You should pay attention to this post. It may be a little drier than I sometimes am, but I’m going to tell you how to cover your ass in the event of a website mishap. I learned through experience and figured I’d share.

So here’s what happened.

Last Wednesday, I decided to sleep in (which is rare), and Robin came into the bedroom after I’d laid around enough and said, “Apparently your site is down. You’ve got all these emails like, ‘Dude, what’s wrong with your site?’”

Now, I’m not prone to freakouts, so I took my time getting in to the office, turned on my screen, and went to my inbox. And it was indeed filled with “Dude, what’s wrong with your site?” emails.

So I went to my site. Which looked great, except that I got that “404 – Page not found” error on the front page, and didn’t see any posts, or any of my sidebar stuff. I logged in and saw that I currently had zero posts, zero pages, and zero comments.

As of the time I’m writing this, I actually have 131 posts, 90 pages, and 2145 comments. Those stats have changed some since last week, but even back then, I was able to notice that zero posts/pages/comments left a discrepancy.

(I should pause here to describe the sinking, panicked feeling I had at this point, but I honestly felt nothing. I’d wager that some of you reading this right now feel more sinking and more panicked that it could happen to your blog than I did. And it totally could. I don’t know, maybe I’m just confident or something, but it was strangely bland.)

It was cool, though, because I’d been doing the right things. I was prepared for something like this.

What are the first and second rules of computing?

The first rule of computing is to back up your files.

The second rule of computing is to back up your files.

Eventually, if you stay in this world long enough, someone will make a Fight Club reference and mention the First and Second Rules, and nerds will start pulling out flash drives.

So the good news was that I had been doing the backup thing… which was fortunate, because I found out later that thanks to some technicality, my webhost had not been making the backups they promised. So if you aren’t backing stuff up on some level right now, there’s a chance that your webhost is doing (or not doing) the same thing, and you’ll have a crash and be totally and completely fucked.

The good news is that I’d been backing up.

But the bad news is that you never know if a backup plan works until something bad happens and you need to restore. And in my case, what I found out was that the backup itself was completely fucked.

When I went in to the backup console and clicked the little “restore” button for my last backup, it just kind of kept working and kept working but never finished. I tried a manual restore with the same result — totally fucked.

A handful of posts and pages showed up. I think around 10 of each. It was nice to have some of my content back, but the other 121 posts? Gone. And that wasn’t the worst part, because for most people, old posts are old news anyway. Technically, I could repost (out of order, randomly) and reformat them based on the original text files, which I had.

But all of the stuff missing from the sidebars? And the other 80 pages? I didn’t even know what those pages were. I couldn’t recreate most of them if I had to. Few of them were linked from the main page; they were pages I referred to for pre-sale or post-sale – things like my 10-step process for clients to get hosting the correct way. Sales pages I had painstakingly written. Ugh. The thought of recreating all of that or losing it was not cool.

To attempt to keep a long story shorter, the problem was that my backup file was somehow corrupt. Andrew Norcross diagnosed it as some fuckery that occurred when I moved from LearnToBeYourOwnVA.com to JohnnyBTruant.com wherein I was kind of somehow pulling content from two different databases. (Don’t ask; I’m not a database guy and don’t understand it myself.) He said that the database and the calls it made for content just got so muddled up that the whole thing kind of died a little, and then died a lot.

Andrew meticulously rebuilt my database from the corrupt backup files, and then I reposted the recent post I had made and my assistant Amy re-added the comments people had made in the time between that most recent backup and the crash. I made a few more tweaks and in under 36 hours, I was back to 100%.

Back to 100%, but also really paranoid.

So here’s the bulletproof stuff I’ve put into place, with Andrew’s advice. It’s a bit of overkill, but I feel super-secure now that I’m protected going forward.

• The Bei Fen backup plugin: This is what I had before – the backup measure that allowed my site to rise from the dead, but which also gave me a screwed backup. I’ve decided that the screwed backup wasn’t the fault of this plugin, but it was that “two databases, overwrought” thing that caused that mess.

When I was originally looking for backup plugins, Bei Fen was the only one I found that would make a COMPLETE backup of the site (database PLUS all of your static pages, media, images, etc.) and not insist on emailing the giant resulting monstrosity to you. It puts the backup in a directory on your site. Upside? Quick and easy and convenient. Downside? It’s ON YOUR SITE. If the whole site gets corrupted by malware or something, then there goes your backup.

