Why emails don’t get delivered

Emails from your website, and even those that you send from Apple Mail or Microsoft Outlook may fail to get delivered. Often times these emails land in the spam or junk folder, but sometimes emails are rejected completely without any notification to you the sender.

It is trivial to spoof an email address, or send an email as somebody else. Here’s some code that will send an email that appears to have come from Bill Gates.

<?php
$to      = 'you@example.com';
$subject = 'You are the recipient of $1,000,000';
$message = 'hello';
$headers = array(
    'From' => 'Bill Gates <bill.gates@microsoft.com>',
    'Reply-To' => 'scammer@badguys.com'
);

mail($to, $subject, $message, $headers);
?>

Because of the ease of spoofing emails, legitimate email senders need a way to prove that they did really send the email. Enter email authentication, which refer to a combination of technologies including DKIM, SPF and DMARC.

Improving deliverability with SPF, DKIM and DMARC

Taking the time and effort to set up email authentication gives a strong signal to email providers that a sender’s emails are legitimate and went a long way to improving their deliverability, the measure of how likely the email will be delivered. Email providers would still accept your emails even if you didn’t enable email authentication… but that may change in 2024.

Last October 2023, Google and Yahoo announced requirements that bulk senders must have DMARC in place by February 2024. “If senders don’t meet these email authentication requirements, messages might be rejected or delivered to recipients’ spam folders,” say the folks at Gmail.

Yes, you’re definitely affected. Basically everyone who needs to send email will be affected by this change, including you. Even if you don’t have an email newsletter, your website definitely needs to deliver contact form notifications, order confirmations and password resets. And emails you send directly to your customers will be affected too.

So if you haven’t yet set up email authentication for WooCommerce and all services you use, it’s time that you implement it now.

How does email authentication work?

Email authentication is a combination of technologies that work together to declare who is allowed to send emails on behalf of your domain.

Using DKIM and SPF, the clickwp.com domain declares the following:

• Direct, personal emails are sent from Fastmail
• Marketing emails are sent via ActiveCampaign
• Website form and order notifications (transactional email) are sent via Amazon Web Services (Simple Email Service)

DMARC then tells email providers that they should spam (or reject) emails claiming to be from clickwp.com but aren’t sent from one of the senders above.

In summary…

1. Services that send email for your domain are authenticated
2. DMARC tells email recipients to junk or reject emails from your domain that aren’t authenticated

Steps to implement email authentication

List all email services that you use

Start by listing out all the services that send email for your domain.

Primary email. The main service is likely your business email. We have used Fastmail for over a decade, but you might use Google Workspace, Microsoft 365 or the email provided by your web host.

Email marketing service e.g. ActiveCampaign, Mailchimp, Brevo, Klaviyo, etc.

Other 3rd-party services. You may use other services that want to send email from your domain. Examples include:

• CRM like HubSpot, Pipedrive, Dubsado and Honeybook
• Course platforms like Teachable, Thinkific and Podia
• Sales / E-commerce platforms like SamCart, Shopify or ThriveCart

If you miss out any services here, their emails will not get delivered. Be sure to compile a full, comprehensive list for this step.

Determine where your domain name servers are hosted

Email authentication is set up at the domain level, and your domain settings are controlled by the domain name servers. You can find your name servers with a WHOIS lookup.

Now that you know your name servers, you need to also have the login details to manage and edit the DNS settings.

Set up DKIM and SPF records for each service

Find the instructions on how to activate DKIM and SPF for each service. Some services may not support the older SPF, but it’s best to set up both if possible.

Setting up DKIM will involve installing new CNAME or TXT records in your domain’s DNS. Each service will have its own DKIM record.

However, each domain can only have a single SPF record. This means installing SPF records involves modifying the record if it already exists.

Remember to verify DKIM and SPF for each service you set up.

Set up DMARC

Activating DMARC also involves installing a DNS record. At the very least, you’ll need to set up this basic DMARC record:

Type: TXT
Host/Name: _DMARC.yourdomain.com
Value: v=DMARC1; p=none;

The p=none above will set your DMARC policy to monitor only. This gives you the chance to catch any misconfigurations before you switch to a stricter policy (quarantine or reject).

Now, head over to learndmarc.com and send a test email to address it provides. It will then diagnose and tell you whether your setup passes or fails, with an easy-to-understand final verdict. Click here to see a sample results page

You’ll want to test each service you had set up earlier. Use the learndmarc.com results to fix any mistakes and get a PASS for DMARC.

At this point, you have completed all the email authentication steps and your emails will now pass Google and Yahoo’s 2024 DMARC requirements. However, you’ve come this far so we recommend taking the final step to verify your setup.

Monitor and optimize your DMARC set up

The basic DMARC record above tells email providers to decide what to do with emails that don’t pass DKIM or SPF, and to report any failures. Getting notified of failures is important in case you missed out any important services that you use.

But where do the failure reports go to? You can have failure reports go to yourself, but the reports are in computer speak and you likely won’t understand it. Therefore we recommend using the free DMARC monitoring service from Postmark: dmarc.postmarkapp.com

Fill in your email address and domain that you want to monitor, then click the Get Started button. You’ll get a new DMARC record to replace the basic one you created in the previous step. Install the record and you’ll now receive weekly reports on DMARC failures.

If there are no failures and you’re confident with your set up, you can now optimize your DMARC policy to be stricter by using the quarantine or reject flag, e.g.

Type: TXT
Host/Name: _DMARC.yourdomain.com
Value: v=DMARC1; p=quarantine;

Example Setup: Email authentication for WooCommerce sites

Now we will provide an example setup for a typical WooCommerce site, example.com. Our example site uses the following services:

1. Google Workspace for primary email
2. cPanel hosting for emails sent via the website
3. ActiveCampaign for email marketing

This means we’ll need to set up DKIM and SPF for Google Workspace, cPanel and ActiveCampaign.

The site is hosted on A2 Hosting and uses their nameservers. This means we edit the DNS settings from inside of A2 Hosting’s control panel.

Google Workspace

Start by logging into the Google Workspace Admin console (admin.google.com). Navigate to Apps → Google Workspace → Gmail. Click Authenticate email.

Select your domain and click the Generate New Record button. We’ll use the 2048-bit option. Once generated, you’ll be shown a DNS record.

Now we’ll login to A2 Hosting and click the cPanel Login button. Inside cPanel, we navigate to Domains → Zone Editor. Click the Manage button.

Now add a new TXT record and enter the details provided by Google Workspace. The 2048 bit key is too long to fit in the field, so we click the Add TXT string to record option to add a 2nd field.

Now go back go Google Workspace and click the Start Authentication button.

Next we check for an existing SPF record. If none exist, we’ll create a new one. But cPanel usually installs a SPF record automatically so here it is:

v=spf1 +a +mx +ip4:103.227.176.12 include:spf.a2hosting.com ~all

We want to modify the record to add include:_spf.google.com to it. Here’s the new, updated record:

v=spf1 +a +mx +ip4:103.227.176.12 include:spf.a2hosting.com include:_spf.google.com ~all

cPanel hosting email

Modern cPanel accounts have an Email Deliverability tool that will check and install the necessary DKIM and SPF records. Login to cPanel and navigate to Email → Email Deliverability.

If you don’t see Valid, click on Repair to have cPanel automatically diagnose the problem and suggest a fix.

For WooCommerce to make use of cPanel’s DKIM and SPF, it needs to send the emails via SMTP (rather than the default PHP method). So now we have to create an email account that WooCommerce can use.

Navigate to Email → Email Accounts. Create a new email account. Then, click on Connect Devices to get the email settings.

Next, we login to WooCommerce and install the FluentSMTP plugin. We’ll create a new email connection with the settings above.

ActiveCampaign

ActiveCampaigns DKIM is set up differently than Google Workspace as it involves CNAME records rather than TXT records. Login to ActiveCampaign and navigate to Settings → Advanced. Choose the I will manage my own email authentication option. You’ll be provided 2 CNAME records to install. On the same screen you’ll also find the SPF record to be installed.

We now add the 2 provided CNAME records, and modify the SPF record to

v=spf1 +a +mx +ip4:103.227.176.12 include:spf.a2hosting.com include:_spf.google.com include:emsd1.com ~all

Don’t forget to verify your DNS records in ActiveCampaign.

DMARC

We’re in the home stretch. Go to dmarc.postmarkapp.com and enter example.com as the domain to monitor. You’ll receive a DMARC record like this:

Install the record and click the Verify button. DKIM, SPF and DMARC has now been set up for example.com.

Conclusion

Email authentication is important for anybody that sends emails, especially for WooCommerce sites or businesses that rely on email to communicate with their customers.

Unfortunately, setting up email authentication can be challenging and complicated. Worse, getting it wrong could cause your email and/or website to stop working correctly. There are also so many 3rd-party services that need to be integrated which makes it difficult to keep track of everything.

