So far some of my monetization strategy has been working well while other parts have not. This post will be short and outline what has gone well, what has gone poorly with Rev 0 of my monetization strategy and what Rev1 of my strategy will include. (more…)
It has been a busy month and I have enjoyed a lot of the outreach work I have been doing in my niche.
The focus for month 2 of my authority site was to continue to produce a lot of content along with my main promotion strategy of guest posting.
I also started monetization of my site and have made some ok money for just starting out under 2 months ago. (more…)
One of the most critical blogging tasks is performing routine backups of your blog. Maintaining frequent backups will keep you from losing all of those articles and custom theme changes that you’ve worked so hard to make. From personal experience, losing a week or more worth of articles and losing 3-4 months worth of theme changes hurts. Unfortunately, I’ve been there.
Generally, most hosting companies provide backups of your WordPress blog, but they generally combine all of your files and the underlying database into one very large file that is tedious to work with. In order to do a full-restore, you will often need to engage your hosts support staff, which can take time. Most hosting companies also only provide backups as a courtesy, meaning it’s probably not best to depend on them.
With all of these factors in mind, I’ve found it best to do blog backups myself. There are a number of different options you can use. I’ll cover my initial method and the option I currently use which is a fully automatic solution with Backup Buddy – I don’t even think about it.
I first started doing blog backups using the plugin WP Database Backup. This is actually a really great plugin that gets the basic job of backing up your WordPress blog done for free. I configured WP Database Backup to do daily backups and then email them to a special Gmail account I set-up. The big drawback with WP Database Backup is that it only backups up your WordPress database and not the rest of your blogs files.
To get a full WordPress backup, you not only have to backup your WordPress database, but also your blog’s files as well. Backing up your files isn’t automated with WP Database Backup. In order to get your files backed up, you’ll need to use FTP to download them. In a nutshell, this is manual, tedious and timely, especially if you have a big site. Blogging with Amy has a good write-up on this process.
I actually used this process for a few years. The big problem I ran into was that I had constant and automated backups of my WordPress database, but would always forget to backup my theme files. Unfortunately this bit me a few times. Also, being a manual process for the most part, doing blog backups is time taken that could be better spent doing other things on your blog. I prefer to spend my time doing activities on my blog that help it grow, like writing content. This is even more true for me currently, as I have about 10 different sites I maintain and have to manage backups for.
An often overlooked and critical aspect of backing up your blog is offsite storage. Many new bloggers make the mistake of running backups and storing them on the same server as the blog. As a result, if your hosting company has an issue, or if you accidentally delete your backup directory, you’re toast. After your backups are complete, you should always copy your backups to offsite storage. As I mentioned above, my blog database backups were going to GMail as the offsite backup, and I stored my theme backups locally on a USB drive. Again, tedious and time consuming.
Last year, I ran across a plugin called Backup Buddy. Backup Buddy is a commercial plugin that completely automates backing up your blog. The plugin not only backs up your WordPress database, but your WordPress files as well. I read over the feature list and concluded this was the solution I had been looking for. Then I saw the cost and hesitated.
Backup Buddy isn’t all that expensive really, I’m just pretty frugal when it comes to my side business. I generally don’t spend money on plugins or software. In the case of Backup Buddy, I made an exception and ended up purchasing their Developer license so I could run the plugin on all of my sites. Here’s why:
Again, Backup Buddy is fully automated. You spend about 10 minutes setting it up, and that’s it. I configured Backup Buddy to send me an email each time it performs a backup. The email just gives me peace of mind and confirms my backups ran (or failed if there was a problem). That’s it. I don’t spend any time at all and know for sure that all of my sites are backed up. No manual downloading, no zipping, no copying files around. While estimating time saved is a bit difficult, I would expect the automation has saved me 1-2 hours a week at least.
Backup Buddy will send your backups, immediately after they occur, to an offsite storage location of your choice. I personally use Amazon S3. The size of my backups for about 10 different sites is small enough to where my S3 storage costs are literally less than $1 a month.
Backup Buddy supports storage to Amazon S3, Dropbox, Rackspace Cloud, email and will even FTP your backups to another server for you. They even recently announced Backup Buddy Stash, which gives you 256MBs of free offsite backup storage. I’ll continue to use Amazon S3 for now, as I prefer to keep my services separate and Amazon S3 is a highly reputable storage provider.
In the event you ever need to restore a backup, doing so is incredibly easy. You download the Backup Buddy import file and save it to your blog’s root directory along with the backup file you want to restore. Access the import file via a web browser, and follow the restore wizard. You can literally have your site restored in minutes.
