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The Stanfield Agency

Small Business Technology is used to make your business more profitable and easier for the right customers to find you. This category of the Stanfield Agency website is about that.

My Small Business Clients Do Best With Clicky Analytics

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Not everyone wants to completely geek out on all the intricacies of Google Analytics. I mean, I do. I LOVE Google Analytics. But I’m me. That’s why I always use Click Analytics with my clients.

My clients are different. They want to get their website traffic information in easy to read bite-sized chunks – small enough to see the big picture but without all the detail that I need as their marketing guy. After all, that’s what they pay me for – to be the Marketing Guy.

Clicky Analytics Website Traffic Reports in Easy to Read – Bite-Sized Chunks

Clicky Analytics Dashboard

And the thing about Clicky is that if you need more than just the bite-sized chunks, it has the power to drill down and get everything else you need. I rarely find myself needing to dive into Google Analytics to answer most questions my clients have.

Each of those blue lines you see in the above graphic are links that you can click on and drill down for more detail.

That’s why I use Clicky for my clients. They all uniformly love it and so do I.

So, like everything else with digital marketing these days, you can bypass the marketing guys like me and get it yourself. So go ahead. Download Clicky Web Analytics today and start using it!

What Does Moving to “the Cloud” Offer Your Small Business?

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An article in today’s USA Today discusses the distinct advantages for small businesses to mitigate their risks of falling behind in technical flexibility by moving to the cloud.  Many good points are made in the article.

Points such as a greater ability to collaborate, greater mobility were well taken. But then the article even went so far as to say that the cloud offered greater security…

Wait WHAT??

The article did not explain how moving your most sensitive documents, calendars, contacts and internal communications off of your own computers and onto someone else’s servers increased your security.  It just said “Check out this alarming stat Ms. Boeger shared with me: 72% of all cyber threats now are aimed at small business.”

Yikes – that sounds scary doesn’t it??

It sure is, and it’s true. But I believe that moving to the cloud and placing your most sensitive digital property under someone else’s control will weaken your security, and not increase it. Corporate surveillance and the erosion of your private digital property rights increases the more you allow other companies to control your data.

So how can you get the technological flexibility you need while retaining your own digital property rights and control?

NextCloud – is an open source (and so peer-reviewed) “personal cloud” that you own and control for your own company. NextCloud resides on YOUR computers, and allows you to secure and retain control of your property while gaining all of the technical advantages of collaboration and mobility that cloud services offer.

NextCloud is free software. It requires some expertise to set it up and maintain it. And because it is open source, you can use that expertise to customize your installation to be exactly how your business needs it to be. Over the long run, your increases in capability and security and secure ownership of your digital property will be greater than anything Google Drive or Dropbox or Microsoft Cloud can ever give you. And you can do everything they can do.

Yourself.

Most small business owners I know see that as an advantage.

How Hackers Hack WordPress Sites

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hack wordpress sites

If you want to hack WordPress sites, a recent article from WordFence, the premier WordPress security software manufacturer, gives you the top ways hackers have done it.

If you own and maintain a WordPress website, knowing about the most common ways that other sites have been hacked can arm you with loads of information on the areas you need to lock down on your own WordPress site, and greatly reduce your chances of getting hacked.

We’ve handled hacks here at the Stanfield Agency, and it is never pretty. You think that you have it covered, but you can be a valuable target for determined hackers if they are looking for a way to increase their search engine rankings by breaking in and littering your site with spam backlinks to their website.

Does Google Increase the Incentive to Hack WordPress Sites?

I believe that recent changes in Google’s search engine algorithms make small but somewhat authoritative sites even more desirable to hack. If you are selling fake boner medication on a website in the 3rd World, then getting a bunch of backlinks from real healthcare websites is the way for you to go. So hackers want to hack your WordPress site even more since Google made authoritative backlinks such a key factor in their search engine results.

And that’s just a reason to hack you that makes some kind of sense, among a thousand reasons that don’t.

I suggest that all small business owners read and understand this blogpost by Wordfence, and look into having someone install and configure their security product, or someone else’s. Even if you have not been hacked before, you should consider yourself lucky. Realize that you are increasingly becoming a target now – if you are at all successful.

Lock down your WordPress website in every way possible.

