I’ve scoured the Internet looking for the answer to this question and I have found it. The question was, can you you install multiple WordPressMU blogs and have them run under one webhost. The short answer is no. However, as with most things in the online world, it is possible with the right “tool”.

If you’re wondering why I would want to have two separate installs of this, it’s because I have more than one client on my web server, each of which are running their own sites. This is fine for most applications, but when you start dabbling in things like SSL certificates and wildcard sub-domains, that’s when the trouble starts. These are just two items that require their own IP address.

One of my clients would like to run multiple blogs on his WordPress Network, but because I’m already doing that for Ledfrog.com, I’m essentially blocking him from doing so. This is because Ledfrog.com is the main domain on my server and any changes utilizing different ports such as 443 for SSL certificates or services like WordPressMU that use wildcard sub-domains have to go through the server’s IP address and since this IP is assigned to my domain, his will not work.

The way WordPressMU works is once you convert your WordPress install into a network, you have the ability to add new sites to it. These sites utilize all of the main structure of the original WordPress installation while creating a separate blog directory inside the wp-content folder to store all of that blog’s specific files such as media uploads and so forth. Plugins and theme are then made available to all sites provided that you (the network admin) have made them available. The advantages here are that you no longer have to install a whole new copy of WordPress, create a new database, download all the same themes and plugins or manage different webhost accounts every time you want to start a new blog. Everything except the media files are shared. You can imagine how much faster updates are too!

Anyway, to make this happen, you need to create a wildcard sub-domain ‘A’ record in your DNS server that points *.yourdomain.com to your server’s IP address. This is needed because when you create a new site on your network, a virtual subdomain is created. An example of this is my personal blog site, Ledfrog.me. When I created it in my network, I was actually creating me.ledfrog.com.

The real magic happens with a feature called Domain Mapping. This is where you can map a real domain (provided it’s been added to your DNS server) to any virtual WordPress site you have created. Using the same example, I was able to map the domain Ledfrog.me to my virtual blog, me.ledfrog.com, so when you access either of those URLs, you’ll wind up at Ledfrog.me. Make sense?!

So all this is fine and dandy when you’re working with one server, one IP address and one main domain, but in my case, another client of mine would like to create his own network. The problems begin when you try to create the wildcard sub-domain. While doing this is possible and serves a valuable function—allowing him to create his own real sub-domains—it does nothing for WordPressMU!

I’ve contacted my webhost, I’ve ran all over Google and even tried Bing out for the first time looking for some help with this and eo far I’ve found two answers. First, I keep getting sent to sets of instructions that allow you use vhost.conf files in your client’s vhost container to allow the use of a wildcard sub-domain. This process basically has you creating a conf file that you then configure into Apache to tell the server that you want it to be included into the configuration for that site. It’s great for adding site-specific features to httpd.conf without affecting your whole server.

The second answer I get is the correct one. You can’t use WordPressMU on two separate installations without an additional static IP address! To verify this, all you have to do is install it on another client on your same server and watch what happens when you try to access one of the the virtual blog sites. Here’s what it does:

Domain1.com is the main domain attached to the server’s ONLY IP address.
site2.domain1.com is a virtual blog site created inside the WordPressMU installation.
site2.com is the domain that is mapped to the sub-domain above.
If you access site2.com, you are really only looking at site2.domain1.com.

Domain2.com is in another client’s hosting account on the same server and same IP address.
site2.domain2.com is a virtual blog that’s created inside the WordPressMU installation.
If you access site2.domain2.com, you are redirected to Domain1.com with an error about registrations being closed.

The reason for that is because site2.domain2.com is being read as a sub-domain of Domain1.com!!

I hope you’re not confused. More so, I hope someone who reads this is laughing their head off because they know the way around all this. Oh and by the way, I’m not try to escape having to purchase a separate IP address. It’s just that my host won’t sell me one without a valid reason and apparently this doesn’t count because they said it’s possible to use one address!

Just over 1 year ago, I joined a little known website called Arkayne. I even wrote about how to drive focused traffic to your site with Arkayne being the central topic. The purpose of Arkayne was to enhance your blog’s presence by connecting the posts you create with other blog owners who write about similar topics. It was such a simple concept; one that has helped my site grow in ways I didn’t think were possible. Today, Arkayne is now BlogGlue and their concept has remained simple, but has become much more powerful.

For me, blogging isn’t about ranking high in search engines or making thousands of dollars a day selling useless information or products—it’s about sharing ideas and providing valuable information about the things I know with people who want to learn. Of course, if I made thousands of dollars doing this, that would be great, but I don’t intend to sacrifice quality for quantity. This is where BlogGlue really helps out.

BlogGlue Partnerships

The give and take process of BlogGlue starts with a recommendation. As you browse the ever-growing community of blogs, you’ll start noticing many websites that share some common interests with your site. As you click through each one, you can choose the ones you like based on how well they complement your site and submit a recommendation.

The site owners you recommended are then notified of your recommendation and have the option to review your site. If they like what they see and recommend you back, you both become partners. At that point, your blogs are linked.

