First Big Mistake – Losing the keys along the way.
It is incredibly common to see clients arrive who don’t know who bought their domain when, or where their sites are hosted. I am chagrined when well meaning business owners don’t realize that they don’t actually control their web properties.
There are accounts with usernames and passwords behind everything related to your web properties. Do you know what they are? Did you create them? If you got them from a webmaster, did you make sure you have full permissions to administrate your accounts?
Unless you are the sole owner of your domain name, hosting agreement, payment gateway agreement, software agreements, and other accounts related to your site, you’re not in ownership of your own business. At least online. A Realtor better be the sole person who knows her IDX login. And a doctor better make certain her own email address is the one her domain is registered to.
Would you allow an outside consultant to sign your office lease for you? No.
But you give similarly vital control away when you allow your website domain name, your hosting and website related usernames and passwords to be controlled by a person you hired once upon a time to build your website.
Whatever happens, each and every time you develop a web property, you should be in complete control of it.
That means all email addresses used in any agreements should belong to you and go to primary staff at your own company. That means that all usernames and passwords are controlled by you. You don’t just have access if you call up your webmaster, you also have complete control over the username, who gets access, who doesn’t. Everything.
What happens if your domain needs renewal, your credit card on account is expired and your webmaster’s on vacation? This is asking for disaster.
I recently helped a client grab back a domain that had been being held hostage by a scam domain renewal company for eight years, charging her nearly $800 for domain renewal each year – all because her webmaster failed to renew the domain once upon a time and these people snapped it up. And she’d been being extorted ever since. I solved it, and she’s now paying the more reasonable $15 a year and it’s owned by HER alone.
OK, so you get the point about controlling your own website, your domain name and every account related to getting business done online. Good.
At this point, what happens if your site goes away overnight?
Second Big Mistake – Not keeping a spare.
Not keeping a complete backup – under your own control – of every file that you’ve invested so much money into creating, will inevitably lead to disaster at some point. The web is where a file will break if it’s going to. There are transfers, hackers, server hiccups, and every kind of traffic that can happen.
Really it makes no sense not to have some kind of online backup of your site. If you don’t want to keep a copy of it on your own computers, there are numerous great services for this. Make sure that the backup occurs regularly and is redundant (old backups are kept) and that you can access your backups independently of your webmaster or anyone else.
I’ve seen a malicious webmaster remove all files. Actually I’ve seen this several times now – for various reasons. In retribution for non-payment, because he overwrote the files and didn’t notice, because he broke up with the business owner, because he was severely ill and let someone else botch caring for the client sites. In fact, I just heard of it happening again this week. It can cost thousands to rebuild your site from scratch. It doesn’t happen to too many people, but why leave your own company – as represented on the web – so vulnerable.
I understand wanting to leave the technical stuff to the techies. I really do. But you need to proof yourself against problems later. Keep copies of the site archived personally and locally. Or use a backup system. Don’t expect that your webmaster is doing all this for you. He may not be. Your hosting provider may offer a plan with backups included. This is a simple and easy solution.
OK, so now you’re keeping your site safe from disappearing. Good. But are you using it properly?
Third Big Mistake: Avoid the potholes and end up off course.
Many business owners try to find a one-web-professional-fits-all solution. It’s just not workable. If you avoid cost or set-up hassles by going this way, you also avoid a great deal of your potential for success.
Any business that truly wants to expand exponentially online needs to assemble a crack team rather than:
- Trying to learn to do it all yourself. Your company is what you do best. Why are you also trying to become expert in the 50 or so technologies needed to master the web landscape? It simply isn’t possible for you to run your company at the same time as you try to master every tech you’ll need in order to succeed online. Besides, the first rule of good management is to learn when to delegate. You honestly don’t save yourself money in the long run by trying to do it yourself. Many of the clients who arrive to me in most need of rescue got into their messes because they tried to do it all themselves, and without vital knowledge they didn’t know they were missing, they ended up banned, actively worsening reputation problems, etc.
- Leaving absolutely everything web-related to one overworked highly-trained consultant. (Need a website built. That’s Bob. Need reputation Management? Bob again. Need a marketing campaign? Bob to the rescue.) As much as Bob may be good at his job, you want specialists if at all possible so that you don’t end up burning Bob out.
- Having numerous consultants that don’t coordinate. AKA: Too many cooks in the kitchen. You can have fantastic people who aren’t coordinating and thus you get double work, backtracking, redesign, conflicting actions… it’s not pretty.
Even if you don’t know anything about web technology – you do know this: Some people are better for certain jobs than others. And when money is at stake, hiring the right person is always worth the money. But, on top of that, having those brilliant team members then coordinate and brainstorm with each other? Is where the best results for you lay. Seriously. Well worth the money, from my experience. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that all of my most successful clients have me as one part of a larger team of professionals working together on a smoothly running web marketing program.
Just as you wouldn’t expect your architect to also know how to do your store’s window display, you shouldn’t put website build in the same hands as your advertising online. The web isn’t a mass of technologies that all blur together. It is a virtual representation of the entire world. And as such, there are jobs for some kinds of people and jobs for other kinds.
Get yourself a truly gung-ho marketing person, and put them in charge of the your pay-per-click marketing. Get yourself a people person for social media. Get yourself a really skilled techie for a webmaster. A brilliant artist for a web designer. Get yourself a perfectionist genius for an SEO. Get yourself a PR person for reputation management or press releases. Get yourself a great copy writer for your blogging… the list goes on.
What violating this means: You miss out on huge opportunities or need to do double work because you didn’t have critical input in the planning stages from professionals in various fields.
Example of a problem caused by this: A client had spent thousands on SEO, perfecting his website with an SEO and a web designer. Looks good. Ranks like a champ. Then the client breaks into PPC, so he hires a PPC firm and takes all their advice without running it by his SEO. The PPC firm creates a complete duplicate of his website on a separate domain, and so he’s removed from search results entirely. He doesn’t tell the SEO for 3 months about the other website. As soon as he tells the SEO what he did, the duplicate PPC-only website was taken down and a reinclusion request was put in. His site shot back up to the top of the search results. Total cost to client of NOT having a team that coordinated regularly? Hundreds of thousands of dollars since his site was effectively down for several months.
Hopefully, now you’ve got outside consultants helping you and you’re streamlining the process.
I wrote these three things here – even though the last isn’t a technical mistake as much as a tactical one – only because they are the most common mistakes that I see well meaning business owners make. And if you take my advice and implement the above, really make your web presence a part of your company and a part of your weekly tactical planning, you’re likely to see more success, as well as protect it for the future against malicious attack.