I am on a personal crusade to help others realize before tragedy occurs to back up their data. This is especially true of your website hosting account. If you really commit to marketing your business using the strategies I personally use and recommend then you will be adding significant time to creating and maintaining your website. You will want to back up this data regularly and I would also stress that you should have redundant backups. Some people would quickly dismiss my warning saying that many web hosting providers offer free backup services. These same folks would say, “If my web hosting provider offers free backup services, that’s good enough and I don’t need to worry about it.” I strongly disagree.
Here’s just a recent example of why you need to have frequent and redundant backups of all your data including your web hosting account. Earlier this year, one of my web hosting providers, during a routine inspection of the fire suppression system in their data center, had a major incident. The vendor of the fire suppression system accidentally forget a step on his checklist and actually triggered the fire suppression system damaging a good number of web servers in the process. No big deal right? They do keep backups of the data. Yes, but in this albeit rare case, a small number of servers had both their main hard drives and the backup hard drive destroyed. That meant that the main web hosting account and the backup was destroyed. Some people who were not making additional local backups of their website on their own lost everything they had worked to create and do. Imagine having a website you’ve been working on for hundreds or thousands of hours that was lost without notice. Imagine if this website was responsible for a significant part of generating new business for you. What would life look like for you if you had half as much revenue coming in and had the daunting task of recreating hundreds of thousands of hours (that’s weeks or months of working 40 hours per week) just to get back to even.
So, you can see that making the process of backing up your website locally as well as letting your web hosting provider back up your website a priority is a worthwhile focus. In fact, here is what I recommend.
First, let your web hosting provider make their normal backups. Never assume that these are working correctly. You will also want to spot check them to make sure those are operating correctly and getting all the data you would need if there was a problem. Better to work through that issue while there is not an emergency than to find out later they were accidentally not backing up your database or a certain key folder of data.
Next, download on a regular basis (at least once a week) an entire copy of your website to your local computer. You can use a new folder for each of these downloads so that you have multiple copies of your website. Occasionally, like once a quarter, burn a copy of the most recent backups to a CD or DVD and take them to a location other than where your computer is and store the CD or DVD backups there. If there was a fire and your computer was destroyed you’d still have a copy of the CD or DVD at another location.
Lastly, I would also recommend you get a automatic online backup service to automatically make a backup copy of your hard drive each night. Make sure that you include the folder where you download the backup copy of your website in the list of folders to make a backup copy of. Automatic data backup services are extremely affordable (many are less than $10 per month) and can backup both your website and all the data you currently have on your local computer that you would not want to lose. I personally use iDrive as my automatic backup service and have been extremely pleased with their reliability and ease of use. I am on the paid plans because I backup a lot of data including all my music, videos, seminar recordings, documents, websites and so on. They also have a free plan which has a smaller amount of backup space.
Until my next post,
James
Remember, the 5 steps for setting up your business website include:
- Domain Name (which we covered in our previous post)
- Website Hosting Provider
- Website Creation Software
- Website Tracking Software
- Email Broadcast Software
Once you select a domain name, you will need a place to host your website and make it available to others on the internet. That is done with a website hosting provider.
A reasonably priced website hosting provider will cost approximately $10 per month for a basic account. Some will charge a setup fee. Some will waive the setup fee. Some may insist that you pay quarterly instead of monthly.
For an updated list of the web hosting providers that I personally use and recommend, please see our Special Report: Website Hosting and Domain Name Registration Services at:
http://learntoberich.com/downloads/
The web hosting providers that I recommend will include the software that you will need. If you are going to find your own though, here are the minimum requirements you will need with your web hosting provider:
PHP
PHP is the programming language that allows you to run WordPress (as well as other web applications). It is the software that gives you the ability to have dynamically generated content on your website and gives you (or programmers that program it) the ability to add additional functionality and interactivity to your website.
MySQL
MySQL is your database. Your database will store your blog posts, comments to your blog, the users that are contributing to you blog plus much more.
PHP MyAdmin
PHP MyAdmin is a program that uses PHP and allows you to more easily manage, edit, backup and restore your MySQL database.
