I’m sure you’ve heard the old expression, “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.”

Well, this past week that old saying was put to the test for me when the WordPress blog for my father’s business was hacked.

I’ve been on the net for a long time, but I’ve never experienced a hacking “event”, so it really took me by surprise. Whomever they were, they did their damage by exploiting a security hole in one of the WordPress plugins I was using. The creator of the plugin responded very quickly and posted a security patch within hours, so I was impressed with that.

The worst part of it was that my web hosting company froze my entire account so that none of my sites were operational, and then proceeded to drop the ball on resolving the whole issue. It took multiple phonecalls, escalations and emails to get their attention, and finally – one week later – everything is back up and running again. Needless to say, I’m switching web hosts ASAP! (and don’t get me started ranting about poor customer service – argh!)

Now, in this particular case, we probably didn’t lose any sales out of it (though I’m only guessing at that), for two reasons: 1) we have two other Squidoo webpages (both highly ranked in Google) providing information on our products; and 2) all of our sales are done via old-fashioned email correspondence, so if someone couldn’t access our blog, they could at least find our contact info on those Squidoo pages.

But imagine if this had happened to you and you relied on high-volume, daily digital product sales? You could have lost a lot of money in that one-week’s time.

The lesson? Always have more than one web property where your prospects and customers can contact and/or buy from you. These days there are so many free or low-cost sites where you can setup shop that you almost can’t afford not to!

For example, if you’re an artist, you could sell your wares from your main website, from a site such as Etsy, and also from eBay. If any of those sites go down or you can’t access them for some reason, you still have the other sites to make sales from.

Now what this means is that you need to put the work in to get all of your sites near the top of Google for a given search phrase in your niche; otherwise, your prospects won’t be able to find your site(s) and the whole exercise is moot. But that’s a whole other topic…

Obviously I’m glad this whole ordeal is over; however, I do want to give a shout out to the lovely and talented Ed Dale. It was through his Thirty Day Challenge training that I learned it was crucial to have multiple web properties for my niches, and this was just one of the possible scenarios in which that strategy really saved my (Canadian) bacon!

Photo courtesy of Flicker user “Librarian Avenger” under Creative Commons License Attribution 2.0 Generic