Small Business Tech Stack #2: Online Marketing & Cyber Security Tools

Monica Pitts 0:00 Hello again and welcome back to marketing with purpose. Today we are going through part two of our three for on the essential Small Business tech stack. In this episode we're digging into marketing and cybersecurity tools. Now in episode one of this series we covered communication and efficiency tools. And then we'll wrap up with a third episode on business management tools. And to talk about marketing tools and cybersecurity tools. I brought two of my favorite geeks. So with me I have Travis Schumacher, my brother and one of the techies, humans, I know Kona co owner of tranquillity Internet services. And Stacy brockmeyer. My chief we're many hats that may create and supertech problem solver. Hello, hello. Remember when we decided that we needed to amp up our website security friends? Do you remember that? Stacy Brockmeier 0:58 I remember it because you were on maternity leave. And it was really hard. Monica Pitts 1:03 It was bad. I had a newborn, and our websites started to get hacked. They were hosted at tranquility Internet services. And okay, first off, though, I would I do not take full responsibility for the hacking of 2014. Because at that point in time, we actually allowed our clients to make the decision to update their software on their own. And did they do it Stacey? No, never. They never did it. And what is the way to protect your website from hackers Stasi Stacy Brockmeier 1:35 update the software and plugins. Okay, so I think we can make a song about it. Monica Pitts 1:42 We just did. So we were like Travis, we had to figure out how we're going to unroll this program while I'm on maternity leave, where we're going to Unhak all these websites and also then lock them down. So no one can hack them again and maintain them. And so, Travis, do you remember what you did to start off this process? I Travis Schumacher 2:05 looked at the most common ways that websites get hacked, and attack those on our server, or the hosting spaces that we had for for the clients. While Monica Pitts 2:17 He learned how to hack websites. Stacy Brockmeier 2:21 He did he Googled how to hack websites, it was awesome. Monica Pitts 2:25 So he came back with a list of vulnerabilities for WordPress sites. And there was actually at that point in time, like no system that you could just pay for that would manage hundreds of WordPress sites, and keep the systems and dataset safe. And now there are like so many to choose from, right, from plugins to server side solutions, like all kinds of different things, right. So that's how we figured it out to begin with. And that's how you guys might be like tackling some of your tech challenges too. So if you're wondering what to do, what you need, or what you're missing from your tech stack, you are in the right place, because we created this three part tech stack series as a roadmap for you. And we packed it with insights, recommendations, and quite a few misadventures because we didn't get where we are today. The easy way, or the right way the first time, right. So hopefully, by the end of this series, you'll have a clearer understanding of those must have tech tools that can propel your business forward. Okay, so before we get to business, I want to tell you one more thing, and that is that we created a list for you of all these services, and tips that we referenced in this podcast. So you can go over to May create.com, ma y e CR ea t.com. And you will find what you need, the links, the service names and more. So what I'm saying is don't write it down on the back of the receipt sitting in the console of your car, you'll get into a car accident. Instead, go over to our website and the link will be in the episode shownotes All right. Are you ready for this friends? Stacy Brockmeier 4:07 Let's do it. Travis Schumacher 4:08 Yes, let's do it. Monica Pitts 4:10 Alright, let's get to business. Transcribed by https://otter.ai Monica Pitts 0:00 All right, friends. So before we get started, I have to ask you, what is your number one favorite tech tool for marketing or cybersecurity? Travis, I think you have an opinion. What's your favorite tool? What's the one that's a go to for your clients, when you're trying to lock their stuff down? Go Travis Schumacher 0:22 go to is probably, you know, a decent, decent router. Everybody's getting on the internet. And usually, it's your frontline at offense, you know, before you before you get out to the web before you start cruising around. So that's probably, you know, probably the number one tool that I'm looking at. Monica Pitts 0:42 But what's the brand of your favorite router? Travis Schumacher 0:45 There's lots of lots of flavors. I'm a big fan of Cisco, Meraki unify has as a good product. There's a couple other ones Sophos as the as the present pretty good one SonicWALL. There's some there's some bigger ones. But you know, the first two are the probably ones that deal the most with. Monica Pitts 1:08 And friends, we are going to talk more about that. In this podcast, I just had to ask him start off. And he used a bunch of words that I don't know. So if you don't know, either at school, he's going to explain them to us in a little while. Stacy Brockmeier 1:22 I didn't know any of those words, either. Monica Pitts 1:24 Stacy, what's your number one favorite tech tool? Stacy Brockmeier 1:27 Okay, so it's no secret that we pretty