But because Google and Yahoo have decided to be stricter with the emails they accept, email authentication is something you can no longer put off. Skip this step and you’ll risk your emails not getting through to your customers.

We hope our guide helps you with setting up SPF, DKIM and DMARC for your business. Feel free to contact ClickWP if you need help.

The post Stay out of the Spam Folder with Email Authentication appeared first on ClickWP.

Before we start talking about WordPress security, we’d like to ask – how would you secure your home? Would you wait for burglars to strike before installing a security system, or would you take proactive action and install a security system beforehand to thwart a potential burglary?  

This might seem like a silly question because the answer is obvious: you install the security system beforehand. And though this is a similar situation for websites, most website owners fail to recognize the importance of preventive website security.

Unfortunately, it is not hard for hackers to break into websites. Nor do they care about the size of the website – all they need is a website with vulnerabilities that they can exploit to spread their net wider on the internet. 

Now, what are these common vulnerabilities, and how do you fix them? You can address them with a series of security measures that are easy to execute and implement to improve your WordPress site’s security posture. So, let’s dig a little deeper and see what these are and how to implement them on your website!

How to secure your WordPress website?

To put it simply, securing your website is just like securing your home with surveillance systems, security alarms, and using security lockers to protect your cash or jewelry. In other words, a rock-solid line of defense that can deter the best of hackers. Security professionals call this “WordPress Hardening”.

We recommend a total of eight website security measures, five of which are primary and highly recommended and the remaining three as secondary measures. 

Here is the complete list:

Now, let’s discuss why they are needed and how you can implement them.

Essential Security Measures

1. Enforce strong passwords 

Now, you might think this is obvious, so why do we need to mention it? That is because WP site users continue to configure weak passwords like – “password,” “123456” and so on – for their login accounts. This makes it easier for hackers to break into a user’s login account and take control of it.

Among the common ways of login page attacks, brute force attacks are specifically designed to guess username-password combinations using automated bots. How do you implement this measure, then? 

First and foremost, ensure that all your website users configure 8-to-10-character passwords, with a mix of uppercase & lowercase alphabets, numbers, and special symbols. Another great way is to install a password manager tool that can be used to generate and store fresh passwords.

2. Update your WordPress components 

Hackers commonly target sites using old or outdated versions and even websites with obsolete plugins/themes. That is because older versions do not contain fixes for security bugs or patches, that are regularly released by the WP team or the respective plugin/theme developers. 

Hence, as a primary security measure, ensure that your website only contains the latest or updated version, along with plugins/themes.

You can easily update your Core WordPress and all your installed plugins/themes from your hosting account or using any WP management tool. Follow our guide on how to safely update WordPress for complete peace of mind.

Additionally, remove any old or outdated plugins/themes that you are no longer using, or those that do not have any updates from your installation.

3. Secure your admin account 

In addition to the target login pages of regular users, hackers also target admin accounts using brute force attacks. This is because a successful hack into an admin account allows them to inflict the most damage to the backend files and database tables. This is like a burglar breaking into your locker box at home containing the most valuable things!

As a security measure, you need to safeguard your WordPress dashboard (aka wp-admin) by restricting easy access.

How do you do this? 

For a start, assign “admin” rights only to selected users whom you trust the most. For the rest, you can set lesser privileges.

Then, implement two-factor authentication (2FA) that is a proven safety standard for login pages. For 2FA, you can install plugins like Two Factor Authentication or a security plugin with that feature.

Thirdly, you can stop brute force attacks by restricting the number of failed login attempts. To do this, install a plugin like Limit Login Attempts or a security plugin with this feature.

4. Install an SSL certificate

Do you know that hackers commonly intercept data being transferred between your web server and the user’s browser? This data can include valuable information like personal data, financial transactions, or any such sensitive data. 

The best defence against this practice is to encrypt the data being transferred, for which you need to move your website from the HTTP to the safer HTTPS protocol.

But how do you move to HTTPS? By installing an SSL or Secure Socket Layer certificate on your site. 

The easiest way of obtaining an SSL certificate is from your web host provider. If that does not help, you need to install a third-party SSL plugin like Let’s Encrypt.

5. Install a malware scanning and removal tool 

And last but not least, you must invest in a malware scanning and removal tool to prevent future attacks. Most operations are automated and can be used to scan and clean your website in a few clicks. 

Security plugins such as MalCare and Wordfence automatically scan your website for any malware infections and even remove them from the site if found. These tools are specifically designed for WordPress and therefore can detect even new and unknown malware, and stop them from damaging your site. These tools can easily be activated just by installing a WordPress plugin.

MalCare is a premium security plugin which uses deep and intelligent scanning. A point to note is that the scans are run on Malcare’s own servers to avoid additional burden on your own website’s server. This also allows the scan to be in-depth and comprehensive to ensure it catches even the most sneaky malware. Learn more about MalCare’s plans at malcare.com

After installing your security plugin, be sure to set up automated scans your website to continuously monitor for malware and security issues.

Recommended Website Security Measures

Once you are done with all the five primary measures, it is time to consider a few more for bonus credits to your website security. 

1. Set up a web application firewall (WAF) 

How about a safety measure that can stop hackers before they even approach your site? Yes, that is what a web application firewall does. 

It monitors every IP request made to your web server and determines each request’s IP address. If the request has been made from a hacker’s computer or suspicious source, it blocks it from sending any further requests to your website. As a result, firewalls effectively keep away “harmful” bots and hackers from your site. 

How do you implement this? 

Our web host Kinsta has an in-depth guide on what firewalls are and picking the best one for your situation.

2. Create a complete backup 

Though not precisely a security measure, backups are the first things you wish for after a successful hack or crash. That is because backups can help you restore both your website and database files so that you have no website downtime. 

Depending on your security needs, you need to develop a reliable WordPress backup strategy –  daily, weekly, or monthly backups of both website and database, or for real-time backups that are useful for WooCommerce sites. 

There are many ways of performing a backup, but the easiest and most efficient method is by using backup plugins like BlogVault or the free UpdraftPlus plugin. Easy to install, these plugins automate the entire backup and restore process and can be executed by any novice user.

3. Maintain an Audit log for your website 

The final website security measure is to maintain an audit log that can record every user activity, be it signing in or out, file additions or modifications, and tool installs on your website. 

Additionally, audit log tools send out immediate notifications when any critical change or suspicious activity is recorded.

How do you implement this measure? 

Install WP Activity Log or Simple History plugin for tracking and monitoring your website activity. Along with security, this plugin can help in improving user accountability and productivity.

Conclusion

While a cliché, the saying “Prevention is always better than cure” is a golden rule to remember when it comes to WP security. In other words, you should not wait until your website is hacked to implement each of the hardening measures outlined in this article. 

As a proactive step, these eight security/hardening measures can significantly lower, by adding more layers of security to your site. 

What do you make of these eight security measures? Do you think they are enough or have we missed out on anything important? 

We would love to hear your thoughts, so do let us know in the comments below.

Picture credit: @stories on freepik

The post Avoid Website Hacks: Implement These 8 Security Measures Now! appeared first on ClickWP.

What is a WordPress.com account

Let’s start by taking a step back and understand that there are two flavors of WordPress.

WordPress is software for building websites. You download it from WordPress.org, then install it on your own server. WordPress is 100% free.

WordPress.com is a website builder service. You sign up and start a website, no need to download anything. The .com in the name tells you that it is a commercial service.

A WordPress.com account therefore gives you access to the WordPress.com service. Actually I should say services since there are quite a few of them.

WordPress.com Services

A website requires several services to get up and running. At the minimum you need a domain and web hosting. WordPress.com provides cloud-based services that include:

• Spam filtering for comments and contact forms.
• Statistics on website traffic, your top posts and where your visitors come from.
• Backups because it’s always important to have a reliable WordPress backup strategy.
• Secure login to multiple websites because you can have many of them on WordPress.com linked to a single account.
• And many more.

WP.com provides all of these services so you can start a website quickly even if you don’t have any technical knowledge. The cool thing is that you can use WordPress.com services on your own WordPress website, even if you didn’t use WordPress.com to create it. Yes, that means self-hosted WordPress websites. And, many of these services are free as well.

Jetpack bridges WordPress.com and self-hosted WordPress

You need two ingredients to use WP.com services on your self-hosted WordPress site: the Jetpack plugin, and—you guessed it—a WordPress.com account. In other words, Jetpack enables WordPress.com services on self-hosted WordPress sites.

Once you install the Jetpack plugin and get through the setup process, all of the free services will be available to your website. And if you want even more, you can upgrade to one of their paid plans.

Why self-hosted WordPress websites need a WordPress.com account

A WordPress.com account brings the cloud features of WordPress.com to your self-hosted WordPress website. This gives you the best of both worlds – the flexibility of self-hosted WordPress and the dependable features of WordPress.com. As explained above, these features are enabled via the Jetpack plugin. 

Besides the features enabled by Jetpack (which are completely optional and have non-Jetpack alternatives), here are some other situations where you definitely will need a WordPress.com account. 

