Site icon Chris Parker

Chris Parker Founder of WhatIsMyIPAddress.com Is An Internet Ninja – Interview Transcript

In this episode we cover internet and IP address security, how to monetize your online business, entrepreneur adventures, lessons learned, and so much more.

https://anchor.fm/s/1efdfc0/podcast/play/2274687/sponsor/a72l02/https%3A%2F%2Fd3ctxlq1ktw2nl.cloudfront.net%2Fstaging%2F2019-1-4%2FEp--129---Chris-Parker-Founder-0233331749e88.m4a?_=1
Brett: Have you ever thought about starting your own podcast? When I was trying to get this podcast off the ground, I had so many questions like how do I record an episode? Where do I find background music? How do I get my show on Apple podcast, and Spotify, and all the other places people like to listen? Where do I find advertisers? That was the biggest question that I had. The answer to every one of these questions is really simple. Anchor.

Anchor is a one stop shop for recording, hosting, distributing, and monetizing your podcast. Best of all, it’s 100% free and 100% ridiculously easy to use. I love Anchor and I’m so thankful for them. It’s because of them that I have a very successful, very popular podcast, and I personally want to thank you, the listener, for joining in today. If you’ve always wanted to start a podcast, go to anchor.fm/start to join me and the diverse community of podcasters already using Anchor. That’s anchor.fm/start. I can’t wait to hear your first podcast.

It’s time for the Open Mic Podcast with your host, Brett Allen. Broadcasting live from the Bay Area studios, here at the Open Mic, no topic is off limits, and of course, you never know who may stop by. Sit back, relax, and enjoy today’s show.

What’s up everybody. Welcome to episode 129 of the Open Mic Podcast. It’s your host, Brett Allen, coming to you live from the Bar Area studios. It’s good to be here with you on a beautiful Monday morning. Happy Monday to you. I don’t know if you watched the Superbowl yesterday. If you did, super awesome. If you didn’t, super awesome. I’m not a big football person and I know people are like, “Oh well, Superbowl Sunday has really become like a national holiday almost,” and I think it’s true to a certain degree. It is really a big deal. Even the most non-football fans on the entire planet, it’s like the one time a year where everybody comes together, watches football, and eats food.

Honestly, I think it’s just because people come together because of the commercials, maybe. I don’t know, but I found you can watch the commercials online after the Superbowl. They’re all available on YouTube. I know, I have a bad attitude about football. I just never been a big fan, but that’s okay if you are. I hope you had a good time. I guess it’s an opportunity just for everybody to gather, hang out, and have a good time as well. There’s definitely that.

Anyway, we have a fantastic show lined up for you today. Chris Parker from whatismyipaddress.com, he is an entrepreneur, a business owner, I’m super excited to chat with him. Shot out to Interview Connections for making this interview possible. We’ll get to that in just a minute. Anyway, thank you so much, as always, every week for listening, joining in, and being a part of the podcast. Be sure to head over to openmicpodcast.net. That’s where you can find all of the latest episodes, and everything, and anything you wanted to learn about the show, all of that information is there. Of course, just for following us on social media, thank you for that, and for every single listener who joins in weekly, it means the absolute world.

You can listen to our show really on about 13 platforms. We just joined up with a company called Bullhorn which is really cool. The interesting thing about this directory and listening up is that, you can call onto a number which is toll free, and you can listen to podcast episodes. That way it’s really cool. I haven’t experimented with it a lot, but it’s really neat. I sent the link to a few friends to join in. It’s kind of cool, but yeah, you just call and you listen to the show, whatever show it is that you’re listening to, whether it’s our show or something else, it’s pretty cool, and it doesn’t use any of your data. That’s Bullhorn and we’ll be talking about more of that information later down the road. Without further ado, Chris Parker welcome into the Open Mic Podcast. It’s good to have you here today, sir.

Chris: Thank you. I’ve been looking forward to this.

