by Robert Plank

Your WordPress Dashboard, Theme and Plugins Explained

Whenever you’re dealing with anything slightly technical, there are going to be many terms you’ll need to know about. But luckily, with a blogging platform such as WordPress, there are not too many terms and once you know them, you won’t have to remember them. You’ll just be able to use them. And with WordPress, you log into a dashboard. You choose a theme and you might add additional plugins to your blog so let’s talk about what all those things do and why they’re all very important for you.

First of all, when you have a website, when you have a WordPress blog, people see the front end of it. They see the content that you have already written. The comments have already been posted. But how do you write that content in the first place? You log in to what some people call the back ends or the control panel or the administration area. But WordPress keeps it simple and calls it the dashboard. You log in and it shows everything you need to know right there. It shows the post that you’ve written. It shows comments that might need to be approved or any kind of problems with blog. It’s the WordPress dashboard and you can log in to it by going to whatever the address of your WordPress site is and add /wp-admin to the end of it. Once you go there, you will be able to do anything. Add new post, delete post, rearrange post, change navigation. Do any of that stuff from your WordPress dashboard.

But if you have a brand new site, the first thing you’re going to want to do is to set up the design or appearance or what’s called the theme of your WordPress blog. Now, your theme is the whole template, the layout which means that if you decide you want to have a blog with a black background and white text, go and find a theme that has that already assigned for you. If you want to have a design with a huge header graphic then find a theme that does that for you. If you want a design with one sidebar, one sidebar on the left, on the right, with 3 sidebars, find a theme that’s already done that for you. And there are literally thousands of free WordPress themes and even more paid ones where you can click a few buttons by going to Appearance, Themes, Install a new theme and you can search their huge directory of WordPress themes to install right away. You install the theme and it changes the entire look and feel of the design of your website.

So you’re thinking, “That’s great. I go in my dashboard, I can change posts. I can edit themes. Now, what are plugins?” Well, plugins are more of the functionality, what the blog actually does. For example, have you seen blog posts where there’s button for someone to retweet it, to retweet your blog post to send it to Twitter to tell your friends about it? Well, that is due to a plugin. Someone installed a Twitter plugin that added a button to every post on that site. And so now, even if you change your theme from a black background to a blue one, that Twitter button will still remain. You might have seen some WordPress blogs where they add a discussion area or a forum to it. Well, that’s a plugin. There are plugins that will actually allow you to add a message board, discussion forum to your WordPress blog. There are plugins that will allow you to add a pop up box to your WordPress site. That is also a plugin. So you can see that the theme controls the way the blog looks. The plugin controls what the blog actually does.

So I hope that when you log in to your WordPress dashboard, in addition to saying what kind of content, what kind of post you can add or change or edit or delete, you also get that youc an change the theme or the design or the look of your blog with a few clicks and install or move or change plugins which add additional functions to your blog. So go ahead right now, log in to your WordPress dashboard and have fun.

Make sure your WordPress blog is safely and securely backed up at www.backupcreator.com.

Backup, Clone & Protect Your WordPress Sites
Using Backup Creator

by Robert Plank

WordPress Posts, Comments, Pages and Categories Explained

I’m not sure if you already use WordPress or if you’re simply researching WordPress but you might have seen some of these terms thrown around such as posts, comments, pages, and categories and I want to explain them to you right now.

First of all, the simplest thing to understand on a WordPress blog is what’s called a post. When you think of a blog, it’s a journal. You see that someone has posted on January 10th and they have something to say. It might be a video, it might be text but there is a list that starts from top to bottom of different journal entries. And usually, the newest one is at the top and this is very basic. It’s very simple. If you want to add new stuff to this website, just go Post, Add New, and now you have added a new journal entry anyone can read. Now if there are too many journal entries that go off the page, people can click and view older posts. Perhaps on the sidebar, they can view previous month’s content but a post is just a journal entry.

Now when you have this journal entry or post, you can allow others not to edit it but to add their additional comments underneath. And what’s cool about WordPress is you can choose to either not allow comments, allow comments or allow comments but moderate them and choose which ones actually get shown to the public. So underneath that every single blog post, someone can click on the actual blog post and type in their name, their email address and their website address and say their additional comments.

