Starting a blog is now easier than ever. Gaining an audience however, is arguably now quite a bit harder than ever (for most folk at least). People are generally so time-deprived that gaining new readers now requires way more than the kind of “If you build it, they will come” attitude that may have worked... View Article
The post Ten Essential Blogging Tips for Beginners (Video) appeared first on WinningWP.
What follows are the most popular articles that we published in June 2018. Articles published earlier in the month are more likely to make the list than later ones.
15 Tools ...
The post June 2018 Top 10: Our Most Popular Posts appeared first on Practical Ecommerce.
If you didn’t make it to our inaugural marketing conference, or even if you did and want to relieve all the excitement, read on to find out what went on at our one-day digital-marketing extravaganza!
No, it’s not a festival of all things Seer, but it is a gathering of some of our closest friends, colleagues, and experts dropping knowledge on some of our favorite topics like SEO, PPC, Analytics, automation, content marketing, and more!…
The post Seer’s What You Missed: Seerfest by the Numbers appeared first on Seer Interactive.
Facebook is getting a bad rap these days for its latest algorithm changes, which makes it increasingly challenging for businesses to gain organic visibility on the platform. But it’s not the only social network that is making algorithm adjustments – Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and practically every major social media platform are following suit.
The end goal, of course, is a better experience for users – and increased in-app engagement – but that rarely translates to better opportunities for brands. In response, many brands are returning to tried-and-true SEO strategies to recoup some of those organic losses on social.
But marketers shouldn’t hang up their social media hats just yet. Social media still plays an integral role in the digital marketing landscape, and the best approach is one that breaks down silos to leverage benefits across channels. The game is changing, but wins are within reach if you know how to play.
Facebook kicked off 2018 with a heaping plate of doomsday by announcing that posts from family members and friends will now have priority placement – essentially downgrading content from brands and publishers in the news feed:
The move doesn’t immediately spell the end for every Business Page; those with posts that generate meaningful interactions and discussion may experience a less drastic drop in factors like referral traffic, video watch time, and overall reach, compared to Pages with content that generates little to no interaction.
Facebook organic reach has already been on the decline, yet many publishers still rely heavily on Facebook, along with other social media platforms, for a large portion of total traffic:
It’s these brands and publishers who stand to lose the most as a result of Facebook’s latest algorithm change.
This isn’t the first time new obstacles emerged for brands in the digital marketing landscape. Google’s major algorithm updates have created similar mass hysteria, as well as substantial losses in rankings and even penalties for major websites and small-time players alike. In fact, challenges in the SEO landscape have led some marketers to place greater emphasis on social media to generate traffic and leads.
Google still holds the majority of search market share (63%), but social networks like YouTube and Facebook are becoming bona-fide search engines in their own right. YouTube is now considered the second largest search engine, with more than 1.3 billion users and more than 30 million visitors daily, while Facebook’s Graph Search and, more recently, Facebook Local, put the platform on the search map, particularly for local search.
Now it’s coming full-circle, and marketers are once again seeking ways to fill the gaps and keep those traffic and lead pipelines full.
Further Reading:
The solution isn’t a one-or-the-other proposition; it’s leveraging the benefits of multiple marketing channels in a cohesive strategy for a mutually-beneficial boost. In other words, leveraging social media to boost SEO, and vice-versa.
Major social networks still account for a significant portion of external referrer traffic for digital publishers. According to Parse.ly’s data as of May 2018, the top 10 external referrers include:
Together, Google and Facebook comprise a whopping 78% of external referrer traffic. When you add Twitter to that equation, more than 80% of external referrer traffic is generated from a mix of search and social media.
It’s clear that marketers can no longer put all their eggs in one digital marketing basket. Diversification is key.
What’s more, the effort that marketers put into social media marketing can have a positive impact on SEO rankings. While Google doesn’t rank pages based on the number of followers a brand has, other social signals, such as links shared on social networks and native social media content (Tweets, Facebook articles, etc.), do matter.
Plus you can use SEO strategies like keyword research to optimize your social media content for search. Google crawls social media sites, and while it doesn’t index every Tweet or Facebook post, sharing your content on social networks helps Google find your new content faster, resulting in faster indexing.
Google has been indexing Tweets in both mobile and desktop search for a few years now, so your Tweets might even show up in the SERPs, boosting your organic visibility.
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Social media and SEO are not mutually exclusive, but the landscape is changing, forcing marketers to continuously adapt.
With businesses struggling for organic reach on the most popular social media platforms, marketers are turning to creative strategies to work around algorithmic obstacles. Use the following proven tactics to leverage the best of both worlds.
One of the main drivers of Facebook’s recent shift in focus was the meteoric rise of low-quality, branded clickbait content shared across the platform. Some publishers relied heavily on vaguely relevant and exaggerated clickbait titles in order to generate clicks or views.
Previously, generating a large number of clicks could increase organic visibility on Facebook, serving as an indicator that the content was interesting to the platform’s users. But as it turns out, some such content had misleading headlines, and many users weren’t actually reading these articles before clicking the share button. The result was a proliferation of misleading or downright false information across the social media ecosphere.
