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Website Security Checklist: 36 Tips to Complete Your Website Security Check

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Website Security Checklist: 36 Tips to Complete Your Website Security Check

website security

It pays to be paranoid in today’s online world with all the potential website security threats because the bad guys REALLY are out to get you…Check your website security often!

We were hacked not long ago. And let me just confirm, it’s no fun.

But this time, it wasn’t so bad because we had systems and tools in place to shut down the hacker fast.

First, evverything is ok. No data was destroyed nor was any customer information revealed. But it was a close call. This is what we call a teaching moment. And since that is what we do best, I wanted to help as many of you as possible make sure that you have the right website security in place. 

Stay tuned and we’ll give you a simple, but thorough website security checklist to help protect you from the bad guys.

Here's what happened to us.

Last week, during the Insiders Club call, Jen (my daughter and company manager) tried to login to the Learning Center to show people how to find a specific product.

She couldn't. She was locked out.

I couldn't log in. I was locked out.

None of the rest of our team could login. We were all locked out.

And we began getting support tickets - customers were locked out too. And that’s a really bad thing.

Website hacking is rampant. We all have to be incredibly vigilant because there’s a group of ne’er-do-wellers out there (and they seem to be growing) who would much rather do damage than do good.

This was the second time we’ve been hacked. The first was many years ago.

During our semi-annual workshop in February, a threatening message on the site homepage read: 

“David Perdew, you owe me money and I will expose your database to the world if you don’t pay $15000.”

Of course, we had no idea the identity of this mysterious - and extraordinarily dumb hacker - since there was no contact information or payment instruction. 

We called the FBI (zero help by the way) and hired a team of cyber sleuths to rectify the hack.

The damage was done though because it forced us to shut down the site for six weeks to clean up and harden the site. Basically, it was a complete rebuild costing us about $75,000 in lost revenue and expenses to get back up and running.

Ten hours after we discovered the attack, we figured out that a person in Jordan, who had signed up for one of our products, used his login and technical know-how to invade the system and plant a malicious file.

Even though our system is much more secure, no computer is foolproof.

So, when we were hacked again recently, I flashed back to that costly previous experience praying that we’d done a better job this time of backing up our systems, putting our WordPress security plugin software in place, configuring it properly, and working with our hosting company to be ever vigilant.

But our system, like yours, gets hit thousands of times a day by hackers and bots trying to find a simple and easy vulnerability to exploit. 

If you think about this too long, you could think that doing business online just may not be worth the trouble. Luckily, there are simple ways to ward against 99.9% of the threats.

This time, when we saw the issue, Jen jumped on with LiquidWeb, our host, and they confirmed that they could see a rogue account with an IP from Tunisia that accessed our server and was in the account. They could see where he was and what he was doing.

And because of the unusual server activity, our WordPress security plugin, iThemes Security Pro, did it's job and shut down the entire site until we could stop the strange behavior in the server.

We'd caught a hacker in the act.

Website security checklist

My first thought in a situation like this is about the backups. “Where's our backups?"

Website backups are not something we think about often, but when we do, it’s usually as the result of some tragedy. And while we never want to use the backups, we must have them in case we do.

One of the reasons our first hacking experience shut us down for 6 weeks many years ago was because our backups had consistently been overwritten with new backups that had become infected with the malicious sleeper file. That allowed the hacker to trigger his activity at a later date.

Rebuilding the site was our only option.

One backup isn’t enough. We like to have a couple of months of backups just in case. Yes, that’s probably overkill, but when you have unlimited cloud storage from a reputable company like Google, data space is not an issue.

Unlimited backup space seems like it would be really expensive, but it isn’t at all. About 18 months ago, I made a very small one time investment in a product called Unlimited Cloud Storage.

All of our backups are loaded on that Google drive account with multi layered 2 factor authentication security. We used those to restore our sites by suppertime and get everything back to normal with very little downtime.

After this episode, I begged the developer to give our community a special promotion code to get $10 off. If you’re interested in Unlimited Cloud Storage, be sure to use the promo code NAMS10.

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To Get Team, Training and Tools for Your Business, Try MyNAMS Insider's Club for Just $1

Yes, I need this!

Tools, tips and tricks to enhance your security with a site security checklist

But unlimited cloud storage is not the only website security best practice we use. 

We’ll go through a few of the best practices we use and a few of the tools we like to implement those below.

Domain Registration/ Hosting

Even though this is so important, too many people overlook this simple step. For example, someone may register their domain Godaddy and decide to get hosting there as well. Their entire business can then be shut down by Godaddy if they don’t like your business for any reason.

If you register your domain in one location like Simple Niche Domains (our Godaddy reseller account), and host your domain with a separate company like A2 Hosting (we recommend highly with very reasonable rates for medium to smaller sites), you’ll be in control.

