Important blogging tips for bloggers that consist of actionable and proven blog tips, ways to increase blog traffic and improve visitors conversion rates.
You know that I’m a huge fan of WordPress premium themes. When I was reached out to do an honest review on TemplateToaster, I know that I have to jump in and try it out.
For the record, I heard about TemplateToaster for some time now. Sure, I have been pretty much away for most of the time because I am pretty tied caught up with my freelance writing but this is just too good of a deal to pass through.
CONTINUE READING
Thrive Themes vs OptimizePress. I know.
You are looking for the most complete Thrive Themes vs OptimizePress comparison and yes, you are in the right spot. Being in the WordPress niche for around 10 years, it is only fair to say that I have seen quite a few WordPress builders. (more…)
You stare blankly on your WordPress blog for over 30 minutes and you have absolutely no idea which keyword you should be using to crush your competitors. They are making tons of money (and traffic) and you are dying for that.
Yes, I have been there before one too many times. I tried to use the same keywords that my competitors are using but honestly, I’m no where near their success. I probably do more backlinks and wrote better than most of them but I’m struggling hard to hit the first page of Google, what else about the top 3 spot.
The biggest question is “What had you done wrong?”
Today, you are going to learn exactly how to spy on your competitors keywords and literally crush them (yes, you hear me out loud).
Tools you need:
There are a zillion keyword tools out there including Long Tail Pro which I highly recommend. Why I would go for SEMrush this time?
The answer is really, really simple. SEMrush provides more information than any other tool out there. In the hands of a beginner, the tool is useless but imagine the power it holds when it is used by an advanced user.
Yes, it is like calling a knight in shining armor cook a full 5-course meals.
I use SEMrush for several reasons:
Let’s assume that you’re a complete newbie … and you hate Google Keyword Planner until death makes you apart. This is where SEMrush comes into play.
On SEMrush search box, fill in the keywords you are interested in and within seconds, SEMrush would provide you a list of advanced data which includes:
Take a moment and compare to any keyword research tool out there. I don’t think any of those can match what SEMrush can offer. Period.
Here’s a little summary of the important functions only.
Keyword summary (importance: 6/10)
Providing a general outlook on the keyword you are searching for. The report is based on exact keyword search.
CPC distribution (importance: 2/10)
If you are not an Adword publisher, this is pretty useless for you. It gives you an idea on one thing and one thing only which is CPC.
Trend (importance: 7/10)
The chart will show you how that specific keyword is trending during a 12 months duration. I mark this 7/10 due to the fact that we need to know what’s trending and what’s not for better control and monetization.
Phrase match report (importance: 5/10)
Okay, this is important but due to the fact that the information is all about the number of phrase matches search based on per month basis, I give it a 5/10.
Related keywords report (importance: 8/10)
Love this. It gives you a detailed rundown on the keywords you can use to further enrich your blog post. By default, SEMrush will show only the top 10 keywords. Click on the Full Report button to see the full list or Export button to download the list.
SE keywords (importance: 9/10)
This is a simple chart that shows who is ranking for that keyword (root and article domain). Want to spy on your competitors or simply knowing who are your targets is extremely vital in this business.
I got eyes on you!
Ads & Ads history (importance: 1/10)
Another feature for Adwords publisher. Since I’m not using it, I would skip this part.
Here’s an example of what SEMrush looks like when you search for keywords. Detailed reports are what you’ll 100% get.
This is probably the juiciest part of SEMrush which I got to admit, I’m in love with it.
For any blogging business, you need to know your competitors and I would be assuming you know that too. Well if you don’t, just refer back to the SE keywords by SEMrush and you get the top 10 and even top 20 results. Those are your competitors.
To kick start, fill in the domain URL (you can ignore the ‘www’) on SEMrush search bar and hit search.
And the magic happens. You will be spoilt with a HUGE report about the site you had chosen which includes:
And those are just the icing of the cake. You can further check on each categories and further analyze from it. For your information, it would easily take you a few hours to completely analyze your competitors.
How do you spy on competitors’ keywords with SEMrush?
With SEMrush, you are going to see what your competitors are doing exactly and how you can monetize them.
