Year end is a great time for making sure all your i’s are dotted and your t’s are crossed when it comes to your website business. The list below outlines 5 important tasks that will help keep your website and your website business on track next year.
1. Change the Copyright Year on Your Site’s Footer
When I see a copyright date on a website that says something like “Copyright 2003. All Rights Reserved”, two thoughts go through my mind.
- This is an abandoned website. The webmaster hasn’t touched this thing in 8 years.
- Is this a site a diamond in the rough? Can I buy it cheap, improve it, and sell it quickly? If the site was ever monetized (unlikely), there are likely some opportunities with new website monetization strategies to get this thing profitable in a hurry.
Do you want to leave the impression that your site is neglected? It’s time to edit the code of your site and make sure the date is dynamically inserted, such as with the PHP Date function, rather than manually added in the footer of each page.
2. Review Your Top Landing Pages for Out of Date Information
Log into your Google Analytics or other web statistics program and find your “top content” or “top landing pages”. Read each one of these pages and make sure all the information will continue to be up to date next year. If not, it’s time to do some rewriting.
3.) Search Your Site for Mentions of the Current Year
A simple Google search can help you identify pages which might be out of date. Utilize a command such as “site:yourdomain.com 2011″ to quickly find pages which could be out of date due to mentioning the current or previous years.
4.) Change Your Passwords
When was the last time you changed your hosting control panel password? If you don’t already have a scheduled frequency that you change your password, at least make year-end your time to do this important task. It can help prevent security problems due to account hacking or simply sharing passwords with outsourced teams who no longer work with you. Here’s a basic list of passwords you should consider changing
- Hosting Control Panel Password
- FTP Passwords
- Email Passwords
- Domain Registration Passwords
- MySQL Passwords
- Revenue Account Passwords Such as Adsense
- 3rd Party Tool Passwords Such as Email Marketing or SEO Tools
- WordPress User Passwords
5.) Backup Everything
If you’ve been online for any period of time and you haven’t had a hard drive fail, an account get hacked, or a programmer seriously mess up your site, consider yourself lucky. However, it’s only a matter of time before something like this happens. Even the savviest people will run into a case where they need to get a backup of their data. If you don’t have at least two copies of your data in different locations, ask yourself if you would be okay with losing it forever. Here’s a quick list of items I recommend backing up.
- Website Files
- MySQL Data
- Email Data
- Customer Lists
- Email Lists
- Transaction Logs
- Your Computer
Remember to never rely on your providers (hosting, email marketing, etc.) to back up your data for you. Get a copy of your data and have it backed up at a separate physical location from where it’s stored.
Here’s to a Smooth Next Year
I recommend taking care of these little but important tasks before the end of the year rather than after. This will allow you to focus your renewed energy in the new year on your biggest opportunities. A little preparation now can help you have peace of mind later and save you headaches next year.
Here’s to your most successful year yet!
I’ve learned an insane amount by being an Income Diary reader and subscribing to Michael’s email list. In fact, I’ve tried to model my own email practices after his (and another guy on this list) — providing LOTS of value in the messages that get sent out. Michael’s site provides tons of value too, as he shares his own experiences as a six-figure online marketer and also interviews a bunch of other successful people.
To say that Justin from Flip Filter is a smart guy would be a crazy understatement. He sees the story behind statistics and turns data into actionable advice that helps people make money with their website flips. His product (Flip Filter) is an amazing resource, but so is his free blog, which should be considered mandatory reading for anyone interested in buying and selling websites.
If the income’s passive, Pat’s probably got his hand in it (or is figuring out how to)… and he’s not shy about sharing. Pat’s blog has a real strong “learn with me” vibe, as he endeavors to make money online. He’s already won big with his own product, iPhone app development, and a niche site monetized with AdSense.
This one’s a newcomer that I’m sure you haven’t heard of, and I’ve learned more from the guy behind this blog in person than online, but his newly-launched site already has some great articles for people looking to start making money online. Keyword research, affiliate marketing, SEO — this dude’s a pro at them all and I know the content he provides in the future is all going to be first rate.
There’s no better-run forum on the planet. E-P has some of the smartest people you’ll run into with an interest in online business and they are VERY generous with their knowledge and expertise. Other forums are more active, but none have a better signal to noise ratio. Every time I go there, I get smarter. You will too. 
No, not their blog — the actual website sales marketplace. There’s so much insight you can gain about monetization methods, traffic building techniques, niche selection, copywriting, and more just by looking at the information provided in their listings. People open up the records to their online businesses in an effort to sell them, and all that information just sits there, waiting for us to learn from it.
Anatomy of a 5-Figure Flip: Link Building
This is the fifth article in a series highlighting a 5-figure website flip. We’ve already reviewed buying aged domains, outsourcing web design and writing, getting repeat visitors, and conducting keyword research. This article covers link building (for SEO and traffic generation).
It’s often said that on the internet, content is king. I call BS. Links are king, and content is queen. A site with enough link equity can rank for competitive terms, even with pretty awful content — just look at Yahoo Answers. A site with well-placed links on heavily trafficked sites doesn’t even NEED search traffic — it gets flooded with referrals. He who has the most (and best quality) links wins.
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