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Ryan talks about your potential website security risks, and how to best respond to a breach (which is unlikely for a small business). Then Ryan and Sean discuss online trolls, and the three ways businesses can deal with them — including an idea of how you can profit from troll comments on social media.

Click above to listen to the 26 min audio.

Read Show Notes

– Website intrusion & hacking is actually quite rare for small businesses. Not something that should be at the top of your worry list.

– We have basic protections and nightly backups in place, should anything happen. It usually takes a few hours to get your site back up and running. Again, though, it is super rare that something like this happens. We have thousands of clients and in the last two years only 1 site got attacked.

– Security issues for a small biz website = some kind of malware added to your site, just breaks it or makes it ugly… not stealing your bank account info or customer data.

– WordPress is the most popular website platform, so it is going to be attacked more. But there are also more robust solutions to protect against it (eg. having a Managed WordPress Host like us). Auto-updates and backups go most of the way to keeping your site safe.

– The topic of SSL certificates: Google wants you to have one, even if you don’t do ecommerce. They have even gone so far as to punish sites without them (or boost sites with them) in the rankings. Again, this is sort of a foundational condition of having a modern website and most serious hosts should be providing them for you. In our world, SSL certificates are automatically applied to your site at no extra charge.

– SSL essentially means there is a private connection between you and the website host. So you know you’re looking at the website you’re supposed to look at. Whereas if there is not SSL, there is a POTENTIAL that a hacker/spammer is trying to redirect you to a different website (rare, but possible).

– Sometimes you’ll see a “not secure” type warning next to the address bar. That doesn’t mean someone is trying to hack your private info, it just means the site doesn’t have an SSL cert. Why would an informational blog, for instance, really need one? They wouldn’t. But browsers have started to warn you about it, and a lot of people panic for no reason.

– People trolling you online: can’t avoid them, so easiest to just ignore them (“don’t feed the trolls”).

– Trolling = someone leaving a negative review just to mess with you, people trying to get a reaction, blind or crazy haters… does not mean an honest bad review (those rare times when you drop the ball).

– Honest bad reviews (where the earnest customer had a less-than-perfect experience) need to be responded to and made right.

– More proactive ways to deal with trolls: 1. welcome all comments to your blog/social, since that shows engagement signals to Google and the various other platforms, 2. you can simply delete the comment, 3. you can troll back (agree and amplify; Ben Settle tactic of using troll comments to have a special sale).

– Your superfans/customers will come on and defend you anyway, so you don’t have to respond to negative comments at all.

– Have a thick skin; you’re not owed a good reputation… bad reviews are going to happen no matter what you do; most customers discount the worst and best reviews anyway.

– Should you allow people to comment on your blog posts: in short, yes… monitor them and remove spam manually (this is the cost of doing business, so take it seriously).

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