Have you thought about the possibility of a Category 5 hurricane tearing through Texas and destroying your web site? It could certainly cause a lot of internet outages as well as damage to internet data centers. Many web hosting companies have datacenters in Texas. Space, cheap bandwidth and geographic location are all reasons why many hosting providers have datacenters in Texas.

How would your business survive if your internet datacenter that hosts your web site was to crash?

Who hosts your web site?

Is it a small mom and pop internet service provider working out of their basement or out of a strip mall somewhere?

Or do you have a robust enterprise class web hosting company that specializes in this business and is located in a secure datacenter with hardened walls, redundant internet connections, diesel backup generators, etc.?

This is very important. If you simply found the cheapest web host available they may not be using an enterprise class facility. If you are lucky your dirt cheap web host is simply renting a cheap server from a enterprise class host like ev1servers or at a the premier web hosting company where this server is located: Rack Space.

I just heard from a friend who has an important web site hosted at a company in Houston Texas. Houston is only 60 miles from the Gulf of Mexico. If a class 5 Hurricane hits anywhere near the area Houston could suffer major damage. So what do you do? Do you move your web site over the next couple of days? Do you contact your host to find out what procedures they have in place? Do you make a backup of your site?

Make a Backup!

The best thing to do is to simply make sure your web host provides backups and has the ability to take your backup off site. However that may not be good enough. Perhaps you are afraid that they are incompetent. Perhaps you can’t stand your site being down for any downtime.

My suggestion is to make a backup of your entire web site.

If you have access to ftp create a new folder on your desktop computer at home. Call it “WebSite Backup Rita Sept 22″ or something so that you know what it is. Then download your entire web site into that folder on your computer.

If you have a database such as MySQL then you’ll also want to backup that data as well. Many of us using MySQL are using a web based tool to administrate our databases called PHPMyAdmin. If you are using this tool there is a very easy way to backup your database. From their documents:

[6.4] How can I backup my database or table?
Click on a database or table name in the left frame, the properties will be displayed. Then on the menu, click “Export”, you can dump the structure, the data, or both. This will generate standard SQL statements that can be used to recreate your database/table.

You will need to choose “Save as file”, so that phpMyAdmin can transmit the resulting dump to your station. Depending on your PHP configuration, you will see options to compress the dump. See also the $cfg['ExecTimeLimit'] configuration variable.

For additional help on this subject, look for the word “dump” in this document.

If you don’t have a visual tool to help you backup your MySQL Database then you’ll want to do a dump. The command in MySQL is: mysqldump. For full instructions on how to use the command visit the MySQL manual for mysqldump.

The great thing about mysqldump is that you can have it dump out all the data and commands you need to completely recreate your entire database from scratch including all the data that was stored within the tables. It is a really nifty tool and I use it to create my regular db backups.

Ok, so your web host is incompetent and you don’t know if you have a db and you don’t know how to ftp!

Never Fear, there is a solution even for you!

The solution is a web site copier. This is primarily a tool people use for bad purposes. However it is a great tool for downloading a copy of your own web site even if you don’t know how to ftp! One such tool is called HTTrack. All you have to do is point HTTrack at your web site and it will download all the pages and images to your local computer.

Now this is NOT a perfect solution. It is very likely that it will miss some items but at least it gives you a working point to start with. At least you won’t loose all your data!

Ok, all that failed. You didn’t read this article until Sept 26th after the hurricane? Guess what? You may still be able to find your old data. I lost a couple of web sites when my old server died and I didn’t have backups. So I turned to the Internet Archive. The archive is a non-profit project to take snapshots of web sites and store them in an archive. So if the archive has visited your site before there may be a snapshot (or several snapshots) of your site. You can simply enter in your URL and it will tell you what months/years they have snapshots for. It might not save all your images but at least your content should be safe. Check it out, even if you don’t need to restore your web site. Look at all the previous versions of your site that are stored on the archive. It is pretty cool!

