Whoops . . . posted that one a bit prematurely . . . no it’s not a problem I have regularly!

The Creation of a Denver Networking Group

I’ve talked on this blog about why you should get out of the office and network and I’ve decided to start up my own local group here in Denver. This group, will be called (for now) the Denver Meeting of Minds Networking group, and will serve as a means for local Denverites (cool word, huh!) to get together, network, chat, pass along ideas, and expand our horizons as a group.

If you’re an internet entrepreneur, programmer, web-developer, investor, or anyone else involved in a tech startup and you live in the Denver Metro area, please stop by and get involved. The official group page can be found here on the blog at: http://www.timeforblogging.com/meeting-of-minds-denver-networking-group/

Upcoming Event Details
When: Tuesday, May 1, 2007, 8:00 AM
Where: CapuVino - 728 S. University Blvd, Denver, Colorado
How to Register: Visit Registration Page
FREE WIFI? Yes

It should be a great event . . . if anyone shows up other than me (lol to myself). I’ll let everyone know how it goes!

Last week, I wrote an article about good customer service and used the example of how EzineArticles.com failed to live up to their promise to contact me about a situation. I am happy to report that I have finally been contacted by the company. The interesting thing is that the company broke another cardinal rule, research first and accuse later.

Don’t Assume You’ve got All The Facts Until You Do!

Here is the content of the email I received:

Hi Joshua,

Your account is suspended because your article “Hiring the Right
Property Manager for Your Rental/Income Property” has content that is
exactly the same as this piece:

http://www.wcrt.org/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=1526

…and is not attributed to you. We require that all submitted
articles be either original articles written by you or articles to
which you have an exclusive right to. Please keep in mind that to
have an exclusive right to an article, only your name may be
associated with it. If you purchased this article as part of a pack
or received it from a distributor/affiliate site, so have others so
you do not have an exclusive right to it.

Can you please explain the above? What is the source of your article?

Abby
http://EzineArticles.com/

A few things . . . first, wouldn’t it make more sense if they had contacted me last year when I submitted the article with their inquiry? Instead, I was flatly banned WITH NO EXPLANATION. They assumed I was the one who was not the original author instead of doing 1 of 2 things: 1) contacting me asking me to prove I am the author or 2) doing 1 minute of research to see if I was the author. A google search of the first line of the article in question reveals the truth:

A little article I wrote back in October of 2005 called: Things to Consider when Interviewing Property Management Companies comes up immediately. It would be very clear to see that the duplicated article that they were talking about was written January 30, 2006, 3 months later.

In addition, the email assumes that I was the one committing the copyright infringement, when in fact it was someone from another site doing it. I was guilty until proven innovent! This is certainly not the way to run a service.

What Can Be Learned Here?

• Don’t assume that you have all the facts until you actually do.
• Choose your words wisely. In tone and content, it apears as though the people at EZineArticles are accusing me of stealing someone else’s articles. Accusing someone is not the way to make them happy customers/users.
• If you say you’re going to respond to someone in 24 hours, then do it.
• Don’t get on my bad side! (just kidding . . . kind of . . . )

Further Implications of The Situation
I am somewhat thankful for the whole controversy for one reason: I was able to discover that one of the users of my company, BiggerPockets’s forums was stealing our materials and posting them as his own. As a result, I emailed him asking him to immediately remove the article from his site, and warned him that I would contact his host if he failed to comply. We shall see what happens . . . back to my 7 Steps on How to Protect Your Website’s Copyright When Someone Steals Your Content.

I’ll keep you posted of any further developments!

For small companies starting out, one of the most important things to have, other than a great product or service, is a strong brand. The largest companies in the world spend billions of dollars a year to build or maintain their brand supremacy. It isn’t easy to establish your brand, but sometimes a few simple steps can help; I’m going to look at one of these steps, and analyze the effectiveness of giving away promotional materials (swag) for the remainder of this post.

Case Study of Promotional Advertising and Branding: Geni.com

After mentioning a great new company called Geni.com in a previous blog post, (Geni has become the place to go for family social networking) I was contacted by the company. As a result of their email, I wrote a post about the power of effective follow-up in marketing, where I talked about how following up with your users/customers is essential. The company told me they’d send some free swag because I’m such a fan (and because it is a great branding opportunity) and I promised to do a final wrap-up post if the company came through and sent me some cool stuff.

Did they ever! They came through with flying colors, shipping me (via Fedex, no less) a mousepad, pens, stickers, a baseball hat, and 2 t-shirts.

Think it’s just a cheap ploy? Lets look at what the result of sending me the swag will be:

• As you can tell, I look good in that shirt! I’m definitely going to sport it around town, providing a lot of really cheap branding for Geni.
• When I tell my friends about the site, I’m sure to mention the stuff they sent me and I’ll certainly use words like “cool” and “check it out”.
• I’m now writing the 2nd post completely devoted to Geni and how they are smart in their marketing. This provides the company with even more publicity.
• I’ll probably give the stickers away to some local kids because I have no real use for them. This is great for the company because kids love stickers and they are sure to put them somewhere interesting and visible.

All in all, giving away promotional materials is a smart, inexpensive, and effective way to help build the strength of your brand.

I recently read a webmaster forum post from a guy whose friends keep asking him to teach them how to make money online. There are a few approaches to take in this situation:

Three Approaches to Dealing With a Friend Who Wants Free Advice on Making Money Online

1. Tell him to piss off and figure it out himself
2. Be a good friend and actually help him out
3. Scare him off by telling him how hard it is

The Fourth and Only Approach to Take In This Situation: Create a Partnership

While I’d typically reccommend the second approach listed above, there is actually a better route to take here. Instead of just giving away all the pearls of wisdom that you spent your hard time learning, do like they do in 24 . . . cut a deal!

