If you have been participating in any of the free giveaways that are going on this month, be sure to have your anti-virus up to date. So far I’ve come up with 3 files that contained either a trojan (2) or a worm (1). I don’t believe it was intentional on the part of the person giving the file away (2 different people, but not sure who exactly), but you can never be too careful.

You should be especially careful with executables. It’s way too easy for somebody to decompile your file and insert code that you don’t want in there.

That’s why I make ebooks in pdf format, they’re much easier to secure against tampering. Plus .exe ebooks seem to rely on being connected to the internet, and it’s really annoying to click on a link and find the site gone. So if you do ebooks, pdf’s are the way to go, because they can be used by anybody regardless of operating system.

New giveaways are coming up, I’ll update the page soon, so stay tuned for that. And Wordpress just released a new update. Apparently this one fixes a security exploit, so check your hosts in the next week to make sure you get the latest version. Or go the WP site to get it.

Just remember to check your files when you download them, or you’ll end up calling some guy like me, who’ll charge you $75.00 or more per hour to fix your system for you.

Once again I hope everyone has a Happy New Year, and here’s to all of us being successful.

Cheers,

J.R. Batson

Giveaways

And a short word about some of these giveaways. You’re going to have to sort through the crap to find the good stuff. It seems like with a lot if giveaways anymore, people are using recycled garbage, and what isn’t junk is mostly two to three years out of date. I must admit that it’s getting harder to find good, new stuff. For example, on one recent giveaway, out of several pages worth of gifts, most of the stuff I’ve seen for the last several months on various giveaways. Some of it was quite old (been around the internet for a year or more, some of this stuff is ok, but by now everbody has a copy). Then there are of course the offers to join numerous membership sites (this can be a good thing, but when they all have basically the same regurgitated information, well…), and the offers to join the next big Internet opportunity (which in my personal opinion have no business being there). It’s getting harder to find good stuff on the net, especially with Internet Marketing. Mark Hendricks giveaway of course has all new, exclusive products, (if you need the link see the last post) and the upcoming PLR giveaway ought to have at least a few gems.

So check out the goodies, and let me know what you think.

I’ll be posting my opinions of them over the next few days, so check back, OFTEN!

But for now I will point you to one of the best:

12 Days of Christmas.

Created by Mark Hendricks, this is the one that started it all. That’s right, it’s all Mark’s fault. Seriously though, this is one of the best. Mark hand codes all the pages, and thoroughly reviews everything submitted. This year he put a slight twist on things. The products all have to be brand new, and exclusive to the 12 Days Giveaway

So just use the link and get over there and grab some goodies, and stay tuned for my take on some of the other giveaways.

Well in the US Thanksgiving is nearly here, which means it’s time for some of the biggest Joint Venture events of the year. These events are great because you can grab some real quality stuff, but just remember that there is still a lot of junk out there too.

Even better though, is if you qualify to join as a contributor, that’s where the best part of these things come in, you can grow your list to even greater numbers. Some of these things get in excess of 20,000 unique visitors.

I’ll be compiling a list and posting it soon because some of these Christmas JV’s are huge events. So watch this space for an announcement.

You see not everyone uses them correctly, I was searching through the PLR stuff on my hard drive and out of curiosity did a google search for the title phrase of an article, the first 2 pages had websites with the exact same article. Wow doesn’t that give you a warm fuzzy. It appears that most people just slap it up as is, without changing much if anything.

This can cause duplicate content penalties with the search engines. Not to mention the fact that most of these articles seem to be written by people whose first, and maybe not even second language, is not English. The sentence structure and grammar are simply painful to read.

The bottom line is if you have products that came with PLR, make sure you edit them, otherwise you will get dinged. If not by the search engines then by potential customers who will see the same thing listed somewhere else. Change them, edit the grammar, put your own slant on them. I have a series of niche booklets that I am creating from PLR content coming out soon, and I can guarantee that they are unique. Nobody else I know writes like I do.

Until next week,

Take care,

p.s. more changes coming soon, I promise.

I’m not saying whether this new product is worth buying or not, it’s just not for me. So why all the hoopla? Because the newer people entering the Internet Marketing field see all the big dogs doing things a certain way, and like sheeple, they follow blindly along.

In case you haven’t noticed, I don’t put a lot of stock in most of the so-called gurus and experts (a large portion of them are self-proclaimed anyway.), but I have found a few that are worth listening to. Stay tuned and I’ll be discussing that in upcoming posts.

‘Til next time,

J.R.

ps. I was an acknowledged SME (subject matter expert) in several pieces of Navy electronic equipment, so when I see people calling themselves an expert or guru or whatever, they better prove it quick.

Well, not necessarily, first you to have to have a lot of time to develop these sites, then you need to have to work them all. And even then are you really getting quality, targeted customers?

Jason Moffat gives his take on Facebook, and another good look at Web 2.0 sites is here. The Top 5 Most Useless Web 2.0 Sites

Let me know what you think. ‘Till next time.