WordPress
WordPress is the blogging software we discussed in the previous section that makes it extremely easy for you to add, edit and manage content on your website.
Dedicated IP Addresses
Some business owners are concerned about whether or not they need a dedicated IP address for their website. If they are free or low priced and available, get one. If your web hosting provider does not offer them or charges a hefty premium for getting one, then do not worry about them.
There are certain search engine optimization and search engine marketing consultants that insist that having a dedicated IP address gives you a slight bonus for search engine ranking. Also, having an IP address that is not being abused by other web hosting clients that are also sharing it with you could be beneficial.
I have not been able to directly attribute a significant, measurable bonus for having a dedicated IP address in my experience, but for a series business owner an extra dollar or two per month for a dedicated IP address might be a worthwhile additional expense in case there is even a modest bump in ranking.
Web Hosting Space and Bandwidth
Many folks are concerned about how much web hosting space and bandwidth they have with their hosting accounts. First, what is the difference? Web hosting space is how much hard drive space you have on the web server. It determines how many web pages, images, videos, logs and emails that you can store on your web hosting account. For the overwhelming majority of web hosting providers now–and especially if you follow my advice on how to host any videos you may have up on your website–web hosting space will be a non-issue for you and your website. Most web hosting providers that I would recommend will give you ample space for all but a very small percentage of very large websites and if you are doing a website of that size you already know that you will need an exceptionally large web hosting space.
You’ll find bandwidth to be a similar situation. Bandwidth is how much information can be downloaded (and uploaded) to your website. That includes how many pages are loaded from the website, how many images are shown and how many videos are played. With most of the web hosting providers that I would recommend you will find that they will provide more bandwidth than you will need for even a fairly successful website. If your website becomes so popular that you need more bandwidth, you will discover it and be able to upgrade your web hosting plan to include more bandwidth.
Until my next post,
James
Here are the five steps you will need to complete for setting up your website for your business:
- Domain Name
- Website Hosting Provider
- Website Creation Software
- Website Tracking Software
- Email Broadcast Software
We will cover each step in setting up your business website separately starting with selecting, registering and configuring your domain name.
Domain Name
Your domain name is what potential prospects and visitors would type into their web browser to directly pull up your website.
Domain names are purchased through Domain Name Registrars (also called Domain Name Registration Companies) who, for a fee, will allow you to select a domain name that is not already been registered and let you use it with your website.
For most Domain Name Registration Companies they will charge you a fee of approximately $15 per year for your domain name. You may be able to get your domain name registration for a little bit cheaper than that while other companies may charge a little more.
For an updated list of the recommended web hosting and domain name registration companies that I recommend, you can download a special report called Special Report: Website Hosting and Domain Name Registration Services on them at:
http://learntoberich.com/downloads/
Having registered hundreds of domain names, here are some domain name registration tips you may want to consider when selecting your domain name.
First, you will very likely want to register a domain name that uses a .com extension. There are other extensions like .net, .org, .biz, .info, .us and many others but the overwhelming majority of the general public assume that a domain name ends in .com. If you opt to use something other than the .com extension your domain name and someone else has the .com version of your domain name, you are just giving traffic to them as you advertise your business since a certain percentage of people will try .com trying to access your website.
Second, try to include keywords that you might want someone to use in a search engine to find your website in your domain name.
Here are some examples of what I mean by using keywords in your domain name.
Real Estate Agent Domain Name Examples
Real estate agents might want to have their website come up when someone types in their city name and real estate, so you might want to register something like:
DenverRealEstateForSale.com
If that is already registered by someone else, you may want to change it up a little and try something like these:
GreatDenverRealEstateForSale.com
FindDenverRealEstateForSale.com
DenverRealEstateToday.com
DenverRealEstateNow.com
DenverRealEstateDeals.com
DenverRealEstateResource.com
When I was creating our network of websites for real estate, we registered a domain name for each US city that we were marketing to. We ended up getting 280 domain names in the format of CityRealEstateResources.com where City was the name of the city that we were focusing on for that website. We were able to get all but a few domain names using that model. For the ones that we were not able to get because they were registered to someone else already, we simply changed it up to use CityRER.com instead.
