Is your online business adding value to the internet?

The more I think about it, the more important I think it is to create something of value, if you want to make money.

Of course, it is possible to earn money without creating much value. Think about sites that are “made for AdSense” but have not much value of their own. Some people even believe that you should make your AdSense sites unhelpful on purpose, so that people will be more likely to click on the ads to find what they are looking for.

This may be lucrative in the short run, but it won’t last. Google and other search engines are working to remove these unhelpful sites from their index. It is also much harder to get enthusiastic about a site that you know is garbage, so you won’t work as hard to promote it or to add more articles to it.

I am not saying that all sites that display AdSense ads are bad. In fact, there are many helpful, entertaining, or otherwise value-packed sites that display AdSense as a way for the webmaster to make money. There is nothing wrong with this.

If you are creating AdSense sites, create something valuable, and you can be proud of it. There is nothing wrong with making money, but it is a lot more satisfying and long-lasting to create something of value, if you expect to keep earning money from it.

This is why you should pick a topic or niche that you enjoy, for your website or blog. You will be much more likely to create a site that people will love, and you will be more likely to stick with it for the long run. If you are proud and happy with your site, you will naturally want to spread the word about it to everyone. You will think of more innovative ideas to get other people to visit your site.

Have you heard the expression, “Do what you love, and the money will follow?” I think this is a little bit over-simplified. You can pick a subject that you love, but that is of no interest to anyone else. In that case, I don’t see how you could make money from it. But you definitely should “do what you love,” just make sure that there are enough other people who love it too, and would be willing to pay for it.

There are a lot of ways to make money online. You can sell your own products, provide a service, make money by recommending products (affiliate marketing), make money from advertising (AdSense or other advertisers), etc. I am sure there are ways to make money online that no one has even thought of yet. You might be the one to think of it.

The bottom line is:

1. Think about what you are truly interested in and how you can help people.
2. Check to make sure other people would be interested in it too.

If you have those two factors, you will be well on your way to success.

- Pat Doyle

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Well, I didn’t practice what I preached, and I got burned.

I urged you to back up your site periodically. But the last time I backed up this site was in January. I did have the wp-db-backup plugin installed, and it was supposed to email me weekly backups of the database, but for some reason, it was not working, and I never noticed. I think I might have had the wrong email address in there, I’m not sure.

Anyway, somehow I lost all my posts and pages! Never mind how, I probably did something I shouldn’t – I was messing around and am not sure what I did, but I did something to the database in phpMyAdmin. (If only I had backed it up first.)

So I had to go back to January’s backup. I managed to recover my posts since January by going to Google and searching for my posts, and then copying them from google’s cache.

Unfortunately, I also lost all the comments made since January (sorry). It would be too hard to go back and re-create them all. I just don’t want you to think that I deleted all your great comments on purpose.

I am still working on getting all my tags back. After I took the backup in January, I added tags to all my posts. Well, they are all gone now, and I have to re-do it. How stupid that I didn’t back up the site after I did all that tagging work before! Well, live and learn. At least now you know I’m not perfect.

I just hope this little event will inspire you to do some backups.

- Pat Doyle

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I have designed my first WordPress theme, and it’s all about dogs! The name of the theme is My Cute Pups.

If you are interested in having a copy of this free theme, you can check out these links:

My Cute Pups Theme Info Page

My Cute Pups Demo

My Cute Pups Free WordPress Theme Download

It was fun to create this theme, and I think I will be doing more of them in the future. You can keep track of all my free themes at my Best Free Wordpress Themes blog.

- Pat Doyle

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If you are an AdSense publisher, you need to know about this! Google has started allowing people to link their AdSense accounts to a Google Analytics account. They are rolling it out slowly, and I just got mine hooked up a couple of days ago.

Wow! Is it great! It will tell you exactly how much each page on your site is earning in AdSense revenue. Before this, the only way to find this out was to set up a channel for each page, and if you have a lot of pages on your site, forget it.

Now you just get a snippet of code to put on your site, in the footer is best, and it will track all the pages that have that code. If you have a WordPress blog, you just update your footer once, and it will be on all your pages.

I got a huge surprise when I installed this on one of my sites. Almost 56% of the AdSense revenue on that site is coming from one page! (See the screenshot below.) And this site has hundreds of pages.

