FTP For Beginners

I have had a couple of queries recently about ftp and other aspects of Internet technologies. After helping some friends with various computer problems over the weekend, I realised that it is pretty easy to forget that many people learning the ropes about earning money online don’t come from a geek or tech background; while they can pick up many of the techniques to get them started to earning money online, they may not have sufficient knowledge, or the underlying technical skills necessary to understand many of the terms and techniques they learn.

With this in mind, I thought it time to devote some posts to explaining some of the standard skills and tools you will need to master. This is aimed at the beginner to intermediate user, who will each learn from this post. To begin, I will detail something you have probably heard of called ftp.

What is FTP?

FTP (File Transfer Protocol) is simply a protocol for transferring files over the Internet. Using ftp, you can send and receive files between computers located anywhere in the World. If you have a Website, or are hoping to create one at some stage, you will be using ftp to transfer files from your computer to the Web server hosting your site

FTP uses a URL (the address of the site) that is similar to what you are familiar with from your Web browser. To load Webtrepreneur in your browser, you enter the address: http://www.webtrepreneur.net/.

The ftp address looks very similar: ftp://ftp.webtrepreneur.net.

This post will only detail connecting to your host server (where your Website is hosted) and the basic commands and details you will need for uploading your files.

There are numerous ftp programs available for all of the major platforms, both free and commercial. The selection comes down to your preference. Some of the basic terminology you may encounter is listed below:

Profile Name:- A name for you to remember the profile you created for a connection.

Host / Server Address:- This is the server your computer will connect to, e.g. ftp://ftp.webtrepreneur.net.

Port:- This is the port on the server you will connect to. The default port is 21 and this should work on most servers

Login / Username:- This is your username for your account on the remote server.

Password:- Likewise, this is your password for accessing your account on the remote server.

Initial Path:- The first directory that will be opened on the remote computer.

Attempts:- This is the number of times the computer will try to download (or upload) a file if it is interrupted.

Retry Delay:- The time between each retry.

Download Path:- The directory on your computer where files will be downloaded to.

You don’t have to know all of these, as you may not have to be concerned with all of these commands, depending on the application you select.

Connected

After choosing your ftp application and entering the settings relevant to the instruction above, you simply connect to the remote in order to transfer files. Once connected, depending on your application you will be presented with a window similar to the one above, with the remote server in the left or right hand side and your computer in the opposite.

Transferring files is simply a matter of dragging them to the appropriate location on either. If you wanted to copy a file or directory from the server to your computer, you simply select the file and drag it from the server window across to the window representing your computer. Don’t be worried, this action will not delete the copy from your server, it will simply copy it across to your computer.

Be aware though, that if you already have a file with the same name, you will be prompted whether you want to overwrite. Make sure that this is what you want, as it will overwrite the file, so proceed with caution if you are unsure and place the file in a different directory if needed.

Permissions

Something else you will come across when transferring files to your server is that on occasions you may read about things called permissions and / or CHMOD. CHMOD stands for CHange MODe.

I wont go into too great a detail here, as you don’t really need to know all the Unix idiosyncrasies behind CHMOD, what you do need to know though is that the server needs some details about who and what can do certain actions on and with your files. Basically, you are setting permission about who can do certain things to your files. For example, on a blog, you want visitors to be able to read posts and comment on them, but you don’t normally want them to be able to access your scripts and change them and damage your site.

That is basically what you are telling the server through you CHMOD settings. It does this by assigning numbers to each file. These numbers set the actions that can be preformed on the files. There are only 3 actions, so it is not too daunting. The actions are:

READ

WRITE

EXECUTE

You can set these permissions on most ftp programs, either by a tick in a text box or by writing a combination of numbers, or both.

To give you an example, a standard WordPress installation will have permission similar to the ones below:

Directories should have permissions of 755. Never use 777.
All files should have permissions of 644.
If you do want to use the built-in theme editor, theme files should have permissions of 666. Once again, never give them 777.

Once you get your ftp program up and running, you will be able to see this by experience and get a better understanding of it.

WordPress 2.7 Review

Earlier today, I uploaded and installed WordPress 2.7 Coltrane. This is my first post with the new and from appearances and features, greatly improved WordPress.

As usual (for me anyway), the upgrade was a painless process. It was actually quicker than the last one I did a few weeks ago.

