In the age of endless possibilities and boundless connectivity, the allure of the digital nomad lifestyle has never been stronger.

Picture this: waking up to the gentle hum of waves crashing on a sun-kissed beach, sipping your morning coffee while taking in a breathtaking view of mountains, or finding inspiration in a bustling café in a vibrant city halfway across the world.

Sounds fascinating. Right? Welcome to the world of “digital nomadism”, where freedom, adventure, and the flexibility to work from anywhere converge into an exhilarating way of life.

But wait… this isn’t as easy as it sounds.

I mean being a digital nomad isn’t trading cubicles for co-working spaces or swapping boardrooms for beachfront cabanas. It’s about embracing a lifestyle that transcends boundaries, challenges conventions, and taps into the essence of what it means to be truly alive.

Embracing the digital nomad lifestyle also requires safeguarding your future, including considering life insurance that you can quickly buy online. This can provide flexible, quick protection for nomads, ensuring financial security for loved ones no matter where in the world you might be. Alongside traveler’s insurance, which covers medical emergencies and travel mishaps, life insurance is vital for those supporting family or with significant financial obligations.

It’s about designing your days according to your desires, exploring new cultures, forging lifelong connections, and experiencing personal growth like never before.

So, without further ado, here is what you need to do.

1. Choose a Country (Your New Temporary Home)

When embarking on your digital nomad journey, one of the first decisions you’ll need to make is choosing a country to call your temporary home. Consider factors such as cost of living, visa requirements, internet connectivity, and safety.

Research popular digital nomads destinations like Thailand, Portugal, or Mexico, or explore off-the-beaten-path locations that offer unique experiences. Each country has its own charm, culture, and opportunities, so take your time to find the perfect match for your desired lifestyle.

If you are unsure where to look, here are the top three popular destinations for digital nomads.

Chiang Mai, Thailand

Chiang Mai, nestled in the mountainous region of Northern Thailand, offers a unique blend of rich cultural heritage and modern amenities. The city is known for its tranquil atmosphere, affordable lifestyle, and thriving digital nomad community.

• Cost of Living: On average, monthly expenses can range between $700 to $1,200.
• Internet Speed: 30 Mbps on mobile, 149.95 Mbps for broadband and fiber internet
• Coworking Spaces in the City: Punspace, Hub 53, and The Brick Space. You can learn more about these shared working spaces here.
• Why Chiang Mai: The affordable cost of living in Chiang Mai allows digital nomads to enjoy a high quality of life at a fraction of the cost compared to many Western cities. Accommodation options range from budget-friendly guesthouses to modern apartments, providing excellent value for money.
• Downsides: While Chiang Mai offers a fantastic digital nomad lifestyle, the city’s popularity has led to an influx of remote workers, which means it can get crowded during peak seasons.

Canggu, Bali

Canggu, situated on the picturesque island of Bali, Indonesia, has become a sought-after destination for digital nomads seeking a blend of a laid-back beach lifestyle and a thriving entrepreneurial community.

• Cost of Living: Monthly expenses can range from $900 to $1,500.
• Internet Speed: 37 Mbps on mobile, 250 Mbps for broadband and fiber internet
• Coworking Spaces in the City: ZinCafe, and Tribal. You can learn more about various other coworking spaces here.
• Why Canggu: Canggu’s relaxed beach town atmosphere, coupled with its affordable prices for food and accommodation, makes it an attractive destination for digital nomads.
• Potential Downside: For many nationals visa regulations in Indonesia can be complex, requiring careful planning and adherence to immigration requirements.

Lisbon, Portugal

Lisbon, the capital city of Portugal, blends historical charm with a thriving modern atmosphere. With its stunning architecture, vibrant culture, and favorable climate, Lisbon has become an enticing destination for digital nomads.

• Cost of Living: Monthly expenses range from $1,300 to $2,000.
• Internet Speed: 60 Mbps on mobile, 250 Mbps for broadband and fiber internet.
• Coworking Spaces in the City: Second Home Lisboa, Impact Hub Lisbon, and Avilaspaces. You can also see this blog to know more information about the above working spaces in Lisbon.
• Why Lisbon: Lisbon combines the charm of a European capital with a vibrant cultural scene, making it an enticing destination for digital nomads. The city offers a rich history, excellent food, and a dynamic startup ecosystem, providing numerous opportunities for professional growth and personal exploration.
• Potential Downside: While Lisbon provides a high quality of life, the cost of living can be higher compared to other digital nomad hotspots.

2. Get a Remote Job or Scale Your Existing Freelance Profile

As a digital nomad, the key to sustaining your location-independent lifestyle lies in effectively working as a freelancer. Having a remote job opens a world of possibilities, allowing you to work from anywhere while maintaining a steady income.

Here is how you can achieve this.

Search for Remote Job Opportunities

Start by assessing your skills and identifying remote job opportunities in your field. Many companies now embrace remote work and actively seek talented professionals to join their virtual teams.

Utilize job search platforms like LinkedIn, Indeed, Jobgether, Weworkremotely, and Remote.co to discover remote job listings. Tailor your resume and cover letter to highlight your remote work capabilities, such as your ability to collaborate online, manage time both effectively & efficiently as well as communicate efficiently.

Freelancing

If you already have a freelance profile on platforms such as Upwork, Freelancer, or Fiverr, scaling your business is a great way to become a digital nomad. Review your current client base and consider expanding your services or reaching out to new markets.

Update your portfolio and website to showcase your expertise and attract potential clients. You can also reach out to your previous clients to secure a long-term contract.

Networking and Referrals

Networking plays a crucial role in securing remote job opportunities or freelance projects. Leverage your existing network and reach out to colleagues, friends, and mentors who are already part of the digital nomad community or work remotely.

You can also participate in webinars to connect with professionals in your field. Building meaningful relationships can lead to referrals, collaborations, and new opportunities.

Whether you choose to pursue a remote job or scale your freelance profile, it’s essential to have a reliable internet connection, effective communication skills, and self-discipline to meet deadlines and deliver quality work while embracing the nomadic lifestyle.

3. Join a Digital Nomad Community

Connecting with like-minded individuals who share your passion for location independence and remote work is invaluable.

Joining digital nomad communities provides an opportunity to exchange knowledge, receive support, and find potential collaborators. Platforms like Nomad List, and Facebook groups such as Digital Nomads and Digital Nomads Around the World, offer spaces for networking, mentorship, and valuable insights into the digital nomad lifestyle.

Digital nomad communities serve as knowledge hubs where experienced nomads and newcomers come together to share valuable insights, tips, and tricks. From recommendations on the best co-working spaces in a particular city to advice on visa requirements and cultural norms, these communities offer a wealth of practical information.

By actively engaging in conversations and discussions, you can tap into the collective wisdom of seasoned nomads and gain valuable insights that can help you navigate challenges and make informed decisions.

4. Start Simplifying Your Lifestyle

As you embark on your digital nomad journey, simplifying your lifestyle becomes a key factor in creating a seamless and fulfilling experience. By adopting a minimalist approach, you can shed the weight of unnecessary possessions and embrace a more streamlined existence that aligns with the freedom and flexibility of the digital nomad lifestyle.

Here are some essential steps to simplify your life as a digital nomad:

• Declutter and Downsize: Begin your journey by decluttering your physical and digital spaces. Take a critical look at your belongings and assess their practicality and value. Let go of items that no longer serve a purpose or bring you joy.
• Embrace Digitalization: As a digital nomad, your laptop, smartphone, and other digital devices are your lifelines. Embrace the digital age by digitizing important documents, photos, and files. Utilize cloud storage and backup solutions to ensure you have access to your essential information from anywhere in the world.
• Optimize Your Wardrobe: When it comes to clothing, prioritize versatility, comfort, and practicality. Build a capsule wardrobe consisting of essential pieces that can be mixed and matched to create various outfits. Choose items that are lightweight, easy to pack, and suitable for different climates.
• Streamline Your Finances: Simplifying your financial life is crucial for maintaining peace of mind as a digital nomad. Consolidate your accounts, automate bill payments, and embrace digital banking solutions to manage your finances efficiently. Consider using budgeting apps or spreadsheets to track your expenses and savings.

By simplifying your lifestyle, you create more space for meaningful experiences, personal growth, and the pursuit of your passions. Embracing minimalism as a digital nomad allows you to focus on what truly matters while shedding the distractions and burdens of excessive material possessions.

Remember, the goal is not to sacrifice comfort or enjoyment but to find a balance that enhances your journey as a digital nomad.

5. Budgeting and Saving

One of the most important aspects of transitioning to a digital nomad lifestyle is effectively managing your finances. Budgeting and saving play a crucial role in ensuring the sustainability of your location-independent journey.

By implementing smart financial strategies, you can maintain a healthy financial foundation, cover your expenses, and enjoy the freedom and flexibility that being a digital nomad offers.

Here is what you need to know about budgeting and saving to live a healthy and sustainable digital nomad lifestyle.

Determine Your Expenses

The first step in effective budgeting is understanding and categorizing your expenses. As a digital nomad, your expenses will include accommodation, transportation, food, healthcare, communication, and other miscellaneous costs.

Take time to analyze your spending habits and identify areas where you can cut back or adjust. It’s important to consider both fixed expenses (such as rent or mortgage payments) and variable expenses (such as dining out or leisure activities).

You can also utilize these budgeting apps in case you aren’t a fan of making spreadsheets in Excel.

Set Realistic Income Goals

Before you embark on your digital nomad journey, it’s essential to have a realistic understanding of your income potential. Assess your remote job or freelance opportunities and determine your expected monthly income. Take into account any fluctuations in income due to seasonality or project-based work so you can align your budget.

Automate Your Savings

Saving money should be a top priority as a digital nomad. Automating your savings can help you stay consistent and disciplined. Set up automatic transfers from your checking account to a separate savings account or investment vehicle. This way, a portion of your income will be saved without you having to remember to do it manually. Treat your savings as a non-negotiable expense and prioritize it alongside your other financial commitments.

Seek Cost-Saving Strategies

Being a digital nomad provides opportunities for cost-saving strategies. Consider alternative accommodation options such as house-sitting, couch-surfing, or renting through short-term rental platforms. Look for discounts or deals on transportation, flights, and travel insurance.

Cook your meals at home instead of eating out frequently. Take advantage of co-working spaces that offer affordable membership plans. By being resourceful and mindful of your spending, you can stretch your budget and save more money.

6. Get Traveler’s Insurance

Protecting yourself and your belongings is essential when living a nomadic lifestyle. Traveler’s insurance provides coverage for medical emergencies, travel delays, lost baggage, and other unforeseen events.

Research and compare different insurance options to find a plan that suits your needs. Ensure that your policy includes coverage for remote work-related activities to safeguard your digital nomad journey.

You can also refer to this blog post that discusses the best travel insurance options.

7. Take a Leap of Faith – Embrace the Digital Nomad Lifestyle

Becoming a digital nomad in 2023 offers exciting opportunities for those seeking a location-independent lifestyle. With the rapid advancement of technology and the increasing availability of remote work options, the concept of working from anywhere in the world has become more accessible than ever before.

By focusing on acquiring the necessary skills, managing finances effectively, maintaining a healthy work-life balance, selecting suitable destinations, and embracing adaptability, one can embark on a rewarding and fulfilling journey as a digital nomad in this ever-evolving digital landscape.

However, it is essential to remember that the digital nomad lifestyle requires careful planning, continuous learning, and adaptability to make the most of this unique opportunity.

So, start exploring the possibilities, embrace the challenges, and step into a world where work and travel seamlessly merge.

The post How to Become a Digital Nomad in 2024 appeared first on DailyBlogTips.com.

One of the most important, highly valued and high return activity in the SEO field, keyword research begins by just entering a word in the search query box. Essential to a website’s success, keyword research can prove to be a boon if implemented correctly and can lead your site to higher ranking success.

In this article, we will be quickly covering 3 different ways to go about doing keyword research. So, let’s get started:

1. The Usual Way of Keyword Research

It’s now extremely easy to find out the right targeted keywords for your website using ahref’s free keyword research tool . You can retrieve search volumes, suggestions, and generate combinations quickly.

You can narrow down based on the global results or on the basis of countries. In fact, you can even retrieve the search volume for every keyword in a particular city or country.

Once the results are generated, you will see the full list of keywords along with the related terms, Google & Amazon auto suggestions, Facebook, Quora and Twitter search for that particular keyword as well as the latest Google trends. You can even export these keywords in CSV or XLS format.

There’s also a difficulty checker in the tool which can help you gauge the approximate difficulty for a certain keyword. Apart from that, you can also view a breakdown of the strongest and weakest sites competing for that keyword.

And lastly, you can optimize your keywords better through smarter targeting. There are inbuilt user intent parameters – terms that are commercial, e-commerce related, questions, positive or negative in sentiment.

2. Keyword Research by Finding Out Competitor’s Keywords

Another smarter way to approach keyword research is by finding out the keywords your competitors’ are ranking for. This is made easy using Mondovo’s Competitor Keywords.

To get started, you only need to enter the website URL, select exact page or across the domain, select the country and click on Search.

Once the report is generated, you will see the number of organic keywords the site or a certain page is ranking for.

Using the filters available, you can then filter the keywords based on current position, previous position, search volume, CPC and traffic.

You can also see the AdWords keywords, if any, along with the ad copies.

Using all this data, you can then optimize your own website, your own content, blog articles etc. to rank for some of the most competitive terms and beat your competitors at their own game.

3. Keyword Research Through Search Volume

We all are familiar with Google Keyword Planner wherein we can get search volume data for a set of keywords. However, the problem lies with Keyword Planner showing the data in ranges wherein as a search marketer, the ideal solution would be to have the exact search volume data.

This problem is resolved by the Bulk Search Volume tool. You can now get to find the exact monthly search volume as well as the CPC cost.

Apart from that, you can also get the exact search volume for keywords for any language and in any country. There’s also the difficulty score that can tell you how easy/difficult it is to target a particular keyword. And lastly, you can also get to know the related keywords for a particular keyword entered by you.

So, if you’re running an advertising campaign or if you’re looking for the right set of terms for your website or for a blog article, using the bulk search volume tool is indeed the right choice for you.

The post 3 Different Ways to Do Keyword Research appeared first on DailyBlogTips.com.

If you are struggling for content or want to expand the number of posts your blog has, having regular features that highlight existing content, whether on your blog or elsewhere, is a good approach. Below are some of the most common and popular features that you can implement on your site.

1. Best or Popular Posts

A common feature on many blogs. It basically involves listing the best or most popular posts over the previous week or month (depending on how often you update). If you are an avid reader of the blog this may not offer much, but for everyone else it’s a great way of showcasing your best content without all the filler in between. Be sure to encourage readers to check out and leave comments on any posts they missed.

2. Best Comments

An excellent way of boosting reader interaction as it rewards those who comment regularly. When doing a post like this try and tie the highlighted comments together rather than just picking random ones. Also, prioritize regular commentators by mentioning their name and website.

3. A Year Ago

Similar to the best post feature, only this one delves into the misty past to highlight top content from a year ago. Not much good if you don’t have an old enough blog or a deep archive, but it’s still a great way of showcasing all those forgotten about posts and giving them a bit of extra life

4. Coming soon

Enticing readers with upcoming, intriguing content is a great way of encouraging people to subscribe to your feed. Just make sure you can deliver on it. If you are a regular poster who sticks to a solid schedule this can be a great way of creating anticipation for a new week or month. If you just post when you feel like it this may not work for you.

5. Interesting links

An old school technique. This feature has the added benefit of attracting the attention of other bloggers, who are usually appreciative of others linking to their posts. Just be sure to provide a solid amount of links for the reader to delve into.

6. Ask the Readers

A great way of encouraging reader interaction. It allows you to take the backseat while the readers provide the value with their comments. Just be sure to join in the conversation and help it along as necessary. Try combining this with a best comments feature for maximum benefit.

7. Recap

If you feel you may struggle to provide value with the features above, why not combine them together? It’s a good way of summarizing what’s happened with the blog over the last week or month, highlighting posts, linking to interesting sites and describing what’s upcoming.

8. Something Different

Offer something a little different to your usual content. It could be a funny video, interesting picture… whatever. As long as you are providing plenty of the content your blog is known for, this feature can provide a nice break from the usual ritual

The post 8 Post Types To Expand and Highlight Your Blog’s Content appeared first on DailyBlogTips.com.

