Make Money Online with Super Affiliate Rosalind Gardner» Plugins

WPTwin: Blog Backups and Cloning Made Easy

MarkWashburn — Thu, 14 Oct 2010 17:38:25 +0000

The following article and video were submitted by Rosalind Gardner’s Academy member, Mark Washburn, who was keen to share what is undoubtedly the best solution to date for complete and easy WordPress backups (including blog, membership software, forum and more…) and WordPress blog cloning.

Read Mark’s review of the WPTwin plugin and watch the video below to see how simple it is to use.

I’ve made a point to back up my WordPress database and files routinely over time. These days you can’t afford not to because sites get hacked, code get’s messed up, or databases run into problems. Any one of these things can take a site out of commission and and the logical remedy is to run regular backups.

In theory, restoring a site from a back up shouldn’t be too hard. You save the database and some primary folders that contain the theme and plugins, install WordPress again,and the rest should be easy…unless something goes wrong… and a few weeks ago, something went wrong for me.

I decided to move a fairly small WordPress site from one host to another. I followed the normal routine and then found, when I launched the site at the new location, things got really screwed up.

Somewhere along the way a forum lost all of it’s content, many of the plugins didn’t activate properly, and my theme got screwed up…so basically I found myself having to set the site up all over again. I was really disappointed.

Nevertheless, I kept thinking about the fact that so many other things are incredibly easy with WordPress, but backups continue to be kind of “primitive“. There are a handful of backup plugins that you can install and use but some haven’t been updated in quite awhile and others end up being helpful but they aren’t a complete solution.

A few days later I shared my frustration with a friend of mine and he told me about a new program called WPTwin that is designed to easily and quickly clone or replicate an entire WordPress site from top to bottom. I have to admit, he piqued my interest, but I didn’t buy the software right away.

A few days later however, I went back into that WordPress site I had tried to relocate. I wasn’t even close to getting everything back to it’s original form. It was going to take at least a few hours, if not days of work and it made me sick to even think about all of that.

And then I remembered something one of my online mentors once told me. He said:

“You have to spend the majority of your time being focused and working on things that matter most, and if you’re trying to make money online, you better be focused on generating great content, finding great affiliate offers or products, and building good incoming links for traffic…everything else is minor and usually a distraction!”

And he’s right. You don’t make a dime endlessly tweaking (i.e. fighting with code) to bring a theme to perfection, or while you’re constantly researching that next great article that you can’t seem to get written, or…doing the mundane work of backing up and hopefully restoring a website should the need arise.

With that said, backing up your work is critical, so you might say I finally saw the light of common sense, and bought WPTwin. If it had the potential to save me days of unnecessary work and helped me avoid future frustrations, it was worth my time to test it out!

After getting the program, I read through the instructions and found the replication process to be very simple.

The program contains two php files. The first one is uploaded into the root folder of the WordPress site that you want to clone. Once uploaded, you simply access the url of the php file page and click one button. Usually within about 30 seconds (large sites may take longer and the system has been tested on sites as large as 4 gigs), you’ll have a replication file that’s available for downloading to your computer.

Using the example of moving a website from one host to another, you would simply set up a new WordPress install on the new hosting account. Upload the replication file along with another small php file which contains the deployment code into the root folder of the WordPress install. Then by simply visiting the url of this php file, entering the email that you provided when purchasing WPTwin, and clicking a final button to activate the process, within another 30 seconds or less you’ll have a fully functioning, identical clone to your original site!

After testing the process on one of my sites, I continued to back up and test the deployment of a handful of my other WordPress based sites. Several of these included unique plugins such as the Wishlist Member membership plugin and the Simple Press forum plugin. And in every case the process worked flawlessly!

All content, comments, videos, pictures, settings, login information, and plugins (and their settings) are duplicated precisely. The only thing you’ll likely want to change is in the general settings folder of WordPress where you can change the title of the new site.

The instructions that come with WPTwin are clear and easy to understand but you’ll probably only need to read through them once. It also comes with video tutorials that cover every step in the implementation process should you ever need them. Customer support has been very good at responding to questions in a timely manner and according to them, several updates are planned in future releases, one of which includes a scheduling module to create automatic backups as often as you need them.