Buying Extensions from WooCommerce.com

You will need a WordPress.com account if you buy official extensions from WooCommerce.com. WooCommerce is owned by the same company that owns WordPress.com, so their website uses the same secure login method and payment method too. Read more.

Using the WordPress and/or WooCommerce mobile apps

The WordPress and WooCommerce mobile apps need a secure connection to your website. This is especially important for WooCommerce stores as orders and sales data are sent to your mobile devices. That secure connection is provided via Jetpack, and as discussed above to use Jetpack you need a WordPress.com account.

Jetpack for WooCommerce

Jetpack for WooCommerce is focused on security and monitoring, but also provides WooCommerce Shipping. Because this leverages the Jetpack plugin, you will need a WordPress.com account.

Other Automattic Services

Automattic, the parent company of WordPress.com, owns many companies that provide a variety of services. These companies also use WordPress.com accounts to enable secure login to their services. These include:

• Gravatar, the profile picture service that is integrated with all WordPress websites
• Crowdsignal (formerly Polldaddy), a cloud-based survey and quiz software
• Longreads, the article curation service that helps find and share the best storytelling on the web
• Happy Tools, a cloud-based HR-management software

Conclusion

A WordPress.com account is the passport that allows you to access WordPress.com and other services owned by Automattic. Even if you don’t use WordPress.com to create your website, you can enable their features on your self-hosted WordPress site with the Jetpack plugin and a WordPress.com account.

A WordPress.com account is created for you automatically if you ever sign up for Gravatar, Akismet or other services by Automattic. A WordPress.com account is optional, unless you want to purchase official WooCommerce extensions or use the WooCommerce mobile app.

What else would you like to know about WordPress.com and Jetpack? Let us know in the comments below!

The post Why self-hosted WordPress websites need a WordPress.com account appeared first on ClickWP.

In this article, we’ll look at why you should consider a logo maker service instead of hiring a designer. We’ll then cover seven logo maker solutions you can try – all of which can be made-to-measure! Some of these tools are free, while others come at an affordable price but provide complete branding kits. Let’s get started!

Professional Logo Designer or DIY Logo Maker?

Creating a logo is important, and hiring a professional designer is certainly a good investment into your business. However most new businesses may not be ready for a designer yet.

You may not even be set on a niche or topic yet so your brand may still be evolving as you find your voice and your niche. As such, you may want to tinker and play around with the design of your website and logo. It took three iterations before ClickWP finally took shape, so we know first hand how uncertain things can be in the beginning.

You may not have the mental energy and space. As a new business owner, you may be busy hustling, gaining customers and building your first website. That’s not the right frame of mind to go through the designer’s discovery process or branding exercise. This leads to a risk of the designer missing the mark with your logo, wasting valuable time and money.

Speaking of money, professionally-designed logos can be expensive. To see a few examples of the fees you’ll be facing, you can check out companies such as Design Hill. Some designers such as Laura Busche might bundle services to make them more affordable. However, these options are still hard on the budget for entrepreneurs who are looking to build their first website.

These are some reasons why we argue that professional logo designers may not be the best option for new businesses. However, you can still get high-quality, affordable customized logo design for your website with a DIY logo maker.

Budget Options for Customized Logo Design

There are many logo making services available, but they aren’t all equal. Picking the right one is important if you want to get the best possible design. There are free and customized tools, DIY solutions, and branding kits that you can choose from, so let’s look at a few of the top options. 

Free Options

1. Wix Logo Maker

Wix is a website builder that prides itself on being easy to use. The Wix Logo Maker is no different, and you can create a custom logo in minutes. The editor uses the same drag-and-drop interface of the Wix website builder, making design creation simple.

There are a lot of other features on offer, including:

• Fully-customizable templates
• Immediate download once the logo is complete
• Automatic matching of the logo with your current website branding

The Wix Logo Maker is free to use, and you can download your logo without charge. However, if you want more file options (such as high-resolution SVG files), you’ll need to make a one-time purchase. Fret not, it’s completely affordable. 

2. Shopify Logo Maker

The Shopify Logo Maker called Hatchful is another free option with a big name behind it. This logo maker is easy to use, with plenty of clear instructions to follow. The system also provides you with a template that you can easily customize. 

The Shopify Logo Maker has a range of features that make it a great option, like:

• A polished and easy-to-use interface
• A large selection of templates to customize
• Instant download of multiple logo files

This logo maker is completely free to use. The download file offers logos for your website and social media. There are no upsells or limitations on the service – it’s all about logo customization for your brand.

DIY Options

3. Looka

Looka is an interesting and fun DIY option. It features an AI-powered platform to design a custom logo in minutes. The tool starts by asking you to choose styles, colors and symbols that you like. It will then use these inspirations to generate custom logo designs which you can further tweak to get just the way you like.

This unique logo maker has a lot of features to unpack, including:

• Mockups that show you how your logo looks on t-shirts, business cards and more
• Custom logos based on personal preferences
• Customization of the generated logo
• Expand your logo into social images, business cards, posters and more with their Brand Kit feature

Creating your logo is free, but you’ll need to pay to download it. You can purchase single logos for $20 (PNG file only) or $65 (includes source files). Alternatively subscribe to their Brand Kit to generate other types of collateral for your business.

4. Canva

Canva is more than just a logo maker. It’s a full graphics creation system that is easy to use. With Canva, you can create and customize logos, business cards, flyers, and social media graphics. Using this tool could eliminate the need for a graphic designer for your website. 

There are a lot of features offered by Canva (and their Canva Pro version is affordable too!), including:

• A drag-and-drop editor
• Guidelines for correct element placement
• Hundreds of customizable logo designs
• Graphic editing tools, including blurring and cropping

Canva offers a free account that is more than enough for creating a professional logo. This account provides access to the editor and thousands of graphics. You can also upload your own graphics if you prefer. 

5. Turbologo

Turbologo aims to make logo creation simple and fun. In fact, you can create a logo in just a few minutes. Initial designs are generated based on your business’ name and chosen colors. The system is simple, yet you can fully create customized logo designs.

Turbologo has a lot of features that make designing your logo a breeze, such as:

• Thousands of customizable logo templates
• A user-friendly editor
• An unlimited number of logo designs

The Turbologo designer is free to use, and you can create as many designs as you want. You will need to pay to download your logo. The Lite plan costs $16, while the $32 Standard plan provides multiple file types (including vectors). 

Branding Kits

6. Laura Elyse Designs

If you already have a plan in mind for branding your business as a whole (rather than just creating a logo), you might want a full branding kit like Laura Elyse Designs.

This affordable website logo making option does not require you to edit anything, but instead provides you with a questionnaire to fill out. Concept logos are created and you’ll need to approve one, which is used for the branding kit. 

Laura Elyse Designs offers a range of features you cannot get with other logo makers, such as:

• Full-service branding packages
• Pre-made logos for easy purchase
• Customized logo designs created according to your style preferences
• Reasonable turnaround times

The cost of this service varies depending on what you’re looking for. Pre-made logos cost $25, while a custom logo costs $400. Branding kits range from $450 to $500. 

7. Creative Market

Creative Market is different from the other logo makers on this list. Here, designers create premade logo templates that you can purchase. You will then need to use editing software such as Adobe Photoshop to customize your logo template.

With Creative Market, you’ll get:

• Easy purchasing of pre-made designs
• Logo designs created by professionals
• Clear licensing for logo usage

Creative Market does offer some free and customized designs, but the majority of templates are premium. The cost varies depending on the designer and the license you want. 

Don’t Get Hung Up Over Your Logo

Your business’ logo is central to your branding and marketing. And because it can be a significant investment, many entrepreneurs get hung up over it. This then delays their website and they miss out on leads that their website could bring.

While you can hire a designer to create it, using a logo marker or service is cheaper and faster for most new businesses (especially when they can be custom-made to your liking). You will also have the freedom to change your logo without facing an additional expense. 

The Wix Logo Maker is one of the best free options, and creates customized logo designs with websites in mind. Looka is a quality free DIY option, but you’ll need to pay for the best resolution. On the other hand, if you are sure about your branding, a branding kit made by Creative Market may be the best choice. 

Have you tried any of these affordable and customized logo design services, and what did you think? Let us know in the comments below!

The post Creating Custom Website Logos On A Budget appeared first on ClickWP.

While there are form plugins that you can install for free, their offerings are limited. You will need a premium contact form plugin unlock advanced features such as email marketing and payment forms. These advanced features can truly transform your WordPress website, much more than a page builder plugin can.

In this article, we’ll discuss five key reasons to invest in a premium WordPress contact form plugin. Let’s get started!

5 Reasons to Invest in a Premium Contact Form Plugin

It’s understandable that you might be hesitant to invest in a premium contact form plugin when there are excellent free alternatives like Contact Form 7. We’re going to show you how premium contact form plugins are so much more valuable than their free counterparts, and other more popular plugins..