For example, if you had a new journal entry or blog post about different kinds of sail boats or if you preferred motor boats to sail boats and someone had a comment saying, “Well, I know that you prefer motor boats to sail boats but I prefer sail boats for this reason and this reason.” And then you can respond back to them in an additional comment. They responded as well. Comments are a discussion that happens underneath a post. So that’s very basic, posts and comments under a post.

But you can also have pages in the blog. Now let’s say that you have this journal and you posted every week or so. But someone wanted to know what was this blog all about. You would have what’s called an About page. And usually this is a link at the top and someone could click on this and they get to this page which is not really a weekly update. It’s just part of the site. It’s part of the site’s navigation.

You would also think, “I want to have a way for someone to contact me privately.” You might add a contact page and this would be another link at the top so you would have these pages that are listed left to right at the top of your WordPress blog. These are pages. Now you can set this up where someone can leave comments under a page. So for example, if you have your About page and someone wants to say, “I like what you’re all about. Congratulations, you did great.” They can leave a comment or you can close comments on pages as well.

A very important distinction, there are posts which are your journal entries that go from top to bottom. There are your pages which are your navigation which have no date, which go from left to right at the top. And you can have comments on either one or none at all.

And the final thing I want to help you out with is this idea of categories because you will probably only have a few pages but you might have many posts, maybe even hundreds of posts over a course of time. And to make it easier to find, you might want to categorize these posts and you might want to say, “Well, this post belongs in the sail boat category.” So if someone wants to see all of the times you’re talking about sail boats as opposed to other kinds of boats then click on the sail boats category and find just those posts talking about sail boats. If they want to find other times they’re talking about motor boats then click on the motor boats category and see all those posts.

But here’s the cool thing is that a post can belong to many categories. So you can say this post discusses sail boats and motor boats and when someone clicks on the motor boats category, they can see all the times you mentioned that. They’re very important. Pages do not belong to categories. Categories belong to posts only.

Just to recap, a blog has posts and pages. Comments can belong on a post or on a page but a post can belong to a category, many categories in fact, but that it is. I hope that clears up a few things. Now you have your blog and your blog will contain several categories. The categories will contain posts. The posts will have comments and off to the side, you will also have pages or navigation such as the About page or Contact page on your WordPress blog.

And the best way to figure all this out is just install WordPress on your own, mess around and see what happens. But after you install WordPress, be very sure to back it up so it’s in a safe place and use www.backupcreator.com to make that possible.

Backup, Clone & Protect Your WordPress Sites
Using Backup Creator

by Robert Plank

What Are WordPress Blogs Not Good For?

If you’ve heard or you’ve seen WordPress, you’ve been surprised how many millions of copies are downloaded every year and how many large and small sites use this blogging platform to host, not just their blogs, but their authority sites, their sales letters and the membership sites and even their entire businesses. But there are a few uses where WordPress blogs are not appropriate.

For example, in a single page website and you’re going to use your website where there’s lots of coding involved. But WordPress is good if you have lots of content wants some navigation and want to host multimedia. If you’re just trying to set up a very, very simple one, very quick website, in just a few minutes, I would recommend you use a regular HTML editor instead. You can still buy HTML templates and have them look any way you want and most of you wouldn’t know that cPanel which is included in most web posts has what’s called a file manager. And within that, actually has a wysiwyg or a what you see is what you get visual editor where you can edit web pages right there on your website and see them exactly as the finished product will look.

But I think that a single page website with nothing else on it is overkill to set up WordPress on. WordPress is a blogging platform where you can install many pages, many posts, have sidebars, have comment, have multiple authors and contributors and it simply takes more work to remove all that stuff in a default WordPress installation than to just get an HTML template and upload it and customize it.

In addition, if you want to use a very complicated coded website, WordPress might not be for you. For example, if you’re setting up the next YouTube or the next Twitter, that might be more appropriate to just code by hand since it is not exactly a blog. But on the other hand, if you are setting up a blog, most sites are blogs or at least, most sites contain pages of navigation. So if you just want to set up a simple web page with text, with video, even with some interaction, WordPress is good. But if you want to have a crazy website where no blog makes sense, where no blog looks at all like what you have in mind then WordPress is not for you.