The plugin

The BlogGlue plugin on your site will add Related Links at the bottom of each post. It gets these links from your partners, so it’s important not to just add every partner under the sun to increase your count. Your site, your partners’ sites and your visitors will all benefit from these partnerships.

The process works both ways as well. Your links will start appearing on partner’s sites in the same location. This is the main function of BlogGlue and it works really well! The more partners you have, the most choices the plugin will have in pulling quality content. And as you would imagine, if you don’t like a particular site’s content, simply delete them as a partner and their links will never show up again!

When writing a post, the plugin also offers some instant help with basic SEO tips. After you saved your first draft, you can click the Test Now button and see exactly what you might be missing and how you can improve the page’s optimization.

The costs

There are three service plans available.

• Free – $0.00/month – You accept up to 5 partners, but you can have unlimited recommendations. Your site content is limited to 200 pages/posts.
• Basic – $9.97/month – You can have up 15 partners and still have unlimited recommendations. Your site content is limited to 1000 pages/posts.
• Unlimited – $19.97/month – You can have unlimited partners and unlimited recommendations. Your site content is limited to 5000 pages/posts.

The best part about these plans is that you can grow into them. Start out free and as you start to notice your traffic increasing, just upgrade instantly to the next plan. At some point, your site will be getting hundreds or thousands of hits a day and the unlimited plan will be needed, but you’ll likely be making money at that point!

There are no contracts, hidden fees, cancellation charges, upgrade charges, taxes, etc, etc.! What you see is what you get.

My two cents

I’ve been using BlogGlue for over a year now and I can tell you just by looking at my stats, they have helped my site grow almost 300% and the numbers continue to rise as I become partners with more and more quality blogs. Their customer support has been super gracious and exceptionally fast with any issues I’ve had and I haven’t had many…that’s for sure.

I can’t say enough great things about the operation they’re running over there. Check them out over at www.blogglue.com.

Often, bloggers are faced with the harsh reality that at some point, their website’s content is going to be copied (or stolen) by one or more websites. Not only can this hurt you emotionally, given the amount of time you probably spent writing a quality piece, but it can severely hurt your website as a whole. As anyone with basic web knowledge knows, search engine ranking is the game of the day. Without a good rank, your site is considered dead.

Why?

The reasons behind why other webmasters steal content can vary from person to person, but generally, these are the top three:

• Domain rank – Whether you knew it or not, the words used to make up your domain name are considered in your search ranking. An example of this is if you write a blog all about your favorite comic books, but your domain doesn’t mention anything about comics at all. This can cause another site, like myfavoritecomics.com to be ranked higher even if they’re content isn’t that great. How this translates into stealing content is simple: a webmaster goes and finds a domain name that better describes your content and then copies everything you have onto their new site. If they get their way, they will soon outrank you.
• Autoblogging – This practice is more common than not. If a webmaster wanted to create a new site relatively fast and begin competing for search rank, all they would need to do is start an autoblogging service that scours the web looking for content based on keywords they input and off they go. Your content is copied and placed on their new site. I strongly discourage using these practices because they don’t enhance the web experience in any way, but if you’d like to read more about autoblogging, you should do so at your own risk!
• Higher search rank – Naturally, the main reason for stealing content is to increase your web presence, however they’re doing so at your expense. If you operate a site that only gets crawled once a day and another site gets crawled every hour, then it becomes very possible for the other site to steal your content before Google even knows you had it. At this point, Google now ranks the other site higher and your site looks like the copycat!

So what can you do about this? The short answer is nothing much. The laws of the Internet (and computers in general) dictate that any content found online can be copied and everyone can access it. It’s the inherent downside to such a cool piece of technology. However, all is not lost! Your goal should be to protect your content as much as possible and one major way to do this is to update your site frequently. If you become one of those sites that gets crawled every hour, then you won’t have to worry about looking like a copycat.

Reporting illegal activities

In case you didn’t know, Google offers a way in which you can report content thieves and other spammers. Here are some tips on how to do that:

• Remove content from Google – Use Google’s own form available at google.com/dmca.html to file a report against any content you find online that may be violating your copyright(s). With this tool, you can also report unlawful content and defamation/libel content.
• Visit Dmca.com – Dmca.com provides services regarding all sorts of copyright infringements including watermarking photos and filing takedown requests for serious violators. These services aren’t free, but if you’re providing very valuable information, you should consider how valuable it is in regards to your Google standings.
• Contact violators – The old fashioned way of confronting your attacker! I’ve had luck with contacting webmasters directly and asking them to take down copyright-infringed content and surprisingly had more luck with them actually removing content. This approach can help new webmasters understand the “laws of the land” as well as give them a sporting chance to better themselves.

Running a website can be hard and some of us put a lot of our free time into our publications. There’s nothing more dis-heartening than finding out that someone else may be reaping benefits from something you created. I now know how musicians feel as they watch all of their music being freely distributed throughout the world!

