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- 9 Ways to Better Protect Your Blog
Warren Wooden is the owner and CEO of PLR Internet Marketing.
When I think of the amount of time that I've invested into my blog and its resources I'm absolutely staggered by the thought of losing any part of it. So I've taken certain steps to protect myself, as well as my blog.
Everyone's blog is at a different level, but regardless of which one you look at, we all have one thing in common: we've poured our hearts and souls into them. Here are a few things you can do in order to protect them.
Back up your website
You've heard that advice before, and if you've ever had a catastrophic loss of data that took your website offline for a few hours, or—worse—a few days, I'm sure you've remembered it.
Image used with persmission
Backing up your website is protection from server crashes or hacker attacks, but the only way they are fully effective is if you do them religiously. Determine how often you are going to back up your data, and then simply schedule some time to do it. It takes no more than the click of a mouse usually, but can save you a ton of heartache and grief down the road.
As someone who has experienced a hacker attack, I can tell you it's not only important to keep the last few copies of your blog, but also a known clean copy in case your backups become corrupted. Often, a website owner may not find out about a virus on his site until he's already completed several backups. If those are all he has, he'll be no better off than if he didn't have any at all.
The majority of hosting companies have cPanel installed for their users. If yours does, simply log in to your control panel, and scroll down to the backup icon. Once you click it, you'll be taken to the Backup and Restore page, where you can then click on the Download or Generate a Full Backup button. This will provide you with a full backup of the website, emails, and databases, as well as any "custom" email setups you've configured such as forwarding. Once the backup has finished you'll receive an email notification and can then download the backup file to your home or office computer for safe-keeping.
It's important to note that if you ever do run into a crisis, and do not have a current backup, most hosting providers will generate a copy from their end for a nominal fee. These backups are usually only performed weekly so you could end up a week out of date with your site's data.
Back up your resources
Backing up your website is only half the battle. Most of us have a ton of resources sitting on our hard drives in the form of ebooks, video courses, guest posts, graphics, podcasts, competition analysis data, as well as programs we use to promote ourselves, build our social networks, or track our keyword rankings, and so much more. I'd recommend creating one master folder that contains all the individual files, so that it can be easily zipped up, labeled and stored on a separate drive or CD.
If you've ever downloaded materials off of the Internet you know that files are compressed for both sending and storage. Two of the most popular programs are Winrar, and Winzip. With these, you can simply right-click on the file or folder you're looking to compress for backup, and choose Add to archive. You'll then end up with a compressed version of all your important files and programs.
Back up your list
“The money is in the list” is another phrase I'm sure you're aware of and many internet marketers would assert that it is their most valuable asset, yet very few people bother to back it up. Having your list under a third party’s control leaves you with no recourse should the unthinkable happen, and your list end up being lost forever.
For more information, see Are you protecting your blog's most valuable asset?
Install protective measures
Using anti-virus measures should be a no-brainer these days, but in case you've missed the message, there are literally hundreds of thousands of different viruses out there, and these nasty bugs can not only crash your system, they can also steal passwords, banking information, and much more. Protecting your computer system will ensure that you're still online tomorrow to make that post, and promote your blog.
Here’s a list of antivirus solutions listed in my personal order of preference.
I've used each one of these at one time or another, and they each do a commendable job of keeping you and your computer protected the majority of the time. However, it is worth noting that no antivirus program will protect you from every virus 100% of the time.
Protecting your system is only half the battle. It's important to also protect your blog from attack. There are several methods you can choose to use to keep the bad guys out. Here are just a few to look into.
- Antivirus plugin for WordPress. This monitors your website for changes to the code, and alerts you with an email letting you know when they’re found.
- Exploit plugins, which scan your WordPress blog for known exploits and alert you.
- Change the default login page. Everyone knows they can usually find the admin page of a WordPress blog by simply adding /wp-admin after the domain. By changing its location, you can effectively thwart would-be hackers.