much deal with websites over here. And so one of my favorites is WordPress defender Pro. So it's a WordPress plugin that Rebecca uses to lock our stuff down for our clients often. And I feel like it's probably the number one security thing that I use on a regular basis. Monica Pitts 1:50 Okay, what's my favorite one? Can I be like completely, not even super techy? Absolutely. Those charts that Rebecca makes that color code all of our passwords, and then make them really hard to guess. Like, it's cool. Like, she makes this little poster for me every time we update our passwords, because we regularly update passwords for our glands. And it has like all these little tricks for us to figure them out without actually telling us what they are. Stacy Brockmeier 2:26 has pictures of animals on them colors, all kinds of things. It's pretty great like an Monica Pitts 2:31 infographic to help you figure out what password to use to log into what WordPress site. I think that's my favorite one. For cybersecurity, I read that in text expander because we put all those numbers in TextExpander to in there. That's good. Stacy Brockmeier 2:46 Yeah, I figured I raved about text expander enough. In the last episode, I had to pick out something new this time. But me and I love Text Expander had Monica Pitts 2:53 you too. I just introduced Kaylin to it, our new marketing assistant. She was like what just happened and I'm like this has been installed on your computer the whole time. And you didn't even know it just like this is awesome. Stacy Brockmeier 3:06 Such a time saver. I get like a report every week or something that tells us how many hours our team saved by not having to type in passwords. Monica Pitts 3:15 Wow, I wonder if they're conservative or not. With that time estimate. Stacy Brockmeier 3:20 I would guess that they're not conservative with it because they want to make their product look really good. But I can't imagine that we save a CRUD of time we do Monica Pitts 3:30 we totally do. So on our agenda of things to talk through in our small business tech stack episode today is online marketing tools, analytics and data insights, and cybersecurity and data protection. So we're going to start at the top with online marketing tools. And Travis, he he's he says he's heard of a couple of these, but he kind of feels about these the way I feel about routers. They're like Travis Schumacher 4:01 they're fair statement. Monica Pitts 4:03 There are like UFOs flying around. Okay, so the first online marketing tool that we feel like you need to have in your small business tech stack is a website development tool. And obviously, our favorite one is WordPress, right? Stacy Brockmeier 4:20 Doing doing WordPress. And Monica Pitts 4:24 WordPress isn't for everybody. But ultimately, and we have whole episodes about this. But what we need you to do whenever you're picking out the right website development tool or platform for your business. It's just think about what you want to do with your website in the future, what types of like programs that needs to integrate with and then pick the tool that will allow you to do that. That's going to be the right tool for you. Whether it's a super simple one, or a robust one like WordPress, that's it. Okay, so Stacy actually plans a lot of these next thing So some people are planning more than just a website they've got they're running a business online, Stacey take it away. Stacy Brockmeier 5:09 Yeah. So the first thing that I do with any of our clients is we talk about what their website can do for them. And recently, I've been planning a lot of shopping carts, so a lot of e commerce website solutions. And for those we use WooCommerce. Monica Pitts 5:26 Now, there's other ways that you can start your website though WooCommerce is really robust. We we make it do everything from sell those awesome right on carts that the kids with disabilities, the frog foundation. That is an awesome website. You guys should go check it out. These people manufactured like these little what do they call them, Stacy? Stacy Brockmeier 5:50 So I'm super honored because these people are our friends like our family friends. And they started a foundation in honor of their son Brody, who has spina bifida and they created basically mobility devices from everything from like the crawling stage up to Brody's six now. And so they have a frog, which is like the children can use their arms and move around. And then they gradually step up from there into what looks like miniature wheelchair, so they're really awesome. So the frog foundation.org Monica Pitts 6:25 Yes, it is, there is a really cool product and a really cool website. So definitely check that one out all the way up to like right now. So we're pre recording this episode, but we're running and online giving campaign for the entire month of December for our community that benefits 150 of our local nonprofits, it were up to 175 this year 175 Holy cow, Isn't that wild. And that website brings in like, almost $2 million in a month for our local nonprofits and WooCommerce does that right? But they didn't start that way. We didn't even start that online giving website that way. Like it started in an email form friends, it literally started as an email form. So I guess what I'm saying is like, it doesn't have to start out as complicated as you think you can test out your products in a different way to make sure that it's going to work. So