This post is not directed at the many high-quality web developers that practice “safe dev”. This is directed at the countless website owners and managers that are NOT technically proficient and have no idea how to approach web security.

Web security risks come in many forms, including code injection, Cross-site scripting, etc.  Although it doesn’t hurt to educate oneself, site owners and managers need not understand web security at a technical level. Leave that to your developer, who you have pre-qualified (hopefully). But it is important to understand the risks related to poor web security. And it is a good idea to understand what you as a layperson can do to monitor and protect one of your most important long-term marketing assets: your website. Think of it as a check and balance againast any oversights or errors that your developer may have made.

So, what are the real business risks that should be considered. Of course this will depend on the type of site you have and how it is used. Today it is not uncommon for small and medium-sized businesses to use the web for both marketing and operations. This may include a selling product, generating leads, capturing client information, hosting a companywide CRM application, storing and sharing company documents, etc. The risks associated can be significant, including:

• Risk of losing confidential information such as personal and financial customer information;
• Risk of downtime within your organization if lead flow or operations flow are interrupted;
• Risk of lost goodwill, if your clients or prospects learn that your website has been hacked (which is easier to do than you might think — see below) or confidential data has been leaked;
• Risk of long-term revenue losses. How? Well, if you rely on your site to generate leads and sales, then you can expect your hacked site to quickly lose search engine rankings once the vulnerability is discovered by Google, et al.

So now that you are scared – and hopefully you are just a bit scared – let’s look at a few things that you can do to monitor your site’s security to avoid these risks. Some very basic security protocols and a few neat tools can go along way:

• Know your users. Start by getting a list of ALL user accounts for your hosting/ftp account, database users and any applications that are hosted on your site. This includes any employees, clients or 3rd parties that may have needed access to your server. You can get this list from your developer/administrator and its a good idea to request it on a monthly basis. After all, your employees and customers that may have needed access last month – let’s say to share certain files – may not need access this month. Limiting the total number of users helps to limit the points of risk
• Require strong passwords. Most users rely on 1 or 2 relatively simple passwords, which they use across almost every website they visit. Often these passwords are a name, object or some other word that can be found in a dictionary making it easy to crack. This is fine for Facebook, but not good if you are sharing sensitive data. Require strong passwords that are at least 8 characters and include at least 1 uppercase letter, 1 lowercase letter, 1 number and 1 special character (e.g., !@#$%^&*). A strong password might look like this:  ocqJn^bJ37. Finally, don’t forget to have users change their password regularly.
• Use SSL. Secure Socket Layers are like magical, encrypted tunnels that enable you to send sensitive data securely from your computer to your web server. If you are using a web-based application that contains your sensitive data, such as a CRM, then be sure that your developer has installed an SSL certificate. You will know that your data is secure, if your login page and every other page that contains sensitive data begins with https (’s’ for secure). For example, https://www.amazon.com/.
• Visit your site. That’s right, it’s that simple. Visit your site every day, if possible. A good browser, such as Google’s Chrome, will notify you immediately if a page you visit has been compromised.
• See what Google sees. Google, as much as any other entity, regularly “sees” almost every page on the web. Whether their systems are indexing pages, pulling data from users’ toolbar or gathering information anonymously from their browser, Google knows. And the good news, is Google gives back to the community. You can get a safe browsing diagnostic for your site to learn more about any risks that your site might pose.

These are just a few simple things that you can do to monitor your site. Of course, your business risks might be large enough that 3rd monitoring services are warranted. Either way, when it comes to web security it’s a good idea to not to rely entirely on any one else. So make it a habit to keep an eye on your site.

Many years ago, I heard the old adage  that businesses should decelerate in to the curve and accelerate out of the curve.  James Surowiecki just wrote a nice piece for The New Yorker titled Hanging Tough. It reminds us that tough economic times present the greatest opportunity to grow, challenge incumbents and seize lasting competitive advantage

“…recessions nonetheless create more opportunity for challengers, not less. When everyone is advertising, for instance, it’s hard to separate yourself from the pack; when ads are scarcer, the returns on investment seem to rise.”

