One of the biggest issues I have to constantly deal with as a website design and hosting company (one of my internet businesses) is dealing with spam and especially the ramifications of it. The most painful part is jumping through all of the hoops that are now required by all of the big providers in their efforts to reduce spam. We ethical and moral entrepreneurs just trying to build a successful internet business have to go to great lengths just to get our customer’s normal emails flowing smoothly.

To give you an example, many of the big providers will block emails coming from a server if they receive more than a certain number of emails within a given time frame. This never use to be the case before spamming became such a problem. In the beginning, this caused problems with some of my customers. Many of my websites will have thousands of registered users. Then, when an email newsletter needs to get sent out from the website to the users, obviously a large amount of the email addresses are with these large providers. When the email would go out, the provider would block the IP address of my server and not allow any more of the messages to go through. So, to jump through this hoop, I had to write code for a special mail queue that would identify if the email needed to be delivered to one of the big providers with this type of “spam prevention”. If it did, it would go into a special queue that would only send out one email per 20 seconds to stay below the threshold of being blocked. This was not a huge issue since the newsletters did not need to be received by all users immediately (similar to the way Aweber sends emails to opt-in lists). However, I still had to spend a lot of time writing my own customized code to get around protections put in place to counteract spam.

Another issue that you may have run into if you do any email article marketing is with your internet service provider and your email. Many providers will monitor the activity on the email (or SMTP) port of your internet connection. If they see a lot of mail going out in a short amount of time, they may block it. This happens frequently using article marketing software when it tries to blast several thousand email messages out in rapid succession. This is another action internet providers have taken to try to thwart spammers.

These are just a couple examples of the many issues that have to be monitored and dealt with on a daily basis. The whole battle between spammers and internet providers trying to thwart their efforts is like a giant moving target that seems to continually morph into different beasts every time you think it may be over. The unfortunate part about it is that we have to pay a price for it. Spammers make it painful for everyone.

- Hill Robertson

OK, it is your turn to give me some information. I am in information and product production mode. I want to hear from you what type of information and products you would like to see from me on this blog. You should know what my areas of expertise are from the posts on this blog and from my about me page. What info would you like me to cover or what products would you like to see from me.

I’m already working on several products but if anyone gives me some good ideas, I might use them. If you give me an idea that I use for a product, I will send you a copy absolutely free once it is released.

Even though I’ll take any suggestions, I’d like to keep the ideas related to the following topics (or any combination or derivative):

• Internet Business
• Website Design/Hosting/HTML/CSS
• PHP/MySQL
• Linux
• Macs
• Computer Networking

Please post your suggestions as comments to this post. I will keep them private unless you specifically want your comment to be public and state so in the comment.

- Hill Robertson

As we start out the new year, I am launching my first product on this blog. It is for those of you who have a blog or website of your own and you use the aweber service for an opt-in popup. When someone subscribes to your blog, they shouldn’t have to keep putting up with the popup window anymore. I know I wish blogs that I subscribe to didn’t keep bugging me to sign up.

The product is an online video procedure where I show you how to set up your blog or website to stop the aweber popup window to new subscribers after you implement the procedure. It may even be a good incentive for your readers to sign up knowing that they won’t get bothered anymore.

It is only $10 for the next 72 hours (until 11:59 PM EST Monday Evening). You have my full money back guarantee if you are not satisfied. If you are satisfied, please post a testimonial as a comment on this post so I can use it on the sales page.

Here is the link:

http://hillrobertson.com/aweberNoPopup

Now get rid of those popups to reward your subscribers for signing up…..

- Hill Robertson

Today I was modifying some of the code on my blog. I love to play around with PHP and MySQL databases…. Anyway, as I was working on some updates and looking at some of the backend of Wordpress, I noticed my “little spinny thing” (official technical term for the animated icon on the browser indicating the page is still loading) was still spinning after the page should have been done loading. Apparently it was still trying to load something.

Even though I didn’t change any code that would cause any problems like this, I looked a little deeper. The problem was the social bookmarker plugin I was using. I had it active on the site for a couple of weeks and never noticed the problem before. The way the plugin works is that it puts links to the common social sites so a visitor can easily click on the icon of choice to quickly and easily add the blog article to the social website. The issue boiled down to the external links to the images.

A lot of plugin or add-on features for many blogs and other websites use external links do display data (in this case image files) that is stored on external servers. There are several advantages to this.

Here are some of the common advantages:

• Easy for the website owner (usually just a simple javascript snippet or other link pasted into site)
• External server controls data and can update without site owner doing anything
• Eliminates bandwith from site owner. All data is transferred between the client’s browser and the external server.

However, there are also disadvantages:

• Site owner does NOT have any control over the data on the external server or how it is displayed. This can cause formatting or layout issues on the primary website that can be difficult to debug.
• Different browsers may display the data differently and the primary site owner may not be able to correct the differences.
• The primary site may not display properly or it may not even show up at all if the client’s browser cannot access the external server. This is the problem I was having.