Small Business Training for Small Business Owners

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Small Business TrainingSmall business owners need places to go on the Internet where they can learn everything from how to write a marketing plan, to how to crop a photo, to how to write a blog post. And they need this information quickly and simply and for very little cost.

A few years ago this was impossible. But not any more. People who do something for a living are the best possible people you can find to teach you.

In the past, all you could do was go to a university or some other school and take a class. It was very expensive, and it took a lot of time, and you had no idea if your instructor knew what he was talking about, or if the course curriculum was the latest information on a subject.

But today, a side job for many professionals is teaching others the skills they use in their own profession. This is quite revolutionary on many levels, actually. The Internet has given us access to all the best working professionals in almost any field, and small business people can now find them and learn directly from them.

Here are two excellent websites that teach small business skills at very low cost, and they offer many free courses, as well.

Small Business Training Website #1: Udemy.com

Udemy.com has thousands of courses taught by working professionals in any area of small business that you can imagine. There is no monthly fee to belong. You pay “a la cart” – for each course at a time. And they run great sales from time to time where their courses are marked down to as low as $10. They also have hundreds of not-too-shabby-at-all courses for free.

Small Business Training Website #2: SkillShare.com

SkillShare.com is another website where working professionals go to teach others the skills they know. Small business owners and their staffs can go there to learn just about anything you could possibly need to know about running your small business. SkillShare.com has a low monthly fee which might be a good expense for your company. You can share your account with your employees to help them continually improve their skills sets while working for you.

There are other places on the Internet to learn new skills, but these have the widest variety of courses for the lowest cost from the best professionals, in my opinion.

So get started! Go! Go! Go!

Marketing Tools for Small Business Owners: Canva.com

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Marketing-Guy.com is launching a series of posts that provide free to low cost marketing tools for small business owners that should help you get your business up and being seen on the Internet.

Marketing Tools for Small Business Owners Canva

Small business owners often have to go out and fend for themselves, and they need the tools of survival to get that done. Canva is a website that helps you to create graphic elements for your Facebook page, Twitter profile, and other places for your Internet marketing – without needing to become a professional graphic artist or web designer yourself.

Canva has pre-designed layouts and free to very low-cost pictures and other graphic elements that help you look like a pro. It is easy to learn and use. You can get your small business set up on Facebook and Twitter in less than an hour once you get the hang of it.

And to help you to get the hang of it, Udemy.com has a fast, free course that can get you started.

We’ll be profiling Udemy.com in an upcoming post as another great learning tool for small business owners, with lots of free to low cost courses that you can take to improve your skills and understanding in a huge number of areas.

Does Using Encryption Make You a Terrorist?

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encryption “I’m not doing anything wrong,’ I often hear people say, ‘I don’t mind if the government can see all my emails and listen to all my phone calls.”

Or they say, “If someone wants to look through all my emails and all my computer files, then I hope they are taking Meth, because my life is pretty boring and it would probably put them to sleep!”

And then they laugh.

Here’s what these people are missing: The same reason we lock our front doors using our house keys, or put our money into a bank account instead of piling it out onto our front lawn, is the same reason we should be encrypting our emails and texts. We should also develop the ability to encrypt the files on our computers and other devices, as well.

In the same way that you are the owner of the property in your home – and you lock your door so that you can control who has access to the things you own – you are also the owner of your digital property. As the owner, you have the right to control who uses your private property, and you should not willingly give up that right if you want to keep it.

Encryption is Like the Envelope You Put on a Letter

Similar to the envelope surrounding a letter you send through the postal system, encryption is a technology which makes digital files and communications difficult for anyone else to read and to copy – anyone other than your intended recipient, that is.

Unless you are using encryption, your digital files, emails, and texts are sent like postcards are sent through the mail – with no envelope surrounding your information. Anyone along that route can read and copy what you say.

That’s right. Would you write your login information to your bank account on to a post card and send it through the mail?

If you email or text a password to a client, business partner, friend or family member, that password can be read and copied anywhere along the route it is taking through the Internet. This is called “clear text”, or “text sent in the clear” and you have to be very aware that this is what you are doing if you are sending any email, text, or file without encrypting it.

So the answer is NO. You are not a criminal, or a spy, or a terrorist, for wanting to encrypt your digital property.

You’re just smarter than too many others these days.

Here are some resources for you to use to learn more about this skill:

Electronic Freedom Foundation

Bruce Schneier’s Blog

Good luck out there!