But on the other hand, if you want to have a site that you can set up very quickly, that’s very easy to rearrange, to add content to, to put with audio and video and images and see exactly the way it will look and be able to change it instantly to get any number of themes and plugins to change the look and functionality then WordPress is for you and you should use that to host your blog, membership site or sales letter starting today.

Set up WordPress right now and back it all up to protect yourself at www.backupcreator.com.

Backup, Clone & Protect Your WordPress Sites
Using Backup Creator

by Robert Plank

Use WordPress to Host Your Content

WordPress is probably the best website creation tool ever invented on the internet. You should use it to host your content whether that content is a series of sales letters, a blog or journal with information or even a protected membership site or a mix of all three. With WordPress, changing things and editing content, adding new content is all point and click. It contains many built-in beautiful themes. You can add multiple authors or contributors to your site and it’s easy to add multimedia such as images, audio, and video.

Unlike many website creation tools, WordPress is point and click. And I know many people who have run WordPress websites for years who don’t even know how to ftp files to their website. And you don’t have to either. To install WordPress, go on to your cPanel, go in to the fantastical area and find WordPress. In a few clicks, you have a WordPress blog that’s installed.

Once that blog’s installed, picking a design or a theme is easy. Just go to Appearance and Themes, click to install a new theme and you can search for anything you want, any kind of color scheme, number of sidebars. And in a few clicks, data is stored as well with no file transfer required.

If you want to edit any kind of functionality to your site, for example, add a Twitter button, add a Facebook Like button, add video to your site, click a button and it’s done. One thing that many people don’t know about WordPress is that you can add multiple users. You can add other administrators like you who can control the entire blog. You can add other people who can only post content. They can’t change anything. They can only add content. You can add people called contributors who can contribute content but you only add their content if you choose to.

And in addition, you can even add subscribers to your blog which means that you can add a protected private membership site where someone needs a username and password to get access, to get entry. But once they’re in, all they can do is read your content and possibly comment.

And finally, adding images and video to WordPress is very easy when you are adding a page or a post. You can click one little icon and upload any video or any image directly from your computer right there to the WordPress blog. That’s where you use WordPress to host your content because it’s point and click. There are many beautiful themes that are free, that are paid, that are being added every day. You can add multiple authors to their site and there are all kinds of functionalities, all kinds of extra plugins you can add and many things are built in that you wouldn’t even have dreamed of such as adding video or images to your content with just a few clicks.

Once your WordPress blog is set up, you need to back it up and protect it. Do that at www.backupcreator.com.

Backup, Clone & Protect Your WordPress Sites
Using Backup Creator

by Robert Plank

You Should Use WordPress as a Membership Site

If you’ve ever considered using a membership site of your own and if you’re wondering which platform you should use for your membership site, you should use a membership plugin such as WishList Member which installs on top of WordPress. The reason for this is because WordPress is always updated and approved and has all the features you need to run a membership site while also being very intuitive and easy to use. Use WordPress as a base for your membership site and then install a WordPress plugin such as WishList Member to act as the membership site gatekeeper because WordPress allows to easily add lots of content. It has lots of quick membership plugins and the code has been tested.

In WordPress, to add a piece of content is very easy. Go to Posts, Add New, fill in the form and boom! You have a new post or page in your membership site. WordPress is also a full blown content management system which means you can grant access to other people for them to add content to your blog. It’s very easy to even import lots of content in bulk using WP Import so it’s in everyone’s best interest for you to use WordPress as a base and then install a membership plugin to handle the payments.

There are lots of quick membership plugins and membership add-ons for WordPress and they will support pretty much any payment processor that is in use including PayPal, One Shopping Carts, Click Bank and many others. All someone has to do is pay you. And even if someone does not have a 1ShoppingCart account or a PayPal account, for example, all these processors handle normal credit cards. So if someone has a credit card, they can fill in that form and pay whatever price you ask to get access to whatever your site is.

And in addition, most WordPress membership software has this idea of levels which means that you can add bonus modules or digital courses or just sell multiple products from the same WordPress website very quickly and easily. And unlike a lot non-WordPress based membership plugins, the code for WordPress has been tested. If something doesn’t work, doesn’t make sense, it is fixed and repaired quite quickly and it is improved over time. Even if you use a simple membership plugin that only handles a few features, most of what you want to do is built into WordPress, not into your membership plugin. The membership plugin mostly handles the payments and WordPress does the cool stuff.

