You ever have a vendor or an agency come on board and you name or password? Or maybe they requested to be an admin of your Facebook page, but email address because you don't know what email address is That's what this episode's all about. Managing the information for your digital infrastructure.
This pertains to not only small business owners, but medium and I've seen this so many times over the course of the past 20 And if you really think about it, it's the equivalent of the check on your breaker box and you don't know where that is. How is that possible? He's going to say, wait, you don't know where your circuit I mean, if what happens if the power goes out and you need to know where that is, that's bad news for your business.
And your digital assets, like your Facebook account, your your website. I mean, if it's as vital, if your website goes down and of importance as if you're power goes off inside of your business items, then you need to listen to this episode because the fact your website or you don't know who's hosting your website is a I mean, this is a digital age. So it's like I said, it's the equivalent of one of your of business and you don't know where things are located and you start. All right.
So the first topic that we're going to cover is how do I find All right. Step one is, do you have the information? No, Joe, I don't have it. So let's move on to the next topic, which is how do I find So if this is pertaining to your website, there's multiple ways information. If you have your domain name handy, which you do, it's your If you have that address handy, and I'm going to put these links All you have to do is run.
It's called the Who is and it tells you who's responsible for The reason why we start with the domain name is nine times at a Your domain hosting company is going to be the same person who the actual files to your website. I know a lot of people will say, no, that's not true. But let's be honest, everyone knows who GoDaddy is. They're a household name. And GoDaddy used to do domains, and then they had hosting.
And now they make it really easy to just say, all right, if domain with us, you might as well host it here too. So a lot of people go with GoDaddy, and they host the So if it's hosted on GoDaddy, if your domain is on GoDaddy, most is also on GoDaddy. So that's step one. Okay, so you found where your website domain name is. How do you know if it's hosted there? So let's just take an example. You know, obviously I can't go through all of the examples.
But one great example that's probably pretty universal at So you go to log in to GoDaddy. If you forgot your password, that's fine. You just hit the button. This has forgot password. If you don't have access to the email address associated with have a little bit of a larger problem. But it's still manageable. You reach out to their support.
And what they do is they either help you with finding out what Or if you don't have access to that email anymore, then you do jazz, which is you send them your driver's license or some shows that you are the owner of that website. This is not going to be like a month-long process. I do this all the time. It takes less than 24 hours. Sometimes it takes less than a few hours. If your verification goes through quickly. But you'll be back up and running in no time.
And once you have access, what you do is in your account. At the top, you're going to see a menu. And this might be outdated because they change their Every couple of months, God only knows maybe even tomorrow. Somewhere you're going to see a menu, just like how on a regular contact us. There's going to be a menu up there. It might look like a hamburger. It might look like nine dots. Or it might actually say view your products, view your along those lines.
What you're looking for is view your domains. Okay? When you go to that page, you're going to see a list of names, a Some of them might match your domain. Some of them might not because their other domains purchased in and optimization, whatever it may be. But if you see your domain there, then you found your That's step one. You can verify that you are on the right path. And if you don't see it, but you saw GoDaddy in the who is scam, on a different GoDaddy account.
So how you would solve that is you can reach out to GoDaddy ask them, you're a customer. Don't forget that just because GoDaddy is just big tech You're still a customer. So they want your money. They want to help you because they know they'll be getting So what you do is you reach out to one of their support guys. They have a chat or you call them up. And you tell them, I don't know what account my hosting is Here's my address. Here's my WWW address.
And nine times out of ten, you're not going to have a They're going to be able to help you within a couple minutes. And you might actually identify yourself. What's your business name? What's the address of the business? They have to make sure you're not just somebody of the street website. So, but anyway, once you verify the desk where your domain is actually go to the hosting section of GoDaddy. Now, this is really important for this part of this tutorial.
The most important thing you're going to look for is either it's or CPANAL or there's a couple of other ones like business plan. If you see a product in there, okay, and don't, you know, a lot this is technology. I don't know what this means. Stop it. If you view a list of products in there, just read what it As I say, the locks hosting does a basic hosting, anything with And you know what?