But I use it anyway still, as a catch-all. I have it make a new compete backup every Wednesday and replace the old backup (otherwise the space consumed gets HUGE). I moved my weekly backup to Wednesday because I found out that my webhost makes backups on Sundays. So I verified that they would keep making them, and between the two, my most recent complete backup will always only be a few days old.

(The files on my computer also function as a second but imperfect backup of files, media, etc… everything but the database.)

• The WordPress Database Backup plugin: As it sounds, this one makes a copy of the database only – but that’s arguably the most important part of a WordPress site. It will email you the database, so I set up a new email account using Google Apps (which is what runs my main email address) and have the databases mailed to that account daily. This means that the database backup is being stored off-site, and it’ll archive automatically… the databases will just accumulate in that email account until I go in and clear out the old ones.

Two considerations here: If the database is all fucked up and overburdened like mine was, it may not backup quite right and/or be corrupt. Also, if the database gets too big, your server won’t email it out. It’ll say, “No way, dude… attachment too big. Fuck off.” And it won’t tell you that it’s refusing to send them, and you’ll find out when you need one and your most recent one is from six months ago.

Both of those problems can be solved by this next piece:

• The WP-Optimize plugin: This one adds an area on your dashboard where you can go in and clear out the junk cluttering up your database, thus making it function more cleanly and keeping its size down.

Two things that will clutter you up like a bastard are spam comments and post revisions. I knew about spam, but the revisions thing took me by surprise. Apparently, by default, WordPress saves every single revision you make to a post, and those revisions NEVER GO AWAY. Go in and change “a” to “an” in a certain sentence? You’ve just created a post revision, and it takes up as much space in the database as the actual published page. Thanks to post revisions, I believe my database was 10-15 times as large as it should have been.

You have to actually remember to use WP-Optimize to clear the crap out, though, so don’t forget. Andrew suggested doing it weekly.

The three plugins above would have addressed my issues if the same thing happened in the future, but then there’s hacking and malware to worry about too. I hadn’t gotten hit by those, but didn’t really want to wait and find out what it was like. So I added this other stuff too:

• The Login Lockdown plugin: You can eventually break a password if you just keep trying until you get it. To combat this kind of “brute force” attack, what this plugin does is to allow someone to try only a specified number of login attempts before locking them out of the system for a specified period of time.

• The Secure WordPress plugin: There area bunch of geeky ways that hackers can get at your site and that I don’t totally understand. By making some changes to the way WordPress presents itself (doesn’t show the version number which would indicate version-specific weaknesses, removes certain error messages that give hackers tips on what they’re doing right and wrong), you can lock your site down even further. This plugin lets you control and change those weaknesses.

• Sucuri malware protection service: I did this one purely on the recommendation of Tony Clark, who’s the Copyblogger Clark that doesn’t come out in public as often as that Brian guy. (And no, they’re not related.) Earlier this year, Copyblogger had a huge malware infestation and subsequently got blacklisted by Google. Sucuri got them out of it and got them back on Google’s good side. What’s good enough for Copyblogger is good enough for me, so I signed up. It’s like $90 a year.

Basically, Sucuri monitors your site and looks for unexpected or nutty software, activity, database calls, and other stuff that I don’t understand. And it lets you know when something’s fishy, and gets you back up and running if bad things go down.

Based on what Tony told me, hackers can get in through your webhost sometimes, which means that the stuff that you can do to protect your site can end up being pretty irrelevant — you’re barricading the front door while they sneak in through the back. Sucuri covers your ass by watching all of your doors.

So now, I feel a lot safer. And given that all but Sucuri above are free, you really should do this stuff yourself. Because having a website problem sucks giant balls.

Be safe, y’all.

There’s some real meat to this review of Scribe SEO (and even a cool video) further down, but let me give you a bit of background as to why I’m writing this first. Why? Well, before you know what something can do, I think it’s important to answer the question of “Why bother?”

So:

What you have to understand about this review of Scribe SEO — a software service that helps users SEO optimize their copy (and which works with WordPress through a plugin) — is that I’m the same guy who wrote a post called “Screw SEO,” after which Michael Martine stalked me with nunchucks for dispairaging his craft.

