How to use Maps To Make Your Blog More Visual

You often write blog posts that talk about or even promote events that you are planning and hosting. Events can involve either one or several venues, but either way location is usually a big factor. You may or may not have heard of Mapme, but you should probably look into it if these types of blogs are up your alley.

You may also just be discussing a topic or piece of content that has to do with places and locations.

Nowadays (and often in the olden days), readers gravitate towards visual content over written content. For blog posts, that means you want your content and the information it involves to be all the more visual, and less ‘texty’.

But to achieve this, you need visual tools that are super appropriate for your subject matter, and that engage people with your discussion topic uber clearly.

Mapme is built for just that. Mapme tackles content by segmenting location categories and themes, and creating personalized, “smart” maps in a very simple way.

How it’s Done:

a. Think of a map idea that would up your blog post’s engagement factor

b. Sign up for map creation on Mapme.

c. Begin the 3-stage process:

1. Create a map
2. Choose the borders of your map (the default zoom of your map)
3. Choose categories that describe your different places. Label them with a name, icon, and color, all of which you can go back and change whenever.

d. Embed the map on your blog, or wherever you want to engage people.

Other cool features that users can choose to take on:

-Opt to make the map content crowdsourced, so that those interested can directly and add location to your map. You can moderate the locations before they’re added.

-Make reviews available for your map locations, to make your map into a community forum and not only a knowledge base/guide.

-Choose which information fields you want to hide or display with each place: URL, phone number, logos, e-mail, etc.

Don’t forget to share your maps!

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4 Steps to Increase Your Blog Traffic

One of the most common complaints that I hear from bloggers is the fact that no matter how hard they try, they can’t grow their blogs past 100 or so daily page vies. Those early days are indeed the hardest, because you need to put hard work in without the certainty of achieving results.

If you are in that same situation, here is a simple strategy that will certainly increase your blog traffic and make you break the 1,000 daily page views mark. In fact, the strategy could be used even if your are already over that number but have reached a traffic plateau lately.

Just make sure to execute the 4 steps as planned and to spend the two hours and a half every day (obviously if you have more time available you can expand the time spent on each of the four steps proportionally).

First Step: Killer Articles (1 hour per day)

Spend one hour brainstorming, researching and writing killer articles (also called linkbaits, pillar articles and so on).

Notice that your goal is to release one killer article every week. If that is not possible aim for one every 15 days. So the one hour that you will spend every day will be dedicated to the same piece. In other words, expect killers articles to take from 5 up to 10 hours of work.

If you are not familiar with the term, a killer article is nothing more than a long and structured article that has the goal of delivering a huge amount of value to potential visitors. If you have a web design blog, for example, you could write an article with “100 Free Resources for Designers”. Here are some ideas for killer articles:

• create a giant list of resources,
• write a detailed tutorial teaching people how to do something,
• find a solution for a common problem in your niche and write about it, or
• write a deep analysis on a topic where people have only talked superficially

When visitors come across your killer article, you want them to have the following reaction: “Holy crap! This is awesome. I better bookmark it. Heck, I better even mention this on my site and on my Twitter account, to let my readers and friends know about it.”

Second Step: Networking (30 minutes per day)

Networking is essential, especially when you are just getting started. The 30 minutes that you will dedicate to it every day could be split among:

• commenting on other blogs in your niche,
• linking to the posts of bloggers in your niche, and
• interacting with the bloggers in your niche via email, IM or Twitter.

Remember that your goal is to build genuine relationships, so don’t approach people just because you think they can help to promote your blog. Approach them because you respect their work and because you think the two of you could grow together.

Third Step: Promotion (30 minutes per day)

The first activity here is the promotion of your killer articles. Whenever you publish one of them, you should push it in any way you can. Examples include:

• letting the people in your network know about it (don’t beg for a link though),
• letting bloggers and webmasters in relevant niches know about it,
• getting some friends to submit the article to social bookmarking sites,
• getting some friends to Twitter the article, and
• posting about the article in online forums and/or newsgroups.

