I use Cloudflare for all my sites.
It's completely free to get an SSL certificate. Instead of installing a certificate, you just point your nameservers at them (easy to do in your hosting account) and turn SSL on in the settings.
You can also set up a free custom rule, which forwards all traffic from http to https.
Another great (free) benefit of cloudflare, is you can cache your site and have it delivered over their CDN. This makes your web pages load quicker and uses less data for your users.
I am by no means a blogging expert, but regarding social media, pretty good with it. Found your account easy enough. With twitter, you'll never succeed by automatically cross posting your Instagram content to it. It looks like crap to be honest. If you're not going to take the time to curate it properly, you can use https://ifttt.com to better cross post content.
When you use the built in Instagram cross posting, it doesn't include the image and sends all the junk you include in each post with it. Like the . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . to bump hashtags down. With IFTTT you can setup an applet (used to be called a recipe) to directly share images, along with proper wording and select hashtags. Ideally you should do it by hand or with something like Hootsuite/buffer, but that's up to you.
Goodluck nonetheless!
In the US ?
As a European who pays 200€/year to go to College, US College seems like the biggest scam in the world, so I would never do it.
If you really wanna learn cool stuff, I'd advise you to go on Udacity : https://www.udacity.com/ and select a Nanodegree that you're interrested in.
And if you wanna make friends, man, just go out a bit. Work at your local library, go to the gym, try to reconnect with old friends... You can even get on Tinder.
Step 1: Grab a list of 100 authority sites in your niche.
Step 2: Download Xenu Link Sleuth: http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html
Step 3: Scrape the 100 authority sites for outgoing link errors.
Step 4: Check all outbound errors to find targets.
Step 5: Contact webmaster/steal links.
You already know your content leans on the thin side...I'd revisit that as soon as possible. Google likes longer content and a lot of readers dig it too, judging from my experience.
As someone mentioned, your site is slow. Here's what GTMetrix shows. Try a plugin like W3 Total cache and fetch some Gzip compression to speed things up a bit. Things like this matter, and they matter a lot.
5-10 visits per day is not a bad start! Make sure you exclude all bots/crawlers from the admin settings in GAnalytics and also block your IP, if you haven't already.
Remember to not give up easily! At some point you can go for a free Ahrefs 14-day trial. Check your competitors' pages there and see for what KWs they rank so you can optimize better :)
It's google analytics spam. Why they haven't done more to stop it is completely beyond me, and it's extremely annoying, especially in the early days when you have low traffic. Here's an article to solve it - https://moz.com/blog/stop-ghost-spam-in-google-analytics-with-one-filter
I don't know if anyone has a better way, but that's something I use.
I use Integrity link checker on my sites on a monthly basis, which is great because it’s free. It only gets the 404s on Amazon (not the “currently unavailable”), but I just hand check my most popular pages. I always try to balance the value of my time with the value of the task.
The major complaint is that your page load speed suffers. If you plan on using Ezoic you need this integration.
You need to be on top of your Google Page Speed Scores.
(https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/)
In Ezoic, when you upgrade the LEAP it will provide many recommendations to speed up your site!
Good Luck.
You're honestly wasting your time.
This is the first organic result for "best SEO software". One of the top 5 most competitive niches on the entire internet, and this site has a mobile score of 24 with 5x your blocking time.
Result 2 and 3 are much faster loading with scores of 60 and 45 for mobile.
So what does that tell you?
Page speed doesn't really move the needle. You're conditioned to think it does because it's a.) you're being advertised to and told it matters, and b.) you want to think it matters because it's the only thing in SEO you can actively measure, test, and improve immediately.
Think about it - Google is trying to pick out what content is most relevant to a query. Do they care more about the content on a page, how much authority it has in terms of links, or that it loads in 2 seconds instead of 4 seconds?
Page speed is nice to have but it's never going to be in the realm of content and links in terms of a ranking factor. If you have just a few posts and you're already looking at page speed for your home page, you're playing the wrong game.
*this is all in regards to SEO, if you have a shopping cart then page speed can matter more.
get a photo from thispersondoesnotexist.com instead (I use this for all my sites where I don't use my real name)
It's AI generated so guaranteed to be unique and looks realistic
You might need to refresh a few times to get one that suits your persona
Crop it in photoshop to make it more realistic if you need to (sometimes some weird artefacts generate around the edges of the images)
I've got a ~50-75 item list that basically is just a little more detailed than yours for the step-by-step on specific plugins and social media sites, but that's basically it.
Get the domain, add it to the host, install Wordpress, setup an email address for the domain, add SSL, get the settings for initial Wordpress setup implemented, install all the plugins, get their settings set how I like them, put in tracking code for Analytics and StatCounter.com, add sites to Google & Bing webmaster tools, and add the sites as valid URLs for AdSense or Amazon Affiliates and reCAPTCHA.
