Bryan Stephens

Ben Teo was one of the speakers at UYMG Sydney 2008 and he was warmly applauded for providing a ton of information to the participants.

Ben spoke mostly about search engine optimization, SEO, and he provided heaps of useful tips for everyone. I liked Ben’s personality, as I am certain many others did.

His girlfriend, Phoebe Chin, now works for Stephen Pierce International as a sales director. I sat next to Phoebe while Ben was talking and took a photo of the 2 of us, which can be seen below. 

I thought that Phoebe was a cute and bubbly person, so I could understand why Stephen and Alica were happy to sign her up for the sales director job. She took a photo of Benjamin while he was performing on stage, which can be seen below.

Ben showed us his catch phrase that he uses “Shh..hit That’s a Lot of Traffic”. You can find more information about Ben’s SEO techniques at Thats A Lot Of Traffic

As some of you would have realized, from the previous WIS Dallas post, I went to Texas to attend the World Internet Summit. However, some may not realize that after I arrived in Dallas, I spent some time in Whitney with some alpha leaders, Stephen Pierce and his lovely wife Alicia Pierce. I will describe some of the details of my trip below.

I left Brisbane airport on Sunday the 18th May and detoured via Sydney so that I could share a flight with Alpha Leader Jennifer. We arrived in Dallas at night, via Los Angeles, and went to La Quinta Inn via a free shuttle bus.

La Quinta Inn was a great place to stay and I must thank Gary for organizing it for us. La Quinta provided a wonderful buffet breakfast included in the price and the staff was very friendly.

During the morning we were packing our belongings to go to a log cabin that Alicia had booked for us, when I noticed a tornado chaser van. Being a meteorologist, I was keen to talk to the guy about his tornado ventures. He did not have too much time to talk, but he mentioned that due to the sophisticated equipment in the van that they usually find at least one tornado in a 2-3 week trip. He also mentioned that many Australians go on tour with them.  Go to Tradd Storm Chasing Tours for more information about these tours.

Gary drove a hire car to Whitney. Thanks again Gary for organizing that and also for driving. Gary is great for organizing things. He had the assistance of a global navigation system with Sean Connery’s voice (very entertaining listening to instructions from a Scottish voice, “turn right, keep left”). Veit also helped navigate and did a great job, as Sean was not always right. While travelling on the highways I was glad that Gary was driving rather than me. It was so confusing compared to what I am used to back in Australia.

We also noticed the amount of large cars on the road. I guess that people may buy smaller cars in the USA eventually due to rising fuel costs? We had a break on the way to Whitney and I took the photo below of Veit, Evgania, Jennifer and Gary in front of the hire car.

To get to the cabins we had to stop at a security gate in order to get permission to enter the reserve. Alicia told us later that Stephen and her stayed at one of these cabins before they bought the property that they now live in. The cabin had a queen size bed and 3 single beds upstairs, so it was cozy for us all. There was a golf course nearby too. I found it amusing that on the front door it had a sign saying “in case of tornado”. Apparently tornadoes are quite common, but luckily for us none got too close to us during our stay.

During the late morning we drove to Stephen and Alicia’s place. Alicia showed us around the house while Stephen was cooking a BBQ for us. The house was large, well presented and very clean and tidy.  I noticed that the cielings were very high too. Stephen did a great job with the BBQ, and seeing that there were 3 vegetarians out of the 6 Alpha Leaders (Sern Yi stayed at the house), there was plenty for me to eat. It was very nice too.

During our stay, 3 days, both Stephen and Alicia offered us tips for progressing with our Internet marketing projects. I certainly gained some great insight from them both and I really appreciate their hospitality and assistance. We also got to use the facilities that Stephen uses for DTAlpha Talkback for recording some audio products. Jennifer, in particular, made great use of this. 

On the second day, we all went for a boat cruise on Lake Whitney. Stephen seemed to be very content driving the boat. Some of us went for a swim in the lake. The water was fine.

We also watched a movie in their cinema.  The cinema had comfortable reclining chairs that had popcorn and drink holders and they vibrated with some of the actions in the movie. There was also a massage chair available for us to use at any time. The Alpha Leaders spent most of their time in the training room.