If you don't, if you don't see it right away, go to the billing You know, if you got charged for, you know, something you know, Verizon or any or optimum. It's the first thing you're going to do. You're going to talk to the billing department, right? And you're going to say, wait a second, what was I charged for? This is the same, this is the same approach for your hosting. There's no reason why you can't treat your hosting vendor as you like a utility provider. There are utility also.
So just ask them these questions or call them up. They will walk you through this. It's not really difficult to go through this step. A lot of people are just so scared and afraid because as they think that you need to be, oh my God, you have to be an engineer or you need to be the smartest You really don't to get this access and to get your username for you if you just log in is the simplest step and this is Am I expecting you to code a website?
All you're doing is finding out if you could log in to your at the end of the day, if you don't have somebody who's doing person doing it. So this is the point of this episode is to help you manage So let's say you log in, you have your hosting plan and it or CPAD or something like that. Congratulations because you have now, you now have your username log in to your domain as well as your hosting. Remember, they are two separate things. You might have your domain hosted with Google.
They might be your domain associate or name cheap.com or your hosting on a little box somewhere sitting in someone's God only knows, but your domain and your hosting you now have step. You're not at the mercy of somebody else or you're not at that you once had that you fired three months ago and you don't You now have it. So this is really good. So now that you have it, what do you do? What do you do with this information? Do you write it on a sticky pad and you put it in your draw?
Is that going to help you if you're out to lunch somewhere that says, I'm trying to buy some e-commerce products and Is that going to help you? That little sticky note that's in your draw? I don't think so. So what we're going to be discussing in the next couple of passwords? What is a secure environment to store my passwords? And most importantly, how am I going to access that in case of I mean, nowadays, everyone has an iPhone or an Android device.
They all have modern technology built into it. Web browsers like Safari or Chrome, where you can access If your website goes down, you literally can access your Most of the time when websites go down, it's not even a It could have been your credit card expired. I mean, over the course of the past five years alone, I that I could think of and I didn't do anything. All I did was ask the client, did you update your credit card provider? And you guys do get the emails.
The problem is these companies send out so much spam that of junk. It goes to junk for me and I own an agency. It's just the way it is. So it's difficult. So sometimes you have to add stuff to your calendar. I mean, Jesus would all the assistance that we have with I mean, you name it, we got it. So there's no reason why you can't set a reminder in your Hey, renew your new credit card information and go daddy.
Again, if the electric company couldn't charge your card and you bet you're actually going to make it a top priority and say, got to make sure this is taken care of. I mean, obviously, you know, if the worry about that because a lot of these domain companies, they do either monthly or yearly years. I mean, who's going to remember to update a credit card in five Putting in your calendar. This is, you know, this is not difficult.
So basically what you want to do is you want to get something You might have heard of a few of these. There's one password. There's Dashlane. There's a whole bunch of them. One of them that I think is really user friendly and is know, small business owner who wants access to their passwords is one password. I'm going to put a link in the description that's going to give password this way. You know exactly what I'm talking about.
And when you create an account, it's going to walk you through One password was made for consumers for regular everyday So they're going to make it extremely user friendly for You don't have to be a tech guru to use this application. And this could be installed on your laptop. This could be installed on your iPhone. This could be installed. You can access it on the web. This way you can view passwords.
But the most important aspect of this is the fact that when you on your iPhone, a really cool utility built into it is that you store your passwords within Safari, they have the equivalent What does that mean? That means that you don't have to store your passwords inside And what this allows you to do is the same way that you would Facebook.com or whatever it is. You can do that with one password and it's very native.
So I'm probably going to release a video on how to set this all But to get started and to just get things moving, download one and start storing your passwords in there. All of them. Every single password that you would use. Even if you think you're not going to use it, put it in there Because one day you might turn around and say, you know what? I need a password and I can't find it and this will help.
If you're a small business or a medium business and you don't to take over things right now, like handling your marketing, anything, you might not think that you need one. And that's fine. You might go a year, two years, three years without an agency. Well, the sudden year four, you say, you know what? We got some revenue and we're starting to gain traction for Why don't we invest in some marketing or why don't we do a All right, great. You hire the agency. They're all excited.