Use WordPress as your membership site, install a membership plugin on top of WordPress to handle the payments and set it up right now before someone else beat you to it.

And once your membership site is set up, make sure to back it up so you don’t lose all that hard work using this plugin, www.backupcreator.com.

Backup, Clone & Protect Your WordPress Sites
Using Backup Creator

by Robert Plank

Set Up and Sell Drip Feed Sites Using WordPress

You might have heard of a technology called a drip feed site. This means that someone comes to your website and they see some content. They see several blog posts you may have made over the course of the last several days, weeks or months. They come back days later and you have added new content and they don’t necessarily know if you’ve gone in and added that content manually or if it was already going out on a schedule.

And what’s great about WordPress is that drip content is already built in. All you have to do to drip out content on your WordPress blog is add a new post and change the date that the post comes out. By default, when you make a new post in WordPress, it will be dated now, today. But you can back date a post. You can date the post as if it came out a month ago. But you can also forward a date a post and set it to be a week from now. Now, what happens when you make a new WordPress post and set it one week in the future? It will become scheduled. No one will see it in public. But a week from now, it will automatically go live and appear to everyone.

This is very powerful because you could, in theory, write 52 blog posts, space them out a week apart and now have one year’s worth of content. And these are the steps to having a drip feed site set up. Create the content or plan it, at least, import it and then change the dates when it drips out on the schedule.

Adding content to WordPress is easy. Log in to the back end of the dashboard by going to whatever your WordPress blog address is and adding /wp-admin to the end. This will give you access to the WordPress dashboard. Now, go to Post, Add New, and it will as you what do you want the new title of this post be? What do you want the content of this post to contain? What do you want the categories to have and so one and so forth. Fill this out, click publish, and now the post is live.

There are many plugins that will import big batches of content such as WP Import. And what you can do is upload a zip file containing several text files and this could contain hundreds, if not thousands of different blog posts that will appear on your blog. Import all this content and now you have all the blog posts you’ll ever need. And maybe, these blog posts contain links to other sites. Maybe they contain images and videos. This is all content that’s part of your blog.

And finally, what you can do is change the dates that these posts appear. If you go to click on post and view the list of posts, you can very easily click on the quick edit link underneath many posts and change the dates so that they are spaced out over time and they don’t all appear on the side at once. In fact, Google and other search engines like it better if a site grows gradually over time. And humans like it better too because that means that they will not be overloaded with all kinds of new information.

And what’s great about setting up a drip feed site like this is that instead of just selling some book you’ve written or selling some articles you’ve written, you can sell someone this site with content ready to be dripped out over the course of a year. Content that you wrote that is exclusive to this person buying it that is now being dripped out slowly over time with affiliate links, with banner ads, with text link ads, with an email subscription form, all that slowly grows for them over time.

To set up a drip feed site, first of all, add or import your content and then change the future dates so that it is scheduled out over time. And now you can simply back it up and sell them the back up for them to restore any place they choose.

Complete the final step and back up your site so that it can be restored somewhere else at www.backupcreator.com.

Backup, Clone & Protect Your WordPress Sites
Using Backup Creator

by Robert Plank

Sell Your Content Blogs with Packs of Content

When you’re trying to make money on the internet, especially from flipping sites or selling virtual real estate, a domain name on its own is not worth very much. And even if your domain name is worth something, it’s worth a lot more if it contains content. Because think about it, if you own a very high demand domain name such as a .com name with one or two English words that’s very short and has a high search volume, people would want to buy that domain name because it will get them lots of traffic. But that’ll be worth even more if you did something with the traffic before they even had access to it.

For example, what if you took that high value domain name and wrote and developed lots of content on a site to get lots of traffic, to get lots of high page rank, SEO ranking, to get lots of pages listed in Google which now people can use to link somewhere else? What if you set up an opt-in form on that web page and built up several hundred subscribers per day? And now when it comes time to sell that domain name, you’re selling not just the domain name, but a domain name, an already developed website, lots of high page rank, lots of organic SEO results and a large number of subscribers. Now that domain name can sell for many multiples of what you would have sold before.