With all of my WordPress sites now backed up and secure I’m confident that I won’t ever have to go through the recent turmoil of rebuilding a site from scratch again.

For well under $100 WPTwin has turned out to be one of the best investments I’ve made in software in several years. I simply can’t recommend it highly enough. It finally brings the WordPress back up process up to speed and makes it so easy that anyone can do it without fear and frustration.

Subscribers Magnet: You will LOVE this Plugin!

Rosalind Gardner — Wed, 29 Sep 2010 01:13:02 +0000

I’ve uploaded, activated and reviewed a number of different plugins and software applications intended to increase your subscribers – most of which I’ve never told you about.

But Subscribers Magnet is different — in a VERY good way… and the reason I’m telling you about it NOW, is because it is 30% off until but only until October 1st.

First things first, ‘Subscribers Magnet’ is a WordPress plugin, which makes it super easy to install and activate.

See the graphic up and to the right?

Yes, the plugin automatically recognizes and fills in your visitor’s name and email address to encourage signups. You have the option to add your opt-in form all over your blog, and actually ‘seduce’ your visitors to join your list, in a very friendly manner.

Watch this video to see Subscribers Magnet in action.

You can add the form to your WordPress footer or within the post itself.

Better still, you can add a subscription box to the footer and decide how often it will show.

(You might be seeing the footer bar right now.)

Plus, you have full control over the look, feel, location and functionality of your forms and it works with AWeber (my favorite), GetResponse, and other major autoresponders.

The developers suggest that Subscribers Magnet could actually triple your sign-up rate almost overnight, without you having to get more blog visitors than you’re already getting. (I WILL be testing that statement and letting you know how it works. Unfortunately, I won’t be able to report my results before their discount offer has ended. No problem though – they do offer a money-back guarantee).

Suppose the assertion is true and you get 100 unique visitors to your blog on a daily basis and receive a 5% conversion ratio, meaning 5 subscribers. If you use Subscribers Magnet, you should get 15 subscribers instead, from the same amount of traffic.

Just think about it!

If you’re all about the list and optimizing it for better performance (which really should be one of your first priorities), you will love this plugin!

Here’s my caveat. You should NOT buy ‘Subscribers Magnet’…

If, once you finish watching the video, you still don’t see its real value
If you receive less than 10 visitors a day to your blog
If you don’t plan to actually test-drive it on your blog.

On the other hand, you should BUY Subscribers Magnet:

If you want to double, triple and even quadruple your subscription rate ‘overnight’ – and do it over and over again, day and night, week after week, month after month!
If you want optimum list conversion and to get maximum value from your blog’s real estate by placing your opt-in form in strategic, non-intrusive locations, where anybody can see it.

P.S. Here are some other amazing features that I haven’t found on other subscriber plugins:

A. You can show the signup form in your footer bar in a highly visible but not obnoxious way. Very good for turning first time visitors into subscribers.
B. You can also end “automatic” and highly-personalized ‘thank you messages’ by email on the first occasion someone comments on your blog. Think of the possibilities! In that message you can invite them to join your newsletter or rss feed. It’s another “friendly” reason to create trust with your readers and get them on your list, in a non intrusive way!
C. Plus, there’s unique tracking available for each subscription method – you will know which forms perform better than others; with this new found knowledge, you’ll be able to skyrocket your sign-up rate like never before!

P.P.S. Download your copy of Subscribers Magnet PLUGIN now and GET a free copy of “Multiple Hit Strategy” with your purchase. This bonus item is a step-by-step guide detailing how to build your list FAST with this proprietary “multiple hit strategy”.

WP Shopping Pages: Review Posts Before Publishing

Rosalind Gardner — Tue, 21 Sep 2010 03:24:33 +0000

I’ve had the WP Shopping Pages plugin for quite awhile now and absolutely love it.

I use it to auto-post products — mostly romantic movie DVD’s from Amazon — to my dating blog on a regular basis.

Actually, the WP Shopping Pages plugin has been a real blessing.

I haven’t been that keen to write about dating for awhile now, yet with the auto-posts my subscribers still receive updates through my Aweber blog broadcasts on a regular basis and therefore keep returning to visit the site. By result, my Google Analytics stats show no real decline in traffic despite the fact that I’ve done very little work on the site for months.

