Gonzalez, who once called  his criminal enterprise “Operation Get Rich or Die Tryin’,” apparantly did not factor in the Get Rich or Go to Jail slogan that he should have used instead. He was involved with two other hackers who got into the credit card cookie jar causing damage of over $130 million to Heartland and Hannaford companies.

According to Wired.com the 28 year old hacker along with other accomplices got into JC Penny, 7/11 and others by using a mysql injection technique, which basically means he hacked the database that is holding all the credit card numbers.

the hackers installed back doors to provide them with continued access. They tested their malware against 20 different antivirus programs to make sure they wouldn’t be detected, and also programmed the malware to erase evidence from the hacked networks to avoid forensic detection.

Although they hacked in 2007, Heartland discovered the hackers on its network only in January 2009

This just goes to show people that Crime may pay in the beginning, but it certainly doesn’t pay overall.

I thought that this gift of wonder couldn’t be topped, it was both delicious and beautiful, and oh so convenient for someone who didn’t have the energy to get up and make dinner, or lunch for that matter.

But Dale has done it again..This afternoon Dale so kindly sent a care package of my favorite things… Chocolate! specifically Chocolate Covered Strawberries and Cookies dipped in Chocolate.

It’s rare to find a client so easy to work with, not to mention one so generous and thoughtful as Dale Miller. Check out her needlepoint canvases at her website. Thanks so much Dale for your kindness and generosity, you make the world a nicer place!  …. Suzanne

Therefore, you may want to exclude things like Parked domains, error pages, crime sites, death and tragedy etc. To do this you should click on “Exclusions” and use the list under Campaign Level to exclude those places. This will get you into content areas and yet get you out of money wasters that can reak havoc on your advertising budget.

Here is a basic ecommerce plan for new sellers and small shops with limited budgets, that will set you going on your Goal list.

Increase e-commerce sales by 50% this year:

Go through design and evaluate user-friendliness, make adjustments

• Focus on one or two products and make them shine, pick your most popular products
• As a customer, navigate your site in dumbed down mode, what do you see? Does your customer find the information they need to purchase your products?
• What are the benefits of those who shop with you? Put them right in front of the customer. ie: Fast Shipping, Easy Return Policy, etc.

Learn about SEO and make changes to Product Names, pages and improve content on pages.

• Don’t try to bite off more than you can chew. Start with products and label them with proper keywords, then proper content. Subtle changes like this can really make a site noticeable to search engines.
• Get the word out. You should at the very least have your items in Googlebase, which is free. Do one feed at a time and do another one next month.

Set up at least one Pay-Per-Click Channel, give it a budget of at least 1% of expected revenues.

• If you don’t have a few dollars to advertise, you should completely re-evaluate your plan here. This is a business. It requires getting the word out or going viral. If you are not a guru marketeer, then pay for some basic advertising in targeted places.

Set up and maintain an email list, and send out those emails once a month!

• Probably the biggest mistake the new site owners make is to fail to collect emails of interested parties. Our most successful clients use an email list religiously.
• aSending has a great, and inexpensive tool for gathering emails and shooting out marketing materials to your prospective customers about offerings, sales and new products. Use it!

Good Luck on a Great and Prosperous New Year!

If you are an ecommerce site planning to add this to your ecom, think twice. Here are some figures to estimate whether or not it’s worth it.

Let’s say you can get about 3000 unique visitors a month. And let’s say your average Click Rate is about 3% (which is nice and high). It equates to about $50 dollars in Google Adsense revenue, and if you have really good content for your direct visitor, you might be able to get them to view more and more pages, resulting in let’s say 25K in pageviews. Of those page views you could be earning let’s say .50 cents per click on 3% so you might even end up with 375. a month.

Doing some affiliate products that earn more than just a few dollars each, with just the unique visitor count and that click through rate, you might earn say 20. per item you send them to, making it something like $1800 a month.

