#How to Harness Your Personality and Become a Better Blogger

[gsteinbert10]

Building Trust Online: The Role of E-E-A-T in Digital Marketing

Trust is the currency of the internet. Without it, brands struggle to rank, convert, or retain loyal customers. For digital marketers and SEO specialists, ensuring a website demonstrates trust is the key to unlocking long-term organic traffic growth. Enter E-E-A-T—Expertise, Experience, Authority, and Trustworthiness. This fundamental framework has become a central focus of content marketing and SEO strategies, helping brands establish credibility and rise in search engine rankings.

This blog will break down what E-E-A-T means, why it’s critical in digital marketing, and how you can leverage it to build trust with your audience while improving your SEO performance.

What is E-E-A-T?

E-E-A-T stands for Expertise, Experience, Authority, and Trustworthiness, and it is a concept featured prominently in Google’s Quality Rater Guidelines. These principles evaluate how well your content aligns with the searcher’s intent and whether your website can be trusted as a source of reliable information.

The Key Pillars of E-E-A-T

Experience:

Demonstrating first-hand experience within your content builds credibility. For example, a food blogger sharing personal experiences of preparing recipes establishes a connection with the audience beyond simple technical knowledge.

Expertise:

High-quality content written or curated by an expert in the field enhances your authority. For this, niche knowledge matters. A medical site needs verified professionals delivering accurate advice.

Authority:

Are others in your industry validating your content? Earning high-quality backlinks from reputable domains establishes your position as a referring authority in your space.

Trustworthiness:

Are you trustworthy as a website and brand? Secure HTTPS connections, transparent business details, and updated content all contribute to trust signals that matter to your audience and search engines.

Why E-E-A-T is Critical for SEO

Google has been transparent about its mission—prioritizing content that provides the most value to users. Here’s how E-E-A-T plays into modern SEO strategies and organic traffic growth.

Improves Rankings: Websites with high E-E-A-T are more likely to appear in top search results due to their perceived credibility.

Enhances Content Marketing: Blog posts and landing pages that incorporate E-E-A-T principles will resonate better with audiences, fostering engagement and reducing bounce rates.

Supports Backlink Acquisition: High-quality backlinks from authoritative websites lend additional credibility to your domain, further boosting E-E-A-T signals.

Aligns with Google’s Algorithm Updates: Many recent updates, such as the helpful content system, reward websites that are transparent, user-focused, and trustworthy.

When you embed E-E-A-T into your digital marketing strategies, you align your brand with Google’s evolving priorities while building long-term trust with users.

How to Harness E-E-A-T for Effective Digital Marketing

Putting E-E-A-T into action takes intention. Below are actionable steps to incorporate these principles into your content marketing and SEO strategies today.

Create Authoritative Content with Expertise

Content marketing isn’t just about quantity; it’s about quality, relevance, and expertise.

Research-backed blog posts, case studies, and whitepapers signal authority.

Always cite reputable sources and author credentials, especially in industries like healthcare or finance.

Use structured data markup like “author schema” to improve search engine visibility and showcase credibility.

Prioritize Trust Signals Across Your Website

Users want reassurance that your brand is secure and legitimate. Key trust signals include:

Implement HTTPS to secure data on your website.

Display transparent contact details and privacy policies.

Regularly update and fact-check your content to keep it accurate.

Invest in High-Quality Backlinks

Backlinks are your vote of confidence in the digital ecosystem.

Focus on link building strategies that prioritize value rather than spammy practices. Collaborate with reputable websites to earn natural links.

Ensure backlink diversity by acquiring links from a variety of authoritative sources rather than over-relying on one network.

Showcase First-hand Experience

Photos, firsthand reviews, and user-generated content all help support the “experience” component of E-E-A-T.

If your blog revolves around a product, publish experiential case studies.

Videos demonstrating product use or tutorials work exceptionally well to convey first-hand knowledge.

Foster Community and Engagement

Trust flourishes when there is consistent interaction between people and the brand. Building this community can amplify E-E-A-T signals.

Respond promptly and thoughtfully to comments or questions on your blog and social platforms.

Encourage user-generated testimonials and reviews to drive credibility organically.

Keep Pace with Digital Marketing Trends

Stay up to date with digital marketing trends and algorithm updates to anticipate how changes might affect E-E-A-T principles.

Build Trust Online Through E-E-A-T

Establishing a trusted and authoritative online presence takes time, effort, and a clear strategy. By embedding E-E-A-T principles into your website’s content and infrastructure, you’ll be better positioned to compete, rank, and ultimately grow your brand’s influence in a crowded digital landscape.

Want to take your strategy to the next level? Start by evaluating your high-performing content and tighten weak spots by improving trust signals. Amplify your content’s reach with solid link building strategies and diverse backlinks to get seen by the right audience.

With E-E-A-T as your guiding framework, you’re not just optimizing for search engines—you’re building connections and credibility with the people that matter most.

[reluconsultant]

web scraping solutions

Unleashing the Power of Web Scraping Solutions: Boost Your Data Strategy

In an increasingly data-driven world, the ability to gather, analyze, and utilize information effectively has become a critical factor for success in business, research, and various other domains. One potent tool in the arsenal of data enthusiasts is web scraping.

This technique, often referred to as web harvesting or web data extraction, allows individuals and organizations to extract valuable data from websites and use it for a myriad of purposes. In this blog post, we'll delve into the world of web scraping solutions, exploring what they are, why they matter, and how they can elevate your data strategy.

Understanding Web Scraping Solutions

To begin, let's demystify the concept of web scraping. At its core, web scraping is the process of extracting data from websites. This data can range from product prices and customer reviews to news articles and weather forecasts. Web scraping solutions are specialized tools or software applications designed to automate and streamline this data extraction process.

Web scraping solutions work by sending requests to websites, retrieving web pages' HTML or structured data, and then parsing and extracting the desired information. This data can be stored in various formats, such as CSV, JSON, or databases, making it accessible and ready for analysis.

Why Web Scraping Matters

Competitive Advantage: In a highly competitive landscape, having access to real-time data can provide a significant edge. Web scraping enables you to monitor competitors, track market trends, and adjust your strategies accordingly.Market Research: Gathering data from websites can be invaluable for market research. You can analyze customer reviews, pricing data, and consumer sentiment to make informed decisions.Lead Generation: For sales and marketing teams, web scraping can be used to generate leads. You can scrape business directories, social media platforms, and other sources to identify potential clients or customers.Content Aggregation: Bloggers, journalists, and content creators can automate content aggregation using web scraping. This simplifies the process of curating and republishing content on your website or platform.Data-Driven Decision-Making: Data is the foundation of effective decision-making. Web scraping empowers businesses to collect, analyze, and visualize data, enabling better-informed choices.

Choosing the Right Web Scraping Solution

Selecting the appropriate web scraping solution is crucial to the success of your data strategy. Here are some key considerations when making your choice:

Scalability: Ensure that the solution can handle the volume of data you need. Scalability is vital if you anticipate increased data requirements in the future.

Ease of Use: Look for user-friendly interfaces and features that simplify the web scraping process. Some solutions offer no-code or low-code options.

Customization: Your needs may be unique. Seek solutions that allow for customization and flexibility in defining scraping rules.Data Quality: Data accuracy is paramount. Check if the solution offers features to handle data cleansing, deduplication, and error handling.Support and Updates: Regular updates and responsive customer support are essential to address any issues or changes in web structure.

Web Scraping Ethics and Legal Considerations

While web scraping is a powerful tool, it's essential to use it responsibly and ethically. Always respect website terms of service and robots.txt files, which can specify which parts of a website can be scraped and which cannot. Additionally, be mindful of data privacy laws and regulations, especially when dealing with personal information.

Conclusion

Web scraping solutions are a game-changer for businesses and individuals seeking to harness the wealth of data available on the internet. Whether you're looking to gain a competitive advantage, conduct market research, or automate tedious data collection tasks, web scraping can be your secret weapon.

By understanding the fundamentals of web scraping, selecting the right solution, and operating within ethical and legal boundaries, you can boost your data strategy and uncover insights that drive success in today's data-driven world. So, go ahead and unleash the power of web scraping – your data-driven journey starts here.

[thejakeformerlyknownasprince]

Disability and Loren

@zarohk asked for my thoughts on a Disability Studies/Media Studies perspective on the disability depictions in Animorphs.  Which was foolish, because I’m teaching an entire dang class on the subject of superheroes and mental health, so I have Many Thoughts.  [PLEASE NOTE: I am nondisabled, so if I err, please tell me so.]

Loren’s role in #49: The Diversion does a lot of things right, and a lot of things wrong.  She incurs a traumatic brain injury that results in memory loss and blindness a couple of years after Tobias is born, and lives with said injury for about ten years before Tobias finds her and gives her the ability to morph, which restores her sight but not her memory.

A few places where I commend the depiction of Loren:

It gets into the massive underemployment of disabled Americans.  Loren is smart, canny, athletic, compassionate... and working a call center job in exchange for state benefits.  Said state benefits do not afford her a decent standard of living; Tobias notes that she has few possessions and almost no time for leisure activities.  Americans with disabilities are twice as likely to be unemployed as those without, and those who do have jobs are ten times more likely to be paid less than minimum wage, e.g. in sheltered workshops.

It shows how inaccessible a lot of systems are in the U.S.  Tobias notes that Loren accidentally grabs an expired quart of milk — because nothing on the label is printed in Braille.  Putting raised text and/or Braille on food packaging is a health and safety issue, one that the U.S. ignores even though it violates its own laws (e.g. the ADA) because companies tend to do what they want and “what they want” is usually not to spend more money on packaging.  The call center and bus system are both marginally more accessible, especially when Loren has Champ to help, but they’re still clearly spaces set up for sighted people that don’t take blind users into account very well.

It shows some of the workarounds that help deal with accessibility problems.  Loren’s house is set up so that there are clear paths to and from all of the relevant spaces.  She’s doing that to allow herself to move around comfortably in that space, because she’s made it accessible for herself.  She memorizes the layout of the local store, and uses that to get around as well.  All of those details help show that she’s adjusted, and actively interacting with her own circumstances.

It drives home the difference between service dogs and pets.  This distinction is extremely important, and it gets ignored all the time by entitled ableists who want to bring their pets into stores.  Tobias and Marco both assume from the outside that it can’t be that hard to become a service animal — just do what Loren says to do, right? — but it takes Tobias 0.02 seconds to realize that it’s not that simple and that he cannot imitate Champ’s lifetime of training on the fly.  He says that he manages to get his mom home in one piece, and that that’s about all that can be said for his sad performance as a guide.  Champ has skills like ignoring interesting smells and applying exactly the right amount of pressure to the harness that most pets don’t have and also most pets can’t learn.  Champ is not a pet, at least not while he’s in that harness; he’s a gainfully employed expert assistant.

It rounds Loren out as a character, and definitely does not just make her into a lesson or problem for Tobias.  Loren is gently humorous, tolerating her coworkers’ teasing and Ax’s attempted juvenile delinquency with an eye-roll.  She’s compassionate, listening to other people’s problems on the phone with genuine concern and not swatting flies if she doesn’t have to.  She’s tough-minded and stupidly brave, chucking rocks at Visser Three’s head and flying at attack helicopters as a three-pound bird.  She’s fallible, unable to support Tobias emotionally even when he asks her to do so and unwilling to check in on him after leaving him with her sister.  She’s a fully rounded person, one whose personality is informed but not defined by her disability.

It talks about some of the unromatic aspects of a Traumatic Brain Injury.  Too often in other works of fiction, we see a person get bonked over the head and wake up with no episodic memory but all other brain functions intact (*cough* Rachel in MM1 *cough*).  Loren actually gets into the fact that she forgot huge chunks of language, forgot how to brush her teeth, forgot how to walk across a room.  She obviously lost her sight as well, and she mentions lifelong balance and coordination problems.  Even her amnesia isn’t absolute — she has some traces of recall, but can’t make anything coherent of her impressions.  Her injury isn’t 100% realistic, but it’s more so than many TBIs we see in fiction.

It focuses on the intersection of disability and social class.  Tobias notes that Loren is under a compounded threat because of her inability to move to a more secure neighborhood and her obvious vulnerability.  He feels a lot of disgust with himself when he and Marco and Ax are harassing Loren, because it’s so clear that this isn’t the first time she’s been harassed.  Tobias understands that his experience with poverty as a nondisabled male minor is different from Loren’s for those reasons.

A few places where Loren falls into the common traps of implied ableism creeping into fiction, as written about in Narrative Prosthesis: 

She gets “cured.”  Loren falls into the “kill or cure” dichotomy, like most of the other disabled characters in Animorphs.  In her case, it’s that she gains the power to morph and in the process regains the ability to see.  It isn’t a complete cure, true — she still has no memory — but it means that she’s no longer blind for the rest of the series.  Having the occasional character no longer be disabled sometimes isn’t automatically problematic; having every disabled character get either “fixed” or killed off inherently treats the disabled body as a problem that needs to be solved, through sci fi nonsense if no other way is available.

