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lostinanimage · 4 years ago

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Hi! Where can I find a masterpost of all your stories that are on Patreon? Like a list of their titles + summaries + characters/relationships + complete or wip? I tried on Patreon, but it's all very confusing and the "summaries" only include the characters and not a real summary. It'd be great if you could also tell me what kind of subscription I need to read what (again, Patreon is SO confusing!). Sorry if this is too much to ask :(

Okay. I hope this is less confusing and gives you an idea of what you want to do. To get all of the Patreon exclusive posts you need to sign up for the $2 (Fans) Tier. I did close the $1 because as you are about to see, on sign up you basically get multiple novels worth of posts and Patreon doesn’t have an option to pay one fee for old content and then a short subscription. So basically, I just decided you get a lot for $2 and if you cancel after reading it all, then it is what it is. I actually have some people you sign up for $2 read it all and unsubscribe. That’s totally not a problem if you do that, but I will go into that more on the 2nd ask you sent.

$3 & $5 tiers get some extra “behind the scenes” stuff and early looks at new stuff, but you don’t need to pay more than $2 to get all the Patreon exclusive fic. The $10 allows for one short story commission a month.

When you log into Patreon as a subscriber, there is a Table of Contents that is pinned. It actually lists the Ao3 stories with links too because I thought it was easier to understand where some of them fit if they were listed that way. I will admit it is outdated because it takes a long time to make. To reply to this ask , I copy and pasted and removed the Ao3 fics and then added some that have happened since this was updated. *I have tagged every single Patreon Exclusive story with “patreon exclusive” so the easiest way to start is to go to that tag and then sort from “oldest to newest” That will start you with Cupid/Mills and then move you to all the later exclusive stories with OCs in the verse. All stories also have tags for each story. So once you get onto Patreon, it’s easier to navigate using the tags. So this is a list of just what is on Patreon and exclusive to Patreon if you want to know what you get right when you sign up. Fics are similar to Ao3 patterns in that some are long and up to 70k and some are fillers that are shorter. I made some notes to give you an idea. (Some of these I’m going to tag characters and not ships because I feel like you might want to discover the ships as you go. A lot of the extras are also Patreon commissions for them top tier which is why you see a lot of random extras)

They Don't Believe You, but They're Gonna Need You (4 chapters – Cupid/Mills)

There's Only You (11 chapters - Cupid/Mills )

Beyond the Headlight Glare (10 chapters - Cupid/Mills ) --Extra set after Chapter 2 of A Place to Go which would be in the middle of Chapter 1 of Headlight Glare (Reaper)

--Extra set between Chapters 3 and 4 of Headlight Glare (Reaper)

--Extra set during the Aces first road trip in Headlight Glare/A Place to Go (Reaper)

--Extra set after Chapter 5 of Beyond the Headlight Glare (Reaper)

Keep It Building Higher and Higher (Mason)

Take Me Home (7 Chapters Micah)

--Gimme More Patreon Exclusive - Today I Saw a Boy - Alternate Point of View set during Chapter 4 of Take Me Home (Mason)

--Gimme More Patreon Exclusive - Things That I've Been Told - Set during Take Me Home (Chapters 3-5) (Mason)

--Gimme More Patreon Exclusive - You Made Me Cry - Set during Take Me Home Chapter 7

Tell Me Am I Wrong? (Mason)

Am I A Sinner? (Micah)

Love the Hurt Away (Micah)

Get Out of My Mind (Micah)

Let's Keep It Simple (Micah & Mason)

I Think You Already Know (Micah)

I Was Broken-Hearted (Micah & Mason)

I Will Be Your Champion (7 Chapters - Micah & Mason)

--One Kiss From You - Set during "I Think You Already Know" but meant to be read no earlier than after Chapter 2 of "I Will Be Your Champion" (Micah & Mason)

-- I Don't Wanna Hear My Time Will Come - Set after "I Was Broken-Hearted" but meant to be read no earlier than after Chapter 2 of "I Will Be Your Champion" (Micah & Mason)

-- What Happens When It Stops? - Set after "I Was Broken-Hearted" but meant to be read no earlier than after Chapter 2 of "I Will Be Your Champion" (Micah & Mason)

-- You Ain't Gotta Be Scared - Set after "Get Out of My Mind" but meant to be read no earlier than after Chapter 2 of "I Will Be Your Champion" (Micah & Mason)

Think That You Know Me Now - (Micah - 11 chapters)

-Micah & Mason Extra Age 13

-Don't Try To Be Too Tough - Mason Extra [Age 18]

-Micah & Mason Extra Age 20

-Micah & Mason Extra Age 22

Nothing Will Stop Us - Micah & Mason [Age 22]

Let Your Inhibitions Go - Micah/Mason extra [Age 21/20] - 4 chapters

Tell me if it's real - Micah and Mason Extra [Age 19]

Patreon Exclusive Gimme More: I got a plan we can do it - Cupid/Mills

Stronger (32 chapters - Alex with a ship as part of the big story)

-Alex extra

-Noah POV extra

-Another Noah POV extra

-Alt Mikey POV set during Stronger

-Alex Extra - Age 17

-Alex Extra - Age 16

This is an AU of sorts that is a rewrite so that I can try to publish Micah's story as a novel. Of course because I'm extra I had to rewrite Kent and Jeff's backstory. That is "Starting Havoc." I don't intend to publish Starting Havoc so it's just a Patreon exclusive.

Starting Havoc - 8 chapters

Notice Me - Short story stand alone

I Fall Without My Wings - Short story stand alone Two untitled and Maybe Abandoned Novels

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theritualofourexistence · 4 years ago

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Odes to Old Gods

I started this year intending to journal about things I survive. Then at the end of the year, I could look back on my challenges and think about them in a more positive way--wow, look at what I overcame! The plan was to document everything, both good and bad, so that I could think about them more as experiences and lessons learned than as... good and bad.

Needless to say, I stopped keeping track of those things in April.

Earlier this month, I pulled out the journal again to update the list. I ended up quitting on that too.

I do think, though, that in a less chaotic year, thinking about my life this way would be good practice. So, here I am, sharing my list with you in the form of an end-of-year, wrap-up blog post.

A few quick caveats:

This year was hard for literally everyone except maybe Jeff Bezos.

It is not healthy to compare challenges or struggles or suffering.

I am not sharing this because I am looking for sympathy... I believe that being vulnerable is a very important part of the human experience but we can all also use a reminder that we never really know all of what anyone is experiencing. We shouldn’t need that reminder to treat others with love... but the older I get, the more I think those reminders might be necessary.

Things I have survived in 2020:

- A bit of a stalking experience in January which has since been resolved.

- Losing my job, hunting for a new job, securing a new job, training for the new job.

- My first Harry Potter tattoo for my ten-year tattooiversary.

- The fires in Australia.

- An absolutely wonderful trip to NYC with my dad when I got to see both Beetlejuice and Hadestown and have an enormous strawberry cheesecake milkshake from Junior’s.

- Losing Kobe Bryant.

- Parasite absolutely CRUSHING the Oscars.

- Having a really, really good visit with my grandparents in March before all hell broke loose.

- Weinstein being convicted and sentenced.

[Everything after this point happened during a global pandemic.]

- Losing Grandmom. I was unable to attend her funeral and still have not had the chance to grieve this loss with my extended family.

- Losing my health insurance.

- A Zoom party for my Grammy’s 80th birthday.

- Losing Breonna Taylor. And George Floyd. And so, so many others. This is the first year I have really committed to understanding the current race-related issues this country faces and BOY, do we have work to do.

- The stress but success of orchestrating a safe family trip so that I didn’t have to go an entire year without seeing my brother.

- Losing my shifts at my primary job due to virus-related concerns.

- Countless other family happy birthdays over Zoom.

- My 60-year-old mother returning to work face-to-face with a student population that largely ignores all virus-related guidelines despite her working tirelessly for months this spring to offer UHS providers an adequate work-from-home option.

- Being diagnosed with hypertension.

- A nightmarish friend trip. Despite our best laid plans for a safe and healthy visit, Mother Earth decided to trap me 90 miles north of my best friends for 4 days. I eventually got to see them for about 12 hours and honestly, it was worth it. That is the only time I’ve gotten with them all year.

- Losing Ruth Bader Ginsberg.

- The selection of Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court.

- Our sweet girl Clio being diagnosed with a seizure disorder and then coming down with a life-threatening upper respiratory infection.

- Learning that my grandmother would be voting for Trump in the 2020 election.

- The actual election.

- Losing Rooster, my sweet, sweet boy.

- Learning that my uncle has been diagnosed with esophageal cancer.

- Missing Thanksgiving with my extended family.

- Getting really excellent holiday gifts for my favorite people.

- Missing Christmas with my extended family.

- Safely spending some holiday time with my immediate family.

That is FAR from everything. But I don’t have the energy? Capacity? Time? to sort through everything.

Here are the things from this year that I am still currently surviving:

- A global pandemic! And all the associated chaos. With my asthma and high blood pressure and obesity, I am considered high risk and am still not able to safely return to my primary job.

- Hypertension! More on this later.

- Grieving Rooster. In the days after we said goodbye, I wrote a memorial that I will eventually share here. Psychology has recently analyzed data suggesting that losing a pet can be equivalent to losing a relative... I have never felt grief like this. It’s been over a month. I cry every night.

- Managing Clio’s health. She is still adjusting to her seizure medication, which she gets twice a day, and is still on medication to help with lasting symptoms of the respiratory infection. She is fussy about food and her weight fluctuates a lot week to week. She is also a feral rescue who has only ever been handled by me, my mom, and our vet. If mom and I are ever going to vacation together again, we will need to find someone who can manage catching and pilling her twice a day... no easy feat. Fortunately, at the moment, vacations aren’t really a thing for either my mom or I and I am working hard to approach these concerns in a cross-that-bridge-when-we-come-to-it way.

----

This year has been overwhelming. The last two months alone have been overwhelming. And they would’ve been overwhelming without the added spice of a global pandemic. The number of Americans we have lost to this virus has doubled since I last posted here in mid-August. Some time this week we are likely to reach a point where we’re losing 4,000 Americans per day. PER. DAY. This year has been overwhelming.

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There were some good things this year, of course. I am so, so thankful for all the time I got with my immediate family and the very brief but vital time I got with my friends. Fortunately I am only ever a text away from my closest friends and we are able to message pretty much every day. I am also extremely glad to have found a place in the fantasy enamel pin community. The family I’ve found in pin-land has carried me through some of my lowest points this year. I spent more time in view of the ocean than I typically do in a given year... even though much of that time was still riddled with anxiety. I did art this year. I read books this year. Some really important ones, in fact. If you read nothing else in 2021, read The New Jim Crow. I also got tattooed! I’m going to include those here because I think the significance of each reflects something interesting and important about all I have survived and am surviving this year.