- Make sure file permissions aren't set to 777 if you can help it. You can change permission settings once you've logged in to your site via an FTP client. If you are unsure how, contact your hosting provider and they can direct you, or most likely simply switch them for you. It literally takes a second! See a more detailed set of instructions here.
- Use brute force protection so that if the wrong password is entered in too many times the person's IP address is locked out for a pre-set duration.
- Keep up to date with the latest WordPress version. WordPress is great for letting you know when there is an update to any of your plugins, make sure to heed the alerts and update as soon as possible.
- Use complex passwords, and limit access to consultants you can trust. A strong password will include upper and lower case numbers and letters as well as a special character mixed in. I'd hate to be the one trying to guess #4Rrtx37EE
- Actively monitor your log files to see if anyone is trying to access your site. Hosting panels provide analytics and log files. By checking these from time to time, you can spot unnatural activity and take action to protect yourself!
These are just a few measures you can look into implementing on your blog, but obviously the more secure you can make it, the better.
Find a good web designer
I'm sure many of you have the skill and talent to recode your website from scratch, but there are also many like myself who are at risk of ruining everything each time they try and manipulate the code within their site. While this doesn't stop me from constantly tweaking and enhancing my blog in order to continually improve it, it does mean that I keep a designer's phone number on speed dial just in case.
Protect your brand
It's a simple matter to setup a few Google Alerts to inform you whenever someone mentions your name, your company name, or the name of your blog. These alerts get conveniently delivered to your inbox where you can take a look to see what is being said about you, and can then respond almost instantly while the effect will be maximized.
If you head over to Google Alerts while you’re logged in with your Gmail ID (you will need to have a Google ID, but don't worry, they're free and easy to set up), you can enter the terms you'd like to be notified about, and Google will start keeping an eye out for those terms while it's going about its daily business. Once a website is published or updated with that term, you’ll be sent a notification letting you know.
Protect your content
Unfortunately plagiarism is one of the threats we face as bloggers. Unscrupulous individuals scrape content and reuse it on their own thin sights in order to try and outrank sites such as yours. Fortunately Google does a fairly decent job of choosing the original work and ranking it accordingly. Placing a copyright notice at the bottom of your pages is the first step, but you should also actively scan for stolen articles using sites like Copyscape.com.
Find a blogging buddy
This is just someone you trust who can take care of posting for you while you are away, perhaps on holidays, or an unforeseen absence of another sort. Just as you'd have a neighbor look in on your house, it's a good idea to have someone you can trust to look in on your blog.
Make a blogging will
Your blog is an asset, and should be treated that way. Even if it's just a case of creating a document instructing your wife who to contact in case of the need to sell it, or perhaps a full-fledged document that details how everything works, and how to continue running things in case you yourself are unable to do so.
While this might be a morbid thought for some, the thought of losing all the work you've invested after a few missed hosting bills is even more unbearable for many. Darren recently wrote a detailed post on the subject.
Getting yourself into a few healthy habits such as the ones listed above can save you time, stress, and money. The peace of mind that will likely result from these actions will more than make up for any inconveniences you incur implementing them.
What tips can you add from your own experience protecting your blog? Share them in the comments.
Warren Wooden is the owner and CEO of PLR Internet Marketing. If you're an entrepreneur, or would perhaps like to learn how to make money online through Internet marketing, blogging, or affiliate marketing, please stop in for a visit, or to grab your free copy of his 79-page ebook.
Post from: ProBlogger Blog Tips
9 Ways to Better Protect Your Blog
Переслать - How to Quit Your Job, Move to Paradise and Get Paid to Change the World
This guest post is by Jon Morrow of Copyblogger.
After all, that’s the dream, right?
Forget the mansions and limousines and other trappings of Hollywood-style wealth. Sure, it would be nice, but for the most part, we bloggers are simpler souls with much kinder dreams.
We want to quit our jobs, spend more time with our families, and finally have time to write. We want the freedom to work when we want, where we want. We want our writing to help people, to inspire them, to change them from the inside out.