  1. Register your domain in a different place than where you host your site! 
  2. Use a hosting company with a good reputation and good support plans

WordPress Admin Structure/Plugins/Themes

  1. Never use admin as your username
  2. Delete any account using admin as the username
  3. Always use a strong password - we recommend 20 characters with AT LEAST 1 Symbol, 1 Number and Upper and Lower Case 
  4. Periodically remove admin accounts set up for support of your plugins or products 
  5. Alway check for abandoned plugins. These are plugins that have had no updates recently (within the last year)
  6. Don't be a plugin hoarder. Make sure you delete plugins that are no longer being used or that are duplicates of another product.
  7. Never allow additional plugins to be added to your site without permission
  8. Avoid free plugins unless the company has an upgrade path. 
  9. Always make sure you're updating your WordPress theme. If your theme has not had updates recently, change themes! (child themes can be hacked too so if your child theme is outdated, it may be time for a newer one)
  10. Keep your WordPress core software updated. Be sure you backup first before updating and if possible run the updates on a test site or server
  11. Do NOT use free themes

Backups

  1. You can schedule backups to run directly with your hosting company. These are not always the easiest to access but are good to have running as a backup of your backup system - or a redundancy.
  2. Make sure backups are running on all of your sites frequently. At least daily. If you add a lot of content to your site, we recommend backing up multiple times per day. We back up every 12 hours and load to our Unlimited Cloud Storage.
  3. Make sure your hosting company is running a Cpanel Backup as well. This does not have to happen as frequently as cpanel changes should be minimal.
  4. Make sure you have a cloud storage account for your backups
  5. Make sure you are deleting old backups, especially if you are paying for storage space. 
  6. Use a WordPress Backup Plugin - These are super easy to configure and use. We use Updraft and recommend BackupBuddy as well.

Connect your backup plug in to your cloud storage and make sure to add extra security on your backup folder. Password protect the folder OR put 2 factor authentication on the folder

Security Plugins

  1. Use a WordPress security plugin. A paid version with good support is best. That’s why we use and recommend iThemes Security Pro.
  2. Configure your security plugin correctly
  3. Remember your security plugin will protect your site from bad players but sometimes can flag innocent customers and users. You can automatically whitelist or remove a blacklist on a customer IP address in your security settings. 
  4. Use recaptcha or two step optins to ensure you're not getting hammered by bots and bad sign ups

Password Manager

Use a password manager tool. There are several out there but we prefer LastPass because we can share access with our team members without sharing passwords. And we can use the mobile app to access anything from our phone as well.

Use A WordPress and Security Company

  • Amy Bair - eHemisphere 
  • Paul Taubman - Digital Maestro
  • Debra Lloyd  - WP WebWorks
Click To Get A Downloadable Copy Of This Website Security Checklist!
 

We'll send it right over to your inbox! 

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Bill Sefton

"I just finished reading your Endless Affiliate Profits - Lots of Golden Nuggets that extend beyond the Affiliate universe...I'll be spending my weekend implementing them..."

Percy Miller

NO ONE else is doing things online like you guys are doing it...You guys are building and teaching what I want to learn how to do with my online efforts...Today I saw the future!"

Shelley Merchant

I have wandered around blindly for over 4 years wondering why things weren't working...the things y'all teach are not being taught elsewhere. Instead, the advice is vague and leaves you feeling stupid because you're not figuring it out.

I cannot say enough good things...the only problem is that there's so much good stuff that I don't want to sleep b/c I want to learn it all.

 
I'm beginning to feel like a plan is forming and that I might actually make things work.
Jen Perdew

The Novice to Advanced Marketing System is a step-by-step system focusing on Team, Training and Tools to help novice to advanced business people build a Simple, Scalable and Sustainable business.

Founded by David Perdew over 15 years ago, he recently retired and his daughter, Jen Perdew, who has been working at NAMS since 2011 purchased the business.

Jen is now the President and CEO of NAMS and comes from a customer service, operations, and employee training background.

Jen has always loved digging in and getting her hands dirty with automation and coaching. Jen's an implementer and focuses on moving her clients as quickly as possible down the path to success. and has since taken over most of the technical training in the business. NAMS is one of the most successful online communities today, specializing in training and proprietary productivity software tools.

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Finding Your Home in the Online Jungle

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Finding Your Home in the Online Jungle

Do you ever feel like an explorer trying to find your way while building your business? Being an online entrepreneur is hard and finding good coaching for entrepreneurs is even harder! I know. There's alot of hype out there that says it isn't.

It takes work. It takes commitment and there's no magic button. 

Not even when you see online "entrepreneurs" teaching how they made $20,000 yesterday in a business they started last week.

What's fact? What's fiction? Who can you trust?

There are so many pieces to creating a business that focusing in one area can mean ignoring another. But ignoring any area of your business is detrimental to its success as a whole.

It can feel like a never ending merry go round spinning so fast you can't get off.  Until you get some solid ground under your feet.

So how can you create a solid foundation for your business?

You have to find support. You have to have someone you trust to talk to about issues and how to fix them. But this can't just be anyone. You wouldn't talk to a roofer about a problem with your car, right?

Having different levels of peer support is essential.

Why is that?

Have you ever been to a workshop or a class and you were scared to ask questions in front of the room. You felt a little embarrassed or unsure because of what you didn't know? (By the way we've all been there).  It felt alot easier to seek out someone who you felt was in the same place as you, right?

You just created an alliance with someone else and things feel a little less scary.

But two people who are inexperienced still need the right answers. You still need some direction but you aren't going to walk right up to the teacher and ask for one on one help yet. That's ok.

coaching for entrepreneurs

Coaching For Entrepreneurs

Now you find someone who's at the next level and willing to lead you to right places. You still have to do the work, but they're showing you which door to open. These are the best people to know. These are the people who make the introductions, the people who "know people", the folks who are really working in their business and creating something successful.

Next, you have your mentors. These are the people you resonate with. They have your same values and you see their business as a model for how you'd like your own to run. Now remember, your mentors aren't necessarily people in your own niche. Any business owner regardless of their product can fall into this category. This is someone you follow and you've become active in their community; enough that you can ask a question and get an answer, a trusted answer.

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Do You Need To Get Your Business Started Right now?

Our full workshop, Fast Business Star Up Workshop, is THE program you need to get your business working for you right now! 

Yes, I need this!

