If you are handy with PHP and MySQL, you can clone a WordPress site easily by using your web host’s control panel tools. However, many users are reluctant to get their hands dirty by tinkering with the backend intricacies of WordPress. So that is why I created BlogZapper – it’s a simple, inexpensive tool designed to do just one thing: quickly clone WordPress site settings and allow you to create multiple copies of a ‘base’ site.

How I Clone WordPress

Here is how I do it: First, I create a ‘base’ install of WordPress in a subdirectory of one of my domains. It does not matter what domain you use- BlogZapper will use your new domain when it does the restore operation. I set up my base blog with all my favorite plugins – you don’t have to activate them, in case you want to choose whether to use the plugin on your new site.

I also install one or more themes that I may wish to use – and then set up my preferred permalinks structure, user names, and other options. Once I have my base install the way I like it, I use BlogZapper to create a clone of the WordPress site – it only takes a few seconds. (Read my tips on WordPress cloning here).

The Result Of The Site Cloning

The result of the clone operation is a file called blog_backup.zip (or blog_backup.targ.gz, depending on your server’s capabilities). So now to create a new cloned blog, I just log into my web host’s control panel and create a new MySQL database, upload my blog_backup file along with BlogZapper to the new domain, enter the parameters for my new blog –and in seconds I have a brand new, cloned copy of my blog.

The settings are the same, the logins are the same, the only thing different is that the blog is on a different domain name and/or folder. You can install your clone in a subfolder, a subdomain, or in the root of a new domain, it does not matter what the source blog’s location was; BlogZapper will transfer the setting to your new location seamlessly.

BlogZapper is one of my most successful and useful products – if you have to create lots of WordPress blogs, it’s an invaluable tool. Learn more.

Here is a great strategy you can easily implement to create niche blog content on autopilot. It’s also a great way to build up more index-able content on your Backlink Index Express indexer blogs.

There are many ways to use FullMetalRSS and Backlink Index Express in combination, so I’d like to get your own wheels turning on the possibilities with this video post. In this video, I’m showing you how to :

• Find RSS feeds for Niche Posting Content via RssSearchHub.com
  
• Merge the RSS feeds into one main feed via Yahoo! Pipes
• Burn the Pipes feed into Feedburner for compatibility
• Use the feed with FullMetalRSS and Backlink Index Express to post content

The possibilities are endless – particularly since there are so many free tools online to create and mash together RSS feeds – and those mashed-up feeds can all be enhanced by running them through FullMetalRSS!

Check out my video, it’s about 7 minutes long:

Answering support questions about Backlink Index Express over the past year or so has given me valuable input and ideas about how to make backlink indexing better and more effective. The question I get most often is concerned with Google, and how the recent changes (Panda, etc.) have affected my backlink indexing strategy. Judging from my experience, and the experience of hundreds of customers giving their feedback, I’m happy to report that my original backlink indexing strategy is still alive and well, and is very effective.

The key to keeping your BIE network strong is content- regular, new content keeps Google coming back to your indexer blogs and indexing your links. And that is really the only thing you need to worry about; you want Google to keep coming. Note that your indexer blogs are NOT going to RANK in the SERPS – actually, you really don’t want them to rank. You want them regularly and slowly flying under the radar, passing your backlink url’s to Google.

Content Is King

Now if you read anything by just about anybody regarding SEO since Google’s Panda update, you will find that the only fact that all the gurus can agree upon is that Rich Content – and lots of it – is the key to keeping Google coming back to your site.

Now most of us populate our indexer blogs with content from Ezine Article feeds, and that does an admirable job of keeping the blogs current. But the EZA posts are very short in length, and with the advent of Google’s new search algorithms, I believe that more is needed to keep your blog network attractive to Google’s spiders. You don’t absolutely have to have longer (over 200-word) posts, but my research shows that it really helps keeping Google coming back.

Full-Length Content For Your Indexer Blogs

This is why I created two products to ‘Pump Up’ your content on your Indexer Blogs. First, I created PostFeedr to add rich content to your blog network. PostFeedr pulls article content from some of the major article directories and posts that content directly to your blog network. The advantage of PostFeedr is that it’s a snap to set up and once you configure it, you are basically done. You can control how many articles per day you get, and it all runs automatically.

