Blogger vs WordPress Blog

Welcome come to Part 2 of my series and I encourage everyone to read Part 1 before going forward. Everyone wants to find creative ways to generate traffic and leads so I've decided to do research and put this together. In the previous part, we talked about choosing the right hosting provider and installing WordPress. Once you've installed your platform, it's time to do some research so you can find out about your audience. I went over some cool ways to streamline your audience research, which means to research your competition and their content while paying close attention to their social media platforms. Next,

It's time to understand your bottom line and come up with a game plan. This is very important especially if you're creating a brand and want to market it a specific way. Without having a clear cut branding plan, you might lose track of what's important and this will affect your bottom line and how you relate to your audience. Let's get started with understanding your branding concept and the fundamentals.

Your branding concept will be determined mainly by your content, which you'll learn in the next step and your identity online. This means creating a website and logo people can relate to each time they visit your website. Your logo, on the other hand, will play a much vital role when displayed on external platforms. For example, think about the image you get when you see the following logo displayed:

Apple

IBM

John Chow

Samsung

Pepsi

I know I can be driving anywhere in the world and I'll know EXACTLY what these brands represent when I see the logo. It's important to know that blogging is a business and you should approach it the very same way. For example, here are a few things you should be focusing on when getting started.

Logo –

Create a logo that will represent your brand going forward. You can get someone to design it, but make sure it's clear and will have an encouraging logo. The reason this is so important is because after you build credibility and people see it, your logo will be able to generate traffic quickly through awareness. I know when I click through on the logo I'll be able to find valuable information.

WordPress –

Your website will represent your brand through images, colors, fonts, and layout. It's important you have a clear idea of the layout when starting. Understand how this will engage users when they arrive on your blog, looking for content. The right colors should be easy on the eyes so people want to stay on your page. The fonts should be clear so they'll be able to read your content without any problems. Your slogan should be right on top and should represent what your blog is all about. Navigational menus should be very easy to locate and be organized in a way to make find content easy.

Finally, I've noticed people love to share their feedback, so always add a comment box for people to leave feedback. This is a great way to encourage a debate and find new content topics through questions posted in the box.

Creating Content Plan –

I never encourage people to jump into writing content because it's important to perform research. You need to know what your audience is looking for and this was discussed in Part 1 of my series. I'm not going into too much detail about this, but will encourage people to have a content plan ready. You should know the following:

Content length

Content frequency

Content topics

You have to keep in mind, your blog is only as good as your content. It's important to have a plan so you can frequently publish content on a regular basis. Your traffic will decrease if you're unable to provide high quality, fresh content to your readers regularly. This is why I've always encouraged my readers to always perform research and create a list of potential topics. This way, it's hard for them to run into a problem of NOT having anything to write about. You never know where you'll get inspiration for content so keep a mobile application ready to write down blogging ideas. The point is this should all be outlined in a content plan. You should know how you'll write down ideas, length of content, frequency, etc., because you'll then discipline yourself to stick to this content marketing plan.

In Part 3, we'll go over plug-ins that will improve your traffic and leads. WordPress has created an interface that streamlines much of the work you need to do when building a site for traffic and leads.

Source: Want More Traffic and Leads? Follow These WordPress Tips – Part 2

On my iPad, logged into my own WordPress.com blog, and using Safari browser, if I navigate to another WordPress users blog post, scroll to the bottom and try to hit the Like button, the screen flickers like it is attempting to open another window, but my Like is not recorded. I tested with a specific post and following same steps on my iPhone (using Safari) and desktop (using Chrome browser) and Like was recorded fine. The issue isn't consistent for all posts, but I have experienced this issue several times in the last two weeks. It may be related to my attempt to install and use the "Press This" and "Publish on your Blog" Chrome extensions. About the time this issue began, I was attempting to use one of these extensions, was having trouble and logged in to WordPress using my email address, when up to this point, since establishing my WordPress account 9 months ago, I had been logging in using my blog name as username on all platforms.

The blog I need help with is travelinspireconnect.wordpress.com.

Source: Cannot Like Another Blogger's Post

Let's say disaster strikes your website. You could get in touch with your hosting company if your plan includes regular backups. But it might not be enough.

Think about it:

Your site goes down because a bad or incompatible plugin or theme broke it when you made the latest update.

Your site goes offline and you lose access because a hacker installed ransomware on it and is now demanding payment.

