If  you use some type of form on your site that sends out an email you are most likely to get some type of malicious bot that finds it and tries to use it to send out spam. You can add a bit of PHP code to your script to prevent that.

<?php
if (!isset( $_SERVER['REQUEST_METHOD'] != “POST”) {
    exit(“<p>You did not press the submit button; this page should not be accessed directly.</p>”);
}
?>

This will check to see if the form was submitted from your own site and that the page was just not directly accessed. Place this code on the PHP page that your form submits to.

Here are 10 online marketing tips to help you with marketing your site.

1. Keep your domain name short and easy to remember.
2. Keep your sales message simple.
3. Be sure to pick up all the extensions you can for your domain to be sure that there will be no issues with  competitors later.
4. Avoid using dashes or hyphens in your domain name.
5. Choose a domain that is easy to type out on the keyboard.
6. Make sure that the domain is somewhat relevant to what you are doing.
7. Speak the language your customer speaks on your site. Remember your not selling to you but to your customer.
8. Understand your core business and do not inundate your customers with too many different options at once.
9. Design a clean and simple site that is as small as possible.  A third of your visitors are most likely still using dial up.
10. Update your site regularly.

Most people who run a business have some sort of business plan for their business. To have a successful site I suggest building an action plan, much like a business plan, for your web site. This will allow you to create a detailed schedule and budget for all your marketing needs.

Strategy

The first thing you need to do is set a goal for how many visitors to or sales you want from your site each month. Once you have decided on the goal, choose from the various marketing options available to promote your site. I suggest that your strategy should encompass several different methods to increase the visitors to your site.

Budget

Now that you have a goal for number of visitors and amount of sales you want to your site, it’s time to set a budget. Be realistic .  Set an amount you can easily affort to spend each month. I suggest having a budget minimum of $50. There is a lot you can do to market yourself with just $50.  Some of the best marketing tools are free.

Create a Timeline

Sit down and write a timeline of when you want to implement each marketing tool. Determine how long you want to spend on each strategy and in what order they should be done. If you are trying out a new marketing medium, I suggest that you do a small test to see how well it works. Many advertisers will want you to commit your whole budget to them, promising extraordinary returns, but I suggest you resist the urge and only do a small test run in order to calculate just how great a return on your investment you will actually make.

Tracking Results

If you do any marketing it is definitely important to track the results. You could simply track visitors to your site using web stats, but then you won’t know where those visitors are coming from, and you won’t know if the marketing you did was effective. To track it I suggest creating mini splash pages that are geared toward a target audience. For example, if you buy a banner on a site, make it so the clicks go to a page that says something like: ”Welcome visitor from X site”.  This will not only help you track traffic from that specific banner, but will help with conversions if you are selling something.

With the domain change to bluefur.com we took the time to update our blog to the newest version of WordPress 2.1.

The new version of WordPress has over 500 bug fixes from the previous version and is secure against some of the recent WordPress hacks that have been happening in the blog sphere.

The upgrade itself was very easy to do. If you have installed a previous version of WordPress through Fantastico you can upgrade it through the Fantastico link in your cPanel.

If you are like me and like to do thing by hand. This is how to do the upgrade using FTP:

1. First download the latest version here.
2. Login to your WordPress and disable each of your plugins one by one.
3. Unzip it to somewhere that is easy for you to remember like your Desktop.
4. Open your FTP program and rename your wordpress blog file to [foldername]backup.
5. Create a new folder with the previous foldername that you just renamed. So if yours was called blog and you renamed your old one blogbackup you should create a new one called blog.
6. Upload the files from the unziped file in step 2.
7. Copy the wp-config.php from your blogbackup folder to your blog folder.
8. Copy the wp-content and wp-images folders from your blogbackup folder to your blog folder.
9. Point your browser to your blog with /wp-admin/upgrade.php on the end.
10. Your site should work now and login to your wordpress and start up your plugins one by one. If you notice any errors from the plugins I would suggest reviewing if it is compatiable here.
11. Reset your theme if it is not showing in your presentation menu.