There are a lot of posts written about blogging success, but perhaps not quite as many written on why blogs fail. Since I believe failure is such a great part of the entrepreneurial learning process, and you really only fail when you quit, I thought I’d write an “homage” to failure if you will. Here you go: 33 ways to fail at blogging:

1. Not having a plan. Your blog just be a business some day, but you should run it like one now. That means spend time writing down your goals (like physically writing them down!) about where you hope to be in a month, six months, a year, etc.
2. Stop trying. I can’t tell you how many blogs I’ve started, worked on regularly for about three weeks, and abandoned. Of course, sometimes it is better to realize when you’ve hit a brick wall, but other times it just takes perseverance to break through The Dip and push on.
3. Stop caring. Apathy for your topic is a close second to #1, but it is slightly different. Lack of caring happens when you forget why you’re blogging in the first place–the energy for your topic is lost; all the great ideas fleshed out, overworked, and drained.
4. Having the wrong expectations. Similarly, if you have impossibly high expectations for your site that don’t align with the real world, burnout and apathy might be nearby.
5. Bad design. Having a site that projects the wrong image can be like trying to open a 5-star restaurant in a strip-mall. Possible? Sure. Likely to succeed? Probably not.
6. Too many ads. Corbett Barr of Think Traffic likes to start his students on a “no ads” blogging approach, only adding them in when the blogs are ready. “Ready” is obviously subjective, but it seems to me like having fewer than 2,000 visits a day might be pushing it.
7. Not having a big orange RSS button. This is a small thing seemingly, but I’m of the type where if I don’t have a super-easy way to subscribe to your content, I won’t come back (it’s not that I don’t love you, it’s just that I’ll forget). It doesn’t need to be orange, but you know…
8. Writing bad headlines. Or at least, not writing awesome headlines. Take the time to read how to write the best headlines possible, and practice them.
9. Not optimizing your About page. People who read your stuff want to read about who you are. Some guys can get away with being a meme, but you’re a person. Give us a big ‘ol mugshot of yourself and a couple paragraphs about why we should want to buy you a beer.
10. Not cross-linking your posts. Blogging–and the web, if you think about it–is ALL about links. Don’t go overboard, but remember that once you get someone on your site, you don’t want them to leave. Link to old posts, new ones, and pages on your site they might enjoy. Lead them to your product, if you have one.
11. Not setting up systems. I love systems. My first post at ProBlogger was on blogging systems, and I recommend it now, too.
12. Having a site that looks like an MFA (Made-for-AdSense) site. Unless, of course, you’re solely trying to blog for profit (nothing wrong with that, but it’s much harder to do when it’s a personal blog). If your design reeks of over-the-top AdSense ads, banners, and in-text link ads, it’s distracting and off-putting for visitors.
13. Bad SEO. Sure, you might not be trying to focus on organic search results for your “personal experiences” blog, but there’s a reason Google’s algorithm is such a proprietary equation: it KNOWS what’s good and bad, when it comes to content. If you haven’t taken at least a little time to optimize your content for a few keywords and add links, it can seem stale, vague, and boring for your readers.
14. No images. If there’s one universal truth that seems to still be pervasive in blogging (and even then there are exceptions), it’s “have at least one image in every post.” Images add color, depth, and flow to otherwise stagnant content.
15. Bad writing style. Your writing should certainly reflect who you are, but I doubt you talk in long-winded paragraphs. You probably also don’t sound like an advanced legal professor–tone it down, trim it down, and let us “hear” who you are.
16. Bad content layout. Going with the prior example, you shouldn’t let large paragraphs of content into your writing. Take a look at the LiveHacked blog, Jeff Goins’ blog, and read some Ernest Hemingway to get an idea for what short, easy-to-read text is all about.
17. Not using lists. This concept is not something that needs to be in every post, but if you visit some of the more popular blogs (including this one!), you’ll often see that the most popular content is blog posts organized into lists.
18. Having too many categories. The guys over at Thesis have a great policy on how many categories a blog should have. You’re not Huffington Post or Yahoo! Don’t have a thousand categories with one post in each.
19. Placing posts in too many categories. Also, don’t stick each post into every single possible category that seems like it might fit. Give each post one–maybe two–categories. It will help Google as well as your visitors find information faster.
20. Being annoying. Some bloggers have an “air” of rudeness to their writing–let them do it, because they’ve figured out how. For you, it’s better to be nice, humble, and kind–especially to your commenters.
21. Not having comments enabled. This is certainly a topic for debate, but I like to be able to leave a comment (looking at you, Mr. Godin!). I do understand, however, how huge sites can’t maintain the massive amounts of comments–and spam–that comes in. But you’re not that big yet–turn them on!
22. Placing too much on the sidebars. Again, this fault seems to plague “little-guys-trying-to-be-big-guys.” It’s not that you don’t have as much to say, it’s just that in the early years of your site, you need to be especially clear, almost to the point of minimalistic, about your site design.
23. Not capturing visitors’ attention. I highly recommend going through a copywriting course like Copyblogger–even if you’re writing about your trip to Africa, you can probably learn a few tips about drawing your readers in with a great writing style. See #9 and #14.
24. Not building a list. If you ever want to build a site that can generate income–even a little–start building a mailing list now. Even without ads, your visitors–if you’re offering great content–want that extra “connection” with you. Let them sign up to a mailing list. (I prefer MailChimp or Aweber).
25. Not engaging with visitors. Engagement can look like following up to commenters, starting dialogue through social media, etc.–just be available to your readers when they want to discuss your topic.
26. Not adding value. This one’s easy–if you’re not giving me a reason to come back, I won’t.
27. Too much self-promotion. If your site only links to other posts you’ve written on your site, and completely disregards the fact that there might be another blog with a somewhat similar topic, and your Twitter account is full of “check me out!” tweets, I’m gone like Donkey Kong.
28. Not enough self-promotion. Okay, okay–there is another side to the coin. You must take the time (I recommend an hour a week) to practice reaching out, engaging, and yeah–self-promoting your work. You did work hard on it, right?
29. “Shiny Object Syndrome.” There’s always another course to sign up for, always another product to buy teaching yada yada, and there’s always another traffic-generation tactic that you must try and implement now. Please resist–I’ve tried many (not all, but more than I should have). These products and “shiny objects” aren’t bad, they’re just probably bad for where you are in your blogging journey. Instead, read #25.
30. Not guest posting. Guess what? The best way of generating traffic, attention, and leading visitors back to your site is free. It’s called guest posting, and if you’ve not really put in the time to try it, check out Jon Morrow’s course at www.guestblogging.com (yeah, I know I just said not to grab at the shiny objects, but at least check out his free videos. He has quite a story, too!).
31. Not interacting with other “small fries.” Or “medium fries,” or “large fries” (or “ProBlogger-size fries”). I’m currently working with a few bloggers who have similar niche markets and are of similar sizes to my blog. If you’re not reaching out to these people, and trying to build relationships, don’t come crying to me when the world moves on without you.
32. Not reading. Read more. Period. Whether it’s news related to your industry, other blogs (I have about 300 blogs I read in my RSS reader), or just awesome fiction thrillers, you need to read as much as you can. It helps your understanding of your marketplace and it can greatly enhance your writing abilities.
33. Not writing enough. Back to #1 and #25, if you feel stuck, write. If you feel like quitting, write. If you feel like you’ve made it (yay! My post just went live on ProBlogger!) write. There’s never enough you can write–since blogging is directly monetized through words, you need more of them to make more of it. Kapeesh?

There you go–33 things to go work on right now. And I do realize there are more–many more. Let’s get it going in the comments section and see what else you can come up with (and what I forgot!).

You can read more from Nick Thacker on LiveHacked.com, where he publishes tips and tricks to hack your life and make it more suitable to your lifestyle.

The post 33 Ways to Instant Blogging Failure appeared first on DailyBlogTips.com.

As I mentioned on this post, one element that virtually any sales page should have is a list of testimonials. That is, people who bought/used the product in the past and liked it.

Getting those testimonials is not always straight forward, so here are some strategies you can use for this purpose:

1. Don’t Use Fake Testimonials

I’ve seen people around the web encouraging you to create fake testimonials while you don’t have any. I don’t agree with this approach. First and foremost for the ethical aspect. Second because often it will be possible to identify your fake testimonials, and the result could backfire.

2. Ask Beta Testers

On the sub-title of your testimonial section you could say something like “Check what some people who already used our product had to say about it…”. Notice the “used” instead of “bought”. In other words, this means you could invite beta testers to try your product for free and ask them for a testimonial, and since you are not claiming the testimonials are only from people who actually bought your product it would be fine. If you want to be 100% transparent you could even mention that the testimonial is coming from a beta tester.

3. Explicitly Ask Users

Rarely customers will come to you with an spontaneous testimonial. In other words, you need to explicitly ask them if you want some. You could email them 30 days after the purchase, for instance, or include a paragraph on the page where they will be redirected after the purchase.

4. Give Them an Incentive

Writing a testimonial takes a bit of time, and most people are lazy. If you give them a small incentive, therefore, the number of testimonials you’ll get could skyrocket. The incentive could be an ebook or a mention on the blog of your company, for instance. Just make it clear that the incentive is a “thank you” gesture for the time the client will take to write and send the testimonial, and not a bribe to get him to write only positive things about your product.

The post Internet Marketing 101: How To Get Testimonials appeared first on DailyBlogTips.com.

This is a guest post by Danny Iny. If you want to guest post on this blog, check out the guidelines here.

How do you feel about a blank screen?

I mean when you sit down to write — does it taunt you? Does it remind you that you’ve got to hit “publish” in two hours, and you’ve got nothing to write about?

I wouldn’t be surprised if it does, because the blank screen is the tormenter of many a blogger.

Not me, though.

I’ve written 30+ guest posts in the last few months, on top of a regular posting schedule on my own blog. I was able to do this, and not run out of ideas, because of a process that I use to make sure that I’ve always got a fresh supply.

I’m going to share that process with you. It starts with a formula…

The Blog Post Idea Formula

Sometimes, you’re inspired — you know exactly what you want to write about, and you just need to sit down and get started. In that case, you don’t need any help at all.

But other times, you don’t know what to write, and you need some help. That’s when the Formula comes in.

The formula follows one of the following formulations:

“What [EXAMPLE] Can Teach You about [SUBJECT]”

“What We Can Learn from [EXAMPLE] about [SUBJECT]”

“Lessons on [SUBJECT] from [EXAMPLE]”

Do you see the pattern? You just need to fill in the blanks, like this:

Subject — This is the subject that you’re writing about. Be as specific as possible; instead of “writing”, try “writing great headlines”, instead of “health”, try “a healthy heart”, and instead of “finance”, try “managing your savings”… you get the idea, right?

Example — This could be anything and everything, and I’ll give you a long list of ideas just a little further along in the post. The important thing is that it should be at least somewhat unrelated to your subject — this makes people wonder what you mean, and compels them to read your post.

Once you’ve got the headline, think about what single insight your example can convey about your subject — and then write the post!

Okay, now let’s get to the heart of this post: places you can look for ideas…

The A to Z of Places to Look

Just for fun, and to give the post a little structure, I’m going to follow the A to Z model — one idea for each letter of the alphabet. Many will plug into the formula that I shared above, but there will be some other places to look, too.

Apples and Oranges — Look for a situation where two things are compared to each other, but shouldn’t be, because it’s not an “apples to apples” comparison. Why do people make these comparisons? What’s wrong with these comparisons? An explanation could make a great blog post! Good examples of these posts are Why Getting Funded Is Not the Same As Succeeding and Nonconformity is not the same as Individuality.

Brainstorming — Sit down with a piece of blank paper, and divide it into two columns. Label one column “subjects”, and the other column “examples”. Now set a timer for 3 minutes, and start jotting down ideas. Don’t filter, just write. Non-stop. For three minutes. When you’re done, go through the list, and circle the ones that you like. Now put them together, and start writing. If you don’t like making lists, try a process like mind mapping instead.

Celebrities — Celebrities are great examples, because they’re in the public eye — this means that people will recognize the name and want to read the post, and it also means that it shouldn’t be hard for you to think of something that they might have to say about your subject! Good examples of this sort of post include Has Steve Jobs Overturned the Apple Cart and How To Keep Kevin Costner From Ruining Your Blog and Business.

Diary Writing — Imagine you’re writing a diary entry. Share your most memorable experience from the last week — what happened, and why it was meaningful to you. Now explain what you learned from the experience. Voila, you’ve got a blog post — you might have to sanitize it a bit if you don’t want to share too much personal information, but with a bit of editing, you’ll have a captivating post that your readers will love. A couple of good examples of posts like these are Breakfast Misadventures: How to Destroy a Customer Relationship in 30 Minutes or Less and High Impact Entrepreneurship: Confessions, Milestones, and Focusing On What Matters.

Everyday Activities — Your example could be an everyday activity — something that is part of your weekly routine, like brushing your teeth, driving to work, going to the gym, or making dinner. Since most people have similar routines, they’ll relate to your example, and enjoy the post. Here are a couple of examples: Give Your Business the Workout of Its Life and Book marketing is like brushing your teeth — you have to do it every day.

Free Writing — Set a timer for ten minutes. Get some paper and a pen, or open up your word processor. Shut down your email, and turn off your phone. Start the timer, and start writing. The rules are simple: you have to keep writing. It doesn’t matter how nonsensical or inane — write whatever comes to mind, but keep on writing. You’ll probably go through a minute or two of nonsense, and then hit onto an interesting train of thought that you can develop into a post.

Gesture — Gestures are a form of alternative communication — we use them when we can’t communicate with words. Think about a common task related to your subject, and then ask yourself — what would you do if you couldn’t do it in the regular way? How would you get the job done? Why would you do it that way? It might make for an interesting post…

Hiatus — Sometimes taking a break from regular content is a good idea. What if you decide not to put up a blog post, and instead just put up a short message saying “I’m out of ideas and taking a break — leave a comment to let me know what you’d like to read about when I get back!” Like my friend Stephen Guise did with Off To The Beach.

Interview — If you’re stuck for content, plan an interview blog post. Make a list of the 5-10 most interesting people that you’d like to talk to, and fire off an interview request. You’ll be surprised how amenable people are to the idea — that’s how I landed interviews with Guy Kawasaki, Randy Komisar, Corbett Barr, and many others!

Justice — Do you know someone who isn’t getting what is fairly owed to them? Either they’re getting way more than they deserve, or they’re working hard and the recognition isn’t there? Write about it — if they deserve more credit, then give it to them. If they deserve less credit, then you don’t have to mention them by name, but you could explore why they are getting the undeserved attention that they’re getting.

Karma — Why not go out of your way to do something nice for someone else? You could repay a favor, or just be the first one to take that positive action — either way, you’re making deposits in your Bank of Social Capital, and creating good work to boot!

Lateral Thinking — You know the game where you start with one word, and then write down a related word, and then a word that is related to that one, and so on? Play that game, and let the thought process lead you to an interesting blog post idea.

Movies — Like celebrities, movies make for great examples, because they’re a part of popular culture. This means that a lot of people will read the post and relate to what you are saying. Good examples of these posts are The Inigo Montoya Guide to 27 Commonly Misused Words and The Blockbuster Secret to Seducing Your Audience.

Nature — Go for a walk in the great outdoors. Go camping, and have a picnic. While you do, pay attention to the world around you. What is beautiful? What is peaceful? What is unpleasant and annoying? Make a list of all these things, and then pick one as an example to plug into our formula.

Obvious — Go back to basics — what are the obvious fundamentals about your subject area? I mean the ones that you take completely for granted that everyone in your audience already knows about, but if you think about, you realize that a lot of them don’t. Write a “back to basics” post about that, and you’ll be surprised at how well it performs. Good examples of this sort of thing include Getting to Know SEO! and A New Look At the 4Ps of Marketing.

Parents’ Wisdom — All parents have stories that they tell us again and again, either because they forget having told it to us the first thousand times, or because they’re hoping that we’ll finally get the message! Well, what is the message? How does it relate to your subject of interest? Why not write a post all about it? If you do, make sure to give credit to your parents — they’ll appreciate it!

Quirky Facts — Do you have a favorite quirky factoid? Maybe it’s the one about frogs not jumping out of pots of water that are slowly brought to boil, or maybe it’s compasses spinning at the South Pole, because every way is North… what’s your favorite factoid? And what lessons can you draw from it about your subject?

Read Fiction — Fiction is fun — it transports you to another world, and connects you with a set of characters that may or may not be more interesting than your real friends. Read about one of those characters, and then ask yourself what questions they might have about your subject of interest. Then write a post answering their questions!