From there it's basically creating the social media plugins and a few specific settings for my go-to theme.
Yeah because Google let's some college students decide on whether a website potentially worth six figures or more gets a manual penalty possibly killing a business.
> Webmaster Spam Reporting Volume Has Dramatically Increased
> It's certainly possible that webspam is struggling under an unexpectedly high load and one where it may not be ROI positive for Google to put massive talent against the problem. Webspam engineers are handpicked from other parts of the search quality and web search team and they need to be 100% trustworthy, loyal and committed (as well as incredibly smart and talented). Google won't abide by speculative hiring of a few hundred or thousand extra hands to help police spam and then potentially release those individuals out into the wild.
Email is still very worth it. That being said, Push Notifications have been something I have been playing around with.
We added them to Merch Informer about a month ago and so far I cannot really figure out why I did not do them a LOT earlier. I never accept push notifications personally, but apparently everyone else does if they like your content. Amazing way to drive people right back to your site without spending a dime.
Setting everything up takes about 10-15 minutes and I used https://onesignal.com which is free and straight forward.
Have you thought about slimming your list down? Find people who haven't opened an email in the last 6 months or something like that and just remove them from your list. It sounds like a horrible idea to remove people from your list but if they haven't been opening emails anyway, what's the point in having them.
To answer your question, though, look for companies that use Amazon SES. Something like Sendy or EmailOctopus (note, I've never used these and am not endorsing them ... these are just 2 I've seen mentioned).
Keyword research has become so much less black and white than what it used to be. I don't obsess over it. I found this article really interesting and can make you think a little different about things, or at least open the mind about what "keyword research" means these days. https://moz.com/blog/tactical-keyword-research-in-a-rankbrain-world
Just enter the image there and see if you can get the old results.
@Akial, I had mixed results with flipping the image, what can happen is that other people have also done the flipping. Therefore you aren't unique as it's something you share with the others.
If it's low competition, flipping is a very quick way to do it:)
It is essential! Google is calling for HTTPS everywhere and will actually begin lowering search rankings for sites that do not, by the end of 2018 IIRC.
Depending on your provider, meaning whether you maintain your server yourself or use a third party to do this, you may want to look into Let's Encrypt, who just became an approved certificate provider. I run a linux server and it could not have been easier to set this up using a Let's Encrypt certificate using Certbot.
I had this exact idea in mind when I custom coded the tables for my own site. Let me know if you can figure out how to get the table to break while still keeping the feature column next to each product's details (by feature column, I mean the column on the left that shows 'awards', 'pros', 'cons', etc.). I could never figure that out.
To further explain what I mean: in the first example you gave (https://codepen.io/geoffyuen/pen/FCBEg), the heading row is what provides the 'features' so to speak (movie title, genre, etc.). But then, when the table breaks down to its mobile version, it displays these 'features' along the left of each individual data group.
I personally love how that works, but here's the problem: since affiliate tables display 'features' along the left side of the table to start with, instead of in the heading row like that example, I couldn't figure out how to get things to work. I don't know how to get that feature column to duplicate and show next to each individual product's details, like they did in your example.
With that said, I'm not the best coder in the world, so it could just be my lack of experience. But shit man, I spent days trying to make this work! Finally decided to just leave it since I was wasting too much time lol. Would love to hear how you're going to make that work.
No one spoon-feeds here.
If aspects of keyword research are already beating you, then you'll probably have a really difficult time figuring out how to consistently pump out high quality articles or harder yet, how to market the site.
Just to give you an idea of how subjective this is, some people don't even do keyword research, that includes me. I think people (especially beginners) get too hung up on it; I'd much rather spend time in forums searching for topics to write about.
But to actually answer your question:
1.) This article is old, but shows you how detailed keyword research should be done.
2.) Download the Keywords Everywhere chrome extension - it shows you a rough estimate of how many searches a month a keyword gets in real time - the lower the searches 'the easier' the keyword.
3.) Then there's KWfinder, it shows you how competitive certain keywords are.
And that's about it. Honestly, don't spend ridiculous amounts of time on keywords alone, there's too much to be done.
That's great. It's a 3rd party metric so who knows what it's worth, but still. 21 for an 8 months old website seems nice to me!
Seeing how you well react to feedback, let me have a shot at you as well lol
I noticed your homepage loaded reaaaaaaaaaaaaaally slow (proof). I was once in your shoes and spent a couple of hours optimizing it, and it's not that difficult to get it faster. I finally prioritized it in my 9th month of blogging, and wrote about what I did here (case study link). You might be interested to see what I did to replicate.
I really believe speed is a huge ranking factor, both directly and indirectly via bounce rate/time on page etc. So I think this could be one of your easiest wins for now.
