If you’re running your blog on a free blog host like WordPress.com or Blogger, chances are you’re not worrying about site backups, because the company is there to take care of regular archives. However, if you’re running your blog on your own hosting account, then you’re not always sure you can get the latest copy of your blog’s database in the even that something screws up.

And trust me, most likely than not, your blog will experience some sort of screw up when least expected. It could be from malicious hackers who can gain access through the database, cross-site scripting or other vulnerabilities, or due to server glitches. Whichever the cause, it’s a good idea to have a regular backup of your blog.

Here we will explore how to make simple backups of a WordPress blog. In backing up your blog, there are two important components: the content and the files.

WordPress stores the content separately from the design and the files. Your blog posts, comments, settings and other information are stored on the MySQL database, and this makes it easy to change design and to move the site to other servers (or domains) without much of a fuss. Backing up your content can either be through database backup or WordPress export.

Backing up database from cPanel

If you have access to your hosting account’s cPanel, you can backup your database through the following steps:

1. Log in to your cPanel account at http://yourdomain.com:2082. Use the account username and password provided by your hosting company.
2. Navigate to Databases, and look for the link to phpMyAdmin.
3. On the left side, select the database that corresponds to your WordPress installation. If you installed using an automated script like Fantastico, it would usually be named XXX_wrdpX (where XXX is your cPanel username). If you did a manual install, you would know how you named your database
4. On the upper navigation links, click Export. You are now ready to download a local copy of your database. Be sure to check the following options: “Add Drop Table” and “save as file.”
5. You can also choose to archive the downloaded file as ZIP, for a quicker download.

Backing up content from WordPress

Backing up your database through WordPress itself is an easier task, but you might not be able to download all options, as this is mostly to save a copy of posts and comments, but not other WordPress settings.

1. Login to WordPress. Depending on the version you are using, the Import/export feature can usually be found either under “Manage” (for pre-2.6 versions) or under “Tools” (2.7 up).
2. Click on the Export link.
3. You can choose to restrict the posts to be exported according to author (useful if you run a mult-user blog). But since we’re backing up our entire blog, leave it as “All authors.”
4. Click the Download Export File button. Your browser will now save an XML file containing posts and comments.

Keep the backup files somewhere safe. It will be a good idea to rename these using descriptive filenames, and with the date of the backup, so you know which is the freshest or newest backup, in case you need to revert to these later on.

In our next post, we shall discuss file backups.

Whoever said that microblogging is for lazy writers has got it wrong. True enough, Twitter only lets you write 140 characters or so, but this limitation actually forces one to be more creative with what you write.

When you write a full-length 300-word blog post, you can take all the liberties you want in order to get your point across. You can post a photo, you can post bullet points, or you can even embed videos. With Twitter (among others), it’s just those 140 characters–not even enough for a full paragraph!

And so, just like writing an effective headline, it takes mastery to get that effective, attention-grabbing tweet done.

Use attractive adjectives

If you read a headline that says Awesome, or Amazing or Great, then that would surely get your interest, won’t it? How about Interesting or Mind boggling? Using these adjectives on a tweet would surely attract the interest of your friends, or even people casually browsing your tweet, especially if that person is interested in the topic that you’re tweeting about.

For instance, if you have a science blog, and you post something about CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, you can tweet and link to it with something like this: “Awesome pics of the CERN LHC. A physics junkie’s dream come true!”

Be sure to back up your awesome headline with awesome content or pictures, thoughh!

Use hashtags

A lot of people come across your tweets not because they’re your friends. Some would be doing searches for certain keywords. One way by which you can add tags to your tweets is through hashtags, or the # symbol, followed by the keyword.

Say, you’re tweeting about cars, you can add #cars. Or you can even be more specific by adding #cars #suv. This makes it easier for people searching for SUVs to stumble your tweet.

So, you can say “Just filled up my #suv’s tank. Boy, #gas prices are high these days.” And then you can link to your blog post describing your story spending big bucks on a full tank.

Use URL shortening services

Twitter’s character limitation is definitely very limiting if you plan to insert URLs to your blog posts. Fortunately, there are a handful of URL shortening services out there that convert something as long as a hundred characters or more into a tiny URL with just about 10 characters or less.

