Increase Website Traffic

Posts Tagged ‘small business’

I love using the online article directories. Article submissions to these sites are increasing my web site’s search rankings noticably. Also, they give my thoughts and musings much broader reach, and bring lots of readers to my small business blog. As I was updating my pen names and author profiles last week, it occurred to me that there is a way for someone who is inquisitive to find out who the real writer behind the pen name is.

In most situations that would be okay, but for the pen names that deal with personal topics, are sensitive work related stories, or anything else that will get me in trouble, I want to make sure that no one can find out who the man behind the curtain is.

Imagine that you have a good blog, which you feed with readership through online article directories, you have a great author profile, and you start to become well read. The popularity is providing your internet business good revenue. Unfortunately, this popularity does not automatically transfer into protection from the consequences of sensitive information and anecdotes you might relate. It would be unfortunate to have a successful blog but get fired, divorced, disowned, and even have your pet snake leave you.

So, how do you make sure that you hide your real identity? Well, you certainly have to do all the simple things. This means in your blog your login with your pen name, as opposed to your real name, or at least make sure your posting is done with your pen name. You have to also certainly make sure your footer has your pen name, and a link back to your pen name blog. Furthermore, if you expose your e-mail address anywhere, make sure that your e-mail address is consistent with your pen name and blog domain name.

Even though it’s tempting to create web-links between all your blogs in order to promote SEO, and showcase your wide range of erudition, you would undoubtedly be better off not linking them together. Someone who has a suspicion, or is curious about you, could track them and put all the pieces together.

Okay, it looks like all the tracks are covered, so where’s theproblem?

There’s still a large security hole called the whois record. The domain name is probably registered to you, and in many cases the default account information is entered into the whois fields. You can check what the whois information of your domain is by going to Google and typing in “whois check”, going to the one of the sites that offer the whois look up, and entering your domain name.

If you don’t see any of your private information there, that’s good. It means you chose private registration when you registered your domain name. Private registration is the best way to prevent this information leak because it hides your private information from people that regularly search the whois records. The extra expense, however, can add up if you create a lot of domains in pursuit of your niche marketing or search engine optimization strategy.

You may want to consider skipping private registration, and instead planning out what information you are going to put into the whois records in order to minimize your exposure on the Internet. This is very straightforward to do. Createan alternate name that is only used for domain name registrations, and put that in the name field. Then, for the email address, use a generic name like admin@domainname.com, where the domainname.com part is the specific domain you are registering. Tradeoffs like this are necessary to make when you start a business!

Then, back in your hosting control panel, forward all the admin@ email addresses to your main admin@ email address, and just set up that one account in your email client.

To change the whois records, do the following (it is similar at all domain registration sites):

1. Go to the domain manager.

2. Select the domain you want to alter.

3. Choose the Contact box on the toolbar above the list of domains.

4. The “update contact information” box will pop up.

5. Click on the box that says “copy to all contact types” (there are probably four, the registrant, administrator, technical, and billing).

6. Change the name and email address to the ones you set up, and the contact address to your post office box (not your home!).

Now that you have made sure the domain name registration information does not point back to you, you can go out and write some more horrible content using your pen names without worry!