10 Ways To Protect Your Internet Business (And Yourself)
A couple of guys in a business group I’m a member of were talking about the potential “red taping” of the internet.
Seeing as we’ve all just survived the barrage of emails that the GDPR regulations brought about, it’s a timely topic.
The discussion formed into a couple of camps.
- The internet will become heavily regulated
- The internet is the wild west, beyond government interference
For the purposes of this article, we’ll sit straight down in the middle. Let’s assume that there’ll be heavier regulations for the internet at some point.
Here are the ten things I’d recommend everyone does as a matter of best practice.
1: Don’t Do Really Stupid Stuff
A lot of my audience is young men. Whilst doing dumb stuff isn’t relegated to any gender or age group, young men have a tendency to do stupid stuff.
In the context of this conversation, I mean stuff that’s likely to get you banned from your various online haunts or otherwise incur trouble and draw attention to yourself.
I mean, take the million examples of guys who post themselves having sex with girls and then getting put on the sex offenders register, or guys who get banned from Amazon because they write controversial books and give them even more controversial titles.
When I started this blog, I made a note of some guys who started at the same time as I did so I could gauge their progress against mine. Nearly all of them have dropped out since, and that’s a lesson in perseverance.
But one guy in particular had a couple of years headstart on me as an online business guy. He then went into “shock horror” marketing around the time Trump started making waves. He wrote controversial articles and gave them more controversial headlines.
Now he lives in the third world and has no presence online (all his social accounts got banned and he can’t make new ones.) He cannot accept payments because PayPal banned him. His books have been taken off Amazon.
Currently, he blogs and begs for Patreon donations. I imagine he can do that solely because he doesn’t get any attention any more.
Now, some would call that political belief stuff but I call it pretty stupid. Sure, hold political beliefs but don’t ruin your business (and life, potentially) over it.
Well, that’s what I’d consider best practice, at least.
2: Don’t Get Into Rap Battles About Stuff That’s Irrelevant To Your Business.
The above leads me on to the wider point so far as this is concerned. If you want to use the internet as a platform for your social views and you want to make a difference about the stuff you care about, then fine.
If that’s your business, then fine.
For instance, let’s say you really care about animal welfare and the government introduces new legislation that allows hunters to gun down endangered species whenever they want.
This is absolutely an issue you can talk about, care about and try to change. It’s part of your business and impacts heavily on it. The fight is yours.
But do not get involved in fights that don’t concern you. It’s bad business practice.
I’ve seen countless businesses “take a stand” on Trump, the Brexit process and more.
And you know what?
It’s a waste of time and it’ll divide your customer base.
Now, repulsion marketing is good. You don’t want people who don’t align with your business values.
But you need the distinctions you make to be about business and not personal feelings.
i.e. you bake cookies and you hate Brexit.
So you start tweeting about Brexit and you say “If you’re a racist Brexit pig, then don’t come to my cookie shop!”
What have you achieved with this? You’ve divided customers who probably would have bought your cookies for no other reason than to get an irrelevant thing off your chest. This is bad repulsion marketing.
Good repulsion marketing would be; “We only source our material from free range, organic farmers who are paid adequately for their services. If you like cheap cookies made from slave labour in Africa, then don’t come to my cookie shop.”
This actually sorts customers under the guise of taking a relevant stand.
3: Diversify Your Income
It’s 2018. You make money online. You read my blog. There’s absolutely no excuse for sticking with one income stream.
Write a book. Build a website. Offer a service as a side-gig. Rinse, repeat, do whatever it takes to ensure your money is coming from more than one place.
Learn skills. Gain autonomy. Build an empire.
4: Save Your Income
This isn’t a personal finance blog, and I’m not your grandmother.
But you need to save money. The more money you save, the better. This is true of any walk of life but especially internet business, because the whole thing is volatile. Some days you’ll have four or five figure days. Other days you’ll make nothing.
The emotional swings and the risk tolerance are one thing.
They’re a whole lot worse if your rent is due and you only have $10 and the money you’ve sunk into your latest ad campaign has returned zero.
Save your income. Get yourself a cushion. Keep building the cushion until it’s no longer a cushion. Keep your lifestyle simple until you have invested and reinvested to the point where you can upgrade your life without denting your cash flow.
Then save some more.
5: Own Your Major Platform
You should have your own website and a credible online footprint. If you’re following the above advice, these more technical steps won’t be necessary in 99% of cases.
But I see a lot of guys who will have tens of thousands of followers on Twitter and no backup plan.
