Well what a fantastic week we had on Stradbroke Island just off the Gold Coast of Australia at Couran Cove Island Resort.

We had 25 keen Internet Marketers who learnt a whole lot of information to help them further their careers in internet marketing. The island was the perfect place to retreat from everyday life and focus on internet marketing strategies, while also enjoying the sun, sand & surf !

What did we cover during the week?  Lots of things like…

• Keyword Research
• How to use Affiliate Marketing Programs like ClickBank & Amazon
• Pay Per Click Advertising and How to Create Google Adwords Campaigns
• Building an SEO Optimized Website with WordPress
• Tips on Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and How to Rank on the First Page of Google
• Split Testing Methods using my New WordPress Super Affiliate Plugin
• Social Media Tactics
• Instant Capture Pages
• How to Create Videos
• Adding Articles / Writing Articles
• How to create Auto Responders and Build your List
• How to Add an Optin Box on Your Website
• How to Process Payments on Your Website using PayPal & ClickBank
• How to Create a Membership Site Using WordPress

And so much more……

Many, many websites were created during the week, with everyone finishing at least 2 each!

Of course not all of it was work – we did manage to get out to play and enjoy the island as well.  Here’s some photos and video of the fun things we got up to!

If you’ve just uploaded a new WordPress blog recently, you may want to check the privacy settings to make sure it’s visible to everyone!

In the privacy settings area there are 2 options to choose from.  One allows your blog to be visible to everyone, including search engines. The other blocks search engines from seeing your blog but will allow normal visitors.

In the latest update of WordPress (2.8.4) the default option has now been set to block search engines and only allow normal visitors. This used to be automatically set as visible to everyone, including search engines.

If you manually install a new WordPress blog the privacy option is shown on the install page, however it is now set to block search engines by default. Choosing the correct option can still be done when doing a manual install.

However, if you have recently installed WordPress using Fantastico you were not given an option to choose the privacy settings, which means your blogs visibility may be set to block search engines.

This also means that no pinging will happen whenever a new entry is posted and this is important for the SE indexing purpose.

Of course this can be easily corrected by simply going to Settings > Privacy and choosing the correct option for your blog, which in most cases will be to allow search engines.

If you do install a new blog using WordPress 2.8.4 (including using the Fantastico tool in CPanel), make sure you reset the privacy to the first option.

You might also want to check any current sites you’ve upgraded recently for the privacy settings, to make sure they can allow search engines to see your site.

After working hard on my WordPress Training DVD series, I have finally presented my first training day on WordPress!

We covered a lot of topics ranging from Installing WordPress using Fantasico, to creating Posts & Pages and installing Themes & Plugins.

Out of the 15 people attending, I’m sure they went home with a lot of content to fill their days for the next couple of weeks

Gail Bottomley and I will be holding more of these training events in the coming weeks in Sydney, Melbourne, Auckland and hopefully, the USA!

If you want to learn more about WordPress you can join Gail and I on our Tuesday night Webinars at http://www.fimwebinar.com

If you’d like to watch a recording of the webinar (Webinar #18) just go to FIMWebinarOnline.com.

I think the webinar went really well being my first an all!

Next week (Tuesday 7.00pm EST) we’ll be talking about how to install WordPress through your HostGator hosting account. If you would like to register for the webinar please go to FIMWebinar.com.

See you then!

Bryan

It seems they have fixed a lot of the bugs that have been raised over the past couple of years, so this is certainly a worthy download. You can see a list of the main fixes and changes here.

Outlook has been updated to improve the start-up and shutdown performance which I’m sure we’ll all enjoy!

Click here to download Office 2007 Service Pack 2.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wptouch/

The WPTouch iPhone Theme completely changes the look and feel of your site to be more native to iPhone users. It doesn’t try to fit your current theme down to the smaller screen, it simply replaces it with slick iPhone style graphics.

This is what your Wordpress blog will look like...

It also allows your users to revert back to your standard theme if they wish to.

I think this is one of the best plugins I have ever come across!! Extremely easy to use, and very effective…

Go and download it now!

I frequently use a web application that throws Javascript errors in IE8 – even with the IE7 compatibility mode turned on… It actually locks up my machine to the point that I have to reboot it!

After a quick google on “How to uninstall IE8″, I found there were some intersting ways people are trying to get rid of it!

But, there is just one thing that you need to do to un-install it; just run this program:

c:\WINDOWS\ie8\spuninst\spuninst.exe

It will remove IE8 completely, and revert you back to IE7.

Remember, I have only tried this for Windows XP. If you have any luck with this on Vista, please let me know!

