Here are 3 of my small tweaks from so far in 2019 that anybody can implement, and that are very likely to have a positive impact on traffic and revenue.

#1 Improve Page Load Speeds With A3 Lazy Load

If you have a lot of image heavy posts, this plugin will make a significant impact on your page speeds, without you having to do anything but install it.

The concept is incremental loading. If you have some image at the bottom of a page, is it really necessary that this image be rendered before the reader is anywhere near it?

A3 Lazy Load makes it so that images don’t load until the reader has scrolled to them. It means the page render completes more quickly and the user has to wait (slightly) less at the top of the page, where they start.

The plugin’s not perfect. If you hit a table of contents item that has an image, or if you scroll quickly, you “see” the image appear, and it can come off a touch clunky. But for the gains you can make, and compared to custom coding something like this (which big sites do instead) it’s a solid “hands off” approach.

#2 Improve Search Clickthroughs With Schema

Schema – the other little bits and pieces of information you can get to appear near your site when it pops up in Google search results: Dates, star ratings, authors and more – is a big topic, but I made some changes recently to correct one annoying problem that was hurting my search engine CTRs.

It’s about dates.

When you publish a piece of content, WordPress keeps a record of (and often outputs to your site, depending on the theme) the publish date, and or, the “last updated” date (Called datemodified in the code)

Both of these have value for readers, and for your users. A recent, up to date piece of content has more value than something that’s out of date. But an older piece of content that has existed for a long time, and has been gradually added to is also of tremendous value.

You want Google to see both your published and updated dates, but next to your search result, in the structured data (Schema), you want people to see the most recent date, for obvious reasons.

Search for something of your own in Google now to see how it shows up. If your published date is showing, rather than your last update, it’s worth making this change.

Warning: You probably need a developer for this next part. I used someone from Fiverr who fixed it for $5.

The best practice here is to take the datepublished code out of your article and leave it only in the meta tags. Then your article body will have the datemodified (or your last update) code, and that’s the one Google should read.

There’s a more precise description of the change to make here at this link.

But there’s another reason I made Schema a bullet in this article.

Sara and I just changed from using the plugin “All in one Schema” to configure rich snippets and other Schema bits… to the plugin just called Schema.

It’s a little easier to work with. It outputs more of the right Schema data automatically (rather than having to add the same details for lots of different posts) and it solved another little problem too.

We wanted to give a more specific description of our content in Schema language. A lot of blog style sites have the posts on the site marked as Article, but Article schema is a top level category from which some more specific options (like NewsArticle or General) can be chosen.

The description in Schema that best fit our kinds of articles is BlogPosting, and as it turns out, this Schema plugin gives an option to change all your site’s posts to this setting with one switch.

Summary: Fix up how your post dates are showing in Schema, and make sure (using Schema plugin) you’re giving the most specific definition of your content possible in Schema language.

#3 Increase Affiliate Clickthroughs With AAWP

Lots of people use the Amazon Affiliates for WordPress plugin (aff). The plugin itself isn’t cutting edge knowledge, but using it, and using it well, can make a number of small improvements to an affiliate site simultaneously.

Those improvements are:

Improving page speeds (by loading images through the API)

If you have the images of your products displaying with the code Amazon gives you, you may have noticed it has a negative effect on page speeds.

I am not the technical person to explain to you properly why this is so, but it’s a long piece of code, with some weird repeated bits, and when you test the load speed of a page with one of those Amazon images on it, vs a regular image of the same size, with all else being equal, you’ll see the first one takes longer to load.

With AAWP you can show images on your site that come via Amazon’s API, so you can get rid of that slow loading code while still showing an up to date, appropriately sized image of the product on your page.

Improving clickthrough rates (by – among other things – highlighting when an item is on sale)

A lot of people use AAWP for their comparison tables, and when you take the time to do them well and add value, it’s a convenient option.

But the CTR increase I wanted to talk about first is from the ability to show an item as “on sale”. Lots of items on Amazon are on sale at any given time, but you can never mention this in the text of your articles as it’s against Amazon’s TOS… except when the pricing data is coming from the API.

So when you add a product box and have the right setting ticked, you can get this detail showing near your products

which is a great added incentive for someone to click and buy immediately. You don’t need to be constantly updating your articles either. If the box is in, it will automatically display any price reductions as per the API, in real time.

Not all the products you promote on your site will be on sale, so an easy way to get started with this plugin is to run through and add a product box on each of your articles where you mention a product that is on sale (to find out which are on sale, you’d just go to Amazon, look at the item, and see if there’s a price reduction)

Improving compliance with Amazon’s TOS: By being able to show the details of item directly from Amazon.

There’s an added peace of mind that comes from knowing you’re only showing data that Amazon already has in its system. You’re not going to accidentally mention a price somewhere, or misquote a detail about a product, or show an incorrect image, or some other trivial thing that causes Amazon to bring down the hammer on you.

Obviously using this plugin doesn’t guarantee you’ll never have a problem, but it’s multiple steps in the right direction.

Those are the 3.

Let me know if you’re already using these, or if you start using them after reading this. I’d love to hear your results.

The post 3 Advanced WordPress Plugins To Boost Traffic & Sales in 2019 appeared first on Andrew Hansen's Blog.