(Click photo to enlarge)

You can bet I am going to add more pages that are similar to that page which is earning most of the money.

The way you know if your AdSense account is ready to be connected, is that when you are inside your AdSense account, you will see a link saying something like “Connect to a Google Analytics account” or something like that. Since I’m already connected now, mine says “Go to your Google Analytics Account”. If you don’t already have an Analytics account, it will walk you through the steps to create one.

It is a little confusing to find your way around the Analytics account until you get used to it, but it is well worth it. Don’t worry if it doesn’t show you anything right away. Once you install the code they give you, it will take a day or so for it to gather data and give you your reports.

One thing to be careful of – if you have more than one site, you will need to add an additional snippet of code “at the top” of your site. I didn’t know what they meant by “at the top”, so I put it in the Header file, right after the <body> tag, and that is working fine.

Anyway, to get this additional snippet, in your Analytics account, go to “Analytics Settings”, then “Edit AdSense linking settings”. (Do this AFTER you have set up the sites in Analytics and have gotten the code to put in the footer.) Once you go there, it will give you a list of your sites. You pick one to be the primary site, and for the rest, it will give you the additional code to put in the header.

It is well worth taking the time to do figure this out and set it up for all your AdSense sites. Let me know if you find any surprises like I did!

- Pat Doyle

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Photo by whiteafrican

I learned my lesson when I moved this blog and ended up upgrading WordPress from many versions ago. I resolved to keep my WordPress installations upgraded to the latest version.

So today I upgraded this blog to version 2.7 of WordPress. It was pretty easy. I followed the instructions on the WordPress documentation (codex) about Upgrading Wordpress.

The main steps are these:

1. Download the latest version of WordPress and unzip it.
2. Back up your site!
3. Deactivate all your plugins. Sometimes it causes problems if you leave them activated.
4. Start up your favorite FTP program and connect to your site.
5. Delete the wp-includes folder at your site, and upload the new wp-includes folder from the unzipped version of WordPress from step 1.
6. In the same way, delete the old wp-admin folder and upload the new one.
7. Check the wp-content folder. This folder contains your plugins and themes. Your theme might be customized. It didn’t look like there was anything I needed to upload there, so I left it alone. This is the safest thing to do, so you don’t lose any customization you have done to your site.
8. Upload new versions of the files that are not in a folder. Be sure not to overwrite your wp-config.php file, since this contains your database info and password. You can say “yes” to overwrite everything else. You can manually check the wp-config-sample.php file to see if anything needs to be updated in your wp-config.php file, but there was nothing – it looked fine, so I left it alone.
9. That’s it for transferring the files – now I went to my wp-admin area. It gave me a message that I needed to upgrade the database, so I clicked on the button and it did that. It worked fine.
10. Now I just went to my plugins area and checked to see if any plugins had new versions. If they did, I clicked on the link to upgrade them automatically. After that, I activated all the plugins that I had active before. I did this one-by-one and refreshed the site each time in between. This is so that, if a plugin is causing problems, you will know which one is the problem one.
11. Voila – I was done!

Version 2.7 has some nice features, so it is worth upgrading. Here are some of the features I noticed. (Some of them might have been in previous versions of WordPress, but I just never noticed.)

• Making a post stick to the home page. This can be done right while editing the post in WordPress 2.7, which is really handy. In the “Publish” section of the “Edit Post” page, look for the word “Visibility” and click on the little “Edit” link next to it. There will be a checkbox for “Stick this post to the front page”.
• Tags. When adding tags to a post, you can click on “Choose from the most popular tags” and get a list of tags that you have previously used. This helps if you can’t remember what tags you have used in the past.
• Export/Import functions under “Tools” – these let you export a backup of your database, or import one from another blog.

If you have Fantastico, you can sometimes use that to upgrade WordPress versions, but I felt more comfortable doing it manually. Either way, if you back up your site before you start, you can’t go wrong. You can always go back to the backup.

- Pat Doyle

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Now that I am getting involved with web hosting, I have been thinking a lot about backups.

Do you back up all your websites? You should!

Your web host might or might not do backups. If they do backups, you don’t know how often they do it. Also, their backups might get lost or be unusable for various reasons. You should not trust your host to do your backups — you should always do your own backups as well.

