When you clone a WordPress blog, it does exactly what it sounds like.
You’re copying everything on your blog including the design, theme, plugins, content, comments, post, sidebar, widgets – everything.
It’s all being copied to a new location. You do that by backing up your WordPress site and restoring it somewhere else.
Why should you clone your WordPress blog?
Because it makes for a nice sandbox site.
You can test changes, you can get paid to set up your exact blog configuration for someone else, and if you want to make a new membership site or content blog or even sales letter site, you can do that without a lot of work at all.
What’s a sandbox site?
It’s basically a site where you can test some of your changes.
Let’s say that you want to find out how your blog will react if you change the theme.
But you don’t want to change the theme on your live site.
What do you do?
You back up the site that you have existing right now, restore it somewhere new, change the theme, get it working exactly the way you want it, back up that new site, and restore it back onto the old site.
What will happen is those changes that you might have spent several hours making just right will appear instantly on the live site because you backed it up, you do what you have to do and then you moved it back to its original location.
A sandbox site is okay.
If you mess something up or if you click the wrong button, change the wrong setting, your entire site is not destroyed.
You can use this to test new themes, test new plugins, test new settings without doing anything to your original site. So, cloning makes it easy for you to make a new site.
In addition, if you are a freelancer, cloning is the best tool you ever heard of because if you get paid a few hundred dollars or a few thousand dollars to set up a brand new membership site for someone, you don’t have to start from scratch anymore.
You can start by duplicating your exact membership site.
Several freelancers set up sites with the intention of using them as starting points for their services.
Let me explain. Someone might set up a membership site with drip content, with featured content areas, with videos, with menus, all things that might have taken several hours or longer to set up.
When they got paid to set up a new membership site, they back up that original membership site, restore it somewhere new, and that is a starting point for the job they’ve been paid for.
Now they’ve saved themselves at least that one hour creating that starting content.
You get paid to set up your exact blog configuration.
Even if you are not getting paid, if you’re making a new website it’s a lot easier to start with something than with nothing.
If I have a membership site, I’ve already chosen the theme, I’ve already set up plugins in a certain way and I already have the sidebar in a way that makes sense to me.
If I’m setting up a brand new membership site in a totally new niche with completely different content, I can start with something’s that’s familiar. I can start with a membership site I’ve previously set up on my own.
You can set up your membership site and clone your WordPress blogs in the sandbox sites into sites you get paid to set up or even into brand new sites of your own.