If there is time left, spend it with search engine optimization, social media marketing and activities to promote your blog as whole. Those can range from keyword research to promoting your blog on Facebook and guest blogging.

Fourth Step: Normal Posts (30 minutes per day)

Just like a man does not live by bread alone, a blog does not live by killer articles alone. Normal posts are the ones that you will publish routinely in your blog, between the killer articles. For example, you could publish a killer article every Monday and normal posts from Tuesday through Friday. Here are some ideas for normal posts:

• a post linking to an article on another blog and containing your opinion about it
• a post informing your readers about a news in your niche
• a post asking a question to your readers and aiming to initiate a discussion
• a post highlighting a new resource or trick that you discovered and that would be useful to your readers

While killers articles are essential to promote your blog and bring new readers aboard, normal posts are the ones that will create diversity in your content and keep your readers engaged.

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4 Tips to Improve WordPress Blog for SEO and the User Experience

WordPress is the most SEO-friendly Content Management System but that does not mean that you sit back and hope your site make an appearance on top of Google search results with no additional efforts. Manual SEO efforts are always required if you want your website to perform well in organic searches. It works for you that WordPress makes it very easy and convenient to weave in SEO best practices into the structural fabric of a website.

Search Engine Optimization is essential for a seamless user experience, where you are primarily fine tuning your blog for human visitors and not search engines.

Google updates have ensured that websites take the required efforts to make it to higher rankings and do not resort to black hat practices to garner results.

Spammy links, keywords overload and non-responsive websites fail to make it good in Google rankings, in fact, the search engine giant penalizes sites that make these mistakes.

Here are a few tips for you to ensure that your WordPress blog is optimized for SEO and delivers a fabulous UX.

#1: Invest in Content

Search engines place much importance on user traffic and the more traction you pick up higher are the chances of getting better rankings.

For your blog to get more visitors, subscribers and shares, you need to focus on generating world class content. Read up popular and high authority blogs in your niche to get an idea on what appeals to your target audience.

Have an inside-out understanding of the user base you are aiming for. You should have proper insight into what will appeal to that particular segment and what you should do to get the audience’s attention.

Unique, interesting, sharable and useful content is always appreciated on the Web. If you are persistent and regularly update and publish quality content you will be able to generate genuine, organic and recurring traffic that will eventually result in a positive change in your SERPs.

Research on trending topics and write in-depth, expert and useful content that aims to address problems or issues that your core audience experience. How-to guides, tutorials, history or origin stories, curated lists and Q&As or FAQs are all favorites of niche audience and can lay the claim to being online evergreens.

As opposed to a tweet which peaks in about 18 minutes an evergreen post can pull in visitors for years!

#2: Choose a Great SEO Plugin

WordPress offers you the option of choosing from a plethora of plugins to maximize the SEO potential of your website or blog.

WordPress SEO plugin by Yoast is the most popular SEO plugin and offers many options to make use of the power of social sharing. Other popular options include All-in-one SEO pack, WP Social, Rank Reveal and SEOPressor.

Keep in mind that an SEO plugin alone will not make your blog win the rankings battle. You need to follow it up with SEO-friendly practices and make sure that your site is optimized for the plugin.

Yoast is quite simple to set up and can integrate with all social sharing sites to give regular updates whenever you publish content.

Using a plugin optimally requires you to tailor your meta descriptions. Ensure that you craft the right meta description for every web page article. You can ideally limit your characters to between 130 and 155. Google will truncate the description if you exceed the limit. Use the keyword around which your content is structured in the meta description because it will show up below the URL in the search results.

Yoast checks whether you have keyword mentioned in the article heading, title and URL of the page, meta description, image Alt description and content of the page and gives you a green/red score indicating SEO-friendliness. You also must ensure that other pages of your website do not focus on the same keyword to avoid traffic leak.

#3: Choose a Good WordPress Host

You know that Google takes into consideration the load time of a site when ranking it. If your site loads quickly, then it is a big step towards providing the best user experience.

There are a variety of hosting solutions for you to choose from and the right host can improve your SEO and outreach.