There are a couple of issues with the plugin that I’ve noticed just recently, however.

Despite selecting Skip Products if No Description Found in the options, one post came up empty as shown in the screenshot below.

Egads! The lack of a description doesn’t exactly compel the reader to click through the link to buy the product. Not only that, but can you imagine what would happen to your subscriber numbers if all the posts for a month or more showed up like that? Bar the thought!

Another smaller issue I have with WP Shopping Pages is that the descriptions show up as one very long paragraph, instead of being separated into smaller, easy to read chunks.

Here’s an example of how a post will show up if I don’t edit it. And here’s how I edited the blog post for the movie Titanic in just a couple of seconds.

Much better, eh?

So, although automation is great, you still have to invest a little bit of time and effort to make sure your blog doesn’t come across looking like a ‘splog’.

Put those autoposts into draft mode and make them reader-friendly by adding paragraph breaks. Delete those without descriptions. Last, but certainly not least — add your own commentary about the product to avoid duplicate content penalties.

Learn more about WP Shopping Pages.

Watch my video or visit the WP Shopping Pages Plugin site.

That Plugin is Messing Up Your Google Listings

Rosalind Gardner — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 16:48:15 +0000

Do you use either the WP Greet Box or WWSGD (What Would Seth Godin Do?) plugins on your WordPress blogs?

Have you placed them to show at the top of your posts and/or pages?

If so, you might be losing some valuable free traffic from the search engines.

Take a look at the screenshot above to the right. The “if you are new here” text shown in bold shows up in the Google search results description when bloggers allow the code from those two plugins to render at the top of their posts.

By result they lose the space alotted for a proper description — which when written correctly can generate LOTS of extra traffic.

This problem can be solved in one of 2 ways:

Have the plugin set to render at the bottom of the post.
A better alternative is to enter a proper meta description either through your Custom Fields or by using a plugin like the Platinum SEO Pack.

Your choice.

Do one or the other, but please don’t waste valuable free search engine traffic — it hurts my head when I see you doing that!

BTW, if you liked this post, you might also be interested in reading “WordPress Plugins and How I Use Them“.

WordPress Plugins and How I Use Them

Rosalind Gardner — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 03:23:46 +0000

Below is a list of my most frequently used WordPress plugins, along with descriptions of how I use them and links to examples in some cases.

The name of each plugin is linked to its download page (each link opens a new window).

Plugin	Description
Akismet	Included with your WordPress installation, Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not and lets you review the spam it catches under your blog’s “Comments” admin screen. Use it on all my blogs. As of today (publishing date November 30th 2009), Akismet has caught 181,601 spams on this blog.

Amaniche	LOVE this plugin. Adds Amazon products and reviews to your blog in the blink of an eye. You can see how I use it here.

Breadcrumb Navigation XT	Generates locational breadcrumb trails for your WordPress blog. Used on my of my blogs. See it in use here at the top of the page above the post title. You don’t need this if you’re running StudioPress or Thesis as it’s built into those themes.

Broken Link Checker	Exactly as the name suggests. LOVE this plugin. Placed on all my blogs — works especially well when I actually use it.

Contact Form 7	Manages multiple, customizable contact forms. I use this one on MyEnergyPal.

Deactivate Visual Editor	For use with Exex-PHP to ensure that you don’t break your php code. Using is heavily on AffiliateBloggerPRO

Exec pHp	Use it to execute PHP code in posts, pages and text widgets. See also ‘Deactive Visual Editor’ plugin.

Faq Tastic	VERY nice plugin. Can generate multiple FAQs. I use it here.

Dynamic Content Gallery	Use it in conjunction with all my StudioPress themes — on almost all my sites.

Google Analyticator	Enables Google Analytics logging on any WordPress blog without template modification. Stats show up in your Dashboard as in the screenshot below (and then some).

Platinum SEO Pack	SEO plugin allows you to specify keywords, description and more. I use it most often to specify a title that is more search engine friendly than the one used on my posts. For example the SEO title for the post, “Have Patience Young Grasshopper” is actually “How to Improve Your Online Buying Experience”.

Popshops	Use to build product feeds with affiliate marketing networks like Commission Junction, LinkShare, Google Affiliate Network, ShareASale, LinkConnector, buy.at, Pepperjam and more.