Marketers should focus on engagement rather than clicks. Content that receives the majority of its traffic from a single source may now be viewed as an indicator of clickbait.
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In other words, focusing on getting tons of clicks without regard for value is an ill-advised move.
Instead, prioritize the value that users get from consuming the content. Measure metrics like time spent on a page and bounce rates to hone in on the content that your audience finds most valuable.
Make it easy for users to share content from your website with social media share buttons to boost likes and shares across multiple social media platforms. Remember, consumers place a high value on content shared by friends and family members – plus, those posts get priority placement in Facebook’s news feed.
Influencer marketing has been around for a while, but it’s growing in prominence. Because influencers are real people with authentic connections, most influencer profiles aren’t getting hit by algorithmic changes, and if they are, it’s minimal.
Leveraging influencers to share and promote content proves an effective tactic for brands that have been negatively impacted by Facebook’s changes, and makes it possible to earn their content priority news feed placement. That’s not to say that Facebook and other social networks won’t start downgrading sponsored content in the same way that they do brand and business content, but for now, influencers are one of the most effective ways to regain lost reach.
But don’t just stick to macro-influencers (those with 10,000-plus followers or connections). Stakla’s 2017 Consumer Content Report: Influence in the Digital Age found that, when it comes to making purchase decisions, consumers are three times as likely to be influenced by content from friends and family members than they are by content shared by celebrities, so generating engagement and shares from users with smaller networks can have a valuable influence.
According to Stakla’s research:
For marketers, this means that cultivating user-generated content must be a priority. The good news is that consumers already share experiences on social media. In fact, 78% of respondents said that they post on social media about positive buying experiences, such as purchasing a car, dining at a restaurant or traveling.
Rather than banking on the possibility that users will create content about your brand, go the extra mile to incentivize your audience to create authentic content through contests and giveaways, or provide discounts for product reviews or testimonials. User-generated content is particularly powerful not just for social proof, but also for SEO: one-fourth (25%) of search results for the 20 largest brands worldwide are links to user-generated content.
Further Reading:
Quick wins are possible with paid social, and Facebook’s audience targeting options are considered the gold standard by many marketers. Optimize both organic and paid ad campaigns by taking advantage of Facebook’s rich audience targeting and other features, such as:
Facebook isn’t the only social network with paid advertising options; every major social network, including Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Snapchat, YouTube, and Pinterest, also offers paid advertising. Each network has its own ad and targeting options, as well as its own analytics tools to measure performance, or you can opt for a third-party paid social optimization tool to get the biggest bang for your buck.
Where should marketers run paid social campaigns? It depends on where your audience is. Facebook is generally considered a viable option for most brands, and a majority of marketers (95.8%) in a March 2016 survey said that Facebook produces the best ROI, with Twitter (63.5%) and Instagram (40.1%) rounding out the top three:
This doesn’t mean that these platforms are the right (or the only) choice for you. Dig into your data to find out where your audience is spending the most time and when.
Further Reading:
New social media platforms are cropping up all the time. Some take off like wildfire and others flop. Social media marketers have their work cut out for them when it comes to staying on top of the social media landscape and managing an increasing number of social media campaigns across channels.
Cross-channel diversity is imperative because algorithm changes significantly impact reach, clicks and other metrics. If you’re not relying exclusively on one social platform, these sudden changes are less devastating.
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Again, marketers should focus on the social media platforms where their target audiences are spending the most time. For some, that means a heavy focus on Facebook with a lesser focus on platforms such as Snapchat and Instagram. For others, it may mean devoting most of your resources to visually-oriented platforms like Instagram and Pinterest. Consider not only which platforms are best for reaching your target audience, but how much of your resources you devote to each.
This helpful 2018 Social Audience Guide by Spredfast breaks down audience stats by platform:
It’s not just about diversifying the social media networks you use, but also the types of content that you create and share on those platforms. Some consumers prefer to watch a video over reading an article, while others prefer graphics and shorter content. Repurposing content in various formats and optimizing for the target audience you’re reaching on every social media platform makes it possible to cater to unique behaviors and audience preferences.
Use interactive content to boost engagement, and ensure that you’ve got a healthy mix of promotional, informational, entertaining, and curated content. Sharing curated content from influencers, for instance, helps to nurture those relationships for your influencer marketing campaigns and can net you reciprocal shares and links.
Brands, marketers, and publishers are facing an uphill battle in the digital marketing landscape today. Challenges in both SEO and social media mean that marketers need to get creative and develop holistic, cross-channel campaigns for better visibility and growth. At the end of the day, social media remains an integral component, and brands that readily adapt to the new rules are poised to win the game.
Main blog image source: Pixabay
The post Search vs. Social: Why Social Media Still Matters in the SEO Landscape appeared first on Single Grain.
Hostage negotiators at the FBI developed a model for creating a relationship between the bureau’s negotiators and their counterparts, which culminates in the FBI negotiator influencing decisions of his or her counterpart during the negotiation—like “let her go” or “put down the gun.” The bureau calls this the behavioral change the stairway model:
The model outlines a process for developing a relationship that flows through time, starting with the negotiator empathizing with his or her counterpart, then building trust and rapport before ever trying to influence or enact any sort of behavioral change.…
The post What Marketers Can Learn From Hostage Negotiators appeared first on Seer Interactive.