So how do you do it? If your host has cPanel, this is pretty easy. Sign in to your cPanel, and look for the “Backups” icon.

On the Backups page, you will see two sections.

Full Backup

The first section is called “Full Backup”. This backs up your entire site, including any databases. The only problem is that you can’t restore these yourself. You need to contact your host to do the restore. Still, it could come in handy, and it backs up everything you have into one file.

When you click on the button for the Full Backup, you will see a lot of choices. Don’t be confused. You will not need to fill in most of the fields.

The easiest thing to do is to leave the Backup Destination as “Home Directory”. Fill in your email address if you want to be notified when the backup is done. Then click the “Generate Backup” button.

When you go back to this screen later, when the backup is done, you will see the backup you have taken, under “Backups Available for Download”.

Now you can just click on this file and download it to your computer. You need to do this step of downloading it, because otherwise the backup is just sitting on your host’s server, so if there is a server problem, your backup could be lost too.

Once you have it downloaded to your home computer, you are all set. To be even more careful, you could make a copy of it and store it somewhere else as well (on a zip drive or offsite).

Home Directory Backup

The next section is “Partial Backups”, and under that, the first thing you can do is a “Home Directory Backup”. This will back up all your files and folders, but not your databases.

Just click on the “Home Directory” button, and it will give you a zipped file to download to your computer.

If you need to restore this file later, you can just upload it again under “Restore a Home Directory Backup”.

MySQL Database Backup

If you have any databases, which you will have if you have WordPress installed, you will also need to do a “MySQL Database Backup”. Just click on the database name under “Databases”, and you will get a zipped backup to download.

As before, you just upload and restore it under “Restore a MySQL Database”.

Just be aware, if your server is totally wiped out, you will lose your Database User as well. You will need to create the user and assign the user to the database manually. You do this in cPanel under “MySQL Databases”. I won’t go into detail on this now, but you would look in your wp-config.php file to get the username and password for the user.

It is because of this manual stuff that has to be done, that a “Full Backup” is easier – everything is included. But it requires you to get your host to restore it.

Other Backups

The Backups page in cPanel has two more sections, for “Email Forwarders” and “Email Filters”. If you have either of those set up, you can do backups of those too. They are backed up and restored in the same way as the other Partial Backups. I have never used these myself, but they should be easy to do.

Backup Schedule

So set up a schedule for yourself, and do your backups!

For WordPress, if all you are doing is adding posts, then all you really need to back up often is the database. The other stuff will stay pretty much the same and can be backed up less frequently.

Just don’t neglect this altogether. Even if you only take backups occasionally, at least you will have something to start from if you lose your site, instead of starting from scratch.

– Pat Doyle

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New Year’s Day is just a few days away. Have you made any New Year’s resolutions for your internet business?

Actually, rather than create hard and fast resolutions, I believe it is more productive to think about the successes and failures you have had in the past year, and then to set some goals for the new year.

Here are some things you might want to think about:

1. What worked for you last year? If it worked for you last year, why not expand on it, doing more of the same – only on a bigger scale?
2. What did not work so well? You can learn a lot from your failures as well as your successes. Analyze what went wrong and decide what you need to do differently in the future. It might be that the particular idea should be abandoned, but it could also just mean that it needs to be revised a little to be successful. Think of all your projects as experiments, and learn from the failures as well as the successes.
3. Are you taking your internet business seriously? Maybe the reason it is not going so well is just that you have not spent enough time on it. You can’t expect to be haphazard about your business and still succeed. You need to treat it as a business, even if you can only work on it part time. At least during the time you can devote to it, be whole-hearted and businesslike about it.
4. Have you been focusing on the right things? I believe a business will do best with clear goals that you focus on. A lot of internet marketers make the mistake of hopping from one thing to another and losing focus easily. In the new year, try to focus on one thing at at time, so that you give it a chance to succeed. It is ok to abandon something that is not working, but be sure you gave it a fair chance first.
5. Have you set some firm goals for yourself, and have you written the goals down? This is something that is a lot more important than you might think. Studies have shown that people who write down goals for themselves will have a much better chance of achieving those goals than people who don’t write them down, or, especially, those who don’t even have goals.

