I am going to ask you this only once… do you, or do you not know about the bird?

The Surfin Bird family guy

I have been using Twitter on and off for the past couple of months, and today I wanted to test it and push it, and see just what could be achieved with Twitter.

Now, for many people, Twitter is a networking tool and ego massaging tool, but I don’t have time for that right now, I want to do what I do best: shake things up and create a little chaos.

So I thought to myself, is it possible to start a viral video with Twitter?

Afterall, we have seen viral videos spread via blogs, but could the same apply to Twitter?

There was only one way to find out, so I grabbed the first video that amused me (see above), it was taken from this week’s episode of Family Guy, and contains a song called Surfin Bird, which was a big hit in the 60’s (so I am told).

My Viral Twitter Test

As you can see, people are already picking up on it, one guy is even linking to the video in his latest aweber email messages.

Now, I should stress that this is not a publicity stunt on my part, the traffic is actually going to a YouTube video, and I didn’t make the video, and that is NOT me at the end of the video.

So can Twitter be used to launch a viral stunt, buzz campaign, amusing video or meme?

It is early days, but it certainly seems to be a good catalyst.

Stay tuned, and one final question: Have you heard about the bird?

Dean

You wouldn’t normally associate humour and fun as business tools, but in the world of web 2.0 and user generated content, there is a huge benefit to mastering what I like to call “personality marketing”.

In a nutshell, it is the art of injecting personality into your web business, and there is no doubt that humour and fun are two of the best ways to do this.

Today I am going to show you a great example of this, from a guy who has a website in the weight loss industry, an industry which is often quite dull, serious and lifeless. Just take a look at some of the wacky stuff David has done below:

The above was a character that he created called “Mr Amos”. It is pretty wacky, but that is a good thing, as it will get people talking about him.

Another technique I recommend in my up’coming book is to jump on the bandwagon for hot trends or memes etc… You may all be aware of the Rickroll phenomenon, and David has put his own spin on it by Rickrolling his own family.

The final video I want to share with you is more focused on his product, and I really feel that having something like this on a sales or squeeze page would dramatically increase conversions:

So I take my metaphorical hat off to David Maleney from Correct Mind For Weightloss for using humour and fun in his business.

You can see all of David’s videos on his Youtube page.

This blog was recently hacked, and one thing I kept hearing over and over again from readers and friends was: “oh, that is so bad, I hope it never happens to my blog”.

Unfortunately, ‘hope’ is about as useless as an ejector seat in a helicopter against hackers, I don’t ever recall hearing that a hacker was unable to hack into NASA because they were hoping he wouldn’t.

So I contacted a good friend, and we decided to take matters into our own hands, we decided that this would be our good deed for the year, and almost definitely a fast-track into karma heaven.

So we rolled up our sleeves and worked well into the night, searching each and EVERY blog in the infamous top 100 make money online list for any sign that they had also been hacked.

We checked all the big names, from John Chow to Problogger, from Copyblogger to Shoemoney, Jim Kukral to Blueverse.

We started with some good news, none of the BIG 10 had been infected.

Our spirits were high, surely none of the top 100 blogs would be infected… but then I was reminded that DeanHunt.com was in the top 50 when it was hacked.

So onwards we marched, all the way from number 1 to number 100, performing checks on every site on the list.

We finally reached blog 100 in the early hours, exhausted and dizzy.

Had we found a hacked blog? Had one of the top 100 blogs been hacked?

You are not going to believe the answer…

Find out next week when I reveal all….

JUST JOKING

Yes, and yes! One of the top blogs was infected, in fact, it was a blog from within the top 50.

See the screenshot below for proof of what we found:

As you can see, the top 40 blog Affiliate Confession has been well and truly hacked and infected with invisible junk links to ringtone websites. The spam links are still there at the time of writing this.

Now let’s put this into perspective: this is a top 40 site, with over 440 feed readers, it hasn’t been neglected, infact, the most recent post was 24 hours ago, and clearly the owner knows what he is doing.