Free hosting and shared hosting work if you have a small website with limited traffic, but if you have advanced business needs this option may not offer you all the facilities you need.

Shared hosting is very cost-effective, but you will be sharing server space with a ton of other companies. Customer support will be tardy but will definitely be the right solution for small companies. If your website does not generate much revenue and you only have a few hundred visitors a month then shared hosting can be perfect for your budget.

Managed web hosting is another great option for you, especially if the business site contributes the majority of revenue. There are many benefits if you prefer this more expensive option. You get additional customized services like server monitoring, state-of-the-art security, customer support, data backup, WordPress and plugin updates, and theme and plugin compatibility. This is highly convenient for busy business owners and frees up time to concentrate on other things.

Managed WordPress hosting also gives you inbuilt caching capabilities which can massively reduce website page loading time.

#4: Build Juicy Links

Suitable and appropriate backlinks are great to pass on valuable SEO juice to your blog.

Spammy links and wrongful tactics cannot escape Google and you will be met with the harsh penalty if you resort to them.

Place natural and useful links in your blog posts. They should ideally link to quality and authoritative sites in your niche. You will inevitably pass on SEO juice to those sites, but they also help you increase your sharable worth. Your blog will appear socially interactive, user-focused and informative to Google thereby giving you a higher link profile which reflects in improved SERP rankings.

If you publish fresh, unique and interesting content, other blogs will also backlink to your blog thus improving your search rankings. When good quality websites link to your blog, Google reads this as a verification of the usability and sharability of your website.

Interlinking to relevant content in your own site and to authoritative sites is the way to go as far as building blog authority goes. Anchor text is important when trying to build quality links. Use natural anchor text and do not overdo it because Google might see it in an unfavorable light.

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Is WordPress the Safest Blogging Platform?

Whenever I need to learn more about how to improve my own blogs, Daily Blog Tips is where I turn. The website constantly turns me to new tools and ideas that I can utilize immediately and effectively, thanks to the quality of the posts. You will want to check out this recent post on an interesting idea generator.

If you are reading this blog, then you are more than likely using WordPress. That is to say nothing about this blog or its audience so much as to say that WordPress dominates the market to such an extent that most people aren’t even aware of other blogging platforms, except perhaps Blogger and Tumblr.

Yet is WordPress safe? Every year hundreds of thousands of websites are compromised or shut down by malicious users, and that says a lot about the state of internet security in today’s day and age. How safe can one be with another blogging platform while still creating something people will see?

A lot of that depends on you. WordPress is most certainly the most customizable mainstream blogging platform. You are free to make a lot of changes, but you are also free to make mistakes. There are some things you should know about regarding general blog protection and WordPress safety.

Are Other Platforms Any Better?

To answer the question briefly, not particularly. WordPress has more than three quarters of the market and with a little searching and work can obtain all of the safety feature more expensive platforms have. Some would find it worth it to pay for the services of Squarespace or Svbtle, but extra features do not mean extra security. In fact, there isn’t really any well-known blogging platform that beats an upgraded WordPress in terms of security.

That doesn’t mean WordPress is safe. What it means is that you need to do your research. There may be exceptions to this rule, and relative security does not mean actual security. Other platforms, such as Tumblr, that are more protected against some types of attacks are so restrictive that one could argue they aren’t usable blogging platforms at all. If you’re using WordPress already, you might as well stick with it.

Virtual Private Networks

No matter what blog platform you are using, you are vulnerable while you are using a public networkunprotected. Your blog will be tied to an account online and likely an email address to go along with it. Both of these accounts (and any other online account that you use online) are at risk because the login information can be intercepted by an amateur malicious user with a sniffer program on a public network. Once a cybercriminal has that information, no good password or security program can stop them.

The only way to protect yourself on a public network is to use a Virtual Private Network (VPN), which is a service that will connect your device to an offsite secure server using an encrypted connection. This connection keeps cybercriminals (and anyone else) out, allowing you to blog privately from any network you want. You will also be able to access any research materials and websites you want as your IP address will be masked, getting around regional restrictions.