The first thing you will notice is the completely new interface. The developers have spent a lot of time listening and have made usability improvements in every area.

Dashboard

When you login, you are greeted by a completely new Dashboard. In the upper right corner of the screen is a ‘Screen Options. button that allows you to select the options to display in your dashboard by checking or unchecking the various modules.

Another cool feature is the ability to move the items in your dashboard into different positions that suit your workflow. It is a simple matter of grabbing the top of each modules window and dragging it to your position of choice. Now you have complete control of the features you want and the location of them on your screen.

Vertical Menus

One of the most prominent new features is the inclusion of vertical menus. This is a great improvement, as navigation is greatly simplified, with each section using Ajax to display a list of options for you to click.

This provides a major speed improvement, as it means you have far less screen loads to get to the section you want to edit. As an example, the Appearance menu option already has the current theme listed, making it possible to go directly to the theme options in one click.

Top level navigation items are Media, Links, Pages, Comments, Appearance, Plugins, USers, Tools and Settings. If you prefer not to have the vertical menu taking up valuable screen space, you have the otpion to minimise it to the side. Mousing over each icon provides the menu item subset. A very nice feature.

Plugins

Plugin management just got a whole lot better, with the ability to search for plugins directly from the dashboard. Do a search for a specific term, such as twitter and you get a rated list of the available plugins from the WordPress plugin repository.

Installation can now be done directly from the dashboard; you no longer have to FTP your plugin files to the server. This is another great improvement for those new to the technology.

Likewise, future upgrades of WordPress itself can be done in the same manner, so no more uploading and overwriting files.

Threaded Comments

Threaded comments is a welcome addition to the core functionality of WordPress. Many blogs already have the feature via plugins and services such as Disqus. I personally use Disqus on another blog, so this will give me a chance to compare that over the inbuilt system.

Sticky Posts

Another little feature that people have been requesting for a long time, is the ability to make a post ’sticky’, i.e. keep it on the home page no matter how old it is. Making a post ’sticky’ is just a matter of checking the box.

Take a look at the video below and then go ahead and try it yourself. As with all things though, be sure to make backups, just in case you have some problems…..

Make Easy Online Money

Make Easy Online Money. That is a claim made by many online affiliate programs, but only delivered by some. Below is an honest review of one such program, what you have to do to make easy online money with it and whether it actually delivers on its claim.

Blogging to the Bank 3.0

As nearly everyone who uses the Internet is aware, blogging is huge, with over 200 million online. But how many of the people behind those blogs are trying to make money with them; and out of the ones that are blogging for money, how many are actually making anything beyond a few dollars?

While I can rattle off a few names of people using blogging to make money, the majority are not making what you would call massive amounts. Sure, some of them are doing better than average, but only a very few are approaching real wealth from it.

Rob Benwell, the person behind Blogging to the Bank 3.0 is one of the few exceptions. Rob has made over a million dollars using blogs. Rob first wrote about his technique in 2006 and, as the Internet moves very quickly, techniques need to change to keep up, hence the rewrite and new release of Blogging to the Bank.

For those who don’t know Rob’s story, here is a quick summation:

Back in 2005 he was struggling to make any profit online, had dropped out of college and was getting deep into debt. He was trying all the techniques the gurus tell you and wasn’t getting anywhere fast. All of that went in the bin and he started using his own techniques and started making more and more money using simple blogs. In early 2006 he shared this with the world and had a great ebook called blogging to the bank. Tons of people got rich from using these techniques. He then spoke at Online Marketing Legend Yanik Silver’s underground Seminar where he revealed even more of his underground strategies. Then July 2007 he released Blogging to the Bank 2.0 which showed users his new methods to creating online wealth using blogs. In total both versions have been read by over 50,000 people across the world.

Blogging to the Bank 3.0 is a completely revised version of the previous offerings, covering all the new techniques Rob uses to maintain his blogging riches. Blogging To The Bank 3.0 teaches you Robs new step by step blueprint to creating highly profitable long term niche blogs using the newest optimization techniques. There’s even a section on advanced Search Engine Optimization, which he makes easy to understand. You wont have to wade through pages and pages of detail and come out none the wiser. It really is explained well and in plain English.

So what is his secret?

Basically, the technique Rob applies is very similar to one I use myself. Rather than going for a single blog and slowly building credibility and a following over time, he uses a multiple blog approach, building blogs in several areas and leveraging them for money.