Not only does the restore process work for restoring backups, but it also works just as well for site moves. If you need to move to a different host, you literally take a backup of your current site, copy the import file and backup file to your new host, run the import file and your site is now up and running on your new host. No need to install WordPress, Backup Buddy does this for you. I’ve also used this same feature to make test sites that are copies of my production site. This allows me to play around with various theme changes or plugins prior to installing them on my main sites.
To see a full walkthrough of a Backup Buddy backup restore, read my article: Backup Buddy – How to restore your backups.
You won’t find me promoting many products or services here on Side Income Blogging because I only promote products and services I actually use. Given I’m a bit frugal, I don’t use that many. Backup Buddy is actually the only commercial plugin I currently use. I’ve found the cost to be very well justified in time savings and peace of mind alone.
Visit the BackupBuddy site now to read about it’s features and purchase your copy. This is a WordPress plugin I strongly recommend to all of my clients.
The highest quality of link that is easily obtainable is through guest posting. By following this straightforward plan I have been able to guest post on some very popular personal finance sites and launch my authority site and earn some website income (shown below).
This post is going to be a step by step tutorial showing exactly how I use outsourced team members to help with my guest posting campaign…
Update – 2016
What if you want to guest post BUT… don’t have the time and want to just get a service to do all the hard work for you?
One of the more popular articles in my Start a Money Making Blog series is the article on how to set-up Feedburner. The article teaches you how to set-up set-up Feedburner for RSS and email. While the article does teach you how to add a link for email sign-up, it doesn’t go into the details on how to add a Feedburner email sign-up form to your blog. Adding an actual sign-up form to your blog, rather than a link is one less step for your visitors and can result in a significant increase in email subscribers. This article will show you how to add a Feedburner email subscriber form to your blog’s sidebar.
Before we dive into the details of adding a Feedburner email subscriber form to your blog, let’s talk about a question many of your may be wondering: “Why Feedburner vs. AWeber?”. For those that may not know, AWeber is the defacto standard for email marketing. AWeber excels at building email lists and sending out emails to those lists, including your daily posts. AWeber is absolutely the platform you will want to migrate too at some point. The problem? AWeber is $29.00/month. Well worth it, if only if you have $29.00 per month to spend.
I tend to be on the frugal side, and I always strive to have my blog pay for it’s own services. I’ll be migrating to AWeber very soon, but Feedburner has served me well for almost 2 years. While basic, it gets the job done.
I’m going to assume you’ve previously followed the steps in my how to set-up Feedburner article. If so, you already have email set-up and working. Of course, you’ve subscribed to your own feed to confirm it is working right? If not, go ahead and do that right now…I’ll wait.
Oh, you’re back, good! Now let’s get that Feedburner email form added to our blog’s sidebar. Here’s how:
While certainly very basic, your visitors will now be able to subscribe to your blog via email using the form. These types of forms convert far better than the previous link we had. If you know a little HTML or CSS, I highly recommend styling it a bit so it blends into your site a little better. Also, one of the first things I do is remove the “Delivered by Feedburner” at the bottom. You can do this by editing the widget we just added, and removing the following code from the code you copy and pasted from Feedburner:
<p>Delivered by <a href="http://feedburner.google.com"target="_blank">FeedBurner</a></p>
I highly recommend you test out your form to be sure it’s working at this point. If so, we’re done. If it’s not working, just walk back through the steps to be sure you did everything completely. Pay particular attention to the step where you copied the Feedburner code and make sure you got all of it.
There has been a great deal of speculation by bloggers recently about the future of Feedburner. Feedburner recently had an issue where it showed zero subscribers for almost a week, and Google recently make the Feedburner APIs no longer available.
Is Feedburner dead or dying? Honestly, I have no idea. Google hasn’t announced any plans for it’s demise, but on the flip side they really haven’t done much to it lately either. I intend to continue using it for as long as I can. When it’s no longer available, I’ll consider other options like FeedBlitz.
Given Feedburner’s questionable future though, I am mitigating my risk a little. I take a weekly backup of the email addresses for my subscribers. I’ll not only use this as the starting point for AWeber when I make the switch, but it also provides me a little protection in the event Feedburner just goes belly up one day.
To make a backup of your Feedburner email subscribers, do the following:
What are your thoughts on Feedburner? Think it will hang around for a while or is it on the way out? Have you made any changes to your blog as a result of the uncertainty?
Photo by: GabrielaP93