Then you have your coach or strategist or consultant...whatever the term is in your industry. These are the people you pay to be part of your support team. You want to pay someone to help you elevate your business.  Believe me, if someone is paying me to be on their team, it's in my best interest that they succeed.

online business coaching courses

This group is important because as your business grows, it becomes necessary to have a solid strategy for your future in place. A strategy based on your core values, beliefs and vision long term. These are the people who see "outside" your business and who can help you stay on the right path. These are also the people who help you reach a place where you are working "on" your business, not "in" your business. There's a really big difference here.  Every successful person I know has someone they pay to coach, strategize or consult with.

I think belonging to a community is the single most important thing you can do for yourself and for your business. As we sit behind our computer screens, we are isolated and many times overwhelmed. Your community becomes a sounding board for your ideas or problems, as a place to find testers, a place to find specialists to do work for you, or sometimes just a place to goof around and have fun.

We all need that. Even the most introverted and shy people can come out of their shell a bit in an online setting.

I've spent alot of time talking about community but there are also two other required areas when trying to establish a solid business foundation.

You Must Have Trusted Training

Everyone needs training in something. No matter who you are. But the challenge is figuring out if you need training on an a concept or business strategy or if you need specific training on a technique.  For example, building a long term social marketing plan for your business is conceptual. Why is it a concept? Because things change quickly in this area. Once you understand how the marketing plan works, you then start tackling the techniques to make that happen. What if you built your entire marketing plan around Instagram for example? Then Instragram made major changes to their business structure and all of the sudden that platform was no longer where your customers were. Now what do you do?

If you have the conceptual understanding of how a social marketing plan works, all your eggs wouldn't be in this one basket. In fact, you'd easily be able to scale your efforts in another area to make up for your losses.

It's easy to become overwhelmed with all the things you need to do for your business. But having basic business foundations allow you to build and scale your efforts easily because you know the processes.

Here's an example - every business owner regardless of their niche has to know how to build a list, how to drive traffic, how to manage business operations, right? Once you have mastered the concept of building a list, you can then apply those concepts to learning different techniques. The technique for building a list on Facebook is different than building a list using email. But the concept is the same. The structure, the pieces you need to do it are the same.

I know this can be hard to wrap your mind around but building foundations based on concepts and strategies allow you reduce the bright shiny object overwhelm.

 

Your Business Needs Tools 

Tools are the things that allow you to operate. Your hosting platform is a tool. Your video player is a tool. Your auto-responder is a tool. Merchant services, graphics editor, page builders, advertising tracking solutions...

All these things are tools. They are what allow your business to operate day to day and should be something that pushes you to be more automated. But alot of us have tools we just knew we needed and have never even opened. Having someone test tools for you and give you honest opinions about them is priceless ( look, we're back to community).

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Bill Sefton

"I just finished reading your Endless Affiliate Profits - Lots of Golden Nuggets that extend beyond the Affiliate universe...I'll be spending my weekend implementing them..."

Percy Miller

NO ONE else is doing things online like you guys are doing it...You guys are building and teaching what I want to learn how to do with my online efforts...Today I saw the future!"

Shelley Merchant

I have wandered around blindly for over 4 years wondering why things weren't working...the things y'all teach are not being taught elsewhere. Instead, the advice is vague and leaves you feeling stupid because you're not figuring it out.

I cannot say enough good things...the only problem is that there's so much good stuff that I don't want to sleep b/c I want to learn it all.

 
I'm beginning to feel like a plan is forming and that I might actually make things work.

Coaching For Entrepreneurs

If you’ve been putting off building your online business, STOP IT NOW!

There’s no better time than right now to get started. Online business coaching courses are readily available and as an online entrepreneur, this is where you should begin.

The key is to finish what you’ve intended to do for years - build that online income stream that protects your assets in uncertain times.

And get it done - fast.

I read something by Gaylon McDowell in Science of Mind magazine this week that hit me like a ton of bricks:

“Results matter because I believe human beings can and often do create self-delusion around intention, action and results. Sometimes people lie to themselves about where they are in consciousness because they don’t want to evaluate the results they are getting.”

...evaluate the results they are getting...

You can’t think yourself into success. You must act to be successful.

If you’re not willing to act, then this course is not for you.

But if you understand the importance of taking action in the right sequence with the right guidance on the right opportunities, then I want to introduce you to Fast Business Start Up. Click now and take a look at the immediate results our members are getting from this coaching for entrepreneurs program!

YES, I'm Ready To Finally Get My Business Started!
Jen Perdew

The Novice to Advanced Marketing System is a step-by-step system focusing on Team, Training and Tools to help novice to advanced business people build a Simple, Scalable and Sustainable business.

Founded by David Perdew over 15 years ago, he recently retired and his daughter, Jen Perdew, who has been working at NAMS since 2011 purchased the business.

Jen is now the President and CEO of NAMS and comes from a customer service, operations, and employee training background.

Jen has always loved digging in and getting her hands dirty with automation and coaching. Jen's an implementer and focuses on moving her clients as quickly as possible down the path to success. and has since taken over most of the technical training in the business. NAMS is one of the most successful online communities today, specializing in training and proprietary productivity software tools.

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Click Here To Read More
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The 5 Mistakes That Guarantee Your Business Never Gets Off The Ground – Part 2

By 1 Comment

“These 5 Pieces of REALLY Bad Advice That Cripples ALL New Online Business Owners … UNLESS You Discover the TRUTH Before It’s Too Late!”

If you haven't read Part 1 of this 2 part series, be sure to catch it first here...