She implies that she’d rather die than continue to be disabled.  When injured by dracon burns, Loren initially refuses to morph out even though Tobias tells her she’ll die if she remains a bird, because (they both assume) to morph out is to return to her blind human body.  This moment buys into the stereotype that it’s better to be dead than disabled, again inherently devaluing the lives of actual blind individuals.

There’s a certain amount of mystery around how she became disabled.  It’s interesting that we never actually get a definitive answer on that one — Loren says she was told it was a car crash, but there’s also an implication that she was attacked by controllers, and we don’t know for sure.  However, the fact of her disability is treated as an aberrant state that needs to be explained, the book inherently asking “why are you like this?”  By contrast (for instance) she doesn’t ask Tobias “why are you in the body of a hawk?”

She views herself as a burden, and the narration doesn’t do enough to contradict her.  Loren says that she couldn’t possibly be expected to raise a child while also blind and coping with a TBI.  Real blind people raise kids all the time, however, including blind single parents, and it’d be nice to see some evidence in the story that Loren’s assumption is wrong.  Loren also apparently assumes that she can’t begin to play a role in Tobias’s life even now that Tobias is more self-sufficient, again because she views herself as relatively helpless and non-contributing due to her disability.  There are some hints that she’s wrong, but we don’t really see her either begin to contribute to the resistance or build a relationship with Tobias until after she’s become un-blind.

Tobias’s view of Loren is often pitying.  As much as Loren doesn’t initially view herself as a potential maternal figure to Tobias, he doesn’t view her as a potential mentor either.  He repeatedly expresses horror or sadness at her life circumstances, and assumes that her life must be barren due to the spartan nature of her home.  (Of course, that begs the question of why the hell a blind woman living alone would ever bother hanging pictures on her walls or putting doilies on her coffee tables, but Tobias doesn’t consider that angle.)  Again, Tobias is allowed to assume that her life must be meaningless if she’s disabled, but it’d be nice to see some contradictory evidence in the form of her having close friends or inane hobbies or some other proof that to lead a disabled life is not to automatically lead a lonely one.

Loren expresses bitterness and desperate desire to be nondisabled.  Again, it’s fine for any character to say “I wish my life was different,” and it’s a common consensus among blind writers/bloggers that being blind is often a pain in the butt.  However, views as extreme as “you need vision to have a fulfilling existence” or “vision is part of what makes us human” are ableist crocks of shit.  Loren doesn’t go so far as to espouse those extreme views, but she also doesn’t seem to view herself as having a well-rounded life in spite of her disability.  It’d be nice to see Loren talking about sight as handy or enjoyable or a thing that the designers of 99% U.S. environments assume everyone must have, rather than a necessary precondition for a minimum standard of life.

Loren’s disability is somewhat medicalized.  Same caveat as above: disabilities are by definition medical things that some bodies do or have that other bodies do not.  However, discussing disability primarily through “this is how your body is different from Implied Normal of Nondisabled Body” and focusing on doctor’s notes, diagnoses, physical differences, etc. can serve to disconnect the lived experience of the individual from their body.  It also tends to focus on the ways that the body is “the problem” rather than focusing on the ways that environments and attitudes are problematic, which then prevents anyone from asking hard questions about the environments and attitudes.  Loren’s doctor’s note, discussion of scarring and loss, and repeated physical descriptions are somewhat more medical than social.  It’d be nice to see a little more emphasis on the social factors that make blindness a disability (e.g. improperly labeled milk), and less on “your eyes are different from those of Implied Normal Nondisabled Person.”

[the-bounce-back]

THE CONFIDENCE CHRONICLES PART V - CONFIDENCE IN YOUR CONFIDENCE

This is post 5/5 of my “Confidence Chronicles” series, in which I discuss the mindsets, actions and thought processes I’ve applied to build/rebuild my confidence in different aspects of my life. The goal of these 5 posts is for you readers to be able to apply relevant points to your own insecurities in order to combat them, and hopefully build your own confidence over time.

—————————————————————

So… we’re finally at the last post of the Confidence Chronicles. It’s taken its sweet (long-ass) time, but we finally got there in the end. Furthermore, it’s almost exactly a year ago since the idea for this series popped into my head, so this really has ended up coming full circle… albeit unintentionally. Not going to lie, it’s kind of a bittersweet feeling - it’s going to feel strange to not focus so heavily on confidence anymore, but on the other hand… I don’t have to focus so heavily on confidence anymore. Finally, I can bring my other post ideas that have been collecting dust in my drafts to life!

The funny thing is that although I started this series with a plan for what I was going to write about in each post, I never actually settled on what aspect of my confidence I wanted to end this series with. I figured that when the time came to write this, I would have a clear idea of what would be an appropriate note to wrap up the series on. 

Of course, at that point in time I didn’t know that the latter half of 2019 was going to turn my life upside down. I didn’t know that I was going to find myself in a massive slump due to stress, confusion and anxiety over my career, my direction and purpose in life and my role in the grand scheme of the world. I know it all sounds very melodramatic and like an excuse to not apply myself to complete my projects - which might be partially true - but the truth is that these questions have been weighing on me for a long time. Long before I started working on my mental health, long before I started this blog, long before moving back to the UK. I’ve been able to ignore these feelings for a long time, but lately they’ve been making themselves extremely hard to avoid. I think that the reason lies in that I’m soon going to be on what society likes to call the “wrong” side of 25, and that I still feel like I’m figuring out where my life is going… i.e. running around like a headless chicken.

However, this blog has really forced me to confront my fears in a way that counselling or confiding in someone I trust ever could - simply because it makes me work through my innermost thoughts and feelings alone. Attempting to address deeply buried issues in order to make my peace with them so I can move past it has been a very triggering process, and also extremely reliant on trial and error.

When you make an error in your healing process, it can be devastating and a major setback in your daily life. But when you get it right… the pain and hard work all becomes worth it. Trust me. There is nothing more satisfying than thinking of a past situation that used to make you feel like you had the weight of the world of the shoulders, and realising that although it felt like it at the time, it didn’t kill you. Hell, you’d even be able to go through it again and be confident you can make it through again, if you had to. One day you’ll even be able to laugh at the situations that once tore you down, and with your newfound confidence be able to realise that at the end of the day… it wasn’t that deep (or, at least, not deep enough to kill you).

For this reason, I want to tie the messages from the previous posts of this Confidence Chronicles series together to make this post - confidence in your newfound confidence. Once you build a solid foundation of confidence in all aspects of your life, the next step is learning to adjust to the newfound energy, positivity and motivation that this confidence manifests itself as. I personally learned (and - in certain cases - am still learning) how to harness this “power” in the following ways: 

1. Slowly but surely trusting myself to believe in my own capabilities.

Do you want to know something that’s funny but at the same time not  funny? If not, tough sh*t because here it comes: despite writing so extensively about confidence, my own levels of confidence are somewhat unreliable at best.

As I’ve mentioned countless times before, I never write blog posts when I’m in a bad place mentally. In fact, every single post (except one) on here is written when I’m in a great mood, my mind is clear, my confidence levels are unbeatable and I can write about my bad times in an objective manner that doesn’t end up making me sad. A quick scroll through my past posts prove that it’s so easy to assume that I’m 100% over the hard things that I’ve written about on here, simply because I’ve become so good at realising my own past mistakes and how I should move forward. However, in reality, there’s usually not a day that goes by without the topics crossing my mind.

I’ve been told many a time by friends that while I’m excellent at giving advice and knowing exactly what measures to take to get over a situation, I’m not very good at applying said advice to myself. It’s very true, and very frustrating - reading my own posts back makes me realise that I already have the tools and capabilities required to be able to heal, but so far I only seem to be able to use these tools when I’m in a good place. For this reason, I struggle a fair amount with self-doubt in my authenticity as a mental health blogger, because what’s the point of preaching about self-love, self-care and bettering your mental health if your own mental health is in a complete shambles from time to time?

However, it’s not all bad, because the more I apply myself to think of solutions, apply said solutions to my own life and start seeing the benefits of constantly working on myself, the more confident I become that one day I’ll get to a stage where I can confidently write about my issues without this nagging feeling that I’m a fraud. Additionally, g-checking myself from time to time and making sure that I am actually following my own advice makes me increasingly more secure in the knowledge that I am extremely emotionally intelligent and do have enough experience to change my own life, as well as others’. 

I think the main thing here is to keep on doing whatever it is you’re trying to improve upon, and allow yourself to appreciate how far you’ve come on your journey as opposed to solely focusing how long you have to go. Regardless of if you’re doubting your capabilities in the workplace, your body goals, your ability to adapt to new situations or your creative ventures - or a combination of all four - it’s important to acknowledge and celebrate your progress.

Giving yourself a well-deserved pat on the back and focusing on how far you have come since the beginning gives you the chance to fully appreciate the hard work you’ve put in towards bettering yourself - which leads to you gradually feeling confident in trusting the power in your own capabilities over time.

2. Stopping the negative self-talk.

As it so happens, I have quite a dark and self-deprecating sense of humour - and so do many of my friends and my sister. Calling myself and others every offensive name under the sun as a joke is something that used to occur on a near daily basis, under the guise that it was all harmless banter. I’ve literally been doing this for as long as I can remember, but the past few months or so, I’ve really been trying to stop for a few reasons.

The main reason is that regardless of how harmless belittling your intelligence and capabilities as a joke may seem, doing it on a regular basis can lead to you internalising these notions and gradually starting to believe them. Although I genuinely thought that I was mentally resilient enough to be able to separate jokes from reality, whenever I’d fall into a bit of slump the first things that would come into my head were the things I’d said about myself as a joke. They would sting a lot, because in those moments I would genuinely believe them.

“God, I’m such a dumb b*tch”.

“Ugh, when did I become such a d*ckhead?”

“I swear to God.... I f*cking hate myself”

“Oh, great, so on top of being a dumb b*tch - I’m also a fat b*tch. Excellent”.

The mad thing is that I’m actually laughing while writing this, simply because I’m in a positive state of mind and know that it’s all a joke. I know I’m neither dumb, a d*ckhead, or fat. Nor do I hate myself anymore. But as soon as that Sunday night sadness hits (I know you all know what I’m talking about!), there I am - trying to choke back tears because I’ve managed to delude myself into thinking that the above is, in fact, true. For this reason, I’ve also tried to stop doing it to my friends, because I’d hate to think that they may be internalising something mean that I’ve said to them as a jOkE.

It’s also interesting to think why self-deprecating humour comes so easily to a lot of us. I can only speak for myself and certain friends that are similar to me in this aspect, but I genuinely think it’s because we’ve - very sadly - grown accustomed to being verbally abused and/or having our weaknesses constantly being picked at during our formative years - either in our home environments, school environments, or both. Instead of devising healthier methods of coping with and eliminating these internalisations, we’ve become reliant on using humour as a source of escapism from our nagging insecurities cast upon us by people around us. 

When I started seeing self-deprecating humour in this light, it actually made me quite sad. There I was, thinking that I should get into comedy for being so hilarious, when really it turned out to be just me being too scared to deal with my own insecurities. That’s when I knew things needed to change, and I’ve been working on this ever since.

Personally, the easiest way for me to reduce my negative self-talk has been to try to visualise how I would feel if a stranger (it used to be friends, but then I remembered that most of my friends are as tapped as I am) was saying it to me. I soon realised that if it had come from anyone else but myself or my friends, I’d be ready to throw hands over this literal verbal abuse. I am now trying my best to speak to and treat myself in the same way that a stranger or acquaintance would - with dignity, respect, honesty and with a regard for my own feelings (because, lo and behold, it is possible to be brutally honest and kind at the same time).

Of course, this is so much easier said than done - especially if you, like me, love a cheeky self-drag and dragging others (out of love, of course). However, this doesn’t have to mean that you can stop having fun - I’ve found that an eloquently worded drag meant to act as a wake-up call for me/someone else to improve my/their situation without having to resort to insults and name-calling is infinitely more creative, satisfying and efficient. Furthermore, I’ve found that g-checks that are based on constructive criticism as opposed to cruel insults give you a clearer image of how to improve yourself moving forward - which can only be a good thing.

Basically, just be patient and kind to yourself and others. Take on the constructive criticism received from yourself and your friends/family to work towards bettering yourself, and your confidence will follow.

3. Learning to trust the feelings of positivity and self-love.

This is by far the hardest one for me - and for good reason. When you’ve spent a large part of your teenage years and early adulthood believing that your capabilities and strengths are inadequate, that you’re ugly, that you’re not worthy of love and happiness, that your life has no purpose and that your family and friends would be better off without you, it’s nearly impossible to break free from this toxic downward spiral and to unlearn all of the behaviours and thought processes that have manifested as a result of these feelings. 

The keyword here is nearly.