My problem was that a couple of the images could not be loaded from the external social web sites. This caused my page to “hang” on these images and not fully load the page. I could have manipulated some of the code to change them to load at the end of the page but I just didn’t like the “spinny thing” going all the time. I also could have used local copies of the images. However, for now I have just deactivated the plugin.

So, let this be a lesson to everyone with a blog (or website) using these external site based techniques. They can be nice when everything works but they can also be a real pain when they don’t. Sometimes you may not see the issue yourself if the connection to the external server and your browser is fine but someone else may be having trouble that you are never aware of.

The moral of the story is…….

Sometimes external links are bad.

- Hill Robertson

Everyone has some sort of passion. Your passion can be a great place to start if your want to start an online business. I have made a lot of money off my passions once I understood how to use my talents to generate profit. In the beginning I did them just for fun. Eventually, they turned into great businesses.

One of the most important reasons a passion can usually be turned into a profitable business is that you are probably an expert (compared to most). When it is something your love, you find out everything you can about it and you spend a lot of your “free” time on your passion. You are always learning more and more about the details. You are probably “hands on” with your passion which solidifies your knowledge and gives you valuable experience that others would probably like to know.

One of my passions is Christmas displays and really going all out with fancy displays. Since I am a total geek (or nerd - whichever you prefer) I always have to take things to the extreme when they are technical in nature. So, I designed and built some hardware to control all of the Christmas lights from my computer. I wrote software (in Linux - a whole other passion of mine) to interface with my hardware that would synchronize the Christmas lights to Christmas music that I transmit from a low power FM transmitter (that I built). I take great joy every year around this time in computer controlled Christmas displays.

If this kind of geeky stuff tickles your fancy, you can take a look at http://computerchristmas.com.

So, since I loved doing computer controlled Christmas lights, I learned everything I could about them in my spare time because it was fun. I spend a lot of time designing the circuits, building the hardware, and writing the software. I learned more and more as I went. I became one of the few experts at the time (around 2000). Now, I have taught thousands of people how to do the same thing on my website and through other forms of consultation. Now it is a continuous revenue stream that I never intended to profit from in the beginning.

Another passion of mine is developing websites. I am one of the founders of a web hosting corporation that has built up into an extremely profitable business and it is something I love to do. We get rave reviews especially on our customer service since it is something we love to do and therefore excel in. If you treat your customers right and give them great products and services, they will be with you for the long term (and will refer others to you as well). Again, I point this out because this passion has also turned into extremely good profit.

You can turn your passion into your profit. What are your passions? You ARE an expert in the areas of your passions to many others out there wandering around the internet searching for the same information that you already have. There is profit to be made. Take action and go get it.

- Hill Robertson

Well, I’ve been changing some things around on this blog. I wanted a little bit of a different look so I have been testing out some changes. I still need to do some more tweaking so you may see changes every now and then. Don’t panic if things look a little different all of a sudden. I may be updating the theme when those things happen.

I still need to update the top logo image. Right now it is a little boring. I haven’t decided exactly what to do yet. But you’ll see what happens when I do it anyway.

I noticed that when I put up the new theme, the RSS feed got updated and it sent out a broadcast email for several of my recent entries.  I’m sorry if you got a bunch of emails from my blog during the transition.

Please feel free to post a comment if you see anything strange or something does not work properly so I can fix it. Thanks for your patience while I update it.

- Hill Robertson

Looking back on decisions I have made in the past and why I failed or quit at anything was quite often due a quiet little creeping creature called doubt. It usually isn’t obvious at the time but its grip is strong and deadly. Doubt will absolutely kill anything worth while if you let it.

Doubt creeps into your thoughts saying things like “you can’t write a good article”, “you’re not an expert”, or “no one will ever buy your product”. If you listen to doubt, you will never succeed. You will always come up with a reason not to do something. However, all of these reasons are just excuses. Nothing will ever get done when you dwell on what you can’t do.

Remember one of the most important rules is to “just do it”. If you wait to long or you try to make everything perfect, you will start letting doubt creep in and you will start focusing on the negatives and you will paralyze yourself and you won’t do anything. You will convince yourself that it wouldn’t have worked anyway. Once you realize you are sliding down the slippery slope of doubt, STOP IT! Focus on the positive and JUST DO IT!

- Hill Robertson

In the world of the Internet, everything is about information. The primary form of information in cyberspace is written (or typed) content. It is obviously the fuel that gives value to a website and is the primary reason someone will visit your site. The better the amount and quality of the information, the more visitors you will attract and the longer they will stay on your site. The content must be relevant to your site. If it is not, it will confuse your visitors and they will leave quickly - never to return again.

Be sure to have good quality related content on your site. Add more content frequently to give your visitors (customers) good reasons to keep returning to your site. This is one of the key ingredients in a successful site.

- Hill Robertson

Here we go into the vast blogosphere universe. I have been building websites for years and have built a very successful online business. We are going to be discussing how to build internet based businesses and how to grow them successfully. Please subscribe so you will get notified when this site gets updated.

Let’s all grow successful together.

- Hill Robertson