Google Docs does a fantastic job of saving and maintaining your documents for you. However, as a small business owner, it’s only smart to want to store a copy (or copies) of your documents on your own drives – just in case. After all, a lot of time, hard work and resources have been spent to create and maintain them. Many people recommend syncing with Google Drive on your computer and other computers. Even I did. After some research, I’ve discovered I was wrong! If you ever open up the .gdoc and .gsheet files in a plain text editor, you will see they contain nothing but a URL to the document itself (and some document ID references). If you can’t find the document from within Google Docs itself I suppose this could be very helpful. However, seeing the file doesn’t actually contain the document contents, this is not going to help in the event the document gets corrupted or deleted completely. Here’s what you can do instead to backup your Google Docs documents. Download All Your Documents In Native Format Log in to your Google Drive, click on My Drive. On the top of the right panel, click the checkbox.
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To encourage sharing, I’ve started adding more share-friendly images to our blog posts. Thanks to our designer, these are often great looking. When I wrote the post on steps to take when WordPress updates fail, she created a great image that really captured the message. The day I emailed about the post, I added the image into the email. The email linked to the post but only after sending, did I realize my mistake. I should have added some share buttons to the bottom of the image as well. The idea is to use the share-friendly image to encourage people to share the post. I did this once but it totally escaped me that time. Live and learn! If you’d like to do this too and you use Aweber, there’s great news. Adding share buttons is super easy. Here’s how. Prepare Your Blog Post & Image Before you do anything, you should have a destination for your shared image. This simply means, when people click on the image, they should go somewhere. The most logical destination is a blog post that further explains the image. Make sure you have a great post with a shareable image. Be sure to specify the thumbnail
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From time, to time, you may not be able to log in to your WordPress admin area. To troubleshoot, you may need to disable your WordPress plugins. Before you begin, this process absolutely requires FTP or cPanel access. In this tutorial, we show you using cPanel. You could achieve the very same thing using FTP as well. There are two methods here. One for disabling all plugins and disabling one plugin only at the bottom. Using your browser, log into your web hosting cPanel, look for a tool named File Manager. A new window will open and you will see a file browser much like your computer. Locate the wp-content folder. Double click it. Disabling All Plugins On the next screen, locate the plugins folder. Click once to select it and immediately after, click again to enable editing. It’s slower than double click but don’t wait too long between clicks either. Change the name, then hit Enter on your keyboard. If that is too difficult, use the Rename button instead. With the plugins folder still selected, click the Rename button. A popup will appear. Enter the new name of the plugins folder then click Rename File. The result
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When you host your files on Amazon S3, there’s a good chance you will eventually use it with a WordPress plugin like MediaGuard that lets you play protected videos, audios or create expiring URLs. Most plugins or software will ask you for security access and keys in place of access keys. It’s not always apparent how to get these keys. Here’s an illustrated tutorial to help. Amazon Web Services Go to Amazon Web Services page. On the top right corner, click the My Account/Console drop down, click AWS Management Console. Log In Enter your Amazon AWS account login, then sign in. AWS Management Console You should then land in your console with multiple services. Click on IAM (Secure AWS Access Control) IAM Management Console You will not be in your IAM Management Console. You now have two options and a decision to make. You could create a group with users inside it or a single user. Amazon helps you out a little by explaining groups are where you manage permissions for multiple users. For most of us, if we need a key to use with a plugin, creating a user is sufficient and so we will do this in this
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Supposing you have a couple of different email lists that you want to rotate out by the month, week or year. It would be rather tiresome to have to manually change it out each time. While you can hire these out, it’s more economical in the long run to let technology do it. Especially when these are the perfect things to be automated. How do you get it done? That largely depends on what you are using to publish your website. Since I am a WordPress fan, the following instructions are MFWP (made for WordPress) Functions.php First of all, to clear up confusion and followup questions. Everything we are doing will go into your theme’s functions.php file. If you switch themes, you will lose this feature, but don’t worry. You can easily copy and paste the code over to your new theme’s functions.php. Determine Your Times In a real scenario, you would already know how often you’d like to rotate or switch out your forms. Everything in this tutorial is dependent on this. The easiest is to go by hard dates and because of that and for brevity’s sake, we are going to develop this based on month. Paste This