But let me make something very clear, these numbers are very optimistic. I would rather estimate a 1% click rate on the unique visitors at a mere 4. per clicker to get $360, and keep working to improve my traffic, then to estimate that all my visitors are great big spenders who will want the single widget that I have and read all the content on my website.

If you are running an ecommerce site, most likely you’ll want to forgo this type of advertising, unless you do a blog on your site. Earning affiliate revenues of a few hundred a month, or selling products for many more hundreds (or thousands a month) on a small site is a no-brainer. You don’t want to send your visitor to your ecommerce site off to another site where you may or may not get revenue.

If you are looking for something to use to get those transactions into one of the financial software programs take a look at Big Red Consulting who has both a Excel to QIF converter and a Paypal to Quickbooks converter. Either of these will send you happily on your way exporting and reconcilling your bank accounts.

Your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for Zen Cart made easy.

Since we do lots of forums for larger groups, we thought it would be a good idea to set out some guidelines for site owners. Now let’ say you are sitting in your private forum and suddenly you see another member in there that is not allowed. Oh my God, what to do. Well first of all don’t jump to conclusions about your security system, feeling you’re being hacked or worry that there is anything amiss. The best thing to do in any business is to first, take a breath, investigate and then proceed. Hopefully you have all your wits about you, and are not too stressed, sleep deprived or overly paranoid before you go jumping around concluding things that may not be true. You don’t want to start harassing site visitors and announcing that they are hackers when this might all be just a misunderstanding on your part, and geez, worse yet – don’t tell anyone you are going to file criminal charges for something they had nothing to do with. In the legal world I’m not sure how the courts will view this, but likely they will feel that you did not do your due diligence before making the accusations and this could lead to a big legal action against you. You don’t want that now, do you?

Most professionals have two sets of IT eyes on things to ensure they are not making rash decisions when it comes to forum security. It’s likely part of your obligation as a provider of services and you might consider it an important aspect of business especially if you are a large company with possible legal exposure.

Now, Can people access a private forum? A little googling will answer that for you. Not really but yes they can “appear” to be there. Anyone who is wandering around with time on their hands can put your url into the browser and start switching around numbers to see what is out there. A hidden forum or a private forum might appear, but likely they will only see a login or an error message. While you, sitting in the forum will see them browsing simply because the call to show who is browsing is higher on the list than the error message or login form. Fear not. You are safe. All those wild thoughts about hackers and site violators can be put to rest. Nothing is amiss except the subtle reminder that you need a qualified professional to explain to you what is going on, and possibly a lawyer if you’ve already banned members and jumped to conclusions, pointed fingers and made wild accusations about someone trying to find out what you’ve been thinking or worse yet, accused anyone of trying to take down your website. If you’ve already gone that far my advise now is put a nice apology in writing and last but not least get a lawyer.

If things haven’t deteriorated to this point and you need more help and don’t have a Phpbb forum site admin or web designer, check out our services or ask your host for more help.

Any questions?

Are these groups really worth it? I guess if all you are doing is gleaning information you’re in good company. But if you get sucked up in the rhetoric and start volunteering, watch out. Nothing in these types of groups is member owned, and here’s why.

1. The Presidents of these groups are often egotistical backed by a posse or hopefuls that will do or say anything to be part of the upcoming promised success

2.  Hours can be invested to no avail because at some point it will be overturned by the Board who has gone googly eyed over their fearless leaders.

3. At some point, usually when $100,000 or more is in the kitty, someone wants to take all  the glory and keep their own reputation from being besmirched while running things the way they seem fit. After all,  they built this city and they should never be challenged.
Any questions?

When you build your ebay store, rememeber that eBay puts some restriction on the amount of code you can use there. You’ll likely have to strip out some styles, and at the very least some spaces in the html code.

As far as the left navigation goes, we’ve done some nice stores with upgraded navigation on the left, but again if you have lots of code you’ll notice the white line separating the middle section of the nav.

Overall eBay store building is fun and a fantastic way to show your wares on ebay. Design your ebay store with these things in mind and all is well.

Take a look at some of our ebay store design here