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Since April 1 is National Backing Up Day I’m posting this video to both celebrate good website backup principles, and to haunt you if you do not have a reliable, set-it-and-forget it backup solution for your own websites.

The first time I saw this video I didn’t know what to think – it was just so WEIRD. Then I found that this was a mashup someone made after watching this ladies nutty interview on a local news station describing her scary experience of being in a convenience store while it was being robbed by two youths “one in a black hoodie, one in a white hoodie.”

But, really I want to encourage you to get the Backup Creator wordpress plugin because it’s a totally awesome tool, inexpensive and can truly save your butt.

Since most websites today run on the amazing WordPress platform, this simple, but powerful plugin easily uploads into your site and using it is a breeze. You set it up one time and it will automatically back your site up for you, and can either email you the backup file, or even upload it to your Amazon S3 account and store your entire site, pictures, audio and video files safely in the cloud.

Cloning – Does it Really Work?

Several years ago I was the first guy to create a software program to actually clone a wordpress site and install it the site on a new URL automatically. It was primitive and kinda geeky clunky (you had to pull commands and links out of your Cpanel to make it work.) It was called WordPress cloner and all I have left now is the graphic and an ebook that I created as a bonus for it.

As if the backup feature wasn’t already a killer app, you can use it to perfectly clone one of your existing websites and install it on another domain in a snap!

Backup Creator Rules!

I use the Backup Creator on all my sites and I sleep much better, even though the “Backing Up Song” still kinda freaks me out…

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It’s totally unnecessary and there’s help for you!

There’s plenty of people and business pulling through this and doing as welll as they ever have!

BUT, they are chaning their approach and attitude.  Right now, you can take advantage of … ME!

Click here to check out my special 1 hour coaching and monthly coaching package.

Why? Well, I’m in the same situation. I am looking to be “Lean &  Keen” too. I’m keen to help you and my normal rates are going to be the “lean” part but only for a Limited Time OR when my schedule is full, whichever comes first.

If you’ve been in Speaker Machine or on my free webinars or teleseminars, you know they’re jam-packed with content. However, maybe you need a boost and some support to get started and you can claim your spot and reserve time to have:

1) Private, One-on-One time with me

2) Digital Audio Recording to capture ideas and CONTENT/Copy that I write for you on the spot

3) Take all the Notes you want and suck my brain dry

4) Implementation Plans that I only share with my fans and folks on the “Inside”

5) 24/7 Email follow up and edits for a full 30 days after we talk

The last 2 weeks I’ve been doing phone consulting again.

It’s been a real motivator to me personally to see how fast people break out of “indecision” and “overwhelm” when they get a chance to lay it out with someone who has been there.

Click here to check out my special 1 hour coaching and monthly coaching package.

People keep telling me to make my coaching more available and I’ve decided to do just that. So here’s the deal…

-> First time 1 Hour Power Sessions – only $97!

(My regular coaching rate has been $247 – this is a smoking deal!)

Monthly Coaching

-> 4 weekly sessions plus some email support – only $497!

(Regular price on monthly coaching has been $1000 – $1650)

* Limited to 5 clients at any one time – only 2 spots remain

We record the audio on each session. I send it to you as soon as we are done in an MP3 file you can play on your computer, put on your iPod or music player or burn to a CD.

There are LOTS of ideas and insights that come out in an hour of working together and taking notes is helpful, but the audio is a super valuable resource, clients tell me they really get a lot out of re-listening to it after the smoke clears.

If you’ve got questions about how I may be able to help you call me on my cell phone and let’s talk about it, or hit reply to this email and let’s get cranking.

Talk soon, Rick Butts

PR/Branding for Writers and Speakers & Other Hot Stuff

This is the first live program I’ve done since October 2011 and I’m excited to get back in the groove with my favorite clients, subscribers, and friends.

