Blogging

7 Infographics to Help Launch a Successful Website

Oct 7, 2020 | Seo, website

With hundreds of millions of sites and blogs in the world today, the odds are against you that your site will succeed. When looking at some of the most successful bloggers in the world, one of the biggest reasons why other sites fail, is because their site owners didn’t put in the time and research to build a solid foundation and business plan around them.

The concept of coming up with a site idea, registering a domain and throwing content out there is not the way to find success online. While this may have worked several years ago, with more websites and competition going live every day, it’s now more important than ever to thoroughly plan out the focus and growth of your site before launching or even registering a domain name.

Infographics are one of my favorite ways to teach people how to get better at online marketing, whether its through increasing landing page conversions, protecting your reputation or even how to become a better blogger.

To help with this process, I hand selected seven infographics that break down some of the most valuable methods, key points and practices that must be considered when starting a new site. Be sure to read through each of them thoroughly, while also jotting down notes to plan out the eventual launch and success of your next site.

7 Great Infographics to Study Before Launching a New Site

Building the Foundation for a Successful Website

One of the very first things you will need to do when launching a new website or blog, is taking the time to build the foundation of your site. While this may seem like a tedious and simple tasks, it’s one of the most important things that need to be done. Thousands of blogs are started every and are inspired with a simple thought, then left to die after the site owner realizes they took the wrong direction in the beginning.

In this Five Steps to Build a Successful Website infographic from you will see the five steps to building the right foundation for your site, which cover everything from finding a niche, to choosing the right domain name, setting up your hosting and going live with your eventual site.

How to Find the Perfect Niche for Your Site

Knowing your exact target audience and the content you are going to create for them is one of the most important aspects of a successful website or blog. Way too often we hear stories of bloggers that want to create a site based on a topic that simply isn’t “niche” enough, and they end up generating a lot of content, but there is no clear focus to the site.

Instead, site owners need to niche down as much as possible so they can have the end goal of becoming the authority within that space and not spreading themselves too thin by covering too many topics. A good example of this would be if you wanted to cover “sports”, this would simply be way too generic. Even if you went down another level to “basketball” or individual players, it would be tough to compete and monetize in the process. It would be much more effective to go after tiny niche markets within sports or basketball, such as “jump training” or “athletic training”.

One of the best ways to know more about your audience and to find hidden niche markets within your existing niche, is to use many of the recommended methods found in this hot niche infographic, which mentions such methods as Google Trends, Amazon and Flippa.

Choosing the Right Domain Name

One of the most crucial decisions you are going to make before launching your site, is what domain name you are going to use. While a domain name isn’t going to make or break the success of your site, it is something you are going to have to keep around for the lifetime of your site. This means you will need to put in the time and effort to think about what you want your domain name to represent and how it will brand the content on your site. You will also want to make sure it’s easy to spell, remember and using one of the main TLDs, such as .com, .net or .org. All of these topics are covered in this How to Choose a Domain Name for Your Business infographic.

What CMS or Platform to Run Your Site On

In addition to choosing a niche, domain name and hosting for your site, you will also need to choose the right CMS platform as well. For most site owners these days, WordPress seems to be the solution of choice, with over a 54% market share among all CMS platforms. However, there are also many other options out there as well, such as Joomla and Drupal.

In this Most Popular CMS for Your Business Needs infographic, you will get to take a look at each of the CMS solutions out there, while also discovering what makes each of them special and seeing examples of different sites using each platform.

Have a Site Monetization Plan in Place

The goal for most websites is to ultimately be able to make money with their traffic and content. If you aren’t specifically selling any products or services directly, it might be hard for you to figure out how to create a site that drives high quality traffic to your site that can also make you money in the process. Fortunately, there are many different ways to make money online with a site of your own.

In this creative Ways to Monetize Your Website infographic, you can walk through the process of answering questions and moving through a flow chat to see what type of monetization might be best for your site. Monetizations include banner ads, in-text ads, sponsorship, affiliate links and more.