Most of us have used location-based data to analyze performance at one point or another, whether it be using Google Analytics geographic data to see where your top performing cities and states are, or whether it’s using paid search data to look at which regions are driving the highest performance for your campaigns.…
The post How to Analyze Location Data for Next Level Geo Analysis appeared first on Seer Interactive.
With the midterm elections coming up, Twitter users will have to brace themselves for a barrage of ads. But this time around, they'll also be getting information on who paid for those ads and why they received said advertisement.
Twitter recently announced that it's making more critical information accessible in its Ads Transparency Center. Users now have a dashboard where they can check up on an advertiser on Twitter and see the ads that they ran on the social media platform that week.
Want to find out who is advertising on Twitter?
Today we launched the Ads Transparency Center, which lets you do just that. pic.twitter.com/LYs8mpm3x6
— Twitter (@Twitter) June 28, 2018
Additional information will also be provided for political ads that are linked to specific politicians and campaigns in federal elections. The Ads Transparency Center will make critical details open to the public, like how much advertisers have paid or spent and the factors used to target particular users. Twitter will also be marking those ads with a badge to indicate that it's a political advertisement.
According to Bruce Falck, Twitter's Revenue Product general manager, the badge and extra information will “allow users to easily identify political campaign ads, know who paid for them, and whether it was authorized by a candidate.”
The news about the Ads Transparency Center came on the heels of American lawmakers questioning social media platforms like Facebook, Google, and Twitter about political messaging during the last presidential election.
Lawmakers have previously asked these companies what they were doing to ensure that political ads running on their platforms were legal and followed campaign laws on finance. This is crucial, especially in the wake of intelligence agency findings that the Russian government may have instigated an online campaign of division and misinformation.
Facebook, Google, and Twitter have already committed to doing more to classify political ads and inform users on who bought them. Facebook rolled out a searchable political ads archive on its platform as well as on Instagram in May. Meanwhile, Google announced it would soon release a report regarding political ad spending on its services.
[Featured image via Pixabay]The post Twitter's New Ads Transparency Center Reveals Who Buys Ads on Its Platform appeared first on WebProNews.
Contextual relevance is one of the primary elements that determines search rankings. But relevance requires words, and words require inspiration. As search engine marketers, we have access to many resources to overcome writer’s block. Here are nine of my favorites
The post 9 Ways to Break Your SEO Writer’s Block appeared first on Practical Ecommerce.
Running a WordPress website or a blog is exciting. The thrill of being able to share your content with your audience at ease is the driving factor in why WordPress powers over 30% of all the websites. A people’s platform, WordPress is a popular Content Management System (CMS) for new and experienced users alike.
WordPress however, does offer its fair share of issues that trouble its users. Some of these issues are generic and can be addressed with small amendments. Other complications with the system demand a technical learning curve to solve. This article highlights the common issues and how to solve them.
Themes and plugins are essentially the structures that support WordPress’ framework. Users often have to deal with issues related to them.
Theme issues:
The root cause of such theme related issues could be that something is missing in the zip folder or you could have simply missed uploading the root theme folder.
For sample data import errors, you can try any of these solutions:
Plugin issues:
Regularly updating and ensuring that you download plugins from reliable sources can reduce risk. However, some errors still creep in which can be dealt with in the following manner.
Losing your WordPress site’s login password can cause real issues.
If you can successfully retrieve it through the emailed link request – you are one of the lucky ones. A lot of WordPress admins never receive these emails in their inbox.
You can try resetting the email and password through the phpMyAdmin option. To do so, you will have to login to your cpanel, locate the phpMyAdmin and select the database option of your WordPress website.
Another way around this is to edit your theme’s functions.php file. Make the following additions and save the file to upload it. You can login to the dashboard and remove the code from the file after yet another upload.
wp_set_password(‘DesiredNewPassword’,1);
A hacked WordPress website is unfortunately a common issue. It can only be dealt with by the implementation of a robust website monitoring security system and with a WordPress security plugin in place. You can also try hiding your site’s login page or integrate 2-factor authentication to make sure that you have ample time to act before your website is attacked.
The most common WordPress error is the ‘white screen of death’. To make sure that things get back to the normal, you can try checking if your existing theme or the installed plugins are facing some compatibility issues. This method however could result in a lengthy process and requires you to deactivate all the plugins and reactivate them one by one to figure out the one that has been causing the trouble.
If you have been locked out of your dashboard, you can go the FTP way.
The other way of fixing your site’s white screen of death error is by increasing the PHP memory limit via FTP where you will be prompted to edit your wp-config.php. All you need to do is add the following code snippet at the bottom of the wp-config.php file
define( ‘WP_MEMORY_LIMIT’, ‘256M’ );
Spam is a recurrent issue faced by many new WordPress site owners.
The only way to deal with spam is by downloading and installing anti-spam plugins such as the Akismet plugin. You should also make sure that you cut out user-generated spam on your site’s group or forums to keep the situation under control. Eliminating spam is generally a great way to speed up your WordPress site.