Your site goes down because your client was doing something they shouldn't have done and you forgot to protect it from them.

There is any number of reasons your site could end up lost, damaged, or stolen, and it's up to you to restore it as quickly as possible. By owning the process of backing up your site, you can set things right a lot quicker than if you rely on the WordPress community to lend their advice or wait for your hosting company to help. This is not one of those things where you have time to spare.

WordPress outlines a number of ways in which you can backup your site in its Codex. Today, however, we're going to focus on how to automate this process by using, of course, WordPress plugins.

7 Best WordPress Backup Plugins Compared

Whether it's a security breach, user error, or something else entirely, a downed website is no good. So, your best bet in keeping your site safe is to always be ready to recover from that potential disaster with a backup. By using a high-quality backup plugin, you can take control of how quickly and efficiently that happens.

Before we dive in, a quick plug for WPMU DEV's cloud backups. Every member gets 10GB of free cloud storage, which you can use to backup your websites.

WPMU DEV members get 10BG of cloud backups.

And if you have a lot of websites and need more storage, just click "Add Storage" to upgrade to one of our paid backup plans.

Why do we offer backups for members? Because having website backups is a no-brainer, really – you should always be ready for the unexpected, whether you need to recover quickly after accidentally deleting a file, experience hardware failure or you get hacked.

It's recommended you keep at last three backups of each of your websites from the past three weeks. Currently, when members hit 100% of their 10GB quota, their oldest backups are routinely deleted to make room for new backups that are created. So if you are backing up multiple websites with large files, you can quickly run out of space and lose key backups if you don't have enough storage.

Here are the 7 best WordPress backup plugins compared:

BackupBuddy is the premium WordPress backup plugin from iThemes. What you're going to find here is a truly premium service and one that would be helpful if you have a large network of clients whose sites you want to securely back up.

Pros

It takes only a handful of steps to back up, restore, or migrate your site.

You can customize what exactly you want your backups to save (e.g. just your database or the full WordPress installation).

You can also customize the frequency of backups, from hourly to monthly.

You can save your backups in a variety of locations, including Amazon, Dropbox, or Google Drive. You can also just download a zipped folder of the files.

Includes the ImportBuddy tool which helps you restore your site from the backup.

There is a migration feature as well so you can safely move sites from different hosts, servers, or domains. For developer-specific plans, you can use this feature to safely move your staging or test sites.

Bonus tools are available, like malware, database, and server scanners.

Cons

This plugin costs money to use and the plan you'd likely need to cover all your clients' sites is pretty costly.

Although iThemes offers their own backup storage Stash Live for free, most plans only cover it for a year, which means you'll have to start paying for it or make a switch down the road.

BackUpWordPress is a simple backup solution. If that's all you're looking for (i.e. you don't need restore or migration assistance), then this is a good plugin to look at. You can use the limited free version or you can upgrade to premium so you have more control over where your data is backed up.

Pros

This is available for free as well as for a premium.

Premium plans allow for different numbers of backed-up sites, so you have affordable options to consider as a developer.

Going premium will also give you the ability to save your backup wherever you want: on your server, emailed as a zip, or to a file storage service.

You can create different backup frequency schedules.

There's a robust knowledgebase available on their site in case you run into questions and want to troubleshoot on your own.

Premium plans come with a year of priority support though.

Cons

The biggest complaint customers have about the free plugin is that the backup can be slow or buggy. The developer attributes that to customers' running backups when resources are low on their server, so be cautious of this.

There are no restore or migration services available.

Although there is a premium version of this plugin available, I'd suggest you first start with the free one as it seems to do a bang-up job in backing up WordPress sites. The main difference between the two is in the type of support and updates you receive as well as the number of sites covered.

Pros

Saves your total WordPress installation.

Can push backups to your directory, FTP, or third-party storage service.

Database optimization, scanning, and repair feature included.

Includes multi-site support.

If you're willing to pay for the premium service, you'll receive priority support as well as automated updates.

Appears to be well-supported as the developer quickly responds to each customer's complaint left in the repository.

Cons

The premium version seems a little too expensive for a strictly backup plugin.

There are also some evident bugs here–some of which the developer is aware of and working to address.

Here is another backup and restore plugin that comes with both a free and premium version. While the free version works great and is probably the highest rated plugin I've seen in the repository for backups, I'd recommend using the premium plugin for the advanced features it gives developers access to.

