Ah the gold ole days.  Google would rank your sites, eBay would pay nice affiliate commissions and you could do it all by using Build A Niche Store (BANS).  Those were the days.

Today its all about WordPress.  And many of us still have BANS sites out there.  But how do you migrate your sites from BANS to WordPress without making a total mess of your website?   It can be a little tricky.   So here are a few tips to help show you how you can move to a WordPress blog without too much headache.

Do BACKUPS!

Before you do any work on any of your websites you need to back things up. I can’t stress it enough. Always, always, always do a backup! Simply ftp into your site using filezilla (or your favorite ftp software) and copy down the entire contents of your website folder.  If you have an addon domain or subdomain, just copy the folder of your addon domain.

Now that you have everything backed up, if anything goes wrong you can just copy it back and things should be back to normal.

THERE’S NO EASY WAY

There isn’t an EASY button to push to move everything from BANS to WordPress.  It’s a very manual process. The two systems are not compatible.   The easiest way to move things from BANS to WordPress is to do it by hand.  First build a WordPress site.  Then copy all of your articles and content (either cut and paste or just type it in) to a new WordPress posts. Finally rebuild any of the product pages.  It can take a while do to, but look at it this way, it will give you a chance to really make the site better.

So the first thing we can do is begin by installing WordPress in a new directory under your BANS site.  I usually call this new directory “blog”  or “newsite” or something that isn’t used.  What this does is it allows you the freedom to build and design your new WordPress site without disturbing the live BANS site, especially if the BANS site is making money.

Once you get your new WordPress site built and everything is tested and looks good, we need to do another backup. This time we need to include the new WordPress site you just built.   You don’t have to copy everything down if you don’t want to.  Just copy of the new “blog” folder (or whatever name you gave it)  to your home computer.

Now comes the fun part

What we are going to do delete (scary part – scary music) everything in your website folder EXCEPT the new “blog” folder. Be very careful. Go to the folder that has your website,  select all files except the “blog” folder and hit delete. Your heart should be racing right about now!   Don’t worry you have everything backed up right?

This next step is critical – Log into the admin dashboard of your new WordPress site and go to the settings tab.  Change the WordPress address (URL) and the Blog address (URL) to be at the root of your domain (removing the “blog” directory name).

Next move all of the files from the “blog” directory up to the root of your website.  This would be the folder above your blog folder.  Do this by select all files in your blog folder (not the blog folder itself) and move them to the parent folder above your blog folder.

Once your finished open up your site in your browser and  you should see your new WordPress site where you BANS site once was.

This sounds more complicated than it really is and really is a bit hard to type out so I’ve recorded a quick video showing exactly how I move a WordPress blog from a directory called blog to the main folder for my site.

I have to say I really love working with WordPress.  It’s so flexible, versatile, and easy.

There’s a lot advice that gets thrown around on how to make money online.  People telling you what you need to start your own online business or which product to buy, blah blah, blah.  The thing is, the most common questions I get from my readers are simply: “How do I get started?  Where do I start? How do I setup a website?” So with this article we are going to start with the basics and explain how to setup a website.

I remember trying to explain to my Mom once what the internet was and what a web site was.  I had to laugh because these questions seemed so simple to me… until I tried to explain it.  It was a little harder than I thought.

But seriously, the Internet is very similar to the public phone system.  Everyone is familiar with the public telephone system.  It’s not owned by any one company or organization. You can pick up a phone and call anyone in the world if you know their phone number.  Whether they use AT&T or Verizon, it doesn’t matter,  the call will go through. The Internet is just like this, it is just a network (like the public telephone network).  People use their laptops or desktops to connect to servers that are on the web (web servers) to look up information (kind of like directory assistance).

These web servers have websites that are setup on them.  They are a lot like your laptop or desktop at home. They are really a computer, with a hard drive, cd rom, etc..  But whats different about these computers is that they are “tuned” or setup to serve files (web pages) through their network card.  These high performance race cars of the Internet are designed with one thing in mind and that is to transmit data over their network connection.  They don’t have sound cards or fancy video cards.  But they DO have a fancy network card, and most likely a lot of memory and hard drive space.

Web servers can be installed on just about any computer.  Windows, Apple, or Linux it doesnt matter.  The most popular web server is the Apache webserver.   Probably because its free!  And setting up an Apache web server is fairly easy.   Oh yes, I can hear you screaming, “But what about Windows?”  Yup, Windows also has the Internet Information Server that comes with the Windows Server Operating system too. It is also free (well , it’s included in the price of Windows).

Webservers are what make websites possible.  They serve up web pages.  These web pages are simply files that end with the file extension .html.  The “html” stands for hyperText Markup Language.  But that is probably way more than you really care about or need to know right now.