1. Accept Payments

If you have a product or service, an important consideration is how to sell it via your website. You could create invoices, but that would require a lot of manual work. You could set up a shopping cart, but that may mean additional fees and a having to learn something new.

Premium contact form plugins can make accepting payments for your services much simpler. Your clients will be able to fill out the form on your website to pay you directly. The form will process payments through a gateway like Stripe or PayPal, and boom—you just got paid!

ClickWP has a form like this too, and we even use the dynamic field feature so we can set the amount to be paid by modifying the URL e.g.

clickwp.com/make-a-payment/?amount=199

You can add a quantity field, dropdowns or checkboxes for product or service options. This effectively enables a very lightweight e-commerce system on your website.

Types of payment forms you can create:

2. Grow Your Email List

Email marketing is one of the most effective ways to reach leads as well as existing customers and drive more conversions on your website. However, before you can start sending promotional content to subscribers, you have to build out your list of recipients.

Premium contact form plugins can integrate with your email marketing platform to make this process smoother. You can set up a dedicated subscription form, and also collect emails through other forms such as support requests or your checkout process.

Note that not all plugins integrate with all email marketing platforms, so it’s important to choose one that’s compatible with your existing system.

A WordPress contact form plugin makes it easy to deliver a lead magnet such as a discount code or digital download as an incentive for subscribing. You can do this by creating a custom confirmation screen or confirmation email message.

3. Collect Detailed Data

Contact forms created with free plugins tend to be on the generic side. However, your site is unique. Gathering all the details you need to provide the best experience for your customers is difficult when you’re stuck with a predefined form template.

This can result in back and forth emailing with potential customers to collect additional information, too, which is time-consuming for both parties. Using a premium contact form plugin can prevent this. 

With more advanced form builders, you can incorporate custom fields to ask for key information relevant to your business. This enables you to create more complex forms, such as intake or client onboarding questionnaires, event venue bookings, property or equipment rentals, and more.

Premium contact form plugins also often include drag-and-drop functionality to make adding new fields easy. If you want to provide set options, you can use dropdowns or checkboxes.

If your business takes bookings or appointments, you can use date and time selectors. Enabling file uploads via your form can be helpful for collecting signed service contracts. These advanced options are generally missing from free plugins. 

4. Accept Guest Posts

If your website accepts guest posts, creating a new author account for each submission can lead to serious security issues. Writers will retain access even after their article is published, and more user accounts mean more points of entry for malicious attackers. 

However, receiving guest posts via email and publishing them yourself can be time-consuming. This is where your premium contact form plugin comes in. Post submission form add-ons allow guest authors to submit their articles without accessing the back end of your website. All you need is a front-end submission form with the right fields. 

Submission forms collect important information such as the post’s title, content, featured image, and excerpt. You can even ask for a meta description. A draft post is created when the form is submitted, and you can review and polish the post before publishing it.

This provides you with the flexibility you need to ensure guest posts match the rest of your website’s style while streamlining the submission process. No more copying and pasting from emails or trying to manage large volumes of user accounts.

5. Combine All of the Above Into a Single Form

Many people assume that form plugins are only meant for contact forms. But as you’ve seen throughout this article, you can do so much more with form builder plugins. These plugins are multifunctional and could help you streamline several areas of your business. 

You can even include all of the functions we’ve described so far into a single form. Some examples of more extensive forms you might create include:

• Membership registration. You can take new members’ first payments, collect their email addresses for your mailing list, and enable them to RSVP to an upcoming event. This type of form is adaptable for use by private schools, volunteer organizations, and more.
• Job applications. If you’re looking to fill an open position at your company, you can use a form to collect contact information for applicants, enable them to upload their resumes, schedule their interviews, and more.
• Surveys. With a premium contact form plugin, you can create extensive surveys to collect data on customer satisfaction, trends related to your industry, and more. You can also include an email address field and add respondents to your mailing list.

You can easily drag and drop fields to suit your particular needs. Many premium plugins also support multi-page forms, which can help you separate different types of information and minimize frustration for users.

Recommended Premium Contact Form Plugins for WordPress

There are many premium contact form plugins available, but WP Forms and Gravity Forms are among the most popular. Both include many of the features we’ve mentioned throughout this post. 

WPForms

WPForms is one of the most user-friendly WordPress form plugins. The interface is intuitive and offers easy integration with third-party products. Watch how easy it is to create a form with WPForms.

You can link your forms to your email marketing platform and use add-ons to process payments. WPForms Basic version costs $39.50 per year. However we strongly recommend the $199.50/yr Pro version to enable email opt-in forms, payment forms and more.

Want to test drive WPForms for free? Try out their Lite version, available for free in the WP.org directory: WPForms Lite

Gravity Forms

Gravity Forms offers several stand-out features including advanced fields, chained selects, signature add-on and a very handy Save and Continue Later function.

They also have a vibrant community of third-party developers that extend Gravity Forms even further. This means that the Gravity Forms ecosystem is most likely to have the functionality you need.

A Basic license for Gravity Forms costs $59 per year for a single website, and comes with add-ons for email opt-ins. To accept online payments, consider the Pro or Elite licenses.

Want to test drive Gravity Forms? Create a free demo site to try all of their features, no credit card required.

Conclusion

There’s no doubt that contact forms are useful, but you may be hesitant to invest in a premium plugin for building one. However, holding back will only result in you missing out on the advanced features tools such as WPForms and Gravity Forms provide.

Five key reasons it’s worth it to invest in a contact form plugin include: 

1. Accepting payments for your services.
2. Growing your email list.
3. Collecting detailed data to help your customers.
4. Accepting guest posts without providing access to your website’s back end.
5. Combining multiple functions into a single form.

Do you have any questions about premium contact form plugins? Let us know in the comments below!

Disclaimer: This article contains affiliate links that earn us a small commission if you purchase the product from that link. This helps support our writing with no extra cost to you. Thanks!

The post Why A Contact Form Plugin Should Be Your First Premium Plugin Investment appeared first on ClickWP.

Video Review

In this video review, I show you how easy it is to sign up and navigate through a course as a student. You’ll also see how course creator’s can easily create their course syllabus, and some of the many features in LifterLMS.

This is my first time on camera and I know the video could be better, but I wanted to get it out to you anyway. I apologize in advance for my flapping hands ?

Why We Recommend LifterLMS

Search “online course plugin” or “wordpress lms” on Google and you’ll find dozens of options, including LearnDash, Sensei, AccessAlly, Memberium, LearnPress, WP Courseware… and the list goes on! Here’s why I prefer LifterLMS over these other options.

More Features than Competition

Some course plugins need to be paired with another plugin to gain some basic features. For example, you can’t even implement a simple 1-time payment with Sensei unless you link it with WooCommerce.

LifterLMS also comes with a basic Memberships feature so you can bundle courses for sale, or restrict access to content on your site.

Focused on Online Courses and WordPress

Some plugins bundle membership site features with online course features together. While this flexibility is useful for some, they add to the complexity of the plugin.

LifterLMS is is completely geared towards creating and selling online courses with WordPress. The user interface and features make it a streamlined process to create a course, uncluttered by additional features.

Standalone

AccessAlly and Memberium are popular and powerful options for creating membership sites and online courses. However, they need to be paired with CRM software like ActiveCampaign or Infusionsoft Keap to work. These Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems keep track of the member’s permissions and determine what they have and don’t have access to.

While CRMs allow for some truly amazing automation and polished user experience, they are honestly too much for beginners or if you just want to sell an online course. Thankfully, LifterLMS is completely self-contained and doesn’t require any CRMs to fully work.

User-friendly

LifterLMS’ interface is uncluttered and simple because it doesn’t have extra features like memberships. It’s also easier to understand because you don’t have to research, choose and learn a CRM system.

In my opinion, this is LifterLMS’ best feature. It’s user-friendly and uncomplicated.

When you need integration partners to help you set up your course, that’s a hint that the platform you’ve chosen might be pretty complex…

Choosing the Right Tool for Your Needs

At the end of the day, you’ll want to choose the best tool for your needs. Perhaps you really do need some features that LifterLMS doesn’t have. In that case, you have to choose something more complex and powerful.

For most online entrepreneurs however, I bet that you’re looking to get your online course up quickly and easily. If that’s the case, you can’t go wrong with LifterLMS for creating and selling online courses with minimal fuss.

Learn more about LifterLMS

Watch our LifterLMS video review

Hire ClickWP to setup LifterLMS for your online course

Disclaimer: This article contains affiliate links that earn us a small commission if you purchase the product from that link. This helps support our writing with no extra cost to you. Thanks!

The post Teach and Sell Online Courses with Minimum Fuss – A Review of LifterLMS appeared first on ClickWP.

Images that are too small will look blurry and low quality. Images that are too big will make your website slow. The solution is to properly optimize images for your website.

In this article, we’re going to save your images from looking like the ones above. With doughnuts!

Step 1: Choose the Format

The first step to optimizing images is to choose the best image format.

