To all my readers I wanted to let you know that Christian Affiliate Marketing has moved.  I originally wanted to use this domain to create a directory of Christian affiliate offers and tack a blog on a folder.

In the end, I could not find enough offers to warrant this and the domain name was too specific for the blog I wanted to create.

This blog is now going to be rebranded as The Affiliate Preacher, Encouraging Internet Entrepreneurs.

The new address for the site is http://www.affiliatepreacher.com/

You can subscribe to the feed by clicking here http://www.affiliatepreacher.com/feed/

I have some great articles in the works I know you won’t want to miss.  I have already begun a series on driving traffic.  So come on by and join in the discussion!

Carl,

The Affiliate Preacher

The more websites that I develop, the more I am convinced that Wordpress is the only CMS the average user will ever need. I have built sites with Xoops, Joomla, SimpleCMS, Nuke, and a host of other scripts. I have found that the majority have far too many features to justify the steep learning curve.

As an example, I can spot a failed Joomla by the next and previous links at the bottom of articles which lead to nowhere. The average user has to obtain a Master’s level of education to rid their site of these links. Links that really are not that useful in the first place. The GUI is so complicated that you have to memorize an ebook just to navigate.

The average user is not going to have 15 pages of new content a week separated into multiple categories like in the average newspaper or magazine. They are going to put up content and update it from time to time.

Here is an example. I once built a Christian Videos site. There are specialty scripts you can purchase and others use Joomla or Drupal to do this. But I did not need all that functionality. I used Wordpress. Modified a theme to match my purpose, and launched.

I have used Wordpress for several ministry sites as well. There is an article about that here with another really good one here by ProBlogger Darren Rowse. Coupled with Podpress and eCommerce plugins, Wordpress has been more than enough.

In a future post I will detail the issues I have WP. There are more than a few. But for the average user WP is fine.

I now have a first criteria in selecting a new VPS host, monthly billing.  I have been the semi-anual billing guy for a long time.  I had no idea that a host would take a nose dive faster than the US economy. 

So today, I bought a new VPS with a monthly billing plan.

I have two niche websites that I made in the a very similar niche.  I put almost no effort into one and spent a great deal of time on the other.  Wouldn’t you know it?  The one with no work is making almost $200 a month.  Not a fortune but I have not done a minute of work on it since I built it about six months ago.

The sites had an identical structure.  so I wanted to get the data from the larger one, that I thought would make money, and import it into the one that actually does make money.  After some research, here is how I did it.

Go to your phpMyAdmin in database A.

In phpMyAdmin open the table, click “SQL”, change the SQL query to SELECT all fields without the field that gets you the duplicate error (for example ID that has auto_increment).

For example:

Normal query: SELECT id, name, address, city FROM table

You do: SELECT name, address, city FROM table

Click ‘Go’. It will show you the results. Now just click ‘Export’ (not the one in the header but in the ‘Query results operations’ area). It will forward you to the export page. Just press GO and your done.

Now you can import it into your database ‘B’.

My Server has been up for almost 18 hours.  I don’t want to get too excited but it is moving really. really fast.

About five hours after it went down my slhost VPS came back up.  No reason from tech support other than

We are now planning to move your VPS also to another node. As of now the load seems to be decreasing gradually and the server will respond fine then.

The node is decreasing because peple are jumping ship.  Check out these threads at Web Hosting Talk:

• Where do slhost folks plan to move to?

Its been a couple hours since my slhost server post and my server is down again.  I would put in a ticket but I cant get to their support page either.  That is not comforting.

update:  Just got word that it might be a ddos attack.  yeah, right

Slhost switched data centers and began the nightmare that I call hosting.  I have a VPS with them and they were increadible hosts.  I even blogged about them twice . . . without affiliate links!  That goes to show you how happy I was.  But, the party is over.

I got an email on Sept 5th that stated

Great News! We have just completed the migration of your VPS to the new Data Center.

In order to do this we had to change the IP addresses assigned to your VPS. To find the new IP addresses that were assigned to the VPS please go to:

Now, it can be debated that finding out that the IP of your server has changed is great news or not.  It is widely believed that one factor in search engine rankings is longevity on a server.  A new IP looks like a new server to search engines.

But, if that were not bad enough, the server does not stay up more than a few hours in a row with no explanation from slhost.

To the left you see a screenshot of the tickets I have put in since the nightmare began.  What this does not show is that several of these tickets contain several reports if my server being down and my inability to restart it.

Starting today, I will give you, my uninterested reader updates on the horrible uptime of my server since slhost moved data centers.

I recently started using skype and the next time I opened Firefox there was a Skype Firefox Extension installed!  I did not even know what the skype firefox extension did so I started to hit the google to find out and all i found were other people who dont know how the extension got installed in firefox!

I am now uninstalling the skype plugin for firefox and I will never know what it was supposed to do.  Pretty sneaky i say!

If you are running your online business out of your house you need to get one of these free household budget worksheets. Earning a living in the online game has a cost and even if you are not doing ppc marketing, there are still domain registration, hosting, and advertising fees.

Also, you can now deduct lots of things from your taxes if you track them and detail the expenses. But no business can prosper without a plan.  Do yourself a favor and get a free budget spreadsheet and start figuring out exactly how much you are making and what you need to get to the next level.

Download them here.