One of the most irritating WordPress errors is where the site posts return a 404 Error when your website is unable to locate a page that you are trying to access. To fix WordPress posts returning 404 error, you can generate a new .htaccess file by navigating to Settings > Permalinks. Just remember to click on save changes.
If your website has been hacked or if there is an issue with your site’s web host provider, your website might run a message mentioning an error establishing a database connection.
To fix the issue, you can check your wp-config.php file to see if any of the information such as the username, database name, password, and host are all correct and not missing.
If the error continues, you can try repairing the error by adding the following line to initiate the repair of the database. Just be sure that this code is removed from the wp-config file to avoid public access.
define (‘WP_ALLOW_REPAIR’, true);.”
However, if everything is intact and the error prevails, you can seek assistance from your host provider regarding the error as it might be taking place due to issues at their end.
There are unfortunately another hundred WordPress errors that demand a space in this article, but we have captured the most common ones that can be dealt with easy tweaks. These errors occur to make sure that all your website elements are in their right places before it’s too late to make a change and your website might go missing, entirely.
Pawan Sahu is a digital marketer and passionate blogger at MarkupTrend.
Given the power of visual content (it’s more memorable and more engaging than text-based content), many marketers have turned to DIY graphic design software or contracted with graphic artists.
With more traditionally text-focused people entering the world of visuals, it’s time for a brief refresher on the essential principles of design. It’s time for a reminder that the strategic use of typography, color, and white space can drastically improve the efficacy and aesthetics of visual content.
These three design tips will keep your blog, social media, and other visuals on the right track.
A telltale sign of an amateur designer is a shortage (or misuse) of white space. If you’re unfamiliar with the term, white or negative space refers to the unmarked spaces around or between visual elements in a design.
Apple’s use of white space for its HomePod page is extreme, but effective. The stark emptiness of the designs force viewers to focus on the product, which is often a work of art.
In contrast, non-designers often itch to fill every inch of space with text, images, or other design elements, leaving no place for the eye to rest.
Non-designers mistakenly want to fill every inch of space with text, images, etc., says @MNediger
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To improve your designs, take a less-is-more approach. Remove elements that don’t clarify to give breathing room to the core elements. Use wider margins around the edges of the design and expand the space between unrelated elements to clarify page structure.
Leaving unmarked space in a design can immediately improve its visual appeal and ability to communicate. Always ask before you finish a design: Is there anything I can remove to improve this design?
Typography simply refers to the technique of positioning and styling type, but true typography aficionados say designing with type is both a science and an art. A lot of technical knowledge is required to master type design: the anatomy of letterforms; rules for kerning, tracking, and leading; type style classifications; etc.
As marketers and amateur designers, you can’t be expected to learn all these details. Instead follow this basic rule to up your typography game: Balance readability with style.
Balance readability w/ style to up your #typography game, says @Mnediger. #graphicdesign
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Every font brings something to the table in terms of both readability and style. Typically, the more stylized a font is, the harder it is to read. Since the fundamental purpose of type is to communicate information, highly stylized, hard-to-read fonts should be used with caution.
That doesn’t mean, however, that type must be boring. An easy way to create balance between readability and style is to use stylized fonts for large header text and keep body text more readable with minimal, traditional fonts. The combination allows you to inject your brand’s flair or taste into the graphics without forgetting the graphic’s purpose: communication.
Use stylized fonts for header text and traditional fonts for body text, says @Mnediger. #graphicdesign
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Oh, and don’t go overboard with fonts, either. Stick with a maximum of two to three fonts per graphic. Any more, and you’ll have trouble creating a cohesive design.
Stick with 2-3 fonts (max) in a #graphicdesign, says @Mnediger.
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Any professional designer will tell you there’s a lot more to the process of choosing fonts than balancing style with readability, but this simple rule serves as a great entry point into the complex world of typography.
Color is tough to get right. Even some full-time designers struggle to use color effectively in their designs. At the same time, because color is innately intertwined with emotion, color choices have an immense influence on a viewer’s perception of a design.
How do you make great color choices?
Use simple, high contrast color schemes to focus attention on elements of the design. Use contrast to add visual interest, but, more importantly, to direct the viewer’s eye toward key information, like keywords, icons, or data points.
What is a high contrast color scheme?
High contrast schemes use colors found across from each other on the color wheel. Traditionally, these schemes are referred to as complementary and split complementary.
Complementary color schemes feature two colors with highest possible contrast. Check out how MailChimp has used a variation on a split complementary color scheme for a visual on its Twitter feed:
The bright, bold “50%” jumps out. The stat catches the eye because it’s featured in the warmer, more saturated color. This is likely a strategic decision by a clever designer who knows research shows humans react to warm, saturated colors, while cool, desaturated colors recede into the background.
When picking colors for your next project, keep in mind that strategically used high contrast color schemes create visual impact and highlight the most important information.
Use high contrast color schemes to create visual impact and highlight key information, says @Mnediger.
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I don’t recommend creating a color scheme from scratch – even seasoned designers struggle with this tricky task. Instead, head to a free app like Color Hunt for inspiration. It gives you access to user-made color schemes from designers across the world, and its “popular” filter is great for getting an idea of what palettes work well.