ProsThe free plugin enables users to backup and restore. The surprisingly affordable premium plugin does backups, restorations, and migrations.

Back up either specific files or the entire installation–and all it takes is one click. It's a great option if you just want to set it and forget it.

You can save your backups to most third-party services or just get it emailed directly to you.

There are a few things that set the premium plan apart from the free and from the competition. There's, of course, the migration tool. It also will automatically back up your site before any updates (core, plugin, or theme) occur. Finally, you can use it to retrieve backed-up versions of your site if you were using another plugin that doesn't have restore capabilities.

The UpdraftCentral plugin extends this one to make it Multisite-compatible.

As a developer, you can also customize how this plugin works on your clients' sites. That way, they don't have to be bothered by backup alerts if you don't want them to.

Cons

While it's great to see the developer respond to nearly every complaint logged in WordPress, you can tell they're often very frustrated with their users and unable to just say "sorry, let us help".

VaultPress is Automattic's contribution to the backup and restore game. Consequently, this means that the only way to access this plugin is by purchasing a premium Jetpack plugin. If you're not a fan of Jetpack, then this one isn't going to be for you.

Pros

If you already have Jetpack premium, then there's nothing more for you to do but activate your backups. You can also purchase this as an add-on to the free Jetpack.

There are a couple of business plans available that include some type of automated backup service. They also come with one-click restore as well as site migration features.

Security scanning is included, so you'll also have the benefits of brute force attack prevention, spam protection, and uptime monitoring.

Additional Jetpack features come with this, like video hosting and Google Analytics integration.

Cons

This plugin won't back up your full WordPress installation; only your dashboard and content files.

This is only available as a paid service. It's not too expensive, but it's still unfortunate that there's no free version available.

You also can't purchase this separately from Jetpack. So, if you happen to be opposed to the bloated nature of the JetPack plugin, there's no way to separate VaultPress from it.

This is a great free plugin to consider if you want something simple and easy for your clients to manage their own site backups. However, if you want to unlock the restore and migration features, you'll need to go premium.

Pros

This plugin backs up your entire dashboard or your entire installation–choose the files you prefer to save.

It's great for WordPress novices as it's easy to use and the free version doesn't force you to charge your clients extra to use.

Unlimited backups are available for both the free and premium plans.

The premium plugin gives you more control over automating and scheduling your backups. It also enables you to restore, migrate, and clone your WordPress site.

Cons

If you're going free, be careful about using this with large sites or Multisite.

This plugin is not compatible with any third-party storage services, so the only place you can retrieve your backups from is the WordPress dashboard. Although they promise the files are compressed, that could compromise your site's speed if not closely managed.

Of course, for those of you who are WPMU DEV members, you'll have access to Snapshot Pro for all your backup and restore needs. This plugin is not only fast, but it's convenient and safe, too!

Pros

It's your choice what you want to back up: a specific set of files or your entire website.

Backups are all automated and at a frequency you prefer, from daily to monthly. You can also ensure that they run before any plugin, theme, or the core is updated.

You can also choose whether you want to back up one WordPress site or Multisite.

This plugin enables you to do a quick, one-click restore, too.

Site backups go to your FTP, Amazon S3, Google Drive, or Dropbox account. Or you can store them in the 10GB of secure cloud storage WPMU DEV gives you. You can also set limits on the numbers of backups saved to conserve space.

Cons

Hmmm… Maybe that there isn't a free version available yet?

Wrapping Up

Every WordPress site needs a comprehensive security plan. And every security plan needs to include a reliable backup solution. Today, I've given you 7 of the best backup plugins for WordPress.

But which one is right for you? Well, most of these come with a free version that you can try out, though that's not always an accurate reflection of what you're really getting since they're not supported and tend to only handle the backup part of the backup/restore formula you really need.

So, here is what I recommend:

UpdraftPlus is the plugin you absolutely need if you're running a WordPress development business. It's flexible, it's affordable, and it covers all your bases. It also comes with developer-specific features so you can have more control over what happens with the backups once they're in your clients' hands.

BackWPup is a great choice if you want something simple and free you can throw onto your smaller client websites. It's easy to use and comes with some awesome support and response times from the developer in case you should run into issues.

Snapshot Pro also gets my vote because of the built-in security of the plugin. If you think about it, storing your backups on your server won't help you if your site goes down or you lose access to the database. And free or cheap third-party services aren't always the most well-secured. With WPMU DEV's contribution of 10GB of cloud-hosted storage, you can ensure that your backups remain out of harm's way.

