Eric Binnion

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There’s no doubt that outsourcing can be a powerful tool in a blogger or Internet marketer’s toolkit. The problem is that most bloggers don’t fully utilize and/or misuse this tool. There are also 3 things that you should never outsource.

Don’t Be Your Own Worst Enemy

Outsourcing is often understood as a way for you to hand off either the repetitive tasks that drain your time or the tasks that are out of your skill range. Outsourcing is meant to be a tool that saves you time and frustration.

The issue is that many business owners don’t trust the process and end up micromanaging on such a level that they might as well do the work themselves.

I recently read an article on Open Forum, a website of American Express™ , where they said:

If you have chosen to delegate tasks to people, great. It can free up your time, so you can do more important tasks. But if you follow it up by micro-managing them to get those tasks done, you have defeated your purpose. Any task that you feel can be delegated should also be free from micro-management.

I couldn’t have said it better myself. Bottom line, if you want to use outsourcing, learn how to be more hands off. Work with people who have a good track record and an awesome portfolio. But, whatever you do… Never outsource these 3 things!

Business Planning and Idea Generation

Bottom line, never hand off the planning of your business to an online outsourcer. It is your drive that created your blog and it is full of your ideas. An outsourcer lacks the full understanding of where you want to take your blog/business, and they do not have a vested interest like you do.

While I understand that you may need some help guiding your business, an outsourcer who makes his income from places such as Fiverr, Elance, and oDesk is almost always not the answer.

If you are frustrated with the direction of your business, then by all means get help. But, do it the right way. Find someone that runs a successful blog or business and ask them for help.

There are tons of rockstars out there who do business and blog consulting. Peter Shallard is highly recommended, although I’ll warn you that he has a hefty price tag. The guys behind Fizzle are also great choices.

Your business plan is the foundation of your business. Do not skimp here with cheap outsourcing. If you need help, bring in the big guns with a record of success!

Web Content

In my dealings with outsourcers, almost every single time, they are not a native English speaker. This is not so bad when I am paying them to help with some programming or to process videos.

But, when it comes to writing content for your blog, you really should hire a native speaker, whether your language is English, Chinese, Japanese, or Spanish.

Why, you ask? Language is so much more than just words. As a prime example, in Britain, “loo” is commonly used to refer to a room containing a toilet. In America, we just call it a restroom or bathroom.

While that example may be awkward it points out a glaringly obvious problem with hiring outsourced writers….

If your outsource writer is not a native speaker, then there is a good chance that they could tank the conversion rate of your copy. As a matter of fact, we have hired outsourced writers in the past. When we got back the content they wrote, it looked OK at first sight. But when we published it, we noticed that the bounce rate was about 30% higher than normal!

Blogging is about much more than just getting content up. Your content must successfully convey a message, and if you’re running a business, you must always be considerate of how you’re going to convert readers to subscribers and buyers. Do you want to leave this in the hands of an outsource writer?

SEO

Art of Blog receives between 70-80% of its traffic from search engines. If Art of Blog were to lose rankings in the search engines, we would be dead in the water.

JCPenney™ experienced something similar to that when they lost some of their highest Google™ search rankings. Get more information from Just Outsourcing.

The question to ask yourself is this, can you afford to lose a large percentage of your search traffic because an outsourced SEO used black hat SEO techniques without your approval?

There are of course great SEO services out there that you can reliably outsource your SEO to. If you need help with your SEO, I recommend using PushFire (run by Suggarae), Kenny Hyder, or some other SEO professional with a proven track record and several verifiable recommendations. A good place to find good SEOs would be SEOmoz’s forums.

What Do You Think?

Outsourcing can be a great tool to help save you time and allow you to focus on the more important things in your blog and business, but only when used correctly.

What are your experiences with outsourcing? Have you had good or bad experiences? Will you use outsourcing in the future?

Leave a comment below with your thoughts!

The post Why Outsourcing is a Pipe Dream for Most and 3 Things You Should Never Outsource appeared first on Art of Blog.

What do you when you run out of topics to write about? How do you build an audience?

3 Tips to Running a Successful WordPress Website

Installment four of the WordPress Rockstar series will give you 3 solid tips to being building a successful WordPress website. In this video you will learn:

• Content Idea Generation. Sure, you have tons of ideas for posts right now since you’re just starting your WordPress website. But, what do you do a few months from now when you’re running out of ideas?
  
• Build Your Audience. Learn how to build an audience from your WordPress website by using what are called ethical bribes.
• Comment Moderation. Learn which comments you should be accepting and which you should be sending to spam.

At the end of the WordPress Rockstar series, you should be confident enough to build a website using themes and plugins, create content, and run your website effectively.

Where to Go From Here

Throughout Art of Blog you fill find hundreds of articles that give you useful, practicable advice on how to start and run a successful blog. For some more in-depth information on how to get your blog running, check out these resources below.

• Best WordPress Hosting Compared
• Best WordPress Themes: The Authoritative Guide
• How to Start a Blog: The Complete Guide from Start to Finish
• The Toolbox: Our Most Recommended Tools for Running a Successful Blog

What Do You Think?

After finish the WordPress Rockstar series, how do you feel about diving in and getting to work on your WordPress masterpiece? What did you like about the WordPress Rockstar series and what could’ve made this series better?

Leave a comment below with your thoughts!

The post WordPress Rockstar Series #4 appeared first on Art of Blog.

Eric Binnion

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But, have you ever just taken a minute to think about whether your design changes are really making a difference? Because chances are, your design changes may not be helping at all. They might actually be hurting your website…

Pretty or Functional Website?

While designing a website, you have the choice of focusing on either creating an amazing design or creating a design that converts like crazy. To be clear, this is not exactly a one or the other situation, but there likely will be times that you have to make a decision between the two.

For example, have you ever seen the Social Triggers website? Have you noticed how simplistic it is? It has a basic greyscale color scheme, a super simple text logo, and a simple white background.

But this site converts like crazy! Derek Halpern was able to break the 100,000 hits barrier as well as 17,000 subscribers for his blog in just 11 months.

Do you know why Social Triggers converts so well?

Because, since the beginning, Derek’s main focus on Social Triggers has been creating a functional website that both converts and has kick-ass content.

On the other hand, there are websites like Matt Mullenweg’s that focus on the design aspect first. But, let’s be honest… Matt doesn’t have to worry about conversions on his personal blog, he has WordPress!

Art of Blog Case Study

To give you an example of why your design does not matter as much as you think it does, let me give you a case study of how Art of Blog’s new redesign has increased our daily sitewide traffic about 15-20% and also increased traffic to one of our main affiliate pages by 37%!

First, let’s take a look at the old Art of Blog design.

Notice how this website has plenty of color, a light background image, and not a lot of white space. Now, let’s compare that with the new Art of Blog design launched on January 21st, 2013.

Notice how this design uses much less coloring and no background pattern. Also, notice how our optin box is at the top of the home page above the fold. Also, notice our social proof banner with the media logos in it.

This new redesign has helped us increase our traffic between 15-20% in just a few days and has also significantly impacted shares, subscribers, comments, etc. The focus on usability and conversion, as opposed to focusing on design, is the reason we have had these results.

Bottom Line

You can choose to have both an awesome looking and high converting website, but be prepared that if you want to run a successful blog… You may need to focus more on conversion.

At Art of Blog, we believe that we were able to draw much more traffic because we focused on:

1. Page Speed - It’s no secret that page speed is a metric that metric that Google uses to determine your rankings. When you lower the time it takes for your website to load, you are also indirectly increasing your search rankings.
   
2. Social Proof - We made it a point to include a banner with the major media networks that our authors have been featured in. Because of this we have noticed that our email signups have been increasing.
3. Minimalism - Our last design was built using the Chronicl skin for Thesis. While we loved the design, we felt like we could get better conversions by using a minimal design. So we built our own design from the ground up that featured our email signup forms and our best content. Because of this, one of our top performing pages is now seeing over a 50% click-through rate to affiliate offers. Not too shabby, eh?