More information

Review the provisions outlined in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to become more proficient in dealing with copyright claims. You should also out everyone who uses the Internet by filing reports against spam-filled websites. Google doesn’t want junk sites in their indexes, so let’s all help them out by getting them removed!

You can also view my copyright information regarding this site to help you with creating your own set of rules for visitors who use your site.

I’ll start off by saying I don’t know John Chow personally, nor have I ever met him or even communicated with him via email or any other means.

With that said, I’m writing this article because I wanted to explore what I do know about him, his website and the throngs of followers he’s amassed over the years. I also have to say that if it wasn’t for John Chow, I probably wouldn’t have done much with this website. However, take that statement with a grain of salt! I’m not here to promote his services or tout how great he is and blah blah blah.

What I am saying is that when I got into this whole blogging thing, I wasn’t sure what direction I was headed, so after doing some searches, I found his website, JohnChow.com to be rather helpful. He sort of inspired me with his little video about how great life was–being able to blog online and not have a day job–in which he could then take his daughter out for walks in the park with nobody around because they were “all at work”. Normally, I don’t buy into such claims because while I do understand it’s possible to live a comfortable life doing hardly any work (that’s subjective by the way), I understand that it usually takes a LOT of work to get there. Whether John Chow’s video is he reality or not is not the point. The point is that I knew it could be done and I wanted to get there…for real.

JohnChow.com

His site title says, “I Make Money Online By Telling Other People How To Make Money Online”. If you read that and you’re instantly brough back to the days (or late, late nights) when you used to listen to Don Lapre talk about how he made $50k a week by putting “tiny little ads” in newspapers from his “one-bedroom apartment”, then we’re on the same page!

We’ve all seen the late night infomercials touting all sorts of plans and ideas of how to make lots of money in short time and/or without much work, but have you ever really investigated these ideas? What are they really selling you? I mean, I could say to you that I have a super secret plan to make $20,000 a day and I’m only going to charge you $1000 for me to tell you the secret. You get all excited, pay me the money and then I tell you the secret is to move to Hollywood, become and actor and land yourself a sitcom making $20,000 per episode. But is that really a secret? More importantly, did your thousand dollars really help you at all?

Now I’m not calling John Chow a scam artist, but I am trying to illustrate one thing: to make money, you have to work hard. What’s interesting about how John Chow operates is that his website is setup to perform 3 main functions (in this order):

1. Present a newsletter – No matter where you look on his site, you’ll find a place to sign up to his newsletter. In reality, what he’s doing is collecting email addresses. I’ve personally signed up for the newsletter once and instantly realized that everything being sent was talking about nothing more than how to make money online and the different ways to do it.
2. Sell a product – He’s not selling any actual products, but rather a multitude of things like ebooks, money-making videos, guides, self-help tutorials and other related digital items at various times on his site.
3. Keep you coming back – This is where the previous two functions come into play. The more you come back to see the latest offers, the more likely you are to purchase something and trust me, these offers are enticing!

The Offers

The first thing you’ll notice about John Chow’s offers is that they are very similar to everyone else who offers an online product. This brings me to the one problem I have with his site; all these offers do is regurgitate the exact same content, tips and advice as every other site out there that promises you to make money online!

As an example, 90% of these “special” videos all claim you can make thousands of dollars a month by joining affiliate programs and purchasing Google AdWords to help drive traffic to some squeeze page that sells a product about how to sign up for affiliate programs and buy Google AdWords to help drive traffic…you can see where I’m going with this. It becomes a vicious circle.

By the way, the products you’re selling to people are aimed at affiliate/Internet marketers just like you, so all you’re really doing is flooding your own market with new competition! That’s like your local 7-Eleven only selling their products to other liquor stores who are then selling to more liquor stores and so on. In time, your city is flooded with too many sources where you can buy the exact same products. Any basic knowledge of economics would tell you that this setup will eventually collapse.

I like to think of these sites as nothing more than pyramid schemes poised to earn untold amounts of profit for the person/website at the top while the bottom support earns crumbs.

How to really make money online

Of course, you can make money online using all of the available tips and tricks on the Internet, including sites like JohnChow.com, but the reality is that you have to be good enough to beat out all the competition…or just get really lucky.

I’ve been able to make money online from my own network of websites because I provide fresh, original content and people recognize me for that. I don’t take one person’s program, put a spin on it and then mask it off as my own. I don’t partake in shady practices in regards to Google search rankings. I don’t accept payments as bribes from people wishing to be named in a blog post.

I’m not accusing anyone of doing these aforementioned practices, but we all know that some people do. My advice is that if you want to make money online today and a long time from now, stay focused on your vision, provide something valuable to the Internet and keep it real. You’d be surprised just how fast your website will start making money.

If along the way, you can add some extra income using affiliate marketing, then by all means, do it! All I’m saying is that you will not become a millionaire overnight and it takes hard work and dedication to run a profitable website.

So the next time you’re on a site like JohnChow.com, get as much free information as you can, but be weary of purchasing a money-making program.