How To Manually Clone A WordPress Blog Without A Plugin

By Robert Plank

Let's say you're moving web host or you are setting up an exact copy of your WordPress blog for someone else and you want to clone or copy your WordPress blog to a new location. How do you do it if you don't have a plugin?

The answer is use phpMyAdmin to dump your database, download all the files, upload them back to the new site, setup WordPress, setup a database, import the database, and adjust your configuration file. Here's what you want to do when you're cloning or copying a WordPress blog. Manually back it up and manually restore it.

What does a WordPress blog actually consist of? It consists of files and a database. What you do is go into your cPanel's phpMyAdmin area. If you go into your site.com/cpanel, you will be able to find a link to phpMyAdmin. Once you're there, find the database where WordPress is stored and there should be a tab that says "Export." What you can do is click on "Export" and then this will save a .sql file containing your site's database.

An easy way to even get to phpMyAdmin is to install a plugin in WordPress called phpMyAdmin. It can run as plugin and you can still get to that entire database just in case your webhost does not have a cPanel area.

You download that .sql file but that contains just the database and that's it. You need the files as well, so connect to your site using FTP and download all the files in that blogs folder. Yes, the config file, the WP-content folder, WP-includes - all those files and folders, you should download them right now using FTP. It might take a while but wait for it all to finish.

Now you have manually backed up your WordPress blog and it's time to go somewhere new and restore it. FTP up to your new site and what you should do first is setup a new WordPress installation here. What we have to do is go into the cPanel of your new web host, setup a WordPress database user, and grant that user permissions to that database.

In cPanel, there is a link for a mySQL setup wizard that will guide you through this process. It will ask, "What's the new database name?" Just call it blog. "What's the new username?" Call it blog. "What's the new password?" Make a password and write it down. Now you have a new WordPress database that will store your files.

What you want to do with then is then go back to phpMyAdmin in you cPanel and upload this .sql file. This will restore just the database but not the files yet. What you will then want to do is FTP up those files that you had downloaded. Now you are setting up your files as well as your database.

The final step is to edit what's called the WP-config.php file. What you'll notice is that in that file, it is pointing to the old WordPress username, password, and database and you will have to edit this to point to the new WordPress, the new blog database you setup with the blog user and the password you wrote down.

Finally, you will have to make one single setting in your WordPress config file and add the following line of code:

define('RELOCATE', true);

Adding that one single line of code to your WP config file will tell WordPress that we're moving it to a new location.

Now all you have to do is log into your WordPress site using the same username and password that you originally had in your old site. If all went well you have successfully cloned your WordPress site without using any plugins. You use phpMyAdmin to dump the database, you downloaded all the files, you setup a new database, imported the SQL file, uploaded all the files and made the one change to the config file to point to the new database and also to relocate to a new location.

Do you want to backup and clone and restore your sites the easy way in a few clicks in a just a few seconds instead of the tough way? Use http://www.BackupCreator.com right now to do that.

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Why You Don't Make Money With Your Blog

By Paul M Ventura

Yesterday I made a post about how to make money from your blog. Today I'm going to address the reasons why you DON'T make money with your blog.

You Don't Take it Seriously - By not taking blogging seriously you're in the wrong mindset and consequently will not make money with your blog. If you treat it as more of a fun hobby or thing which you are trying, you will not succeed.

You Don't Spend Money On It - Getting started in blogging on the path to make money with your blog requires a financial investment, albeit a small one of at least registration and hosting. Sure you can get a free blog setup from WordPress.com and they'll host it on their site for you, all for free. But that comes with ad support, and you're really helping to promote the WordPress site rather than your own. That's time and potential money down the drain, so you want to make sure that you're always promoting your own brand to help yourself. This is why it's paramount that you secure your very own website to work from and establish as your home base because for every second that you're benefiting someone else's business, that's time you cannot get back.

In the same vein, bloggers who don't spend money are more likely to quit earlier because it's much easier to quit when you haven't made any kind of financial commitment whatsoever, which brings me to my next point.

