Your E product: Are You Protecting Your Investment?
By: Diane Sayer
Submitted: 2009-02-05 10:45:03 | Word Count: 943
One minute everything is great – your site is getting a steady stream of visitors who are pulling out their credit cards and money is pumping into your account… but… in the blink of an eye, something could happen that would bring your online business to its knees. You’ve invested too much time and money into your ebook, software or membership site to risk letting anything – a computer virus, hacker, thief, or even lightning – shut you down for hours, days or even weeks. Here are some simple things you can do to protect your investment and keep your online business running smoothly:
Protect Your Computer
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Avoid computer viruses by keeping your anti virus program updated and by not opening suspicious email attachments. Do your kids like to download stuff? Consider getting them their own computer to keep yours safe.
Use a fire wall – they help keep bad stuff from getting to your computer in the first place. Remember that nasty virus that lots of people caught a few years ago? The only people who didn’t get it were the ones safely protected by fire walls.
Back up your work often. Get into the habit of backing up the important stuff on your computer, including your email’s Inbox. If the worst should happen, having a back up copy will get you back up and running in no time.
Use a battery back up. It’ll not only protect your computer from power surges but if lightning strikes, it should stop at the battery and not harm your computer. If you use dial up or DSL, get one with a phone jack to protect your modem as well. Plus, if you’re in the middle of writing your next top selling ebook and the power goes out, you’d lose everything you’ve written since the last time you hit Save. With a battery back up, you’d have five minutes of battery power so you can save your work.
Don’t leave your laptop on a soft surface, like a couch or a bed. Since the fan won’t be able to keep it cool, heat will build up and fry your motherboard.
Protect Your Website
Put your copyright at the bottom of every page on your site. Take it one step further and put it in the Author meta tag in the source code of every page, too.
Use Copyscape.com. There are those who think it’s ok to copy a site and use it word for word on their own site. Make them think twice about plagiarizing yours by putting a Page Protected by Copyscape graphic on it.
Make your passwords hard for hackers to figure out. Use a mix of lower and upper case letters, as well as numbers, and make them at least 8 characters long. The longer, the better.
Use folders. If you have all of your web pages in the main public folder, that’s easy for hackers to mess with it. Instead, put pages in their own folders, especially the important pages, like your Thank You and Cancel pages, to make them harder for hackers to get to.
Keep robots and spiders away from the pages you don’t want people using search engines to find, like your Thank You page and Cancel page. Go to http://www.robotstxt.org to learn how.
Keep snoopers out. If you don’t have an ‘index’ file in every folder on your site, anyone can snoop through all of your files in each folder. Stop people from nosing around in places they don’t need to be by putting an ‘index’ file in every folder on your site to redirect them to somewhere else.
Keep a back up copy of your site handy. If hackers get in and change all of your web pages or your host has a problem and loses all of your site’s files, you’ll need to get your site back to the way you had it fast. Always keep a back up copy close by just in case.
Know if your site goes down ASAP. If your site goes down, you’re not making any money so use a service that will monitor your site, and if it does go down, they’ll let you know so you can get it back up fast.
What about your server? If the server your site is on goes down, does your host have a back up server in place to keep your site up and running? Find out.
Protect Your E product
Put your copyright in your e product. If you sell an ebook, add a copyright page at the beginning of it as well as in the watermark on every page, too. That way, if someone prints out a page, the copyright is on it. If you sell software, put it on the About page.
Formally copyright it. Snail mailing a copy of your ebook or software to yourself won’t stand up in court. Instead, burn it onto a CD and mail it along with the proper paperwork to the U.S. Library of Congress.
Safeguard your e product. Use code or a download manager to keep the people who haven’t paid for your e product from getting anywhere near it.
Find more tips and resources to help you protect your investment at http://www.Write Your First Ebook.com/Tips/ProtectEproduct
While you’ll never be able to protect your online business from every threat that comes along, following these tips will protect you from most of them and get you back in business quickly if the worse should happen.
Author Resource:-http://www.Write-Your-First-Ebook.com is the free, step-by-step guide that shows you how to write and sell your first ebook. You’ll learn how to choose the right topic, how to price it, how to build the right website for it, how to attract affiliates, and more. Start writing your first ebook today!
