Are you are out there trying to get new customers?

Are you spending a great deal of your time prospecting new business?

Are you working harder and harder to get new clients?

Most of you would answer all these questions with a loud YES.

Yet, how about these questions?

Are you aware of how much of your product/service your existing customers buy from people other than you?

Do you have more or less business with your existing customers than you did last year? Do you know why?

When was the last time you worked on selling your existing customers? I bet your competition was there not long ago?

Point is, how much selling are you doing to your existing customer base.

In many cases you can actually increase your business 50-100% and more!

Why are you working so hard with people who do not even know you, yet ignoring the customers who already love you and know you do great work.

Start working your customer – upsell, resell, expand.

Learn it. Live it.

I used Skype over 2 years ago when I needed to video conference with a colleague in another country.. It worked well for what we needed, but I never used it again. Over that time, Skype got purchased by eBay, and they added a number of features and such.

Tonight, I come home and see a number of e-mails about “Skype Credit allocation from Business Control Panel”, and see that I was charged 50EUR. At first, I dismissed the e-mails as another phishing scam. But I decided to log into Skype and see if there was any such credit in my account.

To my horror, it turned out that someone had gotten into the account, activated the seamless PayPal payment transfer option, and purchased 50EUR worth of Skype credits!

What doesn’t make any sense is that I used a non-standard username, a non-standard password, and I hadn’t used the account in years. So how did the account get compromised?

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/09/02/mysterious_skype_hijackings/

Looks like I’m not the only one this has happened to. Like it or not, there’s been a security break at Skype, but no one is owning up to it.. Thankfully, I contacted support and they’ve reversed the charges.. But reading the Skype forums, it sounds like others haven’t been as lucky.

If you’ve used Skype in the past, you might want to consider closing your account if you’re still not using it. With their integration with Paypal, it makes it much too easy for someone to siphon money out of your account without your knowledge, and then you’re up a creek without a paddle!

Sorry for the lack of interesting posts over the past few weeks.. Our new dedicated server has really kept me busy, and I thought I would share some of my newfound knowledge with you.

1) Do you really need all those plugins running on your WordPress blog?

It turns out that one of the reasons our server was crashing was because 100s of httpd processes were being randomly spawned by a renegade plugin (bad coded, I suspect).. And while it might not cause a problem on smaller sites, it really caused havoc on our largest site! We disabled the plugins in question, and life is good.. And we don’t really miss the functionality that the old plugin provided!

2) Keep up-to-date with the latest versions of your plugins..

With the constant WordPress updates, you need to make sure that you’re running the latest version of the plugins, or else things won’t work.. I was naively relying on WP’s new plugin notification system, but found that many plugins (like Dagon Design’s Form Mailer) didn’t show that version 5.5 was out, even though I was still running 5.33.

Additionally, older versions of PodPress just would not work with WP 2.6+. An absolute nightmare, considering even the latest version (8.8) has some major issues with WP 2.6, and the author is over a month behind on the elusive v8.9 that is supposed to fix this.

3) Keep up-to-date on WordPress updates!

Don’t leave yourself wide open to known exploits.. WordPress has a history of security issues, but the WP team is pretty good on updating their software to keep you protected. Unfortunately, many people get lazy and don’t update to the latest and greatest. Big mistake – What’s worse, the 5 minutes it takes to update, or the hours and hours you’ll spend fixing the mess caused by hackers?

4) Install a firewall ASAP!

As I mentioned in a previous post, a firewall is essential.. And it’s better to get your firewall setup on your own terms, rather than in the midst of a DDOS attack! Trust me..

We moved over to a dedicated server last month, and for the first time I’m handling the administration of the box. There’s a decent learning curve involved, and things really came to a head last week when dealing with a DDOS attack!

Lesson 1: Don’t rely on a host’s “security package” to keep you safe.
Lesson 2: Tech support won’t have all the answers, so get Googling.
Lesson 3: Install a firewall ASAP.

WHM has some security features available in their Security Center, but for whatever reason, it’s disabled by default. Had it been enabled, I probably wouldn’t have had an issue. But this incident caused me to start poking around the Apache config and opimizing it for better performance. At the same time, I installed a firewall to prevent any further issues from outside idiots! So in the long run, it actually helped. (Despite the ulcer it’s caused me over the past 3-4 days)

Hopefully the worst is behind us, and I can get back on track here..