internet marketing / YOUR COMPUTER AND YOUR COMPUTER SKILLS

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 at my teenager son to com ande 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 very much enjoy 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 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 and each member of the community supports one 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 struck 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 out 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.

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 is designed (limited to 40 squares like a standard board game), I have no choice but to put more than one piece of 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!”

Tools to help prevent your computer from crashing are antivirus: there are many antivirus programs. The two most common ones are Mcafee and Norton. Another great free antivirus is called AVG. The windows protection system does not provide a complete anti-virus software so you need to get an independent one.

These anti-virus programs 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): when you visit a web site, sometime, the site decides to keep your data in their database and “track” your activites. 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 doing nothing else other than tracking you activities.

The other way to delete cookies is to go into 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, 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 stating 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 kilobytes”. She said: “take out any 50 cent 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.

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 the internet is that it contains its own solutions. Most of your problems, when you are stuck, have their own solutions readily available on the internet itself.

TIME FOR A SAD STORY!

I have a friend who had many sites that were bringing him daily good revenues and he was happy. One day, he checked his sites and all he got was the annoying windows explorer message “this page cannot be displayed”. His blood froze right there. He contacted his hosting company but they did not answer.

What did he do next?

Yes! He did a Google search typing in the name of the company and problem and he landed on people’s blogs and forums who were saying how they had lost their sites overnight and contacted the company but got no answer. His worst fears were getting confirmed and he had to rebuild all the sites from scratch.

What would have made that story a yawning event? Think hard!

If he or his webmaster had made a back-up of his sites, he could have been back in business the same day. Sadly he did not have a back-up of his sites.

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) disappeared one day. Nobody knew what happened and blamed a little goblin but the fact of the matter was that all the pictures had vanished!

I had to search on all my back-up disks and find the missing pictures. In summary, I wasted an entire day 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 are good software programs that can create a back-up of your web site in minutes and you will never have to suffer the agony of loosing your hard-worked labor.

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.

HERE IS YOUR CALL TO ACTION:

Your action for today will consist of finding a good computer and protect it from loss of data by getting a good anti-virus software.

See you on the next square!

  Nathalie