1. Consistency

Consistency is one of the most important qualities that your blog needs to develop that engaged following. Consistent publishing not only drives more traffic but also increases leads.

A recent HubSpot study found small businesses posting content more than 11 times each month had three times the visitors of sites publishing once monthly — and twice as many leads as businesses posting 6-10 times. An editorial calendar helps build a consistent publishing schedule and motivates you to stay on track.

2. Content Arcs

Compared to posting on whichever topic comes to mind, an editorial calendar is far more strategic. By planning out your content in advance, you can build a sense of progression that walks with customers through each stage of the buyer’s journey, while telling the story of your brand.

An editorial calendar will also allow you to build smaller content arcs into your strategy, such as a weekly interview or current events roundup. This kind of connected content will keep your readers returning so that they don’t miss an installment.

3. Future Flexibility

Along with structure, an editorial calendar also provides flexibility to your blog strategy. A content plan lets you see the larger picture, from now into the future, allowing you to more easily refine next week and next month’s content based on the results of past content.

You’ll quickly discover the topics that drive the most traffic and that most resonate with your followers. You can then adjust your future content pieces based on the content proven to be the most popular.

4. Tracking and Analysis

Naturally, in order to take advantage of insights from your content and your audience, you need to be tracking the performance of your content pieces. The specific metrics you track for your content should be based on your overall business goals, but in general, you should be paying attention to the content themes and individual posts that drive the most traffic.

Some editorial calendars also include built-in tools for promoting content on social media and tracking that engagement as well. An organized content and promotion schedule makes it easier to track and analyze your results.

5. Meeting Business Objectives

An editorial calendar also makes it easier to ensure that your blog content and practices are focused on meeting overall business goals. Digital marketing specialist Stacy Jackson suggests ranking each content idea for alignment with specific business goals. At the very least, you should be evaluating each topic for whether or not it will contribute to your marketing and organizational objectives.

Resources to Get Started

There are great benefits in adding an editorial calendar to your blogging strategy — and there are many tools available to help you get started with an effective calendar. HubSpot offers free digital editorial calendar templates that you can adapt for the specific needs of your blog or business, while CoSchedule provides a series of free printable worksheets for strategic planning, along with their flagship digital calendar.

To help you out further in building out your content base, check out our article on planning a year’s worth of content in just one day. These resources will help you quickly develop an effective blog and blogging process that will grow your audience.

Build an Audience for Your Blog

First, in order to make good money with ads, your blog needs an audience. Advertisers will be less likely to work with you if your website is brand new and has no significant traffic (which means no potential customers).

So the first step is honing your blog idea, audience, creating consistent content, and sharing it. Here are some resources to help you grow an audience from scratch:

• How to Start a Blog in a Day
• How to Plan a Year’s Worth of Content for Your Blog in a Day

Building your audience is painstaking and takes a long time, but it pays off. To start off on the right foot, you should have an audience in mind, a topic that’s as specific as possible (remember it’s important to be in a niche that isn’t too saturated with other blog content), and publish regularly at the best quality you can.

The more traffic and loyalty you can muster, the better your ads will perform and the more you’ll make.

Find Advertising Options that Work with Your Content

Even if you don’t have an audience yet, there are some options such as Google AdSense that will let you start hosting ads right away. Just don’t expect them to perform very well without any users.

Regardless, there are 3 basic avenues you can go down for advertising:

• Affiliate marketing networks
• Creating relationships with individual companies
• Blog advertising platforms like AdSense

Affiliate Marketing Networks

What is affiliate marketing? It’s basically when a blogger references, reviews, or promotes a product for another company, and shares in the profits if a sale is made from their referral.

So in this scenario, you’re part of an affiliate program for a company and they provide you with ads and trackable links that you can host on your website or integrate into your content. Ideally, these products are directly related to your content and interest your audience. When one of your readers clicks the link or ad, the affiliate marketing network tracks that interaction and logs that it was a referral from your site. When the purchase is made, you get paid a commission.

The affiliate marketing network provides the technology and the interface for affiliates and companies to find each other and create advertising strategies. Many networks offer a variety of link building tools and advertising widgets.

For example, AvantLink, an affiliate marketing network, offers a custom link builder tool plus a WordPress plugin that allows you to integrate many advertising features into your website.

