Just as you should keep track of your affiliate commissions you should also check all your websites regularly - To make sure they’re up and running, everything looks like it should, no problems in the order process, etc. If you have several different websites you might forget one or two - especially if many parts of your online business are running on auto-pilot. You might have some sites that are more popular than others and you keep a closer eye on them - but don’t forget the little ones ;)
I’m writing about this because I just discovered that one of my websites got hacked. Some unscrupulous people exploited a security flaw in my website and inserted an iframe (that loaded some dubious websites) in the header of the templates. I’m using a popular system to run that particular website so I checked the forum and saw that I wasn’t the only one hit with this. So, fortunately I was able to fix it and get my site (sort of) back on track.
It’s always a good practice to regularly take backups of your important documents (that includes your websites and databases) ;) If you don’t have a backup you might be able to use the “cache:” command on Google - for example for this blog I would type “cache:http://www.hannesjohnson.com” into Google. The Wayback Machine could also help you - but they might only have a copy that’s a few months old (even older). The WP-DB-Backup plugin should come in handy if you want to backup your WordPress blog.
How about you? Have any of your websites been hacked?
Do you regularly take backups?
6 responses so far ↓
olivier // Oct 29, 2007 at 9:31 am
I always wonder how you get traffic to those sites. I have only two sites, and I’m having a hard time promoting them. Maybe I need to wait until more pages get indexed by google (only 10 now) and some get a higher pagerank
Could you maybe post a few links to your sites so that we could check them out to get some idea of the content and how to do it?
Thanks.
Hannes Johnson // Oct 29, 2007 at 9:50 pm
olivier: You can see links to some of my sites in the sidebar under “My websites”.
Yeah, getting more pages indexed on Google should help you - just make sure you have a good navigation set up on your site + a sitemap.
Also, a nice way to get some free traffic quickly is through traffic exchanges. And if you have a blog you should of course join Blog Rush
But I should probably write a few posts about how to get traffic to your website - would people be interested in that?
Angie // Nov 12, 2007 at 6:29 pm
I have a couple of sites on auto pilot as well. If it had not been for regular visitors alerting me of the site being down or running wonky, I would have missed the issues in the past. You’re right — we all need to check out our sites on a regular basis.
Raving Rich // Dec 31, 2007 at 5:16 am
Will online marketing will be boosted by increasing the traffic .If then can u tell me the ways how can i get the traffic for my website.
As Angie said checking our website regularly will increase the traffic?
Hannes Johnson // Dec 31, 2007 at 3:00 pm
@Raving Rich: Usually, when you get more traffic you will most likely get more sales (but it’s not guaranteed - depends on the quality of the traffic).
No, I don’t think checking your own website regularly will directly affect how much traffic you get - but if you’re getting clicks it helps that you make sure your visitors are seeing what you want them to see :)
SEOContest2008 // Feb 6, 2008 at 2:28 pm
Great post Hannes. There are quite a few tools which check the uptime of websites also which can be useful if something goes wrong with the host.
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