As an internet marketer, the most vital tool of the trade is your computer. So you must keep it safe. So, what are the main threats? And what do you need to keep your computer safe?
First of all, imagine this scenario:
You’re been running your own business online for a year now, and finally, after months of building, learning, and trial-and-error, you’ve had your first month of making more money then you spent – your first month of profit! You’ve finally made it, all you need to do now is keep doing what you’re doing and start scaling it up as your budget grows out of your profits. Then the next day you turn on your computer to begin working on your next ad campaign and instead of your computer loading to the desktop like normal, you see this:
“Oh my god!” you say to yourself, as you see in your mind’s eye, your online business crashing and being buried under six feet of Blue Screen of Death!
This whole scenario is preventable, and even if it happens and all your business data is on that one computer, you can still recover. First of all, you’re hard drive’s usually still ok, even at this point, and what caused your computer to crash like this is usually a faulty (or malicious) bit of computer programming. Either way, it’s usually fully recoverable. In fact, I wrote a blog last week detailing how I helped a friend and business colleague recover from just this scenario. You can read that blog post at Recovering Your Computer from Malware.
What are the main threats?
The main threats all revolve around data loss and the inability to access your business. There are several ways this can happen, and regardless of how it happens, losing this information can cost your business thousands, if not more!
First of all, imagine this, you’re building your list with an autoresponder, you’ve spent thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours over the course of a year building it, then one crash later it’s all gone. Kaput. What now? If you’re someone like John Chow who makes hundreds of thousands of dollars a month off of his list that’s a huge disaster. If you’re a newbie just getting started that’s still a huge disaster! One way the losses are astronomical, the other way you don’t have the resilience yet to recover from such a loss.
So how do you protect yourself from a sudden loss of data?
Backup, backup, backup.
I can’t say it enough times, use features to keep backups of your data, so if a computer or something crashes and all the data is lost, you have a backup sitting on a spare hard drive or even on DVDs. I know many think DVDs are passé, but really, if a solar storm were to hit your part of the earth, you could find all hard drives wiped out by it.
Regardless of how or why you lost data, if it’s backed up it’s not really lost, you just have to look to reload it to your main computer again – or your new computer if your main one’s dead.
Back in 1989 the sun shot out a huge flare of magnetic energy right at Earth, and it hit the Province of Quebec. That solar storm ended up bringing down the entire Provincial power grid! All because it wiped out computer data and fried electric circuits. The advantage of something like DVDs is they’re unaffected by such events, so if you have your data on DVDs, all you’d need to do is buy a new computer and copy your data back onto it and you’re back in business! Sometimes old school has its advantages.
So if possible, keep backups of your list. Always keep backups of your website or blog and backups of your business data that you have on your own computer.
How can a virus cause me to lose my data?
Another way you can lose data is if your computer gets infected with a virus. This will spread throughout your computer and any storage devices you connect with the infected computer (eg: memory stick, external hard drive, cloud back-up, DVD, etc). This can be a huge threat and can even cause the loss of your backups too if they’re also infected the virus!
That’s why computer viruses are so insidious! The losses they cause can cascade quickly into everything if you’re not careful.
Another way you can lose data is a hacker can break into your system and steal it, or deliberately sabotage it.
So how do I protect myself against such malicious intent?
In a perfect world, one where everyone’s ethical, no one would write viruses, and no one would break into someone else’s personal online space, steal data or sabotage it.
Unfortunately, we don’t live in such a world, there are those who would seek to destroy your just because your successful, or because they feel a compulsion to commit crimes and your success makes you a juicy target. That’s why it’s so important to make sure you have a quality set of security programs running on your computer. It can keep such intrusions out, or at least to a minimum.
There is more but this is enough for today, be sure to read part 2 tomorrow.