Work Makes Work

Part of the reason I’m so amped up is that I’ve been doing 1 on 1 personal coaching/consulting sessions the last 2 weeks. Since returning from Ukraine 6 weeks ago, I’ll admit I’ve been keeping a very low profile and the consulting sessions have been a great source of inspiration and personal challenge.

If you’ve done any coaching or consulting you know how this works. You are sharing an idea that you know and have implemented in the past and as you go through the strategy you start thinking – “well, why the heck am I not doing this!”

Alas, the cobblers children have no shoes, is an insufficient reply.

One of the things that I found myself doing was imploring a client to start doing weekly teleseminars and building community, creating content that can be leveraged for products and 1000 other things – since that’s what leverage is – and I thought – dude – quit talking about this and do it yourself. You are, after all, a talker!

Join me tonight – and share this link with both your friends via the social media icons below – talk soon!

http://StardustFactor.com/live

I went to your website and was all ready to buy from you – but your site is down!

What’s up with that?

If you’ve ever gotten an email like this you know the pure cold terror that grips you as you scramble to go look at your site. When you discover that it truly IS down – you begin a horrible journey of finding out of there’s a backup (there isn’t) and the attempting to assemble your website from the bits and pieces you can remember or that survived on your hard drive.

Now that we are all keeping so much information on our blog, losing that data in a crash or even a little bitty accidental deletion can be a nightmare. I know!

That’s why I’m admitting that I’m in love – with a plugin!

The Backup Creator not only backs up any WordPress site perfectly, it will also back up all the other files you have uploaded for your site too – like /video or /audio files. It even completely backs up your membership software installations!

Why Clone Your Website?

If you put up new sites from time to time, create sales sites, and ever thought “gee, it would be great to be able to not have to do all the customizing, tweaking, page creation, plugin installations and WordPress settings, then you’ll love the cloning feature of BackupCreator.

In fact you don’t have to do anything different – you just back up your site the normal way – then install WordPress on a new site and simply restore the backup and your entire site is there in a moment – with the new URL of course!

You can get on with posting the new content without all the setup!

I actually have created a couple of different styles of sites that I frequently use – so I can just clone the basic template there and the new site is all ready to go – without having to delete the content of the old site.

I highly recommend BackupCreator and encourage you to go to the site right now and watch the video there and buy it (AND USE IT!) immediately to backup your valuable online assets, before you get the dreaded “your website is down” email from hell.

In my humble, but accurate opinion…

“The greatest asset you can have in your business is a unique solution to a problem faced by an identifiable group of people – with money.”

Rick Butts

Think about it.

What do Michael Gerber’s E-Myth, The Blue Ocean Strategy, The Four Hour Work-Week, The Tipping Point, and other super bestselling business books (and their authors) have in common? They all portrayed their unique solution to a problem faced by an identifiable group of people with money!

The E-Myth – identified the common problem with why most small businesses failed – that the owners were NOT entrepreneurs (thus the E-Myth, that entrepreneurs start small businesses.) Showing people they they were more likely to be “technicians” who’s greatest liability was knowing how to do the work of the business – enabled Gerber to bring his unique solution – The Gerber Small Business Development System to a hungry market.

The Blue Ocean Strategy – showed big businesses dying in a “red ocean” of price competition how the solution was to create a totally unique offering, like Cirque Du Soleil did with the conventional circus, and become wildly profitable by having a product that essentially has no direct competition – and how to develop that new product step by step.

The Four Hour Work Week – flipped the conventional work hard and save for retirement to give restless entrepreneurs and employees a lifestyle alternative and shift their focus to either “mini-retirements” or a currency leveraged lifestyle.

What did they all have in common?

They all had a “Wisdom Thesis” © – they advanced by leveraging the “Fail Point” © of the “Existing System” and developing their “Theoretical Solution” © into a their “New System” which they market and advertise to wild success by creating their “Stardust Factor” through a unique “New Vocabulary.”

Wouldn’t you like to have a fresh, unique, and curiosity inducing, energy vibing vocabulary to describe the fabulous and highly effective benefits of your product or service?

