Internet Content Filtering

Learn How to Protect Your Family from the Worst of the Web!

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The Internet is a great tool for many things, such as doing research, reading the latest news, shopping and staying in touch with family and friends. To borrow from the title of a Clint Eastwood movie, along with the good comes “the bad and the ugly”.

Freedom on the Internet also opens the door for illegal activity, such as emails pretending to be your bank (aka phishing), expression of various ideas - whether you agree with them or not, scams to separate people from their money and content that some find objectionable, like pornography.

While searching the Internet for homeschool support groups, to ask for permission to list their web site as a resource in HomeSchoolEXPOs’ Support Groups & Organizations directory, I became a victim of porn-napping. I didn’t know this term existed until I decided to do research for this newsletter. My purpose was to help other parents, who are short on time, learn about what they can do to protect their children who use the Internet.

Porn-napping happens when a non-pornography domain or web site address becomes inactive and it is purchased by a pornography business. The site might have closed down or the owner didn’t renew their ownership. Once the pornography business owns the address, they post their content on it. Below is an example of how I was porn-napped.

Let’s say there is a homeschool support group called Family Homeschooling. Their web site address is www.familyhomeschooling.com. The group discontinues because all of the children have graduated high school and have gone to college. The parents decide not to renew the ownership of their website address. A pornography business discovers the support groups’ web address is available and decides to buy it. Now that they own the address, they post their content under the domain www.familyhomeschooling.com, with no warning of the content that is coming. Another tactic they may employ is something called a re-direct. This happens when you click on or type in a web site address they have purchased, e.g. www.familyhomeschooling.com, and you are re-directed to another site with their content. Re-directing is not illegal. Many web sites use this feature for functions such as load balancing or redirecting users to a sites new web address because it has changed.

My original plan was to write an article about the steps that parents can to protect their children from pornography and pedophiles. While looking for information, I found a couple of good articles and resources that provide great information for parents. Instead of recreating the wheel, I’m providing the following links for parents to learn more about what they can do to protect their kids when their kids are online.

1. 2005 Software Review of Parental Control and Internet Filtering Software
http://internet-filter-review.toptenreviews.com/?ttreng=1&ttrkey=internet+filter

2. Home Internet Filters - Steps Parents Can Take At Home For Filtering Content
http://www.northstar.k12.ak.us/safety/filters.html

3. Parental Control and Internet Child Safety
http://www.protectkids.org/

4. Wired Kids - Online Safety Project for Kids and Teens
http://www.wiredkids.org/

5. NetSmartz Workshop - Interactive games and activities to teach kids what to watch for online to protect themselves.
http://www.netsmartz.org/

6. Parents Can Make Internet Safer for Kids - Article in the Honolulu Advertiser
http://the.honoluluadvertiser.com/article/2004/Oct/19/tc/tc08p.html

7. SafeKids - Making Technology and the Internet safe for Families
http://www.safekids.com/

8. GetNetWize - The GetNetWise coalition wants Internet users to be only “one click away” from the resources they need to make informed decisions about their family’s use of the Internet.
http://kids.getnetwise.org/

About the Author

Aaron Hyde is a consultant with the 280Group, http://www.280group.com, with over 17 years of industry experience. He homeschools and is the founder of HomeSchoolExpo, http://www.homeschoolexpo.com. HomeSchoolExpo is a new auction site for connecting homeschoolers who want to buy and sell homeschooling books and resources. HomeSchoolExpo also provides store hosting for family friendly businesses.

Learn How to Protect Your Family from the Worst of the Web!

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You spent tireless hours creating your business model, even longer perfecting your website to be the best that it can be. Taking count of your competitors, positioning yourself with a uniqueness that surely could not see you fail.

You agonized for weeks over the perfect website hosting company for your business, and chose the one that guaranteed you 99% uptime (you want your website ‘up’!). You have staff in place, or indeed if working alone, know that you will be your own ‘one-woman’ customer support team.

You have made an executive decision, through the hundreds of business meetings that you have had with yourself (in your own head - whilst falling asleep, in the bath and eating lunch) that you will be providing email sales and email customer support only. After all, if it is good enough for eBay then it is good enough for you yes.

Everything is in place, the site is live, the search engine marketing firm has been contracted for $39.95 a month (you don’t have much of a budget just yet), the advertising is in place and you have decided to do this yourself to save extra money (after all you summarize, why hire a company to look after PPC when you can easily do it yourself right).

It’s Monday, the perfect ‘go-live’ day, 1500 hours and the site has been live 8 hours, your pride and joy is up and running and your dream of making an online business a reality is now yours. You are getting visitors and hey, you are even starting to get sales and it’s all looking good.

You have employed some of the best anti spam/junk mail filter software there is to avoid unwanted distractions whilst you respond to your new customers and your website hosting company also guarantees you the most vigorous defence at server level for unwanted email.