In the end, blogging for profit is a business, and getting a subscriber or a sale is much more important than someone complimenting on the look of your website.

What Do You Think?

How do you approach the debate between a pretty and functional site? Do you split test to increase your conversions?

Leave a comment below with your thoughts!

The post Why Your Design Doesn’t Matter as Much as You Think it Does appeared first on Art of Blog.

Eric Binnion

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But, even though WordPress plugins can provide some amazing functionality, there are tons of plugins out there that will just give you nightmares. All you have to do is Google “WordPress plugin crashed” to see what I’m talking about.

The problem is that many free plugins on the market were either not coded properly from the beginning, or have not been updated over time. Both of these lead to big issues on your WordPress website.

Why Most WordPress Plugins Aren’t Worth Your Time

Picture this. You imaging a new feature for your WordPress website, and you scour the web trying to find a plugin with that feature since you are not a programmer. After an hour you find what you think is a good plugin. You install and activate the plugin, only to find out that your website has crashed! Uh oh…

Websites crashing due to bad WordPress plugins happens quite often. Even big companies like Facebook have released bad plugins that brought down websites. Many times, a crash can happen just because of one letter or word being out of place.

But, this type of bad WordPress plugin is usually not that bad. Just delete the plugin and don’t use it again. Problem solved. Truly bad WordPress plugins are the ones that make your WordPress website vulnerable to malware or ones that slow your website to a crawl.

WordPress plugins can slow your website down in many ways, but usually it is due to:

1. Loading Unnecessary Files. Let’s say you only have one photo gallery page. It would be ideal then to only have the CSS and JS for that gallery loaded on the one gallery page. But, some plugins will instead load the CSS and JS on every single page.
2. Not Enqueueing Properly. When plugins do not properly enqueue CSS and JS, WordPress doesn’t know which files are on the page. Because of this you can run into issues where there are duplicate libraries being called or dependencies not being loaded. All of which can cause errors and slow page speed.
3. Making a Ton of Requests. There are plugins out there that will call an API every time the plugin loads instead of storing the data temporarily using the transients API.

Usually it’s not that difficult to track down a slow WordPress plugin. You can usually use services such as WebPageTest.org to see what is slowing down your WordPress website. The real issue is when a WordPress plugin makes your website vulnerable to attacks. This is usually because the plugin does not sanitize or validate data or because the plugin includes libraries with vulnerabilities in them.

There are plenty of bad WordPress plugins out there, but there are some good ones.

The Top WordPress Plugins That Are Worth Your Time

Yea, the last few paragraphs might have scared you away from using WordPress plugins. But let’s be honest, WordPress wouldn’t be what it is without them. And there definitely are some amazing plugins out there. Below is a list of our favorite plugins that we either use or have used here at Art of Blog:

1. Photodropper. This plugin makes it easy to find and insert free images into your WordPress website. I use this on my personal website and on Art of Blog.
2. WordPress SEO by Yoast. This is arguably the best plugin on the market for SEO, and it’s free. This plugin not only handles the typical SEO, but it does more advanced redirects, integrates with OpenGraph, and even takes care of sitemaps! Can’t beat this amazing plugin.
3. Akismet. This plugin goes without saying. Comment spam is horrible…
4. Broken Link Checker. Bad links can tank your SEO. This plugin will check your website periodically for bad links from within your posts and comments and helps you update or remove bad links.
5. Gravity Forms. We’ve used Gravity Forms for everything from a basic contact form to surveys and polls. This plugin is well worth the money!
6. WP Super Cache. We have had very few problems with this plugin across all of our websites. Highly recommend for  your WordPress website.

What Do You Think?

What has your experience been with WordPress plugins? What are your most, or least, favorite WordPress plugins?

Leave a comment below with your thoughts!

The post Why Most WordPress Plugins Aren’t Worth Your Time and the 6 That Really Matter appeared first on Art of Blog.

In the second installment of the WordPress Rockstar series we covered these topics:

• What is the difference between Posts and Pages?
• How to publish and schedule posts.
• How to upload and insert media into posts. We also share an awesome plugin for finding  free images to use in your blog!
• What are plugins and how to use them?
• How to use the WordPress repository from the admin area.
• Recommended WordPress plugins for new blogs.

By the end of the second installment, you should be comfortable creating content and working with plugins on your WordPress website. But, by now, you’re probably tired of looking at the default WordPress theme. That is where the third installment of the WordPress Rockstar series comes in!

How to Make Your WordPress Website Look Amazing

In video 3 of the WordPress Rockstar series, we will cover these topics:

• Types of WordPress themes and what they are best suited for.
• Where to get great premium WordPress themes.
• WordPress theme licensing.

We will also be doing a redesign on a website using the Genesis framework and the Focus child theme.

Between the several WordPress themes marketplaces we show you and the live rebuild, you should feel comfortable enough to build your own attractive website with the use of premium WordPress themes.

What Do You Think?

After watching video 3 of the WordPress Rockstar series, do you feel confident enough to build your own WordPress website using premium themes? If not, where do you think the video could be improved?

Leave a comment below with your thoughts and suggestions!

The post WordPress Rockstar Series #3 appeared first on Art of Blog.

In the first installment, we discussed these topics:

• Did you know that WordPress is currently used on over 62,000,000 website worldwide? We’ll discuss why this is great for users without much development or design experience.
• How to take advantage of the thousands of free WordPress plugins and themes in the WordPress repositories.
• What is the difference between WordPress.com and WordPress.org? This is one of the big topics for newcomers to WordPress.
• How to install WordPress using either 1-click installs and/or FTP.

With these topics under your belt, you should have a fresh installation of WordPress to play with. Going forward we’re going to be learning how to actually use WordPress.

Video #2 – Working with WordPress

In the second installment of the WordPress Rockstar Series, you will be learning:

• What is the difference between Posts and Pages?
• How to publish and schedule posts.
• How to upload and insert media into posts. We also share an awesome plugin for finding  free images to use in your blog!
• What are plugins and how to use them?
• How to use the WordPress repository from the admin area.
• Recommended WordPress plugins for new blogs.

After watching video #2, you should be comfortable cranking out content for your market. So, whether you’re the next star blogger or a small business looking to get a website up, this will get you well on your way.

This video even suggests a free plugin that will help you find free creative commons images that you can use in your website. That alone is well worth the time it takes to watch this video.

What Do You Think?

After watching installment two of the WordPress Rockstar Series, do you feel confident that you can begin creating content for your WordPress website?

Let us know by leaving a comment below with your thoughts and possibly a link back to your site!

The post WordPress Rockstar Series #2 appeared first on Art of Blog.

Eric Binnion

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And while this is not necessarily a bad thing, let’s discuss it further.

SEO Options Do Not Transfer Easily Between Premium WordPress Themes

All of the premium WordPress themes that Art of Blog recommends come with included SEO support. This typically means that the theme will help you take care of things, such as:

• Title Tag. This is arguably the most important part of your overall SEO strategy.
• Meta Description. This will be the description that search engines show on the results pages.
• Redirects and Canonical Links. Redirect and canonical URLs are ways to URLs to content other places.

Buying a premium WordPress theme will definitely make your life easier just because of the SEO aspects. But, what many people don’t understand is that by using a premium WordPress theme to store all of your SEO data, you are making it more difficult to switch themes in the future.

Extended Features Cost Extra and Do Not Transfer

If you’ve looked into using the Headway theme, then you’ll notice that it includes it’s own marketplace for extending the theme. If you’re wanting to add functionality to your Headway theme, simply check out the marketplace, buy a block and you’re done!

It also appears as if DIYthemes is trying to create their own marketplace after the release of Thesis 2. With the ability to easily add skins and boxes, definitely be on the lookout for a Thesis 2 marketplace coming in the future.

You may ask why you would buy a block/box when you could simply find a free plugin, and you’ve got a point. But, the security of having a piece of functionality programmed specifically for your theme seems worth the $20-30 to me.

