How the heck do they get my address in the first place?

That’s an excellent question here are several ways they do it:

• Off of your personal web page
• Off your company’s contact information
• Off your MySpace or other publicly available social networking site
• They have a dictionary program that systematically generates all possible combinations of email address.
• You sign up for a mailing list from a company you trust and the cheeky bastards sell your address
• and the list goes on….

Mostly, these Spammers will harvest names using programs that crawl the web. As soon as their spider finds an address it adds you to their list. Pretty nasty eh? So once they have your address they will send you an e-mail asking you to buy anything from Iphones to Viagra. Now these guys/gals are pretty crafty. Remember, they got past all those smart people who made the SPAM filter. Not every name that is on their list is going to be valid and being a busy spammer they only want to send their e-mails to valid address. These impolite marketers have devised a way to find out if an address is good or bad and I hate to say it, but more than likely, you’ve fallen for their trick and not even known it.

Usually at the bottom of their e-mail will be a link that reads something like: “If you no longer wish to received e-mails from us, click this link to be removed”. That is the trap! By clicking that link you have told them that a real person actually got this mail so it’s time to blast them with more junk. The link isn’t the only way they verify your address. Sometimes you’ll get SPAM that is written in HTML. Essentially these e-mails are made the same way people make web pages. When you open the e-mail, that mail will download a little image from the internet and BAM now you have let them know your address is valid. I told you they were crafty.

So what can you do to reduce SPAM?

1. Get your e-mail address off of publicly available web pages.

Use a contact form instead of a direct link to your e-mail address.If you can’t use a contact form at least write out your address out long hand i.e. MyEmailAddress A-T MyDomain D-O-T com .

2. Never open e-mail from an address that you suspect is SPAM

This can be tough especially if you get mail from a lot of different people. What you can do is turn off your internet connection before you open a suspicious e-mail. I use my firewall to turn off all internet traffic. You can download a free firewall from Zone Labs Here.

3. Never Ever click an “Unsubscribe Link” from an untested sender

If you had signed up for a newsletter or mailing from a reputable company then by all means use the unsubscribe link. An honest company will be more than happy to honor your request since they have a reputation to uphold.

4. Use free e-mail accounts from places like Hotmail, Gmail, and Yahoo when you sign up for newsletters, coupons, or any site that may try to send you junk in the future.

It’s better to have the spammer sending junk to your Hotmail account that you can dump then your real one that all your friends, family, and coworkers know.

5. ADVANCED Tip: Use e-mail forwards to identify compromised e-mails

If you have your own web site you probably have the ability to set up an e-mail forwarder. Essentially, you create a fake address. All the mail sent to the fake address gets forwarded to your real address. Make the address easy to identify like: CompanyName@YourDomain.com. That way when you get a SPAM message you can see who sent it to you and all you have to do is delete the forwarder. Now, there is no way that spamming company can send you any more stuff since the forwarder is gone and they never knew your real e-mail.

So there you have it 5 ways to help reduce the amount of junk email floating around your inbox.

1) Firewall.

When you’re on a network information goes in and out of your computer. A firewall is like a bouncer at a club. So when your VIP information like the latest Diamondback score comes cruising up to the velvet rope of your I/O port it gets let in right away. But, when some grungy program comes up and says “Hey man let me in” the firewall bounces them, keeping them out of your super exclusive club that we’ll call your PC.

You can download a free firewall from ZoneLabs: http://www.zonealarm.com/store/content/company/products/znalm/freeDownload.jsp . Look for the button that says “I only want basic ZoneAlarm protection”. Or just click here to get the program.

2) Anti-Virus

Viruses are little programs that people write to do all sorts of things to your computer. They range from annoying to down right nasty. An anti-virus program will help keep your computer from getting infected in the first place and remove anything that should happen to slip by. Please remember that you should run a scan regularly. And when I say regularly, I mean a full scan at least once a week

You can get an excellent free Anti Virus program from AVG: http://free.grisoft.com/

3) Spyware

Spyware is kind of like a virus but more annoying than anything else. This is probably on your computer already and you don’t even know it. Often it gets installed when you install another program. Spyware watches what you do hence the name. It will see where you go online and then pop up an ad. What makes this even naughtier is that it is running in the background using your computer’s resources. That means your computer runs slower. How rude!