Part 2 of 2

I got on a roll in Part 1 of this series taking on all the $27 gurus out there who grab your money and run with the latest ‘secret loophole’ or ‘hack’!

The MyNAMS Insiders Club members love it when I do that. They know we have their best interest at heart. We do everything we can to protect our community from the nonsense out in the marketing world.

We also make sure that we introduce our members to really good people with high integrity that believe in our #SellNoCrap mantra by providing real solutions to real business problems.

And there are a bunch of great folks that fall into that category.

What’s our goal in building a community like the MyNAMS Insiders Club?

Frankly, I get a little bashful when I talk about the Insiders community.

Someone asked me today which I like best: Working with new entrepreneurs, high-end coaching clients or building products.

My answer surprised them. I LOVE working with our Insiders Club members. It’s the community! It’s the honesty and the support that we give one another.

If you haven’t found a community of like-minded people who are doing what you do, I invite you to give us a try. One dollar gets you in the Insiders Club for 14 days. Then, you can decide if it’s right for you.

I mentioned in Part 1 that the Insiders Club is like the business behind the glass wall. All the Insiders watch as we figure out what’s working today and in the future for the long haul.

What we teach and what we preach is from our experience. Every week, on our live mastermind call with the Insiders, we review our experience in our business, and share what’s working and what’s not working from our members as well.

We root out the really bad advice that stinks up the Internet, and try to be a guiding light for the new or experienced marketer to get on and stay on the right path, right away.

Let me tell you, it’s a full-time job. There’s a ton of really bad advice out there. It’s tragic too because following bad advice causes you lose momentum, time, money and hope.

It’s hard to recover from that.

That’s why I decided to tackle the worst of the bad advice in this 2-part series. In Part 1, we focused on the two worst, and most common, pieces of bad advice to guard yourself against:

  1. Create your product first
  2. Get more traffic

In Part 2, I’m focusing on these other seriously flawed pieces of advice:

  1. Focus on your passion
  2. Get the money and get out
  3. Get your Infrastructure in place first

Bad Advice #3: Focus On Your Passion…

Here’s a disclaimer.

I wholeheartedly believe in this philosophy. I teach it. I preach it. 

But there’s a second part to this that has to be considered: How is your money situation today?

If you’re panicked about paying your electric bill today, telling you to follow your bliss and focus on your passion is a real disservice.

Your passion at the moment is to get enough money to pay the electric bill!

And, as a business coach, I’m an idiot if I don’t recognize that.

There’s two parts to a passion-based business. And by the way, I LOVE passion-based businesses because when you love what you’re doing, chances are that you’ll do it for a really long time and successfully!

Most people who start a business are reacting to some force in their lives. Here are some examples:

  • Down-sized or laid off or fired
  • Medical ailments restrict what you can do
  • Incredibly unhappy working for the man
  • Very passionate about a cause or a process
  • Control freak who doesn’t trust anyone or any institution to be there for you
  • Entrepreneurialitis (I made up that word) which presents itself as an extreme freedom seeker

All of these have one thing in common: Transition.

Every entrepreneur I know started their business while in some form of transition. And transition, by definition, is a state of flux which can be very stressful.

So, the two parts of creating a passion-based business are:

  1. Triage - how to stop the bleeding quickly? Every person in transition needs to reduce the stress as fast as possible. Often, that means building a system to create money fast to alleviate the financial stress as well as a support group to prop you up and guide you through the personal stress that appears when friends and family tell you that you may be a little crazy for starting a business. (I have an aunt who still tells after 12 years of online business, “I just wish you’d get a job.”)
  2. Long-term prognosis - now, that you’ve stopped the bleeding and reduced your stress, how do you build a business that feeds your soul, one that you can love a long time?

So, when you hear teachers (like me) say, “Follow your passion,” make sure you are past the triage stage of your business life.

Always keep your passion in front of you. But reduce your stress first so you can survive.

Why is focusing on passion AND money so important?

There’s a little thing called the Important / Urgent matrix. It’s one of the best reminders for what you should be working on at all times.

UrgentImportantMatrix

You’ll notice there are four quadrants:

  1. Urgent and Important
  2. Important but not Urgent
  3. Urgent but not Important
  4. Not Urgent and not Important

I won’t go into this in detail. We do that in the Insiders Club. But I will point out that if building a business around your passion is your IMPORTANT goal, then paying the electric bill is the URGENT.

Once the Urgent and Important needs are met, you want to live in as much of the Important and not Urgent world as possible because that’s where your growth and happiness is sure to live.

Never focus on your passion without taking care of your basic needs first. Huge mistake. But you want to focus on your passion as much as possible.

Bad Advice #4: Get the Money and Get Out…


This is just horrible advice.

We all want more money, but getting money at any cost is one the most immoral things you can do. The street equivalent is the Old-West snake oil salesman.

He sold a solution that didn’t work at best, and was deadly at worst, while disappearing quickly before the poor consumer could complain - or recover, as the case may be.

In today’s marketplace, there are a lot of snake oil salesmen.

They’re selling solutions:

  • to problems you don’t really have
  • that don’t work
  • or even worse, that cause bigger issues than you had in the beginning

How many times have you purchased a product or a training program only to find that 3 months later, the access page is gone, the seller has disappeared, or doesn’t support the product any longer.

They’ve basically done the product launch hit-and-run.

Hit your wallet and run with the money!

Why would they do that?

It’s about the money.

It’s always about the money for people like that.

I love money too. Money allows me to have a great life with a great wife doing things that we love to do together. It allows me to spend time with my parents and my kids when our schedules permit. And it allows me to support my family when they need help.

