024: How to Backup, Clone and Protect Your WordPress Sites Using Backup Creator

Robert Plank 0:01 Robert Plank Show episode 24 how to backup, clone and protect your WordPress sites using backup creator. Hey, how's it going? I hope you're having a great day. My name is Robert Plank, and I teach membership sites on how to quickly put new websites online, and I got really tired of seeing people make things so complicated or so drawn out that I decided to dedicate my life to making things simpler and showing people how that in many cases, they can click a button and have an entire website online and established in seconds. So today we're going to be talking about this tool called WordPress that you may or might not use to get your website set up and selling and doing all the fancy things you want, and my own plugin called backup creator, which installs on WordPress not just backup your site, keep it in a safe place. But also clone or make a copy of that site, so that once you have your site exactly the way you want it, you can just make a brand new one without having to start over from scratch and try out all the the screens, tutorials and steps every single time. But first, to kick this off, I have two questions for you, and I apologize if if you find them rude or offensive, or if they offend you. But I had two questions. Now, the first one is kind of a scary question, and it's what would happen if you know, let's say that you weren't feeling well, you went to the doctor, and the doctor said you have a really rare disease and you'll be dead in 24 hours, unless you set up a brand new WordPress website, or someone busted in your house and put a gun to your head and said, I'll kill you and your family unless you set up a website today? Well, I know that's kind of a mean question to ask, but the point of that is that, well, if you were under such extreme stress, you'd find a way to get that website set up, and you wouldn't worry about the details. You just click a few buttons and you'd you'd get something, something basic, set up online. And I asked that in such extreme terms, because so many of you out there just need to have your website online, and then you can do it, go and take the steps to getting paid and making money. And so many of you just don't have that extreme urgency that's needed to get a website online today. So it's not a question of, can you do it, or is it a question of skill? It's just that you aren't motivated enough to get it done. All right, so I've got that question out there on the second question, is it what if? What if, when you were thirsty today, you had to go and leave your house and go walk five miles down the road and carry a big bucket and dip it in the water well and carry it back to your house another five miles just to have a drink of water. What if, every time that you were hungry, you'd have to go and sharpen a spear and go into the jungle and find a tiger and surround it and chase it all day long and stick it with a spear and drag it back your house and cut it up and cook it just to have one bite to eat. Well, that's not how things are today, right? If you want water, if you want food, if you want light, you flick a switch, you push a button, you open their fridge, you do you know, something simple to get it done. And if you had to go out there and make your own fire, kill your own animals, pluck your own plants, get your own water, you wouldn't have time for anything else. So we don't want to live in outdated terms. And yet, I see people setting up website in caveman terms. Okay, they have an idea for website, and they go encoded from the scratch. They spend six months on it, when they should have spent six minutes, and just set it up using this tool called WordPress. So I'm all about making things simple, and I hate to be an evangelist and plug someone else's free thing. But if you haven't used WordPress, you haven't heard of WordPress, it's the best thing since sliced websites, basically, and I guess I should say best thing, since I don't know, sliced Photoshop images if we're being really geeky, but let's not be so you make a website, and in the olden days, you had to go encoded by hand or hire someone to do it. But using this thing called WordPress, you can click a button, click a button, figure out what you want to look like. Figure out what you want it to be titled, type in some content, type in some posts or some pages, click some buttons and add some videos. If you want to add things like a forum or a pop up or members area or a job site or a review section or a classified section, there are free plugins that install on top of WordPress. We're not going to talk about WordPress this entire call, but if you're in the situation where you want to make websites fast, the best way to do it is with this self hosted tool called WordPress. And I mean, if you've heard of these things called FTP or HTML or CSS, the days of editing those by hand are just. Says over as getting the water from the well, just click a few buttons and you use the right tool for the right job. So that's what I want to start off the bat with right now, is those two things, if you had to make a website fast, then you could, if you just use the right tools and knew what it was to do and knew what screen to click on, which ones not to and the tool to do that is by using this thing called WordPress, click a button, choose your theme, choose your plugins. It's all set up, and not toot my own horn or anything. But if you join us inside of backup creator.com there's a one hour video in there called the WordPress Crash Course, so that even if you haven't set up a WordPress site of any kind, before we can walk you through that and show you how to make a site just by clicking a few buttons. Okay, and so the good thing about this thing called WordPress is that you can literally use it to create any kind of site. Now, by default, they have you make a blog, which is like an online journal, which, you know, is like a news site, where you can just add in journal entries. A great example of a blog is my own at Robert plank.com that's R O, B, E, R T, P, l, a, n, k.com now I'm not sure if you're listening to