Catch-All Email Accounts
If you have a web hosting account, with one or more domains hosted on it, then you probably have several email accounts set up, too.
Let’s say that you have a domain, www.MyDomain.com, and have created a few mail accounts; your.name@MyDomain.com, sales@MyDomain.com, and support@MyDomain.com.
What happens if somebody sends an email to accounts@MyDomain.com? There is no email account with that name, so there is no mailbox to store it in.
The answer is that it goes into the hosting account “catch-all” account mailbox. The mail account name is usually the same as your hosting account name, so if you log in with the name “johndoe”, then your catch-all email account will be johndoe@MyDomain.com.
You will find that once you’ve had your domain for just a few weeks, you’ll start getting spam messages sent to non-existent email addresses at your domain. These messages will end up in your catch-all mailbox.
I usually set up my email program to delete the messages in the catch-all account. Whenever I pick up my email, the catch-all account gets emptied, and I never see all that spam. (Take note, spammers – it all gets deleted, so why bother sending it?)
When I upgraded my PC with a new hard disk a few months ago, I forgot to set up the catch-all account handler. I finally remembered yesterday, and discovered there were 83,331 spam messages in there, occupying some 231Mb of disk space.! It took about 2 hours to delete them all.
Most catch-all accounts have an unlimited mailbox size, so if you don’t empty them regularly, they will just eat up your hosting disk space. I estimate that my catch-all account is receiving about 1000 spam messages per day, so it soon bulds up if not cleaned out regularly.
So if you don’t do it already, check your catch-all account and clean it out regularly. You don’t want to fill your hosting account disk with spam.
Google Webmaster Tool Verification Update
If you use Google Webmaster Tools to find out information and statistics about your websites, you’ll know that to access that information you must Verify that you are the owner of the site. You can do this in one of two ways:
- By adding a META tag to your home page. This will include a code that uniquely identifies your Google account. If you are able to edit the home page, then you must be the owner (or authorised user)
- By uploading an HTML file to your site’s root directory. The name of this file is your unique code, with an HTML extension. For example, it might be googlec9e7c4d1799410bc.html. Again, if you have the privilege to upload his file, then you must be the owner or authorised user.
There are advantages and disadvantages to using the two different methods.
META Tag
Using the META Tag means that you do not have any extra HTML files lying around in your root directory. It’s really not important except for the sake of tidiness.
The disadvantage is if you decide to completely renew your web home page. If you forget to include the META tag in the new page, then you will have to re-validate the site when you log in to Webmaster Tools.
Similarly, if you use something like WordPress, you might be unsure about editing the WordPress theme files to iniclude the META Tag. And if you switch to a different theme, you’ll have to go through the process all over again.
HTML File
This is my preferred method, because you only have to do it once. As long as you don’t delete the file, then you can change as much of your website as you want without having to re-verify it.
The disadvantage is that you might accidentally delete the file, especially if you do a site-wide rewrite.
Having said that you only have to do it once, though, I recently found that I had to re-verify all my sites because Google changed the mechanism slightly.
Originally, all you had to do was to create a file with the name Google specify, and upload it to your site’s root directory on your host server.
I always used an empty file with the correct name and it worked just fine.
Now, the file must have some content as specified by Google. In fact, they now supply a file for you to download and then upload to your server. The file now contains a line of text that looks like:
google-site-verification: googlec9e7c4d1799410bc.html
So unless you verified your sites recently or use the META Tag method, you’ll probably find that you’ll need to re-verify your sites next time you log in.
Fortunately, the code that they give you applies to your user account – not to the site. This means the same file can be uploaded to all of your websites for verification purposes.
Viral Marketing Method – Free Tools for Affiliates
Viral Marketing Method is a brand new approach to marketing which will change the face of affiliate marketing forever.
It has been known for a long time that viral marketing is incredibly effective, low-cost, and once the “virus” has been started, requires little or no further effort. This is because it leverages the efforts of other people to promote the product by passing the viral document on to other people.
There are many tools available for creating brandable, viral documents, but most of them cost money. One of the tools in Viral marketing Method’s arsenal is PDF Power Brand, a free PDF branding tool.
Affiliate Marketing in its most basic form, can be very lucrative, but it fails to do one of the most fundamental things in on-line marketing – building a mailing list.
Some experienced affiliates have set up systems to overcome this shortcoming, but the beginning affiliate is unlikely to be able to do the same.
Viral Marketing Method
Viral Marketing Method plugs a gap by bringing all these things and more together. Anyone can set up a viral marketing campaign to promote a website or affiliate program using the FREE tools in Viral Marketing Method. At the same time they can build their own list.
All of the tools required to create and promote the viral marketing campaign are provided. The only other thing you need is one or more accounts on Twitter. The more followers you have, the better the system works, but don’t worry if you don’t have many followers yet – there are simple ways to increase your following.