Obviously, I can only speak for myself, but I would like to think that this could be applied to others as well. When I started this jOuRnEy, I honestly thought I’d never get to a place where I genuinely love every aspect of myself. Despite this, I kept pushing myself through the extremely triggering task of unpacking my toxic feelings - until one day I suddenly didn’t have them anymore. Or, at the very least, they suddenly no longer hurt me. Seemingly out of nowhere... I felt okay.

The sad but still understandable thing about suddenly coming to terms with who you are, what you’ve been through and feeling confident enough to move forward is that you don’t trust the feeling at first. At all. You tell yourself that it’s just one of the little upswings before everything comes crashing down around you again, dragging you back to step one, and you try to mentally prepare yourself for said downfall to happen.

But it doesn’t.

Sure, you might have little dips every now and again. You know that healing isn’t a linear process, so you assume that these little dips will lead to you spiralling again. But, to your surprise, they don’t - and you find yourself picking yourself up, dusting yourself off, and moving forward with your life relatively unscathed and with more experience and wisdom than before. You start to get suspicious and a little scared because things are actually going alright for once. You’ve become so used to your life being so riddled with anxiety, insecurity, sadness and chaos and the good times being fleeting, that this new reality is extremely alien to you. 

This is where things can go one out of two ways.

Either your anxiety kicks in and you start self-sabotaging in different ways because you’re afraid that the longer things are going well, the harder the fall is going to be - so you might as well save yourself the pain by not pursuing things that could allow you to be happy. Or, you are able to tentatively start trusting and accepting the waves of love and positivity as your new reality - making you find the strength and confidence to move forward despite the past pain and hurt.

Personally, it took several rounds of self-sabotaging before getting to the point of learning to trust the positive feelings and  my confidence in all aspects of myself. I try not to beat myself up over all the opportunities I’ve turned down simply due to genuinely believing that I’m not good/smart/pretty/talented enough, but I’d be lying if I said it doesn’t make me sad from time to time. However, the more time that passes I get more and more confident that new, even better opportunities will come up for me - and I’ll be confident enough to embrace them without any hesitation when the time comes.

To wrap up this whole Confidence Chronicles series, I want to leave you all with this simple but true statement:

It gets better - if you’re willing to put in the work.

Regardless of which of the posts resonated with you the most, I need you to understand that building confidence takes time. I would even go as far as saying that it’s a never-ending journey, and that the learning to fully love and trust yourself and your capabilities is a never-ending process as life progresses. However, the more you work hard on your own betterment, the easier and smaller the challenges that arise from time to time become.

My ultimate wish is that we all one day can get to a place where we can trust ourselves enough to be happy and confident, regardless of what life throws at us. That whenever things that would usually send us down that spiral again pop up, we can just take a deep breath, count to ten, and be confident in the knowledge that the situation no longer has power over us, and that we will easily be able to work through it.

Until that day comes - never stop fighting.

Love,

Liv

[richardrobertsimsuccessblog]

How to Harness Your Personality and Become a Better Blogger

This post comes to us courtesy of ProBlogger psychology expert Ellen Jackson

Are you a scheduler? Or do you publish as you write?

Do you delegate? Or is your need for the nitty-gritty too great?

I’d love to be the writer with the annual content calendar, or the leader who entrusts my big ideas to others. I’ve filled a thousand spreadsheets with good intentions, only to find them languishing and incomplete months later. I’ve dabbled with VAs, and had my control freak tendencies laid bare.

It took a while, but I’ve learned that I’m wired to work the way I work best. Other people’s systems and successes may seem appealing, but unless they fit in with my modus operandi I’m trying to fit square pegs in round holes.

Personality is what makes you, you.

In psychology, your personality is defined as ‘the combination of characteristics or qualities that form an individual’s distinctive character’. It describes who you are, and what makes you, you.

It also shapes the way you work.

Think of your personality as your unique operating system. It’s the software that manages your thoughts and behaviour. It directs your energy and attention, and defines which systems, processes, people and environments are most compatible with you.

When your operating system fits your work and work environment, tasks are seamless. Sit me in a café with a notebook and pen and ask me to generate fifty ideas, and I’m a machine. Sit me at a desk with a spreadsheet and ask me to fill in the boxes and you’ll be tearing your hair out at my slowness and ineptitude.

How well your personality matches your tasks, team and goals is often the missing link between overwhelming frustration and intense productivity. When we have insight into our unique operating system, we can create the interface we need with our world to make work easy and fun instead of being filled with stress, bugs and crashes.

Understanding your personality

While there are many ways to describe personality, today’s experts believe there are five broad, basic dimensions known as the ‘Big 5’ personality traits. Unlike models such as Myers-Briggs or DISC that assign people to ‘types’, the Big 5 depicts personality as five spectra:

Openness to experience

Conscientiousness

Extraversion

Agreeableness

Neuroticism

We all exist as a dot somewhere between the two extremes of each dimension. And those billions of dots represent billions of wonderfully unique, complex people.

You can get an insight into your personality through online questionnaires such as the Truity Big Five personality assessment. They’re quick, reliable, and give you a detailed report that includes your score and description for each dimension.

You can also uncover your personality type with a little introspection and a guide like the one I’ll share with you now.

Which of the following best describe you?

Openness to experience

High: People at the ‘high’ end of openness like venturing outside their comfort zone. If this is you then you love novel experiences, variety, and coming up with new ideas. You might be described by others as imaginative, insightful, curious, creative, or even intellectual.

You love the creative side of blogging and business, but the routine and repetition of everyday tasks bores you to tears. Scheduling is tedious, and you don’t have the patience for spreadsheets. You are an ideas person who struggles with following through.

Low: If you’re at the ‘Low’ end of the openness dimension you enjoy routine. You stick to what you know, and you do it well. You’re practical, down to earth, and happy doing the same task time and time again. That’s how you get so good at it.

Conscientiousness

High: Highly conscientious people are persistent, self-disciplined, reliable and persevering.

If this is you then you’re organised, you work within the rules, and you excel at delaying gratification.

Getting the job done is never a problem for you, but you may turn yourself inside out getting it done. (Stress head alert!)

Low: Are you a major procrastinator? A little bit flighty? Impetuous and impulsive? If you are, then you may be sitting at the other end of the conscientiousness scale. You’re fun and spontaneous, but find it hard to actually get the job done. (That whooshing sound was probably another deadline flying by.)

Extraversion

Chances are you’ll recognise this spectrum – extroversion at one end, introversion at the other.

High: If you’re high on extroversion you’re sociable, assertive, outgoing, talkative and socially confident. You’re the team player who wants to collaborate with everyone. You love your colleagues to bits, but you will never be left alone.

Low: At the low end of the extroversion scale you’ll find the introverts, although most of us sit somewhere in between. True introverts are quiet, introspective, reserved and thoughtful. They are people of few words but many thoughts. They’re writers, not networkers, and group work sends shivers down their spine.

Agreeableness

How are your people skills?

High: People high in agreeableness are trusting, patient, tactful, kind and considerate. If this is you then you’re well-liked, respected, and sensitive to other people’s needs.

You might blog to help and spread happiness. No cynics or ranters here.

Low: Not everyone likes to be liked. If you’re low on the agreeableness scale you’re happy on the edge of social acceptance. You can be rude, antagonistic, and maybe sarcastic. You’ll make enemies as well as friends, but you won’t care. You’re much better at saying “No” than your highly agreeable mates, and no-one will ever take advantage of you.

Neuroticism

If you Google it, you’ll see it defined as ‘mentally maladjusted’ – pretty harsh.

High: Those high on the neuroticism scale tend to be over-sensitive, nervous, anxious, self-critical and insecure. They’re also easily angered and temperamental. If this is you, then you might find yourself embroiled in regular battles – online and offline.

But there’s an interesting twist. Parts of your personality can interact with varying results. And if you’re high on neuroticism and conscientiousness, you may end up channeling your anxious energy for good. Healthy neurotics take action to address their worries rather that ponder and plot. If this is you, then you may actually have better health habits and greater motivation to succeed in all areas of life than your less conscientious counterparts.

Low: Finally we have our emotionally-stable peeps. They’re adventurous and unflappable. Unencumbered by worry or self-doubt, it’s hard to rattle them. They’ll try anything once, and no problem is too big. If this is you, then you’re optimistic, self-confident, reliably even-tempered, and will cope with any crisis that’s thrown.

3 Tips on Using Your Personality to Blog Better

Do you know where you sit on each of the Big Five dimensions? If you do, try these tips to work and blog better.

Take note of the characteristics that make you great at what you do. These are your strengths, and you should use them as often as you can.

Make a note of the characteristics making work difficult right now. Are you a creative type struggling to narrow yourself into a niche? Or perhaps you’re an extrovert weary from working alone. What can you change about the way you work to find a better match between who you are and how you work?

Stop fighting your operating system. You work the way you work because that’s the way you’re wired. It’s who you are. Fighting your natural preferences is energy-sapping, and robs the world of your unique and fascinating contribution. Don’t let that happen. Go forth and be the crazy, exceptional individual you are. It will make your work (and your life) a lot easier.

Are you in tune with your personality? Have you figured out how you work best?

Photo credit: Pablo Varela

The post How to Harness Your Personality and Become a Better Blogger appeared first on ProBlogger.

       How to Harness Your Personality and Become a Better Blogger

[awildhanmonster]

More Ado about Characters:

Alright, now for round 2!  The following characters are all more one-offs and have no direct relation to each other quite the same was as Nell/Leonora/Barnes do, so let’s see if I can keep this under novel length.  

Remy Green, aka Remy:  17 years old in current canon, and still in the last leg of high school, Remy is, for lack of any better term, a reverse werewolf: perpetually stuck in the form of a gangly wolfdog monster on all nights save the brightest of full moons.  Originally just a “normal” human kid just trying to survive through graduation, her entire life wound up turned on its head when an out of control werewolf attacked and bit her while out with friends one night.  He was subdued and arrested, even later charged for the negligence and violent assault, but the damage had been done and the virus passed on— in the worst ways.

Remy essentially suffered the equivalent of a severe allergic reaction and anaphylaxis during the first shift, which took hours (normal were shifts should be minutes) and resulted in her parents frantically driving her to the ER in tears.  She survived, though the diagnosis— for a fragile kid with shaky self esteem— was, at the time, seemingly a fate worse than death.  Despite her form, she never seems to suffer the loss of mindfulness or weakened inhibitions of most werefolk during “peak” moon periods.  

Remy has since started learning how to cope with life in a new form she didn’t really want or ask for, and she has the full, unwavering support of her parents, though it’s still a lot for a teenaged kid to handle.  I’m pretty sure she wound up being pulled from high school and is trying to finish out her last year and a half or so at home, though she could really use some friends she doesn’t think are “obligated” to love her like her parents are.  I think she’s pretty lonely and dealing with a lot of depression issues.  Luckily she’ll fall in with Wayne at some point, who’s like a sweet (greasy stoner) older brother, and he and the rest of the Losers can adopt the hell out of her as a little sister and teach her how to not give a fuck about what humans think when you’re a weirdo.  She’ll earn her happy ending eventually.  

Rose Lund:  Absolutely 100% a retooling/transplant of one of my dearest, most beloved, super shitty/earnest self-insert characters as a 12 year old on Neopets and I have NO SHAME AT ALL.  Rose is a human mage (they do exist!) around 30 or so, a pale/skinny English-Caucasian mutt with green eyes, straight brown hair, and a penchant for fancifully extra looking dyed bang fringies because she’s stopped giving a fuck.  She’s one of those rare people who can strike up a conversation with just about anyone, blessed by a very… unique way with words that’s unintentionally contributed to her internet fame as a slice of life blogger about the day to day trials of pet dragon (well, wyrm) ownership.  

Rose has been passionate about rare and magical exotic creatures since she was a wee girl, and developed an obsession with dragons (‘wyrms’ being the correct term for all non-sentient varieties) before she was out of grade school.  In college she double majored cryptobiology and spell artistry, then upon graduation, acquired a pair of rare pygmy wyrms— from temperate and tundra subspecies— respectively, as pets, both for personal reasons and to aid in her pursuit of a master’s degree in cryptobiological husbandy.

Pygmy wyrms, it should be noted, are generally terrible pets.  While only growing to approximately the size of a house cat (10-12 pounds on average) and sporting the appearance of beautifully miniaturized mythological six-limbed dragons any fantasy nut would fall in love with, they are far from domesticated, exasperatingly precocious, and have the charming habit of expelling flammable gas from a myriad of orifices when startled.  They have a distinctive, vaguely musky sulfurous smell about them regardless of cleanliness and are just clever enough to ignore training commands when convenient.  Imagine giving a very ornery, very clever raccoon flappy wings with a several foot wingspan, feeding it rotten eggs, and strapping a flamethrower to both ends, then rigging it all with an excitable hair trigger.  That is a pygmy wyrm.  Rose owns two in an apartment complex: Ice Pack (Packy), who is a pale milk white/ice blue, and Sharky (Sharkbite), who is black and burgundy/red.  