Scientific Journals — Speculation can be nice, but cold hard facts are even better — especially when you take interesting research and then apply it to your topic of interest. That’s what John Medina did in his blockbuster science books Brain Rules and Brain Rules for Baby. So what research is relevant to what you write about? Why not explain that to your audience?

Television — Like movies and celebrities, television is a great way to tap into popular culture in your writing. Think about your favorite television show or television character, and what they can teach about your subject area. Then write a post about it! There are tons of examples of this — a couple of them are The Mad Men Guide to Changing the World With Words and Desperate Housewives on Marketing, Storytelling, and Selling.

Upset — What makes you upset? I don’t mean mildly annoyed — what makes your blood boil at the injustice of it all? Ranting about it might make you feel better, and if you’re going to rant, why not do it in writing? Make sure to edit it after the fact, and edit out any identifying information — you don’t want to flame anyone in a blog post. But post-editing, you might find that your catharsis has led to an interesting and captivating post!

Victory — I love asking people what their greatest victory was. I love it because they often surprise you with their answer — they tell you about personal victories — things they did in college, high school, and in the context of relationships. Things that might not seem huge, but were very important and meaningful to them. Why not share your greatest victory with your audience? Tell them why it was great, and why it mattered to you.

Walk — Take a break. Go for a walk. Breath some fresh air. Don’t worry about the blog post, and don’t worry about writing at all. Set yourself a timer — for the next twenty minutes, you think of nothing other than enjoying the weather and the exercise. When you return to your desk, you might be pleasantly surprised by the ideas that your subconscious has assembled for you.

X Marks the Spot — Make a map of the path to mastery in your field. What are the different milestones and waypoints that travelers pass through along the way? Why not take that map, and expand it into a blog post? Maybe even outline the biggest challenges at each step along the way, and how to best avoid or overcome those challenges?

Year — Take some time to reflect on your big achievements or most interesting lessons learned from the past year. It’s a great way to share and connect with your audience, and it’ll help you gain some perspective on where you’ve been, and where you’re going. That’s exactly what I did in my post 365 Days and 9 Big Things — why don’t you try writing one, too?

Zoo — Take a break — go to the zoo, walk around, and look at all the animals. Pay attention to how they behave, and how their habitats are laid out. Pay attention to the signs for visitors, and the behavior of those visitors. You might find surprising insights — for example, Dino Dogan pointed out that the automatic response to a beware of pickpockets sign triggers a reflexive touch of the pocket in which you keep your wallet — telegraphing its location to nearby pickpockets! What odd or interesting behaviors can you point to and learn from?

Capturing Ideas for Later Use

This process doesn’t just work when you need to write and you’re out of ideas — it works all the time, and it often works best when you AREN’T trying to write!

The lesson here is that you should keep your eyes open for ideas that would work, and jot them down (I carry a small notebook around at all times for this exact purpose). Over time, you’ll develop a crib-sheet of blog post ideas that you can refer to in a pinch.

Over to you — which of these ideas could you see yourself using? Have you already tried any of them? What’s your favorite go-to strategy when you have to write and you’re out of ideas?

The post The A to Z of Blog Post Idea Generation appeared first on DailyBlogTips.com.

Chester asks:

How frequently should we change the WordPress theme that we use for our blog?

As seldom as possible!

In fact, a better question would have been: “How frequently CAN I change my WordPress theme.”

Why?

Because whenever you change your WordPress theme, or your design for that matter, you will inevitably weaken your brand. The design of a website or blog is one of the factors that contribute to the brand around it, so the stronger that design is stuck in people’s heads, the stronger your brand.

Want to do a simple exercise to see how this works? Close your eyes and try to visualize the Daily Blog Tips theme in your mind. I am sure you were able to do that easily. That is because I have been using this theme for over one year and a half. I am sure that if I had been changing the theme every other month people would not be able to associate the design with the site so easily.

Another factor to take into consideration is the overall layout and navigation structure. Whenever you change those, it will take some time before your readers and loyal visitors get used again, which might be annoying.

The minimum time frame that I think you should wait before changing your theme or design is six months. Anything shorter than that will send a message to your readers that you have no idea about what you want from the blog.

Better yet it is to wait one year or more before you do a major redesign.

Obviously I am not saying that one should stick with his design forever. Sometimes a new design can be used to add freshness to a website, and to attract buzz from the people and bloggers that are interested in web design.

So redesigning or changing theme is fine, just do it as seldom as possible.

By the way, if you are considering to pick a new theme for your blog, check our our WordPress themes collection.

The post How Frequently Should I Change My WordPress Theme? appeared first on DailyBlogTips.com.

Google is perhaps the biggest source of traffic for most blogs and websites.If you don’t optimize your blog posts for search engines, then you’re missing out on high quality blog visitors. On the other hand, if you over optimize or wrongly optimize your blog posts, then your blog might get penalized and lose even its existing traffic. If you optimize your blog post the right way, then it will improve the search engine rankings as well as drive more blog traffic.

Here are 7 steps to write an seo-friendly blog post.

1. Pick a topic
The first step is to pick a topic that is relevant and useful to your readers. If people like your blog post they’ll share your content on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter & LinkedIn and spend more time on your site, without bouncing off quickly. This will send social signals telling search engines that your content is valuable, and rank your blog posts higher.

2. Do keyword research
Once you’ve decided what you want to write about, it’s important to come up with a list of high-traffic keywords that you can target with your blog post. You’ll need to include these keywords at different points of your blog post (described below) when you optimize it.

You can use free tools like Google Keyword Planner to get keyword ideas for your topic. Simply type in your blog post topic in Keyword Planner and Google will provide a list of keyword ideas along with their monthly search volume and competition information (low, medium, high).

Pick one high traffic keyword relevant to your topic, as your main target keyword, and 4-5 related long-tail keywords that you’ll include in your post.

3. Write naturally
Before you optimize your blog post, you need to write a great article in the first place. If your content is not good, it won’t rank well, no matter how much you optimize it. So write a blog post naturally, keeping your readers in mind. Will they find it interesting? Will it help your readers? How will they use the information in your post?

This means structuring your content into paragraphs, and using complete sentences.

4. Use headings
Use headings (H1,H2,H3) to break your content into easy-to-understand sections. Headings make it easy for Google to understand the subtopics covered in your blog post and helps improve search engine rankings. Headings also enable readers to quickly scan your post, understand the main points and easily read it.

Generally, the title is displayed in H1 heading, and each subtopic in your post should have its on own sub heading H2. If you need to use H3 sub headings, ensure that they are used after H2.

Use your main target keyword once in your title. Typically, Google shows about 50-60 characters of your Title. So keep your post title within this limit. You can also use your long-tail keywords in some of the sub headings to rank your post for a wide range of keywords and search phrases. However, avoid overusing keywords in headings. Otherwise, you may get penalized for keyword stuffing.

5. Optimize Meta Description
Meta description is the 1-2 lines of text that appears below your blog post title, in search engine results. It helps search engines understand the topic of your blog post, so it’s one of the most factors that affects search rankings.

When you’re adding meta description, you need to provide 1-2 lines of complete and meaningful sentences describing the content of your blog post. Google displays only up to 150 characters of meta description, so ensure that your meta description is within this limit.

Meta description is a great place to include your main target keyword as well as a related long-tail keyword. However, if you try to stuff too many keywords, or use meaningless phrases in it, then Google will simply ignore your description.

Nevertheless, most users look at the title & meta description in search results to decide if they should click the link or not. So ensure that your post title & meta description are not only keyword-rich, but also click worthy.

6. Optimize Images
Images play an important role in SEO – they make your post visually appealing and more likely to be shared. They also make it easier for people to read and understand your post.

Most search engine (including Google) are text-based, and can’t understand images. So you need to add descriptive text, wherever possible, to help search engine understand what your images are about.

When you use an image for your post, ensure that you use descriptive file names. For example, “seo-friendly-blog.jpg” is better than “bsd213.jpg”. If you use multiple images, you can also use long-tail related keywords in their filenames. This will help search engines rank them better.

Similarly, you should also add a keyword-rich ALT tag to your images. ALT tag is basically used to describe your image, and helps search engines understand images better. When you upload your image to WordPress (or other platforms), you’ll see a form with a textbox to enter ALT text. In the above example, you can add something like “how to create seo-friendly blog post” for your image.

7. Add Internal Links
When you write a blog post, ensure that you’re linking to at least 2-3 other articles on your blog. This not only improves SEO score of your blog but boosts the crawlability of those articles.

However, ensure that you’re linking only to relevant articles from your blog. For example, if you’re writing about “how to do SEO” it makes sense to link to posts about “building links” and “doing keyword research”. However, linking to something like “how to install wordpress” is not relevant.

Conclusion
Hopefully, the above tips will help you optimize your blog post to rank better for more keywords and search terms. The trick is to target the right high-traffic keywords, write a super useful & interesting blog post around them, and include those keywords throughout your content. If your blog uses WordPress, then you can use the free Yoast SEO Plugin that allows you to easily optimize your blog post for search engines.

Sreeram Sreenivasan is an entrepreneur & digital marketer who writes for Fedingo Blog about various blogging, marketing & business growth topics.

The post How to Write an SEO-Friendly Blog Post appeared first on DailyBlogTips.com.

Sometimes your readers might find it useful to have a printable version of your articles and posts. This is particularly true for blogs that publish timeless content like tutorials, how-tos and so on.

If you are tech-savvy you probably could solve this problem by creating a special CSS stylesheet and loading it when people need to print your articles. For the lazy or less tech-inclined of us, there is a WordPress plugin that handles everything itself.

WP-Print will create a printable version of your posts by using its own CSS file, and it will automatically launch the printable page when the user clicks on the “Print this” link that you will insert on your blog.

You can see a live of example on the Pick The Brain blog. All the articles come with a “Print this post” link, and you just need to click it to see the printable version.

I have installed this plugin on some other blogs and it gets the job done. I am still considering it for Daily Blog Tips though, since I am not sure if the readers actually want to print our articles (bloggers usually just bookmark what they need to read later). Just leave a comment if you would like to see a “Print this” link on each post here and I will integrate it.

The post WP-Print WordPress Plugin appeared first on DailyBlogTips.com.

Written by Nishant Maliakel Oommen

Innovation drives the future, and technology is the main catalyst that fuels rapid evolution. High competition to capture profitable markets have pushed entrepreneurs to invest huge sums in developing technologies that baffle all alien life forms. Creative brains have given birth to complex bots and algorithms that interact itself, track, monitor, and analyse trillions of data, all with a persistent ambition to poke and probe the customer, “all to grab their attention”.

Every commercial institution across the world is on a race to equip and adapt with modern technologies that can influence people. Marketing is one in the strand which needs to be addressed. The complexity of analysing and understanding customers lead to the creation of new marketing tool where customers can gauge prices, compare features, customize, ask for a live demo, etc. Advanced robotics and machine learning algorithms evolved to form networks of the cognitive system that helps entrepreneurs to make informed decisions. Yes, we are looking towards a future that will be super ceded by radical breeds of AI enabled technology.

In this article, we will take a succinct overview of how few technologies will influence your online business. Let’s start small rather delve straight to complex technical jargons.

1. Hyper personalized websites or eCommerce marketplaces

Fundamentally every business is the same regardless of whether it’s offline or online. The biggest change is noted when people start to leverage the unprecedented opportunity that technology accompanied. In a broader sense, new technological advancements started to manifest itself by simplifying people’s life. This main factor persuaded a bunch of tech savvy minions to migrate to comprehensive displays where they stayed for hours, exchanging information and interacting with other minions they find on the platform. Enlightened with the realisation of this incremental shift, where a high populous permeate from offline to online, it became an obligation for businesses to reflect their values in the online realm.

Seth Godin recited that, Don’t find customers for your products, instead find products for your customers. Great words. Over time, everyone’s taste and preferences changes and your customers are no exceptions. The best example is, consider that you’re a business that caters the needs of infants. Your business model started to proliferate and you started to notice a substantial turnover, all of a sudden, out of bloom you realized that you are not able to make repeated sales. The primary investigation revealed that all the sales were made for infants under one category “kids below 2 years old”. A design flaw on the website created the presumption among customers that the business only caters to one category “baby products – kids below 2 years old”. On the contrary, the child was growing and their needs must be met, forcing the parents to leave your business and look for another one that could cater a wider market.

In the above example, the business entity failed to reflect their business values in totality, limiting them to address only a small segment of the whole market. The best practice for the business would be to use technology to plot the customer needs and create an enticing eCommerce website that showcases their business as a whole. A hyper personalised website that sends a strong message, Hey we are a business specialized in delivering high quality service that caters the entire market, Our business to cater your child’s need from infancy till he grows to a charming toddler. Which beguiles the customer to believe, and drive higher customer satisfaction.

2. IoT – Continuous coordination and collaboration

Internet of Things, a phrase that echoed in our ears for past couple of years, and still we are not acquainted with. IoT is a network of electronic peripherals that are interlinked to a common network, where they share data and collaborate, to gradually learn individual systems and progress along the experience curve to work as a single unit “a smart system”. The main purpose of IoT will be to present a digital economy that enables smart homes, smart offices, etc.

The importance of IoT in business can be highlighted with a simple example, Consider your online business/ eCommerce store is selling T-shirts. With IoT all devices in your office “Garage” will be able to stay connected and share data with each other with a concordant view to make smart decisions, thereby ensuring a seamless flow of operations. Here the system will work as a single unit, learning the operational flow from one department to another and will cognitively make prudent decisions in-case it finds any flaw in the seamless operation. If the AI recognizes that the demand for a particular lenin has gone up, then the system coordinates with the concerned department and will discern the reason behind the increasing demand. Once the reason is analyzed with data from the planning /forecasting department the AI will make informed decision to source an order or will notify the reason behind its action. That is why business application modernization is so important.

IoT also plays an important role to present a delightful customer experience. Let’s see how IoT will benefit you as a customer. Consider that one of your friends is having his birthday next week. You getting too indulged in the business forgot your mates birthday. How IoT will benefit you is, it will go through different profiles and connections you have and will intimate you about his birthday. The system will recognise it and will intimate you about your friends birthday and will ping you with suggestions, like what present you friend likes the most, or what he was searching two days back (a bit extreme when comes to privacy breach, Who knows the future), what he was presented last year, etc. Keeping you updated, and offering a plethora of opportunities to strengthen relationship. May be the insights you collect will help you to decide which colour he likes and can present him a T-shirt of the same.

3. In app marketing the best way your lead gets incentivized

The great news is, In app marketing is an amazing way to keep continuous interaction with your customers. OHhh, forgot to mention the challenge. Stats published on BuildFire.com says that out of 100 apps downloaded 33.3% of them are only open once. Shocking information isn’t it. The main reason is that a majority of them (app’s) become obsolete before they hit the market, and the remaining failed to meet the customer expectation.

Most businesses use the strategy of incentivizing in app traffic (usually done with virtual money). A hope to tickle with the curiosity, and expecting that the prospect at one point will convert into paying customers. Yes and No. No, because of your service, regardless of what is not adding value to the user. Then there is a high probability that the user may leave when the incentive gets over.

What when the answer is yes? As a user, he finds value in your business and continues with the service. In most cases, the user finds value with the continuous education and lead nurturing the organization rolls out. So, by the time the incentive gets over he is well aware why he should not send your app to the trash.

Release an app (you can hire a company such as Techolution to build it for you), build an enticing microsite, and drive traffic to the microsite. For eg: your website is selling high end mobile peripherals, in that case, use your app to drive targeted traffic to your micro website. You can always brainstorm and come up with some alluring marketing strategies, to attract interested people/ early adopters to stay tuned and be the first one to buy products on the release date. Frequently send reminders, offers, discounts etc through the app. Make sure the visitor will see value in your business model.

4. Google semantics for prioritizing information based on the context

Semantics have paved way for business intelligence systems, International Data Corporation (IDC) estimates that by 2020 the amount of data produced from the point of sale system to sensors will reach 4.4 zettabytes. Which comprises a pile of structured and unstructured data. Data, when analyzed, gives in-depth knowledge about the relationship each data points have with one another, helping us glean compelling opportunities and obtain business benefits. The application of semantics and meta knowledge in the field of IoT has gained worldwide attention.

The future of business is driven by quality, and quality is comprised of deviants. So, how do we evaluate and quantify the reasonings behind an engagement? As a business how do we evaluate sentimental interactions with our business? How could an aircraft manufacturer like Boeing find the intangible reason behind a purchase? Beyond the huge markdown what motivated the airline to consider them over their rival Airbus. Both businesses provide state of the art cutting edge technologies.