The only problem with buying premium WordPress theme specific functionality is that you begin to rely on that theme. So later on, if you decide to change your theme, you will not be able to use you theme specific plugin.

Changing Premium WordPress Themes Could Hurt Your Traffic

There is speculation that dramatic redesigns of your website can temporarily hurt the traffic to your website. Articles on SEOmoz discuss this as well as various other posts throughout the Internet.

This traffic drop shouldn’t ever be an issue when you do a redesign of the same premium theme, because you will end up with essentially the same HTML output.

The potential traffic drop could come from using a different premium WordPress theme that structure their web pages much differently.

I have not seen anything that confirms this, but speculation from several respected places is well worth being cautious.

Bottom Line

Premium WordPress themes come packed with options that will help you build an amazing website. But, the tradeoff for having all of this functionality is that you are having to build your site based on that specific premium WordPress theme. This means that you are creating extra work later on when you decide to redesign and/or switch your premium WordPress theme. Not to mention the potential bad effects on your SEO.

Thankfully, for those that are dead set on changing their premium WordPress theme, check out  SEO Data Transporter. This tool will help you keep some of your data as you switch.

When you do decide to switch premium WordPress themes, I highly recommend you find a WordPress developer that specializes with the premium WordPress theme you’d like to use that way your transition is as painless as possible.

What Do You Think?

Have you ever switched premium WordPress themes? Did you run into any issues?

Leave a comment below with your thoughts!

P.s.

Are you looking for a great premium theme that you can stick with? How about you take the “Which Premium WordPress Theme Should I Get” survey!

The post Why Switching Premium WordPress Themes is Plain Stupid appeared first on Art of Blog.

And with this mindset, it’s natural that a business owner would think that he needs to have a shiny website to impress potential customers. But, this idea is flawed. The fact is that most flashy websites are slow, and this could adversely affect your business.

To Be Flashy Or Not?

Right now, you’re probably thinking that you’ve seen several websites that were flashy and successful, and that this means you should have one. While these websites may be successful, despite their clunkiness, do keep in mind that these websites usually have a different audience.

For example, the website for G.I. Joe Retalliation is a perfect example of a slow, flashy website. But, even though this website shows me a loader and takes several seconds to load, I will patiently wait every single time. Why? Because I came to this website expecting it to be very feature rich.

Now let’s take a website like Amazon for example. I usually go to Amazon for price checking and “cool stuff” discovery”. I’ll easily browse through 20-30 pages before finding a product I want. In this situation, I don’t want to deal with a slow website… and if you show me a slow website I will not be happy.

If you’re running a small business, then your website is most likely like more similar to the Amazon scenario. Your readers are most likely not  coming to your website to be entertained, they are coming for information, and want it fast.

The Adverse Effects of a Slow Website

There are two main reasons that having a slow website is a horrible idea for businesses.

1. Several large companies have done research that shows that when their websites slow down even a fraction of a second, they lose millions of visitors. Your website may not work on the same scale as Google, but the idea is that with a slow website, you are leaving money on the table.
2. In recent years, Google has begun to consider the page speed of a website in their ranking algorithm. Although the exact influence is unsure, it is certain that a slow website will hurt your rankings in search.

Both of the above scenarios lead to a reduced amount of visitors, which ultimately leads to a reduced amount of money. And while recovering page views may be easier when speeding up your website, the impact to SEO may be more long term.

 Set Your Website Up for Success!

You’re a busy small business owner, so I’ll keep it short. Here are the 4 things that your website needs:

1. Responsiveness. This means that your website will change its look depending on the device it’s being viewed on (Visit ArtOfBlog on your mobile device to get an idea of what I’m talking about). Did you know that over 25% of mobile web users browse only on their phones and that mobile traffic as a whole accounts for over 23% of all traffic online! If your website is not responsive, then you could potentially be alienating almost 1/4 of all of your traffic.
   
2. Minimalness. As we talked about earlier, a flashy website could hurt your web traffic. We recommend getting a website design that loads super fast. This usually means going light on images and having a great host. Check out our WordPress hosting page for our top recommended hosts.
3. Claim Your Google Listing. This will help you get in the local search results within Google. While you’re at it, go ahead and register your local business with Yahoo and Bing as well.
4. Display Your Phone Number in a Prominent Place. You want to make it easy for potential customers to get in touch with you. As a local business owner, this usually means through the phone. Be sure to place your phone number in the header and footer of your website so that it’s convenient for website visitors.

What Do You Think?

Would you do business with a small business that had a slow website? And if so, how long are you willing to wait?

The post Why Smart Small Businesses Shouldn’t Have Flashy Websites appeared first on Art of Blog.

• How do I install WordPress?
• What’s the difference between a post and a page?
• How do I install a theme?

Because of this, those of us at Art of Blog decided it would be a great idea to create the WordPress Rockstar Series which is aimed at taking people from zero knowledge of WordPress to having enough knowledge to install WordPress,  publish content, and work with plugins and themes to have a functioning and beautiful website.

This video series will consist of 4 videos, the descriptions of which are below.

Subscribe to the WordPress Rockstar Series List for Updates on New Releases

We will use this list to send out updates when new videos are published. We hate spam.

Video #1 – Installing WordPress and Getting Everything Setup

In video 1 of the WordPress Rockstar Series, we will cover these topics:

• Did you know that WordPress is currently used on over 62,000,000 website worldwide? We’ll discuss why this is great for users without much development or design experience.
• How to take advantage of the thousands of free WordPress plugins and themes in the WordPress repositories.
• What is the difference between WordPress.com and WordPress.org? This is one of the big topics for newcomers to WordPress.
• How to install WordPress using either 1-click installs and/or FTP.

Video #2 – How to Use WordPress

In video 2 of the WordPress Rockstar Series, we will cover topics such as:

• What is the difference between Posts and Pages?
• How to publish and schedule posts.
• How to upload and insert media into posts. We also share an awesome plugin for finding  free images to use in your blog!
• What are plugins and how to use them?
• How to use the WordPress repository from the admin area.
• Recommended WordPress plugins for new blogs.

Video #3 – Designing a WordPress Website

In video 3 of the WordPress Rockstar series, we will cover these topics:

• Types of WordPress themes and what they are best suited for.
• Where to get great premium WordPress themes.
• WordPress theme licensing.

We will also do a basic website design using the Genesis framework and the Focus child theme.

Video #4 – Now What Do I Do?

In video 4 of the WordPress Rockstar series, we will cover:

• Techniques to always have content ideas.
• How to use ethical bribes to build your audience.
• Techniques for comment moderation.

What Do You Think?

I’m always curious to hear what readers think about Art of Blog and the content we release. Please leave a comment below with what you think about the WordPress Rockstar Series!

The post WordPress Rockstar Series #1 appeared first on Art of Blog.

Eric Binnion

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With all of that work load, you have likely looked at some sort of way to increase the amount of work you get done. And while personal productivity can help you get more work done, a lot of the advice out there is bull****.

Why, you ask? Because many of the personal productivity systems out there are so difficult that you end up wasting more time using the system.

Examples of Failed Personal Productivity

Although I could give you several examples of my failures at personal productivity, I think it’s best if you get a non-biased opinion. Mike Vardy had this to say on Lifehack:

This seemed like a good idea at the time. I used to use coloured pens and highlighters that were associated with a legend so I could tell what each task was associated with and how far along they were to completion. Different coloured pens were used for the “context” of the tasks (keeping in mind I had no knowledge of how contexts are defined in most productivity systems at the time) and the different coloured highlighters were used to signify the progress of the tasks.

One of the biggest problems with this experiment was that I was carrying around a pencil case for the first time since school. I also wound up using one of those multi-coloured pens that you had to flick to change colours. Not exactly the most pleasant writing tool.

Furthermore, I had to keep tabs on what each aspect of the colour-coding represented. I was either pulling out the legend regularly to make sure I knew what was going on with certain tasks or I inadvertantly would use a wrong colour and throw everything out of whack. Well, at least it felt like everything was out of whack. What it really was: not the best solution for my personal productivity.