And yet, when Brian Clark asked me to demo Scribe (a Copyblogger project), I thought it might be cool to give it a try. But it gets more ridiculous: Today, you can find me on the Scribe site, giving a shining testimonial. So given the aforementioned “Screw SEO” mentality, you’re probably wondering what gives.

Allow me to explain: I guess I don’t really think SEO sucks per se. It’s more that I feel it sucks conditionally.

For me, most of the time, SEO feels pointless because I blog about nothing that anyone would ever search for. When I wrote “Christmas is Gay,” for instance, I wrote it because the idea seemed funny to me, not because I expected people to Google “gay Christmas” and find that post.

(Note to self: Google “gay Christmas” and see what comes up. I’ll bet it’s interesting.)

But I’ll admit it… there are times I should probably be optimizing. I have a really good aWeber tutorial that would probably be earning me some business if people could find it in the search engines. And I suppose I’d get a few more clients if I optimized for the phrase “WordPress blog setup,” maybe.

When people pointed this out to me — that SEO and compelling content worked together and that a few SEO tweaks would essentially help me get more mileage out of what I had already written and done — my reply was always that the effort wasn’t worth the reward.

In other words: I was doing fine as it was, so optimizing was too big of a pain in the ass to be worth whatever increase in business I might see from it.

In order for me to give a shit about SEO, one of two things was going to have to happen: Either the reward I could expect from optimizing was going to have to get more promising, or doing the work to optimize was going to have to become so stupidly easy that I’d basically trip over it.

So, to the punchline: The reason I like Scribe is that it makes SEO stupidly easy and obvious.

(I’m pitching the above to the Scribe folks as their slogan. I haven’t heard back yet.)

When you use Scribe as part of your workflow, it happens like this:

1. You write a post naturally, the way you normally would, using your normal writing voice to talk about the topic.

2. As you write, Scribe is staring at you in the corner of the “Write Post” window. From the get-go, it’s yelling at you if you’ve forgotten something obvious.

3. Once you’re done writing, you click a button to analyze the post. Scribe then tells you which keywords you’re already naturally optimized for.

4. You can then decide to roll with the keywords that are already primarily emphasized (and Scribe will tell you how to do that), or you can decide to emphasize different keywords (and Scribe will tell you how to do that, too).

It’s right in your face, which is what I needed in order to care about SEO. It also uses intuitive visual cues — like, if you’re doing things right, you see green stuff up there in the corner. If you’re not, you’ll see red stuff. If you’re so-so, you’ll see some yellow. I know, I know… you’re wondering if I really need it to be this simple. The answer is yes. If I’m to do it, then yes… it has to be this simple. And I’ve found that a lot of people are like me in that way.

But enough explanation… let me show you a little video of Scribe in action. (NOTE: If you’re reading this in a feed or on Facebook, you’ll probably need to click through to my site to see the video.)

(You can also click the button in the lower-right corner to play it full-screen)

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Now, Scribe isn’t a magic bullet. It won’t get you millions of visits simply because you’ve used it but done nothing else, and won’t do all of your work for you because it hasn’t developed Hal-from-2001-style evil artificial intelligence capabilities (yet). There’s still some stuff you’ll need to do on your own, to allow Scribe to do its thing for you with the best results.

So here are some things to keep in mind:

Keyword choice matters.
At some point, you’ll want to figure out which keywords are worth targeting. If you write a post about whale oil lamp efficiency, Scribe will help you get laser-focused on those words and you’ll likely rank #1 for “whale oil lamp efficiency” in no time. But chances are nobody is searching for that term, so it’s kind of pointless.

Links matter.
As described in the video, this post is partially an experiment to see how well I can rank for the phrase “Scribe SEO review.” Because incoming links help a post’s ranking, I’m going to try my damnedest to get Copyblogger to link to this review. If they do, having an incoming link to this post from a high-authority, highly-relevant site like CB is going to help me place better. The more links you get coming to whatever you’re trying to optimize (ideally from relevant, popular sites, using your desired keywords in the anchor text), the better the ranking.

The other principles of SEO matter.
If the above two points aren’t things that you already fully understand or if you know little else about SEO, I’m going to very strongly suggest picking up a copy of IttyBiz.com’s SEO School. SEO School is by far the most accessible, most no-bullshit / no-technobabble guide to SEO I’ve ever seen. You get SEO School and Scribe and I think you’re off to a fantastic start.