But most of all, money allows me to serve my customers and my community, especially the MyNAMS Insiders Club community better.

For example, when the NAMS team searched for more than a year for the right WordPress page builder, we landed on Beaver Builder. It’s an outstanding tool that’s easy to use and performs way more design tasks than we’ll ever use.

Our pages, designed in Beaver Builder, have become beautiful and modern.

Instead of buying the single or multi-site license, I bought the agency license. I paid twice as much for that tool, and will annually.

Then, I gave the license to ALL Insiders as one benefit of being an Insider with Beaver Builder’s blessing!

I used the money that I earned from their membership dues to give more value back to them.

When you focus on prospects and customers and how to create better value to improve those relationships, every offer whether it’s yours or a partner’s solution must support and enhance that relationship.

The relationship becomes more important than the money.

I have dug into my own pocket to give more value to our Insiders even when I didn’t have the money to spare. The relationship with Insiders is that important.

Today, as of this writing, an Insider gets:

  • Beaver Builder multi-site license
  • Beaver Builder Power Pack templates add-on tools
  • FTC Guardian (basic version)
  • Simple Video Management System (single site license)
  • Simple Click Tracker (single site license)
  • Simple Countdown Creator (single site license)
  • Simple Quiz Engine (single site license)

And a single site license of all the other plugins we’re launching this year (that will be about 10 plugins total.)

That’s just a sampling of the tools that we provide in addition to the team and training resources.

Bad Advice #5: Get Your Infrastructure in Place First

Now there’s a piece of advice that will keep you stuck in never-never-land forever!

And it couldn’t be more wrong.

Your infrastructure is only important if you’ve got money-making funnels to your own products in place. If you do, then focus on infrastructure.

But for this particular piece of advice, the key word is “FIRST”!

Refer back to Bad Advice#1 in Part 1. Never build your product or your infrastructure until you’ve borrowed someone else’s to learn how to market and sell their products.

Infrastructure costs money.

Every email, every subscriber, every download has a cost associated with it.

It makes no sense to create a huge infrastructure expense overhead before you have an income rolling in.

That being said, you will need some basic infrastructure such as:

  • Domain name. (If nothing else, you’ll want to establish your email marketing brand with the domain name. David [@] MyNAMS.com is much more impressive than david [@] gmail.com. You can get one registered today quickly and easily at my registrar called SimpleNicheDomains.com - this will cost you about $10 per year.
  • Autoresponder system. Building your list from day 1 of your new business is your number 1 job. An autoresponder system like Aweber is great to start with. And you’ll get started for less than $25 per month. You don’t even have to have a landing page or a hosting account outside of Aweber at first, but you will soon. And that’s easy.

For hosting and further infrastructure tools, refer back to our favorite tools post.

But back to our original premise, don’t get befuddled by the technology!

Your job as an online business person is to sell stuff putting it bluntly.

If you don’t sell stuff, you don’t make money. If you don’t make money, you don’t have a business, but an expensive hobby.

And I don’t know about you, but I can’t afford to have an expensive hobby.

Therefore, selling stuff is the key.

Other people’s stuff is fine.

Sell using affiliate platforms, social media, Youtube, and email if that works.

But SELL!

Learning how to sell is the best, most profitable skill you can learn. Don’t get suckered into thinking you have to have an extensive website infrastructure.

Not true. Sell and earn enough money until you can hire help to build and infrastructure for you.

Is There More Bad Advice to Avoid?

Of course. There’s a ton.

That’s why you need to find a home on the web. A place where you can trust the leaders, get involved with the peers, and find partnerships, relationships, tools and training.

I love the MyNAMS Insiders Club for that reason. And I’d love to see you there.

So much, that we’re offering a 14-day $1 trial to the community.

Tell us what bad advice you gotten in building your business in the comments below.

The 5 Mistakes That Guarantee Your Business Never Gets Off The Ground

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The 5 Mistakes That Guarantee Your Business Never Gets Off The Ground 

 I see ‘$27 gurus’ giving terrible advice all time, while new entrepreneurs follow them straight off a cliff…It just breaks my heart.

Part 1 of 2

After years of beating my head against the wall until there was nothing but a bloody spot, I finally realized that much of the advice I’d received from the $27-guru crowd was absolutely wrong.

Not just wrong, but dangerously wrong!

Before I made my first nickel online in 2005, I spent $22,000 of money I didn’t have, $27 at a time on ebook after ebook.

Those low-cost ebooks professing to reveal the secret to making money online without lifting a finger to do the work usually were a colossal waste of money.

They all claimed you could follow some secret black hat ‘hack’ or by slip through an unknown ‘Google loophole’ to make instant cash. Usually, the only one making any money was the one revealing ‘the secret’!

With so many disenchanted wanna-be-get-rich-quick-entrepreneurs out there, no wonder the Internet Marketing crowd got such a bad name.

The real issue for the aspiring business folks was not that financial loss. After all, $27 does break anyone’s bank account. It’s the crushed spirit and the vanishing hope of financial freedom when you realize you’ve squandered your biggest asset.

Time.

Waste too much time following the advice of someone who doesn’t really have a sustainable or successful entrepreneurial experience, and you’re not only at zero again, but you may even be further behind.

Those $27-gurus haven’t built a business. At best, they’ve built an illusion. It may have everyone fooled for a moment, but when things get a little shaky, it all crumbles and disappears in the wind. They disappear never to be heard from again.

It kills me when I see this happening.

That’s why I committed to my long-term goals and passion when building my business.

NAMS didn’t start out as an online business training company, but as a hosting company.