That should be it. Enjoy the new features of WordPress 2.1.

We have added some WordPress videos for those that would like to learn how to use WordPress more.

We at Manticore Media Group Inc. would like to announce the change of the name of our hosting business from MonsterHosting.ca to BlueFur.com due to allegations of trademark infringement.We felt that, rather than spending hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees defending our use of the name and possibly affecting our ability to continue to deliver affordable hosting and the excellence in customer service our customers are accustomed to, it was the best option to settle this matter out of court.Manticore Media Group Inc. and BlueFur.com will continue to strive to meet and exceed our customers’ needs and expectations. We look forward to marketing under the BlueFur brand and growing with the industry in years to come. As I am sure there will be many questions we have posted some of the obvious ones here:

Will there be any disruption in my service due to this change?
There should be no disruption to your service due to the change. Once we are 100% sure that the BlueFur.com domain is running at full capacity we will start to point the monsterhosting.ca domain to the bluefur.com domain. This should happen in the next 24 to 48 hours.

Why did you pick BlueFur.com?
Finding a domain which allowed us to continue using our lovable mascot was a tricky venture. We feel that BlueFur.com is a great brandable name that is unique and easy to remember.

Who brought these allegations of trademark infringement against you?
Part of our agreement states that we can not disclose the details of the agreement. Let’s just say that they are a very large US based company with deep pockets.

Does this mean you are going out of business?
By no means does this mean we are going out of business. In fact due to this legal matter we have spent very little time on marketing and branding. We look forward to the challenge of getting our new name out and making BlueFur.com a household name.

What domains does this effect?
This effects all of our ‘monster’ domains. If you use any of these services you should update your bookmarks:

MonsterHosting.ca -> BlueFur.com
MonsterDomains.ca -> BlueFurDomains.com MonsterAff
iliateca -> BBlueFurAfiliate.com

Is te any way we ce can he If you provide
ide lion your site to to MonsterHosting.ca we advise you to update and redirect them to BlueFur.com.

We believe every great business should set goals for there business. This year we have several specific goals we want to achieve and we have outlined it below in no specific order. If your business does not have a business plan then you can build one free online using the Interactive Business Planner.

Billing Improvements
Our biggest goal for 2007 is to improve the way billing is done. We are working on integrating a customized version of ModernBill into our system. We will then need to bring in all 5000+ customers into that system. This is no easy task for 2007 but it is something we see as a major hole in our current delivery.

You will be able to then update your payment online, review invoices, purchase new services or upgrade all through the billing system. We will also be integrating our help desk and customer resource center into the billing system so that they are all centralized.

Support Improvements
Another goal for 2007 is to improve the way you can get support. One method is we will be upgrading our Help Desk to the newest version of Kayako which allows you to login with a username and password that you set to view your tickets online. One of the problems with the current version of our�Help Desk�is that you need to have some form of email working to view your tickets.

We are still working on getting our support wiki online. This task is about 45% done and is a work in progress. The wiki will have all of our knowledgebase and more that can be searched and contributed to by our community.

We tested Live Online Courses�in 2006�which was sort of a hit or miss on the topics. We are working on developing a more step by step online course which you can run at your own pace with supplemental Live Courses to fill in the wholes for 2007.

Service Improvements
One of our continuing goals is to look for additional services our customers want and drop off any services that are a miss or not profitable.

We will be dropping VPS servers, Merchant Accounts, Oracle and MySQL 5 services in 2007.

We will be adding a custom dedicated server builder so you can build a server that matches your needs and price. We will be introducing Colocation services�in the Vancouver area. We will be looking at creating a blogging service directed at the new blogger in Canada. We will be moving the majority of our Unix servers from Texas to our Vancouver location in 2007.

Summary
We have some lofty goals in 2007 which will improve our services to you. We hope you have a great 2007. If you have any ideas to help us achieve our goals feel free to comment.