Yeah, this is pretty well established, and one way to make yourself stand-out is to create your own category within a broader category, to differentiate yourself from other people within the space. This is a good book which might be worth reading: https://www.amazon.com/Play-Bigger-Dreamers-Innovators-Dominate/dp/0062407619
What is the 'digital assortment space' ?
In The War of Art the author (who is a writer, writing about the creative process) recalled a interview with a fellow writer on writing and motivation he read the other day. It goes like this:
“Do you write on a schedule or only if you are inspired?” “I only write when I’m inspired. Luckily inspiration hits me every morning at 9 sharp.”
We have a very similar background, outlook, and general approach to affiliate marketing. I found my internet doppleganger.
I went the easier digital ocean route and did the 1 click wordpress install (do not be fooled though, there's a lot more work than that one click!).
You're going to want to do this ASAP - disable the XML-RPC protocol or you will be restarting your db every few days. The Jetpack plugin was useless, as were other XMLRPC blocking plugins, but this guide worked for me using their "Method 2" - https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-protect-wordpress-from-xml-rpc-attacks-on-ubuntu-14-04
Get that content out ASAP so you're ready to rank for the spring and summer influx.
Is substack a blogging platform like Wordpress.com?
Because most of us at /r/juststart are using Wordpress.org which is free software that you install on your own domain, not on a blogging platform.
Setting up your own domain name and hosting is more technical but a much better plan in the long run. Some people have built entire livelihoods on blogging platforms only to see them close down a few years down the road. Building your site on your own domain with your own hosting protects you from this risk.
The same way that search engines or any information directory site makes money!
On page ads, boosted listings, email marketing for xyz thing (your own product, affiliate links, or even just paid ads)
Not super creative ideas.
For example, build a 'hottest jean deals' website... on page ads, affiliate links to the jeans, collect emails for 'the hottest deals daily!' and then sell ads in the email blast...
These guys are doing it: https://www.dealnews.com https://slickdeals.net/
Build up an Instagram account to go along, and then you get followers there you can leverage for paid promotions.
"Blah blah" retailer is going to spend money on ads to promote their sale anyway, might as well be paying you!
>https://serposcope.serphacker.com/en/
I think there is a misunderstanding. This is plug & play and it's free and has unlimited keywords+websites.
​
Maybe I wasn't being clear, I meant there are also custom code options available... but there is open source software like above that are plug & play and don't require any knowledge and aren't limited by how many keywords you can track. They work the same way any software online would, just that it's free.
It's of course up to you if you want to pay for a service.
Hey, man, If you're interested, we're hosting 2 webinars (US time on thursday and UK time on Friday) where we'll show our new users how to use the tool.
It's not supposed to be intuitive. It's 5 search analytics tools in one, each providing tons of variable data, so there's no way we can simplify it. I mean, we could make a button saying [SHOW ME WHAT YOU GOT] but I'm not sure what data it should return.
Link to a webinar page: https://serpstat.com/page/webinar/
And you can still buy it after the webinar. It runs till Tuesday.
No need to upgrade anything. Simply move over to Google Docs or Word as /u/WatchedByChickens/ mentions. Docs saves your progress with every few keystrokes. WP does not auto-save that often.
I've actually started writing in HTML markdown in my Google Doc articles. I'm trying to utilize a more future-proof writing method.
By using markdown, I don't have to manually add HTML tags. I just use an online converter and notate where I want items like images and stuff like that. Whatever's comfortable. Good luck.
Run those lighthouse tests that I added in my edit, it might give you some insights on what's going on "under the hood" and what you need to change.
There is also https://www.webpagetest.org/
If you'd like you can post the result link and have others look at the results.
It's great that you posted a link. It really helps to get an idea of what might be going on. Most folks around here tend to shy away from posting their actual site for various reasons.
One thing that immediately stuck out to me is how long your page took to load. Your homepage is loading 8MB worth of resources. That's incredibly high. Take a look at how Google's PageSpeed tool ranks your page. You're basically not even giving your visitors a chance with that type of resource usage. They are likely to bounce right away.
Check out what PageSpeed has to say: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=Www.adventregear.com&tab=mobile
Is the default setting for that Elementor section to be hidden on mobile?
https://elementor.com/help/show-or-hide-columns-per-device/
EDIT: Why are you using Elementor to fart around with posts? Gonna have a bad time when you realize how much Elementor slows down your site and you want to move away from it.
Essentially you'd use WordPress to just create pages & posts, there's no theme. Then when you add or modify content you'll generate those new static pages to be served on the front end. The nice part about this is that lots of people (writers) are familiar with creating posts in WordPress. The downside is that this approach is fairly technical and you may need or want some help on the front end with design.