But…suddenly there is a problem, you start receiving emails complaining that you have not replied to other emails, which you had never received. At first you simply thought it was a ‘crazy’ customer or one of those lost emails that never get there that you know the traditional postal service are so well known for.

But….then there are 2 emails complaining of non-response, one from a customer who had bought from you the previous day demanding that if you do not respond immediately that they will charge-back the transaction! Where did that come from, you never received an email but you did receive this email - why was that, this really is coming more of a regular occurrence and something that you need to take action in resolving.

Now, not only are you losing sales by not receiving emails of a pre-sales nature but you are receiving emails from your customers complaining that once they buy from you that you cannot be contacted.

And so it starts, the beginning of the end, a bad reputation for customer support, charged-back transactions that cost you and your now struggling website business additional money and a realization that there seems to be a problem with email, but you do not know what it is.

Ok, so the above might seem a little extreme but we live in an extreme world where just one issue can make or break a company and as a small ‘one-woman’ online business who has spent so much money on search engine marketing, advertising and making your website the best that it can be, you really could do without such issues. You want to be a success, not gain a reputation as one whom provides terrible service.

Where do you look to resolve the issue?

No further than the spam/junk mail filter software you purchased and/or the service mail filters that your website hosting company put in place ‘for your protection’.

The very purpose for which spam/junk mail filters are implemented, being to protect your mailbox from unwanted email, can be the very same good intentions that cause you great issues with your customers and cause annoyance to distraction in resolution.

What is an unwanted email; yes the hundreds of spam emails selling the latest pharmaceutical product from yet another untrained and un-web-educated affiliate. Emails that you never asked for or indeed want - they are so annoying that you ensured that your home PC, which is also used by your 2 kids (12 and 15 years of age) employs the same level of spam email protection as your business PC. You didn’t want your kids to become privy to ‘adult’ spam themed emails that pop through every mail box from uncaring spammers across the world did you.

But wait, this is your business computer and your business website we are talking about now, not your home PC where spam and junk email filters are best put to use. Your business uses email as its main communication tool, is it really a wise idea to put your faith in a piece of software or your website hosting companies default mail filters. Should you not really take on the ownership of deciding what is and what is not junk email, and the question to really ask oneself is, can your website business really afford to put the decision of what should and what should not arrive in your email box.

Regardless of how ‘intelligent’ the spam filter is, how much control you have over it, or indeed how much control you do not have over it if a default feature of your website hosting email accounts, any website business worth its salt needs at the very least to consider all of the factors that make up this fundamental business decision - to filter, or not to filter.

Have you run all appropriate tests? Can you receive emails from Hotmail, Yahoo and other free web accounts? What happens if an attachment comes with the email, and are there any kind of content filters or ‘auto-responder’ issues to think about. What about the different ISP’s, can you receive from AOL users - or more importantly sometimes, can AOL users receive your emails.

Explore the next set of issues, perhaps you can receive all emails, but what happens if your customer is using s spam/junk email filter and they cannot receive your reply. The nightmare scenario then of you actually responding to your customers contact emails but because of their ISP or junk mail filter they cannot receive your replies, have you tested this, have you tested the content of your emails? If you lace HTML or URL’s within the content is that accepted…yes these are all issues that you should have considered before your website even went live but this is not a well documented or well discussed topic.

Yet, this should a subject of conversation, it should be a topic of interest and it certainly should be something that is addressed as part of every website implementation plan.

Do not let a spam or junk email filter ruin your business. Get it setup properly, with thorough implementation and gain knowledge of how to operate it correctly. Don’t let technology take over by simply selecting the ‘default’ option.

NOTE: Not all website hosting companies implement anti-spam filters by default. If in doubt, ask. This article does not assume that spam/junk email filters will ruin a business, only that the business in question should be thoroughly knowledgeable of any issues when running such software - and where implementation and spam control is available that these are properly set up.
About the Author

Suzzi Law is the quality and control marketing arm of www.servicewrap.net, with many years experience in undertaking search engine ranking services for hundreds of companies worldwide - without real visitors it will not matter if you have email communication issues.

Learn How to Protect Your Family from the Worst of the Web!

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If you have an Internet business, then you have a need for quality, fresh content. It has been said that the more content means a greater chance of attracting web visitors.

So basically, more content means more visitors which means more m*ney!

But what if you really hate writing or can’t think of ways to get more content?

If that is the case, then here are six great places where you can easily add quality content to your website.

Google Alerts

Google has a service that sends news, press releases, and website information to your email account. Easy to set up, you enter a search phrase and Google Alerts will send you updates about that specific topic. You easily take this information and create a 100-150 word summary that can be entered into a blog or news section.

To get started, you can check-out Google Alerts: http://www.google.com/alerts

Public Domain

There are tons of books, magazines and websites full of great content that can be easily copied to your website. Called Public Domain Works, this is content that is written by someone else which has no copyright protection. You have the legal-right to take it and use it for your own purpose. By using public domain works, you can easily create sites with thousands of pages.