Although I understand where Mike was going with color coding his tasks, can you imaging how hard it would be to not only keep up with all of the colors and what they mean, but to also always have a bag of pencils and highlighters with you? This is a prime example of a personal productivity plan that actually results in more work and frustration than no personal productivity.

Still not convinced? Let’s take a look at another example of Mike’s that’s more applicable to those of us with iPhones.

When I first dove into using apps for productivity purposes, Things won out over OmniFocus. The price was cheaper and it seemed to have everything I needed. The user interface was simple and elegant, the developers had built a complementary iPhone app and I was able to use it with relative ease and get a whole lot done.

Until I was away from my Mac for too long with my iPhone. Then “Things” wasnt working out so well. It had no over-the-air sync at the time. That was a problem for me. Others felt the same way.

This example really hits home with me because I’ve tried dozens of different types of personal productivity and task management apps, and I can never get the hang of them. I always spend tons of time trying to keep data in sync or figuring out how best to organize.

By now, you’re probably beginning to ask yourself if you should keep looking for a personal productivity plan that works. The short answer is, “Yes, personal productivity can work!“

3 Easy Steps for Better Personal Productivity

Before we talk about what works in regards to personal productivity, it’s time for a gut check. If you want anything, then you have to make it happen. 

No one else is going to save you. If you’re not willing to put the work in, then personal productivity is a lost cause. With that said, here are the best ways to drastically increase your personal productivity within the next 48 hours!

1. Quit scheduling so much. I often talk about analysis paralysis, the idea that you think and plan so much that nothing ever gets done. Think about this, every time you schedule some little task, you are wasting time. Or how about this… Have you ever not started a task because you had an appointment coming up in 15-30 minutes and you knew you wouldn’t be finished? Schedule the important stuff. Otherwise, just get to work!
2. Work at the right time. If you have the ability, then work when you are most focused and can get the most amount of work done. For me this is between about 8 PM and 1-2 AM after my family starts going to sleep. For others, like Nick, this seems to be early in the morning. We are all different. Find what works for you and stick to it.
3. Work in spurts with zero interruptions. Your body operates in cycles of about 90 minutes. By working within these cycles, you can get much more good work done! The basic idea is that you work for up to 90 minutes without any interruptions. Then, you take a 15-20 minute break. Repeat this cycle a few times throughout your day. You should notice that you are able to get more work done because you are able to focus more intently on tasks.

In short, you can greatly increase your personal productivity by simply not scheduling as much, finding your optimal work time, and taking breaks within your work. This system is very low maintenance and should only require that you have some sort of timer so you don’t go over 90 minutes of work at a time.

What Do You Think?

While most personal productivity plans are crap and will end up wasting your time, there are ways that you can increase your output. I’ve laid out 3 quick and easy steps to get you going. But, I’m curious about what you use for your personal productivity? Do you have any ideas to share?

The post Why Personal Productivity is Bull**** and What Works appeared first on Art of Blog.

Eric Binnion

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I’ll tell you. It’s likely because you’re forgetting a golden rule - “What’s in it for me?”

Readers Only Care About Themselves

Sure, readers are not intentionally self-centered, it’s just how they are.

Most readers likely make it to your blog through a search engine where they were likely looking for something specific. This could be something like “What is the Best WordPress Hosting?” or “What is the Best WordPress Theme?”

The point is that a large majority of people come to your website to fulfill their own needs. On Art of Blog, this number is around the 70-80% range.

How about this scenario: Have you ever spent hours writing an incredibly information packed article only for readers to leave comments asking how to do something that you clearly covered? Readers want their questions answered… NOW! And they will waste your time asking you to repeat what you said.

Yea, it sucks, and you really shouldn’t have to put up with it. But, you do, so let’s talk about you can get past this. Because once you realize that readers are serving their own needs, you can begin to really build an amazing blog.

Here are two ways that you can begin serving your readers’ needs.

Quit Being Boring…

On the Internet, being boring is a cardinal sin. Nothing will tank your bounce rate more than being boring. The problem here is that being boring just comes naturally to people. So, how can boring people become interesting?

The easiest way to become more interesting is to change the type of content you write. Sure, readers want good information, but they want to be entertained at the same time!

Allow me to use Art of Blog as an example. Last week I posted an article asking if WordPress developers charge too much. The post resulted in 21 comments in just a few days and since then our traffic has increased about 20%! Here’s a graph from our analytics.

Why did this post do such a good job at increasing traffic? Because it was not boring. The post made people pick sides on whether or not WordPress developers charge too much. There was even a fairly heated debate on Twitter. All of this helped result in the increase in traffic over the past week.

Here are some ideas on how you can create content that’s not boring:

1. Create polarizing content. When you write about a controversial topic, people naturally pick sides of the issue and they will argue to the death. Next time you see a pro-life or pro-choice article online, read the comments. Not only are these people commenting and arguing on the article, but they are likely sharing it with their friends and family!
2. Share something funny. If you have a hard time being funny, then find something funny to write about. There is no shortage of silly people in this world doing silly things.
3. Exploit your readers’ emotions. Entrepreneur wrote an article where they detailed 10 of the most common emotional triggers. It’s not surprising that fear, guilt, and trust are the top three on this list. When you work on these emotions, you can hook readers into your content.

While being exciting is one way to get readers, readers that you have built a relationship with will also go through your content like there’s no tomorrow!

Focus On Building Relationships

Any decent Internet marketing advice will include building an email list, because readers are worth much more than just their initial visit. When you put your email list first, you can focus on building long term relationships with your readers.

Readers that feel a connection with you are willing to forgive you for writing the occasional boring piece. When you work on providing valuable and entertaining content, you can afford to experiment more with different types of content and business models.

Building relationships should always be at the forefront of your blogging strategy.

Chris Brogan, a contributor to Traffic and Trust and President of Human Business Works, says:

Trust makes me money every day. Trust is why I’m successful. Building and earning trust is one of the CORE elements you should think about as an affiliate marketer, not just “how do I make a million bucks?”

On a side note, I follow nearly everything that Chris Brogan or Nick Reese (author of Traffic and Trust) say.

What Do You Think?

If you run a successful blog, what do you focus on to engage readers in your content and get them to share it?

If you are still building your blog, what do you plan on focusing on in order to increase reader engagement?

Leave a comment below with your answer!

The post Nobody Cares What You Say On Your Website. Here’s What to Do About It! appeared first on Art of Blog.

Eric Binnion

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Tech savvy college students can now take advantage of tools such as blogging, personal pages, and portfolio tools to get prospective employers offering jobs to them.

Students Can Establish Their Knowledge with Blogging

This is arguably the most powerful tool that any college student can use. Imagine this, approximately 1,750,000 college students graduate every year. With so many people getting college degrees, today’s college students have to do so much more to stand out.

Blogging is a great tool for this because students are able to demonstrate their growth in knowledge of a field over time. But even more than that, blogs are a great tool for getting search engine traffic.

As a student blogs about things he/she has learned, that content will get picked up in search engines. This will deliver a steady level of traffic to the student’s website which potentially exposes them to employers.

As a current Computer Science student, I can tell you that I have had 2 job offers that have come as a result of my blog. In other interviews and internships, I have used my blog as a tool to demonstrate my knowledge.

But don’t just take my word for it, read Aleksandra’s story:

After first week of blogathon I got my first job offer, to work as professional blogger for small translation agency. We negotiated and didn’t agree on payments issue, but I didn’t have much time to despair. The next day I got two similar offers from one of the world’s science blogger society with much better terms. Unbelievable, a few days later my blog posts about bastardization of language brought me another job offer. This time it was from a well-known translation agency from the neighbor country whose offer was just to good to be declined. I passed their translation test for IT translator and localization specialist and got the job. I’m finishing the school year with my students in few weeks and I’m about to finish my (master’s) thesis so I thought I’ll have plenty of free time this summer. I’m actually happy that I have to change my plans. This new job looks like a great opportunity to gain new experience while doing something that I love. And I have blogathon to thank for all this!” – Aleksandra Milcic Radovanovic, Linguist Blog

Aleksandra also received several job offers from companies that were interested in hiring her as a translator.

