Since I need to rebuild it for the kids anyway (they are all hot on learning how to really work on the Internet), I thought I’d try Ubuntu as it was recommended by a friend.

The first problem I had was the install media … after burning and trying 3 different CD’s, each one had multiple errors when I tried to install.

What’s really weird is the erors came up in different places (same disk, different reboots).

This could be the media itself (Memorex), the burner or the reader … I don’t actually know.

What DID work, however, was buring the CD ISO to a DVD instead … first time worked wonderfully, and ubunty came up quickly and without a hitch.

Getting the wireless card running is still not happening, however. ndiswrapper says hardware is present, and modprobe says that ndiswrapper is installed, but still no wlan0 to fiddle with.

I’ve been futzing with hardware most of the evening (after we returned from Six Flags), and am putting it away for now. It may just require a reboot … but given that I’m running from CD (DVD) that’s not an option. I’ll need to find a way to do some sort of “soft reset” that doesn’t dump the ramdisk.

IF I can get this card working, then I’ll switch to Ubuntu permanently and let the kids have at it …

Anyone have any clues?

You can find a complete list of autoresponder products here.

Let me know what you think - should we port? Or spend the time adding more options (AutoResponse Plus, Constant Contact, MailChimp … any others?)

• Create a “free” report
• create a “squeeze” page that captures a prospect’s name and address, and in return, the free report is provided.
• on the “back end” you sell the product you really want the prospect to purchase.

The above may be an oversimplification, and there are many variations … but in the end, what you end up with is a email list with a lot of barely-qualified people on it.

Two things at Ryan Lee’s Continuity Summit has me questioning this sales method.

The first was Russel Brunson’s presentation, where he shows that providing a very low cost CD actually increases conversion.

In this case, you end up with a very qualified list of people that actually are willing to pay for information. But more importantly (in my mind), the conversions of the back-end offer were tested to be two-times that of sending a prospect directly to the sales page.

(I think more testing could - and should - be done, but the results are encouraging)

The second presentation was Stephen Pirece, who shows how to start making sales directly with a five step process that gets qualified traffic to just about any offer. Russel also us upteen (60? More?) ver different methods to get offers in front of traffic (and some of them are quite ingenious).

You see, originally getting a “big list” was necessary so that marketers could send traffic to various offers. But now, there are so many alternative ways of getting offers in front of people that are already online, email marketing just simply isn’t as attractive of a traffic source as it once was.

Maybe I should qualify this a little: CUSTOMER listbuilding is NOT dead. What may be on its way out is listbuilding for list building sake: free reports, for example, where all you can do is hope the person on the other end is a live, human, prospect.

Having a CUSTOMER list (those people who have actually purchased from you, vs. “just interested”) is another matter entirely.

A corollary to this theory becomes: listbuilding may not be your most valuable skill, and “not having a list” may no longer mean doom to your business. The “my list is bigger than yours” pants-pulling-contests really don’t mean squat.

The real skill is getting your message in front of people - or “traffic building”.

With good traffic skills, you can easily build any list.

Do you agree? Disagree? Let me know below.

The easy membership sites website is currently in pre-launch, and open to new subscribers … it’ll just take a few days to deliver the software and setup because all the automation isn’t quite done yet.

Well, I’ve been a student of Brad Fallon’s for many years (long before StomperNet was born), and I’ve picked up quite a few things including being the “coolest guy on the planet“:

The “coolest guy on the planet” was a contest to see who could get the #1 phrase for that spot. As you can see, I didn’t quite win, but having spots #2 and #3 - even for just a couple of days - was pretty cool.

Why did I drop out? Simple: top rankings for that particular phrase got me exactly one thing - people wanting SEO help! And that’s something I usually don’t do for other people.

Frankly, there’s just not enough money in helping other people rank well when the effort spent on my own sites can be multiplied tenfold or more.

But I CAN show you where to go and get some of the same information I’ve used over and over to get ranked well, and it won’t cost you much, either. ($1.00 right now)

http://www.stombernet.biz (affil.)

This course has just about everything you need to know about SEO in it, except for a few closely guarded secrets I don’t reveal for cheap. One of those “secrets” I sold in a report for $1,000 to exactly 10 people - and promised I’d never sell it to anyone else. [Yes, some things just work better when the whole world doesn't know about it]

So the second best thing you can do to learn about SEO is to get Stomping The Search Engines 2. The first, of course, is getting inside of an experts head, but even then … you gotta do the basics, or the rest simply won’t work.

I’ve setup a free account, and am playing with it …. what I’m finding is really cool.

What I’m doing now is using the dynamic portion of the DNS to send visitors from different locations to different hostnames on my server …. which, in turn, redirects to different parts of my website (or you could send them to an entirely different website ….).

The advantage? Visitors from across the pond get localized content.

I’m still playing with this, but the concept is cool, and right now I can already drill down to the city level.

A website accessible _only_ from within Louisville, anyone?