Just like how doughnuts come in a variety of flavors and styles (glazed, frosted, jelly-filled, etc), images can come in different formats. The ideal image format will communicate your message effectively while ensuring the best user experience for your audience.

The image format you choose will depend on the content of the image.

JPG (or JPEG) images are best for photos i.e. images captured with a camera or mobile phone.

PNG images are best for graphics like logos, icons, etc. PNG images can also have transparent backgrounds which is a very useful feature.

GIF images are the fun ones that can contain animations. GIFs also have limited transparency capability.

Based on these guidelines, select the most appropriate format when saving or exporting your images. Tip: In some image editors, you need to “Download” the design to choose the format.

Don’t use PNGs for photos

PNGs are the “heaviest” file format. As mentioned above, they are best for graphics. You can use a PNG for photos, but the file size will be much larger than a JPG. This will cause your site to load slower and can affect your SEO.

We notice that many bloggers like to quickly grab a picture off another website by screenshot-ing it. Unfortunately, most screenshot software saves the image as a PNG which means the resulting file can be much larger than necessary.

Instead of screenshot-ing the image, you can right-click and save the image. Then simply upload it to your site. Don’t forget to credit the website where you got the image from too.

Step 2: Compress

The 2nd step to optimizing images for your website is to compress them.

Image compression works by removing details from an image to reduce its file size. However, over-compressing an image can cause the image to start looking weird and “yucky”. Yep, that’s a technical term.

There are many ways to compress images.

With a WordPress Plugin

Using a WordPress plugin is the most convenient way to compress your images – you simply upload the image to WordPress and it gets optimized automatically. The drawback is that you don’t have control over the level of compression and the fact that some of these compression plugins cost money. The image optimization plugins we recommend are EWWW Image Optimizer and Compress JPEG & PNG by TinyPNG.

Image Editor

Using an image editor allows you to better control image compression settings. Your image editor may automatically compress your images (like Canva) or it may have an option to export images at a lower quality (like Photoshop).

Image Compression Desktop App

These apps make it easy and convenient to compress your image. Install the app and launch it. Drag and drop the images you want to compress into the app. Voila! Your images are automatically compressed. Our recommendations: ImageOptim for Mac and Caesium for Windows.

Online Image Optimization / Compression Tool

These work just like their desktop counterparts, but without needing to install anything on your computer. We really like TinyPNG and TinyJPG because it automatically applies the correct amount of compression without sacrificing the image quality. Alternatives: Kraken.io, Compressor.io

Now you have a slim and trim image in the right format. You’re ready to upload it to your website.

Step 3: Pick A Size

Before we continue, we need to understand image size and file size.

Image size is the width and height of an image (how much space it takes up, or its dimensions) and is measured in pixels (px). In doughnut terms, this is the size of the tasty treat.

Image file size is how much storage the image uses on your computer or website and is measured in kilobytes (KB) or megabytes (MB). This would be how many calories the doughnut has.

Image size is how big an image is, and
File size is how heavy the image is.

Image size can influence file size. If you have a very big image, then the file size will generally be big as well. And if you get one of those Texas-size doughnuts, you’re gonna get a Texas-size serving of calories too.

With that out of the way, keep in mind that this section is talking about Image Size, or how much space the image takes up.

Why is image size important?

If you only have space for an image 300px wide, anything larger is not optimal. You technically can squeeze a larger image into that space, but that will slow down your website. Your website visitors will take longer to download the larger file, and their browsers will need more time to scale the image down. So choosing the appropriate size is a key to optimizing images for our website.

Use an on-screen ruler to measure the space available for your images. Download A Ruler for Windows (Windows) and Free Ruler (Mac)

I want to use the same image for a large full-width banner as well as in my small sidebar? Do I need 2 copies of the same image in different sizes?

Yes… but WordPress to the rescue!

WordPress Image Sizes

WordPress generates multiple sizes of every image that you upload to the media library. This means you upload an image, and WordPress will automatically create the following sizes for you to use:

• Full size for full-width banners and photo galleries
• Large size for blog posts and pages
• Medium size for small blog images or images for the sidebar
• Thumbnail size isn’t very useful, but available if you need
• Possibly more, depending on the plugins you have installed

This means you don’t have to manually create multiple image sizes if you want to re-use the same image. All you need to do is pick the right size when adding images into your content.

Full size is technically not full size

WordPress resizes all uploaded images to a maximum width and height of 2560px. This helps avoid your Full size images from being too large and also saves space on your web server.

It also means you can uploads images directly from your camera without worrying they will ever be too large for your website. That being said, uploading full size, 24-megapixel images from your camera will take a loooong time because of the large file size.

Rule of thumb for the best image size: 3000px maximum for the width and height, and no more than 2MB in size.

Resizing vs Cropping Images

There’s one final thing we wanted to talk about. When optimizing images for websites, we mainly want to resize images. However you can also crop images, and it is important to know the difference.

Resizing is altering the size of your image without cutting anything out. Resizing is also known as scaling.

Cropping is cutting off a portion of the image to change its shape.

Imagine that you need a square profile picture. The selfie from your phone is in portrait orientation (tall) and much too large. Here’s how to use that selfie for the profile picture.

Start by cropping the image so that it becomes a square.

Next, we’ll resize the picture so that it fits the space for your profile picture.

Here’s how it looks like if we had taken a shortcut and resized the height and width without cropping. Worse than a squished doughnut!

So that’s the difference between resizing and cropping. And what happens if you try to take a shortcut. Now you know!

Summary to Optimizing Images

Images are an important element of your website, but using them wrongly can result in poor user experience and impacts your website negatively. That’s why it’s important to optimize your images.

The 3 steps to optimize images for your website are:

1. Choose the right format
2. Compress the image
3. Pick the right size

We hope this article has helped you understand how to optimize images so you can ensure that your websites load quickly for your visitors. At the very least, we hope we entertained you with my love for doughnuts!

Further Resources

How to display images side-by-side in WordPress

Share a link to Facebook with a preview image

How to Optimize Images for SEO by Grand Cru Digital

10 Stock Image Websites You Need To Know In 2021 by Oberlo

Canva Tutorial for Newbies – Youtube video by Five Minute Social Media

Photo credits: Nerfee Mirandilla, Court Cook on Unsplash; rawpixel.com, Racool_studio on Freepik; @ubereats on Giphy; @eatinwithb on Instagram

The post 3 Simple Steps to Optimizing Images for your Website (Explained with Doughnuts) appeared first on ClickWP.

Unorthodox Method #1: Call to Action in the Menu

The first thing I’ll start with is having a call to action in the top menu. Most people think of a menu as having a perhaps an item for some services, an about us, pricing etc. and a ‘Contact Us’ page. However, the menu is a great place to have a call to action. Here is a finance company I’m working on and note the ‘Apply Now’ button in the top right hand corner.

Having a call to action in the menu is very useful – as you can see in the example above the button has a border to bring attention to it and also has a cool hover effect.

In order to achieve this you’ll have to create a standard WordPress menu as you normally do – and then apply some custom CSS to the specific menu item. In case you’re curious how I achieved the effect above – below is the custom CSS code I used:

.menu-item-5887 a {
    border: solid;
    padding-top: 10px !important;
    padding-bottom: 10px !important;
    margin-top: 20px;
    border-radius: 5px;
    padding-left: 20px !important;
}

.menu-item-5886 { padding-right:25px !important; }
 
.menu-item-5887 a:hover { background-color:#77b34e !important;
    color:white !important;
    border-color:#77b34e !important;
}

You’ll need to replace the .menu-item-5887 with the ID number of your menu – which you can find by using Element Inspector as per the screenshot below:

Unorthodox Method #2: You Can Never Have too Many Call to Actions

We’re not finished with call to actions yet – In this particular example there is a call to action (‘Apply Now’) in the header menu – but also in the callout to the left.

You can never have too many call to actions – in fact here’s an unpopular opinion – you should have your application form on EVERY page. Your website footer should contain call to actions too.

Here’s an example of a site that does this:

As you can see there is a whole ton of footer content on every page – not just an application form, but also an email newsletter sign up call to action, as well as a call to action to download the brochure – the latest articles and even a trust section with awards.

Who says website footers have to be boring? Or that they should be short? If a user scrolls all the way to the bottom why not give them some additional call to actions, build trust and direct them to other parts of the site?

Unorthodox Method #3: The Downward Arrow (aka treating users like children)

Let me ask you this – have you been to a website and it was very difficult to navigate? Maybe the text was too small giving you a headache – or you couldn’t find what you were looking for. Perhaps all the ads slowed down the site – or the scrolling wasn’t smooth because the site messed with natural scrolling? Were you upset and irritated about this?

Now let me ask you another question – have you ever been to a site where everything was so simple to use to the point that you were offended that it was so simple – like you were being treated like a child?

Yeah – me neither.

Treating users like children may sound offensive but believe me – no one is going to get upset you made things easier than they should have been.

