Hello! Two weeks ago I announced a little contest which I’m going to give away 500 busiess cards, courtesy of UPrinting. Well, the time is up and I got a winner through Randomg.org!

And the winner is Adrian Rosulescu! A guy from Romania who will use the cards to promote his auction website StoreEbay.ro.Congratulations man you have won 500 business cards!! You will be contacted soon by the sponsor…

Thank you very much everyone for participating!

Hey mates, some weeks ago I changed my hosting and I had to move all my websites from the old hosting to the new one. May be it’s seem like an easy task but it’s not when you are involved with databases.

The problem I got when I was moving this blog was related with its databases. I followed the steps recomended by almost every hosting but without reason, the procedure failed many times… So I decided to stop following those steps and do it my way.

Migrating a WordPress Blog

The following one is a list of steps, that you should follow to change your wordpress blog of hosting successfully:

1. Backup your data: First of all, you need to make a backup of your blog. You can do this by connecting via FTP and downloading everything in the root directory of your wordpress installation, i.e. download everything in /public_html/ or /public_html/blog, or wherever your installed wordpress. Save all those folders and files into a folder on your computer.
2. Backup your databases: This is where the recommendations of the hostings are wrong. First, log into your cpanel and go to phpMyAdmin and when it loads, click Export. After that, select the database you want to export – in this case the one which manages wordpress. By default there will be some options selected: export as SQL, Add IF NOT EXISTS, Add AUTO_INCREMENT value, Enclose table and field names with backquotes, Complete inserts, Extended inserts and Use hexadecimal for BLOB.
3. Save the database: You should not change any of the options mentioned in the step 2, it’s not necessary. I read in many websites that you should check “Add DROP TABLE / VIEW / PROCEDURE / FUNCTION” but that’s totally false! If you check that you won’t be able to import your database in the near future… So after verifying all those settings, check Save As File and press GO. Don’t check any related with compression.
4. Change wp-config.php: This file contains basic configurations of your wordpress blog. Open it in your computer and change the info related with your database name and password, user etc etc… Otherwise you will get an error of database once you upload it to the new server.
5. Upload your blog to the new hosting: Congratulations! You backed up your data from your old hosting with success, but this not ends here. Now, upload all those folders and files which you downloaded in the step 1 to the new hosting. Where to upload it? In the same directory it was in the old hosting!.
6. Create a new database: Log into the cpanel of the new hosting and go MySQL Databases. Create a new database (it will the one which will handle your blog in this new server… if you want, you can give it the same name of the old database). Add a new user to that new database with full privileges.
7. Import your old database: Go to phpMyAdmin. Then click import, selecting the database you want to fill in. In this case, select the database created in the step 5. Select the database from your computer and then change the Character from utf8 to latin1 and then press GO. Why to latin1? In order to verify this, open the backup of your database on your computer with a notepad or another text processor and search for the word “Character”. You will see the character type of your database, which is latin1 for default. Note: If your character type is another one different of latin1, you should select it in phpmyadmin or you will fail importing the database.
8. Change the nameservers: If everything is right, then you should go into your domain manager (godaddy or whatever…) and change the nameservers of your domain to point it to the new hosting. Once you do that, your domain will be bouncing between the old host and the new one, and that could take some days, it’s not instantaneously.

Recommendations

Due to the nameservers bouncing, I highly recommend you NOT to alter anything on your blog: add a new post, comment, plugin… Why? Because you won’t know if you edited the blog of the new hosting or of the new one.

When I did it some weeks ago, I had the wonderful idea of publishing a new post and the next day, many people sent me an email reporting a 404 error. They tried to visit the post through their RSS feed but they got and error because in the new server, that link didn’t exist!. For my luck, I copied/pasted the post from my Google Reader and I published it again ( yes, I’m subscribed to my own feed in order to see how things look lol ).

Also, remember that you can contact your hosting/domain manager if you have any problem – Good luck!

The Holidays are great seasons to give away gifts, discounts or free stuff in order to attract new clients. Many people want to win something for free, and that’s why almost every blogger is holding a contest now.

Why on Holidays?

Basically on holidays everybody has that spirit of sharing and love! That’s why many bloggers give away something in order to make stronger the relationship between they and their readers – creating a better sense of loyalty.

What I’m giving away?

Besides my knowledge about blogging, I’m going to give 500 business cards to one lucky winner in order to celebrate the end of this year.

What about you? Are you holding a contest this holidays? Feel free to share your contest with me, I would love to participate!

Yesterday WordPress 2.7 was oficially launched and today, after reading some articles about plugins and themes compatibilities, I upgraded my wordpress.

The first screen I saw made me say a wow! It’s completely different and it’s very well organized, I really like the new presentation…

Here is a screenshot of the Dashboard of WordPress 2.7:

New Features

• New Commenting system
• New Dashboard Features
• Sticky Posts
• QuickPress
• Dashboard and Write Rearrangements
• Batch Editing for Posts
• One-Click Plugin Installs
• Comment Replies From the Admin Section

That list contains just some of the new features of WordPress. If you still thinking about upgrading or not to this version, I invite you to check the following posts in order to learn in details more about the new features:

• WordPress 2.7 – 20 Must See Features

• 5 Amazing New WordPress 2.7 Features

• WordPress 2.7: Ten useful new features

Happy Blogging!