When I realized my customers didn’t know who to trust or who to follow to set their businesses up right, I introduced them to the best people, either at the NAMS Workshop or in our MyNAMS Insiders Club.

The Insiders Club became the business behind the glass wall. All the Insiders get to watch as we figure out what’s working today and for the future in the long haul.

It’s a little like making sausage – never pretty, often messy, but always tasty.

What we teach and what we preach is from our experience. Every week, on our live mastermind call with the Insiders, we review our experience in our business, and share what’s working and what’s not working from our members as well.

This is real world stuff in real time.

We root out the really bad advice that stinks up the Internet, and try to be a guiding light for the new marketer to get on the right path, right away.

Now, I’m not against low-cost items that help you build a system using strategies and tactics that fundamentally work. Just make sure it’s not a ‘hack‘ or ‘hidden loophole‘… there’s no future there. That’s one of the biggest mistakes you can make, taking really bad advice from people who care only about their wallet, not yours.

But it’s not the only bad advice you’ll see.

In this two-part blog series, I’ve decided to reveal the 5 worst pieces of advice you can get and how to avoid it. Here it is:

  1. Create your product first
  2. Get more traffic
  3. Focus on your passion
  4. Get the money and get out
  5. Get your Infrastructure in place first

Today, we’re going to look at 1 and 2.

Next, we’ll tackle 3, 4 and 5.

Bad Advice #1: Create Your Product First…

This is just awful. This piece of advice is the one thing that strips new marketers of all hope because they are guaranteed to fail! And it’s a really a costly failure.

The bad advice is often couched in these well-intentioned platitudes:

“You’ve got something to say and people need to hear it,” or

“You’re an expert. Just claim it and get your product out there for people because they’re waiting on you…”

Frankly, unless you’ve figured out how to cure cancer, no one is waiting to hear what you have to say.

I know we all want to believe that we have solved a serious problem and we have to get our product out the door because people need it.

Maybe they do, but they have to WANT it first.

That’s where all that marketing and sales experience comes in so handy.

And they’re not sitting idly waiting for your product. EVER.

Don’t get me wrong. You may have a great product idea. And you may have some life experience that is absolutely riveting.

But building your product first is the fastest path to going out of business.

Here’s what happens to a lot of new entrepreneurs:

  • you spend all your time building your product
  • throw up some last-minute sales page because a guru said you must have one of those
  • hook up a PayPal account to the buy button
  • wait for people to send you money ‘while you sleep’
  • And then, you wait for people to beat a path to your door

Crickets. Nothing. No nibbles. No sales.

This confirms your worst nightmare. Your husband or wife was right! Your mom said, “I told you so!” Everyone was right. There’s no way to make money with an online business!

It’s time to give up.

What’s missing?

EVERYTHING is missing! Especially sales and marketing strategies and techniques.

You’ve made the classic mistake of spending your hard-earned cash building a product without a market, that doesn’t solve a desperate problem, or that people haven’t said they want or need.

The only one with a desperate problem now is YOU!

Next step? Clinical depression.

Man, this seems harsh as I’m rereading it, but I really wish someone had smacked me up side the head with this TRUTH when I first started.

I’ve done it. Been there. Got the t-shirt.

My XXL says, “I’m with stupid!” and the arrow’s pointing up at my face.

You’re not alone.

That’s why I teach that product creation is the LAST step!

We break the business down into two simple layers: Marketing and Delivery.

  • Marketing equals sales, traffic, conversions – all the skills and techniques required to make money. If you live in this layer and master it, you’ll be rich for ever!
  • Delivery equals the plumbing of your business, the infrastructure, the products – all the technology you need to build an empire. And frankly, you never need to know how any of this works…

I love the delivery layer. It’s fun. And it’s tangible. You can see your progress there very quickly.

The marketing layer is harder. You have to get good at sales and marketing to survive.

But don’t spend any time in the delivery layer first…

In fact, you shouldn’t step foot in there until you are making beaucoup money.

It’s not necessary to your success. When you’re making a lot of money selling other people’s products using THEIR delivery layer, you may be ready to build your own – including your own products – if you decide you want the headache of a complex infrastructure. (We’ll talk more about this in #5.)

But not until then.

Here’s another harsh truth: Your product is not so special that it will sell itself.

Everyone I know who is successful in business spends 80 to 95 percent of their time SELLING.

But it’s not really necessary to have your own product. You should focus on selling other products until you get REALLY good at it, and forget creating your own products.

Why? Let’s count the reasons:

  1. You didn’t have to spend the time building it yourself.
  2. You don’t have to invest cash in the solution.
  3. You test the market to determine if the consumer market wants it while being completely detached from the outcome.
  4. You can drop it like a hot potato if it doesn’t sell – and not lose a wink of sleep over it.
  5. You can serve your community by offering solutions to problems which makes you a vital service provider.
  6. You get paid for your performance. The more you sell, the more money you earn.
  7. You learn to sell and market immediately without waiting until everything is ready (when you’re creating your own products).
  8. You build relationships that will reciprocate for you when you’re ready to sell your own products down the road (if you decide to do that).
  9. You discover how to generate cash fast.
  10. You get paid by other people to build your list with quality buyers.

Bad Advice #2: Get More Traffic…

Oy vey!

What if every click on any link to your website costs you $1.

Imagine a little meter in the upper right corner of your site that counted the clicks, dinging every time a new person visits, and withdraws a $1 from your bank account instantly.

No money is going into your website because the person who visits doesn’t buy anything.

Your friend, Annie, has a meter on her site too. And every time someone visits, it dings her account $1 just as it does yours. But within a few minutes, her website meter sends out a beautiful cash register sound and adds $2.

