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.
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):
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
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???
Upgrade your wordpress (or other type) blog NOW.
Remove the tick from “Anyone can register” if that is not totally necessary.
As mentioned in a previous post, I planned to write a little about the guest speakers of UYMG Sydney 2008. Today I will write about Alan Forrest Smith.
Alan Forrest Smith is well known in the Internet Marketing world as an expert copywriter. Not only has he written for Stephen Pierce, but he has also written for the likes of Jay Abraham group, Marlon Sanders and Ted Ciuba.
Alan started used copywriting for his hairdressing business, but he read tons of books and attended many courses to perfect his skills. He now teaches others how to become great copywriters as well as some other Internet marketing skills. You can find more information about Alan Forrest Smith and his copywriting skills at his Orange Beetle site.
When Alan Forrest Smith got on stage at UYMG, he was wearing a kilt. He reminded me of Billy Connolly when he mentioned words to the effect, in a Scottish accent of course, “Before I came up on stage a couple of people were asking me why I was wearing a long dress…. you can find them lying on the floor towards the back of the room”.
I spoke to Alan during the event and found out that he came from Edinburgh, Scotland. I noticed that he said the word “wee” a wee less than my Glasgow born girlfriend Maureen does.
I found Alan Forrest Smith’s girlfriend to be very nice. I think her name was Katherine, but please correct me if this is not the case. She was amused that there was a picture of Pavarotti at the Acer Arena because of the likeness between Alan Forrest Smith and Pavarotti. I should have taken a photo of Alan with the photo of Pavarotti in the background, but I did not think of it at the time. The photo below is a blown up version of the Pavarotti photo taken behind the photo of Laura and me.
As you are probably aware by now, my dad “John” was one of the Alpha Leaders at UYMG Sydney last month.
In the last post I wrote, dad made a comment “I am disappointed that you did not link to the video of the dancing on stage at the start of day 2 when that “Old Bloke” showed the youngsters a few steps. Anyhow the video failed to show most of the dance steps and focused mainly on upper body movements. :)”
Well I have now included the video of dad performing and starring on stage along with some other Alpha Leaders. You can see it below. In my opinion, he really did dance very well and I know that some others agree with me. Unfortunately, I was at the door, so I did not get to see him or the other Alpha Leaders perform live. Thanks for taking the video Sern Yi.
UYMG Sydney March 2008 (Unleash Your Marketing Genius) has been and gone and I had a wonderful time again. I wanted to get this and some other UYMG posts out earlier, but I had some unforeseen difficulties that I had to sort out first, including computer PC problems. I will not get into that now though.
The attendance was good considering that the WIS (World Internet Summit) was being held at the same time, and there was a great deal of energy in the room. Thanks for all that participated in the event to make it all so worthwhile. The good news is that UYMG and WIS will be combined in Dallas, Texas 22-25 May. I will be there, so hopefully I shall see you there too.
Many may not realize that Stephen Pierce did not get his luggage until the day before he had to go back home. In fact both he and Alicia lost their luggage on the return trip too 🙁 . Stephen and Alicia had to hustle around town to find suitable clothing for him to wear at the event. Alicia told me that she had previously bought some expensive clothing for Stephen just for the event. Despite all the chaos, Stephen provided a few days worth of internet marketing and related content in his usual professional and informative manner. Everyone seemed to pay close attention to every word he spoke, as they should have. I was quite amazed and impressed with the fact that Stephen sometimes did not know what he was going to talk about until moments before he went on stage.
Above is a photo taken of Stephen Pierce with me at UYMG Sydney 2008. Have a look at the size of his fist and forearm. I had better stay on the good side of Stephen… only joking.
Alicia was as lovely as usual at UYMG Sydney 2008. Every time I have been in contact with Alicia she has been very helpful and friendly to me. I know that Alicia has faith in me and I really appreciate the support she has given me. Alicia does a lot of work in the background to help support and promote Stephen and they complement each other very well. I loved the hat that she was wearing at the event. The hat can be seen in the photo below of Alicia Pierce and me.
Laura Remeselnik is well known within the SMCC community, where she works flat out. It was her first appearance at a UYMG event in Sydney and I was glad that I got to catch up with her in real person after receiving many emails from her in the past. Laura, along with with Sern Yi (The SMCC development manager and one of the nicest person that I have met), gave a hands on presentation about web pages and ftp. I found Laura to have a pleasant and unique personality. I enjoyed the conversations that I had with Laura and enjoyed working with her at the event. Laura is also mad about craft work, so we had some craft exercises to do in the pre UYMG training.
Above is a great photo of Laura Remeselnik and me at UYMG Sydney 2008. Don’t worry Maureen (my girlfriend), Laura is happily engaged to be married. Raymond, make sure that you take notice of that last sentence! Also notice the picture of Pavarotti in the background? That photo of Pavarotti will become relevant in a future post.
Unlike 2007, UYMG Sydney 2008 was held at the Acer Arena at Sydney Olympic Park. While the Acer Arena may have been difficult for some people to get to, I had the pleasure of dealing with some of the staff who ran the Arena and I found them to be very nice. In case you are reading this post, a warm hello to all, including the manager, head caterer and the cleaner.
My dad “John” was part of the Alpha Leadership group this year and we both shared accommodation at the Ibis. The Ibis was less than a 10 minute walk to the Acer Arena, so it was very handy for us. I only wished that they remembered to replace the towels when they took the used ones away for cleaning. My dad was suffering from a cold and was coughing and spluttering at night. You would not know it though as he was lively and very helpful at the event.
Below is a photo of Stephen Pierce, dad and me at UYMG Sydney. You can see dad and me propping Stephen up to make him look taller, well it almost looks that way.. lol.
UYMG had several guest speakers of which I shall write posts about in the future. Inanna Lawton and Melissa Hewetson both presented in the previous UYMG event too. Others included Allan Forrest Smith, Nikhil Parekh, Andrew and Daryl Grant, Janet Switzer, Ken Shimizu and Ben Teo.