In that line of thinking, a domain name on its own is almost worthless. Whether using it on your own or selling it to someone else, it’s worth a lot more if you build it up. And the best way to build it up is using a platform called WordPress. WordPress powers all kinds of popular sites including CNN, Tech Crunch and more. And you can make it look any way you want. Sites entirely made of video are hosted on WordPress. Magazine sites, multi-author sites or just simple blog journals are all run on WordPress.

Get your content set up. All the categories, pages, videos, and fill it up and start measuring what kind of daily traffic do you get. If you have ads, what kind of daily profits, income, do you get from that site? And now when you list this on Flipper or Site Point, you’re not listing just the domain name, you’re listing a business in a box. You’re listing a site that has traffic, that has search engine rankings, that has consistent income which is much more valuable than a simple .com name.

Build up that site, list it on Flipper or Site Point and as an added bonus, offer to back up your site and restore to the location of their choosing using a simple back up plugin. What back up plugin, you ask? Use www.backupcreator.com to back up, restore, and clone all of your WordPress sites starting today.

Backup, Clone & Protect Your WordPress Sites
Using Backup Creator

by Robert Plank

How to Use WordPress as a Membership Site

You may have heard that WordPress is the best platform for hosting your very own download area or protected membership site where you can charge a one-time fee or a multi-fee for access to content. You can use WordPress and install it as is and use any WordPress plugin and easily manipulate, add any content the way you would with any WordPress blog but you have the added benefit of charging for your information. The pieces to get this all set up are to install your WordPress blog, to install a membership plugin and protect it and then set it up to make it work with a payment processor such as PayPal, Click Bank or One Shopping Cart.

The very first thing to do to set up your own membership site is to first of all, install WordPress. I highly recommend you use a web host that has cPanel such as HostGator or BlueHost. What you’ll do is go to whatever your site’s web address is, /cpanel and now you will be in the back end of the control panel. Then click on an icon that says fantastico. And then on the site, click WordPress. This will allow you to set up a WordPress blog wherever you want. I recommend setting it up at your site/members. That way, people can go to whatever your site is, name/members and have access to that membership site.

Now we have set up a brand new, blank WordPress blog with nothing on it at your site site/members. And now we have to protect it and install a membership plugin. I recommend WishList Member. This will install right into WordPress and protect your content.

So now what we have is a WordPress blog that’s set up but now, no one can access it. You need a way for people to be able to pay us money to then get access to our membership site. But this is very important. You don’t have to charge a monthly fee to have a membership site. You can charge 1 single payment and that gives someone lifetime access to your protected download area. And it’s actually very easy.

First, you have to get an account at a site like paypal.com. They will allow you to accept payments over the web and your money will now be placed into this online PayPal account. And once you have accrued several thousand dollars, you can then transfer it out into your bank. So you don’t get paid right away. The money doesn’t end up in your bank account immediately. It gets put into this PayPal account which you can then transfer. So sign up with a business account for free at paypal.com and they will take a percentage of every sale you make but that is how it is done on the internet.

Once your account is set up inside WishList Member, click on the Integration tab and they will give you some very simple, about 5 or 6 steps of instructions to configure WishList with PayPal. Once you’re done, you will end up with a link. Now when someone clicks on that link, they will be sent over to PayPal to pay you a one-time or recurring fee and then redirect it back to your membership site where they will have the account set up for them. Now if they refund or cancel, they will lose that membership access. But if they remain a member in good standing, they will keep that membership access as long as they need it.

And that is how you set up WordPress as a membership site. Install your WordPress blog. Install your membership plugin and configure with a payment processor.

Now that your WordPress membership site is set up, let’s back up and protect it using www.backupcreator.com.

Backup, Clone & Protect Your WordPress Sites
Using Backup Creator

by Robert Plank

How to Choose Between a Self-Hosted WordPress Blog Or a Remotely Hosted Blog on Blogger or WordPress.com

When people are talking about WordPress, they may be talking about wordpress.com which is the remotely hosted version of WordPress that’s free or wordpress.org which is the self-hosted version of WordPress which is also free but it costs you money to host that site on a webhost such as HostGator or BlueHost. If you’re deciding betweeen your remotely hosted site like wordpress.com or remotely hosted like wordpress.org, you should definitely be self-hosted because when you’re self-hosted, you have control. You don’t get your site banned for no reason. You have customization. You can do anything you want with the site and you have migration. You can put the site anywhere you want and you don’t have to worry about it going anywhere.

