New Year Productivity Tips #1

It doesn’t matter whether you have been back from the holidays for a couple of weeks, are still on holidays or didn’t have any holidays at all (you poor bugger) there are to-do’s that always work better if you set them as a habit at the beginning of the year.

Backing up your data is one of those habits!

“That old chestnut you might ask?” Yep that one again.

I’m not going to go into the regular stuff about your files, email etc, what I will point you towards are [tag]backup[/tag] tips for a couple of commonly used applications – AWeber, Wordpress and TypePad.

Backing Up Your AWeber Lists

As the marketers say – the money is in the list. But what happens if you loose the list of subscribers to your newsletters, e-courses, information products, customers, and generally interested parties that gave you their details via your website.
If you are a user of the very popular AWeber service you might have presumed that [tag]AWeber[/tag] has a process for backing up their systems (and you would be right).

Now you can make sure that you have a full copy of the valuable information stored in your account at AWeber.

This backup utility will create a compressed zip file you can download which will contain all of your accounts different subscriber lists, follow up messages, and broadcast newsletter messages.

It’s as simple as :

1. Log in to your AWeber account
2. Click the create & manage lists link (top right-hand corner of the screen)
3. Click export all and select the email address to send the backup notification to.

Voila!

Backing Up Your Wordpress Blog

Just imagine, you have written a blog article/post every week, for many months. These articles are valued by your clients and readers, valued by search engines (for their rich source of keywords) and are valuable to your business.

Now imagine loosing all that value one day when your host has a fatal crash or just ceases to exist. How do you make up for all that energy?

My blog information is as valuable to me as the information stored in files on my computer (and sometimes more so).

If you have a Wordpress blog (like I do) I would strongly suggest you get one of the backup plugins that are available – I use Scott Merrill’s Wordpress Database Backup. Very quick and easy to use and you can have the backup emailed to you or saved to your computer or server.

If you have a Typepad account all it takes is -

1. Log in to your Typepad account
2. Click on the link to the blog that you want to backup
3. Under the Manage tab click on Import/Export
4. Scroll the the bottom of the screen and click on the link Export Posts from your TypePad Weblog:
5. The coded entries of the blogs will display in your browser and you can then select File / Save and save the file to your computer.

These are instructions for only a couple of the many applications out there. Make sure you know how to protect your systems and some of your most valuable assets.

[tags]Wordpress, TypePad, productivity[/tags]