we have a whole episode on that. You can check it out, it's called before you set up your ecommerce site, do this, which is test your product and, and build your audience. Okay, so the next online marketing tool, I feel like you need to have in your toolbox is a social media management tool. Because you don't have time to go out and like publish and all those other places or gather all the analytics and all those different places. We've used lumely and HootSuite, we like both of them, they work really well. Hootsuite has a free version that you can check out but it will save you so much time to have a scheduling tool. Stacy Brockmeier 8:06 I think the analytics on those are really powerful too, because it does combine all of the social media platforms into one location and you can really compare what you're doing. So I think that's almost as big or bigger of a time saver than the actual posting itself. Yeah. Monica Pitts 8:23 Because why do it if you're not going to look at how it did, it's just like, Stacy Brockmeier 8:31 Gotta see what works. Monica Pitts 8:33 It's like running a science experiment and not looking at the results. It kinda doesn't make a lot of sense. Okay, so last but not least, is I feel like if you're going to do online marketing, you should be doing email marketing, and you should not be sending those out using your normal email service provider. Travis, what happens if I send out hundreds of emails from like, in one, like two hundreds of addresses from one, by my normal email account, what happens? What happens to me Travis Schumacher 9:00 You probably be marked as a spammer, and then your mail won't get delivered, unfortunately, yeah, Stacy Brockmeier 9:07 and that includes even those like regular one off emails that you're sending to real humans. You, they'll just all go to spam. Yeah, then Travis Schumacher 9:16 then you'll get a bad reputation, then you get a bad reputation, they'll send an email and then just regular emails may not make it there. Monica Pitts 9:23 That fee that you would be paying to use an email marketing software is worth it. And you can even set up a free account with MailChimp and and that's a great, great way to start. We also we use mailer lite for a few years and we love it. Like it's so easy to use. It's really, really easy to use, and it's very cost effective. And now we actually use Active Campaign and we kind of have a love hate relationship with it to be fair, but it does everything that we want. And every time I attend another training session, I feel smarter. Okay, So that was too much Monica talking. But those are the online marketing tools, I feel like you should have in your business tech stack your website development tools, in any commerce solution, if you're selling things online, maybe something to take payments, your social media management tools, and then your email marketing software. Now, we touched on this a little bit earlier, we said, you know, you, you need to have analytics. So that way you can see if your marketing is working or not, because smart marketing is like smart marketing. It's like a science experiment, right, you're going to do the experiment. And then you're going to look at the results and improve it for next time. And so the next set of tools I feel like you need to have that are tech tools for marketing are analytics and data insights tools. We install two sets of tracking on our website, Stacy, tell us what they are. Stacy Brockmeier 10:52 So we install Google Analytics, which as everyone knows, probably because we talked about it all the time, changed a lot this year. So we've learned a lot about that. But we also install another Google product called Search Console. And we use that to tell what pages are being indexed. Where for for errors are lots of good data around that so that we can make good marketing decisions from both of those systems. So Monica Pitts 11:17 Google Analytics is a free tool that will tell you what people are doing on your website, like physically on your website, it'll tell you how long they're there, where they came from, to get there, and also what pages they're visiting. And if you had it installed properly, if you have a shopping cart, it'll even tell you like how much money came in from social media, or how much money came in from people just typing in your domain or email. And then Google Search Console. On the other hand, that's how Google interacts with your site. So it's how your site's performing out on Google searches, basically. But it also has a lot of extra tools in it. It's not just about that. Those are the performance metrics that it shows you. But it also tells you how your website behaves on mobile, if it has errors if there's things missing if Google can't find stuff. So it's an it's an incredibly awesome tool. And it's also free. So if you have those two tools, along with a social media management software that tells you analytics and an email marketing software that tells you analytics, I'm not sure what else you need. Stacy, is there anything else? Stacy Brockmeier 12:26 I don't think so. But I do think it is important for us to tell people that Google Analytics and Google Search Console, while they are tracking activity, they're not tracking individuals. So I can't say Monica went to XYZ pages. And Monica did this. It can it just tells us this number of people from these towns or cities or states go to these pages. So not necessarily