So I introduce you to the downward arrow – here is a video example below:

You may think having an arrow is overkill – however when I have a header (or hero) image that takes up nearly the entire page – I want the user to be able to easily:

1. Know that there is more content below and
2. Get to that content with the click of a button

You would be surprised how many people may not know there’s more content below – having an arrow gives them the psychological direction of where to go – it’s very subtle. You’ll note that this is a secondary call to action – ideally a user would click the primary call to action as described above (Apply Now).

But failing that the user can go down and learn more about the product/service and its benefits/features (that whole thing would take up another article of its own).

Unorthodox Method #4: Use Multi Step Forms

In this particular case study example that I’m using – I’m working on a loan website – the user is able to apply online. Having a multi step lead generation process is important – as it streamlines the sales process.

Multi step forms – which I have – in this case – created with Quform (a form plugin for WordPress that I highly recommend)

A multi step form can streamline your process – the trick though – is to get the data from the form if the user chooses to leave early.

The other benefit is no one likes to fill out big long boring forms – but a multi step form is fun (you never know what’s going to be around the corner) – also having a % complete bar at the top can help to set the user’s expectations.

Note: Use Quform and import the following form – www.quform.com/examples (click on ‘Steps’) –  and then add the shortcode to your page to achieve the effect above.

Unorthodox method #5: Live Chat

One great feature to have on your site – if it’s practical – is the live chat feature. Here is how it looks like on my site:

The great thing about this feature is that it allows people to ask a question without having to leave all their details (which a user may not want to do because of time and also because the risk they see of being bothered in the future – it’s a lower risk way to engage).

One other cool thing to look at is the Facebook chat widget which you can see below (currently developing on one of my client’s sites)

The great thing about Facebook chat is that if someone messages you on there you have their details (you actually have their entire Facebook profile) – which can be very helpful. This is only useful in certain cases though and for certain industries – you wouldn’t have a Facebook chat widget on B2B website in most cases as Facebook is a bit more personal.

Unorthodox method #6: Use numbers and figures to state your case

One element which can increase conversion rate is #Facts – or numbers. Using numbers to help with your case –  and presenting them in an engaging way is a great conversion strategy. The interesting reality is despite whether the numbers are true or not – people respond better to numbers. Here’s how I setup a section to show the benefits of getting finance:

As you can see there are two sections here – % of customers who said financing helping their business and also % of increased growth forecasts of businesses that used financing. But you’ll also notice they have a cool counting effect.

This can be achieved with Elementor’s ‘Counter’ widget:

Unorthodox Method #7: Nobody Likes Reading

There’s one rule you should go with – and this goes back to treating people like 5 year old kids – and that is making your content easily digestible. People do read bulky books all the time – but your job is to keep the reader engaged – the last thing you want is to have a whole large block of text for a reader to digest.

The consumer wants to be entertained, he wants the information in simple packets – he doesn’t want to think too hard.

While different products require different complexities of writing to sell there is one rule that will always remain constant – the easier you can make it for the user to digest the information you’re giving – the more likely they are to actually digest the information and be able to make an informed decision (or the decision you would like them to make).

For example take this section from the landing we’re studying:

Here I have 2 sections – one called ‘The different ways you can finance’ and one called ‘Why finance?’. Now I could have just had these as blocks of text but notice the different effects I use – like for example putting every section in its own block, having an icon for each block – and separating the sections with different background colours.

You may also notice that the first section has 2 columns while the next section has 3 columns – these are all graphic design tricks – the concept of contrast, having enough white space and changing things up while keeping the main elements in uniform (like for example I keep the heading fonts/sizes, theme colours and icon sizes the same).

This will take time to learn to ensure it looks good but also serves its purpose to guide the reader along.

Unorthodox Method #8: Copy, Copy, Copy

I can’t emphasize this enough – don’t try to start from scratch and try to be a Picasso revolutionary. In many cases I take a site that is doing things really well and I just copy what they’re doing – I change up the colours of course and the content – but in many cases I have a template for something that all ready works and just work off that – and I’m very transparent about that.

If you are in doubt – focus on copying things – and as you do you will learn why some things work the way they do.

Thanks for reading! I hope this has given you some ideas on how to approach your next project and how to setup elements to increase conversions.

Need help with your landing page or improving SEO? Contact Kosta at www.headstudios.com.au

The post 8 Unorthodox Conversion Optimization Tips for your WordPress website (Case Study Included) appeared first on ClickWP.

SEO is a huge topic, and it’s so confusing! In between the million articles on the internet, advice from Facebook groups, consultants sending you reports of everything wrong on your site, how can you even hope to master the basics of SEO?

First, let me assure you that every new blogger or website owner has been in the same place. The good news is that the basic premise of SEO is quite simple to grasp. Pair that with a little technical knowledge and some consistent effort, and your website will reap the benefits steadily over time.

How this guide is different

Search for “beginner seo guide” and the top results are thousands of words long. This guide is different. Instead of trying to cover everything you need to know, this guide aims for the minimum you need to know. The focus is on actionable steps so you can start applying SEO right now. 

Here’s what to expect:

We’ll start by identifying the absolute minimum SEO you need do for each piece of content you produce. If you only have time for one article, this is the one to read.

We’ll then take it a step further by understanding how keywords fit into SEO – how to decide which keywords to target and how to use them in your content.

Next we’ll have a look at improving your website user experience, which is becoming an important ranking factor.

We saved the most technical for last. The chapter will wrap up with how to identify and fix technical issues that can impact your SEO.

Each article in this chapter will take less than 15 minutes to read. If you want to learn more, we’ll direct you to some trusted resources. 

A Plain-English Definition Of SEO

Let’s start off our SEO journey by understanding what it is and what it isn’t.

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, and is the process of improving search engine rankings in order to increase the quantity and quality of traffic to your website. 

When you “do SEO” correctly, you may find…

Visitors to your website or blog are actually reading and engaging with your content. Your keyword research helped you identify what topics your target audience is interested in, so you can create relevant content to attract them.

Your copywriting makes your content readable and ensures visitors understand your message. Side benefit: Google understands it too. Your trustworthy writing style also improves the number of visitors buying from you or signing up to your offers, becoming customers and subscribers.

What’s more, visitors to your site visit more than one page and stay longer. Your efforts in improving the website user experience makes content easy to find, read and navigate. The ease of use causes your website feel trustworthy and more credible too.

From the description above, we can see that SEO is basically all about the website visitor. SEO is all about building a website that your audience will love. And when you do that, the search engines will reward you by sending you lots of traffic.

But don’t take my word for it. It’s what Google says themselves in their Webmaster Guidelines.

Make pages primarily for users, not for search engines. Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings.

Google Webmaster Guidelines

Google and other search engines are so advanced today that they rank sites based on how we humans like those sites. They now factor the reputation and credibility of a website, and Google is encouraging website owners to improve their user experience by emphasizing page speed and usability. 

SEO is not a secret technique that will suddenly send you more traffic. SEO is not about installing the correct plugin. SEO is not about pleasing Google—it’s about pleasing your audience.

So how do we please our website visitors? We start by making a great first impression.

Making A Great First Impression In Search

If you only have time for one nugget of SEO knowledge, you’ve found it. This section explains the two basic SEO techniques that gives you the biggest bang for your buck. 

As we explained previously, the goal is to get visitors to love your website. Do that and Google will love you too, rewarding you with more traffic.

To woo your website visitors, start by making a great first impression. Consider these search results. Which would you rather click on?

Obviously the 2nd result right? Unfortunately a good-looking (optimized) search result doesn’t happen automatically. Therefore our first tip is to learn how to make your search results snippet look good—and more importantly—get search users to click to your website.

Page Titles and Descriptions

A single item shown on the search results page is called a snippet. It consists of a SEO title (in blue), the URL (in green), and the meta description (in black).

To ensure you have the best looking snippet possible on the results page, you’ll want to be able to control the text for the SEO title and meta description. We can do this by using one of the many SEO plugins available for WordPress. We are using the Yoast SEO plugin as an example in this guide, but the same principles apply to any other SEO plugin.

SEO Basics Tip #1

Attractive Search Snippets Make Great First Impressions

Optimizing Search Snippets for Posts and Pages

The goal of this step is to make your search snippet attractive so that search engine users want to click on it.

Your SEO plugin will typically add some fields to the post editor for controlling the SEO title and descriptions. Here’s how it looks with the Yoast SEO plugin.

Click the Edit snippet button and you’ll be able to set a title and description for the post or page that you’re editing. A live preview shows you how your snippet will look in the search results and a progress bar indicates the optimal length for your title and description.

With this in mind, if you set your page title to The best Pepperoni Pizza in Miami, your page should be about pepperoni pizza and your subject should be located in Miami. Google is very good at detecting inaccurate—and even deceptive—SEO, and may penalize your website for it.

Subsequently, the next question is: What should your search snippet say? Figuring out the keywords or keyphrases your audience uses will help you decide. We explain further in the next article: How to use keywords in your content. In the meantime, ensure that the search snippet summarizes the content of your page in an interesting way.

