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Since April 1 is National Backing Up Day I’m posting this video to both celebrate good website backup principles, and to haunt you if you do not have a reliable, set-it-and-forget it backup solution for your own websites.

The first time I saw this video I didn’t know what to think – it was just so WEIRD. Then I found that this was a mashup someone made after watching this ladies nutty interview on a local news station describing her scary experience of being in a convenience store while it was being robbed by two youths “one in a black hoodie, one in a white hoodie.”

But, really I want to encourage you to get the Backup Creator wordpress plugin because it’s a totally awesome tool, inexpensive and can truly save your butt.

Since most websites today run on the amazing WordPress platform, this simple, but powerful plugin easily uploads into your site and using it is a breeze. You set it up one time and it will automatically back your site up for you, and can either email you the backup file, or even upload it to your Amazon S3 account and store your entire site, pictures, audio and video files safely in the cloud.

Cloning – Does it Really Work?

Several years ago I was the first guy to create a software program to actually clone a wordpress site and install it the site on a new URL automatically. It was primitive and kinda geeky clunky (you had to pull commands and links out of your Cpanel to make it work.) It was called WordPress cloner and all I have left now is the graphic and an ebook that I created as a bonus for it.

As if the backup feature wasn’t already a killer app, you can use it to perfectly clone one of your existing websites and install it on another domain in a snap!

Backup Creator Rules!

I use the Backup Creator on all my sites and I sleep much better, even though the “Backing Up Song” still kinda freaks me out…

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I went to your website and was all ready to buy from you – but your site is down!

What’s up with that?

If you’ve ever gotten an email like this you know the pure cold terror that grips you as you scramble to go look at your site. When you discover that it truly IS down – you begin a horrible journey of finding out of there’s a backup (there isn’t) and the attempting to assemble your website from the bits and pieces you can remember or that survived on your hard drive.

Now that we are all keeping so much information on our blog, losing that data in a crash or even a little bitty accidental deletion can be a nightmare. I know!

That’s why I’m admitting that I’m in love – with a plugin!

The Backup Creator not only backs up any WordPress site perfectly, it will also back up all the other files you have uploaded for your site too – like /video or /audio files. It even completely backs up your membership software installations!

Why Clone Your Website?

If you put up new sites from time to time, create sales sites, and ever thought “gee, it would be great to be able to not have to do all the customizing, tweaking, page creation, plugin installations and WordPress settings, then you’ll love the cloning feature of BackupCreator.

In fact you don’t have to do anything different – you just back up your site the normal way – then install WordPress on a new site and simply restore the backup and your entire site is there in a moment – with the new URL of course!

You can get on with posting the new content without all the setup!

I actually have created a couple of different styles of sites that I frequently use – so I can just clone the basic template there and the new site is all ready to go – without having to delete the content of the old site.

I highly recommend BackupCreator and encourage you to go to the site right now and watch the video there and buy it (AND USE IT!) immediately to backup your valuable online assets, before you get the dreaded “your website is down” email from hell.

I got this in my email inbox today. The people who put out scams like this should be publicly caned. Never, never, never respond to anything that comes in the mail about a domain without looking really closely at the source.

The only people who have any relevant info about your domain are the people with whom you registered it.

There is this one company who snail mails really urgent and official looking letters about my domains – they are a total scam. And, the little bastards use the American flag as a watermark. I think they are like the American Domain Registry.

Maybe they are the guys who will sell you a star, too.

This shocking video was recorded live in Las Vegas at the Internet Marketing Superconference.

Witnessed by Jack Humphrey, Colin McDougall, Len Thurmond, Carl Galletti, William Shatner, and Leonard Nimoy.

Since many of you are finding out about me from the white hot discussion about unsubscribing from email lists – I thought I’d include something to tear me a new one over – and to have some laughs.

Since I’d had the entire Internet uploaded to my body – I let everyone in the audience try to stump me with any question…

The entire video – which is filled with hilarious (and insightful) answers to their questions – will be uploaded soon. It’s about a 40 minute phreak and phun show.