Each affiliate network has different requirements for publishers, and a different set of advertisers to work with. You can find out a lot by signing up and searching for products related to your content. Here are some great affiliate networks to try:

• AvantLink
• CJAffiliate
• Impact Radius
• Pepperjam

Go Directly to Companies You’d Like to Work With

Another option is to reach out to companies you’d like to work with directly. Just search the company’s name with affiliate program in Google. Here’s an example of an affiliate program page on the Cotopaxi website.

Use Blog-specific Advertising Tools

Just like Google’s AdSense, there are many blog-specific advertising tools available for serving ads or adding affiliate links to your website that are separate from the big affiliate networks.

Here’s a list of options:

• Crispad
• Blogads
• Amazon Associates

Especially if you’re starting out with product reviews on items you’ve purchased, Amazon Associates is a great starting point. You can review anything you buy on Amazon and get paid a commission on products you help sell with a referral.

Placing Advertisements On Your Website—The Technical Part

With WordPress, placing advertisements is about as easy as it gets. You can place image and text ads anywhere on your website that features widgets, such as a sidebar, header, or footer area. You can also place ads directly into your WordPress blog posts or pages pretty easily.

Placing Ads with Widgets

Just about any affiliate ad you’ll find will give you an html snippet that you can copy and paste right into your site. Here’s an example from AdSense.

Here is the AdSense code snippet you’ll copy to implement the ad. Either copy and paste it into a notepad or keep this page open and navigate to your WordPress dashboard. You can add widgets by going to Appearance > Customize.

Next, select Widgets from the sidebar menu.

From the widgets menu, you can choose the area of your website where you’d like the ad to display. Then simply scroll down until you find the Custom HTML widget. You’ll paste your code into this widget, and your ad should preview to the right. When you’re done, click Save and Publish and you’re good to go.

Placing Ads or Links in a WordPress Post or Page

Now, you can also embed most ads into your WordPress posts and pages. When in the post or page editor, you can switch the editor from visual to text to paste in raw html.

The same method works for custom links or image ads. This enables you to add in referrals to products and deals when it’s most relevant, as well as serving more generic ads in your blog’s sidebar.

If you run into issues with placing ads, our WP Live WordPress experts can help walk you through it, and teach you any WordPress tips and tricks you want to learn. Check it out here.

Color Psychology and Your Website

Part of choosing the right colors is knowing what colors mean to your audience. Keeping in mind that colors mean different things in different contexts and cultures, you can easily find colors that accomplish your goals. I’ll come back to that in a moment, but for now let’s look at how color psychology can inform the choices you make.

Color Context

Colors often have different meanings in different contexts. For example green is often associated with environmental or conservation causes, while green can also indicate a successful action such as entering the correct password.  The colors you choose can be useful navigation guides. However, you should never rely on color alone to indicate important states such as error messages.

Red and green are known to cause problems with accessibility for colorblindness, as you can see in this example. There are some free tools to check colorblindness accessibility on your website:

• The Colorblinding Chrome extension—simulates colorblindness on any website you’re browsing.
• Coblis colorblindness simulator—upload any image file and simulate colorblindness.

Aside from the accessibility problems that arise with different colors and contrasts, keep in mind that colors also have cultural cues, such as red or yellow for alerts or warnings and green for confirmations.

Perception of Brands and Products

With the right color choice, you can better control the perception of your brand, products, and website. For example, bank websites tend to use blue as their primary color because it implies stability and trust.

Here are some great examples of how well-known companies have made color choices to control the perception of their brand.

Using Contrast as a Cue to Take Action

Most websites have an end goal of getting the user to take some kind of action. Color can help direct your users to those areas, such as buttons or important callouts, by using the power of contrast.

A theory known as the Von Restorff effect suggests that using a color that is totally different (in isolation) from all the other colors on your site will immediately draw the user’s attention to that spot.

Research has shown that calls to action with bright colors drive action way more than darker or muted colors. And even within the common choices for buttons, such as green, red, and yellow, companies have found a 21% increase in actions taken just by changing the color of the button. The performance of your button color and calls to action will depend on your audience, but it’s one of the easiest A/B tests you can run to discover what works best.

Choosing Colors for Your Audience

Now that you have an understanding of how color psychology can inform your website design, let’s move the focus over to your audience. Before you choose colors, you should conduct a little research about your people. While surveys and focus groups are great for staying in touch with your customers, you may not have those resources yet, so where do you turn?

Instead, research your competition. This is a great opportunity to observe the choices they’ve made and assess what you can do better. Think about how you might use a color palette to beat the competition.

