BusinessPeanuts

It’s been a long time since I last updated my blog. This actually is a good thing because I have been very very busy.

Make Money Blogging Membership Site

First up, my collaboration project with one of the up and coming blogging expert John Yeo is almost done. Project BlogCashMentor is finally up and running.  He is the man for blogging and it has been a great learning experience collaborating with him on this membership site.  I am definitely not the marketing and blogging guy but in terms of technical skills, and the technical needs of this site, it has been a challenging experience.

Using Amember to power up the membership site has shown me one very important thing on the Internet Marketing scene.  And coming from a guy who used to work in programming, documentation of how to change the needs of these software is bad.  No offense to these software creators from Amember, DLGuard and affiliate-prophet but after testing these software, the documentation provided is amazingly “not helpful”.

Luckily, their helpdesk and forum are very responsive, especially amember and dlguard.  Fast and responsive, and Amember comes out TOPS!

Amember Membership Software

For Amember, these are the things I am doing using the software for:

1 – Creating a membership script and setting the recurring payment from members on a monthly basis.

2 – Using the incremental plugin to slowly show contents for each new month only after they have paid subscription.

3 – Control the One time offer bonus so that only those who have paid the OTO can see the download link.

4 – Control the number of days and the number of times each member can download the bonuses.

5 – Recurring Payment is via paypal

6 – Use amember affiliate system to get affiliates and track their sales (It cannot pay affiliates for you but it can generate a thing call a mass pay which can be uploaded into paypal to pay your affiliates using that list)

Check out Amember here

DLGuard Software

For DLguard, the project I did was to hide the download link of your digital products.  With all the hacking these days, DLGuard is useful for hiding the real link of your digital products and you can actually limit the number of times your customer can download from the product link.  Dlguard can also be use for creating membership site but I have not tried it yet.

Check out DLGuard here

Personal Web Design Business

Recently I accepted a project to customize a zen-cart powered shopping cart website and I have to say that for such a free software, it was amazingly powerful.  And there are a lot of support from the creators and users of this software.  It was another learning curve for me to customize their templates and requirements but damn, it is powerful.

Zen Cart Software:

This is a free software for anyone who is interested in setting up a shopping cart website.  Personally, I think they have a very good forum and some good plugins to use.  Go download it at their website here => zen-cart

Clickbank Progress:

For some strange reasons, I only had time in June to manage some blog post and articles for my love and health niche, and it is nicely moving up to $200 for this July.  Weird but nice.  I like such things because I seriously have limited time for clickbank now.

Personal Project:

If you look to the right of this blog, you can see this project call CBproj.  Just for fun, I created a small and damn simple app to send you an email immediately if you made an affiliate sale from clickbank.  If you would like to test it, just sign up for it on the right.  I am not releasing it yet.  Creating some videos on how to use the app and then i will release it.

Thats all the updates.  Thanks for reading.

Regards,

Andrew

Just a follow up on my previous blog post on starting all over again for my health website, and using the advice from Andrew Wee, I have just completed converting one of my articles to a spinnable format so that my articles can be spin into different articles.  Now awaiting for approval from Free Traffic System (easier to refer as FTS) and see what kind of results can I expect.

I use a keyword i am targeting that is not that competitive and should be easy to rank as my experiment for FTS.

In the mean while, I just realized I have more than 15 articles in my computer that I have written in the past but never submitted to any article directory.  Stupid move but it sure allows me to have more articles to convert to make full use of the Free Traffic System platform.

By the way, to Andrew Wee, thanks for the tips in the previous blog post comments you made.  I have written down the details and executing them.

Ok.  Thats it.  I have a slow plan to produce 4 unique articles for 4 different platforms and 1 spinnable article for Free Traffic System per day and see how things worked out.  Still have to change my squeeze page too.

Regards,

andrew

Ever since I started doing videos for customers to teach them how to install software, I have became very very lazy in terms of writing articles to improve my clickbank sales.  Though I can pretty much survive just by doing videos for customers, I have to admit laziness is the middle name now.  I can enthusiastically setup software programs for people, learn new software, write my own programs but when it comes to the right things to do for clickbank, I have totally neglected my clickbank sales.

This is the current sad status of my clickbank account. And truth be told, since i had found another way to find money on the Internet, I gave up clickbank for quite a while.

But it was always a wish of mine to see the bars of clickbank being in blue and grey everyday. So as of now, I have only made $25.48 for the whole month of April 2009.

Inspired by John Yeo of www.johnyeo.name as well advice from Andrew Wee of www.whoisandrewwee.com , I felt it was time to buck on clickbank. Consistency is the game and Andrew Wee gave me a lot of advice as well. There was no point in showing empty clickbank account.  And since i have all the time in the world, it was time.

Case Study : Weight Loss Niche

On this day, I have decided to document down my steps to turning this website profitable again. When I first started this health website in May 2007, i was hoping for it to be a hit and played around with it. It went through a number of transformations.

(more…)

I know I have barely updated my blog but this is a good thing for me.  Cause there are progress in my IM journey and that is why I seldom blog.

First up, I have been helping a friend setup DLGuard and Amember software.  What a learning process to go through.  I think i can start doing some videos and selling it.

Second, been running 3 campaigns using Yahoo Search Marketing and after failing to get any sales for my first 2 campaigns, my 3rd campaign is already seeing 2 clickbank sales.  Thanks to friends and a coach who has been giving us some great training.  His name will be revealed soon.

Thirdly, i finally started running my polls for a CPA offer again.  Though I lost money, i still consider it a step forward.  Spent $215 singapore dollars and earn $165 from my CPA network.  This was the first time i ever surpassed $100 for my efforts from the traffic in google content network.