Now tell me. Do you think you can crush your competitors while they are sleeping? Yes, you certainly do thanks to SEMrush.
This is another good add-on for SEMrush; keyword difficulties.
For those who are wondering, this feature compliments the above (competitors keywords research) perfectly.
You will a report like this:
SEMrush keyword difficulty is shown in percentage where bigger percentage would be harder to compete compared to smaller percentage.
At the same time, you will also see the number of searches (volume tab), number of results, trends and SERP results.
Personally, my rule of difficulty recommendations would be anything below 70% (competition is tough with anything above 50%).
In short, I can’t imagine life without SEMrush. It is probably one of the most comprehensive SEO keyword research tool I ever seen until date.
You can grab a free SEMrush account here which will give you limited access for life and you find this useful, you can easily upgrade to Pro plan which costs $69.95 per month or Guru plan which costs $149.95 per month.
There you go, my summary wrap up on how to spy on competitors keywords using SEMrush. Tell me what you think using the comment form below and feel free to share this around with your friend!
Want to give SEMrush a run? Click on the banner below and create your free account today!
SEO i.e. Search engine optimization it’s a term which has people crying and many a webmasters losing their hair as they lose all of their traffic overnight. The future of SEO is something which can’t be predicted just by looking at the major search engines or the people who are ranking well these days. With lots of non predictive algorithms in place we can’t even tell which strategy might work well in the long run. With the recent Hummingbird algorithm update by Google things have become more unusual than ever. People who were on the top of their game have lost significant traffic.
Players who were nowhere to be seen are on visible everywhere now. But one thing is for sure these days, what’s most necessary is to have a coherent strategy. Everything has to be taken into account from the ground up. Once you have a proper strategy in place things might become a little easier. So what are the top seo trends to follow for 2014, let’s discuss them in detail.
Top seo trends to follow in 2014: The points to keep in mind.
1.) Social media integration with content: What once was an optional point for people while doing SEO is now one of the pillar points in SEO.
The emphasis now is on shareable content. People want to read stuff that hasn’t been written anywhere else already. They are not interested in the news rather they are interested in what a particular writer thinks about something. That’s the trend these days. The social media strategy for any website should be in alignment with the content strategy. Posts should be shared on different platforms according to the platform relevance. Job specific posts and career related opportunities and professional updates should be front lined for networks like LinkedIn. Real time content which is relevant only for one or two days should be promoted only on Twitter and other real time update platforms. Engaging content which can draw out user response should be shared on Facebook and Google+. Gear up your site for easy pinning on Pinterest and social sharing should be included for easy sharing options. Don’t make them stand out too much or don’t go other way and make them too bland. The right social buttons are those which are easily accessible and fit in with the user interface (UI) but still entice the user enough for clicking on them.
2.) Making really awesome content: The whole of 2013 passed with people screaming on the top of their voices that ‘Content is the king’ . This statement has carried itself forward in 2014. Content marketing is still the dominant strategy for getting lots of promotion in a limited time. Awesome content also helps in building a unique brand profile for your own. Awesome content can include anything from Infographics, interview series posts of experts, simple memes about any topic to analytical content which includes surveys and questionnaires.
3.) Focus on building your own brand: Building your own brand requires time and patience. You have to make sure you are visible everywhere and on every platform. A single branding strategy should be in place. What kind of brand image do you want to convey? Is your website a self help website with focus on helping the user, then your brand should inculcate qualities like supportive, easy to access, user friendly etc. By clearly defining what you offer you can stay in the user’s mind for a long time and decrease your reliance on search only traffic. Creating a cool brand image requires you to be active on mediums people use for various activities. You can use Instagram to upload cool photos so as to build your brand identity.
4.) Ensure you update old content: What is visible these days is that people time and again focus on the new and forget the old. You must update your old content weekly in order to make sure your old posts get that edge in SERPS. Google loves fresh content and so does everyone else. By regularly updating your old content you gain over the people who had posted articles on the same topics a year or two ago and haven’t updated it since ages.