today's podcast through iTunes or directly on that site, but either way, go under Robert plank.com right now and leave us a nice comment on whatever the most recent post is because that really helps. So you can make a WordPress site that's a blog. You can make a WordPress site that's a membership site. We use a plugin called Wish List member. And with that you can, you can have basically a course for sale. You can have online videos and things like that. And someone can, someone can buy something from you pay your money, then they get access to this private area with all these videos and all this stuff they can watch and read and download. You can use WordPress as a sales letter. We have a plug in called paper template.com where you can fill out a form, and it will basically make something that looks like a like a letter in the mail. Okay, like it starts off and it says, Here's what brought you here. Here's what I have go and buy it. So WordPress literally replaces any kind of website that's out there. So that's great until a couple of problems rise. Now I'm going to be talking about three things today, backing up, cloning and protecting your site. Okay, so backups, I mean something that we don't really like to think about too much, until your site's down, and then that's the most important thing in your life, right now, right? That's the most urgent problem is that no one can come to your website, which means that no one can buy from you, which means that if they have bought from you, they can't get to their download really scary places when your whole business dries up or is on hold because someone else made a mistake. And I've just heard of story after story. I've seen time after time where something really scary happened, like where then there was one point where the top three web hosts in the world, and I think if I can remember them right, they're a HostGator Blue Host and host monster, the top three web hosting world. We're talking about literally millions of websites, all worldwide went down for 24 hours just because someone made a mistake. And it turns out that all these web hosts are owned by the same company. No one really realized that. It was like the Rupert Murdoch of web host, basically, and all these everyone's sites were down for a full 24 hours. I've seen times where a very mainstream shopping cart software lost the last six months of customer records and said, well, sorry if you bought from us last six months. We have no record from you. You gotta buy again, and even on small websites. I mean, you know, I've had customers and clients, and there was one person in particular where he was hosted on a certain web host. And I think maybe he spent two or three years building up a website, and then they had a failure in there, and the web host and there were no backups, and the web host said, Oh yeah, that site you had for three years. Well, sorry, we lost it. Start over again, and he had nothing. So the good thing about backing things up is that it only takes a couple of seconds you click a button and now you have a copy of your website, safe and sound that you can restore anytime you that you want to. So this plug in called backup creator, what you do is you go to backup creator.com that's at B, A, C, K, u, p, c, r, E, A, T, O, r.com, backup creator.com,

Robert Plank 9:15 you get it the at the time we're recording this, it's on 66,000 sites, and the low end version of it is $7 so you can grab this plug in, and then you install it on your WordPress site by going to a screen that says, plug ins, add new upload. You install this plug in. And by the way, inside backup creator, there's a video showing all this stuff. So it's on there. You click on one single button that says, backup the site, and then it creates a backup and you can download it to your hard drive. So that cool. I have a copy of that on my website, and then I have a copy of that on my hard drive. The other cool thing about backup creator is that in the more advanced version, what we call the ultimate version, you can back it up to FTP. So. If you happen to have a second website, or something like that, you can fill in the details and then, boom, it sends a copy up to that website. If you prefer everything, called Amazon s3 it's okay if you haven't, but if you have, Amazon has a service where you can store all your stuff up, you know, with them. And if you happen to have an account with them, then great. It will save a copy there. And if you even have an account with a service called Dropbox, this is another backup service where this one is, I think, completely free, where you can basically say, well, here's my backup folder on my computer, and everything in this folder, it'll just save a copy up to the cloud, basically. And the cool thing about Dropbox is that if, let's say you had Dropbox installed on your home computer and on your laptop and on, like, I don't know, like a friend's computer, well the same folder gets basically synchronized, to use a big word, across all those computers. So if you put something in that folder on your computer, your home computer. Now you can get to it from your laptop, and then you can load it on your laptop and change it and save it, and then get the same copy of the file on your friend's computer. And so I mentioned this because backup creator can also save a copy of your website up to Dropbox. So that's really cool, because you can click a button and then it will put a copy on the service called Dropbox, which will put it in safe and sound up there, but it will also download and save a copy onto your home computer, on your laptop, anywhere else that you want to put it. Now, the really cool thing about backup creator is that you can also backup things automatically. So if you want to back up, you know, every hour, every day, every week, then you can just set that in our settings, and without you having to do anything every Sunday at 3am it can just go and run through back up the site, put it on s3 put it on Dropbox, and you don't even have to think about it. And so, you know, I mentioned all these things that it does because some of our customers have some really clever ways of using backup