Some of the better places to find Public Domain works are http://www.firstgov.gov/ or http://www.gutenberg.org.

Articles

By using other people’s articles, you can easily add thousands of pages to your website. If you go to an article directory, you can find a large variety of web articles that are related to your topic. In addition, most of these articles are quite informative and provide quality content to your web visitor.

Two of the better places to find quality web articles are http://www.goarticles.com and http://www.ezinearticles.com

Outsource Your Content

If you have a little c*sh to spend, you can easily hire someone else to write tons of web content. What I usually do is find about 30-50 profitable keywords in my niche and hire someone to write an optimized article of 400-600 words. Usually you can find authors for around $8-$10 per article. So for a small-investment, you can get great content that is unique and optimized for search engines.

Here are few places where you can find quality (and affordable) people to write content articles: http://www.elance.com and http://www.rentacoder.com

Private Label Resale Rights

One of the “hidden” places to get quality content is through websites that offer private label resale rights. With private label rights you get full access to ebooks and articles that are written by other people. You have full permission to change or present the content in any way that you see fit. So if you find an ebook with 101 tips on a topic, you can easily turn this material into a series of web pages. You can also take this one step further and create an autoresponder sequence that is tied into your major affiliate-program.

One of the best places I use to get private label rights is http://www.nicheology.com

RSS Feeds

A great way to get fresh content is to have a RSS Feed installed on your website. Basically a RSS Feed is a tool that pulls news items from a website or blog. A great trick is to place the RSS Feed on all your web pages, so search engines see that your content is being consistently updated.

What I usually do is use a feed that pulls entries from my own blog. That way, I can control the content and amount of times that it is being updated.

One of the better places to find a good RSS Feed for your website is http://www.pheeds.com.

Although I have given you six great places to get content, there is one thing you should know about using it. Many search engines penalize websites for having duplicate content. So if you know that this information is listed on other sites, you need to change or add to the content. What I usually do is add to or alter about 25% of the content. This will help you avoid the duplicate content filter that is used by major search engines.

By utilizing all six of these content sources, you can easily build up a site filled with thousands of pages of fresh quality content that will attract tons of web-traffic. Once this is done, you will see your income soar through the roof.

About the Author

Scott J. Patterson is not that smart, yet he earns over $12,000 a month from his online businesses. To find out how YOU can build a profitable Internet business, download his fr*e ebook, The Secret-Guide to Home Businesses: http://www.duncemoney.com/content.html

Learn How to Protect Your Family from the Worst of the Web!

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Copyright 2005 Rok Hrastnik

The importance of RSS for marketing can no longer be disputed, but do we really understand all the benefits RSS brings to us as marketers, or really understand why we need to use it to get closer to our customers?

WHAT RSS WILL DO FOR YOU AS A MARKETER?

a] Get your content delivered without fail to all of your subscribers.

E-mail delivery rates are dropping, spam is everywhere and it’s getting increasingly difficult to get our marketing content read by our subscribers, prospects and customers. RSS is the way out.

b] Increase your web traffic and your online visibility.

With more and more sites competing for business every day, you need to do everything in your power to increase your online traffic, and RSS will help you get an upper edge.

c] RSS enables you to easily get your content published on dozens and dozens of other sites.

d] It will serve as a platform for ad sales,

e] It will provide advertising opportunities to promote your own business

f] It will help you get more content for your site without you having to write a single word.

WHY YOU NEED RSS, FROM THE END-USER POINT OF VIEW?

a] People want to receive content in a controlled environment where they are in-charge, not the publisher.

b] Delivering content using e-mail is becoming increasingly difficult, due to blacklists, spam filters and over excessive amounts of e-mail in your recipients’ mailboxes.

c] RSS allows you to deliver content beyond your e-zine, giving you more content delivery opportunities.

d] RSS is a natural tool for content syndication, which means easily and instantly delivering your content to hundreds of other content sources, thus creating additional exposure.

e] When using RSS to deliver all of your web site content updates, RSS will actually increase your web site traffic, thus giving your promotional messages more exposure.

f] People are afraid of subscribing to e-mail lists, which makes getting new subscribers difficult; RSS is a whole different story.

WHY SHOULD YOU CARE?

Either as an end-user or as business person, content delivery should be one of your top informational concerns.

a] As an end-user you cannot function properly without having relevant access to the information you need. Content delivery mechanisms affect your ability to access this information.

b] As a business person you must understand that your business success, among other things, depends on information, and in large on your ability to deliver it. Without the proper content delivery vehicles you cannot get content in-front of your target audiences, at least not in a relevant fashion.

RSS answers the needs of both.

About the author:

Learn how to take full marketing advantage of RSS and get all the knowledge and how-to information for implementing RSS in your marketing mix, from direct marketing, PR, e-commerce and online publishing to SEO, traffic generation and so on. FREE guide available for immediate download, too. Click here now: http://rss.marketingstudies.net/book/