How to Monitor Website

10 Critical Steps To e-business Safety

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-Books^TM ]. 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 downloaded 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.

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.

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