First of all, if you haven’t heard of it yet, WP Twin is a software solution to make an exact copy (clone) of any WordPress site. Theme, plugins, database and settings – the entire works, just how good is that?

If you don’t backup your site(s) then you are opening yourself up to a mass of work to recover from hacks, system crashes server moves etc. The method I used to use was to have a plugin that backed up my database every night and emailed me the file. This alone is useless unless you have a copy of your site theme and plugins to be able to recover your site to. The restore process is both time consuming and error prone.

On several occasions I have had to move sites from add-on domains to new top level domains for my clients. This is a real pain in the butt to do and manually intensive. I can do it in a few minutes with WP Twin, perfectly.

So, with those issues identified, how does WP Twin help? My response is, in every way! I copy a single file to the WordPress site to be “cloned” then execute that file in my browser, seconds (and I do mean seconds) later I have a clone file that I can download (using an FTP client) to my computer. The next step is to create a blank WordPress setup on the destination domain ( less than a minute if using Fantastico).

Then I copy (using an FTP client) a second file and the clone file to this new WordPress installation and once that upload is complete (the slowest part of the process dictated by your internet connection speed) you execute the file and (fanfare of trumpets) you have an exact copy of the original site up and running. Just how cool is that? Click the banner below to see a video of WP Twin being used.

WP Twin’s introductory price is just $97. It isn’t often such a fanstatic product is released and my advice to you is to get it now before the introductory price changes.

Contextual advertising with Google Adsense is an extremely simple way for you to monetize your site. There are a number of WordPress plugins that make it very easy to place Adsense ads on your WordPress site, which has probably made this the most commonly used method to make some money with your website.

How it works

1) Advertisers from all over the internet sign-up up with the Google Adwords system. They then design small contextual adverts (of 3 lines + 1 URL line), and make monetary bids on specific search terms.

2) Publishers (you) join up with the Google Adsense system, and specify certain places on your website where you wish to display the contextual adverts that the advertisers created.

3) Google spiders the content of your page/post and gets a very good idea of what your page/post is about. They then display RELEVANT contextual ads in the places that you have specified.

4) If a visitor to your site clicks on one (or more) of the adverts, then Google pays you a percentage of what the advertiser paid to them for that click.

That’s it in a nutshell. Read the rest of this entry