Popularity Contest	Popularity Contest keeps a count of your post, category and archive views, comments, trackbacks, etc. and uses them to determine which of your posts are most popular. Valuable for determining your readers’ real interests.

Search and Replace	LOVE this plugin! As name implies, allows you to search and replace anything in your ID, post-content, GUID, titel, excerpt, meta-data, comments, comment-author, comment-e-mail, comment-url, tags/categories and categories-description. Excellent for changing links if you haven’t created a single redirect page or you’re not using MaxBlogPress’ Ninja Affiliate.

Search Everything	Choose which of your posts, pages, comments etc. you wish to include in search. I use this specifically to exclude pages from my search functions.

Sexy Bookmarks	Xxtremely useful plugin for getting your readers to actually submit your articles to numerous social bookmarking sites.

Subscribe to Comments	Lets commenters sign up for e-mail notification of subsequent entries. Used on NPT.

Tweetmeme	Displays button that allows your blog posts to be retweeted and displays retweet count. Used on almost all my blogs. See above left.

WP-DB-Backup	Easy backup for your core WordPress database tables.

What Would Seth Godin Do	Drops cookies to display different messages for new visitors and returning visitors according to your specifications. Check it out on the homepage at 101Date.com.

WP Email	Allows people to recommend/send your WordPress blog’s post/page to a friend

WP No Category Base	Completely removes the mandatory ‘Category Base’ from your category permalinks.

WP-Polls	Adds an AJAX poll system to your WordPress blog. You can see it in the sidebars here and here.

WP-Print	Displays a printable version of your WordPress blog’s post/page.

YaCaptcha	yaCAPTCHA is a CAPTCHA plugin for WordPress that helps you block comment spam from automated bots.

Yet Another Related Posts Plugin	Displays a list of posts and/or pages related to the current entry, introducing the reader to other relevant content on your site.

Search and Replace Plugin for WordPress Ends MUCH Frustration

Rosalind Gardner — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 21:14:34 +0000

I have no idea what Ed was doing when he was posting to our travel blog back in 2006 – 07, but it seemed that each one of his blog posts had strange characters popping up.

From a reader’s perspective, it made for frustrating reading.

From my perspective as the blog owner, it was frustrating because not only would it put my readers off, it also looked like hell.

At one point I tried to eliminate the strange characters by doing a search and replace from phpMyAdmin. I’m no geek, so wondering what I would ruin in the process of doing a global search and replace on the database was too scary a prospect, so I gave up on that plan.

Every so often I’d sit down and try to pluck out the weird characters one-by-one, but that too was frustrating and I could see it eventually leading to madness. Indeed, the idea of fixing the problem that way was sheer madness.

Then I found Mark Cunningham’s Search and Replace plugin for WordPress.

Eureka!

Simply install, activate, check off in which areas (title, content, authors, etc.) you want the search and replace executed, then enter what is to be replaced and what it should be replaced with.

As you can see in the screenshot below, there were 1696 ocurrences of Â. There were thousands more when it came to the Ò’s and §’s, ¿’s, Å’s and ¥’s, each instance of which took only seconds to replace.

And while I was at it, I moved most of the top-of-post pictures from the left-hand side – where they were incurring on the Tweetmeme button – to the right side of the post.

What a great plugin, especially if you ever had to change a million affiliate links on your blog.

Best of all, you can download Search and Replace for free.

What do you think? Do you run Search and Replace? How have you used it to remove those typical frustrations? Do you use something comparable? Or, are you just thrilled to have learned about it? Share with us!

Wishlist Member Review: How to Turn Your WordPress Blog into a Membership Site

Rosalind Gardner — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 03:05:44 +0000

With all my affiliate site posts queued up for the next 2 months and some time on my hands this weekend, I decided to get to work making the Super Affiliate Handbook available as an online tutorial, through a membership site.

My primary concern was how to set up a membership site easily.

Gail and I use Amember on PrivateLabelCentral.com. The setup is relatively simple for someone who has worked through installation directions more than a few times, but I did manage to mess things up with some bad file permissions that required another intervention by my favorite geek and host master extraordinaire, Steve Hetrick. The temporary downtime aside, I am quite happy with Amember.

However, I recalled reading that there might be a plugin available that could turn a WordPress blog into a membership site.