To exorcize these annoying programs grab a copy of Spybot http://www.spybot.com/ . Just make sure to update it regularly and like the virus scanner, run it regularly.

So there you go, 3 handy programs that will keep your computer safe and clean and all for free. Most places like GeekSquad charge over $100 for this service plus the cost of software. Now you can use that $100 for something else like buying me a beer, or several.

P.S. I actually have the utmost respect for hackers. They are the smart people who figure out the flaws with software and make it better. Think of it like getting sick. Yes it’s a miserable experience but afterwards your body has a stronger immune system.

Drop Card

Drop Card is one of the first services I checked out. All you have to do is text "drop TheirEmail@Whatever.com" to 77950 and a neat html based e-mail will be sent to the address you specified in the text message. You can have 2 different profiles which is pretty cool if you want to keep your business and personal contacts separate.

You get 25 free drops a month but if you need more than that you have to upgrade to the premium service. Aside from more monthly drops, premium service allows you to customize the e-mail that gets sent with a company logo. Overall, it works as advertised but, most users will need more than 25 drops a month.

Txt Ms

This free service is handy if you have a phone that can send text messages to an e-mail addresses. All you do is have the recipient text "YourUserName" to x@txtms.com then TxtMs will reply with your contact info. Unlike the other services, you are afforded more control over your information since you have the ability to authorize each requests for your info. There is also an automatic approval setting so you don’t have to micro manage it if you choose not to.

One thing to note is that I’ve got an iPhone and have yet to figure out how to send text messages to e-mail address. I’ve been able to use the Txt Ms system but only by sending the text messages through Google Voice’s web site.

Contxts

This one is my favorite so far. It’s still in Alpha so a lot could change in the coming months but, it’s got two things on its side: simple and free. All you do is have someone text your user name to 50500. They will receive a text message back with all your contact info. You can also directly send your contact info to another person by texting the recipients phone number to 50500.

So, next time you are out and about with out your business cards, at least one of these services will have you covered.

As a final note, when I was researching ways to get Txt Ms to work with my iPhone I came across this cool little tutorial that will show you how to text some pretty cool special characters like music symbols, stars, hearts etc….

When I was a kid I wanted to be rich.  Not a football player, not an astronaut; rich is what I wanted.  I grew up in the era of Gordon Gecko, Alex P. Keaton, and that bad ass Scrooge McDuck with the swimming pool full of money.  Of course, there are people who tell you that money doesn’t buy happiness.  Ironically, only my broke buddies say that.  That’s like having a fat person tell you running is bad for your knees.

But, I have to admit that, to a certain extent, they’re right: money doesn’t buy happiness.  It buys all sorts of other crap that usually just ends up sitting around gathering dust.  I remember when I first had enough disposable income to buy something fancy.  One of my first extravagant purchases was on a high-end watch – pretty ironic since I’m never more than 5 feet away from four clocks at any given moment.  It looked good, but keeping time wasn’t really its forte.   A $20 Timex could’ve done the job, and adding a few zeros to that figure didn’t make it any more accurate.   Hell, for the price I paid for it, it better be able to turn back time.  But hey, it’s a status symbol.  People need to see how well I’m doing.  Or do they?  Who am I trying to impress?  My broke buddies don’t care.  My business associates have even nicer ones, crusted in enough jewels to make Liberace drool.  Maybe that gold digger at the club will give me some luvin’ if she sees me sporting a flashy time piece.  Great, that’s just what I need, some parasitic plastic playmate.  Now that we’ve checked off all the possible uses for the damn thing besides telling the time, what good is it?  It’s too nice to wear every day, so it now sits in a safety deposit box gathering dust.   I see it every six months when I put my renewed insurance papers in there.

All is not lost.   My childhood mentors were right about the importance of money; I just overestimated how much happiness would cost.  Take the purchase I made at the Maricopa Animal Care & Control department.  For $25 I bought a little black cat.   She’s an ordinary house cat that likes to play with string, stare out the window at birds, and shed on my nice clean folded clothes.  She was a hundredth of the cost of that fancy watch, but that little cat makes me happy every day.  No one’s ever going to be impressed with my mutt of a house cat. The only thing the gold diggers would get out of her is an allergy attack.  Yet I’d have to say she’s the best purchase I’ve made with my new found “wealth.”