But some of my customers wanted more control. They were using BIE as a ‘Niche’ posting tool, and wanted more granular control of the types of content that was posted to their indexer blogs. So to satisfy this need, I created FullMetalRSS.

More Power, Control; FMRSS Is My Most Powerful Product

FullMetalRSS is simply the most advanced and powerful product I have in my stable. Simply stated, it takes ‘summary’ RSS feeds and extracts ‘full’ RSS feeds from them. You can even configure FMRSS to pull full-text posts form Ezine Articles, or even Google Blog Search results. This opens up a giant can of worms for anyone wanting to improve the content quality on your BIE indexer blogs.

Using FMRSS and BIE together also makes a great niche blog posting tool for affiliate marketing. Once you start playing around with FMRSS you will start to see infinite possibilities. I invite you to take a look at FullMetalRSS and explore all the way it can make your backlink indexing more powerful and effective.  Try the free demo and see for yourself; this is one powerful product!

My customers are always the best source for new ideas. A while back, one of my customers requesting support on my help desk asked if there was a way to integrate two of my products, Backlink Index Express and PingFeedr. I was a bit embarrassed to admit that while it was a great idea, I had not even thought of it before. Both products use similar pinging technology, but after doing some testing, I’m happy to report that PingFeedr is a GREAT companion to Backlink Index Express.

A Quick Background

If you don’t know about these two products, here’s the quick version: Backlink Index Express is the premiere solution for ‘backlinking your backlinks’ – and making them more powerful and effective. PingThingr is the world’s easiest and most effective url pinging solution, so it only makes sense to use them together. And it’s so easy!

Backlink Index Express stores all of the backlink urls in a simple text file. To integrate those links in to PingThingr, just take the mylinks.txt from your BIE installation and upload it into PingThingr. That’s all you have to do- PingThingr will create PingOMatic urls for each of your backlinks and will start pinging away, 24 hours a day, with all automatically.

A Great ‘One-Two Punch’

Now, you can’t do the opposite – you can’t take PingThingr data and load into BIE- as PingThingr has a different method of storing it’s data. But for an inexpensive and simple-to-implement enhancement to Backlink Index Express – PingThingr cannot be beat.

I’ve been using this method now for a couple of months, and it’s a winner. PingThingr is inexpensive, very easy to set up (MUCH faster than setting up BIE!) – you’ll be rolling in less than an hour. Give it a try. Remember, with all my products, you have a 30 day, no-quibble guarantee. Learn more.

What would happen if you had 90% of ALL the available data for EVERY aspect of your business?  Wouldn’t that be a great competitive advantage?

Let’s say you are in the golf club business – and you could measure the following, and be correct to within 90% certainty:

• What relevant golf terms users typed into search engines?
• Given a set of search results, what links actually received clicks?
• How many competitor’s web sites are out there promoting golf items?
• How many pages do each of your competitor’s sites have?
• How does each of your competitor’s pages rank for a given search term?
• How does your competitors buy ads, how much do they pay, and how do those ads perform?
• What golf topics are most-often emailed by users?
• What are your competitor’s conversion rates?  For organic search?  PPC ads?
• How are your competitor’s customers paying for their items?

Wouldn’t it be great to have all of this intelligence?  If you had all of this information, would you be fair with your competition, or would you use every bit of your power to crush it?  In this intensely competitive marketplace, I know what your answer will be to my question.

But you do have a competitor now that is armed with all the above advantages – that would be Google itself.

You see, Google has ALL of the information I outlined above; and they got it from you and me.  We provided all this data to them freely, by using Google’s services: Adwords, Adsense, Gmail, Webmaster Tools, Analytics, Checkout, Website Optimizer, etc. etc.  They gave this stuff away free for a reason.

And now we see the chickens are coming home to roost.  Read this post from the SEO Book Blog about the shrinking of the SERPS; also read this related post about the latest Panda update.  Google is shrinking the screen real estate once allocated to everyone and is now pushing their own heavily monetized properties over the top of the results.  When it comes to ranking on Google, you are never going to beat Google.

So has Google used it’s Dominion Over All Data to become evil? I think they are clearly headed in that direction.  Google did recently drop their ‘Don’t Be Evil’ motto.

“Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

What do you think?  Post a comment.

I get questions about link posting rates and numbers of links all the time.  I have answered this question so many times on the support desk, I thought it was time to post on the blog.  So how do you determine how many links Backlink Index Express can post in a day?  Well, it’s pretty simple, you have 2 variables to work with:

1. Cron Job Frequency – how often BIE runs
2. Links per post – a setting in the config.php file.

So let’s do a sample calculation.  Let’s assume that you are running  your cron job every 10 minutes (the recommended frequency) and are adding 5 links per post (the recommended maximum number).  Now we need to do some math here – we are doing a cron job every 10 minutes, so that means we are doing 6 runs per hour (60 minutes):

60  / 10 = 6

Now, we simply multiply 6 x 24 hours = 144 posts per day:

6 x 24 = 144

Now, if we are posting 5 links per post, we just multiply our 144 above by 5:

5 x 144 = 720

So we are posting 720 links per 24 hour period.  Now, if you want to increase the number of links per day, you could speed up the cron job to every 5 minutes, that would effectively double your posting rate, to 1440 links per day.  Increasing the number of links per post has the same effect.

Now you do get diminishing returns on this – your web host will not like it if you cron BIE more than every 5 minutes, and if you attach too many links per post, Google will not likely spider them all when it comes to visit.  So it is better to not push BIE past the limits set out in the Best Practices Guide (included with your BIE purchase).

The best way to scale for more links is to use multiple instances of BIE – run more than one BIE install and post to a large blog network – this works well for large volume linkers, and is the method used by many large backlinking services that utilize Backlink Index Express as part of their service.

We have updated Backlink Index Express to version 10.  New features include:

Integration with The Best Spinner – auto-spin your post and title text for more uniqueness.  This will really improve the indexing rate of your indexer blogs!  Requires you own a copy of The Best Spinner.

Integration with Sick Submitter – allows you to automatically add links you create from Sick into BIE.  The handiest and fastest way yet to build backlinks and get them indexed with BIE.  You need to subscribe to Sick Submitter to use this feature.

Bookmarklet now works with Hostgator!  NOTE: All users must update their bookmarklet, regardless of what host you use.  If you use the bookmarklet feature, you MUST update your bookmarklet.

Fixed minor issues with file linefeeds and BIE’s internal feed generation.

All registered users are entitled to a free upgrade.  If you did not get an email notification please put a ticket into support and I will send you a new link.

I use Social Monkee regularly. It’s a great service that allows you to build backlinks daily, for free. When I am creating blog posts or doing Article Marketing – I always enter the URL’s of my content into Social Monkee. The service automatically builds backlinks by submitting to social sites all over the web. I have found the service effective and recommend it highly.

My $7 Script Will Make Social Monkee 7 x Better

One feature about Social Monkee that I particularly like is the fact that they provide RSS feeds of all the links they build for you. You can take these feeds and ping them regularly to the RSS aggregator sites – and that is where PingThingr comes into play. PingThingr only costs $7 and it will make your Social Monkee efforts 7x better. Watch this short video and see how easy it is to ping your Social Monkee feeds with PingThingr:

Social Monkee is a great deal – it’s free to sign up and you get a premium membership by referring just a few other users – with the premium account, you can get 300 free and easy backlinks per day. And it’s just as easy to supercharge your Social Monkee efforts with PingThingr.

Everyone who creates content, whether it’s for blogging, article marketing, Web 2.0, Google Places, or any other purpose knows the regular pinging of content URL’s is an important part of any strategy.

There are several free and paid services that you can use to ping your url’s regularly to the important ping sites, and I used them in my own business for several years. One afternoon I thought to myself, “You have auto-pinging technology built in to your product, Backlink Index Express – why not create a handy tool that leverages that technology and make it easy to use” – so I created PingThingr – the easiest Auto-Pinging software ever created. And for a limited time, this product is on sale (read on for why):

PingThingr is desiged to be simple to use, quick to set up and is very effective. PingThingr auto-Pings your content; a great way to promote:

• Article Marketing Content
• Backlink URL’s
• Blogs
• Web 2.0 Content like Squidoo Lenses, HubPages, and more
• Google Places
• RSS Feeds From Social Monkee or Other Services
• Backlink Index Express urls
• Or, ANY URL YOU WISH!