This is what I help speakers and writers do – and it is deadly effective.

Click here to find out how to create your own highly profitable “Wisdom Thesis” now.

LIVE from Odessa Ukraine it’s Rick Butts!

Notice the American Christmas music playing in the background of the video. Why is this particularly interesting? Because it’s January 5th. Ukrainians celebrate Christmas on January 7th (their big holiday is New Years – a lot more like our Christmas traditions with family, gifts, and warm seasons wishes. Then at midnight they go out and get crazy drunk and burn the GDP of the entire country in gunpowder in excessive fireworks EVERYWHERE until dawn.

In this video I give you a bit of an update on what I’ve been up to Ukraine as the last two weeks before I have to either get on the return flight to Denver or stay in the country illegally.

American’s can stay in the country 3 months on a passport here, no visa needed. But, if you don’t leave they are very unlikely to hunt you down and deport you, but they pretty much will notice when you go go to LEAVE the country and you get a hefty $200 fine. (Hefty is humorous)

Making the film has been an amazing experience, and we’ve decided to deploy it in a very unusual way to leverage multiple streams of income from the content. I’ll be talking about that more in The Stardust Factor for members.

I’ve avoided doing live video stuff using the Youtube Webcam recording function, mostly because I think it is a bit intimidating for most of you to actually see a real male model up close like that, but I overcame my congenital shyness and gave it a go. Do you like the live off the cuff thing. (As if I ever prepare anything ON the cuff!)

Please leave your comments and/or questions about Ukraine or the film below and I’ll try to get back to you pretty quickly.

I don't always drink beer - but when I do - I like to drink it in a dining car in a Soviet era train with mystery chicken and french fries.

So, I’m running along side a dark green train, in the rain. I’m pulling two gigantasaurus safari-pack type roller bags, one in each hand, with my Macbook in a backpack on my back and if we don’t find the right car in about 2 minutes the train will simply roll down the tracks for it’s 12 hour trek and leave us in Poltava Ukraine.

Us is my friend Sean Mathes, co-conspirator on the film we’ve come to Ukraine to shoot, who is loaded down like a sherpa with the same two roller bags (we bought 4 with different color trim at Costco before we left Denver – God, I miss Costco…) plus a fat and bulky camera bag with lights and a big yellow tripod, and his own laptop briefcase. He is sweating profusely and has been for the 3 hours of rapid packing, saying goodbyes to our new friends in Poltava and dealing with the odd reality that the taxi we called was such a tiny car it would barely fit 2 people in it, and the tiny truck was full of soccer gear and balls – incorrectly referred to here as football.

There’s something very unsettling about saying goodbye to people you’ve grown very close to very quickly when you are nearly dead certain you’ll never see them again the rest of your life. This is a cold fact as I look across my life at all the bands I’ve been in, towns I’ve played in for a month and gotten to know everyone then jumped in the van and disappeared, right on through towns I’ve lived in for a couple of years, and even sadder still, marriages with all the collateral in-laws, which always include that one relative of your spouse with whom you get along famously while the rest of the tribe hates you to your DNA.

The rain began about noon, the sun had not been around for nearly a week, and when we did finally say goodbye to the friends who showed up for a hug, it seemed like the temperature dropped several degrees, and the night got a little colder.

So this train is like forever long, and army green in the great tradition of the old Soviet Union who surely built this sturdy machine, and it smells. Not one smell, but smells plural. We drag our gear up on the steps and down the hallway through the tiniest hallway imaginable, squeezing past the local people who were smart enough not to be late, and stood now smoking cigarettes and drinking beer in the hall we had to drag out bags down to get to our compartment.

The thing about Ukrainians is that they do not give up their ground easily. The country has been conquered approximately 900 times since the dawn of history – a history that goes back centuries past good old America, with mongol hoardes like Genghis Kahn to the Communist Russian global expansion that started with it’s neighbors taking the place over and bossing people around, or killing them as Joseph Stalin did in 1932 by starving more then 2.5 – 7 million Ukrainians to death in an attempt to crush Ukrainian nationalism. (The numbers vary because of the lack of records kept by people starving to death.)