The third tip for selecting a domain name is try to make it easier to understand when spoken. Some people will recommend getting domain names that have their keywords separated by dashes, but that becomes much harder to speak to someone on the telephone. For example, try speaking the following domain name out load now:
Great-Denver-Real-Estate-For-Sale.com
You’d be saying, “Great dash Denver dash Real dash Estate dash For dash Sale dot com.” Now, that’s a mouthful. That’s why I try to think about what it would sound like if I had to say the domain name to someone over the telephone.
Are there words that can be confusing? Are there numbers that people would wonder if it is the digit or word? Is it made up of single letters (like in an acronym) that are hard to hear and understand? Call up a few friends and colleagues and speak some of your finalists to them and see how easy they hear them and what their opinion is.
On the complete other hand, if you are registering an “extra domain name” that will only be used for online lead generation where it may be seen and clicked on but will never be spoken, I think dashes can sometimes help. However, I would not include dashes in my main business domain name.
Once you have registered your domain name with your Domain Name Registration Company, you will want to configure it to work with your web hosting account and your email. How this is setup will vary depending on your Domain Name Registration Company and your Web Hosting Company.
Until my next post,
James
All of your online and offline marketing will be directly potential prospects to your website for more information. You will be using your website to accomplish the following key tasks:
- Reduce the cost of your marketing by having additional information that potential prospects want on your website.
- Provide irresistible offers to potential prospects to get them to request additional information and become a prospect or, in less frequent cases, convert them directly to a paying client.
- Continue to build credibility and trust between you and your prospects and clients.
Your website is an important part of your marketing plan yet many business owners set it up correctly. Here are the steps for setting up your website correctly.
Website Software
You will be faced with many choices when setting up your website for your business. The options range from buying turn-key pre-made websites to starting completely from scratch and writing everything yourself. Having bought completely turn-key websites and built ones from scratch, I will share with you what I strongly recommend for getting your business website setup now.
First, there are some things to consider when making this decision. First of all, it is my belief that you will want to keep your website updated with fresh new content. Why? For the overwhelming majority of businesses, visitors coming to your website want to see new stuff when they visit. They don’t want to see the same 6 pages that you created 2 years ago and have not updated since. In fact, if they come to your website and see a static website and you then try to get them to go back to your website, many of them will not return as they feel, and rightly so, that there is little new to see.
That’s why you will probably want to consider making your website in blog format.
What is a blog?
A blog, abbreviated from weblog, is like an online journal where you share new content with your visitors. The typical blog is setup so that the newest post of content is shown on the homepage at the top. As you add new content to your blog with new posts, you push the old posts down the page and your newest posts appear on top. Blogging software does the majority of the heavy lifting of linking, categorizing, organizing and displaying your content.
The software that is available for creating a blog today is extremely powerful and has many additional features that are very helpful for running a website and for your visitors. The one that I recommend is called WordPress and can be found at WordPress.org.
WordPress.com Versus WordPress.org
WordPress runs both WordPress.com and WordPress.org. The blogging software that is provided on both the sites is extremely similar except in how it is provided. Here is a very brief description of the big difference.
On WordPress.com you can setup a website and have WordPress.com host your website and charge you for extra features you may want. You do not need to go find a separate web hosting provider since they provide that for you.
With WordPress.org you can download the software (at the time of this writing it is currently free to download and I expect it to remain that way as far as I can predict the future). Once you download the software you can get your own web hosting provider and use the WordPress software on that provider. Actually, many of the web hosting providers you will be looking at will have already downloaded WordPress for you and made it so that you can set it up on your website with minimal fuss from your web hosting account control panel. I strongly recommend you get your own web hosting account and use WordPress software on it.
For the rest of our discussion of setting up your website and WordPress we will be talking about WordPress.org and having you setting it up on your own separate web hosting account.
Until my next post,
James
P.S. For my recommended list of web hosting providers, check out our Special Report: Website Hosting and Domain Name Registration Services.