If you don’t have a Twitter account, you can get one free by signing up at Twitter.
If you would like to find out more about Viral Marketing Method, read our free report. You don’t even have to sign up to get the report – just sent a Tweet to your followers using the form on this page, and follow us on Twitter.
Once you’ve Tweeted the message, you will be redirected to the download page for the free report.
Twitter: Is it an Effective Marketing Medium?
Twoverload. I guess that’s the word for being overloaded with tweets on Twitter.
When I first signed up with Twitter, there were a lot fewer users than there are now. At the time, I thought the whole thing was quite pointless and even cancelled my account. I resurrected it several months later though.
As Twitter took off and the online marketers realised they could use it to promote their wares, a number of different schemes to increase your number of followers sprung up. The first one I came across was TweeterGetter, which promised something like 19,000 followers in 1 month. For me, the reality was never like that, but I did get several hundred followers as a result of using it.
The big problem with getting all those followers was that many of them didn’t like the idea that they followed you but you didn’t follow them back. Consequently they would soon “unfollow”.
As a result of the obvious imbalance of Followers to Following, various online services appeared which automatically managed your Twitter account. Whenever you gained a new follower, the service would auto-follow them back again, thus reducing the number of followers who would subsequently unfollow.
And this is where the problem lies.
The number of followers to my Twitter account recently reached about 800. I was auto-following them back, which meant that I was receiving the tweets of 800 different people; many of whom were quite prolific tweeters. Some even had an auto-tweeting service set up that would automatically send pre-programmed tweets at regular intervals.
A lot of the incoming tweets were not really of interest to me, or they came in so rapidly that anything that I was genuinely interested in would pass through unseen. It was only by using programs such as TweetDeck that I was able to separate out the tweets of my friends and family.
TweetDeck was acting like a spam filter. I very rarely look in the column containing all the incoming tweets – just my filtered columns.
I have my copy of TweetDeck set up to check my status once per minute, and on average, on each update I receive 18 tweets. That’s equivalent to around one tweet every 3 seconds. No wonder the tweets from my friends were getting lost. That was with just 800 followers. I know people who have 20,000 followers, so their accounts must be absolutely swamped.
It struck me that there must now be thousands of Twitter users who have hundreds or thousands of followers, who also receive the tweets of those hundreds or thousands of people. If the majority of those followers/followed are online marketers, their messages are probably not even being seen.
It’s like standing in the middle of a major sporting event full of cheering fans, and then trying to advertise your product to them by speaking at a normal level. Perhaps a few people standing nearby might hear you, but nobody else will. Those people standing nearby are equivalent to Twitter users who follow just a handful of people.
Twitter was never meant to be an advertising medium, and it never really can be. As soon as you let all those advertisers into your personal twitterverse, you’re overloading yourself and you start to ignore everything that comes in. The advertising message gets lost in the tide of unwanted tweets.
But I guess that people will see the false potential of Twitter as an advertising medium for some time to come, or at least until the next big thing comes along.
PDF Power Brand Offers Free Affiliate Marketing
PDF Power Brand marketing executive Dan Blackburn is excited to announce a free promotional offer, available to any online merchant operating an affiliate program. “We want to promote your e-book” says Blackburn.
He goes on to explain. “PDF Power Brand is a free software application that allows affiliates to brand links within a PDF file. Merchants can create effective e-book marketing campaigns for affiliates and affiliates can brand them with one easy click.
We have almost 10,000 affiliate marketers registered at PDF Power Brand and they are all looking for effective, profitable promotions to set up. I want to work with merchants who operate an affiliate program to set up a profitable e-book marketing campaigns for our affiliates to use. It really easy to do.
Imagine all of a sudden having hundreds of professional affiliate marketers all promoting your product and making sales for you every day. That is what I am trying to offer, at no cost, today.”
It sure sounds like an offer that’s too good to be true, but how does it work? When asked how he makes money through this offer, Blackburn explained… “I’m after some free promotion too, and the most powerful promotion you can get is word of mouth. I am looking to help both merchants and affiliate marketers though these difficult times by offering my services for free. Hopefully they will be glad to tell their friends and I will be paid back later”.
“The merchants we work with are required to promote the campaign we create with them to their own affiliates, this will help to spread the word about PDF Power Brand and get more people joining the site, using the software and setting up the profit proven campaigns we give to them.”
To get your FREE copy of PDF Power Brand, click here.
For more information on how to take advantage of this exciting offer to get more affiliates making sales of your product contact Dan directly though the number below or free though Skype
For more details, call:
UK: 020 8144 2865
US: (630) 687-1378
International, +44 20 8144 2865
Article Marketing