Expertise, Authority & Trust

If your business gets traffic from Google (or if you want it to) it is no longer viable to proceed without understanding what E-A-T is.

In short, Google put out a document some years back called the Quality Raters’ Guidelines. It was originally a document given only to contractors they were using to help assess the quality of websites in the search index. Information from these “quality raters” was fed back into the algorithm to help improve it’s ability to… assess quality. Turns out robots can’t do everything afterall.

This is not a minor thing.

Ben Gomes, Google’s vice president of search, assistant and news, told CNBC, that the Quality Raters’ Guidelines,

“don’t tell you how the algorithm is ranking results, but they fundamentally show what the algorithm should do”.

Yes, this document lays out the best they hope the algorithm to be able to achieve some day. Paying attention yet?

Later the guide became publicly available (link here), and SEOs began poring over it for tips to improve their rankings. It’s a huge document. You probably don’t want to read the whole thing, but I strongly recommend at least a skim through during tonight’s Netflix binge. (We just finished “Wild Wild Country“… what a story!)

One of the core concepts of the report is E-A-T. These contractors are taught to assess the quality of a site based on, among other things, the site’s apparent levels of Expertise, Authority & Trust.

There is a lot that goes into E-A-T but for the sake of a handy simplification it can be roughly separated into two parts: On site, and off site.

On site is about the EAT of your authors, contributors and anyone else involved in the running of the site. Who actually writes your site? What’s their expertise? What’s their experience? How credible are they? Are they known in their field? How are they thought of in their industry? What qualifications do they have? Have they been recognized in any particular way?

The answers to these questions have to be considered and then communicated on your site to the greatest extent possible, to show you have sufficient E-A-T in your market.

Off site is about how your site and your authors are referred to elsewhere on the internet. Have you been quoted in newspapers? Appeared on TV? Published some important report? Have you been positively reviewed anywhere? Are you mentioned on consumer report websites? Maybe the Better Business Bureau?

Essentially, if someone went looking for information about your site… that wasn’t written by you… what would they find, and how authoritative would it make you look? Current opinion is that off site E-A-T carries the most weight.

Now, before anyone throws their hands up and quits SEO for good, a couple of notes.

The place where these principles are supposed to be being applied most carefully by Google is in YMYL markets: Your Money or Your Life. Any market with a safety component: primarily finance and health/medical.

It’s still true that in the majority of markets outside of this, sites with no E-A-T are doing great. If your blog is on quilting or pet clothing, you can afford to pay much less attention to this. How much expertise can anyone really have on dog sweaters?

Secondly, even despite having been affected by updates supposedly targeting E-A-T this year (my main site lost about 40% of it’s organic traffic. Yuck.) I see this as a really positive step for search.

SEOs have complained for years that Google is bad at determining the quality of content. It doesn’t know what great content is so it has to rely on secondary metrics like links to decide.

E-A-T might well be the beginning of the end of that. There are prominent SEOs who believe that Google will come to rely less on links and more on authenticity to determine the quality of content.

Better search rankings with less link building?? I’ll take it.

(Ok let’s not get too excited. There’s still plenty of work to do.)

E-A-T Action Steps

So as to avoid leaving this discussion purely theoretical, here are some of the things I have done and am doing to increase my E-A-T in 2018 and 2019.

NOTE: I’m in a YMYL niche so I have to take this more seriously than most.

Author Pages

You know in your Yoast settings where you can choose to noindex those silly pages like tag pages, archives… and AUTHORS. Yeah, those days are done.

My author pages are indexable and they are basically shrines to my authors. On them you can read a full list of their qualifications, their achievements, their backgrounds, all the important work they’ve published, all the places they’ve been recognized, as well as the usual feed of their most recent articles. Their real images are there; social profiles; other websites and more. No one can have any doubt about whether this author is a real person with real qualifications who is a real hero in their field.

No More Template Legal Pages

This year I paid to have proper legal pages created that were specific to my website. Even if you don’t want to pay for it, it’s worth a review of your Terms of Service, Privacy and Affiliate Disclosure/Disclaimer to make sure they properly reflect what your website is doing and not doing.

If you’re not sure what else might need to be added, look at some of your competitors for ideas then ask for one off advice from a lawyer on those.

Oh, and INDEX THEM. Forget whatever duplicate content concerns you once had. Think about it from a trustworthiness perspective: What kind of a website HIDES their legal pages from being found in Google?!

No More Pseudonyms/Personas

There are plenty of reasons you might want to use a pseudonym. I’m not saying a site that has a pseudonym author can’t work anymore. It still works perfectly fine in plenty of niches.

I am saying a pseudonym author can’t build E-A-T properly. Obviously it can’t. Is your fake persona going to be quoted in a major industry publication? If a quality rater digs into the qualifications and education and experience of your fake persona author, are they doing to find anything good?

If your niche requires a lot of E-A-T, you’re going to lose out by not having your authors be real, searchable people.

Disclaimers

Disclaimers for safety if that’s a component of your site, and disclaimers for advertising: Not just on a dedicated page of your site, buried in a footer link somewhere…

but in a small note on EVERY page where there’s safety affecting information, or affiliate links.

Affiliate wise, all the biggest sites do this. TheWireCutter for example, has this one sentence declaration, in prime real estate, at the top of every page with affiliate links

“Wirecutter is reader supported. When you buy through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission”

Why not add something similar to your template?