So, Ukrainians on the street, in bars, discos and train hallways often act like NBA centers. They get their first and they are not moving, so deal with it. This has been a bizarre shift on the polite, excuse me, I need some space Americanism I’ve grown up with, but, now it’s just a pure pisser as my bag won’t fit past the surly guy ahead.

Finally in our compartment we smash our bags into the 4th bunk (we’ve rented the entire compartment in self defense) and collapse in a sweaty super humidified box on a train that will bang and rattle along for 14 hours on a scheduled 12 hour ride. It’s nearly snowing outside but the the temperature inside will go up to what I figure is crock-pot hot and stay there until we burst into the freezing cold on the other end in Odessa.

I swear to God, I don’t think I’ve ever had a more annoying travel experience, really all for the sake of the stifling heat in a dirty train car with a solid glass window that could not be lowered. I feel like the prisoner in the “hot box” in the movie Bridge over the River Kwai which I saw as a kid and surely began the phobia that ran through my childhood terrors about being locked out of the air conditioned house in the summer to swelter in the heat of the Ozarks in Southern Missouri – and now makes me nearly psychotic when I experience heat and trappedness.

Go South Young Man – and See The City of Odessa

It was a dark and stormy train station in Odessa Ukraine

We’d gone to Poltava to attend a social event related to the film and catch a confluence of people who would not be together again ever, and had planned to be there for about 8 days and then take this train to Odessa, a much larger port city on the Black Sea, and complete shooting interviews, edit the film and produce the beta. It is nearly impossible to describe the rapid series of events that pulled us into the little town of Poltava and kept us there for weeks, but the nature of the super-gravitation pull that bound us can be described in one word – people. Amazing awesome people who truly changed my life.

At the mid point of the 12 weeks Americans are allowed to stay in Ukraine with just a passport, an expat (expatriate – an American living fairly permanently in a foreign country) friend named Max Creel arrived in Poltava apparently to give us a huge ration of crap for attempting to make any movie about Ukraine, the largest country in Europe after Russia after only seeing about 4 square miles of a small town in the North East.

He was right.

The city of Odessa is amazing and has opened our eyes to an entire new level of the Ukrainian experience. It’s a by-gosh real city with malls and a lot more of the options and conveniences you’d expect in a larger city – or about any city in the USA, but don’t get carried away, everything in Ukraine is shaded differently than  my myopic American experience.

In my next post I’ll share some of the paradoxical to the purely odd realities here. Hope you are enjoying this unusual information. Please let me know in the comments section below. If you encourage me I’ll likely get totally carried away!

Been in Ukraine for 2 weeks, which seems outrageous, the time has flown by.

I made this update in an impromptu fashion (shocker!) but thought I’d publish it for the sake of my relatives who thought I’d disappeared.

We are planning on taking the train to Odessa on December 6, 2011.

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We are running a live webcam for LivingInUkraine.com and I thought you may want to see what we are up to.

I can’t predict what you’ll see at any given time as we are both running live cam footedge from the street outside the window, to meetings we have in cafes in Ukraine.

Today we’ll run a cam behind the scenes as we do some interviews for the film. If the audio is sketchy well, oops. The primary purpose is to give a look at some of these amazing scenes that you have probably never seen from a country that is much understood and profoundly fascinating.

Remember that Ukraine is 7 hours later than EST NY time zone, and 10 hours later than PST California time, so if you get up in the middle of the night and take a look we could be having lunch, and if you are taking a look in the middle of the work day we may be in a rockin’ nightclub!

Of course, I look forward to your comments here and will reply. I’m really interested to see what goes up here (who knows?) and what you think about this international maneuver! Post to Facebook if you like or find this interesting – or weird!

For more video clips and recordings of past cams go to Living in Ukraine Ustream Channel.