Sure, that’s only two stories, but I can assure you that there are many more success stories out there where people have been “found” through their blogging, and received job offers, deals to write books, solicitations to speak at conferences, etc. The opportunities are essentially limitless for those that use blogging to show their knowledge.

Don’t Like Blogging? Build a Portfolio!

Although blogging provides tons of benefits, it’s definitely not for everyone. Blogging takes up quite a bit of time for writing posts and communicating with those that comment. But if blogging is not for you, don’t worry. There are several other options for college students to get their name out there. The second best option for a college student to get exposure online is to create a portfolio.

For graphically inclined college students a portfolio will usually include pictures. For these types of portfolios I recommend using tools such as Dribble or Carbonmade. Both are free and will allow students to get their design work seen by a large audience. Dribble slightly takes the win because it allows discussion which could allow college students to interact with potential employers and clients.

For engineering and computer science students that like to create with code, Github is the best possible place in the internet to get their work seen! While learning how to use Git and Github will take a little bit of time, the rewards are definitely well worth it since some of the biggest engineering and technology companies use Github to manage their products!

Want the Easy Route? Get a Personal Page.

I understand that today’s college students are stretched thin between work, school, and other extracurriculars. So, for those college students that don’t have the time to maintain a portfolio or blog, then I recommend setting up a personal web page (think internet version of a resume).

Flavors.me is a personal landing page service that is free and was named the best personal landing page service by Lifehacker! What makes having a personal landing page from Flavors.me so much better than a typical resume is that you can get creative and use pictures and text to really show your personality.

This route takes less than 15 minutes and will give you a creative and attractive presence online to give employers an idea of who you are.

What Do You Think?

With 78% of college graduates from 2012 stating that it is difficult to find a job, today’s college students must compete now more than ever. Technology tools such as blogging, portfolios, and personal pages are a great way for college students to get their name out there and get prospective employers coming to them.

Are you or a college student you know afraid not of getting a job? How do you plan on competing in today’s marketplace?

Leave a comment below with your thoughts!

The post How Tech Savvy College Kids Are Ditching Their Resumes and Getting More Job Offers appeared first on Art of Blog.

MaxCDN happens to be one of the largest and most popular CDNs out there.

And although MaxCDN is very affordable, I understand that parting with $39.95 can be a difficult decision at times. So, please allow me to share my experience of MaxCDN with you.

Why We Chose MaxCDN

At the first of this year, I noticed that one of the websites I work with seemed to be lagging when I loaded it. This particular website is for a small business, so we weren’t too concerned about the SEO aspects of having a slow website. But, we were concerned that potential customers were getting to the page, getting frustrated at how slow it was, then leaving (which could be costing the company quite a bit of money).

Because of the slow load times, I immediately began looking into a CDN solution, and decided that MaxCDN the best option since:

• MaxCDN integrates well with WordPress and W3TC.
• MaxCDN is affordable with plans as low as $39.95 per year.

With these goals in mind, I tested the speed of the local business’s website before starting the integration (results below) then I got to work.

Using the W3TC plugin, I installation was fairly quick and painless. The only issue I ran into was since I was using the new MaxCDN interface, I couldn’t find the information needed to integrate. As soon as I switched over to the old interface, the instructions I was following were a piece of cake!

There’s really only a few steps, so installation was done in about 10 minutes.

The Results of Using MaxCDN

I was very impressed with the results of integrating the website with MaxCDN, especially since it only cost this small company $40 a year. Below are the before and after screenshots.

You can see that the page was loading at 5.3 seconds before MaxCDN and at less than 4 seconds after MaxCDN. That’s over one whole second that we were able to shave off in just a few minutes with installing MaxCDN. You may be wondering now how much is a second worth?

Here is an infographic from KISSmetrics that does a good job of explaining how just one second can affect the performance of your website, especially how much money your site could make!

Before Results

After Results

Bottom Line

When you are looking to speed up your website for your readers’ experience and for SEO benefits, MaxCDN is low hanging fruit. MaxCDN is very affordable at $39.95 per year  and takes less than 15 minutes to install.

I highly recommend that you take advantage of this service.

What Do You Think?

CDNs have grown very popular over the past few years, because they are great for increasing your website speed which will give your readers a greater experience and better your SEO.

Do you currently use a CDN? Have you thought about using a CDN? Leave your thoughts below in a comment.

The post MaxCDN Review appeared first on Art of Blog.

Eric Binnion

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To be successful in blogging, you have to continually focus on things that work, and stop spending valuable time on things that don’t. But, which activities should you be focusing on?

Today, I’m going to make your life a bit easier by giving you 11 actions that you can take today to set your blog up for killer success! Set aside a block of time and try to knock out as many of these as you can.

You may have already done some of these, and that’s ok. That means you’re on the right track to success. But remember, the more you complete, the more successful your blog will be!

Action #1 – Start Building an Email List

We can all agree that to build a successful blog, we need more than just one-time search engine visitors. We should also focus on getting repeat visitors. The most effective way to get repeat visitors is by converting one-time visitors to email subscribers and focusing on building long-term relationships.

The real power behind email is that you have complete control over your email list at a very affordable rate.

3 Easy Steps to Start Building Your Email List:

1. Sign Up for an Email Marketing Service, such as GetResponse.
2. Create a Signup Form. GetResponse has a very simple to use signup form builder. I suggest using some sort of giveaway (ethical bribe) to increase conversions.
3. Put a Signup Form on Your Website. Use GetResponse’s form builder to get the code, then insert code in sidebar and footer at minimum.

Action #2 – Add Social Media Buttons to Your Blog

Social networks represent a very powerful marketing opportunity for your website. If people visit your website, and like your content, then they have the ability to share that content with their network of friends. But, people will usually not jump through hoops to share your content, so let’s make it easy for them by including social sharing buttons.

Although you can program some advance sharing functionality into your website by visiting the Facebook and Twitter developer documentation, you can likely get by with just using services such as ShareThis or Digg Digg.

If you don’t like either of those services, Facebook and Twitter have their own button generators.

• Facebook Button Generator
• Twitter Button Generator

Action #3 – Add Social Proof to Your Blog

There’s a reason why athletes and other famous people are paid millions of dollars to endorse products… it works! While you likely can not afford to pay some superstar a million dollars, you do have other options.

If you have an established blog, you can choose to show the number of RSS subscribers, Facebook fans, or Twitter followers that you have. For those of you that like to work in the “grey” area, you may consider buying Twitter followers. Be warned though, there are obvious pros and cons to this technique.

If you do not have an established blog, then you really have a few options.

• Option 1 (not the best) – Choose not to show any social proof.
• Option 2 (better) – Share your best content with a recognized name and ask for a testimonial. This is a long shot, but you never know until you try.
• Option 3 (best) – Get your very best content published on a blog in your niche. You can include something like, “Featured on xxx Blog.”

How to Add Social Proof to Your Blog:

1. Decide which social proof you want to use. At first, I recommend you choose the social proof that sounds the most impressive. Do you have 10,000 Twitter followers? Include that. Have you been featured in a national newspaper? Include that. Later on you can split test to see which is most effective.
2. To add RSS subscriber count, login to your Feedburner account. Under the publicize tab, get the FeedCount code and copy it to your website.
3. To add Facebook and Twitter followers, I’d recommend using a WordPress widget such as WP Max Social.

Action #4 – Clarify the Purpose of Your Blog

The importance of this really is two fold:

1. Gain and Retain Readers. Ideally, you should define the purpose of your blog as early as possible. This is because to set your blog apart from the thousands of other choices out there, you need to do something different. If you can’t come up with a good answer to, “Why should I read your blog instead of all of the others”, then keep trying.
2. Make Your Life Easier. Clearly defining the purpose of your blog will help guide you into the future. Having a purpose will make writing content and building partnerships much easier.

