My company, American Consumer News, LLC, sends out about two million emails per month. The vast majority of these are the daily edition of our investment newsletter, ARN Daily. We do send out our fair share of marketing messages too, so I’ve had a lot of opportunities to do try things out to see what generally …
Don’t Build an Ecosystem-Based Business
In the last five years, there has been a major trend to build businesses on top of the platforms offered by major web companies, such as eBay, Facebook, Twitter, Apple (iTunes) and Google (YouTube, Search). Eight years ago, the big thing was to build an eBay business. Four years ago, the big thing to do …
Podcasts I’m Listening To
Like many entrepreneurs, I am a voracious consumer of content. I read a lot of non-fiction books and listen to dozens of podcasts each week (35 to be exact). Someone asked me the other day what podcasts I listen to, so I went through my feed and have compiled the most recent list below: Business and …
There’s Only One Problem with Passive Income Businesses
If you’ve spent more than a minute hanging out on internet marketing forums or listening attention to gurus, you’ve been pitched on the idea of generating a passive income stream. In order to get you to sign-up for a service or buy some sort of product, some marketer will sell you on the dream that …
A Sure-Fire Way to Limit Your Business’s Upside Potential
What’s the difference between a food-service employee and a high-price attorney? When it comes to their compensation structure, not all that much. Both offer to perform specific tasks for an hourly rate. Granted, an attorney can charge a much higher hourly rate for their services than a fast food employee can, but both the attorney …
How to Prevent Your WordPress Website from Getting Hacked
“Hey, did you know one of your websites is redirecting to a Viagra website?” Receiving that phone call or email is probably not the way that you’d like to start your day. There’s big money in hacking websites, and using them for black-hat SEO or marketing purposes or serving malware to your visitors, so you …
How to Implement the SendGrid Newsletter API in ASP.NET and C#
A while back, SendGrid announced its newsletter functionality that provides functionality for managing and emailing distribution lists. If you’re a developer that makes use of SendGrid, you’re probably managing your list internally in a SQL database and have no need for SendGrid’s newsletter functionality, but there are two distinct advantages to using the Newsletter API.The …
How to Automatically Backup Your WordPress Website with BackWPUp
What would happen to your website if the server that powers your website were to crash? You would probably assume that’s something the hosting company is going to worry about and would go on with your life while you wait for them to get it back up and running. Unfortunately, many companies that offer shared …
How to Prevent WordPress Comment Spam
If you run a blog that’s powered by WordPress, inevitably your website will be hit by a deluge of comment spam. More often than not, it comes from automated software tools designed to build links back to the spammer’s website for search engine optimization (SEO) purposes. If you leave your WordPress blog unprotected, your posts …
How to Improve the Performance of Your WordPress Blog
WordPress does a lot of things right. It’s easy-to-use, it’s extensible and it has been widely adopted by the website development community. Unfortunately, WordPress doesn’t do a great job when operating under a heavy load of traffic, especially when residing on a shared hosting server and being combined with a couple of dozen third-party plugins …