That’s because someone just deposited $2 into her account.

For every dollar she spends, she gets $2.

You tell your friend, Tom, about Annie. You mention how frustrated you are that your site doesn’t seem to be making any money, and you’re not sure what the problem is.

Tom, who doesn’t have a website at all, decides to write an ebook about Annie’s experience. The conclusion is that Annie is going to get very rich as she drives more traffic to her site.

It’s a secret formula anyone can follow Tom says on his sales page, and you can solve your traffic problem with his ebook for just $27.

You buy the book. Tom’s conclusion is that all you need is more traffic, because that’s what Annie needs to create more sales with a converting offer.

You decide that’s right! More traffic will solve your problem. You get 10 times the traffic you had and immediately you see that your bank account is draining 10 times faster!

More traffic? No! No! No!

Traffic is a double-edged sword!

Sending lots of traffic to a bad offer that doesn’t convert and continuing to do so over time will bankrupt you FAST!

What’s the solution?

First, get new friends. Tom’s an idiot.

Immediately, stop paying for traffic until you figure out why it’s costing you so much. In other words, why isn’t it converting?

Annie is doing something right. What is it?

Study Annie’s site, her offer and the marketing system that she’s using. Why is her site converting so well? Talk to her. She’s living the successful online business life.

What’s she doing that you’re not?

Then, look at other people’s offers and conversions. What’s working for them? Why is yours not?

You’ll discover that successful marketers are split testing sales pages, messages, offers and prices to build the best conversion rates.

Terry Dean, one of my real mentors, says: You don’t have a traffic problem. You have a conversion problem!

Always!

Successful marketers are spending as little as possible to determine what works best, and then doing more of that.

Testing becomes your best friend.

Make changes slowly and watch your numbers.

Test those changes with small, but meaningful amounts of traffic to make sure your changes are effective in a positive way. Continue testing until the conversions don’t rise any longer.

Test different markets, warm or cold traffic, paid or free, Bing or Google, Facebook or Youtube. You’re looking for the sweet spot.

When your conversions are making you more money than you’re spending, then – and only then – do you need more traffic.

Here’s the key:

If you’re making money because your traffic conversions are really good, then you know exactly how much money you can spend on getting more traffic and it becomes a self-perpetuating system.

But not until.

What we’ll cover in Part 2…Click here to read it.

One of my favorite, and more controversial efforts this year was to focus on creating our own products or selling other people’s products that solve real problems with real solutions. We backed that up with our favorite hashtag:

#SellNoCrap

The final 3 pieces of bad advice really support an attitude of quality and service above all by focusing on your passion AND money, building value in your offers, and creating systems that work for you all the time.

Stay tuned. I think you’ll love the next part in this series.

Tell us what bad advice you gotten in building your business in the comments below.

 

To learn more about how you can test drive the MyNAMS Insiders Club for only $1, click here

This is My Story

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“That’s Easy for YOU! You Already Have a Big Business Online, But That Won’t Work for Me!”

If I had a nickel for every time someone used that excuse with me why they can’t get a break online…

Listen, I have a good business now, but it wasn’t always that way.

In fact, I struggled for years. And even today, it’s not always easy.

It’s always a challenge to improve any business.

When I worked for Gannett Newspapers many years ago, that company had more than 72 quarters of consecutive revenue growth.

And that is absolutely amazing for any business, but especially a big corporation.

Growth is only surpassed by one thing: Cash flow.

Cash flow is ALWAYS the key to making sure your business doesn’t bury you in a mountain of stressful debt. If you have massive billings but tiny collections, growth may seem large.

But if you can’t pay your bills because cash is never there, business failure is around the corner.

That’s why I fell in love with the online business model. The difference between billings and cash are pretty negligible.

Sell something, get paid for it right then. That’s my kind of business.

In the beginning, selling enough to replace the income you need is your goal.

That is quickly followed by selling enough to grow and buy a little security.

Which is quickly displaced by selling enough to create a sustainable cash machine.

Notice, the common word in those three statements previously is “selling.” That’s what we do.

Unfortunately, selling is what I liked to do least, so…

When people say, “I don’t like to sell like you…” or “Business doesn’t really interest me, I just want to [insert topic or service here],” I cringe a little.

“If they only knew how hard it was for me to get started,” I think to myself.

So, I decided I’d tell you. This has not been a picnic. But it’s been a rewarding challenge and a lot of fun along the way.

Let’s start with my online business desire…

I’ve always been an entrepreneur, even though I wouldn’t really admit that for years. When I was a kid, I sold cards, seeds, magazines and newspapers door-to-door.

That’s how I bought my bicycle, got a baseball glove and a bat. Whatever sales opportunity was in the back of Boys’ Life magazine, that’s the one I jumped on.

Then, when I was 14 I got a job in a car wash. And next, at 16, I became a shoe dog, selling shoes at B&B Shoes in New Castle, IN all through high school.

But it wasn’t selling. It was making money. That’s how I saw it.

Before NAMS, I had several other businesses: The Henry County News Republican (as in our country is a republic, not a political affiliation) weekly newspaper, Stock South stock photography agency, and Maximize Communications – an independent consulting firm.

Then, I fell into the Internet.

This week, a book publisher asked me to contribute about how I got started online by answering these questions.

Q: How did you come up with the idea for your business?

I’ve had several businesses in my life, some successful some not. But I’ve always been an entrepreneur at heart even when I was working in the corporate world.