In fact, if you care about SEO and write or work in an area where search engine visitors matter (“wedding photographers in oregon”, “IKEA cabinet repair”, “WordPress tips and tricks”) I’d go so far as to suggest a full starter pack that will take you from knowing virtually nothing to being pretty damn near as optimized as you can be given who and where you are. Pick up the following and you’re golden.

SEO School: To teach you the basics of SEO quickly and easily in a way anyone can understand and implement.

Scribe SEO: To allow you, in a very intuitive and natural way, to implement the copywriting part of what you learn from SEO School.

Thesis: Scribe was designed to work as a compliement to Copyblogger’s most visible product — the Thesis theme for WordPress. Thesis is widely regarded as perhaps the best out-of-the-box-SEO-friendly WordPress theme currently in existence, and contains all of the code machinery that Scribe uses to work optimally.

(Note: Thesis is not required to use Scribe. You can also use Headway (which I also really like), and you can use any other theme if you install the All-in-One SEO plugin.)

The three-pack I’ve recommended above won’t magically make your site a magnet for whatever terms you want to target, but it will give you a hell of a lot better shot at it than if you just kind of dick around and don’t really have any idea what you’re doing.

For many niches, search engine traffic is EVERYTHING. If that’s you, and you’re either just starting out or if you haven’t been optimizing, invest a few bucks and pick this stuff up. Even all three together are hell of a lot less expensive than an SEO consultant, and you’ll likely be paid back quickly in new profits if you do things right.

Look, I’m going to be blunt here. Do I suddenly care all about SEO, and am I going to start optimizing everything I write? No, absolutely not. I still don’t give a shit 90% of the time because I don’t write often about stuff that is all that optimizable (like Christmas being gay). But sometimes I’ll do a tutuorial. Or I’ll create a service, or a product. And those will be things I really probably should at least try to optimize.

And now, with Scribe, I can do that without hassle, and absolutely will. So yeah, my definitive word is that if you’re like me, you should get it.

So you want to install some stuff on your blog, right? Some cool stuff? Well, there are two main kinds of cool things to install on your blog (or, for that matter, on your $100 website, if I built one of those for you — they’re proving to be really popular, don’t you know). Those cool things are themes and plugins.

Let’s start with plug-ins.

Plugins are so badass. If you want your blog to do just about anything (give a list of related posts following each post you make, add a contact form to your contact page, shave sheep), chances are there is a plugin that will make doing it super, ridiculously, retardedly easy for you.

Starting with WordPress 2.7, the kind folks at WordPress (which is the software that runs your website or blog if you’re awesome (and if you’re on Blogger or something else instead, you should totally migrate to WordPress)) have finally made adding plugins very easy.

Here’s how you do it:

1. Log in to your blog’s admin console.

2. On the left, click “Plugins,” then “Add New” under that.

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3. Enter a term into the search box that describes what you want. So for instance, if I wanted to add a contact form, enter “contact form.”

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4. A list of plugins will come up. Choose one, and click on “Install” at the right.

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5. Now, click “Install now.”

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6. After that, you’ll want to activate the plugin by clicking “Activate Plugin.”

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Congratulations! You’ve added a plugin. Way easy, huh?

Themes
Your blog or website’s “theme” determines, in a nutshell, what the blog or site looks like. Change your theme and you totally change the look of the site. Again, thinking like the awesome people that they are, the WordPress development team finally added easy-install theme functionality when they rolled out WordPress version 2.8, similar to what they already had for plug-ins.

Here’s how you install a new theme.

1. Find a theme.
Now, disclaimer here… this quick install only works for themes that exist in the WordPress Themes Directory. The bad news is that a lot of people develop themes that aren’t in the directory, and if you want to install those, you’ll still need to use FTP (which is kind of geeky). But the good news is that there are a hell of a lot of themes in the directory. Like, most of them are in there.

So go to the directory, browse through the themes, poke around, and find one you want to use. DON’T DOWNLOAD IT. Just note that theme’s name.

So for instance, I’m going to use iNove.

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2. Go to your blog’s admin console and on the left, click “Appearance” on the left, and then “Add new themes” under that.

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3. Enter the name of the theme you want in the search box.

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4. When your theme comes up, click “Install.”

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5. This little lightbox display will come up. Click “Install Now.”

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6. Now, just activate the theme by clicking on “Activate.”