You Don't Stick With It - Making money in affiliate marketing requires serious work and it's never more important to stick with it than it is in the early days when you're not making any money from it. In the past it was easy to throw up a review of a product and rank that page/site pretty quickly. It's a different game now where substance and multiple page sites perform the best in terms of conversion rates and in the search engines.

You Don't Treat It Like a Business - Businesses require a serious commitment of time, money, and effort, and blogging is no exception. You have to treat blogging as a legitimate career to expect legitimate results. You have to look at blogging like something you want to make money from and you deserve to make money from. Once you get in that mindset, you can begin creating better content and getting on the path to success.

Now let's talk about how to make money from your blog by clicking the link in this paragraph.

OR you can sign up for my free 10 Day Fast Track Training Course which is a completely free email/video based course designed to teach anyone how to make serious money through affiliate marketing. Check out this video to see how quick and easy it is to make money in affiliate marketing when the path is laid out clearly right in front of you without costing you a dime.

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Blog For Money Successfully

By Brandon Michael Young

Blogs can be very profitable if they provide value and are done correctly. To be successful, you must be able to grab the attention of your target audience and the search engines. Here are five tips to start turning a profit from a blog.

1) Pick a popular niche that you enjoy talking about. Keep in mind that you must be able to write about this topic on a daily basis. Keyword research tools will give you the information you need to pick a good niche. Using the tool, the Google keywords tool, is my favorite, you should type in various words or synonyms for words describing your potential niche, and see how much traffic there is, as well as the amount of competition for the target keywords. You need to have a laser focus in this game to be successful, and know that you cannot always compete in certain niches. A niche with a small following could be more profitable if there is no competition in it. To turn a profit, it is not about hits. It is about making money, sales not hits.

2) You need to update your blog regularly. Plan to set aside an hour per day to do this. This is essential. To have fresh, unique content on a regular basis will make your site appear better to search engines. To not post for days or weeks is a recipe for failure. Any readers you do have will lose interest and stop checking for updates. To be sure, irregardless of how knowledgeable you may be about a topic, it is hard to create content on a regular basis. At times when you cannot seem to come up with anything fresh, it will be beneficial to hire a ghostwriter to write for you. Without content, you will never successfully blog for money.

3) You must get traffic to make money from blogging. There are several ways to get traffic. Paid advertising, forum posting, search engine optimization, article marketing, and social networking are all methods you should consider. Paid advertising is the method that will get you the quickest results, but it is also the most costly. It may be possible to turn a profit from paid advertising in niches which are not competitive, but I would not count on it. Typically it will cost more per click than it should. In my opinion, the most effective long-term strategy to make money from blogging includes going out there are creating high quality back links to your site through article marketing. This method of building traffic requires time and effort, but is also free.

4) Monitor your traffic statistics. No comments does not necessarily mean no visitors. Many people do not leave comments but they are returning visitors. Many visitors are just there to read what you have to say. Pretty much every blog has a method of monitor incoming traffic and telling you where it is coming from. Constantly monitoring your stats will help you to know what works and what does not. If you stop doing the things that are not working and start concentrating on the things that are, you will be able to get more money from your blogging efforts.

5) Pick a way to make money from your traffic. You can sell your own products or affiliate products, make money from AdSense, charge people to post their articles, or sell space on the blog for advertisers to put their ads. It really does not matter what you choose, just make sure it is relevant to your audience.

Brandon Young has been blogging for a couple of years. He has more experience than a lot of people, and wants to show people how to make a little extra cash by doing so. If you are interested in making money by blogging, go to http://www.toblogformoney.com.

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Ways To Encourage Blog Participation

By Liza C Panuncial

For every new blogger, it is discouraging to see the readers participating less in general discussions on the blog. Blogs are the best way to generate traffic for your website. Hence, user interaction is necessary and should not go unnoticed. Some simple ways might help you in providing the users with some extra incentives so that they may participate more in your blog.

1) Make it easier for your readers to comment on your blogs. There are some blogs that ask the readers to sign up before they comment. Though, this takes only a minute or so but can act as the main barrier. Doing this is sometimes and irritating and the readers might avoid commenting at all. Most of the blogs that ask for a registration are looking forward to avoid spam. Now, there are a lot of automated tools that help you remove spam.