----

In January, I got my first Harry Potter tattoo! My favorite quote from the entire series is delivered by Hagrid during the Triwizard tournament:

”What’s comin’ will come, and we’ll meet it when it does.”

I got that incorporated into a tattoo. In January.

Also in January I got a “Prisoner of Donuts” tattoo... because life just wouldn’t be manageable at all without donuts.

In March, I got a bird of prey carrying a book to represent one of my all time favorite poems, “On Thought in Harness” by Edna St. Vincent Millay. The final lines of that poem:

“Soar, eat ether, see what has never been seen. Depart, be lost, but climb.”

In July, I was able to safely navigate getting a tattoo that symbolizes the saga told in The Lord of the Rings trilogy. LOTR is my first and oldest fandom and the story is still so, so important to me today. The lessons I learned from Tolkien when I was a kid also carried me through some of my hardest moments this year.

Also in July I got a Plumpy tattoo. That’s right. Plumpy. From Candyland. If you haven’t played the game in a while, you may not remember Plumpy. He’s one of the first characters you meet on the game board... and one of the worst cards to see when you’re close to winning the game. You could be three damn squares from the finish line and pull the Plumpy card and back to the beginning of the board you go. Plumpy is a really great reminder that even when we have no choice but to lose ground, we can gain that ground back again. And hey, once you pull the Plumpy card from the deck, you likely won’t see him again for a good long while.

In October, I was able to safely navigate getting my second Harry Potter tattoo. Neville has always been one of my favorite fantasy characters and I chose to carry him with me permanently. His courage, despite so, so much bullshit, inspires me every day. I also got a nautical tattoo for my mom’s ancestors who came to this country and fought in the Revolutionary War. Just as my family has a long and proud history of fighting for what matters, I too will carry that banner, even if it looks very, very different in the modern age. My third tattoo of the appointment is a cuckoo holding playing cards, a nod to one of most important stories I’ve read: Ken Kesey’s “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” This book has informed not just my personal journey with mental illness but my passion to work in the field as well. My final tattoo of my October appointment, less than a week before the 2020 election, is a weeping Lady Justice.

----

This year has made me look critically at things I very comfortably ignored for a long time. I would hope that it has done the same for most of you. Very little if any of this year was easy for me... but the most important lessons are never easy to learn. I’ve spent this year more worried and more angry than I’ve ever been before... and all I hope to do moving forward is use that fear and that anger to make this country, this world, a better place. Miss me with your resolutions this year. Every single day we should prioritize surviving and treating others with understanding and active love. I worked hard to do that this year and I will continue to work hard to do that every day. I’m proud of the work I’ve done. And in case it wasn’t clear, I’ll be dragging as many of you as I can on this journey with me. If you really feel the need to make a resolution this year, resolve to learn. Resolve to understand. Resolve to read The New Jim Crow and then TAKE ACTION. Take action with your votes and your voices and your money. Resolve to act.

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This year wouldn’t let me escape it without being put on blood pressure medication, despite my best efforts to lower my blood pressure without it. Although I had gotten back down into a healthy range for a few weeks, RBG’s death and the landslide of utter shit that followed that completely wrecked all the progress I had made. I’m not happy about adding a new medicine to my regimen. I’m not happy about adding a new chronic diagnosis to my already lengthy laundry list. I did not expect 30 to look like allergy pills and three daily moisturizers and foot stretches and Metamucil and acid reducers and migraine medication and iron supplements and six prunes a day and chronic pain and blood pressure medication... but here we are. I’m exhausted from working so hard to be healthy just to have all that work not be enough. I feel very much like my body is giving up on me... and that is a feeling I am struggling with a lot right now. My soul is a vibrant but powerless passenger in a car speeding towards the edge of a cliff.

I’ll keep trying though. I start my new medication tonight. Hopefully it helps. Hopefully the side effects are manageable. I don’t really feel like I can handle much more... but I guess we keep going until we can’t.

----

I have no expectations for 2021 to be better. I don’t have much hope for it to be better either. This vaccine will saves lives and that’s really good news. But a lot of other things will be difficult, will stay difficult, will become difficult. I’m going to try to keep fighting, and I hope you do too.

“What’s comin’ will come, and we’ll meet it when it does.”

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jjonassevilla · 4 years ago

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How to Win the “SEO vs. PPC” Debate

Believe it or not, some marketers are still taking sides in the “SEO vs. PPC” debate. I can understand the passion on both sides of the aisle, but I’d compare it to an argument about the need for “air vs. water.” Depending on your immediate circumstances, one may be more important than another—but both are necessary for survival.

To those passionately arguing that SEO is better than PPC, or vice versa, I propose a truce based on the potential for incremental gains when we work together.

For those seeking answers to the question, “should I invest in PPC or SEO,” buckle up—we’re about to unpack a debate that has raged for more than a decade to help you decide how to prioritize your digital marketing efforts.

Let’s start with the basics.

What is the difference between SEO and PPC?

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the art and science of improving your brand’s visibility in search engine result pages (SERPs) to attract more visitors to your web properties.

It’s not limited to just web search engines, though. SEO strategies also improve your visibility in maps search results, image and video search results, shopping listings, app stores, and social media search results.

Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising positions your brand in sponsored ad positions on search results pages. Advertisers have more control over the targeted keywords, audiences, and creative, but they pay for each click to their website.

A search ad is most commonly found at the top of the search results.

Many marketers oversimplify the difference between SEO and PPC with a half-truth like, “SEO is free but PPC costs money.” While it’s true that clicks on organic search results don’t cost you money, there’s a good chance that your content won’t rank consistently well unless you invest in people, content, and tools to step up your SEO game. You get what you pay for.

Another misperception is that PPC has to be expensive. Sure, PPC can be pricey if you don’t put proper safeguards in place to protect your wallet. You wouldn’t just leave your debit card hanging out of an ATM, would you? No, you protect it with a PIN and withdrawal limits. Similarly, you protect your PPC spend by setting daily budgets and monitoring your campaigns for wasteful spending on irrelevant keywords.

Which channel is better at increasing revenue?

That’s a trick question. It’s both.

SEO and PPC can generate qualified traffic to your site and improve your chances of converting more visitors to customers. And surveys conducted by Google and Nielsen suggest that brands get more combined clicks on ads and organic results when both are present on a SERP. Sharing insights and integrating your paid and organic search strategies will yield more growth than focusing all of your resources on one versus the other.

How do you measure the success of an SEO strategy vs. a PPC campaign?

Start with your business objectives. In most cases, the overall aim is to increase revenue, leads, sales, or engagement. Successful SEO and PPC strategies can create measurable impacts on your business, quantified with a few key metrics at each step in the customer journey.

This is not an exhaustive list of the metrics that you can measure, but it does show the similarities and overlaps between SEO and PPC that can be exploited.

The SEO or PPC zealots can each claim superiority in some of these metrics. But savvy marketers realize that neither channel exists in a vacuum and we should focus on the contribution of each channel to shared goals.

Attribution Is the Future Present

In most cases, consumers interact with your brand multiple times before converting. And like snowflakes, no two conversion paths are the same. There are likely multiple touchpoints that must be accounted for to get a true picture of the customer journey.

Attribution is where the SEO vs. PPC debate loses some steam. The position-based attribution example below shows multiple conversion paths that include “Organic Search” and “Paid Search” touchpoints. In each of these cases, a customer converted only after multiple interactions.

Your proportion of “Organic Search” to “Paid Search” conversions will vary depending on your brand awareness and product offerings. It’s important to keep an eye on your preferred attribution model and use the cross-channel insights to dial in your budgets and prioritize your focus where it’s needed most.

Put your strengths to work while compensating for your weaknesses.

The most polarizing arguments for SEO vs. PPC often fail to recognize each company’s inherent strengths, weaknesses, and resources. What may be easy for one company could be extremely difficult to pull off in other companies with different team structures, historical baggage, or finances.

Here are the most common factors to consider when deciding how to invest your resources:

Your Website & Landing Pages

Evaluate your current website to determine if it will support your goals. Do you have control over the code and easily editable templates? If not, your SEO success may depend on building a new site with best practices baked in. (And that can get expensive.)

Most PPC campaigns don’t need an entire site to support the visitor journey. Landing pages work exceptionally well to convert visitors into prospects or customers without messing with a content management system (CMS). Landing pages can also be a force multiplier when it comes to testing and scaling up relevant, valuable offers and experiences for multiple visitor segments.

Landing pages can enhance your PPC campaigns by delivering more conversions for the same spend. Read about how you can build tailored pages and create killer post-click experiences without bothering your devs.

Time & Money

If you have lots of spare time and very little money, SEO might be a better long-term option. Your free time can be spent creating great content to attract links and visitors, building partnerships to establish authority, and refining your site architecture to make it more accessible to search engine crawlers.

Conversely, if you need to make a splash right away and are swimming in Scrooge McDuck pools of cash, you could get immediate visibility with a significant PPC investment. Higher budgets would allow you to test your way to better results quickly.

Team & Talent

If your team can create content, build links, establish authority, and share expertise, you have the ingredients for a successful SEO initiative. PPC teams tend to skew more towards the analytical mindset with a hint of creativity.

Assess the team you have or build the team you want in order to stand out. Thankfully, people haven’t been replaced by AI (yet), so continue to invest most heavily in your talented humans. That said, the learning curves required to excel at PPC or SEO are steep and can take years to climb. It’s nearly impossible for a single person to master both disciplines. Keep your expectations realistic and don’t put all your eggs in one basket.

Photo by You X Ventures on Unsplash

Content & Brand Equity

Do you have a content-rich site with oodles of authority and expertise? SEO might look more appealing. Established brands can use their reputations and communities to boost their SEO efforts. A brand new startup doesn’t yet have a foundation to build from.

If you are launching a new site or trying to build awareness for a new brand, PPC might give you the immediate boost you need to stand out.

Competitors

Any debate about the merits of SEO and PPC should also consider the strengths and weaknesses of your competitive set. Think you’ll beat Amazon to the top of Google’s organic search results for a generic term like “board games”? Not likely. However, it is possible to stand out in a local market or niche industry with just a little extra SEO attention.

Similarly, deep-pocketed PPC competitors may seem daunting until you realize there are multiple ways to outsmart and outflank them. There’s no way for even the wealthiest competitors to simultaneously target all keywords and all audiences with the perfect message.