I was fortunate to meet Alicia’s mother, Ilona. Ilona helps out Alicia and Stephen with their business and she also did much of the cooking for us during our stay. Not only was Ilona a good cook, but I loved her company. Ilona told me that she was born in Guyana and moved to Canada when she was 15. She loves the cricket and I am hoping that she visits me, as promised, in Australia some time so that we can both attend the cricket together.

It was sad to leave, but we had to go to the Sheraton Hotel for our next adventure. That being WIS Dallas. Below is a photo taken by Gary of Sern Yi, Evgania, Veit, Jennifer and me in front of Stephen and Alicia’s place before departing to Dallas.

I have recently returned home to Australia after a long flight back from Dallas and wanted to share some of my experiences from WIS Dallas 2008.

The event was organized by Brett McFall, Tom Hua and Stephen Pierce. It was held at the Sheraton Hotel in Dallas between 22nd-25th May 2008. As an Alpha Leader for Stephen Pierce, I was invited to help assist at the event. I accepted the invitation and was glad that I did so.

There were many speakers at the event. Apart from the 3 that organized the event, Ray Edwards, Debra Thompson, Armand Morin, Sean Roach, Mike Stewart, Christopher Guerriero, Joel Comm, Adam Ginsberg and Joel Therien gave presentations. They provided some excellent internet marketing content.

There were many wonderful and interesting people at the event and below are some photographs that I took of them. The audience had a great deal of energy within it.

Dr Stan Harris is a 10th dan black belt in Karate. There are less than 100 of them world wide. He was awesome in the audience by regularly providing positive feedback for each speaker. He also gave a demonstration on stage whereby he let 3 people punch him in the stomach, including a 3rd dan blackbelt. He did not flinch with any of the blows. Dr Stan then broke about 7 boards using various strikes, a kick and a head butt. The boards had differing types of fears written on them which he “broke through”.

I loved the energy Adele had at WIS. She was always smiling and pleasant to be around. Adele is involved with motivation skills, if I can recall correctly.

I met Rochelle while doing the networking session on Saturday night. Rochelle is in the wealth creation field. She was so sweet to me and lovely to talk to.

Raghu is involved with options trading and has a product that may be available for sale in a few months time. Raghu now lives in Texas, but came from India.

As you can see, A R Hurd is quite a tall man. He always came in a basketball style outfit and was quite a funny man. He made us flick our name tags over our shoulders for this photo. I enjoyed his company.

Before the event, I spoke to David Ciup while at Stephen Pierce’s house and he invited Julie Castleberry to attend. I spoke to David throughout the event and met up with both he and Julie at the Network Session. The photo taken here is one where they found the crew, Susan (Mike’s wife), Tom and Brett having some drinks after the event had finished.

The crew were invited to the speakers dinner after the close of the event. From Left to Right.. Sern Yi, Bryan, Jennifer, Kate, Gordon, Jason, Evgania, Veit and Gary. Kate, Gordon and Jason were part of the WIS. The rest of us are Alpha Leaders.

After the WIS event had come to a close and the speakers dinner had finished, Tom and Brett were more relaxed and enjoyed a couple of drinks with some of the crew. I really enjoyed it.

After UYMG Sydney had finished in March, Stephen Pierce offered the Alpha Leaders the opportunity to participate in an Alpha Leadership summit at his house in Whitney 19th-21st May, followed by the WIS in Dallas 22nd-25th May.

If you have not yet registered for WIS (World Internet Summit) Dallas, then do so now and I shall see you there.  I got ”It is only $97 for 4 days of learning from 12 of the best internet speakers in the world!!! Only $97!!! Not to mention the $29,494 worth of bonuses you will receive.” in an email from SMCC. So you can see that there is some great value there. To register for WIS Dallas, click here.

I was excited about the idea but thought that getting leave from my work would be difficult, considering that I will be having at least 6 months off starting from July. I spoke to Alicia Pierce about my concerns, and she said something like “I am sure that you will use your charm to get the desired result”. I felt that I had used up all of my charm to get time off to attend UYMG Sydney, but Alicia was right. My boss, Ann, found a way for me to get leave so that I could go to Texas. Thanks very much for that Ann.

The photo above shows Joey and Jennifer with Stephen Pierce at UYMG Sydney 2008.  Jennifer, the girl on the right, was the Alpha Leader team captain at UYMG Sydney 2008 and will be travelling with me to Texas. Jennifer seemed to be a lovely person, so I am looking forward to having conversations with her on the flight to Texas. Gary, Veit and his wife are the only other confirmed Australian Alpha leaders going that I know of, but they are going on an earlier flight.