It’s a modest dream, a dream that deserves to come true, and yet a part of you might be wondering…
Will it?
Do you really have what it takes to be a professional blogger, or are you just being dumb? Is it realistic to make enough money from this to quit your job, or is that just silly? Can you really expect people to fall in love with what you write, or is that just wishful thinking?
Sure, it’s fun to dream about your blog taking off and changing your life, but sometimes you wonder if it’s just that: a dream. This is the real world, and in the real world, dreams don’t really come true.
Right?
Well, let me tell you a little story…
How I quit my job
My van
In April of 2006, I was hit by a car going 85 miles an hour.
I didn’t see him coming, and I don’t remember much about the accident, but I do remember being pulled out of my minivan with my shirt on fire. The front end of the van was torn off, gasoline was everywhere, and my legs were broken in 14 places.
For the next three months, I had nothing to do but endure the pain and think about my life. I thought about my childhood. I thought about my dreams. I thought about my career.
And overall, I decided I didn’t like the way things were going.
So I quit.
I sold everything I owned. I stopped paying most of my bills. I turned in my letter of resignation, worked my two weeks, and then disappeared without saying goodbye.
Hearing about my insanity, a friend called and asked me, “Well, what are you going to do now?”
“I don’t know,” I told him. “Maybe start a blog.”
And so that’s what I did.
For the next three months, I didn’t just tinker around with blogging. I dedicated myself to it. I started work at 8 AM in the morning, and I kept going until 11 PM at night. I didn’t watch television. I didn’t see my friends. From morning till night, I was writing, reading, and connecting with other bloggers. Nothing else.
Within a month, I had On Moneymaking off the ground, and within two months, it was getting 2,000 visitors a day and Performancing nominated it for the best business/money blog of the year. A couple of months after that, Brian Clark asked me to become the Associate Editor of Copyblogger, and so I sold On Moneymaking for five figures and went to work at one of the most popular blogs at the world.
And amazingly, that’s just the beginning of the story.
How I moved to paradise
Have you ever woken up one day and realized you secretly despise everything about where you live?
The weather is horrible. Your neighbors are jerks. You don’t like inviting anyone to your home, because it’s always a wreck, and you’re ashamed of how it looks.
Well, that’s exactly what happened to me in January of 2009. I was sitting in my pathetic apartment, wrapped up in blankets to keep warm, trying to get some work done on the computer, when it struck me how monumentally stupid it was.
I was a full-time blogger, for God’s sakes. I could do my work from anywhere in the world. Why on Earth was I living in this hellhole?
The only problem was I had no idea where I wanted to go, but a couple of weeks later, the telephone rang, and it was an old friend who had retired to Mazatlan, Mexico. As usual, he was calling to gloat about the weather and the food and the general superiority of the Mexican lifestyle, but instead of just suffering through it this time, I stopped him and said, “No, don’t tell me any more. I’m moving there.”
My office
“What? When?” he stammered.
“I don’t know exactly when,” I told him, “but I’m starting right now.”
Two months later, I took a one-week trip to scout it out and look for places to live. When I got back, I started selling all of my stuff, packing the rest of it into storage, and saying goodbye to friends. Almost one year to the day after our phone call, I hopped in the car and drove just shy of 3,000 miles to my new beachfront condo in the finest resort in Mazatlan.
As I write this, I’m sitting on my balcony with my laptop, watching (no kidding) dolphins jumping out in the Pacific. It’s a sunny day, there’s a nice breeze, and I’m thinking about ordering a piña colada from the restaurant downstairs.
Lucky me, right?
Well, what might surprise you is I left out a piece of the story. It’s the part where I have a fatal disease, I can’t move from the neck down, and yet I essentially get paid to help people. Let’s talk about that part next.
How I get paid to change the world
You know what’s funny?
Yours truly
The worst part about having a disease like SMA isn’t how everyone treats you like a charity case. It’s not the frustration, anger, or depression. It’s not even the inability to reach over and pinch a cute girl's butt when you want to (although that’s pretty bad).
