Today’s blog post gets a little personal. I’ve had some challenges the past few days. The first one is with hackers. Unfortunately, if you have a website, it will probably get hacked eventually. It’s a royal pain to fix and often it will get hacked again because the first cleanup didn’t fix everything. I spent most of my weekend working on this and everything seems to be a ok at the moment. Yea!
One thing that I do suggest for everyone is that they list their site on Google’s Webmaster Tools. If you get your site listed there (it’s free), Google will email you when you get hacked. It’s a nice warning. Also, check your site often. Luckily, I do check my sites quite often and usually know about these things fairly quickly.
If you do want extra protection, it might pay to use a service like SiteLock. They will monitor your site and alert you if there are any problems.
While fixing the hacks I stumbled on an even worse problem. I was doing extensive Google searches on my name and discovered that someone filed a false Rip Off Report on me. It had been there since last August but I just now found it. It said some pretty nasty things about me that are 100% made up. Even worse, Rip Off Report won’t even remove it without a court order.
So, how do you fix these types of things? Unfortunately, people get pissed off and do stupid things. In my case, it was a lead generation company filing a Rip Off Report on me as “payback” for a Rip Off Report that I filed on them the day before. However, their “payback” just made me madder and I’m planning on getting an attorney as a result of it.
The crazy thing is that my order wasn’t that big. Maybe $100. They could have quietly refunded my money and I would have gone away. And that’s exactly what I recommend that you do if someone files a bad report on you for any service issues in your business. Quietly and rationally do what you need to do to get the negative report removed voluntarily.
Another mistake that many business owners make is using unsolicited email to drum up business. If you see a company offering up x number of email addresses for you for cheap, don’t fall for it. Yes, it’s cheaper than direct mail. Yes, it’s easier. But in the long run, it’s just not worth it.
And don’t believe for a minute that just because you are giving something away for free, that you won’t get a spam complaint. Prospects can complain and often they will. I had a situation back in 2006 where I gave away an ebook for free through one of the send “100,000 opt in email address” emailing services like I mentioned above. I wasn’t even trying to sell anything. 100% free. Yet, bam, I ended up on some spammer complaint site. I’m still there to this day and there’s not a thing I can do about it. Just don’t do it. Take the time and pay for direct mail or blog or better yet send them a card.
I hope you learned a thing or two from these tips and I would love to hear your feedback.
Carlos was able to affordably transform my web site from "just being there" to getting me to the top of important search engines in just a couple of weeks. My leads have improved dramatically!!