Then for any content that may affect a person’s safety (arguably even a fitness website could benefit here) a similar one sentence on every page (sidebar, header, whatever) isn’t going to hurt:

“This workout advice does not take into consideration your personal fitness or health, and could be dangerous if implemented incorrectly. Seek specific advice from a qualified trainer before attempting this yourself”.

This even gives me the chance to make a disclaimer of my own:

“This advice on disclaimers is for illustrative purposes only. Andrew Hansen is blatantly not a lawyer. He doesn’t even like Law and Order. Don’t copy the disclaimers he’s given. Write your own, ideally with help from a legal professional”.

Boom.

Off Page: Less But Better Links (Better by E-A-T)

Look, I still want high Domain Authority when I’m link building.

But more than ever before, I’m thinking “What is the E-A-T of this site I could get a link from?” and I’m judging the appropriate effort to commit to the acquisition of that link, by the answer.

I’ve got links in my profile that are DA60+ that I can clearly see have minimal E-A-T. They’re not worth working as hard for as they were before.

On the other hand, the well known industry publication who’s DA might not even hit 60 is much more valuable now. If people in your niche will recognise the site, it’s worth having a link on. What’s more, it’s worth being mentioned on even if you don’t get a link. 

I’m thinking a lot more about press in 2019. I’m thinking more about creating content specifically because it will be newsworthy. I’m thinking more about building relationships (best case: contributor spots) with the biggest sites in my market.

I’m thinking about this idea that “Google is getting better at knowing which links to ignore”. I’m trying to minimize time and investment on the kind of links that are likely to be recognized someday by a quality rater as obviously not saying very much about the quality (read, the E-A-T) of my site.

Last note about link building: For new site owners: I think there is a lot in the realm of link building that can be very worthwhile for the purpose of getting a new site off the ground, even if it’s not as worthwhile once the site is established. I’m still a fan for example of the kind of guest posts that can be acquired through services we mentioned in our courses previous and current. I just see them as having less long term value once a site is say 2 years+.

Want More On E-A-T?

This video is a great introduction, by a highly experienced SEO, with tonnes of QnA at the end.

I hope you’ve found this helpful and I wish you all the best at increasing your E-A-T.

The post The Ranking Factor I’m Thinking Most About Going Into 2019 appeared first on Andrew Hansen's Blog.

Augmented Reality

Different to “virtual reality” where the user is immersed in a virtual experience, “AR” is a category of products that adjusts (augments) your experience of actual reality.

The most popular product in the category are the once dorky glasses.

According to Google trends this niche has been more consistently popular than I expected. Over 5 years search volume has been pretty steady. There’s been an upswing since 2016 but nothing major.

The big change has been in the technology. It’s better, people have grown more accepting and it’s brought a range of new products to market, many of which now have search volume and market awareness of their own by now.

Case in point #1: Vufine

This is just a brand of augmented reality glasses that sell for $199 on Amazon.

Low competition, and a list of long tail keywords to go with it.

Like the “smart home” niche I talked about in the last edition, I see this as a niche with lots of education potential. The number of ways to do cool things with your AR devices will keep increasing and there will end up being personalities and authorities in that space that are making money teaching, reviewing and comparing.

There’s also this thing that has higher competition on the short tail term, but still plenty of long tail opportunities and sells for over $700 on Amazon.

You just won’t run out of ways to monetize in this market in the next 5 years.

CBD Products

Like it or not, with changing legislation around the world, the market for cannabis products is exploding.

CBD oils are a huge product (CBD oil having 320k searches a month at time of writing) but a look at this page on Trendhunter gives a sense of just how many ideas and products are cropping up in this space:

This is a market where in general, price points are lower, but volumes are higher. Oil products seem to be cheaper, ranging from $20 to $50. Capsule products (like some of the ones below) can push over $100.

There are already small brands with their own bits of search volume, and low competition, like these:

The latter even having what seems to be a private affiliate program (which I came across a couple of times in this market and I would expect to see more of, before there is the kind of full mainstream acceptance that means Amazon products – and the associate program – will dominate the affiliate space.)

But there are shorter tail keywords that aren’t yet out of reach either…

This market has the virtue of re-ordering potential and if you got with the right program nice and early I can see the possibility for a profitable relationship into the future.

It will have education potential (do I need oil, or capsules, or should I use a vape?), it has the controversy element that would allow extra promotional opportunities, and it’s pickup up steam rapidly. 3 things that make it a strong opportunity for content business entrepreneurs like us.

That’s it for April.

I hope you saw something interesting in these!

The post 2 Niches I’d Enter Right Now – April 2018 Edition appeared first on Andrew Hansen's Blog.

Below are two niches I’d enthusiastically enter right now, and the reasons why.

#1 Smart Home

It’s not a hot “new” topic anymore, but it has become perfectly clear in the last two years that the trend toward wifi enabled, programmable, controllable and interactive home devices isn’t reversing any time soon. We’re not going to see less of this in 5 years time than we do now.

I’m talking about Wifi lightbulbs, voice controlled home devices (Apple, Google and Amazon all have one of these), smart learning thermostats, home audio setups, security devices, and much more.