Content Creation is Key

The driving force for visitors coming to your site is going to be based off the content that you provide to your audience. This ties back into the beginning process of finding the right niche for your blog and knowing who your audience is. Creating content that provides value, a solution and also a call-to-action is key — however, unique content ideas aren’t always the easiest thing to come up.

Through this 22 Ways to Create Compelling Content infographic, you can take your niche topic and spin it through a wide range of content creation ideas such as letting a guest write content for your site, interviewing other experts within your niche, reviewing products or services and also using world trends to write link bait based articles.

How to Build High Quality Backlinks to Your Site

Content creation is always going to be important, but even more important is content promotion and getting high quality backlinks to your site. This is one area that many bloggers and site owners struggle with. A common theme is after writing numerous articles and seeing no visitor growth or incoming revenue, the site owner gives up and leaves their site to die. This can usually be attributed to not focusing on content promotion and building the necessary backlinks required to have a site rank in the search results.

In this How to Determine the Value of a Backlink infographic, you will understand what type of backlinks provide the most value, why they are important and how they affect the overall score of your website and the content you create.

A Successful Website Starts at the Foundation

Starting a website is one of the most exciting times for a site owner, blogger or online marketer, however the due diligence and research period in the beginning can get quite boring. Invest the necessary time and research into the foundation of your next website in the beginning, so you don’t find out a few months down that road that you took the wrong approach and completely wasted your time.

Discover how to create your own web site or blog today by following my simple walk through at blogging.org.

7 Ways to Make Your Blog Stand Out from the Crowd

Oct 7, 2020 | Blogging, Seo

When you first started your blog, you will probably remember the very basic looking design and theme it had. This is because each WordPress installation comes with the default theme of WordPress. If you don’t change this theme, you will then be lost among the millions of other blogs on the internet that have this same default theme. Good for WordPress, bad for you!

However, there is good news. In addition to changing your WordPress theme, there are many other ways you can make your blog stand out from the crowd. In this post we are going to highlight seven of the best ways to make a great first impression with your site, while also looking like an established authority in the process.

Change Your WordPress Theme

As mentioned, changing your WordPress theme is one of the easiest and most effective ways to stand out from the crowd. There are hundreds of thousands of free and premium WordPress themes for you to choose from. Free themes are always nice, but they are often outdated and not the highest of quality.

Over the years, I’ve always had a custom theme for this blog. Right now I’m using a custom version of the RISE theme from ThriveThemes, and I definitely recommend that you check it out if you are serious about the look, feel and customization of your site.

If you can’t afford a custom theme or hiring a designer to do the customization work, there are many other premium theme sites like ElegantThemes.com, which offer a wide selection of themes at a very low annual cost.

Get a Domain Name and Premium Hosting

When starting a blog, you have the option between going with a free hosting service like WordPress.com or Blogger.com, or actually getting your own premium hosting and a domain name to go along with it. The later is definitely your best bet, as it will allow you to not only have complete control over your site, but it will look much more professional than having a long free address off another free service.

Invest in a Logo Design

A great way to make your blog and site name pop, is to have a logo created for your site. Years ago a logo design may have cost a few hundred dollars to create. Now with the addition of sites like Fiverr and many different logo design marketplaces (such as DesignHill and LogoMyWay), anyone can now have a great logo design created for their own site for under $50.

Don’t Let Your Blog Content Dry Out

With several hundred million blogs in the world today, many of them have died out and stopped creating content for their sites. This is the last thing you want to happen to your site, as anyone who comes to your site and see the content is a few years old, it’s likely they won’t keep reading or even come back again.

At the same time, this doesn’t mean you need to create content on a daily basis — just make sure it’s consistent over time. Some of the biggest blogs in the world today might only release new content once every few weeks or even per month.

Get Active on Social Media

With over two billion users spread across all of the major social networks, shouldn’t it be a priority for your blog to be there as well? Of course!

In addition to any personal profiles you might already have setup with Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest and so on… you should also create accounts for your blog as well. This way you can easily share blog content with your social followers, while also keep track of who is sharing your content and engaging with your audience on their favorite networks.