creator to make money that I want to talk to you about right now. And an obvious one is, if you use it on your own websites, then you can create your own blog, your own membership site, and then have a backup that just automatically is somewhere, just in case, just in case, the worst possible things happen. If your web host messes up, if you get infected with a virus or hacked, at least, you have a copy, and people have written in and I mean, on docket creator.com there's all of these, you know, reviews from people who say that, well, I lost some website. And if it wasn't for backup creator, I would have had to start from scratch. Now I can just roll back to the previous version. Now, speaking of rolling back, well, have you ever heard of things like someone messed up one little thing on a website and the whole website just was messed up? Well, that happens. That's just computers. The problem with computers is that they'll do exactly what it is you tell them to. So if you mess up a file in WordPress, the whole site might be gone. And sometimes we don't know what it is we change maybe we added some plug in or change some file, and we said, oops, what the heck? The whole site's messed up. So what a lot of our customers do is they'll back up their site periodically, and if they mess something up royally, that's okay, because they have that backup, they can go and restore it and basically roll back to an hour ago or 10 minutes ago, to when the site was working just fine, and keep going. Well, we know people who use backup career as kind of a staging server or like a template where they'll set up, so Okay, they'll have the live version, I don't want to say the production and the developer version, but there's like, the live version of their site, right? What's on there right now, and it's working just fine. And they want to see what would happen if I change the theme? What if I change the look and feel of my site? What if I added some plugin? Well, they want to keep changing a site that people are on, because it'll people will be like, What the heck. Why the site keep changing every two seconds. So what they do? They have the live site. They make a clone, which means use backup creator. They click the button to back it up, and it might save it to Dropbox or to their hard drive, right? That's the live site. Then they go and create a test site, which is just a blank, brand new WordPress site with nothing on it. They install backup creator, and then they restore that backup onto this new test site. So they basically, by doing a backup plan and restore, they've cloned the live site onto the test site, okay? And then they go and make whatever changes they want, and if they have it the way they want it to, then they back up the test site and then restore it on the live site. Okay, so they basically clone the clone back on the live site. So they have the live site. They backed it up, go to the test site and restore it and make whatever changes, then back up the test site and then restore it on the live site. So I'm sorry if that was a little too crazy, but I mean, you can see how we just were talking about a simple backup Plank. Ahead, and people are using this in all kinds of cool, fancy schmancy ways, on their own sites. Now, what if it was on a site that wasn't yours? Well, I'm glad you asked, because in the members area, there's the option to upgrade to what's called the developer version. And what that means is that you can now use backup creator on client sites. So by default, it's just the sites that you normally own, but if you want to use this on client sites, that means that, for example, you could get paid monthly, and many of our customers do, they get paid monthly to run backups. They might be thinking, well, who? How the heck does that happen? Well, some people just don't want to deal with websites. You might go and find like a local pizza restaurant, not necessarily like a chain, not like a Pizza Hut, but like some small business, some, you know, pizza restaurant with five employees or with one employee, right? So they might need a website, and they don't know how to do a website. They don't even they're pizza people, they're restaurant people. They don't want they're not restaurant people and tech people, and tech people. That's where you commit. So you can say, Well, I see that. You know, all of your competitors have websites. You know, Round Table pizza has a website, Domino's Pizza has a website. So people are going to them and not you. So you can say, well, I can make a website for you, and here's what it would look like. So you pay me $2,000 to set it up. And by the way, $2,000 is a small amount for for most of these offline businesses, $2,000 and I mean to compare that to Yellow Pages ads which don't work, or newspaper ads which don't really work, website cost is a drop in the bucket. I'll make a website for you, which includes, you know, pictures, uh, map, the hours, phone number, location, maybe some things on your menu, maybe some way to contact you, all that good stuff. I'll make you a website 2000 bucks, and they don't need to know that you use WordPress. They don't need to know that you might go and find some local restaurant theme or a pizza theme, and just fill in the blanks there. They all they have to know is that for $2,000 you're setting up their site, you might be thinking, Okay, well, that's fine, but $2,000 well, how many sites we're gonna have to make per week just to have like, a full time income? Well, I'm glad you asked that too, because the other thing, and I mean, I didn't make any of this up, this is what our customers do. This is what a lot of online marketers do is they charge $2,000 per year. So they just charge for the site to stay online, because it does cost you to renew the domain, to keep the hosting going, and all that good stuff. And then something you can add into that. The things they should do are backups. So you keep the domain hosted, keep everything renewed, and then you have the backup plug in running, so that way you'll always have a copy, just in case something happens to it. Okay? So then if someone, if they kind of balk at the $2,000 you say, Well, maybe you can make one change per month through me. And I'm gonna, you know, keep it backed up that way, that the site's safe and secure and all that good stuff. So really cool, really easy way to make money there. If you just are the kind of person who has connections, who knows some small business owners in your area, even if you don't know them, just look them up and figure out, where do people need me? And I mean, here's the other thing is, they don't even have to be in your area, do they? I mean, it helps if you can go in there, locally, in person and talk to them. But if you find someone where some business where they don't have a website, or their website sucks, or they're not happy with their website, or they don't have control over their website, that's where you can come in and use WordPress to set up the site for them and to back it up. And, I

