Category: Blog

Do You Need CSS Knowledge To Manage A WordPress Blog?

WordPress has done a fantastic job of streamlining the site-building process for the mainstream. And that’s not to say WordPress is a host for amateurs, because WP hosts a ton of big-name brands. According to statistical data, approximately 35% of sites are powered by WordPress. But one of the main appeals of WordPress is that any person with a little average know-how can set up a reasonably decent looking website, it all depends on how much time you’re willing to invest.

Should you learn CSS to manage a WordPress blog?

That should be the real question of this article. You don’t need CSS knowledge to manage a WordPress blog, not at all. But due to the nature of website building, and how prone to creep scope website projects can be, you’ll probably end up learning CSS of your own volition along the way.

What I mean by “creep scope” is that as you build your own WordPress blog, you’ll eventually experience the desire to customize and enhance it beyond what the easily clickable tools can offer. So you start learning a little bit of WordPress custom CSS to do what you want, and it keeps going from there, and so just by starting a WordPress site you’ve stumbled into the proverbial CSS rabbit-hole.

Another thing is that because WordPress is such a popular mainstream host, it’s very easy to spot the generic “made in WordPress” layout that you really can’t escape without buying custom themes, and even then you’ll want to know a bit of CSS to tailor it for your website.

Having an obviously generic “made in WordPress” theme can kind of hurt you, depending on your industry. There are certainly some making-ends-meet Podcasters and ebook sellers skating by on generic WordPress layouts, but that’s niche content stuff.

In this article, we’re going to go over some basic tasks in WordPress that site owners will invariably perform at some time or another, and whether or not they require any CSS knowledge. After reading this article, you can check out some CSS courses for a deeper understanding of how all this works.

Tasks that don’t require CSS knowledge

In WordPress, you can do all of the following tasks without any CSS knowledge whatsoever:

Adding posts and images: WordPress has a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) post editor, which makes creating blog entries as easy as updating your Facebook status, with additional buttons of inserting images, changing the font, etc.

Modify your site’s layout and theme: WordPress has a lot of 1-click install themes to change the layout and outlook of your website. It’s also easy to change simple things like your site banner and menu layout.

Create a store: With various plugins such as the free WooCommerce, it’s really easy to set up a store page and start selling online.

Tasks that may require some CSS knowledge

These tasks won’t require any significant CSS knowledge, but you may need to learn a thing or two.

Customizing small aspects of your site theme: For simple, sitewide theme changes such as changing all Header 2 text to orange, you just need a few very basic CSS codes. You could copy-paste them from CSS tutorial websites, like this:

h2 { color: #e38b19; }

And you can do it directly in the WordPress Customizer, without installing any additional plugins.

Using a simple CSS plugin: For adding more CSS without needing to go into WordPress stylesheets, you could install a streamlined CSS editor. Something like Simple CSS does the job for most people, as it offers a real-time preview of your CSS code.

Alternatively, you could install a front-end CSS editor like Visual CSS Style Editor, which gives you buttons and sliders to change CSS code without any actual coding necessary.

Tasks that require CSS knowledge

These tasks require perhaps not only CSS knowledge but a more thorough understanding of WordPress back end. For this type of tasks, you might need to hire a professional development from companies like Soshace.

Creating or massively editing themes: You only need to copy-paste some CSS code to change your header colors, as we mentioned previously. However, for creating themes from the ground-up, or doing significant changes to a downloaded theme such as adding customized menus and grid layouts, you absolutely require CSS knowledge.

This is because you’ll be working inside WordPress style.css file which controls the nitty-gritty details of your site’s theme. And if the .css file extension didn’t give it away, the style.css file is written entirely in CSS (imagine that).

In any case, CSS is used to create those really sleek, professional-looking sites that capture everyone’s attention. Surely you want that?

How To Find Guest Bloggers To Write Guest Posts On Your Blog?

If you are a blogger, you need to increase your content for your audience if you want to keep your visitors engaged.  Another problem content writing is quite time-consuming you may be busy with high-level tasks or your daily life to create your own content. In any case, you wouldn’t sacrifice the quality in order to save tons of time. But these days, most of my blog posts are written by guest bloggers. It is a good decision to accept the guest post.

What are Guest Bloggers?

Guest posting simply means writing an article for someone else’s on their website or blog. Bloggers need good content so it’s a great way to connect with new readers and get your name out. Guest posting also builds a strong relationship between bloggers.

Here are some benefits of guest posting.

  1. Save tons of time if you don’t have to write content
  2. You don’t have to compromise with the quality of content and you serve different content to your audience.
  3. Guest posting introduces you to new people
  4. Guest posting is great for search engines

Are all guest bloggers paid or how much they charge for a post?

You can easily find bloggers who charge around $50 for a publish a guest post and on the other hand, someone else who charges in excess of $300 to $500 for publishes guest posts. It depends on the quality of the content and how exclusive it from other content that you are getting.

Where to Find Guest Bloggers?

The easiest and fastest way to find a guest blogger visit other blogs in your niche that also accept guest authors and you can contact for them there is higher chances they may be interested in wring for you. The key benefit of this technique you will get an idea to see their post that they are good writers and what is the quality of their content.