There are always gaps in your competitors’ strategies wide enough to drive a wedge in. You can begin to exploit their weaknesses and expand your presence once you have a foothold.

Integrate your PPC and SEO data for massive wins.

Another weakness of a diehard SEO vs. PPC devotee is the inability to see the big picture. PPC and SEO don’t exist in isolation. Savvy marketers will understand how to incorporate data from one channel to improve another resulting in better overall performance. In other words, we have more to gain by working together than trying to “win” an intractable debate.

Sharing SEO Data with PPC

Organic search traffic produces mountains of data that PPC marketers can use to improve their campaigns. A few examples:

Improve the layout and flow of a PPC landing page with user experience data from site navigation paths and heatmap tracking.

Conserve PPC budgets by pausing or lowering bids on keywords with strong organic rankings and limited competition.

Expand PPC keywords that align with organic performance and goals.

Improve PPC quality scores and landing page performance by sharing SEO insights such as page speed enhancements, accessibility, and image optimization.

Sharing PPC Data with SEO

Insights from PPC campaigns can benefit SEO strategies as well:

Inform SEO target keywords or inspire new pieces of content based on PPC search terms with high conversion rates or ROI.

Improve organic search click-through rates by updating page titles and meta description tags based on successful PPC ad copy and calls to action (CTAs).

Fill in the gaps in organic search visibility with focused PPC campaigns to capture fast-moving trends in search queries, highly competitive organic results, and topics where you want to control the message.

Promote new content to target audiences before it has earned enough organic visibility to stand alone.

Once you connect your Google Search Console to your Google Ads account, you can access a somewhat useful Paid & Organic Report template that shows your paid activity alongside your organic search performance.

It’s not very intuitive and doesn’t immediately surface any insights, but if you spend some time analyzing the data, you can spot gaps in your keyword coverage and opportunities to improve your overall visibility.

How to win the “SEO vs. PPC” debate

Nobody has won this debate in the past decade. It’s not likely that a winner will emerge in the next decade either. So don’t paint yourself into a corner or limit your career opportunities by picking sides and standing in opposition to the other.

Instead, embrace the ebb and flow of paid and organic search channels. Get comfortable saying, “it depends.” Be prepared to defend that statement with an assessment of your unique situation and healthy discussion. Become a champion for integration and watch your results and your reputation improve.

from Marketing https://unbounce.com/conversion-rate-optimization/seo-vs-ppc/ via http://www.rssmix.com/

#SEO

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cindylouwho-2 · 5 years ago

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RECENT NEWS, RESOURCES & STUDIES, late February 2020

Welcome to my latest summary of recent ecommerce news, resources & studies including search, analytics, content marketing, social media & Etsy! This covers articles I came across since the early February report, although some may be older than that. I am a bit behind due to my trip last week and other events, but some things here are a bit time-sensitive so I wanted to release this now.

I am still looking into setting up a new ecommerce business forum where we can discuss this sort of news, as well as any day-to-day issues we face. I need some good suggestions for a cheap or free forum space that has some editing tools, is fairly intuitive for inexperienced members, and is accessible. If you have any suggestions, please reply to this post, email me on my website, or send me a tweet. (I will put out a survey once we narrow this down to some good candidates, but if you have any other comments on what you want from such a forum, please include those too!)

As always, if you see any stories I might be interested in, please let me know!

TOP NEWS & ARTICLES

Since we are seeing more shops closed due to Etsy’s customer service level standards, my blog post on ODR now has major revisions explaining what we have learned, and includes some tips for staying out of trouble and if necessary, appealing a suspension. Please circulate the info widely, as many sellers still haven’t heard about this, and some were closed without having any clue this was possible.

Mobile continues to grow while desktop use is slowly shrinking. It should affect how we design web pages. “Mobile visitors also behave differently from their desktop web counterparts, staying on pages for shorter periods of time, for example.” Other interesting takeaways from this SimilarWeb report: “[Facebook] lost 8.6% of [web] traffic over the past year alone” but increased in app sessions.

The price of domains ending in “.com” will almost certainly be going up soon, and will go up most years after that, unless something changes at the last minute. If you are absolutely certain that you will continue to use the same domain name for your website, blog, ecommerce forwarding etc., then you might consider paying a few years in advance to save a few bucks.

Another article explaining how people are selling thrift store and vintage clothing on Instagram, without setting up a checkout/cart anywhere. (The article focusses on teenagers, but does reference other examples.)

ETSY NEWS

Two weeks ago, Etsy Support posted on Twitter that they were no longer monitoring the account, and asked everyone to use the help page maze instead when they need support. Forum thread here.

Another trend report for 2020 from Dayna Isom Johnson [podcast links & transcript] She leads off with tips on how to get featured: “ so it's incredibly important to see a bright representation that really clearly shows your product...Do be original. I'm always trying to find the latest and the greatest that isn’t already on the shelves...Do be inclusive. ... I'm talking about models of all ethnicities, all genders, all body types, all ages.” Etsy chose chartreuse as their colour of the year: “in the last three months, there's been a 12% increase in searches for green already, and a 55% increase in neon green.” The wedding trends part was mostly already covered in a blog post, but she does also answer a few seller questions.

Website user experience (UX) is a big part of getting people to convert, and an outside group ranks Etsy’s as “acceptable”. Many will be unsurprised that search gets a score of “mediocre” and Accounts & Self-Service get a “poor” grade.

The migration to Google Cloud services is complete, so now Etsy can run more experiments more often, including those involving AI. (Although the forum thread was laughing at the idea of bad reviews helping shops, there is actually some research supporting that, so it is a logical thing to test.)

Etsy sellers in the US, UK & Canada who use Instagram can apply to win a trip to Etsy HQ here, until March 1.

Etsy is launching an Etsy U program which just seems a bit sketchy. Forum thread here.

Reverb (owned by Etsy) named a new Chief Technology Officer on Feb. 18.

SEO: GOOGLE & OTHER SEARCH ENGINES

Google does not confirm every large search update, so this one remains a mystery at the moment, since Google refused to give an answer. That means it’s not a core update.

Another video (with subtitles in several languages) from the SEO for Beginners series from Google, on the basics you need for good website SEO.

If you are interested in “searcher intent”, this 500 person survey asks about what people are really looking for, and what they think of the search results the end up with. Overwhelmingly, they say they prefer organic results to ads, and the majority see targeted ads that they can’t figure out the reason/s behind. “Sixty-eight percent responded that Google adding more ads to the search results would make them want to use the search engine less.” Also, a slight majority preferred text results to images, video, & audio. “When asked which factor had the most significant impact on their decision to click a result, 62.9% responded it was the description, followed by 24.2% who said the brand name, and 13% who said title.” That means that the first part of your Etsy listing description, or the coded meta description on a page on your website, has the most influence on people clicking on your link once they see it.

I usually strongly suggest that people setting up their own websites make sure they do some SEO work & keyword research for their category/shop section pages, and it turns out that there is new research showing I am correct. “Specifically, e-commerce category pages – which include parent category, subcategory and product grid pages with faceted navigation – ranked for 19% more keywords on average than product detail pages ranked for. The additional keywords they ranked for drove an estimated 413% more traffic, based on the keywords’ search demand and the pages’ ranking position. With optimization, those ranking category pages also showed the potential to drive 32% more traffic.”

Semi-advanced: explaining the (seemingly endless) debate on whether subdomains or subdirectories are better for SEO.

SEO study - do you really need to use H1 tags on a page? Maybe not, although some screen readers recognize them as the page title so they help with accessibility. (Etsy & many other marketplaces don’t let you make this coding choice, so don’t worry about it there.)

Confused about how to apply all of these SEO tips I post here to your Shopify site? Good news! Here’s a list of what is most important for Shopify SEO. Note the attention to setting up your category pages, which is something I completely agree with. (it’s by Ahrefs so of course it pushes their tools; you don’t need to pay for that.)

CONTENT MARKETING & SOCIAL MEDIA (includes blogging & emails)

Some businesses say social media doesn’t work, but maybe they aren’t doing it right. See if you are making one or more of these three mistakes. “Understanding who your target audience is - what they want, what they need, where you fit in, etc. - is critical to maximizing your social media marketing performance.”

Email marketing also works better if you do it right, so here are 5 things you might be doing wrong. And if you like a quick read, here’s an infographic on the psychology of email marketing.

8 ideas for getting more interactions on Facebook (detailed infographic).

More fourth quarter reports continue: Pinterest’s 4th quarter revenue was up 46% but they lost $1.36 billion, and they are introducing a verified merchant program. “Almost all (97%) of the top searches on Pinterest are unbranded, according to the company, giving merchants a chance to stand out.”

Want to tap into that Pinterest traffic? You should because “90% of weekly Pinterest users log in to make buying decisions.” Here are 10 ways to get more attention, followers, and pins.

Like almost all social media, Twitter has an algorithm that mediates what users see (although you can turn it off, or use apps such as Tweetdeck to get around it as a reader). Ranking factors include recency, engagement, media and activity. The article includes a few tips on how to make it work for you, but then slides into promoting its app as the solution - you can just skip that part.

ONLINE ADVERTISING (SEARCH ENGINES, SOCIAL MEDIA, & OTHERS)

Google search ads get more results than Facebook and Instagram, simply because more people who see them want to buy something. “Less expensive products tend to sell better than more expensive ones on Facebook and Instagram, per the study.”

If you are running ads where you can choose your keywords, don’t forget to examine your organic search results and impressions for new words to advertise. Google Search Console is a great source.

If you found Instagram ads too expensive, check out this post on how the ads are priced, which can help you make decisions on your spend.

ECOMMERCE NEWS, IDEAS, TRENDS

Amazon has nearly 40% of the US ecommerce market, according to a report by eMarketer. Etsy is not in the top 10; eBay is 3rd behind Walmart.

Sales on Shopify sites during the Black Friday-Cyber Monday long weekend went up 61% to $3 billion in 2019. They claim that the “direct -to-consumer” approach can be successful for both big & small brands.

Japanese authorities are going after Rakuten for the ecommerce company’s push to make its sellers offer free shipping.

eCommerceBytes’ annual Sellers Choice survey placed eBay first out of the online marketplaces that were rate. Note that this is not a scientific survey and largely covers the site’s readership only. Bonanza was the most improved & Etsy showed the worst drop (from 1st to 5th place).

A review of that article last month that says ecommerce sites should have info pages as well as product pages, if only for SEO reasons. The author approves.

