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0.10 Google Updates
1:21 Importance of images
2:11 Backing up
5:42 Checklists
Google Updates Algorithm with 86 Changes
0:10 Over June and July, Google relaxed over 86 changes to their algorithm. I’ve had a look through these and here are the key factors that I’ve pulled out of it: One of those things is that Google is paying a lot more attention to your websites pages and how fresh they are. Google is having a look at the quality of the content, whether it is original and unique.
Avoid spun content
One thing that they’re getting better at doing is noticing synonyms or phrases which basically say the same thing. What this means for you as a website owner and online marketer is that you need to be very careful that the content on your website is not the same as content elsewhere on the web. Even if it is spun content, Google is getting better at picking that up! So, if you are going to want your website to rank well, please make sure that the content on your site is unique and original and not used anywhere else.
With your online marketing efforts, if you want to be spreading content around the net, make sure you do hand re-writes, because spun content is really being picked up on these days.
Images Great For Search And Traffic
1:21 Speaking of content, the other thing I wanted to touch on is images. We’ve been talking a lot in our community about how important it is to have good quality images on your page. there are several reasons for this. Firstly, having good quality images on your page that are labelled appropriately can help with your search results. The other thing is that they are more popular to people and the human eye. So if you’ve got a really catchy image or something original that you have created, then people are more likely to ‘like’ your page, share it or perhaps even share it on Pinterest (which is something that is becoming a really, really big wave). So, if you want to take part of this Pinterest wave and have your content shared on there (which does in fact create a back link back to your page), think about how you can create engaging images on your posts.
Back Up To Protect All Areas Of Your Business
2:11 One things that has become a very big topic of discussion in our community is backing up. Generally when we speak about backing up, we’re talking about backing up your data. For instance, I have four different backups of my data. About five years ago, I lost everything through very unfortunate circumstances I had one backup and then data on my computer hard drive and both of them corrupted within two days of each other and I ended up losing everything. I had to pay hundreds and hundreds of dollars to try to get someone to recover my data and I only got some of it back. The bits that I did get back was full of all this ‘gobble-de-gook’. So, backing up your data is something that you NEED to be paying attention to if you are a business owner – especially if you have most of your business stored online.
How many data backups should you have?
I personally not only have my data on my hard drive, I have two external hard drives that I back up to on a weekly basis. I have one of them stored off site, out of my home and one in my home. that way, if something happened to my home, I’m not going to lose everything. I also have two backups in the cloud. I backup to Google Drive and to Dropbox. This ensures that my business is safe, secure and not at risk. Let’s say I was robbed or there was a fire in my house, or if my computer was stolen – something like that. So think about that.
What else should you be backing up in your business?
But there are other ways you need to be thinking about backing up. One is with your team. Do you have people in your team who are responsible for tasks that nobody else knows how to do? If you’re in this situation you’re making yourself and your business very vulnerable. So make sure you have other members of your team that know how to do someone else’s job.
Now how do you get around doing this? People ask me how I cross train people without taking up a lot of my time.. It’s very simple really – I systemise my business. Every process in my business has to be documented and systemised. We have checklists, workflows, we have training videos. That means if someone is away from my business, then someone else can take over that task. That happened to me just this week. One of my main team members in the Philippines had to go help out family members who had been flooded and had no food, so I was without her for a full week. What that meant though, was that the important tasks that had to be done could be taken over by someone else in the team.
Another area of your business you might want to think about backing up is how you accept/receive payments and how you pay people. For example, if you are just relying on Paypal, you might find one day that your account has been banned, suspended or put on hold for some reason – which may really cripple your business if you have no way of receiving money or in fact, if you can’t pay your team members. So think about other ways that you can accept money and how you can pay money. For instance, you might want to use Orbit Remit – which is another way I can get money to my team outside of Paypal. You might also think about having a merchant account.
So these are just three areas you may want to think about to make sure you are safe and secure, in case something goes wrong.
Checklists For Leverage And Quality Control
5:42 Now before when we were talking about backups, I mentioned checklists. Checklists are a very important part of your business. We use them, as I mentioned, as a way of systemising your business. But I use them in my day-to-day tasks to make sure that I’m not forgetting important things daily, or perhaps weekly. sometimes I create a mindmap which I keep next to my computer to remind me of all the areas of my business, or the processes I need to be thinking about. This is important when your’e thinking about how to grow and scale your business as well as making sure you are keeping a certain quality as well. They are also good for systemising in order to show other people how to do things within your business.
This is something that I am training the people within my community, the people who I mastermind with and the members within our coaching program as well.
That’s our update for this week to give you a bit of an idea of what we’re talking about and we’ll see you in the next update.