It’s kind of hard to make money online when your monetized website is down. The situation gets even worse if someone hacked into your servers and messed around with all of your files. That’s why it is of paramount importance to back up your self-hosted WordPress blog on a daily basis, just in case something bad happens. This way, you can quickly and easily restore your blog back to how it was before it was hacked.

There are manual ways of backing up all your databases and such, but why go through all that trouble when there’s an automated way to back up your blog? The aptly-named WordPress Database Backup plug-in created by Skippy and maintained by Austin Matzko fits the bill perfectly. It’s a one-click solution… in fact, it can even be a no-click solution, because there is an option for the system to automatically email your backed up database (as a .sql.gz file) to you on a daily basis.

More instructions about installation and implementation of this invaluable plug-in can be found on its official page.

You might be living in a different time zone than your primary audience. You might have a spark of inspiration in the middle of the night, but you don’t want your posts to crowd together with a big span of “dead air” in between. What can you, as the mindful blogger, do? Thankfully, within WordPress, you can set it so that any given post can go “live” at any given time. This can ensure that your posts are reasonably spread out over the course of the day. If you’ve got your hands on some juicy embargoed information, you can set it so that your highly informative post goes live the moment the embargo is lifted.

How do you do this? Well, when you’re writing (or editing) a post that has not yet gone live, you’ll notice that along the right sidebar, you have a series of pull-down menus that you can adjust. This is where you set the category for the post, customize the post slug, and so on. One of these options is the Post Timestamp. Here, you can set whatever time and date you want, and the post won’t go “live” on your blog until that time. The last thing you do is click on “Publish” (not on “Save”), and everything will take care of itself from there.

I found this feature particularly useful when I went on vacation earlier this month. I was going to be away from internet access for nearly a week, but readers of my blog were none the wiser, because I had pre-written a number of posts that were slowly published over the course of that week. It was like I never left.

Even if you already have this WordPress plugin, you should definitely keep reading, because there’s a few important things that are noted below.

While it’s great to build up a strong RSS readership and have a loyal following, it is a well known fact that traffic from search engines is more likely to click on ads (and hence, make money for you). As such, if you want to make significant money from your WordPress blog, it is important to keep search engine optimization in mind. A descriptive title for each post goes a long way, but under the default WordPress settings, the title appears after the name of your blog on SERPs (search engine results pages). This could mean that your post title will get truncated, and thus, reduce your search engine visibility.

Thankfully, Aaron Schaefer developed the Optimal Title plug-in for WordPress that switches this order. It effectively takes the title of each blog post and puts it in front of the blog name, giving search engine users more relevant-looking results, and thus, these users are more likely to click on through and visit your site. Speaking from my own personal experience, after installing this plug-in several months ago, I have seen a significant increase in search engine traffic for my blog. It fluctuates, naturally, but typically 50-70% of my traffic comes from search engines (mostly Google).

If you currently have Optimal Title 2.0 installed on your blog, Schaefer recommends that you upgrade the latest (and final) version, Optimal Title 3.0, because it is “more efficient, future-proof, and secure.” He claims that this plug-in should work with “ANY version of WordPress, past, present, and future.”

If you’re out to monetize your WordPress blog, one of the best plug-ins you will ever encounter is Adsense Deluxe. In a nutshell, this plug-in streamlines the whole Google Adsense procedure. Instead of going into each individual post and having to paste in that messy Adsense code that you pull from Google, you can simply type in the call tag <–adsense–>. What’s more, you can put in all sorts of different Adsense codes, calling them up individually based on the name you give it. For example, you might call up the 468×60 banner by typing <–adsense#468–>.

But why stop there?

Something that I have done with my own blog is to include the “wrap” coding in Adsense Deluxe. Most Adsense gurus will tell you that the in-line 300 box is the generally the most lucrative ad placement, but it can be a bit of a pain to go through the process of right (or left) aligning the ad box in each post. So, when you’re setting up Adsense Deluxe, you can make it so that the <–adsense–> tag not only brings up the ad code served up by Google, but also the “wrap” coding: e.g., <div style=”float: right; margin: 3px;”>

And don’t forget to include </div> to close the tag!