Engaging Comments Through Your Blog

Just like everyone is using social media to connect with friends and family, blogging is meant to be the same way. Go back ten years ago and most web sites were created with HTML and were a one-sided conversation. With the introduction of WordPress, blogs are now more interactive and allow people to place comments on any blog posts they like.

To increase engagements and comments on your site, be sure to end each post with a call to action, such as asking for your audience’s thoughts in the comments below. It’s also important for you to respond to these comments as well. Everyone loves to be appreciated, and there is no better way to appreciate a blog comment, then to acknowledge them and follow up with your own response.

Keep Your Distractions and Ads to a Minimum

In the world of blogging, it’s very tough to keep people on your site. In fact, over 70% of the people that visit your site for the first time will never come back. It’s not so much about your site content, but that there is already so much out there already.

For this reason, you need to make sure your blog is limited on how many distractions and advertisements you have. Gone are the days of creating a site and throwing as many advertisements on it as you can. Now it’s all about creating compelling content, building a trusted brand and growing your following on a daily basis. One of the best ways to do this is through the use of the Optin Monster popup window (shown below) to grab your visitors email address and follow up with them through a well thought out autoresponder series.

How to Create a Successful Blog from the Start

No matter where you are currently at with your blog, it’s important that you always keep all of these methods in place. Starting your blog off in the right direction from the beginning is one of the best ways to insure you find success down the road.

An excellent way to think about how others might find value in your blog, is to simply look at your site or article as if you were a visitor and what areas you might like or dislike. Put yourself in the eyes of your audience and if your content doesn’t provide value to yourself, why would it be worth posting for others to read?

How To Make Money with the WP Engine Affiliate Program

Oct 7, 2020 | Affiliate Marketing, Seo, website

Web hosting is one of the most competitive markets online. Since every web site and blog has their own hosting, there is plenty of customers to go around. The type of hosting that you choose for your site will not only determine how much you pay, but it will also reflect on how fast and secure your site is. With that being said, not all web hosting services are the same. While most ‘shared’ hosting plans are fine for newbie bloggers and site owners, there are many advanced hosting services and dedicated server options to explore when you are pushing a lot of traffic through your site and simple can’t afford to have it go down — not even for a second.

One of these such option is WP Engine, a premier hosting service that specializes in WordPress hosted sites. In this article we aren’t going to focus on the WP Engine hosting service so much, but instead how users of WP Engine can earn money by recommending their own web hosting service to others through their affiliate program.

There are a many benefits to using WP Engine as your web host—they offer incredible security, scale, support, and more — which means it should be even easier for you to recommend them to your audience as well.

WP Engine Affiliate Program — What You Get

Likely nearly all affiliate programs, you are paid when someone signs up for a service or completes an action. The same holds true for the WP Engine affiliate program. WP Engine has made sure that if you put in the effort of being an affiliate for them that it will definitely be worth your time.

When you’re an affiliate for WP Engine, you get the following benefits:

$200 per sale commission for all accounts under $200 per month
100% commission on the first month on self sign-up accounts over $200 per month
$249 per sale in commission for business accounts
Tracking cookies make sure you’re getting credit (and getting paid)
Commissions paid out monthly
Bonus Commissions are available if you make multiple monthly sales, with the tiers and bonuses increasing
Commissions are triggered and registered after 45 days
Get paid for bringing on new affiliates. For each customer referral your affiliate referral makes, you get $50

Keep in mind that all sales have to maintain service for 45 days in order for you to get your commission.

To see more reasons why you should sign up to be a WP Engine affiliate, you can click here.

How To Sign Up as a WP Engine Affiliate

To sign-up to be an affiliate for WP Engine, all you have to do is go to their site and sign up.

Since their affiliate program is run through ShareASale, you can trust that all stats and campaign tracking are reported accordingly and that payments are always sent out on time. Once you are all setup, you can login to your Shareasale account, grab your links and start promoting WP Engine to your audience.

Tips For Success as a WP Engine Affiliate

With WP Engine already having a lot of experience and thousands of customers, it should be an easy sell for anyone with a web hosting or blogging related site — especially if you are already using WP Engine as your current web host. However, that doesn’t mean that you can bring in fat paychecks without doing any work. To be successful and make money as a WP Engine affiliate, you can follow a few easy tips.

