With digitalization permeating the economy on every level, cybercrime has become the stuff of nightmares for the business world.

In fact, 48 percent of SMBs fear that a major data breach or cyber attack has the potential to deliver a devastating coup de grace to their companies, putting them out of business permanently — and without any prospect of recovery.

Content marketing — a tool for increasing brand awareness and nurturing relationships with potential customers — may end up being the very thing decimating your brand in one split second, wiping out years of hard work, as a result of poor cybersecurity hygiene.

To prevent that from ever happening to you, you need to understand where the most common cybersecurity challenges in content marketing lie.

1. Content Theft

They say good artists copy and great artists steal, but apparently, some people tend to take this notion to the extreme.

When you schedule your content in advance, a rival from overseas or disgruntled ex-employee who gained access to your website can release your work before it goes live or gets indexed by search engines, effectively claiming ownership of it.

The issue plagues highly competitive, narrow niches in particular.

Taking into account the resources poured into producing content, the potential lost revenue, and the cost of opportunity, such leakage may result in thousands of dollars of damage, a tough blow to shrug off for small businesses.

2. SEO Spam Link Injections

The 2019 Website Threat Research Report carried out by Sucuri states that 62 percent of all hacked websites have one thing in common: they get broken into specifically for SEO purposes.

Among the myriad ways in which bad actors can leech off of your website, stealthily inserting spammy links into the source code to boost the SEO value of their digital properties is one of the nastiest tactics to prevent your content marketing campaign from ever taking off.

Some of the links are planted to be clicked on by the visitors as a means to siphon away your traffic.

However, the lion’s share of the links is typically hidden from the human eye, injected deeply into the source code to be seen only by search engine bots. In fact, the practice has been so widespread over the years that even has its own name — cloaking.

Not only do link injections tarnish your SEO authority, a factor that directly impacts your rankings in Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs), but they also discredit your company’s brand image.

Sadly, SEO spam injection attacks tend to fly under the radar, chipping away at the hacked website for years to come while devaluing any content published on it.

3. SEO Spam Content Injection

On top of lacing the source code with external links, having snuck in, cybercriminals may also approach sabotaging your content marketing strategy from a different angle: by creating spammy web pages (also known as doorway pages) behind your back.

And as you may have guessed, the purpose of such practice, again, is to manipulate search engine algorithms at the expense of the website’s reputation.

Obviously, that often leads to a perfectly legitimate website getting penalized or even blacklisted by search engines, bleeding it dry of any organic search traffic.

And here’s the rub: Business executives are typically not even aware of the problem since they lack the technical SEO knowledge and special software it takes to timely spot holes in their website and patches them up before Google gets a whiff of trouble.

For small businesses that double down on content marketing to reach out to their potential customers, the aftermath of a successful SEO spam injection may easily push the company off a cliff.

4. Social Engineering Attacks

90 percent of all successful cyber attacks are attributed to human error.

Social engineering and phishing attacks rely on psychological tricks to dupe the victim into making a certain action or giving up sensitive information that grants cybercriminal access to the victim’s digital properties.

Be it your website or social media profiles, having your digital marketing channels hijacked that way to spread deceitful or embarrassing information is yet another way to wreak havoc on your content marketing strategy.

5. Erasing Content

When applied to small businesses neglecting regular data backups, destroying databases of a compromised website is a surefire way to knock a rival out of the race for a while, if not permanently.

When someone gains access to the server hosting your website or the content management system (CMS) administrator menu, all the content can be erased with just a few lines of code.

For that reason, always, always, always create copies of your databases and store them somewhere safe.

Never forget that any website can be hacked, even the ones shelling out top dollar for the best cybersecurity systems under the sun.

However, scheduled database backups allow you to instantly reverse the damage should you find yourself on the receiving end of a cyber attack.

How to Safeguard Your Content Marketing Campaign from Cyber attacks?

Any cybersecurity expert worth their salt will tell you that you are never completely safe from the many dangers that lurk online, no matter how deep your pockets are.

But since most cybercriminals are on the lookout for an easy target, it is perfectly within your power to dramatically reduce the likelihood of a successful data breach or cyber attack by implementing a series of simple security measures:

1. Create strong passwords. Instead of relying on easy-to-remember combinations, use online password generators to come up with a long, hard-to-crack password.
2. Turn on two-step authentication. The practice will prevent cybercriminals from breaking into your accounts, even if they somehow got their hands on your password.
3. Change the default CMS admin login. The login URL is the gateway to the website’s dashboard, a place that should not be easily accessed by anyone other than your team.
4. Avoid logging into your accounts from public Wi-Fi networks. Since most passwordless Wi-Fi hotspots do not offer any encryption whatsoever, anyone with a drop of technical knowledge can snatch your sensitive data.
5. Make sure your CMS, plug-ins, security software, and firewalls are up to date. Developers constantly roll out new updates to close the loopholes found by cyber criminals.
6. Control who can access your accounts. Only a handful of trusted people should be authorized to log into your accounts, which helps minimize the risk of a data breach.
7. Restrict access to the CMS dashboard based on user roles. Most of the popular CMSs make it possible for you to limit the parts of your website a certain user is allowed to access.
8. Back up your data on a regular basis and stash away the copies of your databases somewhere safe so that you can bounce back from any cybersecurity incidents, no matter how devastating.
9. Promote good cybersecurity hygiene in your organization. Raising cybersecurity awareness among your staff fortifies your company against social engineering attacks.

While seemingly primitive, the easy-to-do security measures mentioned above should help you stave off trouble and protect your content marketing campaigns from ever becoming the prey of cybercriminals.