Here’s the actual story of my unfortunate accident from the USA today – I’ve been tested many times by scientests, the CIA, the X-Files Dana Scully (by far the most enjoyable) and questioned extensively by Oliver Stone.

HIS NAME IS…..?

There is a place in the movie Fight Club where one of the characters dies unexpectedly during “Project Mayhem” and the whole group begins to recite his name.

Can you remember his name?

By the way – everything here, from the concept for the video – the graphics – the copy – the post headline – every bit of it is a lesson in creative thinking for marketing an idea.

My goal with this post is to begin to get you to maybe get away from the shiite and worn out phrases in your “swipe files” and start synthisizing the principles in those ideas – into one’s that resonate with your audience.

I know my readers are bright, clever, and informed – so this is my offering to you…

“Submitted for your approval” Rod Serling.

(PS: I totally LOVE your comments dear friends – so let me know what you think of this video and way of sharing marketing copy writing ideas – and you’ll get a link to your site! Rick

Long know for their extreme, some say fanatical, adherence to every scintilla of the Can-Spam act, Aweber has been the most stringent about uploading an existing email list to their servers without sending out “ye olde confirmation email.”

Anyone who knows anything about email marketing knows that if you send any existing list a confirmation email your list is going to shrink up like a grape in the sun, and you’ll end up with a raisin in the morning. Now, some will say that you SHOULD prune the list (interesting dried fruit thing going on here – purely unintentional) and that the folks who didn’t want to keep getting email from you who don’t confirm when you move the list are good riddance.

I think that’s stupid and at best willful ignorance.

Email Marketing is All About Timing

Everybody has had the experience of being on a list that you’d ignored for weeks or months – just deleting the updates or the ubiquitous and dirt-stupid “This Won’t Last Long!” obvious affiliate offer subject lines driven by false scarcity IMHBAO. Then one day you happen to see a subject line that sounds interesting or catches your eye. You open the message, are moved to click a link, and voila – you bought something!

And everyone who sends email to their list, whether a newsletter, blog update, or pure offers, has seen someone rise from the dead like Count Dracula and make a purchase. Holy cow, I didn’t know you were even still ALIVE Mr. Used to Be a Happy Blog Commenter / Twitter Chirpster / Facebooke Friendly – and here you are buying my schwag again! Yippie!

Money From Prunes

If you’d have pruned this customer based on open rates, or click-thru statistics you’d have never made the sale, and the buyer would have missed out on the opportunity to get something they wanted. (Ok, I’ll give you that the buyer isn’t really losing out if they never see a particular offer – or are they?) I’m primarily writing this for you and me from the marketer’s perspective.

Everything that happens online is driven by timing. Why do you think a sales letter that at best converts at 2% – 3% loses 98% of the people sho see it. You can run all your Taguchi Split Testing data by me and I’ll continue to insist that anecdotal evidence is that most people online have the attention span of a house fly and that 1000 things can take you away from clicking that buy button.

What Can Distract Someone Online?

• An inbound text message on their Iphone or cell.
• A Facebook alert that someone they don’t know just had tuna for lunch.
• Twitter and all it’s sick and twisted reindeer game apps like Hootsuite.
• Someone yelling – “come and eat this or I’m throwing it out to the dog!”
• The dog making a series of “urp-urp-urp” pre-wretching “I’m fixing to vomit” throat sound that can wake even the soundest sleeping human blot upright.
• Blue screen of death (see Microsoft Windows Support) – Mac users can skip this one.
• An actual phone call.
• An actual human visit.

Which brings me in a poorly structured transition to:

The Whole Aweber Stats Obsession Thing

Tom Kulzer - Boy Wonder Founder and CEO of Aweber

Tom Kulzer, founder of Aweber, admitted in an interview that he created the basic sequential autoresponder business at age 12 (okay he was a little older but not much) and it turned into a successful business pretty straightaway. Tom has never had any other business. Tom is brilliant and a super nice young man, but not having had trenchworthy experience in any other business has made him a bit myopic about what his company ought to do/be for the everyday customer.