  1. Social media mainly Facebook groups.
  2. Create a Write Us page
  3. You can mention  guest post word in your blogs
  4. Add Call to action

How to Manage Guest Bloggers?

Recruit a guest blogger for your site is the only the first step you need to make sure that they produce the highest-quality and hundred percent unique content. Always take your time to review carefully guest posts before publishing. You should set up new guest bloggers with a contributor account WordPress site so that they can begin drafting their posts.

Set Up Guest Bloggers on WordPress

Setting up a guest blogger account on WordPress is a great way to recruit guest posts. You can also set up capabilities for specific uses such as editing and reading posts (and they will NOT be able to publish posts).

Here are the steps to creating a gust post account.

  1. Go to Users > Add New on your WordPress dashboard.
  2. Create  a username and enter their email and name
  3. Check the box next to “Send User Notification
  4. Select “Contributor” from the Role dropdown menu.
  5. Click to “Add New User” Button

After that, your guest blogger will receive an email with instructions on how to log in to their account. Now your guest blogger is all set up and ready to start drafting posts on your site.

You can also manage user capabilities with plugins there are a couple of plugins available on WordPress to manage guest bloggers on your site.

Edit Flow  plugin (Edit Flow give power you to collaborate with your editorial team inside WordPress. Edit Flow team made it modular so you can customize it to your needs)

Detail Your Guest Blogger Guidelines

As you know you have to share and explain the guidelines for guest bloggers in detail.

  1. What topics do you need for a post?
  2. Require a minimum word count?
  3. What things that allowed and not allowed in a post?

Some more things that you may keep in mind while accepting the posts like You must have a track record of writing great content and You need to fully own the content and be careful about spelling or grammar errors in the content. And the content has to fit in with your blog theme it is also helps to maintain your blog standard.

Conclusion

Guest bloggers are really valuable contributors to your blogging. If you are able to find great bloggers, they save you a ton of time and money and bringing you high-quality content and new readers. allow guest bloggers to write a short biography with a link to his or her own blog or website it helps to build strong relationships with bloggers.

Tips On How To Start Writing For Personal Blog

People enjoy sharing ideas, experiences, and knowledge with others. Thanks to the internet, now you can reach a global audience very quickly online. All you need to do is start a personal blog. But like with most things, there’s a pitfall: if you don’t do it right, you won’t grab anyone’s attention.

What is Personal Blogging?

When blogs appeared in the 1990s, they were mostly online journals for people designed to write down their thoughts. Many blogs are still informal diary-style text entries, where people share everything that bothers and excites them and discuss a variety of topics, including favorite TV shows, cooking experiences, politics, or sport. 

However, personal blogging is much more than just writing posts and publishing them online. The success of a personal blog depends on your ability to attract an audience that shares your interests and wants to read what you write.

You can’t just start a blog and expect that people will find you. It doesn’t work like that. A lot of effort goes into building a successful website. So here are nine absolutely essential tips for starting your personal blog.

1.  Determine your goals

Why do you want to have your own blog? Some people are just looking for an online version of a diary. Others want to build their personal brands and establish themselves as experts in specific areas. There are also people who want to make money from blogging. All of these goals are valid, but achieving them requires different actions. So, be honest with yourself and identify your reasons for blogging in the first place.

2.  Choose a platform

There’s no shortage of blogging platforms these days. If you’re not tech-savvy, use online platforms like Medium or Blogger. These services let you create your blog in a few minutes and require no technical knowledge so that you can focus on your content and audience. On the other hand, if you’re looking for more control over the technical details of your blog, other solutions like WordPress are more appropriate.

3.  Be yourself

It’s essential to give your audience an opportunity to get to know you. Start with introducing yourself in the very first blog entry. Your readers need to know who you are, what your content is about, and why you are blogging. A short introductory paragraph can give them an idea of what to expect.

4.  Find your voice

Your writing should reflect your identity and personality to make your online diary unique. Depending on the purpose of your blog and your target audience, you can choose a voice that can be formal, a voice of humor, or a newsier one. For example, a blog for a business that provides academic writing services needs to have a polished tone, as opposed to a therapist’s blog that needs to convey a sense of friendliness and calmness.

5.  Link to Your Social Pages

Over time, your blog will build a strong relationship with your readers. Including share buttons for your social media accounts makes it easy for your audience to follow you on different platforms. This increased exposure is likely to lead to more commitment.

6.  Proofread

A poorly written post with grammar errors can be a big turn-off for readers. Before posting the first blog entry, you have to internalize your writing. Make sure your content is free from typos and grammar mistakes by editing and proofreading. You can read your post aloud or have someone else read your content.

If you’re on a tight budget, there are many affordable essay writing services available to help you with proofreading and ease your blogging activity. In addition to cheap essay writing services, you can rely on the Grammarly extension that’ll help you with proofreading.

7.  Add Images, Video, and Interactive Content

Long texts can be tiring for readers. Add images, videos, and interactive content, such as slideshows, quizzes, and infographics to break words into digestible parts. This will keep the audience linked to you, create more engagement, and give a chance for the readers to comment on your post. Keep sentences as short as possible and use shorter paragraphs wherever possible.