Now, what I need to find is a city->timezone conversion map, so I can get accurate timing stats, too.

Any ideas?

Ever since Butterfly Marketing hit the streets years ago, and possibly before then, everyone and their brother has a launch on Tuesday.

Today there’s been a new email from someone promoting yet-another-launch every time I open my Gmail account - and those are just the ones that have gotten through my massively effective filters.

Is there an opportunity to have a launch on a day OTHER than Tuesday, and maybe cut through some of the noise?

What do you think? Is tuesday still the best day for a product launch, or have people just been blindly following the “traditional wisdom”?

In the Fire Book, Shinmen (Miyamato) Musashi describes a technique described as to renew. Musashi states that when fighting with the enemy, sometimes the spirit becomes entangled and there is no possible resolution. Taken another way, when balance has been lost it is time to renew ourselves and re-think strategy. To win, abandon our efforts, think of the situation with a fresh spirit and find the new rhythm. The trick to change the rhythm and win through a different technique without changing our circumstances.

Let me add one to it: Aweber needs an API.
(an API - or application programmiong interface - is a way for programmers to write software that talks to each other.)

Not only don’t they have one, but they shut people down for “scripting” the form.

Yes, they need the users IP address, but they can get that when they click on the confirm link … like the rest of their competitors do.

Most other autoresponders out there make integration easy with simple API capability: GetResponse, iContact, even MailChimp.

Their alternative “email parser” works - usually. But it’s a pain to setup and seems flaky, not always processing the messages sent to it.
A simple API to add subscribers would sure make things a LOT easier to integrate.

That said, I do have a whole series of Aweber based solutions - mostly for Joomla, but some training videos as well - on the Intellispire site.

As usual, I jumped on the challenge and quickly implemented a Joomla! 1.5 native plugin for the service. This plugin automatically moves your sites static content (images, css, javascript) to the CloudFront CDN, thereby providing faster loadtimes for your users … especially those users that are geographically “far away” from your servers.

Setting up the service was extremely easy. First, I had to get the content ready and upload it to an S3 bucket. While arguably easy using the s3sync command line tools, the process is complicated by the fact you need to choose exactly “which” files to upload, setting the right headers, and, for more advanced users, gzipping them in advance (more on that later).

Once I had my staging area ready, I just uploaded everything to S3. Then, using the simple but effective PHP based client, I registered the bucket, and received a cloudfront.net domain that can be used interchangeably with the s3 bucket, but is actually on the CDN.

Configuring Joomla! was even easier. I uploaded the CloudFront plugin, told it the current domain and path of the site, and the new path using the CDN. Then I published the plugin - and bingo! All static content is now being served from CloudFront instead of my local server.

A bug or a feature - I haven’t decided which, yet, - is that the not only the front end Joomla! files are being served from the CDN, but the backend files (administrator) are, as well. I may make that ‘configurable’. While I like saving a second or two from each request, I’m not sure I want that to happen in all cases.

A side advantage of this setup - now that my webserver no longer serves static content - is that I can optimize it for PHP.

Before turning on the CDN, I took screenshot of the site (a stock Joomla! site) with YSlow. You can see the image here (big picture opens in a new window):
http://itest.s3.amazonaws.com/nicktemple/images/J-NOCDN.png

The biggest thing to notice is that YSlow gives this site a big ‘F’ for performance … 46 out of a posible 100. But remember, an F is still 1/2 an ‘A’ :->

Now, after turning on the plugin, we do a little better … a ‘C’ grade, with a numeric score of 76.
http://itest.s3.amazonaws.com/nicktemple/images/J-CloudFront.png

Wow! A big improvement!

Note, though that, YSlow doesn’t yet know that ‘cloudfront.net’ is a CDN, so you must tell it, using the instructions found here: http://developer.yahoo.com/yslow/faq.html#faq_cdn

Overall, I’m extremely impressed with the service, and am using for my sites and my largest customer sites. There are two downsides right now:

a) CloudFront doesn’t currently support ‘gzipped’ content, nor does it support ssl. There are some workarounds discussed on the forum, so it isn’t a performance show stopper. It just makes setting up the staging server a little more difficult.

b) Setting up the staging server isn’t particularly “easy”. This is not fault of CloudFront, but rather the fact the tools there aren’t quite ready for most non-developers to use, yet. That’s the portion we’ll be working on over the next few weeks by building a service that allows you to easily manage CloudFront for your Joomla! powered site.

Finally, there are additional performance improvements that can be made to Joomla! For example, combining and minimizing the Javascript and possibly some of the css, as well as caching some of the work the CloudFront Plugin is doing could increase response times for most Joomla! powered websites dramatically.

Signup now (upper right) to be notified when these products are available.

While I’m not yet releasing the plugin except to current customers, if you’d like to hire my company Intellispire to implement CloudFront for your website, please click here to contact us.

P.S. If you are a Wordpress or Drupal developer, contact me … I’d like to discuss porting some of our products to other CMS’s, too. Contact me!