Adobe announced in December that hackers had found a security flaw in their widely used pdf reader. Read this article from PCWorld Business Center for details of how to protect yourself. It’s not complicated but it is important.

In commencing work over the past month or so to revitalise this blog and the AdMastery.biz group of sites in general I’ve been developing a plan.  It wasn’t totally coherent to start with but gradually came into something like an intelligible shape.

Yesterday I came across an excellent blog post by Lynn Terry describing her approach to planning the future development of her main blog.  She’s much further advanced with it all than myself, but her approach fits so well with the way my mind works that I was delighted to discover that she’d also put it into pdf format for downloading. I could print it out and scribble all over it.

I was even more delighted when I found that not only was she was giving it away free but was allowing others to give it away as well.  So here it is – completely free, with none of  my affiliate links in it, and without even asking for an email address – a gift to my readers.  Enjoy it and use it. If you’re like me you’ll find it well worth the time and thought.

Download it here: Lynn Terry’s BlogBoost2010.

This post is more or less a repeat of an email I sent out this morning to the members on my text ad site, Text.Admastery.biz. I went into its admin area half an hour ago and found eleven ads waiting to be reviewed and approved.

Of those eleven I have approved only one.

Why do people try to post ads promoting easy wealth, quick earnings, massive riches and things like that? It’s clearly stated on the entry screens on the site that such advertising will be refused and deleted without comment as this is not what the site is designed for.

My policy for some time now has been that if I spot in an advert any hint that it is easy to earn great wealth on the internet then it will be refused. Certainly there have been cases of quick success, but these are not the norm and excessive expectations should not be raised. I’m fully aware that this policy has restricted the growth of the site, but am determined to stay firm on this point.

Easy money schemes do deliver a lot of easy money, but only for the few at the top of the “food chain” who benefit at the cost of the thousands who will never even recoup their expenditure.

I have a couple of small sites in the health and fitness niche, and have often wondered about whether or not it would be right to promote certain types of product and service. There is so much fake material around, and not only the fake pharmaceuticals which are a curse especially in developing nations; there’s a multiplicity of ebooks promoting “cures” which no self-respecting qualified clinician would ever recommend.

On the one hand one does not want to close off less conventional but perfectly legitimate options. At the same time one does not want to be found promoting rubbish. It’s not always an easy balance to keep.

Today I came across a summary of some research done by scientists in the University of Sheffield (England) into factors affecting the degree of trust placed by web users in online health information. They developed some interesting guidelines for site owners which certainly merit serious consideration by any webmaster owning or managing sites and blogs in the health niche who wishes to maintain standards of integrity beyond simply generating some quick revenue.

For more click online health advice and information.

The effective life of a tweet on Twitter is considerably shorter than that of a blog post, which can give valuable service for months and even years.  Although it is true that a search of Twitter may find an old tweet the harsh reality is that for many, possibly most, of your followers a message will be there in front of them for a few minutes and then will pass into obscurity.  If they follow many people, and don’t look at their incoming tweets for several hours they may never see it at all.

Another reality is that the earth is round.  Not everyone is in daylight at the same time.  When I post a tweet in the middle of a UK morning my American followers will still be asleep whilst the Australians will have finished their day already and be preparing for the next night.

So without staying awake around the clock how am I going to reach them all.  This is where PostLater comes in.  I still do send out tweets on the spur of the moment as events occur and ideas hit me; but my more systematic tweeting is now managed largely by PostLater, on which I can set dates and times in advance – and not only for Twitter.

Yes, PostLater will handle full blog posts as well as micro-blogging. Some of the recent posts on this blog have been pre-written and scheduled on PostLater to appear at intervals. Of course, I could have scheduled them in WordPress, but a big advantage of doing it on PostLater is that I can easily see all my posting timetables in a single place. (This one is not being done that way as I’ll be sending it immediately; that flexibility is still there).

The links on this page are of course to an affiliate page, but in line with my normal practice I am not sending an affiliate link for something I’ve never used myself. PostLater is now an integral part of my blogs management structure. I recommend that if you’ve not already done so you check it out and see how it might fit with your blogging strategy and your ways of working.

There is no doubt that blogging can be a highly effective means of getting your message to your desired audience. But the challenge is to get your audience to your blog.

There are, of course, many ways of achieving this. Social bookmarking and networking, forum submissions, article marketing and many other approaches are powerful. However, good old fashioned SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) should never be ignored.

What does this mean? Put simply it means looking at your blog not as seen by a human eye but as a search engine’s robotic crawler will view it during its periodic visits. How can we do that?

I use a free tool called SEO for Firefox. As its name implies this is a plugin for the Firefox web browser. Its icon sits at the bottom right of my browser window and also in the Tools section of my top toolbar. It does many things, but for me the most valuable is its “SEO XRay”.

Open up an individual post of your blog in Firefox, click on SEO XRay and you’ll see an analysis of some key elements of that page, including what a search engine would find as its title, its description and its keywords. Unless you’ve already done what I’m about to propose, or something similar, I will guess that whilst the title will probably show as the title of your post you’ll find the description and keywords labelled “N/a” (Not available).

Now this is just not good enough. Search engines differ as to exactly how they use this information, and the importance that they give to it, but they all want to see it there. So how can we ensure that there’s something there, relevant to each individual page on your blog? It is, of course, very easy to go into the theme editor of a WordPress blog and add description and keyword content there. That will be better than nothing but the problem is that they will come up exactly the same for every post, and that is unlikely to be what you want as you deal with many different aspects of your blog’s subject area.