For online businesses, everybody wants to be the first on search engines in order to have more exposure than anyone. So far, no matter how much SEO work you do on your website, it never seems to be enough. Among other things, we all know that search engines rankings are related with numbers of backlinks, which are links pointing back to your website.

There are many seo services that let you increase the number of backlinks of your website, but one of the most commons consist in something called directory submission, which you can submit your site to website directories. The good thing is, that you will get many backlinks pointing to your website, helping to improve your search engine rankings… The bad side of many website directories are the super-slow process, which makes you wait months until get reviewed and approved by the directories, and that’s a terrible problem when you want almost immediate results.

After continuing with this article, let’s explain what’s a website directory:

A website directory is usually defined as an alphabetical list of names and addresses for example Yellow Pages, other types of telephone directories and address books.  The online directories contain the names of websites and their URL’s.

Introducing Fast Approval

Fast Approval is a fast and easy way to get a fast review of your directory submission, within 7 days or less. This service is divided in two: Directory Owners and Directory Submitters.

Directory owners can earn cash for each submission made to their directory! Each submission will need to be reviewed by each owner within 7 days for you, in order to earn the submission fee. It’s really important to remark that if you (as owner) don’t approve a listing after 7 days, any fees will be refunded to the original website submitter.

It also offers to automatically post the new listings for you, by uploading the ResellerGo API file straight to your directory. Afraid of using its API? Don’t worry, you will always have complete control to what is published in each of your directories.

Directory submitters can use the ResellerGO control panel to get their website reviewed within 7 days! They provide reports within your account that displays the status of your submissions and also the link to each listing after it has been approved. Keep in mind there is a minimal one time fee for fast approval that is less than what most directories charge for a fast review. Remember that if you haven’t been reviewed within 7 days, your fee will be refunded automatically in the system.

How much it cost?

That’s a good question. May be you should be thinking that it’s fairly expensive because of its effectiveness but it’s not, you need to pay as low as $0.5 per approved listing!.

How long does it take to get listed on a directory?

Certain directories allow you to get your website listed almost immediately. Other directories take much more time but generally few directories take longer than 4 weeks before your website gets the necessary approval to be listed.

Screenshots of Fast Approval

Fast Approval

Fast Approval for Submitter

Submission Center

URL Submission Panel

As you can appreciate in the screenshots, this service is very easy to use, allowing you to do something tedious in very simple steps, just with a few clicks!.

Benefits of using Fast Approval

As you can notice, it’s not a common url submission service. It’s called fast approval because you can submit your website to about a 1000 directories in 30 minutes. Generally the free services are much slower than the paid ones…

As you may know, the higher the PR the higher the ranking. WIth this tool you can easily submit your website to a directory with a specific Page Rank, PR range or alternatively a mix of PR ranges, It all depends on your preferences.

So if you feel an urgency of improving your search engine rankings quickly, you can try this service to achieve that goal – It has different packages and surely you will find something that fit your necessities.

Writing articles for a blog can be a problem when you don’t have inspiration, those days when you don’t have idea about what to write. As I mentioned before, if you don’t have inspiration it will be better for you to take some free days, and after then you could go back to the work.

That’s great, but in this post I’m going to give you some tips about how to get inspiration almost instantaneously! Yes, do you think that bloggers write articles by their own every day? Of course not… Well let’s stop talking and let’s review my main sources of inspiration!.

1- Reading my own articles: May be you can be thinking Are you serious? You gotta be kidding me… But yes! Reading your own articles can give you inspiration automagically and I’m going to tell you why. Sometimes when we write things, we leave -unconsciously- some ideas in the air, and waiting to be developed. By reading your own past posts, you can discover some of those undeveloped ideas and then you can get inspiration to write something completely new, being related with your old post.

2- Reading other people’s articles: I am subscribed through RSS feed to 60 blogs more or less. Blogs about blogging, making money online, tech, design, random and crazy, politics and many other things… Normally, I have about 600 unread posts, but I try to keep that number as low as I can. WIth all those information comming from many sites, everytime I open my Google Reader is such as a big brainstorm. By reading many of those articles from different bloggers you can get another perspective of a specific topic, giving you the inspiration you need to create a killer blog post.

3- Searching for something: Many times I have been looking for something on Google, but after reading many sites I don’t find the information that I expected before. But wait a minute, if I couldn’t find anything about X topic, why don’t I write something about it on my blog?! It has happened to me some times and I’m sure that it has happened to you too. So if the thing you have been looking for many hours is related with your blog, go ahead and write exactly what you were expecting to read in other sites, be the first on providing that information!.

4- Talking with friends: This is my main source of inspiration. Every time I talk with a friend about my online businesses, he or she asks me many things that I never thought to write about on my blog. Everything starts when the person tells me that it was looking for X information but it never found something clearly explained, and it asks me for tips. After that, my brain starts thinking and linking many concepts, creating a big package of information and preparing it to be blogged. So, if you have friends who make businesses on internet, talk with them! Share your tips and you will see that at the end of the conversation, you will have great material to write about.

Also once you have a topic to write about, you can try to detach it in some pieces, let’s say 3. So then, you can create 3 separate posts about the same topic but with different points of view, or may be dealing with different characteristics… When a topic is too big you can create a series of posts and linking each chapter with the other ones. By doing that, you will be giving plenty of content in a pleasant way without boring your readers.

And you? Where do you get inspiration from? Share your main sources!