MatthewWolfe.com

Archive for the ‘Blogging’ Category

As you may remember, one of my New Years resolutions was to get back in to blogging with at least one post per week. I’ve got tons of ideas for new blog posts but I want to get a feel for what people like to read about. I created this cool little poll to get your opinions. If you wouldn’t mind letting me know what kind of topics you like to read about and respond to, I’ll have a better idea of what direction to take future blog posts.

I really appreciate all the feedback and all of the support you guys have given me over the past few months since I’ve dove in to internet marketing head first. It has been an amazing ride so far.

If you are curious about how I made this poll and how you can implement one on your site, check out Blogpolls.com. It literally takes about 4 minutes to set up a poll.

Please make yourself heard in the comments below. If there’s something you’d like me to talk about that is not mentioned in the above poll, let me know.

Thanks so much for you input!

So I have stumbled across quite a few amazing blog posts lately that have been really helpful. I thought it would be a good idea to round them up and point them out. Have a look at some of these links. I guarantee that you won’t be disappointed and that you will learn a lot!

Probably The Most Comprehensive List of Traffic Sources – This is a massive blog post with 21 places to generate boatloads of traffic. I thought I knew about most of the traffic generation techniques that were out there… Man, this article really proved me wrong. There is a ton of great stuff here!

59 Things You Should Be Doing But Probably Aren’t – This blog post is well over a year old but it is a great round up of all of the things you should be doing in your internet marketing business but probably aren’t. There is some amazing advice here!

Here are 3 plugins to boost your Wordpress SEO – Phil Morgan put together a short and sweet list of Wordpress plugins that will help your blog get to the top of the search engines.

12 Essential Security Tips For Wordpress – Well this sort of ties in with my little mishap from last week. Here is a list of things that you should be doing to make sure that your blog is safe and secure.

How To Position Yourself as an Expert – This is very relevant if you are in to blogs or mailing lists. You need to give people a reason to want to listen to you.

That’s my round up of awesome blog posts. I’ll be doing these periodically. What do you think? Do you like the idea of me pointing out some great posts?

So I woke up this morning and jumped over to my blog. I noticed that my theme was still installed and that I could still log in to my dashboard but that there were no posts on my front page. All I saw was a “Page Not Found” error. I logged in to my dashboard and saw that every single post and page that I have ever created had been deleted. I have no idea how this happened but everything was gone. The database that held all of the information on my blog had apparently crashed. I freaked out a little bit and then remembered that I had taken some actions to safeguard against situations like this. I spent about 5 minutes reloading my last backup and everything was back to normal again. I may have lost one or two comments that may have come in over night but, for the most part, it’s like it had never happened.

It is scary because if I hadn’t have taken a few certain actions a few weeks ago, I would have been unable to recover my blog. I figured that there are probably a lot of bloggers out there that may not know how to backup their blog or how to recover their blog from a backup. It is really scary because your blog CAN go down at any time for no apparent reason whatsoever! Read this post and maybe you can put yourself in a situation where a database crash is nothing more than a 5 minute fix.

The very first thing that you should do is download and install the WP-DB-Backup plugin for wordpress. It’s a free plugin and can usually be searched for and installed from directly inside your Wordpress Dashboard. Get that installed today. Once it’s installed set it up to backup daily and send you an e-mail with the backup. By doing this, you can jump back to any point in time and recover all the information that crashed. If you don’t update very frequently, you can also opt to backup weekly. I prefer daily because I know I can restore comments from the previous day as well.

Now… If your blog ever goes down and you have been doing a good job of backing it up, here is how you restore your blog.

1. Login in to your CPanel account and scroll down until you find phpMyAdmin

2. Find the database that your blog is installed on. The backup files that are sent to you from WP-DB-Backup will share the same name as the database you need to recover. So if you are unsure of which database to open, refer to the filename of your backup file.

3. Click on the tab that says import at the top of the new screen that just opened.

4. Click on “choose file” and find the backup file that you are going to use to restore your blog.

That should do it. Your blog should be back in all of its glory. Having a database failure can be extremely scary! Fortunately, if you take the right precautions from the beginning, it can be a very quick and painless fix. If you only have one plugin installed for your blog, make sure that it is a backup plugin. It will save you someday!

Please feel free to make comments. Have you had your blog crash? Do you have any questions about making sure you are protected against your blog crashing?

It is important to make sure that your blog doesn’t get stale. You want people to come back and see that you are keeping up with it. Sometimes, however, you are going to be away from your computer for long periods of time or you have some pressing matters that are going to make it impossible to keep up with your blog. If you know about these circumstances in advance, there is a way to make sure that it looks like you are keeping up with your blog without you having to log in and keep posting.

You can actually schedule posts for later. A lot of times, when I know I am going on vacation or something, I will write several blog posts and then que them up to post over the next several days. This allows me to be “hands off” on my blog while making it appear that I am constantly updating.