Attractive Results Rank Higher

Optimizing your search results snippet doesn’t just make it look good – it will also help you rank higher. Search engines often use the click through rate to determine a website’s ranking. Brian Dean from Backlinko explains how to take advantage of this in his video below.

Set a SEO Title Template

Do I need to optimize each of my blog posts and pages?

If they are important pieces of content (a.k.a. cornerstone content) to growing your audience, I recommend that you do. 

For the other content on that you don’t need or want to optimize manually, you can fall back to a default template for SEO title and description. To do that with the Yoast SEO plugin, navigate to SEO → Search Appearance → Content Types. For each content type, you can create a template by filling in the fields with the available snippet variables. 

We recommend the template above. This will give you titles like this:

Tip: You can change the separator from the General tab.

Optimize Your Content

By optimizing our page titles and description, we’ve put our best foot forward in the search results. But what happens after the user clicks through to your website? 

We want to ensure that we’re impressing them with our content too. So our goal here is two-fold: 

1. Create clear, understandable content that meets the searchers’ needs
2. Ensure our focus keyphrase is used in high-value locations throughout the content to rank higher for that keyword

But how will we know that we’ve met these goals? That’s where your SEO plugin’s content analysis feature will help.

SEO Basics Tip #2

Quality Content Impresses Website Visitors AND Search Engines

Content Analysis with Yoast SEO

Most SEO plugins now offer content analysis to grade your content for SEO. As with before, we’ll continue using the Yoast SEO plugin in our examples.

Here is a post before optimization. The Yoast SEO sidebar has been activated, and we’ve filled in “podcasting with wordpress” the focus keyphrase. Yoast analyzes the text content of the post and has given it an orange ? rating for both Readability analysis and Focus keyphrase. You can expand each section to see the Analysis results and recommendations.

The plugin not only tells you what the problems are, but how to resolve it and recommendations. If you click on the blue text in the problem description, you’re presented with even more info on how to fix it.

After addressing the problems, the plugin updates its analysis in real time and updated it’s rating to green ? – yay! As a result, we can be confident that this piece of content has a good chance of earning the affections of website visitors. 

Here’s that article from the example above – Beginners Guide to Podcasting With WordPress. Can you see how it’s been optimized for the keyphrase? 

However, getting a green happy face isn’t enough to create content that visitors (and Google) will love. Your content needs to have substance – facts, details, and explained in an engaging manner. If your content sucks in the first place, optimizing it won’t make it much better. You also don’t have to address every problem identified in the analysis to get a green happy face. Optimize your content enough and move on.

If you want to learn more about how to use this excellent tool from Yoast, read their blog post: How to use Yoast SEO’s content analysis tool.

While the free version of Yoast SEO is awesome, if you’re serious about SEO do consider purchasing the premium upgrade.

Do you find it hard to create high-quality content? If you do, follow the steps in Fizzle’s free 80/20 Copywriting Workbook. We can’t recommend it highly enough.

Other WordPress SEO Plugins

While we are big fans of Yoast SEO, it is by no means the only SEO plugin available for WordPress. Here are some alternatives for you to consider.

• SEOPress is an all-in-one plugin that also includes Google Analytics integration.
• The SEO Framework bills itself as a smart plugin that uses AI to enable optimal settings for your site.
• Rank Math is a lightweight and modular plugin that claims to help SEO tasks.
• All in One SEO Pack is the original Yoast SEO alternative with many fans of its slim and utilitarian interface.

As you can see, there are many options for you to choose from. Pick one, learn its features and stick with it. Above all, remember that…

SEO Is More Than A Plugin

It’s tempting to leave all the SEO tasks to a plugin. But as I have shown, the essential SEO tasks aren’t all that difficult:

1. Optimize your search titles and descriptions
2. Produce readable content with your focus keyphrase

These are tasks that can’t be automatically done by a plugin, regardless how smart it is. You must still take the time to do these steps yourself. With some consistent effort, visitors will fall in love with your website and Google will reward you with a flood of SEO traffic.

This is an excerpt from the chapter on SEO basics of our Grow Your Audience guide. Continue reading the next article: How To Use Keywords In Your Content

The post The Absolute Minimum SEO Every Website Should Have appeared first on ClickWP.

You started your podcast, and you’re ready to release new episodes. But how do you grow it over time?

If we compare with popular podcasts, it’s hard to relate: they have so many unique downloads, tons of reviews, and years of content.

What about when we’re just starting?

This was what Ling Ling Tai had to figure out when she started the Leaders of Learning podcast, the show where she explores learning in the 21st century with educators, leaders and entrepreneurs. As a result, Leaders of Learning was downloaded 100k times in its first year, with listeners in over 130 countries globally. Having finished Season 2 recently, she’s on the way to starting Season 3 with A-list guests such as GaryVee and many others!

I had the chance to interview her over the phone and ask (with great enthusiasm!) how she made it to this stage. Let’s take a look and learn!

In the beginning…

A seasoned learning and development professional (over 13 years!), Ling Ling resigned from the corporate world to start her own business venture:

CultureSpark a learning and development company that offers programs, profiles and coaching on intercultural communication, cultural intelligence, building virtual teams and many more.

But this was her first time starting off her own business, after being in the corporate world for so long. Not only that, a business survives on cash flow, and that means marketing out to potential prospects! Where can we learn about business, marketing and entrepreneurship? Podcasts, of course!

For reference, she listened to these podcasts to learn about business-modeling, marketing and how to create her own financial independence:

• John Lee Dumas’s Entrepreneur on Fire 
• Side Hustle School by Chris Gillebeau 
• The Tim Ferriss Show
• Freakonomics
• Infinite Monkey Cage (just because she loves science!)

But an idea came up: Ling is a fan of podcasts. She’s learning about business and marketing. She also wants to market her own business.

Why not start your own podcast to market your business?

Starting from zero, just like every beginner podcaster

After watching John Lee Dumas’ webinar on podcasting, she launched her podcast and learned on the go.

When she started hers, she set a high benchmark by making the standards the same as the above names. The mindset helps a lot with making sure your podcast has a great standard of quality before launching.

For the first season, Ling Ling started off with 12 full episodes, with 7 episodes pre-recorded and primed for release over the course of the season, all done on her own! In the beginning, she was still learning about audio production, so her first episode took 3 days to edit. Over time though, she became much more efficient and now can prep an episode within a day. Today, she also relies on freelancers for audio editing and copywriting to help her focus on tasks much more valuable to her time: her business, and interviewing guests.

Growing a podcast to 100k downloads

With grit and grind, Ling Ling achieved enviable success with her podcast. 

• Leaders of Learning was featured on the iTunes Podcast Chart! The show has reached No. 1 in Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Indonesia, Malaysia and Sri Lanka; No. 2 in Singapore and the Philippines.
• The podcast show was also featured on Castbox in Malaysia, Singapore, India and Australia.
• Through her hustling, the podcast achieved 100k+ downloads in 10 months!

Throughout these two seasons, let’s see how she grew her podcast audience:

1. Share your podcast strategically

In the beginning, Ling shared her episodes on all relevant social media: Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Starting off with friends and family, colleagues, co-workers and those in the same field of interest, her immediate proximity was the first to hear about what she’s been working on.

This is a great start to a new podcast, because your immediate circle has the highest chance of finding your most organic listeners: those who really do support what you’re doing.

If they’re in your industry, they may like what you’re interested in. If they’re close to you, they’ll listen and support your endeavours.

2. Getting listed in podcast directories

Where can you share your podcast, beyond your immediate proximity? Directories and aggregates!

First, the podcast episodes themselves were hosted on Libsyn’s rock-solid podcast hosting. This ensures that downloads are fast and more importantly, reliable.

Next, Leaders of Learning was distributed from Libsyn to various platforms, including Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, YouTube, Castbox, Stitcher and many others.

Being on as many platforms as possible means greater avenues for potential listeners to stumble upon the podcast! In particular, Castbox the audio aggregate platform is good for finding discussions on the podcast. Spotify is also on the rise, as it’s an easy way to introduce someone to podcasts.

So! While you’re setting up your padcast show, take the time to apply for other platforms! Over time, you’ll tap into their listener base, and that’s always a good thing

But let’s talk about the one that stands out the most:

The Power of Apple Podcasts

Apple Podcasts (formerly the iTunes Podcast Directory) is a beast when it comes to marketing and growing your podcast.

The Apple ecosystem is one of the strongest and most effective systems to market anything. For example, if you’re an artist, having your music accessible on iTunes is a great deal marketing-wise. It’s the same for podcasts!

For podcasts to thrive, you will need a combination of the following factors:

1. Effective SEO and using relevant keywords in the podcast description
2. Downloads, both unique and recurring
3. New subscribers

A combination of all of that creates activity that influences your podcast’s value in the Apple ecosystem, driving up its rankings. When your rankings are on the verge of moving up/down, it affects their standing in different categories (ie. What’s hot, new and noteworthy, etc.). 

