Overnight all 23 of my domains were hacked, all be it rather nicely, by the infamous Turkish hacker, iskorpitx.
If you Google his name you get almost 70,000 results. A couple of years back he was breaking records by hacking more than 20,000 sites all at the same time.
Fortunately for me and however many other sites were done, these kinds of hacks are more of a statement than malicious and the fix was just to simply restore or delete the little plain text index.html file and all was back to normal.
After having domains on the net since 2003 this is my first time being hacked!
So i have been using twitter for a while now and one thing i have noticed among the 140 odd people i am following is that NOT ONE OF THEM SWEARS. Which makes things a bit hard for me cos i swear like a fucking trooper. Then i found this site.
In July, our Postini datacenters saw the biggest volume of email virus attacks so far in 2008, with a peak of nearly 10 million messages on July 24. One of the more prominent attacks in the month involved a spoofed UPS package-tracking link that was intended to lure recipients into clicking on it and downloading malware. Our zero-hour virus protection technology first started catching these emails on July 20.
July Breaks Record in Virus Attacks
Spam Levels Remain High: April showed peak spam volumes for 2008, but the overall level of spam remains high this summer. The average user has received 133 spam messages per day this year. Our statistics show that the average unprotected user would have received 36,000 spam messages in 2006 and 36,000 in 2007. This year’s July total shows a 68% growth rate over the same time in 2007. In short, spam attacks in 2008 have not let up from previous years.
Viruses tend to increase during the summer months, and August is already showing some new types of viruses. On August 5, we saw a large inflow of messages with an encrypted .RAR attachment. The overall 2008 trend has been a decrease in the use of attachments, so this new virus is confirmation that spam doesn’t follow trends for long.
These examples are also a good reminder about the importance of educating our colleagues, friends, and family on how to safely interact with email — namely, that we should all be careful about clicking on links in emails, even if those messages appear to be from people or organizations we know.
EDIT: for some reason that site is down now! lol wouldn’t you know it.
How does it work? From the site:
Websiteoutlook contains a collection of actual number of pageview from other websites. The visitor data is combined with information about number of links that point towards the site, country, Alexa ranking and other data that is available on-line. All this information has been used to make a formula that uses the information that is available on-line to estimate the number of pageviews, its worth and possible daily income that the site has.
Basically is records visitors to your website as a video so you can play it back and actually see how they navigated around the site, what they clicked on, heat maps etc.
I installed it on one of my sites and it actually works! its very scary. You can see exactly how they moved around your site, what links they click, how long they stay on a particular site, their navigation paths, everything!
It is FREE at the moment to sign up and what you get is 100 recordings a week. You tell it how many visitors you are currently getting, how many page views a visit etc and it picks the optimum recording frequency. Obviously this doesn’t record everyone but it gives you a fair idea of what is going on.
Amazing for anyone trying to optimize their website performance to improve web usability, conversions and revenue.
Many of you would have heard of affiliate marketing, even if you haven’t you can probably figure out what it is. Basically it is a web-based marketing practice in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each customer brought about by the affiliate’s marketing efforts.
So as an affiliate, you find a product that you think you can sell of behalf of the products creator, and if successful you will receive a sales commission. These commissions are generally in the are of 1% to 100% of the price of the product, usually 50% or 75%. If selling a recurring billing product as a subscription, affiliates will earn commission for each rebill. So as you can see, it can be an extremely lucrative business.
There are a few tactics that affiliate marketers will use in order to drive traffic to the products sales page, the main one being Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising such as Google Adwords, or Yahoo! Search Marketing.
Recently Google has changed their rules a bit and you can no longer link directly to an affiliate link on your ad, however there seems to be quite a bit of that going on today. So in order for your PPC ads to work, you will need to create some kind of landing page from where prospective customers can then click on your affiliate link. One such was it to create what is called a review page.
Here is an example of a review page for some weight loss products.
As you can see, it is a simple page with two product reviews. The point of this is to attempt to convince the user to click through on the affiliate link to the sales page of the product. Once they have done that it is totally out of your hands, so obviously it is important to chose a product with a great sales page.
Chris McNeeney or Chris X as he like to be known, has just released a product called Google Nemesis. This is attempting to help wannabe affiliate marketers get ahead of the rest by implementing some clever keyword tracking technology, along with some ready made review page templates. That page i linked to up there was made with this product. He has demonstrated a number of pages he created using Google Nemesis that are pulling in well over $1500USD a day.
Once you have this review page setup, you can then start your Adwords campaign and see how convincing you have been with your reviews. This could end up costing you a fortune for nothing, as all those clicks are costing you money and if they do not complete the process you have lost that lead forever.
Another way is to build a list of subscribers that you can market directly to again and again. This is not easy and takes a great deal of time to build a list of substantial size. If you have a huge list of say, 50,000 subscribers, and 10% of those buy the product you marketed directly to them you can see the huge amount of commissions you will receive just from sending one email.
In order to build a list you need what is called a ‘squeeze page’. This is a page that is used to grab peoples attention with a free offer of some sort, then convince them to put a name and an email address in to get said free offer. It could be an ebook or something like that.
What you see is it is offering a free ebook and has an ‘opt in’ form at the bottom. This way you can get the visitors information and it is yours to keep until they unsubscribe or the email dies etc. You can probably somehow work these two techniques together then that would be very beneficial to you indeed.
I am interested in this business so will come back to the topic again. In the meantime here are some links you might be interested in:
I have made a few changes to the inner workings of the blog in order to see if it increases the amount of traffic i get. At the moment there are half a dozen posts that really draw the crowd in and i’m trying to figure out exactly what people are looking for and why they would end up on my blog.
So the permalinks have changed, installed a related posts plugin and also some Google trickery has been done on the back end. Will see how it goes!
Mozilla.com web traffic is pushing well over 2 Gigabits a second of just pure HTTP traffic. That is in addition to the 13 Gigabits a second or so of download traffic. We are still at around 14,000 download/minute and mozilla.com is responding well! Go Mozilla community and IT team!
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