Hopefully this article can give you some overall insight into how it'd work and this piece from Netlify (a static site host) includes a list of tech you'd need to make it happen with WordPress, which includes the Gatsby Starter Kit that uses the WordPress API.
This approach could be warranted on a high traffic sites or an existing WordPress site could be migrated to this infrastructure. I was at a very large digital property who migrated from an old CMS to WordPress and a complex front-end using a Content Delivery Network. We needed to maintain extremely valuable, decade-plus SEO rankings too so this transition took some time.
There's a lot of keyword tools out there that will estimate the difficulty of ranking for a keyword. They usually do this by judging the strength of the competitors who rank in the top 10 for the keyword right now.
Two of the most popular tools used for this are Ahrefs.com and KWFinder.com.
KWFinder lets you use their keyword difficulty tool for a few free searches per day if you have a free account. You should try it out.
Live worms, not kidding. I think it was similar to these or something like that. At the time, I was 'Shit, Amazon sells fucking worms too?'
Then I searched around and holy hell can you find things like these there indeed.
My new site has sticky sidebars for ads and Buy Now buttons that link to the lowest-priced retailer for an item.
Amazon has sticky headers with product info: https://www.amazon.com/Samsung-PC4-19200-DDR4-2400MHz-Unbuffered-M471A5244CB0-CRC/dp/B071DVWQFC/
I imagine this means that it's working out well for them or they wouldn't do it.
Just be different. Don't do what all the other sites are doing and you won't have to worry about backlinks. I also think backlinks don't need to be chased down, they will come naturally.
I recommend reading "Zero to One" by Peter Thiel. Peter talks about what it means to be doing something different then your competitors.
A lot easier than manually installing Wordpress but still a lot more complicated than a single click.
its redirecting the image based on the numbers on the end of the url. Here is a URL I just made up that redirects to the same flower.
https://www.shutterstock.com/image-vector/hi-rosehamler-on-reddit-25168324
>submit your sitemaps in Google Search Console
if your blog is thru Wordpress.com, do you have to submit your sitemap manually or is it automatically done? Been blogging for 2-3 years and have never heard of this before.
Thank you!
This is super embarrassing because I was actually working as a graphic designer at the time, but couldn't be assed to put more than 10 minutes into this infographic so I just used a generator to make it. Hey, it did well though! I got a thousand or so clicks a month from it at its peak.
What I'm saying is don't judge me too harshly because it's godawful: http://pinterest.com/pin/415738609335276776/
You know, that paragraph made me think of all the possibilities to package this specific type of automation. A smart marketer could surely find a way to sell it to the masses.
Basically IFTT but marketed for a specific purpose.
Look up page rank sculpting. Lots of articles out there will explain it better than I can.
It basically means building your internal links specifically for the purpose of helping your most important pages rank higher for certain keywords.
Moz is saying the following about the 2/19 update:
>MozCast registered a 40% day-over-day drop in SERPs with Featured Snippets, their lowest point since 2015. On further inspection, these were heavily focused on short queries (especially 1-word queries) and disproportionately hit YMYL queries (health and finance).
Are you in a YMYL niche? Have you done a traffic comparison with your Google Webmaster data to see if there was a specific query group or set of pages that were affected?
with wordpress.com you dont need hosting. You dont worry about a number of things, just get your domain and the theme you like, however unless you have a more expensive plan you will be limited on features.
if you want your site to be hosted elsewhere, you have to use the application which is offered by wordpress.org, you will have to handle everything on your own, like install the application, connect the domain name and everything on your end (or by siteground support, whatever) this one is very flexible.
Looks like you have a URL in your title! Click here to check it out:
^I ^comment ^URLs ^from ^titles ^as ^hyperlinks ^so ^you ^can ^be ^lazy ^and ^just ^click ^my ^comment.
I'll be using this: https://ifttt.com/
Pretty much all social media posts will be nofollow links but Google will uses social media as a trust factor. Whether how much it actually contributes to your ranking is up for question (I don't think it does too much). I'm mainly building the social fortress to reduce sandbox length as well as to diversify my sites backlink portfolio (more on this below). Even if a social fortress doesn't contribute to rankings, It surely doesn't hurt to have. It definitely makes the site look a lot more natural.
It also helps in the fact that It'll balance out your sites backlink portfolio. If a site had 53 dofollow links and 0 nofollow links, this would look really fishy and your site probably won't be ranking any time soon. A site with a good mix of follow and nofollow links looks a lot more natural and that's exactly what you'd want a blackhat site to look like. Natural.
https://moz.com/blog/nofollow-sponsored-ugc
I read through that, it gets confusing. Rel=sponsored is for paid or sponsored links. Does that include affiliate links? The article itself says google is not clear on this. You would assume so, but they should have spelled it out more clearly IMO. If they want all affiliate links clearly tagged sponsored, that should be explicit in their documentation. There is a BIG difference between a paid link (!) and an affiliate link.
