Sellers: Are You Protecting Your Online Investment?

Avoid computer viruses by keeping your anti-virus program updated and by not opening suspicious email attachments.


New viruses come out all the time so
update your anti-virus program often.

After catching one nasty virus one day and another one two days later, I downloaded the free trial of Malware Bytes and it found 27 trojans on my computer! Then I caught another virus a few days later.

THREE viruses in one week! Grrrr!!!

I decided it was time to really find a way to protect myself so I got ForceField and my computer has been safe and sound ever since. It shows me when something is trying to get into my computer [it's scary how often it happens!] and if I go to a site that is known for being malicious, it warns me before I even get there so I know to run the other way. Don't learn the hard way like I did. Protect yourself from malicious software.

If other people in your household use your computer, like your spouse or your kids, they could download a virus without even realizing it and that would mean big trouble for you. Your computer is the heart of your online business - keep it beating. Consider buying yourself a new computer and let them have your old one.

Don't count on the fire wall that comes with Windows(TM). That's the first one hackers aim for. I use one from ZoneAlarm [which now come with an anti-virus built in] and didn't catch that nasty virus that went around a few years ago but lots of people I know did. The great thing about it is any time a program on your computer wants to go on the Internet, it stops it and asks for your permission first.

Get into the habit of backing up the important stuff on your computer, including your email's Inbox. If the worst should happen, having a back-up copy will get you back up and running in no time.

Click here to get 2GB of full-featured online back-up for free from iDrive

It'll not only protect your computer from power surges but if lightning strikes, it should stop at the battery and not harm your computer. If you use dial-up or DSL, get one with a phone jack to protect your modem as well. Plus, if you're in the middle of writing your next top-selling ebook and the power goes out, you'd lose everything you've written since the last time you hit 'Save." With a battery back-up, you'd have five minutes of battery power so you can save your work.

Protect Your Website

Put your copyright at the bottom of every page on your site. Take it one step further and put it in the "Author" meta tag in the source code, like this:

<meta name="author" content="©2009 YourSite.com">

There are those who think it's ok to copy a site and use it word-for-word on their own site. Make them think twice about plagiarizing yours by putting a Copyscape graphic, like this, on every page of your website.

Use a mix of lower- and upper-case letters, as well as numbers, and make them at least 8 characters long. The longer, the better.

If you have all of your web pages in the main public folder, that's easy for hackers to mess with it. Instead, put pages in their own folders, especially the important pages, like your "Thank You" and "Cancel" pages, to make them harder for hackers to get to.

Keep robots and spiders away from the pages you don't want people using search engines to find, like your "Thank You" page and "Cancel" page. Here's how you're going to stop them:

Let's say you're going to put your "Thank You" page inside a folder called "A" and your "Cancel" page inside a folder called "B" on your site.

Open Notepad [In Windows(TM) click on 'Start,' 'All Programs,' 'Accessories' and then 'Notepad'] and enter this code:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /A/
Disallow: /B/

...exactly as it appears into Notepad.

Replace the 'A' and 'B' with whatever you named the folders with your "Thank You" and "Cancel" pages in them.

Now save that file as "robots" - make sure it's in lowercase, there are no blank lines between the commands, and that the file's name is correct (robots.txt). Then, just upload this file to the same place where your site's main 'index' page it.

What the code says is that all robots (those of you who are old school, like me, will remember that * from DOS) are not allowed to go into the following folders: cgi-bin, A and B. If you have any other folders you don't want them to go into, just add them to the list, but if you're new to all this, this is all you need. [The cgi-bin has all sorts of important stuff for your site in it so you don't want robots snooping through it!!]

Robots can ignore your "robots.txt" file. The naughty ones, like the ones looking for vulnerabilities so they can hack into a site and the ones looking for email addresses for spammers, will go wherever they want. The ones for Google, Yahoo! and the other respectable search engines should honor your NoRobots rules.

But know that any folders you didn't include in your NoRobots list are fair game to be snooped through.

If you want to learn more, click here to go to the Web Robots Pages website.

If you have a folder on your site but don't have an 'index' file in it, anyone can snoop through all of your files in that folder. Stop people from nosing around in places they don't need to be by putting an 'index' file in every folder on your site to redirect them to somewhere else.

In some folders, it makes sense to have a page that links to the individual pages in that folder, so you'd create an index page just for that folder. But for other folders, like your 'Images' folder, it makes better sense to redirect the nosy so-and-so to some other place on your site, like your main 'index' page. To do that, you'd use this code:

<html>
 <head>
 <meta content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1"http-quiv="content-type">
 <title>Redirect to www.YourSite.com</title>
 <meta http-equiv="REFRESH" content="0;url=http://www.YourSite.com/">
 </head>
  <body>
    <br>
    <br>
  </body>
</html>

FYI: In the code above where it says "content="0; ...

You've been to a site that says: "you will automatically be redirected to another page in 5 seconds" or whatever, and then it sends you to another page. They're using this same code but changed the 0 to a 5. For your site, leave it at 0 so it immediately sends the visitor to the other page. I just thought I'd mention it in case you ever want to do that on another site in the future.

If hackers get in and change all of your web pages, or your host has a problem and loses all your site's files, you'll need to get your site back to the way you had it fast. Always keep a back-up copy close by just in case.

If your site goes down, you're not making any money so use a service that'll monitor your site, and if it does go down, they'll let you know so you can get it back up fast.

There are a handful of services out there that will monitor your site for you. The one I like is 1stWarning.com. Because it acts like a customer visiting your site at the time intervals you tell it to, it will "see" what your visitors see, unlike the services that sit on your site's server. They may think your site is up and running when it's not.

If the server your site is on goes down, does your host have a back-up server in place to keep your site up and running? Find out.

Protect Your Product

Put your copyright in it. Every book has a copyright page - yours should too. Most also have it in the watermark on every page. That way, if someone prints out the page, the copyright is on it.

My 2 cents on Copy Protecting Ebooks
Putting a password on your ebook or using software that locks it to one computer so your customer can't read it on any other computer is a huge hassle for your customer. Passwords get lost, computers get replaced, and the only ones who really benefit are the companies hawking ebook protection products. Instead of giving those companies your money, focus on protecting your downloads, which we'll talk about in a second.

Put your copyright in it. Every program has an 'About' page. Put your copyright there.

Snail-mailing a copy of your product to yourself won't stand up in court. Instead, burn it onto a CD and mail it along with the proper paperwork to the U.S. Library of Congress. Click here to learn more about getting a copyright.

Use code or a download manager, like DLguard, to keep the people who haven't paid for your product from getting anywhere near it.

While you'll never be able to protect your online business from every threat that comes along, following these tips will protect you from most of them and get you back in business quickly if the worse should happen.