The Art of Protecting Your Business, Profits, and Staying Out of Trouble Online
If that title totally confuses the hell out of you, congratulations! You actually are thinking about it in a context of your business and how it is probably something you deal with on a daily basis. What I'm going to do is show some ready-made guidelines for achieving all of this and more. So let's get to it.
- Control Access: User accounts, passwords, equipment, bathrooms. All of it.
- Monitor Network Activity: Check to see if anything looks "unusual" or not in the norm. Examples of this are random login attempts, posts on your blogs that look suspicious or blatant hacking attempts, and forms being submitted with symbols and other commands that are not typical data submitted by your visitors.
- Reputation is King: Check all social media profiles and other public facing interfaces for damaging or possibly damaging comments. Malicious communications need to be addressed ASAP, so if it seems unusual, check it out.
- Back It Up: Your Data. Self-explanatory.
- Host Check-up: Check every morning to see that your sites are up and running and loading under 5 seconds.
- Got Links?: Are they functioning? Are any/all affiliates and their campaigns reporting correctly?
- Do You Exist: Make sure you are still showing up in all MAJOR search engines ("SE") and niche specific directories. People can't find you, then you don't exist.
- Marketing: Check campaigns and reports from any/all online advertising outlets if tracking and costs are reporting and accurate. PPC, Media Buys, Text Link Ads, Affiliate Networks, Videos, etc. Verify and validate all.
- Compliance Resistance is Futile: Verify all policies and necessary privacy and security controls are in place if required by a region or state you do business with or have associates within. Basic things such as taxes, transparency on what you do with customer data, EU Safe Harbor, California Laws are biggies here.
- Third-Party Data Handling: All about data a)who will own it, b) how it's handled, c) where it's located, d) retention period, and e) how is it "destroyed". This is very easy to do, but if overlooked, can REALLY become a legal and PA nightmare for you.
- Due Care and Due Diligence: Monitor and react to issues like you would your own bank account. Easy concept isn't it?.
Defend your business, make all the money you can, and do everything you can to stay out of legal/compliance issues in your state, country, and internationally.
Good luck, and as always, I am here to help you with any of this.