If you failed to backup your computer and it died. Would you pay big bucks to restore that data from your hard drive? Depending on what you have on it but I’d say if your whole business is on it, you’d probably think seriously about it. Here’s the thing that many don’t realize about data recovery. It’s not guaranteed to restore 100% of your data. Now I must be truthful and qualify that statement. It all depends on how bad a shape your hard drive is in. Sometimes you get lucky and only your computer is fried. Which means you can simply pop the hard drive into an external hard drive enclosure and grab your data from another computer. Yup! I can be that simple. Sometimes we aren’t that lucky and your hard drive may have been damaged. That is not so simple and recovery at that point can get super expensive. If the damage is extensive, you may only get a partial recovery So what’s my point? Backup and backup again. Have at least two sets. One in home – it can be external drive or network attached storage and another set of backups offline like Mozy. It really

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This may seem like an elementary issue for some but I know many, especially first time info product marketers tend to wonder and worry about bandwidth issues. Do you upload your product to your own web site or to Amazon S3 or another file hosting service. If the product is only a simple PDF or a collection of documents, audios and PDF’s, I’d host it on my own site. As a matter of fact, I host almost all of my products on the web site itself. In the 4+ years I have marketed video info products, I have never had a problem with bandwidth. Although, if you anticipate huge sales you may have to start re-thinking this. However, for most startups that I know, bandwidth is not an issue. Where it could be an issue is web space. If you have a small web hosting plan and are delivering a lot of large audios and videos, you could run out of space quickly. Documents and PDF space is negligible. Overall, the answer is take a look at your product. If it’s a simple product – chances are it is, then host it yourself. 99% of the time, you won’t have

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When was the last time you changed your logins? I know… Each time I think about changing passwords I cringe. There are SO many of them! But you don’t have to change them all and having a password manager like Roboform or 1Password for Macs absolutely helps. It’s kinda crazy going without them. What you should consider changing – other than your personal bank accounts and stuff like that are: Blogs – especially the ones that are the busiest/biggest Email PayPal Web site FTP/cPanel – I think this one is important Changing passwords alone won’t guarantee you’ll never get hacked or have any malicious code injected into your web site, but it helps. A moving target is harder to hit.

So there I was hanging out in Twitter again. I have a special stream in TweetDeck that searches for anything to do with membership sites and saw this lady tweeting several times over days about the frustrations she’s been having with aMember. So I reached out and asked what kind of issues she was having and quickly found out that it was something way too big to be handled on Twitter alone. Which is why I invited her over here to do a ‘Blog Consult’ and she agreed. Here’s how it works. I’m posting the details of the issues Alska’s having, asking for pertinent questions. She’ll respond in the comments and we’ll try to solve this whole problem right here. If you work with aMember as well and would like to chime in, feel free to do so. Without further ado. Let me give you a quick outline of the issue. According to Alska, To which I’ll ask now for more information. Can you please clarify what you mean by regular price and what is renewal price? Do you have two products set up for the same item with two different prices? Which is higher? Can you explain how people

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This seems like a great book for small business owners since we are often the ones who need to manage and secure our computer networks ourselves (plus a gazillion other things). The book helps you understand how to prevent attacks and eliminate network weaknesses so your business won’t be exposed and at risk. Vulnerability Management for Dummies gives you the facts and also shows you how to put in place a successful Vulnerability Management program. It doesn’t matter if your network consists of just a handful of computers or thousands of servers distributed around the world, this 5-part book will help: Explain the critical need for Vulnerability Management (VM) Detail the essential best-practice steps of a successful VM Program Provide a 10-point checklist for removing vulnerabilities from your key resources and more I’m requesting mine. Hope you get yours too before they close the offer.

Late 2004 was when I had an idea to build an info product. It was my first and I was convinced video was the next big thing online. I guess in many ways that turned out to true. So, I chose video and audio to deliver my information and in 2005, BloggingStarterPack was released. 4 years have flown by in a heartbeat and so much has changed in blogging and WordPress as a whole that I need desperately to update the course. Although still very relevant, I hated the thought of students viewing the old WordPress screens. But at the same time, I also dreaded the idea of re-recording hours of content plus editing – more hours. That’s the problem with using video in your info products, especially when you are showing people how to do things using a particular software or web site. It dates quickly. If they are simply talking heads or video presentations then it isn’t too big a problem. But things simply move too fast in the tech world which is a down side of my chosen industry I guess. At many points through the years I’ve often regretted not creating BloggingStarterPack as a written manual

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A friend of mine had just finished an e-book which she will sell. She has links in her book some going to affiliate products and others are just web sites and miscellaneous relevant links. She asks if all links in the book should be redirected or only affiliate links. What a great question! Generally, I prefer to redirect any links I want to track. Affiliate links are a given of course because you don’t know when the affiliate program may be closed or if they change systems which means your links will no longer work once they switch. If it’s a link to Google or something similar, I rarely redirect them. However if the link goes to my social network profiles or links to relevant articles, I like to track stuff like that to see how interested people are in those topics.