   For example, think about your income goals for the next year. Write down a figure for how much you want to earn from your business. After you do that, you can break it down into monthly, weekly, or even daily goals.

   Personally, I have an income goal that I want to achieve this year, and I have written it down. Let’s see if having it written down helps. (I’ll let you know next year.)

I’d like to share with you some of the plans and thoughts I have for my business for next year.

First of all, l have noticed that, once I worked out some personal issues that I was grappling with, I suddenly was able to have a clear vision for my business. I found that when my personal life was up in the air, I could not form a good business plan either. Thank goodness now that has changed, so I expect great things from my business this year.

Some of you may know that I have moved a few times this past year. I have now settled down in Sheboygan, Wisconsin. My business address is still in West Bend, because that’s where I have my business mailbox. I will move it to Sheboygan eventually.

Side note: Did you know that Sheboygan is the bratwurst capital of the U.S.? I heard that on the radio the other day. Some of you might not even know what a bratwurst is… it’s a spicy sausage, very popular in Wisconsin, which originally comes from Germany.

Anyway, back to my business plans:

1. Build an email list. I don’t have an email list set up for this blog yet. As I mentioned in a previous post, I was thinking of creating an email newsletter.

   I now have a great idea of how the email newsletter will be structured. I don’t think anyone else is doing this. It will be a good way for you to learn about making money online. I’m not going to say any more until I roll it out, but I think you will really like it.

2. Post regularly, at least once per week. I used to try posting 3 times per week on this blog, but that got to be too much. But I want to post at least once per week, to keep the blog current. It might not always be on Mondays, but look for a post once a week from now on.
3. Create more videos. I have found that I need to do this regulary, or else I get out of the mode of doing it. It’s kind of like exercise. You get out of shape if you don’t do it on a regular basis. I haven’t created videos for so long that I have forgotten the Camtasia settings that I used, or even where my microphone is. So that’s something I need to get back to. Some of the videos will be free and some will be paid products.
4. Which brings me to: Create more products. I am going to start creating products on a more regular basis. There are so many things I know how to do, that I could create products on. I am sure the same is true for you too. You know more than you think. So maybe you should be thinking of products you could create, as well.
5. Continue creating websites. For a while at least, I am going to continue to create websites to sell on Sitepoint. It is a good steady source of income. It does take some work to set up the sites, but I have only had one site that did not sell, and I know why. I won’t make the same mistakes again. Most of the others have sold for $99 at the buy-it-now price. A few have sold for less, but they have still earned me money.

   One thing I am going to do differently there is to charge for hosting. I have a reseller account set up at Hostgator. So far, I have been offering a year’s worth of free hosting to my website buyers. In the new year, I will only offer one month of free hosting, and then charge a minimal amount for hosting. After a while, it will add up.

So I hope you have enjoyed this little peek into my plans for next year. Don’t forget to review your own internet business, and make some business plans of your own.

I wish you all the best for next year. May it be happy and prosperous, no matter what you decide to do.

– Pat Doyle

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I have been creating some niche blogs and selling them on Sitepoint. I might soon do the same with other (non-blog) websites.

So far, I have been selling them in the Startup Web Site section.

It has been going ok, but it takes a while to create the content for the sites. That’s why in the future I might do sites without articles, as they will be faster to create. Ironically, the sites without articles will be easier to maintain, as they will be updated automatically.

I will try and remember to post links to my auctions in the sidebar of this blog, in case you are interested in any of the sites.

By the way, I have not been online or posting as much as I would like. I am beginning to wonder if a blog is the best way to go, in my marketing efforts. I guess I am rethinking my business strategy.

I might go more towards having my best advice in an email newsletter. I have not created a newsletter for this blog since I moved to my new domain name of patdoyle.com. I will try to do that soon so that I will have a way to contact you with tips and stuff without having to write a whole blog post every time.

Still, it is nice to have the blog as a “home base”, so I will certainly keep it around, even if I don’t end up posting very often. We’ll see. Try to bear with me as I work these things out. I have been having some issues in my personal life as well, so these things have been taking more time than expected.

Anyway, check out my auctions on Sitepoint. If you are good at creating websites, selling them on Sitepoint can be a way for you to earn some money. If you are not good at creating websites, you can look on Sitepoint for websites to purchase.

