The Importance of Protecting Your Data

Can you imagine showing up for work one morning to discover that all of your valuable data has been lost? The odds of this happening are not as low as you my think. The data you spend so much time compiling is often essential for running your business smoothly - especially a new business. Think about the consequences of losing every one of your business contacts, all of your financial spreadsheets, your important business documents, every computer template, ect. I’m sure you get the picture.

Avoid a Costly & Time-Consuming process

You need to protect all of your valuable data in the case of unforeseen circumstances. Recompiling all of your data is a very labour-intensive and expensive procedure. Imagine how long it would take you to recreate every template, re-enter every contact or retype every document. Even worse, starting over from scratch may not be possible, depending on the volume, budget and staffing of your particular business.

Don’t Risk Losing Credibility & Customers

If your business data is ever compromised, you also risk losing credibility and customers. Having to call all of your clients to explain you have lost their documents or financial information is certainly not a good way to start a new business. Your clients may start to worry that you are careless or disorganized and are not taking sufficient care of their personal information. This may send them heading straight to your competitors!

Aviod Losing Irreplaceable Data

Some of the data you have gathered for your new business may be irreplaceable. For example, you may have time-sensitive or historic data that can never be retrieved. This is yet another important reason to protect your business data.

Possible Cause of Data Loss

There are many circumstances that can lead to data loss. A power outage or power surge may erase all of your valuable business data. A network glitch, corrupt hardware or software component or computer virus can also wreak havoc on your stored information.

Sabotage

Another increasingly common cause of data loss relates to computer hackers and information theft. More individuals are devising innovative new methods of stealing data, especially customer’s financial information.

Human Error

Human error continues to play the largest part in data loss. Pressing one wrong key, forgetting to press the “save” button, dropping a laptop or accidentally formatting a drive can wipe out hours, weeks, or even months of valuable data.

How to Protect Your Data

Perform Regular Backups

First of all, you need to start incorporating routine data backups into your regular routine. It’s advisable to back up all of your business data daily. If this isn’t possible, make sure you perform this task at least every week. This way, you won’t risk losing months or even years of valuable data. Certain computer programs will facilitate the task by automating backups at specified time periods.

Install Data Protection Software

Another useful method to protect your data is to install programs that will safeguard your computers against viruses, worms, trojans and hackers. Many companies offer relatively inexpensive software to assist you with this task. The expense will be well worth the price if it helps you protect your invaluable data. You should also install reliable firewall, anti-virus and disk encryption programs.

Implement Proper Passwords

Do you tend to use that same easy password for multiple programs so you don’t have to worry about forgetting them? This is a very common problem that may cause your business data to be compromised. In order to safeguard your information against hacking or viruses, you need to implement proper passwords. This means avoiding words that are easy for others to guess such as the name of your children, spouse or pet. Instead, you should incorporate letters and numbers and use words that aren’t in the dictionary.

You need to take every possible precaution to safeguard you valuable business data. Having to recompile this information thanks to a virus, hacker, power outage, human error, or software problem can be a very time-consuming and expensive process. In fact, it may end up completely destroying your new business. Don’t risk losing credibility, customers and irreplaceable data; perform regular backups, install data protection software and use proper passwords to keep your business data safe and secure.

Available Statistical Tools & Resources

Fortunately, maintaining accurate website statistics is now easier than ever.  Many innovative and helpful tools and software exist to help you with this task.  You can purchase software that is usually relatively inexpensive and complete this task yourself. You may choose to assign this responsibility to your web designer or another trusted individual.  The most important thing is to actually perform the task on a regular basis.  It’s great that your business did very well 4 months ago, but is it doing just as well this month?  If you don’t know, you should and detailed website statistics will let you know instantly.

Benefits of Website Statistical Analysis

Website statistics will also show you if any changes you have recently made are proving successful or not.  This way you can decide whether to continue as usual or make further changes.  There is no point repeating the same mistake over and over again.  If you don’t continuously monitor the effect of the changes, you will never know how well you are doing.

This also ensures you’re obtaining optimal results for your advertising or marketing budget.  You may think that spending a lot of money to advertise with a certain company is a brilliant idea.  However, will you think the same way when you check your website statistics and realise that your advertising dollars have not produced one single visitor from the company’s marketing efforts.  Absolutely not!  On the other hand, you may be surprised to discover that one of your less expensive marketing strategies has produced very successful results.

Important Elements To Include in Your Analysis

You may think that the only number you need to be concerned about is the total number of people who visit your site every month.  Well, this is not the case as you require additional information to perform a sufficient analysis. 

Here are some elements you should ensure are included in the website statistics for your business:

Unique Visitors:  This refers to the number of actual visitors to your site, not just friends or family members who check your site several times a day.  The term hits is often used be paid advertisement or affiliate sites, but it can be very misleading and inaccurate.  The number of hits on your site may be very impressive, but don’t get too excited; many of these may actually be files such as movies and images.  You need to concentrate on the number of actual visitors to your website.

Referring Search Engines:  This statistic indicates the number of pages that were visited when someone clicked on a search engine link.  Google, Yahoo! and MSN are currently the three largest search engines, but many others may generate a large percentage of online traffic to your website.  By reviewing which search engines refer the most visitors to your site, you can ensure your ranking or search engine result position (SERP) does not diminish with them.

Other Referring Sites:  This will help you determine what percentage of referring sites is actually spam.  You will notice some legitimate sites from actual sites and clients. If you don’t run any affiliate programs or pay-per-click ads, these statistics may not be as important.  However, if you pay for advertising on any external sites, make sure to pay close attention to these numbers.

Entry & Exit Pages:  These statistics reveal exactly where your visitors entered and where they left your website.  This will give you a clearer idea whether they actually found what they were searching for or if they immediately exited your site after taking a quick look.  In the latter case, you may want to ensure your website looks attractive and professional and is easy to navigate. Your contact page is generally one of the most desirable exit pages because it indicates that visitors want to obtain additional information about your company.

Keywords/Keyword Phrases:  This type of statistics will show you exactly what visitors were searching for when they ended up on your website.  If you discover some keywords that continue to rank highly, you may want to consider changing some of the content on your website.  You can also include some of the more popular keywords or keyphrases in the meta tags you use for your titles, domain names and descriptions.

Error Pages:  No one likes to arrive at a web page to be greeted with a dreaded 404 error message.  This applies to your visitors as well so make sure you continuously check if any of your pages are creating errors.  If so, fix them immediately before you begin to damage your reputation and lose valuable customers!

Monitoring website statistics is not as complicated as you may think, but it is extremely important.  You can hire someone to help you or purchase software and do it yourself.  By regularly monitoring various elements of your online traffic, you can determine how well your business is doing and whether any changes are warranted.  Learning how to properly analyze the numbers on your statistical reports can add up to much higher numbers on your business’ monthly bank statements!