As I’ve come to understand it further, what’s made “smart home” more exciting to me as a niche is the possibility for education. You can’t just buy a wifi lightbulb, or Amazon’s Alexa device and instantly have a better life. They need setup, syncing, and configuration before they confer any of their benefits. In that realm, online authorities have a real opportunity to profit, largely because the creators of these devices aren’t in the business of teaching.

Even the lowest end product like a lightbulb (which starts around $20 and you’ll rarely buy just one) needs apps and codes (If This Then That, anybody?) and work to make it… work.

And the number of possibilities keeps increasing. A friend of mine set up a motion scanner on his mailbox, that sent a notification to his phone when he got a piece of mail… which I realize is positively plebeian by “up to the minute” Smart Home standards, but that I – sometimes accused of being a Luddite – found wholly impressive.

I can easily imagine an authority site in this niche reviewing every new smart device that came out, providing tutorials on setups and syncs, and comparing devices to one another. I know they already exist, but my impression is that the niche is broad enough to tolerate many of them all with their own unique angles and specialties, all profiting nicely.

Want a place to start?

There’s a home security camera called a Blink I just found that has some nice looking numbers in Ahrefs and starts at $100 a pop…

Or these “smart locks” called Schlage that I can see for $175 on Amazon that look equally appealing…

New products seem to be popping up very regularly in this niche so the opportunity is rapidly increasing.

Anyone who put a year into a high value site in this niche would be well rewarded.

NOTE: This is a niche where a personal interest and passion would be very well rewarded. If you don’t have that, you’d need to be hiring someone who did in order to really make an impact.

#2: Posture Correction

It’s hard – not impossible – to imagine a world in 5 years where humans had better posture than they do now. With more people spending more hours hunched over more devices, a global improvement in posture is not on the cards…

But there are an increasing number of businesses trying to change that.

When I started digging around I was shocked to see the number of different solutions there are to the problem of poor posture. Physical devices, wearable technologies, desks and chairs, furniture, exercises, even personal coaching.

This search on TrendHunter gives a sense of the variety of innovations occurring in this market, from the obvious to the “what on earth is that?”

Looking for a place to start?

Well, the keyword “posture corrector” which is a product search, has inexplicably low competition for something that has multiple $100 products in the Amazon search results.

And a brand of standing desk called Ergotron that has products up to $500, has tonnes of volume with low competition…

Including this model the Workfit, which has variations all between $300 and $500 and literally could not have lower competition…

But of course there are so many more (looking at furniture both for the office and home, and wearable technology in particular).

A site focused on ergonomics and good posture has plenty of expansion opportunity, touching just enough on the bigger topics of lifestyle, health and fitness.

You could develop info products here, keep a good newsletter, do training programs of your own where you partnered with a posture authority. There are no shortages of possibility for revenue in this market.

This one also has the advantage of being less complex a topic. The human body and what makes you stand straight will never change in the same way that the technologies of modern homes will.

That’s It

Those are two that excite me right now. If you do end up getting started in one of these markets, drop me a line privately and let me know. I’d be your biggest cheerleader.

The post 2 Niches I’d Enter Right Now – February 2018 Edition appeared first on Andrew Hansen's Blog.

The video below is a video showing how you can do exactly that. It’s quick, simple and you could do it while you’re watching.

Do it.

The post How To Find & Rank For New Profitable Keywords Without Publishing New Content appeared first on Andrew Hansen's Blog.

What do you get for a logo that expensive? How does a professional brand strategist think about creating a logo? What did I learn from getting a logo this way, rather than posting on 99designs?

Those questions and more I’ll aim to answer in this blog post.

First and Foremost: Why?!

Why spend more on a logo when you can easily spend less? If your traffic is mainly organic and your visitors are mainly “one visit” types, what does it all matter?

A few things:

Authority: This particular site is at a point of growth where it will soon be seen as a competitor to bigger sites in the niche. If at a glance, you clearly look cheaper, smaller, and lower quality than your competitors, how do you beat them? (And does the extra work you do to make up that difference (say, in your content quality) cost less than $1600? Probably not.

The site has a revenue stream that makes the cost reasonable. Not unless you have start up capital would I recommend making such a significant brand decision at the pre-revenue stages of a site.

Outreach: Alex Miller from Posirank (aff) made the point recently that if you’re sending outreach emails, asking people to link to something you’ve written, you can play a game and put yourself in their shoes. They actually open your email, open the suggested article on your site, and what do they see? Before they read a word, they get an impression. “Is this a spam bot who’s emailed me, or an authoritative website?”. They’re probably not reading the whole article, but if they open the link, they’ve made a decision about your relative authority.

My friend Filip Matous added that this is relevant before they even click the link in your outreach email. If you have a great, professional logo it can go in your email signature so anyone who opens your outreach email sees it. It’s harder to look like a spammer when your company has an expensive, authoritative looking company logo at the bottom of it’s emails.When it comes down to links, cost becomes easy to justify. If a great logo increases the number of outreach links you get by even 5%, it pays for itself quickly (assuming you’re working hard on outreach!).

Conversion: This same “impression” factor is at play on your site itself. So you do product reviews and comparisons? When someone arrives on your site, what impression do they get about how reliable you are? And how quickly do they get it? Do you look like an authority? Or like a one man band, blogging from your basement? When a prospect’s money is involved, that impression means something to your click through rates, your conversion rates, and your revenue.