If you include DeanHunt.com that means that 1 out of every 25 blogs have been infected in the top 50 sites, and remember, these are the big players. Imagine what it is like elsewhere in other industries.

So once again, this is a shout to everyone who owns a Wordpress blog, check your site using the free tool we have created, then read this post to make sure you are protected.

For everyone else, again, we ask you to spread the word, afterall, that such big sites have been infected is BIG news, so mention this on your twitter, blogs, facebook, digg etc….

Together we can raise awareness.

Thankyou.

Dean Hunt (with a lot of help from Paul)

If you own a Wordpress blog, you may have been hacked, but what’s worse, you may not even know that you have been exploited.

This happened to me recently, and today I want to ensure that every Wordpress reader not only knows how to detect this problem, but how to fix the problem & how to protect your site from future attacks.

Ok, here is the thing… like most marketers, my technical skills are not very good, but like most marketers, I have a lot of very useful contacts. So I contacted a good friend of mine (Paul from SEOidiot)

Paul takes up the story below:

What Happened To DeanHunt.com - By Paul

Here’s the technical side of what they did and what we did to get around it, plus a brief explanation of what I coded to try and give people the chance to check for themselves: -

Wordpress uses calls to wp_head and wp_footer to allow plugins to alter the content being returned as the page loads, a good example of this working well would be the SEO Title Tags plugin. However this is the functionality that the spammers used to insert a whole raft of links into the footer.

This article [http://linux.byexamples.com/archives/397/wordpress-exploit-we-been-hit-by-hidden-spam-link-injection/] explains the technique for anyone who likes headaches, but in basic terms they are using compromised theme files or adding in new files to your compromised server which act on the wp_footer call to insert their links.

They have been even smarter than that though as they have cloaked the links, so if you pop over to your own hacked site and view the source code you wont see the inserted links. Only when Googlebot comes along are the links shown, which is obviously a bad thing as Google suddenly thinks you’re linking out to a bunch of parasite hosted pills sites and will give you a penalty or remove you as a result.

Note: Dean’s rankings were virtually wiped out in Google

The Solution

So how to solve this? On a dedicated box you can trawl through searching for the files known to be compromised but a simpler and easier method is to remove the wp_footer call from the footer.php file in your current theme.

There are very few plugins that do anything useful in the footer so this made sense for Dean. If it had been the WP_head that was inserting links we would have needed to get the host to find the dodgy files or perhaps to have moved to a clean install somewhere else.

Because it isn’t easy for people to detect when they have been hacked this way I wrote a little tool to show people what their Google cache thinks are links out from your page, you can find this free tool at http://www.seoidiot.co.uk/cachecheker/

Back to Dean….

So in a nutshell, your Wordpress blog may have been hacked, and the usual checks won’t show anything wrong. You may only realise something is wrong once you have been booted out of Google.

I am happy to announce that my Google rankings returned within 4 days of the offending spam being removed, which just shows once more why Google are by far the king of the search world.

So how can you prevent this happening to your Wordpress site?

Firstly, and perhaps most importantly, make sure your Wordpress is up to date. If you remain with the latest version at all times, you stand a much better chance of never having these issues.

For the more technically minded amongst you, i got some great tips from Matt Cutts, and this post I hope that considering the circumstances, Matt won’t mind me posting his tips below:

1. Secure your /wp-admin/ directory. What I’ve done is lock down /wp-admin/ so that only certain IP addresses can access that directory. I use an .htaccess file, which you can place directly at /wp-admin/.htaccess . This is what mine looks like:
   

   AuthUserFile /dev/null
   AuthGroupFile /dev/null
   AuthName “Access Control”
   AuthType Basic
   order deny,allow
   deny from all
   # whitelist home IP address
   allow from 64.233.169.99
   # whitelist work IP address
   allow from 69.147.114.210
   allow from 199.239.136.200
   # IP while in Kentucky; delete when back
   allow from 128.163.2.27

   I’ve changed the IP addresses, but otherwise that’s what I use. This file says that the IP address 64.233.169.99 (and the other IP addresses that I’ve whitelisted) are allowed to access /wp-admin/, but all other IP addresses are denied access. Has this saved me from being hacked before? Yes.

