An Internet marketers world is filled with some things that we have a lot of and some things that we have, well, just too much of. One of those ‘too much of things’ is passwords. Passwords for your home network, email accounts, websites, ftp accounts, cpanel, memberships, etc.

You also should use different passwords for each account. Because if you
use only one password everywhere and someone should get this password you have a problem… A serious problem! A thief would have access to your
e-mail account, websites, etc. Your life just got hacked! Unimaginable!

KeePass Password Safe is a free open source password manager, which helps
you to manage your passwords in a secure way. You can put all your
passwords in one database, stored on your local drive, which is locked
with one master key or a key file. So you only have to remember one single master password or select the key file to unlock the whole database. The databases are encrypted using the best and most secure encryption algorithms currently known (AES and Twofish).

Some features of KeePass include: Strong Security, it has a built-in random password generator; Portable, you can install KeePass to a flash drive and take it with you for use on multiple computers; Multi Language Support, KeePass is available in several localizations; You can export your files to TXT, HTML, XML and CSV; Plug-in Architecture and more!

KeePass is easy to use and store your passwords and login information. You can even store your account notes with a particular password. Such as, when the account was created, an affiliate link, etc. Plus you can sync the databases on multiple computers in your home or office network. A very handy feature!

Remember though, that doesn’t mean you can throw away all those notes you have with those passwords written down. Poopoo happens and a crashed computer or a failed hard drive puts you back to point A.

Now you have a safe, secure way to store all of your Internet marketing,
Affiliate marketing and personal account passwords in one location and
all you need is one password or file to access them.

Next time around we will look at how to get your web pages and files uploaded to your webhost server with a free software FTP(file transfer protocol) client, FileZilla.

Till we meet again!

Technorati Tags: affiliate marketing, database, encrypted, Internet marketers, manager, open source password, passwords.KeePass

If you do anything in Internet marketing or Affiliate marketing, you receive the majority of your downloads in the .zip or .rar file formats.

Let’s say that you are new to all this and here you have all these ZIP and RAR files you’ve just downloaded from one of the many giveaway or PLR sites. You’re thinking, how the heck am I supposed to get the stuff out?

Windows has a built in extractor for the .zip format, but it doesn’t speak RAR. What’s more, you can’t view the contents of the file, you can only extract it to your desktop or another folder. What’s a poor home business owner to do?

The answer, is 7-Zip. 7-Zip is a high compression ratio file archive tool in 7z format with LZMA and LZMA2 compression. 7-Zip is licensed under the GNU LGPL with the unRAR code under a mixed license, GNU LGPL and unRAR restrictions. For ZIP and GZIP formats, 7-Zip provides a compression ratio that is 2-10 % better than the ratio provided by PKZip and WinZip.

Yeah, I know, what the heck does all that mean? Well, it means that this is one slick puppy. You can double click on a .zip or .rar file; view the contents of the file; view the contents of .zip files inside the .zip file; open the .html pages from inside the .zip and more.

7-Zip integrates into the context menu, also. So, you can right click on a .zip and perform several functions from there. Such as, extracting the file at the current location, like your desktop. Or extract the file into a newly created folder.

7-Zip supports these formats: Packing / unpacking: 7z, XZ, BZIP2, GZIP,TAR, ZIP and WIM.

Unpacking only: ARJ, CAB, CHM, CPIO, CramFS, DEB, DMG, FAT, HFS, ISO,
LZH, LZMA, MBR, MSI, NSIS, NTFS, RAR, RPM, SquashFS, UDF, VHD, WIM, XAR and Z.

7-Zip has localizations for 79 languages and strong AES-256 encryption in
the 7z and ZIP formats. What more could you ask for?

Now let’s say that you have created a cool new product and need to distribute it. You just put the information files into a folder, use 7-Zip to compress the the folder into a .zip file and upload it to your server and you’re ready for action!

All this boils down to a very handy and functional piece of free and open source software that you will find very useful in your online Internet marketing business.

Next up, we will discuss how to securely store the gazillion or so
passwords you have with free software , KeePass Password Safe.

Later!

Technorati Tags: 7-zip, affiliate marketing, file archiver, free and open source software, internet marketing, online Internet marketing business

My first experience with a full office suite was Office 2000, the latest and greatest from Microsoft. It had everything you could want and more. Plus it had the html web editing software FrontPage as part of the offering. I worked with it for a time and then said, “Ok, what else have we got?”