Now that’s clear, let me walk you through what happened after I agreed to this logo project, how it all came together, and what I learned along the way.

The Process Part 1: Creating A Brand Persona

This was orchestrated by my friend Filip, who was on the podcast here, and who’s instructions on creating a brand persona I got from his book How to Get Your Website Noticed. He put me in touch with the designer who made this happen.

The way this process DIDN’T start was by getting a designer, telling them my website name, and asking them to “make me something that looks good”.

To even start thinking about how a “good” logo might look, this designer needed to have detailed notes on exactly who my website was speaking to and it what it was trying to convey.

I had to give him a full profile, including a “day in the life” of my perfect customer; not their demographics (32, male etc) but what they think about, what their values are, what other websites they like, and psychologically why they find my site valuable.

NOTE: The business Facebook page for this website proved invaluable to me in this process. I could go through bunches of the people who had liked my content already and (many of of their profiles being public) look at what else they “like”, which other pages they follow, etc).

I could even go through their comments on my posts to give a picture of the language and tone they use to make it super clear (when seeing lots of them side by side) who this person really was.

I also had to profile other websites that speak to the same audience, including why my site was different to theirs, and how I wanted us to stand out compared to them.

Everything this designer does will be with that perfect customer in view; How will they view this logo? What will make it stand out to them? What will imply trustworthiness to them? Why will it help them feel the things we want to help them feel?

You start to get a sense of why it’s not just a “graphic designer” who can do this. The person requires an intimate knowledge of marketing and brand combined with impeccable aesthetic judgement to pull this off.

Part 2: First Concepts

In the first round, the designer submitted to me 6 concepts; individual logos that were different possible ways of communicating the desired brand identity to the exact target audience.

They were things like, “this one is if you want to accentuate the “fun”ness of the brand”, “This one is if you want to push harder on the authority of it” etc. This allowed me to decide (since I should still know my brand, it’s desired place in the market, and the target audience best) which idea made the clearest statement of what this site was, and why it mattered.

Importantly, the designer said for this round that the fine details were less important. He said to tell him which concept I liked, and the typography, sizing, layout and other smaller bits we could work out in the final rounds.

As soon as I saw the first set of concepts I could tell this was different.

When he saw my current logo for this site (a 99designs job that I’d previously thought was ok), Filip was highly ambivalent. The content of his criticisms were noteworthy.

It’s in the health niche and the logo was using two colors, a lighter and a darker green. Filip said something like “You usually have a primary and a secondary color who’s contrast creates the interest in the logo. But you only really have one color here, green”. That made immediate sense.

Then when he looked at the logo part, the graphic (non textual) representation of the brand, he goes “I get why he chose that, and it’s alright, but I don’t think that’s the best you can do”. In other words, he could imagine other ways of taking the idea at the center of “why this site is unique and noteworthy” and representing it in a more exciting way.

Of course, as was clear on the first round of designs, that was true.

All the concepts used a primary and secondary color, often as well as a shade (black/white/greys) for text or supporting elements. This gave them all a kind of depth and complexity that my existing design lacked.

The logos used symbolism to try and create associations and put ideas across.

There were a lot of questions like “Is this a clearer representation of X feeling/idea, or that?” There wasn’t a line out of place. Nothing that meant nothing. If a line was thin, it was to create a minimal modern feel. If something crossed over, it was to symbolize intersection or union. If something was misaligned, or “inorganic” it was to infer imperfection – the beautiful kind that could come from nature – and so on.

(What I’m hoping by the way is that by talking about these points and this experience, you’ll be able to ask better questions, have better conversations with, and get better results from your designers in the future, however much you’re paying.)

I gave the initial concepts to a handful of my marketing friends for feedback, selected what I thought was the best option and we moved to the next step.

Part 3: Final Tweaks

On Filip’s recommendation, we took the first concept, and asked the designer to “play with it” – I didn’t even know this was a thing until working with Filip.

It’s basically asking him to try variations on different aspects of the design to see if one can add a little extra “pop” to the final design. It could be some different fonts, different color variations, bold this, add more space to that, etc.

The designer sends back through 6 variations on the original. (You can already start to see how much more work is involved than what – at least plenty of designers I’ve worked with in the past – would be willing to do.)

When I saw these tweaks, I actually couldn’t tell whether I liked them more than the original.

Again, Filip had a couple of great bits of advice.

Look from 10 Feet: First, he told me about this practice of looking at designs by standing way back away from the computer screen. There’s some kind of perceptual filter applied when you’re looking at your screen from right in front of it, that disappears at distance. Comparing which design looks more striking seen from a computer screen across a room can point out subtle aspects of a design that make it more or less attractive.

Split It Up: Then, on matters of typography, he told me to look at the design in it’s individual parts. It’s a logo, with website name next to it. He said look at the text on it’s own, with no logo next to it. Compare two versions of “text only” and whichever is most striking on it’s own, will be the most striking as a full logo.

That did it.

Next Steps & Takeaways For You

This logo was a pre-cursor to a full site design for this particular property. This itself was a change to common thinking where normally your early steps are to get a logo that fits with your website. Here we’re getting a logo that establishes the core brand identity, then having a website designer (different animal again!) flesh that concept out into a coherent layout where each feature of the site echoes the same feel, the same brand values.

