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Yesterday Jeffrey Morgan very kindly wrote a guest post detailing how to back up our WordPress sites, without the need of plugins.

Backing Up WordPress Quickly

Jeffrey saw that some people were a little concerned about going into technical areas of their websites that they’re not familiar with so has kindly written an additional post detailing how the back up process can be completed using Filezilla.

In this post Jeffrey takes you through the process of downloading, installing and configuring Filezilla. He then explains how to create and download your back up files.

Over to you Jeffrey:

Yesterday Barry was kind enough to allow me to post on the subject of backing-up WordPress. WordPress has become so easy to work with that most of the time you can work with image up-loads or file downloads directly with your hosting FTP. But there can be times that you will need to use FileZilla. We will take a look at this fabulous FTP.

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Updated June 2011: It is extremely important that we keep our work backed up and I have found a video that shows us exactly how to carry out the same instructions that Jeffrey has given us here. I have also found a second video showing us how to restore our blogs from a back. Both videos are by Dee Ann Rice and links to both are now at the bottom of this post.

Earlier this week I wrote a blog post entitled The Simple Solution To Every Bloggers Worst Nightmare in which I advised you to download and install a plugin that will back up your WordPress Blogs automatically.

I use the plugin myself and have always thought it was very handy, however I received a comment from Jeffrey Morgan pointing out a couple of glitches that may occur during the download process. Jeffrey explained that he had used the process I was mentioning and that when he came to use the back up zip file he found it was corrupted. Imagine that for a minute yes exactly!

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The majority of my readers are blog owners so will relate to this.

Backing Up Your WordPress Blog

You’ve created your blog, worked hard and made regular posts to build a following. It just starts coming together when you’re told there’s an upgrade for your blog theme so you upgrade it and your site crashes.

All of your work has gone, never to be found again.

How gutting would that feel?

That’s exactly what happened to my online friend Gary Tannahill. Now Gary isn’t following a mentor, in fact he’s doing it all by trial and error and trying to learn from his mistakes. There’s no doubt that Gary is learning, I’ve been following him since he started.

I suspect that this has probably happened to others reading this but I’m going to use Gary as an example in my fictitious story below.

Gary thought “Ok, I’ll ask Fred the technical assistant to come round and see if he can help get my blog data back for me”. Fred arrives to examine Gary’s PC

I should have written this post some time ago but as my regular readers know I’ve been otherwise engaged.

For those that haven’t heard of the challenge please visit My Contributors Page

The idea was to get 101 bloggers to take part by writing a post, submitting the post URL and then visit, read, comment and bookmark every blog post that was taking part. Thus creating 100 comments on everyone’s blog, improving our blogs ranking, creating backlinks, increasing our traffic and building relationships with other bloggers.

Jacinta Dean and Steve King set about finding another 99 bloggers to take part, which in itself was quite a challenge, so much so that Mandy Allen and I offered to help. We set up dedicated blog pages to list the contributors blog posts, giving everyone easy access to the challenge participants.

Having got our pages in place we went blog hopping, forum posting and tweeting to tell everyone about the challenge and invite them to join in.

With some help from John Thornhill and Sally Neill we reached our quoter and had the 101 blogs needed, in fact we had 102 but Craig Breeze had a few problems with his blog and unfortunately had to pull out.

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Over the last few months I’ve written a few posts on Blogging. I’ve offered advice on choosing a subject, constructing a post, Keyword Research, and I’ve mentioned some plugins that have really helped me and my blog develop.

I’ve also mentioned that blog hopping, when done properly, helps build relationships and bring traffic to our blogs, not to mention the gems we find along the way.

One thing I haven’t mentioned is The Benefits of Blogging When You Pass It On.

What do you mean by Pass It On Barry? I hear you ask.

Let me explain: During some recent blog hopping I came across a video that I know will help me in my eBook Business. The video showed how to quickly create eBook Covers and within the post was a link to a sample of the Photoshop scripts that the creator was using. Knowing that this video was going to help me in my business from that point forward I thought I’d Pass It On to my readers as I know that it will help many of them as well, especially those following The Newbies Guide.

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Do you need a little help:

Adding a Gravatar to your WordPress Blog

For the last few weeks I’ve been taking part in the 100 Blog Comment Challenge, which is showing signs of being a huge success for everyone involved. We now have 102 contributors on board so phase one is complete, phase two is to get them all to comment and bookmark each others blog post. I have been following the comments and replies of quite a few blogs and can plainly see that a lot of people are really benefiting from the interaction with other bloggers.

One thing I noticed during the challenge was that quite a few people were having problems Installing Gravatars on their blogs, with some having installed it only to find it was conflicting with another plugin and showing two images.

Being the helpful kind of guy I am I decided to make a video and show you how I have it set up on my blog, so that you can simply follow my settings and resolve the issue on yours.

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This post is going to be slightly different to my normal posts, in fact what I’ll be doing here I have never done before……more on that in a moment.

I sell information products, both on eBay and from my websites and I have recently found a jewel that I just have to bring to your attention, especially if you also sell (or are thinking of selling) information products.

Whether you are an established eBook writer or a newbie with an idea to create an eBook something you are going to need are

eBook Graphics

I personally have only ever used Planet Divinity, No that is NOT an affiliate link, my earning money is not the point of this post….

I could go on and tell you about the Cheap Prices, the Quality of Work Produced or the Speed at which it is delivered, but that’s not the point of this post….

I could go on even further and tell you that Planet Divinity ask a series of simple questions and from your answer they will produce a first class cover, but that’s not the point of this post either….

Need A little help with your

Blog Writing

Over the past few weeks I’ve noticed many people trying to get blog owners posting to their blogs a bit more frequently. In fact that is why I wrote my last blog post, to give the new bloggers a little nudge of encouragement.

Since then Steve King and Jacinta Dean and have thrown down the gauntlet and started the “100 Blog Comment Challenge” AKA #100comments. Basically those that take up the challenge have to write a blog post and try to generate 100 comments for that post.

Personally I think this is a fantastic opportunity for every blog owner to get in the mix and get to know each other. This is exactly how you build relationships, with like minded people, that can become beneficial to us all for the long term success. How many times have you heard the saying “I don’t, but I know a man (or woman) that does”?