HTML files are just simple text files.  You can create these with Notepad on windows (or any text editor). Try this yourself.  Open Notepad, just type some text (dont worry about html tags or anything like that) and save the file as “test.html”. Make sure it doesn’t have “.txt” at the end.  Then open the file with your browser.

TADA!

Now, How to Setup a Website?!? Web sites are really just nicely organized web pages (those .html pages) all linked together and served up by a web server to anyone who requests them.  When you first configure a webserver you designate one folder or directory on the server that will contain all of the files that the web server will serve up. Most of the time this folder is called “public_html”.  It can be called anything, but just know that what ever is in this folder is fair game for public consumption.

So anyone can setup a web server.  But really the hard part is keeping it running. Protecting it from power surges during a storm, keeping it cool, and keeping it secure (don’t want anyone stealing your website) thats’ the true challenge. And it gets expensive.  You need a dedicated internet line (can’t have a dsl or cable hookup). You need a dedicated IP address and don’t forget DNS and Email.  GEEZE!

What many people do to help them setup a website is to “rent” a webserver from a web hosting provider.  There are a lot of companies that make good money renting servers to webmaster.  One great hosting provider I use is Hostgator.  I love them.  They provide everything, the physical server, the protected clean power, they back it up, they secure it, provide ample bandwidth, monitor it, and best of all if anything goes wrong I just call them and they fix it!  Its great.  All for only $10  month.

That’s about it.  Next time I will go over how to choose a hosting company for your business.  Price isn’t everything.

As always, I’d love to hear from you.  Did this article answer any of your questions? What kinds of problems have you had with setting up a website? Comments help websites come alive and allows us all to share our ideas.  I’d love to hear yours.  Thanks!

Have you ever written a beautiful article or blog post and wondered how to create a hyperlink directly in the body of the post?  I’ll show how to do that today and it’s really not that hard to do.  I must warn you, we will be learning a little html in the process – but don’t worry I promise it won’t hurt a bit.

In my example today I’m going assume we are working from a post written in WordPress.  Whether its wordpress or a straight html page… the code is the same.

So from our blog post edit screen, we need to click on the html tab.  This will will allow us to embed html directly into our article.

The html tag we will work with is called the anchor tag (or “a” tag).  The finished code for a plain anchor tag looks something like this:

<a href=”http://www.josephlwilson.com”>My Awesome Website</a>

And the result looks like this:

 My Awesome Website

In the html code itself we can break it down and see that it’s not too difficult to understand. So lets dig in to it

First off,  html code is always surrounded by angle brakets – < and >.  The first letter “a” after the first angle bracket tells the browser its an anchor tag (also known as an “a” tag).

The next part is “href”.  This stands for “host reference” – basically saying where are we going to link to.  This is then followed by a closing angle bracket.

Then we add our text we want to highlight for the anchor which in this case is “My Website”.  FInally, we close the entire thing with the closing “a” tag -</a>

And that’s it!

So right about now you maybe thinking… GEEZE!  What a hassle.  And your right sometimes writing this out for every link you want to embed is a hassle. Especially if you have a lot of affiliate products you may want to link to in your article.

To make things easier, I’ve had my eye on a product that automatically will add links for me based on certain keywords that are in my articles or blogs.  Its a WordPress plugin called Ninja Affiliate.   It has been a bit pricey though, at $97 and was just too hard to swallow.

Well, MaxBlog Press, makers of Ninja Affiliate just reduced the price of Ninja Affiliate! They’ve knocked off $30 bucks from the price and its now only $67 dollars!.  I have been watching this product for a while and it has never gone on sale.  So needless to say I bought it yesterday.

I have to say I’m glad I did, its an awesome WordPress plugin that has already begun to pay for itself. Its you have a chance check out the sales page and read about it. It will save you time and possibly make you some money!!

This is one of the coolest ideas I’ve seen and I really don’t know why anyone hasn’t thought of it yet. If you’re wanting to keep visitors on your site longer (and who doesn’t want that?), give your visitors something fun to do while they are there. Add some cool games to keep them entertained.

With HeyZap you can embed directly into just about any web page, blog, Wordpress.com, Blogger, etc. They offer 3 different screen sizes to accommodate your page layout. There’s even a WordPress plugin to add a game to the sidebar of your WordPress blog

For the games, they are multiple categories of games to choose from. They offer Sports, Shooter, Strategy, Puzzle, and more. Give it a try and see what it does for your retention.

Do you think adding games to your website will help retain visitors to your website or blog?  Leave a comment below and let me know your thoughts?

heyzap.com – embed games