- Pat Doyle

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Well, I did it, and it wasn’t too bad. (Except for this – see update below.) I moved my blog from www.patbdoyle.com to patdoyle.com (without the “b”).

The hardest part was upgrading to the latest version of WordPress – I hadn’t done that in a while. Somehow I lost all my categories, but that’s ok. I had lost them a while ago when I tried upgrading before. I’ll just put them back later.

I moved from DreamHost to Hostgator too. Hostgator has Cpanel, which Dreamhost does not have. If they both would have had Cpanel, it would have been even easier.

So here is what I did to move the blog.

1. I copied all the files in my root directory (all the files under patbdoyle.com) to my hard drive, using FTP.
2. I backed up my WordPress database to my hard drive using the “export” function in phpMyAdmin on Dreamhost. This is where Cpanel would have been easier – you can just go to “Backups” and do a database backup in Cpanel.

   There are a lot of settings in phpMyAdmin that I did not know what to do with. So I just followed the instructions in the WordPress documentation: http://codex.wordpress.org/ Backing_Up_Your_Database. That worked just fine.

3. The database backup was in zipped format, so I unzipped it on my hard drive.
4. I opened the database file with Notepad++, my favorite text editor. You could use plain Notepad too. I did a search and replace, changing “patbdoyle” to “patdoyle”. This changed all the URLS from patbdoyle.com to patdoyle.com.
5. Now here is where I did something weird. Because I used phpMyAdmin to backup the database, I should have used phpAdmin on the new domain, to restore the database (using the “import” function). Instead, I tried using the “Backups” option in Cpanel, where you can restore a database.

   This did not go very smoothly due to the differing formats. Lesson learned – do the restore the same way as the backup. If you can go from Cpanel to Cpanel, this is easy. If not, then go from phpMyAdmin to phpMyAdmin. If you do use Cpanel, make sure you zip the file up again first. Otherwise the restore won’t work.

6. Now go to the files you have downloaded using FTP, and edit the wp-config.php file. (I used Notepad++ again. Or you can use Notepad.) You want the DB_NAME in the wp-config.php file to match the database name that you created. Hostgator puts your username as a prefix on the database name, so I had to add the prefix to the wp-config.php file.

   You will also need to look at DB_USER and DB_PASSWORD in this file. These need to match the database user and password that you are going to create in the next step. If your host uses a prefix, then put it there.

   Also, look at the DB_HOST. Most hosts just use ‘localhost’ as the hostname, so that is what I had to put here. Dreamhost uses something else, like ‘mysql.patbdoyle.com’. If both hosts use ‘localhost’, you will not have to change this.

7. Now, in Cpanel on the new domain, go to “MySQL Databases”. You will see there is already a database there, because we already imported/restored it in a previous step. But we still have to add a user. Make sure the username and password match what is in the wp-config.php file. Then, after you add the user, you have to add the user to the database (on this same screen, just scroll down a little). Check the box for ALL privileges.
8. Ok, we are done with the database, but now we still have to move all the other files to the new domain. These are the files you copied from the old domain to your hard drive using FTP. Now we will use FTP again to copy these files to the new domain. Note: For Hostgator, you put all these files in the public_html folder. Make sure you copy the version of wp-config.php that you modified with the correct database information.
9. Ok, you are done! If you did everything correctly, you should be able to log in to your new wordpress blog using the same username and password that you used on the old domain.

   I did have to make a few other tweaks where I had hard-coded the old domain name in some of my theme’s files. I also had to register the new feed with Feedburner and replace the name of the feed on the new blog.

10. After that, I upgraded to the latest version of WordPress. I was quite a few versions behind, so this was a lot of work. I am not going to go into this here, since it has nothing to do with transferring your domain. Just a word to the wise – deactivate all your plugins before you start the upgrade process. They are not kidding when they tell you to do this.

    Hopefully you will have kept up with the WordPress upgrades all along, so you will not have to do a major upgrade all at once.

11. The last thing you will want to do, after checking to make sure your new blog is ok, is to redirect your old blog to your new blog. To do this, open the .htaccess file at your old blog and put the following commands right at the top of the file. (What comes after these commands will not matter, but I would not delete the rest of the stuff, so it will be easier to undo the redirect if you need to – just delete the first few lines to undo it.)

