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10 Steps for Business Owners to Take if They Are a Victim of Identity Theft

Be aware that 40 million crooks obtained credit card numbers this past year, “Be Suspicious”. Also be aware that most identify theft is not reported, especially when it involves family members, so the statistics are off. These statistics show that consumers lost $5 billion last year when in actuality it is closer to $50 billion. There have been an estimated 9.9 million victims in America.

In a recent article in MSN Money their research showed that 32% of people said they had been a victim of identity fraud by a friend or family, and 13% were victimized by a co-worker. Beware! These people know your patterns and habits.

• Contact the fraud departments of the three major credit bureaus, to place a fraud alert on your credit file.

• Close all accounts that have been affected and request copies of fraud-dispute forms and complete and return immediately. Keep copies!

• File a police report in each jurisdiction the theft occurred

• Send copies of the report to your creditors or anyone that requires proof of the crime

• File a complaint with the FTC (800-IDTHEFT or www.consumer.gov/idtheft) and Post Office

• Contact the Identity Theft Resource center at 858-693-7935 or www.idtheftcenter.org

• Request a new driver’s license from the state of motor vehicles and have a fraud report attached to your driving record.

• Notify check-verification firms about any fraudulent checks:

International check service 800-526-5380
Telecheck 800-927-0755
Certegy Check Services 800-437-5120

• Call 1-888-CALL-FCC and file a complaint.

• Change your passwords and PIN immediately.

Michelle Dunn has over 17 years experience in credit and debt collection. She is the founder of Never Dunn Publishing, LLC, is a writer, consultant and the Editorial Advisor for Eli Financial Debt Collection Compliance Alert Newsletter. Michelle started M.A.D. Collection Agency and ran is successfully for 7 years. She owns and runs Credit & Collections.com a free online community for credit and business professionals.

She has written 5 books in her Collecting Money Series and is currently writing a book for the Streetwise Series, part of the Adams Media Corporation. For more information on Michelle’s services or to order any of her books please email her at michelle@michelledunn.com or visit http://www.michelledunn.com & http://www.credit-and-collections.com

Oct 18 2008 01:31 am | Net Center | Comments Off

RSS Mania - Part Four - The Basic Elements in the “Channel” Element

Now that you are familiar with templates, or at least what an RSS Template should look like, and some of the possibilities within the template, let us attack the “Channel” description. This article will deal with Channel Main Elements. The next article will deal with Channel sub-elements more specifically the “image” element.
Crtitical Point - None of these are required EXCEPT for the

command line.
However it would be to your best interest to include some of them.

In the previous article we described a channel, but it will do good to go over it again.

Look on a Channel as how you choose to define the information you are going to put into the RSS file (remember it is rss.xml” for our series.) For instance if you are putting out an RSS file to get people to look at your Web Site which has information about and sells Perfume, your channel would be:

.
and read in the RSS File as:

That is pretty easy isn’t it?
Just keep on telling yourself that it is all that easy. Do not sweat the little stuff.

Next comes the Description of your Channel.
So how are we going to define your Channel?
Hmmm…let’s see:
“RSS Feed for The Great Perfume Products Sold At Randy’s Pandy’s Perfumery”
which would like:

Hey not so bad is it? See I told you!

Okay now the next command - Copyright.
That should be easy. After all we are going to release everything we write out into the Internet Virtual world and we would like to mark the text with just some sort of ownership statement. That is your copyright.

Okay next command - The “link” command>
You do want to be able to give any viewers the ability to know just where to find these great deals on perfume, don’t you? After all the whole purpose of creating this “x####ooo&^%$#(((__” feed is to get them to BUY from you! So the link command tells them where you are and how to get to you.
Let us say your website is at the directory:

<a href="http://www.randypandy.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.randypandy.com</a>
So your link command will look like:

Okay Next is Language. Why you ask do we need a language command? Well it is part of the RSS specifications and it is important for the Readers to know just what langauge you are using. It also helps search engines know what language this is. And anything you can do to be helpful to Search Engines is critical. And here we have to be careful. Most of us will be writing in English. But what happens if the RSS feed is in another language?
Well the code works like this.
language-code = primary-code ( “-” subcode )
So if you were writing in English from the United States your code would be:
en-us
You do not need the subcode. “en” would be enough.
(If you need a langauge code table try: http://www.purplepages.ie/RSS/netscape/languages.html
or some two letter codes are: fr (French), de (German), it (Italian), nl (Dutch), el (Greek), es (Spanish), pt (Portuguese), ar (Arabic), he (Hebrew), ru (Russian), zh (Chinese), ja (Japanese), hi (Hindi), ur (Urdu), and sa (Sanskrit).

So our next line will read:

(Remember the “-us” is purely optional.)

