Mark Acutt Online MarketingMark Acutt Online Marketing | Fresh Approach, New Ideas

SOPA Blackout

markacutt — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 17:20:00 +0000

What is SOPA and what is the SOPA blackout all about today 18th January 2012?

SOPA stands for STOP ONLINE PIRACY ACT.

So what’s the deal and how does it affect us?

SOPA is a proposed bill that will crack down on piracy websites and copyright infringement.

Apparently their main targets are are overseas (namely European) sites that host/provide services to download copyright content.

Here’s a few examples on the sites in question:

Pirate Bay
Torrent Portal
Mini Nova
Bittorrent
Torrent Reactor

And membership News sites like:

Newzbin – UK site that’s already had their fair share of court battles in the UK.
Gingadaddy

Also, streaming sites such as:
BeeMP3′s – Where you can search, listen to, and download music!

And…

YOUTUBE! Yes, there it is, YouTube will be serious affected. There’s no way that can control the millions of users and uploads.

So now you have the basics, how would this affect us?

The bill is to stop access to any sites as shown in the examples above. And it also puts the site OPERATORS in jeopardy for content that USERS upload.

The bill requires every payment or advertising network operator to set up a process through which outside parties can notify the company that one of its customers is an “Internet site is dedicated to theft of U.S. property.” Once a network gets a notification, it is required to cut off services to the target site within five days.

Read the full article here: CNN SOPA Explained

Wikipedia also has an explanation on their site. Stop Online Piracy Act

Three sites that I often use are against the bill. Namely Namecheap.com, Warriorforum.com and WORDPRESS.org. Three of the largest names in online marketing.

Warrior Forum have gone one step further than Namecheap and taken their entire site offline in support to stop the SOPA bill from being passed.

Warrior Forum state in BOLD: This bill is not the way to handle the problem. It is a disaster in the making.

In fact Warrior Forum’s concern and explanation is true in many ways:

How It Would Work

Here’s the simple version: If the Justice Department or any copyright holder accused a site of “encouraging or facilitating” piracy, the government could order that site removed from US-based search engines and ad networks, forbid payment processors from handling transactions for them, and require ISPs to block access to those sites by their customers.

Let’s consider how that might apply to this forum… There are currently over 335,000 pages on this site. If just one of those pages contained a single post promoting an illegal download, or one WSO seller has used graphics or code from a copyrighted product without permission, or we miss just one Chinese spam for counterfeit goods, we could be blocked.

Would it matter that we actively look for and delete those posts? Maybe, but only after the process had begun. And we’d probably never know about it until the block was in place.

The amount of time that it would take to correct such an unjustified blocking would cause permanent damage to any interactive site. Shifting the membership away from a destination for that long nearly guarantees the site would never recover.

Along with that, there is no requirement that payment processors re-accept a site that has been blocked this way. You know how these guys work: They don’t care if the site is eventually found innocent. They’d label it as “high risk,” and never deal with it again. And they’d probably start creating whole new categories to lock out, just to avoid the headaches.

“You let visitors post on your site? Sorry. We don’t accept interactive services in our network.”

And, unless the ISPs are working from a centralized and regularly updated database, it’s unlikely most of them would ever remove the blocks once they were in place.

Mistakes would almost certainly be fatal to the target sites. We’re talking about legitimate sites that provide real value for their visitors and real incomes for their operators and their families.

Here’s the video from Worpress.org explaining exactly what SOPA is all about:

How would it affect us?

Well, if the bill is passed; expect to see a LOT of sites you may regularly use SHUT DOWN, banned from ISP’s, search engines, and even fined.

It does mean that online piracy of our own digital work would be cut down to a minimum (but it will never be stopped).

Either way; if you run a “regular” website, stop your users from user being able to upload potentially copyrighted material, and operate ethically you should be safe if the bill is passed. It just feels like big brother is monitoring our every move and taking control of everything we do.

What’s your 5 cents?

Manage WP – Manage All Your WordPress Sites At Once

markacutt — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 14:56:15 +0000

ManageWP is an online system that allows you to manage all your WordPress sites from one central administration area.

This is NOT a sales pitch and I don’t have any affiliate links in this post. I stumbled across ManageWP when I was looking for an alternative to BackupBuddy.