Needless to say they’re the loves of her lives and she revolves around them, having garnered a massive internet following thanks to her daily posts about their antics and the realities of exotic pet care.  They’re harness trained now and reasonably polite, though this is only due to years of hard work and constant reinforcement.  She hopes one day to breed more biddable specimens and help contribute to the conservation of the species worldwide.  Also, they’ve made her very good at anti-flammability hexes.  

Shun —: known only by her first name, a kitsune who moved into the apartment complex fairly recently with her pet pipe fox, Yuzu.  It should be noted that kitsune are particularly long lived among mythicals, though how long exactly that is tends to be hotly debated and unknown by all but the foxes themselves.  What is known is how they are extremely slow to age after reaching their peak maturity/fitness, with certain individuals reported over 500 years old and, apparently, showing very little of their age beyond a massive swath of grown tails (nine being the highest on known record).  Kitsune typically grow to around 30-40 lbs, outwardly resembling a much large. leggier, more willowy silhouette than traditional foxes, and will begin life with a single tail that splits or “buds” and multiplies over time.  

Neurologically they are fairly unique among mammals, possessing a kind of distributed intelligence throughout the body that can give the tails a “mind of their own”, so to speak, in much the same way as octopi or other related cephalopods do.  In fact, due to the extremely slow rate of cell death/turnover, a severed kitsune tail will continue to move and attempt “functioning” for weeks, even years by some reports, under correct conditions.  Which I’ll get into shortly.  

Swerving back to Shun herself, she’s an artist by trade who zigzags between traditional and digital freelance work for a living.  Conservation of mass is still in place for humanoid shifts— which all kitsune can voluntarily assume— with predictably small, delicate, androgynous bodies that rarely get above 4’5’’ or so in stature.  Features like pointed ears or slit pupils/exposed tails can be morphed or shown as desired, though the chronic perception of being childlike or “cute” regardless of how old they are is a pretty common occurrence.  Shun is no stranger to this either, and hates shopping for clothes at non-mythical-specific places because she has to do so in the *really* young children’s department for anything to fit.  

Back on the subject of pipe foxes, though— Shun is a kitsune with 3 and 3/4 tails.  She had an unspecified accident several years ago in which she lost the final quarter of her fourth tail, but managed to retrieve the piece after several weeks of searching, at which point it was already trying to become a pipe fox.  Pipe foxes (at least in this world) are the result of a severed kitsune tail’s survival instincts going horribly wrong (or right) and attempting to restructure themselves for survival, and the amount of tail there (i.e. how much was separated from the body) will determine what becomes of it, though the “starting” process is pretty identical no matter what you do.  

If a severed piece of tail has no food, eventually, with time, it will die.  If, however, you keep it somewhere safe (like a drawer) and you present it with food (which could be, I don’t know, a chicken leg), it will sense it, and you will see the start of a small, gaping fanged mouth begin to grow from the stump.  Once this has formed, the tail will wriggle itself to its prize and devour everything it can, sustaining it.  Keep feeding the tail and it will continue to grow legs, organs, features, and a face— though not necessarily in that order.  Eventually, you will have a small— usually mouse to rat sized— beautiful white magic fox, prized heavily by black market collectors for its splendor and apparent luck giving properties.  A true quarter-tailed pipe fox will live somewhere between 5-40 years, unpredictably.  The distributed intelligence of the tail will reform/conglomerate into a brain relatively on par with a modern pet dog, possibly smarter (or much dumber) depending on your luck.  

If, however, there is MORE than roughly a quarter tail chopped off, with more of the nervous tissue and mass intact, the pipe fox resulting may appear larger and more robust.  Many exotic buyers have been lured into purchasing these creatures from traders without realizing, and years later the unlucky recipient will find their precious fox’s skin suddenly flaccid on the ground like a shed cocoon, having erupted into 75 tinier pipe foxes that will summarily swarm the accessible property to spirit off with literally anything they decide is valuable, never to be found again, often raging like an infestation for days or WEEKS before vanishing forever.  

Rumor has it that feeding an entire severed tail will result in 75 tiny pipe foxes bursting forth from the cocoon shell that will each burst into 75 more bug sized foxes each, resulting in a plague of nigh biblical proportions.  But that’s never actually been confirmed on record.  

Needless to say the kitsune have a lot of protocols for dealing with severed tails and will usually destroy half-formed pipe foxes of unknown origin on the spot.  Shun keeps Yuzu as a pet due to being intimately aware of the little rat-sized creature’s origins, and she still had to sign SO many extra insurance papers and wavers before the complex would let her move in.  

I am not good at keeping it short, am I?  Wow.  Well, there you have it!  I’d be happy to answer any extra stuff I forgot too if someone has a question.  I do love these nerds.  

[mahmoud-sgaier]

How Important is Link Shortening

Hidden behind the scenes of digital marketing is a little detail that has made the world of difference. The Uniform Resource Locator (URL) is at the heart of the internet’s evolution, and yet it’s an often-overlooked element until its format presents a problem.Unwieldy URLs can become something of an eyesore – and a hassle – particularly for social media marketing. Long, unintelligible strings of text distract the reader’s attention, upstage your content, and are also difficult to track. That’s where link shortening (and tracking) comes in – and it’s the secret weapon in your social media marketing.In this post, we’ll examine the origin of link shortening, illustrate why it’s so important to your current social media marketing campaigns, and finally show you how to harness its potential for your gain. Let’s get started!A Very Brief History of the URLTo put link shortening into the proper context, let’s take a quick look at how it fits into the overall history of the internet.Between 1989 and 1991 Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented the web, developing HyperText Markup Language (HTML), Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), and of course, the URL. Together, these form the basis of all we do online. Soon after, the public was invited to link to the first prototype, and the internet grew from there.Ten years later, the first URL redirection service (V3.com) was set up. This enabled URL shortening, prevented broken links, and helped guide navigation into and out of web pages through a memorable, short URL.Social media expanded rapidly from the early 2000s, with sites such as Photobucket and Flickr facilitating online photo sharing. YouTube arrived in the first half of the decade, followed by Facebook. Digital marketers soon found these to be the perfect platform for sharing links and content.Twitter launched around the same time with its 140 character limit – which presented a brand new challenge for long URLs, adding more motivation for finding a way to shorten them, revamp them, and (of course) track them.In the early 2000, mobile phones started to access high-speed 3G networks, enabling them to connect to the internet. Display sizes soon became a burning issue. Before 2011, the display area on virtually every phone on the market measured between 2.5 and 4 inches. Since 2013, phones with displays under four inches are rare, yet display size still remains a problem for web designers.The internet has now evolved into a versatile, powerful marketing tool – strung together by that one small detail we tend to forget about – the URL.Why URL Shortening Has Become VitalIn the early days of the web, the average person didn’t have to worry about URLs too much. Those mysterious strings of text had a job to do and were never given a second thought. Unless you were creating software, you didn’t really need to bother about using, cloaking, or tracking them.Gradually that has changed. At first, longer and more complex URLs became a problem when pasting them into an email. Because the string of text would often be too long for a single line, text wrapping would break things, and clicking on the link didn’t always work.With the explosion of social media, the problem became even more urgent. Now, URLs form part of your link building and sharing strategy, and they also need to fit into a limited space. Link shortening makes the whole process more manageable and enables you to squeeze more links into the same space.Besides just looking better on the screen, you can also tap into another very useful property of the shortened URL: It’s now possible to track what happens to your link – and that information is invaluable for your digital marketing campaigns.Simply put, it lets you understand your audience, figure out what they’re doing with your content, and enables you to create better campaigns in the future.The Perfect WordPress Link Shortening ToolUsing a third-party service has its advantages, but you’ll lose a certain amount of control over the process. For a start, there’s no guarantee you’ll always have access to your links, and that means there’s a risk to your credibility if a service ceases to exist.In contrast, WordPress users come in all shapes and sizes. Some are able to code their own redirection software, but most don’t have the background – the vast majority are bloggers and small business owners. Therefore, the perfect solution should offer power and flexibility, while being easy to navigate and use.The answer is to use a plugin. It offers hassle-free link shortening, giving you the control you require, and also offers the tracking functionality you’ll need. Social links, redirects, and affiliate links are all taken care of, and no coding experience is required. It’s simply a matter of purchasing, installing, and activating the plugin.What’s more, the software will automatically create short links for all of your pages and posts. You also get the ability to automatically tweet a customizable message to multiple Twitter accounts when a post is published.ConclusionThe web has given us lots of scope for expansion. Whether we’re part of a worldwide team or running a small business, it’s important to keep up with any changes. If there’s a way to get an edge on the competition, it should be explored.The URL is at the heart of web technology, and by extension, link shortening. To recap:The URL is often overlooked, but in reality it’s at the heart of web connectivity. Link shortening and cloaking is a secret weapon in modern social media marketing.With the evolution of the web, link shortening has become vital to better manage URLs.Unwieldy URLs should be replaced with short, pretty ones, and tracking and managing them needs to be easy.

[moodblog71]

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020 was a rough year, but despite its shortcomings, the desire for companionship has not been more intense. If you're tired of searching through dating apps and would instead prefer a professional touch, we've compiled a list of the top Black matchmakers and dating coaches in the country.

This list is in no particular order and includes experts with several years of experience and whose expertise has been highlighted in numerous publications. As such, be sure to do your diligence when connecting with a service provider.

MATCHMAKERS

Fisher Gilmore Matchmaking (FGM.) is an exclusive agency of heart hunters led by The Matchmaking DUO™ (Kelli Fisher & Tana Gilmore). FGM provide matchmaking services personally designed to accommodate busy, successful professionals who are seeking long-term love. In searching for one’s compatible match, FMG pride ourselves on giving our clients a lot of what they want, and even more of what they need.

Website: thematchmakingduo.com

African American Passions is a stand-alone free African American Dating Site and if it isn't 100% clear yet, African American Passions has been designed specifically for the African American community. Separately, it is also part of a much (much) larger network of niche dating sites.

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Website: elisimone.com

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Jasmine Diaz is a renowned dating strategist, matchmaker, Founder of RELASH, Diaz Dating Group, and Co-Creator of the award-winning SmartMatchApp whose clients include some of the nation's greatest celebrities, athletes, and C-Suite executives. She has worked with high-profile and successful professional singles for over 15 years, and believes that matching is less of a numbers game as it is about strategy. Matchmaking clients undergo a discovery period where we discuss your dating preferences, relationship history, and future goals.

Website: lovebyjd.com

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The world's most influential matchmaker, founded and exited three businesses, hosts two television shows, spent nearly a decade working directly for a billionaire. Named as a Top Voice on LinkedIn, Oprah said herself, 'Paul is more than a matchmaker.' He is currently co-host of Celebs Go Dating and Married At First Sight.

Website: paulcbrunson.com Plenty of fish dating site.

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DATING COACHES

‍Coach Cass - Inspire Many / Real Love Network

Coach Cass has a master's in public health and an honorary doctorate in philosophy. She is a certified dating and relationship coach, also trained under and certified by John Gottman's Seven Principles Program to Making Marriage Work. She is a certified life coach, matchmaker, TEDx speaker and more. She has worked with thousands of women over the last 11 years as a certified life, business and love coach.

Website: inspiremany.com

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Monique Kelley - Cocktails and Confessions‍

Monique Kelley is the blogger behind the popular site, Confessions Of A Serial Dater in LA. She initially chronicled the trials & travails of her post-divorce dating life. Monique is currently the resident dating expert on NBC’s hit day time syndicated show, Access Live, NBC’s regional show California Live and Fox LA’s number one morning show Good Day LA. She has also been a guest on The Talk and has previously been featured in Essence Magazine, LA Confidential Magazine, and TV One.

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Angela N. Holton is an International Coach and Speaker, Author, and Founder of Love Sanctuary, an online spiritual and personal development site centered on helping individuals create success and transformation through Self-Empowerment and Self-Love.

Website: lovesanctuary.com

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Brittany Jenkins, better known as Bree to her clients, has been working in mental health, life coaching, and counseling services since 2002. A graduate of both Pepperdine University’s Graduate School of Education and Psychology and Dillard University’s Bachelor of Arts in Psychology program, she has extensive training in the mental health field. Bree is a marriage and family therapist and dating & life coach specialist that focuses on couples, and adults with anxiety, depression, eating disorders, and a multitude of mental health, social, and emotional problems.

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Features: Good Day LA, Fox Soul, People, Bustle

Damona Hoffman is the dating expert of the new generation. An online dating early-adopter and success story, she has been showing singles how to harness the power of technology to find love for over a decade.

A former TV casting director and executive, Damona always entertains while she teaches about celebrating your own unique experiences and personal story and learning to LOVE AS YOU ARE instead of conforming and compromising your individuality to find love.