8.  Encourage Comments and Feedback

A genuinely engaged reader in personal blogs is attained through a dialog. Facilitate your two-way communication with the audience through a comments section. Ask questions to encourage feedback and give readers the subscription option. Show your readers that you care for them by responding to the feedback. A solid relationship with your audience will strengthen your weblog.

9.  Work with other writers

Maintaining a successful blog requires discipline and time. To scale your blog, you need a lot of content – more than you can produce on your own. That’s why you can ask your audience to contribute to your blog by allowing guest posting. You can also work with ghostwriters. Most online essay writing services are willing to work with blog owners and provide them with ghostwritten content.

10.  Bottom line

Blogging seems easy until you start doing it. Luckily, it gets easier with time and practice. Make an excellent first impression and then share your ideas with these simple tips. The most challenging part is to stick with it.

What You Shouldn’t Do With Your Blog

These days, everyone knows about blogs. Writing blogs is a good way to share somebody’s life, work, project, ideas, etc. and for a good reason. The main advantage of this kind of communication is its suitability for different fields because no matter what you are doing, a blog will be the perfect way to deal with almost every situation.

But there is wrong thinking about this subject. A lot of people still think that blogging is an easy and simple activity than other occupations and jobs. They say something like, “You get money for doing nothing. Everyone can sit at the computer and surf the net.“

This is not correct perspective because they don’t know the details blogging job. Writing a blog or article is a creative job, it requires a lot of imagination, perseverance, and patience. A real failure is writing a blog about someone’s life or project because this may be uninteresting for visitors and won’t be attended as expected.

It is very simple to start a blog but difficult to make it interesting and it requires experience and knowledge.

So here are some points you shouldn’t do in your blogs.

Use Wide And Complex Topics

The first thing is the topic of your post. You need to use a small and interesting topic for your post so people could understand quickly what it is all about. Some people use large and complex topics for their blogs and faces problems like what to write and which details should include. If you are new to blogging then it can be challenging and problematic to cover all the details and points for a large topic. The same problem with common topics so please don’t use common topics that people are using most often.

Focusing on the common topics for blog produces less audience. The loyal blog readers will not show much interest in it.

Make It All About You

Readers of company blogs don’t really care about the author so don’t need to make the whole blog about you. They don’t want to read about you, this kind of information is useless because everyone wants to read something interesting and valuable. Of course, you can add intro as the author. You need research on it properly. What is the trend these days? write about it and make an emotional connection with your readers.

Write Only What You Want To Read

Do not write articles according to your interest that you want to read. A blog is not only for you. We write articles for everyone so you need to satisfy other people’s needs and interests. For the company, a column should have interesting and useful content for customers and audiences. When you like a certain idea, it does not mean that everyone will like it.

So, you need to prepare content for people. If you are writing a blog for an organization, make sure that the topic is relevant and correct so their customers will happily read it.

Losing The Structure

It is a bad idea not to structure a blog with headlines, sections, templates, etc. Humans like to sort things out, organize them, categorize them into different categories or groups. The blog is easily not acceptable without, special typography style, colors, attractive paragraphs and conveys information. You need to prepare the material for quick reading so that it is clear from the landmarks first.

Ignoring Pictures

Even if the text is separated into sections, different font colors, bold headlines but still something missing. Yes, it is an image. Pictures can help to attract the visitor’s attention and engaged them with your content for a few moments. By the way, pictures are rememberable. If there is a brand in a visual space, the pictures make people remember the firm’s icon.

Just imagine you have a travel related blog and you are using this picture

Isn’t it beautiful and eye catchy?

Publishing Right After Finishing

Finally, before publishing your blog, look at your work, and check it for mistakes. You shouldn’t ignore the article on how good you are in writing. We are human, so correct our mistakes.

No Plan or Goals

You should not only live in today – the future may be harder than today. Soon, it will be difficult to find an interesting topic or idea, and you will spend too much time on searches.

So you need to be prepared for future and plan wisely according to it. Make a plan or roadmap for your blog.

Wrapping Up

Blogging is a lovely and interesting experience. If want to start a blog then you need to find a topic but not a wide one then search about it collect the content then write it in your own way. Use interesting points to arrange blog and use images.

WordPress Blog Monetization: 5 Things to Try Implementing on Your Blog in 2020

WordPress has been around for a while now. In its glorious years, it has helped launch the careers of many and played a significant role in creating the genre of blogging. Today, WordPress is a favored platform by not only bloggers but also big names, including BBC, The New Yorker, Sony, and many more.

While WordPress has given to the public a fairly easy way to website monetization, it needs more than a few posts to start making money out of it.

As of 2019, the worldwide web has 1.7 billion websites, 600 million are blogs alone. Out of this, WordPress alone carries 76.5 million blogs. In other words, you need to be pretty unique to stand out from the crowd.

If you already have a WordPress site and a relatively good traffic flow into it, then there are a few more things you can try implementing to get returns.

Products and Services

Selling products or services on a website has become one of the most common ways of monetizing in the last year. You can also generate leads and traffic through content creation and promotion. WordPress has easy solutions to include shopping carts and allow customers to pay through different methods.

Much like the membership program, these products could also be anything related to your niche. You can offer services, such as web development, designing, or digital products.