How To Create An Online Partnership

1. Convince your friend of your know-how and let them know that you can relpicate your previous successes
2. Let them know that while you’d love to just give them all the knowledge you’ve gained, it would be easier if you partnered up
3. Cut a deal. In exchange for you helping them create a successful online money-making website, you absolutely deserve a cut. It is up to you to negotiate your share based on your ongoing participation in the site, the work you put in to get them started, etc. For example, I’ve partnered with a friend on a blog site, where I am responsible for the setup of the site, maintenance, monetization, and publicity; he is responsible for content. We have come to a 50/50 arangement.
4. Put everything in writing. Working with friends can lead to problems if expectations are not clear. In creating a contract for this partnership, consider the following questions (this is by no means comprehensive):
   • What will each partner’s role be in the day to day care of the website? (consider little things like who wants to be woken up at 3 AM if the is a problem with the site)

   • Do you want to create a company, which will own the site, or will it be in your names
   • Who will be the registrant of record?
   • Who will finance the site’s startup costs?
   • How will expenses be covered?
   • How will any income/profits be split?
   • If sold, how will the proceeds be split?
5. Once you’ve got everything in writing, be sure there is absolutely no debate over any of the expectations.
6. Sign your partnership agreement and start making money!

If the online business is a success, you will both benefit. If the partnered site(s) is(are) better then any of your personal sites, then you won’t be kicking yourself in a jealous rage . . . you’ll be laughing all the way to the bank!

Looking to increase traffic for your website? For a little over a year, the use of linkbait has exploded across the net. People have figured out little tricks for building traffic. some of which are very clever, but at some point, doesn’t it dilute the quality of ranking results?

Gaming the Search Engines is Too Easy!
Sure, you can do something inventive to bring a mass of traffic to your site, but if the traffic is not targeted or if the post is unrelated to your site’s purpose, you’re still building up backlinks and authority in the eyes of the search engines. This doesn’t make any sense. In addition, I think it just shows how easily the Search engines can be gamed.

In the “clever” example mentioned earlier, a webmaster posted a political cartoon on a webpage for a cabinetry company. The posting brough him thousands of visitors through social bookmarking and social media sites. He gained at least 40 backlinks from it (according to him), and as a result will score higher in the rankings by the engines.

Does he deserve the traffic that ge gets from the stunt? Sure. Does his carpentry site deserve all the extra buzz it will get as a result? Probably not, but because the SEs allow themselves to be manipulated, he is set. Now all he has to do is duplicate the experiment and he’ll start to see some gaina in search results.

I have nothing against people getting traffic to their sites and being creative, but I just wonder if linkbaiting will get out of hand and really reduce the quality of results from the search providers.

Failing to Stop Comment Spam

For the past week I’ve been getting a ton of comment SPAM, and it doesn’t want to stop. I’ve got the Akismet and Spam Karma 2 plug ins up and running, and SK2 is set on MEAN! Unfortunately, as you can see:

I’m getting hit by MP3 Ringtone spammers. The problem is that I’ve gone and put this spammer’s domain on the blacklist, but it doesn’t seem to be working . . . they are smart enough to be using multiple IPs to post the messages, and seem to be using some kind of exploit on the Share This plugin:

If you look at the above image, you’ll see that the posts aren’t trackbacks to an outside site, but to my site’s “Share This” pages. Of course the author’s link goes back to bla-bla-bla.us.

Tracking Down a Spammer

When I did a WhoIs search on the domain, I got what seemed like a nonsense profile, until I saw the contact email domains@sslpayments.com, which is run by Andrew Kartashov, a SPAMMER out of Moscow, Russia. (Thanks to the Spam Huntress for the info on this guy)

Domain Name: BLA-BLA-BLA.US
Domain ID: D12017577-US
Sponsoring Registrar: ENOM, INC.
Domain Status: clientTransferProhibited
Registrant ID: DE8A82A65637B3F3
Registrant Name: Tamara Larsen
Registrant Organization: RX-PHarma
Registrant Address1: Cordova
Registrant City: Cordova
Registrant State/Province: AK
Registrant Postal Code: 99574
Registrant Country: United States
Registrant Country Code: US
Registrant Phone Number: +1.34578905
Registrant Email: domains@sslpayments.com

Technical Application Purpose: P1
Technical Nexus Category: C11
Name Server: DNS1.NAME-SERVICES.COM
Name Server: DNS2.NAME-SERVICES.COM
Name Server: DNS3.NAME-SERVICES.COM
Name Server: DNS4.NAME-SERVICES.COM
Created by Registrar: ENOM, INC.

It looks like the domains are registered and hosted by eNom.com. I put in a message to them to see if they’d be helpful at all in dealing with this.

What about the ShareThis PlugIn Exploit?

I’m not sure. If anyone has any ideas about what I can do from here, let me know. I’ve always been able to handle spam on site with the 2 plugins I mentioned earlier, but this is just geting annoying now!

If I have to stop using the plugin to handle the situation, I guess I’ll have to . . .

Any thoughts?

I had a great post lined up, but my fat nasty finger has gotten in the way. I Jammed it earlier today playing basketball and can’t even find my camera to shoot a pic for posterity.

I’ll be back when I can type a bit faster with 2 hands . . . tommorrow I hope!