Local Market Monopoly

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Clarence Fisher: Welcome back to Local Market Monopoly, Clarence Fisher, your host. And today we're going to talk about website security, keeping your marketing safe, and how to keep your site safe. It is getting, I tell you what out of a control. We not only host a number of websites. We take care of quite a few websites and we are busy if our customers do what goes on behind the scenes we're like running and throwing fits and chairs, and giving ultimatums, it's crazy. It's like a battle. But then on the outside, it's kinda like the duck, the feet are moving. And then on the outside, they're just gliding and nobody knows, and the websites stay up and it's so beautiful. But then you get behind the scenes and it's ugly. And that's what I'm going to share with you today is how you can protect your website.

Clarence Fisher: I'm telling you, I'm going to give you all of the ninja stuff. Not all of it, because it will be here all day, but I'm going to give you the biggest benefit, the things that are going to give you the biggest benefit in keeping your website safe and avoiding hackers, as soon as we get back,

Clarence Fisher: All right, we're back. And we're talking website security. And what I'm going to do is give you some simple steps, uh, to monitor your site and keep your site safe. I'm telling you, it has been so crazy here lately that you know, we used to update plugins. I'll I will give you a quick win right now. If you have a WordPress website, and one of the things that we run into quite often is once you have a website developed, many businesses, don't ever log into that website. They will say, you know, Hey, we don't need an ongoing website care package because that's going to cost every month, right?

Clarence Fisher: You've built our website. You've spent thousands of dollars on this website and it's like, Hey, we're done. We're done doing business. Well, Hey, that's great. You want to save that money, but I'm telling you, if you have a WordPress website, for sure, you have to log in to that website and you have to update the plugins. You have to update the core WordPress CMS, the database, it has to be updated and you can do it. You can log in and click the button and choose all the plugins. Some plugins can auto-update, if you have that capability, but not all of them, but you definitely need to log in, see what plugins need to be updated, and click update so that they update. Otherwise, they leave a back door open for malware and hackers to get into your website.

Clarence Fisher: And if you can tell right now, I'm super passionate about it because we've been fighting for the last 90 days. Just a malware, the likes that I've never seen in 12 years in business, it is just super crazy. So if you have a WordPress website, if you're updating it yourself, then you probably know this, and you're probably fighting it. We used to run updates once a month, and then we had to do them twice a month. Now we're having to get into our customer's websites every single week, updating and cleaning and making sure that malware is not in there. So what I'm going to tell you to do right now is, well, that's the quick win. If you haven't been into your website and you don't have an ongoing website care package with your web developer, you need to get in right now and make sure that all of your plugins and the core website or the core WordPress installation is updated.

Clarence Fisher: Okay. And then I'm going to tell you that you need to contact your web developer and get on some type of plan, because I promise you when it goes down, when it hits the fan, you will not be ready for it. And you will not want to take all of the time out of your schedule to try to be, actually, you're not, you're going to tell someone else on your staff or on your team to handle it. And then they're going to have to pull away from what they are doing. And it is going to be a headache when you can just pay a hundred $150 or whatever they charge them off to monitor and your stuff. I'm super adamant about this right now, if you don't have a web person or you don't, sometimes you don't trust the web person, that digital website, and you just wanted to get away, give us a call.

Clarence Fisher: You go to a localmarketmonopolycall.com and you can get a 15-minute call and we'll take care of you, but you have to be taken care of. I'm going to walk through some steps right now that you can do, or you can hand them off to your web person. Again, I'm telling you to hand this off to your web person, and, and they're gonna, you know, again, like I always say on here, they're going to thank you. They're like, Hey, you know what? I don't know who you're listening to, but I love him because he keeps sending you to me with this information. So here we go. You want to ensure that your website is secure. Okay. It's essential to keep hackers in thieves out of it. So I'm just going to give you five really quick ones that you can do if you have, uh, access to your website or to a developer, then you can knock these out.

Clarence Fisher: I think there's, there's probably even more than five in my notes here, but first, first off you want, you need to make sure that you are notified if your site goes down. And so, there are all kinds of different notifications that you can use software that you can use. One of them is called Pingdom that you can install. It's one of the best uptime, uh, monitoring platforms out there. You can use what all else is there, backup. I would just go ahead and look up Pingdom and then use that. There's an option to monitor your site from even different parts of the world. If you need to, then that's a good one. You just want to make sure. And there are several plugins. You just want to make sure that you are notified when your website goes down. And then typically you will also be notified when your website is back up.

Clarence Fisher: Now, this is, if you are monitoring it yourself, I promise you, if you have some type of package with a web person, they have this, okay. They are being notified when sites go down and I will tell you, if you are monitoring this yourself, don't be alarmed when you get a notification that your site went down because you know, sites go down more often than you think, but they're not down a very long. Where do you want to get alarmed is if you don't get that email saying that the site is up within about five minutes, 10 minutes, if it's been 10 minutes and you don't have, the, your site is up email, okay, now, ears are perked. What what's, what's going on? So if you're monitoring yourself, just don't be alarmed when you get, if you get that, when you get that, I'm going to say email, you just want to pay attention.