If you start thinking like a designer, you can produce graphics that are more beautiful, that communicate more clearly, and that do their job more effectively. Here are the three key design tips to keep in mind that will help you take your visual content to the next level:
Are you ready to create some DIY visual content? Let me know in the comments.
Please note: All tools included in our blog posts are suggested by authors, not the CMI editorial team. No one post can provide all relevant tools in the space. Feel free to include additional tools in the comments (from your company or ones that you have used).
Not an expert in multiple areas of content marketing? Improve your skills, learn lots of tips, and gather with folks encountering the same challenges. Register today for Content Marketing World Sept. 4-7 in Cleveland, Ohio. Use code BLOG100 to save $100.
Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute
The post 3 Graphic Design Tips for Non-Designers appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.
By now the advantages of blogging are undoubtedly well-established. Statistics show that:
However, if you don’t have an SEO strategy for your blog, you are most certainly missing out. Research shows that SEO leads have a 14.6% close rate, compared to a 1.7% close rate through outbound means.
In other words, it is not enough to blog. You need to make sure your blog ranks in the search engines. The following basic tips will help you optimize your blog for search engines:
Take a look at the screenshot below — from an article on the Writers in Charge website:
You’ll notice the section underlined in red? That’s breadcrumbs.
You can also see this implemented on all Search Engine Watch articles, including this one you are reading.
Using breadcrumbs has two main advantages:
Any article discussing basic blog SEO tips that doesn’t talk about content is incomplete. While Google has maintained a level of secrecy about factors it uses to rank websites, it has never shied away from emphasizing the importance of content. In fact, according to Google Search Quality Senior Strategist Andrey Lipattsev, content, links, and rankbrain are the three most important search ranking factors.
The main question, however, is this: what gives a blog post an advantage over others in the search engines. While Google has been very vague, SEO experts have some data based on analysis:
Taking the extra time required to add relevant, properly-tagged images to your blog post can seem frustrating, but it will be well worth it. It’s one of the easiest, most basic things you can do to help your content rank better.
According to Backlinko’s analysis of over one million articles, blog posts that contain at least one image significantly outperformed content without any images. That said, it doesn’t seem to matter much whether a piece of content has one or ten images: at the very least, make sure to include an image in all of your blog posts.
Links are undoubtedly one of the most important search engine ranking factors. In fact, the impact links play on search engine rankings is so significant that Backlinko’s research found that links influence the rankings of any content piece more than anything else.
However, a lot of attention is often paid to external links to the detriment of internal links. In a case study, Ninja Outreach explained that they were able to boost their search traffic by 40% simply by working on their internal linking.
Here are some tips:
Depending on the CMS you are using for your blog, you’re likely to be stuck with an SEO-unfriendly permalink structure. Permalinks are the web address used to link to your content.
For example, if you own the blog: howtoteachadog.com and publish an article titled “How To Teach a Dog to Catch,” the resulting URL structure could be this:
howtoteachadog.com/?p=100
Or this:
howtoteachadog.com/how-to-teach-a-dog-to-catch
In most cases many blogs are stuck with the first version — which gives no indication of what the article is about. The second structure, on the other hand, is more descriptive and will be more effective from an SEO perspective.
If you use WordPress, this article will show you how to change your blog permalink structure. If you use other CMSs, they most likely have an official tutorial on how to do this.
Plugins can give you a kind of superpower when it comes to your blog SEO. While you want to be careful with what plugins you install (in order to avoid clunking your site and making to slower), installing and using the following basic SEO plugins will give you an edge:
This is as basic as it gets. Google admits that links are one of the top three ranking factors it uses when ranking websites. Effective blog SEO is not possible without external links.
Here are some ideas to help you get backlinks to your blog:
Google has revamped how its ad services and products are organized and sold in a bid to make its advertising system easier for brands to understand.
After two decades, Google is retiring AdWords and DoubleClick names and rebranding them instead. They are also being reorganized in order to better showcase their capabilities and growth trajectory. DoubleClick products and the Google Analytics 360 Suite will now fall under the umbrella of Google Marketing Platform. DoubleClick Ad Exchange and DoubleClick for Publishers will be integrated into the Google Ad Manager while AdWords will now be called Google Ads.
Google AdWords is officially becoming Google Ads! Meet our new brand and read more about the full announcement here: https://t.co/7lal06WGGX pic.twitter.com/MiD5xGaGvR
— Google AdWords (@adwords) June 27, 2018
The newly introduced Google Marketing Platform is designed to assist clients in planning, buying, measuring and optimizing their digital media and customer experience. The decision to merge the DoubleClick and Analytics 360 Suite brands was the result of marketer feedback regarding the advantages of using analytics and ads technology to create improved customer understanding and bigger business results.
Meanwhile, Google Ads will represent the extent of the company's advertising capacity across its numerous properties, like Google Maps, Google Play, and YouTube. Google Ads will also roll out a new type of ad strategy called Smart Campaigns. This feature will be utilizing machine learning technology and focuses on small businesses. It will be the default experience of start-up companies.
As for the Google Ad Manager, the unified programmatic system is developed to help partners to generate higher revenue in a more efficient manner.