The CBC show Marketplace did a large test buying branded items on AliExpress, Amazon, eBay, Walmart and Wish. It turns out that most were fake.

Facebook’s cryptocurrency plans (Libra) finally have a partner: Shopify. The potential benefits include no credit card processing fees.

BUSINESS & CONSUMER STUDIES, STATS & REPORTS; SOCIOLOGY & PSYCHOLOGY, CUSTOMER SERVICE

Younger people (think Gen Z) expect to see gender treated expansively and beyond traditional stereotypes, and they expect this from companies and advertising. “Half of women and four in 10 men in the U.S. now believe that there is a spectrum of gender identities, according to a recent Ipsos poll titled "The Future of Gender is Increasingly Nonbinary." An additional 16% of those surveyed said they know a person who identifies as transgender”

MISCELLANEOUS (including humour)

Google employees are pushing back against the sea change in the company’s culture and values - and some are being fired.

Turns out that the “Peleton Wife” ad might not have hurt them as much as you might think. However, their stock dropped 12% after the fourth quarter report showed a 77% increase in revenue that still managed to be below market predictions. Interesting discussion around going viral in a negative fashion.

#Cindylouwho2newsupdates #seo #search engine optimization #search engine marketing #Etsynews #etsy #social media #Contentmarketing #Content marketing #ecommerce #Smallbiz #Seotips #Customer service #Ppc advertising #onlinemarketing #ecommercetips #EmailMarketing #socialmedianews

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michaelteeuw · 6 years ago

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A Tiny Success: Flashing the USBasp

Two weeks ago I posted about my experiment with the ATTiny10. A 12Mhz 8-bit micro controller small enough to be confused with an obese ant. Unfortunately I didn't succeed in programming this tiny guy, so this week I continue my small scale flashing quest.

My first guess was that the tiny wires I used to connect the ATTiny10 to my USBasp flasher weren't working, or I damaged the ATTiny10 in my amateur micro soldering attempts.

To test if these were the causes, I soldered an ATTiny10 and a WS2812 2020 to SOP16 breakout board. This allows me to do some testing on a breadboard. It also made the soldering much simpler, lowering the risk of overheating the components.

Unfortunately, this didn't solve the issue. I still wasn't able to upload firmware to the ATTiny. Time to shift the focus to the next suspect: the USBasp flasher.

To program the ATTiny10 I tried using the USBasp flasher I bought from AliExpress. I used this Flasher to program my Electrocards, so I know it works. The only difference between the electrocard's ATTiny85 and the ATTiny10 is that the latter uses TPI protocol in stead of the ISP protocol to be programmed.

After a small Google session, I found the USBasp project website. Besides some interesting technical details, this website also offers the Firmware downloads. And that's where I noticed that TPI support was only available in the newest firmware. Maybe my cheap chinese USBasp included some old firmware? Time for an update!

To allow the USBasp to be updated, JP2 needs to be closed. In this case, the JP2 is on the back of the PCB. Soldering a short wire between these connection points is enough to enable self programming mode.

Next, I used an Arduino Uno as the programmer. To do so, I uploaded the ArduinoISP sketch to the Uno. This sketch is available in the Examples sketches section of the Arduino IDE. Next I connected the USBasp to the Arduino using the following pin configuration:

ARDUINO --- USBasp 5V ------- 2 (VCC) GND ------- 10 (GND) 13 ------- 7 (SCK) 12 ------- 9 (MISO) 11 ------- 1 (MOSI) 10 ------- 5 (RESET)

(Note that the blue led of the USBasp will not turn on after connecting it. I'll get back to this later ...)

To check if the connection is working, I used the following command in my macOS terminal:

avrdude -c avrisp -P /dev/cu.usbmodem14201 -b 19200 -v -p m8

avrdude is a utility to download/upload/manipulate the ROM and EEPROM contents of AVR microcontrollers.

The -c flag specifies which programmer whe are using. In this case the Arduino usni which is configured as an avrisp programmer.

Using -P I specify to which port the Arduino Uno is connected. In my case this is the /dev/cu.usbmodem14201 port, but in your case it might have a different name/path.

Next, I specify the communication speed using the -b flag. In this case 19200 baud.

To get some feedback, I enable the verbose mode using -v.

And last but not least, I specify the type of AVR I want to program. Since my USBasp has a ATMEGA8A, I specify part m8 using the -p. If you omit the -p flag you'll get a list of all supported AVRs.

After running this command, avrdude will try to communicate with the USBasp's microcontroller using the Arduino avrisp.

Great! This works! Time to do the real work: flashing the USBasp with the new firmware. First I downloaded the latest firmware at: http://www.fischl.de/usbasp. In this case the latest firmware was usbasp.2011-05-28.tar.gz. After downloading and extracting the file (by simply double clicking it in the macOS finder) I navigated to the usbasp.2011-05-28/bin/firmware folder which includes the firmware I need: usbasp.atmega8.2011-05-28.hex.

Uploading the firmware to the USBasp is almost the same command as before:

avrdude -c avrisp -P /dev/cu.usbmodem14201 -b 19200 -v -p m8 -U flash:w:usbasp.atmega8.2011-05-28.hex

In this case I've added the -U flag to do a memory operation:

I want to do an operation on the flash part of the micro controller.

I want to write, so I specify the write flash with the w flag.

And most important: I define the filename of the flash hex file (which is in the current folder)

Let's press enter, and hope for the best ...

Yes! It seems it has worked! :) Since the blue led has turned on after flashing, it really feels like something good has happened. LEDs always make thing better, right?!

Now, most important ... don't be like me: don't forget to open/disconnect that self programming jumper JP2 on the back of the USBasp! When it's connected/closed, the ESPasp won't be able to function.

So, after reconnecting the ATTIny10 to the USBasp, it's time for the most exciting part. Will the Arduino IDE, be able to flash the ATTiny10 using the ATTiny10Core?

How about we just select the USBasp programmer and smash that Upload button?

YEAH! It worked! :)

If you want to read more about this flashing process, make sure to read Roger Clark's great post on this subject...

For me it's time to start working the firmware to get that WS2812 2020 LED working. Don't miss it, so make sure to keep an eye on my blog or follow me on Twitter or Instagram.

#attiny #attiny10 #avr #usbasp #arduino #flash #firmware #tpi #isp #success #electronics #ws2812b #sop16

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herbalblog549 · 3 years ago

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Free Planner For Mac

Free Kitchen Planner For Mac

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Use our free printable planner templates, and let the templates +More Printable, downloadable, and made available in (A4) 8.27x11.69 inches with bleed. These templates are 100% customizable and easily editable from the comfort of using Apple Pages in your Macbook.

Yearly planning pages are a great tool to use for setting up the big priorities of your year. They make long term planning a breeze. From tracking special and important dates to planning your vacation time, these planner printables can be used to fit many different needs.

Calling all homeschooling moms and dads! If you’re looking for a free homeschool planner, this post is for you! I am excited to finally able to put together a collection of homeschooling organizational printables that you can all enjoy. I understand how much chaos homeschooling can get if you don’t have an organizing system, and probably, here are all the printables you need to get started navigating it right!

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It’s no secret that I love getting organized with planners. I love listing down almost everything! From my weekly to-dos to daily tasks, to priorities; Name it, I probably have it listed. Planning has immensely changed my life. It has made me more prepared, more confident, and more productive.

And I share my love for planning here in Shining Mom blog.

If you’ve been following Shining Mom, you know that you can rely on the blog for your planning needs. From life planners to travel planners, I have all your printables covered. I am happy that Shining Mom is now a community with almost 50,000 subscribers who share the same passion as mine. Together, we take steps towards our goals by creating bite-size action plans to achieve them, without the overwhelm.

I hope you, too, can join the Shining Mom crew by signing up for our newsletter, which entitles you to receive this free Homeschool Planner and receive all the latest free planner updates from us!

The Free Homeschool Planner: 30 Printable Pages!

You might have noticed that although I have shared hundreds of free school printables on the blog, I only have a few organizers for homeschooling. Since I will be homeschooling my pre-Kindergarten son this new school year, it came to me that I also need to come up with more printables to use for ourselves and to share with my fellow homeschooling parents and teachers out there.

So this week, I tried my hands again in designing more organizers, and this time it’s a pretty homeschool curriculum planner that I came up with. My teaching experience for eight years helped me create the printables that I think will also be useful for us.

As Alton Brown famously said, “organization will set you free,” and that is the case when it comes to homeschooling. You need to get organized to keep things at bliss.

It is not a bad idea to try a few before closing on to one.There are many cross platform IDEs that are supported on Windows, Linux and Mac and are available for free download. There are many IDEs available in the market, both free and paid, and selecting one can be a difficult task.It is absolutely possible to get started with PHP programming in a basic text editor, like notepad, but better is to start off with a feature rich and complete PHP IDE like NetBeans. PHPStorm, VIM, Zend Studio, Cloud9 or Atom, specifically if it is about professional web development and not just hobby.A good IDE comes packed with tons of features and facilitates rapid development and effective PHP programming. Mac editor for php. This question is for you and the decision depends on what you need, like, and can afford. Integrated development environment is developer’s playground and better is to spend time upfront to select an IDE that best fits requirements.Which one should you go for?

I am so, so thrilled because today I am finally able to update my free homeschooling planner for all the homeschool parents and teachers out there to enjoy. I understand the stress that homeschooling can generate without a clear organizing system. I hope that the printables I have included here will make organizing a whole lot easier for you and me!

What are the homeschooling organizational printables included?

Inside the planner, you’ll find printables for your homeschool organizing bliss. Here’s a peek to the pages so you’ll know what to expect in your copy:

Now you can plan your weekly activities and schedule your exams in your home school easily. This planner has beautiful pages for you to do that!

You can use a combination of 2 of the 3 outputs (DisplayPort or the two Thunderbolt 3 ports) at up to 8K 60Hz or allegedly can drive a single 4K display at 120Hz that is FreeSync/G-Sync/VRR or native 120Hz capable! Thunderbolt for mac pro pci. Titan Ridge:The Titan Ridge on the other hand uses the Intel chipset DSL7540 and negotiates over DisplayPort 1.4.

Homework planning? Tracking down monthly activities? Everything is easier and streamlined with the printables included in the Homeschool Planner. Organizing has been made a whole lot easier for you!

In addition to all of the free homeschooling printables featured above, I’ve also weekly added lesson planning pages that you can use. This homeschool lesson planner covers the following subjects: Reading, Language, Writing, Science, Mathematics, and more! There is also a blank page for you to write the particular subjects you teach. Here’s are the sample pages included in your printable homeschool curriculum planner.

