Before I share a few more of Gary’s invaluable insights let me tell you why I am so enthralled with the message.  Over the years I’ve had many clients and potential clients ask me to help the build their websites and help them figure out how to market their blogs, who I knew weren’t’ going to make it.  I knew it because they came to me after reading some huckster’s garbage about how to get rich selling ebooks, or creating blogs for Google’s Adsense, or some other get rich easy scheme.  I do what I do because helping people has always been my passion.  Anytime someone has come to me to help them build a blog or website and I got the sense that they had been drinking the Internet get rich koolaid I’ve flat out told them that there is no easy Internet path to wealth.  Usually, I get a sincere thanks, and then asked if I will do the job anyway.  Months later some of these individuals come back to me, having written a handful of blog posts and bookmarked their site at a few social bookmarking sites, to ask why their product isn’t selling, or they aren’t getting more visitors.

The second most valuable piece of advice Gary gives, in my opinion, is patience.  I would word this a bit difference because I think what he really means is perseverance.  In my mind patience is waiting for something to happen while perseverance is taking the time to make something happen. As Vaynerchuk puts it “No one makes a million dollars with little effort unless they win the lottery.”  He admonishes readers of his book, “If you contact me within a year of starting your business to complain that you haven’t made the money you thought you would, you’re not listening.  I said that you could make a ton of money being happy; I didn’t say you could do it overnight.”

Whether or not you read “Crushing It” if you’re going to use the Internet to make a living or give a significant boost to your business take what Vaynerchuk has to say about hard work and patience aka perseverance to heart.

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The question any company considering advertising on Facebook should be if they can afford to have their brand linked to Facebooks reputation.  At the moment, we’re advising our clients to put their Facebook campaigns on hold, and new advertisers to wait until Facebook cleans up it’s privacy act.  Advertising and building trust through advertising is tough enough.  When a company advertises on a social media site like FB they hope to be associated in the same sphere of trust as family and friends.  Right now on FB they’re getting anything but that.

Our hope is that Facebook will do a turn around on their privacy policy and hold user’s information safe.  Now is the time for them to step back from the direction they’ve been headed in.  Make a formal and public apology and accompany that apology with not only a new restricted privacy policy, but a user interface that makes restricting your information easy.

In our opinion the good guys on this one are the FCC, Google, Amazon, Common Cause, and others who argue for a concept known as net neutrality.  On the other side  are Comcast AT&T, Verizon etc. who want to control what you can view and how fast you can do that.   You can imagine the advantage for a cable company like Comcast.  They can choose to show their shows to their subscribers while blocking YouTube or other services.

Recently, the US Court of Appeals decided that the FCC can not regulate cable giant Comcast from slowing traffic to a particular website.  Today it’s Bittorrent tomorrow it could be YouTube and the day after that you could find that visitors can’t access your website because they haven’t paid a premium or you haven’t paid off their ISP to allow them easy access to your site.

Some anti-regulation types will cry foul .  They’ll say that this is just part of the Government’s take over, it’s attempt to socialize our country.  In reality, our country’s infrastructure has always had government regulation and the fastest growing part of the US infrastructure is the Internet. Imagine a free for all in our airspace. What would your next flight look like if air traffic controllers were privatized and the price your airline paid determined your landing or take off position.  Does that sound like a good thing?

Given provisions of the Patriot Act that forced libraries to turn over records and report on who took out certain books, it seems likely that the privacy behind buying and borrowing books is dead.  Since the basis of Amazon’s argument is that to do what NC asks would violate the privacy of what it’s customers are purchasing it seems likely to fail.  Additionally, NC could ask for total sales by customer without the data of what they purchased.  Amazon certainly has this information and the certainly have the ability to sort the records this way and ultimately they can afford the staff time to do it.   The same burden on a small business is huge and while it seems likely Amazon will lose this fight, for the same of small business, we hope they’ll win.

What can you do?  Insist that they give your new WordPress driven pages the same URL as the old pages had.  In most cases this will be possible.  In a few cases, such as when your old url had a capitol letter in it, it isn’t possible.  In this case insist that they do a 301 redirect.  You don’t need to know what that is, you just need to know they need to do it.  Also, don’t let them just 301 redirect your entire site because this is a very poor second choice to creating the same URL’s as you had before the conversion.

In no way should this scare you off from converting your site to WordPress.  The benefits of a conversion are huge, but there are pitfalls so choose a savvy developer and be sure to ask them how they intend to handle URLs in their process.  If they don’t know move on and find a new developer.

Hmm… sounds fishy.  Herley estimates that if it takes 1 minute per day from every working adult to focus on security the cost is $15.9 billion per year.  Okay that’s a lot of moola, but what’s your actual cost of spending 1 minute per day on security.  Let’s say your  hourly rate is $60.00.  If you spend one minute a day on internet security your costing yourself $1.00.  Chances are you don’t even need to spend a minute a day to have secure passwords, more likely the total task on a yearly basis would be in the hour to two hour range and that’s if you have a lot of passwords.  This is certainly true if you use automate the tasks you can.  You probably don’t spend more than 20 minutes updating your virus protection yearly.  And, in terms of avoiding phishing, you can learn all you need to know and stay up to date in 20 minutes every six months.  Total yearly time cost, two hours.   So it costs you $120.00 per year to not have your identity stolen, not have your bank account broken into, not  have your credit cards hijacked, not have your credit rating destroyed.  Want to guess how many hours any of those things are going to take to repair?

Do yourself a favor, get good anti virus protection with a firewall, get a password manager and stay up to date on the latest phishing hazards because 2 hours a year can save you endless hours of headache, no matter what Microsoft says.

“

Computerworld has done a more extensive article on the situation here.  Network Solutions isn’t saying what the vulnerability is which leaves us guessing that it has yet to be fixed.

From a business owner’s perspective their are two ways that this can be damaging.  First of all, there is lost trust with clients.  What’s happening (in at least some cases)  is that the hackers are redirecting these sites to a site that infects the visitor’s computer with a virus.   Once your client has to go through the hassle of cleaning up their computer and maybe some expense in doing so, how soon do you think they’ll want to visit your site again?

The second way that your site can be hurt is that if there is malware on your hacked site, Google may block your site from its index or mark it in its index as being infected by malware.  Left untreated your site could lose its rankings.  Google does have a process for getting the site reevaluated, but who needs the headache.

If you’re on Network Solutions and you’ve been hacked and you didn’t get notified of the problem, it’s probably worth contacting their customer support to ask why you weren’t alerted to the situation.

This still leaves a lot of unanswered questions about traveling with an iPad.  What was it like to watch a movie on?  Want to work on a spreadsheet for the meeting you have an hour after get off the plane, we don’t yet know how it was for that.

Today is Paul’s first day working from his home office on his iPad and what we know so far is that it is a great alarm clock as it woke him up at 4:30.  Unfortunately, that wasn’t the hour he wanted to get up, but due to WiFi and the fact that iPad is set for push email that was what time the email notifier started making enough noise to get him out of bed.  Hopefully things will improve for him on this first full work day of the experiment.