I did get just about everything restored on my blog, except for some of the comments. If you recently left a non-spamming comment and you don’t see it, then I didn’t erase it. I wasn’t able to restore it cause I have my WordPress database backup setup to save once per week.

Backup all of your Work…

I know it’s cliche, but the experts are right about backing up all of your work, especially your blogs and websites. We live in a unpredictable world and your sites could be hacked, or any number of things could happen to them at any given time. I was lucky because I was a little stubborn for the first year or so of internet marketing and I didn’t ever backup any of my work online. Until I had read an article about someone losing their entire blog they had spent a few years on. That scared me and I started Googling for the best way to backup my wordpress blogs.

How I backup my WordPress blogs…

It’s actually really easy to backup a wordpress blog. I installed the WordPress database backup plugin (WP-DB – Backup). This is a really easy plugin to use and has many functions on how and when you want your wordpress blogs backed up. I have mine set to email my backup to me once a week.

How to Restore your WordPress Blog easily…

Since I have very minimal tech skills, I thought it would be really difficult and take a lot of time for me to restore the content on my blog. I found this page Restoring your Database from Backup and followed their straight forward guide. All it took me was a couple minutes and everything was restored like nothing had happened. What’s really cool about restoring your WP blog this way is that even if someone did hack into your WordPress blog, you can restore it through your cpanel in your hosting and it will restore your old password, even if someone hacked into your WP blog and changed the password. Of course change the password once you get back in.

If you aren’t backing up your WordPress blogs and any other work you do online, then one day you could lose all of your hard work. I never thought it would happen to me but since it did, I’m so glad I started backing up my WP blogs. The process to backup and restore a WordPress blog is quick and simple, even for a non-techie like myself.

This isn’t the most exciting post or anything, but just in case it happens to anyone else, I figured I’d write about what happened and how I fixed my WordPress login error.

I had created another mini niche blog not to long ago and I was playing around in the dashboard under the “general settings”. For some odd reason I changed my blog url in the “WordPress address” url spot and pushed save. The next thing I notice is I can’t login to the WP-Admin and I get an error message saying that url doesn’t exist. On top of that my actual site had no WP theme, it was just a bunch of content and images and basically I took WordPress off of the site entirely and didn’t know what to do. I had one of those “what the **** moments” or simply put, confused.

This is how I fixed it…

Of course I did some Googling and found this very helpful page http://codex.wordpress.org/Changing_The_Site_URL

All I needed to do was enter my cpanel, went into my file manager, found my blog and edited the “WP-config.php”. I only had to enter these two lines below and hit save.

• define(‘WP_HOME’,'http://enter yoursite here.com’);
• define(‘WP_SITEURL’,'http://enter yoursite here.com’);

There’s even a better way of doing this and it’s explained in the link I gave you above. If you ever find yourself in the same situation or can’t login to your WP-admin for your wordpress blog, then this may work for you.

In this post I’ve really showcased my technical and design capabilities by kicking myself out of my own blog, only kidding. I have no skills and that is one reason why I use WordPress. It is very easy for just about anyone to use and any technical problems are usually quite simple to resolve on your own.

After hearing endless reviews on how “31 days to build a better blog” helped so many experienced and newbie bloggers alike, I decided to get it for myself. The 25% discount might of played a little part in my purchase today too. :-)

The discount is suppose to be going on for only a week!

Click here to get your own copy of 31 days to build a better blog and enter this discount code below when you’re at the sales page for 25% off today!

chrisjuly25

It is a download so you get it right away and it regularly sales for $19.95 but you can grab it right now for only $14.95. Plus it does include a 31 day money back guarantee.

If you don’t know who Darren Rowse, (Problogger) is and you are interested in blogging or improving your blog, then you need to go religiously read as much of his blog, Problogger as you can. Darren Rowse is one of the pioneers of blogging and has helped shape what blogging has turned into today. He’s very straight forward, intelligent, humble, consistent and helps more people succeed with blogging than anyone else just from his blog, Problogger.

His blog is actually the first blog that inspired me to want to start blogging a few years ago before I even knew what internet marketing and blogging was.

What does the Workbook cover?

• daily tasks which you can do on your own time and help you stay accountable to improving your blog for 31 days
• building relationships with your readers
• multiple ways to promote your blog and get more traffic
• writing different type of posts and styles
• networking with other bloggers
• how to plan ahead for future posts and creating a editorial calendar for your blog
• Much More, this is just some of the topics when I did a quick glance…

I haven’t started reading it yet, but the workbook teaches new things daily and you get first hand experience by accomplishing the daily tasks.