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As a certified relationship coach, a speaker and author, Stephan seizes every opportunity to help both men and women overcome the challenges that hinder their relationships. From understanding the opposite sex, to navigating the paths and avoiding the pitfalls of relationships and self growth, Stephan’s relationship advice and insight helps countless individuals achieve an authentically amazing life.

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How to Make Money Writing: 5 Ways to Get Paid to Write in 2021

Listen:

Most writers never get rich.

You know that. I know that. Everybody knows that.

But is it possible to make a nice little side hustle income? Get paid to write from time to time?

Absolutely.

Free Training: A Cheat Sheet for Becoming a Freelance Writer, Starting from Scratch

In this post, you’ll learn exactly how to make money writing – different strategies, how to do it – basically, everything you need.

Let’s start by talking about what’s possible (and what’s not).

Table of Contents:

The Truth About How to Make Money Writing

The 5 Most Realistic Ways to Make Money Writing

Write Articles for Popular Blogs, Magazines and Journals

Create Collateral for Content-Hungry Businesses

Become a Best-Selling Kindle Author

Sell Yourself as a Conversion-Focused Copywriter

Build a Niche Blog and Promote Third Party Products

It’s Time to Choose Your Path and Finally Make Money Writing

The Truth about How to Make Money Writing

Writing for a living offers a ton of advantages – you get to choose when and where you work, and with whom.

No wonder this promise of creative and personal freedom attracts so many people.

But the truth is that most of them don’t want to think about the practicalities of becoming a full-time freelance writer.

They don’t want to think about the uncertainty, the rejection, the self-doubt.

They don’t want to think about all the small, unglamorous tasks that make a writer’s life possible.

Deep down they fear their perfect dream will tarnish if they drag it down to earth. So it just hangs there in a shiny bubble, waiting for the day it miraculously comes true.

But let’s be honest — it just won’t happen. Or do you really think someone will approach you one day and say:

“Hey there. I heard from someone that you were thinking of writing something, someday, and I’ve love to pay you to see where that someday could lead.”

Of course not, but without a concrete strategy, that is what it would take to make your distant dream of having a writing career a reality.

Experience shows that vague plans fail. Grounding your dreams in reality is what makes them happen. Even if it means thinking about the things you’d rather not consider.

It’s not enough to say you want to make a living as a writer; you need to know how. You need a concrete plan to bridge the gap from where you are now to where you want to be.

And the more realistic your plan, the better. Don’t bet the farm on a path that only a small handful of super talented (or incredibly lucky) outliers have followed. Choose one that’s worked for lots of people.

The 5 Most Realistic Ways to Make Money Writing

Get Paid to Write Articles for Blogs, Magazines, and Journals

Make Money by Creating Collateral for Content-Hungry Businesses

Get Paid to Write by Becoming a Best-Selling Kindle Author

Make Money Writing as a Conversion-Focused Copywriter

Build a Niche Blog and Promote Third Party Products

1. Get Paid to Write Articles for Blogs, Magazines, and Journals

Despite talk of global “content fatigue,” major publications — both on- and offline — must keep publishing content or die. Just look at the plentiful opportunities for writing gigs on any job board.

That means popular WordPress blogs, magazines, and journals remain hungry for quality content writing — and many are willing to pay good money for it too. You’ll need to hustle to find the best paid writing jobs, understanding that success won’t happen overnight. But freelancing for these publications is still a smart way to make money online as a writer.

Let’s start with the blogs.

Although writing articles for popular blogs (a.k.a. guest blogging) is still typically unpaid, with most new writers trading their content for exposure (via a byline or author bio), numerous exceptions still exist.

Editor’s Note: Guest blogging opportunities can be found with search engines (Google and Bing) and social media sites (Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter) if you know where to look. If you need a one-stop shop, check out Carol Tice’s Make a Living Writing for a comprehensive list of sites that pay for guest articles.

A well-written guest post can lead to freelance writing gigs and other paid work. Take this blog as an example: we’ve approached several guest writers to create content for our paid courses, and paid them several thousand dollars for their work.

And what about the world of print? Is that still a viable way to make a living as a writer in this day and age of online everything?

Traditional publishing has had a rough ride, but many consumer magazines are still going strong, and many of these publications still pay well for a feature article. Of course, you can’t expect to land a lucrative opportunity right away — you’ll need to climb the ladder via smaller, local publications, building your credibility as you go.

Likewise, trade journals crave quality articles within their narrow topic area and many are waking up to the more conversational, engaging writing style that writing for the web demands. Also, talented bloggers with proven specialist knowledge can often skip the ladder-climbing and break in with the right pitch.

In general, the secret to making this model work is being tenacious about chasing down opportunities — whether it’s ghostwriting or regular freelance writing work — and being efficient with your writing once you land them.

The people who follow this model successfully are like writing machines — they crank out quality content quickly and don’t allow themselves to get bogged down in any one project.

Editor’s Note: The Medium Partner Program is worth considering too. The more you publish, the greater your chances of building consistent, passive income over time.

2. Make Money by Creating Collateral for Content-Hungry Businesses

In the last five years, content marketing — this concept of creating valuable content to attract customers and build credibility and trust — has undoubtedly gone mainstream.

The result? More and more businesses are getting into the content game. Some have a clear strategy, while others are just jumping on the bandwagon and hoping it pays off down the line.

This has created a market for smart writers who can write for a specific audience. These content-hungry businesses need articles, white papers, case studies — the list goes on. And they fully expect to pay for them.

Breaking into this market can be tough without a few contacts to get you started, but it’s not impossible.

Initially, you may need to jostle for attention with thousands of other eager freelancers vying for online jobs on marketplaces like Upwork.com.

But with patience and hard work you can establish a track record of successful projects and break away from the low-earning masses.

However, this route requires a writing portfolio of content-related skills — not just an understanding of the target niche, but of marketing fundamentals and SEO too. In other words, you’ll need more than a laptop and a passion for writing to impress this crowd — you’ll need to persuade clients that you understand the bigger picture.

One smart way to differentiate yourself as a professional writer is to build your own platform, using blogging and guest blogging to demonstrate the expertise you hope to harness for others.

3. Get Paid to Write by Becoming a Best-Selling Kindle Author

What about making it big as an author? Could that be your best route to a life of freedom as a full-time writer?

Well, it’s certainly more realistic than it used to be. Ten years ago, writing a best-selling book was a distant dream for most writers and self-publishing on Kindle was often dismissed as a vanity exercise.

But today, thanks largely to Amazon and Kindle, the self-published book market is gigantic and making money from writing books is far more achievable.

Enter, the authorpreneur — the author with an entrepreneurial brain.

Of course, more achievable doesn’t mean easy. If you have visions of publishing one book and retiring on the profits, you’ll be sorely disappointed.

To succeed, you need to be commercially minded and target an established market with proven demand from readers. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t follow your passion but be prepared to validate it first.

You’ll need to be persistent and prolific too — chances are you’ll publish several books before gaining any traction, and you’ll need sales from multiple titles to approach anything resembling a full-time income.

However, according to a report earlier this year from Author Earnings, 1,600 indie authors are earning $25K or above from Amazon book sales, and 1,000 published their first book three years ago or less.

But should you be writing fiction or nonfiction? Nonfiction is the most natural fit for the average blogger, and if you’re blogging in a popular niche, the chances are that books covering similar topics will also be popular.

If you want to find success as a self-nonfiction author, check out Steve Scott. Even though he’s recently switched his attentions to a regular podcast on self-publishing, his old site still has a ton of useful information.

Fiction writing is arguably tougher (and requires a rather different set of creative writing skills), but there’s no denying that your earning potential if you do hit it big, is much larger. And it’s no coincidence that the most famous self-publishing successes are all fiction titles.

For inspiration and direction visit The Creative Penn. Joanna Penn is a prolific fiction (and nonfiction) author and her site is rich with information about making it as a creative writer.

But in either case, you need to be led by the market for topic (or genre) selection. And you need to be prepared to write multiple books before seeing any real results.

One major advantage of this route is that you continue to earn money from your back catalog, sometimes far into the future. Once you start to make a basic living from your writing, additional titles only build your income further.

The secret to making authorpreneurship work for you? Build an email list. Your existing fans are the perfect audience for your next book.

4. Make Money Writing as a Conversion-Focused Copywriter

Copywriting, in a nutshell, is writing that’s designed to make readers take a specific action.

Sales letters, video scripts, even product descriptions — these all need writing by someone, and they live or die on the results they produce.

Copywriting may not seem fundamentally different to other forms of writing skill, but in practice, it’s a discipline all of its own.

While there’s a trend towards more conversational, empathetic copywriting — moving away from the hype-fuelled “hard sell” — you still need a solid understanding of the principles of persuasion.

So unless you have a copywriting background be prepared to invest a lot of time (and possibly money) in learning the fundamentals. There are some excellent books on the topic — CA$HVERTISING: How to Use More than 100 Secrets of Ad-Agency Psychology to Make Big Money Selling Anything to Anyone (affiliate link) is a good place to start. Copyblogger’s Brian Clark shares his favorite titles here.

The most famous training course on copywriting is probably AWAI’s Accelerated Program for Six-Figure Copywriting.

Notwithstanding the steep learning curve, the rewards of copywriting can be significant. A high-converting sales page might earn you $2,000, plus a slice of the revenues too.

As a bonus, a foundation in copywriting will also be valuable should you ever decide to sell your own products.

5. Build a Niche Blog and Promote Third Party Products

I’ll be honest — building a popular blog is tough. Really tough.

And once you’ve scaled your blog beyond a certain point, you might be surprised how little time you actually spend doing the thing you love — writing.

So if your dream is to build a six-figure blog, you’d better be as excited about the prospect of running a business as you are about writing your next blog article. (In fact, if you’re making six figures, writing is one of the things you should probably outsource.)

But there is a path to making money from a blog where you still spend a good proportion of your time writing. And it starts with picking a writing niche where a large, passionate audience already exists and — this is crucial — where you can find successful products from trusted names to sell.

Promoting affiliate products (affiliate marketing) is a much smarter way to start earning money from a blog than creating your own product. With an affiliate product, someone else has already done the hard work of validating the market, building the product, and enhancing it based on customer feedback. Someone else gets to handle the pre-sales inquiries, payments, refunds, and product support.

Many affiliate products pay high commissions too — 50% or even more — because the incremental production cost of digital products is essentially nothing.

The secret is finding the right products — ones that you can stake your reputation on. Pat Flynn is the undisputed king of passive income, earned (mostly) from sales of affiliate products — check out his video on Choosing Affiliates Products to Promote and How to Sell Them.

Ideally, you’ll know what products you’ll sell even before starting your blog because then you’re growing an audience that perfectly matches your offer.

Of course, you still have to do all the stuff that makes a blog successful — publishing great content, building your email list, reaching out to influencers, etc. — but writing remains a big part of the equation, i.e., creating the stellar content that brings people to your site.

Once you’re in a groove, you can think about adding your own products to the mix, using your writing skills and topic knowledge to deliver a specific result that readers are willing to pay for.

But when you’re starting a blog, promoting affiliate products is the most realistic, and least risky, way to make a living from writing.

It’s Time to Choose Your Path and Finally Make Money Writing

Just stop for a moment and ask yourself:

“Am I sabotaging my writing dream by refusing to get real about the how?”

Because you know what… I’m tired of seeing talented writers stuck in lives they don’t love.

So the dreaming stops here — it’s time to decide once and for all.

Are you truly serious about writing for a living, or is it just an idle fantasy to cheer you up when your regular, full-time job gets you down?

If you are serious, then decide: which of these five paths above will you follow? Writing articles for money as a content writer? Content marketing? Becoming an authorpreneur? Copywriting? Or starting a niche blog?

If none of them feels like an exact fit, don’t worry, that’s normal. Pick whichever one’s the closest and try it on for size. Any discomfort is just the price of getting real.

Got one? Excellent.

Let’s turn your perfect dream into an imperfect reality — one where you’re making enough money as a writer to support yourself, and then some…

Just picture the faces of your family and friends when they find out.

The post How to Make Money Writing: 5 Ways to Get Paid to Write in 2021 appeared first on Smart Blogger.

from SEO and SM Tips https://smartblogger.com/make-money-writing/

[sociallyinsmmagency]

Subscription Marketing on Social for Amateurs

Whether you’re looking to promote your subscription service or are just beginning to dip your toes into the subscription marketing landscape, we’ve gathered some incredible insight into subscription marketing from our experience with clients AND research to give you the best start possible.

What is Subscription Marketing?

Okay, so you’re probably more than familiar with the term subscription service, but maybe not so much about subscription marketing specifically.

Over the last decade, subscription services have become increasingly more popular for online brands.

Makeup, razors, laundry detergent, diapers, hair care, household cleaning products...you name it, there’s probably a subscription service available somewhere on the web.

Subscription service promotion is the art and act of positioning your own brand as a leader in your particular industry and presenting your subscription as the “answer” to your customers' worries and needs.