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7. Now go to your blog’s main page and refresh. Voila!

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Congratulations. You are now a tech geek. Please form an orderly line at the left to receive your pocket protectors, taped-up glasses, and punch in the gut by the high school quarterback.

P.S: But what if you’re on a version of WordPress below 2.7 and don’t have these options available to you? Well, fortunately, I have a solution for you.

I realized that I always assume people know how to use WordPress after I set up a blog for them, but I’ve discovered this isn’t always true. There have been a few who have gotten the keys to their blogs and said, “Thanks! Now what?”

The video below will show you what you need to know. And by the way, I created it for my Zero to Business course, so if you find this informative and enjoy this type of instruction, you should totally join the mailing list so you can buy that when it comes out, on July 15th.

Intro tour of WordPress from Johnny B. Truant on Vimeo.

The title says it all. But if you’re on a version 2.6 or earlier and would like to upgrade and be 1) more secure, 2) more stable, and 3) able to easily upload your own new themes and plug-ins, I’d be happy to do it for you.

That’s a teaser title. It’s meant to bait you and scare you into reading this post.

So yeah, you’re going to lose your wife because she’s sleeping with another dude or even another gal, or if you’re a girl, you’re going to lose your husband — unless you’re gay, or unless you’re just dating, and you can see that the permutations are sort of endless here, so we’ll leave it to “you’re fucked.”

That said — and this is really an insult-to-injury thing after learning that your old lady is shacking up with Florida from Good Times — the fact is that you’re going to eventually lose your data if you don’t back things up. Like, it’s only a matter of time.

But the good news is that backing up has gotten easier, as in you no longer have an excuse not to do it. Unless you’re so lame that you just wear a big lame sign all the time, you lame-ass lame-o.

But first, let me convince you that this is all necessary by recounting a few of my own real-life experiences:

• Several times, the database that holds all of my email in my email program has gotten corrupted. If you’re like me, losing email is like losing your wallet. It suuuuuucks, and I use my emai like a big to-do list. If I lose email, I have no idea what I’ve promised people, or what I need to do for work.

• One time, my blog got a virus. Yes, that can actually happen. And if you don’t have all of your blog posts stored somewhere, you’re pretty much screwed.

• Another time, I did something as innocent as made changes to a web page file for a client. Then I realized that I had changed the wrong file, and that I had saved the changes… so there was no way to recover the original file. I had to re-create the whole damn thing.

And lastly:

• If you’re on a PC, your computer is going to crash eventually, and you lose everything. Not so much on Macs. I’ve never had a catastrophic crash, but my Dad has them every few years. He says they’re delightful.

So.

YOU NEED TO HAVE EVERYTHING BACKED UP. You just need it. Computing without regular backups is like having unprotected sex in orgies filled with guys like Ron Jeremy: it’s just a matter of time before you get cannonballed in the nuts with some horrible flesh-eating disease.

Enter the best $5 service I’ve ever seen.

I recommend Mozy backup like I recommend myself as the recipient of large sums of cash. You sign up. You download a little file and you install it (for both PCs and Macs). You tell it what you want to back up. Then (this is the way-cool part), you schedule it to do these backups automatically, through your broadband internet connection, every night, or every day during an off time.

Every damn day, this little program uploads the entirety of whatever you want up to Mozy’s servers. It’s 64-bit encrypted, meaning it’s as secure and as private as credit card data. Nobody can read any of your files without you logging in and authorizing it — including Mozy. So don’t worry, your sex pictures with Grandma will remain your little secret.

What I like best about this (other than the fact that I don’t have to think about it) is that it’s OFF-SITE. When I used to back up everything manually onto DVDs or even CDs, I used to think, “What if my house burns down?” or “What if someone steals it all?”

You use Mozy and it’s nowhere near your house. You could have a catastrophic fire, go to a buddy’s house the next day and log in, release your files, and they’d burn them to a stack of DVDs and FedEx them to you overnight.

For less catastrophic stuff, you can log in from your own computer and download the files you want.

That thing I did where I changed the wrong file and didn’t have a copy of the original? That happened after I started backing up once. So I logged in and downloaded the backup copy that Mozy had made the night before. Sweet.

You need to do this.

And it’s unlimited.

I seriously have over 40GB up there. Sure, it took a month of on-and-off uploading (automated, but I’d stop it while I was working) to get it all up there, but it’s there: My music, my photos, my files, my email database… everything that isn’t system files and applications.

