The Back End of Your Blog or Website

We come to our last piece in our introductory series from idea to online business creation. We’ve discussed your online goals, finding and testing your idea, building your blog or website, advertising and now how to run the back end of your blog or website.

If your front end is running great (great design, great content, great traffic, great conversions, great revenue) this success won’t mean as much if your back end isn’t running so well.

What do I mean by back end or business end?

Everything that helps keep your website or online business running smoothly and maximising revenue and profit.

• Goals are in place for revenue, traffic, subscribers and are regularly checking to see how you are tracking with these.
• You’ve been in contact or at least plan to meet with professionals regarding set up or the running of your blog or online business.
• Systems and procedures are in place to keep your website running smoothly (including creating content, new products and outsourcing).
• Revenue is actively tracked and you are keeping a close eye on your expenses.
• Making sure your website is secure and has back ups and you have back up plans if your site is hacked or goes down. What is your back up plan in case tech (computers) or software (including web access) is down and unavailable.

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Let’s go into these above points in more detail:

1. Setting and tracking goals

If you have got these in place, excellent. If not, then look at setting some goals. I have discussed setting online goals in detail previously. Monitor your goals, keep tracking them. Some of these goals will be tied to online benchmarks such as traffic, subscribers, etc and you can use analytics to track these (we will discuss these a little later in this post). Don’t be afraid to change your goals mid stream if they aren’t working for you. Who knows, your online venture may be a lot further ahead than you anticipated and you need to set bigger goals!

2. Reaching out to a professional or at least seeking out professional advice for accounting, legal, financial, etc

If possible, seek out an accountant specializing in online business and before you embark, ask what tips should you be starting with. The might even suggest the right entity or structure that you should have. It may be a little early considering the little to no revenue your online venture will be starting with however they may also have some timely suggestions or could refer you to another professional in this area.

Once you start making an income get in contact with your accountant (or start following the plan that you would have put together during your initial meeting with your accountant). Once your online venture starts making a nice income stream then other financial and business professional should be sought out, particularly in regards to scaling and growing your business and hopefully diversify or investing surplus cash flow or profit.

3. Systems and Procedures

When you start out these won’t be that in depth however if you want to scale and grow your blog or online website you will need to have sturdy systems and procedures in place. To get you to focusing on growing your business you will need to outsource some tasks that for one reason or another you did whilst building your business.

Systems you should be looking to build would be to maintain a regular flow of content, what happens in the even of a security breach, how to outsource jobs you were previously doing but don’t make sense you spending time on them.

Once you start building revenue where you can look at outsourcing menial jobs, do this. Start by keeping track of the jobs that you can (and should be outsourcing) so you can focus on growing your business.

Examples of jobs you should be outsourcing once you have sufficient revenue could include: website development/updates, social media updates, content changes, etc

If you go down the freelancer route have a look at sites such as fiverr.com or freelancer.com

If you would be prefer to hire a VA then there are options available such as:

Or you might get lucky and find someone who can help you out through your own network.

4. Analytics

As mentioned earlier analytics are needed to track your online progress.

The main benchmarks you should be tracking include:

Traffic: One of the obvious analytics to track, traffic is a very important part of the success of a blog or website.

What to track? You want to track how many visitors have visited your website. More importantly you also want to track where these visitors came from. Ie Did they visit your blog or website from organic search, from a referral link or from another source altogether?

You also want to track any traffic spikes or drop offs. Let’s say for example you are running an advertising campaign or you have written a guest post for another site, you’ll want to track any boost to your traffic numbers.

How to track your analytics? The easiest way is to set up a Google Analytics account and to download a plugin to track your analytics such as Google Analytics Dashboard for WordPress Plugin (GADWP) or Monster Insights.

Bounce Rate: As per Google, bounce rate is “Bounce rate is single-page sessions divided by all sessions, or the percentage of all sessions on your site in which users viewed only a single page and triggered only a single request to the Analytics server.” In most cases, the higher the bounce rate, the shorter people are hanging around your website page or blog post. You want these numbers to be low. Neil Patel writes about ways to lower your bounce rate.

Subscribers: In most niches attracting email subscribers is something you should be aiming for. To do this you probably want to set up an email opt-in (such as a PDF or free course) and link this to a opt-in form to capture email addresses linked with an email service provider, such as Convertkit. Hubspot and Social Triggers have good articles on how to build your email list.

Keywords: Keywords are a very important analytic for your SEO. More importantly, keep a track of what keywords you are ranking high in search engines for. Look to use a keyword tool such as Moz or Ahrefs. Note what you rank for and use this to build future content or product ideas.

Conversions: This could be tracked for readers that visit your opt-in landing page and actually become subscribers or people who visit a sales page for one of your products and purchases your product.

Revenue: The aim for most people creating a blog or website is to make money. So track your revenue (and expenses) from day one. Now if you are making money from day one congrats, however for most people making money with their online venture will take time. However once you do start making money start tracking this. If you make more money from one month to another ask yourself why. Why was there a large jump from month to month? Was it from an advertising campaign or from a large boost in traffic? Track this, use this data to plan out your future moves.

5. Security and backups

As your blog (or online business) will hopefully be a good source of revenue you will want to make sure that you have protected yourself and your business in the event of a targeted attack. Unfortunately the more successful your blog or online business becomes the more susceptible you will be to an online attack.

How to avoid this?

Be prepared. Have a high level of security in place to stop these attacks from happening. If an attack does happen then make sure you have plans and systems in place ready to not affect your website or online business.

Have a backup for your website, have a security expert on your staff, use a high quality website host (one with great technical and customer support), find a great WordPress plugin that secures your website and backs up your website.

Back up any major content or future content plans, be careful who has access to this. Have a backup for all of your existing content.

Any time you use a freelancer or virtual assistant (VA) and no longer use that person or firm any more, change all of your password details so they don’t have access to your website.

If you are able to, have one laptop that is used for your business activities and another computer that you use personally or for web searches. These are just a few suggestions to help keep the business side of your blog on track with your front end of your blog or website.

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