Additionally, if you are providing writing services, you can create an ebook on any specific issue. Say, compose one on how to write an annotated bibliography. This way, you can blend in the features of both products and services in one go.

If you are selling physical products, you will need to take care of the shipping further as well.

Paid Subscriptions

Chances are that you currently have a subscription program running on your blog. The current internet landscape considers memberships as something that offers exclusive access to premium content. There are no rules on what this premium content has to be. However, it has to be worth the time of the audience.

WordPress has some amazing plugins that can allow you to integrate a paid membership program on the site. If you can provide good content, then this could be the most consistent and profitable source of income from your webpage. Rather than focusing on a one-time payment, here you can monetize every month, quarterly or yearly.

Online Courses

This is essentially a subcategory of products. For an industry that is expected to grow to a value of US$ 406 billion by 2024, the market offers limitless opportunities for entrepreneurs.

Hence it is worthwhile to expand your attention to this sphere. If you have a thorough knowledge of a subject and good delivery skills, you can create a course right from your home.

Remember that whatever your skill level is, there would be people who are willing to pay for it. So even if you are intermediate, you can develop a course for beginners.

You can use your website content to find out which courses you readers are looking for and provide them with exactly that. Alternatively, sending our surveys to your subscribers will also give you an idea of their expectations.

Advertising

Since the beginning of blogging, advertising is considered the holy grail of monetization. It certainly works if you have a popular site with a continuous flow of traffic. For new ones, however, it might take longer.

There are many ways to approach advertising. The first is to sell ad space directly. It works well only for established websites. The second is to sell semi-directly. There are services where you can list your website, and customers can pay you to advertise on your site.

The next is using Google Adsense to do contextual advertising. The last one might be more feasible for a new blog.

Affiliate Marketing

The next most common way of monetization through a blog is through affiliate marketing. You promote products of other businesses and receive a commission for every sale you bring. In many aspects, it is very similar to advertising.

You can make it more organic by including product reviews or using promotions in a not so obvious way. Affiliate marketing works better if you have a niche website.

Many major eCommerce websites have their own affiliate programs to encourage bloggers.

Wrapping Up

There is no shortage of ways to monetize your blog. Getting the information is only the first step.

Now is the time to actually work on it, and strategize to make the ideas work best for you.

Plagiarism Checker WordPress Plugins In 2020

Plagiarism is one concern getting worse day by day. A lot of cases are reported of self and accidental plagiarism which means anyone can be a victim of content thieving one way or another. Whenever you publish content you might get accused of stealing someone’s content even if haven’t done it.

There is a need for plagiarism checker before publishing content online to proofread your text to let you know and decrease any chances of plagiarism to zero.
In addition to this, you may have seen different websites offering free and subscription-based plagiarism checker for your work. Choosing the best for your precious work is difficult for newbies.

Here are some of the best plugins that you can use in WordPress and get rid of plagiarism:

  1. Copyfight
  2. Free Online Plagiarism Checker
  3. DMCAprotectionbadge
  4. Grammarly
  5. Prepostseo
  6. Plagiarism Checker Pro

1.     Copyfight

With high accuracy, Copyfight protects shortcode, pages, and posts. In addition to this, Copyfight provides incomparable defense against plagiarism. This plugin also prevents people who apt to steal email addresses, which is a unique feature as compared to other anti-plagiarism plugins.
Copyfight can be accessed from the WordPress dashboard. This is one of the best plugin available so far and provides a seamless experience to keep content safe.

2.   Free Online Plagiarism Checker

Plagiarism can cause serious problems to your website’s SEO as plagiarism leads to duplicate content and which might affect the ranking of your site in the search engine due to Google penalties.

This plugin provides quality services which reduces this risk by checking for plagiarism and reducing the chances to zero. This plugin works directly with the posts in WordPress.
This plugin is easily available and can be used easily on WordPress to check drafted posts before it goes live.

3.   DMCA Protection Badge

DMCA protection badge is a great way to get rid of potential thieves. All you have to do is just sign up for a free account and place the badge on your website pages. After signing up you’ll also get access to a secure portal where you can easily vie status of your web pages.
If you find someone using your content without proper access permission, DMCA offers takedown services that can be used to eliminate the content within a short period.

DMCA tool also provides services that can protect your images and videos, which is a must needed thing for content-rich websites.

4.   Grammarly

This is one of the best tools available online. Grammarly not just provides exceptional services for grammar and punctuation mistakes but offers unmatched services for plagiarism as well.

Grammarly is easy to use. To compare your writing with other websites, simply just sign up using a free Grammarly account and copy-paste your content in the editor. After that, click on the circle that will be visible to you on the left-hand navigation bar. By doing this you will get to know if there is any website featuring the content as compared to your paper.

These options can only be used if you are a premium user of Grammarly. Grammarly monthly subscription is 29$ per month but if you pay quarterly it decreases down to 19.98$. This tool is however expensive but it’s certainly worth the investment if you check large quantity of content often.

5.     Prepostseo

Prepostseo is a free online plagiarism checker tool that provides easy services to scan copy theft on the web. This plugin is easy to use. All you need is to just copy-paste your content and this tool will scan the whole text automatically and spot every cross-matching content with other sites.