Once you know the strategies, the system is quite mechanical and involves:

• Build your blog.
• Produce content for the blog.
• Market your blog to build traffic.
• Monetize your blog with adsense, advertising and affiliate programs.
• Rinse and repeat.

That is essentially what Rob does, but in order to make it work, you need to know how to do each detail correctly and follow each step. Blogging to the Bank 3.0 explains each step and guides you exactly through what you need to do in order to start earning a huge income.

In truth, you can honestly start earning money very quickly by following these techniques and once you have built one site, which should only take a half hour at the most, you can move onto the next and so on.

I can actually vouch for these techniques. As I said, I do something very similar myself and wish I had this book to guide me when I got started. I had to stumble my way through like Rob did before I found this way of doing things.

The other great thing with this type of program is that once you have setup one site, you can bascially forget about it and move onto the next. Each one will bring in passive income, without you having to nurture them or anything else. Once built, it really is a case of set and forget. The more streams you have coming in, the more money you can make.

To give you an idea, say you have one blog that you slave over and count the 50 cents a day you make from google via adsense. How about having 100 blogs that you write on once that get an averaged earning of $5 a day, without having to do anything. And this is conservative. I bet you can see the potential now.

If you are serious about getting on your way to wealth and making easy money online, you really should get Blogging to the Bank 3.0.

MMO Blogging Wars

War has broken out in the MMO Blogging niche. I could see this coming from a long way off and did a post about some of my concerns way back in September 2007. The first I saw about the War was when reading JohnCow’s blog. I am only an occasional visitor to his blog, but I found the article interesting for several reasons.

John has a go at Vic from BloggerUnleashed when he ranted about the purchase of OneMansGoal.com. If you are not familiar, Marc Galeazzi bought OneMansGoal from Bryan Clark for $10,500, which Vic seemed to find pretty funny. I have never visited either BloggerUnleashed or OneMansGoal.com before now, so in fairness to both, I will read both sites a little more before passing judgement. What I will say though, regarding Vic’s take on the matter, is that I found his post nearly unintelligible. We all make typos in our posts, but Vic’s is laden with them, possibly because it was written in a state of rage, or possibly because that is the normal quality of his writing. As I said, I need to read the site a little more before I can pass judgment.

JohnCow has written a follow-up post of sorts, where he has a go at Garry Conn and his post on the subject. Once again, Garry’s site is one I had not visited before today, but based on what he has written there, I have to say that if what he reports here is accurate, then I totally agree with his sentiment. Based on his post, the sale of www.blogrepreneur.com does seem like a total scam. the misrepresentation of the site stats is atrocious and as far as I am concerned indefensible.

In defense of JohnCow, he has built a pretty successful MMO blog in pretty quick time. Also worth nothing is that his blog is for sale. You could interpret that he has a vested interest in allaying fears about the MMO bubble bursting, as well as stamping out any negative articles on blog flipping and people paying too much for a reasonably new blog, especially in the MMO niche. I am not suggesting that JohnCow’s stats are manipulated in any way. I would be very surprised if they were, so I do not have an issue with him selling or marketing his site.

Caveat Emptor

One point that seems lost in all of this is that at the end of the day, the buyer or blog reader needs to use due diligence in any purchase they are considering as well as with what they are reading.

In the case of a blog purchase, there are several ways you can check the stats of a site to determine if they are as good as the seller is representing them to be. I use pMetrics for my own site stats and it provides me with a much more accurate representation of traffic then the outdated Awstats. You can read my review of pMetrics here.

Obviously you have a right to expect that you will not be ripped off and in the case of the sale of www.blogrepreneur.com, that would seem to be what has happened, but you also have to do your homework.

Likewise, with the fodder you are being fed by some MMO bloggers; you should use due diligence to determine if the information you are reading is transparent, valid and useful.

MMO Bloggers Need To Make Money

Many bloggers derive an income (some even a living) from blogging. Obviously, if the blog is in the MMO niche, there is a fair chance that the blog is being used to make money for the blogger; there is nothing wrong with that, I do it myself, so you cannot harshly judge a blog just because it uses advertising or affiliate marketing to monetize the site. You need to be aware of this though when reading a blog and for certain blogs, you should be very skeptical about the products being recommended.

