I have a friend that wants to buy a revenue producing site.  He’s doing his homework before he buys, but I’ve been telling him over the last couple of weeks don’t believe everything you see.  A lot of those “gurus” out there and sales pages are complete bullshit.  From the screenshots down to the videos.

Testimonials a lot of times are faked also and even if they’re not the big internet marketing guys play the “you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours” game.

Another thing PayPal fees vary by transaction.  When I see a screenshot of PayPal transactions and the fees are exactly the same for every transaction, that raises a big red flag for me.  PayPal charges you different fees depending on what kind of transaction it is and what kind of account you have.  Usually you won’t be billed at the same rate for every single transaction if you have a ton of transactions.  For more information get it straight from PayPal.

Here’s a quick tutorial for everyone.  You can take this as a warning or you can take it to become a scammer.  Either way it’s up to you what you do with the knowledge.

There are a few ways to get the desired effect.

Technique one:

Go to your favorite website and save the page.  Open the page up in your favorite WYSIWYG editor.

Change the names and numbers.  Save, open up in your friendly browser, get a screenshot.  Done.

Click on the images to enlarge them.

Look who's PayPal account this is!

See How Easy it is to Manipulate any of the Fields?

And that’s just one technique.  We still have the Firebug technique.  The javascript code technique.  I haven’t even mentioned videos.  You get the point.  I don’t think the other techniques are necessary.

Pay attention to detail and verify as many details as you can.  There are too many scammers out there.

A blank index page is a simple but incredible trick to help you secure your site directories.  You just right click on your desktop or within a folder on your computer, go to New>Text Document.  Once your text document is made you change the name to index.html or index.php.  That’s it you’re done.  Why is this so good?  Why is this always on my desktop?

Simple if you create a lot of websites or use a lot of scripts you’ll be dealing with a lot of directories.  The internet browsers always by default look for an index page on each directory it’s sent to.  If it doesn’t find an index page it lists everything that the directory has inside.

This can be dangerous to you and your pockets because you might have paid downloads you’re trying to hide in that directory or a ton of images or programs in there.  Whatever is in the directory you don’t want anyone to see it.  You just drag and drop your little blank index file into your FTP program into any directories without an index file and you just saved yourself a lot of hassle.

Of course an index file won’t stop every kind of attack on your directories.  If Alexa or Google or any of the other search engines decides to index your files they will still be taken.  With the index file you’ll be at the very least slowing down their progress.  Imagine if you had 500 files in a directory and you had that little blank index page blocking everyone out.  For someone to get all 500 of those files they’d have to manually go to each link or manually search out each link to get them.  If you didn’t have the index page they would land on a directory with a nice listing of all of your files and they can either scrape every file on their or they can just click on the conveniently displayed links and download everything.

There are other security benefits such as people searching for script vulnerabilities and searching out certain files, but it’s just good practice to include a blank index file inside each of your directories, get use to doing it with all of your sites.  You can thank me later.