tracking people just tracking activity. Monica Pitts 12:57 Yeah, they're just users. They're not actual human beings. Yeah. And the new version of Google Analytics is like a cookie list version as well. It doesn't mean you don't have to have a cookie pop up on your website still, but it's cookieless tracking. And Google Analytics for is a lot different than then Universal Analytics. And yes, so Stacy Brockmeier 13:18 much. It's a party. Love new song. Monica Pitts 13:23 I love it when Google changes everything. I think when it came out, I like email. No, no, Travis and I were down at the lake like visiting our parents together. And I was like, Oh my gosh, if I have to watch one more training video to figure out how to find the same stuff that I used to be able to find in a second. With Google Analytics for I just, I, my head's gonna explode. And then you told me that they had changed 14 Other things this summer, too. And we were like, Oh, my gosh, they're busy. Stacy Brockmeier 13:49 I do think I do think the day we found the conversion chart, though, that was like, it used to be called this. And now it's called this or it used to be this. And now you have to take this divided by that to find that. That was a good day, though. Because at least it gave us some semblance of knowing what used to be and what is now Monica Pitts 14:09 I should link to that conversion chart on our website. I will guides if you go to the blog post that accompanies this episode on our website, I will give you a link to that conversion chart because it was it was really helpful to understand what things are called now and how they're tracked completely differently and what they mean. It was it was interesting. Okay, so Travis, that wraps up our section on analytics. Now, I want you to tell us all about cybersecurity and data protection, like let's start off with does it even matter? Travis Schumacher 14:40 It does, it matters a ton. I mean, it's cybersecurity and data protection is probably the lifeblood of your business. It's something you gotta have got to protect it with, with everything you got. Because if you lose it, it's either going to be a time, reinvestment in time. Or A, your customers information could be at risk. And then well, if you don't have customers, then well, you don't really have. Stacy Brockmeier 15:08 What do you have? If you don't have customers? Yeah. So, Travis Schumacher 15:12 I mean, the importance of data security, I mean, I try to look at it, it's, you know, it's protecting against unwanted access, or corruption, both internal and external, right? That's kind of, that's kind of the foundation, you don't want certain people to get to it, maybe, you know, customers don't want them to get information or your competitors get you know, your information, or even certain employees to have access to stuff that you don't want them to have access to. And then, you know, if data does get corrupted, I mean, it happens, you know, there can be a disaster, or a hard drive can fail, or you know, or something gonna happen. So you want to make sure you're protecting that, you know, as well. So, important importance of security, securing data. Huge, huge part of business. Huge, huge thing, very important. And Monica Pitts 16:10 that mean, so like, think about it like this way friends, remember back in the day, I don't know, I know that you friends that are geeking out with me on this podcast are old enough to remember this, where we went to the computer lab to write papers, and then you would either save it on a floppy disk or on a jump drive. And you had to save it, or else it didn't save itself. Okay, so the feeling that you had when you left, your jump drive, or your floppy disk or your hard disk at the computer lab, and you left and you didn't know if you were ever going to have another copy of that paper again. How did you feel? Stacy Brockmeier 16:47 total panic? Travis Schumacher 16:48 Or if you didn't, or if you didn't have one, and you saved it in? You're like, Oh, I'm gonna finish that up tomorrow, and someone else stole it and turn it in as theirs. Monica Pitts 16:58 Did that happened to you? Maybe Stacy Brockmeier 17:03 I feel terrible for you, Travis. That's the worst, Travis Schumacher 17:07 Many moons ago. Monica Pitts 17:09 And you hate writing. That way. That's Wow. Dude, that sucks. All right, friends. Travis Scott hacked at the computer lab. Stacy Brockmeier 17:21 Poor little Trav Monica Pitts 17:24 in my younger days, and Stacy and I have clearly had the experience of pretty much blowing up our entire papers by leaving them there. Okay, so now now magnify that feeling that we just had of reminiscing by like, I don't know, 5000. And that's how you're gonna feel when all of your customers data gets breached. When all of your customers records are deleted when all of your files are gone. It's even worse as a business. Like it's even worse. It's bad. Stacy Brockmeier 17:57 Think about it, like all of your money from your whole business is tied to that jump drive, or that floppy disk. Monica Pitts 18:02 God protect that thing, bubble wrap it yo, Stacy Brockmeier 18:06 Because your money, your money, your business money is tied to your cybersecurity. Don't mess around with it. It would Monica Pitts 18:15 be like if you had a factory full of inventory, and you just burned it down without insurance. And there is insurance against this. We actually just had to get a