Once you have clarified the purpose of your blog, publish it for the world to see. You can do this in an about page, in your optin forms, in your site’s tagline, and even in your posts!

Action #5 – Add Calls to Action

The best way to get a reader to take an action is to ask them. This is known as a call to action. 

Do you want more Twitter/Facebook shares? Ask people to share your content.

Do you want more email subscribers? Ask people to subscribe.

Although every website has different needs, all websites can benefit from using a call to action. On Art of Blog, we have been working on increasing interaction with our posts. For example, at the end of every post I ask our readers what they think about what I wrote, and then I ask them to leave a comment below.

Action #6 – Showcase Your Best Content

First impressions matter! That’s why you should give visitors a chance to see your best content on every page of your website. The easiest way would be to add links to your best content in your sidebar and/or footer.

What exactly is your best content? Well, that’s completely up to you. You can choose to show your most commented on posts, the most linked to posts, the most viewed posts, or something else. The great thing is that there are already WordPress plugins that can do this for you ;)

On Art of Blog, we have our own code to show the most commented posts (this is mainly because we want to show the featured image along with a link to the post), but we use Author hReview to handle our product and latest reviews.

Action #7 – Plan Your Posts In Advance

As I grow as a blogger, I realize that planning my posts out in advance is one of the best things that I have ever done. Planning posts in advance has not only helped reduce some stress by having to come up with a topic last minute to meet a deadline, but I can now:

• Plan a Series of Posts. Have you ever looked back at your posts and thought that they could’ve been ordered in a much more logical way? Planning your posts out in advance will let you publish in a way that will help your audience better understand your material.
• Batch Write. Although I don’t batch write often, it definitely has its benefits. Batch writing allows you to get all of your posts done at one time so that you can focus on other tasks. For example, I like to batch write when I know I have a programming project or a website redesign coming up.

The beauty of planning your posts in advance is that it should only take 30 minutes to an hour to plan four to 10 posts for the whole month. To get some good writing inspiration, check out Prismatic. This tool will keep you in touch with your niche and supply with a steady stream of ideas.

Action # 8 – Ask Your Readers

Readers are a blog’s lifeblood. Not only do readers give you traffic to your website, but your readers can provide insights that make your blog more successful.

On Art of Blog we stay in touch with our readers in several ways, but here are the most noteworthy.

1. Ask where readers are struggling. The first email that an Art of Blog subscriber receives contains this simple message, “What do you struggle with most in your online business?” The answers from these emails have often times been enlightening and many times have provided opportunities for me to write posts.
2. Ask readers to comment. Many bloggers focus only on the content that they produce, but the comments that your readers leave can be a goldmine of post ideas and products to promote.
3. Survey email subscribers. Periodically, Art of Blog will email its subscriber list to tell them about a new feature and we will ask for their input. This allows us to get quick input as we move forward.
4. Did we do a good job with this post? I recently built a plugin that asks subscribers one simple question, “Did we do a good job with this post?” If they liked it, great. If not, then we ask them how we can improve.

Find a way to stay in touch with your readers. From there, act on the information you grain from that interaction.

Action #9 – Create Better Headlines

Your headlines (usually also your Title tag) are the one part of SEO that you simply can not ignore. The tricky thing is that your headline must be appealing to both human and computer at the same time. Your headline must, at the same time, be appealing enough that it forces readers to click and it must also be relevant to the keyword(s) that you are targeting.

To have better headlines I suggest you first focus on the keyword (SEO) aspect, and from there craft a jaw dropping headline that will force clicks.

For choosing great keywords there are several tools out there that will gladly charge $30 or more a month. To be completely honest, you can get by using the free Google Keyword Tool.

As far as creating attractive headlines, I will point you toward Copyblogger’s Magnetic Headlines. I regularly use this series to help come up with headline ideas. Pst – Don’t tell Brian!

Action #10 – Network with Bloggers in Your Niche

No matter what topic you choose to blog about, chances are that there are other bloggers in that niche. All of these bloggers can potentially be a powerful resource for your blog.

The hurdle here is that you’re going to have to stop thinking of other blogs as competition and try to look at them as friends. Once you make this mindset change and you begin to naturally build your relationship, your network can help build each other’s blogs by recommending post ideas, sharing each other’s content, and much more.

The key here is that you must naturally build these relationships over time.

Action #11 – Take a Look at Your Foundation

I intentionally left this action at the end of this list because I think it is the most important. As a blogger, you should primarily focus on creating content. You don’t want to worry about having your blog hacked or your hosting going out.

The performance of your website should always be a primary concern. Therefore, your first actions today should be to check your WordPress security, determine if your hosting is the best WordPress hosting possible in your price range, and get a WordPress theme with a design that can grow with you over the next year or two.

Once you have got your foundation, you can then move on to crush all of the other action steps!

What Do You Think?

This post is definitely a long one (about 2,000 words), and if you’ve made it this far I congratulate you! That being said, I’m curious what you think about the action steps, and what other action steps do you think should be on this list?

Leave a comment below with your thoughts!

The post 11 Painless Actions You Can Do Today to Set Your Blog Up for Killer Success appeared first on Art of Blog.

Eric Binnion

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When you can get a professional looking WordPress theme for just $50-200 that comes with very simple options to customize the theme, is $2,000+ justified?

Before we can answer that, I’d like to share some stories with you.

Bad WordPress Developers – Overcharging and Underdelivering

I recently read an article on DIYthemes where Derek Halpern said, “I ended up paying a ton of money for a design that was unusable. It was so bad, in fact, that if I wanted someone else to use it, I would have had to bribe them…”

On that same article, Rebecca tells a story of how a client paid $30,000 for a mediocre site… at best.

In both of these stories, the client admitted to paying a lot for a design that they felt was not worth the money. Derek even says that it was so bad he couldn’t give it away!

If you read Rebecca’s comment she mentions how the site was hard to work with because everything was coded in PHP and there was no easy way to edit the stylesheet. I’m assuming that she means the styles were also included in the PHP.

Now, I don’t know what exactly happened in this story, but I can tell you this… Just because a person is a talented designer and they can build a beautiful, functional website, that does not mean they are a WordPress developer.

If you are paying $2,000+ for a WordPress developer, you want to have an amazing website. With any programming, there is a right and a wrong way to do things, and it takes a WordPress developer to correctly build your next WordPress site.

Good WordPress Developers – Overdelivering at a Premium Price

The issue here is not necessarily price. The issue is whether or not WordPress developers are delivering enough value for the price you are charged. The real answer here is that it depends.

The question you have to ask yourself is the developer delivering functionality that demands a $2,000+ price? I used to be surprised that Bill Erickson charges $2,500+ to do a Genesis based WordPress website (and that’s if you have the design already done). But, the more I read into his services, I realized that he provides  amazing value.

Bill goes above and beyond by future proofing your website (this is one example). The idea here is that if there is any functionality that you want to maintain in the next version of your website, it needs to be factored out into a plugin.

Bill has also established himself as an experienced WordPress developer by contributing to the core code of both WordPress and Genesis as well as speaking at various WordPress functions.

Is Bill worth spending $2,500+ on for a website? If you can afford it, hell yes. That being said, I’d like to note that there are many WordPress developers that I consider great. I just happen to be most familiar with Bill.

Bottom Line

If you’re willing to spend at least $1,000, and likely $2,000+, then you deserve to have a great WordPress developer. Great WordPress developers are well worth the money and will deliver a greater quality website than a WordPress developer that simply knows how to cut a template up into basic header, index, and footer files.

Here are some things to look for in a great WordPress developer:

• Properly enqueueing styles and scripts. This will ensure that styles and scripts are loaded at the right time as well as integrate better with plugins such as Better WordPress minify.
• Putting any custom functionality into a plugin instead of the WordPress theme. This is important for future redesigns.
• Delivering clean, light code that validates. Having a website without code bloat is very important for the page speed of your website, while validated code could reduce cross-browser inconsistencies.
• Recommending plugins that perform well. How many times have you installed a plugin that doesn’t function properly? A competent WordPress developer will know which plugins to use and which to stay away from.