Brett: I’m very excited and I’m a little excited more than usual, because Chris and I, for those of you listening, we can see each other. I can see what type of equipment he uses and he’s got really nice equipment. It’s exciting. We were talking about this before we started rolling tape. It’s a dream come true for a podcaster when your guest has the premium ultimate setup. Chris, thanks.

Chris: You’re very welcome. I’m a geek, so I tend to buy stuff to make things work better.

Brett: Yeah, I think that’s key. Work smarter, not harder.

Chris: Yes.

Brett: You are the founder of whatismyipaddress.com. It’s a tech friendly website, and the numbers that you attract are just absolutely remarkable. Let’s talk about how this all started for you particularly.

Chris: Sure. I started the website back in 2000. I think that was before Google even existed. Way back in the old days of AltaVista, Lycos, Ask Jeeves, and sites like that.

Brett: Oh gosh, that’s really old school. Ask Jeeves, wow.

Chris: Anyone under 40 is, “What are you talking about? I have no idea what that is.”

Brett: Yeah. They have no idea or web crawler. I mean geez, Ask Jeeves, I haven’t heard that in ages.

Chris: That’s an old one. I was working for a phone catalog reseller of computer equipment and they had just recently got a new internet connection in, a massive T1. For people that aren’t technical, that’s about 1/100th the speed of your cell phone.

Brett: Yeah, at least.

Chris: We needed to know the public IP address of the internet connection and that should be easy to find out. From the inside, you can only see the inside. How in the world do you figure out the outside? So I poked around and realized, there’s not a simple website that will tell us this. A couple of days later, I spent, at that time, was a couple hundred bucks to buy the domain name whatismyipaddress.com and put up the site in an old windows NT server in my condo, on a 384 kilobit DSL connection, and that was the day the site started.

Brett: Wow, that’s unbelievable. Just some of the references that you’ve made so far. It’s funny my brain is catching up with it. We’re obviously close in age, but that’s a whole nother conversation about that. Basically, you’re just kind of navigating the ever changing SEO landscape essentially, because you’ve come up with a system to help people find things. It obviously turned out to be a huge business for you. I want to ask you in particular, what are some particular ways that you monetize traffic to your website and other people can learn as well?

Chris: It’s kind of funny because I have, in some sense, the opposite problem that a lot of other people have. A lot of people are like, “I’ve got this great engine and I can make a lot of money for every person who visits my site, but I just can’t get enough people to my site to make a living off of it or to make the needle move,” I kind of historically have had the opposite problem, which sounds kind of weird, but that I have a crazy amount of traffic in the tune of about 6 million people a month come into the site, which is like the top couple thousand website in the world, but it’s really hard traffic to monetize, because people are there to just get their IP address and go. They’re not there to figure out which is the best camera to use, which is the best mic to use for podcast setup, on the cheap, or the expensive. They’re there just to get a little bit of technical information and they’re off. The other thing that has made it really difficult is 70% of my traffic is coming from outside the United States.

Brett: That seems typical these days though right?

Chris: It depends on the industry that you’re in. if you’re looking overall internet traffic, yeah, that’s about right, but if you’re a US based person talking about something here in the US, you probably had 80% or 90% US traffic.

Brett: I want to talk about, in that same vein, Google AdWords and AdSense. Is that becoming a thing of the past as far as a simple way for people to monetize traffic, or are people just not using it correctly? What’s the scoop on that whole deal?

Chris: I think other people’s platforms have gotten significantly better over the years. AdSense was probably the first. I played around with a couple little ad networks, but really kind of the first successful like, “Oh my gosh, I can really make a fair amount of money out this,” was using Google AdSense on my site. It was great because I didn’t have to work with ad networks, just set it, forget it. You don’t really have to maintain it, you don’t have any relationship to manage, but that has its pros and cons.

In the last couple of years, there is a new technology that’s come out, a new platform that’s come out called Header Bidding. It allows, at least for me, the other ad networks out there, the OpenX, AppNexus, Index Exchange, some of these more well-known display ad networks to actually compete on a more level playing ground with AdSense. You can figure it all together in your DFP and now you can start letting your ad networks cherry pick the type of traffic that they want to cherry pick. It also forces a little bit more competition on Google AdSense.