Fourthly, subscribing to SENuke now.  Lets see how much money can this software bring my sales.

Business have started picking up.  Clickbank sales is still way below my usual mark but hopefully it starts to increase.

Thats all for now.  Time to earn more money.

Regards,

Andrew

So far, it has been a pretty bad sales month for december 2008 and january 2009.  Really learnt a lesson that I should have expanded to more niches instead of relaying on just 1 niche.  Look at the stats below.  It was going up but the moment december came, things went downhill all the way.

October  2008 $246.54
November 2008 $268.43
December 2008 $26.30
January  2008 $32.34

Time to buck up, buck up, buck up

Regards,

Andrew

I have been pretty inactive for a while since my niche is not for xmas, my clickbank sales really took a dive.  Anyway, I was enjoying myself watching so many movies and episodes online that I have to say I really enjoyed myself throughout december.

The best part of 2009 is that I found a IM coach that is coaching 12 of us to be better in our preselling of products to customers and hopefully, that works out!

The worst part of 2009, the really BIG BANG for me happened on January 2nd, 2009.  I was about to prepare for a launch of my new adwords campaign and my webhost, Bluehost, dropped me a BOMB! They banned my account because my site is listed as a phishing email site.

I was HACKED!

Worst part, bluehost couldn’t really advise me on what to do except to say I have to remedy the situation.  First time encountering such times and sadly, when you look around online, there is alot of solutions for normal email users but not much solutions for webmasters.  It is so damn frustrating.

The only thing I found out is to be careful of all php and asp files and html files are relatively safe from being used as phishing.  So it was time to do some clean up.

There was no software that I could find to detect which files my web host has that is causing the phishing or could I get bluehost to help in resolving since they say they only provide hosting and it is each person’s own responsibility to take care of what type of software we install onto their server.  Sickening but they do have it in their terms and conditions.  One thing good was that their live chat support was able to answer me immediately to let me gain access to my domain hosting so that I can rememdy the situation.  And once everything was resolved, using their live chat (which is really instant), they enabled my websites to be shown again once I explained my resolution.

So how did I solve the problem?

The best way I know how.

A- Backup all my database,

B – Backup all my web files,

C – Reinstall everything one by one.

I split my solutions into 3 categories =>

1 – websites that are purely HTML

-> Since I read that HTML files seem to be safe, all my websites that are purely HTML will be copied from my backup straight back to my web server.  Just need to make sure that the files are uploaded without problems. This solution if it is pure HTML files.

If you have any php files, Look through the php codes to see if there are any unfamiliar codes sending out some funny commands.

2 – Purely WordPress blogs

First thing you need to do is to backup all your database tables.  Remember to take note which tables belong to which of your wordpress blogs.  This is very important.

Take note of the SQL tables below

wp_comments
wp_links
wp_options
wp_postmeta
wp_posts
wp_term_relationships
wp_term_taxonomy
wp_terms
wp_usermeta
wp_users

You may have other tables but it most likely belongs to other wordpress plugins and not from your original wordpress SQL tables.

2a – The whole point I am trying to achieve is that I am going to backup all my wordpress blogs into my harddisk, uninstall all my wordpress blogs using bluehost web host’s fantastico function.  And if there are any remaining files left in the folder, I will delete them all.

2b – Then I will reinstall each blog one by one using the fantastico function again.

2c – Then I will upload my previous wordpress theme that was backed up into my harddisk.

2d – Once done, login to your phpMyadmin function in your web host.

2e – Find the correct database that you have backup on your harddisk and reload it back into your SQL tables.

wp_links
wp_options
wp_postmeta
wp_posts
wp_term_relationships
wp_term_taxonomy
wp_terms
wp_usermeta

For the wp_comments, the data is the people who commented on your blog so it is up to you if you want it to be loaded or not.

For wp_users, this is not necessary since you have already specified a new profile when reinstalling your wordpress blogs.

2f – Reload whatever plugins you need.

2g – Test if all the links are working.

3 – Mixture of HTML and wordpress

This type of situation is when you have normal HTML files as your main files and have a added blog.  Just combined my 2 solutions above if you are in such a situation.

3a -Backup the wordpress SQL tables.  Backup all files and folders for that domain into your harddisk.

3b – Remove all files and folders for that domain in your web host. Uninstall wordpress blog from fantastico.

3c- Add back all your html files first and ensure everything is working.

3d – Reinstall wordpress blog. Load back your previous wordpress theme as well.

3e – Load back the wordpress data that you back up previously.

3f – Test.  Load any plugins that you need.

The End Of Solution

Above is my brief way to resolve my phishing website problems.  Took me 2 full days to complete everything above.  There are many other details I missed out, especially if you are not good in technical stuff like reloading SQL data back after reinstalling wordpress.

Plugin and Applications To Note

There are many web applications and wordpress plugins you have to be careful because these programmers may code good uses of applications and plugins, but it may potentially open up your web server to be hacked as these codes may lack security measures or open loopholes that allows hackers to make your website become a phishing website like mine.

Disclaimers:

Ok, I have to put this because I have no idea if I have resolve the situation.  I do know that I have cleared almost all files that I am allowed to delete and reinstalled anything (those with php files) that is from bluehost capabilities and not from my previous backup.  Only files I reused are those HTML files.  Logically, since there are no more files left, then it means I have a clean slate in the web server.  But I am not sure so please don’t blame me if it does not work for you.  So far, no more problems on my side but keeping my fingers crossed.

Regards,

Andrew

Technorati Tags: my website got phished, suggested solutions to phishing