The main thing to concern yourself with is getting the right VPN for the job. You need to look for speed, a large number of servers and strong security measures (like military-grade encryption). It’s recommended you read some reviews to find the best VPN for any blogging platform.

Plugin Usage

A lot of what makes WordPress great all-around is the plugin support it offers. Enterprising individuals and businesses have developed a vast array of plugins for WordPress websites ranging from security tools to eCommerce solutions to small widgets. If it can be programmed, it is probably out there, and some website is using it.

This isn’t necessarily a good thing, and you need to pay attention. Every plugin you install fundamentally changes the functionality of your website or blog. Combined with the popularity of WordPress, this leads to a few things:

-Malicious users develop plugins that are malware in disguise, sometimes with a timed release so that you don’t immediately become suspicious.

-Cybercriminals develop plugins that work and are fine, but also contain a backdoor that allows them access into more sensitive information. Alternatively the plugin might collect information (on you or your readers) secretly and send it back to the creator.

-Established and popular plugins are neglected, and malicious users find security holes to exploit to get into your blog.

There are absolutely safe plugins that you should use, but you need to put safety first. If a plugin isn’t updating itself, then you should probably replace it. If you don’t hear much about a plugin, wait a while and let other people try first. Read reviews and ask people questions. The internet is scary, but it just as often is happy to help. If you use plugins, WordPress is less safe than other platforms unless you are careful.

Proper Management

In what you may see as a trend from the previous two sections, you need to know that this makes proper management of your blog a vital thing for you to keep up with. Regular chores might not be as fun as creating content, but WordPress isn’t automatic. It won’t be safe unless you are regularly doing these things (some directly blog related, some not):

-You need to equip your computer with the latest security suite. The free anti-virus that came with your computer just isn’t enough when you have more than a few of your own files on the line. If your computer is breached, then your blog can easily be compromised through it.

-You need to take some time every month to do a manual review of all blog related files and systems. This includes going through your blog’s pages to see if there is anything out of place and scouring through your computer to make sure no one (or thing) is tampering with it.

-You need to be involved with your blog’s community. Not only will you gain valuable information about how to improve your blog or website, but you will get a heads up if there is a potential security issue with your blog.

-You need to ask yourself if you can keep up with these habits regularly, as they make up a great part of how WordPress can be the safest blogging platform. You should note that with any blog you may have to deal with maintenance, unless you are willing to spend a lot of money.

Conclusion

WordPress is a changing platform and malicious users are always finding new ways to make life difficult for you. WordPress cannot respond immediately to every threat that comes its way and may take several days to respond to a particularly nasty threat. This results in a tumultuous safety landscape.

Nonetheless, we still believe that WordPress can be made into the safest platform through its adaptability and common acceptance. Other platforms are usually too restrictive to be usable or so open that they are indefensible, making WordPress the default choice, especially given the other advantages it provides for your website.

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Making Money from Blogging

A lot of people blog for different reasons. Some do it to share their knowledge and experience, while others may do it for more professional reasons; blogs are very effective for building professional image and establish authority in certain fields. Whatever your reasons may be, you would want to make money from blogging. I have to warn you: making money from blogging is not an easy thing to do. That said, these next few tips will help you get started without a problem.

Establish Your Blog

Before you can start monetizing your blog, you need to have an established blog in the first place. If you don’t have one already, not would be a good time to start. You may be tempted to start with a free blog, one that is built using the available free blogging platforms; I can tell you right now, that is not the best way to start.

To have an established blog, you need a few things:

– A logo or a brand that signifies the name and values of your blog.

– A dedicated domain name and also get your blog hosted somewhere reputable. Use a name that represents who you are or what your blog is all about.

– Content. A lot of quality content.

Establishing your own blog doesn’t have to be all that complicated. There are a lot of tools that you can use to help you. When setting up your site, for instance, you can use a content management system (CMS) that you are already familiar with, such as self-hosted WordPress.

Now that you have your blog established, the next thing you need is….