The three new brands are being hailed as a way to help all advertisers and publishers pick the right solutions for their business, regardless of the size. It also aims to make it easier for companies to provide consumers with trustworthy ads and an improved experience regardless of the channels and devices used.
The restructuring of its ads business was announced on Tuesday by Sridhar Ramaswamy, the SVP of Ads at Google. According to Ramaswamy, the company's extensive ad offerings is challenging for advertisers, ad agencies, and publishers to navigate. He also mentioned that while advertising opportunities have never been greater, it has also become more complicated.
“It is harder for advertisers, publishers, and agencies that help them choose the right products for their business and know how to use them,” Ramaswamy said.
Despite the changes, brands have nothing to worry about as Ramaswamy emphasized that Google's “underlying products aren't changing.” But while the rebranding is basically just a name change, there will be small changes in some ad interfaces that will streamline the different services that the company's advertising and marketing products offer.
The post Google Rebrands AdWords, Introduces 'Smart Campaigns' for Small Businesses appeared first on WebProNews.
As a 100% distributed company with remote work employees across the US (and one in Canada!), WebDevStudios (WDS) relies on Slack as our main internal communication tool. So when Slack goes down, as it did yesterday, our team is directly affected, but the reactions are pretty comical.
When you’re working remote and @SlackHQ has been down all morning. pic.twitter.com/yxJCZcyZ1w
— Chris Wieber (@cwieber1) June 27, 2018
What is a remote team to do? How can we continue to work on client projects, manage proposals, write blog posts, and just be successful when our main resource for communication suddenly comes to a halt? Well, we scramble, check in on one another, and find other ways to connect. When Slack goes down, and it will again at some point, here are some methods we use at WDS to keep delivering quality service and building amazing websites.
Our WDS team enjoys keeping in touch after hours and on the weekends. We use GroupMe for that. Mainly, we send each other photos from Taco Tuesdays, videos of our families enjoying a day at the park, or an update about a movie we just watched and enjoyed. But when Slack goes down, it’s where we come together to panic and regroup.
Since participation in GroupMe is not mandatory and not everyone on our team uses it, we send text messages to those that don’t and verify that, yes, it’s all of us who can’t access Slack, not just them. We’re all in this together.
Whatever happened to good ol’ fashioned email? It’s still a viable form of communication, especially if your company is using Gmail. You can still share Google Docs and Sheets and keep projects moving along.
If you’re not familiar with Basecamp and you work on a team that tackles multiple tasks, you should get to know this project management solution. Not only does it keep things organized, but it also allows for communication threads per project or task. Very often, when WDS teammates need to update one another on specific assignments, they do so via Basecamp rather than on Slack. It just keeps project communications neater and tidier.
Hey, we like each other. We, really, really like each other—so much so, in fact, that a lot of us are Facebook friends, follow each other on Instagram, or tweet at each other on Twitter. So when Slack goes down and someone is non-responsive on GroupMe and an email reply just seems like it may take too long to receive, we can digitally tap one another on the shoulder via social media messages.
It’s a great big tech world out there, but that doesn’t limit your options for communications. Oh sure, it can be hard to turn to an alternative form of speech. We, ourselves, were left feeling a little…
That feeling when #Slack goes down and our #team has to find other ways to communicate. pic.twitter.com/G9b3HG4VIl
— WebDevStudios (@webdevstudios) June 27, 2018
But at WDS, we are determined to remain successful when Slack goes down. We hope you are, too. If you’re interested in joining our workday adventures, we’re hiring! Click to see our Careers page.
The post How a Remote Work Company Can Still Be Successful When Slack Goes Down appeared first on WebDevStudios.
Google has finally taken steps to make their Calendar more flexible. The company has rolled out two new features that will allow users to customize their schedules on a daily basis and mark events as “out of office.”
Our lives do not run on a fixed schedule, so it only makes sense that Google Calendar should also allow for some flexibility. Let's say you prefer to have a late start on Mondays and will just make up for it by working longer the following day. A new set of controls in Calendar will make it easier for you to adjust your availability and limitations on a daily basis.
Google Calendar now has an ‘out of office’ option https://t.co/NO7q2ypO3l pic.twitter.com/Rwk6yKBhSd
— The Verge (@verge) June 27, 2018
This means you can adjust it so that your work hours on Mondays can start at 10 am while you can extend your Tuesday schedule until 8 pm. When someone sends an invitation to a meeting and it falls beyond your work schedule, they will receive a notification stating that you might decline.
At the moment, Google users can set up only a single default working schedule from Monday to Friday. But with this new tool, you can be as specific as possible.
Another new feature headed to Google Calendar is the “out-of-office” mode. It also works in a similar manner, but instead of blocking off their schedule with a random event, users can set it up as an “out-of-office” entry. So people who invite you to an event during this scheduled timeout duration will automatically receive a message declining the invitation. The message can also be personalized as you see fit.
The updates are Google's way of assisting its users to have a healthier “digital well-being.” After all, something as simple as setting up flexible work hours or scheduling time to be out of the office can have a big impact on your work-life balance.
The new features are expected to be available on all G Suite editions in the next few days.