Brett: Very interesting. Going to your website, if somebody goes to check it out, what are some specific services that you offer to help people? I obviously know, but if somebody has not been to your website, what can they expect when they go check it out?

Chris: The first and primary thing that I’ve done on the website is showing the user their public IP address. Some people go, “Well, what’s that?” It’s kind of like your caller ID telephone number for your phone, or return address for physical postal mail. Anytime that you want to communicate on the internet, your data has to go from your computer, off to the other computer, and back, and the other computer needs to know where to send that data. That’s your IP address.

Your IP address actually tells people a little bit about you. It tells you who your internet service provider is, and more recently, it can start telling people with a fair degree of accuracy where you’re located. I have a guy doing graphics work for me and he was playing around the site one day. He looked at it and he’s like, “Oh my gosh, my IP address, the location is coming back to my kitchen window. That’s a little too freaky for me.”

Brett: Yeah, that’s a little bit much.

Chris: Which kind of leads into some of the other stuff that I’ve started working with and you’re talking monetization. I started to work with a company called VPN services. They allow you to route your internet traffic through their servers. Three reasons why people do that, there’s people who want privacy. “I don’t want my ISP knowing what websites I’m visiting. I don’t want my government knowing what websites I’m visiting.” There’s the security aspect of it. “While I’m traveling, I don’t want people sniffing my traffic. I don’t want people trying to get passwords. I don’t really trust that. The person who can make a really good bagel also has really good network security on their open Wi-Fi.” Then you’ve got people that are wanting to access content that’s restricted based on location type of stuff. If you’re in China, well guess what, you can’t use Google, you can’t use Gmail, you can’t get on Netflix, or Hulu, all these sort of service. Those kind of three reasons why people do that. A lot of people, once they decide on a VPN service, they want to make sure it’s working, so they come to my website and visit, “Yes, I know I’m using Verizon, but when I visit the website, it says I’m using Bell Canada which is, I want to look like I’m coming from Canada,” so they do that.

Brett: Interesting. In that same vein, this is just more of kind of a curiosity question. Is there such a thing as “private browsing”? Like when you go on Google, or Internet Explorer, where you can click the link and make this session private, which I’ve always found a little bit weird. I don’t know why somebody would want it. I mean, there’s probably reasons why, but is that sort of thing really exist or can anybody just see what you’re doing all the time?

Chris: Well it actually means two things. Incognito mode is basically, I don’t want my family knowing what websites I’m visiting. That’s really what it is. It doesn’t keep history. It’s like, I don’t want my family knowing I’m watching porn. That’s realistically why it was designed. If you want to be a little more technical, it deletes cookies at the end of the session, so there’s no record for if you decide to go back to a website that you had been there previously. It keeps no logs on your computer. Some people are concerned about that, but it really doesn’t prevent anyone from the outside from knowing about who you are or what you’re doing. You’re still using the same internet connection, the same IP addresses. They just don’t know that you previously logged in under this account or something like that.

Brett: Very interesting. I find what you do so intriguing and just kind of going through my notes here. I have a lot of questions. What are your core philosophies that you have behind running your website?

Chris: I think one of the reasons why it’s always been successful is, I’m always trying to think of the user experience and how can I provide a better experience for people visiting my website, and trying to find an appropriate balance with me being able to pay my bills. Over the years, I’ve always had people, “Hey, we can do pop-unders and popovers, and you could just make crazy amounts of money,” those are really annoying.

Brett: Yeah. They’re obnoxious.

Chris: I hate auto playing video ads. I hate all these creative things that take over all your screen and you can’t see the content. I hate pages where there’s three sentences of content and 40 ads. I try to stay away from stuff like that, and in doing so, provide a useful experience for people. Taking technical subjects about the internet and making them simple without using all the technical terms. People go, “I know what an IP address is now. I know how email works,” things like that.

