

Fight the Bad

Do we need a way to call the bad guys out on the carpet? I don’t know if that has any affect. There are several sites that have reviews of the offending site, pointing out their flaws. But people are still promoting and signing up to it.

One thing I like to do is send a private email to someone when the do something I think hurts their integrity. I don’t do it every time and many will either ignore you or attack you (I’ve experienced both). But some will realize you’re only trying to help them. And they may even change their tactics.

Support the Good

One way that I have found to support good marketers is through IMTrustWorthy. I don’t know if it will be the answer to the problems of trust and integrity, but it is a step in the right direction.

Becoming a member gives you the right to put a badge on your site, like the one you see in my sidebar (check out the site by clicking my badge if you’re interested in learning more). But it isn’t just a badge. It actually links back to my profile on the site. And other members of the site have the right to rate me and even make comments. It’s kind of like StumbleUpon for marketers.

I’m sure that there will be imitators and those that put up fake badges. And there is always the risk that the site will be gamed by unscrupulous marketers. But it is a start.

Another way that we can support one another is to speak up for one another. If you see someone doing something impressive, tweet it, plus it, blog about it.

The Challenge

So here’s a challenge. How are you making the web a better place? How are you setting the example of an integrity marketer?

Share your story in the comments or write a post at your blog and let me know. I’ll add links to this post as they come in.

SexyBookmarks and W3 Total Cache – The Battle

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plugin conflict sexybookmarks and w3 total cacheNo, it’s not a new online game. But I recently decided to run W3 Total Cache here at LoneWolf’s LMA.

And it didn’t play well with SexyBookmarks (is it just me, or is that kind of delicious name for a plugin 8=)

The Great Plugin Conflict

I installed the cache shortly after upgrading to WP 3.3, so at first I thought it was a problem with that. But my other sites that run both SexyBookmarks and WP 3.3 weren’t having any problems, so I turned back to the caching plugin.

The problem was that the icons for the bookmarking weren’t showing up on my posts. I did some digging and found that people using CDN with W3 Total Cache were having similar problems with their SexyBookmarks. But since I’m not using a CDN yet, the solutions that they presented didn’t solve my problem.

I looked at the source that was being served and it appeared that all the html and javascript for the SexyBookmarks was in the HTML received by the browser, but it wasn’t displaying. So there was something interfering with the javascript that displays the icons somehow.

So, here’s the conundrum. I want to run the cache to speed up response time of the site. This is good for SEO and user experience. It also saves the load on the server (so when I become incredibly popular my site won’t crash 8=)

But, the sharing icons are very important as well. In fact, it is critical to make sharing easy to build SEO in today’s world. So I need something there. And I really like SexyBookmarks. Not just the name, but the look of it as well. It is flexible and integrates well into my sites. But I was looking at the possibility that it would have to be replaced.

Getting Support

I decided it was time to contact support. I figured that the people at Shareaholic must have dealt with this before, so I left a support ticket there. Unfortunately, with the holiday season in full swing it kind of slipped through the cracks. But I finally heard back from them today (and we got it sorted out when they pointed me in the right direction).

In the short term, I added the ShareBar plugin to get the big social media names up there. I like it so much that I plan on keeping it up in addition to SexyBookmarks. I think they compliment one another quite well.

Anyway, back to the battle.

The Shareaholic rep reported that they were unable to find any reported problems with W3 Total Cache and SexyBookmarks other than those relating to the CDN. She tested on a test machine and couldn’t see the same problem.

But she was pretty sure that it had something to do with the minify options for W3 since Shareaholic already minifies the code that they use. She gave me a few things to try out (including going back to the Twenty Ten theme to see if there was a theme conflict).

The first thing I did was to tell W3 to leave the SexyBookmarks code alone when minifying. I went to the Minify tab of the W3 Total Cache plugin admin and added “wp-content/plugins/sexybookmarks/*” to the Never minify these pages list. Clear the cache, reload the page and voila — still no bookmarks 8=(

Dang! I was sure that was it.

So I went back to make sure I typed it right. It was fine.

More head scratching. Clear the caches again — selected Clear All Caches this time. Still no joy.