Honestly, it seems fine to do nothing right now.. it doesn't seem like you'd get any kind of penalty for not doing it, or bonus for doing it. I'm assuming all your affiliate links are at least rel=nofollow right now. I don't see any kind of advantage to going back and adding rel="nofollow sponsored" at this point in time. Who knows. I'm not going to bother to be honest, maybe others have a different read on what they're saying.
Well, I wanted to be an android app developer at first. But then after 5-6 months of into android development, I decided not to do it anymore. I was always intrigued by the idea of a web business. Somehow, I ended up with SEO.
Two years ago, I came across an Amazon Affiliate site that was listed on flippa for like $300k. That's when I first thought of starting an affiliate site. But I was too lazy to set things up. Idk what changed but two months ago, I decided that I'd do it. I knew I had to do something if I want to fulfill my dreams. No more procrastination. I know I have a long way to go but I'm optimistic.
For someone who's just starting out, I'd recommend Moz, Backlinko, ahrefs blog, Search Engine Land, and seobythesea. They have everything you need to succeed. I'm sure you can find tons of other great resources as well.
Here's a quick link to get you started: https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo
Hope this helps!
Google doesn't penalise you for guest posts marked correctly.
Take a look at the new link guidelines with the new sponsored link tag and
https://moz.com/blog/nofollow-sponsored-ugc
Also, I have in the past sell sponsored Post on website and its decent money. You can charge as low as $5 per post to $infinity and beyond. Depends on how well you can sell.
Best of luck!
You need to focus on learning one aspect at a time to a basic level of competency. In general, a niche site requires a few key areas of knowledge in order to make money:
You need to learn #1 first, then #2, then #3 if you want to rank for competitive keywords, in that order. Don't bother writing more content unless you know that it's about a topic/keyword that meets the criteria in #1 that allows you to actually profit from it.
There are tons of free guides all over the internet to learn most aspects of these three key ingredients. You should probably start with a comprehensive guide like the Moz SEO guide and go from there.
The problem I see with surveying the community is that we have no idea how qualified everyone that's answering is.
There are a lot of lurkers on the sub who blindly follow unqualified, but popular gurus. The respondents will then just regurgitate the information that they've been told and might skew the results the wrong way.
If we somehow qualify the respondents, we might have like 20 data points, which isn't really enough for a conclusive study.
Companies like Moz have already done much bigger studies.
I would also add Moz blog and if you are a beginner, there is a very comprehensive guide on how to start with SEO there: https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo - it's basically a free 10 chapter course on SEO fundamentals and how everything works
Use this if you need a fake picture: https://thispersondoesnotexist.com/ They're all completely AI generated photo-realistic images.
That said I personally would err away from setting up a load of fake authors on a site, you can often tell when someone does that and it doesn't feel genuine. Also if they are completely fake and there is no sign of them anywhere else online then I can't see how that would ever help build trust in your site.
I subscribed to shutterstock for $200/month for 350 images.. downloaded a ton and organized them on my machine for easy searching, and cancelled the plan. If I don't have something I need I go to pexels.com, pixabay.com or the other free ones.
So this is unethical because Google should serve its users the best content and an additional user investment would alter the criteria of which one would consider content "best"? Therefore if a user can get the same content from a site with no user investment, that source is more valuable to the user and therefore should be ranked higher.
Briefing a LH post: >In order to read all of the answers in a thread, you have to register, or else you can only read the first.
I don't know if first means the highest ranked or earliest. If it is the former then the user could be getting what they are looking for and if they didn't, they wouldn't find it in a lower rated answer either.
Also the case could be made such that since the content is facilitated by the Quora company but not created by it, they are outsourcing this task to its users. Therefore it would increase competition within the site itself to only feature "winning" or "home-run" answers. This way the quality of answers would improve.
Appreciate the reply! Good to know! I was completely off! Most of my research is just looking up sites on https://www.similarweb.com/ and seeing their traffic estimates, and it seems like a lot of seemingly independent sites do very well traffic wise. I'm sure they still have teams behind them and took years to reach that point.
Keyword research is not easy at all. Google is always changing organic search algorithm, and one day your #1 page might drop to #12 for no apparent reason. This is one reason why I really like SEMRush and their suite of tools. My agency has really enjoyed them compared to other tools in the past: https://semrush.com
Humble, thanks much for sharing this hard research. When an earlier discussion of AMP came up I googled around for info and found this Moz article from December last year:
What You Need to Know About Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMPs)
If someone had been infected with their breathless enthusiasm and sense of urgency (but see critical comments below the article), then they would have rushed out and grabbed a WP plugin which would not have completely done the trick, and then started spending time and resources in making it work well. All for what?