Suggested:

Ways Businesses Are Breathing New Life Into Content Marketing.

The post Top 5 Cybersecurity Threats That Can Ruin Content Marketing for SMBs appeared first on Tricky Enough.

Affiliate marketing should be relationship-centric, meaning, that the relationships that a brand has with affiliate partners should be purposefully cultivated and nurtured. This includes individualized outreach and consistent communication in order to convey brand goals and get content creators excited about a brand.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s a time-consuming strategy and keeping a pulse on all affiliate relationships to ensure they’re representing your brand well and that they’re complying with FTC guidelines takes work. That’s why many brands opt for affiliate marketing companies who already have strong relationships in place and have affiliate marketing down to a science.

Have the affiliates – try the product out for themselves

This one should go without saying but I’m consistently surprised at how many brands work with affiliates to talk about their product but don’t actually send them the product. These kinds of inauthentic brand mentions lead to affiliate marketing’s bad rep. Good news is, it’s an easy fix.

When partnering with a content creator, it’s okay to have a theme for their post or idea for a campaign but you want to make sure you always leave room for creative freedom. In order for an affiliate to create content that is engaging and that their audience actually trusts enough to buy the product being written about, the affiliate needs to be able to organically incorporate your brand into their lives and thus their content.

Apply “authenticity filters”

Instead of reaching out to a bunch of content creators, be sure to vet potential affiliate partners for a content fit. They’ve curated an audience by being an expert on a topic so make sure that your brand aligns with the topics they write about to ensure success for your earned media.

Also, make sure content creators are engaging with their audience as this shows they will be proactive about promoting your brand.

For your earned content to not come across as spammy, make sure that your potential affiliate partners produce high-quality content. It’s a good idea to read through their content and make sure that too many of their posts aren’t advertorial to ensure that when they talk about your brand, it will come across as sincere.

Ensure Compliance

Familiarize yourself with FTC guidelines and ensure your content creators and willing to comply. Non-compliancy can result in catastrophic consequences for your brand. The FTC requires that content creators let their audience know that they are earning a commission from sales of your product. Additionally, they need to mark their social posts as #sponsored or #ad. Studies show that if a content creator is transparent, their audience still acts on their product reviews as they understand that a content creator needs to earn a living to keep producing awesome content. If an affiliate partner is dodging FTC guidelines, they are not a good partner for your brand and could do actual harm to your brand’s image.

Utilize Multiple Channels

Develop a multi-channel approach and have content creators share your brand on their blog, social media, guest posts and in their newsletters. When an affiliate’s audience sees multiple mentions of your brand, they are more likely to buy your products. Blogs are great for long-form content and will show up in search results for years to come while social media posts create a quick spark for your brand.

Implementing a multi-channel approach from the beginning of an affiliate relationship will ensure maximum exposure of your brand and enable your brand to come across as credible.

Define Clear Goals

To create a successful affiliate strategy, goals need to be established from the beginning so that your brand can steer affiliate partners in the right direction in order to help you achieve these goals.

For example, if you’re a b2b brand, direct your affiliates to a product page where they can register for a demo or download a piece of content. If you’re a b2c brand that sells a product online, equip content creators with a personalized link or code to track sales. If you sell the product in stores, consider having content creators drive traffic to a newsletter sign up or printable coupon page.

Clear goals like the ones I listed will help your affiliates talk about your brand in a way that converts and will build a strong foundation for your campaign.

Do you have any additional tips on how to break down affiliate marketing’s spammy reputation? We’d love to hear from you in the comments below!

The post 5 Ways to Breakdown Affiliate Marketing’s Spammy Reputation appeared first on Tricky Enough.

Gmail is one of the successful mailing Platforms. People use Gmail in daily life and is considered as one of the secure ways of communication. There are billions of people using Google Mail daily, but there are some unwanted emails sent and received. Now, these disturbing emails sent by spammers or advertisers are a real problem for a busy person.

You would have tried to unsubscribe to these annoying emails in Gmail. So, if you have not been able to find a way to unsubscribe from these emails, then you are reading the right post to get rid of these annoying emails. I was going through this problem also, as whenever I opened up my Google email account, I used to have a load of emails that irritated me. So, I found a solution on the internet which helped me to get rid of my problem within a matter of minutes. And I am going to share the same solution with you.

How you can unsubscribe the Annoying Emails in Gmail:

It is much easier than anything, but still, I will show you all the steps that will help you to get rid of these annoying emails. Unsubscribe tool for Gmail on which you can depend.

Read:

How to Get Rid of Spam?

Here are the steps for the same:

Step 1.  There’s a site named unroll.Me which can solve this problem for you. So, firstly visit this website. Click on the get started button which you see first.

Step 2. After clicking on the Get Started button, you will get a sign-up Screen. Now sign up with that Gmail account, for which you want to unsubscribe the annoying emails.

Step 3. Now allow access to your account to unroll.me. 

Step 4. When the next screen appears, hit the continue button. (Sometimes it may take a little more time to scan the subscribed emails) and after hitting the Continue button, you won’t receive the annoying emails. 

Step 5. Another screen will appear, with the welcome message. You can unsubscribe to those emails which you think are spam and waste your time.

Step 6. You are all done. You can share or tweet If you like their service.

It has worked for me, so I hope that it will also work for you. So, go ahead and try and let us know through your comments.

Suggested:

How to Free Up Space in Gmail?

The post How to Unsubscribe from Annoying Emails in Gmail? appeared first on Tricky Enough.