Hope this helps you all. We’ll be praying for everyone in the path of Rita.

- Ben Fitts
PS. I’m going to file this under internet marketing because any of you who do internet marketing should be aware of where your web sites are!

Popularity: 6% [?]

What kind of entreprenuer are you?

Are you afraid to talk to other entreprenuers? Are you afraid they’ll steal you ideas? Do you want to get as much information as you can from them without sharing any real information on your own?

I just had a chance to meet a young entreprenuer named Dan Marques. Dan is already a serial entreprenuer and is working on several businesses. Probably my favorite is ProfileAds. ProfileAds allows you to put ads in your instant messenger program. Then you get paid a little bit every time one of your buddies clicks on the ad in your profile. Its a pretty cool service. If you want to reach 80,000 young people primary ages 18-25 then you should check out Profile Ads for advertising opportunities.

Dan also wrote on his blog recently about the power of networking with other entreprenuers. I totally agree. In the past two months I’ve met Dan, Matt Geri, Jonathan Wold, and Paulie Sabol.

I totally dig sitting down and brainstorming with other entreprenuers. I like to bounce ideas off them and I like to hear what they are up to. It might help me figure out ways in which I can grow my business. Maybe I can use similar marketing ideas. Maybe I can joint venture with them. You never know what is going to happen.

Three years ago I met my business partner Jack Spirko. He was visiting Rhode Island on business and I called in sick to work to drive down to Rhode Island and have breakfast with Jack. Since then we’ve made thousands of dollars working together and we’re launching a new project now that promises to be our best business ever!

When I was younger I had some business plans stolen from me. A friend was supposed to be my partner but he decided not to do the business. 6 months later I found out he found his own investors and launched the business himself. Within 6 more months he was out of business.

You see just because someone steals your idea it doesn’t mean that they are going to be better at it than you! You may have specialized skills or expertise in this area. It makes your business more likely to succeed than someone else who steals your idea.

So now when I got meet other entreprenuers I don’t mind sharing what I’m working on. I don’t go crazy. I don’t hand them my business plan, however I don’t mind talking about the projects I’m working on. Its a two way street and by being willing to share and trust someone I build better relationships and develop potential new joint venture partners!

What do you think? Am I crazy?

What ways do you find entreprenuers to link with? Leave me a comment and let me know!

- Ben Fitts

Popularity: 9% [?]

Hey guys,

I just changed over our template.

I know the green picture at the top isn’t “home business related” and I’ll replace it at some point soon.

The reason for the change has to do with the way people “view” web sites. One of the things I’ve been reading is that people still are naturally drawn to blue underlined links.

My old web template had yellow text on top of a red background. Although I liked the way it looked, it isn’t way people traditionally look for. According to what I have been reading from “eye tracking” studies on people viewing web sites is that they still look to the upper left corner first and scan across, and that there eyes are drawn to blue underlined links. They just scan the page quickly and within 5 or 6 seconds have decided whether they way to read more or whether they want to click on the back button.

This design didn’t originally have blue links, but I liked the clean design. I changed the links to blue and added the underlines.

My blog software is WordPress and they have tons of templates designers have created for you. You can select one of their templates and make a few minor modifications. Wha-la you have a brand new template in a short period of time.

If I had to write one from scratch it would probably take me at least all day to do. I’d have to make changes test them, make more changes, over and over again.

This way I can download a bunch of templates, then turn each one on and see how it looks. If I don’t like it I try another design. Once I’ve picked the template I like, I can go in and start modifying it. Thankfully most designs now use a StyleSheet. The Stylesheet controls all the links and colors and stuff for the page. I can simply go into the style sheet and change the background color for the the entire web site, or change the link color to blue, etc.

This saves me hours of work and allows me to get back to the important things (like writing blog entries, marketing my business, etc.)

What do you think of the new template?

What do you think about the green picture at the top? Any ideas for what I could replace that picture with?

