Tech Tip Tuesday: Make A Backup

I work in the hosting industry for my day job.  It’s interesting and educating (and many times humbling) work.  Other than the day job, I build websites, run a few (3) blogs, keep a few (5) Twitter streams, do the whole Facebook thing, the Flickr thing, and teach others about using the social web to market their businesses and websites.

One of the things that has amazed me in each and every one of these positions is how little people create backups of their information.  Most people create a backup once a month, many don’t make backups at all.

Of course I have had experience in this.  About a year ago my girlfriend’s computer crashed and she lost her entire educational portfolio (not fun when applying to Law Schools.)  Unfortunately she did not have a backup of any of these items anywhere, so they were lost to the ether.

I personally have always backed up my data in some form.  Whether it be online with Carbonite, some other online storage, or on an external hard drive.  I’ve even used my GMail account to save files as attachments. 

Marketing Tip Monday: Renew Your Domain Name

There’s a problem in the web industry.  People only buy their domain names for a year at a time.  Why is it a problem?  Well there are a number of reasons, and I’ll delve into those throughout the week, but for today, I’ll stick with some of the Marketing implications.

First things first.  You never (never, never, never, never, never) want your domain name to go past due.  When your domain name goes past due it is usually (depending on your registrar) pointed to a parked page.  You’ve seen these pages on other sites, I’m sure.  They’re the ones with a group of adlinks to “similar services.”

The reasons for not wanting this to happen should be relatively obvious.  You don’t get any business from a website that is down.  On top of that, you also lose reliability instantly.  Additionally, anyone coming to your site and seeing that will probably never come back, or worse yet, they might click on one of those adlinks and go to a competitor.

Another reason to renew your domain name for as long as possible is to assist with your rankings within the search engines.  That said, Google and Yahoo have never officially said that a domain name that is only registered for a year will have a lower ranking.  However, you have to believe that they will see a domain name that has a longer registration more reliable as the business plans to be around longer and isn’t holding on year to year.

Tech Tip Tuesday: Update Your Passwords

Passwords.  They’re what keep the hackers and the crackers at bay.  (OK, mostly the crackers, but that’s just industry speak.)

Today just about any site you sign up with for anything is going to require you to set a “secure” password.  Unfortunately each site has a different version of what is “secure.”

What is one to do?  Well, personally, I have one password.  Yep, that’s it, just one.  It’s a pretty simple one too.  I could even tell you what it’s based off of, and I’m guessing you won’t get into my account.

Alright, I won’t tell you.  I’m not an idiot.  Bu the fact remains that I could give you a hint and you still wouldn’t be able to log into any of my accounts.  The reason, I don’t actually use the same password all the time.

“But how is this so?” you ask.  Simple.  My password is a phrase and I change it pretty regularly.  I use something like this:

SciFi To SyFy: Marketing Brilliance Or Marketing Mistake

Recently my much beloved, default channel, 50 on my remote, decided to change their name from The SciFi Channel to Syfy in order to update their image.  Additionally they’re changing the brand message from the allusive “If” to more solid “Imagine Greater.”

So why the change?  In the words of SciFi’s President, Dave Howe:

The new brand broadens perceptions and embraces a wider and more diverse range of imagination-based entertainment including fantasy, paranormal, reality, mystery, action and adventure, as well as science fiction

OK, that doesn’t sound too unreasonable.  I’m a huge Sci-Fi (genre) fan, and I do like action/adventure and some fantasy as well. 

Jumping Outside The Norm

I love the idea of bringing people to your business in new and different ways.  The web has changed marketing since its inception, and still today the classical marketers are trying to catch up.  One place where more and more of these groups are working in is through inbound marketing.

Now I could take a moment to brown nose and say that my favorite example of inbound marketing is HubSpot TV, but I’m not that guy.  I will admit that the reason for this post is the hope of winning a ticket to the Inbound Marketing Summit in April, but it’s an honor to just be nominated.

Successful Failure By Cox On Twitter

I’m going to give Cox Communications a little bit of credit here.  I’ve criticized my need for cable in the past, but I knew I’d need to keep my internet, because, to be honest, I wouldn’t be able to survive without it.  So the other night, when my internet connection went out, I Twittered about it.  Someone over there was on the ball and tried to help.

Apparently @CoxTech1 Twittered me back mere moments after I posted my aggravated note with offers to assist and even giving me an email to send a support request to.

I appreciate that.  I really do.  But there’s a problem there.  You see, when my internet is out, I have no access to check my twitter replies, I can’t very well send an email now can I!?!?!

Ideally, the person working at Cox would have checked the content of my message:

Hey Cox Communications. If you’re smart enough to be on Twitter (which I doubt) you have an outage at University and Evergreen. Please fix. about 23 hours ago from txt.