These are just some of the pages included in this free homeschool planner. As I have said, you’ll get to enjoy a whole collection of over thirty homeschooling organizational pages!

And oh! Please know that your freebie also comes with four beautiful pages for you to choose from! Print the planner cover that you like best!

Ready to Print the Free Homeschooling Planner?

If you think you can use this free homeschool planner can work for you, go ahead and click the link below to snag your freebie!

CLICK HERE TO RECEIVE YOUR FREE PLANNER SENT STRAIGHT TO YOUR INBOX

Already subscribed to our mailing list? CLICK HEREto enter the Printables Vault and enter the password sent to you in the mail.

Lastly, please know that I have more printables that can help you with your homeschooling. I also don’t want you to miss the following free printables:

Are there any printable organizers that you wish I included here? Feel free to tell me at the Comments, and I’ll try to include them in the future. Again, sign up for the Shining Mom mailing list to receive your free homeschool planner!

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No time to print the free homeschool planner yet? Save this post for later by pinning it now on Pinterest!

Enjoy the free homeschool planner! May it help you run homeschooling blissfully!

Have a great day, friends! Thank you for visiting Shining Mom today!

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A horizontal layout, an editable 2021 monthly planner, includes US federal holidays. This customizable calendar can be customized using an online creator tool. Download and print this Microsoft Word template on different paper styles like A4, letter, and legal.

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Mx anywhere 2 for macs. The graphite version I reviewed has a dark gray body and grips that contrast subtly against a light gray underside and top panel.

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suzanneshannon · 4 years ago

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The Thirteenth Fourth

Well boy howdy. The 13th birthday of CSS-Tricks has rolled around. A proper teenager now, howabouthat? I always take the opportunity to do a bit of a state of the union address at this time, so let’s get to it!

Design

Technically, we’re still on v17 of the site design. This was the first design that I hired first-class help to do, and I’m still loving it, so I haven’t had much of an itch to do massive changes to it. Although it is quite different¹ today than it was on launch day.

For example…

The search experience is totally different, as it is powered by Jetpack’s Instant Search now.

The Almanac pages (e.g. background-blend-mode) have an additional sidebar that helps you navigate between pages

I re-did the typography using Hoefler&Co. Sentinel and Ringside. The monospace font code snippets are in Operator Mono and the logo has long-been Gotham Rounded, so it feels like one big happy family of typefaces.

Maybe next year we’ll do something different again. My list is starting to grow for some behind-the-scenes tech stuff I wanna re-jigger, and sometimes that goes hand in hand with redesign work.

Closed Forums

The forums on this site have been a mental weight on me for literally years. Earlier this year I finally turned them off. They are still there, and probably always will be (so the URLs are maintained), but nobody can post new threads or replies.

It was a painful move. Even as I did it, there was still some regular daily activity there and I’m sure it didn’t feel good to those people to have a place they have invested time in shut down. Here’s why I did it:

Nobody here, including me, checked in on the forums with any regularity. Unmoderated public forums on the internet are not acceptable to me.

The spam volume was going up. There were periods where most posts, even after the automatic spam blocking I get from Akismet, where spam that required manual removal. Even if we had a dedicated forums employee, that’s no fun, and since we didn’t, it was just a random job for me and I don’t need a time sink like that.

The forums represent a certain level of technical debt. They need to be updated. Their design needs to be functional in the context of this site. At one point I ripped out all custom styles and left it be the default theme, which was a good step toward reducing technical debt, but in the end it wasn’t enough.

I can handle some work and some technical debt, of course. But when you combine those things with the fact that the forums don’t contribute much to what I consider to be the success of the site. They don’t exactly drive page views or advertising demand. There isn’t really money to hire help specifically for the forums. But that’s a small part of it. I want this site to help people. I think we can do that best if we focus on publishing with as little divided attention as possible. I think there are places on the internet that are better for forum-like discourse.

Now that they’ve been off a number of months, I can report that the lifting of the mental weight feels very good to me and there has been little if any major negatives.

Social

Here’s another mental weight I lifted: I stopped hand-managing the Twitter account (@css). I still think it’s good that we have a Twitter account (and that we have that cool handle), but I just don’t spend any time on it directly like I used to.

In the past, I’d queue up special articles with commentary and graphics and stuff and make sure the days were full with a spread of what I thought would be interesting tweets about web design and development. That’s fine and all, but it began to feel like a job without a paycheck.

We don’t get (or seem to drive) a lot of traffic from Twitter. Google Analytics shows social media accounts for less than 1% of our traffic. Investing time in “growing” Twitter just doesn’t have enough of an upside for me. Not to mention the obvious: Twitter can be terribly toxic and mentally draining.

So now, all our posts to Twitter are automated through the Jetpack social media connection (we really use Jetpack for tons of stuff). We hit publish on the site and the article is auto-tweeted. So if you use Twitter like an RSS feed of sorts (just show me the news!), you got it.

The result? Our follower count goes up at the same rate it always did. Engagement there is the same, or higher, than it ever was. What a relief. Do ten times less work for the same benefit.

When I have the urge to share a link with commentary I use the same system we’ve always had here: I write it up as a link blog post instead. Now we’re getting even more benefit: long-term content building, which is good for the thing that we actually have on our side: SEO.

Someday we could improve things by hand-writing the auto-tweet text with a bit more joie de vivre, crediting the author more clearly, and, #stretchgoal, a custom or fancy-generated social media graphic.

Opened Up Design Possibilities

One aspect of this site that I’ve been happy with is the opportunity to do custom design on content. Here are some examples of that infrastructure.

On any given blog post, we can pick a template. Some of those templates are very specific. For example, my essay The Great Divide is a template all to itself.

In the code base, I have a PHP template and a CSS file that are entirely dedicated to that post. I think that’s a fine way to handle a post you want to give extra attention to, although the existence of those two files is a bit of technical debt.

I learned something in the creation of that particular essay: what I really need to open up the art direction/design possibility on a post is a simple, stripped-down template to start from. So that’s what we call a “Fancy Post” now, another template choice for any particular post. Fancy Posts have a hero image and a centered column for the content of the post. From there, we can use custom CSS to style things right within WordPress itself.

For example, my recent post on DX is styled as a Fancy Post with Custom CSS applied right within the block editor.

The Block Editor itself is a huge deal for us. That was one of my goals for the year, and we’ve really exceeded how far we’d get with it. I think writing and editing posts in the block editor is a million miles ahead of the old editor.

The hardest challenge was (and still is really) getting the block transforms set up for legacy content. But once you have the power to build and customize blocks, that alone opens up a ton of design possibility within posts that is too big of a pain in the butt and too heavy on technical debt otherwise.

Another door we opened for design possibilities is a classic one: using categories. A sort of freebie you get in WordPress is the ability to create templates for all sorts of things that just sort of automatically work if they are named correctly. So for example I have a file called category-2019-end-of-year-thoughts.php and that fully gives me control over making landing pages for groups of posts, like our end-of-year thoughts homepage. Not to mention our “Guide Collection” pages which are another way to programmatically build collections of pages.

That’s a lot of tools to do custom work with, and I’m really happy with that. It feels like we’ve given ourselves lots of potential with these tools, and only started taking advantage of it.

Speaking of which, another aspect of custom design we have available is the new book format…

eCommerce

We’re using WooCommerce here on the site now again. I just got done singing the praises of the Block Editor and how useful that has been… WooCommerce is in the same boat. I feel like I’m getting all this powerful functionality with very little effort, at a low cost, and with little technical debt. It makes me very happy to have this site on WordPress and using so much of suite of functionality that offers.

So for one thing, I can sell products with it, and we have products now! Lynn Fisher designed a poster for our CSS Flexbox guide and designed a poster for our CSS Grid guide, which you can now buy and ship anywhere in the world for $25 each. Look, with the Block Editor I can put a block for a poster right here in this post:

CSS Flexbox Poster

Find yourself constantly looking up the properties and values for CSS flexbox? Why not pin this beautiful poster up to the wall of your office so you can just glance over at it?

$25.00

Shop now

Another thing we’re using WooCommerce for is to sell our new book, The Greatest CSS Tricks Vol. I. If we actually made it into a proper eBook format, WooCommerce could absolutely deliver those files digitally to you, but we haven’t done that yet. We’ve take another path, which is publishing the book as chapters here on the site behind a membership paywall we’re calling MVP supporters. The book is just one of the benefits of that.

WooCommerce helps:

Build a membership system and sell memberships. Membership can lock certain pages to members-only as has programmatic hooks I can use for things like removing ads.

Sell subscriptions to those memberships, with recurring billing.

Sell one-off products

And I’m just scratching the surface of course. WooCommerce can do anything eCommerce wise.

Analytics

They are fine. Ha! That’s how much I worry about our general site analytics. I like to check in on them from time to time to make sure we’re not tanking or anything scary, but we never are (knock on wood). We’re in the vicinity of 8m page views a month, and year-over-year traffic is a bit of a dance.

Categories

Open up Categories, in the menu, and you'll see the existing categories in this table. You may also create new categories here.

Perhaps you have a blog that covers several different topics. Using categories to filter content not only makes the administration of the site easier, it helps website visitors find the content in which they are interested.

For example, a website may talk about food or travelling the world. The categories might then be Restaurants, Food, Travelling, Hotels, and so on.

Clicking a category name shows all the posts that have been given that category.

Organizing Posts With Tags

Tags are similar to Categories.

If you add a few, ensure you also add description to them. Created three tags, for example, then go back to the posts. On the right under Tags, start typing and it'll find the tag for you.

Return to the post, in the back-end, in order to choose categories and tags.

Viewing the updates on the website, you'll see that the category and the tags are also displayed here on the post under the metadata: author, publish date, category, tags, and comments.

That's how you publish a post and edit it by adding categories and tags.

Making a Post Sticky

Options

When publishing a post, there are a couple more options of which you need to be aware. You'll find all of these options on the right-hand sidebar.

First, you can make a post sticky.

You may pin it to the top of the blog, regardless of the publish date. Even if it was published two years ago and there are still more recent posts, it'll always be displayed at the top.

You may edit the permalink, this changes the post's URL—how the post appears in the address bar of a browser.

Featured Images

Posts can also display featured images.

A featured image is an image that is displayed on the website post and is usually before or after the title. It really depends on the theme that you're using.

Post Excerpts

Excerpts

On any post you may also define an excerpt. An excerpt is an optional piece of text that is displayed as a preview to the post, as highlighted in blue in the image above.