Good Luck!

Yaro Starak is a professional blogger/entrepreneur who created, managed and sold several different Internet businesses since 1998 and currently teaches people how to make a full time income from blogging part time through his Blog Mastermind coaching program.  So if your looking for pointers on how to make a membership site Yaro is certainly one to learn from!

The Membership Site Masterplan is full of excellent information and is certainly a great place to start when setting up your membership site. The free report is well worth a look, as it covers many aspects of membership sites.

Some of the things covered are:

• How To Build Your Preeminence
• Marketing Through Communication Channels
• Technology (putting it all together) – Membership Site Software, WordPress, Taking Payments, PayPal, Audio/Video & Forums, Affiliate Management
• Pre Launch & Launch
• Set Your Membership Site On Autopilot
• Selling Your Membership Site

I highly recommend you read Yaro’s free report as there is a wealth of information in it and it will certainly get you started on your next membership site.

Then if that’s not enough, Yaro is also starting up a coaching programme called Membership Site Mastermind. The course runs for 6 weeks and Yaro will provide you with more training and resources and also help you on a more personal level to build your membership site. Yaro launches his course in 1 week, opening the doors to take on new members but you’ll have to be quick because registration is for only 1 week. After that he will close the doors and start teaching!

Good Luck with your membership site!

Bryan

With the new Google Similar Images Search that has been added to Google Labs they are hoping that image search will now improve.  

When searching for an image, “Similar Images” will appear as a link underneath the thumbnail images of your search results.  By clicking on “similar images” below the image you like, it will return all images that look visually similar to the one you selected.  Using visual similarity, you don’t have to refine the text/keyword of your search, instead, you can just click on the similar images link of an image you like.

A very cool tool for finding many images in a particular category with a similar look, it will narrow down the results to exactly what your trying to find!

To try it for yourself go to: Google Similar Images Search

Happy Searching!

If you upgrade WordPress through the dashboard area you will replace all of your source code, which is everything in the WordPress directory. So that’s all of the standard source code and all of the default themes, which means if you’ve changed or customised any of the default code, then that will be erased when you run the upgrade. But all of your custom things should still be in place if you’ve downloaded a custom theme and it’s not one of the default themes. Still be cautious though even if you think that you haven’t changed any code or have anything customised because anything could still go wrong and leave your website out of order and if you have no back-up then you will have lost it all.

So before you do anything you need to back-up your database and any customisation you’ve made to your website. To do that go to the back end of you website, either via the control panel or FTP, whichever you prefer to use.

For the purpose of this article I will be telling you how to do this via CPanel.

1. Go to the “File Manager” where your wordpress website is installed
2. Click the file you want to backup so it’s highlighted
3. Click “compress” in the tool bar
4. A new file will be created which is the back-up
5. Next you want to download that file onto your local computer, so click on “download” in the tool bar and download it to a location on your computer
6. Then delete the backed-up copy of the file from this area so no-one else can get to it by selecting it and clicking “delete” in the tool bar

The next thing to do (also from the CPanel) is back-up the database.

1. Go to “Databases”
2. Click on “Php My Admin” and back-up a copy of your database
3. Select the database from the left-hand side
4. Click on “Export” and make sure all the tables are selected
5. Make sure it’s a SQL file
6. Click “save file as” the click “Go”
7. Click “Save” and download it to a location on your computer and when that’s finished you have a copy of you’re database on your local computer

Now you should have your entire site directory backed-up and downloaded to your local computer and your complete database also downloaded to your computer. So now we can go back to the website dashboard of your WordPress site and use the link to upgrade your WordPress version and know that if anything happen to go wrong when upgrading to the new version we have the backed-up copies to revert to.

There is still one other precaution to take to help with a smooth upgrade so we’re going to go to the “plugins” area from the dashboard and deactivate all of the plugins.

1. Click on “plugins”
2. Select “all” then click “deactivate” and “apply”

So now we have the site backed-up the database backed-up and the plugins deactivated which means we’re now ready to come back and click “please update now”.

It will show a warning to backup your database and files which we’ve already done. So it’s safe to click “Upgrade Automatically”. It will tell you when it’s finished and if it was successful.

Now go back to the plugins area and reactivate the plugins that you turned off earlier. Once that’s done go back to your site to check everything is working fine by clicking around and making sure you are lead to the right places.

Hopefully everything should work if you’ve taken all these precautions, but if for some reason something goes wrong you have got all of your files and database backed-up which you can revert to if needed.

If you have any questions, please post them in the comments section below.

Happy blogging!