Session: Don’t Lose It: How to Protect Your Blog
Speaker: Peter Pollock

I LOVE to drive. Driving is one of my favorite pastimes.

I DON’T love maintenance though.

Oil and grease and taking the skin off your knuckles when trying to get some faulty part out of the engine are nowhere near my list of favorite things. I hate them and avoid them as much as is humanly possible.

I think most of us are like that in some areas of our lives. There are maintenance issues that we all avoid, whether it’s with our cars, our washing machines, our computers or even important things like the plumbing…

The problem is though, the mundane, boring, time consuming things like changing the oil or replacing gaskets are often the most important.

If I don’t get the little faults repaired, they turn into big faults and all of a sudden I have no car to drive – and the fun of driving is gone
The same is true of your blog. If you don’t put the time and effort in doing the mundane, boring work of securing your blog from hackers then one day you’ll lose it and it will be gone, irretrievably.

Sony, Fox News, AT&T, the CIA… the list of major sites that have been successfully hacked goes on and on. We’re deceiving ourselves if we think somehow we’ll be immune or even clever enough to defeat all hackers.

Most bloggers don’t have sensitive information which could be stolen, but rather the attacks against them focus on taking them down – which really hurts when you’re trying to build readership.

From my experience as a web host and designer, the number one most important and guaranteed defense against hackers and other blog problems is…

BACK UP!!!!
BACK UP NOW!!!
NO, I MEAN NOW!!!!!

Seriously, backing up your blog regularly and consistently is going to help you keep your blog up and running more than almost anything else.

Don’t rely on your host to back it up, either – and don’t back up to a folder on your hosting space. You need to download a copy of the backup at least weekly and then store that on your computer or an external drive.

This is YOUR data, YOUR blog… don’t rely on anyone else to protect it for you!

My session at BlogWorld L.A. is titled Don’t Lose It: How to Protect Your Blog. Hopefully, everyone who comes will leave having learned new tactics, like making regular backups, on preventing and defending against hacker attacks, and dealing when they strike without panicking.
It may sound a little boring or even over-technical to you but trust me, this is some essential stuff and I’ll keep it simple.

If you love to blog then you need to come to BlogWorld and drop by my session to learn how to protect it so you can keep on loving it!

Learn how and why to:
i. Backup
ii. Upgrade to latest version of WordPress
iii. Use as few plugins as possible and update them all regularly
iv. Delete the Admin account
v. Use strong passwords
vi. Change file permissions / locations and server-side passwords

Are you coming to BlogWorld L.A.? Will you be coming to my session? If so, I’d love to hear from you. Feel free to either comment here or send me a tweet. I’m @peterpollock.

I’m excited about going to the conference and would love to meet you there!

If you can’t come, I’ll be making all the session materials available online after the event at http://Peterpollock.com.

Hear what else Peter has to say about his session: