Last week I was lucky enough to be invited to join another of John Thornhills Masterclass sessions – where John provides some training and answers everybody’s personal questions.

During the call, John mentioned problems people were having losing affiliate income from scammers.
That reminded me of the Hoplink Protector software I created some time ago.
I was following Jeff Walkers Video Squeeze Page course – using great professional graphics to promote a few selected high gravity Clickbank products.

After hundreds of hours work spread over many weeks, I had some great sites – but something was going very wrong with either the affiliate sites or Clickbank – because most of the time my affiliate links were either disappearing completely or being replaced by somebody else’s on my own PC!

I was horrified because most of my traffic had zero chance of bringing me affiliate sales.
Each time I raised a ticket with Clickbank they responded that there was no problem – despite thousands of angry posts on forums complaining about how much money other people were losing.

What I found was that when I first checked a hoplink after a day or two – my affiliate link had been replaced by somebody else’s.
The problem only disappeared for a day or two each time Clickbank investigated.
But if I refreshed the hoplink once or twice, my link appeared and stayed working for a while.

That’s when I created my HopProtector software to automatically check my affiliate links continued working – by checking them out at regular intervals – and flagging any sites or links that lost my affiliate name from Clickbank order pages.

Fast forward to John’s masterclass – and I can see HopProtector will be a great asset to all affiliate marketers who probably just ‘set and forget’ web pages with affiliate links.

Any hoplink can be added to HopProtector once then set to check that all of the affiliate links remain intact all the way to a Clickbank order page – at fixed or random intevals.

I’ve been burning the midnight oil working to update HopProtector to a version suitable for anybody to use.
Although the engine is fully working, tested and proven, it takes a lot of work to create a glossy user interface and all of the supporting training documentation – so users can get it up and running with the minimum effort in a few minutes.

Check back regularly for updates.
I’m hoping to have something released in the next few weeks.

A big mistake I made on my journey making money online was to focus far too much on how to do things – to the detriment of deciding what to do.

My Engineering background instilled an insatiable appetite for learning how things work and trying to understand how to use and improve the way they work – a real handicap for making money online.

Over a year ago at one Open Wednesday afternoon my internet marketing guru friends brought along a 15 year old lad to chat to us about how he was making $5000 a month.

The real key to his success was that he was just doing eaxactly what his mentors were telling him to do.
He didn’t have all the baggage of life’s experience to question what he was doing.
Instead he just got on with it.
Of course if he didn’t know how to do anything, he quickly learnt – but the most important thing was that he just focussed on doing what he was told to do.

One comment he made still makes me chuckle.
After a long career developing products, I thought I knew what ‘R & D’ meant – but no.
His definition was ‘rip off and duplicate’
In other words, just copy what the experts are doing – not what they are telling you to do!

I’ve always been skeptical about get rich quick schemes – particularly push button tools that promise $$$ on autopilot.
This view has constantly been reinforced every time I meet genuine Internet Marketing guru’s in real life.
Not only do they work extremely hard – often very long hours and ‘overnighters’ to meet product launch deadlines.
But they actually spend most of their time and energy on product development.

That’s why I have spent the past 2 years on my own product development – so that I have something of real value of my own to offer customers.
Now I just need to improve my copywriting and marketing skills to leverage sales of these products.

One of the best courses I attended recently was Jason Fladleins Product eClass
I love Jason’s training style – succinct and straight to the point without wasting my time on lots of spurious fluff.
His ‘1 problem, 1 sitting to create 1 product’ each day is so different from my approach of spending days and weeks sorting the minutia before completing a product that I don’t know if I’ll ever get to daily product creation.

Even using Jason’s Product Creation Tools I just seem to spend far too much time prvaricating and wondering what I should be doing next – even though I oprobably know how to do it!

But at least I now understand the need to get off my backside and finish my products quicker.

When things are going well online, I seem to forget about what can go wrong – and the consequences.

Yesterday after I finished a post on this blog, I noticed a typo.
But instead of being able to log in to wordpress, I got the dreaded “Internal Server Error”

As soon as this message appeared I realised I hadn’t bothered to even make a backup of my posts for quite a few days.
And it’s even longer since I backed up the complete site.

WordPress is great when it’s working – but it doesn’t take much to start making things go wrong.
And making proper backups invloves MUCH more than simple backing up posts, pages and comments.
If you don’t believe me check out what the experts say!

My hosting account for this blog is with  JustHost – and one of the reasons I like them is that they provide daily backups of all my domains for just $10 a year.

Anyway, I didn’t want to lose yesterday’s work and really don’t like messing with live MySQL databases (the blog was still working fine) – so I raised a ticket asking for help.

I don’t bother to pay extra to get 30 minutesupport  response from JustHost , so they tend to take their time – but are still much faster and more helpful than other hosting providers (such as one I have been waiting 3 weeks to get blocked access to FTP and cPanel sorted)

Anyway today’s a new day and I was very happy to discover the tech guys at JustHost have sorted the problem for me – thanks guys.

Now I’m back in to my wordpress site dashboard the very first thing I need to do is create an up to date backup of my site.