Looking through some rose colored glasses, I would like to think that the majority of MMO blogs do really believe that the products they recommend are useful and add value. There are others however, who simply promote whatever gives them the most value at the expense of the unsuspecting reader. This is no different from any other business, there are ethical businesses and others who are less so. As a blog reader, you need to decide whether you are receiving value or jut being fed a line from a slick salesman.

Posts That Keep On Giving

About three weeks ago, while viewing my Web stats, I noticed something interesting on one of my other blogs. A story I posted way back in December had suddenly become the top story for the day.

What is unusual about this post is that although I hadn’t previously checked how much traffic it was bringing in, it had never been near the top of the stats, so hadn’t jumped out at me as an effective post. Sure, the day I posted it, it received a quick spike in traffic, but after that, nothing major.

Now though, that one post has brought in somewhere around 30,000 new visitors to the site in the last three weeks and is regularly rating as the top post on most days. Even better, each visitor is averaging 4 page views per visit.

The story itself is not that good, I have, and do post much better content. When I wrote this particular post I set out with the intention of generating a lot of traffic and while the content may have been simple, it took some time to put it all together.

What’s The Story

So what caused this sudden boost in traffic for this ‘old’ post?

Several factors came together at the same time, but the primary one is that I redesigned my theme. The new theme seems to generate a lot more Google search traffic. So it would seem that with the previous theme, the post simply wasn’t being indexed as well by Google. It jsut goes to show the value of a good SEO enhanced theme.

Will It Last?

So how long do I expect this surge in traffic to last? Going by the stats of my other posts that rate quite highly, I expect this post to do the same. It will taper off and eventually drop down to bring in 300 - 400 new visitors a day, but that is still a nice healthy figure.

Capitalize

Now there is not a lot of point in generating traffic, if you are not prepared to take advantage of it. Rather then sit back and simply wait for the surge to drop, today I wrote another post along a similar thread to the previous one. Rather then simply wait for this post to be found by the search engines, or by readers looking at the related links, I put a link in each of these posts, promoting the other one. I also did a couple of other little things…

Now my new post is rating number two on my stats, not all that far behind the top rating one.

Know Thy Stats

Of course, none of this would be evident unless I was actively following my Website stats. I do this several times a day, and it takes nothing more then a quick glance at the dashboard to see how things are going. There are a lot of stats tools you can use for doing this. My favorite though is this one. I have posted about it previously here and I can highly recommend it as an invaluable tool to have.

I am Going Viral Tomorrow

I am going viral tomorrow. This is just a heads up.

I think you have all had a good run, but it is time to give you all the Webtrepreneur bug; well that’s what you come here for isn’t it?

So tomorrow, I give you a viral post to demonstrate the technique.

I have never tried to go viral on this blog before, so you may be asking how I can make such a statement. Well, I have done it on my other sites and even on this one without really trying I have had stories really take off.

So how will I do it, come back tomorrow to see…

Stumble Your Way From 10 To 4000 Readers

Following on from my post the other day titled “Build Massive Traffic With StumbleUpon“, I thought I would give you an example of how effective it can be.

As I said in that post, this blog is very new, which means it can be very difficult to gain any descent amount of traffic. In that post, I mentioned how effective StumbleUpon can be to generate massive amounts of traffic, even on new blogs. Let me show you how effective it is.

First to put things in perspective, I have done no marketing for this site, no commenting on forums or other blogs in the niche; I was starting clean and naked so to speak. On Tuesday I had 10 visitors to the site.Pretty dismal really, but not unexpected. Late on Wednesday, I wrote this post, about a Gold MacBook Pro.

From 10 - 4000

At about 8PM I decided to Stumble the story. 8PM is not an ideal time to post to StumbleUpon, but I did it all the same. As you can see from the image below, with just a few hours left in the day, the 266 users coming in was not exceptional, but still better then the previous day. The next day however, saw a massive increase in users, topping out at 3,164 for the entire 24 hour period.

All up, this one post has brought in nearly 4,000 users, which is vastly more then the 10 I had on Tuesday.

What About The Actions

What was even more pleasing, was to see the actions of these users. As you can see in the image below, Tuesday the site received 57 actions. This jumped to 574 on Wednesday, and went up massively to 5,994 on Thursday when the Stumble had a full day of recording.

I think this reinforces my claim about StumbleUpon having the ability to drive massive amounts of traffic to your blog. Some points worth noting though, and which I mentioned in the previous post.