With semantics, the entity will be able to deduce the complexity of analyzing individual behavior and will be able to find the reasoning behind a purchase. Semantics give meaning to the whole data available, scrapping intuitions, giving it a clarity, which helps to make precise informed decisions. The aircraft manufacturer can dig deep into data and analyze which variant of their airplanes are more preferred my businesses in that region. Why they preferred a 747 over a 737, Is the airline operating long haul services to busy destinations, Have they mentioned any information about their current load factor, How frequently customers mentioned their experience flying in a 747, How customers respond to the airline’s services, social mentions of the aircraft, etc.

What semantics does is, in its core, it will consider all these factors and will use the available bits of information to canvas clarity. With the internet revolution, even the manufacturer will be able to collect, analyze, and suggest the airline, why a 747 will be much better for their business than any other variants.

5. Automation – To build strong relationship with prospects

With a rapidly evolving digital world, innovation is one strand that we cannot say no to. Why? COMPETITION, a simple but compelling word that exigence the importance of time, making time as one of the scarcest resource available to business. Even with the realization that there are only 24 hours a day, every entrepreneur is searching for the extra 10 min, which they believe could make a dramatic influence. With technology and innovation, we come to fathom that we are not just a glob that revolves around a bright red hot ball, we are just one among the millions or billions. We are in a course, too busy running around to find the cosmic source which gives birth to the single celled alien that over time transformed into a fully grown sentient with feelings and emotions.

As time is the scarcest resource, we with our hocus pocus created the wonder “automation”. An effective strategy to stay tuned for day to day operations. Technology wants to reduce the distance between people, offering them common platforms where they can continuously interact and exchange information. But what if, you have customers who need your presence halfway across the globe. What in case you need to respond to time bound customer queries? To the least, How will you show your gratitude to a customer who signed up with you late night? The answer lies in this one sentence, Adapt technology and embrace automation. (Note: automation should not be at the cost of compromising your entities value in recognition to a general message. It needs to be a well addressed and a personalized note, reflecting your business values).

Automation needs to be streamlined to that of an efficient marketing machine. Social channels have become one peculiar stop among millennials. Stats published on BrandWatch.com says that there are 2.3 billion social media users, and 91% retail brand uses two or more social channels. This information itself pinpoint the importance why businesses need to stay connected, social media. Social media is an important channel for businesses to stay alive.

Technology has changed the way we administer business and wade through our professional life. Don’t take my word for granted. Look around you. You will be able to plot patterns reflecting a transformation, wondering the penetration of technology into our personal lives. Technology is forcing us to showcase an omnichannel presence, making it more mandatory for businesses to keep up with the radical trends and customer shift (channel hopping). Every business needs to incorporate a synergic approach to welcome technology that can productively reduce the distance between organizational values and customers. Once the values converge with the customer’s belief then a business can claim that technology has been used to deliver a purpose.

The post How Technology is Influencing Online Business appeared first on DailyBlogTips.com.

A web designer takes charge of performing all the designing tasks related to your business, like creating a website. The quality of your website will largely influence the growth of your business. And, quality is determined by the designer that you hire.

With so many options in the plate, choosing the right web designer can be a daunting experience. Here, we have found some tips to keep in mind while hiring.

DNA First and Experience Later

Long term experiences can be very appealing while hiring a web designer. However, we believe DNA is a much bigger factor for success. The cultural characteristics that make up your work environment should be sought for in the designer to fit in well.

Therefore, list your company’s DNA characteristics, like persistence, determination, curiosity, time management, deadlines, and so on. A great team player would be the one fitting into most of the DNA requirements.

References from Associates

Always go through the websites of other businesses to look out for their designs and presentations. This will help you visualize and evolve ideas for your own site. Also, the associates of those businesses can be a great source of finding a great web designer yourself.

You can study the quality of their work beforehand through their websites and ensure if they are the best suit for your company. As you keep narrowing down the list of designers, you can even meet their former clients for a background check.

Return on Investment

ROI or Return on Investment in a vital component for any business process. A keen eye needs to be kept on the ROI of the work done by the person, and regular impact assessment is mandatory. Be mindful of the money that you have invested and the quality of work that you are receiving. 

Professional web designers often offer higher value work and better ROI right from the beginning and at reasonable rates. An inexperienced or low-cost designer could appear inexpensive but end up being a heavy burden on your company’s financial resources in the long run.

Aptitude Over Skill Set

In the constantly growing and shifting tech world, skills become obsolete even before one knowing it. Thus, investing your money in a particular skill set might not be the best decision. It is advisable to hire professionals who are much more receptive and can easily adapt themselves with the advancements in technology.

The simplest way to find a designer who will be open to learning new technology is through their dedication and love for the profession.

Hire Slow, Fire Fast

Always invest a good amount of thought and time while hiring a new web designer. The hired person is going to be responsible for the media management and online visibility of your company. Therefore, quick and easy decisions might end up in misuse of your company’s resources.

However, never hesitate to fire an inefficient web designer immediately. Missed deadlines and unproductive work can prove highly detrimental to the growth of your company, especially if it is a new startup.

The post 5 Effective Tips For Hiring A Web Designer appeared first on DailyBlogTips.com.

As website owners, we all want to create quality content that not only is interesting and engaging to our audiences but often, also serves to promote and ideally sell our affiliates products. Your website can be big business and mean big bucks if you know how to use it.

Ok, so now you might be wondering, is there a way that it is possible to stack the odds in your favor when it comes to ranking on Google? Ranking on search engines is important; when was the last time you visited the second page of a search engine query?

Well, the folks over at Content Refined, a content marketing service seem to think so. Is creating content feeling like a shot in the dark? Are you frustrated with wasting time and money on having articles written that just don’t produce results in terms of ranking in search engines? Below, we share some of Content Refined’s tried and tested strategies on how to increase the chance your content will rank well in Google.

1. Targeted and Relevant Keyword Research, Which Creates Interesting and Engaging Article Titles

Content Refined is a start to finish content marketing service. This means that they will do your keyword research, create titles, write your articles and then edit and publish your articles to optimize them for your website.

Content Refined utilizes a keyword research tool call SECockpit to complete keyword research for their clients. The way Content Refined is different when selecting keywords for your article is that they filter keywords to fit specific sets of data. For Content Refined, that metric is a keyword that is searched at least 500 times per month but has less than a 30% competition score.

The fun doesn’t stop there however. Content Refined will also analyze what other sites are ranking for a given keyword. Even if a keyword is statistically right for use on your site, the team looks at what other sites are ranking for the keyword. This way, they ensure that they aren’t pitting their clients against massive, domain authority sites that they will realistically never be able to outrank.

2. Already Strong Writing Enriched Using MarketMuse To Ensure In-Depth Coverage of A Given Topic

Content Refined only uses native English speaking writers to create their articles. This is a good first step to ensure proper flow and grammar for an article. However, Content Refined goes the extra mile to ensure that not only are the articles interesting with good readability but also that they cover topics in depth. The best way to ensure in-depth coverage of a topic? There is a tool called MarketMuse that Content Refined uses. Users can plug an article title into the program and get back a variety of relevant information about the selected keyword. Not only will MarketMuse produce a list of relevant keywords that should be mentioned or touched upon in the article, but it will also yield the current content score of an article along with the average content scores of competing articles and the overall best content score for a selected keyword from the competition. In addition, MarketMuse will supply its customers with a list of competing articles, so that you can scope out the competition.

Data analysis has shown a moderate to strong correlation between a high MarketMuse score and a good ranking in search engine results.

3. A Statistically Driven Standard That All Articles Ideally Meet

Ideally, Content Refined articles meet a specific benchmark in terms of data and their team believes that articles that fit this criterion are likely to rank on search engines such as Google or Yahoo.

For Content Refined, that standard is a competition score under 30% and a MarketMuse score of over 40. In a real life scenario, this should result in a quality, well-rounded and in-depth article that features an interesting topic with a keyword that isn’t dominated by big, established domain authorities. Content Refined has uncovered that articles that meet this metric have between 80-90% chance of ranking on the first page of a search engine. Combine this with the fact that the service also only uses keywords that are searched at least 500 times a month and you have the opportunity to create some really fantastic, relevant and useful content.

The Content Refined process is based in finding out what people are looking for that isn’t necessarily being extensively or properly covered on the web. The method is to create useful content that is backed up by researched data, instead of using what we call the “spray-and-pray” method, which involves peppering your sites with heaps of articles, some of which may interest your audience and much that may not. The problem with the “spray-and-pray” is that you can end up losing readership if you post too much content that is useless or irrelevant to your audience and “spraying-and-praying” can also end up being very expensive.

To conclude, we all want to make money off our websites; that’s why we have them. However, it can be difficult, time consuming and costly to work out the exact metric for your site. If you are tired of creating content that doesn’t provide predictable results, the tips and tricks of the trade mentioned in this article may be able to help you rank on Google with a higher degree of certainty. Content Refined openly shares their process because they believe knowledge is power and that nobody should be deprived of the ability to create an awesome niche website.

If you don’t have the time to manage all these different tools on top of your singular or multiple websites, you can also take advantage of Content Refined’s start-to-finish content creation process by checking out one of the many available packages here:

The post How to Increase The Chance your Content Will Rank Well in Google appeared first on DailyBlogTips.com.

Everyone knows content marketing is where it’s at. Sure it takes a LOT more time and effort than other forms of traditional digital advertising, but it works! Its no secret that people tend to tune out the old school forms of advertising. So what makes content marketing work so well, and what tools and tips are needed to make it even more effective?

Whether you’re creating new content or revamping old articles, there are triggers that are guaranteed to make your content perform well on the web. In the online world, there are several million pieces of content added each day to the already billion pages of content that already exists on the web. In order for your content to stand out, it needs to have compelling elements that will allow it to break through the noise. Most web marketers struggle to execute this with their campaign.

Here’s a few key tidbits we’ve picked up from mashing up several articles in our heads:

1. Document Your Strategy – Seems pretty basic, right? It’s hard to know what’s working well if you’re constantly shooting from the hip. Make sure your efforts support your business goals, which can vary based on your industry, otherwise it’s all just a waste of time.

2. Measure and Track ROI – Of course this is not always cut and dry. Content marketing is not meant to have an immediate impact on sales, it’s more about building trust with customers. Metrics such as web traffic, social interactions, and other metrics are common forms of measurement, but are they really impacting your business over time? Although content marketing is a long term strategy, over time you should be able to see an uptick in qualified leads and sales. Your tactics ultimately need to make an impact, or it’s time to tweak your strategy.

3. Use Infographics – This just makes sense. Humans tend to digest information better in graphical form, even information that seems kinda dry on the surface. Need some inspiration? Check out this collection of the best infographics from Hubspot.

4. Distribution of Your Content – it can take some trial and error to determine what works best for you. LinkedIn is typically the most popular (and successful) option for B2B, while Facebook or Pinterest are best for B2C. And many ad paid search and sponsored posts to the mix as well. More the likely its gonna take a mix of free and paid methods to get your message out there.

5. Produce Quality Content that Aligns with Your Goals – the popularity of content marketing breeds the mediocrity of content. Focus your efforts more on quality than sticking to a strict rule of “must create one piece of content per day” rule.

6. Get Contributors With Multiple Perspectives – ok, so I get it that you’re not comfortable with everyone writing your next rad article. But chances are they either have ideas on what would generate interest, or they can give you a good draft to work with. So talk to product development, the sales team, your IT department and so on. Even if you need to sit down and conduct an informal interview, a different perspective can be very refreshing.

7. Deliver Content for a Specific Audience

By addressing a core topic for a specific audience, your content will have a much better chance of gaining traction on the web. Don’t try to develop a content piece that appeals to everybody. Instead, find out the needs, wants, desires, problems, frustrations and fantasies of a specific audience group. For example, WordPress developers that want to use plugins that will improve their website’s performance. Or basketball players that want to know how they can improve their vertical leap ability.

8. Use Compelling Headlines

Powerful headlines should be used to sell your content to the audience. They need to sell the worthiness of the content to be clicked, liked and shared on the web. Epic content will fall short if the headline fails to convince a potential viewer to engage with it. Upworthy content writers are required to write 25 headlines before publishing their content. As a result, they create unique and compelling headlines that allows their content to perform well across the web.

9. Use Compelling Images

People love to engage with image content. The featured image that you use for your content can double the amount of traffic to your website. When the content is supported by more compelling images, it will create more opportunities for your content to get liked and shared across the web. Spend time creating good quality images that have a high-resolution and that tell a compelling story to your audience.

10. Make Sure Your Content Delivers Value

No matter what type of content you publish, it must deliver value for your target audience. Take the time to support your content with value by providing:

• Quotes from credible sources.
• Statistics from primary sources such as surveys.
• Embedding valuable content such as infographics, videos or audio files.
• Linking to other credible websites that support your content.

11. Keep Your Content Interesting by Telling a Story

People love stories. So it is important that you find an angle that will allow you to develop a compelling story for your content. Consider telling a story that:

• Captures the human-interest angle.
• Highlights major announcements.
• Marks the passage of time (such as a 5, 10 or 25 year anniversary)
• Reacts to a current story, event or trend.
• Solves a problem.
• Is honest.

12. Promote Your Content on Platforms Where Your Target Audience Hangs Out

Implementing the right promotional strategy will allow your content to gain exposure, traffic and shares from your target audience. It is important that you identify where your audience hangs out online. Some methods for finding your audience online include:

• Searching for discussion threads on forums.
• Searching for question and answer websites like Quora for relevant discussion -topics.
• Searching for blog posts and adding to the commentary.
• Searching for topic groups on social media platforms.
• Searching for influencers on blogs, media or social media platforms and sharing -the content with them.

You can even use tools like BuzzSumo or Buzzstream to find people that have engaged with similar content and promote your content directly to them.

These are proven methods that will get your content likes and shares across the web. Amplify your website’s content by implementing these tactics today!

Nobody ever said content marketing is easy…but your customers like reading stories, or learning more about topics that help them become more educated on an important subject. It’s well worth the time and extra effort in the long run.

With all that in mind, we came up with a brilliant idea for blog promotion (coming soon on that, just be patient)! But first things first….we started a handy little newsletter to help ourselves and our own networks. So, checkout the free Content Weekly newsletter, a roundup of the best tips and tools for content marketing and the art of blog writing. New resources surface daily, so don’t miss the best ones by subscribing to Content Weekly.

The post Fresh Starts and Major Makeovers – The Keys to Content Marketing Success appeared first on DailyBlogTips.com.

Whenever you need to sell something, how do you introduce it to potential buyers? The most natural thing for us to do is to start describing the product itself. In other words, to start describing its features. The problem with this approach? It doesn’t sell! It will simply bore the customer and make you lose his attention.

If you want to sell, you need to start with the benefits and value that your product will bring to the life of your customers. Sure, down the road you’ll need to actually describe the product features (cause people want to know what they are actually buying), but you only do that once the customer is already convinced to buy your product.

I’ll give you an example to illustrate my point. Suppose that you are a bit over weight, and you are looking for an ebook to guide you through the process of losing that extra weight. You visit the sales page of two weight-loss ebooks. Ebook A has the following bullet points right on top of the page:

• 176 pages full of content!
• Illustrations about exercises.
• A complete list of food you are not supposed to eat.
• Immediate download after you buy.

Ebook B, on the other hand, starts with the following bullet points:

• Techniques to start burning fat today!
• Lose up to 10 pounds in the first 2 weeks!
• Discover the 5 best exercises to slim down.
• Become healthier and more attractive at the same time!

If you could keep reading only one of the sales page, which one would it be? Probably the second one, cause it’s describes exactly what you are looking for, right?

In fact that’s the logic behind the theory: customers don’t want your product, they want the benefit that your product will bring to them. In the example above you can clearly see that. Over weight customers don’t care if an ebook is red, yellow, with or without illustrations, with 10 or 200 pages. All they care is whether or not they will lose weight using it. That’s what they are willing to pay for.

Bottom line: whenever you need to sell something, always start with the benefits. After all that’s what the customer is looking for.

The post Internet Marketing 101: Sell Benefits, Not Features appeared first on DailyBlogTips.com.

Affiliate marketing can be a great way to get started in the online marketing world. The reason I love affiliate marketing is that you can test your online marketing skills with someone else’s product before going out and creating your own.