It involves lots of analysis, strategy, time and effort as you create content, distribute the content, measure results and make adjustments. However, the results are incredibly rewarding as it’s not likely you’ll make much progress without online promotion. (Sorry, but it’s true.)

Why are Subscription Services Such a Powerful Business Model?

Subscriptions are convenient because a customer doesn’t have to worry about ordering your product again and it gives your brand a certain bit of “confidence” and security in that customers will often leave subscriptions running for a number of months before ending them, even if they’re not particularly thrilled with the service.

Why Should I Utilize Social Media for Subscription Marketing?

With subscription services popping up all over the place month after month, it’s more important than ever to stand out from the crowd.

Social media gives you the platform to speak directly with your target audience. All you have to do is find them, create content that speaks to them and create a community around your products and services that will help them feel more connected, inspired and understood.

Finding new customers, connecting with them and retaining them to make a profit and develop brand ambassadors who can promote your subscription services are all common struggles that subscription brands face when they’re on the verge of beginning their subscription service promotion. We’re here to help you solve problems by finding a solution that works for you.

How to Utilize Social for Subscription Service Promotion and Revenue Generation

Social media has become an increasingly popular and powerful tool for marketing professionals in a variety of different industries, so it’s no wonder it’s a popular and powerful tool for marketing your subscription service.

Targeting

Getting serious about your subscription marketing means getting serious about targeting the right crowds and demographics.

You can break your targeting down easily by considering who your target customer would be.

Let’s look at one of the most popular subscription brands right now, Billie.

Their subscription is aimed towards women over the age of 12 who are body and hair positive. (That’s right! A subscription service for RAZORS is hair-positive and we have to say, it’s an excellent marketing tactic.)

In addition, they’re looking for hair/beauty and makeup enthusiasts who might be interested in subscribing to their other products as well.

So, they’re most likely targeting a specific age bracket. Possibly 15-50, or even a little older.

They don’t just set their targeting options and call it a day, though. Just selecting who you want to see your ad isn’t enough. Instead, you have to completely shape your content marketing game around your target audience.

For instance: Billie is particularly popular for showing women in their ads removing hair rather than shaving hairless skin, which is a method typically adopted by bigger razor brands.

This makes their content and their products appeal more easily to the crowd they’re targeting. A.k.a, young women who are body and hair positive.

There are a variety of ways you can target for subscription service promotion, these being:

Location

Age

Gender Identification

Interests/Hobbies

Political Interests

The Value of Metrics

It might seem like information that everyone should know, but the truth is that not everyone takes advantage of the incredible opportunity that social media metrics provide when it comes to subscription marketing on social media.

By paying close attention and monitoring the real-time metrics like clicks, comments, downloads, shares and views, subscription brand’s have a better chance of knowing exactly what’s resonating and what isn’t as far as content and their products go.

Harnessing this valuable data will also help subscription brands develop a sufficient picture of the demographics of their social audience to allow for a more customized, creative subscription marketing approach and overall strategy.

Positioning Your Brand as the leader in Your Industry

Social media is where every individual spends the majority of their time, right? Right. So positioning your brand as a leader in your industry is vital to the success of your subscription marketing strategy.

When marketing a subscription service organically, a strategy is just as vital as the evaluation of metrics for improvement.

But your strategy won’t be very effective unless you’re implementing opportunities for your audience to see you as an industry leader.

Doing this requires high-quality content and staying on top of industry trends to put your brand at the top. Your feed should flow, but always be on point when it comes to colors, tone and the overall appearance of your images, videos, graphics and more.

Start by implementing a similar style across your content. Whether this means you take a more cartoon-y approach or a next-generation, technical approach, your content should have a similar look and *feel* and flow well together. The key is making sure someone can identify the content is from your brand long before they spot a profile name or logo.

Use a similar voice and tone when addressing your audience. If you’re a professional brand, keep your audience in mind when addressing serious problems and concerns. If you’re a B2C brand that focuses on light and fun topics, keep it that way. But don’t be afraid to address serious issues when the need arises.

Keep your communication, whether public or private message, consistent with your brand. Mixed messages are never cool.

Address questions and concerns and provide solutions. If you’re going to be a leader, be a good one. Your audience looks up to you. Prove your worth!

Listen! Good industry leaders listen and take notes from the way their customers respond to certain content, messages and products. Use it as an opportunity to improve!

Positioning your brand as an industry leader is a sure-fire way to expand your audience, get more subscriptions and open the lines of communication between you and your audience to help them feel heard.

Subscription Marketing: Content Matters

Creating engaging, on-brand content is a vital part of the subscription promotion plan.

Your content needs to be:

Informative

Engaging

Inspiring

Eye-Catching (if it doesn't capture you within 1-3 seconds, it's not content you're going to see much of a return on.)

On brand, (both in color and style)

Socially in-tune, (A celebration-type post during a natural disaster is never a good idea. Social listening can help with this!)

Good content doesn't have to be complicated in nature, it just needs to follow these basic principles. Check out this video by one of our incredible content producers on how to utilize Canva for EASY content creation:

Why You Should Embrace Social Paid Advertising for Subscription Marketing

When it comes to subscription marketing, executing a social paid advertising campaign is vital to the success of your brand awareness, follower growth, drumming up sales and downloads, and also driving engagement with your brand.

Sure, you’ll spend more money than you would doing everything organically, but what’s more important? Spending more money upfront for an improved ROi, or waiting endlessly for your audience to just “show up”?

Check out this guide on everything you need to set up a social paid advertising campaign and get your products and services into customers hands!

7 Social Subscription Marketing Tricks for Amateurs

So now we’ve knocked out all of the important first steps, from setting up your profile to establishing yourself as an industry leader. But what’s next?

Sometimes getting creative is the best method for marketing a subscription service, so here’s 15 ideas to take your subscription marketing efforts to the next level.

Consider a Subscription Affiliate Program

By paying bloggers, websites, influencers and current customers for every new customer you acquire, you’re building brand loyalty, creating excitement around your own brand growth and making your customers feel as if they *belong* in your “brand family”.

If you need some ideas or inspiration for what affiliate companies to use for your own subscription service, here’s a good list to get you started:

Shareasale

Skimlinks

Impact Radius

Rakuten

Pepperjam Network

Avantlink

Flex Offers

Get Interested Bloggers/Review Sites Involved

There’s nothing more enticing to a Youtuber or a blogger than the pledge of free stuff for a quick review on their website.

Much like influencer marketing or an affiliate program, getting a review from a trusted blogger or YouTuber will allow you to leverage their viewers and get sales for the cost of just one person.

Host Contests and Giveaways!

Drumming up excitement around your subscription and giving the world a chance to learn about all of the awesome perks of your subscription could be as easy as hosting a quick content or giveaway.

Whether you giveaway an entire month of goodies or a percentage off of an order, you’ll be sure to get your audience excited, possibly grow your audience and showcase all of the wonderful things about your subscription that others might find irresistible.

Offer FREE Shipping

AND you can do this without actually having to offer free shipping. Just go ahead and add the cost to the subscription so everyone knows exactly what they’ll be paying with “no added costs.”

Believe me. It works and it’s BRILLIANT.

Offer Discounts for Longer Commitments

Because hey, if they’re signing up for six months right now, it’s WORTH IT.

You’re basically paying for brand loyalty. :)

Connect Your Subscription to a Cause

Research has shown that 94% of shoppers will automatically choose a subscription that is connected to a social cause they care about.

So get connected to a cause! Both for your monetary benefit and because it’s an awesome and epic way to get your name out there, make the world a better place and provide your customers with a way to quickly and easily “give back” to their communities in a positive way.

Customer Service is Everything

Remember when we talked about staying on brand in public AND private settings? This means staying professional even when a customer is chewing you out in your DMs, leaving rude messages and generally making life difficult.

Exercise care, concern and when possible, make your mistakes and customer disappointments right. It pays off in the end, we promise.

Subscription Marketing: What NOT to Do

Please. If you do anything for FAST subscription marketing growth, don’t make it ANY of these things. We beg of you.

Buy Followers

Contrary to popular belief, buying followers is the absolute worst way to grow your brand, increase brand loyalty and boost your brand engagement.

Instead it just makes your business profiles look spammy, empty, unengaged and did we mention spammy? DO NOT DO IT. No matter how much you are tempted. You will 100% wish you hadn’t later.

Ditch the

This has to be a reminder because some people don’t understand why being rude/not answering phone calls or generally not responding to customers can be detrimental long-term.

Being reliable is also just as important as being kind, concerned and sympathetic. Remember, the customer might not ALWAYS be right, but they are the future of your business and thus require special care and attention.

Subscription Marketing FAQ

Turns out, even when you’re doing your best to answer all the questions, there’s inevitably going to be more.

“How Do I Market a Subscription Service?”

Like we explained above, you’ll need a strategy first and foremost, with a focus on content that is educational and informative about why YOUR subscription is the one people need.

You can use free tools like Canva or a Canva Alternative and stock photo sites like Pexels to create content for your profiles to help drive sales and increase brand awareness.

In addition, running particular ad campaigns can be helpful for increasing your reach.

How Big is The Subscription Box Market?

It’s been estimated that the market for subscription box services is upwards to $15 billion and continually growing.

Does this mean you shouldn’t launch your subscription box? No! It’s never too late to get in on the action if you have an idea that you believe can take off. And we can make it happen.

How to Market Subscription Boxes

The concept is similar to any subscription service, so the process will also be very similar, with the only difference being whether people KNOW what exactly they’re getting and what they’re not.

If your subscription box focuses on the “surprise” element, marketing it can be a little more difficult, but only because you can’t focus on specific products.

Instead, focus on the perks of the items your last box included, OR what typically comes in your boxes.

How Long Will it Take to Market My Subscription Service Effectively?

If marketing were a one and done solution, I wouldn’t have a business!

Okay, but all joking aside, it’s important to remember that marketing is an ongoing process that you have to continually keep up with and improve over time.

Yes, there will be a day when you have a big following and don’t have to worry about drumming up enough sales to make quota, but you’ll always want to be reaching for the next big goal, right? Right!

But, to answer your question: with a good strategy, you’ll most likely see results in the first month or less!

Sociallyin is the Subscription Marketing Solution You Need

As experts in the social media space, we know what works and what doesn’t.

We’ve worked with countless businesses, services and influencers to provide incredible results and gradually improve the ROi for all of them.

Our content is second to none and we’re always learning and improving to keep it that way in a constantly changing space.

Are you ready to take your subscription marketing to the next level of incredible? Our team has the solution you need. Let’s get in touch TODAY!

This post has originally appeared at https://blog.sociallyin.com/subscription-marketing

[christinegphillips]

What Is Life For Me – Life’s Purpose Discussed In Detail

What a question “what is life for me” or it could mean what is the purpose or meaning of life for me. Either way some people think different things about our purpose in life and some would say that our paths are already written and we are just following it, others will take the bull by the horns and craft the life they want or dream off. Which theorist are you?

It really is an interesting point though, as many of us do not know what life has in store for us or does it even have anything in store. When I was a youngster I would never have thought I would have been married 3 times and have children to different wives (that is all another interesting story you can find out some more about another time). I would have dreamed off changing the world for the better and becoming a game keeper in Kenya at one stage. Things are so further from my original perception that working out what life has in store for me is still an ongoing process in life.

I am not going to concentrate on the theory of all of this or to tell you what your purpose is in life, but what I will do is give you my top tips on what living a purpose driven life looks like and how you can make sure that you make a life for yourself rather than having to follow an unknown certain pathway to nothing.

What is life for me – Photo by Bich Tran from Pexels

My Top Tips on What Does Life Hold For Me

Take life by the balls – The last thing you want to do in life is sit and watch it go by. Everyday is really fresh start and no matter what background or education you come from everyone of us is responsible for our own lives. You can succeed in anything you want to do, if you really want it badly enough to do anything to obtain it.

Don’t be scared – Don’t be scared of life. If someone in your past has hurt you or not supported you then learn to stand on your own two feet. There is no better master of your own emotions than yourself. Once you learn to harness your own emotions and not let others put you down, you put yourself into a powerful position of just making yourself accountable. Then the only person in life you have to let you down is yourself.

Have fun finding your why in life – Life is meant to be fun, it is not meant for us to wake up every morning hoping disaster doesn’t strike, or just being generally unhappy with life. Each and every day we have an opportunity to live life to the fullest. It is generally only our own motivation and lack of belief that stops us from attracting the life of our dreams.

Accept change in your life – Sometimes it is not ourselves that hold us back, but our surroundings, education, family or friends. Sometimes you need to move on from these situations rather than holding on hoping they will get better. In my experience in life, people who are down on life are really hard to get back to a positive place, unless they can see for themselves that they are responsible for making the changes. I have moved around the country so many times and lived in different places, each time having to make new friends. Yes it is scary at first but when you feel good about yourself and give kindness to others, you soon start to attract the right sort of new friends into your life. So make big changes and don’t be scared of changes.