StarOffice Suite came out in the mid- 1980s and Sun Microsystems acquired the software from StarDIvision, a German company, in 1999. Soon after, October 2000, OpenOffice was born.

An open source software very similar to StarOffice, OpenOffice lacked many of the features of StarOffice. However, it was still a good choice and had begun a following of programmers who were moving fairly quickly with improvements and additions.

Over time, with Sun Micro support, it became a very popular choice of open source office software. In 2007, many companies found that it was more cost effective to integrate OpenOffice in their businesses than it was to acquire Office 2007 and train their employees to use it.

Oracle purchased Sun Micro this year and continues to be the primary supporter. But, along the way others have joined the group, including Novell, RedHat, RedFlag CH200, and IBM. Not to mention over 450,000 people from around the globe have joined the project. Is that a support team or what?

OpenOffice is a complete office suite. It includes the components Writer, Base, Calc, Impress, Math and Draw, with each component having its own unique features.

Writer is the word processor, as you probably guessed. It comes with pre-installed templates and fonts, as you would expect. But, it also integrates with Google Docs and SOHO and can export your newly created works of art directly to PDF.

On the main website you’ll find a link to extend OpenOffice’s capabilities. Remember the 450,000 people I mentioned earlier? This is where you will find the works of many of them.

Look around and you’ll find just about anything you can think of to add function to your creative talents. There’ everything from fonts and template packs to forms and MySQL connectors. Plus, there is a built in Extension Manager to check for updates.

OpenOffice is available in several languages and operating systems. You’ll find them all on the download page.The current version is 3.2.1 with a Beta 3.3.0 RC 8 available, but still being tested. You know the rules; only download a beta version if you know to expect bugs. That’s why it’s a beta not the full version.

OpenOffice can open, read and edit Microsoft Office documents and saves documents in the International .odt(open document text) format.

You know how I said, “I love it when coders get together?” Well, recently I ran across another program called OxygenOffice Professional Office Suite. Now guess what, these folks have collaborated with the OpenOffice team to create an enhanced version of OpenOffice that includes clipart, templates, fonts and VBA support.

Open up Writer and go to Tools and in the dropdown select ‘Gallery”. There are all kinds of clipart in there. Such as cars, trucks, plains, people, animals,architecture, chemical formulas, Cisco media and clocks. You just find the image you’re looking for, drag and drop into your document. Then you can resize, add sounds or macros and play them back.

Now, just so you know, I have OxygenOffice Pro and Office 2007 on 2 of my systems. And I tried out Office 2010, and frankly, I like Office 2007 better of the two. There is an add-on for Office 2007 to export to PDF or XPS. But it does notwork with Office 2010, since Microsoft came up with a PDF creator.

So, there is one more tool for your Internet marketing toolbox. Give OxygenOffice a try and see what you think. I believe you’ll like it. And, of course, it’s free and open source software also.

Happy 10th Birthday OpenOffice! Thanks to all who participate in the project to provide us such a fine tool.

Next up, we’ll talk about the free and open source high compression file archiver, 7zip.

Till we meet again!

Technorati Tags: FrontPage, internet marketing, Office 2000, office suite, open source software, OpenOffice, OxygenOffice Professional, StarOffice, Sun Microsystems

Back in the early days of blogs, I asked a friend of mine what he thought of
the whole blogging thing. His response was something like, “People just get
on there and talk about stupid stuff and make fools of themselves. Viewers
will get tired of that and stop going to them. It will never amount to anything.”

Well, he was partly right. And this was the general feeling around the Internet Marketing community. And people did get tired of the nonsense.

The Internet was still relatively new and people were having fun bouncing around looking at this and that. But, if they were going to spend their time going there,
they wanted more.

Static websites were in command of the Internet and we sat for hours trying to
learn enough about building a website to apply a header graphic. I still attribute
much of my hair loss to that period of time!

Initially, there were a few free blog sites where you could put up your own. These were, by today’s standards, very user unfriendly. Then, after gathering some feedback from users, those platforms started to add features and the evolution to what we have today began.