policy. We did. And it was really fun. Sending them that money. Stacy Brockmeier 18:28 It was even more fun filling out the paperwork. Even more fun filling it out. Yes. Monica Pitts 18:34 Oh my gosh, I had to fill it out. And then I had to ask them what everything meant. And then I had to go to Stacey and asked her what she thought everything meant. He sent it in. Okay, so you can insure yourself against these things. Okay, friends. And if you deal with a lot of data, you probably I mean, I'm not an insurance agent, but I'm thinking you probably should. I'm saying, okay, Travis. So how are we going to protect ourselves from let's start with like, hackers, how do we protect ourselves from the hackers and the viruses and the yucky thing? Travis Schumacher 19:07 Well, hackers, obviously they're, they're pretty clever. And so there, they try multiple different ways to you know, get access to things. So the approach is to take multiple defenses against those things to make it that much harder for them to get access. Some of those things could be you know, antivirus, you know, on your computer. I mentioned you know, routers or firewalls, you know, something in front view getting on the internet, you know, that kind of a thing. So, usually, you know, the best thing to do is to kind of start with a couple of those you know, so that you can keep yourself out of harm's way and help protect you know, your people, your your staff, your employees that are that are working for Are you, you know, and working on your stuff on your behalf. So they will help. Monica Pitts 20:07 Remember back in the day where I didn't have antivirus software on my laptop, and I kept getting 1000 viruses, do you remember that laptop? And because we were doing like social media marketing at the time, and I would keep going out to Facebook, and I would keep getting more viruses, and eventually, it nuked my microphone. And I didn't have a microphone on that computer. That was like, Why? Why doesn't it work? And then I took it into the computer guy, and he was like, yeah, in virus ate your microphone driver. And I was like, Whoa, that's gross. That's gross. So, um, how do you know what kind of protection you need to have is, um, Travis Schumacher 20:49 usually you start with a foundation, I mean, you guys mentioned, you mentioned it early on about, you know, just updating your website, keeping your computer up to date, you know, a lot of stuff changes, as we know, in the world today, and it changes at a rapid pace. So selecting a few simple tools, you know, keeping your if you use Microsoft, you know, you have a Windows laptop, we want to make sure that it's up to date, you want to make sure there's the basic antivirus, you know, on that the firewall, you know, is enabled, the basic, the basic firewall within the computer is enabled, okay. And then you kind of just keep, you know, put on a couple of extra layers in there. You guys talked about that, you know, what was it TextExpander, you know, to help protect, you know, passwords, right? You have those stored in a safe place, you know, enable different access within your email systems, you know, there's a lot of two factor authentication, you know, things out there where you can, there's a second form to identify yourself, so that you are who you say you are kind of a thing. You know, so starting, starting simple, you don't want to overcomplicate it, usually, you know, three, four, different levels of protection are a great place to start, you know, and just keeping it simple, is usually, you know, my, my number one thing is, Keep it keep it simple. So that you can, so when there is an issue, you can you can tackle it. Monica Pitts 22:21 So I feel like you had three points there, you said, keep everything up to date, safely manage passwords. And then the third one was multiple Stacy Brockmeier 22:30 forms of identity, yes, two factor Monica Pitts 22:34 authentication, which is kind of crazy. Because like, as I was removing myself from all of these Facebook accounts, because we no longer manage social media for our clients. I can't tell you how many people didn't have to two factor authentication and like enabled, and so I couldn't add them to their own Facebook page. And they were like, I just can't figure it out. I'm just not going to do it. I'm like, Okay, I don't know what to tell you, then. You should. Okay. So then, when we were talking about the losing of the floppy disk, we were kind of hating on the need for backup and recovery solutions. So tell me about that. How do we keep ourselves safe doing that? Travis Schumacher 23:21 There's, there's a couple of different things, you know, with that a lot, a lot of folks, a lot of my customers, you know, they're using an online type backup tool, you know, it might be built in with their, you know, office, you know, Microsoft 365 suite, or Google workspace, you know, something like that, or, you know, even even Dropbox. So having a backup for a backup recovery solution. You know, if there was a fire, you'd want to have it off site, right. And sometimes those that's the easiest way, the most logical way, you're already paid for the email calendaring type service, hey, you know, store these files up there, too. Alright. So that's, that's an easy way. Another way is, you know, having a, you know, a file server or a local server, obviously, we still need to get backed up off site, you know, but it may be it's not, you