If at first you don’t succeed try and try again -If you are looking to find your purpose or your why in life, try different things. You don’t have to settle in life to being something in particular, a lot of skillsets are distributable across different skills. The main purpose is to find something that you enjoy, it makes you happy to do it in the first place and it gives you the rewards that you need to feel accomplished. I have done loads of jobs from estate agency, insurance broking, project and program mangement, shop assistant, blogger, coach. I am 47 years old and really only just found out what life has in store for me.

Stay happy – No matter how crappy a day you have had, week, month or year. Happiness really is a choice. I have been to some of the poorest places on the planet and the people have always been the happiest I have ever met. They may not have much but actually when you look at the basic principles of life, we all just want to feel loved, be treated kindly and have a laugh. If you strip away all the materialisitic things then there is less pressure on you in life.

Have fun – Life is also meant to be fun and you should look at your life as being one that goes on adventures, sees life and the beauty all round you and if it isn’t there then go and find it. Getting a stressful job and working all the hours under the son and not seeing your family is not fun at all. So whatever you decide on being your purpose in life make sure that it is someting that adds value to your life.

Believe in yourself – Believe that life can be great and it will be. If we all did something in life that we were extremely good at our confidence levels would be through the roof. Now on the internet however you can learn any skill that you want to so there should be no fears in your ability to do anything you set your mind too. No one else can actually instill confidence in you it has to be something you give yourself, by doing things and getting feedback and improving on your behaviours until you master something.

Do it now – Stop thinking about what life has in store for you and get out there and do something with your life. Stop making excuses and saying I’ll do it when. When never comes and no one wants to be unhappy in life so just make a start on your journey to making the best of life you can for yourself.

Always be yourself – We are all amazing in our own way and have your own special qualities in life. We can learn to adapt our thinking and behaviours but deep down we have our own thoughts and feelings. So never ever change for anyone unles it is a bad habit to a good one. Never let anyone put you down, just move on and hang out with people that appreciate you for who you are and then you can be comfortable that whatever you did in life, it was just you and not some other you that achieved it all.

Most Frequenlty Asked Questions About What Does Life Mean For Me

What is the true meaning of life? This can mean something to different people but to me it means, looking back on life with no regrets, being content that I put my all into everyday, taking on new challenges, supporting my family, spreading love and kindness, sleeping contently every night, working hard and playing hard. To others it could just be to go to work and go home to a nice family and whatever it is that puts a smile on your face and a feeling of contentment in your heart if what you should go with.

What is life and what is the purpose of life? Life is about enjoying it, having fun and making the most out of it. There is no need to argue, be hateful as everyone has their own crap going on in life. You just concentrate on your own happiness and everything else around you will fall into place. Staying focussed on what you want in life and finding a purpose that makes you happy so as above you can look back on life and know you gave it your all.

What is life for you in one word? Happiness

What is life, the simple answer? Seeing and appreciating the life that we have been given and the opportunity to do anything we want to if we want it badly enough.

So there you have it they are my thoughts on what is lifes meaning for me. All of us are different and want different things in life, it doesn’t mean we are right and they are wrong. The key to life is spending it with people who appreciate you for being you and support you in your adventures no matter what they lead too.

We spend far too much time wasting our lives than actually doing anything to fulfill it. So if you need a hand a long the way, to motivate you to have a better life and change your habits then check out my transformation program at https://changeyourlifeforever.co.uk where I will be with you every step of the way to cheer you on.

In the meantime I wish you all the best in life. Best wishes Scott

What Is Life For Me – Life’s Purpose Discussed In Detail published first on https://changeurlifeforever.blogspot.com/

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5 Best Performing AltCoins of 2018 : Reviews & Ratings

Cryptocurrency is finally moving into the spotlight with Bitcoin rates quickly climbing up and investment analysts looking for ways to harness this growth opportunity as quickly as possible. China’s recent ban on cryptocurrencies which started from the ban on Initial Coin Offerings in September introduced a certain level of uncertainty to the market, but investors were quick to identify opportunities in various investments that still held on to firm grounds. Even the Bitcoin noticed a sudden plummet from its record high rate of $4,900 to $3,000 when China announced the ban, but Bitcoin rates shot up higher than previous rates quickly.

Best Altcoins

Best Performing AltCoins 2018 : What Makes an AltCoin Good For investment? While Bitcoin leads the pack, there are a number of alt coins that you can invest in for favorable returns. We look at various factors like:

The team responsible for putting together the coin Their reputation in the current virtual currency markets Their efforts in maintaining and improving the coin The technology used by the coin The number of coins that are already in circulation How many exchanges are currently trading these coins Whether the coins can be mined. Keeping these factors in mind helps in reducing risks of investing in the alt coin. It is important to rely on your personal research for the coin at the time of the investment to ensure that the coin will lead to better returns. While this list of 5 best performing alt coins can guide you to choosing the right coin, it is not meant to be your ultimate answer to investing in altcoins. You will be required to conduct independent research regarding these coins to make sure that you invest in the right one depending on the time of your investment.

While Bitcoin is one of the most popular cryptocurrencies, it is highly volatile and with SegWit2x underway, there is a chance that investors will notice a drop in the rate of Bitcoin. It may gradually build its way up as it always does, but this may not be the right time for this currency with so many uncertainties arising from the hard fork about to occur around 16 November, 2017. So we have chosen five coins other than the popular Bitcoin which are doing well at this time.

Ethereum This is one of the best altcoins next to Bitcoin. Its price tells us about the reputation of the coin in the market. The fact that Ethereum introduced simpler ways of programming on blockchain making it easier for other coins to grow as well, makes Ethereum stand out.

Ethereum also has a very keen way of handling smart contracts. It takes it up a notch from Bitcoin making it easier for users to manage agreements. It offers higher flexibility than Bitcoin and is hence be considered as more lucrative when it comes to investing in altcoins.

Best Altcoins in 2017

Ethereum has a brilliant reputation in the market and its team does well on ensuring that the currency continues to garner positive attention from the users. Unlike Bitcoin, the idea behind Etehreum is to provide a decentralized software for developers and programmers and Ether is the monetary unit that is very much like Bitcoin. Since it offers more in terms of value, investment in Ethereum makes more sense and may lead to better returns than other cryptocurrencies.

Ripple Next to Bitcoin and Ethereum, Ripple is the fastest growing cryptocurrency which is becoming a favorite among many investors. It is a start-up which provides global financial settlement solutions. The digital currency of Ripple is XRP and it is a scalable digital asset which is growing very quickly. It has almost $10 billion in market capitalization and is continually increasing its prevalence by partnering with banks and financial institutions to provide smoother cross-border payment solutions.

Top 5 Altcoins

With more financial institutions embracing XRP, Rpple has the ability to grow and provide you with favorable returns.

Dash Evan Duffield and Hyle Hagan are behind this altcoin which continues to serve the purpose of ensuring anonymity which is the main idea behind cryptocurrencies. It is being developed continually to attain new heights and the creators ensure that the reputation of the coin improves every day.

Altcoin Prices

Dash has some unique features especially when it comes to heightening the levels of anonymity when using these coins. This makes it a winner in the cryptocurrency race and has helped it improve its standing from where it started. This is a currency that is still in the development stage but surely has the potential to help you earn better returns.

Monero Another altcoin that aces anonymity is Monero. The increase in the value of this cryptocurrency is also hugely because of the anonymity it offers to the users. It uses stealth addresses and displays a cryptographic hash of the destination address to viewers. Just the sender and the recipient have the ability to decipher the hash making the transaction more secure.

Altcoins Mining

Monero is doing well but it is largely associated with darknet users. While it seems to be climbing up the ladder of success very quickly, there are organizations that still do not want to be associated with this cryptocurrency.

While it started in April 2014 with market capitalization of $5 million, Monero had a market capitalization of $183 million by mid 2017. This only proves the potential of the altcoin to grow.

Steem Steem is the token used on Steemit. Steemit gives you the chance to make money in the form of Steem dollars or Steem by posting quality content on the website. It means that you have the ability to blog and get money for it through upvotes related to your content. It is like a social media platform for bloggers or content writers.

Altcoin vs Bitcoin

At this time its potential seems under recognized with around 300,000 registered accounts. Imagine the power of Steem if it reaches the same popularity as social media platforms like Facebook. The value of Steem is bound to rise and it will rise quickly in a world where internet is a habit and not a means of passing time.

[expertdigitalmarketingthing-blog]

10 Ways How To Get More YouTube Subscribers #GetYoutubeSubscribers

How To Get YouTube Subscribers #GetYoutubesubscribers - Video content has become a hot component in digital marketing. YouTube hogs international limelight as a top of the bunch online video streaming site. This free platform by Google is the favorite of millions.  

  Backed by billions of fans, it is a great pool. To get YouTube subscribers and amass customers smart targeting is the way to go. Having a vast audience that is up grabs, businesses use YouTube to run targeted video advertising campaigns. Thanks to its sheer size it is better to showcase product videos to draw business leads. YouTube videos target social networks, blog communities, chat groups and video marketing communities in attracting new subscribers to take the campaign to the outer world. These days, businesses outsource services of professional marketing agencies help in making and marketing YouTube videos for harvesting likes and comments. Those YouTube marketing agencies harness Geo-Targeted traffic conversion from the desired regions to drive traffic. That is why, every time a new video is uploaded to a channel, videos will start getting likes and views from targeted audience base. Organized campaigns can make YouTube Videos trending and popular as a way to attract new YouTube subscribers. Only when YouTube Videos are trending, better audience engagement results and that make the audience watch and like videos. Videos need to be shared with hundreds of niche communities and video networks to get into trending charts. Marketing experts create a range of videos based on business verticals. Buzz needs to be generated about the brand and marketing via YouTube to net great results. The videos can be any of the following types. Promotional videos Presentation Videos Product Launch Videos Training Videos But take care of quality. It must be of HD quality and well scripted by experienced writers and there is dubbing by professional artists with pictures of product/service/website. Royalty free music and post edits can add to success.

10 Ways How To Get YouTube Subscribers

A business owner must know how to get subscribers on youtube / How To Get YouTube Subscribers as a video is a great video marketing avenue. Despite Facebook and Twitter stepping into the video marketing game, there is no dip in the bang of YouTube and the appeal is only growing. Those with a YouTube channel will be keen to know the tricks to get YouTube subscribers and increase the reach of YouTube videos. There must be a way to get subscribers for youtube as billions of unique YouTube visitors are getting added every month. Free Youtube subscribers are a valued user base for any uploaded video. While knowing the recipe of how to get more subscribers on Youtube, know that there is huge competition, as well as more and more YouTube stars, are on the rise. Bloggers too are turning to YouTube as a great platform to broaden their reach. They must know how to gain / Get youtube subscribers by creating a personal connection with their followers. On how to get free youtube subscribers leveraging other social media is also appropriate to drive traffic to YouTube as possible subscribers. A revamped YouTube channel will try to attract more audience as it can get get youtube subscribers fast. Many smart ways exist to gain ore YouTube subscribers. Add watermark to your video On how to get more subscribers on YouTube, a watermark on videos can hike its appeal and attract new subscribers. This can boost / Get youtube subscribers for viewers to subscribe to the channel. There are various options to show the watermark. Remove any existing watermark and use a new one. “Subscribe” mark helps to increase the number of subscribers. Configure YouTube account defaults On how to increase youtube subscribers a nice hack of configuring Youtube account defaults will work like subscribe reminder. To grow youtube subscribers fine tune YouTube adds default settings for future uploads.  This feature will ask users to subscribe all videos. For this, go to YouTube defaults page and add a description that will show up in all videos a person uploads. It is possible to edit or remove anything at the time of uploading videos. As a time saver, it ensures viewers to subscribe to a channel. Append your Channel URL with SML magic string The best way to get subscribers on youtube is appending  channel link with SML magic string “?sub_confirmation=1” When a user clicks on the link with SML magic string (?sub_confirmation=1), a pop-up will emerge asking to quickly subscribe to YouTube channel. This removes friction and allows users to quickly subscribe to a channel. Work with a plan and script videos Regarding how to gain youtube subscribers fast, the  first step is starting off YouTube journey with a plan so that the channel communicates it easily to viewers. Videos perform better if you write a script because scripts help in organizing your videos efficiently and keeping on track. By sticking to a script, it is easy to stay on track without veering off to unrelated topics in making sure the easy flow of events are resulting in a well-focused video. So, make sure all details are packed in a video script: words you are going to say actions to be taken in the video main points to stress. call to action such as link click Produce engaging content In order to to get subscribers on youtube, the content must be engaging, informative, and entertaining. It must remain that way for the whole duration of the video. It should not lose the hook in the middle. Any content that is entertaining or informative will bring an audience. That is standard with content marketing also. That means, if videos do not inform and entertain even a hard marketing push will get only partial success. Combine burst and evergreen videos To get subscribers on youtube upload a combination of burst and evergreen videos. Burst videos will charm viewers for a limited time and bring rapid hits, but it will fade away as time passes. On the other hand, evergreen videos get archived views and remain relevant all the time. So, it is important to feel satisfied before hitting the publish button so that videos are highly engaging and adds value to the audience. Increase uploading frequency Before knowing how to get subscribers on youtube look at the reason why subscribes look at a channel. This is out of the love for the publisher’s work and they have the urge to see more of their videos. Consistency is the key to developing a long-lasting relationship with subscribers. So, it is important that release of videos has to be timely, recurring, and structured. The kernel of YouTube success is the ability to stand out and is distinguishable. One way to do is to give videos offbeat names. That will draw a lot of people to channels based on curiosity alone. Most often, quirky titles play a major role in getting the views channel needs to benefit from social proof factor. To optimise views, explore the SEO part of YouTube marketing. A few tips for optimizing YouTube titles for greater reach can be explored. Use the keyword in the title. Using keyword in the title gives a big punch to SEO and adds a pretty large effect on video. Since Google crawlers do not watch videos as much they read blog posts keyword in the title will let Google bots know what the video is all about. Also, Google Adwords can trace what people search on the web. Offering videos that blend high volume searches and low competition with the title length moderate will flow good results. Google often shortens the length of the video to 66 characters and adds ‘YouTube | before the video name. That itself takes 10 characters. So the ideal video title should not exceed 50 characters. No matter what product or service is marketed, via YouTube customers want the best information to trigger a reaction. Videos are apt to provide company information, product information, service details, industry information, and reviews and provide a credible face to a company. Many case studies exist that talk about impressive returns from video marketing. GE’s success with YouTube marketing One example is GE that uses social media channels to connect with customers by showcasing user-generated content, videos and graphics about their business. GE’s YouTube channel tries to reflect values of transparency, information, and experimentation. Their commercials, interviews with visionaries, scientists, and engineers, can be watched on Youtube offering updates on future plans, technology, and other information. Apps to get YouTube subscribers There are also a few apps mainly Android ones used as YouTube Subscriber hacking app telling how to get youtube subscribers. Viral Booster: This YouTube Subscriber hacking app for Android makes videos go viral. Searching video and sharing on Viral Booster is a guarantee that it would go viral. Mutual watching for a minute also offers viewpoints. UTubeX: This app will get youtube subscribers as a top YouTube subscription hack and boosts video view, comment, like and channel subscriptions. New YouTubers can earn popularity to their channels. This anti-cheat, view and watch time supporting app supports mutually viewing videos and also offers the ability to send messages and sharing of videos.  

