Your Computer and your computer skills

In the internet marketing business, your computer will be your best friend and your daily companion. Let’s not kid ourselves and admit you will need basic computer skills in order to be a successful internet marketer.

Do not worry though, not long ago, I used to scream to my teenager son to come help me do a simple copy-paste! Now, less than 24 months later I have over 100 websites up and running.

There are places you can learn basic computer skills and I personally enjoy very much those illustrated books that show you exactly where to go and what to click.

Computer learning is a work in progress and if you have children at home, the odds are good they can help you!

Most computer programs also hold a help section where most if not all your questions are answered. I personally find these programs to be hard to understand and need to print the instructions. My most helpful resource is to go into Google search and type in my problem. 99,9% of the time other people have experienced the same problems and are willing to share their solutions with me.

The power of the internet is created by the fact that all its users (billions of them) are creating a community which supports one and another.

For example, I had a printer which had tremendous power but was always malfunctioning. I was just about ready to throw it in the trash! Suddenly, it stroke me that if I had this problem, someone else must experience it too. So I did a Google search and found all the creative solutions other people found to make this kind of printer work. I now love my printer as I am getting the most of it.

Another way of getting basic computer knowledge is to take a course but then again some teachers really enjoy making simple things sound complicated and you end-up wasting your time and feeling stupid. (insert picture called my computer 11).

I HONESTLY CAN SAY I HOLD VERY BASIC COMPUTER KNOWLEDGE AND YET I HAVE OVER 100 WEB SITES RUNNING AND HELPING PEOPLE! You can too.

They say in internet marketing that you should only have one important message and one important call to action on every page.

The way this web site will be designed (limited to 40 squares like a standard board game), I will have no choice but to put more than one valuable information on every page.

HENCE’ THE NEXT SECTION IS CRUCIAL FOR YOUR MENTAL HEALTH AND WELL-BEING.

John Reese who is a great experienced internet marketer said it best when he said: “It is not a question of IF your computer will crash but WHEN it will crash!”

(insert picture called computer crashing).

Tools to help prevent your computer from crashing are antivirus:

There are many antivirus companies. The most two common ones are Mccafee and Norton. The windows protection system does not provide a complete anti-virus software so you need to get an independent one.

(insert pictures called computer virus 1,2 and 3 here please)

Those anti-virus have the problem of running scans that are sometimes very slow and prevent you from working. A good idea is to schedule your scans at night while you are sleeping.

I personally like a lot the software called Noadware which is not an anti-virus but rather an anti-tracking software which can slow down your computer. Allow me to explain in my simple English (I am French from birth): whenever you visit a web site, sometimes, this site decides to keep your data in their database and “track” you sort of speaking. In the long run if hundreds of companies are tracking you, whenever you go on the internet, you will have a slow connection as all these companies are receiving signals that you are surfing. By doing a simple scan, you can delete all those so called “cookies” which are nothing else than tracking data from you.

The other way to delete cookies is to go in internet explorer (standard on every recent computer), click on the upper task bar, click on “internet options” and then in the middle of the window, click on “delete cookies”.

The other thing you need to do to protect all your valuable files (data, text, pictures, etc) is to do regular back-ups. These back-ups should be done on CDs or external drive devices.

ONE WORD OF CAUTION AGAIN!!

Many people come to me telling me they have bought those little external disks you can wear on your neck that cost anywhere from 20 to 100$. They are scams! I know I bought one.

The salesman was very convincing of telling me how practical they are and how I could put my entire computer data on there but when I started trying to download songs, I got the message the files were too big. I then called my sister who laughed at me and asked: ”How many Gigs does it say on the device?” I answered: “512 megabytes”. She said: “take out any 50 cents plain CD you have and read how many megabytes they can hold!” I checked and answered sadly: 700 mégabytes!”

You should be happy, I just saved you tens of dollars…

The easy way I have found to do my computer back-up as I travel a lot and do not carry my heavy backup device, is I bought an Ipod that is 80 Gigs. When I told my hip 15 year old daughter that I was going to do a back-up of my computer on my Ipod, she just laughed at me. (insert picture called laughing)

I, of course, had no idea how to do a back-up of my laptop using my Ipod, I just relied on what a friend had told me. What could I do? Who could I call and disturb?

I just did a Google search and there it was in three simple steps!

This is one thing I just looooooove about internet it’s that it contains its own solutions. Most of your problems when you are stuck have their own solutions on the internet itself.

TIME FOR A SAD STORY!

I have a friend who is the sweetest person in the world and a great internet marketer. One day, he was not his usual chirpy self and we asked him what was wrong. He answered that the company who was hosting many of his money making web sites had just crashed and went out of business. (picture called computer smoking). When he contacted them, they just answered:”we are sorry. We lost everything. We cannot recover your data.”

The second lesson on this page is that you need a back-up of all of your web sites data so if anything happens, you can rebuild them easily and rapidly. Unfortunately, most web masters do not bother with offering a back-up of web sites and are just content to admire their masterpiece.

I found that out the hard way when all the pictures on one of my web sites (www.hypno-beginning.com) had disappeared one day. Nobody knew what happened and blamed a little gobbling but the matter of the fact was that all the pictures had vanished! (insert picture called goblin please).

I had to search on all my back-up disks and find the missing pictures. In summary, I wasted an entire day of doing some recovery work.

How would you feel if you were finally successful in your internet marketing business and lost it all overnight??

Of course, if this is a problem that you may encounter, there are other people that have encountered it and found solutions to it. There is a good software that can create a back-up of your web sites in minutes and you will never have to suffer the agony of loosing your hard-worked labor.

(link to data base back-up)

URGH!! I knew this was going to happen! I just wanted to write simple pages but they end-up being long. My apologies but my main concern is to give you as much valuable information as I can.

Take care,

Nathalie

(image of queen).

HERE IS YOUR CALL TO ACTION:

See you on the next square!

 Nathalie