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 fianceé, 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.