2. Make an empty wp-content/plugins/index.html file. Otherwise you leak information on which plug-ins you run. If someone wanted to hack your blog, they might be able to do it by discovering that you run an out-of-date plugin on your blog and then they could exploit that.
3. Subscribe to the WordPress Development blog at http://wordpress.org/development/feed/ . When WordPress patches a security hole or releases a new version, they announce it on that blog. If you see a security patch released, you need to upgrade or apply the patch. You leave yourself open to being hacked if you don’t upgrade.

And here’s a bonus tip: in the header.php file for your theme, you might want to check for a line like

<meta name=”generator” content=”WordPress <?php bloginfo(’version’); ?>” /> <!-– leave this for stats please -->


I’d just go ahead and delete that line or at least the bloginfo(’version’). If you’re running an older version of WordPress, anyone can view source to see what attacks might work against your blog.

Credit to Matt, Reuben and my buddy ShoeMoney I also got a lot of assistance from David Geere from the awesome EatingBritain. Oh, and David Naylor was incredibly helpful as well. Thanks David.

What’s Next For My Wordpress Site’s Security?

Myself and Dave are looking to do a fresh install of Wordpress, and we will also be looking into any plugins that can further assist us.

If you have any advice or tips based on the above, please leave them in the comments box. Also, send this post to any friends who have a Wordpress site, I would hate for them to go through the hell that I had to suffer.

A wise man once told me: “what doesn’t kill you, only makes you stronger”, together we can ensure we are all strong enough to avoid this sort of issue in future.

Dean

Today I am going to talk a little about how NOT to spend your money… or more importantly, how to prioritise where you spend it.

For those of you who have been following my buzz marketing advice for a while, the money should now be coming in, and whether it be an extra $100 per month or an extra $10,000 you are going to have many options on where and how to spend that extra cash.

So here is my advice to you in a nutshell: Comfort Comes Before Image

Unfortunately, due to billion dollar ad campaigns, society works the other way around… for example, I recently bought a 50″ plasma tv at over $2,500 in cost, not one of my friends, family or neighbours said anything about this… however, when I let them know that I have a cleaner who comes and irons and cleans my appartment twice per week, they suddenly raise their eyebrows in shock and disbelief at such extravagance.

But for the cost of the TV, I can hire the cleaner for almost a year and a half.

Which of the two is going to have the greater effect on my life?

The Cleaner!!!

One of these expenses will enrich my life, free up my time, improve my living conditions, and therefore my mental state, and generally save me a lot of time, energy and hassle…

The other, is going to waste my time, and negatively affect my fitness and mental condition.

Yet it is the cleaner that gets the raised eyebrows.

I also recently hired a personal assistant to come in once per week and help with my accounts, paperwork, bills, receipts etc… again, this brought a shocked response from my friends, yet they haven’t said a word about my home cinema sound system… despite the fact that I live in an appartment now, and can’t use even 10% of it’s power.

It reminds me of a story from my buddy Woody Maxim, who was mocked by his friends because he bought a $7,300 matress. The same friends who bought sports cars and had no issue justifying that to themselves.

Woody’s point was that he is likely to spend more time on that matress than any other place on the planet, and out of every possession he owns (other than his home), it is what he will get the most use out of.

So if you do have a little extra cash this month, don’t waste it on the crap that the ad companies want you to spend it on, instead, invest in your own comfort, and focus on making your life easier.

Once you have your comfort and state of mind sorted, THEN you can go and buy a Porsche.

Dean

PS: a wise man once told me that it is your state of mind that will determine your prosperity level.