The post Google Calendar's New 'Out of Office' Mode Helps Improve Your Work-Life Balance appeared first on WebProNews.
For roughly 200 years, the U.S. Supreme Court has resolved disputes arising from companies selling products across state borders. The conflicts often center on the preservation of interstate commerce and ...
The post Sales Tax Expert on Impact of Supreme Court’s Wayfair Decision appeared first on Practical Ecommerce.
Do you ever have doubts?
You’re building your blog, hoping to one day turn it into a full-time income, but you have no guarantees it will ever pay off.
What if this blog you created is doomed to fail? What if you’re wasting your time? What if you’re fooling yourself thinking this will ever lead anywhere?
Building a profitable blog is hard work, and it usually takes time to see the rewards. Not everyone has the wherewithal to see it through.
But those who do can find amazing opportunities.
Today, we’re showcasing a few of the biggest blogging success stories. These 10 bloggers built their blogs and today make $1 million per year or more.
We’ll tell you how they got started, how they built their blogs, and how they generate revenue.
These stories will show you that you can take many paths to blogging success, and hopefully they’ll inspire you to see it through.
Michelle Schroeder-Gardner didn’t intend for her blog to become the income machine it is today. She started it more as a hobby, not even thinking she would ever make money from it.
Once she made her first $100 from her blog, though, that changed. She saw the potential and got more interested in turning her hobby into a business.
Her blog kept doing better and better, and eventually she was able to quit her job as a financial analyst and work on her blog full-time.
She’s currently traveling full-time, touring North America in an RV and loving her life with her husband.
Her blogging income picked up some serious steam in 2016, when she further diversified her income.
Her main source of income up to that point was affiliate marketing, with some money coming in through sponsorships and advertisements. In 2016, though, she created her course Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing.
Her income doubled the month she launched her course, and in 2017 she had her first million-dollar year.
Steve Pavlina is an author, a motivational speaker, and one of the most prolific self-development bloggers online. He grew his blog to more than two million monthly visitors without spending a dime on marketing or promotion.
Steve’s passion for personal development began when he was sitting in jail, having been arrested for felony grand theft. At that moment, he decided to work on improving himself and turn his life around.
And it paid off. He accomplished many amazing things. He earned two college degrees in the span of three semesters. He founded a software company that developed computer games. He ran the Los Angeles Marathon and trained in martial arts.
Steve has experimented with many income streams to see which he likes best.
He mostly makes his money from affiliate marketing/joint ventures and hosting live workshops.
When hosting one of his workshops, he asks people who register about their personal struggles and uses this feedback to custom-tailor each workshop, which means he never does the same workshop twice.
Steve has also written a book called Personal Development for Smart People, the purpose of which was to create a single framework for growth that people could apply to all areas of their lives.
Pat Flynn was thriving in his career as an architect and had no plans to leave — until an economic downturn hit his industry hard and he was laid off from his job.
Before all this happened, Pat had created a little website to help him study for an architectural exam. It got thousands of visitors, and he realized he could leverage this traffic for income.
After studying up on doing business online, he created an ebook which he sold for $19.99 and made over $7,000 in his first month.
This got him so excited that he started Smart Passive Income, a blog on which he would share his strategies that helped him grow his online business. Today, this blog generates over $100K each month, with some months doubling or even tripling that figure.
But it’s not the money or material wealth that motivates him. Pat has remained a down-to-earth guy whose primary motivation is his family. He loves the freedom to plan his day around his family instead of his business, which allows him to spend the day with them and save work for after his kids go to sleep.
Pat has done a great job of diversifying his income over the years.
The bulk of his income comes from affiliate marketing and course sales, but he also sells books, software, and apps, and he makes money from podcast sponsorships.
Chiara Ferragni’s track record is impressive, to say the least.
She got her feet off the ground posting her daily outfits to Flickr, an image-sharing website, where she amassed a significant following. She then started her personal style blog in 2009 — when personal style blogs weren’t really a thing yet — and within two months she got tens of thousands of visitors per day.
She quickly began receiving sponsorship offers from fashion brands such as Dior and Louis Vuitton.
And three exams away from finishing her law degree, she decided to make The Blonde Salad her main focus.
Since then, Chiara has amassed over ten million followers on Instagram, Forbes named her one of the most influential people under 30, and she was the first fashion blogger to score a cover on Vogue.
The Blonde Salad transitioned from an outfit-of-the-day blog to a full-on lifestyle platform with its own e-commerce clothing store.
And Chiara Ferragni has become a brand in her own right and makes thousands of dollars through sponsorships, modeling, and appearance fees.
On top of that, Chiara leveraged her platform to launch her own shoe line, the Chiara Ferragni Collection, aside from her blog. This line has reportedly made made eight figures in 2016.
Vitaly Friedman was a freelance web designer before he started blogging. He had never taken a single design class at the time, but learned his skills from reading articles online.
He always had an interest in writing and editing as well, though, and he wanted to give back to the design community, so he started blogging.
Through one of his projects he was introduced to Sven Lennartz, who asked him to write for his German magazine Dr. Web. One year later, they started Smashing Magazine. They had no idea it would become one of the most influential resources for web designers and developers.