Enter Platinum SEO Pack. This is a plugin for WordPress blogs that allows you to specify what you want to appear in the SEO-critical fields. I’m not going to go into detail here on how it is set up or even the full range of its functionality. Go, get it, install it on one of your blogs, and see the difference. By the way, it works on WordPress blog pages as well as posts.

(Incidentally, the links above to Platinum SEO Pack and SEO for Firefox are non-commercial. I get no financial reward if you decide to use these utilities. This post is meant solely as helpful information).

I have to confess that I have not yet done what is advocated in my title.  I ought to do so, and have been reminded about it by an excellent blog post entitled “Year in Review Article Template” by Chris Knight of EzineArticles.com.

To supplement that article I looked around on the web and found a few different examples of recent Year in Review writing.  Here are four, including a narrative report, a video review, a simple list and even a spreadsheet format. Between them they may give some ideas.

Commercial Open Source Blog: Another Year in Review

Commercial Open Source blog few days ago has completed another year of life, a good excuse to make another write-up about the past year. Over 300 posts covered many open source related to.

Wrecked Magazine – A Drifting Magazine featuring Formula D, D1GP …

Scion Racing 2009 Year in Review. The 2009 Scion Racing team video has quite a few drifting highlights from their respected stars Ken Gushi and Tanner Foust. The video is mixed with some other Scion assets but the bulk of the video …

Josh Ellingson Illustrator – Battle Damage – 2009 Year in Review

2009 Year in Review. Holy smokes, it’s almost 2010! It’s been a very interesting year, and about a million things happened. Here’s a meager rundown of all the trouble I got into this past year: My artwork went to SPACE! …

Data Breaches in 2009 – a year in review | Assassin's Blog

Announced Where the Data Breach Occurred Details of Breach Amount of Stolen Records October 28, 2009 Bank of New York Mellon Corp.

What will my own review look like? Watch this space!

I often see people asking the question, “Can I make money on Twitter?”

Well initially I have to say that I did not create my Twitter accounts with a view to making money from them directly.  I was more concerned with attracting people to my blogs and web sites. The money-making would take place there.

However, as time passed I decided to try something a little more direct. My first experiment was on a highly specialised Twitter account on which at the time I had only 65 followers. I tweeted a simple statement that Amazon were offering a DVD boxed set on a subject relevant to this group of followers, at 50% discount … and one was sold within ten minutes! A simple experiment. It worked, so I continued to do similar things on this and other accounts.

I’m not now going to claim that it has made me rich, but I do know from experience that it can be done – although I’m keeping ads down to a minority of my tweets as I don’t want to be viewed as commercially over-aggressive by my painstakingly built lists of followers.

In the past few days, though, I’ve been experimenting with other forms of Twitter advertising. In particular I’m testing out several advertising services which say they’ll pay me for carrying their adverts, and in one case will reward me on a pay-per-click basis.

No, I’m not going to promote them here – at least, not yet. When I have something to say about them I’ll write again.

I have several lenses (pages) on Squidoo.  Some of them I’m not particularly proud of because I have not given them enough attention, especially having been away from my normal work due to illness for most of this year.  Others, however, I feel quite content to claim are unique and useful pages (to use their description of what they say they’re looking for).  My pages provide good quality content, researched and written personally by myself and with plenty of outside links to help readers find further information.

But there’s the problem. Outside links! Squidoo in their assumed wisdom have put a limit of nine links to the same domain.  This gives me a problem in three respects.

Let’s take just one of my lenses, the one about Beatrix Potter the children’s author.

1. Beatrix Potter wrote a lot of books, and there have also been many books written about her.  Now I also happen to own an online bookshop so obviously I want to direct people to it.  The Squids have no objection to selling books.  It’s just that I’m probably going to have to change to directing people to Amazon because that’s a domain which they’ve whitelisted. Commercial bias?
2. Beatrix Potter was an early supporter of the leading British landscape protection body, The National Trust, and indeed spent a considerable proportion of the income from her writing to buy up at-risk land, especially in the Lake District, and hand it over to the Trust for the benefit of future generations. In a lengthening Squidoo lens I now have think carefully before creating another link between Miss Potter and the Trust in case the whole lens is banned by the Squid-police.
3. Finally, most of my links (to whatever external site) were passed through my tracking system. I’ve had to stop tracking in order to keep the lens live.

I can only assume that Squidoo only want small amateurish lenses and prefer not to have serious, professional web people involved with them.  Will I abandon all my lenses?  Probably not.  I can see that the content of one or two may have to be moved to somewhere else, probably onto new blogs of my own and just a small proportion left for the sake of a presence.  It’s most unlikely that I’ll be starting any more.  Is this what they really want?

- David Murray -

Anyone who has anything at all to sell, and expects to sell it in reasonable quantities is well advised to make serious attempts to understand the thought processes of potential customers. Buying decisions are by no means as logical as we are often led to believe.  Indeed that is true of any and all the decisions we make.

With respect to our marketing in general, and our advertising and copywriting in particular, most of us need to get a better grasp of how people actually make choices.  Decision making is only consciously rational to a limited degree.

Jonah Lehrer’s book, How We Decide, explores many of the mysteries of the human mind, not only in connection with buying and selling but across the board of our human experiences. What’s more it’s written for the non-specialist in language that is intelligible to the ordinary intelligent person.

Buy it from Amazon.com or from Amazon.co.uk