Ling Ling was able to maximise her efforts on these factors and stayed on all the important categories! While other podcasts stayed on the ‘Top Shows’ and ‘New and Noteworthy’ categories for 2-4 weeks on average, Leaders of Learning stayed on them for a whole year!

This meant constant, front-page impressions for her podcast to any unsuspecting podcast listener!

Over time, this could have been one of the factors that led to unique downloads steadily towards the end of each season, which is of course a huge win for Ling!

3. Launch with a bang

It’s always good practice to launch with a bang! ?

By batch recording episodes beforehand and launching the show with 3-5 episodes immediately, we can retain first-time listeners who try out new shows through the first few listens.

This was what Ling Ling did:

• On January 2018, launched Leaders of Learning Season 1 with 3 episodes
• The first season was planned with up to 15 audio pieces, which include episodes, teasers, recaps, etc.
• 7 Episodes were already pre-recorded and in the backlog!

With this, she is able to retain listeners who stumble into her podcast, as well as keep up with her determined release schedule. Consistency is key!

Asia’s very first
virtual Podcast Summit

Nov 9–10, 2019

Claim your FREE pass

4. Build the hype around each episode

When releasing any piece of content, it’s always good to build the hype around it. Ling uses a 3-phase approach to promoting each episode.

Pre-release Marketing

This is where you create anticipation. Ling Ling would release updates on who the upcoming guest is, what the episode will be about, and priming podcast listeners on what they will hear! So, for you, it would be posts on:

• Release date of the upcoming episode
• Where can we listen to it
• What will the theme be about?
• Who is the guest?
• Sneak peeks?

Release Marketing

This is when you release new pieces of content that coincide with the release of the new episode. This includes content that is posted a few days after release too!

Examples include the following:

• Announce on social media that the episode is released. Be sure to include an episode summary and brief profile of your interviewee
• Have a direct link so listeners can consume it through their favourite app
• Post audio snippets from interesting segments in the episode to promote it further

Post-release/Recap Marketing

This consists of content that’s repurposed a while after the episode is released. Usually this promotion is scheduled a week after, normally coinciding with the next episode’s release.

If you can find memorable quotes, useful insights, and anything that is evergreen from your podcast, these can be repurposed and re-used over again. Some of the content from your Release Marketing phase can apply here too!

This all works really well with GaryVee’s content pyramid, which you can check out here. 

5. Marketing your podcast in events!

According to Ling one of the most unconventional yet effective method to grow a podcast is showing up to events and talking about it!

People put a lot of social proof to the word podcasts: having one under your name gives you a unique advantage over those in the same field who don’t have one. To Ling Ling, this is a huge opportunity:

She would go to networking events and call herself a podcaster, being proactive in discussions and informing those around her about what she does. Standing out, asking questions, giving back value: we tend to base the value someone gives by their experiences and career. If we associate that with our podcast show, people are much more inclined to find out more about it! Plus, Podcast hosts are few and far in between, so the fact that podcasters stand out is awesome!

Later on, people would approach her and ask about the show. This was where the goldmine is: directing people to where they can listen to your show in person is advantageous. For a listener, nothing beats listening to a show once you’ve met the face behind the voice

And remember:

6. Marketing through guests!

I asked Ling Ling about marketing through guests: is there a right way to do it? Is it bad to ask?

In her experience, you can’t control what your guests do with your episode: some share it once and move on, and others downright ignore it. You can encourage them to share it with their network, but that’s the extent of it.

For Leaders of Learning, it’s less to do with the branding of the guests, and more about what they do with the episodes themselves. The episodes that had spikes in organic downloads came from guests that have the following traits:

1. A large following
2. Willing to actively share the episode to their following
3. Encouraged their following to listen
4. The followers are die-hard fans of the guest

Once again, you can encourage but not force your guests to talk about the podcast. It’s never a good thing to make our relationships transactional after all!

7. Be part of the podcasting community

One important thing about being a podcaster is having a podcast community around you. It’s like joining a support group, you can hang out with people who:

• Understand the struggles of podcasting
• Are confirmed podcast listeners
• May give you more podcasting opportunities!

In Ling Ling’s case, she stumbled upon the SG Podcasting Community, a Facebook Group of fellow podcasting enthusiasts who talk about all things podcasting! They have bi-monthly meetups where they would hang out (*cough* drink *cough*), share their knowledge and even ask each other to guest on shows! These are some of her guest appearances:

• Discover and Learn with Ling Ling Tai – The Tao of Self Confidence
• Ling Ling talks about The Human Voice and Duolingo – Economical Rice Podcast
• Questioning female leaders after Theranos – LongKang Kitties

This is just a rough list, there’s more here!

Cross promoting really helps with both shows: you’re sharing your listener base and spreading the love! Plus, your listeners don’t have to worry about being introduced to the show: they will follow your voice everywhere you go

Overall, it’s a win-win situation for podcast hosts and the podcasting community. Hosts help each other by guesting, creating content, and contributing to the overall skill level of the community! The more buzz happens around the community, the more followers it’ll gain over time!

Basically: being a podcast guest and sharing podcast tips and tricks is super effective!

What were some of the struggles growing the podcast?

“Time and limited resources,” said Ling Ling. “It was difficult to dedicate time to the podcast if there is no revenue, and vice versa.”

As her podcast was a way to market CultureSpark, Ling had to balance between running a business and running the podcast. There wasn’t exactly any revenue being generated from producing an episode for example, so it was more of figuring out how to spend your earning hours.

It’s important to determine the tasks that you are responsible for in building a podcast. To give you a quick overview, here is an example of Ling Ling’s workflow:

• Planning a season’s worth of episodes and themes
• Drafting a podcast brief
• Sourcing for guests + guest outreach
• Interviewing the guest
• Audio production, editing
• Source for music licenses (if necessary)
• Show notes, transcription of the episode
• Pre-release, release, post-release marketing creation
• Marketing management

One thing that stands out to me is how well-organized Ling Ling is. She plans all the pieces she needs to record (episodes, teasers, recaps, etc) which she then edits together for a really professional production.

Questions to ask yourself: In which part of the workflow do you thrive the most? Which parts are you weak at? Should you outsource them? Do you need more time for some of the tasks, like guest outreach?

Podcasting is a huge commitment, so it’s good to clearly assign roles to your team, or schedule your time accordingly to do all of them on your own!

In terms of finding guests, it wasn’t that difficult as the theme of her podcast is centered around a specific niche. It then became a matter of tapping into the network where all the potential guests could be, and as a seasoned professional in her niche, Ling Ling has it going there.

For those budding podcasters who may have multiple themes, you might get ‘guest overload’ when planning out your episodes: you don’t want too many guests talking about the exact same topic consecutively. A little bit of variety and narrative in the field keeps the listeners going after all!

As long as you have the time and know how to manage your single most important resource well, it’s all good

What’s happening down the road for Ling Ling?

There were tons of opportunities that came by ever since Leaders of Learning was released!

One amazing thing that happened was that Ling got a 15 minute interview with Gary Vee! Check out the full interview here:

At the time of writing, she has just kicked off Season 3! The first episodes are just being released, but Ling has already lined up all the guests for the season and outlined all the content (props for preparation!). Helping with both CultureSpark and production of the podcast is her new Virtual Assistant! It’s a sign of great growth

Remember when Ling Ling would meet up with others in networking events who are interested in diving into the world of podcasting? She’s started a new company to help educate users on how to start their own podcast, as well as consult them too! Her goal is “to build a podcasting landscape where it’s democratic, where you can get your voice out, and not have it changed by anyone.” What an awesome goal! Want to learn how to start your own podcast? Be sure to checkout Meavox Live.

Some Final questions

Finally, I asked her this:

What are the biggest factors of growth for a podcast?

Her answers were:

• Content, if it’s not relevant then it’s listeners will drop off. Even if it’s pretty, high quality audio, if the content is not high quality then it’s not worth it
• Consistency, making sure that you’re on a regular release schedule. Your loyal followers are waiting to hear you again!
• ALSO, transparency. If it’s seasonal, you have to let your listeners know when you’ll take a break, when you’re coming back, etc.

And of course, as a budding podcaster myself, I asked:

Any advice for podcasters wanting to grow their own podcast?

Her answer? Just launch it.

“One of the biggest stumbling blocks is fear of failure, and needing to be perfect, and that delays the process.” She said. “It is a journey, not a destination. As you go through the journey, you make changes to the podcast, the structure of the episode, and much more. You have to see as a journey not as a goal. It’ll evolve. Just launch, learn from it, and evolve.”

And on that note, we’d like to say thanks to Ling Ling for taking time to share her tips and strategies with us. You’re a real inspiration!

P.S. Did you enjoy the article? Share this article and say hi to @linglingtai on Twitter. And don’t forget to tune in to Leaders of Learning!

The post How To Grow Your Podcast: Proven Tips from Ling Ling appeared first on ClickWP.