Here’s how you do it:

Login to your Wordpress dashboard, click on “Posts”, and then click on “Add New”. Then go ahead and write one of your posts like you would anyway. Now, under the “Publish” area on the right hand side of your screen, there is an area that says “Publish: immediately”. Click on the link that says “Edit”.

Now you can change the date and time that you want this post to update.

That’s it. That is all there is to it. You can do this as many times as you want to schedule up as many days as you want.

It is something that is really quick and simple, yet a lot of people ask me how to do this. So there you go. That’s how it is done.

Do you have any burning Wordpress questions? I can probably help you out with any questions that you have or anything that you’ve been trying to figure out how to do. I want to get back in to doing a couple of blog posts a week. Post your Wordpress questions and what you would like to learn and I will make more tutorials on how to do them. But first, don’t forget to check out my free Wordpress video tutorials at The Wordpress Classroom.

Ask your questions in the comments below and I will help you out if I know the answer!

Over that last three weeks I have built a blog to between 75 and 100 visitors per day, I have built a mailing list from 3 people to 65 people as of this post, I’ve made blog posts that have gotten over 50 comments, and I have created my own product (with two more in the works). I have also managed to average about $50 per day in affiliate commissions over the past 2 weeks or so. I am not writing this post to brag at all. In fact I want to explain to you exactly how I did it.

People ask me the question every day, “How have you done what you’ve managed to do?” They think that I had a huge head start or that I’m just some blogging genius or something. That’s not the case at all. I started this blog on July 1st. My Alex Jeffreys mentoring started on July 6th. That’s hardly much of a head start. I’m definitely no genius but I have made blogs in the past.

So what I will do is I will relist my acheivements here and then explain exactly what I did to get those results…

I have built a blog to between 75 and 100 visitors per day
The biggest thing that I have done here to gain the amount of traffic that I have gained is that I have helped as many people as I could in forums and I have commented on a lot of blogs. I have made it a goal of mine to assist anyone who asks for help in the forums and I either know the answer or know how to do what they are asking. I have also made it one of my daily tasks to comment on a minimum of ten other blogs per day. I usually end up posting on more like 15 per day. At least two of my comments every day must be on blogs from people that are not students of Alex Jeffreys.

I have built a mailing list from 3 people to 65 people as of this post
I have created a video series on how to set up and do tasks on blogs. I gave away the videos for free in exchange for opting in to my mailing list. I have consistently made a minimum of $100 per month in blogging and I intend to continue to create videos on how I have achieved this. The idea came to me after I began to receive the same e-mails over and over again from people asking the same questions about setting up or running thier blogs. I figured that if I created video tutorials, I could start sending them links to videos instead of explaining the same thing over and over again.

I’ve made blog posts that have gotten over 50 comments
This comes back to how I generated my traffic numbers. I have commented on a lot of blogs and a lot of people have returned the favor by commenting on mine. I have helped people in the forum or through e-mail who have come to my blog and commented as a thank you. I enabled the plugin CommentLuv on my blog so that people who comment get a backlink?to their latest article. I have also installed the top commentators widget, which puts a link to the people with the most comment’s blogs. I have also made it a rule of mine to reply to every comment that people make on my blog. This generates an almost community feel to the readers and commenters. This also drives up the comment count, giving social proof to visitors of my blog that I am someone that they should be reading.

I have created my own product (with two more in the works)
I have created my series of Wordpress videos based on common questions that I was receiving. I would have never gotten this started if it wasn’t for my mentor, Alex Jeffreys’ first coaching session where he discussed organization and getting things done. I decided that I need to set goals and create a path to achieve these goals. I started making daily task lists and I posted a list of goals on my wall. This has made me so much more focused and driven to keep moving on my product creation. I also need to thank Josh Bartlett, once again, because he has helped so much with the brainstorming and creation of my current product and the products that are in the works.

I have averaged about $50 per day in affiliate commissions
I have posted links to products that I use and endorse. I only endorse products that I can personally vouch for. If I haven’t used it, I haven’t promoted it. My mentor once said that you need to find the way cash flows and then jump in front of it. I believe I finally understand what he was talking about. One way that I have implemented this philosophy is to promote products that I use and I am affiliated with to people who are going to need them anyway. People come to my blog to learn how to blog. They are going to need a host and an e-mail list. I simply promote who I use for these services. I have offered up my link to people who are going to purchase the services anyway. That is simply all I have done and it has worked so far…

Anyway, this post was a little bit longer than I had intended. I wanted to be 100% honest and outright with every method that I have used to gain the traffic that I have gained. I feel like there are still so many more traffic generation methods that I haven’t even taken advantage of yet. I have not really leveraged social media outlets such as Twitter or Youtube, I have not attempted to promote through article marketing, I have not hunted out more forums in my niche to help out in, and I have not experimented with paid traffic for this site. There are still so many avenues that I intend to venture down to continue to build on the success of this site.

Please leave me some comments. I would love to hear if this was helpful to you or if there are more avenues that you would recommend that I venture down. I also intend to comment on any blog of the people who comment on my blog. Leave me some comments and let’s continue to build our network of blogs in to one of the best resources for internet marketers on the internet!