Brett: Very interesting. That brings me to the topic of internet security just as a whole. When you go online and you make a purchase through Amazon or Apple Pay—I don’t know, there’s a million different ways to go about it—what causes somebody to get their information stolen or hacked? Are there ways to prevent that in particular?

Chris: I think the first step is really being aware of where you’re providing information. A lot of websites now allow you to do guest checkouts, and not setup accounts, and not provide as much information, and those are good. If you can use Apple Pay, that kind of prevents you from using a credit card number. You really have to limit where you’re providing your information. You have to assume any website that I provide user credentials for, at some point in the future, it will get hacked.

We’re recording this on February 1st, and a couple of days ago, there was a database of usernames and passwords, 2.2 billion records, I refer to it as collection number two of usernames and passwords that have been pulled from data breaches, compromises, and things like that. You almost just have to assume that everywhere that you create an account, it will get compromised. You need to be mindful of how much information am I providing? Do they really need this information? What’s the least amount of information I can provide to this entity in order to do the transaction?

I like to buy from Amazon. It’s really convenient. It used to be that Amazon was the cheapest place to get basically everything. Now, that’s not true. There’s a lot of products that you can get cheaper elsewhere, but that’s one more account I’ve got to create. That’s one more place that has a credit card number. That’s one more place that need an email address and a password that I have to maintain somewhere, like a password manager. Sometimes, you might be willing to do things like pay a little bit more in order to just reduce the number of entities that you’re dealing with.

Brett: Yeah, that makes sense. It kind of reminds me of when you go somewhere and they’re like, “Hey, do you want to be part of our rewards program?” It’s like, “What? No.” I have a funny story about that. In any case, it’s like, “No, thank you. I’m good,” I guess the biggest thing is like, it’s never going to happen to me until it happens to you, like the target breach that happened a couple years ago. I was actually affected by that. Not in a major way like some people, but I was affected. It’s crazy. Now with the chip system, that is supposed to be more secure, I’m kind of wondering if it really is, but I like Apple Pay. I use that a lot when I have the newest phone. I actually have to look at my phone for the charge to even go through, but I don’t even know how safe that really is. I know that’s not necessarily what you focus on per se, but do you have thoughts on that?

Chris: I definitely have thoughts and opinions on it. In terms of providing information, I was just at the local hardware store yesterday, and I like self checkout because I can get through faster and it just takes longer to get in line. I go through and I’m about to walk out the door, the person who’s monitoring the self check station comes over and says, “Hey, we’d like you to go online and do this survey. This is how us as employees are being rated now.” I had a conversation with her and I said, “Unfortunately, that’s a horrible way for companies to rate their employees, because the last thing I want to do is go to a website, provide them a whole bunch of information about myself in exchange for $5.” It’s like, “I don’t want to give you more information. I want the least footprint out there.”

It’s funny you’re talking about credit cards and chip cards. I’m not much of a conspiracy theorist, but I find it interesting that in most of the world where there’s chip cards, it’s chip and what they refer to as chip and pin. You have to use your card and then you have to type in a pin code, a password. Well in the US, I guess Visa and MasterCard figured that people were too stupid or something like that, and so we just won’t require the pin portion of it in the US.

Basically, this concept of switching to chip cards is a little technologically more secure, but it doesn’t prevent anyone from who obtains your credit card from going to the store, from store to store, and charging stuff up. Everywhere else in the world it’s, “You got to enter your pin code in order for the charge to go through.”

Brett: In the Bay Area here, there’s a few places that even if I use Apple Pay, I still have to put a pin in, but then it’s my problem because I get irritated. Why am I using Apple Pay if I have to put in a pin? But you have a very valid point and I think our listeners should be aware when you’re putting that information out there into the universe, you have to be careful.

