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Archive for the ‘How To’ Category

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?

Today I want to explain how I build my list so fast.
It’s been a while since I have posted a tutorial type post on my blog. Everything I’ve been doing lately has been about personal stuff. You’ve seen my Crib, learned 25 things about me, and met my new puppy. Today I want to talk about the one thing that will grow an internet marketing business faster than any other thing that you could possibly do. Of course I am talking about growing that mailing list. The bigger you can grow your mailing list, the more success you are going to have online. Whether you are promoting your own product or you are promoting other people’s product as an affiliate, the larger your mailing list, the larger your audience.

About eight weeks ago I had no mailing list. I had zero subscribers. I made it my 100% focus to build that mailing list as fast as possible. In a period of about seven weeks, I went from not even having an Aweber account to having a mailing list with over 1,000 subscribers. The cool thing is that I know for a fact, that I will double my list in less than one more month. My list grows at a rate of about 50 new subscribers per day. So it really should only take about 20 more days to completely double my list.

Why has building my list been my number one goal over the last several months, you might ask… You may also be wondering why I made the statement that building a list is the fastest way to grow an internet marketing business. Well, to answer both of those questions, internet marketers much wiser than myself have said over and over again that one subscriber on your list is worth one dollar per month. So if I am growing my list at a rate of 50 subscribers per day, I am growing my business by about $50 per month! If you do the math, I should have about a $3,000 per month business in no less than 40 days time at the rate that I am going.

So now that you know the importance of growing your mailing list. Let me share with you the top 3 techniques that I have used to grow my mailing list.

JV Giveaways - This was the absolute first thing that I started doing after I had a free product created. You can enter your free product in to these JV Giveaway events and every single person that has submitted a product, promotes the JV giveaway. This causes a massive flood of traffic to the JV giveaway and some of that traffic finds, and opts-in for, your product. JV Giveaways usually have an option to upgrade for a price. I tend to like to upgrade as well. Upgrading gets your product in front of a lot more people. I have done about 50% of my JV giveaways without upgrading and about 50% with upgrading. When I upgrade, I usually get about four times as many subscribers from the event than if I didn’t upgrade. JV Giveaways are the best way to start building your list before you really have many people on your list to leverage. For the sake of?convenience, I have started to compile a list of current JV giveaway events. I will make sure to keep this list updated as new ones come up and old ones shut down. You can find JV Giveaway Events Here. Bookmark that page because you are going to want to access these JV giveaways as soon as they come up.

ListJoe – ListJoe is a cool little site that I found that I don’t think is very well known yet. Basically, when you sign up for ListJoe (100% Free), you will be able to send out a mailing to 2,000 people immediately. That’s right, you will mail 2,000 people within 10 minutes of signing up. From that point on, you will begin receiving e-mails from other ListJoe members. For each e-mail you open, you will receive a certain amount of points. One point is equal to one person mailed to on your next mailing. You will receive a lot of e-mails per day but you can build up your points and send out to a list of about 3,000 per week. You might think that this doesn’t sound too effective because you are just sending to other ListJoe members. However, I have only sent 2 mailings so far and it has accounted for over 150 new subscribers. I would definitely not downplay the ability of this service. If you are interested in playing around with ListJoe check it out here.

Adswaps – Adswaps are probably the absolute fastest way to build your list up. However, adswaps are difficult unless you already have a little bit of a list built up. Basically, you are telling someone that you will promote their opt-in page to your list if they promote your opt-in page to their list. Most people will only do adswaps with people who have similar list sizes to their own. Adswaps are basically a way to leverage the list that you currently have. I have, however, asked people with lists much larger than mine to do an adswap and been surprised that they had accepted. So I would say that even though your list may be smaller than someone else’s, it never hurts to ask. You might be surprised at some people’s generosity.

Because I have made list building my complete focus over the last several weeks, I have decided to dive in deeper and explain some of the advanced techniques that I have also learned that I have used to boost my list exponentially. I want to teach people how I manage to grab about 50 new subscribers per day. To do this, I have created a two-week course that dives in to list building. The course is 100% free and each lesson is delivered to your e-mail. There is no site to log in to and you can save all of the information to your hard drive as you go. The course digs in to everything from the initial setup of a mailing list all the way in to super advanced techniques that can potentially build your list by hundreds of subscribers overnight. I also cover several resources to find things like adswaps and JV partners. You really don’t want to miss out on this free opportunity to explode your list over the next 2 weeks. To get started with the first lesson today, simply enter your e-mail address in the form below. Otherwise, please leave a comment with your list building tips or your thoughts on my list building tips.

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!

I hate SPAM – Your email address will be kept 100% secure and you can unsubscribe at any time!

So I have finally done it. I have finally opened up the video tutorials that I have been talking so much about. I have called my program The Wordpress Classroom. It has videos about setting up the blog all the way through installing various plugins and hiding affiliate links.

All of the videos are not done yet so I will upload more as they are finished. I just wanted to get this online and going so people can have access to them now. I know a lot of people from Alex Jeffrey’s course will get great use from these.

Please give me your feedback in the comments below!

I don’t know why I call these sneaky marketing tricks. They are really tricks that help you earn commissions but add value to your customer.

Offer a complement.
The main trick that I like to use involves adding a complement to the product that you are trying to sell. If you remember in my previous post about how to make a WordPress theme, I offered to personally create the theme for anybody who signed up through PowWeb. This little technique can be used for so many different products. I am a fan of the theme creator Artisteer, so I offer free tutorials and personal help to anybody who purchases through my link. If you can think of creative ways to complement the product that you are trying to sell, you can gain an upper hand against the competition selling the same product.

In the past, I have also pushed products through Clickbank. This method works extremely well for digital products as well. The trick that I like to use is that I look for areas where the e-book or digital video product may be lacking a little bit. I then explain to my readers how this product lacks. But then I offer a complement to the product to offset the deficiency. It is an insanely powerful marketing method. The whole idea behind this method is that you are grabbing people who would buy the product anyway but convincing them to purchase it through you instead of somebody else.

Offer your product for free.
The other technique that I commonly use is to flat-out offer a really great product for free. Give the people who are going to be reading or using this product extreme value. When somebody accesses your product and they see what great value you offer, they are going to want more, and they are going to want to purchase your follow-up products. This technique also relates to list building. You offer your product for free in exchange for an e-mail address. Once people realize the great value that you are giving to them for free, you will have them on a mailing list to offer your follow-up products. This technique only works if your free product is truly a great product. If you offer the people a crap product, they are going to think that your paid product is crap as well.

Only promote products that you feel strongly about.
Many online consumers have an ability to see past insincere product promotions. It is important to promote products that you have used and that you feel strongly about. This works in two ways. First, it is so much easier for you to write about it because you feel strongly about it and you understand its worth. You can honestly recommend this product and feel confident that the people you are recommending it to will enjoy it as well. Besides, if you are offering a complement to the product, how will you know what to offer or how to offer it if you do not really know what you are promoting? The second reason this is important is because most online consumers can feel your passion and your sincerity towards the product. It is so much easier to sell a product. When you know exactly what you are promoting and exactly how your customers will benefit from it.

Use some of these “tricks” and watch your commissions grow. Have any other tricks or want to let me know how these have worked for you? Please leave your comments. I love the interaction.