Creating your own products takes tons of time. There’s also no guarantee that it will sell. But if you sell someone else’s product and promote it and the product gets tons of sales, then you can use that same strategy when your create your own product.

When starting out, you can use pay per lead affiliate marketing. This is one of the most popular techniques in affiliate marketing and you get a better commission than display ads.

If you’re in the personal finance industry, check out LeadNetwork.com to generate your leads. It is a trusted and established company that is known for its high industry payouts.

The LeadNetwork creates products that are needed in the financial marketplace. The purpose is to connect lenders with consumers looking for installment loans, payday loans, and startup business loans.

Leadnetwork has high rates of conversion, proprietary technology, superb digital marketing materials, high ethical standards, a weekly payment schedule, and unwavering support for their publishers.

It works based off an auction-based system. This means that the lead is put at the highest price possible. From there, the price will gradually lower until a buyer is ready to complete the deal.

When you use this affiliate program, you get lifetime commissions. When you refer a new client you’ll continually generate commission from that client for forever.

With Leadnetwork they have a payment threshold of $100. Once you hit the $100 mark they can pay you through PayPal, Wire Transfer, EPESE, ePayments and Webmoney.

The leads you generate need to be based in the United States but you can be located anywhere in the world.

If your website is in the finance niche it could be very profitable for you to check out affiliate network mentioned above.

The post Ever Considered Pay-per-Lead Affiliate Marketing? appeared first on DailyBlogTips.com.

The importance of statistics is undeniable. They give us valuable insight on the website traffic and how visitors interact with it. By analyzing and getting deeper into your website stats you can significantly improve its performance, accelerate its growth and better serve your visitors.

If you’re looking for good analytics tool you’ll most probably end up by choosing Google analytics, the free and most complete analytics tool offered by Google.With its second to none tracking and monitoring functionalities it’s the first choice for millions of users and website owners. Another great thing about Google Analytics is that it’s pretty flexible, which allows you to obtain individual statistics and maximize the benefits of the tracked information.

The partnership of Google with WordPress made it easy to bring GA to WordPress powered websites and get tracking reports directly from the website dashboard. Moreover, with the available plugins you also get tons of tracking customization options to make your data more valid and useful. Below, you can find 10 tips that will help you maximize the benefits of WordPress Google Analytics.

1. Add Google Analytics to WordPress

Adding Google Analytics to your WordPress website comes with a bunch of advantages. It will allow you to access your website stats from the comfort of your WordPress dashboard, and ease you from the hassle of checking your GA account separately every time you need to get a glimpse of your website stats. There are a lot of tools out there that will help you to add Google Analytics to your WordPress website without touching a line of code. And Google Analytics Technology Partners Program, and makes GA integration with WordPress a breeze. The plugin comes with all the advanced tracking and reporting functionalities that GA provides, and makes it way easier to collect and monitor the data.

Google Analytics WD comes in FREE and PRO versions, both offering a set of most needed analytics features. Find the plugin demo here, and see how it tracks and collects data.

2. Get a more accurate picture of your stats with data filtering

Of course, there can be data from specific resources that you might not want to be included in the tracking reports. Using filters is a smart way to improve the accuracy of the collected data. With data filtering option of the Google Analytics WD you’ll be able to filter out the traffic from specific IP addresses, countries, regions, and cities.

3. Exclude specific tracking

Tracking exclusion is a form of data filtering which allows you to exclude tracking based on specific roles and user accounts. Any activity and interaction performed by them on your website will be ignored and you’ll get a valid data on your website performance. You can exclude interaction tracking for site administrators, editors, authors, contributors, subscribers, admin and user accounts.

4. Get the most out of custom reporting

With the sheer volume of the data that Google Analytics provides, sometimes it’s overwhelming to figure it all out. Plus, there can be specific data which is not automatically reported by the plugin, but you’d really like to track it .This is where custom reporting functionality of Google Analytics WD comes to rescue. You can set custom reports for any metrics and dimension and access them directly on the plugin reports page. For example, you can set pageview as a metric and session duration as a dimension, and track how much time your visitors spent on viewing pages.

Google Analytics also allows you to export the tracking reports to CSV and PDF formats, and forward to specified email recipients on a scheduled basis.

5. Display frontend reports

With Google Analytics WD you can enable displaying reports on the frontend of your website and give access to them to specific users, such as site administrator, editor, subscribers, and contributors. This is a great option to enable those users to access individual page or post reports right on the frontend while working on the pages. This saves a lot of time and keeps them focused on their work.

6. Set reports for custom dimensions

You can maximize the benefits of your stats by tracking specific data that you have on your website. That could be the tracking which of the authors is the most popular among your readers, or what type of posts your readers like to read the most. With Google Analytics WD you can track custom dimensions based on logged in users, post type, category, tags, post author, post publishing year and month.

7. Measure how often your visitors complete specific actions

You website visitors perform thousands of activities on your website every day. With some additional setup you’ll be able to track targeted activities and get notified as soon as they are accomplished. You can set visiting a certain page as a goal, or measure how many of your visitors proceed to checkout on your shopping website. For setting and managing goals you’ll have to provide its name, select one of the goal types (destination, duration, pages/screens per session) and configure the options for the goal type. The plugin collects data based on the configured options, and keeps you notified by sending you an email or pushover notification.

8. Set alerts for specific conditions

Google Analytics WD comes with an advanced option to send you alerts and pushover notifications when a specific metric meets the predefined condition. It could be the highest/lowest number of the traffic, bounce rate range, and average session duration. For example, you can set to get an alert or pushover when the number of your website visitors exceeds a specific number. The alerts and pushovers are sent based on the selected period, either daily, weekly or monthly.

9. Track your sales stats

You can link your Ecommerce account to Google analytics WD and track your sales stats based on revenues, transactions, time to purchase, product name and category and sales performance. It’s a time-saving option for tracking your sales stats.

10. Google Adsense and AdWords reports

If you have authorized accounts on AdSense and AdWords, Google Analytics WD will enable you to view relevant information tracking within the reports page of the plugin. All you have to do is to link your accounts to the Google Analytics and access the tracked data from the WordPress dashboard.

Google Analytics WD is a powerful tracking tool. The data that it tracks includes tons of valuable information that you can use to improve your website performance. So, why not use these useful tips and get the most of your website stats.

The post 10 Tips for Maximizing the Benefits of WordPress Google Analytics appeared first on DailyBlogTips.com.

Local SEO can be very profitable, yet most bloggers and webmasters ignore it. If you are not familiar with the term, it refers to optimizing your website or application to search queries that have a strong local component. For instance, if someone searches for “good dentist”, Google will assume that the person is looking for a good dentist close to his or her location, and will therefore adapt the search results to that constraint.

With the explosion of mobile phones, more and more search queries are getting influenced by local SEO, and that is why you should learn about it. A couple of weeks ago I came across an interesting article on Search Engine Land titled 10 Things I Learned About Local SEO In 2014. Here’s a quotation:

The World Really Is Going Mobile
We all talk about it, but this past Black Friday/Cyber Monday, we saw a 100+% increase in mobile traffic to our local retailer clients. According to one national/local client that has a partnership with Google, Google has told them to expect that 80% of their organic traffic in 2015 will come from mobile search.

The challenge is that, as more searches go mobile, conversion can decline. This is particularly true if your site is not mobile optimized and definitely true if you are selling stuff versus just trying to generate phone calls.

If you have not started your mobile-friendly strategy yet, what are you waiting for?

I liked the article because the tips mentioned are not the usual stuff you’ll find on other guides. Check it out if you have some time, and to explore more the local SEO concept if your online business is affected by it.

The post 10 Tips About Local SEO appeared first on DailyBlogTips.com.

What makes a great website? Is it the colours, the layout, or the information contained in the site itself? Every small business owner wants their site to attract as much traffic as possible while competing against rival businesses and some much larger companies.

The truth is, no matter how pretty your website is, if nobody’s viewing it, then it’s a waste of time. You might have heard words like Google ranking, SEO, keywords, backlinks and other technical terms which can be confusing. After all, you just want your website to do the work of attracting customers while you go about your work.

Here are 7 ways to make sure that your website gets the attention it deserves.

1. A Consistent and Professional Look

To be competitive you have to have a great website that looks professional, after all, it’s the “face of your company”. Everything must be laid out in a logical order and be easy to read because most people don’t have to look for things.

The layout of every page must follow a similar theme and should have a consistent colour scheme. Because your website is a reflection of your company, having an unprofessional-looking website will reflect badly on you.

2. Search Engine Optimizations (SEO)

So your site looks lovely but now you need to get traffic to flow through it. SEO are practices that get your site noticed and ranked by Google so that people looking for your product or service can easily find it. This means you need to use as many keywords and phrases that are specific to your product in your URL’s and descriptions.

Another way to increase SEO is the use of backlinks. Backlinks are links from your site to others, and from other sites to yours. These links create relationships between the sites through which traffic will flow. You can also have internal backlinks to other pages on your site so that if readers see something interesting they can instantly navigate to that page.

3. Quality Content

It may seem like a no-brainer, but having quality content that’s engaging for the reader is a must on any website. Not only should the quality be good, but the content should be regularly updated so that the readers that you’ve hooked keep coming back for fresh information.

Having good quality content also helps with SEO because Google looks at quality content that’s regularly updated as a way to determine ranking. Some of the ways in which Google ranks the quality of the content is by analyzing the number of keywords as well as the relevance of the information with regards to what you are selling. Google also looks at the length of the content as a factor that determines whether its quality is high or not.

4. Tell a story

Your site is about telling people who you are, what problem you can solve for them and why they should trust you. In order to sell your brand, you have to have an identity.

When the reader sees your website they should see how your company was started, who the founders are, what your core principles are and why your product or service is better than the countless others out there. One of the ways to do this is by having authenticity. Don’t over-do the sales pitch and try to force people into buying your message. Try to sound natural and talk about what you can do for the customer with a call to action at the end.

5. List building

Not all visitors to your site will be convinced into buying into your services, In fact, you’ll get a lot of visitors that will never return again…..unless you do something about it. This is why it’s important for visitors to your site to be greeted by a splash page that offers a subtle way to get their contact details.

The splash page can contain a free download, access to a promotional item or even a competition. The idea is that the visitor will want it in exchange for their email address. After gaining the address, you can send your newsletter or promotional material and build a relationship. Some websites even have a person on a live chat ready to answer questions and build an instant relationship with the reader.

6. Marketing

You may have a great site that’s getting traffic from searches and ranking but it doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t look at other avenues of marketing. These days social media plays a huge role in promotions and your site should be linked to as many social media sites as possible.

You should have dedicated buttons linking to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or any other social media sites that you use, as well as a share button. It’s also good to have a live feed from one of those sites directly linked to your website. Obviously, social media sites should be updated regularly if they are expected to work.

7. Mobile Friendly

Over the last few years, the number of users accessing sites from desktops has been in a steady decline, with more and more people accessing from their phones and tablets. It’s predicted that by the end of 2019, up to 79% of web traffic will be from mobiles with only 20% coming from desktops.

It’s therefore vitally important to ensure that your site is optimized for mobile access because visitors that don’t get a good experience on their mobiles are unlikely to return. Mobile friendliness is yet another factor linked to Google ranking. Since 2016, has taken ranking signals from the mobile version of the site and not the desktop version.

These 7 steps are some of the most important things to consider when designing your site. If you can get your web development team to implement these steps, you’ll be on your way to having a great website that will attract traffic and do justice to your brand.

The post 7 Website Design Essentials for Small Businesses appeared first on DailyBlogTips.com.

According to Statista, the global retail e-commerce sales have increased from 1.3 trillion USD in 2013 to 5.7 trillion USD in 2022. This represents an average annual growth rate of 18.2%.

Remember, these figures cover only retail sales and do not account for other types of online spending such as online travel booking, digital media, online gaming, and others.

While we’re all obsessed with the Elon Musks, Mark Zuckerbergs, Jeff Bezos, Larry Pages and Sergey Brins of this world, the fact remains that there are a lot of average people making a difference, and ensuring a comfortable living for themselves without necessarily having to create the next big thing.

If you are yet to start an online business, all data and indications show that now is the right time to start. If you’re confused about what to start, don’t worry, I’ll show you seven practical and proven business models, with relevant examples, that you can implement immediately.

Business Model #1. The Ecommerce Business Model

While we all know Amazon.com to be the giant in the ecommerce space, very few people know that you can start a profitable ecommerce business that is barely a fraction of Amazon’s gigantic size.

A very notable success story that proves the efficacy of this business model is Steve Chou, of MyWifeQuitHerJob.com.

Steve’s wife wanted to quit her job so she could take care of their newborn child full time, and Steve was becoming increasingly concerned with financial security as his family grew.

Steve and his wife decided to start Bumblebee Linens, an ecommerce store that specializes on handkerchiefs and linens, and they were quickly able to replace his wife’s salary of $100k within a year of starting the store.

Key Lessons

1. You don’t have to start big; Yes, Amazon’s success is massive but unrealistic for everybody else. Focusing on handkerchiefs and specialized linens seems smaller, but it is profitable for Steve and his wife.
2. Getting started doesn’t have to be complicated or expensive: There are several ecommerce software and apps you can start with, a notable example being PrestaShop, which is free and an industry leader with 250,000 stores and a community of 800,000 members for support.

Business Model #2. The Freelancing Business Model

I’ve been online for over 5 years now, and one thing I’ve noticed among people who want to start online businesses is the desire for quick income.

I won’t necessarily sell you a “quick cash” dream, because most people who start with such mindset don’t last, but I can tell you that the fastest route to income online is to be a freelancer.

By becoming a freelancer, you can very well be making an income within a few days of starting your business.

You need to first have a viable skill you can use to serve potential clients; perhaps you’re good at using Photoshop, drawing illustrations or cartoons, writing, designing plugins and themes, customizing websites, etc. Then you could have a successful freelance business in no time.

I’m an example of someone who built a successful online business through freelance writing, and Daniel and Ali’s Freelance Writing Course is one of the best resources if you decide to go this route.

Key Lessons

1. Have something to offer: The fact that quick income is possible by freelancing doesn’t mean it is effortless; you have to offer real value to clients, and you should forget about some “passive income” dream. Earning from freelancing requires real effort.
2. Learn from the best: If you’re a freelance writer, Daniel and Ali’s course for freelance writers is a good place to start, and it’s extraordinarily affordable as a career investment.

If you want to do other forms of freelancing, seek the best people doing the freelancing of your choice and learn from them.

Business Model #3: The Consultant Business Model

The consultant business model is very similar to the freelancing business model, but it’s different in that your role is to provide guidance to your clients instead of to execute their projects.

Perhaps you have some specialized knowledge you can use to help other organizations grow or achieve certain results that would have been impossible otherwise? Then you might want to start consulting.

Ross Simmonds was able to generate $160k in revenue, and $120k in profit, for his consulting business within a year of starting. He did $250k in revenue his second year, and that’s without him having to employ anyone.

Business Model #4: The Digital Products Business Model

Selling your own products can be a profitable source of income, and this can eventually lead to a source of semi-passive income.

There are lots of success stories online that prove the efficacy of selling digital products, and a renowned example is Danny Iny, who rose to fame and built a 7 figure business within 4 years of starting online.

The key to creating successful information products lies in knowing what people want, and then giving it to them; if you can master this, and learn some basic marketing, then you’ll experience above average success.

Business Model #5: The Affiliate Marketing Business Model

Some people do not want to be a “slave to their time” so to speak, and they detest having their income rely on them working all day non-stop.

For these people, freelancing or consulting won’t work, and they might also not want to invest the upfront time required in creating an information product.

If you’re in this camp, then affiliate marketing could be your business model of choice.

With affiliate marketing, you can promote a product created by someone else and get paid a percentage of the income generated from the sale you make.

A notable example of a successful affiliate marketer is Zac Johnson, who has made millions from affiliate marketing since he started around 15 years ago.

According to Zac, the key to affiliate marketing success lies in finding products that convert best for your audience and traffic source and focusing on them.

Business Model #6: The Subscription Business Model

This is the dream business model for most people; you put in the initial upfront effort and, with some maintenance effort, you can guarantee a consistent, or increasing, income every month.

The benefit of a subscription business model lies in the fact that people only need to register once, and they will be billed month after month; depending on how well you’re able to maintain your subscription site, and how well you can attract new users, this can be a massive source of income.

My favorite success story using this approach is Carol Tice. Carol started the Freelance Writers Den, her community for freelance writers in 2011, and it’s since grown to thousands of users that pay $25 monthly to be a part of the community.