2) The second thing to keep in mind is the topic that you choose for your blog and the conclusion. Choose a top of your interest and gather the latest information about it so that you can connect with the readers. Also consider ending with a question or a query that the readers might be interested to answer. The content of your blog is very important as it defines whether your readers will be interested or not.

3) Include a link on your blog to your RSS comments feed in addition to your RSS posts feed. Be sure to update the head region of your HTML to include the comments feed as well. In WordPress, this can be done by modifying the header.php file of your current theme to include the line highlighted in red below.

4) Your readers should also be rewarded for their comments. You can announce a list for the best commentators and you may provide them with some special deals and offers. You can also include the website URL that the commentators left while commenting. You can include the URL in the top commentators list. In WordPress, this can be done easily with the Show Top Commentators plug-in. Those utilizing WordPress Widgets can make use of the My Top Commentators plug-in.

5) The last and the best thing you can do is to send an e-mail to your readers whenever a new comment is posted on your blog. Doing this too much might annoy the readers. Make sure they get e-mails related to the posts they commented on. This can be done easily in WordPress with the Subscribe to Comments plug-in.

Netvani is a Social Media Monitoring and Marketing Tool to help you expand your presence in social Media.

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The 3 Basic Principles Of Effective Business Blogging

By Dan S Smith

Although simply a resource that was used on a personal basis for many years, blogging has blossomed in the business world in recent times, with more and more businesses realising just how beneficial having a business blog can be to their organization as a whole.

The problem that many businesses face is that although they have often heard of blogging and understand it in its most basic form, this is where their knowledge ends and once they've got their business blog set up, they don't know what to do next to get it off the ground - and keep it off.

If this sounds familiar, the following three points should be read, read and read again, as they are what are considered to be the three basic principles of effective business blogging.

1. Knowledge of your market - although you might think that this is a given, as if you're a business owner looking to develop a business blog, you're going to understand your audience, this unfortunately isn't always the case and it's far too easy - and common - for business to produce blog posts that bear little relation or are of much use to their audience.

Business blogs are to be utilized first and foremost as a way for a business to communicate with their customers, but if you don't know your market, you're going to struggle to produce relevant content until you take the time to develop your understanding of the people you're aiming your products and services at.

2. High quality content - whether you produce it yourself or you hire someone to do it for you, the foundation of any successful business blog is the provision of content that's both in high in respects of its actual written quality, as well as in terms of what's being written.

This is a part that's often misunderstood, but there's absolutely no doubt that one well written piece that focuses specifically on your target market is always going to have more of an impact than half a dozen poorly written pieces that are only slightly related..

3. Understanding of a blog's capabilities - it's hard for many to believe that something which is in effect so simple can be gotten so wrong so regularly, as many people use a business blog to do nothing more than upload content, when the truth is they have so many capabilities.

It's not a necessary requirement to utilize a blog to its full extent, using every single feature that the platform offers,but it is important that you're aware of what a blog should be used for - communicating with your customers - and know how to get the best from it for your own needs, as it's always best to master small sections a little at a time, rather than using every single aspect at once, but doing so badly.

Business blogging is something that every organization needs to be doing to develop their online presence and although it might seem difficult at first, these three principles are what make up an effective business blogging strategy for any organization.

Launched in 2011, The Blogshop is a Digital Management Consultancy that solely concentrates on increasing your online and social media presence by offering cost effective and quick responsive business blogging services.

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Business Blogging and SEO - 3 Reasons Why They Go Hand In Hand For Any Business

By Dan S Smith

When any type of business is looking to increase their online presence, they'll generally look at Search Engine Optimization (SEO) in some shape or form as a starting point.

In recent times, business blogging has seen a distinct increase in popularity and although some see it as simply a way to communicate with customers, it does in fact have a number of SEO benefits, with these three explaining why the two resources go hand in hand perfectly for any business.

1. Blog posts can produce backlinks - one of the most basic principles of SEO is that links from other websites pointing to yours - known as backlinks - are needed to increase your rankings in the search engines.