I don’t know if you watch comedy but comedian Bill Burr has a bit about that and he hates those DNA tests. He goes, “Why would I want to put my saliva and send it out to the internet?” It’s those kinds of things. He goes, “You’re just putting your information out there in Google home and all these other things. Alexas, all of those are listening in and collecting information.” We’re talking about things now and I’m sure later, it’ll show up on a Facebook feed or on an iPhone ad, something crazy.

Chris: I don’t believe that just yet, but in some cases, that is the direction that the things are going. At some point, legislation will have to find a way to match parity with technology and make sure that there are privacy things in place. We’re starting to see how that started to impact companies like Facebook. Facebook’s business model is the more we know about you, the more we can market stuff to you. The more information about you, we can sell to other people.

I don’t know who created the phrase, but there’s a concept of, if you’re not paying for the service or the product, you are the product or the service. Everything that we do out there that’s “free,” it’s not really free. We’re doing something in exchange for that free. When you’re using Facebook, you’re giving up all your relationships, your photos, facial recognition, things that you like, the things that you don’t like, in exchange for being able to be marketed to.

When you visit my website, I don’t charge you for that, but I force you to see display ads. Hopefully, you’re not using an ad blocker which annoys website owners, but there is an exchange there. It’s technically not free. The cost of visiting my website is seeing a couple of ads as you go from page to page. We just have to think those things through. I find it interesting though. I had a conversation with someone else recently. He was talking to a number of people in their twenties and their perception was, “I’m not worried about this, I just assume that everybody knows everything about me already.” This concept of privacy to them is very different than what you and I might think of privacy of like, “I’m uncomfortable with people knowing what I like, what I don’t like, where I’ve been, where I’m going,” where other people are like, “That’s just the way it is,” it’s not even a concern to them. We’re in that transitional group, so we get affected by it and they don’t.

Brett: What are some technical ‘what ifs’ that keep Chris Parker up at night?

Chris: For the longest time, I’ve always worried about hard drives failing, denial of service attacks, what if I get hit by the latest search engine algorithm, that’s technical. Most of those are things that are somewhere in my control, those things that I can move to having redundant servers, which is what I did a number of years ago. What if I have a denial service attack? I sit behind a protection system for stuff like that now. I can’t really do much about if Google changes their algorithm other than make sure that I’m not doing tricks, that I’m not trying to scam the system, that I’m just producing good content for people. There’s always going to be those things that keep you up at night, regardless.

Brett: One last question about monetization and then I want to move to the entrepreneur side, because I have some questions about that. One of the things that I love to focus on the Open Mic Podcast is just picking entrepreneurs’ brains, podcasters putting episodes on their website. What are some things that we can do to help try and monetize that particular traffic if we can at all?

Chris: You mean as a podcast host, what are things that you can do?

Brett: Yeah. As a podcast host, let’s say we put up episodes on our website. We want to drive our traffic to our website. That’s where we want people to go for everything. Are there some simple ways that we can monetize that, or is that something that’s not really happening yet, or maybe down the road, or in the future?

Chris: It’s interesting, I see quite a wide range of things happening with a number of the hosts that I’ve been on their sites. I try to look on their programs. I look at their sites and try to kind of gauge what’s going on. It seems to me for a lot of podcast hosts, that they don’t do anything other than produce an audio file, which to me is a lost opportunity. You and I, we’ve talked about a variety of technologies, we’ve talked about a few services, we’ve talked about some websites.

One of the things that I do is as a guest, once the recording is live, I go out and have it transcribed for myself. A lot of podcast hosts do this because people consume content in different ways. Search engines aren’t really listening to your MP3 files and driving traffic to your site based on an MP3 file, but you might have a page that has the video that we’re recording for those that like to watch video, along with the audio recording which goes up on all the podcast applications, in iTunes and stuff, or people can listen to it in their browser, and then for other people, you’ve got that same content that’s been transcribed by someone in the Philippines for $3 an hour, $5 an episode, or something like that.

