A lovely video about something we’re all guilty of at times – from Royal Academy of Art graduate John Kelly

After reading that post I spent a couple of hours reading more and more about how people are using Twitter to achieve business success.

But in the end I thought “Forget it. I don’t want to read 50 tweets or more a day from people telling me what they watched on TV or had for lunch, or pushing affiliate links for crappy get traffic schemes.

Then next day something happened to stir my interest in a big way.

Megan Henshall, a good friend of mine in England, runs a photo studio in a small village in the Lake District, and she wrote to tell me that this week she’s used Twitter marketing to get 4 bookings for portrait sittings.

FOUR BOOKINGS IN A WEEK  —- WOW!

And it’s not like she’s built up a long term relationship with these people – she’s only been using Twitter for about 5 or 6 weeks, and only “really got what it’s all about” in the past 9 or 10 days.

Four bookings for a photography studio. I find that amazing. Plus her studio regularly pulls in over a thousand pounds a shoot so we’re talking very good money here.

So how is she using Twitter for local marketing in such a small out of the way place?

Well I’ve asked her to write me a piece for my newsletter and this blog, telling you exactly how to use Twitter for local business.

So I hope to get it to you soon.

Though she’s not actually said yes yet, so maybe you could visit her Twitter page and bug her to write it for me

By the way, I’ve made a few Tweets now. So follow me… or whatever you call it when you read someones Tweets

You’ll find me at http://twitter.com/phil_wiley I promise I’m not going to post rubbish like “I ate a boiled egg and a slice of toast for breakfast”

Well, maybe a bit of rubbish. But I’ll try and make it amusing rubbish

]]> http://philwiley.com/workathome/twitter-offline-marketing/feed/ 0 http://philwiley.com/workathome/forest-fires-update/ http://philwiley.com/workathome/forest-fires-update/#comments Tue, 27 Oct 2009 03:10:25 +0000 phil http://philwiley.com/?p=769 Continue reading →]]> Lots of people have emailed me this past week asking about the fires, and checking that I survived and got though them without the house burning down.

Yes both the house and I survived. But only just

The fires burnt the bushes at the end of the garden, and the house was full of smoke for almost a week. One night, when the fires were at their worst, I stayed up all night to keep spraying the house with water, and putting out the small fires made by flying ash and embers. Then I had to stay alert for most of the next day too, just to make sure that the situation didn’t get too dangerous. People who have lived here over 60 years have said they’ve never known anything like it before, and never been so frightened.

In the end I even profited from the situation, getting hired for a day by a Sunday newspaper I used to freelance for. Not that I could do much work because the road into town was blocked by huge boulders, and fallen burning trees which had crashed down the steep slopes and the cliffs onto the road.

Here’s a pic I took for the paper, looking down towards the town. It’s a bit hard to see them, but in the bottom right corner of the photograph there are the first of the houses down in the town, and the fire is dangerously close to them.

It’s quite beautiful really, for something so dangerous. A bit like some women I used to know

Anyway, it’s all over now. It rained heavily a couple of nights ago and seems to have killed the last of the small fires which were still smoking. So back to work.

phil

Right now, it’s 7am, the wind has died down and it looks like the worst of it has passed us and is now heading towards the town below the mountains, so I’m taking some time out to write this

Have a look at this pic I took in the night, of the fire raging below a neighbours house. It’s just the same view from my house but the smoke was thicker around mine so this pic is better. Because I used a very wide angle lens the flames look quite distant, but the reality is that fires were raging everywhere – a small fire was raging through a gully less than 50 yards away and bushes in the garden burst into flames.

The whole mountain is on fire. It’s just been on the national news. One house has been destroyed, people lower down the mountain have been evacuated,and it’s been a highly dangerous night.

It’s been quite scary, though the mountain is still swarming with fire crew and they tell me they’ll be here until it’s over.

Here’s a brief news story on the fires, and a photo

Quit your job

Is it possible to quit your job in ninety days? Tony Shepherd, the author of this free report (value $97) did it in 97 days.