The one advantage of this plugin is that it is free with no extra fee for any service. Everybody needs a tool for free with brilliant services. This is the best tool that is free and provides exceptional services to every user.

On the other hand, Prepostseo provides addition free services, such as an SEO score checker that analyze your site from every side and point out every possibility to increase your website’s domain and page authority. This is one additional service that makes it a unique plugin from others.

6.     Plagiarism Checker Pro

Plagiarism Checker Pro is one of the fastest plagiarism checkers that can detect any duplicate content across the internet in seconds. It has more than 700000+ active installations as on date.

This is the fastest yet precise online checker as it only takes seconds to check and compare content. Using this tool you can find out the exact pages which have been copied from your genuine content.
This checker needs a subscription to use every service they provide, but you can only use the trial period free of cost. After the end of the trial for further use, you need to pay. There is a basic plan that costs only $5 per month which is not expensive and everyone can afford it.

Apart from speed this plugin also provides services such as:


• Using the slider section you can display plagiarized content on your website.
• You can check entire content by just copy and pasting links, paragraphs or sentences
• The simple and flexible plugin, you can add this anywhere in your site’s WordPress and check your content.

Summary

  • Plagiarism is getting worse and many cases are reported for accidental and unintentional plagiarism.
  • Proofreading content before publishing is important. There are many online tools that provide plugins for WordPress to check for plagiarism before uploading the content.
  • Copyfight is one of the best tools that provide protection for shortcode, pages and posts and also provide defense against plagiarism as well. This tool is free and user-friendly.
  • DMCA protection badge is a plugin that can be used to takedown plagiarists using your content on other sites. Using this tool you can also check the status of your web pages.
  • One of the best online and offline tools to check grammar mistakes and also plagiarism. Grammarly is the most precise and effective tool to proofread your pages before publishing.
  • Prepostseo not just automatically checks for plagiarism but can be used to checks SEO of site to properly increase your site ranking.
  • Plagiarism checker pro is the fastest checker which checks for plagiarism in seconds. There are some monthly charges to use this tool after the basic trial period.

Ways To Increase Your WordPress Blog Traffic

In its early days, blogs were mostly used as a creative outlet, or an online diary of sorts. While they are still being used in this way by a large number of people, blogs are now also used to generate income for bloggers. Whether it’s income generated through ad revenue or sponsorships, blogging has become an additional revenue stream.

Making a living off of blogging however, is largely dependent on the amount of people visiting the blog regularly. Website traffic has now become directly correlated to the success of a person’s blog, which is why so many bloggers on WordPress are trying to increase it as much as they can.

Below are a few strategies to help you increase website traffic in your WordPress blog.

Generate quality content

One of the things that sets apart blogs that have a good amount of traffic from those that don’t  is the quality of the content. Writing great content for your WordPress blog is one of the ways to drive more traffic to your blog. Avoid generating content that does not provide value to your target audience, and make sure that the content you provide is not redundant. While you can tackle the same topic other bloggers may have tackled, make sure to provide your own voice and perspective to that topic. And most importantly, never plagiarize other bloggers’ content for the sake of getting more traffic.

Consider guest posting

You may have noticed that a lot of blogs nowadays feature content written by other people. And no, it’s not just the blogger being lazy. Rather, guest posting is a strategy used by many bloggers to help grow their WordPress blog traffic. Guest posting is a great SEO strategy, and it is a great way for you to drive people from other sites to your own blog. You can even do this the other way around. But if you don’t have a viable audience that will attract other bloggers, you can pay someone to write your blogs. Over time, your guest posts on other sites will attract audiences and other bloggers as well.

Use social media

Social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter are really great tools you can use to complement your strategy to increase WordPress blog traffic. For one, social media is free to use. Second, a lot of your potential readers are on social media already, so you can easily pop on over to Twitter or Instagram, and get people on social media to view your content on your WordPress blog. Social media can even be used to better your email marketing efforts if it’s properly integrated. If managing multiple accounts proves to be hectic, you can use marketing automation platforms such as Hootsuite to automate your blog postings. That way, you can focus more on creating great shareable content on your site.

Connect with others

When thinking of ways to increase the number of people who visit your WordPress blog, you may be thinking of implementing digital strategies. While they are perfectly fine and acceptable to use, going out in the real world and connecting with others can also be a way to increase website traffic. Being the creator of your own blog, you can also be the ambassador for it. Attend social functions where you can network with like-minded individuals, and work your website into your conversations.

Make functional improvements

It’s not enough to generate traffic using content and social media. Google’s search algorithm has been putting more emphasis on user experience. Websites that work well within user expectations are rewarded with higher search rankings. In this case, you want your website to be responsive and efficient for users. The best way to do that is to make sure it loads faster and it doesn’t make it difficult for users to jump from one page to another. Loading time plays a big role in the success of your website. Indeed, people want instant access to information, so you wouldn’t want to keep potential customers waiting. One way you can make your website load faster is to compress your images and review the plugins you have installed and see which ones to discard and which ones to keep.

Use the right plugins

Speaking of plugins, the success of your website will depend a lot on the kinds of plugins you have installed. And when it comes to increasing organic traffic, you need those plugins that can help you improve the searchability of your website content. Yoast, for one, can help you make sure your blogs are search-engine friendly. Once the plugin is installed, it will give you suggestions about the optimum frequency of your SEO keywords as well as suggestions for improving the readability of your content.