Where your guests are talking about products or services, you can get affiliate relationships with those. If they’re talking about a favorite book they read, you can become an Amazon affiliate and refer people to that book. I think, producing that transcript to me is a huge opportunity for podcast host, because now you’ve got a much more rich content. People that are looking for, “Hey, what did Chris Parker say about privacy and security?” could now actually find a transcript of it which leads to your site. “How did he start his business,” that gives you an opportunity to get that search traffic, allows you to be seen, and people are like, “Let me listen to some more episodes.”

Brett: Very cool. Onto the entrepreneur topics. What are some of the biggest challenges that you face as being an entrepreneur?

Chris: I think for me, one of the biggest challenges was actually making that transition from full time work to jumping to side and becoming a full time entrepreneur. It took me probably considerably longer than it should have. My wife and I, we’re both very risk-averse. The thing that pushed me to make the decision was the company I was working for. Basically, it was starting to go out of business. Changes in the economy hit them really hard. A couple of their key partners decided to leave the niche that they were in, which kind of left them high and dry for partners to work with.

I was kind of faced with, “Okay, do I look for a new full time job, or do I make the jump to making whatismyipaddress.com my full time job?” We kind of set some milestones in place in terms of, I’ve got to be able to increase my revenue by this amount of money over the next 3 months, the next 6 months, the next 9 months, the next 12 months. If I can’t hit those milestones, then it’s time to go back and get another job working for somebody else. I think that was a hard transition for me, that’s a bit nerve wracking. I like to security of a consistent paycheck.

Even though the website was producing a fairly consistent revenue, it was a question of, can I actually really by putting 40 hours a week into this, can I actually significantly grow the revenue. It has grown quite a bit. It’s also helped me learn a lot about myself and a lot of my shortcomings in terms of what I do know and what I don’t know. A while back, I started working with a business coach which I think has probably been one of the best decisions I’ve made. I regret not doing it many years ago because there’s other people who just think about things differently than you do.

They’re in a different place in their business world, experience they’ve run across, different issues than you have, and it helps having that other perspectives that you otherwise don’t have. The only perspective you have is those things that you’ve experienced. That’s ultimately actually caused me some problems in my business. We talked about, it was never started as a business. It was a hobby. It was something fun. A lot of the website infrastructure, a lot of the technical infrastructure is all self grown. I built it myself. I programmed it myself. Well, that makes it really hard to get myself out of the way of letting my business grow.

I’m a bottleneck for certain aspects of my business. It doesn’t matter if I work with 20 contractors, because of the way I built the website, there’s things that only I know how to do, there’s only things that I have access to and it was never designed to be able to give other people access to it. Now, it’s shooting myself in the foot to some extent. Many years later, it’s going to cost me some money to outsource and have kind of the whole backend of the website rebuilt so that I can have content writers from around the world start producing more content for me, that I can have my editor go in and fix things without, “Hey Chris, I need you to push a new file up on your website.”

Some of it is just learning that there’s things that I should be spending my time on. When I first started working with my coach, I was really proud of, “I’m a solo operation. I do it all,” and he’s like, “So how much are you paying your accountant?” “I don’t have an accountant. I’m doing it all myself. I’m doing it,” and he’s like, “So your accountant is a CPA?” “I’m not a CPA.” “So your accountant has 20 years of experience doing accounting?” I’m like, “No.” “It sounds like you really have kind of an entry level accountant.” “I guess I am, I’m kind of entry level,” and he goes, “And how much are you paying your accountant?” “I’m not paying myself anything. I’m not paying for those services.” He goes, “Well, you are. It’s time that you can’t do things that only you can do. So if you’re making $100 an hour in your business, or more, whatever, you’re paying your accountant $100 an hour who have no experience, have no degree, and be an entry level person. You’re way overpaying that person.”

Now mind you, I still do my accounting because I have some control issues. But it was that kind of the realization that there are things that I really should be outsourcing to people who are, this is what they’re good at. This is not a good use of my time, so I started to do that. One of the things I was talking about podcasts transcripts, having someone in the Philippines doing that. I have social media stuff now being done by other people who have more experience in that than I do. They enjoy doing it, which I don’t necessarily enjoy doing in the process. It’s difficult. It’s hard, I think, for solo entrepreneurs to give up control of things that we’re so used to. “I don’t trust this person.” Well, at some point you’ve got to figure out how to trust or put things in place where your accountant can’t spend more money than you want them to spend. Otherwise, those things become a hindrance to growing your business.