While AMP is not a google project per se, google's history is littered with canceled projects. When there is a perfectly good and still functioning alternative as in mobile responsive here, it does not pay to be a guinea pig by being a google or google-backed early adopter, unless as you say they make it clear it will be a major ranking factor.
Also look who would benefit from this the most (other than google), which is behemoth bloated sites likes news sites. Would even the Wirecutter benefit enough to outweigh the negatives?
One question I do have is since the point of AMP is to strip down HTML and CSS and possibly eliminate most JS, how are things like tables handled? We depend on those.
I've used LTP for years (and it's ok), but they've been having some serious problems ever since Google started grouping keyword volumes. The search results for keywords appear in ranges (ie, 0 to 100 searches per month, 100 to 1K, 1K to 10K, etc). It's pretty much unusable, so I'll be looking for something new. Thank you for this!
I think you are missing my point, WordPress isn't important, in fact you can swap it with anything you want , maybe you like contenful, maybe you like prismic, the CMS isn't important.
The point is to have a blazing fast static website, right now there is a big trend of web performance with static site generators etc.
There is a lot of benefits including Speed , Security and SEO, it has also some drawbacks but mostly of functionality so nothing to worry about in a blog.
Basically a standard WordPress website will always be Worse on Speed Security and SEO (if they have same content etc) that its static counterpart.
The majority I have outsourced have been through upwork.com. About 4 others have been through a Facebook group in my Niche. I just made a post asking if anyone in the group would be interested in writing for me and that I would pay them. Turns out the girl that is writing for me is also a photographer so I get free high quality pictures with the articles which is nice.
At upwork I just signed up for an account and post a job, I try and be as descriptive as possible and provide the writer with everything they need to give me exactly what I want. I still have to do a good bit of editing to get it how I want it for my site but that's fine. I am generally paying $60 for 2000 words. Some people pay closer to $30 for 2000 words and I may see if I can pay closer to that range next time, you just have to keep in mind you get what you pay for.
Check out Calm (https://www.calm.com/) or Headspace (https://www.headspace.com/). IMO These are the best way for beginners to get into meditation (there's many other apps that may be just as good also, but I haven't personally tried them). Try to get into a routine of 10-15 mins a day for a month and I promise it will change your life for the better.
Long term serverpilot user here, it automates wordpress instals, manages apps and databases, mostly it helps with apache setup and php environments. Even though I have a fair bit of experience managing linux servers, its so easy I cant stop using it. A valid alternative would be https://runcloud.io/
Hey man thanks for the kind words.
It definitely depends on the article. The niche I am working in I am semi-familiar with, so writing the articles / researching them is easier than if I went into a website about medicine for example. I would say it takes around an hour per 1,000 words. That includes researching and everything, over my years of uni I have gotten quite good at writing and researching. And I use a dual-monitor setup so that I can have word processors and information up at the same time.
Well I worked from May 15th-May 29th on this site and I probably did about 3 hours a day over the period of that time. Some days it was 8 hours, some days none. But I'd say around 40 hours for the first month so far.
Yeah I do link out to amazon right now, but I limit the number of links and keep them within images usually. Such as a 'buy now button' or on the image of the product. I have linked to a few external sources, but these are usually to try and give some spice to my article.
I use stock Amazon images and then re-purpose them by putting them within a heading banner or somewhere else. This gives a unique feel to them and is better than just the image. I also think it will give my website a certain 'feel' as it develops and gets bigger.
I also use Libre to get free for commercial use HD photos that I use throughout my website.
You can be real with a fake name and picture (a good place to look is https://thispersondoesnotexist.com). Nobody cares about specifically who you are unless you're already known. You can still use your own story.
You can though in some niches it might hurt your EAT (Expertese, Authority and Trust)
This is supposedly more common in YML niches, (your money or your life). Finance, health etc.
If you do decide to go ahead, this site is a cool way to get an anonymous photo of a person that doesn't exist.
https://thispersondoesnotexist.com/
Kinda creepy, some examples look strange, keep refreshing the above URL and it will generate a new human each time.
>the Google Fred update slapped them.
Pretty much the same situation as me but I lost most my stuff with Penguin 4, one in Fred, and one on 12th December update too.
>Do you write all your content by yourself?
For this particular project I have so far but I am probably going to look to outsource in the coming months. I am doing a bunch of tweaking with my keyword research method right now too and if it goes the way its looking I probably won't have enough keywords to get to 500,000 words of content never mind 1,000,000.
>Where do you get your images for articles?
>How are you planning to build backlinks?
I'm not right now, just want to do the whole white hat thing to see how it goes. I will take another look at how things are going come September-December time and make a decision on backlinks then. I will probably just offer bribes to niche related webmasters for "guest posts".
you can try "DaVinci Resolve" https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/davinciresolve/ - it is a full-on video editor that has some text animation capabilities. Most importantly - it is free.
