Photo by Per Ola Wiberg

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.

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Photo by jeffwilcox

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.
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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.
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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:
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Photo by Gaetan Lee

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.
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Photo by pasotraspaso

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:
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Photo by Natalie Maynor

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.
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Photo by The Consumerist

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 internetbusinessflash.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.
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Photo by NEOPIXX

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?
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