An Important Update For You

This post is an update with some IMPORTANT and FUN items.  So let’s get right to it.

Spyware

Back in February, I had a week off with my family in Whistler, BC, Canada.  It’s a ski resort that is about a 4 hour drive from where we live in Bellevue, WA.  The weather was great but there was no snow.  Basically spring skiing and snowboarding conditions if you know what that’s like.

While I was there, I did get one very nasty surprise.  I was using the wireless connectivity to the internet in our hotel.  No problems getting connected, speed was good… BUT within minutes of connecting I realized something was WRONG!

I started getting popups even when I wasn’t browsing anywhere.  My laptop slowed right down to a crawl. I tried to figure out what was going on.  I checked the process running on my machine to see which of them was using most of the processing power of the laptop.  What I saw were a bunch of running programs that I didn’t start. 

They had names like adserver and admon.  In short, I had become a victim of spyware!

There’s a lot to know about spyware, but I’ll give you a short explanation.

Spyware comes in two basic categories:

1. Adware
2. Surveillance

Adware is the annoying but less worrisome of the two categories.  If you get adware on your pc then you get popups appearing at random when you don’t expect them.  You may be shown ad for competitive products as you are surfing the internet. 

Like I said its hardly fatal, but annoying.  Plus all those adware programs are consuming memory, disk space and bandwidth from programs that you really did want to run.

Worse, yet, some of those adware programs will turn around and download other spyware programs WITHOUT telling you.

The second category, surveillance spyware is the more serious of the two.  These types of programs usually run in the background without you know it and record your keystrokes and other information.  So if you shop online or logon to do banking online, these programs could be recording your account information and passwords!!!  And then sending that information to someone via your internet connection.

Ok, to make a long story short, I was able to download a version of Microsoft’s AntiSpyware program and cleanup most of the problems I was seeing.  But I promised myself that I was going to learn more about spyware and make sure that I took some steps to ensure that this type of activity was not going to happen again. 

One of the things I did this past week was purchase an ebook on spyware.  It sounded very complete and the price was great too.  I downloaded the book and started reading it.  And I learned a lot!  I consider myself fairly sophisticated when it comes to technical challenges like viruses and spyware because of my background in software and working at Microsoft for many years. 

But the book showed me some things that I didn’t know.  And best of all it recommended some antispyware programs that were great and FREE!  It even tells you how to configure them and run them to ensure you have the best possible chance of eliminating spyware from your system and preventing it from coming back.

So far most of my computers came out pretty clean because of some of the precautions I had already taken.

But there was some spyware on my main computer too.  One program was downloaded, unknowingly, by my son because he thought the cursors it let him use were cool! These types were cleaned up easily by the programs and recommendations in the book.

However, I did find really nasty, hard to remove, piece of spyware that I am still working on.  And trust me, with my background I tried a lot of things that should have killed it!  But the book saved me again because it actually told me what to do about it and where to get the help I needed.

Anyway, this should be a Big Ticket concern for everybody.  You work hard on your business and marketing and you don’t want your accounts, passwords or time stolen by spyware.  I only recommend items that I personally use and have given me great value.  If you want to check out this ebook and protect yourself you can do so at this link:

    http://www.likemagicmarketing.com/spyware/

Upcoming Marketing Campaigns

My joint venture partner and mentor, Joel Christopher and I are working on some cool marketing campaigns over the next 3–4 months.  Its a little early to tell you about them yet.  But I will say that the products great and you are going to be able to get them at the best possible prices.

I’ll announce more about the products and the special prices to the my valued list members once they are closer to completion.

If you are not currently on my list you can sign up for the Big Ticket E-List using the opt-in box on the right hand side of this blog.  Or if you want to learn more about the Big Ticket Home Study System, you can go to:

    http://www.bigtickethomestudy.com

and sign up for the audio e-course.  Signing up for the Big Ticket E-List or the Big Ticket Home Study Audio e-course ensures that you will be notified of all future offers and other valuable information.

Upcoming Article

I had planned to have an article written on another Big Ticket Marketing tool but I got so busy this past week that I couldn’t complete it.  The topic for the article was going to be on business networking. Not the hook your computers together type :-). But the type where you attend a business meeting, seminar or workshop and you meet a lot of other like minded people that you might build relationships with so that they may be able to help you later in some way.  It could be a joint venture in the future or just someone who ends up in your mastermind group that you can bounce ideas off of.  Anyway, I am still working on that so look for at soon.

In Search of Heroes Program

I was recently honored by being selected as an internet hero in the In Search of Heroes program.  You can learn more about the program here:

    http://www.insearchofheroes.com

I was interviewed by Ralph Zuranski, the creator of the program.  I learned about the program from Ralph who I had met previously at several seminars and workshops.  The program teaches kids about copywriting and marketing and helps them to help businesses in their local areas.  The kids learn skills that will be valuable no matter what they decide to do in their lives and they can actually see those skills work in a real world environment.

And the staff for the program are fantastic.  Look at this list:

Alan Bechtold, Bob Silber, Carl Turner, Craig Garber,  David Garfinkel,  Joe Vitale, Lorrie Morgan Ferrero, Nerissa Oden, Orrin Hudson, Ralph Zuranski, Randy Charach, Rick Raddatz, Ted Ciuba, Ted Nicholas, Terri Levine, Tony Marino, Troy White and Vicky Herron

These folks really are among the best in their fields.  I feel honored to be included with them as part of this program.  One area I wanted to spend more time on when I left Microsoft was to work for charities and other good causes.  This is definitely one of them.  If you want to know more about the program you can contact either me or Ralph Zuranski.  Our contact information is on the site.

And if you want to listen to the interview I did with Ralph and learn about one of the scariest experiences of my life you can do that here:

http://www.insearchofheroes.com/internet-heroes/pages/chuck_daniel_hero.html

Coming Soon – New Release of the Big Ticket Marketing Audio E-Course

This past week I’ve also been creating a web based version of the Big Ticket Audio E-course.  The new course will be nicer because it will be web based with streaming audio.  Plus, I going to expand the content to include information that was only discussed at some webinars that I did.  Once it’s ready, I’ll let people know via email update so you can check it out.  (Make sure you are on my update list. You can join by following the instructions I gave under the section above on Upcoming Marketing Campaigns)

Lake Tahoe Pictures

You can find pictures from our recent trip to Lake Tahoe here:

http://www.likemagicmarketing.com/tahoepics/tahoe05.htm

That’s it for this time.

Best in Big Ticket Success,

-Chuck