High Quality Content and Resources

A blog is only as good as the articles and other content in it. Great design and pleasing visuals will get users happy, but it’s the content that will eventually make them stay (and return). Similar to establishing the blog in the first place, creating high quality articles and other content for your blog can be really simple.

Start with topics you are familiar with the most. You can share personal experiences and expertise on various subjects. Don’t worry about creating articles that sell just yet. Just focus on writing articles that users will find valuable. How-tos and tutorials, tips and tricks, news or updates as well as general stories can help build up your authority in the particular field you are writing.

Stick to a certain topic and let users identify your blog with it. I know how tempting it is to write about all kinds of things. To be honest, I started my blog doing just that: writing about anything from my day-to-day life to recipes and tech-related posts. Eventually, you will have to decide on a topic or a field you want to focus on.
Don’t forget to write. Just write. Don’t wait until tomorrow. Don’t worry about making mistakes. Don’t even sweat the small details. Just start writing and start filling your blog with quality articles. The rest will take care of itself.

Promote – Reach Out – Build Relationships

Once you have enough articles on your blog, it is time to start promoting it. Attracting users is much easier than it was a few years ago. You now have social networks, multiple promotional tools and thousands of other blogs and websites talking about the same set of topics. These make promoting your blog a lot easier to do.

There are a few things you can do to jumpstart your blog’s promotions:

– Go on social media and start engaging users directly. Twitter, Facebook and Instagram are the main social networks to target. Share articles, talk about updates and don’t forget to respond to your followers. You’ll be surprised by just how quickly you can gain traction on social media. Here is a great article on how to double your visitors.

– Use paid promotions and ads, especially when you don’t have to pay for them. Web hosting companies often give away ad credits for free. These free credits can be used to place AdWords and Facebook ads and both are very effective for promoting blogs.

– Last but certainly not least, connect with other blogs. Visit other blogs that interest you and leave comments; genuine comments. Instead of spamming multiple blogs with generic comments, write insightful comments that will get the attention of the sites’ owners and other users. Don’t hesitate to get in touch with the sites’ owners for the possibilities of writing a guest post and doing a cross-promotion.

Spend enough time socializing and promoting your blog and you will be able to maintain a steady stream of traffic. Once the traffic reaches a certain level, you are ready to start making money from your blog.

Monetize!

From what we have discussed so far, making money from blogging is actually 80% blogging. The remaining 20%, this part we are in right now, is when you start capitalizing on what you have accomplished as a blogger.

You can make money from blogging thanks to a wide range of opportunities currently available, including:

– Image, video and text ads. Three are a lot of ad networks that allow you to earn money from your blog’s traffic. Find a good one to join, place the ads on your blog and you are all set.

– Paid reviews and advertorials. You can get paid to post an article on a particular topic. A lot of professional bloggers earn most of their revenues from advertorials.

– Offline revenue sources, such as seminars and talks. Once you have established yourself as the authoritative figure though your blog, you may be invited to do a seminar or a talk for a fee.

– Merchandising and online sales. You can start selling merchandises or other products related to your niche. You can even produce your own products that you think users will be able to benefit from.

I will let you in on a little secret: the key to earning a good stream of revenue from blogging is to actually implement multiple monetizing techniques. Understand your audience and choose the right opportunities to implement.

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How to Make a Full-Time Income by Adding a Storefront to Your Blog

Creating and selling your own product lets you open a steady flow of passive income that may last long.

Unlike monetizing your website with advertisements, you don’t necessarily need to have a huge traffic base to make a solid income. Other blog monetization models such as sponsored posts, paid reviews and affiliate marketing might come off as a little out of sync to your trusting audience.

That being said, selling products on your blog is not a get rich scheme. However, with the right strategies it is totally possible to make a full-time income by adding a storefront while selling your own product.

In this article, I will show you how to make huge profits by adding an ecommerce storefront to your blog.

What to sell?

Before jumping in to start a storefront on your blog, one of the first questions you should ask yourself is ‘what to sell’.

