Hi, thanks for stopping by my blog.

A quick catch up:

My mum is now out of hospital and has returned to the care home but her memory has been badly affected by this latest bleed to her brain. Her memory now alternates between 1950′s Dublin and 1970′s England, where she thinks she has small children at home that need caring for. Her only aim is to get “home” to look after the children, bless her. Even when we explain that we have grown up with children of our own she doesn’t calm down and has become very temperamental, so much so that one of the family needs to be with her most of the time. Needless to say work comes after my mum so I’m falling behind, but hay ho such is life

Decembers Traffic:

As I said above I’m falling behind with my work load and should have posted details of Decembers Traffic before today, but it’s better late than never

It’s very important that you know where your traffic is coming from as it allows you to focus on what drove the traffic your way and you can see what is and what isn’t working for you.

With Christmas a matter of days away and the new year following shortly behind it I would like to take this opportunity to wish all of you A Very Merry Christmas and A Happy New Year.

 I hope that you are ending this year on a happier note than you started it with and that your online efforts are being recognized and that you’re being rewarded for them.

Did you achieve all that you set out to achieve at the start of the year?

I did, but to be honest I didn’t set myself a hard target as I started this year as I ended 2009, on bed rest awaiting another operation, which I had in February allowing me out of bed at the start of March.

My mother, being unwell, took priority in my schedule, as she still does. So my time was divided between my own health issues, my mothers health issues and my work load.

Having missed the first 3 months of 2010, other than blog updates, I set about putting the finishing touches to the product I created during the Masterclass. The product itself was finished but I wanted to add bonus items and make some corrections to the HTML on the salespage.

We may be

Newbies

but

Dummies

We are NOT!

Don’t you just hate it when you shell out your hard earned cash on the latest “New Thing” only to find that it doesn’t do what it says on tin? Of course you do.

What about if once you’ve purchased it you find that you then need to buy the tools to open the tin, or stir the contents?

If it’s an off-line purchase you’d take straight back to the store get your money back, right?

If it’s an on-line purchase of a physical item you’d check it out as soon as it arrives and if it’s not right it gets sent straight back to the seller with a request that they refund your money, yes?

But what about when it comes to buying Information Products or software, you read a cleverly worded salespage that installs desire with loads of screen shots of the sellers earnings and promises to lead you to your dreams and change your life for the better?

Heck it’s only $67 and for a life changing product that’s cheap right?

Hi, thanks for stopping by.

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.

Hi, thanks for stopping by.

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!

Hi, thanks for stopping by.

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. Just click this link and you’ll see the quality of the comments he leaves here on my blog.

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

In my last blog post I told you that I would explain the mistake I made when creating my first ever product. In doing this I hope to save you making the same mistake.

The product was called Free Websites On Orange Start to Finish, but should have been called Free Websites On Orange Start to not quite Finish, let me explain why…

I was selling eBooks on eBay and had been told that to make money I really needed to create my own eBook. I raked my brain trying to think of what I could create, bearing in mind that I hadn’t been an eBay seller for very long and was still finding my way around.

I had set up a free website on Orange, to house my eBooks for my customers to download from and thought I would show people how to do it and supply them with everything they need: eBooks, Sales pages and Auto reply messages with click by click instructions from start to finish, setting up a free website and Outlook Express as an auto responder with everything that was needed.