Now that it’s up there, nightly backups take maybe an hour and happen while I’m sleeping. It’s so badass.

You need to fucking do this right now. Seriously, it’s so brainless and easy and you’ll never lose data again. Do it now. Now. Now.

Then, all that’s left after you’ve done that is the matter of backing up your blog, so that’s the subject of the following video. You can watch it once you’ve gotten your home files backup together. (Which you should do now.)

So here’s the vid. And Jesus does my headset suck. Sorry for the audio quality. I just can’t seem to make a respectable audio recording.

Got it? So take a few minutes to back up your blog, and then go get Mozy. Like, now. You’ll sleep so much better at night. It has saved my ass so many times.

Let’s say you’re into weasel flogging. I know a lot of you are into it, so it’s a good example. Maybe you’ve registered “weaselflogging.com” and have a blog there, all about the most effective and efficient ways to flog weasels. But then you decide to buy a second domain name — say “flogthatweasel.com” — and you want to point it at your weaselflogging.com blog.

So to summarize, you want both domain names pointing at the same blog. You are NOT trying to launch a new site here. I mean, nobody needs two weasel flogging sites. You just want your bases covered with two domain names.

You choices are:

1. Domain forwarding
When you forward a domain, you’re simply saying to the browser, “Oh, flogthatweasel.com. You need to head over to weaselflogging.com.” So when someone enters flogthatweasel.com into their browser, it just sends them to weaselflogging.com. They know they’re heading to the different domain name, because as the page loads, the URL in their browser actually changes to weaselflogging.com.

2. Domain forwarding with masking
“Masking” means you’re hiding the actual URL of the page you’re sending visitors to. In this case, we still want users to wind up at weaselflogging.com, but we want them to think they’re at flogthatweasel.com. So basically, the same thing happens as in #1 above, but this time the URL in their browser doesn’t change. Instead, it remains “flogthatweasel.com,” just as they typed it in.

(This is a really useful strategy for affiliate links. Let’s say you’re an Amazon.com affiliate and are constantly sending people to Amazon to buy a book on weasel flogging. However, you don’t want them to know that it’s an affiliate link. So what you do is you register a domain name like www.weaselfloggingbook.com and you forward and mask that domain so that it goes to your affiliate link. The visitor will think they’re at weaselfloggingbook.com, but they’re actually at http://www.amazon.com/books/category=rodent-abuse&subgenre=weasel-flogging&affiliate=8309302.)

The problem with the way that most registrars do masking (like GoDaddy’s forward-and-mask service) is that the URL in the browser remains flogthatweasel.com as the visitor clicks on links and views other pages. It won’t change to, for instance, www.flogthatweasel.com/contact.htm.

3. Mapping
I don’t know if this is the official term, but I think of option #3 (which solves the problem from option #2) as “domain mapping.” In order for this to work, you need to own both domain names involved. You can’t do what I’m calling “mapping” with an Amazon URL because you don’t own Amazon.com. But don’t you wish you did?

In this case, you’re telling the new domain to use the same files as the old domain name. You’re saying, “If someone wants a file at flogthatweasel.com OR at weaselflogging.com, look in this folder on my hosting service to find it.”

This will make your links work properly. They will behave in all ways as if they are two totally separate websites, but they will use the same files. So if you make a change to the contact page of weaselflogging.com, the contact page on flogthatweasel.com will change too.

Happy domain play. I know you love it.

I’ve been doing my $39 blog launches for a while, have had a lot of satisfied customers (and just check out my testimonials! Good shit!) and have gotten a lot of really positive feedback. When I do those launches, I like to use GoDaddy for the hosting, and for the $39 price, I require that people get GoDaddy’s “Deluxe” hosting plan. (And if I’m not setting up a blog for someone and they ask me about GoDaddy, I still strongly suggest the Deluxe.) The reason is that not getting the Deluxe is retarded.

Stick with me here.

I recently re-released my free blog launch e-book (you see it there in the sidebar with the blue cover) and changed the process so that instead of recommending GoDaddy, it recommends HostGator. (This had nothing to do with GoDaddy’s quality. They just kept changing things around and I was tired of updating the e-book… so relax if you have GoDaddy. They’re cool.) In the e-book, I recommend getting the “Baby” hosting plan, because not getting at least the Baby plan is retarded.