Scrolling through the General tab of the W3 settings and there it was! Minify mode! There is a line beside this option (which can be set to Auto (the default) or Manual).

Select manual mode to use fields on the minify settings tab to specify files to be minified, otherwise files will be minified automatically, but will not use the CDN.

Basically, this is telling me that if I have the mode set to Auto it will ignore everything on the Minify tab and just try to minify everything!

Sure enough, I changed this setting to Manual, cleared the cache and I was back in business!

Now, I did have another entry in the Never minify these pages list which may have been what is needed. The contents of that field are now:

wp-content/uploads/shareaholic/*
wp-content/plugins/sexybookmarks/*

So you might get by with just the first entry in that list, provided the Minify mode on the General tab is set to Manual.

But I don’t mind having the extra line in there. Shareaholic has everything minified already so that isn’t going to hurt anything.

How To Find PLR

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How To Find PLRMaybe you’re still a bit leery. You think that PLR might be good for your business. But you need to know how to find PLR that will suit your needs.

Given the amount of products that are floating around the internet with reuse rights of some kind, you’d think it would be easy.

But it isn’t.

That’s because there is a lot of low quality PLR that is promoted out there.

If you’re a writer, then the low quality stuff still has some use as fodder for your creativity (provided it’s readable, which isn’t always the case). But if you want to be able to use the product with minor adjustments then you need something that is well written and researched as a starting point. And if you’re dealing with MRR, RR or similar rights, you can’t change it so it has to be good out of the box.

There is a lot of material that is available for free if you hang out at giveaway events and sign up to email lists. I get tons of the stuff that way. But it takes a lot of effort to sort through it all and figure out what will be useful.

Finding Good PLR

The best material will usually be behind the money curtain — that’s right, you’ll have to pay for it.

So the question becomes “Who do I trust?” If you’re paying for a ghostwriter, you can see the end result before you finalize the payment. But with PLR you have to pay up front and many providers have a “no returns” policy (for obvious reasons).

That means you need to do some homework. You’ll be putting your hard earned cash on the line so you want to be sure about it.

You’ll need to find a couple of trusted sources that you can go to. People with a track record for creating well researched, well written articles, eBooks, etc. Once you’ve found a few good sources you can go back to them for more when needed.

How Will You Know?

Your due diligence involves several different approaches.

  • Check out sources that you trust that promote the use of PLR (like LoneWolf’s LMA — hopefully 8=) and see who they recommend. But keep in mind that most of us are affiliates for the people we promote. Check the PLR Sources page here for a list of people I recommend.
  • Do a search for the provider in Google or Bing. Look at what people are saying about them. You’ll need to wade through some obvious sales pages to get to discussions.
  • Search for their name on forums like The Warrior Forum. This is also a great place to find new sources of PLR as many products are offered there at great prices.
  • See if the provider has samples. Many of them offer some free articles to give you an idea of the quality of their writing and whether it will fit with what you want to do. But, once again, they may have lower quality stuff hiding behind the “Buy” button. Your due diligence can help you find the ones that do this kind of stuff. Those who are burned will be vocal.
  • Finally, you’ll need to buy something to know for sure. The word of others can only get you so far. Eventually you need to see for yourself.

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Bonus!

Most of the providers of PLR will also provide a lot of solid information about marketing online in their newsletters. You can learn a lot from them.[/stextbox]Once you’ve found a good source of content, you’ll want to make sure that you sign up for their newsletter so that you can be advised when new stuff is ready. That way you won’t have to be checking back all the time.

Once you’ve found a couple of great providers you can build up a fairly steady stream of content for your business. But remember that not every PLR provider has the same level of output. Some will produce new content every week or so. Others will be sporadic, with new content coming out with no pattern.

You also need to keep in mind that a content provider may work in several different niches. You are not always going to see PLR content that matches your needs.

With these 2 caveats in mind, you may want to expand your list of sources to minimize the possibility of running out of material to work with.

Get Looking

Now that you know how to find PLR for your project, the job is to get out there and look! Remember that you can check my PLR Sources page for a starting point if you need to.

And if you know of a great PLR source or tip on finding one then, by all means, share it with us in the comments!