Phishing? No, Fishing!

Why Is My Computer So Slow?

Why, oh why, is my computer so slow? As soon as I can afford it I am going to invest in a new one. This one is really becoming annoying and I feel it’s now starting to hold me back.

When I sit down at my desk with the intention of working on my blog or wanting to continue with the training program, I fire up the computer and have to wait, for what feels like for ever, for the pesky thing to settle down. I’ve got to the point where I don’t turn it off anymore just to save time. Even so, it will eventually struggle to let me into the programs or apps and I end up having to reboot anyway, wasting even more time.

You’d think after a lifetime working with them, I’d be able to overcome these obstacles but no. I paid a “computer expert” to visit a while ago to sort it out but he wasn’t very helpful. I’ve purchased a couple of software packages that supposedly clean up registers, storage etc, but they don’t help in speeding up things much. The only thing that isn’t too bad is the internet connection and wifi. At least they’re working reasonably well. I guess they don’t last for ever; I’ve had this one for several years and it feels like it’s one step up from an abacus right now.

One thing I have learned over the years, and I’m being reminded of by Dean Holland, is to save what you’re doing and take backups of your work regularly. Having said that, I’m yet to discover how to back up this website/owned asset I have created. Let me know in the comments how you back up your work.

What A Week!

Week Five of the Beginners Advantage program within the Affiliate System was the longest by far. It’s taken me at least two weeks to get through all the tutorials and tasks but, boy, was it worth it.  I have learned so much and it’s given me some great skills that hopefully I will be able to draw on for a long long time to come.

One of the major topics this week was about email sender reputation. There are new rules being introduced in February ’24 by the likes of Google and Yahoo. They largely focus on three areas: authentication of outgoing emails, reported spam rates and the ability to easily unsubscribe from email lists.

In sending emails we now have to be careful that the people we are communicating with actually want to receive emails from us. If not, our emails can end up being considered as spam. If this happens often, our reputation can suffer and as a result, the email service provider may end up preventing our emails being sent at all.

You may recall, in my previous blog, A Trip To The Barber, I mentioned adding a DMARC record to my website. This, along with authenticating our domain with DKIM, are two of the measures we now have to take, as part of the new regulations. Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance (DMARC) helps us specify which actions to take when an email fails authentication. In our case, we flag those emails and the system automatically prevents any further emails going to those people. DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) adds a digital signature to outgoing email, which verifies the message was sent by an authorized sender and wasn’t tampered with along the way.

Amongst other things, what we must not do is send mass emails from our domain. The chances of ending up in spam are great if people receive unsolicited and unwanted emails. Also, don’t keep emailing people that are not engaging. Keep your email list clean by regularly removing people where the emails are not being received (bad address) or that are not responding.  

When we first make contact we have a choice to use the single or double opt-in methods. The single opt-in method is where someone opts in to your list via a form built into your website and they begin to receive your ongoing emails immediately. The double opt-in method is where someone opts in via the same form, but in addition, they are sent an email asking them to click a link to confirm that they are happy to receive your ongoing emails.

This week in the coaching program I have: –

• Published my Email Subscriber Management Flows. Within Affiliate System there are workflows that are designed to automatically perform certain actions when particular things happen. Three of these workflows are concerned with the actions required when emails that we send out are :-
  • Bounced – meaning they were unable to be sent because the email address was misspelled or did not exist
  • Complained – meaning they were identified as spam by the receiver
  • Unsubscribed – meaning the recipient has unsubscribed from from your email.
    In all of the above, the workflow automatically ensures that no more emails are sent to this recipient. The action for this part was to ensure that these three workflows were set to “Published” rather than “Draft”.
• Uploaded Lead Magnet Videos to My Own Affiliate System. A “Lead Magnet” in the affiliate marketing world, is the name given to the free incentive that we offer people to join our email list. Dean Holland’s system provides five different free videos for me to make use of. This action instructed me to firstly download the videos to my computer and then upload them to my version of Affiliate System.
• Chosen my Lead Magnet. A short time spent viewing each of the five lead magnets was the task for this one to see which one (or more) I would be happy to use in my blog.
• Created my List Building Funnel. This was easily the hardest thing for me so far. I really struggled to grasp the concept of what this was trying to achieve. Fortunately, through perseverance and persistence, it all made sense in the end. Dean was showing us how to build a funnel where free gifts (i.e. training videos) were being offered as an incentive to subscribe to a newsletter. I was terrified; I have enough trouble trying to think of what to put in a blog let alone produce some fancy published periodical. So with that in mind I went ahead and created my funnel, asking people to join my email list rather than subscribing to a newsletter. I found out later that the term “newsletter” only referred to a regular email communication and not what I was thinking at all. So I don’t need to change what I’ve done as we’re both meaning the same thing; just using different terminology.
• Created the opt-in workflows. This was great fun; building flows associated with the funnel I’d just built. If someone clicks within the opt-in page to get on the email list, an email is sent out and if they click on the confirmation button in that email, a second email is sent giving them access to the free gifts. This was incorporating the double opt-in method mentioned above.
• Added the List Building Funnel to my blog website. I was shown how to add a link to the funnel. You can see it in the menu at the top of the screen. I didn’t want it to be buried away and not obvious, so I have included it in a banner in the side bar as well, so it’s in sight pretty much everywhere throughout the site.
• Tested the whole thing using a spare email account. Actually, it was one of my wife’s email accounts and low and behold, it worked! She is the first one on my email list of subscribers.

Feel free to have a look and see what it does. It’s in the side bar (or down below if you’re reading this on a mobile).

Any comments would be gratefully received. Until next time…

Stay safe.