The only issue you can have is - it may be too complicated. But once you watch some tutorials things get easy.
Another vote for web scraping. It's super powerful. I think people here who routinely hire VAs and content writers should focus learning their tech stack and programming more. It can be a long road from absolute 0 but I still think it's worth it to learn some automation. Read a bit about javascript then practice daily on edabit.com just my 2c.
I used to scrape with python (scrapy + selenium) now I've moved to javascript for a few reasons. Puppeteer and building chrome extensions, and going full stack for web development (javascript/react frontend websites with gatsby, backend javascript with node.js or serverless functions). I love writing js objects (json) directly to a database vs. old method of mysql and sql queries. I'm pretty good at old way of doing web dev, LAMP, linux/apache/mysql/php but I'm all javascript in 2020.
The nice thing is you only need to learn one language now, javascript. Learn it well, along with CSS and HTML obviously. Learn it inside out and practice daily, in 6 months you'd be pretty awesome.
You might consider producing a video course to sell on a site like Udemy.com instead of teaching live classes. Teaching live classes is basically just tutoring, which there are probably sites out there designed for connecting tutors to students but I couldn't name any.
You know, to be honest, I would ignore what Yoast says. I've ranked plenty of pages that are red. Most of them are, in fact. Grammarly is better, but you shouldn't let these programs cause you to doubt yourself. From the sounds of it you are doing a pretty good job and putting a lot of effort in.
You're going to write a lot of content. Some of it will rank, some will not. The 'quality' of the content is a factor, but it's not the only thing to keep in mind. It's not like the articles that rank are all "good" and the ones that don't are all "bad."
You will find affiliate sites out there that have garbage content and still make tons of money. Heck, even with writing i'm very proud of I find that readers will skim a couple paragraphs and immediately click on one of my big comparison charts. In fact, for a while I ran the trial of fullstory to see how users interacted with my page. I found that it was actually VERY uncommon for somebody to sit and read my whole article. People just skim.
Taking the time to write high quality content is going to help with engagement, and it might help you get some natural links. But if you're doing your best and you think that it's not good enough, then i'd focus all that extra energy on finding other ways to improve your site instead of stressing about it too much.
If you have less than 500 urls, you can use Screaming Frog SEO Crawler for free, although I'm not sure how much data the free account gives you. I've always used the paid version.
An alternative is Xenu which is free, but I have no experience with it.
http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html
Crawl your website, look at the Redirects tab and see which pages link to these 30x redirects. Then work your way through them and update the internal links to point to the final urls.
If you're linking to page which redirects more than 5 times, GoogleBot will give up following the redirects.
By this I mean...
Page A to Page B to Page C to Page D to Page E to Page F
Google will get as far as Page E through the redirect chain and give up following them. So if Page F is only linked to through this redirect chain. Google may never find it as a result.
Bit more to it than this, but keeping things simple
if you're just running a standard aff site and are mainly concerned about the browser warnings, i would 100% go with cloudflare flexible ssl.
i would also just stick with their free plan to start with - you get most of the benefits without paying anything, and i personally don't think their paid options are worth it until your site is much much much bigger, and perhaps not even then.
edit: you could also obviously grab a free cert from https://letsencrypt.org/ , i'm just suggesting cloudflare because it's easier to set up depending on your technical know how
A sane suggestion for sure. I'm currently managing all my sites on RunCloud.io as well. But using Vultr instead of Digital Ocean. No regrets so far. Had used a similar service named Ploi.io earlier, but once one of my site got hacked, I took the expensive option of getting RunCloud and let go of Ploi, which at that time was new.
It does the job, easy to integrate and works well with vue's components, which - combined with the GQL API - were the driving factors behind my decision to go with them. I am considering a switch to sanity though as it seems even better suited, treating content as structured data and I'm still small enough for the switch to not be too much of a time sink.
2.57s (with ads)
Have you tried putting your site in to Google PageSpeed Insights: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/ ?
I have found that their suggestions have made a huge impact to my site speed, so have a look!
Ok, thanks for the info!
So you use Jekyll for all of your sites or a different one for the others? There are a lot of generators that can be deployed to Netlify.
https://jamstack.org/generators/
Once you reach 100k monthly visitors, do you plan to change your hosting or stay with Netlify?
In the pro plan we get 4x bandwidth but for the free plan it's not mentioned properly.
You can always use tools like https://www.grammarly.com and http://www.hemingwayapp.com to clean up your writing, as well as simply rewriting what some of your competitors are saying and then eventually paying a editor/proofreader on something like /r/slavelabor for cheap.
Damn, 70k words in a week is impressive! I'm sorry to hear about your sales drop in September, seems to be happening to others on here though which is in some ways reassuring.