So, in 2003 I took a year off from my consulting business with one of the largest corporations in the world to build a house on 100 acres of land in North Alabama. It was a log house, and it had always been a dream of mine to build one using my own two hands.

From a hole in the ground to finishing the roof during that year long period I had a lot of time to think as well.

And because I worked in technology as a consultant, I understood the way the world was moving connecting digital technology with the Internet business world. I saw massive opportunities there

because the low-cost to build a business online.

My expertise in the consulting world was a powerful belief in solving problems, and the ability to build strong relationships. My primary job as a consultant was to make sure my clients always looked great in their boss’s eyes, and that I always was the one who got the blame for any problems.

I took the arrows. My clients always got the treasure.

Any business that I created online would need to solve specific problems as well as protect my customers.

And of course, we know that good businesses-all good businesses-solve problems. Otherwise, there’s no business there.

But I knew nothing at that time about doing business online. So, I found the best online business training program that I could, and it happen to be produced by Corey Rudl.

He was the godfather of Internet marketing until his death in an auto racing accident in 2005.

I studied that course at night while building my house during the day to understand niche marketing, and that meant understanding desperate problems with simple solutions.

Since I was in the consulting world and the newspaper business for 25 years prior to building my house, I realized I could use my content creation skills with my business training skills to create a solid business.

And that’s always been my focus.

Q: What was your first big breakthrough on your path to success?

The most important thing I ever did was get honest about my skill level.

In the beginning, I was at the beginning.

But I wanted to use my writing and storytelling skills to create my first business.

So, I decided that I would write a book about parenting called Bad Dad: 10 Keys to Regaining Trust.  It was about building relationships with your kids after you have pretty much destroyed those relationships – like I had.

It sounds like I was creating a niche book, but in reality, I was creating my first training program for business owners.

I had no list, no product, no following, and no idea how to accomplish any of this.

But I thought that I could not be alone with my dream of building an online business by turning my experience into a product.

I ran an ad in Writer’s Digest magazine for $600 basically explaining that I was a former newspaper editor who was going to create an e-book and a business around that e-book, that I was starting from scratch, and with scant knowledge about how to do this.

The call-to-action? “If that describes you, follow me, watch me make the mistakes and see my progress for free.”

All that was required was to optin to my “course.”

Before the ad, I had zero people on my list. Within a week, I had 750 people following me through my year-long process of building my first business online.

That first training business was called The 60 Day Experiment.  It has since been retired, but the result of the book is still available Bad-Dad.com.

The proof was in the process of learning, doing, and telling other people about it.

Basically, my business model has always been “If you look over my shoulder, I’ll show you how to do something, and how not to do it.”

And it still works for me today.

Q: How long did it take you to earn enough money to quit your job and become 100% digitally free?

I gave up my consulting contracts after 5 years.

I was maintaining three offices in Atlanta, Dallas and Seattle when I finally quit the traveling to focus 100% on my business.

But it wasn’t easy.

With nearly $250,000 in annual contracts, I was making a big leap into a net that I could not see.

I hadn’t replaced my income by any means, but I was doing well enough to  commit to working on my business at home versus traveling all the time.

NAMS was a going concern at that point. In fact, I’d done 6 NAMS Workshops and growing the attendance to nearly 300 people every six months at that point.

It really was becoming too much for me to handle while I was on the road so much.

It was proof to me that entrepreneurship is not for the faint of heart, but if you want it, you can have it.

Q: What was the biggest failure, waste of time or money, or most embarrassing mistake you made along the way?

I think failure is an ugly, negative word for awesome opportunities to learn positive steps in challenging situations.

One of my “secrets” is to fail fast and don’t make the same mistake.

I like to say that I have never had a problem in my life.

Every problem I’ve ever had was the stepping stone to the next big win. Too many people see a challenge, and quit.

That’s the only failure that anyone can make that counts because it’s permanent.

For example, during one of our workshops, our website was hacked and held for ransom by a Jordanian criminal.

At first, I was desperate and scared. But once we stopped the bleeding, I saw that my mistake in that whole mess was that I was not running a secure enough website.

The lesson from that mistake (and it cost us about $75,000), was to create a much more secure operation.

I enlisted the help of some very smart people, another big lesson.

But was that a failure? By financial standards, yes.

Was that embarrassing? Absolutely.

The result, though, has been much greater than the $75,000 I lost during that episode because I don’t make the same mistake twice (if I can help it).

Q: What is the single most effective tactic you discovered to grow your business?

You can’t run a business successfully without two things:

1.     Dumping everything that doesn’t work, and dumping it quickly. That’s the only way you can get clear on success paths, without cluttering up your life with distractions.

2.     Mastering sales funnels that convert. You can get all the traffic in the world, but if your sales funnel doesn’t convert, its wasted money.

Q: What advice would you give someone wanting to achieve similar success?

Don’t handicap your success by limiting the investment you put into your business, health, relationships, money, and your spiritual well-being.

I spent $22,000 on $27 products before I made a nickel online. I thought that I could get the answers and the skills that I needed without investing in real solutions. That was a huge mistake.

I needed a coach and mentor to guide me along the way, and when I discovered that, I never looked back. I’ve had a coach every day since 2007.

This was my story; yours will be different!

But without clarity of purpose, without an attitude that declares nothing will stop you, without a clear understanding of your purpose and your guiding principles, you can’t succeed.

So, the opposite is true. If you have those things, you can’t fail.

That’s why we focus on the one thing around the MyNAMS Insiders Club. And it’s your one thing. I’ve got mine. We need to help you discover yours so you can stay on track at all times.

Join the Insiders Club today to get started with a 14-Day $1 trial.

Surround yourself with success.