Whatever your niche, this is the kind of move that bigger players in your market will eventually make.

Even if you’re not about to splash for a new logo, I hope this gives you a chance to think about what your brand’s identity will be eventually.

• What’s the position of your site in your niche?
• How is it different to the sites that do something similar?
• Who are you really speaking to when you write content? What do they really love and care about (besides, you know, finding a new toaster oven)?
• And what can you do with your site to deepen your connection to those people?

Because if you’re in this for the long haul, knowing those answers will pay off.

The post What I Learned By Getting A $1600 Website Logo appeared first on Andrew Hansen's Blog.

In this week’s episode, I spoke again to the “Shrink for Entrepreneurs” Peter Shallard from Commit Action (aff, and recommended!) about our paradoxical desire for “freedom” in entrepreneurship, and about the value of creating systems of accountability.

We touched on goal setting (and the controversies in the science of it), Peter discussed the specific steps for setting yourself up with a powerful in person mastermind group, and we discussed what it means to live a “highly leveraged” life, maximizing human flourishing.

My Favorite Parts of This Chat Were

[4:10] The problem with “freedom” as a goal in business

[6:30] The alternative to freedom seeking & why it’s better

[9:00] Why discomfort is a valuable part of that process

[11:20] What it means to live a “highly leveraged” life

[17:00] Jerry Seinfeld and Noma (in Denmark), as examples

[21:50] What it means to replace freedom with leverage

[23:15] Willpower depletion and the mental gastank

[27:45] Being in the zone, but the wrong one

[34:00] The results of doing high leverage tasks compared to others & why “working on work” depletes willpower

[36:00] Working on work depletes willpower

[38:20] Increasing accountability to transform yourself for the good

[41:25] The problem of isolation and countering it with accountability

[51:45] Learning from others and sharing goals

[59:10] How to set long term goals that matter.

[67:15] Whether it’s better to tell or not tell other people your goals

Resources

Even if you missed our webinar offer a couple months back, Peter’s accountability and productivity coaching service Commit Action is still a huge competitive advantage for entrepreneurs that I recommend highly.

What’d You Think?

Let me know in the comments here, or by leaving a review on Itunes.

The post Ep16: Peter Shallard on Productivity via Accountability, Goal Setting Science & The Freedom Paradox appeared first on Andrew Hansen's Blog.

In this week’s podcast episode I talked to Sara Young about her new favorite subjects, dopamine, serotonin, and why these brain chemicals (rather than your own rational decisions) play such a large role in the results you get in business.

My favorite parts of this chat were

[4:25] The 1950s experiment with rats and what it told us about how susceptible we are to pull of dopamine.
[7:15] How dopamine affects you while you’re reading a sales letter (& why it’s so bad for your progress)
[12:30] The role of dopamine in your most frustrating, least productive moments.
[16:40] Step 1 to engineering your dopamine releases (to get them from more rewarding places than from social media)
[18:05] The relationship between dopamine, motivation and focus.
[21:15] How to attain high dopamine “flow” states at your choosing.
[25:11] Did Sara actually call me a Gorilla? I leave you to decide…
[29:40] Sara’s “Neuro Bucket” method for avoiding dopamine crashes (avoiding binges & blowouts for maximum efficiency)
[41:15] Sara explains another neurochemical Serotonin, with a story about cows which was the first thing I told my wife when we hung up the call
[52:00] The strange ways we get Serotonin (that seem innocent, but reveal less savory impulses within us)
[54:45] How to make Serotonin work in our favor (rather than make us do horrible things).

Resources Mentioned

Sara recommends the work of Loretta Breunig to learn more about brain chemicals & how they affect our lives.

This video of cows fighting!

The post Ep15: Sara Young on how brain chemicals are affecting your results appeared first on Andrew Hansen's Blog.

This episode is about a business model that isn’t new or “revolutionary” but that is exciting and profitable and I think will be even more so in the future.

The power and value of Niche Authority sites are still being fully understood. In this episode we’ll look at what this kind of site really is, what drives it, and how you can start utilizing and profiting from it’s core principles on your own sites starting today.

The Best Parts Of This Chat Were…

[3:10] Why I found searching for a new Chinese restaurant so frustrating.

[7:15] What I consider a “Niche Authority” and why it’s so much different and better.

[14:05] Why niche authority sites stand to be more profitable in the future.

[24:20] The 4 core principles that create niche authority (all to do with content & style)

[30:50] 3 examples of niche authority sites that we can all learn from (particularly in their content and monetization)

[41:30] 3 less common ways of monetizing authority sites that have high earning potential.

[49:35] How to create content like a niche authority site does.

[54:00] How to promote your site like a niche authority does.

Resources Mentioned

SeriousEats.com

PermanentStyle.com

DiffordsGuide.com

Patreon.com

BrainPickings.com

The post Ep14: Niche Authority Sites & Why They’re The Future of Organic Search Marketing appeared first on Andrew Hansen's Blog.

In this post you’re going to see why I now believe that if:

a) You run WordPress sites that generate over say $200 of revenue a month, but with traffic below perhaps a million uniques a month.

b) Your skills are in marketing like me, not tech.

that WPEngine (aff) is the best value for money hosting solution you can get right now. You will shortly see that I haven’t arrived at this solution lightly.