This is, of course, a basic understanding of backlinks and there's a number of aspects to consider, such as the quality and relevance of the website from which the link is coming from and the anchor text that is being used, but generally speaking, the more quality backlinks you can receive, the more likely it is that you'll rank highly in the search engines.

And while a business blog shouldn't be the sole website from which you receive your backlinks, there's no reason why it can't supplement your other link building efforts.

Furthermore, as your blog will be closely related to your business, you're likely to see a lot of click-through traffic, too.

2. Google loves quality content - something that has been specifically realised since Google implemented its Panda update in early 2011, the higher the quality of your website and the content that's on it, the better search engines such as Google will rank it (again, this is a basic explanation).

Therefore, if you can have a business blog full of high quality content, it would be expected that Google would rank this higher in the search engines for certain terms over a competitor's business blog full of poor quality content.

3. It makes your business more visible - the primary aim of any SEO campaign is to develop the level of organic traffic that the business receives and the simple way of doing this is to increase the online visibility of the business.

While a new business blog isn't likely to drive thousands of visitors to your website, what it will do is provide another website where people can begin to learn and understand about your company and link your brand with the products and services that you offer, instantly increasing your business's online visibility.

As tempting as it can be to simply focus on one online resource, such as SEO or business blogging, the best online strategy for any business includes taking aspects from every online development method and this information shows just how SEO and business blogging work so well together.

Launched in 2011, The Blogshop is a Digital Management Consultancy that solely concentrates on increasing your online and social media presence by offering cost effective and quick responsive business blogging services.

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5 Steps To Gaining More Followers On Your Business Blog

By Dan S Smith

Having a business blog and utilizing it effectively is fast being considered one of the most imperative things any business can do, as just like SEO - search engine optimization - and social media resources have done over the last decade, there's a growing amount of proof that business blogging can do nothing but have a massively positive impact on your business.

One of the issues that a lot of people have with business blogging, however, is that although it might seem easy in principle, it can actually be particularly difficult to implement an effective business blogging strategy yourself, with one of the most difficult aspects being the gaining of more and more followers.

Therefore, if you're currently struggling to get more people reading your business blog, take a look at implementing these five effective methods.

1. Write quality content - it might sound simple, but that's because it is, as one of the best ways to gain more followers to your blog is ensure that all of the content you're publishing on it is of the highest quality possible.

And although you might think you have good writing skills, it's always worthwhile getting a second opinion, as apart from saving you time, hiring an agency to produce your blog posts will also ensure the quality of the content is as high as it can be.

2. Publish regularly - while you don't have to be putting up new content every day, it is recommended that you get into a regular routine, uploading new content at the same time every week.

The reason behind this is that because people are creatures of habit, you'll find that your readers prefer to know when there's going to be new content available and so if you can publish fresh content at the same time on the same day once or twice a week, you'll be doing your utmost to ensure your follower level doesn't drop and continues to rise.

3. Interact - the primary aim of business blogging is for the company to interact with their customers and therefore if you have a blog and are using it to simply upload content to, you need to take some time out to start replying to comments, as simply put, this is one of the main reasons why people leave comments.

4. Get involved with other blogs - for people new to blogging, it can be difficult to get their around this aspect, but the truth is that generally speaking, the more you interact with other blogs in your industry, the more popular your blog becomes, as people see your blog through your comments (this also has a particularly positive effect on SEO).

5. Understand SEO - although it seems like everyone now considers themselves to be an SEO expert, most people know only the absolute basics and in many instances, the knowledge they do have is out of date.

By taking the time to learn the basic principles and techniques of SEO and implement them into your business blog writing, you'll see that your blog ranks higher and higher for your chosen keywords in the search engines, naturally increasing the level of organic traffic.

Getting followers to your business blog isn't as easy as many believe, but as long as you understand these five techniques and are willing to spend the time implementing them, you can be certain that you're doing a substantial amount of work towards gaining more followers to your business blog.

Launched in 2011, The Blogshop is a Digital Management Consultancy that solely concentrates on increasing your online and social media presence by offering cost effective and quick responsive business blogging services.

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