Today, I received a message in which I was asked to visit a site called ‘Rate Your Guru‘. More out of a feeling of disbelieve than out of curiosity, I clicked the link to check out the site.

Once on the homepage, I was stunned: the site appeared to be everything I feared. All I could see on the home page was a list of names with under each name a 5-star rating system…

And maybe even worse… when I checked the list, I found my own name on it.

I resisted the feeling of leaving the site instantly - you know, simply click away and never return -, mostly because I was curious why someone would ever think of a creating a site like this…

On the ‘About’ page, I found this message:

I’ve been Twittering away lately. Ever since I found out about Twhirl -a free desktop client that allows you to post messages to Twitter without having to visit and log in to the Twitter site - I’ve been able to see the fun & benefits of being an active ‘Tweeter’.

To me, Twitter has become more than just a way to promote my blogs & biz: it has proven to be an excellent resource for valuable info & sites, a great way to build relationships with other marketers ánd - last but not least - a channel to get a quick  answer to any questions I have. I found many of my fellow tweeters to be very friendly and always willing to help.

I’m still far from being a Twitter pro: there are millions of things about Twitter and how to optimize my tweets I still need to discover, but I’m learning new stuff every day.

Yesterday morning, when I visited my JV giveaways site, I found a couple of big, scary eyes on a black background staring at me. Above them, a piece of text telling me the site had been hacked…

Since I never had experienced a hack before, I didn’t really know what to do. To be honest, I always considered hacks to be something that only happened to other people. I instantly realized this was the price to pay for being so shortsighted.

Fortunately, it wasn’t that bad. It appeared someone had renamed my index-files in several folders and put his own index.htm file in place. I was able to solve the problem by deleting all new files and re-uploading my original files. You can’t imagine how happy I was that I had learned my lesson from all those previous server problems, and kept a backup of all my online files on my hard drive…

Every so often, I receive a message with a question like

- How do I add a PayPal button to my site?
- How do I create a PDF- or a zip-file?
- How do I use Facebook?
- How do I register for a Clickbank account?
- …

These messages remind me of the fact that some things that I take for granted, are not obvious to those who are new to the Internet Marketing game.

After all, it hasn’t been that long since I was a so called ‘newbie’ too. When I just started online, I didn’t know about things like PayPal, or databases, or how to register a domain name… To learn the ropes, I kept my eyes open, and taught myself new stuff with every new action I took.