Not quite a year ago, I crashed my WordPress site and lost all of my content.  I was creating a course and using one of my parked domains to show the steps to building a WordPress site. Unbeknownst to me, a parked domain points directly to your main domain, so whatever you do on a parked, you are also doing to your main domain.

Long story short, I called my hosting company to see if they could recover my site for me, but was told that my site had long ago become too large for the automatic backup service (up to 2 gig) and there was no backup available.

So what have I learned about hosting that could help you in the future?

1. That once your account (not just your site) gets bigger than 2 gig, it will no longer be automatically backed up.
2. That you do not get any warning that lets you know you are close or have exceeded the 2 gig limit.  But you can go into your C-Panel (the back end of your hosting) and check the file space and usage anytime to see how close you are to the 2 gig point.
3. You can backup your site yourself and I highly recommend that you do this.
4. Bluehost has wonderful tutorials that will walk you through this process.  Go to tutorials.bluehost.com for the best info available.
5. That PARKED domains are redirected to your main domain.  What you do to a parked domain, you will be doing to your main domain.  (Remember I installed WordPress on a domain I wasn’t using? It was a parked domain.)
6. I highly recommend that you learn all you can about your hosting package.  Bluehost offers C-Panel which is a user friendly, highly intuitive program allowing end users (you) to manage your hosting/sites/account yourself. Read up on all that you can get your hands on from your Hosting company.
7. Wherever possible, use other sites to upload content to. For example, did you know that you can create the coolest sales page in Twitwall (thank you Lauren McMullen for this tip)?  And you can host your videos on YouTube and so on.  Get really creative and monitor the size of your account frequently.
8. If you don’t use a file anymore, take it out of your directory.

You can read the complete story by clicking this link, but in the meantime, schedule a weekly manual backup of your WordPress site. Go to your hosting company and find the information you need to do this yourself.  It’s not difficult to do, but playing around in the back end of your hosting can be intimidating. Good hosting companies will have videos or some way of instucting you on how to do this.

Contact me today to get yourself online with a WordPress site. Click here to check out my WordPress packages

Here are some suggestions:

Publicize

Headline Animator: Create and customize an animated banner that cycles through your feed’s five most recent items. It’s an easy way to promote your content anywhere you can place a snippet of HTML.

BuzzBoost: Do you maintain more than one blog, site, or podcast? BuzzBoost helps you cross-promote your content by repurposing your feed as go-anywhere HTML.

Optimize

Enhance and extend your feed with FeedBurner’s array of services.

FeedFlare™

Build “interactivity” into the content you create, making it simple for subscribers to tag, email or share their content with others.
Give your subscribers easy ways to email, tag, share, and act on the content you publish by including as many or few of the services listed below. FeedFlare places a simple footer at the bottom of each content item, helping you to distribute, inform and create a community around your content.

SmartFeed

Reach the widest possible audience while publishing a single feed on your blog or site. Translates your feed on-the-fly into a format (RSS or Atom) compatible with your visitors’ feed reader application.

BuzzBoost

Have feed, will travel. BuzzBoost republishes your burned feed’s content as go-anywhere HTML. Want to promote your blog on another site you manage? BuzzBoost gives you a snippet of JavaScript you can paste into your page templates.

Email Subscriptions

Give your biggest fans another way to keep up with your blog or podcast feed by placing an email subscription form on your site.

PingShot

Most web-based feed reading services will check for updates on their own time. Give ‘em a push with PingShot.

Analyze

FeedBurner Stats is our analytics offering for blogs, Web sites podcasts and feeds of all kinds. The service is free with every FeedBurner feed and provides publishers with a comprehensive view of their audience.

Monetize

Earn revenue by displaying relevant text and image ads using AdSense for feeds.

Configure Ads

Activate Google AdSense for feeds and choose options that control how these ads display in your feed.

“Troubleshootize”

It’s true, some good feeds go bad. Learn how to diagnose and solve the most common problems FeedBurner encounters when working with your original feed. The best part? We also notify you about any issues we discover using our FeedMedic and PodMedic reporting services.

Oh Dear, What Kind of Trouble?

Troubleshootize contains general tips and a couple of quick-fixes to try with any malfunctioning feed. And yeah, we’re sticking with this tab title. For now.

Fouled-Up Feeds, and Quick Ways to Fix ‘Em

The most common problems that affect your FeedBurner feed are:

The trouble: Your FeedBurner feed isn’t up-to-date with your Original Feed.

