“Don’t let uncertainty talk you into pursuing a backup plan instead of your purpose.”
– Bob Goff
INTRODUCTION
In my previous blog, I have mentioned to you the four foundation tools for starting an online business. In case you missed out, click here to read. But, I forgot to mention to you the fifth and most important foundation tool, so keep on reading.
Like everyone including myself, we easily over see things in life and forget it until we needed it the most. Ever had the moment you left your keys at home and locked yourself out? Or maybe the moment you were cooking something in the oven, left the stove on, forgot about it and the food was burnt?
So, the 5th foundation tool is the Disaster Recovery Plan (DRP), which basically is a process that recovers and protect the business in an event of a disaster.
Most people overlook and tend to take risks without thinking of the consequences; or how to recover from a disaster until they actually face such a scenario. My question for you is, how safe are your documents? What about your email lists and blogs? Have you backed up your posts?
If you don’t have those things backed up or have a recovery plan, it will definitely at some point, affect your entire business.
Well, if you are a Youtuber, you’ll be very complaisant since Youtube has its own backup system. Obviously, the odds of Youtube losing your channel or videos is pretty much near zero. But what if, for a reason you are not living up for their terms of service and will result to them banning your account, you’ll no longer be able to access your account and your videos will be gone.
Internally, these companies have their own backup system like the web hosting service I use — Hostinger. They have backup as well. They save your stuff on their server but again, this is a backup on their end. But what if, for example, you accidentally violated their terms of service? Well, this happened to person that know, which was also an internet marketer like me.
He was using AWeber as his email service provider, he set-up a sales funnel that built a list connected to it using the back-end to sell stuff through his funnel. He was doing really well and was making a lot of money every month.
Then one day he can no longer log in to his server and his account was gone. Turned out, AWeber suspended his account because of a lot of spam complaints. He contacted AWeber and was informed that his account was flagged with spam activities and has been suspended.
He didn’t download his list — the biggest asset an online business could have — he had no choice but to start all over again.
Don’t let that same thing happen to you. You need to have a plan to have everything backed up somewhere else in another location.
Below are sample services you can use to backup your documents.
- Vaultpress. You may use this to backup your blogs. This is owned by wordpress. This will automatically backup your blog every hour in real time. If someone will post a comment on your blog, it automatically backs up. Incase like malware attack let’s say 2 hours ago, you can go back 3 hours ago and get a clean copy and restore it out.
- Dropbox. This is an online storage where you can put all your files. The good thing about this is that it is accessible online, may it be on your computer, phone or tablet. Sign up for Dropbox, it’s free!
- Evernote. This is used to backup documents. Easy to use, just scan the documents and upload it and you’ll have an easy access to your documents that way.
The above 3 services will allow you to backup all your stuff that you use online. In case a disaster hits or the services you are using will ban you for violation, these will allow you topull up all your documents.
So, having a backup plan is definitely a must have when running an online marketing business. From the start, this should be taken into consideration. That way, you are ready just incase a disaster might hit your business. I hope that won’t happen, but just incase. As they say, “Better safe than sorry”.