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For most of us, the forms provided by Aweber (or our email marketing solution) works just fine… most of the time. There are some projects where it would be smart to attempt to collect more information from the lead. One smart reason is like a form of opt-in upsell where you provide an option for people to get a freebie of a bigger value if they provided extra information about them or choose to continue, settling for the original freebie and less information. As your technical advisor, I’m happy to tell you this is very do-able, the bad part is, you will require some HTML and perhaps Javascript or PHP knowledge depending how complex your form is. Set up custom fields Your first step is to make sure your custom fields get set up in Aweber. If you haven’t used this feature before, it is where you add the groups of information you’d like to collect on your form. For example, if you need to collect the number of bedrooms people are looking for in a rental or their monthly rental budget. You’d create one field for budget and one for bedrooms. Create two basic forms Next, set up a
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Oh Pinterest. How it captivates us. I think it is the perfect exemplar how visual most humans are. As a blogger or website owner, you might want to take advantage of the traffic you could be getting from Pinterest. You can roll your eyes – as I did – but when I saw how Pinterest suddenly became a top referrer for one of my sites, you bet I sat up and paid attention. But there is a challenge. Getting those graphics created especially if you lack creativity (like me) and really wouldn’t like to fork out hundreds of dollars for PhotoShop. In the video below, I’ll guide you through the steps for creating pin-worthy graphic from scratch using Pixlr, a free online tool. This tutorial is about 18 minutes long and is packed with tips especially if you are new to graphic creation. After you watch the video, don’t forget to download my Pixlr Pinterest Graphic Templates below. FYI – you can certainly download GIMP which I also highly recommend. Like any professional grade image manipulation software though it’s a huge program. That’s why I love using Pixlr for Pinterest graphics. Since it is online, it means I can access
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One of the best features about PayPal is the ability to create limited access sub-accounts. You can specify exactly what each person can see or access. If you outsource (and you should), this is perfect because you can let your customer service team to handle refunds, check validity of orders, or give your book keeper access to download reports. Setting up limited access sub-accounts is pretty easy and straightforward. Here are the steps you need to take. Log Into PayPal As Primary Go to PayPal.com and log in as the primary account holder. Go To Profile On the menu, locate the Profile link and click it. My Settings On the next page, you should see a menu to your left. One of the options is My settings. Click to go there. Manage Users Somewhere in the middle of this screen, you should see an option to Manage Users. Click the Update link for that option. Add User Click the Add User button. Security Confirmation You may be asked to confirm some account information before you can proceed Create Login Enter the user’s Name ID which will be used to log in Password User Permissions Select what you’d like the user
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If you do any kind of business online, you’re bound to have an account in several social networks and you often have a profile page where people can read your last shares. That’s all great, but admit it. It’s sometimes difficult to remember the URLs to these profiles. Beyond that, I often wonder at marketers – and I admit making this very same mistake – why we are so smart when it comes to creating affiliate redirects but not for social profiles? Sadly, nothing lasts forever. While I don’t foresee Facebook, Twitter or even Pinterest closing down yet, nothing is set in stone. Great example – Google Reader closing which came as a surprise for many. Truth is, companies cut stuff out all the time. There may not be a rhyme or reason to you but they surely have very legitimate reasons they won’t tell you about. Why would they? Besides the ‘fear’, what about more practical reasons? Take Facebook Pages as an example. A new Page has to achieve a minimum number of fans before you can request for a unique URL. Most of us just beg our friends and network before we promote the Page. Nothing wrong with
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Believe it or not, it is super easy to put up a link for people to download a PDF from your WordPress powered site. Create Links To Download A PDF In the post (or page) you want people to download the file from, place your cursor where you want your link to appear. Click the Add Media button Click Upload Select the PDF file you want to share or drag and drop it into the media uploader. Then click Insert into post. By default, WordPress will use the filename as the link text. You’ll want to edit that to something that makes more sense like “Download”. Be careful! If you select the text and start typing you will lose the link. The best way is to place your cursor in front of the link. Start typing and only then delete the portions you don’t want. This will give you a simple link when clicked, will download the PDF. Please note however, different browsers and plugins on users browser can modify this behavior. For example, if your visitor is using Chrome, all PDF links open up inside a new tab. This really isn’t something you can change and personally, I prefer
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