Grammarly sounds interesting, my grammar is generally pretty poor and I have a tendency to write crazy long sentences.
When I was looking for decent writing software (I don't have word and libre office writer is horrible) i stumbled upon a pretty cool website. You can paste in your article and it tells you which sentences it thinks are poorly written. In my opinion it's a little too harsh so I'd take its advice with a grain of salt but it can be quite interesting and useful to look at. The website is http://www.hemingwayapp.com/
Jarvee is the best alternative to massplanner that I've found and to be honest they seem like the same people that made MP... Honestly though, it's an all-in-one program and a good one. Take the free trial: http://jarvee.com?ap_id=freetrial
I just launched a minimal reddit clone
I used to run a very popular political blog. I made like $2/week on it. The problem with forums is the regulars either block or ignore the ads.
Not sure what you're using in terms of email capture form, but the Contact Form 7 plugin allows you to grab some other info at submission time (like post ID, title, url, etc), more info here. Then depending on the email service you're using (mailchimp for example), you should be able to segment your list based on some of that information.
I think there are other plugins that allow you to grab post categories/tags but I'm not sure if they're up to date. Hope this helps!
Dude! you need to brush up your site speed and core web vitals. At least bring them to respectable levels... https://gtmetrix.com/reports/coffeescanner.com/0UDkX6se/
Are you serious here? If yes, I suggest you look elsewhere for a site to look up to.
Starting with this: https://gtmetrix.com/reports/www.owntheyard.com/hhqL9vRF and going into how shit the whole thing looks, as well as the rather bland content...
I use WP Fastest Cache. Try switching to a default WP theme and see if there is a difference in the load time. Also, use https://gtmetrix.com/ and check the waterfall and what is causing the load time.
There is definitely a learning curve but I really love the tabular swtup and how flexible it is. They have a pretty good repository of examples called the Universe that is worth checking out. One of the bases I cribbed from was this content agency one:
https://airtable.com/universe/expDmODikocmjfdr9/content-agency-manager
I started out with NordVPN for now, but never looked into LeadDyno or Refersion so far. Seems weird having to pay for them though, as opposed to regular affiliate programs.
Definitely need to learn how to find long-tailed keywords, everything that I've accidentally targeted so far was mostly short-tail.
Nah, it's a pretty slow calm down. I know when it's starting to wear off and work accordingly.
Currently taking a single scoop of this version of C4:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0734CCWGR/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o00_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1
However, my sleep quality has taken a hit, but shit. At this point, not taking the stuff is like deliberately slowing myself down. It kind of sucks, when you think about it. I've handicapped myself just by taking the stuff nearly every day for almost a year.
At this point though, I need as much energy as I can get. Gonna starting selling my own physical product via my affiliate site. FBA seems a bit too saturated, and with the commission cuts that Amazon has been doing every year, I really don't want to go back to relying on them again by doing FBA.
Of course, by selling on my own website I'm at the mercy of Google. Lol. It never fucking ends with leaning on these titans.
I was recently talking with various potential buyers for my blog. This is what I learned:
This book does a wonderful job at covering it even though it’s not specifically talking about blogs https://www.amazon.com/Built-Sell-Creating-Business-Without/dp/1591845823
I'm not sure if this works (I'm not in the US) but I have This one
Thank you so much buddy.
Funny thing is that I did wrote an e-book as well in 2016. It was about viral traffic from reddit. In one of my site, I managed to drive about 100k traffic just from reddit. So I wrote an ebook on it. Reddit Codebreaker. As I said earlier in the post. i wasn't that serious back then in 2016 and was just trying different hands. But, I will say that I got really happy with the reviews I received on it from the readers.
And about the assignment, I will surely give it a try but may I know your niche. I will just give a sample for you to see if I ma even eligible. Won't going to make false promises.
You get better at writing by writing, but only if you are self-aware and trying to improve. If you keep lifting weights incorrectly, you won't get anywhere.
Try William Zinnser's book "On Writing Well" not hard to find a pdf or epub. I'd also grab a book on copywriting like Robert Bly's Copywriting handbook.
Make a point of reading a book a month.
Look at articles you want to imitate on the web, and actually imitate them. Basically copy them - edit it - edit it again, and cut some lines out - and finally you have your own article.
everything starts with imitation. and if you are diligent about improving you can cut the learning curve drastically.
Have you posted anything related to a grain or an extract kit?
Something like this: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B015TDQ5TW/ref=sspa_dk_detail_0?psc=1
I would think that if you start focusing on essential supplies, and your thoughts on different brews (not reviews, kinda like "Now is the time to start working on those Stouts & Porters for the winter months. Here's something to get you started"), you might start to see some conversions and extra sales.
maybe I can not identify the difference :O here's what i was looking at, is a rock climbing bag
I click the name (Black Diamond) and takes me here