How to make changes to your Plug-In Profit Site

NOTE - This post refers to Host4Profit hosting. The Plug-In Profit Site hosting has changed a lot over the years moving from Host4Profit to Hostgator then to PIPS hosting, then to HostThenProfit, so it is hard to keep up with all the changes. This means that depending on which host you are on, some of the instructions below may not be applicable for you.

Many people ask me – can I change my Plugin-In Profit website? The answer is “yes”. Of course you can - you own the site and the domain name so it is yours to do exactly what you please with. You can remove or change any of the existing pages, add your own new pages or completely re-design the site if you do desire. My own website How to Start an Internet Business is now almost completely different from the original Plug-In Profit site that I received in May 2004.

A number of people in my downline and on forums have asked recently “How do I make changes to my site”? Since this is a common question I am going to explain the answer here in step-by-step detail.


The most important thing to do before you start making any changes is to make a backup of your site. If I had a dollar for message I have seen on the Plug-in Profit support forum saying “Help – I’ve lost my website” I’d have enough money for a good night out (at least :-)

To make a backup you need to log into your Host4Profit WEBEPanel. You will find this at http://www.yourdomain/menu - that’s just the URL of your website with “/menu” on the end. You will need to use your username and password that you received by email from Host4Profit to log into the WEBEPanel. If you can’t find this, send an email to Host4Profit support.

Once you have logged in you will see a menu screen. To make a backup of your site, just click on the “Website Backup Manager” icon.

Next, select the “ZIP file format” and click on the “Create my website Backup” button. You will then be taken to a page with a link. Just click on that link to download the zip file to your computer.

Once you have the backup file saved on your PC, you should then unzip the file and extract all the files.

Although it is possible to edit the html files from the File Manager in the WEBEPanel I don’t recommend doing this. It’s easy to make a mistake and end up making a mess of your website, or worse, lose it completely!

For this reason I recommend making all the changes locally to the files that you have just downloaded to your PC. When you have made each change, you can then upload the files to the web server very easily.

If you want to make a change to your main page, just look for a file amongst the files that you have downloaded called “index.html”. If you view this file with a web browser such as Internet Explorer it should look the same as it does when you view the live version of the website.

If you know HTML already you may want to just edit the HTML file using a text editor such as Notepad. You can then save your changes and check that everything looks OK by viewing your changes in your web browser before uploading the file to the web server.

If you don’t know HTML there are a number of special editors that you can use to visually edit the page such as Dreamweaver or Microsoft FrontPage.

Even if you decide to use an editor I still highly recommend at least learning some basic HTML. It’s easy to learn and should not be thought of as a scary programming language. It is just a way of formatting and presenting text and images. I recommend the following free resources both for starting out with HTML and as a reference:

- http://www.htmlgoodies.com
- http://www.chami.com

You can practise making changes to web pages on your PC until you are happy with the final result, then just upload the changed file to your web server.

To upload the file, just login to the WEBEPanel and click on “File Manager”.

Scroll down to the bottom of the page to where it says “Select up to 5 files to upload by clicking the Browse button” and click on the “Browse” button.

Now navigate to the place on your PC where you stored the file, and double click on that file (or select open). You will now see the filename in the box under “File to be Uploaded”. Keep doing this for all the files that you have changed and then click the “Upload Selected Files” button.

Congratulations! You have now made a change to your website and you should be able to view that change by visiting your website in a web browser (you may need to hit the Refresh button in your web browser to see this change)

To help you with the most common changes to a website here are two step-by step examples for adding an ebook to your website and adding a banner to your website.

Example of adding an ebook to your website

1) I decide to add the Free Ebook “Google Adsense Made Easy” to my website http://www.homebiz-direct.com/

2) I have my copy of the ebook stored on my PC in a file called google-adwords-made-easy.pdf

3) I log into the WEBEPanel and click on the “File Manager” icon

4) I click the “Browse” button, navigate to the place where I have stored the google-adwords-made-easy.pdf file on my PC and double click the file

5) I click on “Upload Selected Files”

6) My ebook is now uploaded and I can send an email to my opt-in list to tell them that they can download the Google Adwords Made Easy Ebook here - http://www.homebiz-direct.com/google-adwords-made-easy.pdf

7) If I want to add a link to this ebook from my site I just need to add some code like this to the web page that I want to link from:

<a href="http://www.homebiz-direct.com/google-adwords-made-easy.pdf"> DOWNLOAD NOW</a>

8)I decided to take this a step further and created a completely new web page with an image of this book on it. You can see this page at http://www.homebiz-direct.com/google-adwords-made-easy.html


Example of adding a banner (or a clickable image) to your website

1) I’ve decided that I want to put a banner on one of my web pages

2) I go to the Plugin Profit affiliate webpage and find the banner that I want to use

3) I then right click on the banner and select “Save Picture as” and save the file on my PC. I now have a file on my PC called “PluginProfitBanner.gif”

4) I log into the WEBEPanel and click on the “File Manager” icon

5) I decide that I want to keep all my banners in a new directory called “banners” to keep them separate from all my html files (optional)

6) I create a new directory called “banners” by typing “banners” in the “Create Directory” text box and clicking on the “Create Directory Button”

7) I now click on the “banners” link under the list of filenames to move into the banners directory

8) I upload the file “PluginProfitBanner.gif” by clicking on the browse button and navigating to the place where I have stored this file on my PC, then double clicking the file. I upload the file by clicking on the “Upload Selected Files” button

9) I can now view the file at the following address: http://www.homebiz-direct.com/banners/PluginProfitBanner.gif

10) I now add some source code to one of my existing web pages by editing the file “getyourownwebsite.html” on my PC

11) I add the code

<img src=
"http://www.homebiz-direct.com/banners/PluginProfitBanner.gif" border="0">

12) This successfully displays the banner on my website

13) But, I want to make the banner clickable so that if someone clicks on it they go straight to my Plugin Profit Sales page

14) All I need to do is add the linking code. So, my code now looks like this:

<a href="http://www.homebiz-direct.com/pluginprofitsite.html">
<img src=
"http://www.homebiz-direct.com/banners/PluginProfitBanner.gif" border="0"></a>

15) You can see the banner at the bottom of this page: http://www.homebiz-direct.com/build-a-website.html

Just remember to replace my links with your own links!

If you would like more details on how to do this you may want to take a look at the Plug-In Profit site editing videos.

If this is all too much for you, you may want to consider my Website Update Services