No, the worst part is the freakin' bills. The doctors. The medication. The nurses.
I added it all up, and the total cost of keeping me alive in the US was $127,000 a year. That’s not rent. That’s not food. That’s just medical expenses.
Granted, I didn’t actually have to pay all that. I had private insurance, Medicaid, other government aid programs, but all that support comes at a price: they control you. The government allotted me only $700 a month to live on, and I had to spend every single cent above that on medical expenses, or they would cut me off.
So for years, that’s what I did. If I made $5,000 one month, I set aside $700 for living expenses, and I spent the other $4,300 on medical bills. Nothing was left. Ever.
And eventually, I got sick of it.
I wanted to make money without having to worry about losing my healthcare. I wanted to take care of my family, instead of them always having to take care of me. I wanted to actually live somewhere nice, not some ratty little apartment built for folks below the poverty line.
The only problem was, it just wasn’t possible for me in US. No matter how I played with the numbers, I couldn’t make it work. So, I did something crazy:
I quit Medicaid. I moved to Mexico. I stopped worrying about myself at all and started a business based on one simple idea:
Helping people.
I found up-and-coming writers who wanted a mentor, and I trained them. I found businesses who wanted to cash in on social media, and I developed their strategy. I found bloggers who wanted more traffic, and I created a course on how to get it.
In exchange, they paid me what they could. Some folks gave me $50 an hour and others $300 an hour, but I treated them all the same, and I dedicated myself to making their dreams a reality.
The results?
Within two months, I was making so much money so fast PayPal shut down my account under suspicions of fraudulent activity. Today, not only am I making more than enough to take care of myself, but a couple of months ago, I got uppity and bought my father a car.
Do you understand how precious that is? For a guy who can’t move from the neck down to buy his father a car?
And the best part is, I’m not making money doing mindless drudgery. I’m changing people’s lives.
Every day, I get emails from readers who say my posts have changed their thinking. Every day, I get emails from students who say my advice has changed their writing. Every day, I get emails from clients who say my strategies have changed the way they do business.
I can’t really believe it. Normally, a guy like me would be wasting away in a nursing home somewhere, watching television and waiting to die, but here I am speaking into a microphone and essentially getting paid to change the world. If my fingers worked, I’d pinch myself.
And here’s the thing:
I don’t want it for just me. I want it for you too.
The reason I told you this whole story wasn’t just to brag but also to convince you of one incontrovertible point:
YOU CAN DO THIS!
You want to quit your job and become a professional blogger?
You can.
You want to travel around the world, living life to its fullest?
You can.
You want to dedicate your every hour to helping people and making the world a better place?
You can.
Because listen … I know it’s horribly cliché, but if I can quit my job, risk the government carting me off to a nursing home because I can’t afford my own healthcare, convince my poor mother to abandon her career and drive my crippled butt 3,000 miles to a foreign country, and then make enough money to support myself, my mother, my father, and an entire nursing staff using nothing but my voice, then what can you accomplish if you really set your mind to it?
My guess: pretty much anything.
No, it won’t be easy. At some point, I guarantee you’ll want to quit. I guarantee people will treat you like you’re insane. I guarantee you’ll cry yourself to sleep, wondering if you made a horrible mistake.
But never stop believing in yourself. The world is full of naysayers, all of them eager to shout you down at the slightest indication you might transcend mediocrity, but the greatest sin you can commit is to yourself become one of them. Our job isn’t to join that group, but to silence it, to accomplish things so great and unimaginable that its members are too awed to speak.
You can do it.
I believe in you.
So get started.
Right freaking now.
Jon Morrow is Associate Editor of Copyblogger. If you’d like to learn more about what it really takes to become a popular blogger, check out his free videos on guest blogging.
Post from: ProBlogger Blog Tips
How to Quit Your Job, Move to Paradise and Get Paid to Change the World
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