These are just a few ways to increase your WordPress blog’s traffic. Following these tips will surely net an increase in the number of people who visit your site regularly.

SEO Copywriting: 5 Steps To Make Sure Your Content Ranks In Google

You’ve been writing blog posts, but the best you can get is 30 views from time to time? It feels unfair as you’ve spent hours to work on the material, make it interesting, and the results aren’t even close to what you’ve expected.

Being a writer myself, I know all the pitfalls of composing process. That is why, when you don’t get feedback, it’s extremely difficult to keep your chin up.

Don’t worry, though, as we’re here to help you write the content that will attract the readers. So get comfy and enjoy the 5 steps that can ensure that your blog post will reach the top.

1.  Make Sure You Choose Your Content Smart

Whether you’ve already chosen the topic you’re writing about, or still deciding on what to select, you need to do it smart. By this we mean, it’s not enough to just write about what you like or what interests you. If people don’t look for such information, your content won’t be ranked high in search results. Basically, because there will be no search results for such a topic.

That is why, the easiest thing you can do is compare the blogs of your competitors and see what they’re writing about. What is more, you can select some terms from your topic and enter them in various Keywords Explorers or Keywords Tools. This is how you’ll see what are the top topics your potential readers are searching for.

2.  Search for Keywords in Your Niche

Another thing you should definitely do is analyze and search for keywords related to your topic. Needless to say that no matter how great and informational content may be, if it doesn’t have keywords, search engine won’t be able to recognize and rank your text.

There’s one essential thing to keep in mind! When you’ll be choosing keywords for your blog, make sure they have informational intent. To learn more on this subject, we really recommend watching the video “How to Do Keyword Research: Go Beyond Search Volume”.

3.  Examine Your Chances to Rank

It’s vital to analyze the compatibility of the keywords you’re going to use. In other words, you need to find out how difficult it is to make it to the top using particular keywords. There’s an easy-to-use Ahrefs Keywords Explorer tool. With its help you can examine the so-called keywords difficulty. The lower it is, the easier it is to reach the top ranking if you’re just a beginner.

In addition to that, check whether your keywords have informational intent (we’ve already mentioned that it’s essential). Google aims at providing users with the most suitable info. For instance, if you choose the keyword that is used in sales pages, it will be hardly possible to get your informational content to the top.

4.  Organize the Writing Procedure

As it’s called SEO Copywriting, it’s high time to talk about writing itself. First and foremost, always remember to organize and structure your writing (when it comes both to time management and the composing process itself). Secondly, always write an outline when you’re working on posts. This is how you’ll avoid the daunting feeling of staring blankly at the screen not knowing what to write about. Thirdly, make sure you use various composing tricks like convincing techniques. It’s crucial to create an eye-catching introduction, for example. Otherwise, you’ll lose the reader at the very beginning. Finally, write from your target audience perspective, not yours. Show that you understand how they feel.

5.  Proofread and Polish

For some this last piece of advice may seem not as useful as the one mentioned before. However, through years of experience, we can assure you that it’s as important as anything else. Always proofread your texts. “When you’re caught at the moment, trying to explain yourself, using mind-blowing metaphors, you can easily misspell the word, or even use the wrong grammar (not because you don’t know, but because you were paying attention to other things). For this reason, it’s essential to check your writing for grammar and spelling mistakes. What is more, we would advise you to let some time pass by before the editing process. This is how you’ll have a fresh eye, and it will be easier to notice the lines worth polishing”, explains Adam Simon, a professional copywriter and owner of the LegitWritingServices blog.

Hope this information was useful and now you’ve got a better grasp of how to make your content reach the top in Google. Now what are you waiting for? It’s high time to go for it and make your blog rock!

How To Start Your Own WordPress Site On A Budget? Get The Effective Guide!

More and more people face the need to create a site. Such a need is quite natural in modern conditions. After all, to be afloat you have to be present in the online space. But as soon as a person approaches closer to this issue, he meets with many nuances.

The first is the difficulty in creating the site yourself. The second is the high cost of using the services of professionals. But does this mean that it is impossible to cope with these two nuances on your own? Of course not. Today you will learn how to make a website on WordPress on a budget.

Learn Free WordPress Guidelines

To make your work on the site less costly, you have to devote your time to training. No, we are not talking about paid courses. There are a lot of methodological information and guides that are available for free on the Internet. Finding such information does not require much work. Start with the simplest. Watch training videos on YouTube, read articles.

Many professionals use free information rather than paid courses or manuals. Therefore, you should act in the same way. It is quite possible to squeeze the maximum of useful information from free sources. So all you need is desire and time.

Get a Hosting For a Price of a Cup of Coffee

This is one of the first things you will encounter and probably the most expensive in our guide. Although later you will realize that these costs will be equal to a cup of coffee.

WordPress does not provide its own domain like many other CRMs. But do not consider this as a drawback of this tool. For example, Wix provides its users with a domain, but then you will not be able to migrate the site to another one.