You want a hosting plan that allows for multiple domains. Let’s face it, website hosting has gotten stupidly cheap, so you’re paying a maximum of about ten bucks a month to have literally as many websites as you’d ever want on one hosting plan, without paying an extra nickel. So just get an unlimited plan already.

I’m going to draft a tutorial for this shortly that will show you in painfully simple detail exactly how to do this… like my iContact tutorial. (Or maybe it will be a video; I’m not sure.)

For now, here are the basics:

The below examples assume you already have one website rolling and just want to add a second.

ADDING A SECOND WEBSITE IN GODADDY
1. Log in to your account at GoDaddy and register the new domain name you’d like. You do this by going to “Register Domains” under the “Domains” tab in the green nav bar along the top. MAKE SURE YOU LOG IN TO YOUR ACCOUNT BEFORE REGISTERING THE NEW DOMAIN NAME!
2. Once you’ve finished registering the new domain, choose “My Hosting account” under “Hosting” in the green nav bar.
3. When your hosting account comes up, click “Manage account.” A new window should open.
4. Click the big “Your domains” button along the top of the new window.
5. Find the silver “Add Domain” button to the right, almost all the way to the top of the screen. Click it.
6. In the pane that opens, type in the new domain name you just registered, without the “www” at the beginning. Then, in the field that says, “Folder,” enter a name for a new folder to contain the domain. Personally, I just drop the “.com” and use that. Be sure to leave the “/” at the beginning. So for example, if I was using “cars.com,” I’d call the folder “/cars”.
7. Click the orange “OK” button. You’re technically done at this point.
8. But to add the site files, use the same FTP information you’ve been using to send content to your current site except that this time, you’ll be putting files in the new folder you created above. So if my first site was bob.com and I’d been using bob.com as my FTP hostname, I’d still use bob.com as my FTP host and would log in using FTP in exactly the same way but would now put my cars.com files in that new “cars” folder I created.

ADDING A SECOND WEBSITE IN HOSTGATOR
1. Log in to your HostGator control panel. You’ll find this info in the welcome email HostGator sent you. It’s also described in my blog launch e-book if you downloaded that.
2. Along the very top, there’s what looks like a search field, but it says “Register” above it. Use this to register your new domain name. Do not just go to HostGator and register the domain… YOU MUST BE IN YOUR CONTROL PANEL!
3. Once you’re done with that, return to the main screen of the HostGator control panel and scroll down until you find the “domains” section. It’s about 2/3 of the way down, below “Security” and above “Databases.”
4. In that section, click on “Addon Domains.”
5. Enter the domain name you just registered in the “New Domain Name” field.
6. The rest of the important fields will likely be filled in for you after you do that, but if they aren’t, just put the domain without the “www” or the extension (“.com”) in the subdomain/username box. So if I entered “cars.com” in the top box, I’d enter “cars” in the second. Then, in the “document root” box, enter “public_html/cars.com”, but of course put your own site in there instead of “cars.com.” Then pick a password and click “Add Domain.
7. You’re technically done at this point.
8. But to add site files, use your FTP program as such: In the “host” box, enter your new domain name. Then use the new username and password for that domain that you chose in step 6 above. So in my case, the username I chose was “cars.”
9. In contrast to the GoDaddy explanation above, you won’t have to put your files in any special folder. Just put them where it takes you when you log in using your FTP program. (This is actually just because you’ve already been taken to the correct folder automatically.)

In both cases above, GIVE THE NEW DOMAIN NAME TIME TO PROPAGATE. If I register sitename.com right now and immediately try to set it up and send files to it, it probably won’t work. New domains need time to “propagate” throughout the internet, and that time can range from 5 minutes to two days. An hour or two is typical, but sleep on it if nothing happens right away.

Questions? Leave them to comments so that I can answer them publicly for everyone!

Finally got this up. Cool shit. Enjoy!

NOTE that there is a “full-screen” toggle at the lower-right corner of the video if you’d like to use it.

Took me a while to get this right, but here’s the video of Monday’s webinar. (In the lower-right corner of the video is a “show full screen” button. Consider using that.)

The sound sucks in places because I didn’t know how close to be to the mic, but I’ll do better next time. Same for video quality.

Be sure to visit the individual webinar’s page for topics and resources.

Enjoy!