I met up with Tony in England recently, and talked with him on camera on the very subject this free blueprint is about – how to quickly make enough money online to be able quit your job (if you chose to) or pay of your debts.

The video is for my forthcoming product launch at oneweekcash.com

Anway, I’ve been offline because my dad somehow managed to knock my notebook computer off a table, and although it miraculously turned out to be undamaged, the USB Internet dongle I was using in England was damaged. Seeing I was leaving in a week I didn’t bother replacing it.

Then I had the longest flight I’ve ever had back to Australia, thanks to problems in Heathrow, then a whopping 13 hour delay in the airport in Bangkok, where the air conditioning was so cold I had to keep walking around to stop myself freezing to death, then another 7 hour wait in Sydney for my flight up to the isolation of The Great Barrier Reef.

That’s one of the views from my garden, mountains sticking out of the clouds as far as the eye can see. Though not right now at the time of writing this it’s just 5am here. Pitch black outside and a terrible wind is racing across the mountain, and smashing into the house so hard, that I’ve been awake for hours but too cold to get out of bed until now.

Ok, that’s it for a day or two. Now I’ve got to look through hundreds and hundreds of emails I’ve missed reading.

If you live in England and want to get on the notification list you can sign up for the London Lunch here

You won’t receive any promo emails by being on that list, just news about the date of the next lunch.

Usually the first thing I do in the mornings is walk around the top of the mountain, but I’d been a bit freaked out by a big brown snake the day before, so I decided to give walking a miss.

I don’t know what type of snake it was because quite a few are brown, but I do know that some of the snakes around here always make World’s Top 10 Deadliest Snake lists. So if I see one I’m off in the other direction. Which in this case was straight back home. Yep I’m a coward.

And I’m scared of really rich beautiful women too. And mayonnaise

Don’t ask about the mayonnaise. It’s a long story involving spiteful aunts, priests, and choirboys and I’m not about to tell it here. Well not today anyhow

So back to the hacking, and WordPress security and what to do about it.

I took a pot of coffee downstairs to my office, scanned Google News to check out the sadness of the world, then logged to my Gmail account.

And the very top email smacked me between the eyes.

Dusty here. I got your information through the Cash Flow Marketing. FYI I was trying to access your mini site profits on several of your pages and my software detected a virus. I was unable to access it. just wanted to let you know.
Dusty – DBar Safety Technologies

Quickly checking it out I found that all the sites redirected to a site that tried to install rogue anti virus software. So I put in an urgent support request to the hosting company, then discovered that cpanel would still work and didn’t redirect me, so I started to investigate and found the problem within 10 minutes.

Somehow a Permanent 301 redirect had been set up.

301 hack

So all I had to do was remove the redirect and the problem was fixed.

But how did the hacker get in? I’d no idea.

Support got back to me after about 25 mins, and we emailed back and forth a while. They suggested making sure that all my WordPress installations were up to date, including the plugins. Each blog (about 10 of them) were all 2.7 except one, which was running 2.6.1, and that site had a few major problems even after I’d fixed the redirect, so I tried to re-upload the backup database but failed, and after a few attempts I decided to leave it for another day.

Bad mistake!

Went away for the weekend and my brother Ric from HighDensityGardening.com emailed to let me know his site was hacked again (I host it for him). And this time I’d no idea how to fix it. Here’s a screen grab of part of the front page.

Maybe my old mate Andy Henry did it.

Nope, only kidding Andy

Right, Support got back to me and said it was an outdated WordPress issue. Outdated? The blog in question was running WordPress 2.6.5 (I’d updated all the other blogs on this host to 2.7 and just hadn’t got around to this one yet)

“It appears that the account was attacked using a vulnerability
in an outdated version of wordpress on one of the sites. Using
this vulnerability, PHP shell scripts were uploaded onto the
account, which were then further used to deface the site.
At this time, I have removed the malicious files, however,
you will need to update any and all scripts on the account
to prevent further attack. Unfortunately, since the attack
occurred before our weekly backups were taken, we do not
have a clean copy of the files affected. You will need to
replace these with clean copies from your own backups.”