Their fixation on statistical data and super drill down reports is so thorough and amazing that seriously, I suspect Obama should hire Tom to fix the economy – or at least find out where the $700 Billion Schtimulus money went. But then, Tom has far too much business experience to get a shot at that gig.

But, almost no one I know uses any of that statistical data – ever. Most of us operate Aweber for what we want from it, something to capture emails and let us send broadcast emails when we think up something to send. Frankly, I’ll bet most Aweber accounts don’t even have more than 1 follow up message – failing to use even the auto-responder feature. We know we should use them, but most don’t.

Aweber Bills You For Unsubscribes!

This article began, like most of my rants, on me noticing a disturbance in The Force. My Aweber monthly bill has edged up from $29 to $49 without me doing any major listbuilding activity and I wondered why. Turns out I am being billed for 950 unsubscribes! I called the sales department guy and asked how my tab went up – and he told me I had a list on this account about 1000 people higher than I knew I had.

Why would Aweber charge me for the people who are unsubscribed? Easy, they are getting high on the fumes of the whole statistical thing. The guy actually told me that “some people like to look at that data and figure out which message in their autoresponder got the most unsubscribes.”

Are you kidding me? First, that never even occurred to me and I’ve been making money online for 14 years. Second – I DON’T EVER “like to look at data” and if I ever wrote something that sent the list into an unsubscribe frenzy – prunes away! Good riddance to those people! LOL

Now, THAT’S an unsubscribe – not someone who didn’t even see the new shiny “I’ve moved my list – please please please God click the confirmation link so I can be an Aweber customer too like Ryan Deiss or Perry Belcher?”

Perhaps You Could Tell Me Why You are Charging Me Extra Every Month – Forever?

I asked Mr Helpful if he could delete these deadbeats – repeating my snort that I would never go look at who unsubscribed – much less “enjoy looking at the data.” He said he could and that would save me $20 a month.

But, as for knocking that $20 off my existing bill. No freakin’ way cowboy! We stored that data for you (without asking you or telling you – but charging you) and will that be Visa or Mastercard?

Agree Disagree? Tweet – Facebook and comment below – I’ll reply!

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No 140 character limit and no laptop just the free app for WordPress for iPhone and a quick admin update to allow XML publishing and I am untethered, bad and nationwide.

Transitioning from rare article publications to life-streaming, at least on my personal site means I can really use this editing too to get stuff up fast with pictures and not lose that fragile inspiration that often strikes while observing idiotic behavior out in the streets.

Perhaps it will even help battle the loneliness and isolation that can occur when away from the computer for too long. Like an hour and stuff.

Comment rave and tell both your friends to get this app in iTunes And check it out.

"In preparing the content for this site, I've discovered sadly, that much of the work that has to be done comes in the form of UNLEARNING myth and bad ideas being spouted by most of those who propose to teach you."