Source: 7 Best WordPress Backup Plugins of 2017 Compared (Pros and Cons)

Sharing content like blog articles on social media is a great way to build your audience and get traffic to your site, and no doubt you're already doing it on Facebook and Twitter. But the mistake a lot of people make is sharing content on each channel only once.

I know, because that what we used to do.

The fact is, when you spend so much time creating content like we do for our blog, it makes absolutely no sense to share it on our channels just once. Why? Because there's every chance people won't see it. How often do you go back through the social feeds of websites you like and click on old content? Exactly. By sharing content only once, a huge chunk of our audience is likely to never know a post we spent hours putting together even existed.

This is why sharing content more than once makes so much sense. Sharing multiple times increases the odds of catching people who didnt' see it the first, second or even third time.

Kissmetrics explains how resharing works in this excellent article. But this quote from the article sums it up really well:

"Your social media followers aren't like RSS subscribers who see and read every post. In fact, sharing more than once probably is an essential part of providing your audience with the value you promised them. If you don't share your links a few times, they may never see any of your updates."

While it's important that you don't re-share multiple times to your social accounts with the exact same content (boring and repetitive!), you can re-frame content in lots of different creative ways.

For instance, say you've got a post about WordPress backup plugins that you want to share. The first time you tweet about it you could use the title and link, and then next time you share it pose a question:

Straight and Easy: Post Title + Link

The Question: Ask an engaging question to stir conversation

Cite a Fact: Share a fact or figure that is included in your post

Share a Quote: Grab a pull-quote from your article and turn it into a social message

Add Intrigue: Write a teaser message that grabs the attention of your readers

The great thing about framing your content in different ways is that it can also help you gain insight into what works best with your audience, i.e. do your readers prefer a "straight and easy" approach, or are questions better for encouraging clicks?

We continually experiment with our social accounts (as everyone should, it's good practice) and started re-sharing our content, but we quickly found there there was some content that we wanted to keep on sharing on an ongoing basis. What was this content? Mostly promotion stuff, like the fact we provide 24/7 support for any WordPress issue, that we have a bunch of awesome plugins available for free at WordPress.org, and that we offer a 30-day free trial.

Our members all know about this stuff (we hope!) but we probably don't promote it as much as we should. So we wanted to do something about that.

So we started looking out for a tool to help and stumbled upon MeetEdgar.

What is MeetEdgar?

MeetEdgar is a handy service that helps you recycle social updates automatically. It works by organizing all your social posts in categorized libraries, like "blog posts," "tips," "inspirational/funny."

You can then schedule your content by category and choose which days and times you want Edgar to automatically pull and publish content from your libraries. A cool feature is that you never need to refill your queue – Edgar moves through your content and then starts recycling older updates, ensuring your posts will be seen by a new audience, bringing more traffic to your site.

How We Use MeetEdgar

We really only use one category: promotional. Our queue is filled with posts that, as I mentioned recycle through all the cool features we offer that we always forget to tell people about!

Currently, our schedule is set on a random setting as we're still testing and experimenting with MeetEdgar, but what we have noticed is:

It's super easy to use – just like scheduling posts and tweets as you would for Facebook and Twitter

It saves a bunch of time – instead of scheduling a message to go out only once, we can schedule messages that are recycled over time

It's hard to measure just how effective re-sharing our content has been since it's still early days, but what I can say is that we're now sharing important promotional content more often and that can only be a good thing. Doing this is more about brand awareness, letting people know what we offer, and just generally being pro-active about sharing all the cool stuff our developers build!

Summing Up

So there you go, just a little insight into one of our social media experiments. We've found MeetEdgar to be really helpful in spreading the word about what we offer.

Next time you see one of our promo posts, you'll know why you're seeing it and how we pushed it with MeetEdgar.

If you're not already sharing your own content more than once to your social accounts, I encourage you to check out the Kissmetrics post I linked to earlier in the post and read up on recycling your content.

Source: Why You Should Share Blog Posts More Than Once on Social (and How We Do It with MeetEdgar)

I accidentally created a second blog address instead of changing my original blog address. Help! Now I technically have two blogs. It looks like if i delete the second one I won't be able to use that address and thats the address I want to use for my active blog. Any suggestions?

The blog I need help with is lauslittleadventures.wordpress.com.

Source: Exchanging blog addresses