I’ll do a review on “31 days to build a better blog” once I get into it and you can watch for yourself to see if any positive changes start happening with my blog in the next month or so.

Leave a comment with your opinions about “31 days to build a better blog”.

Now, taking long breaks from blogging is always up for debate whether it’s a good or bad idea.

First off, if you’re a blogger, then you should be blogging about something you have a passion for so it should be relatively easy to continue blogging. Using MONEY as your motivator can work too, since I know many successful online marketers use that as their drive.

The Negatives-

Blogging  and pushing out posts on a regular basis, consistently, helps in a couple ways. When I was posting every few days the search engine spiders would visit my blog a few times everyday, now they rarely visit or crawl my blog. My blog posts would appear in the serp’s almost instantly after I published them and I had many posts that were on the front page of the serp’s too, which I lost quickly once I stopped posting. Secondly, your readers will get accustomed to when you publish your posts so you’ll probably lose some readers and less traffic from referrals.

Many people will stop visiting your blog and you’re name and brand will be forgotten quite quickly. The internet is ever changing 24/7, if you take a long break then someone who is hungrier than you will take your place and never look back. You will have so much catch up when you get back into the game and back to your blog that you could lose everything you worked so hard and consistently on. Think about it, just about every Top Blogger stays consistent with their blogging, none of them take long overdrawn breaks.

You’re sales will decrease. I saw a dramatic decrease in my sales from this blog as soon as I stopped posting on a regular basis, probably from the reasons above.

The Positives-

Taking a long break is quite refreshing and can give you some new angles and ideas on what you want or need to do. Having a constant pressure to blog can burn you out so a break is needed or you may just quit entirely. It allows you to work on other things, learn new things and experiment. You can use the time to find other means of making money online such as ppc or ppv marketing.

It’s good to take a break from the pressures of the online world and “live life”. Enjoy some of the freedom that internet marketing allows you to have that the “9 to 5″ doesn’t give you.

Lastly, it is your blog, you decide what you want to do with it. But just remember, are you writing for yourself or for others?

All I can say is there are strong points for both sides of the coin but I didn’t start blogging just to get by. If you want to separate yourself from the rest of the pack then just start blogging consistently since not many can keep up with it for a long period of time.

I wanted to point out that the $40,000+ John Chow makes per month from blogging, is pure profit not revenue.

John Chow is a pretty good guy and I’ve learned a lot from him. One thing that I particularly like about him is how insightful he is and how he really explains things in full detail. Many other gurus will give you a small glimpse on how they make money online but not with JC, he’ll show you pretty much step by step on what’s working for him.

The Ultimate Blog Profit Model ebook really helps to inspire and put you in the millionaire mind set. This is a great read for bloggers who are experienced or for beginners. Either way, it will give you the blogging model to make massive amounts of money from your blog. With 60 pages of detailed information on how he makes over 40k a month and the chance to win a FREE iPad, it’s a win win opportunity.

The winner for the Apple iPad will be chosen randomly, so all you gotta do is download a FREE copy of The Ultimate Blog Profit Model for a chance to win before it’s to late!

Here’s what I’ve learned…

Most of these Top Internet marketing experts have been blogging for a long freakin time. Some of them were the original pioneers, especially for the “make money online” and “internet marketing” blogs. So seriously, they probably covered just about everything they could on their niche and then some in the first couple of years, and that leads to my next point.

Dig deep to find the good stuff-

I’ve read and continue to read most of the Top Internet Marketing Gurus blogs. But I like to dig deep into their archives or use their sitemaps to get to their older posts filled with some of their most valuable and insightful content. This is where you’ll find posts about case studies of their failures or success. Their best how to’s, lists, tips and tutorials, all before they were rich and famous. This is knowledge and information that you couldn’t even pay for or find in the best online money making programs. Just realize that some of the info maybe outdated, but most of it is timeless.

Learn by watching them-

If you got any experience as a internet marketer, then I’m sure you’ve learned to just watch what the experts do on their blogs and then implement it yourself. That in itself is worth thousands of dollars of coaching, for FREE.

I think most of these gurus blogs have become huge platforms for them to promote or influence a ton of people everyday. If you could write one post “money page” and make 1000′s of dollars from it in a couple days with little effort, you wouldn’t do it? Yet most of them still throw out a valuable post every now and then even though they’ve probably covered it before in someway in their blog already.