Build your own website. Make sure people know it’s there. Link everything to your website so your Twitter followers can become your followers in general.
Then if a piece goes down (or becomes less profitable) you can replace the spoke and the wheel keeps turning.
6: Own Secondary Platforms Where You Can
So you have your own website. There’s another step though which not many people do.
I recommend the following:
Look into the services you use as an online business. It might be Twitter. It might be an email service provider. You might use some nifty tool that automates posting to Instagram or whatever.
A lot of these apps go bust or get taken down by the tech giants. I knew a guy who built a massive Instagram empire based on a software called MassPlanner. He thought he was indestructible. I told him, “You’re making $10,000+ a month… for god’s sake get someone to code you an untraceable, bespoke version of the software.”
He didn’t listen, and MassPlanner got a takedown notice.
Bye bye that guy’s business overnight.
Same with email service providers: they don’t generally interfere with what you’re doing unless you’re a pretty obnoxious spammer, but they own your list and can lock you out.
There are solutions where you can become your own service provider and hold everything on your server. More on that another time.
And ALWAYS back stuff up.
7: Back Up Everything
You need to back-up your website. Case in point: this time last year, I accidentally wiped my website out. It was my own fault entirely. But I didn’t have a backup. So I had to manually rebuild the whole thing, and to be honest, 13 months later my traffic numbers have only just recovered.
It was brutal and avoidable.
The same goes for your email list. If you’re heavily invested in social media, then back that content up too. That way, if you get locked out or something breaks, you can restore or post your stuff elsewhere.
Outside of content, your business transactions need to be kept safe. Have a hard disk. Keep the proper records. Use the cloud if you know what you’re doing encryption-wise. Again, this is all best business practices and it is stuff you should be doing but probably aren’t because we’re all lazy.
Don’t be lazy until you’ve got everything in order.
8: Arbitrage For Hosting Etc.
I work with a few survivalist publishers. I work with a couple of guys into the offshore banking stuff. Both of these markets work based on doom and gloom. But both have good ideas.
Diversification. Back up plans. Moving where you’re treated best and not being stuck to anything, anywhere and anyone who could be a liability.
One common thread is arbitrage. You have multiple eggs in multiple baskets.
How does this apply to your online business?
Simple. You don’t put your eggs in a basket. This might mean you use a couple of different servers to deliver your online content.
It might mean using Scandinavian VPN services because the privacy rules in those countries are sacrosanct whereas in the USA you know you’re being watched by everyone.
It might mean that you keep backs up in different places and you might want to take the best bits of one service or country and pair it with the best bits of another.
This can work for all sorts of things and a lot of people go far off the deep end with this stuff. But you can (not legal advice) start an international company to deal with your online affairs outside your own country. You can get a bank account in a different country.
These things might seem shady and people do these things for shady reasons, but you can do these things legally and legitimately and for a number of reasons. (i.e. it’s a pain in the arse to deal with currency exchanges, middlemen and arbitrary trade rules that shouldn’t affect you.)
9: Deal With Real Business
I agree entirely that a lot of online business will likely come under the firing line at some point. For every guy who starts a blog and does everything as legitimately as possible, there is a guy who tries to sell dick pills to ten year olds on Facebook using proxies, cloaking and other shady stuff.
If you want to avoid scrutiny and guilt by association, the best thing you can do is deal with real businesses.
By real businesses I mean other legitimate entities. Offline businesses are good. Established businesses are good. Professional entities bring professional associations.
They also give you the exit clause if you have the right skills. If the internet didn’t exist tomorrow, I’d probably offer old-school direct marketing services to the same companies I currently work with. An affiliate marketer who uses cloaking can be killed by an algorithm change or a fraud lawsuit.
Someone who builds a real business based on tangible skills and works with other real businesses is more resilient.
10: Learn Your Legal Reponsibilities
Let’s wrap this up with the most important lesson.
Learn your legal responsibilities for your business. Stick to them. If you have to, hire a lawyer. Hirea finance guy. Make sure you’re doing things by the book.
It’s very rare that laws are changed and people are punished retroactively, and in most of the world it’s arguably not possible, legally speaking.
That means if the law changes tomorrow, as long as you change, you’ll be fine, legally speaking.
But the same isn’t true if you’re doing stuff unwittingly or because you think you can get away with it.
Ignorance is not a defence in legal terms. Ignorance isn’t good in any case.
Learn the law, stick to the law and keep what you’re doing purely professional. Don’t draw attention to yourself unless you need to.
You’ll be fine.