Clarence Fisher: If there is a long space between, that and the site coming back up. So go check out Pingdom. You want to make sure that you are notified. And then also you want to have some type of security subscription either. You're going to get it with your web developer, or you're going to get it directly with someplace like security. You can do a security scanner count check of your website. You can go to the SUCURI site check and that's SUCURI will put the link in the show notes. There's VirusTotal, WP scans, WordPress security scan. We'll put links to the east, uh, Norden safe web, there are all of these different security scanners that you can use in case your site is hacked. And you know, if you want to see if your site's blacklisted, which is probably not, but if it gets hacked, you want to definitely go to someplace like SUCURI site check, put your URL in there, hit the button.

Clarence Fisher: And and they should be able to report back whether you have malware on your website and then you have the option to have them clean it up. And I'll tell you, it's not cheap to have your website cleaned, which is again, why this entire episode. I am sorry, but I usually don't push you towards a managed solution, but for this I am, I'm just saying, find a web person and get on a website care plan. Otherwise, Hey, I'll just pay when I get hacked. It's just not the thing to do. Okay. Monitor your links. What links are being sent to your, your website now, you know, that you hired some SEO people in the past, possibly because they told you for $300, they could get you to page one. And in your report, you're like you got 5 million backlinks from different countries and all kinds of different sites.

Clarence Fisher: I'm telling you, it's a bad thing. So make sure that you monitor your backlinks. You could be losing authority from that as well. You can go to link checker pro, that's a good tool that you can put your, your, what I'm saying, your URL in and check your links. You know, a lot of times in the comments, people are linking out spam comments on your website. If you, if you're trying to avoid that, there's a software called Akismet AKISMET. Let's put the links to this, so all of these in there so that they can have access to this and the Akismet, I think it's $10 a site. Now, it used to be $5 a website that they would block or help block spam comments. And they worked pretty well. The spam comments from showing up on your blog posts, because what they, what these bots do is they'll put a comment on the blog post, and then, you know, put a link. And the comments always like, Hey, didn't know what was going to do till saw your post and then linked to a Russian website.

Clarence Fisher: And there's like comment after comment after comment. So the keys map helps you block that. And then also on your contact forms on your website, make sure to have Captcha on. And if you, captcha can be, when they submit their information, it pops up and tells you to choose all stoplights or choose all bridges or choose all puppy dogs. Or it can be the, what's two plus whatever number or whatever, but just make sure you have captcha turned on because there is bot there is such thing as bot traffic, and it can be malicious once it gets out of hand. If you want to check and see if your website is being targeted by bot traffic, there's a Finteza that you can use to see if you're being affected. And again, we're going to put the link in there, but you want to monitor also your brand name to see if you've been hacked, you know, the Dark web, it was funny.

Clarence Fisher: We were doing some work for an IT an MSP company. And I didn't know anything really about the Dark web at that time, but the Dark web is like totally on my radar right now, because you can have your emails out there on this dark web. And you can, I mean, it's gust ridiculous how much information is out there, but you want to keep a pulse on your brand name. I would go to Agorapulse and that's going to be something you can use to monitor your social, your name and social media and everywhere online. These are some of the things that you could do, but I'm going to tell you the biggest bang for the buck that you're going to get right now is make sure that you have, if you're doing blog posting, get Akismet and we'll have the link on there, make sure you have Captcha on and make sure that either you have a, you have some type of monitoring service, the security does one I'll check and see whatever else you can use, but have some type of malware protection going on on your website, especially if you have a WordPress website.

Clarence Fisher: Okay. So I guess I could have just said that, you know, keep your, keep your website safe. Have these three things, have your Captcha on, have Akismetmet to do your comments. Also, you want to make sure that, I mean, you have to have an SSL certificate at this point at the very, otherwise Google is saying that your site is just not safe. It's telling visitors that your site isn't safe. So if you don't have an SSL certificate, definitely call your web person. And I mean, I'm sure you do, because if you did not, you would have been told by now that when someone goes to look at your website, Google is saying, this site is not safe. They started doing that about a year or so ago. Now everybody has an SSL certificate. And really, if you're on a GoDaddy, I just hate to GoDaddy, I think still charges in order to leg for their SSL certificate, which is just like crazy.

Clarence Fisher: But anybody else, you can probably just get it added for free. I would think at this point, so if you have any questions, definitely, like I said, you can reach out to us at localmarketmonopolyhelp or localmarketmonopolycall.com. If you want to grab a quick call and, and chat about any of this, we'll put all of these links. I know I've kind of been scattered a little bit, and I started off all fiery because this is the thing right now, it is security. You know, it's security on. I know it, companies have to be making a killing right now, MSPs because it is so rampant right now, just that the hacking that's going on, and it's not just the big companies. It's the local, it's the local mom and pops just the local, small business, the local business owner, the main street business that we're having to fight these really sophisticated malware programs. And again, I'm probably excited because I'm, I'm the one fighting it. I, you were one of our customers and you're like, I don't even know what he's talking about. That's what I'm talking about because we are, we are gang banging in the background for you I do on your behalf. Anyway, go protect your site, listen, go out market your market, do whatever you need to do to own the block.