Social media is becoming an increasingly large aspect of SEO and online marketing, and whether you like it or not, as an online marketer, you may well have to juggle various different social accounts in order to maximise your ROI and indeed make your website successful. (Don’t believe me? This infographic sums it up pretty well).
But managing all of those different accounts can be a big headache, and anything that makes your life harder will ultimately make you less effective. That’s why you need to read this post, because it is full of helpful tips (on how to manage multiple social media accounts) to make your life nice and simple. read more
If you want to take your website beyond amateur hour, you’ve probably already realised that it’s not enough to get lots of people to visit. If it was, black hat SEO techniques (like putting ‘free porn sex hot girls free car win’ in white text on a white background) would be more excusable mistakes.
But here’s the kicker: it’s not enough. Not only do you need to very quickly convince a searcher that your description in the SERP is their perfect match – you also need them to continue believing that when they arrive at your site.
I’ve got a few pieces of advice to help you get that conversion rate up. read more
Do you know that for every single second delay in your website loading speed your website conversion rate goes down by at least 7%?
Do you also know that 40% of potential visitors to your website will abandon it if it takes more than 3 seconds to load?
These and more insightful data can be found in this Econsultancy study; however, I’m not here to talking about website speed data but to share some practical tips to help you significantly improve your website speed.
In other words, one of the top ways to kill your website is if it is slow.
Whether you’re a blogger, a small business or a corporation, a slight delay in how long it takes for your website to load could be costing you a lot in revenue while some little tweaks to make your website faster could double conversions on your website. Here are a few tips for you:
1. Limit the Number of Plugins or Addons that Power Your Website
This is especially important if you’re a WordPress user; it’s impossible to run a website that is powered by WordPress or other major CMS without using a few plugins but the reality is that the number of plugins you use every day grows and ends up slowing down your website.
With an open source platform like WordPress, each plugins are coded by different people and as a result the server configuration required for each plugin to run is different; in other words, when the function a certain plugin provides is requested, it’ll make a request to your server which will eventually influence your website speed.
St. Patrick’s Day is here again and with it, the need to go out and get ourselves sloshed on some beer. This time around though, we have our handy smartphone’s to help us with the task at hand. Here are some of the best apps you’ll need for an awesome St. Patrick’s Day:
Bloggers are inevitably obsessed with the topic of creative commons, and if they aren’t yet, they will be soon. Why? Well, if you have ever seen the cost of subscriptions for stock photo sights, you wouldn’t have to ask that question. They are expensive, often offer nothing special and in general don’t cut it for most casual bloggers that don’t want to spend cash on what is essentially a place for their thoughts.
Using public domain or CC licensed content is the perfect way around that. You can use photos and videos as you like, not worrying about the cost or being sued for copyright. Which is ever bloggers wost nightmare, thanks to the many horror stories we are subjected to on the web. read more
You’d be surprised how many forget this one. They choose a platform, they load it up with a million plugins, they advertise to their existing social media circles, but when it comes to writing they miss the mark completely. What is great content? This is material which engages your audience. It is researched, highly structured content posted once a week or more that meets people’s needs head on with solutions. It produces a response (in their sharing) to their questions because it’s entertaining but also informative. Pick a niche, and then research ways i.e. read other blogs and construct a way to say what they are saying, but in your own voice. DO NOT REINVENT THE WHEEL.
Promote properly
I previously mentioned promotion as a way to grow your traffic. But here’s the thing about promotion: too much will kill your success before it gains traction. Many of you, including myself, have probably done the following when starting out: start blog, tweet 100 times a day, get on Facebook and beg people to ”like”, then auction your soul to the Devil when that doesn’t work out. This is not only painful, it’s unnecessary. The best promotion tactics, by far, are the ones which never get talked about. For instance, writing great content often produces a series. Conversion of these articles into PDF format and sharing with eBook directories and free document sites like Scribd or Helium is a great way to bump the odds in your favor. Angering your readers by over-promotion is an avoidable situation, so don’t do it!
Engage your audience
If someone, say a family member or friend, asked you a poignant question which gave you pause, would you ignore them? OF COURSE NOT! You’d jump right on the bullet train to Intelligentsia (sorry, bad puns abound in my world) and figure out a worthwhile reply to their query. So why is it when you post on your site, the only thing you see is the occasional greeting from Grandma? The ‘gurus’ bread and butter is no longer figuring out how to get traffic, it’s merely conversing (read:engagement) about all the traffic they get, thereby getting more. It’s a topic which spews dividends every time it is brought up. Simply put: present a question in your great content, then engage with your audience’s feedback. This method can be accelerated if you use forums to become an expert on your niche and use your blog URL as a signature in your profile.
Registering a domain name and turning it into a profitable blog takes time. It takes patience, hard work and quite a few clever decisions. Some people would even argue that at times it takes a little bit of luck. The one thing that’s for certain is that it’s not easy.
Though most people know how difficult it is to create a profitable blog, many are surprised to learn how easy it is to kill one. Getting noticed might take a long time but losing the lions share of your readers can be achieved surprisingly quickly.
If you’ve been enjoying a certain amount of blogging success of late, here are seven mistakes that you should avoid making at all costs. read more
One of the reasons I love working online and running a website is that it lets me mind my own business. I’ve never been one for office politics and I hate the idea of having a ‘boss’ so I’ve never been particularly partial to working your typical office job. As such then, I also don’t appreciate it when my work as a blogger starts to turn political and the whole thing starts to degrade into something like a schoolyard shouting match. Isn’t that the kind of thing lots of us are trying to avoid?
Unfortunately though where there’s money to be made there will always be those willing to resort to unscrupulous methods, and to try to blow out our candle to make theirs blow brighter. This is where ‘negative SEO’ comes in – which is the point at which bloggers stop concentrating on themselves and on offering a great site, and instead start thinking about how they can get ahead by taking down the competition and getting their sites penalized. Find yourself a victim then and you can see your website drop from the top spot in the SERPs to page eight and even see your content and design ruined. It’s unsettling, it’s unfair and it can potentially cost you a lot of money. read more
Because of the seemingly countless mobile s made for just about anything you can think of, writing blog posts, using social media, and checking website traffic stats for your business outside of desktops and laptops have become possible. Indeed, blogging has now entered the domain of mobile phones.
If you’ve never experienced the freedom of blogging anywhere, then it’s time you do. To get you started, here are the top blogging s that you should get for your smartphone. read more
Commenting is often an important part of being visible on the internet. Doesn’t matter if you’re trying to build a popular blog or a profitable online business, you still need to find a way to get people back to your site or blog.
There are many techniques to do that, some work better for bloggers, and some for online business owners. Even though the goals are different, commenting can boost your popularity and expertise in general if you do it often enough.
However, only because you’re doing something often doesn’t make you good at it. And when it comes to commenting, there’s one important thing everyone should focus on … that is not looking like a spammer.
This may sound obvious to you. I mean, you’re probably not a spammer and you only submit comments when you actually have something to say, so you might think that this post doesn’t concern you. However, are you 100% sure? read more