5.) Clean your design: What’s the use of having a website loaded to the brim with UX elements and features if the user doesn’t like it. Minimalism and flat design are trends that are here to stay. What is needed should be used on the site, and the whole site should have a coherent design. There should be proper call to action buttons like sign up for our newsletter, download our eBook, buy our product and other stuff like that! The typography plays an important part in the whole user experience. Make sure your design is well structured on the inside and outside.
Related: Find out why StudioPress themes are used by over 112,000 website owners around the world today. Read more here.
On the inside you can check the layout of your site by adding missing schema components, you can add DC i.e. Dublin core code and apple touch icon to improve your site’s seo score.
These are some of the top SEO trends to follow in 2014. To read more about great SEO tips and money making tutorials, keep visiting ReginaldChan.net
This post was contributed by Aditya Nath Jha and sponsored by MyRefers.com, a unique peer to peer referral based job search platform.
Guest Blogger
Deep Wadhwa blogs at BloggersDog. I believe in helping people around. You can call me thinker; believer or exceptional writer.
Today I am going to share my review about a new yet potential product that I came across recently. It’s FormGet– an application that helps you create any kinds of online forms.
From Contact Forms To Guest List Planner Forms, it can be used to create any of them, in whichever way you want. So let’s take a look on how it works! Check this video that shows instant form building.
Why it grabbed my attention???
Its POWERFUL INTERFACE
FormGet has got such a powerful yet easy interface that you will not get stuck anywhere from adding fields to embedding it on your site. It’s all in a flow all hassle free. The smooth interface makes your form building easy. Just clicking on the form fields will do the work. After adding form fields, you can rename them, give your form a new title relevant to your form and further drag and drop fields if you want to adjust their positions. Now click on “Next” and your form is ready.
Grab the Eyeballs
The overall look of the form is elegant and attractive. It will surely grab your visitors eyeball.When your form gets ready, it gets navigated to a page where you will find different default “Design Templates” which you can use on your forms or else you can customize the form colors and your form footer section manually within the tab “Form Colors” and “Footer Settings”. You can even insert Paragraphs, Video , Images on your form Once the form is completed , you can use the Embed Code and embed the form on your site. Its as simple as that..
You also can use them as tabbed widget, which looks cool when you put it on your website.
Get Notified
Every time you get an entry on your form you will receive an email-notification notifying you about the entry. The user also gets an email confirming about his form submission. The acknowledgment is necessary and FormGet has this feature.
Share Your Forms
The next amazing feature that caught my attention was its usage for those who don’t own a website. Everyone out there who thought about creating website and then create forms to collect information can just opt for FormGet blindly. It gives you a form URL with which you can share your form anywhere you want. Also it has social sharing options where you can share your form on different social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and Pinterest. So, all those who want to collect leads without website, you must surely give a try to this app.
Do Smarter Email Marketing
Its Email Integration with all major email marketing service providers makes it even more compelling and robust. If you have an account with any of these email marketing providers like MailChimp,
Madmimi, Constant Contact, Campaign Monitor etc. then you can easily store the leads coming through your forms to your mailing list. And now since you have the target customers information with
you, shoot your marketing strategies with email campaigns. Not just this, it can also be integrated with Dropbox which can help save and manage the file uploads coming through the forms. Turns out to be really helpful..isn’t it? You can go through the videos for integration here.
Make Money Out of Your Forms
FormGet is integrated with payment gateway PayPal and so now you can collect payments via Forms. It’s easy, just add a Payment field to your form and rest it will do. So not just leads, you can make some good cash too, with these online forms. Its beneficial for those who want to create Hotel Booking Forms, Online Order Forms, Fee Registration Forms etc.
Assign Forms
Amidst trying this app I wondered, what if I have to create multiple forms for multiple sites. How will I manage all forms together? And then I stumbled upon its Agent Feature. This amazing feature allows you to assign forms to your team members and get the work shared. The team members or agents can handle the leads coming in through their assigned forms and manage them easily making the work much simpler and elementary. Its beneficial for large businesses where multiple forms are to be handled.
Analyze Your Forms
The form statistics is definitely a turn on as you can track how good is your form doing. It will show your form statistics according to views and entries, which can help you analyze which of your forms is better in collecting information.
