All Entries Tagged With: "online business"

The Benefit of Backing Up Your Blog

Blogging has become one of the top ways to market your business online now-a-days. Many entrepreneurs have turned to blogging as a means to expand there business organization and get their message out to an online community who is looking for what they have to offer.

 

While it is very easy to start up a blog for free, there are some things to take into consideration if you are seriously looking to explore blogging as an avenue to market your business. Although entrepreneurship and online business is the main focus for my blog, there are obviously many other genres of blog subjects that people are blogging about online. However, my goal is to provide topics geared towards entrepreneurs.

I want to share a couple of incidences in which I almost lost all of the content to my blog. It is not a good feeling when you have put so much hard work into your blog and it is all lost in an instant. After about a month of creating this blog I was attempting to upgrade my blog to WordPress 2.5 for the first time and I wound up somehow triggering something within the control panel of my hosting site for this blog.

Although I was only within a month of having started my blog, it felt like I put about 2 months worth of work into it. After all of the hard work that I put into my blog with in that first month I wound up loosing it all. I will never forget the feeling I had when I went to view my blog after so-called "updating it" to WordPress 2.5. Many WordPress users may still remember the very first custom blog entitled "Hello World", that comes with WordPress when a new blog is set up. That is all I saw when I typed in my blog address at www.JarrodClark.com. My blogs didn’t show up, my theme wasn’t there everything was lost.

I had another instance today (the day I published this blog). I was installing a plugin to the plugins folder for my blog, and although I was aware of the fact that after installing a plugin to your blog, you should always go back to your blog site and refresh the page to make sure that the plugin doesn’t interfere with the operation of your site.

Not thinking I installed the plugin and about 10 minutes later when I totally forgot that I installed the plugin I went to refresh my blog and guess what… it was all gone. Those same feelings came flooding back from when I lost all my blogs the first time, I just couldn’t believe it. All I could remember was the hard work that I put into my blog. I tried to think if I saved all of my blogs on file. Then I thought to back track all of the steps that I’ve done. After deactivating one of my plugins and refreshing my blog’s home page, I saw that all of my blogs have been retrieved. Needless to say, I will not be using that plugin, ever again.

I was so thankful that all of my blogs weren’t lost. This was a learning experience for me because I am now making an oath to myself to save every blog post and organize it into a folder on my computer as well as the pages. This situation gave me a big scare, as it would scare anyone who have worked hard on their blog, because I just could believe that I lost it all again.

I took out the time to save the html version of every blog post and page in a folder and title them accordingly. I thought that by saving the html version instead of just the plain text version, I would also be saving the pictures, the links, related articles and the subscribe form that are at the end of every post. If you save the plain text version, you won’t save the pictures or the links you will only be saving the plain text.

I am not condemning saving the plain text version because after all,  saving something is better than nothing. However, I realized that if anything ever happened to where I lost all of my blogs again I would not only want to upload the text as it were before I would want to upload the pictures and links in the same way just as they were before.

I must say that it is not the fault of WordPress or Hostgator, (the hosting site I use). WordPress is the most amazing blogging resource and it is the safest most reliable blogging tool available, if you host your own blog. It was a mistake on my part number 1, for not knowing exactly what I was doing in the upgrading process of my blog and number 2 not having backed up my blogs in the first place.

If I could encourage you to do anything I would encourage you to back up all of your blog information, it could be a life saver. If you have many posts I would advise taking out some time to save just a few a day but nonetheless, save them all.

To your success,

Jarrod  Clark

 

 

 

10 Must Have Web Sites for Online Marketing

Provided here is a compilation of useful sites that I refer to often within my daily online business ventures. By sharing these sites it is my sincere hope and desire to shed some light for entrepreneurs in the areas of online marketing, web site optimization and site advertising. Here are a list of a few websites:

 

1) Freekeywords.wordtracker.com/

This is a great site for searching keyword phrases that are highly searched. This site is great because it highlights the most used keyword phrases in connection with a single keyword. I go here often when I’m keyword brainstorming and searching for a host of particular keyword phrases.