Then in about 2003, WordPress came along. At that time there were very few users, but it had potential as a core for a CMS. That’s a Content Management System. There were some CMS programs available to the public then. But, they were expensive and the average user could be assured that they were going to have trouble understanding and using it.

As blogging became more popular, the Internet Marketing community became interested in how easily and quickly you could have a website up and running.
With very little knowledge of how to build a website required.

WordPress today, is the largest self-hosted blogging platform in the world. There
are, of course, others and many receive good reviews and get a lot of use. But,
as of this writing, WordPress is the big dog.

If you haven’t been over to WordPress.org, they have a tidy site and provide just about all the basic information you need to download and install the system.

I do my own personal WordPress installations. However, if after looking over the set-up documentation, you may not feel comfortable doing this yourself. Be that
the case, I recommend Alex Sysoef’s Expert WordPress installation package. The program can very quickly install and have your blog up and running very quickly.
This is the best and most secure WordPress installation package that I know of.

Once you have decided what your niche or market will be, go back to the WordPress site and click on the ‘Extend’ tab. You will be given the choice of ‘Themes’ and ‘Plug-ins’.

Let’s start with ‘Themes’. There are over a thousand free wordpress themes listed
on these pages. Plus you will find even more by doing a search online. And,
of course, when you are ready for them there are premium wordpress themes available also to give your blog a more individual appearance.

You may have noticed, when you install WordPress, in your dashboard under the ‘Themes’ category you have three themes pre-loaded. Two are the old faithful,
basic themes that have accompanied WordPress for years. But, recently they have added the TwentyTen theme. This theme is a good starting place to practice your theme customizations, if you are new to the platform. TwentyTen is widget and plug-in ready.

Once you feel that you are comfortable customizing themes, you will want to try a more advanced theme like the ‘Flexibility’ theme, which I am using. Another very customizable, and again not for the beginner, is ‘Suffusion’. Suffusion is in the WordPress theme gallery, ‘Flexibility’ is not.

Now let’s go get some plug-ins to add to your theme to make this puppy talk. Like
the page says, there is over twelve thousand plug-ins available on the WordPress site. And, as with the themes, premium plug-ins can be found with a web search.

Now you are asking, “With so many choices, which plug-ins are the best to use?” That will depend largely on what you want a plug-in to do. I suggest that one of
your first choices be the WP-DBbackup plug-in. This plug-in can send scheduled backups right to your email. So, if there is a problem with your blog, you have the basic settings at hand rather than having to rebuild everything.

Some other very useful plug-ins for your Internet marketing blog are the All-In-One-SEO-Pack (self explanatory), TweetMyBlog! (this sends a tweet to your Twitter account when you post), and many more.

Some words of caution about plug-ins, some do not play well together. Too many plug-ins installed will slow the load time of your blog pages. Some plug-ins require configuration. That could be anything from adding your e-mail address to adding search engine codes to make them function properly.

Unless you are familiar with the functions of plug-ins, just activate one at a time
and deactivate the plug-in until you resolve the issue.

Oh, by-the-way, before adding a theme, be sure that it is plug-in and widget ready. Some are not, but that information will be in the themes’ description. Once, I added an incompatible plug-in to one of my sites. I activated the plug-in and when I refreshed the webpage, it looked like an html spider had exploded in my browser.

WordPress is, no doubt, the way for the inexperienced online business owner to get
a good looking website up quickly and inexpensively. Take your time with it and you can easily add elements as they become a part of your new online business.

And your tool tip for the day: Self hosted is the way to go with your primary website. But, don’t discount the free platforms entirely. WordPress.com is a good free platform and so is Blogger. Both are a good place for the blogging beginner to start.

And there is that authority business. Both wordpress.com and Blogger rank highly in the search engines. So, can a text link from a relevant site of yours from one of these leading back to your primary Internet marketing site be a bad thing? I’m thinking, probably not!

Next time, we’ll talk about your office suite and how the free and open source OpenOffice can fill your Internet marketing business needs.

Until we meet again!

Technorati Tags: Alex Sysoef, All-In-OneSEOPack, Blogging, content management, Expert WordPress, Flexibility theme, inexperienced online business owner, internet marketing, Internet marketing business, Internet marketing community, secure, system, TweetMyBlog, WordPress, WordPress installation