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.

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.

Just a few minutes ago I was thinking about content for a couple of new pages on one of my sites when it occurred to me to ask, “Of the dozens of products and services that I use every week, which do I use most?”

Now I don’t have details statistics but a few moments’ reflection led me to two, so I thought I’d tell my blog readers about them.

Roboform
I guess the most-used has to be Roboform, but actually I’m not highly aware of using it very much at all. That’s because it takes away from me the need to remember and enter passwords into software and sites both on my own computer and online. Its ability to encrypt and store all my passwords and personal data, to enter them automatically into form fields when they’re needed, and then to “press the button” to enter a site (even one that I may not have visited in months) is an enormous time-saver as well as setting my mind at ease about security. If you don’t already use Roboform for password encryption and to autofill forms on your browser then you should look into it now.

Cloak & Tracker
If you take a look at one of the links in the above paragraph you’ll see that it does not look especially like an affiliate link … and yet it is. The link is cloaked (and often shortened considerably), plus when anyone clicks on it my tracker statistics are updated so that I can see where the clicks are coming from. For a long time I used to subscribe to a third-party tracking service, but why pay out monthly when a modest initial outlay can bring one’s tracking in-house? That’s when I turned to Jay Jennings and his “Cloak and Tracker” utility. After more than a year of using it I’ve no plans to change. This easily installed utility also helps protect me against commission thieves.  Take a look at “Cloak and Tracker“ now.

That’s all for today.

Remember:

For encrypted password storage and to autofill forms:  Roboform

To hide affiliate links and track where your visitors come from: Cloak and Tracker

- David Murray -

I was researching today for some up to date content on email marketing when it occurred to me to check what are the latest books on the subject.

Having done that it then occurred to me that it might be helpful to my blog readers to see some of what I found, so here first is a collection from Amazon.com, and then for the benefit of UK-based readers there’s a similar listing from Amazon.co.uk.

I’m in a reflective mood today. Maybe it’s the impact of the election in the land of my American cousins. (Yes, I do have ten of them, spread from Illinois to Florida – quite apart from the more general historical trans-Atlantic “cousinship” of Britain and America).

Whatever the cause, I’ve been thinking about freedom. There are so many places in the world where still there is little or no freedom. Slavery is still not totally conquered. Freedom of conscience is constantly under threat. Freedom of religion is a distant hope for hundreds of millions around the globe. And yet in the United States and my own country, Britain, we have so much freedom that we tend to take it for granted … and run the risk of allowing it to be eroded because we’ve become accustomed to its existence.

But what about freedom for business. The Internet now gives us an enormous freedom to present our various commercial offerings before a global public, but it was not always so. My mind goes back to the early nineties, before the Web. I was then an enthusiast for Compuserve forums, but “crass commercialism” was not on the whole welcomed. And outside the electronic world, on the ground in many countries, freedom to operate any kind of business was a novel experience.

I spent much of my time then in countries of Eastern and Central Europe which only two or three years earlier had been under the control of centralised communist bureaucracies. My role as an adviser was to work with groups of aspiring business people encouraging them to develop businesses with high standards of ethical conduct and to resist the corruption which surrounded them. Initially the biggest challenge was to convince people that this was possible. Freedom was increasingly interpreted as license to cheat, steal and deceive.

Looking to those parts of the world today there are still many challenges ahead, but thankfully there are now many home-grown examples of business with integrity. Freedom with responsibility is more widely understood. Sadly, though, there are too many examples of the opposite in countries which have long been privileged with liberty.

What has this to do with Internet marketing? A great deal, it seems to me. We have tremendous freedom. We need to use it responsibly. Business ethics is not merely a subject for glossy promotional brochures and bureaucratised compliance programs in the corporate world.  It is something for the daily life of every online marketer.

OK!!! It’s “Go!”

Apart from a very few minor tweaks the first two modules of AdMastery.biz advertising suite are ready. I’m planning to do that last-minute tidying tomorrow, and launch date is set for 23rd October.

Meanwhile anyone seeing this here before the 23rd is welcome to come over and sign up (for free, plus a free upgrade to “Pro”).

That’s it for now.  I’ll not clutter this with non-essentials.

Don’t miss it.

- David Murray -

For several weeks I have referred here and there to the “Brunlea-Web family of useful web sites”. It is now becoming more of a reality rather than merely a dream.

Following on the annoucement of time-for-more a couple of weeks back the latest addition to the family is Brunlea-Web.com. This is a mini-site on which we will periodically promote four or five selected products or services associated with the building of business on the internet, the selection changing every few weeks.

My experience of the past year in establishing BrunleaBooks on the web, both for used books and new books, has been both fascinating and disturbing. It has taught me much about the vital importance of avoiding the hype of “get-rich-quick” merchants, furiously promoting one another’s products as the best thing since sliced bread, and milking the gullible of their cash.

I decided to avoid like the plague this dangerous vortex of “internet marketing” scams, but of course the web is a valid place in which to do business and there are products, services and advice to be had from reputable organisations, large and small. My aim is to identify some of the the best and to promote them without exaggeration. I do not and probably never will myself merit the title “marketing guru”, but having spent much of my life in other fields working with many of the world’s top specialists in their respective subjects, I’m now looking out for those genuine experts in this area of business who really do deserve to be listened to and learned from.

On this first edition of the site you will find only a few product banners with no associated text other than sectional subtitles. Subsequently, however, I aim to provide links to reliable, well-written advisory papers (and, of course, books) on e-commerce topics. There are many, but they need to be sifted out from those written chiefly to suck their readers into the maelstrom of viral affiliate links.

We will, of course, be using affiliate links ourselves but will try to be completely transparent about this and give a promise that we will under no circumstances promote a product simply because it carries a high commission rate.

The Brunlea-Web – take a first look at it now.

More soon,

Yours bookishly,

- David -