Therefore, all you need is just to choose a hosting provider that will offer favorable conditions. For example, GoDaddy will cost only 4.99 dollars. You can also consider BlueHost which requires a monthly fee starting at $3. SiteGround prices starting at $3,95 per year.

Now you see that hosting has affordable prices that simply will not affect your financial situation.

Create a Theme Like a Real Web Designer

WordPress is famous for its wide range of different themes in the field of design and pricing. If you have a limited budget, then there is no need to spend a lot of money on it. Many people mistakenly believe that it is possible to get amazing design only through financial investments. But in practice, this is far from the case!

You will be able to create a unique and attractive website at no special cost. All you need to do is spend a little of your time studying how you can customize the theme without extra money.

Moreover, WordPress allows extensive customization of themes in manual mode. So after you study the methodological information, you will not have any difficulties with this issue. Nothing prevents you from making design no worse than web designers can do on your own!

Graphic and Content Filling Yourself? It Is Quite Real!

Many beginners immediately rush for help to specialists who are responsible for the graphics and content without having tried to do it yourself. But in fact, it is quite possible and not as difficult as it might seem. Naturally, this will take time, but when the question is about dollars, it is better to sacrifice time. Since the cost of the services of designers and copywriters can cause a serious blow to your wallet.

Today there are many tools that allow you to make graphic elements for free and even without installing special applications. You can use a tool like Canva. Users note its ease of use and of course free features. Need a banner or graphic for your publications? No problem! Look at a couple of guides on working with this tool and try yourself in the role of a graphic designer, it is quite easy.

Content can be a little trickier, especially if you’ve never created content before. But you have a key advantage over experts. You know about your business like no other, which means you can make better and deeper articles. If your goal is to create a blog, then naturally, only you should create all the text material. Do not worry if you have difficulty writing content. There are many useful online tools to help you do this. Here are the main ones you need to pay attention to:

  • If you want to check grammar and punctuation, then use the online Grammarly tool. Moreover, free features will be enough for you to make the text literate and clear.
  • Be sure to check your text for uniqueness. Remember that non-unique content can drown your site. You can check the uniqueness of the text in Copyscape and Duplichecker.
  • If you do not know what to write about and need new ideas, then try using the Hubspot Blog Ideas Generator.

It is worth noting that you can use these tools for free. But to achieve maximum results, you may need to buy a premium version. If you do not have extra money for this, you can consider assistance from LendGenius. But you can squeeze the maximum even from free features in most cases.

Make Your Personal Brand to Get Recognized

To make your site look unique and recognizable, users need to come up with their own personal tips. This item will not require any financial investments if you give free rein to your creativity and imagination. Formulate your catchphrase, which will be appropriate for many publications. Think about creating a personal logo that you will use to promote on social networks. You can do this in the online tool Canva you already know. For the first time, this may not seem like an easy task. Nevertheless, this can increase the flow of users to your site, as something creative and original always attracts people’s attention.

Think About SEO Promotion

Many people think that working on SEO involves a daily effort. But in fact, you just need to think about it once and then everything will go smoothly for you. Therefore, there is a need for a well thought out site map. Create a clear site structure and then think through each individual page.

You also need to consider making your content SEO-optimized. Think about which keywords are most relevant to your site and publications and do not forget about them in your texts. Such words are quite able to attract traffic to your site.

The Final Thoughts

Now you see that creating a site on WordPress without significant financial costs is quite realistic. Of course, for full-fledged work and serious promotion, you need financial investments, but for the first time, there is no need to invest hundreds of dollars. Most of the work for which usually hire specialists you can do independently.

Think about what you can do yourself, and where you need special help. Try to start on your own, and after that, consider the help of experts. Modern technologies provide enough opportunities to make a good website cheap. So do not doubt your strength and make a unique website now. And maybe you will discover in yourself web design or SEO promotion talents.

Author

Mónica Rodríguez is a writer, art historian, and editor located in the tropical island of Puerto Rico. She specializes in Art History, Art Conservation, Finance, Tech, History, Literature, Wellness, and Travel. In her free time, she’s usually roaming the halls of the museum or the local bookstore surrounded by stacks of books.

5 WordPress Blogging Practices

With the advent of easier web publishing, blogs have been booming and consumers are reading and subscribing at greater rates than ever. In fact, WordPress (WP) estimates that there are over 70 million new posts made each month on its platform alone with an excess of 409 million people viewing 20 billion pages monthly.

For some added perspective, the number of bloggers in the United States is expected to reach 31.7 million by 2020. And since bloggers based in America amount for around only 30% of all bloggers, you can do the math and become mind-blown at the number of people worldwide regularly writing material for blogs.

With the blogging industry growing at such an impressive pace, it’s absolutely imperative that you’re following certain best practices to get the most out of your WP blog. Your best shot at success is to recognize that blogging requires a great deal of patience, consistency and dedication to continuous improvement.

Keep the focus on readability

First and foremost in blogging, you have to ensure that your message is easy to read. People simply aren’t going to waste their time struggling to decipher cramped fonts or battle their way through an article overloaded with frustrating popup ads.

Your job is to make your audience’s reading experience as seamless and legible as possible. AmericanEagle.com suggests the use of larger font sizes in the range of 15-22 for website body text. A 120% – 150% line spacing can also go a long way towards reducing eye strain, while a text width of 45-90 characters is thought to be ideal for keeping readers focused.