Business Model #7: The Paywall Business Model

The Paywall business model is quickly becoming a choice among publications and media sites as a way to increase revenue without relying on ads.

The paywall businessá model involves you giving people access to a certain number of content on your site, or restricting access to a certain percentage of your content, so that people can pay to access the remaining content.

Several reputable news sites like The New York Times and Boston Globe rely on this as their main source of online revenue.

Which is Your Favorite Business Model?

Do you have an online business yet? Which of the above is your favorite online business model? Comment below.

The post 7 Proven Online Business Models that Work appeared first on DailyBlogTips.com.

A primary goal of any website or blog should be to provide its visitors with a pleasant and fulfilling experience. Regardless of what market the website is targeting, the opinions of users will play a huge role in determining the site’s level of success. Visitors that have positive experiences will be much more likely to come back later, refer friends, sign up for a newsletter, purchase a product, submit an inquiry about a service, etc.

When developing a website, the user’s wants and needs should always be in the forefront of the decision making process. It doesn’t matter what type of website you run, it needs to be user-focused. Unfortunately, sometimes it’s easy to get caught up in the design and development process and create a site that satisfies the designer or the owner but doesn’t really provide visitors with much value.

What makes a website user-friendly? There are probably an endless number of factors, but let’s look at five of the major ones.

1. Page Load Speed

Although high-speed internet connections are becoming more and more common, there is still a large number of internet users that are on slower dial-up connections. Even with high-speed connections some pages just don’t load very quickly. Most of your visitors will be fairly impatient and pages that load slowly could chase them away. At the very least, slow loading times will reduce the number of pages that they’ll visit on your site.

Knowing your site’s audience can really help to know how your pages should be designed. A program like Google Analytics will show you the percentage of your visitors that are using different internet connections. Based on the numbers you can get a good idea of what type of impact page load speed will have on your overall audience. If your site attracts a high percentage of users with dial-up connections, you should be sure to keep pages loading as quickly as possible. If a very high percentage of visitors are using high-speed connections, you may be able to add a few extra elements to your pages.

Factors that influence the load times of pages include the number and size of images, extra items like flash, the amount of excess code (example, designing with a table-based layout instead of CSS), and the size of your pages. (Read more about website optimization).

2. Accessibility

If someone can’t use or access your website it serves no purpose for that visitor. Accessibility of websites has become a bigger priority for designers and developers in recent years, but there is still a long way to go. Even major corporations have struggled to achieve complete accessibility. Target was even sued over the accessibility of its website for handicapped individuals.

Some of the easiest things that you can do to improve the accessibility of your site include using alt tags for all images, use valid HTML and CSS coding, avoid frames, and allow text to be re-sized by visitors. There is of course much more to accessibility, which was covered in detail by 456 Berea St.

3. Navigation

All users want to be able to move through the website to find what they want. A huge factor in being user-friendly is providing simple and intuitive navigation. Major areas of navigation should be located consistently on all pages. Using common elements that users expect to find, like About pages and Contact pages will help as most internet users have come to expect them and will look for them at times.

A general rule of thumb is that any page on your site should be reachable with 2 clicks from your home page. For larger sites this probably isn’t realistic, but offering a sitemap and/or a sitewide search can really help.

Another important factor with navigation is that user’s shouldn’t have to guess where they will end up if they click on a link. Regardless of whether the link is part of a navigation menu, or if it is simply in the body of the text, visitors should understand where the link will lead them.

4. Information

Visitors are coming to your site for a reason. Whatever that reason may be, you want to provide them with what they are seeking. Are they coming to find basic information on your business’ services? Are they coming to read in-depth articles on a particular subject? Whatever the case may be, the information that your website provides needs to sufficiently meet the expectations of visitors.

A blog like this one will need to provide its readers with great, insightful articles in order satisfy its visitors. The website of a restaurant may need to provide hours of operation and a menu in order satisfy its visitors. Obviously, each situation is different. In order to have a user-friendly website you need to anticipate what visitors will expect to find at your site, and then put it right in front of them.

I know this is just the tip of the iceberg on the subject of user-focused websites. What factors do you feel are important (either from the perspective of a visitor or a designer)?

The post 4 Characteristics of User-Friendly Websites appeared first on DailyBlogTips.com.

As Instagram has around one billion users, it’s increasingly difficult to get noticed. Especially the case if you’re trying to grow your business account. Since Facebook has changed its policies, Instagram is becoming a popular hub for companies to connect with their customers.

Instagram is a crucial platform for marketing. Studies show that there around 500 million online users per day. In my article “Boosting Instagram Followers in 2024“, I shared practical ways on how to do that. Instagram has a massive user base and visually appealing content, making it an excellent tool to reach a wide audience. I provide practical tips on increasing Instagram followers, such as leveraging hashtags, stories, and influencer collaborations along with some advanced tactics. Expanding your brand’s visibility and driving sales are the key benefits of utilizing Instagram for marketing purposes.

Regardless, whether you’re trying to grow your account or a business account, you should take a look below, and the best tips that you should try right now to increase your followers list considerably within seven days.

1. Consistency is key

Similarly, to everyday life, consistency is essential. The math is simple; the more often you post, the more followers and likes you will get.

The study done by Tailwind, the marketing tool, shows the following:

As you can see from above, those that post every day more than once or at least once per day, have gained followers much faster than the ones that published less than they should.

Furthermore, you have the potential to almost double the follower growth rate if you post up to 6 posts per week. On the other hand, you can also duplicate that rate if you post more than once per day.

2. Provide versatility

Even though the platform has begun as a photo-sharing hub, now it’s much more than that. Therefore, you should show content through videos, live videos, stories, and story highlights.

It may seem like it will take an effort, but, it will significantly benefit your profile. Such sharing features will allow you to create content that is suitable for more than just a particular group. For example, some may not be interested in the photos, but they enjoy watching stories.

There are numerous reasons why you should ensure versatility, such as:

• The engagement rate is much higher for videos than photos
• Your live story appears as the very first story in the list, for every one of your followers
• There are around 450 million people that watch stories every day

Another report done in 2019 show that brands use Stories and videos to their full potential. Take a look below:

To get more people to view your stories and content, you should buy Instagram followers. To ensure that it works, we recommend that you should begin with 100 purchased followers to see if there are any changes in your profile growth.

Nonetheless, you mustn’t post the same content in photos, videos, and stories. You should mix up the posts to prevent getting unfollowed.

 3.Use hashtags correctly

It may be tempting to use any hashtags that come to your mind, but that can be a damaging mistake. Even though hashtags are not crucial on other platforms, Instagram algorithms put a significant emphasis on this function. Instagram loves it so much that now, you have the option to follow a hashtag!

By using the right hashtags, you are exposing your content to a broader audience; these users have the opportunity to view your profile and give you a follow.

Pro Tip: Use a combination of hashtags and geolocation.

In general, the platform will allow you to use up to 30 different hashtags per post. The best option would be to use up to 9 different hashtags as you will maximize the engagement rates.

Before you add the hashtags, you have to search for the best keywords that fit with your profile. So, if you mainly focus on fashion, a great hashtag would be #Fashion and not #CurryDish. To make the job more comfortable, you can take a look at what your competitors have used.

It’s important to mention that if you use this strategy, it will take a while to see significant results. Therefore, if you buy Instagram followers, you will ensure that the results are immediate. Hence, you can focus more on content rather than hashtag research.

 4.Use other influencers

Another method that you can use is to get help from others. There are two ways in which you can go about this:

• Sponsorships
• Partnerships

For example, you can cut a deal with another account to take over each other’s stories. Such alliances will create a win-win situation for both parties. While you’re providing valuable content to your existing followers, you are also reaching a new audience. Hence, encouraging your profile to grow.

Nonetheless, if you have money to spare, you can get influencers

to promote your account or business profile to their massive follower’s list. Nevertheless, you have to ensure that you reach out to those in a similar niche as yours.

Don’t forget to make them tag you in the posts! Generally, such accounts will do it for money or at a percentage of the total products sold. So, if you create their unique promo codes, they can get a rate on precisely what they sell.

Daniel Wellington is a big fan of this. The profile has gained more than 4 million followers so far. At one point, a large number of influencers have promoted the brand at the same time. Therefore, encouraging their loyal fan base to purchase the watches.

 5.Organize Contests

If you’re not willing to give other people money to expose you, you should use your account. By setting up contests, you are encouraging others to take any action that will benefit you. Additionally, you can also think about giving your followers a free thing for a follow.

Here are some of the things that you can do:
• Ask your followers to repost one of your images
• Mention you in one of their posts
• Tag a number of their friends to spread the word

If the offer is good, there could be an overwhelming response from your followers and not only. Thus, increasing the chances of exposing your profile on the “Explore Page.”

If you want to get more people to engage with your content, you should first buy Instagram followers. Since the accounts are of real people, they will want to follow the steps that you’ve provided.

6. Post at the right time

When you post the content has as much influence as what you post. Your engagement rates can be severely affected. In general, you should focus on posting from Monday through Saturday. Additionally, you should also post between 9 AM to 6 PM. The time after that should be ongoing on a following spree.

If you have a daily job and you find this a difficult thing to do, you should schedule ahead. So, every Sunday, you should have explicit knowledge of what your posts will be the following week.

To further the engagement rates, you should figure out what type of content your existing followers are enjoying. To do this, go through your old photos to see which post has achieved the most likes and comments. Then, ask yourself questions such as:

• How can I integrate more photos as such?
• What type of description does it have
• What was the exact day the content was posted

The posts that have the highest engagement rate were uploaded on the best possible day and time for your following particular group. Thus, it’s essential to repeat that action every week.

 7. Engage with others

If you don’t engage with your followers, why do you expect them to do it for your posts? By using features such as open-ended questions and emojis, you are giving your followers a chance to interact with you.

A great example of this is to use stories. Ask your followers how their day has been or what their interests are. Also, what their plans are for the weekend. When others are encouraged to share their experience with you, you make them feel like a valuable follower. Thus, you will be more than just a person on their following list.

Take a look at the great example by The Cheesecake Factory:

As you can see from the description, they have asked their followers how they are celebrating. From the comments, it’s visible to see that their followers are tagging others in the post. Thus, increasing the chances for the photo to appear on the “Explore Page.”

Instagram is a profitable platform if you know how to use it correctly. To maximize its full potential, you should begin with at least 1,000 to 2,000 followers. If you don’t have time to grow the list organically, you should buy Instagram followers. This action will help you to have a good start compared to your competitors.

Furthermore, it’s also essential to create good quality content and use the right hashtags when posting, along with the location tag. The more visible you are to others, the higher the chances of growing your follower’s list.

The post 7 Tips to Grow Your Instagram Account appeared first on DailyBlogTips.com.

You don’t have to know or be a photographer to have a great web presence, but it certainly helps. Images have become the currency of social media and many forms of online news and communication. Images distill thoughts into a form that can be consumed in an instant, much faster than the thousand words or so it would take to get across the same information. While writing is still important, it’s increasingly images that get people to pay attention to the written word. If you still aren’t sure how to use images to increase your online presence, here are three of the very best methods.

1) Use Professional Quality Images.

If you don’t so much as own a camera, you can still use amazing images if you have the right source. There are countless ways to buy great images at affordable rates, with so much variety available that you can find pictures tailored to your exact needs and specifications. If you go the stock photo route, it pays to do your homework. By digging into places that present uncommon and affordable results, you will be able to avail yourself of images that don’t look commonplace or unnatural for your purpose.

2) Use Original Images Sometimes.

Content creation is the name of the game online, and this isn’t likely to change anytime soon. Platforms like Instagram are full of images created by people of interest, which can be incredibly successful even if they aren’t of the highest quality. If you have a customer or fan base, you may be surprised how many people have an appetite for images of you or your brand. All you need is a phone to make creative, candid, original images that your fans won’t be able to find anywhere else. This creates a sense of intimacy and activity that some brands are surprisingly without.

3) Invest in Images That Dazzle.

If you don’t want to go the stock photo route and you aren’t the type to throw up images on social media platforms willy nilly, you might be the type of internet personality who invests in dazzling images and video. These images are a production. Whether they are taken in a studio, in nature, or under the sea, images that amaze with their quality, subject matter, and unusual perspective help brands take a step beyond conventional branding. Drones, underwater robots, adventures photographers, and innovative video techniques – all of these are strong ways to create pictures that impress people for their originality.

4) Bonus Tip: Don’t Forget About GIFs!

GIFs, or “graphics interchange format”, is like a self-contained looping video that shows a short period of content or action, often measured in just a few seconds. GIFs and memes are two of the most popular ways to communicate information, ideas, and jokes anywhere on the internet. You’ve likely seen them or used them before. They’re a great way to distill an important bit of video from your business, a humorous concept, or a thought-provoking message that pertains to your brand. Once you get hooked on making GIFs, you’ll use them all the time.

There are many strategies that will produce an effective imaging strategy for your career, business, or brand. The most important thing is to do it, whichever one you choose! For people who have not always used the internet, the image-first nature of today’s web may seem unfamiliar. Even so, it’s here to stay and anyone who wants to make a place for themselves online, or to expand their current reach, needs to use images that are compelling, brand enhancing, and on the cutting edge of convention, taste, and trend.

The post 3 Ways to Use Photos to Improve Your Online Presence appeared first on DailyBlogTips.com.

Do you know that a simple tweak to your blog can double, triple, or even quadruple your blog growth?

I made slight changes to my blogging strategy and saw some massive results; for example, installing a simple plugin resulted in over a thousand extra subscribers to my blog every month, and I was able to get hundreds of subscribers from several of my guest posts even when people were crying that guest blogging is dead.

With the right plan, you can supercharge your blogging and take your blogging from nobody to superstar status. In this article, I share 7 tips guaranteed to supercharge your blog growth; these tips worked really well for me, and I plan to use them even more this year. Enjoy!

Tip #1: Revise Your Guest Blogging Strategy

While many people claim that guest blogging is dead, I got thousands of visitors directly from my guest posts, and I got hundreds of subscribers each from several of my guest posts. In fact, I got over 1,000 subscribers from one of my guest posts. That was when many people regarded guest blogging – especially for traffic generation – to be dead. Here are some of my tips to help you create a revised, effective guest blogging strategy:

1. Choose Your Target Publication Wisely: While I did a bit of guest blogging, my most successful guest posts were on blogs much bigger than mine: blogs like JeffBullas.com with hundreds of thousands of monthly visitors, ThePennyHoarder.com with millions of monthly visitors, etc.

The key to success with guest blogging lies in making sure you choose a blog that has an audience big enough to impact yours, and to ensure that the blog has an audience that will be interested in your blog because there’s relevance between the topic of your blog and that of your host blog.

2. Submit Resource Content as Guest Posts: I’m a huge advocate of publishing resource content, but I decided to take it to another level: I started submitting resource content as guest posts to other blogs, and the result was massive. Several of my guest posts had thousands of shares, resulting in thousands of visitors and subscribers to my blog.

Here are just a few examples:

• 15 Websites That Pay Writers $200 or More Per Article (over 2,600 shares)
• 20 Amazing Websites that Pay $100+ Per Article (over 2,000 shares)

Resource content can be very powerful. Imagine what can happen when you amplify the power of your resource content by publishing it on a blog much bigger than yours.

3. Implement a Content Upgrade in Your Guest Posts: I believe guest posting should always be a win-win situation: both you and the host blogger should benefit. Oftentimes, it takes significant effort to create a winning guest post, and one of the best ways to make best of this is by introducing a content upgrade inside of your guest posts. I did this in 2015, and the worst that happened was that editors of some of the blogs moved my content upgrade to the bio section. Even with that, those guest posts resulted in hundreds of subscribers.

Whether it is in your bio or directly at the end of your guest post, having a content upgrade will always lead to more traffic and subscribers for you. My student, Clement Lim, can testify to this: he started noticing an improvement in traffic and subscribers from his guest posts simply by implementing content upgrades in them.

Tip #2: Increase Your Blogging Frequency

For a very long time people have been debating whether it is better to publish content more frequently or to simply focus on publishing quality content whenever you feel like it.

If observing the successes of highly successful blogger is anything to go by, we realize that “blogging when I feel like it” does not a successful blogger make.

Seven-figure blogger Neil Patel gets over a million visitors monthly between his two blogs, and he has repeatedly documented that increasing blogging frequency led to significant traffic gains. This was also corroborated by data from Hubspot that revealed that blogging more frequently leads to more traffic, and that it’s better to publish 16 or more articles monthly.