Robert Plank 18:41 mean, I'm talking about, you know, any kind of site, restaurants, doctors, dentists. We have a customer who's a chiropractor in Australia who set up his site exactly the way he wanted, because he knew what, he knew what he wanted, right? He has this chiropractor practice. Is that? What you'd call it? But he knew what to talk about. He knew his stuff, and he set things up exactly, but then he said, Well, if I live on the east side of Australia and someone else is a chiropractor on the west side of Australia, we don't compete. I don't lose any business to them because they're, you know, 2000 miles away. So this chiropractor approached the other chiropractors on the other end of the country and said, Well, here's my template. Can you hire me for $5,000 and I'll set up a site right now, today, or maybe he spends a couple weeks or waits couple weeks. But the point is, he backs up his own site, goes over there, restores it, changes a couple names and things on there, and then boom, now he has his exact template set up. We know people who sell sites. Have you heard of this thing called Site flipping? So that means, I mean, let's say that you set up a an article site or an authority site, or a site that reviews, I don't know, like the best WordPress plugins, you had one of these sites. And let's say that through ads and affiliate links and things like that, this I was making about 1000 bucks a month. Okay, so per. Be good. And he said, Well, then, you know, that's fine, but I don't really have the time or effort or I don't really feel like updating this anymore, so I'm gonna put it on the marketplace and sell this site for 10,000 bucks a month. Now, I'm not very important. I'm not guaranteeing or promising any kind of account. I'm just saying, in a theoretical sense, if you had a site that made 1000 bucks a month, you can list it on the site called Flippa for $10,000 and just say, well, here's a site, here's my proof, here's my traffic, here's my sales, here's how, where the traffic comes from, here's where the sales come from. It makes 1000 bucks a month. $10,000 is like a no brainer price for someone to buy a website. And the good news is, once someone buys the website, you can make up, you can just repeat the process and make a new website kind of similar to that, or in whatever new thing you want to do. And once you get tired of that, don't just let it die on the vine, put it on the site and sell it. So let's say someone says, Alright, $10,000 goes through escrow, things like that, and and now they have, you have to figure out how to get the site to them. Wait. Do you really want to give them, like, your username and password? Do you want to you know, let them poke around out there. How the heck are you gonna get your site over to them? Glad you asked backup creator to the rescue. So what many people do who flip sites is they put the site online, you know, for sale. Someone buys the entire site from them, and as part of the deal, they get a login to the new site. They log into the new site, they install WordPress, which you just do in one click from an area called cPanel, fantastic, but inside of backup creator and the WordPress Crash Course, we show you that. But they log into the site, they set up WordPress, they set up backup creator, and then they restore the site that they just sold on the new site, so in a couple of minutes, boom, it's done. The deal is complete, and now everyone's happy because the site's been moved over. The site creator has been paid, and now things are all done. So I know we threw around a lot of things right there, but you can get all the details you need over at backup creator.com and once again, this is a WordPress plugin which automatically backs up your site to either your hard drive, FTP, email, Amazon, s3 or even Dropbox. So you create your site, whether this is a sales letter, shopping car directory, site, content, site, membership site. You use WordPress to manage the content. You install whatever plugins you need to get the functionality, like the membership component or the discussion board components. You select a theme for this WordPress site to change the look and feel like if you want to have, like a black background, or a magazine site, we call it, or anything like that. And then you install backup creator to make backups of the site, to either just keep it in a safe place, or to flip the site or to clone the site. So, I mean, let's say you make a let's say you make like a site for a non some kind of nonprofit organization, and you spend a week or a few days, getting it the way that you want, and now you back it up. And then if some other nonprofit comes to you, or you want to help another nonprofit to set up a similar site, you just restore it on the new site, change some names, and boom, it is done. So that's all for me today. My name is Robert Plank from backup creator.com so be sure to go to Robert Plank show, calm and like the page that way, I can mention your name on air in a future episode of the Robert Plank show. But most importantly, head on over right now to backup creator.com to claim your WordPress plugin, to backup, clone and protect your WordPress sites, even automatically. That's B, A, C, K, u, p, c, r, E, A, T, O, r.com, I'm Robert Plank, and have a tremendous day. You.