Utility and cost are not always equal.  If you make your life about chasing after money, ask yourself: what exactly are you going to buy with it?  I’d advise against fancy baubles… unless of course you’re up for some gold digger luvin’.

I’m a firm believer that caring about the welfare of your customer is the number one priority.  If you truly want them to succeed, you are going to do everything in your power to achieve that goal. That way you spend your time analyzing and solving problems, not just counting up billable hours. In my field it’s pretty easy since I treat clients as though they are part of my own portfolio. With this philosophy in mind, it’s hard not to look at your client and advise them in ways that are outside the scope of your job when the company starts to struggle. Needless to say, this is the absolute WRONG thing to do. For starters, the client pays you to fill a function and only that function. If you go beyond that, you run the risk of looking like a complete idiot since you as an outsider don’t understand all the ins and outs of their business. Because of the complexity of any business, you could miss the mark entirely.  Your advice, although well-intentioned, could be just plain wrong.  That’s especially awful if it’s your job to be the one with all the right answers. Even worse, implicating an individual or methodology as the source of the problem can cause some hurt feelings (that could be someone’s pet idea you’re trashing).  You are treading in an area where you aren’t the star and you can cause all sorts of problems that you aren’t capable of fixing. And finally, you aren’t getting paid any extra for giving advice in an area where you have a strong likelihood of being wrong.  You could be hurting your client and, even worse, you are spending your precious time without compensation.  If that doesn’t drive the point home, I don’t know what will.

So when it comes to consulting, care about your client, do what they hired you to do, but keep your opinions about how they should run their business to yourself. You’ll be a much happier and wealthier consultant.

Frantic. That’s the name of the song where I pulled that quote and, besides being a damn good song (yes, I was one of a handful of people that liked St. Anger), there is a pretty important message in those lyrics. Whether you are a business owner like me or work for someone else, the idea of doing more with less isn’t just a catch phrase, it’s a reality. There are only 24 hours in a day and the To Do list grows every week. If you want to get a hold of a schedule spiraling out of control, I propose you do an audit.  That’s right: those five letters that cause so much fear when uttered by the IRS may in fact be a time saver when you do one yourself.

Like you, I was getting buried in tasks. I literally work from a half an hour after I wake up to an hour before I go to bed. If you’ve ever been brushing your teeth and reading your e-mail at the same time, you are in the same boat as me. So what do you do about it? The first task is to simply keep track of what you do and how much time you spend doing it for one week. This is the time to get anal retentive. Detail, detail, detail. The goal here is to get a realistic picture of what your day looks like, so be brutally honest. Once you have your list, it’s time to get organized. After, looking over my list I saw some patterns emerge, and was able to group my activities into 4 categories. Some of you will have more and some will have less. To help you get started, here are mine:

1. Money Making
2. Research
3. Maintenance
4. Personal

Money making is pretty obvious: my activities that directly generate revenue. For me, it’s performing SEO for clients and my own affiliate business. Research is the stuff you need to do to stay a head of the game, whether this is reading industry news or researching new ways to do your job better. Maintenance is the routine crap you do every day that isn’t sexy but needs to be done to keep the ship afloat, like washing dishes, going to the bank, etc… And finally, personal time is just what it sounds like. Think of it as investing in your relationships, with phone calls, e-mails, or a social networking site.
For this next step I use a spreadsheet program. MS Excel is great, but you can get an equally useful and free spreadsheet program at Openoffice.org. Create a little matrix like this:

Now that you have a list you can sort that hour column from greatest to least, which will put your most tim-intensive task on top. This is the map of your daily life. If you are like me, you may have seen some disturbing patterns emerge. For instance, I found out that I spend over 3 hours a day on message boards and social networking sites. Ouch! If you read my article about the economic advantages of time management you would know that I’m throwing money down the drain. Hey, I like looking at my friends’ pictures from their trip to Alaska, but am I willing to forgo thousands of dollars in lost productivity? I think not.

If you did this correctly, it will be a true eye opener as to how your time is really spent. Once you see just how much time you allocate to your daily activities, you can adjust accordingly. Life comes at you pretty fast. If you don’t reduce the silly stuff to its proper proportion you’re going to end up, well, Frantic.