Brett: Very valuable information. I appreciate you sharing that for all of our listeners to take a hold of that. One last question here, what’s on the horizon for What Is My IP Address? What’s next?

Chris: I’ll give something for your entrepreneurial people, your listeners. There’s a book and a program I started going through called, Ask Method by Ryan Levesque. It’s a way of surveying your audience and really starting to learn their language. Why do they do the things that they do? How do they talk about your products and your services, or products and services in your space, that allows you to then turn around and use that information in your marketing? One of the examples that he talks about is, if you’re a golf business and you think that most of your customers are in their seventies, but they’re actually in their fifties that changes the imagery that you use in your ads. That changes maybe the music that you use, maybe you talk a little bit more about your upcoming retirement as opposed to your current retirement.

By knowing those things, it allows you to increase your conversion rates. Not only that. It helps you to actually use the lingo that your customers use in your material so when they search for it online, they actually get to your site not seeing your marketing stuff. One of the challenges in any industry that we have is that we use industry lingo. If you’re in life insurance, you might talk about yourself as a CLU, “I’m a Chartered Life Underwriter.”

Brett: What the heck is that?

Chris: Exactly.

Brett: Ask Jeeves, he’ll tell you.

Chris: I spent about eight years working for a life insurance broker. I heard these terminologies. One time I was told to put them on the website and I’m like, “But that doesn’t mean anything to anybody outside the insurance industry.” “But what does that mean?” “It means I’ve got 30 years experience.” “Well, put that down. 30 years experience as opposed to CLU, because CLU doesn’t mean anything anybody.”

It helps you understand that. What we did is, we did a ton of surveys on the site about people, why they use VPNs, what VPNs they use, how do they talk about VPNs, and how do they decide which one to use, and realize there’s a lot of confusion out there, a lot of misinformation about virtual private networks, and how to choose a good one, which ones are good for what. A lot of sites out there with affiliate relationships, which I do as well for just full disclosure, but they just have this big gigantic list of, “Okay, here’s 40 VPNs that you can use. The one at the top is the one who’s paying us the most.”

We use that information from that methodology to put together what we call a VPN simplifier that reflects some of the terminology that people use when they talk about VPNs, and refers people to a very short list of ones that are really good with what they want to do, whether it’s privacy, whether it’s security, whether it’s access, there’s something for that. We’re looking forward of launching an advertising campaign for that this coming year. I’ve got my team in the process of increasing content and trying to grow significantly in that area. I’ll traditionally probably produce one article a month on the site or trying to increase that and really talk about things that are of interest to people, that are of concern to people, try to help people out to stay safe online, and do a little bit of education in the process.

Brett: That is fantastic. If people want to learn more about you and perhaps maybe get in contact with you and ask questions, how can they do that Chris?

Chris: Anyone who wants to get a hold of me can visit my website. It’s cgparker.com and of course, you can always visit whatismyipaddress.com if you have privacy and security questions. We got a great support team there as well.

Brett: Well Chris Parker, thank you so much for being a part of the Open Mic Podcast today. I really appreciate it.

Chris: Thank you very much. I had a great time today.

Brett: All right, that brings Monday’s episode to a close. Thank you so much as always everybody for being a part. We’ll be back on Wednesday with a solo show. I’ve got some things I’ve got on my chest that I want to get off and we’re going to talk about another solo episode. Until next time, let somebody know that you love them, let them know that you care. We’ll talk to you soon.
That brings today’s episode to a close. Thanks for listening in. If you enjoyed today’s episode, head over to Apple Podcast and leave us a high rating and review, it really does help. Until next time, cheers and be well.

Exit mobile version