How Can I Be Sure to Get a Great WordPress Developer?

WP Engine maintains a Favorite Consultants page where they list their top choices of consultants that provide services for your WordPress website. I recommend this as your first stop in finding a good WordPress developer.

WP Engine also runs a finely tuned consultant series where they interview top WordPress consultants. You can use this to get more information about prospective developers before you even approach them!

Before you hire any WordPress developer, be sure to ask them these questions:

• Can you provide references? A competent WordPress developer will gladly provide references and examples of his work.
• How long have you worked with WordPress? Although programmers learn at different rates, I would suggest that you look for a WordPress developer with 3+ years of experience. This is a guideline though, and not a hard and fast rule.
• What contributions have you made to the WordPress community? A rockstar WordPress developer will have made many contributions to the WordPress community, whether they are contributing to the core, or releasing a plugin or theme.
• What experience do you have with PHP, CSS, Javascript, and MySQL? Any good WordPress developer will have a good working knowledge of each of these and will be able to give you their likes and dislikes of each.

What Do You Think?

WordPress developers may be expensive, but are they worth the price? What is your experience with WordPress developers? Leave a comment below with your opinions.

The post Do Most WordPress Developers Charge Too Much? appeared first on Art of Blog.

That being said, what is the best way to take advantage of search marketing?

Long tail keywords are the answer to search marketing success for blogs, and for many reasons.

• Long tail is usually less competitive
• Long tail has more purchase intent
• There is more search volume in long tail as a whole than the popular keywords

But, even though long tail keywords are successful in search marketing, they’re not always easy to find. That’s why I was excited to find a tool called HitTail, which helps with finding long tail keywords.

What is HitTail?

HitTail is a piece of software that you add to your website. Once installed on your website, it then analyzes all of the keywords for your incoming traffic.

Based on those incoming keywords and a special formula, HitTail recommends long tail keywords that you should be able to rank well for.

HitTail also allows you to easily see all of the keywords that brought traffic to your site. This is useful for planning out groups of keywords to attack.

What’s even better than all of this information, is that HitTail provides a service where they will write a 400 word article for the keyword of your choice for just $19. Although, we have not used this article writing service as of yet, we believe it may be of use to you.

My Thoughts On HitTail

First, I will say that much of the information that HitTail gives you, except for their suggestions based on their algorithm, could be found in Google analytics. That being said, HitTail does an amazing job of presenting the most important information in an easy to digest and attractive format. I’m a sucker for beauty.

When I first signed up with HitTail, I was primarily interested in getting ideas for new articles, regardless of whether the keywords were long tail or not. I just wanted to see what people were searching to get to Art of Blog, that way I could give them more targeted information. HitTail absolutely crushes this.

Below is a screenshot of keywords that people have actually used to come to Art of Blog.

Usually search data is pretty secret, but I think it’s necessary that you see this data. Based on this list of keywords from HitTail that actually brought traffic to Art of Blog, I could write articles such as:

• The Biggest Benefits of Genesis Framework
• The Best Place to Host WordPress
• What is the Best Hosting for WordPress
• and More.

Essentially this gives me a never ending list of topics that I can write about. Pretty awesome, right?

What’s even cooler than this are HitTail’s suggested keywords. HitTail describes their suggested keywords as a highly filtered targeted list of keywords. That sounds cool, but what does it mean? Well, HitTail goes through all of the long tail keywords that bring traffic to your website, and then recommends the ones that are most likely to increase the traffic to your site.

This is what makes HitTail so much more powerful than any analytics software.

I think HitTail is an effective and affordable marketing tool that all bloggers should at least look at. There is also a 21 day trial. And as of now, HitTail is offering one year of free service if you write a review after trying their service.

I highly recommend that you get the free trial of HitTail, try it for 21 days, then write a review and get a year of free service!

What Do You Think?

I think HitTail is a great tool for bloggers and other Internet marketers. It compiles readily available information with HitTail proprietary algorithm to provide the most successful long tail keyword ideas.

What tools are you currently using right now for search marketing? Do you plan on trying out HitTail? Leave a comment below and let us know!

The post HitTail Review: Search Success Is In The Long Tail appeared first on Art of Blog.

Ex. – “This company has 25,000 twitter followers, they must be doing something right!”

But, social media can also serve to provide negative social proof. If your company only has 20 followers, and you display this information, you could be pushing away potential readers and customers.

The Good of Buying Twitter Followers

The New York Times wrote an article that detailed Dan Nainan’s Twitter use:

“The number of Twitter followers I had in relation to how many people in the world know about me was woefully inadequate,” he said. So in June he bought a small city’s worth for $424.15, raising his Twitter follower count from about 700 to more than 220,000.”

Nainan also went on to say that having a lot of followers was very important for being respected and for possibly getting gigs. And I agree that having a large number of social media followers can be beneficial for many things, including making more sales and getting more email subscribers.

But, there is a dark side to buying Twitter followers.

Buying Twitter Followers is a Risky Venture

Mitt Romney’s Twitter account acquired approximately 117,000 Twitter followers in a 24 hour period. Romney’s team denied that they bought the Twitter followers, but after looking through many blogs that portrayed Romney as a fake, I wonder if more harm than good was done.

The question you should ask yourself is this. Can you afford that possible bad publicity if it becomes known that a large percentage of your following is fake?

Personally, this is a gamble that I’d be willing to take with a non-established business. But with an already established business, I would argue that it is safer to try to build your followers in a more natural way.

How Much Does This Cost?

You can buy 1,000 follower packages for just $5 on Fiverr. If you are looking for more followers, I would suggest you look at InterTwitter who has packages from $14 to $387. Although I have not used InterTwitter, and I do not get a commission for recommending them, I would recommend them after looking through their followers.

You’ll notice that InterTwitters followers all have profile pictures and have several tweets. If you’re going to buy fake Twitter followers, you might as well do your best to make sure they look real!

What Do You Think?

The practice of buying Twitter followers is surely controversial. I personally believe that even though it is a grey hat technique, that it could still be effective in building an actual audience and increasing sales and subscribers.

That being said, I’d like to know what you think. Have you previously bought Twitter followers? If not, would you?

The post Buying Twitter Followers: Is It Worth It? appeared first on Art of Blog.

Naturally I was intrigued by this, so I decided to do some research into the best way to integrate Open Graph into my websites. What follows are the tactics that I have discovered. Tactics similar to what Tumblr used to receive a 250% increase in traffic!

How Can Open Graph Increase Traffic?

A 250% increase in traffic sounds nice, but you may be asking yourself how Open Graph will actually affect your traffic. To answer that, let’s take a look at a post on Facebook that is using Open Graph.

Do you notice how this post does not only include a link? The post has been enriched with a title, description, and image. All of which should help increase traffic to your site by making social posts about your site more interesting.

Images alone have been shown many times to greatly affect click through rate. One study I found on Tnooz details how a change in an image resulted in a 60% higher click through rate.

This could be an important reason why TNW reported that Kobo had a 50% increase in traffic after integrating with Open Graph.

What Is Open Graph?

Open Graph was created by Facebook, who states that, “the Open Graph protocol allows any web page to become a rich object in a social graph. For instance, this is used on Facebook to allow any web page to have the same functionality as any other object on Facebook.”

There’s a fair amount of tech lingo in there, so i’ll break it down.

Have you ever noticed that when you are on Facebook and someone posts a link to a Youtube video, there is a preview of that video shown? Have you ever noticed that some links come with a preview image and description?

This is due to these websites taking advantage of Open Graph tags. The use of Open Graph basically allows you to create a richer, more interesting experience for people interacting with your content on Facebook and Twitter.