Now we come to the “last build date”. Again the reason for this is simple. To let search engines and users know when was the last time you updated the file. However, here too, there are some caveates. You must follow specifications on Dates. Let us remain simple here.
Each Day & Month is represented by a 3 letter character, as follows:
Days:

Mon

Tue

Wed

Thu

Fri

Sat

Sun

Months:

Jan

Feb

Mar

Apr

May

Jun

Jul

Aug

Sep

Oct

Nov

Dec

Now as to time, well let us not get complicated. We can use GMT, EST, CST, MST, PST etc.
Most RSS feeds will prefer to use the GMT as it is basically universal and can be checked on the internet fairly simply.
So finally our date will look like this:

Okay before we end the BASIC aspects of the Channel description let us just include some of the other possiblities here (the last three are real technical so we will leave them out of our feed.)

pubDate this is along the same syntax as our lastbuilddate and just tells people when you publish the file. Usually used for newspapers and the like to flip automatically each day.

managingEditor - this is the email address for person responsible for content of the feed. So here we would put: randypandy@randypandy.com (Randy Pandy)

webMaster - this the email address for the person responsible for technical issues relating to channel. So here we would put: webmaster@randypandy.com (Pandy Randy)

category - This is used to specify one or more categories that the channel belongs to.
So here we may put: “E-commerce”

generator This is A string indicating the program used to generate the channel.

skipHours A hint for aggregators telling them which hours they can skip.

skipDays A hint for aggregators telling them which days they can skip.

So what are we left with?
Well here we go (including also pubdate, managing editor, webmaster & category):

The next article will cover the image sub-element within the “Channel” element.

This is a continuation from my articles on RSS

Part One - “RSS Mania Addiction - An Introduction to RSS and the Terminology”

Part Two - Outline of How to Create an RSS Feed”

Part Three - The Template File”

Ted W. Gross owns Virgin Earth, a real estate brokerage firm in Jerusalem, Israel. Virgin Earth represents residential and commercial real estate all over Israel. The web site for Virgin Earth is: http://www.virginisrael.com. Virgin Earth also maintains an RSS Feed on its current properties which can be found on most pages in the web site of Virgin Earth. Virgin Earth also operates an Israel Tourism Portal. Virgin Earth - Israel Tourism & Information Portal on the same site. Ted Gross can be reached at: virginearth@gmail.com Ted Gross is also a published author and maintains a web site for his works. This can be found at: http://www.virginisrael.com/twg/iw.html

Oct 16 2008 09:34 am | Net Center | Comments Off

How Non-technical Webmasters are Harnessing the Power of RSS

The opportunity to quickly and easily implement and harness the power of RSS is quite real and new programs become available every week that allow non-technical marketers and webmasters to capitalize on the effective use of RSS.

Jim Edwards spoke of this trend in the recent “For a Greater Cause” teleseminar. Media-rich blogs and content sites are stickier and keep visitors on site longer.

Consider delivering audio content via the internet by setting up a blog and incorporating streaming audio. By doing so, your media-rich message creates a relationship with visitors that cannot be achieved with text alone.

If you’d like to take this one step further, start using video content. It’s the difference between reading a flyer versus listening to the radio versus watching television. Why do people gravitate to the TV when every home has a radio? When presented with the option, we prefer the satisfaction of both the auditory and visual senses.

The real power of blogs, audio and video is that you can invite your visitors to participate and interact with you by allowing them to post comments. Your blog becomes a community event and we all love a party.

If you’ll be using the strategy of blogging with audio and video, there are three things that you should do.

First, as mentioned above, allow your visitors to post comments to your blog.

Second, always give visitors the opportunity to sign up for your newsletter or ezine directly from your blog.

Third, for those who prefer to receive news via RSS feeds, post your RSS feed on every page of your blog.

Recorded interviews with industry experts fed via podcast can raise your credibility simply by association. Arrange for a phone interview with an expert in your market area, get permission to record the call and post it to your blog. If you’re offering publicity and exposure for the interviewee, it should be simple to find willing and eager parties.

RSS offers you the ability to provide high frequency content updates. It can be daily or hourly. Deliver important messages, news and other content on demand rather that waiting for your regularly scheduled e-zine.

What’s next?…

Here’s where things get fun for the online marketer and webmaster. One area in particular where you can really start to take advantage of RSS technology is to build sticky content on your sites and monetize it with programs like Google’s Adsense.

RSS feeds are available in abundance that provide product news, press releases and updates. Sites such as PRWeb (http://www.prweb.com) want you to use their news feeds on your site. So why not? Build your site’s content with news and information feeds that deliver steady streams of traffic.

Do a bit of searching and you’ll find programs and scripts that make the addition of RSS feeds to your website very simple and fast.

RSS gives you an edge over your competition by allowing you to create a sense of community, offer interaction and provide the latest news and information nearly on autopilot.

Ron Hutton - EzineArticles Expert Author

Ron Hutton is a 20 year sales and marketing veteran with a passion for coaching and training. To watch a free video tutorial on how RSS was used in one little experiment to generate an extra $100 in Adsense income in 2 weeks (10 days actually), go here now… http://www.gothrive.com/auto-news-video.htm

Oct 16 2008 02:51 am | Net Center | Comments Off

Net Center

10 Steps for Business Owners to Take if They Are a Victim of Identity Theft

RSS Mania - Part Four - The Basic Elements in the “Channel” Element

How Non-technical Webmasters are Harnessing the Power of RSS

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