The excerpt feature is particularly useful in any the list of posts. Instead of showing the entire contents of each and every post, it'll show just a small portion of it. The excerpt.

Discussion

Under Discussion, there's the option to allow comments, pingbacks and trackbacks. These are just mechanisms for linking to other pages on the worldwide web.

Pages

A WordPress sample page

This is a sample page provided by WordPress by default. You may put any kind of content that you want in here. In fact, any content that works in a post works in a page.

How to Add Pages in WordPress

Pages are actually very similar to posts, except, they don't have categories, and they don't have tags. Pages don't appear in category pages and archives like posts do, instead they have a specific URL and users go to them directly via links or navigation menus.

I've shown you how to add a post and the process is similar for adding a page in WordPress. In terms of publishing, you have pretty much the same options as posts, except for the sticky part. You can not make a page sticky because that doesn't make sense—they don't appear in lists so they don't need to be stuck to the top of anything.

Pages are their own thing. They don't belong to a category, like posts do and there isn't an archive of pages.

You can however add a featured image to a page.

Under Discussion, you can choose whether or not to allow comments, but this is disabled by default. With that said, if you want, you can allow comments on pages, although it's not a very common practice.

You may change the order of the pages and it's simple to add a new page. The process of creating pages is basically the same as for creating posts.

Conclusion

In this tutorial, I showed you how to create pages and posts and demonstrated their functionality.

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makeitwithmike · 7 years ago

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How I Generate 300,000 Unique Blog Visitors Per Month

By Pauline Cabrera

Alright, so you’ve taken the plunge and decided to start your own website. Love it.

It shows that you’re serious about your business. You may have even made some financial investments, via design or web hosting.

Whatever it is, just know that the time you’re putting in, and the money you’ve spent will come back to you.

Now that the pep talk is out of the way, we need to face certain realities.

YOU HAVE NO VISITORS.

I’m sure it’s no secret to you guys how crucial web traffic is if you want to grow your business.

Despite all of your hard efforts, something just isn’t clicking. You don’t have to feel alone.

Many bloggers just starting out can barely crack 100 visitors a day, let alone thousands.

As a fellow blogger, I know EXACTLY how you guys feel because I was once there. There is no secret formula. You just need a strategy.

Here’s the overview of my users in 2016 for TwelveSkip.com. See how I’ve consistently generated 300,000+ users per month throughout the year?

Here’s what you can do to generate a big amount of traffic in no time:

1. Invest in social media marketing

I’ve learned that every social media channel is different. Some networks may work for you while others may not.

While I use every major social media network myself, I choose to focus on two channels – Facebook Groups and Pinterest. I did invest in other social networks too but I figured that only these two work well for me, mostly because of my niche.

Check out this stat from 2016: (see how Pinterest and Facebook bring the most social traffic?)

In Pinterest, most of my own pins generate thousands of repins. Some of them get over 10,000 repins. My Pinterest generates over 900,000 views per month. In Facebook, I started a group where bloggers help promote each other. Now it has over 7,000 members and 100+ bloggers active daily.

Image Source: Pinterest

How did I do this? Besides reading a lot of tutorials, I also followed some successful people and observed how they use social media. Like they say, learning from the best is always one of the best methods to generate ideas and techniques.

Lesson here? Be active on all social media by using a scheduling tool (to save time) but only focus on those that work well for your niche. Determine where your target audience hangs out the most. Each network works differently so research for tutorials on how to promote on each social network effectively. Lastly, watch how your competitors use social media.

Here’s what I’ve noticed:

Pinterest works well for those who are in the creative industry (bloggers, fashion, makeup, weddings). Most people use Pinterest to search and curate ideas.

Facebook works well for those who are in the entertainment industry. The audience here usually likes and/or shares content that sparks emotion.

Instagram works well for those who are in the creative industry as well. It’s similar to Pinterest but you share your own photos and you need to be active daily in order to make it work well for you.

Here are some useful tutorials: Generate Traffic from Pinterest, Driving More Facebook Traffic, How to Grow Followers on Instagram

Social media should be a part of your daily marketing and that is a non-negotiable – at least until you are able to build up a big enough following.

2. Provide freebies that your target market craves

People think that in order to sell, that making money must be their entire focus. Of course, you want to make money.

But that doesn’t mean you can’t throw out a free nugget of wisdom every so often for your new or loyal visitors.

People LOVE free. If you keep churning out free content that is relevant, you create trust with your visitors. The more they trust you, the more often they will visit your site, and eventually purchase whatever product or service you are selling.

I use this tactic all the time and it works.

In my blog post, 100+ Blog Post Title Templates That Grab Attention, I break down the simple, yet effective way to create catchy blog titles. Here’s an example:

This article really generated a lot of positive feedback because, not only did I write about what works and what doesn’t, but I also provide over 100 title templates for them.

People need information but they don’t necessarily have a lot of time to implement the new information they are absorbing.

This step-by-step formula made it easy for people to create powerful titles, without having to waste precious brain power to create them.

This gives entrepreneurs more time to focus on their business, rather than small details that can often drive people crazy.

What do I get in return? I’ve been racking up relevant backlinks and email subscribers. More backlinks = better search rankings = more traffic = more email subscribers.

This is Google GOLD!

3. Prioritize email list building

Imagine, I started prioritizing this method after about a year of blogging and I really wish I started earlier than that.

As of 2017, here’s my current number of subscribers – 100K!

It does bring a decent amount of website traffic, and no it’s really not as hard as you think.

Here are the methods I use to generate subscribers:

Offer an incentive. Remember, people love free stuff. So offer them something they crave in exchange for their emails.

Place your opt-in in multiple places. Create several catchy opt-ins and place them somewhere visible on your website. This can be done via pop-ups, top bar, bottom right or within your blog posts.

Make it easy to subscribe. Remember, you want to make people’s lives easier. Only request 1 or 2 pieces of information (email and name).

Take advantage of your most popular blog posts. This is actually the most effective method for generating subscribers. 50% of my subscribers come from my most popular blog posts. Check your most popular pages via Google Analytics and offer freebies that are relevant to the current article. For example, you’re offering advice on how to write a catchy title, create a template for them with sample title templates.

You can check out my website (TwelveSkip.com) and see how I place my opt-in forms. There is one on the top, there is one pop up, some within my blog posts and at the bottom of every blog post.

Here’s an example post:

Encourage your readers to subscribe by using beautiful visuals and an effective call to action button. Let them know exactly what they’re getting.

4. Make your content easy to read

Remember, one of your goals is to make a good impression (to keep your visitors coming back).

You want people to remember that your content is easy to follow or scan. You don’t want to scare them off with lengthy, uninterrupted text.

Organize your content in an easy-to-follow format. This includes everything from having images that are big and clear, to making sure your content is easy to read.

Here’s what I do:

Keep your paragraphs short. I like to break up my paragraphs, so users don’t get bogged down by too many words. When you break up the paragraphs, users can read a lot faster. This is particularly useful for articles, which are over 1,000 words.

Use lists. Not only does it make your content look more appealing but it also give your readers a visual break.

Use readable fonts. Use fonts that are easy to read. I recommend using commonly-used ones such as Arial, Georgia, Times New Roman or Trebuchet MS. Do not use less than 12px in size.

Use visual aids. Keep your readers’ attention and make reading a lot more enjoyable with relevant and appealing visuals.

5. Infuse SEO

SEO has always been my most favorite method for driving website traffic. Here’s a stat from Google Analytics. In 2016, about 70% of my visitors came from search engines. Amazing, right?

Let’s take a look at this example post with over 1.8 million views:

When you type “Twitter Header” or “Twitter Cover” on most search engines, you will see that my The New Twitter Header Dimensions + Templates Included (2017) post is on the first page of the Google search.

Why? Not only is it useful, but it’s also optimized for search engines.

See how I use long tail keywords in the post title itself? Instead of just using “Twitter Cover Dimension”, I added “NEW” and “2017” because I know Twitter keeps changing their layout, and people would always search for the latest and most updated template.

Here are some other methods I use to get better search rankings:

Generate backlinks. In order to generate backlinks, create useful content, provide freebies and link to authority websites. Be active on promoting your content by spreading out on social media, engage with other bloggers within your industry, and guest post for high-quality blogs.

Use keywords effectively. Determine what keywords you need to use by defining your target market’s wants and needs, and by watching your competitors. Here’s a good guide for you.

Improve user experience. One of your goals is to get visitors to stay longer on your website and decrease your bounce rate. How? Make your website responsive (mobile friendly). Use a reliable web hosting company. Remember, your website’s speed impacts search ranking so be sure to choose the right web hosting for you. Make your website easy to navigate and easy to scan (ask yourself: when you go to your website, do you immediately understand what it’s all about?)

Apply on-page SEO methods. I optimize my content for search engines by using SEO-friendly URLs, linking to authority websites, using ALT tags on images, removing duplicate content, optimizing meta tags, using headings and doing internal links effectively.

Wrapping up

You may be feeling all alone when it comes to increasing the traffic of your website. But I promise you that if you start implementing these tips, you will experience massive amounts of growth in no time!

What are your favorite ways to increase traffic? Time to share!

Guest Author: Pauline Cabrera is a digital strategist based in Toronto, Ontario. She helps bloggers & businesses get noticed online using effective internet marketing strategies combined with web design, SEO + email marketing.

The post How I Generate 300,000 Unique Blog Visitors Per Month appeared first on Jeffbullas’s Blog.

The post How I Generate 300,000 Unique Blog Visitors Per Month appeared first on Make It With Michael.

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activebodi-blog · 6 years ago

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50+ Places to Promote Your Next Blog Post

So you’ve finished writing the most epic, killer blog post of all time.

It’s 3000+ words, PACKED with value and it will cause empires to fall, thunder to shoot from the sky and people will bow in reverence! Now, people just have to know it exists so they can read it…

Where will they find out about it?

Where the hell do you even promote your blog post?

Damn it.

There are so many options out there yet most people simply pop a link on Facebook and then move permanently into their Google Analytics dashboard to watch to traffic pour in.

Then nothing happens.

We all know there are more places but few actually do the home work to find those places to share their posts. If you’ve got a solid following already and an Email List that’s 100,000’s deep you may not need to promote overly aggressively to every platform on Earth – but when you’re in the early stages and growing you need to get the word out.

So below I’ve listed where you can share your post once it’s published, increase your reach and get more traffic to your blog post.

Before you promote your blog post…

Make sure you write a Blog post that is packed with value, and information people actually want.

Try cramming as much information that is valuable and actionable into your post as possible. Long posts often perform best, so aim for that 2500+ words and make sure that the content is easy to read, scannable and easy to navigate without having to read the whole thing.