Read the complete article here.

“If You Build It…They Will Come” may work for historical baseball ghosts, but it’s not a strategy you can rely on when starting an internet company. Driving traffic to your website is a formula that can be reverse engineered. Other than paying for traffic with advertising, there are only so many ways to get people to show up at your door.

There are 7 Ways to Get (unpaid) Traffic on the Web, in no weighted order they are:

1.) Search Engines
2.) Referring Traffic / Press
3.) Social Media
4.) Online Partnerships / Distribution Deals
5.) Refreshing Content
6.) The Viral Loop / User Email
7.) Solve a Personal Compelling Need

Search Engines – Google, Yahoo, MSN, ASK redirect billions of searches everyday. Search engines have the potential to drive millions of visitors to a given site. Wikipedia and About are two of the most popular sites on the web, but the majority of their traffic comes from referrals from search engines, not people going directly to their site. To make sure your site is optimized for search engine traffic:

1.) Each individual piece of content should have its own distinct URL(title tag), and a unique title (H1 tag) for the page that search engines can read and index.

2.) Increase the production of your content. It’s a simple formula, go to Google and type in this query site:“name of your site.com”. The more pages indexed, the more traffic you will get.

3.) Get more websites linking to your various content pages. Once you get your pages indexed by search engines, you want them to show up as high as possible in the results. The two most important variables to make sure an individual piece of content ranks high in search results are 1)how many inbound links that page has from other websites and 2)the amount of traffic that page gets.

Helpful Resources about Search Engine Traffic: 68 Helpful SEO Tools

“Referring Traffic / Press – The web is interconnected, and traffic flows among sites that interlink. The more sites that link to you, the more sustainable traffic you build overtime. The type of sites that might link into you are blogs, traditional press online, forums or bulleting boards, or content rich sites that are focused on a similar topic. To make sure you maximize the potential for referring traffic:

1.) Create a target list of blogs that could cover your product or content. You can search Technorati to find the most popular blogs on the web across various categories. Make sure to reach out to bloggers personally and build a relationship. Leave comments on their posts, link to them from your site… do that and when you approach them to write about you, you’ll find a welcomed reception.

2.) Make a list of 15 similar websites. Track all their online press in major publications such as the WSJ, NYTs, BusinessWeek Online, or more specific trade publications. Make a list of the journalists writing the articles, they’re easy to find on Linkedin and Facebook. Follow up with compliments on their writing and get some emails going back and forth, and then pitch your product or service.

Helpful Resources about for Getting Referral Traffic: Top Blogs List (with email contacts)

Social Media – Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Del.icio.us, Twitter. This is a separate segment of referring traffic that warrants its own category. These are sites that are set up to discover content on other sites across the web. These sites are typically geared towards more viral or humorous content, but they can be powerful sources for driving a significant amount of traffic.To make sure you maximize the potential for traffic from social media:

1.) Create content appropriate for these sites, each site has a slightly different slant on which type of content is most easily popularized.

2.) Engage in the community and make friends. Most of these sites are based on some type of voting or book-marking system. More community friends = more exposure = more traffic.

3.) Find a way to engage users in other content on your site. This traffic is mostly transitory and has low pageviews/visits, so in order to maximize its potential, make sure to serve up lots of related content on each of the pages that receive traffic from social media.

Helpful Resources for Getting Social Media Traffic: The Social Media Manual and Promoting Yourself on Twitter (by geekpreneur)

Online Partnerships/Distribution Deals –These are harder to come by, but can pay off big dividends. The idea is to get other major sites to integrate some core functionality of your site into their own, as a value ad. One of the best examples was when social news aggregator Mixx.com landed its deal to have its links on all of CNN’s online articles, likely one of the main factors that helped their traffic skyrocket. To make sure you maximize the potential for traffic from partnership/distribution deals:

1.) Get the list of the Alexa or Compete most popular sites on the web, and scan through the list to find any and all web properties that have a crossover with your site.

2.) Widgets, Widgets, Widgets. Wherever possible build a simple, value adding, easy to use widget that others can include on their blog or website, a la the docstoc embed documents tool.