Luckily I do a daily back up of all my WordPress databases, so it was a simple matter of deleting the existing databases and re-uploading a back up version. Playing safe I skipped a day and login into php myadmin I restored the databases from 2 days earlier.

The last step was to made sure that WordPress, and all the plugins were current up to date versions on all the sites on the account.

Update: 31st Jan

I just came across a WordPress security plugin, or WordPress firewall which investigates web requests with simple WordPress-specific heuristics to identify and stop most obvious attacks.

It intelligently whitelists and blacklists pathological-looking phrases based on which field they appear within in a page request (unknown/numeric parameters vs. known post bodies, comment bodies, etc.). Its purpose is not to replace prompt and responsible upgrading, but rather to mitigate 0-day attacks and let bloggers sleep better at night. Its features include —

* Detect, intecept, and log suspicious-looking parameters — and prevent them compromising WordPress.
* Also protect most WordPress plugins from the same attacks.
* Optionally configure as the first plugin to load for maximum security.
* Respond with an innocuous-looking 404, or a home page redirect.
* Optionally send an email to you with a useful dump of information upon blocking a potential attack.
* Turn on or off directory traversal attack detection.
* Turn on or off SQL injection attack detection.
* Turn on or off WordPress-specific SQL injection attack detection.
* Turn on or off blocking executable file uploads.
* Turn on or off remote arbitrary code injection detection.

* Add whitelisted IPs.
* Add additional whitelisted pages and/or fields within such pages to allow above to get through when desirable.

You can download the WordPress Firewall Plugin here.

So far I’ve only installed it on one blog as a test, so assuming it works I’ve still got lots more to add it to. But unless my blogs are attacked again how will I know it’s working?

For now – job finished.

So what you’re looking at right now is just a work in progress, and might change a few times over the next week.

I’m moving everything, except a number of my mini sites, to WordPress, and intend using the same theme on all of them. It’s a management thing. I’ve got a lot of niche sites, and looking after them takes too many man hours. If all sites are set up the same – same theme, plugins, modifications, etc, it should make things easier.

That’s what I’m hoping anyway
I’m a bit concerned about this philwiley.com site though.
Do you think I should keep the ‘me with the gurus’ images somewhere?
For the personal touch?

Let me know with a comment.

Here’s the old look

The Phil Wiley site is also going to have a lot more personal stuff … photo’s, what I’m reading, what I’m doing, what I’m thinking (etc)…kind of like a Facebook page I guess, and most of the marketing, making money, material will end up back where it used to be, on my old ozemedia.com site.

Some of my other sites I’m in the middle of redoing are travelfoodandwine.com (anyone fancy writing for that one? Get in touch via the contact form if you do) a dating site at ionlywannabewithyou.com, and a test fully-automated site >link removed<

If you’re interested in buying ionlywanna. Get in touch via the contact form. The person I was jointly doing it with has lost interest, and I’ve never been very interested in it which is why it’s not been updated for ages. There’s some very good unique handwritten content on there. Some rubbish but some really good stuff.

I didn’t realize it was so few, and I almost feel ashamed about my output.

What it does go to show though, is that unlike the majority of people who write marketing and online business ezines,  I don’t rely on them to make an income, so I don’t have to send you 3 or 4 ‘sales pitches” a week J

Probably (and I haven’t done the figures, so this is only a guess) 90 percent of my earnings come from non internet marketing niches. It might be an even higher figure.

To cut what could be a long story short, because I want to give you the chance to get Adrian’s software before they’ve all gone (you’ll never find a lower cost toolset, so grab it) I want to say that things are changing around here and I’m going to start passing on more of more knowledge, and more frequently.

So I hope you don’t get sick of too many newsletters from me

What I’d like you to do, if you can spare a few minutes, is give me some thoughts on what you’d like to see from me, what you’d like to see me write about or do for you.

Do you simply want more newsletters which are a mix of product reviews, news, and advice?

A low-cost member site where I pass on all my knowledge to you?

Ebooks, reports, and other tutorials?

Let me know

phil