The fix: Try pinging FeedBurner using our Ping page. This action tells FeedBurner to go check your feed for updates immediately.

The trouble: Invalid characters or XML markup in content items, often introduced by composing your posts in Microsoft Word
or embedding JavaScript code in a post.

The fix: Check your feeds for validity problems: Original Feed Validity, FeedBurner Feed Validity. See if any errors are reported,
Then, check out this help topic for removing unwanted characters from your posts if mysterious characters seem to be to blame.

The trouble: Connection timeouts between FeedBurner and the web server that hosts your original feed. If FeedBurner can’t
reach your Original Feed for any reason, we will report it as a FeedMedic item here on Troubleshootize.

The fix: Try a ping once your website service has been restored.

The trouble: For podcasters, the web server hosting your audio does not report the correct content MIME type for your
podcast files; FeedBurner doesn’t create podcast enclosures for these files.

The fix: Make sure your web server is configured to return “audio/mpeg” as a MIME type for your audio files (or whatever the
appropriate type for your podcast media may be). This confirmation may require some help from your hosting provider if you
do not manage your own web server.

The trouble: Your Original Feed is too doggone big! FeedBurner does not process feeds that are larger than 512K. Remember,
your feed is an update on your content — not an archive for it — and you should use your publishing tools’ controls to make sure
your feed doesn’t grow like kudzu possessed.

The fix: Follow this help topic to control feed file size with Blogger; other publishing tools have similar controls.

The Nuclear Option: “Resyncing” your feed:

As a last resort with a regular feed or a podcast, you can resync your feed. You should only resync if your feed is more than 1 hour out-of-date and pinging FeedBurner does not update it or your podcast files are not being turned into enclosures by our SmartCast service.

Here is the article:

#1: Use Your Blog to Set the Stage

A blog is your foundation and starting point for strategically getting your message out to the world. If you don’t have a blog yet, the place to start your planning and preparation is this article: Top 10 Easy Steps to Starting a Business Blog.

Using your blog as your hub, or home base, not only provides a presence on the web where you can go deep and intimate with your prospects and customers, it’s also a money-saving tool. A blog is far less expensive to build, design and maintain than a traditional static website that may cost thousands of dollars.

Your blog is where you have the opportunity to demonstrate your expertise, expose your personality and give your audience the chance to get to know, like and finally trust you as you share valuable, useful content that makes their lives better.

Keep in mind that a blog is a search engine magnet. When you post consistently and constantly, the search engines tend to index your content more frequently. Using keywords relevant to what your target audience is looking for gives your content a good chance of being in the top results in searches. You become visible and findable on the web.

To target your message and/or campaign, publish a series of posts directly related to the topic you’re promoting. Whether it’s your new book, a service or a product, post content for several weeks prior to the launch date of your promotion.

If you don’t have a specific promotion, create an editorial calendar and frequently post on the prime topic and/or keywords for which you want to be found. For example, if you have a book being published, start seeding your blog with excerpts and snippets about the launch date, book signings and other events and news.

To read the complete article:  Click here!

1.  While writing a post or page, look over to the right of the editor and you will see the Tags and Categories sections.  You can create and select categories there.

2. Go to Dashboard –> then to Post –> Categories   A new window will open you can create your categories there as well.

3.  If you want to change your default Category, go to Settings (down the left side) –> Writing  and you will find a drop down menu where you can choose which category will be your default (especially good if you forget to select one).

Some blogging experts, Denise Wakeman for example, say that if you are using more than 6 or 7 categories, you are watering down your content.  This really does make sense.  Your business site should be laser focussed on your services or products.  Therefore, all of your content should be specifically about those products and services.

If you find that you need a lot more categories to list your content under, you may want to consider building another site.  (It’s easy too if you are being hosted by someone like Bluehost who allows you to have 5 complete websites hosted under your annual fee. )

Contact me for more information if you need it.

Search Engines

With your target market or client base always in mind, you can do any of the following to make your blog postings stand out. As an added benefit, most of these strategies are SEO or Search Engine Optimization and make your postings more ‘magnetic’ to the Search Engines.

Bolding

• Adding Bullets

√ Making checklists

Using Italics

Adding Interesting Images & Captions

Using Short Paragraphs

Having Titles

& Sub Titles

Underlining : Pros and cons to this. Aome people believe that only links should be underlined. I tend to agree, but you could try it anyway.

Indenting

Crossing Out

Color

Handwriting

.

To get some really great tips on SEO ing your posts and pages, sign up over on the right for my free 6 part Simple
SEO for WordPress (for non-techies).