So no, I don’t think that most of the experts are only after our money. They’ve just had to evolve and have to be more cautious of what they write because of their HUGE audiences.

Now, I already mentioned I wasn’t talking about every successful blogging expert online in the “make money online” niches. Some of them still to this day continually give valuable, fresh and up to date relevant posts without a handful of affiliate links thrown in. But they are masters at what they do and know how to make a ton of money still without being so obvious to their visitors.

However, the cold hard facts is the average blogger will probably never make any money online from their blog. Why is this? I don’t believe it’s because they aren’t internet or computer savvy. I and many other bloggers I know that make money online had little or no online skills. I believe just about anyone can make money online from a blog but they are lacking a few things.

Here are 5 key things that can help you to make real money from your blog.

Amount of traffic – This is usually every bloggers goal to get as much traffic as possible. Without an audience, then there’s probably no reason to blog at all. Most experts will tell you that you need targeted traffic or certain type of traffic. Which isn’t a bad idea, but there are many ways to get paid from advertisers who are more interested in the numbers of your daily traffic count than anything else. Selling ad space is a very popular way for bloggers to make money. The more traffic, usually the more you can charge to place a add on your blog.

Demographics – This is where you need to think about what kind of traffic you are trying to get to your blog. Who are you trying to make money from and who is your target audience? If you have a blog about cats, then your demographics would be people who are into cats.

Also, lot of new bloggers especially in the “make money online” niche, try getting traffic from others who are already bloggers or internet marketers. But the problem is that they are probably just like you. They are just trying to make money from their sites and blogs as well. Usually they aren’t coming to your blog to make a purchase.

You would have a better chance of making money by getting traffic from the search engines that land on your “money pages“, from others who are either new to blogging or want to start a blog.

Internet marketing skills – If you have the internet marketing skills, then it’s pretty easy to make money with your blog. A good internet marketer knows what kind and where to get targeted traffic to their blog. They acquire and master the skills to write valuable content, presell and influence their visitors.

An experienced internet marketer knows how to adapt and think out of the box. Internet marketers may make money from their blog by creating a list, selling their own product, affiliate marketing, selling ad space, cpa offers or with CPC programs like Adsense. The internet is a playground for a highly skilled internet marketer. If you checkout many of the top bloggers, you’ll find that they were internet marketers before they were a blogger.

What you blog about – Are you blogging about a good topic or niche for you to make money from? Do you have enough information, experience, passion and knowledge to continue blogging about your topic? Many people including myself start a blog and then soon realize it isn’t heading in the right direction for what it was originally created for. If your goal is to make money from a blog, then you should really spend some time thinking about if you have the proper knowledge, skills and you are blogging about a topic that you will be able to easily monetize and actually make money from.

Putting in the effort – This is one of the most common reasons for bloggers to not make any money online. Actually putting in the work and effort publishing posts, networking, creating a blog community, promoting, SEO and etc…. on a regular basis is a lot easier said than done. But is required if you want to make a stable income from your blog.

I’ve learned that if you aren’t making money from your blog, then you are lacking in at least one of these key things mentioned above. Just about any average person can make money from blogging. But if you are approaching it all wrong, then you probably won’t make a cent and eventually give up. Don’t get me wrong, there are many reasons to blog other than making money from it. But this post was totally about how bloggers can actually make real money from their blog. Also, would you actually continue blogging long term if you never benefited financially in anyway, shape or form?

Many people start a blog just to get their feet wet. They write and write and start churning out content every day. Some get few visitors and get discouraged. Some get lots of visitors and their blog keeps getting bigger and more popular. Whatever the case, at some point, they take a look at their blog and ask the classic question – How can I make money with this thing?

Luckily, with the worldwide popularity of WordPress, there are a whole slew of plugins that can help either a budding or experienced blogger make money. Some are free, some cost a little money to use, but whatever the price, here are 7 WordPress plugins that can make you money;

AdSense Manager
This WordPress plugin makes it incredibly easy to put up and maintain ads from Google’s AdSense program on your blog. Instead of having to go through complex steps in order to get the AdSense ads up on your blog, AdSense Manager does it for you, generating the AdSense code automatically and allowing you to place and change position of the ads through the use of widgets.

Ad Rotator
AdRotator is a wonderful little plugin for those of you who want to best use the ad space you currently have on your blog. This WordPress plugin will automatically rotate the ads you chose to appear on a certain place of your blog. This is controlled by text files created by the user. The great thing about this plugin is it can be used not only for AdSense, but also Clicksor, Chikita and other ad programs, as well as displaying text messages, photos, or almost anything you want to put in the space.

