Why and How To Backup Your Blog - DailyBlogTips

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Why and How To Backup Your Blog Posted: 02 Apr 2010 09:16 PM PDT This is a guest post by R Kumar. If you want to guest post on this blog, check out the guidelines here. What is the frequency of backups for your blog? If that question has got bells ringing in your mind, then you need to seriously evaluate your blogging blueprint. It is not just you who are a culprit to ignorance on backing up your blog. I too, was a victim of it. I learned it the hard way when I found that my hosting company's servers were attacked by a hacker and that they had no backup copies of any installations on their servers. My blog had more than a year of content and since my blog was a single author blog, it was all my own hard work. I had no clue what to do because neither did I keep any backups of my blogs. The final outcome was that I had to start my blog as completely new, as if I was starting it for the first time. It is then that I realized the importance of keeping a backup of my blogs. Importance of a Backup WordPress gives you an option of restoring your entire blog, including the posts and comments, theme settings, plugins settings and the complete content including comments and other trackback details by a simple import. But in order to import all of these, you need to have a backup. The Internet is extremely vulnerable, and no hosting company or server can say that they are completely protected from virus attacks, spyware and malware attacks and hacker attacks. In that case, a backup should always be your first line of defense. How to Back Up Your Blog Since WordPress is a blog platform that works entirely on a MySQL database, keeping a backup for your database is pretty much all you need (you might also want to backup your theme files once in a while, though). Most hosting providers will backup your website files and databased, but you should rely on that too much. Why? Because if anything happens to the servers of your provider they could lose both the original files and the backups. When it comes to backups it is always essential to have them stored in at least two different physical locations. Below you’ll find three ways to achieve this. 1. Backup from cPanel – The easiest form of creating a backup is from the cpanel of your hosting company. If your hosting company gives you an access to a cpanel, then all that you have to do is use the "backup wizard" option that is available on the front page of your cpanel to create a backup. 2. Wordpress Database Backup – This is a simple to configure database backup plugin that will maintain a periodic backup of your core Wordpress tables. The options are easily configurable and it gives you an option of creating a backup and downloading it onto your computer or, periodically emailing it to a designated email of yours. You can even choose to save a copy of the backup on your hosting server. 3. Wordpress Online Automated Backup – This is a handy little tool with the difference that all backups are kept safe at a location on their website. I use this tool in addition to the above plugin, as another layer of protection. Whatever the options you choose, just make sure that you are creating backups regularly and storing them properly. Better safe than sorry, as they say. About the Author: R Kumar is an affiliate marketer who started off on an Internet marketing business with about 32 mini-sites. His blogging journey includes a blog on helping develop Internet entrepreneurship at DK Speaks and on tips and tricks on tweeting at TweetingTips.com. Original Post: Why and How To Backup Your Blog

What Are The Alternatives to Google AdSense? Posted: 02 Apr 2010 01:10 PM PDT This post is part of the Friday Q&A section. If you want to ask a question, just write a comment below. Aminul Islam Sajib asks: I was wondering what your recommendation would be for a blogger who wants to try out the best alternatives to Google Adsense. This is a popular question among bloggers and webmasters. Some of them will have a hard time getting accepted into Google’s AdSense program, while others will get banned for one reason or another. After that that remain looking for alternatives. First of all keep in mind that Google AdSense is still the best CPC network on the web. Some people don’t like, some claim to make more money with other networks, but the vast majority of website owners agree that Google AdSense is the best CPC advertising option, period (this does not mean it is the best monetization strategy, as affiliate marketing or selling your own products could beat the earnings of AdSense easily). Considering this fact, I would highly recommend you to play it safe with your AdSense account. If you are not sure about the program policies and guidelines, take some 30 minutes to read them and to make sure your sites respect all of them. Getting banned from AdSense is a bad thing for anyone working on the Internet, because the ban is for life. With that out of the way, what are the alternatives to Google AdSense? If you are looking for CPC alternatives, I would recommend two networks. The first one is Chitika. They used to run product based ads only, but recently they have expanded to a wide range of categories, in which they call “Premium Ads.” The second alternative is BidVertiser. This network works like AdSense, but they have a smaller amount of advertisers, so the CPC rates you’ll get will be smaller. Apart from using CPC ads, however, you could also try CPM based ones. This means you’ll get per 1,000 impressions rather than per click. Tribal Fusion is one of the best networks in this segment, but your site must receive over 500,000 unique visitors monthly to qualify. Networks that will accept smaller sites include Casale Media and AdBrite. The third option would be to use affiliate marketing offers that will pay you when you either when you refer a paying customer (called CPS offers) or when you refer a lead that will perform a specific action like subscribing to an email newsletter (called CPA offers). Two very large affiliate networks you can try are ClickBank and Commission Junction. Finally, you could also try to sell your advertising spots directly. This means you would manage the ads and interact with sponsors directly. I talk extensively about this method on the article How to Find Advertisers for Your Website: The Ultimate Guide. What about you guys, what do you use as alternative to Google AdSense? What would you recommend for someone who was banned or not accepted? Original Post: What Are The Alternatives to Google AdSense?

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