Leave me a comment and let me know what you think!

- Ben Fitts

Popularity: 9% [?]

A few days ago I mentioned you guys should all be checking out Search Bistro. Search Bistro is a blog by Henk van Ess a Dutch newspaper reporter. Henk happens to be interested in search engines and internet marketing and he has uncovered several interesting things about Google.

Henk wrote an article entitled Google’s Unknown Spam Recognition Guide. I don’t know if this is real or not. However Henk has located a document supposedly by Google for the “raters” whose job it is to manually review sites and determine their relevancy. These raters are given a set of criteria to determine whether a site is relevant to a particular keyword phrase, irelevant, or offensive (spam).

Reading this spam guide is very interesting. There is a detailed set of criteria to be applied to affiliate sites. One thing google is concerned about is sites that are cretaed for the sole purpose of generating affiliate revenue without providing any real content. I’ll quote the spam guide here:

We differentiate between affiliates that produce extra service, value, or content, and those that simply are duplicates of other sites, set up to boost traffic to other sites and earn a commission for it.

The document goes on to describe sites where there are a ton of affiliate links. They then describe which of these sites are relevant. These being the sites that provide genuine information along with the affiliate links. They also provide examples of “offensive” or “spam” sites that provide no real content and are simply a copy of another site, copy of search engine results, etc.

The document might not be real but the avoiding these pitfalls in this document is probably a good idea for any search engine marketer.

Henk also has a article on Google’s method of having reviewers review the results for random queries and evaluate the results. The reviewers are given random queries and are ask to assign the sites returned a value. Each site should be rated as:

Vital
Useful
Relevant
Off Topic
Offensive

Erroneous
Didn’t Load
Foreign Language
Unrated

Once again it can be quite an interesting read to determine how Google might determine one site as an “authority” on a topic and give them a high PR, and how another site might be deemed offensive and have 0 PR.

I’d be interested to hear your comments. Do you think these are real documents?

- Ben Fitts

Popularity: 8% [?]

I haven’t been blogging here daily as I used too.

One reason is I have been doing a ton of research on new projects. I’ve been doing a lot of search engine optimization research. I even wrote about this a few weeks ago on my blog.

If you guys haven’t been there yet, you need to check out Search Engine Radio. The site provides a weekly radio show covering topics relating to search engine optimization and getting more traffic for your web site. They’ve been on air since April 27, 2004. You can even listen to archives of their past shows from your computer. If you still work a job and only have the chance to build your business part-time, then this is a great way for you to learn how to build your business while work your JOB. You can do this in a way that doesn’t interfere with your ability to work for your employer. I never want to interfere with your JOB. That would be unethical. I don’t encourage you to work on your business while you are at work. However it usually doesn’t hurt to listen to a training while you are working. I use headphones myself so I don’t disturb co-workers. Heck for some of you, you might even be able to use some of what you learn in SEO Radio for your job!

Some cool web sites I’ve found while listening to SEO Radio are, SEO book and Search Bistro. SEO book obviously sells a book on search engine optimization. However they’ve also put together a ton of tools and resources on search engine marketing. Its a really cool site and I’m sure I’ll be writing more about it as I have time to go into more depth on the site. Search Bistro on the other hand is a blog subtitled “the World According to Search Engines”. It is maintained by a Dutch reporter. That is perhaps one of the most interesting aspects of this site. The author, Henrik, applies his reporting skills to the stories he writes about blogs. Specifically he has uncovered several dirty secrets about Google and has posted some of the documentation he has uncovered. For example, Did you know Google has a secret lab where individuals all over the world review web sites and determine their relevancy, and whether or not the site is a spammmer? Theres lots more cool stuff on the site too.

Don’t however go check these sites out at work, unless it relates to your job! Check out SEO radio if you can listen to audio files on your computer while you are at work, but don’t check out the other ones! I’m warning you! You’ll want to spend all day reading those sites! So wait until the weekend!

Good luck with your SEO work!

