personalized shirts: 10 Critical Steps To e-business Safety

10 Critical Steps To e-business Safety

Copyright [C] 2002 Shahnaz Rauf, snzeport.com

Web site and e-business security is a very sensitive
issue. Some of the top brass in cyber-marketing have
hired full time network wizards to work it ...

by Richard Lowe

10 Critical Steps To e-business Safety

Copyright [C] 2002 Shahnaz Rauf, snzeport.com

Web site and e-business security is a very sensitive
issue. Some of the top brass in cyber-marketing have
hired full time network wizards to work it out for
them. Giants such as Microsoft have set up special
network security courses just to resolve such issues.

If you had a brick and mortar business, you would be
maintaining a regular schedule and time sheets to
monitor your employees. Also you would be ensuring
tight security by installing alarms, closed circuit
monitoring (video cameras), electronic cards etc.
Online too you need to monitor your 24 hour sales
person...

- Is he really doing the job you want him to do?
- Is your eshop secure from the darker elements?
- Who and what are your customers doing?
- Where are they coming from?
- Does your business have any loop holes?
- Are your transactions safe etc?

Yes you need to set up all your bells, whistles,
snooping devices and other security measures.

Here are 10 basic ‘must do' steps for small home
based webmasters like you and me:

1. Trade mark all your slogans, logo, ultimate
selling proposition etc. by putting a TM sign [For
example: The House of Viral e-BooksTM ]. This also
gives you a touch of `class` and creates a brand
image for you.

2. Put a Copyright notice and date (Copyright [C]
2002 Your name) on all your creations, articles,
sales letter, web pages etc.

3. Put a disclaimer - `use it at your own risk`
clause for all your work- articles/ebook/website/at
the end of ezine etc. This discourages those
elements who are not capable of accepting
responsibility for their actions and need to pin
it else where.

4. On all outgoing auto-responder messages – put
the ‘this is an autoresponse' clause to avoid
any spam complaints. For I have experienced that
in the rush to grab something free, some people
will keep sending several emails to auto-
responders instead of waiting patiently for
response to arrive. Then of course, the basic
autoresponder sends them an equal number of
responses.

5. Make your ezine/ list double opt in - state
this right at the top, also let them know that
confirmation e-mail and computer IP address is
on record. If you want to be even more secure,
tell them that any false spam complaints will be
prosecuted and damages will be claimed due to
downtime- this will discourage any ‘happy-go-
lucky' individuals whose sole purpose in life is
to mess it up for hard working, down to earth,
honest people. [Beware: The double opt–in
procedure may reduce your subscriber count – but
will let you cultivate a very high quality list
of people who really want to hear from you.]

6. Monitor your website statistics – usually your
webhost should enable raw statistics, but any good
sitemeter should be able to provide this information:

- Who is visiting your website?
- Where are they coming from?
- How much time they are spending?
- Which pages they are clicking to?
- And whole lots more.

Again this is very essential.

7. Track Your links - This is the single most
important factor that can give an instant boost
to your advertising efforts. you need to know:

- Which ads are pulling?
- Where are your buying customers coming from?
- How many files/ebooks/software are being down
loaded from your site?
- Who is clicking on your links – IP address of
your clients?
- How much traffic you are sending to some one?

Any good link tracker should be able to provide
this information.

8. Keep tabs on your web-host`s performance – You
need to know:

- When your website went offline?
- When it came back up?
- How many hours it was un-accessible?
- How many seconds did your page take to load up?

Here you may use the services of
http://www.internetseer.com

9. Broken link monitoring - broken links can

- Create a bad image/impression about you in your
customers minds.
- Affect your search engine ranks.
- Impact your business negatively.

You may check these out using http://www.jimtools.com/
here click on the ‘link' button at page top.

10. Who's linking to you – Again if your webhost
enables raw statistics, finding this will not be
a problem – you can even find who is linking
directly to your e-book downloads etc. Otherwise
you may use:

http://www.linkpopularity.com/
http://www.jimtools.com/ - and click on the ‘link'
button at page top.

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Shahnaz Rauf is a freelancer actively seeking writing
projects. She is also The Editor of The Monster
Twister– a Newsletter helping ordinary web owners
achieve extraordinary heights without losing their
personalized shirts. To Subscribe
mailto:themonstertwister-subscribe@snzeport.com Or
visit her website at http://www.snzeport.com