Uses Ping-O-Matic

For years, I’ve used Ping-O-Matic – one of the top pinging services. One feature that of Ping-O-Matic that I have always liked is the fact that once you create a URL with Ping-O-Matic, you can bookmark the URL and use it to re-ping the same content over and over again:

So I gave it some thought and created software that generates two custom browser bookmarklets – one to create the Ping-O-Matic links, and then another to store that Ping-O-Matic link in a data file for use later. Then the magic happens when PingThingr processes this data file – and RE-PINGS your Ping-O-Matic URL’s UNATTENDED – AUTOMATICALLY, 24 x 7!

Watch This Video And See How Easy It Is:

Batch Upload A List Of URL’s

Have a big list of URL’s you want to ping and don’t want to go to the trouble of using the bookmarklet for each? No problem – just use the file upload feature of PingThingr. Upload a text file (up to 1 megabyte) of URL’s you wish to ping, one URL per line and PingThingr will add to the queue to be pinged. This opens up PingThingr to be useful for backlinkers who like to ping their backlinks, as well as those who already have a big list of content URL’s they want to ping.

Easily Integrates With Backlink Index Express

One of my customers gave me a great tip – and now I’m using it regularly- I just take the mylinks.txt from my Backlink Index Express data folder – and upload to PingThingr using the built-in file upload feature. It takes a few seconds – and instantly – PingThingr goes to work pinging your BIE backlinks – for MORE backlink POWER and EFFECTIVENESS. PingThingr and Backlink Index Express are a great ‘one-two’ punch to get the most from your backlinking efforts!

Simple Install

PingThingr is a simple-to-install script that makes this all happen, simply, securely and with very little configuration. Just log into your PingThingr software, drag your bookmarklets, and start submitting content for Pinging – automatically.

PingThingr takes about 10 minutes to set up, and is a true, ‘set and forget’ type of program. As is my custom, I provide complete video training for setup and use. It’s designed to be used by anyone, from beginner article marketers to ‘pro’ bloggers and content creators. I use this utility every day in my own business, and I love it because it’s simple, and it works. As with all my offers, you have a 30 day, ‘no-quibble’ guarantee.

Requirements: linux/unix web host, curl, PHP5.

The number one problem users have when they try to clone WordPress is that they have incompatible plugins.  Plugins that modify the .htaccess, provide redirection, sitemaps or caching often mess up the WordPress cloning process.  To be safe, I doable plugins like those mentioned before I make my backup – of course, I use BlogZapper, but you can do it by hand, too if you are technically inclined and have lots of patience.

WordPress Cloning Tips

The idea of WordPress cloning is simple: create ONE base site that has all the features you would likely want.  You set up the ‘base’ site with all your desired settings and options – then make your backup.  Here are some other tips:

• Keep your ‘template’ blog up and running – but not visible to the search engines (you can set this in general settings).  This is your ‘test mule’ for new plugins, etc.  Keep all your favorite themes and plugins loaded in this version of WordPress.
• You can add plugins and themes – but you don’t have to make them active.  I like to have my base install with ALL of the themes and plugins that I’m likely to use – that way you don’t have to go back and install them on each blog.  Re-work is a real time-waster, and the more you can do up front to speed your site creation, the better.
• Keep your ‘template’ install up to date:  when you see it’s time for a new WordPress version – update your template – same goes for the plugins.  After you update everything, shoot a new cloned copy and use that for future installs.
• Watch your blog’s security – there is a very good plugin called Ultimate Security Checker, run that plugin and try to get at least the easy security holes fixed on your WordPress cloning base template.  You don’t need to go overboard here, but it’s not a bad idea to get the easy stuff fixed, security-wise.
• Finally, have a system.  Site building can get time-consuming, particularly if you are doing lots of small sites.  That is why I advocate WordPress cloning – it just saves you time and gets your sites out there quicker, so you can make money faster!

WordPress cloning is one way a marketer can save time and trouble when building up a fleet of web sites for affiliate marketing or Adsense.  Take these easy-to-implement steps in advance and save yourself some trouble.