know, save on just your computer. Right, it saved on, you know, another a secondary location, you know, so, you know, those, those are kind of the ones that we run into, you know, most often biggest things is making sure it's, you know, it's backed up off site to a lot of the newer tools, you know, have a lot of that stuff built in already. And you don't know what's there, but it is, and so it's just, you know, peeling back the layers to take advantage of it. So, Stacy Brockmeier 24:42 so Travis, for those of us that do use a cloud server setup, so you know, our setup, we use Google workspace, we store all of our client files up there. Are we safe with just that or do we need to back that up locally in another way? Travis Schumacher 25:00 You can you can do a combo, I mean, there's a hybrid, you can save those files locally, and you can sync them, you know, up to the up to the cloud. Some of our clients have backups of Google, and Microsoft, you know, so that if they, if there's a need for, like version history, you know, some attorneys or people that work on large documents, they need, like version history. And if something happens, or there's a lapse, or if they lose access to Google, or 365, then they have that in another place, or they can restore it, or maybe somebody overwrites it by accident. So it kind of depends answer your question, that kind of thing. And kind of depends on the, the structure of your business, right, some have different different needs, and others, but I mean, overall, I think, you know, having stuff on, you know, OneDrive or Google, you know, it's, it's far better than just simply having it on your computer, because you can access it, you know, remotely. I mean, it's, it's, it's backed up off site, but it's also, you know, on your, you know, local computer as well. Monica Pitts 26:14 So there is I feel like there are a few other things too, that Stacy we don't even realize that we help people with with data. One is that every website that we build has a privacy policy on it, because that is like your legal agreement that you would be protecting the people's data that you gather through your website. So that would be one thing to think about underneath this cybersecurity and data protection is just the contractual agreement that you need to establish with the people that are, you know, you're gathering their data, and then a cookie pop up to be compliant with GDPR. And the California regulations to, like, let people know, if you're using cookies on your website, and almost all of us use cookies on our website, they're not bad cookies, they're just cookies that make things work, as well as so you sort of have to have it on there, especially Stacy Brockmeier 27:10 in the shopping cart, like a shopping cart is typically cookie based. And so when you add something to your cart, you have to be able to go to your cart and see that it's in there. And that's a cookie. So you need to allow cookies when they're applicable, so that you don't have a deprecated user experience. And Monica Pitts 27:29 then the last one that I'm always surprised at, and sometimes people ask me to do like, website reviews, and I get hit by like this weird page on Google that's like, this is not a safe website. And I'm like, what is happening? Like, maybe they don't go to their own website? I don't know. So Stacy, remember when we like started it? It was like it's mandatory, you get an SSL certificate. Travis remembers this too, because he had to figure out how to deploy them for every single website that we had. So Stacy really quickly, like, what's an SSL certificate? Why do you need this thing? Stacy Brockmeier 28:05 So basically, in like layman's terms, an SSL certificate protects the connection from the viewer to your website. So it encrypts that connection and encrypts your website. And that way, it's safe for the user to go to your website. And so Google started requiring them a few years ago, and they started getting giving these notifications that Monica is talking about sporadically. But really, it's just a protection of the connection and the files on your website. And you're required to have one or you're not gonna have very much website traffic, especially I think. So they've kind of sprinkled out the, the alerts that when you go to them, but I think, coming soon, I don't have a date in my head. But every single website without an SSL will have the alert on it very soon. So even if you can see it now, you're probably not going to be able to see it very, very quickly in the near future. So you need an SSL certificate. Most of the time, your hosting provider will provide your SSL certificate, especially if you're hosting with a company like we do. It's a free service. If you host with the less expensive hosting companies. Usually it's a paid service. So you're really not gaining anything by hosting with a company who doesn't provide them because you also have to pay $100 a year for your SSL. So you might as well host with a more legitimate hosting company and not have to pay for it. Absolutely. Monica Pitts 29:39 Because not having this like and this is the reason that we put this in your tech stack is if you don't have an SSL certificate on your website, then your website isn't essentially in your tech stack because people won't be able to get to it like like Google is going to tell them not to go that's a really bad deal. And like if You don't have a privacy