It grew from two people’s hobby to a business with a dozen employees and hundreds of contributors, and today gets over three million page views per month.
(Sven Lennartz is no longer actively involved with the site.)
For most of its existence, Smashing Magazine made money primarily from ad revenues. But seeing those revenues decline a few years ago, they focused more on selling their books and diversifying their income.
They now have a library of 60+ e-books for sale (which they also sell in packages). They run high-ticket conferences and workshops. They added a job board where companies can purchase job postings and find skilled employees. And they offer membership packages which are reportedly their biggest source of income today.
Brian Clark started writing about content marketing before people started calling it content marketing. He had been using content to market products and services for several years when he started CopyBlogger in 2006.
At the time, he wasn’t focused on selling because he didn’t know what he would sell. He focused on building an audience and had faith that he would identify their pain points.
And his faith was justified. As his audience grew, Brian was able to identify the problems content creators were having online, and he partnered with other entrepreneurs to create and sell solutions.
Brian has offered a number of training programs, plugins, products, and services through his blog over the years. Many of them have since been taken off the market, and today his main income sources include:
Timothy Sykes took $12,000 of his Bar Mitzvah money and turned it into $2 million by trading penny stocks. This feat got him on Trader Monthly’s “Top 30 under 30” list and on a TV show called Wall Street Warriors.
He then got hundreds of emails per day from people asking questions, which led him to write his book An American Hedge Fund. He initially launched his blog to help promote his book.
Around that time though, his hedge fund lost 30%, which lost him a lot of credibility. To get it back, he decided to start from scratch and repeat his earlier feat of turning a few thousand into a few million, resolving to track each step of the way.
Now he makes more money from teaching others how to trade than from trading himself.
Timothy sells DVDs, offers coaching, and offers a subscription program called Tim Alerts, which lets his subscribers follow his trades in real time.
Elsie Larson and Emma Chapman are a sister team who have turned their food and DIY crafts blog into a raging success.
Elsie started A Beautiful Mess in 2007 and Emma started a food blog a couple of years later. They then decided to combine forces, and that’s when things took off for them.
At the time Elsie was running a retail shop, and she used the blog to move products, but the sisters soon realized that they enjoyed the blog more and that it was more profitable. They decided to close the shop and make the blog their main focus.
They once got business advice from a friend who said they should diversify their income, and boy, have they taken it to heart. They have built up several healthy and reliable income streams over the years and they try to add a new one every year.
They sell banner ads through AdThrive, promote products through affiliate marketing, and offer sponsored content.
They sell fashion, beauty, and wellness products in their online store as well as subscriptions to monthly beauty boxes and monthly stationery packages.
On top of that, they’ve written three books, created several courses, and launched three bestselling photo-editing apps.
When Darren Rowse started blogging, he was only looking for a new hobby. He blogged about living in Australia, religion, politics, and other topics he found interesting. He didn’t even know you could make money blogging at the time.
A year later, he started another blog on digital photography and discovered he could make money through ads and affiliate marketing.
He only made a few dollars per week at first, but it was enough for him to see the potential. After consulting his fianceƩ, he decided to treat blogging as a part-time job and devote two days per week to it. He saw his income grow from a part-time into a full-time income, and eventually into an income most only dream about.
Darren has started and been involved with numerous blogs over the years, but learned after a few years that his blogs perform better when he focuses on a few. So today he only focuses on ProBlogger and Digital Photography School.
While affiliate marketing is still his biggest income source today, Darren has since been experimenting with different income streams over the years.
His second-biggest income source is product sales. Between his two blogs, he sells dozens of e-books and several courses. On Digital Photography School, he also sells Lightroom presets.
On ProBlogger he makes additional money through a job board, and also through hosting an annual event in Australia.
In 2016, his earnings were split as follows:
After two of her daughters were born, Heather Delaney Reese looked for ways she could use the journalism skills she acquired in college and still remain a full-time stay-at-home mom.
You guessed it. She started a blog.
At first she wrote about budgeting and saving money, but over time she transitioned to writing about her family’s lifestyle and travel.
Her husband Pete eventually quit his job to also work on the blog, and their three daughters now contribute as well.
Over time, she has turned what started as a hobby into a full-time career for their entire family.
Until March 2017, the Reese’s blogging income came solely from sponsored content. Every year their income increased as their audience grew and they were able to increase their rates.
From March 2017, they also started promoting products and services through affiliate marketing.
But their income truly boomed over the past seven months when they launched their premium courses, Blogging Blastoff and the Travel Blogging Fast Track, which they launched only months apart.
The launch of these two courses doubled their income and propelled them into their first seven-figure year.
If you ever have doubts whether you’re chasing a pipe dream with your blog, keep these stories in mind.
They all took different paths to success.
Not everyone struck gold with their first blog, and you may not either. Not everyone got rich on their first attempt, and you may not either.
That’s okay. Every step is a learning moment.
If you keep going and keep trying new things, you’ll reach your goals eventually.
It may be faster than you think, or it might take longer than you hope. But. You. Will. Get. There.
Keep that in mind the next time you’re plagued with doubts.
The post This Is How 10 Bloggers in Different Niches Make $1 Million+ per Year appeared first on Smart Blogger.