What could be more perfect, especially since the main focus of the tutorials is affiliate blogging.

My search brought Wishlist Member to the top of the results.

Per the sales page, the list of features include:

Unlimited Membership Levels
Simple Installation With New or Existing WordPress Blog
Flexible Membership Options
Sequential Content Delivery
Control Viewed Content
Shopping Cart Integration
Easy Member Management
Multi-Level Access
Total Content Protection
Secure RSS Feeds
Subscription Length Control
Login Redirection
Create Your Membership Site Using WordPress & WL Member
“Sneak Peak” Content Display
Custom Error Pages
Partial Content Display

On confirming that Wishlist Member could be integrated with my shopping cart of choice (Clickbank) and my Aweber autoresponder, I decided that it was worth a try. Note: Wishlist Member also integrates with 1ShoppingCart, PayPal, Cydec, Autoresponseplus and GetResponse and generic systems.

The single licence version of Wishlist Member is $97 and the multiple licence version is $297. With a 30-day refund policy, I opted to buy the multiple licence version – realizing that if the plugin worked as well as promised, I would definitely want to use it on other blogs.

My experience with Wishlist Member

After buying Wishlist Member, I purchased a new domain, set up hosting, did a 1-minute WordPress installation, uploaded the plugin, installed the theme that came with the plugin… and was off to the races.

Within 30 minutes, I’d watched a few of the tutorial videos, set up 8 modules using Pages (you can restrict member access by post, page, categories and comments) , a sequential upgrade that drips content over time and input some articles. By the way, the video tutorials are accessible without having to purchase the product.

The video below shows the results of those 30-minutes, as well as how membership content is protected, even when someone is smart enough to figure out the URL of a higher-level module.

If you’d like to view a larger sized video, it’s available on YouTube.

The only thing that would make Wishlist Member absolutely perfect, is if it could be integrated with the more popular forum software, such as phpBB or vBulletin. I haven’t heard that this is planned, but with all the other features that were integrated after user suggestions were submitted, I wouldn’t be surprised to see that option turn up at some point — or at least, I’m fervently hoping it will — Are ya listening, Stu?

Other than that, Wishlist Member is a GREAT choice for bloggers who want to set up their own membership sites, especially in terms of ease of set up and price.

Wishlist Member gets a 2 big thumbs up from me and my HIGHEST recommendation.

Testing Out the “No Feed” Plugin

Rosalind Gardner — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 04:24:58 +0000

Have you ever wanted to stop the feeds on your blog?

For example, if you wanted to import a number of static HTML articles that you had elsewhere on your site and post them into your blog without sending an email to all of your Feedburner email subscribers each time you posted one of those articles – you might want to stop the feed… temporarily of course.

One way to do that is to remove the following files from your WordPress installation.

wp-atom.php
wp-comments2rss.php
wp-feed.php
wp-links-opml.php
wp-rdf.php
wp-rss.php
wp-rss2.php
feed-rss2-comments.php

The other way – apparently – is to us the No Feed plugin by Jason.

Let’s see if it works…

Follow up… Well, sure enough the No Feed broke the feed and gave an error message when I clicked my Feedburner link.

On the other hand, when I deactivated the plugin, this post showed up immediately under Current Feed Content at Feedburner, so it remains to be seen whether Feedburner will send that email out… but I suspect they will.

Any other ideas?

Feedburner to Google Account Deadline Today

Rosalind Gardner — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 18:46:36 +0000

Today is the deadline to have all your FeedBurner accounts moved over to your Google account.

Although I’ve heard various opinions on whether the old Feedburner subscriptions will continue to work – with some bloggers reporting that subscriptions should work indefinitely and others already reporting glitches with the old addresses – I’d trust the Feedburner to Google FAQ which reads:

“It is our intent to keep backward compatibility with your feed address as long as this service exists.”

I updated my accounts last week and haven’t yet changed all the feed addresses, but the old one’s are redirecting just fine.

The real issue is in updating your accounts. According to the FAQ, if you don’t update your account:

“…you will no longer be able to access your account at http://www.feedburner.com, and your feeds will either begin returning a “404 Not Found” response or a “301 Moved” response back to your source feed.”

Learn more on the Feedburner to Google FAQ