They go, oh yeah, let's do this. We'll start next week. We could sign quickly. Oh, okay. Next week's not going to work for us because, you know, you Like my hosting, my Facebook, all this stuff. I don't have any of that. I don't have it ready right now. That's not good. So this one password thing will help you because the set of You could now tell the agency, oh yeah, you know what?
I'm going to add you guys to have shared access to my And what this is going to allow you to do is you can now log in, You could take care of our domain name and all that stuff. And there's no delay that can happen same day. We could sign the contract. We could start next week. Great. We have everything we need. You'll be really surprised as to how that changes the view of the I know this feeling. I go through it all the time with new clients. I say to myself, my God, how is it possible?
They run these guys run such a successful business. Yet they don't know what their Facebook login is. And it's not a good look because it as a business owner, it You know, you're not coordinated. I mean, just pretend that that was a customer and they asked And instead of you knowing what the price is by looking it up I put that price on a sticky note in my draw somewhere. The customer is going to say, wait, why don't you even know And you don't know where to find it?
I mean, I expected to know, you know, oh yeah, that's true is a No, but it's going to look it up in a computer, right? Look at that. You're you looking it up in a computer is already telling the They got everything. They got their stuff together. They were organized. But now, if an agency doesn't have that same feeling, they're ah, these guys really serious about this because they don't It's not a good look.
And it's not going to help you at all with what you want to tools available to you in the timeline that you need it. Now, you may be wondering, well, Joe, why would I want to give And you are absolutely correct. That is not the point of this episode.
The point of this episode is to let you know that you should so that you can access these accounts and invite the proper Now, I know you must be wondering, why don't I just use I mean, I already have all my other personal passwords in One of the major reasons why you shouldn't use those passwords is what if you don't use that web browser today? And you might say, oh, no, I use that all the time. There are some websites that aren't Safari friendly. They aren't Google Chrome friendly.
They aren't Microsoft Edge. Well, internet explorer used to be its own thing, but Microsoft Anyway, but the point is, you might not use that browser. And then if you need access to that password, now you're stuck. Whereas, if you have something like a one password that they if you want to go that route or you doesn't matter, you just and or on your desktop and then you hand type it in.
Whatever approach you want to take, the browser passwords are There's I'm not saying not to use them, but it's not a place centrally store information other than passwords as well. So these other pieces of information that will come in For example, going back to the whole GoDaddy example, just doesn't mean you're no way you're account ideas or your If you've ever had to reach out to GoDaddy support, you know what is your account ID and what is your support pin?
So what you can do in one password is you can actually note inside of there and you'll have your account ID and your place to store that because it's encrypted and you will only have It's not going to be on a sticky pad somewhere. And the benefit of that is that now, let's say you do hire to your one password business account. You can do that safely It's not like, oh hey Jennifer, we just hired you for social username and password. Remember to store that somewhere safe.
right? No, they're going to just do their job and log in and where they store it. Whereas you can control this a little bit a one password. You're not going to give them access to your No. So this is a good way to start to get into that habit of through the application, not actually verbally writing it You know, might not be a big deal at first. You might say, oh you fire them and the next day you don't know, you don't know change a password or put up a
post. That's an insulting post So you want to take control of this that you could manage this Something like a one password is step one for managing your this was the first thing that I wanted you to do. You know, it's all of this information, all of these user accounts and just This is where you store it inside of a one password. And If you have trouble, just send me an email, my email is also in And I'll help you walk through it. I mean, it's, you know, it's a difficult application to
manage. It might take a little to get the flow of things, you know, to get used to you logging Maybe you don't trust it at first. That's fine. A lot of you to put your bank account or your social security number in safe because it's encrypted. You know, start small start with your, you know, your Facebook, uh, username and password, you might be able to recover. That's not something that's like people don't treat these accounts like their utilities.
and you can't log into it and your customers are asking you It's snowing today. Are you guys open or closed? You know, the are, you know, when you start getting all these responses from gee, oh, man, how can I make this easier? This is how. So go one password, not password one, one password. And once that's there, I promise your life is going to be 100 times easier. where I guide you through other aspects of how you could manage This is the information that lives and greets with your
this is your online identity. So this is why you have to keep it