    Here are the redirect commands:

    Options +FollowSymLinks
    RewriteEngine on
    RewriteRule (.*) http://www.newdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

    Replace “newdomain.com” with your new domain name.

    Don’t ask me what all this means. I just googled it, and I found this, and it works.

By the way, the only reason this blog transfer was so easy was that earlier that day, I was copying a WordPress blog I had just created, for a different reason. I had to go through all this with that blog, but it was a lot harder because of the trial-and-error I had to do. I hope I have saved you from some of that trial-and-error. Once you have the steps down, it is pretty easy.

These instructions might not make much sense now, but if you are in the middle of it, and looking at the files and your Cpanel, it will make a lot more sense. Also note, if your host does not have Cpanel, that’s ok. Use whatever your host has. The steps will be much the same. I just think Cpanel makes it easier because it is uniform – a lot of hosts use it.

You can use the same steps if you are just moving your blog to a different host, but keeping the same domain name. You can just skip the steps of replacing the old domain name with the new one, and of doing the redirect at the end.

I hope this post is useful to somebody. Some people requested it when I announced that I was going to be moving my blog.

Update: Just when I thought everything went smoothly, I got a rude awakening. My automatic Blog Broadcast emails from Aweber sent out 10 emails at once – for the past 10 posts of my blog. I quickly sent out an apology email, but two people still unsubscribed. I can’t blame them – who would want to get 10 emails in a day from the same blog?

When I redirected the old blog to the new one, the feed also got redirected. Since the Blog Broadcast in Aweber works from the feed, it thought that there were 10 new posts to broadcast. Lesson learned: Turn off your automatic blog broadcasts before you redirect your blog! My apologies again to those who got all those emails

- Pat Doyle

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I feel bad for the people that take up those challenges, like creating 30 sites in 30 days, or creating 100 sites, etc. I am not trying to target any one campaign, because I don’t remember the details of any of them, but they all involve creating a large number of sites in a short amount of time.

The only thing these challenges accomplish is to wear people out and discourage them. If you don’t know much about creating moneymaking websites, how is repeating the same mistakes 100 times going to help you?

I could understand it if you created one site, learned from your mistakes, and did better on the next one. Then creating multiple sites could actually help you. But if you are just mass-producing sites, and they are all the same, then creating a huge number of them will not help.

The theory is that if you can earn $1 per day from each site, then creating 100 sites will get you $100 per day. Well, I have news for you: it is very hard to get $1 per day from each of 100 sites, unless you know what you are doing. 100 times zero earnings is still zero.

So what should you do? I suggest that you should concentrate on one site at a time, until you become accomplished at creating moneymaking sites.

Once you know how to create successful money-earning websites, then you can start to produce more of them at a time. But at first, while you are still learning, create one site, and get it to earn some money.

You will learn more doing one site than you will from burning yourself out on 30 sites at once. With one site, you can keep trying different things, and watching the results. You will be able to promote one site better than you can promote 30 sites.

When you are commenting on blogs, you will know which site to put in the “website” field of the comments. You will get attached to your “baby” and be happy to promote it to others.

You will have time to make a decent site that others will want to visit. You will be able to participate in social networking and promote the site. You will be able to concentrate on creating content and getting links for one site.

Just try this for a month or two. Pick your favorite one of your sites, or if you don’t have any worth building on, then create a new one. In either case, just focus on that one site. Post to it as often as you can. Get as many good links as you can. Test out different ad placements. Test out ways of getting more visitors.

Even if you are in the sandbox, work on the site. Unless you are in a competitive field, you will probably be out of the sandbox within 3 months. Meanwhile, you have built a solid site. After a while, you can put AdSense on the site, if that is your business model. You will start to see money coming in, because you have built a good site and are getting visitors.

Won’t it give you more confidence to have one good site that is actually earning you money than 30 or more sites that are not earning anything?

Once you have figured out how to make money from one site, then you can start to build more of them. At least by that time, you will know what you are doing. Instead of repeating the same mistakes with each new site, you will be building the new sites on a strong foundation of knowledge, and they should do well also.

What do you think? Agree, disagree? I think there will be some strong opinions on either side of this issue.

- Pat Doyle

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