Unless you got hit with a brilliant idea, deciding what you should be selling on your blog can be tougher. With all the available technologies, though there are thousands of possible choices to create, everything might seem like as it’s been done by someone else already.

Here are a few suggestions for brainstorming product ideas.

• Look for an opportunity gap and try solving your own problem: Create a product that can solve your own problem. By solving your own problem, more likely you’re also solving a problem of others.
• Validate the market: Before creating it, ask your followers if it helps to solve their problems. You can also walk through your niche forums and sites like Quora.com to see if your product can solve a common pain point of your potential customers.
• Digital or physical product: Creating and selling digital products such as ebooks and online courses are easier than creating a physical product such as books. However, the profit margin will be huge when it comes to selling a physical product. Decide which option might be a good fit for you and go with it.
• Pricing: Pricing your product is as important as the product creation itself. If you’re not a well-known face among your niche circles, it might be harder to sell high priced products, so rather you should consider selling low priced products at first. After getting a nice start, in order to raise more revenue, you can think about expanding your product lines by releasing new products on a consistent basisor focus on selling a single higher priced product.

Should you start selling?

Once you decided what you should be selling, the very next step is to look at how to sell.

You might have started blogging for a while. However, it doesn’t guarantee that you could run a successful ecommerce store on your blog by simply rolling it out and thus make huge profits.

For instance, if you didn’t launch a product previously on your blog, chances are your readers might expect everything from you for free. That’s a wrong mindset to be in. As a seller, what you could do to change that mindset is to nurture your prospects carefully throughout each customer lifecycle, so that they eventually buy products from your store.

Define your unique selling proposition: You need to define who your potential customers are and why they’d need your product.

Create a minimum viable product: Launch your product to a small group of people and get early feedback. Yaro Starak uses this approach to sell his premium plugin. He made a preselling campaign and asked his readers to buy the beta product for just $5. This strategy has not only helped him to get early funding but also valuable feedback before launching the final product.

Choose an ecommerce platform

As hundreds of different ecommerce platforms are available, it is easy to get overwhelmed with different choices. In fact, each platform has its own pros and cons. Some of them will charge you on the basis of total sales whereas some others will charge a monthly fee. In fact, there are even some other open source choices that charge you almost nothing.

To get a quick idea about which platform is best suits your needs, you can use a recommendation engine such as WebAppMeister. What it does is it does a head to head comparison between ecommerce apps and helps you pick one that seems to be the best choice for you.

If you’re a WordPress blogger, below are some of popular shopping cart choices.

E-junkie- For selling digital products

E-junkie is one of the easiest ways to start selling digital products such as ebooks on your blog. All you need to do is to register an account on e-junkie and provide some basic info about your products and business. Copy the buy now button from the e-junkie admin panel and paste it on your blog where you’d like to sell it. Once you did it, E-junkie will take care about everything else.

Price: The monthly cost starts from $5 onwards.

You can visit e-junkie website here.

Woocommerce- For both digital and physical products

Woocommerce is a popular ecommerce plugin that lets you easily add a storefront to your blog. According to datanyze.com, Woocommerce is the shopping platform of choice for almost 22% of ecommerce websites in the Alexa Top 1 million sites.

It is best suitable if you’re looking for adding a storefront that can easily integrate with your current blog.

Price: The Woocommerce plugin costs free. However, you may require buying additional plugins for making a fully featured ecommerce site.

Visit Woocommerce official site here.

Start selling

Once you picked the platform, it’s time to start selling by adding a storefront to your blog and setting up the products on it.

Here are a few ways you can spread the word out of your new store.

Promote on your network: You can promote the news about the store throughout your blog and social network.

Special offers: Consider offering huge discounts to early customers.

Remarketing: It is a clever way to show ads to your blog visitors who haven’t purchased a product from your store. The best thing is that the CTR for remarketing ads will be comparatively low.

Invite affiliates: Invite other bloggers in your niche as an affiliate marketer for your product.

Have you ever considered selling on your blog? Let us know your thoughts in the comment section.

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