How to Implement Open Graph

Open Graph can be implemented in your website by simply adding meta tags into the head of your website. Although there are optional properties, here are the four required properties for the Open Graph protocol:

<meta property="og:title" content="">
<meta property="og:url" content="/">
<meta property="og:image" content="">
<meta property="og:type" content="">

I would also recommend that you consider adding:

<meta property="og:description" content="">

All you have to do is copy and paste this into the head of your website, change the content attribute, and you’re good to go.

Right about now, you might be wondering how to update the content attributes for every page of your website. Well, if you’re using WordPress, I’m going to recommend that you check out the WordPress SEO by Yoast plugin. Not only does this plugin handle SEO, but it will handle the Open Graph tags for both Facebook and Twitter so you won’t have to worry about a thing.

Wait, I Thought This Was Only For Facebook?

Even though Open Graph was developed by Facebook, Twitter has been rolling out a feature called Twitter cards. Twitter cards allows you to make tweets about your website much more interactive by adding images, videos, descriptions, and more to your tweets.

Twitter’s implementation of Open Graph is not currently open like Facebook. You will need to apply to get in the program. But, if you are accepted, you can expect your tweets to end up something like this:

For more details on Twitter cards and how you can join the program, check out the Twitter developer website.

What Do You Think?

I hope that after reading this post, you will agree with me that Open Graph is very simple to implement on your website. For just a few minutes of work on your website, you could greatly increase the amount of traffic that you receive from social networks.

My question to you is, are you currently using Open Graph on your website? If not, do you plan on implementing it? Lastly, what other tactics are you using on social networks to increase your referral traffic?

The post How Open Graph Can Give You a 250% Increase In Traffic appeared first on Art of Blog.

But, what many people are missing out on is that guest blogging can lead to a lot of extra exposure for you and your blog. This exposure can naturally brand you as an expert and help you discover business opportunities.

So, let’s delve deeper into the actual benefits of guest blogging!

Build Those Backlinks

This is one of the biggest reasons why guest blogging and content marketing are the hot term online right now. The idea is that when you guest blog on a reputable website in your niche, you will get a link back to your website.

The key here is that you want to be receiving back links from more established websites than your own. One of the easiest ways to check this is with PageRank (PageRank is a trademark of Google).

PageRank is essentially an algorithm that factors in all the links to a site and the weight of those links. Based on some fairly complex math, your website is assigned a number between 0 and 10.

You’ll want to use a PR checking tool, such as PR Checker, to find the websites that will give you the juiciest backlinks.

Hint: Art of Blog has a PR of 5 and accepts guest blogs over topics covering information such as marketing, idea generation, SEO, general blogging, theme and plugin reviews, etc.

Become An Expert

When you guest blog, you should be putting your best content out in front of new audiences. Ideally your content should contain new ideas or techniques, be well written and entertaining to read, and look aesthetically pleasing.

Why, you ask? Well, first impressions matter. And bottom line, if you do a great job on a guest post, you end up looking like a badass! This naturally leads to branding yourself as an expert in the field.

But, let’s take this a step further. Your author byline should ideally be customized for the audience you’re speaking too. For example, if I were to guest post at Problogger, my author byline would like include something about how I manage Art of Blog and the topics I cover.

If I were to blog for KISSmetrics, a marketing and analytics blog, I would likely discuss how I blog about generating ideas for content and using analytics to brainstorm great content.

The author byline is a piece of real estate that is largely underused by many bloggers. You should put a lot of work into your guest posts. Take advantage of this space!

Create Business Opportunities

You’ve likely heard that saying, “It’s who you know.” Well, that may be true, but I like to think of this saying more as, “It’s not who you know, but how you know them.”

The idea here is that when you guest post at reputable websites, you are establishing yourself as an expert (as mentioned in the last section).

This reputation that you are building for yourself can be leveraged to create new business opportunities, whether you provide a service or sell a product.

For example, Leonard Widrich from BufferApp.com had this to say when he guest posted on KISSmetrics:

The opportunity to write a guestpost for KISSmetrics was fantastic. The exposure of our name increased considerably. In fact, someone even approached us in a coffee shop saying: “Hey, aren’t you the Bufferguys? I saw your guestpost on KISSmetrics today, great job!”. Additionally there is of course the SEO and traffic aspect which helped us greatly to get the word out about Buffer and attract additional users.

The part I’d like to point out here is Leonard stated that he was able to “get the word out and attract additional users.” This same method can be used for your product or service!

What Do You Think?

Are you currently using guest blogging as part of your content marketing strategy? If not, do you plan on guest blogging in the future?

Don’t forget, that you can get started guest blogging on Art of Blog by checking out our guest posting page and submitting your idea!

The post 3 Reasons Why You Should Be Guest Blogging appeared first on Art of Blog.

With new improvements that have been released in version 3.4, it’s about time Headway receives an updated review.

There are several features in Headway 3.4 that I’d like to cover: Grid Editor, Design Editor, Responsiveness, and Blocks.

For this review, I’ll cover each of these features to give you an overview of Headway themes. Then I will give you my overall opinion at the end of the review.

The Grid Editor – Drag and Drop Design

This feature is the bread and butter of the Headway theme. Drag and drop is what makes Headway such an attractive theme, and I’ve got to say that they make this feature fairly intuitive and simple. When you navigate to the grid editor, you will see a screen that looks much like this below:

You’ll notice that there is a grid that you can drag and drop boxes on to. You can then resize those boxes. I was really glad to see this grid, because it will make the drag and drop process cleaner. Trust me, you do not want to have to worry about being pixel perfect when dragging to resize.

By default, Headway let’s you resize in 40 px increments, due to the 20px column width and 20px gutter width. This can, of course, be changed.

Once you’ve placed a few boxes on your canvas, you can then decide what those boxes do by selecting the block type. This makes creating things such as a widget or a Gravity Forms box insanely easy.

All in all, I believe the grid editor to be a very simple tool to use to build layouts. Kudos to the Headway team for that.

Design Editor – Design Without Code

For those of you that hate to touch code, you may fall in love with the design editor for Headway themes because it will allow you to easily change any part of the design with a graphical interface.

Once you decide that you want to change something, you just click that element on the page, and change the design settings for it in nifty drop down boxes like these below:

I must warn you in advance that the design editor is going to have a bit of a learning curve because there are a ton of options. Headway does do a good job of organization on this though.

Responsiveness – Take Advantage of the Huge Surge in Mobile

I have read reports that put the total amount of mobile web traffic between 15% and 20%. Having a website that is optimized for mobile browsers will allow you to create a better user experience for your readers which could lead to more page views and less bounce.

Headway makes it super easy to create a responsive website. All you have to do is click one button in the grid editor. Once you have done that, your entire website will be optimized for mobile visitors. Even for templates that you create yourself.

Possibly the best feature of Headway’s responsiveness is that readers are given the option to opt out of the mobile version of your website via a link in the footer. I can’t tell you how many websites I have been to where the mobile version made it hard for me to get content and all I wanted to do was see the desktop version of the site.

Headway’s combination of responsiveness and the grid editor make it, in my opinion, one of the best responsive WordPress themes on the market!

Blocks – Easily Extend Your Website

Headway is a good theme for people that do not know how to code. A large part of what makes Headway easy to use is blocks. Blocks allow you to quickly add functionality to your Headway theme. Blocks for Headway are very much like plugins are for WordPress.

When you combine the ease of blocks with the power of the skin editor, you can easily create powerful websites.

Overall Thoughts

Headway is a powerful drag and drop WordPress theme that will be most suited for people that don’t have much experience with programming. I will warn you though that if you plan on doing something special, you will likely still need to do some custom programming, whether that is CSS, Js, or PHP.

In regards to the blocks, I think they are a brilliant idea and easy to use. But, I believe that some of the blocks are overpriced considering there are existing code tutorials for things such as tabbed content, Facebook comments and likes, etc. But, for those that do not want to muck around with code, a $25 block is probably well worth it ;)

All in all, I think Headway is a solid theme that can be used for beginner and intermediate WordPress users.

The post Headway 3.4 Review appeared first on Art of Blog.