Yesterday, I finally decided to do something to stop the emails I was getting for a https://caninefriendsforlife.com/wp WordPress site I hadn’t touched for almost 2 years!

Imagine my surprise when I found 9,860 pending comments – despite having Akismet and WP-reCAPTCHA activated.
I quickly found that WordPress would only let me bulk move comments to trash a page at a time.
And my server flagged a ‘string too long’ if I set pages to more than 150 pending comments – so this would take a very long time – particularly as it was taking 30-40 seconds to move 150 comments to trash where I could delete them

So then I decided to give the ‘Check for Spam’ button a try.
This started to work – but was obviously going to take a long time – so I left it running while I got on doing some real work.

About an hour later, I checked to find and error message displayed – but all of the pending comments had been moved to trash.
And the delete trash button worked fine.

This morning I was surprised to find email still arriving – but for a slightly different version of the blog at https://caninefriendsforlife.com/blog

And when I logged into wordpress for this blog found almost 30,000 pending comments!
This blog didn’t have Akistmet or WP-reCAPTCHA activated – so although not perfect they clearly do something to help.
Anyway I decided I needed to find a better way of deleting these pending comments – and found agreat little plugin – Delete pending WordPress comments

This little plugin worked a treat deleting all 30,000 comments in seconds.
And it obviously did it’s job properly because the size of exported backup file shrunk from 43Mb to less than 1Mb

The only irritation with this plugin was that you have to type in “I am sure I want to delete all pending comments and realize this can’t be undone” to get it to work – quite a mouthful.
The pluging delevoper, Nicolas Kuttler, explains this on his site but unfortunately has locked out copying this text.
And copy and pasting the text from the plugin just wouldn’t work.
It only worked when I typed all of the text by had – a bit tediuos.

Anyway this time wasting lesson reminded me why I have drastically reduced the number of website I manage from over 600 to about 50 – and even that is too many.

A couple of months ago I paid just $27 for John Thornhills ‘One Month Mentor’ training course.
Well worth the price – and as a bonus John offered a mastermind mentoring session for small groups where he would help and answer any questions.

Well last night, my session with John finally arrived.
I expected about 10 people would be on the call – after all John had sold 100’s of copies of his ‘One Month mentor’ course.
So I reckoned I would be lucky to get 5 minutes of John’s time and attention.

What really surprised me was that only a few people were on the call – so I was lucky enough to get all of John’s time and attention for over 20 minutes! How lucky was I?

What I wanted to quiz John about was the best way to market my software – and here are his recommendations:

• Set up as WSO at a starting price of $5 to $7 maybe increasing to $9
• Don’t bother with Clickbank for now
• Avoid warriorplus – too many people have had Paypal accounts shut down
• Use JVzoo as a payment processor
• Don’t get hung up on copy protection – check out his blog comment
• OK to keep a separate sales page at headermagic.com with price $27 to $47
• Consider offering white label software as PLR upsell for $27
• Add bonuses to offer

John also answered a number of things I was unsure about:

• You can’t split test WSO – only buy separate one at $40 a pop
• Don’t just start with one product – but get others out there – maybe one a week
• Make use of his WSO domination course – that I bought as an upsell, but haven’t used yet

Since the call, I have been trying to clarify a real business plan.
I’ve discovere the real problem with making money online is not about a lack of how to do things but rather not knowing what to do and spend time on.

Like all software developers, I constantly ‘waste’ time improving my products – because I am always thinking up new ideas – but this doesn’t help bring in $ to pay the bills!
So now I’ve been refining my processes so that I can start releasing new software products at regular intervals and build some marketing momentum – because creating a working product is very definitely only half the job.

Thanks again for your help John

Header Magic is my latest piece of software – allowing anybody to create professional looking Headers and Facebook Banners in minutes – with no need to learn how to use any image complicated image editing software.
Update – the software is 100% ready along with customized graphics and a couple of great bonuses.
But my problem is the lack of back end products to sell.
One fully working product called Instant Image Grabber and I am rebranding as Clik-n-Snap – similar to Snagit but at a fraction the price.
Another I have just started work on is Magic Watermark. The software works well but I wasn’t happy with the initial graphics I ordered and need to get them done again.
Meanwhile I’m working on creating a version of HopProtector – watch out for details in a post coming very soon.
Check out progress at headermagic.com