Smart Ads
This is an interesting WordPress plugin that is supposed to be kind to your regular readers by not throwing large amounts of ads at them, yet still monetize the archives of your blog. SmartAds will place ads both above and below your posts, yet implement a time delay. Instead of the ads going live the day you publish your post, they will appear when your posts are 10 days old or 30 days old and so on. Additionally, you can set the word length as an additional parameter – shorter posts get no ads, for example. Flexible and powerful.

FeedFooter
This little WordPress plugin allows the blogger to place footers under the RSS feed at the end of the post. This footer can be filled up with ads (maximum of 10 ads), images, affiliate banners or the html code of your choice. A nice way to get a click or two before your reader leaves.

WP125 Ad Management
This plugin is great for the person who has little 125×125 ads on their blog. It is a multi-functional plugin that allows you to maintain, change, deactivate and upload ads on your blog – all with incredible ease.

BayRSS2.0 )
While the name may not be catchy or fancy, this plugin can help generate money through not just ads, but affiliate sales. Diversifying the various sources of income one makes from their blog is always a good idea. Installing this RSS feed wrapper plugin will do just that, allowing you to make money from both eBay and Amazon affiliate sales.

WordPress Paypal Donation Plugin
Begging for money is not only an honorable profession it can also be quite lucrative. Take this old profession and update it for the internet age and your blog. This plugin installs a small “donate” button, allowing users who appreciate your posts but are unwilling to click on ads or buy something through Amazon to still financially support their favorite blogs.

So there you have it – 7 WordPress plugins that can make you money. Maybe you’ll get a lot, maybe enough to cover your hosting fees, maybe just enough for a cheap cup of coffee. But you’ll never know until you install them and give them a shot.

This guest post was submitted by Melissa Tamura. Melissa writes about medical coding certification for Zen College Life, a blog about online schools.

The creators of the Socrates WordPress theme are Dan Nickerson and Joel Comm, two of the top internet marketing experts in the world. They both have been around for a long time and have impeccable reputations.

Easily change the theme to 1000′s of different unique designs with just a few clicks and in a matter of minutes. Niche Bloggers and affiliate marketers will appreciate the low price and it’s capability to be used for almost any niche. Talk about REAL Point and Click formatting.

Make Money and Monetize your site with the optional built in Adsense and Clickbank feature. As you can see below, your adds will be nicely blended in, or change them around with just a few clicks!

Click Here to watch Socrates Theme Video

One of my favorite features is the Header Generator. Over 160 different headers are included like the ones below, or easily add your own.

Effortlessly change the sidebar layout from many different combinations, then point and click.

Socrates WordPress theme Features:

• 150+ Niche header designs
• built in header generator
• Create 1000′s of different designs within minutes!
• built in adsense and clickbank monetization
• Multiple sidebar layouts
• Lifetime upgrades for the Socrates theme
• Social media sliders
• Search engine optimized
• Pick and choose different backgrounds
• Custom navigation bars
• Customize styling and Color options
• Video tutorials to lead you step by step
• and much more………

This theme has some truly incredible features to easily customize just about anything you want. Other similar themes can cost you at least a couple hundred dollars. But you can Purchase Socrates theme for WordPress today for only $47 for a single domain license or $77 for unlimited domains.

This theme is especially great for beginners or internet marketers who create several different blogs in different niches. You should check it out and compare it to the other WP themes out there. I hope this Socrates theme review has shed a little light on what this theme is all about.

What knowledge do you possess and what can you leverage right now?

When you are first starting out, you should think of your skills, (writing it down would be even better) hobbies, passions, connections and knowledge that you already have that you can leverage for your blogs content. This will give you ideas on what you could or may want to write about for a blog. The more you know about something, will allow you to be more credible when you are writing your content about your chosen topic. This will allow you to look like an expert right off the bat, without having to do to much research first. However, choosing something you are interested in but don’t know to much about can work too. Maybe you have sources and connections that can teach you more about your topic and give you insight.

I just wanted to add, most successful bloggers online started off writing about something they have a passion for. It’s pretty easy to get burned out really quickly if you are just trying to make some quick money online. Blogging and making money from a blog can be a lot harder than it looks.

It doesn’t really matter if you can write or not. The more you practice (what better way than by writing in your own blog) and the more you read, the better you’ll become. I totally sucked when I first started blogging, just read some of my first posts on this blog. The more I blogged and read other blogs, I now actually produce some decent content.