If you want to grow your blog, you need to work on your blogging frequency.

Tip #3: Publish More Comprehensive Articles

Resolve to publish more comprehensive articles; gone are the days where you can just slap articles of 500 words on your blog to meet some content schedule. Various sources have shown that content length matters, and high-profile marketer Neil Patel has repeatedly featured studies to show that content length influences traffic and blog growth. Neil recommends publishing content no less than 2,000 words.

Tip #4: Create a Resource on Your Blog

Resource articles resulted in hundreds of thousands of visitors to my blog; in fact, most of these visits came from resources I had published years ago.

The average article on my blog has a short shelf life, and traffic usually dies down within months of publishing an article. Things are different with resource articles, though: with every resource article I publish, traffic never dies. In fact, after some time, with almost all of my resource articles, traffic starts to pick up, eventually surpassing the traffic the resource generated when it was first published and heavily promoted.

Here are some good examples of resource content to inspire yours:

• 32 Christian Magazines that Pay Writers
• Ranking of Best National Universities by U.S. News
• Ranking of 27 Web Hosts Based on Speed and Uptime
• The Ultimate List of Blogs that Accept Guest Posts

The above examples include resources from 4 different categories: writing, education, web hosting, and marketing. It goes to show that you can create a resource for your blog no matter your niche.

Here are some tips:

• Identify a common pain point in your niche that people need a solution to
• Instead of giving people tips to solve this pain point, give them a solution. For example, instead of telling people to do outreach to promote their business, give them several outreach templates that they can use
• Make sure your resource content is specific; the more specific a resource is, the more likely it will spread.

Tip #5: Install the SumoMe App

If the only thing you can do this year is to install and properly configure the SumoMe app, your blog will thank you for it. Installing the SumoMe app resulted in thousands of extra email subscribers from my blog EVERY MONTH. Here are two key SumoMe apps I recommend installing:

1. The Welcome Mat: The SumoMe “Welcome Mat” shows a full-page opt in form that takes over your screen immediately people visit your blog. They can either cancel the form, scroll down to continue reading, or opt in to your newsletter. Usually, though, a good percentage of your readers will opt in; I get an average of 4.4% conversion rate, site-wide, from the Welcome Mat installed on my blog. For me, that’s over a thousand extra subscribers monthly.

Below is an example of a Welcome Mat in action – screenshot taken from Zac Johnson’s blog:

Here’s a screenshot showing options I’ve gotten through my Welcome Mat:

Here’s a nice tutorial from WPKube.com on how to create a Welcome Mat.

2. The Scroll Box: The SumoMe “Scroll Box” introduces an optin form that is triggered when readers scroll through your blog; you can configure your optin form to trigger after readers scroll to a certain percentage of your blog. Because the form is only triggered when readers scroll, it will only appear to engaged readers, leading to an improved conversion rate.

Tip #6: Create a Content Upgrade

I created my first content upgrade and, thousands of subscribers later, it’s contributed immensely to the success of my blog.

I wrote an article here on DBT about my experience with content upgrades early last year, and, needless to say, it’s a strategy I’ll be leveraging for increased blog growth this year.

Here are some tips to help you with your content upgrade:

1. It Does Not Have to be Complicated: Most people fail to create content upgrades because they assume that it has to be complicated. No, it doesn’t. Most likely, people aren’t interested in your free 165 pages ebook. Instead, they’ll appreciate your short report, compilation of your best blog posts, a quick resource or tool, or even a video.

2. You Don’t Have to Create New Mega Content: The first month of creating my content upgrade last year, I got 700 subscribers directly from the content upgrade; within two months, I already had 1,200 extra subscribers. This wasn’t because I published new content that was a big hit; instead, it was because I updated existing content – popular content I published years ago – to feature my content upgrade.

Simply update some of your popular old articles to feature your content upgrade, and you’re good to go.

Tip #7: Ensure a Faster Website Experience

Research shows that 40% of people will abandon your website if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load. It has also been established that Google uses site speed as a ranking factor.

A slow blog can cost you half of your traffic. Having a faster website leads to better user experience, more traffic, and improved search engine rankings, and it’s one way to take your website growth to the next level.

Bamidele Onibalusi is an entrepreneur, blogger and freelance writer. He helps people build profitable businesses through his blog, EffectiveBusinessIdeas.com

The post 7 Tips to Supercharge Your Blog Growth appeared first on DailyBlogTips.com.

If you are new to SEO Google just released a video with some basics mistakes you should avoid and six tips you should apply on your website if you want better rankings. If you have been working with SEO for some time you won’t find anything new here, but it might be a refresher and remind you about the factors that Google considers to be important. You can watch the video below:

If you are in a hurry here are the 6 tips:

1. Do something cool: Make sure your site stands out from the competition.
2. Include relevant words in your copy: Try to put yourself in the shoes of searchers.
3. Be smart about your tags and site architecture.
4. Sign up for email forwarding in Webmaster Tools to get notified by Google if anything is wrong.
5. Attract buzz: Natural links, +1s, likes, follows… all these can help.
6. Stay fresh and relevant: Keep content up-to-date on your site to keep receiving organic traffic.

The post 6 SEO Tips from Google Itself appeared first on DailyBlogTips.com.

I built my first blog back in 2005, and today a large part of my online income is generated from my blogs. Over these years I made many mistakes and figured some things out. Below you’ll find 15 of them.

1. The domain name matters

When I started blogging I didn’t pay much attention to the domains of my blogs. As a result I ended up with some long and boring domains (e.g., FutureTechWeb.com, which was my first tech blog). This is a big mistake because the domain is one of the few factors you won’t be able to change.

The rule of thumb I use these days is to look for domains with two words, branding potential and a .com extension. If I wanted to start a soccer blog, for instance, I would consider domains such as SoccerHub.com, SuperSoccer.com and so on. Most of the times I am also willing to spend some money on the domain (e.g., $200-$500), because finding available ones that fit the above requirements is tough.

2. Quality is more important than quantity

As you can guess by the name of this blog, I have always been a big fan of quantity when it comes to content creation. Over the years, however, my opinion has changed a bit.

I still believe that you need to update your blog regularly if you want it to be come popular, but quality should be your first priority. If you only have two hours to spend writing content every week, for example, I would recommend you to spend all the time writing a single, high quality post, instead of writing four small posts to be published on different days.

3. It is about the readers, and not about yourself

If you are blogging as a hobby, then writing about whatever you feel like is fine. If you are trying to build a popular blog and to eventually make money with it, however, you need to be more conscious about the type of content you’ll publish.

More specifically you need to understand that your content should be appealing and interesting to your readers above all, and not to yourself. It’s about them, and not about you.

4. Social media can be a waste of time, too

Social media certainly became a buzz word over the past years, and people seem to think that they need to have a presence and be active on every single social media site out there. I joined the bandwagon for a while, but then realized I was just wasting my time.

I am not saying social media is useless, but that you need to have the right approach to it, else you’ll just waste your time. For instance, instead of joining every single social network out there join one or two at most, where you think your target readers/customers hang out, and where you think you’ll be able to add value and build real relationships.

5. The Pareto principle applies to anything, blogging included

I have a degree in Economics, so I learned about the Pareto principle years ago. It basically states that for many events and things in life, 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes. For example, 80% of the land in the world is owned by 20% of the people, and 80% of the revenues on most companies come from 20% of the customers.

After some years I realized that the Pareto principle also applies to blogging. This means that 80% of your results (e.g., traffic or revenue gains) will come from 20% of your blogging activities. What are these activities? Writing quality content and promoting that content. If you focus on these, the rest will come naturally.

6. You need a community around your blog

Apart from writing quality content and promoting that content, there is one more activity that is very important for your blog, and that is community building. It’s important because without a community your blog will not be a blog, but rather a website with some articles.

Your community will enrich your content (through comments and email feedback), keep you motivated, help to promote your blog by spreading the word and so on.

Practically speaking this means that you should engage your readers with your content (e.g., by using polls, surveys, asking questions and so on), and that you should interact with them as often as possible (e.g., via comments, email, Twitter and so on).

7. Having an email list is essential

When I started, around 5 years ago, I didn’t know what email marketing was. After two years or so I started joining the email list of other marketers, but until then I had not considered building my own.

It was a big mistake.

A responsive email list is one of the most valuable assets you can have. And mind you that you won’t be using it to spam people, but rather to deliver quality content that will solidify your relationship with your subscribers.

8. Giving away free stuff works like a charm

Over the years I have tried many types of promotions, from interviews to viral videos and linkbaits. One technique always seemed to work, though, and it was giving away free stuff.

I have given away WordPress themes, ebooks, plugins, and more recently my entire Internet marketing training program, and the results I got always exceeded my expectations. If I knew this back in the day I would have used it more often.

9. You need to think about the business model

If you want to make money with your blog, you need to start thinking about your business model right away. That is, you need to have an idea or a plan regarding how you’ll produce value, and how you are going to get paid for that.

Having this clear in your mind will help you craft your content, target the right readers, design your blog around your goals and so on.

10. Selling ads is not the best business model

When people start blogging they believe that the best, if not the only way to make money with it is by selling ads. This is not true.

Selling ads might be the easiest way to make money with a blog, but it’s definitely not the most profitable one.

On most niches selling your own product will be the most profitable model you can have, followed by selling other people’s products (i.e., affiliate marketing), so make sure to consider these at least.

11. Shared hosting sucks

When I started my first blogs I obviously went with a shared hosting plan, and since I couldn’t compare it with anything else I thought it was a decent option.

A couple of years later I moved to a dedicated server, and only then I realized how bad shared hosting plans are. The slow loading speeds, the downtimes, the security holes created by other users on your server….

I know we all must start on shared hosting, but as soon as your blog start making some money (e.g., $300 per month or so), consider investing half of that into a dedicated server.

12. Checking your stats daily is pointless

When you build your first website or blog you start checking your stats at least daily (some people go further and check them hourly….). Every new visitor is a joy, and a sign that you are doing something right.

The problem with this is that you are wasting time. Every minute you spending checking your stats is one fewer minute you have to work on actually get more visitors. On top of that daily fluctuations might give you the wrong idea of what is going on.

My advice would be to check your stats monthly.

13. It takes persistence

Everything happens really fast on the Internet, and when you start building your first websites you figure that they will sky rocket (both in terms of traffic and revenues) within a couple of months.

The reality is quite the opposite. While it’s possible, very few websites become popular or profitable before one or two years. If you want to play the game, therefore, come with the right expectations, else you’ll get frustrated and quit too soon.

14. Choosing the right niche is important

Choosing the right niche is critical if you want your blog to become popular and profitable. Sure, you should follow your passion (as you probably heard around…), but you should also make sure your niche is big enough to generate the kind of revenues you are aiming for.

Also remember that some niches will always be more profitable than others, regardless of their sizes. That is because people inside those niches actually buy stuff, so money circulates more freely.

15. Learning the technical part helps a lot

The Internet technology has advanced so much that today anyone can build a blog or website in 5 minutes, with no technical knowledge whatsoever. As long as you know how to read, you are good to go.

This is certainly a positive thing, as it democratizes the access to information and to publishing.

If you want to make a living online, however, it would be a good idea to spend some time learning the technical part. Start with HTML/CSS, and if you have time try learning JavaScript, PHP and MySQL.

What about you? What do you wish you knew when you started blogging?

The post 15 Things I Wish I Knew When I Started Blogging appeared first on DailyBlogTips.com.

Small businesses can gain a lot from taking advantage of technology and by using a website builder. One of the easiest and most important ways to utilize this is to start a blog. A blog is a tool that allows you to reach people and engage with them. There is no other method for marketing and engagement that is as effective as blogging. When you create a blog, it allows you to essentially speak to your target audience. This makes you more real and relatable to them, allowing for a deeper human aspect with your business.

Offer Promotional Material

When you are blogging, you want to ensure that the content is varied and valuable. You can make some blogs centered around promotional materials, such as coupons or special sales that are coming up. You can also create content about new products and services that you are launching. It is estimated that marketers who blog get about 67 percent more leads compared to those who do not blog.

Search Engine Optimization

People need to be able to find your business website to see what you have to offer. Search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the biggest factors in getting your website better search engine placement. While you want to utilize it on all pages, it is easier to take advantage of this method with your content. You start by doing keyword research to see what people are searching for. For example, if you sell a productivity application for mobile devices, you want to see which keywords people use to find information on these apps.

Once you know the top two to three keywords, you build valuable and accurate content around them to drive traffic to your website. Just remember that while the keywords are important, the most critical aspect of your content is quality.

Market Research

You have to know what your audience wants and your blog is an excellent way to assess this. Your website builder can implement different tools to aid you in tracking activity so that you can analyze what is attracting visitors and what is not. The backend of your website has analytics to show you information, such as where your traffic is coming from, where and how it is being shared, and the content types that are the most popular. Use this information to help direct your blogging strategy.

Enhance Credibility

Businesses must be credible in order to succeed. A blog is an opportunity for you to create a presence for your brand within your specific niche. When you blogand provide valuable information to your customers, you make your brand more trustworthy. Remember that success begins with providing something of value to your target audience.

Your blogging can help to increase your company’s value to the public by not only supplying them with products or services, but also with important information that is related. In fact, approximately 60 percent of consumers have a more positive outlook on companies that provide high-quality and valuable custom content.

Network More Efficiently

Networking with fellow businesses, professionals, and your customers is important to grow your company. When you blog, you get to meet people and engage with those that can be beneficial for your business. Make sure to read comments, answer questions, and work to develop relationships through your blog. Over time, the relationships that you do make could further your credibility and enhance your bottom line. Just ensure that your interactions are genuine.

With this information, the next step is getting your small business blog up and running. You do not need a complicated setup or anything fancy. In fact, keeping it simple will be the most beneficial. Just make sure that the content is sharable and that it is true and honest.

The post Your Small Business Needs a Blog and Here is Why appeared first on DailyBlogTips.com.

Albert Einstein has made many amazing contributions to the scientific world, including the theory of relativity, the founding of relativistic cosmology, the prediction of the deflection of light by gravity, the quantum theory of atomic motion in solids, the zero-point energy concept, and the quantum theory of a monatomic gas which predicted Bose—Einstein condensation … and finally he brings us 8 amazing blogging lessons.

Jokes apart, Einstein was perhaps the most influential scientists to ever live, and I would be strange if we could not find some blogging related principles among his ideas, right?

1. Persevere

“It’s not that I’m so smart; it’s just that I stay with problems longer.”

Your blog won’t succeed overnight; success requires perseverance! There’s no such thing as an “overnight success.” What often appears to happen overnight is the result of many years of work.

This is what I call the “silent years” of success. If you can persevere through the “silent years,” then you will qualify to succeed.

Eddie Cantor said, “It takes twenty years to become an overnight success.”

2. Focus

“Any man who can drive safely while kissing a pretty girl is simply not giving the kiss the attention it deserves.”

I like to say, you can do anything, but not everything! To succeed in blogging you must give your blog the attention it deserves. If you want a part-time income, then you put in part-time hours, if you want a full-time income, …you’ll have to put in full-time hours.

Focus your efforts, if you want to succeed! Focused energy is power, and it’s the difference between success and failure.

If you never focus your efforts …you won’t have a future, just a longer today.

3. Create Value

“Strive not to be a success, but rather to be of value.”

Don’t waste your time trying to create a successful blog, dedicate your time creating a valuable blog. If your blog is valuable to others, it will succeed.

You create value for others by solving their problems. Your blog must solve people’s problems. You will only be rewarded in this lifetime for the problems that you solve for others.

Labor to be valuable and success will chase you down!

4. Be Curious

“I have no special talent. I am only passionately curious.”

What you’re curious about is what other like-minded people are also curious about, so blog about things that pique your curiosity.

Don’t write about the mundane, and the obvious; explore your curiosity. Research the unknown and document what has never been documented before.

You have to “think bigger,” Einstein said, “No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.”

You have to think differently, he said, “He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would suffice.”

5. Make Mistakes

“A person who never made a mistake never tried anything new.”

Make mistakes; mistakes make you better, smarter, faster, and more relevant. If you’re not making mistakes then you’re not making progress. Get rejected a few times, mess up a few projects, this is the pathway to success.

Want to succeed twice as fast, make twice as many mistakes, run into twice as many obstacles.

Frank Clark said, “If you can find a path with no obstacles, it probably doesn’t lead anywhere.”

6. Don’t Be Insane

“Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”

You can’t keep doing the same thing everyday and expect different results. In other words, if your blogging routine is the same from month-to-month, your results will be the same from month-to-month.

