“How to Keep Your Blog Hacker, Spammer, and Spyware-free” plus 1 more

How to Keep Your Blog Hacker, Spammer, and Spyware-free

Posted: 06 Jun 2011 01:07 PM PDT

This guest post is by Sean Sullivan of F-Secure.

It's a notion that strikes fear deep in the heart of every blogger. No, we're not talking about getting dooced (fired for blogging). We're talking about waking up in the morning, loading up your blog, and finding a screen that looks something like this:

The website has been blocked

Or perhaps it wasn't as overt—you just discovered links injected into your site footer containing the anchor text of a certain famed pharmaceutical brand.

In any case, these kinds of scenarios aren’t good news for bloggers. Those fickle web users you work hard to attract can easily be put off by a hacked site and never return. Or, just as bad, being hacked (and not fixing it) risks the search engine equity you've built up over years of blogging, and which is time-consuming to restore.

If your site has been hacked or spammed, you've likely been through the tedious and time-intensive process of combing through MySQL databases, theme files, and directories on your server. If you're lucky, you found the problem, removed it, and got things back up quickly (without having it replicate again, which we've seen). Or perhaps you had a backup copy and completed a restoration process.

But even then, this situation is not ideal. If you're anything like us, you feel it’s unacceptable for your blog to be brought down, even for a moment—and especially by hackers.

The single most important tip? An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

In no area other than security is that adage more important. This is simply because hackers, both the automated and the manual kind, choose the path of least resistance.

To a large extent, many are playing the numbers game to try to build black-hat links or manipulate website content for the benefit of helping illegitimate companies rank higher in search engines. To accomplish this, hackers frequently send crawlers searching around the web, to seek out the most vulnerable sites.

So how can you stay safe?

1. Keep your blogging software up to date

As we know, most bloggers here use WordPress (and definitely most professional bloggers use a self-hosted installation). Keeping it up to date is critical. Since WordPress is so popular, unfortunately that means it's frequent prey for hackers. By keeping up with the latest updates, you'll ensure security, and get vulnerability fixes straight from the source, as the WordPress community actively seeks to maintain security of the software.

2. Choose secure logins and passwords

Brute force attacks can easily be prevented: choose a secure login and password. By “secure login” we mean change it from the typical "admin" to be more specific. For a “secure password,” use something that is at least ten characters long, and contains at least one upper-case letter and one symbol, such as an exclamation mark. This will make it virtually impossible for either a human or computer to guess your login details.

3. Beef up security with WordPress plugins

There’s a huge number of free WordPress plugins written by Good Samaritan developers looking to keep their blogging peers safe. A few must-haves include Secure WordPress, which removes some critical meta information that a hacker could use against you from your WordPress install, Limit Login Attempts, which makes a brute-force attack basically impossible, and WP Security Scan, which provides a report about your specific configuration of WordPress and suggests corrective actions.

4. Only blog from a system that is safe, secure, and spyware-free

Computer virus

For those who aren’t so tech savvy: your WordPress install (or any blog install) is software and runs on an operating system, similar to how your own computer runs.

One of the easiest ways for malicious code to find its way onto your blog is through an infected system. In reality, your blogging software is only ever as safe as the system you access it from. The best way to keep your system safe is with a comprehensive Internet security and anti-virus product. Alternatively, you can check with your ISP—many of them now offer Internet security to their subscribers.

5. Automated backups: set it and forget it

You can setup backups to be made easily via a simple plugin. Alternatively, for those who run popular sites and are very serious about the safety of their posts, Automattic (the makers of WordPress) recently started to offer a premium service called VaultPress, which provides the dead-simple backup of not just databases, but all files associated with WordPress. Frequent snapshots of your install are critical and, aside from providing peace of mind, will ensure even if you ever get hacked, you don't lose your work.

6. Stop spammers in their tracks

You can use Akismet (which analyzes comments via hundreds of tests) to quickly and effortlessly deal with spam comments, or use Bad Behavior (which references bad IP addresses via Project HoneyPot) and block them from even reaching your site in the first place.

What to do in the worst-case scenario

Even with prevention, code compromise is always possible. It happens to even the savviest bloggers. If you ever do get hacked or find webspam on your site, and aren't sure what to do, don't panic and start deleting files. This can make the situation much worse.

Instead, take screengrabs of the issue, and send them to someone who specializes in WordPress (or whatever your blogging software is) along with the most recently known good backups. This issue is very common, so there are many who specialize in helping fix just this situation.

Of course, these are just basic tips for prevention that everyone should take. There are more advanced tips (for example, locking down the /wp-admin/ directory with an .htaccess file) but if you can start out by implementing the tips above, you'll already be a notch safer than most.

Has your site been hacked? Tell us what happened—and how you rectified the problem—in the comments.

Sean Sullivan is security advisor for F-Secure, a provider of award-winning anti-virus and computer security software. You can find more great security tips like this on F-Secure's Safe and Savvy blog and stay at the cutting edge of the latest online threats via the F-Secure labs blog.

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

How to Keep Your Blog Hacker, Spammer, and Spyware-free

10 Tips for Opening Your Next Blog Post

Posted: 06 Jun 2011 07:01 AM PDT

Have you ever sat down to write and suffered from Opening Line Paralysis (OLP)?

It happens to me all the time—in fact it’s taken me about 15 minutes just to start this post. You know what topic you want to write about, and you might even have more main points in mind, but you just don’t know how to kick the post off!

If you suffer from OLP, you’re not alone—many of us bloggers do.

First impressions count

We all have a message drummed into us throughout life: people make snap judgements on you based upon the first impression you give. In many instances, those judgements are lasting ones.*

The same is true for your blog posts. Your opening line really does matter—readers will make a snap decision about whether to read your post by how you open that post, both in the headline or title and the opening line.