The big problem with sites such as Google, YouTube, Blogger, WordPress, Flickr, and others is that someone else is in control. If you get reported for spam or for terms of violation, even if you’ve done nothing wrong, some of these services will delete your account for no reason, with no checking up on you to see if you actually are at a fault.

It doesn’t make any sense for you to spend thousands of dollars on traffic or to spend hundreds of hours on content to set up a site that might be deleted at a flick of the switch. If you’re serious about building a site, spend the $10 a month with HostGator. Get a site and set it up your own way because when you set up a site your own way, you can customize what you do. You can install plugins that you never would have been able to use on a regular wordpress.com site. Different plugins to collect email addresses and opt-ins to host video, to run a form, to run a membership site… all the things that the big actual established sites use. So when you host on your own, you can customize it and do anything you want.

And if you ever decide you want to expand out, make more sites, move to a new web host, you can. And when some of these will only host sites that’s very difficult to export your site and to put it up somewhere else.

In addition to all these other reasons, one thing that really scares me about remotely host services as some of their other terms of services, it is exactly stated that they own the copyright on all of your information. In the terms of services, it is exactly stated that they can remove service for any reason that they choose, including no reason whatsoever.

I would say don’t risk it, host your own site. Don’t use Blogger. Don’t use WordPress.com. Get your own web hosting account at HostGator or BlueHost. Download wordpress.org and use that as the platform for your website, your sales letter, your blog, and your membership site right now.

Go to www.backupcreator.com to back up, clone, and secure your WordPress site right now before anything happens to them.

Backup, Clone & Protect Your WordPress Sites
Using Backup Creator

by Robert Plank

Backup And Clone Your WordPress Blogs For Ready-Made Content For Local Businesses and For Money Making Sites

When someone talks to you about backing up or cloning a WordPress blog, I want you to get creative. I want you to think about how you can use it to save time and make more money. When you are backing up and cloning a WordPress blog, you are cloning not just the design, the theme and the settings of that blog but the content as well. That’s why you can use your cloning technology to deploy ready-made content, to deploy a functioning website for local businesses and also set up brand new money-making AdSense or e-commerce sites.

It’s very tedious to add content to WordPress. If you have 100 pieces of content, 100 articles you have to copy and paste every individual title and post content one at a time unless you have an Importer plugin. But once that’s all setup, once that is all loaded into WordPress with all the proper hyperlinks, with the settings, now you can put this on a new site.

What would happen if you wanted to put all these content on a brand new site? Very simple, back up the site, restore it somewhere else. Now that the content has been restored, you can change the theme. You can move the content around to different categories, set it up on a drip, do whatever you want. Now you have ready-made content either for a public blog or a paid private membership site.

A great magic trick to use for this backup and cloning technology is to show local businesses how quickly you can get their website online. Just imagine if you set up a dentist blog with a dentist theme and some dentist content. You went to a dentist office and you said, “I want to set up a site just for you that shows a map to your business, hours of operation, maybe some videos, maybe some content,” and you can do it right there on the spot. Open up your laptop or pick up your iPad, tap a few buttons and now you have made a copy of this dentist site and you can change it to show that dentist’s name, their information all with a few click of a mouse or a few taps on the screen because you backed it up, you restored it, and you made changes to that restored site.

Finally, you can set up brand new money-making sites by cloning a blog. Think about a site where maybe you have 100 or 1,000 different pieces of content with affiliate links or AdSense ads and you said to someone, “I want to syndicate my articles onto your site.” You backup your site, restore it somewhere else and changed their AdSense ID or their ClickBank ID to that new value. Now they can use all the articles you’ve written to make money on their own. Maybe you’ll swap out some of the articles and yours or some combination of the two but you can take a site that’s already making money and give someone a copy of it by just backing it up and restoring it somewhere else.

I hope that gives you some new ideas about what kind of new niches you can use to clone with your blog. You can revive ready-made content, you can set something up for local businesses which means you set it up, change the information or even set up a site or a plugin that already makes money and help someone else make money with it as well.

Backup and clone your WordPress website at www.BackupCreator.com.

Backup, Clone & Protect Your WordPress Sites
Using Backup Creator