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Archive for the ‘Project Management’ Category

What If Your Web Server Was Hacked Tonight?

10 Jul

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Through the years, we have had the privelage of being hacked at least three times that I remember.  Each time, we learn something new about how we are running our business.

What if your webserver or website was hacked tonight?  Do you have back ups?  Is your list maintained on a third party provider like AWeber?  Are you saving your lists on AWeber periodically?

The content we create, and the list we build are the lifeblood of an online business.

Unfortunately, a hacker doesn’t follow a schedule and it seems they attack at the most inconvenient time.

If you have multiple sites, are all your sites hosted on the same webserver/reseller account?  If so, you may be setting yourself up for a domino effect as one gets hacked, they all get hacked.  Our latest attack earlier this year was the worst ever, we lost an entire dedicated server with an unrecoverable error.  The hacker was very good and attacked the boot sector of the server.  This crippled the server so bad it could only be booted from within the data center using a restore disk.  We were able to get an emergency backup, but it ammounted to 8 terabytes of data from our websites and databases.  That is not an easy amount of data to FTP to another server.

We are now in the process of downsizing to a single dedicated server and choosing hosting for individual sites with hosting around the world.  This also gives us an opportunity for even better SEO by linking the sites togethor from different hosting providers.  While this poses a management challenge, I am currently designing a portal to manage our sites across hosting providers.  Time will tell if we are able to implement the new portal, but we find it neccessary in order to effectively manage our business.

So, in closing, take some time this weekend and layout your backup plan for your websites and data including your pc/laptop.  I can tell you from experience, you don’t want to wait until it is too late.

Kevin

 
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Posted in Featured Posts, Project Management

 

Time To Review Our Marketing Expenses

03 Jan

This is the time of year where I spend some quality time going through the various subscriptions I have joined the previous year, as well as the different products and courses I have acquired. I usually find a few that I bought with good intentions but never used, as well as a couple that overlap one another. Another resolution I have come up with for 2009 is to take a hard look each month at the expenses for the month and determine where I am investing in my business and what kind of return both monetatrily and intristically I am recieving on that investment.

There are a few essentials, that we have, that are crucial to the operation of our business.

  1. An Autoresponder – Our choice is AWeber.com for there reputation for deliverability
  2. Hosting – Currently we have two dedicated servers through Versaweb.net. Our hosting requirements have gone down over the past year, so we are looking at phasing one of those out. I also have a reseller account through Hostprince.com at only $10/month, but we haven’t done anything with it for the last 2 years. $10 seems to be one of the key price points where I don’t seem to take action too quickly.
  3. Internet Connection – My connection is through Comcast
  4. Domain Reseller Account – We have a Domain Reseller Account through Wild West Domains at FirehorseHosting.com. That way we are able to buy discounted domains through ourselves and promote our domain registration as the preferred registar to our clients. If they are going to buy domains anyway, they might as well buy through us and we make about .25 – .50 a domain.
  5. Affiliate Elite – Brad Callen finally got smart enough to start charging a monthly fee for his software so we are now locked into this one for a while.

Monthly memberships that we have that are not essential to our business are:

  1. Nicheology – It is so hard to get into, we hate to give it up
  2. Reese Report – John Reese’s newsletter, great content, but we are spending less time reviewing the information each month.
  3. Nitty Gritty Marketing – I was at Russell Brunson’s event when this was prelaunched. Jermaine really know’s his stuff, but it is becoming a distraction for our core business.
  4. Content Goldmine – Another PLR resource from Ryan Deiss, great content as well but not being used by our core business
  5. DomainTools.com – We have a silver membership again here in order to watch a few key nameserver to “spy” on our competition. I will probably cancel this one in February.

What are you paying for each month that you are not using? now is a good time to reassess your assets and expenses in your business and cut the fat. If you haven’t used it in the last three months, it is probably not essential to your business and a good candidate.

Now is also a good time to plan out your seminar schedule for the year. What events are you planning to attend? I am planning to go to Big Seminar again this year. We have taken a year off, and now it is time to get back out there and meet all the new marketers on the scene and reconnect with some of our old friends.

Take your online business serious and run it like a business. You will be suprised how much of a difference little changes can make.

To our online success,
Kevin

 
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Posted in Project Management, make money, motivation, personal

 

Information Product Creation Workshop In Las Vegas, NV

10 Dec

It is that time a year again, and we have resurected Product Creation Lab to start 2008 out with a bang. We will be hosting a product creation workshop at the Convention Center Embassy Suites, in Las Vegas, NV on January 17th through January 19th, 2008.

This year we are temaing up with the legendary Tor Black, creator of WrapAcademy.com and vehicle wrap maestro. Tor has semi-retired from the vehicle wrap business and has spent the last year being the Napolean Hill of Internet Marketing, interviewing over 20 Internet Marketing Gurus for an upcoming product he will be releasing in 2008.

We met Tor in Annaheim this year during Affiliate Incubator with Russell Brunson and Stu McLaren. After talking about our businesses, we decided to team up and put togethor an A to Z Product Creation Workshop to walk you through everything you need to do in order to start creating your own products.

While you can make good money online promoting affiliate products, if you want to build an online business, you really should have your own products as well. There are many reasons why people don’t pursue creating their own products, but it is our mission to eliminate those stumbling blocks at the event to get you on your way to creating your own profit pulling products in record time.

We have finally put up a new page on the Product Creation Lab website, go out there and sign up for the advanced notice list to get a chance to get in on the fast mover bonuses when we launch the site on January 1st.

More information about the event can be found at http://ProductCreationLab.com

See you in Vegas,
Kevin, Rick and Tor

 
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Posted in How To, Outsourcing, Project Management, Training Videos, news

 
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