Ready? Let’s get to it…

First of all, Send an email out to your subscribers (duh)

If you don’t have an email list, then you need to start one.

Create an Opt-In PDF, sign up for ConvertKit and start building your business. Email will get you far more visitors per subscriber than any other platform. So do not waste this! It seems obvious but it needs to be said.

I have a guide on how to start an email list right here.

Your Facebook Page

You’re already doing this, I know. Bravo!

But don’t get complacent, keep up the good work. If you’ve been tirelessly building your Facebook following then you can get some solid traffic here. Another good reason is if you have supportive people on your page they may like your post before even reading it, it helps it travel further.

Besides, what’s the point of having Facebook if you’re not sharing your blog posts there?

Facebook Groups

You’re still logged into Facebook, right? Good.

If you haven’t already, do some research to find various Facebook Groups that are in your niche or topic and join.

Be helpful, comment, be a solid part of the group and when you publish your blog posts find a handful of groups and share them there.

Just make sure you read the rules of the group and don’t go spamming 100’s of groups in a short amount of time as Facebook will notice! Pick and a handful and test them out.

Tweet it Now

Twitter is another powerful tool for reaching more people.

If you have a strong following a single tweet can make a difference, and it’s not hard to get your first 1000 Twitter Followers. But even if you don’t, you can tag people in your tweet, find some relevant hashtags to use and even sign up for some retweet groups that make it easier for you to reach more people.

You can also source which hashtags to use by leveraging tools like RiteTag!

You can tweet more than once too, soooo……

Tweet it later

Tweet later in the day.

Tweet tomorrow.

Tweet in a week.

You can simply log into Twitter and reshare your post. Even better, try to schedule your Tweet using automation software like Buffer. Another option which is totally free is to use is TweetDeck to schedule your Tweet.

This means you can sort this all out at the one time. Booyah.

JustRetweet

Get some more retweets and spread even further into the Twitterverse by using JustRetweet.

This handy platform allows you to sign up and buy retweets with points you can either buy or accumulate by tweeting, liking and sharing others posts. This is a really cool tool and is one not a lot of people seem to take advantage of. So check it out!

Post to Your Google Business Page

If your website is a business, then you shoudl go to business.google.com and sign up for a business page.

There you can post updates and links that people will see and even add an attractive ‘learn more’ button to your post – linking off to your blog.

Don’t overlook Google Business, they’re owned by this really big company that has a lot to do with search engines (apparently…)

Search Out Online Forums

Does your blog post solve a problem? It should.

Then search for forums related to your niche. There’s usually a search function, type in a question or problem related to your post and go in to offer some advice and link off to your post.

This not only spreads the word about your post but also spreads your reputation as an expert in your field. It’s called networking ;)

Email Influencers & Other Bloggers

I won’t lie, a lot of bloggers and people you email are busy and get this kind of thing all the time, they may just ignore you. But not always…

If you have a good reason for these people to share, then they may go for it. Some of the reasons why a popular blogger, one who is far more established than you, may share your work are:

You mentioned or quoted them in your post

It helps them to sell their products or grow their email list (also a mention)

It solves a problem they or their audience has been having

It’s such a bloody good post it blows them away and they share it out in pure awe (no really lol)

I recommend finding other bloggers who are at about your level of slightly higher though. If you started blogging yesterday, don’t expect to get a tweet sent out by Neil Patel.

You can even create a full outreach post if you really want to leverage this technique.

Proceed with caution, Redditors are protective and will eat you alive if you pop up randomly and spam your post.

However, if you use Reddit, contribute and gain some respect on the platform, some subreddits may enjoy you sharing your post. If not there’s Self Promotion, a subreddit dedicated to you sharing something you’ve created.

The best case scenario here is if someone else shares your post on Reddit. :)

If you have interesting imagery within your post, pinning the images on Pinterest is a solid way to reach more people and catch more eyes.

I’ve personally created collections based on my niche and occasionally I surf Pinterest looking for new images so there’s a healthy mix of my stuff and other people’s pins. Like a lot of things though, give it a try and see what results you get, it may or may not work for you.

If you’ve got a solid following on LinkedIn and your niche is business oriented then share your post on LinkedIn (but don’t share your anime toy collecting website here).

If you have a solid post on a business related topic, LinkedIn can be a good place to cut through the noise as people are expecting this kind of thing to come through. So don’t neglect this powerful social network.

While we’re here…

LinkedIn Groups

A lot like GooglePlus and Facebook, LinkedIn has groups you can join and share to – expect people in the groups will receive emails whenever you post there, so it has a little extra reach.

This can be powerful if used correctly, as usual, I recommend getting a feel for the group cultures a bit and not spamming them all of your links.

Instagram

I know, you can’t share links on Instagram!

You can, however, place a link in your bio. Then all you have to do is post an image to the tune of “more information on our blog, link in my bio” and boom, you’re in. You can also do paid ads and link from there too. You’ve got options :)

Send a Push Notification

You can get visitors to sign up to receive browser and push notifications when you update.

One plugin you can use for Free is made by Push Assist on the WordPress repository.

This is a perfect way to take advantage of technology and reach more people.

Mix (formerly StumbleUpon)

Some people were skeptical of StumbleUpon, but it’s proven to be valuable to my blog’s growth – well now they’re called mix!

If you have your email list ready to convert people, these semi-random visits can lead directly to growth. You can also get some nice indirect growth via SEO, as I’ve noticed many of the posts I create that do well on this platform usually see increased search engine traffic. There’s also the flow-on effect of people sharing your post elsewhere too.

It takes 10 seconds and can be an awesome tool, don’t overlook StumbleUpon.

Digg

Digg is another Social Bookmarking website you can promote your blog post on.

Like a lot of other networks, it covers a wide range of topics so you should be able to share just about anything here. It’s a pretty popular platform so if done right this could be a good promotion for your blog.

Delicious

Or should I say Del.ico.us?

Much like Digg, Delicious is another social bookmarking site covering a wide range of topics but you can also organize and categorize posts. Another place to possibly break through to new people.

Quuu Promote

Ever heard of Quuu Promote?

Quuu Promote is a platform where users can submit their content and it is hand reviewed and suggested to other people on the network who follow similar interests.

It’s an interesting platform so check it out: https://www.quuupromote.co/

Find Niche Bookmarking Sites

So above I’ve mentioned a few general social bookmarking sites that anyone can use, but there are also niche specific sites out there that may suit your blog or latest blog post.

A do a google search and see what exists out there for your niche and consider signing up and sharing there!

Run Paid Ads

Have you promoted your post on Facebook? Boost it!

Any kind of ad you can run that may give you the traffic you can convert into subscribers or customers could be a worthy investment. Crunch the numbers and try things like Google Adwords, Facebook Ads, StumbleUpon ads, etc or any platform you come across.

Buffer it

Do you use the Buffer App?

It’s a nifty platform you can use to schedule future posts to various social media networks (more on it here). Throw the post into your Buffer stream and share it again at a later date.

This is perfect for those who didn’t see it the first time around!

Create a Video

Take your blog content, format it into a video, upload it onto YouTube & link it up in the description!

This acts a promotion, a backlink and you can build up your presence on YouTube at the same time. Also, you can embed the video into your post so people can choose to read or watch – that’s real multimedia for you!

This one is highly underrated.

Create a Podcast

Much like the previous tip, you can read your blog post into a short podcast and link to it in Show notes.

Again, you can build your podcast, promote your content and even embed the recording into your post so people can listen. This strategy will help you spread across multiple mediums.

Snip.ly

Share someone else’s blog post…

..and link to yours!

Snip.ly works by allowing you to share a link and add your own message and link over the top as suggested reading. This is another out of box technique that can make a big difference to your promotion.

Triberr

Triberr is another cool platform where you connect with other bloggers to cross promote each others content.

Find your tribe, share their stuff and they’ll share yours. You can grow both your blog and your network at the same time.

A lot of people swear by this tool for their traffic so don’t overlook it!

Link up Older Blog Posts

If you have existing traffic going to other posts, a simple link could drive you some more people!

On top of that, linking up your newer posts in a relevant fashion from older posts is good for Search Engine Optimization and site structure.

You’ve already got other pages receiving traffic, so promote on them!

Add Tweetable Quotes

People love a though provoking quote. Take advantage by adding a “click to tweet’ on that quote that includes a link back to your post!

Craft a Tweet on Share Link Generator (I have a video on that here), pop it under your quote as a call to action (‘tweet this’ or something similar).

This is a great way to give people quick tweetable content they can share whilst also promoting your blog and your Twitter profile if you include your username in the tweet.

Comment on other relevant Blog Posts

I know this sounds pretty outdated, but if you leave a really helpful comment on a popular post, you can often add a link with your name and email.

If your post expands on another post, comment in a helpful manner and people will click and explore. Some people may say it’s also good for link building but I wouldn’t give it too much credit. Treat it as networking.

Slideshare

Convert your post into a Slideshare slide, linking back to your post!

Slideshare is a lot like PowerPoint, you can create slides with bits and piece of information that pop up as the user views it. This is another strategy many people claim to be effective so try it out for yourself.

Tell Your SnapChat Followers

Got a following on SnapChat? Snap them!

Tell your followers about the problem and tease your solution, telling them to check out your website for more in your latest blog post.

Snapchat is pretty popular these days so don’t underestimate this social media network, it can help you get some good traffic to your website.

Add to your Email Signature

Do you correspond by email a lot? You should have an email signature.

Take advantage of this by updating your email signature with something along the lines of “Latest post: how to lose 10 pounds in 8 weeks” as an example.

If you’re already conversing via email with people then there’s no reason for them not to check it out if they’re interested.

Ask people to share the post – from within the post!

Remember Share Link Generator?

Well, you can simply put a link on your post saying “do you like this post so far, please consider sharing it!” with the text as a link. Budda Bing budda boom! (Again, video here)

Speaking of which, has this post been handy so far? Consider sharing it on Facebook! That’d make my day :)

Add to your Email list DripFeed

You’ve emailed your subscribers, cool. Now add the link to your Dripfeed for future subscribers!

If you have an automatic drip feed hooked up to your email where people get a predetermined series of emails after sign up, then there may be a perfect place there for your blog post.

Add your post onto your drip feed and promote it on autopilot for years to come!

Contact new people directly.

Send a Facebook Message, email, text, phone call, whatever!

If you have friends who support you, people in your industry or niche or even have a private circle of people you share with, then contact them asking to share your post.