I’ve just transferred all of my sites over to it, and I never thought a hosting company could give me any form of happiness, let alone the level of happiness that I’ve since attained.

Here’s how and why this view of mine developed.

Background: Oh Hostgator…

Since I started online in 2005 I’d used Hostgator as my primary host. I’d dabbled with different solutions over the years, mainly for PBNs, and small individual projects, but had never veered far.

I had a dedicated server with HG since maybe 2009. At one stage we even had 3 dedicated hosts with HG, paying about $1200 a month.

This offered some small reprieve from the worst things about Hostgator (and companies like it) that people complain about with cheap shared accounts. On dedicated, you have better security than shared, and if you know how, you can get slightly better support.

But mainly, I just stuck with it because it’s all I knew. For an entrepreneur, I’m surprisingly resistant to change on certain things. I tend to see the amount of work involved in a change before I imagine the benefits.

Finally, and most after chatting to my friend Bill (who you can hear from on this episode of the podcast) I came to understand the full extent of how bad hosting companies like HG are, compared to what’s available in 2016.

Those interested can read more here about this company called EIG who now own Hostgator and, well, most of the major web hosts online, why they are producing such low quality, and why they are to be avoided for the time being.

What’s WordPress Hosting?

For those who don’t know, it’s a relatively new form of web hosting company that, as the name suggests, works only with WordPress. This means they can focus on being amazing at hosting WordPress sites, with all the intricacies that entails.

Example: At various times with Hostgator, I’d find out that one of my sites had gone down.

I’d talk to Hostgator support, and after much back and forth, learn that some plugin had started throwing an error, which went crazy hogging server resources, until it used up all that site’s allowance in my account, and the site went down.

When I’d start asking which plugin it was, and which file, they could only ever paste me lines from an error log file who’s meaning I didn’t understand.

With WordPress hosting, no such thing should happen.

They manage the updates of your WordPress core. They manage plugin updates. And when something weird does happen, and you ask them about it, they know what happened because… they only work with WordPress. They can specialize.

Actually something like this already happened in my first month of using WPEngine. I had a runaway plugin one day. The site didn’t go down, it just slowed way down this day. I talked to their support (more on which later) who immediately told me what the issue was, and recommended a solution, which I took and the problem was immediately fixed.

As you’ll see below, hosting WordPress sites with a WordPress managed host is a very different hosting experience.

Advantage #1: Security

Since I started this blog post, I’ve recommended two close friends switch to WPEngine after bad hackings took their sites down, costing big money and time to repair.

Security is a huge challenge for new entrepreneurs. When you’re trying to keep costs low, you choose the cheapest hosting you can – which usually means shared. That is, you buy space on a hosting account that’s shared with a whole lot of other people – and you hope for the best. It doesn’t always go well.

I once lost an entire income stream because I was sending Adwords traffic to a landing page, on a blog that was hosted on a shared account. The site got hacked, so Adwords stopped running my ad… then they killed the quality score of my whole site so I basically couldn’t send traffic to that site… then they killed my whole Adwords account because I looked like someone who was sending traffic to a hacker website.

It sucked.

I’ve had others bad experiences too, with sites getting organic traffic being hacked, struggling to get the site back, losing rankings and income. What’s worse, basically anyone I know who has been making WordPress sites long enough has had problems with hacking. And the more exposure your sites get, the higher the chances of catching a hacker’s attention.

Most of us know this, but managing our own site’s security is among the most boring of human pursuits.

You know you have to keep WordPress up to date. But sometimes you just forget.

You know you have to get rid of old plugins…

You know you have to hide certain WordPress files…

And a bunch of other tasks, but when you’re focused on creating quality content and getting your new site noticed, you just don’t prioritize that stuff.

When you have managed WordPress hosting, they prioritize security for you.

I just saw this post on WPEngine today called “15 Ways To Harden Your WordPress Security” and it’s basically just a list of security things that WPEngine does to improve your security if you’re a customer.

Practically speaking, it means hosting with WPE, I’m much less likely to get hacked, and in the worst case that I still do, they fix it for free.

The peace of mind this gives is no small advantage. As entrepreneurs we stress about enough things as is. Having one less is nice.

Advantage #2: Speed

Site speed is still a ranking factor. According to most experts, it’s more of a factor now than it was.

Depending on the package you choose at WPE you’ll be able to utilize their CDN (content delivery network) as part of the service, to speed up your sites.

What’s a CDN? No way am I the right person to explain that to you. This explanation is simple and quick. Bottom line is CDNs make your site faster and user experience better.

Smarter people will tell you that just having a CDN doesn’t necessarily speed your site up.

What I do know is that my sites load faster now, according to speed tests than they did before we switched.

More than that, I love that WPEngine makes speed a focus. They let you run speed tests on individual sites and pages within your hosting dashboard…

They also give recommendations for improvements based on each test.

Functionally, it means each time you make a tweak to your layout, or add a plugin, you can quickly do a speed check, and compare it against your past results to make sure nothing slowed down.

Even after finishing a post you can check the speed of that URL to make sure it’s in line with your norms… then you can tweak it if not.