I have been very busy lately, but the excitement is certainly building up for this Texas trip. Not only will it be great to catch up with Stephen, Alicia, Laura, Sern Yi, the Alpha Leaders and the rest of the crew, but there will be many new people that I will have a chance to meet. I have never been to the USA too, so that will be an experience in itself.

I will take my camera again. Hopefully I can provide some nice snaps for the readers of this blog.

I was searching through my mail recently and found an email, written below, with respect to a blog that my dad works on. At first I thought that it was some sort of spam or trick, but after investigating it further I realized that it was for real and there really was a problem.

Dear site owner or webmaster of beatyourdepression.com,

We recently discovered that some of your pages can cause users to be
infected with malicious software. We have begun showing a warning page
to users who visit these pages by clicking a search result on Google.com.
Below are some example URLs on your site which can cause users to be
infected (space inserted to prevent accidental clicking in case your
mail client auto-links URLs):

http://beatyourdepression .com/blog/
http://beatyourdepression .com/blog/category/overcoming-depression

Here is a link to a sample warning page:
http://www.google.com/interstitial?url=http%3A//beatyourdepression.com/blog/

We strongly encourage you to investigate this immediately to protect
your visitors. Although some sites intentionally distribute malicious
software, in many cases the webmaster is unaware because:

1) the site was compromised
2) the site doesn’t monitor for malicious user-contributed content
3) the site displays content from an ad network that has a malicious
advertiser

If your site was compromised, it’s important to not only remove the
malicious (and usually hidden) content from your pages, but to also
identify and fix the vulnerability. We suggest contacting your hosting
provider if you are unsure of how to proceed. StopBadware also has a
resource page for securing compromised sites:
http://www.stopbadware.org/home/security

Once you’ve secured your site, you can request that the warning be
removed by visiting
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=45432
and requesting a review. If your site is no longer harmful to users,
we will remove the warning.

Sincerely,
Google Search Quality Team

I checked out some information from stopbadware.com and realized that the static site was OK, but the blog had some problems. I now know why the traffic stats had dropped significantly. Google had dropped the blog posts from its index.

I contacted my hosting company. They were helpful as usual, but they told me that they could not really help me too much without any more specific information from Google.

I knew that dad and I had not deliberately put malicious content on the blog, so I investigated further by checking http://www.stopbadware.org/home/reportsearch with all of the external links that we had on the blog. All of them were found to be clean.

I used the clearing house tool with several of my other sites, including this blog, and they all came up clean until I arrived to another site with the same wordpress theme as the beatyourdepression theme. Therefore I thought that it was possible that the theme itself had been corrupted somehow. However, I found some other sites with the same wordpress them and they all were clear.

I then tried some of my other blogs and found a few more that were earmarked by the clearing house as having badware within them.

It then became apparent that there was a common denominator between the blogs that had badware and those that were OK. The ones that had badware had “Anyone can register” ticked in the membership section of the settings in wordpress. I unticked all of those boxes on the affected sites, although the latest wordpress upgrade (2.5.1) is supposed to fix this problem.

I then had to search through all of the posts for coding that was not supposed to be there. (Go to Manage post and choose html). Much of the bad coding had iframes and something like “<-traffic Statistics” and links to bad sites such as ringphones, casinos etc. It took ages to sift through all of the posts and remove all of the bad code, but hopefully it is all OK now. Note that all of the badware is not visible on your blog for the viewer.

I have asked for Google and stopbadware to check the site out again and I shall have to wait and see how it all goes. I really have to thank them for alerting me about the badware as the last thing I would like is having my readers being affected by it.

I have learnt my lessons. 

So what do I suggest other bloggers to do right now???

1. Upgrade your wordpress (or other type) blog NOW.
2. Remove the tick from “Anyone can register” if that is not totally necessary.
3. Check out to see if your sites have badware on them using http://www.stopbadware.org/home/reportsearch
4. Fix up any corrupt posts or pages by deleting the bad code
5. Tell Google and Stopbadware that your site is now OK again (if there was a problem in the 1st place)
6. Have a nice cup of tea and keep a positive attitude