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Beginners Guide to Starting and Monetizing a Blog: 2019

Are you planning to start a blog but don’t know how to start it? Or is your blog not attracting desired traffic targets, making it difficult to monetize? Well, these are just some of the problems which almost every budding blogger faces as they come up.  With consistency, patience and a little passion on your side, you can create the blog you always dreamt about. Almost everyone wants to start making money from their blog immediately, which is a great mistake. The Holy Grail lies in first building your brand before you start monetizing it. However, let us not put the cart before the horse. Below we are going to show you five golden tips you can use in order to increase your chances of creating a successful blog and making money from it.

1. Find Right Inspiration for Blog topic

This is perhaps the most crucial step to create a new blog. There is no way you will be successful in writing about a topic that does not inspire you even if you think it can earn lots of money. Creating a blog that reflects your passion and likings is the first step if you have dreams of monetizing in future. Topics that you are passionate about can be derived from things as varied as your career, hobbies, or miscellaneous and specific topics.

Select your Niche

After you have come up with a topic that inspires you, try to narrow it down to a niche that you could possibly monetize. This should not be crowded but be popular enough to attract traffic. If you are interested in travel articles, for example, you could write about travelling to specific areas of the world such as Hawaii or India. This ensures that you capture a certain demographic of readership that is specific to where they want to go.

Research your Niche and Market

The next step after this would be to visit blogs that offer a similar or related service to what you are trying to bring on board. Reading a few blog posts that appear on top of the search engine ranking, will give you a good idea on the competition and public interest on the topic. If you find that there aren’t any popular blogs on your topic, then it could mean that you chose too specific a niche. On the other hand, if you find that there are many popular blogs on your topic, you might find it hard to out-compete them. This may call for you to tweak your topic to another related subject.

Check & Verify your knowledge on the Topic

Before you can start off, however, it would be crucial to test how knowledgeable you are about the topic. This can be done in a pretty easy way. Take a blank sheet and start jotting down as many headlines as possible about your topic without referring from any source. If you find that you can easily come up with at least thirty that fit the topic, then you are good to go; if not, you need to move to something else where you are more knowledgeable. Another way would be buy content online from professional writers. There are various writing services online that help you do the same.

2. Choosing the right Blogging Platform

After you have come up with a specific topic of discussion, it is time to decide on the blogging platform. There are typically two types of blogging platforms you can decide on; a free blogging service or self hosting of your blog.

Free Blogging Services

Free blogging services are what most new bloggers opt for. They are also indispensable for people who are not keen on paying for web hosting, aren’t familiar with web design or just want to enjoy the stability and ease that come with the services. Popular free blogging services include Google blogger, Wix, and Wordpress.com. Some of these, however, have premium payment for services such as add-ons or themes in order to enhance the aesthetic appeal of your blog. It is, however, important to note that most free blogging services have restrictions on how you can monetize your site and will expressly prohibit excessive affiliate links, banner ads, gambling, get rich quick schemes, pornography, and multi-level marketing.

Paid Blogging Services

Hosting your own blog is another option you should consider.  Although it requires initial capital injection, it often proves to be worth full in the future. The first step in this involves purchasing your own domain name. Thereafter you need to pay a certain monthly or annual fee to the hosting service so that they can keep your website available. The main advantages of hosting your blog through a paid service are greater customization options, direct access to information about your blog and a greater leeway on how you monetize your blog.

3. Create Compelling Content

It is worth noting that no blog can become successful or popular without first creating compelling content and secondly without having a captivating interface. Luckily it is possible to customize your blog to what you think will compel you and your readers to the blog. In case you are using a free service, this is possible with the myriad of free options and settings they have at your disposal. However, if you are hosting your own blog, getting help from a person with web design experience is absolutely necessary. It is, however, possible to use software such as Wordpress.org on your paid blog. This will offer you the same customizations and benefits available at the Wordpress.com free services.

Content for Blog

Without any reasonable doubt, it has been proven that bloggers who write original content are more successful than those who spin and copy-paste work from other internet sources. Original content is such a rare commodity on the internet. Make sure that you always come up with your own unique experience with the thing that you are writing about. For example, if you are writing a travel blog, it would be much better to write about your own adventures and tours complete with pictures and videos. This is bound to sell much more than writing about generic topics and lifting copyright images right from the search engine. In case, you lack experience, knowledge or time to write on the topic, you can simply outsource your content writing to platforms such as content-kart.  You can also create a loyal following by posting content that was not previously present online such as pre-20th-century artwork and books

Blog Posting Frequency

                                       Image Source: Weirdert Group

Finally, you cannot expect to post the article once in a while expect to make a decent earning from your blog. The key for blogging are consistency and prolificacy. You need to frequently create and post content on your blog so as to continuously keep your audience engaged. New content not only attracts new readers to your blog but also enables you to keep a tight leash on your current audience without the risk of losing them to a more prolific competitor. Always strive to write at least one article per week at the barest minimum. You can even consider using the content writing services like content-kart to get content for your blog.

4. Marketing your Blog

As renowned marketer aptly put it; “The art of marketing is largely the art of brand building. When something is not a brand, it will be probably viewed as a commodity.” One cannot sit easily even after they have followed the above steps if they have any dreams of monetizing their blogs. While it is true that a blog offering quality content is sure to attract traffic eventually, this can take too long if not marketed properly. Moreover increased traffic created after marketing leads to more traffic from the normal channels.

Choosing Right Keywords

Choosing the right Keywords is the first step for successful self-marketing of your blog. Keywords refer to specific words that relate to the topic of your blog. Keywords are what most readers will type in their search engines when they are looking for content like yours. You should choose only relevant keywords that people are likely to search frequently since these will increase your blog’s visibility, attract more readers and lead them to advertisements that they are more likely to click.

Search Engine Optimization

You probably have come across a term known as search engine optimization or SEO. This refers to the art for using and placing keywords at the right density and place so as to optimize the chances that your blog comes out top when that keyword is searched in search engine. Some of the ways that you can better optimize your keywords include; fixing them on the main title or subsection headers, on the first few sentences that introduce your article and in the links. Another effective way would be embedding them into your blog’s URL as opposed to using the date it was posted. You should always strive to make keywords as descriptive as possible in order to attract the right audience and increase your rankings. The tagging function on most blog softwares is an important place to add targeted keywords. It should be used as frequently and accurately as possible. For more details on SEO optimization read the article: 8 Golden Tips for High SEO Ranking in Google

Using Social Media Platforms

The power of social media in the 21st century cannot be underestimated. Social media platforms have gained a massive following and succeeded in building previous unknown brands into what they are today. This is why you should strive to harness the power of social media to grow your nascent blog brand. Albeit you should do this with a great sense of responsibility and care so that it may not backfire on you. Make sure that you make frequent updates on Twitter, Facebook, and other relevant social media sites so that you can get the best results. Additionally, it would be wise for you to post relevant links on blogging communities’ forums and comments. This always works with blogging communities that match your readership as it raises traffic to your site and improves your search engine ranking.

Backlinks for your Blog

Another innovative way to market your blog would be to contact other established bloggers who post related content to yours and ask them to crosslink with you. Make sure that you target established bloggers who boast of a massive following since they are much more likely to boast yours as well. If you have problems finding such bloggers you could try finding them on social media and blogging forums. When using a free hosting service, however, it would be important to note that excessive cross-linking could lead to your account getting closed down due to violating their terms of service.

Advertising on paid platforms

If you are looking to earn an audience for a fee then you could try marketing your blog via paid advertisements. Becoming an advertiser on Google AdSense, adding your blog on StumbleUpon, and creating your own paid adverts on Facebook can be a great way to market your own blog at a fee. Indeed this is one of the fastest ways to gain a massive audience to your nascent blog.

Creating Viral Content

Finally, you could try to go viral with your content. While it is not guaranteed that you will succeed in doing this, you could try using a funny image or video that is easily shared in order to market your content. In case you succeed in staying above the pack that is doing the same then you can be guaranteed of a massive influx of people visiting your blog.

5. Monetize your Blog

There are various ways to monetize your blog once it reaches the required amount of traffic and readership. This is because without having a constant stream of traffic coming into your blog, your hopes of making money are utterly hopeless. The first and basic way of monetizing your blog would be via contextual ads such as Google Adwords as well as other contextual ad services. The more readers click on the ads on your blog, the more advertisers get to pay you. In case you face issues regarding getting approved by Google AdSense, then you could try some Google AdSense alternatives such as BuySellAds, Chitika, Infolinks, BlogAds, and Media.net.

Creating Online Store

If you are a blogger who specializes in art and craft, creating an online store via Etsy would be a great step in introducing your products to the world. While you definitely don’t need to sell an item to make money on your blog, if it fits your blog then you should definitely give it a go. Preferably you should include a PayPal button for quick safe purchases since most buyers nowadays prefer not to divulge their credit card information online.

Collecting Funds for your cause

In case you run a blog that specializes in providing free assistance, services, and advice to those who can’t afford it, then it would be a good idea to monetize your blog by providing a PayPal button that your readership can use to donate to your cause.

Affiliate programming

Finally, the last way you could monetize your blog is through joining an affiliate program. Affiliate programs involve providing links to a company’s product where you are paid a commission after a customer purchases the specific product. In other words, you are actually doing a sort of sales marketing for the selling company. Different major online stores such as eBay, Alibaba and Amazon offer lucrative affiliate programs you can easily join. You can also find other company offering affiliate marketing by looking them up on an affiliate directory such as ClickBank. For successful affiliate marketing, however, make sure to follow the following simple tips:

Always sell products that everyone who reads your blog can afford to buy as opposed to selling only those designed to specific groups of people. For example, if you are talking about smartphones, it would be wiser to recommend mid-level budget devices as opposed to much more expensive flagship devices. Try to choose the affiliate programmes that give recurring commission & have less competition. This will ensure high returns for your work. For example, if you join referral program of content-kart, you can get recurring commission for 9 months. That implies, if you join one customer, whenever he purchases in first 9 months, you get your commission.

It is important that your readers know that you are an affiliate and that you get paid for advertising products to them. This is to dispel any confusion among readers who might think that you are advertising the product voluntarily or as a hobby.

Do not be overly marketing or dishonest when selling a product as an affiliate. Preferably you should always recommend products that you have actually personally tried out and enjoyed. Give honest reviews that include what you did not like about the product since this look more believable and less biased.

If you are however using a free hosting service such as Google Blogger, it is important to know and understand their affiliate policies, so as not to risk getting punished for your lack of knowledge