The Not So Pretty Truth About the Speaking Business video explains this contrary view in a way I'll not labor in this blog post. This next sentence is kind of long, but it packs a wallop, maybe read it a couple times? The counter-intuitive failure model being perpetuated by the well meaning but out of touch, self-perpetuating National Speakers Association, the people who purport to train speakers who themselves have never earned $5000 for a keynote speech and can only teach you what they observe, not what they have experienced, and the obstruction choke-hold of the "dead but don't know it yet" speaker bureau indsutry so muddy the waters of what it takes to be a speaker that it's a wonder anyone navigates them to earn a good living in speaking. Add to this the annoying tendency of marketers and biz-op hypsters (don't even get me started in MLM!) who speak for free at pitch conferences calling themselves, and even the preposterous guy who claims to teach you how to "Get Rich in the Speaking Business" (for a mere $25,000) by learning how to speak for free and fleece your audience – I've got my work cut out for me in helping you to see that the real world of paid professional speaking, and the path to building a career as a pro, is quite different than the noisy barkers. But, that is exactly what I'm going to do here. Tell you the truth about what it takes and show you exactly how to do it. So let me put down my tear soaked hanky and leave you with a positive truth: "What meeting planners, and the people who hire speakers really want, is original, creative, talented people, who have a passion to share a great message in an entertaining and professional way. Meeting planners can spot a hack platitudinous copy cat a thousand miles away. This is why NSA is dangerous – it pollutes your creativity." Can you make it as a paid professional speaker? The answer is – maybe. If you have talent and creativity, enthusiasm and spark, passion for your message, want to help people, and the drive to do the work I'll show you here, you CAN be successful as a highly paid professional speaker, earning $2500 – $5000 per speech. And, that's just the beginning. If you can do this – I'll also show you how to massively leverage your brilliant hard work into multiple streams of income on and offline. Please subscribe to Stardust Factor. It's FREE and you'll get immediate access to my politically incorrect – but totally accurate – truth about the speaking business in 2010, it is not for the feint of heart. You'll also get useful tips for creating, crafting and delivering your Killer Keynote Speech, plus marketing tactics like using social media, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, as well as business strategies for leveraging your speaking business. Thanks for giving Stardust Factor a try, and I'll see you on the inside! Rick

This post was originally written and posted in July 2008.

For the record, I like John Reese, for whom I got about 700 email offers flooding my inbox. This was about the way $1000 digital products were being slammed every 3 weeks on what seemed to be a rotation among big list gurus.

I complain – you decide. Here is the original post:

The 12 Biggest Whores in Internet Marketing

Walk down the cyber streets of Internet marketing today and you’ll see Internet marketing whores dressed in skimpy outfits (shocking subject lines), shaking their bonuses at you, (the stuff they swore would never be for sale again at their last launch), and cooing seductively – for what?

For a teensie cookie to John Reese’s Traffic Secrets 2.0.

Why, because if you buy John’s Launch Product from them, they take a big fat 50% of your money for themselves – and if they are the real “bottom bitch” (the #1 whore from the book ‘The Pimp’) they win even more in prizes and inner-circle, zero-gravity-dive braggin rights.

Is this too strong?

So while you are busy sorting the flood of emails you are getting today with each one pimping off their bonus “package” as youself two questions:

1. “Does the person sending this to me actually give a darn how I come up with the money for this “must have” product – and whether it truly has a positive impact on my success – or if it is just another big box of stuff I will not be able to digest – putting me further behind in my goals?”

2. “Does this course contain real “secrets” or, is it possible, I can learn everything I need to learn, at a pace I can actually absorb and implement it – another way, for less money or free?”

Come on, haven’t you seen this movie before?

In 2005 “Traffic Secrets” was a great name because John Reese really had come out from underground with lots of great tips and strategies that were, for the most part, not well known outside a few heavyweight players online. It was a seminal work of great value.

AUTHOR NOTE: I was totally right about the following observations about Social Media.

Today, the entire world of getting traffic to your website, blog, or sales letter, has changed dramatically due to social networking, and web video, twitter microblogging, chat, and wireless.

IMHBAO (In my humble but accurate opinion) there are many people who have been pioneers in the social marketing movement. Jack Humphrey is the king of this medium and already has a fabulous resource that is constantly upgraded with the newest ideas.

This medium is not static – it changes constantly.

This is, I know, a very controversial statement I’m making here – and by contrasting John and Jack I’m going to catch flak from some people who think I’m a whore, just a really tricky one, for doing it.

QUESTION: Ask yourself, how did you got so jaded?

ANSWER: Email List Whores…

Please take just a few moments and leave your feedback here as a comment – and tell me, is the landscape of Internet marketing changing – or will millions bleed once again out of the pockets of people like you and me – and into the bank accounts of the 12 Biggest Whores in Internet Marketing?

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I am Joe’s Email List: An Open Letter to Internet Marketers