Apart from all these highlighted features, FormGet has got many tiny yet substantial features, like you can track the entry users details on your dashboard like country, OS and browser. You can also track the point of contact at which they entered on your form. Language Translation that enables you to create forms in your native language will also help your forms to penetrate in your local regions. Field validations, captcha to help avoid spams, real-time conversation with entry users etc are some of the other features.
Conclusion:
FormGet is definitely promising when it comes to its features and management. It’s easy to use interface and robust features will make you form building experience better. It will not make you regret if you want to create effective online forms effortlessly. You can sign up for the free trial here and see if it will help you with your form creation.
Today, 12th June 2014, marked my first year anniversary for ReginaldChan.net.
And I’m pumped. It has been a long road; probably a very tough one but I’m glad I made it through.
Phew!
Of course, I met with many friends down the road in blogging and thank you all for being there.
In this article, I’ll expose all my secrets that I had experienced with for the past 12 months:
My traffic isn’t huge and I am a strong believer that quality over quantity. This means that I focus on a very simple blogging strategy; more targeted traffic.
As seen from the image above, I managed to gain 111,648 visits which equals to 306 visits per day. Personally, not much of an achievement compared to blogs who makes thousands of traffic a day.
Google is still my main powerhouse for traffic followed by social media and email marketing. Contrary to what others claimed about social media being the main generator of traffic, if search engine (Google in particular) isn’t your main drive in traffic, you’re definitely doing something wrong!
Want to build more blog traffic? Follow these steps:
I believe the biggest success is still my blog earnings. Here are my current (average) earnings:
Affiliate sales ~ $500 +/- per month
Ad banners ~ $150 +/- per month
Business consultations services ~ $1,500 +/- per month
Featured posts ~ $50 +/- per month
Total estimated earnings per month ~ $2,200 per month
On a bad month, I earn a mere $1,500 which is pretty A-okay to cover my spending especially with premium plugins, tools etc.
And if you think I’m making big bucks out of this, think again. There are many ‘gurus’ out there who earns at least 10 digits per month compared to my little blog here.
Honorable mentions is my second biggest success. I was mentioned many times in various blogs which I’m truly thankful of. Some of the biggest names that I can remember are:
Not to forget, I was extremely lucky to be included in The Top 100 Bloggers on Triberr by Dashburst. It was a honor and thank you!
In the past 12 months, I was also able to meet up with several top guys in the market. Of course, I kick started my first experts share on SEO 2014 and it was one hell of a challenge!
On top of that, I was lucky to be able to connect with the decision makers in WP Engine, SEMrush and even landed myself some opportunities for beta testing apps.
And recently, I have just secured a place with a publisher to publish my first book!
Yup, we all have them and I will be lying if I tell you that I didn’t.
For starters, I wasn’t focusing on my blog enough to convert it into a business.
I wasn’t offering my services when I started my blog. I only did it down the road; after 3 months. Until date, providing consultation services easily land me at least $1,500 per month which is huge.
My failure? I didn’t start much earlier and didn’t capitalize my knowledge in blogging.
Moral of the story: Use your skills and knowledge to monetize your blog!
My second failure is that I was focusing too much on social media traffic. Don’t get me wrong, social media traffic (some call it referral traffic) is good but you are required to be active all the time just to get some quality traffic back.
Seeing my situation, I know I wasn’t able to cope up with all the work and I changed my plan to focus slightly more on search traffic.
The third mistake was a little odd (to be honest). I was focusing so much on specific traffic (for better ROI) but I left out the opportunity to make more money out of it.
Take it an instant where I have only 300 traffic per day. Advertisers aren’t interested with these low traffic figures. They want huge 4 or 5 digits traffic a day … even if you have a 90% bounce rate!
Specific traffic is good for affiliate sales but when it comes to Google Adsense or advertising, you’re on a huge losing side.
Yes, I’m not letting you go empty handed. I’m giving away 6 months FREE hosting for you!
I have several reseller hosting accounts and I believe it is time to give back.
So, how do you claim your free hosting?
Important note:
I hope you enjoy this (small) celebration of mine. Again, my success isn’t huge and I am looking forward to grow even biggers.
Thank you guys for all the support and I really appreciate it!