3.) Be creative and persistent. This is the hardest category to give specific “how to” advice. These are typically custom deals that take some creativity on your part, relationship building, and a whole lot of patience. But fortune favors those who persist.

Helpful Resources for Getting Traffic from Partnerships::Web 2.0 Distribution Deals

Refreshing Content –I go back daily to sites like TechCrunch, GigaOm, Drudge Report, Huffington Post, WSJ, Neatorama, because they have topical, informative, biting, controversial content that is always refreshed. On the web, Content is King. Find ways to integrate refreshing content into the pages people visit most on your site, and you’ve given them a reason to come back for more. To make sure you maximize the potential for traffic from refreshing content:

1.) Don’t use your home page just as a static business card. Put new topical content that updates as often as possible on the home page so there is always something new and interesting to bring people back.

2.) Find ways to automatically generate refreshing content without having to manually edit and input it. For example, how can you show related content or automatically surface the content that is most topical and popular.

3.) If your site isn’t optimized for refreshing content, add that as a component. It might seem overly simple or it may seem to difficult to implement, but just do it, and over time returning traffic benefits will accrue.

Helpful Resources for Getting Traffic from Refreshing Content::How to Write Great Blog Content from Problogger

The Viral Loop - The viral loop is the process of turning users into marketers and thus exponentially increasing your traffic via your user base. For example, in 2003 I became the “chief marketer” for LinkedIN and proudly exported 1500+ Outlook contacts to LinkedIN and sent them ALL a message asking them to “join my network” to satiate my ego – I wanted to show off that I had “500+” connections. They turned 1 Registered User = 100 Registered Users, 100 Users = 1000 users. Turn your users into your marketers, it’s the more legit cousin of multi level marketing.

To make sure you maximize the potential for traffic from the Viral Loop

1.) Make sure you have a sign up process on your site. Give your users a compelling reason to share a link with friends or import their contacts and send a message.

2.) Awards, Points, Leader boards, Recognition, Self-Promotion. Adults still like party games, there typically has to be some notoriety or self benefit involved to get others to promote your site for you.

3.) Have an easy call to action. Don’t put the onus on your users to do all the work. Sure, anyone can copy and paste a URL and send it out to dozens of folks, but how many ever will? Import your users’ contacts, and have easy tools for them to post and share links with friends and across the web.

4.) BONUS: set up auto-emails that go out based on all the users’ actions. Think of all the emails you get from Facebook whenever one of your friends does something on the site. Those users aren’t intentionally sending you email, but the items they post, friends they add, and events they host all generate an email that shows up in your inbox and potentially drives you back to the site.

Helpful Resources for Getting Traffic from the Viral Loop:The Viral Coefficient

Solve a Compelling Personal Need – So this is kind of the general catch-all category for “just build a good site that people want to use”, but even this is more nuanced. People come back to sites that solve a personal compelling need. Most of the time, we’re either thinking about Money, Health, or Love (or some derivative). So gear your site around one of these compelling needs and make sure you solve a BIG problem. For example, Pricegrabber lets you find all the stuff you want at the lowest price. Dating sites are the modern day Yentas selling love. WebMD tells you what every possible symptom you’re suffering from could really be. To make sure you maximize the potential for traffic by solving a compelling personal need, you should ask yourself:

1.) If you were the most popular site in your category, would it give someone a reason to come back to the site everyday?

2.) Am I directly dealing with making/saving money, related to health/fitness/symptom reduction, helping people find love/have sex/meet people, am I in the vanity business/do people come to my site for fame?

Conclusion

I don’t claim to have unearthed any amazing secrets to traffic generation. And for anyone in the business of building Internet companies or marketing online, this list of 7 should be very familiar. However, I know from personal experience, many entrepreneurs neglect to take a comprehensive approach to building traffic.

Each of these seven is a piece to the puzzle that makes up your entire user engagement. The goal is to analyze which of these seven areas you may be lacking in, apply attention and effort in these areas to help them grow, and keep working on improving the areas that already work for you.

Source: Jason Nazar