It’s no wonder that so many of us feel pressure to get our first lines right.

*It’s worth noting that you can bounce back from a poor first impression. For example, the first thing my wife ever said to me was, “Hi Michael, it’s nice to meet you.” Not a great opening … but I married her within a year!

How can you craft an opening line that will draw people into your post?

There’s no one right way to open a blog post. However, over the years I’ve experimented with a number of formulas that have worked for me.

Note that while I’m writing here about opening lines of blog posts, much of what follows can also be applied to blog post titles, too.

1. Start with a question

Lets start with the approach I took in this post—I asked you a question. The question I chose to ask in this post was one that attempted to make you remember a time when you’d faced a problem or need—paralysis at the beginning of writing a blog post (a fairly common problem).

This technique may not draw every single person who reads it into the post, but it will hopefully draw in those that can relate to the need.

There are of course other types of questions that can be used. Here are a few I could have gone with in this post:

Did you know that 9 out of 10 of your blog readers don’t get past the first line of your posts? This line contains the shock factor, but also puts a finger on the need we’ll be addressing.
How do you open blog posts? This type of question signals the topic to readers but also shows you’re interested in their opinions.
What’s one of the most common problems that bloggers have when sitting down to write posts? This question doesn’t touch on the actual need, but is designed to intrigue readers and will hopefully draw them in to find out if they have the problem.
Do you want to learn how to open your blog posts more effectively? This question only really has one answer: “yes.” Asking questions that have a “yes” answer puts your readers into a “yes” frame of mind, and hopefully one that makes them more positive and receptive to your solutions to their problems.

Let’s look at some examples from other sites.

Example: Does the traffic coming to your site come in a Yo-Yo like cycle of ups and downs that never really seems to go anywhere in the long run?—from 21 Ways to Make Your Blog or Website Sticky.

Example: “How do you take Portraits that have the 'Wow' factor?“—from 10 Ways to Take Stunning Portraits

Of course there are many other types of questions that you could go with. If you’ve used some in your opening lines I’d love to hear them in comments below.

2. Start with a statistic

“Only 1 out of every 100 readers Comment on your blog.” I used this opening line on one of my most popular posts here on ProBlogger. It’s a line that readers often quote back to me as a statistic that they’ve heard me say.

Stats can quickly and effectively communicate a need or sum up a topic in a way that few other phrases can.

3. State a need or problem

I regularly find myself staring at an empty Word document, wondering how to start my blog posts.

If your post is about helping people to overcome some need, problem or challenge that they have, a simple statement about your own experience of that need can be an effective way to go. Putting it in these personal terms shows your readers that you’re able to empathize with their need, and are writing from a more personal point of view.

Alternatively, you might not have the problem yourself. You could write in a less personal tone, but still highlight the need your reader might have.

4. Start with a reader’s question

I’ve used this technique many times in my posts. Simply take a question that a reader has asked in a blog comment, in an email, or on Twitter and put it at the top of your post (I always ask those who asked the question for permission first if it was asked via email or in some other private setting).

Taking this approach shows your readers that you’re interested in hearing questions. It also shows that what you are writing about is relevant, and emerging out of the real needs that your readership has.

Example: “Help me – I'm photographing my first Wedding!… Help me with some Wedding Photography Tips Please!“—from 21 Tips for Amateur Wedding Photographers.

5. Start with a quote

Introducing a post with the words of another person can also be an effective way of starting off. This effectively takes the focus away from you, but if you choose a quote from someone with authority and/or familiarity to your readers, it can actually add more punch to your article and make readers take notice of what’s to follow.

6. Communicate the benefit of reading the post

In this post I’ll share ten ways for opening blog posts that will ensure you’ll never be stuck for an opening again.

Start with the end in mind. By doing so, you’re communicating to your reader what they’ll get if they read on.

7. Make a claim

This post will make you filthy rich!

You need to be able to back it up, but opening with a claim about what your post will achieve can be an effective way of getting attention.

Claims need not be promises of benefits, though—they might also be personal claims of achievement. One that worked for me in the early days of ProBlogger was in this post, where I opened with the words, “It just hit me—like a truck—that I’ve just become a six-figure blogger.”

Example: “I have earned $119,725.45 from Amazon Associates Program since I began using it as a way to make money online late in 2003. Around half of that amount was made within the last 12 months.”—from 11 Lessons I Learned Earning $119,725.45 from Amazon Associates Program.

Note that not all “claim”-style openings have to be about money!

8. Tell a story

Everyone loves a story, and to kick off with a post with one can be a very effective way of drawing readers into your blog (for many reasons).

One example that comes to mind of this was a post I wrote on dPS. I kicked off the post with a story of taking photos a George Michael concert.

Example: Last night my wife came home with a book and started a conversation on a topic which I'd been dreading a little since the time we first found out that we were expecting a baby later in the year. The book was called something along the line of “Names for your Baby”—from: Choosing the Domain Name for Your Blog

9. Start with a controversial statement

Controversy can be similar to a big claim, in that it is one great way of getting attention—but also can open up problems if you aren’t careful. Use with care!

10. Go for a punchy opening

One of the opening lines that I’ve had the most feedback on was this:

“It hits you like a TON of BRICKS! It's an idea for that KILLER blog post that is just bound to bring you all the traffic that you've ever dreamed of…” (from How to Craft a Blog Post).

The post went on to paint a picture (and tell a made up story) of a scenario that many bloggers face. It worked partly because it was a story of sorts, but also because I used formatting to emphasize words and aimed to make the opening quite “punchy.”

These are my favorite ways to open blog posts. What are yours?

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

10 Tips for Opening Your Next Blog Post

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