2) Alexa.com

This is an extraordinary site that will give you a ranking based on the incoming traffic that your site receives. This is a great site to refer to when building your traffic and attempting to achieve a higher ranking to your site.

 

3) Directorysubmitter.imwishlist.com/

Directory Submitter is a great software program. It is free to download and easy to use. With Directorysubmitter you can input your information such as your name, website name, title of your site, description of your site and a few other variables only one time and DirectorySubmitter will provide hundreds of free sites where you can submit your website for free. DirectorySubmitter makes it much easier for you by automatically submitting your information into these sites and all you have to do is click send. Go here and take a look at the video and it will give you a short tutorial on how to use Directory Submitter and how it can benefit you in getting free one way links to your site.

 

4) Articlesubmitter.imwishlist.com/

Article Submitter works in the same way Directory Submitter does except you’re submitting your articles to online article directories. Like Directory Submitter it’s a great tool to attract viewers to view your content and to your website. With Article Submitter, you only have to input your site and article information once and Article Submitter will provide you with hundreds of Article Directories for you to choose from. All you have to do is pick which sites you want to submit your article to and Article Directory will automatically submit your information then you’ll just hit send. Just that easy. Go here to download and view a short tutorial video on how to use Article Submitter and how it can also benefit you in gaining exposure to your articles.

 

5) Toolbar.google.com/

This site gives you a free downloadable google toolbar that can be placed at the top of your internet browser. It’s very helpful because it gives you the google page rank of every page you visit. It has a google search bar there so you don’t have to go to google’s home page to search for a term you can just key it into the toolbar and it will take you strait to the SERP listings. I use it and I have found it to be a very good resource.

 

6) LinkPopularity.com

Link Popularity is the total number of websites that link to your site. LinkPopularity.com is a great tool for finding what sites are linking to your website or your competitors websites. Go here and scroll down to the bottom and key in the website you want to analyze backlinks.

 

7) "SEO Made Easy" free ebook

Through out many of my blogs I’ve mentioned Brad Callen’s free ebook "SEO Made Easy." It’s a wonderful tool for webmasters or bloggers who are optimizing your pages. The link to download the free ebook "SEO Made Easy" is http://www.homebiz-direct.com/SEO-made-easy.html.

8 WordPress.org Blog sites are one of the many ways to voice your thoughts on certain ideas or topics. Many bloggers will blog to gain an audience in an attempt to expose their personal life, politics, business, or an effort to market their business online. WordPress.org is a free site that gives you access to a more secure blog site which gives you more tools and freedom than some of the many well known blog sites such as blogger.com and others. WordPress also offers many plugins that you can download for free at: Wordpress.org/extend/plugins/ However with WordPress you will need to host your blog.

9) Hostgator.com Hostgator.com is a hosting site that supports WordPress. It offers a hosting plan for about $4.95/month which in my opinion is well worth it due to the security that you get that some of the free blogging sites don’t offer. Just as an FYI, for $7.95/month you can host an unlimited number of sites through hostgator.com.

 

10)online-income-101.com/series/becomea/blogger.html

For those of you who have tried Wordpress.org or are in the process of setting up your blog, the above link features outstanding hands-on tutorial videos that take you step by step on how to set up your blog. I know for me, in the process of setting up my blog the tutorial videos just mentioned were very helpful. I have found all of these sites to be conducive in my daily online business ventures. I was fascinated by how useful these sites were and thought I’d put them on here and provide awareness for many entrepreneurs. Many of these sites are are well known but for someone who is just starting these tools could be a lifesaver. And indeed… that is what my ultimate reason for starting this blog is to provide awareness and help smooth out some of the rough edges in this long but well worth it journey of online marketing.

 To your success,

 Jarrod Clark