What? BackWPup Not Working?

Did some research on the recommended WordPress backup plugin and decided to give BackWPup a shot.
Installed the plugin and was really anticipating about the new ability it will be adding to my WordPress arsenal.

Only to run into an error…… Yes a @%@$@! error!

It is a frustrating experience, ain’t it?

Warning: Job Restart Due to Inactivity For More Than 5 Minutes

Now every time I tried to backup my WordPress contents, I see this warning.

Symptom 1: Warning: Job restart due to inactivity for more than 5 minutes

Symptom 2: Each attempt to backup takes a long long time (which I thought to be normal at first), that’s like more than 1000 seconds (about 17 minutes)? And no physical backup-ed file after the said “completed backup” (did I mention I was sending the backup to DropBox?).

I googled for solutions, found a few and tried them out:

- Breaking the backup job into smaller parts? Instead of 1 big file, split it into smaller ones – one part for database, another for the files and another for plugin etc
- Increasing the “Maximum number of retries for job steps”
- Checking the box for “Restart the job on every main step on a running job

It just doesn’t work.

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Who’s Anton Casey?

If you are not socially connected and do not live in the little red dot, you probably would not had heard of Anton Casey.
But if you are, you will probably be aware of his quick rise to “stardom” and the attention on him in Singapore for the past 96 hours.

It all began with two Facebook posts.

Anton Casey’s Facebook Post That Spark A Public Backlash

The first, a picture of his five-year-old son on the Singapore’s train system, the MRT, captioned: “Daddy where is your car and who are all these poor people?”
The second is of Mr Casey’s Porsche with the caption: “Ahhhhhhhhh reunited with my baby. Normal service can resume, once I have washed the stench of public transport off me…!”
In addition, Mr Casey also uploaded a video to YouTube mocking reactions to his comments, calling Singaporeans “wuss”.

It went viral.

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The New AdWords Feature – Shared Budget

In early September, Google announced a new feature that allowed budget to be shared between your AdWWords campaigns – Shared Budget.
The advertiser can now specify a budget to be shared among numerous campaigns, instead of a single budget for each campaign.

Turning Missed Opportunities Into Potential Opportunities

Ever experienced a day whereby some of your campaigns exhausted their budget but the others didn’t?
Don’t you wish that these unspent budget (read missed opportunities) can be shifted to the spent campaigns to generate more potential opportunities?
Shared Budget will make your dream come true.
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Ever Been In Such A Situation?

Isn’t it frustrating when you made up your mind to complete a task, only to run into issues which you had no answers to?
Matters can’t get any worse when this supposedly very popular solution doesn’t provide a very decent support.

That’s exactly the kind of scenario I faced when I was attempting to install the Google XML Sitemaps plugin for WordPress By Arne Brachhold.
To be fair to Arne, this is a free plugin he contributed to the community and we shouldn’t expect too much of his personal time to be devoted to this plugin.
The very least I suppose is a FAQ somewhere on the common issues faced.

2 Common Issues; 2 Solutions To Share

Enough whining about the situation, it’s time to do what the article aims to do – help provide solutions to 2 of the most common issues faced by users.
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Which First? SEM or SEO?

An age old question often asked – should I go SEO first? or SEM first?
Let me ask you another question – does the chicken comes first or the egg?
There’s no right or wrong answer, it very much depends on your scenario.

Chicken First Or The Egg?

The answer depends on 2 criteria, the stage your business is in and your business objectives.
A new business needing a fast turnover can’t rely on the long term benefits of SEO.
A digital veteran well optimized for the Google search engine might not (critically) need SEM.
Do they still need SEO/SEM? Yes they sure do, but it won’t be a priority for now, However, it should definitely be somewhere in the pipeline.

Why do I need SEO when I am already doing SEM – vice versa?

Similar to the current USA presidential election, there are 2 camps of supporters, 1 for Obama and the other for Romney. Among search marketers, there are 2 camps as well – 1 that believes in a direct relationship between SEM and SEO, while the other staunchly deny of such a relationship between the 2.
I am an advocate of the former and I will offer 6 reasons why, in a logical manner.

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