Write an Honest Review About Your Web Host

The best way to make money with WP Engine, is to have them as your existing web host, then writing a review about why you are using them as your hosting company and giving a detailed review of why others should use them as well. The best way to convince your audience to act upon something, is to show them the value and that you are currently using that same product.

Need some advice on how to get the most out of your review articles? Read this guide on writing killer review posts.

Put Time in the Promote Your Content

Don’t just post your affiliate links all over the internet and expect users to just take your word for it (or even expect them to click it). When you’re promoting WP Engine, make sure you put in the time and effort to create engaging and quality content around your message and call to action.

In addition to building out your own content, you can also view the many different types of ad creative that WP Engine offers to their affiliates through Shareasale.

No matter how you are going to create your content or promote WP Engine, the most common and best way to do this is to talk about why you honestly believe it’s a great investment. Which brings us to the next tip…

Utilize Features and Benefits

Talking about features and benefits of a service or product is an age-old sales technique, and it’s highly efficient in both print, online, and in person. It’s not enough to tell someone you think that they should buy something; you have to tell them why.

Explain that faster support (something WP Engine is great at) means that you’ll get issues on your site fixed before you risk losing customers because of it (benefit). People start listening (and purchasing) a lot faster when they start hearing what’s in it for them.

In short, tell your audience why WP Engine is the best solution for them.

Be Patient

Spamming your affiliate links all over the internet repeatedly and aggressively isn’t going to bring you any sales. If anything, it will turn people off and drive them away. You need to be patient as an affiliate—sales will come in over time.

This doesn’t mean to sit back and not do anything (unless you’re just counting on the affiliates you got to sign up to bring in sales), but you shouldn’t be impatient to see a lot of income come quickly.

Though WP Engine brings in large amounts of commission, sales often come in slowly and overtime. It’s an investment—it may take some time, but you’ll surely reap the benefits—and profit—over time.

Stay Up To Date

In the world of web hosting and technology, everything changes very fast. What was hot last month, might not be so hot today.

WP Engine is one of the top hosting sites, largely because they constantly stay on top of their game and are offering new tools, services, and patches to their users. Just as they stay up to date, you need to stay up to date, too.

Every time they offer a big upgrade that would inspire either customers or new affiliates to sign up (like the current bonus comimssions for multiple sales), you want to be the first to know about it. It’s a new selling tool that can bring in entirely new sales, as well as push a few over the edge who were thinking about purchasing but hadn’t yet.

Changes they make also gives you an extra chance to talk about WP Engine and why it’s so amazing, which is a great opportunity to re-open the conversation to interested potential customers.

Always Have a Call to Action

Your Call to Action is important any time you’re running an ad campaign or trying to sell something. It tells users exactly what you want them to do.

When you’re promoting WP Engine, whether it’s in a blog post or your Facebook or a newsletter or an ad campaign, you need to have a clear call to action like “see more” or “sign up today,” hyperlinked with your affiliate link that sends them right to the landing page or sales page.

No matter where you’re posting your affiliate link for WP Engine, it should always be accompanied with (or hyperlinked in) a very clear and concise call to action.

Recruit New Affiliates

Unlike other web hosting affiliate programs, WP Engine also offers the benefit of not only getting paid for every customer you refer to their service, but also any active affiliates you can send their way as well. This is a great way to make some really nice income—and it’s income that will come in automatically.The more affiliates you sign up, the better off you are, and the more money in your pocket, all with little to no extra work on your part after you get those affiliates to join. Why wouldn’t you want to take advantage of that?

Special Bonus Commissions!

For a limited time, WP Engine is offering special bonus commissions on your sales! You’ll earn a cash bonus as you reach each tier. For example if you send 10 sales, you’ll get a bonus commission of $100 (5 sale tier) + $250 (10 sale tier) in addition to your normal commissions!

Are you an affiliate for WP Engine yet? Have you thought about signing up? If you’re interested, click here to get the process started and to become an affiliate for WP Engine.