In order for your results to change, you must change your actions, to the degree that your actions change will be to the degree that your results change.

7. Expect Opposition

“Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.”

There will always be opposition. People will oppose your blog, your ideas, and the risk that you’re taking. Zig Ziglar said, “Little men, with little minds, and little imaginations, go through life in little ruts, smugly resisting all changes which would jar their little worlds.” Never let “little men” stop you from achieving your dreams. Great spirits have always encountered great opposition.

8. Play Better

“You have to learn the rules of the game. And then you have to play better than anyone else.”

When it’s all said and done, your success will depend on how well you played the game. You must commit to play the game better than anyone else. If you can play the game “better,” you will succeed!

The post 8 Amazing Blogging Lessons from Albert Einstein appeared first on DailyBlogTips.com.

“Don’t focus on having a great blog. Focus on producing a blog that’s great for your readers.” –Brian Clark

The Internet is full of traffic. How do you attract at least a part of it to your blog? You have been working so hard to maintain the quality of your blog, but when will the analytics bless you with better numbers?

It is not that your blog drives traffic only if you are lucky. However, you can’t promote it carelessly or expect it to be read widely just by ensuring a great topic. Only patience and systematic efforts will get you the desired traffic. Look at these factors one by one, and you will be convinced that you can open the gates to the traffic you need.

1. Quality content

Everything you need to know about creating killer content (can be put) in 3 simple words: Clear. Concise. Compelling.” –Demian Farnworth

This is, of course, the basic requirement. So besides regular study and proper research, fresh topics and interesting treatment, get your content reviewed by professionals to make it error-free before sending it online. You will add value to it by making it relevant. Also make your content SEO friendly.

Google Analytics tells you which of your topics are getting more viewers, their location, language, and preferred devices. The blogs they like will highlight the areas in which you are strong and you will know where to focus for more traffic.

2. Captivating headline

On the average, five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy. When you have written your headline, you have spent eighty cents out of your dollar. –David Ogilvy

A headline is like a preview of a blog. The signboard to the shop a blogger has started. In this busy market, only a catchy headline can lead a reader to the display of blog he has created. A reader is generally looking for a problem solver, so titles such as ‘How to stay young even at the age of 50?, ‘10 Steps To Stay relaxed using Outsourcing’, and ‘The Ultimate Guide to…’ are the best click-baits to land them on your blog.

3. Visual bait

If content is the king, visuals are what make it kingly. Time and again the importance of the visual element has been proved. Any information which comes as a visual treat naturally gets more likes, shares, and ultimately more traffic. Some of the most popularly engaging visual contents are:

• Quotes
• Current affairs
• Stats
• Questions
• Infographics
• Memes

4. Promotion

There are two ways to promote your blog. Organic and Paid.

Under the organic promotion, attach the blog link to your email signature. Invite the receiver to read it. Because it goes with each mail you send, it is a good reminder, and sooner or later every receiver will click it. Mail others who you know would be interested in the topic. Then there is Facebook, Twitter, and other to regularly put up your link. If you are regularly interacting on various social forums, your blog will definitely get noticed.

Paid promotion or pay per click services, of course, gives you a wider and definite reach, but you need to decide wisely on who you want to read your blog, and strategize accordingly.

5. Bring in influencers

Mention a big brand or incorporate an influential person’s quote with a back link to their names. Cite an example using their name. This creates chances of that person or brand promoting your blog – knowingly or unknowingly — in the process of their branding exercise, such as tweets or status messages.

6. Keep in touch

Blogging is an online exercise, so you must regularly socialize on the internet. The most popular club is Twitter. It is a place where you will find both old and young, intellectuals and non-intellectuals. Tweet your posts there. You can also leverage an occasion by retweeting a past post. Make your content easily shareable. Facebook too brings you views, but far less than Twitter.

7. Keywords

Keyword is one of the keywords in promoting a blog. There are popular keywords, but big agencies are already fighting for it, so no point wasting your time there. For you, the best bet is long-tail keywords– search phrases made of more than 3 keywords. They are focused, cheaper due to less competition, and are easier to target. See these examples:
Health food — health food plans for children below 8 years
Hot pot – electric hot pot car adapter

8. Frequency

(Superheroes) can disappear for months or years and then burst back onto the scene with a climactic display of their impressive powers. Okay for superheroes, not okay for your content. It might feel boring and constraining, but publishing consistently brings results.” –Amy Harrison
People need regular reminders of your blog. You can’t pop up once in a while and expect people to promptly visit your blog. You need to decide how regularly you wish to write and stay committed to it.

9. Guest, guest

Be a guest. Bring a guest. Visit others’ blogs. Be their guest blogger. Bring a guest blogger to yours. Your reputation will help them, similarly, theirs will help grow traffic to your blog. At the same time, never neglect the quality. Be patient and careful. Beware also of spamming as it attracts painful penalties.

10. Loading time

Loading time is a major factor that affects ranking for marketers. Since you are promoting your blog, you must ensure that it has a good loading timing. Smooth loading of a page makes for a good user experience and brings a user back to the page.

There are no lines in the sand in the blogosphere except for those who draw those lines in an effort to get attention. –David Risley

No great blogger is awesome on his first day. He just keeps honing his blog writing skill, unfailingly follows rules he has learnt, and with his persistence, creates value that makes his blog awesome.

The post 10 Rules A Blogger Can’t Ignore For Better Traffic appeared first on DailyBlogTips.com.

The desire to start a blog, or any business for that matter, tends to stem from passion. There’s a subject you know a lot about and you want to talk about it, and you want to leverage this knowledge to promote your business or build an online community.

At first, the topics and inspiration come to you easily. There’s plenty of material you want to go through and items you want to discuss. You never struggle to put words into your content management system. Over time, however, conjuring up ideas for a new post can become far harder than you ever thought possible. You’re running out of steam, struggling with loose concepts you don’t really care about just for the sake of a post, and then you finally run out of ideas altogether.

You’re probably familiar with the concept of writer’s block; the idea that there is a point at which a writer just can’t seem to keep going with their work. Blogger’s block is no different. It’s a phase you enter when you are thirsty for inspiration but there doesn’t seem to be a drop to drink. Your blog and its readership wait for the lightning bolt of inspiration to strike, but you just keep coming up empty. As a result, new traffic may slow down on your site.

So, rather than letting your blog fall silent to the point it is invaded by digital tumbleweed, here are a few options to get you back on track.

#1 – Stop Blogging!

Even if your blog is a source of income or a major part of your content marketing strategy, it’s important to take a break from it every now and again.

There’s nothing to be gained from sitting over your keyboard, panicking about the fact that you’re not coming up with anything. There’s even less to be gained from publishing something just because you need to publish. If you do that, you’re undoubtedly going to be compromising the quality of what you write.

Rather than continuing to go around in circles, give yourself at least two days away from your blog. It might be just what your mind needs to get the creative juices flowing again.

#2 – Edit Old Posts

You probably have posts on your blog that are a few years old and might not be quite up to your current standards. Blogging is always evolving, and you might find yourself embarrassed by your archives if you look closely enough. If you go back and edit these historic posts to be more SEO friendly or improve the picture quality, you not only help your blog, but you could also find yourself coming up with fresh ideas.

You might even find that you now think differently about a post you wrote before, or have developed a better technique, having developed as a writer over the years. This gives you an immediate launch into writing a new post that reflects how you feel in the present.

#3 – Look At Other Blogs (Within Reason)

When authors need to shake writer’s block, they often read some of their favorite novels in the hope of unblocking themselves. It makes sense to translate that to blogs, but do be careful not to be too directly influenced.

Competitor’s blogs and industry news are often the best sources of ideas for new blog posts that will be relevant to your readership or target market, but it’s important not to copy them directly.

If a blog has just written “10 Things I Love About Summer”, don’t write “5 Reasons Summer Is The Best Season.” It’s far too close to the source material.

However, something topical involving summer (outfits, makeup, styles that work well in summer, for example) would be considered inspired-by rather than a direct copy. Ensuring you don’t focus on individual posts but rather the blog as a whole can also help with this. See if you can muster up thoughts and emotions from the entire blog, then expand on these in your own writing.

#4 – Browse Forums

Forums might not be as on-trend as they used to be, but there’s still plenty online to use as fodder for blog posts. Find a forum that is relevant to your niche, then dive on in and see what people are talking about.

A great way to do this is to look for questions forum users are asking about your niche. You can then write a blog post in response to those queries, even if you never publish your reply on the forum itself. If one person is asking the question, it’s likely someone else is too, so you’ll scoop up traffic from Google searches and break your block at the same time.

#5 – Write About Not Being Able To Write

It might sound odd, but it works. Often the problem with blogger’s block is not in the words themselves, but your attitude to the words or even how you feel about your blog as a whole. Writing that out can be hugely beneficial, especially as it might be the first time you see the real causes on screen. Maybe you have been feeling dejected with your numbers not growing, or you’re concerned about the quality of your images — all real issues that can cause a block in your mind.

At the very least, this post will inform your readership of what’s happening and why there are no new posts. The fact it might help you shake the block once and for all is just a lovely potential bonus.

Blogger’s block is an inevitability, but that doesn’t mean there’s no light at the end of the tunnel. If your creativity can suddenly dry up and cause a block, there will always be a way to get it running again. It might take a few false starts and sputters, but eventually the walls will come down and you’ll be able to blog freely once more.

Stephen Van Delinder is a Co-founder of Reputation Resolutions, a company that serves individuals and businesses in restoring, building, and maintaining their online reputation and brand. Armed with certifications in Digital Marketing from New York University, Google, and Microsoft, Stephen applies his knowledge of online reputation management to help people and businesses look their best online.

The post 5 Solutions To Blogger’s Block appeared first on DailyBlogTips.com.

Starting a blog is no longer enough.

There are millions of blogs out there, and most of them get nowhere because they don’t have a strategy in place.

In this post, you’ll not only learn blogging for beginners, but you’ll get 17 concrete steps you can take to dramatically increase your chances of success.

It doesn’t matter if you haven’t started a blog yet, or if you’re a veteran, because just one of these tips can make a big difference in your life and in your blogging.

With that said, let’s start with the first tip.

1. Passion

Don’t just start a blog because you want to make money. There are no shortcuts to success.

If you want to build a thriving blog that brings in revenue, you will have to work hard, and to stay motivated, you have to find something you’re passionate about.

Or at least something you’re interested in.

2. Purpose

When your purpose is weak, your chances of giving up somewhere along the way go up dramatically.

So ask yourself the following questions:

• Why are you starting a blog?
• What do you want to get out of doing this?
• Why do you want to succeed?

If you have a strong reason for starting your blog, you will go far. This is a long-term game. Always remember that.

3. Niche

The next step is to find your niche. The best way to stand out from all the millions of blogs out there is to become an expert in a highly targeted area.

Think opt-in conversion expert instead of email marketing. Think turning your blog into a book instead of just general blogging tips.

Get specific and you will go far.

4. Solve a Problem

One addendum to finding your niche is to make sure you solve a problem.

Money is made by solving problems for people. If you can help someone get more subscribers on their list and make more money, you’re solving a problem.

So think about what problem you’re solving, and then do some research on if people are willing to pay for having that problem fixed.

5. Personality

To really stand out from all the noise, you have to inject your personality and expertise into your blog.

There are too many people out there teaching something they have no experience in.

If you don’t have experience, get some. The more you know, the more you can share with your audience, and the more they will grow to know, trust and like you.

6. Come Up with a Domain Name

There are many ways of coming up with an excellent domain name, but in the end, you alone have to decide what kind of name and brand you want to build.

A few tips for coming up with a good domain name is to make it:

• Unique
• Memorable
• Easy to spell
• Concise

Coming up with a name is tough, so go for good enough instead of perfect.

7. Tag line

Coming up with a tagline is not absolutely necessary when you’re starting out, but it can be a lot of fun.

Go for a tag line that communicates who you help and what you help them with. If you help small businesses get more leads on their email newsletter, a simple tag line could be:

“Turn your readers into leads, and your leads into raving customers.”

8. Pick Your Web Host

Avoid using a free blogging option like WordPress.com or Blogger.com. If you’re serious about blogging, you need a self-hosted service.

There are plenty out there, like BlueHost and HostGator. They are just a few dollars a month and will get you started on the right path.

9. Pick Your Theme

Next up is picking a WordPress theme that makes your blog look professional.

Again, there are several free options out there, but I recommend you spend some money and get a good premium theme. Some of my favorites are:

• WooThemes
• Thesis
• Genesis

If you’re strapped for cash right now, go with a simple free theme and upgrade later.

10. Pick Your Plugins

Once you’ve got a web-host and a good looking theme, it’s time to get your plugins in order.

Keep the amount of plugins you use to a minimum. Each plugin you add will (usually) make your site slower, which isn’t the best thing you can do.

Here’s a list of plugins I use:

• Akismet — to prevent spam.
• Audio player — to play interviews and podcasts.
• Broken link checker — so I can remove and fix broken links.
• Contact form 7 — so people can contact me.
• Google XML sitemaps — to create a nice and simple sitemap for Google to crawl.
• Popular posts — to help people find my best content.
• Sharebar — so people can share my content on social media.
• WP smush.it — to reduce image file sizes and make my site load faster.
• WP super cache — another plugin that helps my site load faster.

11. Analytics

The next thing you have to do is get analytics set-up, which will help you keep track of how many visitors you get, where they are coming from, and what they are doing on your site.

If your traffic isn’t growing from month to month, something needs to change, but remember, traffic isn’t everything.

If your goal is to make money with your blog, you should be building your email list, and converting that traffic into email subscribers.

12. Content Strategy

You need to have a solid content strategy in place, so think about the following questions:

• What kind of content will you produce? (audio, text, video)
• How will you produce it?
• How often will you publish new content?
• How will you make new readers aware of old content?
• How will you use your content to grow your business?

Your content is what will build authority and trust. The more you can share, the more people will trust you.

13. List Building

I mentioned building your list above, and it’s crucial if you want to make money with your blog. Think about how you will get people on your list, and what email service provider you will use.

One of the easiest ways to start is to give away a free 5 to 10 page report when people sign-up.

There are many email list service providers out there, and they do cost money, but it’s an investment worth making. One of my favorites is Aweber. I’ve been using them for over 5 years.

Do not skimp on starting an email list, because while you may save money now, you will end up losing thousands in lost opportunity down the road.

14. Monetization

The next step is to think about how you will monetize. How will you make money with your blog?

If you don’t want to make money with your blog, you can skip over this step. But I see so many people jump into blogging without having a simple business plan.

You have to have an idea of how you will generate revenue. You don’t have to be crystal clear, but there needs to be opportunities for you to do so.

Look at what people are already paying for. Go to ClickBank, Amazon, or just use Google to find products and services people are selling in your market.

15. Traffic Generation

How will you get traffic to your site?

Write down at least three traffic generation strategies that you will start off with. For example, I started with blog commenting, but I quickly moved over the guest blogging, because it was so much more effective.

To this date, I’ve written close to two hundred guest posts for different blogs, and they all keep bringing traffic to my site and building my list, and consequently, my business.

16. Outreach

How will you connect with peers in your field?

If you blog about knitting, how will you connect with other knitters?

This part scares people, and it scared me for a long time. Or to be honest, it still scares me, but in reality, it’s about making friends and being yourself.

Just write down how you can connect with fellow bloggers. Maybe you can comment on their blogs, see if they hang out on Twitter or Facebook, or simply shoot them an email.

Start connecting with people right away. Think about how you can add value to their lives and people will appreciate your help.

17. Expectations

Last, but not least, write down what your expectations are. Here are a few questions to get you going:

• Where do you expect to be with your blog in 6 months?
• What will happen if you don’t reach those expectations?
• Why do you want these results?

If your expectations are unrealistic, you will be in for a disappointment, and you’ll probably give up.

But if you equip yourself with the truth, you’ll know what to expect, and you will keep going when the going gets tough.

Summary

Whatever you do, don’t just move on and read another article. Pick one of the tips above and implement it.

If you haven’t started a blog yet, look at the first few tips on passion, purpose and finding your niche. Sit down and brainstorm some answers and then move forward.

Starting a profitable blog is not easy, but it is worth it. It opens doors, helps you grow as a human being, and if you work at it, can help you make a living working from home, just like it has done for me.

It’s not easy, but it can be done.

The post Blogging for Beginners: 17 Tips Before You Start Your Blog appeared first on DailyBlogTips.com.