Advantage #3: Support

Ohh the support…

I’ve contacted WP engine probably 10 times with small issues, since I signed up.

I’ve never waited more than a few minutes for a live chat reply. That’s no exaggeration either. This is what their live chat looks like at time of writing, in the middle of a US workday…

And I’ve never closed a chat without the issue I inquired about being fixed.

Their support goes above and beyond.

I’ve asked them to help me with things that shouldn’t be their job. Maybe it’s late at night and your developer isn’t going to reply quickly… whatever. They haven’t let me down once.

And they’re newbie friendly too. Sometimes something has gone wrong. I don’t know how to describe it properly? “This page is showing some weird code all of a sudden” is the kind of technical descriptions I’ve throw at them without them blinking an eye.

Advantage #4 Backup Management

Sometimes you break something on your site. And the experience I used to have contacting Hostgator in these moments was always fearful. Maybe they had a backup, maybe they didn’t. How old was the backup? And once they sent me a link to the backup file, what was I going to do with it?! (Email a developer, that’s what)

WPEngine not only manages your backups internally, they offer you 1 click restore points to any of them.

This means if I break something, I can fix it… or at least prevent it affecting revenue… immediately, and myself.

I like this.

What I Worried About

The reason I put off changing hosts for so long is that my only experiences of ever moving a site from one place to another were… lacking in fun. Let’s put it that way.

The Faff of Transferring

Especially transferring from a Cpanel host (what your host probably is) to this new managed WordPress thing… I just didn’t know what to expect.

Turns out it’s all pretty simple. You install their WordPress plugin on your existing site, and it sucks all the details over to your WPEngine account.

A change of nameservers and you’re pretty much done.

I won’t overplay it: I did get some help from a friend for the first one, and had a few back and forths with live support to make sure everything was set. But after that it clicked and subsequent sites were easy to move.

It’s not exactly fun work, but you only have to do it once.

Limits On Traffic

I didn’t like this idea when I was considering joining. And plenty of people don’t like it.

“Why do I get punished for being successful?”

A: “You don’t get punished for being successful. You get punished for using more resources, IDIOT.”

(Yep, that’s me having a fake conversation with an imaginary person. It’s late here. Forget it.)

Truth is, I picked the plan that corresponded with the traffic I was getting, with about 100% room to grow… and it was fine.

The cost saving was still huge compared to my dedicated accounts at Hostgator.

What About Email?

I always used Cpanel email addresses for sites, and I was familiar with them and how they worked.

WPEngine doesn’t host email so you need to get a separate provider. You still have an @yourname.com email address, it just gets managed elsewhere.

This is another thing I didn’t understand that put me off from transferring for a while.

Turned out the solution was easy enough. I now use a free service called Zoho, that you connect up through your domain registrar, instead of your host.

It’s only a few steps to set up (configuring mx records… which may sound complicated but it’s mainly just copy/pasting. Zoho has a good tutorial on it too) and once it’s done, the email client is actually really cool. You can create multiple email addresses per domain name and manage them from one central account.

Did I mention it’s FREE?

Bottom line: The email part was a change of habit but I lost nothing, and gained quite a lot with the new setup.

Plugins Disallowed?

This was another thing I was concerned about. WPEngine doesn’t allow you to run certain plugins because of risks they might pose to security and speed across their servers.

At first I thought this was a bummer, especially because I read that some Related Post plugins were on the list.

This turned out not to be an issue at all.

It actually alerted me that I should change to a different related posts plugin (I use Yuzo now but there are other good options too) and all other plugins on the list I didn’t need or wasn’t using anyway. I could uninstall some like backup plugins, and caching plugins because WPengine takes care of those things for you.

When I Wouldn’t Recommend It

I tried to be specific at the start of this post in saying that I think WPEngine is the best choice for you if:

a) You run WordPress sites that generate over say $200 of revenue a month, but with traffic below perhaps a million uniques a month.

b) Your skills are in marketing like me, not tech.

There are another couple considerations too:

If you run a WordPress site AND…

something else on the domain, or on your current host itself… maybe your CRM, something to do with your payment processor…. something else for your landing pages or e-commerce store, or whatever…

Anything that’s not WordPress has to be managed differently and you might consider it too much hassle.

I ended up transferring some of my assets in this category to Siteground, who I’ve also been really happy with.

Point is just that if you host lots of sites and stuff that isn’t all WP, you’ll have to decide whether that extra separation and effort is worth it.

If you do lots of in depth development…

Some developers have said they don’t like WP engine because of the way they restrict access to their environment. Apparently they don’t allow SSH access. This has never affected me but it may affect you.

If you have only one site that gets more than say 50,000 uniques a month…

There’s another managed WordPress hosting service that’s picking up steam called Kinsta. The main advantage with them is that they don’t restrict traffic. With the single site install, you get unlimited visitors for $100 a month. Some people have said they think it’s much better than WPEngine, but as with any web hosting question, debate rages.

Bottom Line

For a digital business, your hosting is like the land a house is built on. You don’t pay attention to it until your house starts sinking.

Having a higher quality web host is protecting the asset your business rests on.

For security, speed, and ease of management, I’ve been so happy with WPEngine and I now excitedly recommend it to others.

The post Review: Why I Changed My Hosting To WPEngine appeared first on Andrew Hansen's Blog.