You can check out tinyurl.com, bit.ly, is.gd or other services. They basically give you the same functionality, but some, like TinyURL, would let you customize the name that comes after tinyurl.com/, so you can better remember a URL if you plan to use it elsewhere.

These services would let people click on the short URL and they would be redirected to the original source. Just be sure to use the more respected and reputable URL shortening services, as some fly-by-night ones might lead you to malware sites instead.

A good Twitter headline is short, sweet and interesting. Keep it that way, and people will keep following you, and they will most likely click on links in your tweets.

There are certain charactersitics of a celebrity blog. One of these is that whatever the beginnings, celebrity blogs are often flooded with a lot of traffic and comments, due to the fact that the author is someone well known. Sometimes, it’s the celebrity of the author that makes the blog popular, and not necessarily the content. Sometimes, thoguh, it’s the blog that makes a celebrity out of a person, not necessarily in the mainstream sense of the word “celebrity,” but in the blogging sense. Several people have found themselves to be considered celebrities in the blogging world because of their accomplishments. And one way by which these people launch blogs is by doing so with a bang.

What exactly does launching a blog with a bang entail?

Write a collection of stellar content

The mistake that a lot of starting bloggers do is that they post one or two articles, and then they think their blog is the best thing that has happened on the Web. They aggressively market their blogs to their friends, to social networks, and to other bloggers, when in fact their blog is not extraordinary at all! And so the intended readership is not reached. And the blogger’s interest fizzles out.

In contrast, when the founders of Performancing.com launched their blog, they had built up at least a couple of months of excellent, groundbreaking content. They kept on this momentum for a few weeks, and everybody was talking about how great these guys were at running a blog. That’s one way to launch with a bang. Make sure your blog is worthy of conversation even before you formally introduce it to the world.

Establish yourself first

Another big mistake that bloggers do is assuming that they are big just because they can publish blogs. Reality check: just about anyone can publish a blog. In fact, there are tens of milions (or more) blogs out there, published by just about anyone. If you intend to launch a blog with a bang, it might be a good idea if people knew you first as an authority in something.

When Problogger founder Darren Rowse lauched Twitip, he was already established as a top problogger, earning a good living from his blogs. He was so interested in using Twitter that he decided to create a blog all about Twitter, and how people can best use Twitter as a productivity, business, and networking tool.

And as expected, Darren’s fame preceded him. Twitip became an instant hit not only because of the usetul tips that the blog gave, but moreseo because Darren was an Internet celebrity.

Launch your blog with a bang. But make sure to follow throuhg by being consistent. Only then can you attain the status of celebrity, or at least get a decent following.

If you’re anything like me, you probably check your blog’s stats regularly. I often spend half an hour every day reviewing daily stats for the numerous blogs I write for. I’m not normally interested in the pageviews and referral sources only. What I’m really intrigued with is the keywords that users have used to arrived at my blog.

Most analytics packages like Google Analytics, Mint and pMetrics track search engine referrals, and could tell you the top keywords that people use when they get to your blog. For example, for one particular science blog I contribute to, people referred by Google seem to be searching for the H1N1 virus, using various keywords like Swine Flu and the like. This would prompt me to write more about the topic, knowing it’s something that people like reading about. Of course, this is a popular topic today, and I’d be riding the trend if I wrote about H1N1.

However, even better for me is finding novel and unique keywords that people use on their searches. For example, I would never know how someone landed on my tech blog using keywords related to nudity and adult websites. Or perhaps it’s because I wrote about the adult website industry some time back, in the context of blogs and social networking. It’s not what I expected, but it’s intriguing. It made me realize how relevant that site could be in different niches.

Reading up on your referral stats could help you better focus the content on your site. If you find that your readers land on your blog or any specific posts within using the keywords that you are actually optimizing for, then congratulations! But you shouldn’t stop there. If you see some interesting keywords popping up, then you can also optimize for these keywords. Your site has already popped up as a relevant match. You can now follow through with this relevancy.

What best way to focus on these keywords than to use these to jumpstart new categories or topics. For instance, in my mention of referrals from adult-related searches, I could have probably written more about the dynamics between social networks and the adult industry. That would definitely be keyword rich, and would push up my site further in the search engine results. Then again, it was my choice not to, because I thought it would be too controversial. But my point remains. If you find an interesting and intriguing referral, try to do a follow-up. It might be a good way to jumpstart new topics that are interesting to new, prospective readers.