I do this one a lot and it works well!

Create some Eye-Catching imagery and share

I’ve extracted quotes, interesting images and all sorts from blogposts and posted them on Facebook and Twitter for their own merits. Add a link to your blog post and you’ve got another promotional method.

Since people engage more with videos or imagery than this one has the potential to reach more than a simple shared link.

Install SumoMe so people can share easily

SumoMe sharebar creates a bar of buttons tha tlink to Facebook, Twitter, etc that visitors can click and share.

Not only does it act as an easy way for people to share your post, but if you have a lot of shares and likes it acts as social proof too.

Sumo Me have a range of tools you can use to get more traffic and grow your email list, so check it out by searching for Sumo Me in the WordPress plugin repository.

Tease the upcoming post

Before you release your next post, tell people it’s coming and what it’s about.

If people really want to hear your take on the post you tease, it’ll build some buzz so when you share it, they’ll be a bit more excited and more likely to visit, link and share.

This is a good strategy when you’re creating a blog post that has been frequently requested.

Facebook Instant Articles

Ever heard of Facebook Instant Articles?

It’s basically a service which links up to your website and stores articles in the Facebook app. So people on Mobile and Tablets can click through to the article and it displays instantly in the Facebook app, no switching to Chrome or Safari, it just loads instantly.

This is a good way to give your posts a little more presence on Social Media and you can even earn money with ads on Instant Articles. So check it out!

Pay to Post

If you know of a relevant Facebook page which is quite large and gets a lot of interaction, consider messaging that page, offering to pay a fee for them to share your link.

This is a technique you can use to reach more people in similar networks and aggressively grow your reach. This can be done on virtually any social media network.

Hell, you could ask them to do it for free, they may accept.

Answer some Questions

There are a number of websites out there where people ask questions for the community to answer.

Search for questions on forums and groups that your post can answer and, in some cases, link to your blog post from. Even if you can’t add a link, mention your website and simply type in the domain name so people can look you up. You’ll help people, build your name and promote your site all at once.

Some of the most popular Q&A websites out there are:

Yahoo Answers

Quora

Answers.com

My Reply Is

Ask.fm

Snippets

Blurtit

Fluther

You can also search for Forums in your niche also, where people often ask their community questions. Simply search google for (your niche) + “forum”. Form there you can usually search form within the forum.

Co-Promote

Start up a network of bloggers and create a group to share that shares each other’s posts.

Be picky and choose only quality bloggers (so you don’t get stuck sharing low-quality blog posts), and then send an email out to your group asking to promote. This is a powerful strategy if done well with good people.

Cross Promote

If you have another website or audience in a similar niche than you have another set of eyes you can leverage.

I once wrote an article on a fitness website “The top physiques in martial arts” and shared it both on the fitness Facebook page as well as my ‘Martial Arts Action Movies’ Facebook page. The Martial Arts page had an audience of thousands and it sent a lot of traffic to the fitness website.

So leverage your other properties appropriately, you can even write a post targeted at another page that works for both niches.

Bloglovin’

Bloglovin’ is a network where bloggers can follow each other and promote their blogs.

While it’s rooted heavily in Fashion and Lifestyle, this covers a wide range of topics and can be a powerful tool if you grow your presence on Bloglovin’. Check out their website here.

Blog Engage

Blog Engage is another community built for people to share their blogs and blog posts.

This is another tool that can be useful for interacting with other bloggers, build your network and then leveraging it directly by keeping people there up to date by posting your blog posts there regularly.

Check out Blog Engage.

AllTop

This content aggregator won’t take up much of your time.

Sign up and submit your RSS Feed and if you make the Alltop listing than your website will automatically display your latest posts. This tool is attractive because it only takes one submission to get started. You don’t have to submit every single post, it’s all automated!

Check out AllTop

Tumblr

Tumblr is a blogging platform that is linked up just like a social network.

It’s easy, sign up for a Tumblr account, follow some people (many will follow back) and then share your links on your blog with a few tags attached. Tumblr is another popular network which is perfect for building your network and of course, sharing your blog posts!

Check out Tumblr

Blog Post Roundups

Many blogs and website run Blog Post Roundups or have blog posts dedicated to a certain topic, linking out to other bloggers posts.

You can contact these websites and submit your post for consideration. If the quality of your post is high, most people are more than happy to include them in a roundup. Google is your friend here as it may take some searching to come up with what you’re after.

Flipboard

Flipboard is another bookmarking style site you can sign up for and share your posts on.

Flipboard is another site which covers many topics and niches so just about anyone has the opportunity to share the blog posts here and grow their traffic. This could be another promotional tool to grow your following with.

Check out Flipboard

Make use of “Latest Posts” Widgets

People may land on your website and leave because they don’t see anything that interests them. So promote your latest Blog Post!

If you don’t have a blog page as your home page, throw a ‘latest posts’ widget there, same for the sidebar and maybe even the footer of your website. Anywhere where people might see your latest posts and shift their attention is a potential reader of your most recent work.

This is a common feature of your standard WordPress Widgets.

Share again at a later date!

Remember, once you’ve written this post, shared it and moved doesn’t mean it’s dead and gone.

If you’re proud of this post or it gets a good response, keep it up your sleeve and share it again in a week, a few months, later in the year, in 2 years or anytime when it’s still relevant. It’s been made so why not make use of it over and over again.

Automate and Link these avenues of promotion

Save time by linking some of these platforms up.

You can easily link Facebook to Twitter right here. Most people know that, but there’s another tool called “If this, then that”, or IFTTT for short. It allows you to login and link up a massive number of apps with rules, many being based on your RSS feed when you share a new post, or to share from a platform like Instagram to Pinterest or Tumblr.

There’s way too much for me to mention here but is a powerful tool and a MASSIVE time saver if you’re looking to make your blog post promotion more efficient.

Check it out at IFTTT.com, spend some time and write some ‘recipes’.

Finally, Create a “Promotion Cheat Sheet”, here’s how:

OK, so you have a few places in mind already from above, but can you remember them all? Have you done any further research? Well, let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves.

In my time I’ve created and run several websites. Some went nowhere, some have received mammoth traffic in their time. If there’s one thing that I swore by, at least in the earlier days of blogging it was having a promotional cheat sheet I could refer to each time I published a post.

That way every time I published a post I’d open up the sheet and promote it on every website or platform listed. It’s not rocket science, it called being organized. SO!

First, Create a Spreadsheet.

Do you have Microsoft Excel? Open Office Calculator? Maybe even a Google Sheet?

Whichever weapon of choice you use, let’s get started by creating a spreadsheet…

Excellent. You’re doing well so far.

Now add the following across the top:

Website / Platform

URL

Username

Password

Maybe make the text bold and widen the columns to accommodate. It should look something like this:

Add the sites & their information:

Now, just go through and fill out the form with any platforms you may have, with the corresponding information.

It’s pretty basic & straightforward :)

Now, research & add everything in.

Spend some time searching, researching and looking for places to promote your latest blog post. Make sure you include any of the items already in this blog post (that’s kinda the point of this whole thing), record these places down, sign up for their services and put everything right here.

The idea is to spend some time upfront gathering up information for the future.

So the next time you post, use the list you just created!

Like I said, it’s not rocket science.

Next time you go to publish a post you will know exactly where to promote it and begin the influx of traffic. Just make sure your website is ready to receive and convert the traffic it receives into customers or Email subscribers.

Over time you can refine this list by going into your analytics and seeing where your traffic is coming from. For the sake of efficiency I highly recommending adding and removing over time so you don’t waste hours promoting your stuff somewhere just to receive 1 or 2 visitors.

Thanks for reading this post and I hope it helps you out.

If you want more information just like this, consider subscribing to our Email Newsletter below!

source https://wellbuildyourblog.com/promote-blog-post/

#blogging #internet marketing #social media

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diyandweebly166-blog · 6 years ago

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lovelovingbouquetbeliever · 6 years ago

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#http://itubeudecide.com/2019/02/23/no-bake-peanut-butter-granola-cups/

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suzanneshannon · 4 years ago

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The Thirteenth Fourth

Design

For example…

The search experience is totally different, as it is powered by Jetpack’s Instant Search now.

The Almanac pages (e.g. background-blend-mode) have an additional sidebar that helps you navigate between pages

Maybe next year we’ll do something different again. My list is starting to grow for some behind-the-scenes tech stuff I wanna re-jigger, and sometimes that goes hand in hand with redesign work.

Closed Forums

Nobody here, including me, checked in on the forums with any regularity. Unmoderated public forums on the internet are not acceptable to me.

Now that they’ve been off a number of months, I can report that the lifting of the mental weight feels very good to me and there is been little if any major negatives.

Social

The result? Our follower count goes up at the same rate it always did. Engagement there is the same, or higher, than it ever was. What a relief. Do ten times less work for the same benefit.

Opened Up Design Possibilities

One aspect of this site that I’ve been happy with is the opportunity to do custom design on content. Here are some examples of that infrastructure.

On any given blog post, we can pick a template. Some of those templates are very specific. For example, my essay The Great Divide is a template all to itself.

For example, my recent post on DX is styled as a Fancy Post with Custom CSS applied right within the block editor.

Another door we opened for design possibilities is a classic one: using categories. A sort of freebie you get in WordPress is the ability to create templates for all sorts of things that just sort of automatically work if they are named correctly. So for example I have a filed called category-2019-end-of-year-thoughts.php and that fully gives me control over making landing pages for groups of posts, like our end-of-year thoughts homepage. Not to mention our “Guide Collection” pages which are another way to programmatically build collections of pages.

That’s a lot of tools to do custom work with, and I’m really happy with that. It feels like we’ve given ourselves lots of potential with these tools, and only started taking advantage of it.

Speaking of which, another aspect of custom design we have available is the new book format…

eCommerce

We’re using WooCommerce here on the site now again. I just got done singing the praises of the Block Editor and how useful that is been… WooCommerce is in the same boat. I feel like I’m getting all this powerful functionality with very little effort, at a low cost, and with little technical debt. It makes me very happy to have this site on WordPress and using so much of suite of functionality that offers.

CSS Flexbox Poster

Find yourself constantly looking up the properties and values for CSS flexbox? Why not pin this beautiful poster up to the wall of your office so you can just glance over at it?

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WooCommerce helps:

Build a membership system and sell memberships. Membership can lock certain pages to members-only as has programmatic hooks I can use for things like removing ads.

Sell subscriptions to those memberships, with recurring billing.

Sell one-off products

And I’m just scratching the surface of course. WooCommerce can do anything eCommerce wise.

Analytics