Choose one niche or topic

If you don’t have experience as a blogger, then starting your blog off in one niche or topic would be best. Once you’ve narrowed it down to a small list of things you are either interested in or already have knowledge about, it’s time to choose one for your blog. Staying within one topic will help you to get visitors that are interested in the same things and then you can start building a community for your blog. Your blog should also show up in the search engines faster for keywords related to your niche.

Make sure it is a niche or topic that will give you plenty to write about and expand. For instance, this blog “mathewday.com” is about internet marketing and ways to make money online. There are a ton of things for me to write about, all the way to blogging to affiliate marketing.

Unless you purposely want to make a small targeted niche blog with maybe only a few pages for one specific thing. You could also create a personal blog, where it’s more like your journal of rants, opinions and thoughts.

Your first blog posts should include…

You need to remember you are writing for other people, not yourself. Create ORIGINAL and VALUE in your content that others would want to read and share. In your writing, make the person feel as though you are talking to them or like your telling a story. You want to affect your readers in some way through your writing, inspire, help, humor, teach, vent and share your personal experiences. Let them get to know the real you and your personality. Being creative and doing something totally different or in a different way, will get you attention and traffic. Think outside the box.

When you are first beginning your blog, you should begin by adding content that explains what your blog is about. Start adding structure to your blog, you need to build the foundation with Pillar Articles. This would include longer posts that outline your expertise or research for a specific topic. The content should be timeless, informational, factual, and attract other bloggers to link to you as a reference.

If you want to be successful with your blog, you need to take ownership and act as if you are an expert in your field. Do whatever it takes to get there, research, network, learn, experiment, until you have the confidence to become an authority figure in your niche. Now it’s time to put in the work….

Motivation is going to eventually be the #1 factor on whether you continue to add content to your blog regularly and whether you reach success with your blog. I found what works for me is to write down a list of achievable goals you want to reach and when you want to reach them by. Also, write down things that motivate you or why you do anything in Life. It could be for your family, yourself, God, your kids, just to be the best dam blogger in the entire world, or etc….

It also matters on the type of blog or niche you choose to write about. For instance, if it’s a humorous blog, then starting with funny posts right off the bat would be ok.

Ideas to Create Killer Content

1. Write informational and helpful posts about your topic.
2. a tutorial on how to do something
3. a factual post about your niche, include references
4. throw in some humorous posts once in awhile
5. Start a little controversy by disagreeing with something a expert wrote about in your niche and sharing your view point on the matter.
6. Case Study showing what you did, how you did it and what the results were.
7. Add something personal about you, anything, it’s your birthday, your kids, latest event you went to, etc…..
8. debunk a myth on your topic
9. compiled list of several resources and references on just one thing pertaining to your niche
10. a list of resources, explaining a little about each one
11. list of helpful references and links
12. list of helpful ideas, tips and tricks
13. the latest buzz in your niche
14. you can do a review on just about anything
15. product or service review
16. something you just learned
17. sharing your expertise
18. giving your opinion or looking at something at a different angle and sharing  your thoughts
19. look at your competition and see what they are writing about, good way to get ideas
20. write posts for the beginners
21. write posts for the experienced
22. share your latest experiment or experience
23. compile a post with links to your best articles
24. write about your failures or what not to do
25. a post that inspires your readers
26. answer a question from one of your readers
27. link baits – posts specifically made for getting backlinks to your blog
28. do extensive research on just one particular thing and write about what you learned and found, include references
29. write about your success and how you achieved it
30. Allow others to Guest Post on your blog
31. an interview with an expert or authority figure in your niche
32. answer a question someone would be looking for
33. do a collection of posts from other bloggers all on the same topic with small descriptions and links to them
34. latest current events for your niche
35. compare two or more things together and show their likenesses and differences

Don’t forget to add some video and images to your blog too.

Include Keywords and SEO

While writing your content for your blog, make sure you are implementing the correct on site SEO, adding keywords to your titles and throughout your content. Go here if you have no idea what I’m talking about, learn how to get traffic to your blog for FREE and about SEO.

How often should I write?

Just about everyone has a different opinion on this matter. However, I’ve learned that the search engines, like Google, will start to love and visit your blog more often if you post regularly and often. I don’t think posting daily is necessary but if you can keep up with it, then do it. I suggest adding a new post at least once every few days and then sticking to that routine.

I hope this article helps and gives you ideas on what to write about in a blog. What are some things or ideas that help you to create Killer content?