policy or a cookie pop up, you are not even meeting laws, like you're not meeting the regulations. So you should really, you know, do those things. They're not hard. They just need to get done. Stacy Brockmeier 30:14 And you don't have to do them yourself. I think that's the other thing, if you, if you don't know what we're talking about, just go to your web developer and contact them and tell them you need these things. And they should know what they are. And if they don't, you should find a new web developer. Monica Pitts 30:32 When there's services out there that literally do like just this, like we decided that we weren't going to tell we started off with privacy policies. And we were like, well, what are we going to do with these? Like, should we just have a drafted one, and we talked to our lawyer about it, and they were like, No, do not do that. You cannot give people legal documents, this is bad. And then we were like, Oh, man. So eventually, you found a company that literally creates privacy policies and keeps them up to date with local laws. And we have like an account with them. And they keep our privacy policy up to date, and we pay them for it. So and that's not hard, like, anyone could walk through that system on their own and fill out the paperwork. And then you just put a link at the bottom of your site for it. So like that kind of stuff. It doesn't have to be recreating the wheel. You don't have to pay your lawyer lawyer to draft it for you. You just, you know, there's solutions all over the place. It's totally doable. Okay, friends. So we're wrapping up this episode, is there anything else that is top of mind right now, for tech stack for online marketing tools, analytics and data insights, or cybersecurity and data protection, anything else you would tell a small business owner to think about? I Stacy Brockmeier 31:46 think I just like small pep talk. These things are scary, and they're hard to choose and you don't know what they are. But it's okay. There are people to help you. You don't have to do it on your own. But they are really dire things that you need to have. So make sure you're doing it. Make sure that your online marketing tools are up to date, make sure you have analytics so that you can make decisions down the road. And for the love of Pete, please secure all your things. Unless you are driving a car from like 1980 or before you do not have a phone and you do only things by pen and paper, please secure your stuff. Travis Schumacher 32:25 It's important, please make sure you backup your stuff. Because the amount of time it's going to take you to recover from that it will be brutal. It'll be discouraging. In the stuff that you work so hard, you got to try to kind of make sure you're protected. So if you don't have any cybersecurity protection, get one thing start there. If you don't know ask your IT guy. Monica Pitts 32:53 Or if it's your brother or your Travis Schumacher 32:55 techie friend to point you in the right direction, at least Stacy Brockmeier 32:58 download Windows Defender on your computer. That's like the very most admit Travis Schumacher 33:03 to your window thing your Windows updates do your Windows updates is baby step number one, Monica Pitts 33:10 I do have to say to like, I know that you're like oh my goodness, you know, the budget is stretched tight but remember that scenario that we painted at the computer lab right so having someone like Travis come in and help you with this type of like tech stuff or even may create at the beginning when you're small is going to be pretty cost effective we have very cost effective solutions for you. And if you don't do it, it could literally break your business quite frankly. Now for medium and large businesses Yes, it is more you know costly but at the beginning I mean like I was blown away like there's there's some services that Travis sets up that like you pay very very little to Travis it's actually the service provider that he's representing that pays him for like setting up your service so like there's all kinds of different things like that and people like Travis or like Stacy and I that are out here to help you and not like gouge you so you guys are right Travis says start small do at least one thing and Stacy says do it you won't regret it. Trust me yes Travis Schumacher 34:22 do something. There Stacy Brockmeier 34:23 was one time I had to rebuild our QuickBooks like it was it was enough to like scar me for life and it wasn't because we didn't have backups it was just be a mistake that happened. Don't do that. Don't be that person. It's very stressful. Take care of your cyber stuff. Monica Pitts 34:43 With that friends I think we beat you to death and over the head actually no, there's no death beating that's really bad. We say that. Ill okay just ignore me people. Alright, so ah, that is all for our small business tech stack episodes. Ode to online marketing and cybersecurity tools. Remember that we have episode one of this series where we covered communication and efficiency tools. And stay tuned for our next episode, definitely subscribe to the podcast, or subscribe to our email list over on May create.com. That's ma y e CR ea te.com. And we will wrap up our tech stack episode with Episode Three business management tools. Oh yeah. All right, friends. Thank you so much for listening today. And until next time, go forth and mark it with purpose. Transcribed by https://otter.ai