• Ads on the site received very few clicks
• Your users come in a massive spike, and drop off nearly as quickly after the spike
• I am still receiving a good level of traffic from this one post
• Your stats and ranking get a nice boost

40 Stumblers added the site as a favorite for this story, which is not too bad for a first up Stumble on a new site.

Mac Blog Editors - Part 2

Flock - The Social Web Browser

Following on from my recent post on my continuing search for a Mac Blog Editor, I was reminded of one I hadn’t thought of’ Flock. If you are not familiar with it, Flock is a Web Browser based upon Mozilla Firefox. Flock’s creators call it a “social browser”, as it interact with popular social networking web services such as Flickr, Del.icio.us, Technorati, Photobucket, as well as various popular blogging and news aggregation services.

Flock arrived on the scene about 2 years ago, and arrived with a bit of fanfare. Since then its popularity has wained; I myself had not installed it on my latest Mac, until today. I was reading a quick article about TechCrunch40 and saw that Flock had been there. I thought I’d check it out again, primarily to test its Blog editor.

Some things that grabbed me straight away, was its ‘Blog This’ feature. While not ground breaking, it works seamlessly.

There are however a couple of features lacking in the editor.

• You cannot add images from your computer until you have setup an online account with one of the image services such as Flickr or Photobucket.
• Categories are not imported. Categories are selected when you publish the post.

I will probably find more issues Flock once I have had more time with it.

Blogged with Flock

Tags: flock, mac, blog editor

Would you Buy A Used Car From An A-list Blogger?

Like many other people, I read some articles from a lot of the A-list bloggers in this category. On the whole I find most of them pretty reputable. For many of them, their blogs are their primary source of income, and while they do not dwell on the fact, they also do not try and hide it. Of course they could be very talented writers, and write in such a style that the reader does not notice that the underlying motivation is to generate income for the blogger.

Now I am not casting aspersions on used car salesmen, but when I read some of these A-list bloggers sites, I can’t help having the feeling that the blogger is trying to con me in the manner of the worse used car salesman.

There is a standard pattern to their blogging, that begins with their posts; they write about some new service they have discovered that can make you money, such as the latest advertising widget. The article is normally quite long and well written, espousing the virtues of the service and how effective it will be as a source of revenue for your blog.

You will even find convenient links to the widget throughout the article, that make it so much easier for you to go to the site and find out more information, or better still sign up for yourself. What you will not see, or read however, is the fact that the blogger bringing you this latest information on the service has previously been contacted and already signed up for affiliate marketing or some other revenue sharing model.

Now, there is nothing wrong with writing revues for services that you feel are of benefit to your readers, like I said, many bloggers do this. What is wrong with this type of blogger is that the service primarily serves them, or more importantly their bank account. For them, this seems to be the primary motivation for writing the post. I cannot distinguish between this form of blogging and the derided PayPerPost service, yet for these particular A-list bloggers, either their readers cannot see through them, or are simply caught up with the aura of the personality and feel that it is entirely acceptable, as the blogger makes a lot of money from their blog, and as we know, that is the goal.

Maybe these particular bloggers feel that they are really giving a service to their readers and imparting knowledge about possible revenue streams, maybe this helps ease their conscience about the way they hide their own mercenary interest in their posts. Then again, they may simply think that if they don’t do it, someone else will and it might as well be them making the money.

Personally, I prefer to read content that is not prostituted or has the primary motivation of screwing the reader for the betterment of the blogger writing the post. I totally agree with making money from your blog, that is after all one of the goals for myself with this blog, however, I do not intend to do this by misleading or deceiving the reader or without giving some value to the reader.

Let me know in the comments if you have felt conned by any bloggers.

Mac Blog Editors

I do all my blogging on a Mac. I have been blogging directly through the WordPress backend, which works ok, but is not totally ideal for all occasions. A lot of the time, I use a simple text editor and then copy this into WordPress. This is not overly efficient, so I thought it was time to take a look at the available blogging editors for Mac.

I have previously looked at Mac blog editors, but none of them functioned the way I liked and each one had some limitation that was frustrating to the point of making me scrap it. There are probably more out there, but I decided to limit my choice to 3; ecto, MarsEdit and the Firefox extension, ScribeFire. I will test each one and see which, if any I feel best meets my needs. Hopefully one of these will have the features and functionality I require.

I am writing this post in ecto; I’ll update my thoughts once I have evaluated each application.

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