Or even Robert Plank’s take with BackupCreator.

Importantly, does it do what it says on the tin without unleashing a new host of problems? I’ll find out, but first…

What does ManageWP allow you to do?

Manage all your WordPress Sites from one central area.
Upgrade all your wordpress sites, install/upgrade themes and plugins with a few clicks.
Backup your sites and databases (even to DropBox). You can also schedule backups.
Select the website you want to access and work on directly from Manage WP
Manage users on your sites
Install or *CLONE* your WordPress sites, see below…

Plus a LOT more!

The best thing with MangeWP is that at the moment it’s totally free. It’s in final beta testing stages but the final pricing when released seems well worth the time and hassle it will save us all when installing new blogs, updating WordPress, Themes, Plugins etc.

Should ManageWP have applications such as BackupBuddy and BackupCreator be shaking in their boots?

Well, I signed up and gave it a trial run (still in Beta stage), lets see how I got on…

As you can see below it’s easy to just add a site by clicking “Add Website“.

All you have to do is enter the Website URL and Admin Username.

PS: Click the images for the full size.

*NOTE: I’ve found that occasionally the wordpress plugin needs to be deactivated and reactivated in order for Manage WP to pick it up in the dashboard correctly. Below is my initial error…

After I had disabled and re-enabled the plugin the site was successfully added – see images below:

Tried again –> Success!

Manage WP then automatically added my website (as above).

You can see it’s been successfully added to my dashboard with my other domains.

So there you have it.

Once you have your site added there’s a whole host of things you can do including more that I have haven’t mentioned here.

VERDICT:

So is Manage WP a worthy contender of what else is out there?

Simple answer is: YES!

I think it’s a great way to backup, clone and upgrade your wordpress websites. Yes, there may be some teething problems, but doesn’t everything have these?

UPDATE:

There’s a new “final version” out and the final plans and pricing of Manage WP has been revealed (not an affiliate link).

You do get a 14 day free trial to test it out yourself.

It’s worth it for the time and headaches it saves managing multiple sites.

ClickBank Refund Policy Changes – Good or Bad?

markacutt — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 11:50:08 +0000

So what’s the deal? Are ClickBank refund changes good or bad?

I’ve been meaning to write about this for a couple days now as a policy update from ClickBank hit my inbox.

To sum up: Vendor accounts with a refund rate at or above 15% will incur additional fees or penalties.

So what does this mean and how will it affect you?

AFFILIATES:

If you’re an affiliate it’s great news. It means as an affiliate you can be sure vendors are going to be scurrying to make sure their products have a low refund rate.

That means less refunds for affiliates and more cash in their pocket.

The problem is; people expect MORE now than they did a few years back. If they’re going to fork out $37, $47 or even $97 on a book or video training it has to offer a lot more value than what they can find

[A] For free
[B] Elsewhere for cheaper (Take a look at Amazon Kindle as an example).

So what does this mean for Vendors?

VENDORS/MERCHANTS:

Wake up call time. Far too often I see vendors selling high priced items that just don’t cut it. They don’t deliver value on what is expected. Fair enough if you’re paying less than $20 for a product, that’s more than reasonable and you don’t expect much for 20 bucks.

But when an affiliate promotes a $47, $97 or $197 product, people want something of substance. Something they will learn from and say: “Wow, that was awesome”. Even if there is one good “take away” from the product, it lessons refunds.

Think about it…

If you learn one good thing that you can use and implement into your online business for the better, would you ask for a refund?

Usually not.

But a lot of products just don’t deliver. They promise to help you achieve all sorts of “magical” things – but in reality they just don’t work. They don’t help you (the customer) achieve the required result.

Bundled with regurgitated content that more often than not is easily found by searching online is a massive downfall.

Read the full ClickBank Policy Update.

Conclusion:

ClickBank are making a smart move. Vendors will be persuaded to providing better value at the risk of being penalized. In turn will help keep their affiliate retention.

This is great news all round for affiliates. Products with high refund rates will be lessoned and affiliates don’t have to learn the hard way by driving traffic (especially paid) only to find out the high refund rate at a later date.