Additionally, you should stick to the common easily readable Serif and San-Serif fonts. For those of you who aren’t typophiles, popular Serif fonts include Times New Roman, Garamond and Baskerville. These are thought to be better for long-form articles. Some common San-Serif fonts, considered a bit more modern with slightly better on screen legibility, include Arial, Helvetica and Avant Garde.

Once you’ve settled on fonts, remember Headings that pointedly label the various sections of your article are key. H2 headings should be used for main sections with lower level headings or bullets and numbered lists brought in as needed.

To aid you further, here are some additional resources on font combinations and WordPress formatting to guide you along your improved readability journey.

Carefully choose what images to include

Now we all know the saying about a picture being worth a thousand words. While images are not technically a requirement of on a blog, it’s couldn’t be truer that they have the ability to enhance blog posts well beyond the scope of written content.

Lucky for you, visually captivating images are widely and easily available via dedicated stock photo sites like Pixabay, Freepik, Unsplash, PicJumbo and Death to Stock. You can then use Photoshop or free online photo editing tools to add any personalized text, filters, etc.

When putting together longer articles, keep in mind visual aids that help convey the message can go a long way in increasing reader engagement. Just ensure to use images that are truly relevant and informative so readers get a full, cohesive experience.

You should also always include an alt-text when uploading images in WordPress posts because search engines pick up on this. Optimizing your image’s alternative text can lead to a higher SEO image rank which could in turn create an additional channel of web traffic to your blog.

As an add-on, if you just so happen to dabble in photography and want to display your work, here’s some excellent advice on putting together a kick-ass WordPress photo gallery.

Help search engines find you

You can have the most readable blog post with impressive images but if your blog is not optimized for search engines, traffic will only be a trickle. As of this year, there are some 1.94 billion active websites on the internet. So your job is not only to develop a rockin’ blog, but you also need to help the billions of internet users to find your site. That’s where  Search Engine Optimization (SEO) comes in.

Though SEO can be a challenging aspect of digital marketing to master, there are many tools and tips that can help you on your way.

First of all, you have to guarantee your privacy settings to make your blog visible to all search engines. It’s the first step towards having your content indexed by giants like Google and Bing.

Next, you want to focus on keyword research as this is essential for on page optimization. Thankfully, there are many tools and techniques for finding the best keywords relevant to your blog post. For example, Google Adwords and Semrush both offer great topical tools.

Once you’ve identified your best keywords, you’ll want to litter them throughout your post. Try to include them in all of the following places if possible:

  • Title
  • Headings and subheadings
  • Introductory sentence
  • Final paragraph
  • Anchor text (text you hyperlink to other related pages on your site)
  • Title tags and meta descriptions

Here’s a bit of caution though: If you randomly or forcibly repeat the same keywords multiple times, the readability of your content will decrease.Engaging in keyword stuffing, the act of filling your content with too many keywords, only hurts your site ranking in the long run.

Hubspot has a great article on optimizing your blog content for search engines. Be sure to give it a read for a more in depth SEO advice. The ultimate takeaway will be this: it’s your job to make it as easy as possible for people to find your content when they perform a search.

Think twice before clicking publish

As tempting as it may be, resist the urge to jump the gun, hover your cursor over the publish button and click enter as soon as you’ve completed a blog post. Reviewing with fresh eyes is a must in order to ensure an optimized experience for visitors and search engines alike.

Think about developing your own pre-publishing checklist or download this WP plugin to help with enhancing content before going live. Cover your bases by:

  • spell checking
  • proofreading
  • reviewing headings for improved scannability
  • checking links and video embeds
  • reviewing to ensure you have the perfect focus keyword
  • editing the meta description snippet
  • confirming publish date, and the list goes on…

You should also take time to verify that you’ve correctly cited all your sources. Trust me, the extra effort is a worthwhile investment.

Share on Social Media

Once ready to publish, be sure to use plugins to alert your various social networks of new content. Set it up so that new blog posts are automatically shared to Twitter, Facebook,  LinkedIn, etc. This way your audience never misses a beat.

The popular Jetpack plugin offers bloggers a variety of options spanning security, performance, site management and social sharing. If downloading and using this option, make certain you make the most of all applicable widgets.

You can also follow this great guide on how to have social sharing buttons built into your blog. Readers appreciate having to ability to easily circulate content to their friends and followers. Don’t make them work too hard. 

In addition, most people suffer from FOMO and have strong feelings about belong to groups. You can tap into psychology and try to increase a reader’s probability of following the herd by displaying a running count of your social shares and/ or total social followers.

Here’s a pretty extensive list of WordPress social media plugins for you to consider, many of which include social counters as a feature.

Lastly…

A number of highly recommended plugins and tools are already scattered throughout above, but as you forge ahead striving to  create your best possible WordPress blog, feel free to consider these additional options for improved readability, image selection, SEO, social media sharing, etc.

About Author

Uwe Dreissigacker is the founder of online invoicing software InvoiceBerry & also offers free invoice templates to businesses. Small businesses and sole traders can create, send and manage their invoices, quotes and credit notes with the tool. In his free time, Uwe travels the world and enjoys experiencing different cultures.