- Ben Fitts

Popularity: 11% [?]

There is hidden power in using a blog for your business.

Many top internet marketers will tell you the secret to success is building an email list.

While that used to be true and may still be true now for people who have put together a large email list, I think it will be less and less true now. Spam is such a huge problem and many internet service providers are blocking emails. For my Send Out Cards marketing site I give to my team members to help them market their business I experienced a lot of problems trying to send emails to my team members. The system was setup to send them an email every time they get a lead. The problem was many internet service providers were viewing those emails as spam. My team members weren’t getting their leads!

One of the really cool things about Blogs is they incorporate RSS feeds. I’ve already written an RSS Tutorial with some cool links in it.

An RSS feed is basically just a list of headlines from your blog, with a link to your articles, and a short description of each article.

The cool thing about RSS is that people actually “subscribe” to your blog! They JOIN your blog by subscribing to it. Scroll down this web site a little bit and look at the right hand column. See those buttons that say My Yahoo, My MSN, Newsgator, etc? What that will do is add this web sites headlines to your My Yahoo or My MSN page. You can also subscribe to this site using Mozilla’s web browser or email programs like Thunderbird and Outlook. They’ll keep you updated on new blog entries and you’ll get the headlines automatically.

Now, whats really cool about this is, it is NOT blocked by internet service providers! Even if you have AOL they won’t block it! You can use any newsreader to read my blogs RSS headlines!

This is better than those old email lists because those are being blocked as spam by ISPs.

Because RSS is different, because you actually have to physicially subscribe to my rss feed, it is NOT blocked. It is what email lists used to be!

I say this is the hidden power of blogs! This is one reason why you need to create a blog, or at the very least use my RSS Tutorial to help you find some software that can generate RSS feeds from your traditional web sites.

I’ve even seen people (and I am in the process of doing this myself) who setup their email lists to simply send their blog headlines once a week just like an rss feed. They basically use their email list for the same purpose as an RSS, to send headlines. They recognize not everyone understands RSS or understands what a newsreader is. By converting your email list to use your RSS feed you can teach those that aren’t as technically savy about news feeds and rss.

I think one of my next articles will cover how to make an email list out of your rss feed. Would you guys like that?

Leave me a comment and let me know!

- Ben Fitts

Popularity: 11% [?]

One of our new readers “Halli” commented:

Sorry to bother you once more but do you have a rss file that I can change and make my own :-þ

I wanted to write back to Halli but I also thought you guys might find this information useful too!

My rss file is hosted by feedburner. My Home Business Blogs RSS feed is specially formatted by feedburner for rss 1.0, rss 2.0, and atom. They also make my feed look readable in case a human accidentally clicks on the link. Even better they can automatically put Google Adsense ads and amazon.com links in my rss feeds for me. You can see an example of the actual XML feed here. Most rss feeds look like that XML example and are not really human readable. Yet another great reason why I use Feedburner!

I use software to write my blog which automatically generates an rss/xml file for me. I just tell feedburner where my rss is and they automatically create that nifty new feed for me. Then I change my normal rss links to point to feedburner. It is actually pretty easy to do.

Most blog software should automatically generate rss feeds for you. The blog software I use is Word Press. Wordpress generates 3 different xml feeds automatically. One in rss 1.0, rss 2.0 and Atom formats. This means most people with a newsreader can get your feed. Best of all wordpress is free.

If you have a standard web site not a blog, you might want to generate an rss feed. Never fear, you too can generate the properly formatted xml you need! You might want to look at software called a ” screen scraper” or “screen scraping”. You point these services or their software at your web site and they generate rss feeds for you. They scan your site and look for links and things and use all that to generate your feeds. One such product is called My Web Feeds.

Finally this is a tutorial I used to learn about rss feeds when I was getting started. There is a section of the tutorial dedicated to tools to help you generate rss feeds for your site.

Hope this helps!
- Ben

Popularity: 8% [?]