Color Preferences

Depending on who your demographic is, you might use a different palette entirely. Studies show that certain color preferences can draw a specific group of people in, or repel them. Keep in mind, these are generalizations, so you shouldn’t build your whole strategy on them.

Researchers have identified certain color preferences by gender, which can be useful if your business or blog is catering to a specific gender’s interests.

Location is another consideration that can affect your color choices.

As you can see, blue and red can mean very different things across the world, so if your target audience is in a specific geographic location, it’s a good idea to research the cultural significance of your color choices.

Determining the Emotional Impact of Your Color Choices

In addition to color context and preferences, a big part of choosing the right colors is the emotional impact. Your colors should leave users feeling exactly way you want them to about your brand. So if your big push is credibility, blue is a great option. Or if you want to inspire your customers to be creative, try purple.

This great color chart from CoSchedule can help you choose the colors that will most likely convey the feeling you want for your brand. Also, their word association chart can help further refine your ideas.

Finding your audience and the emotional impact you want to make as a brand will set you up nicely to create a color palette you can test.

Creating a Great Color Palette for Your Website

The key to a good color palette is balance. Having too many colors makes balance difficult to achieve. Plus, research points to the fact that users prefer websites with simple color palettes, so keep yours to no more than 3 primary colors.

To add variety, texture, and hierarchy, you can experiment with the different shades of your primary color choices. This article on color in UI design shows how effective designing with one color can be.

Adjusting the saturation and brightness of your primary color choice can give you a great palette of secondary colors to add dimension to your website.

Balancing Your Colors

When actually placing your colors in different areas of your website, it’s good to go by the 60/30/10 rule. This means using your primary color 60% of the time, a secondary color 30% of the time, and a contrasting color (this would be your call to action or button color) 10% of the time.

Often this translates to a hierarchy on websites that carries through each page. For example, you might have a header with your dominant color, a white background for the page content with splashes of your secondary color, and your contrasting call to action color smattered across buttons, links, and important callouts.

When playing with your options, keep accessibility in mind and use the colorblindness tools from the beginning of the article to check your contrast.

Common Website Elements and Color Choices

To help you get on track faster, and not waste time reinventing the wheel, let’s look at some examples of how a color palette might be used with common website elements.

Here are two homepages for similar products—Nike and Brooks. We could summarize their color palettes by element:

• Header
• Navigation
• Buttons
• Text
• Images

Nike relies on a stark black and white scheme with splashes of bright, highly contrasting colors in their images. This has the effect of appealing to a wide audience—which makes sense because Nike spans the sports, fitness, and fashion industries.

Brooks, on the other hand, is more running-focused. They use a similar black and white palette, but with a very bright blue secondary color which is also used for their calls to action.

The simplicity of these palettes make it easy to navigate without getting distracted and draw attention to the products—perfect for an ecommerce website. Brooks even uses their blue as part of their brand promise, with their “true blue guarantee”—that’s a prime example of how to insert your secondary color right where users are looking for more information (it shows up after the product feed).

As you can see in these examples, the headers and footer are full, saturated primary colors, while other elements are accented with more or less color saturation. This creates a nice balance of color and allows your buttons and calls to action to stand out.

Practical Tools for Creating Your Color Palette

Now that you can strategize and research your color choices, I’ve wrangled up some of the best free tools online to help you get started.

• Color Hunt – Find interesting color combinations and copy the color codes.
• The Colorbook – Find the most popular color palettes from leading designs on dribbble.
• Coolors.co – Generate random color palettes by pressing the spacebar and create palettes by uploading images.
• Colorzilla chrome extension – See a color or palette you like? Get the color code using this Chrome extension.

Find Out Your Current Site Speed

Before you start optimizing, get a pulse on what your site speed is now. Pingdom is a speed testing tool that allows you to paste your site address in and run a performance test for free. You’ll be able to test your site virtually from different locations in the world—a great advantage if you have a specific geographical audience. The tool will give you a score and some suggestions to optimize your speed.

After running your speed test, you’ll also get a list of specific performance insights. Using this list, you can root out the more pressing issues with your site speed first, and work your way down to the smaller problems later.

Go ahead and run your test. When you can pinpoint some areas for improvement, you’re ready to move on to the next step. These five optimizations are great for any WordPress site, but can also help you solve some of the more specific problems found in your performance report on Pingdom.

1. Optimize Your Hosting Plan

Some of the biggest gains can come from upgrading your hosting plan. Depending on your plan, and how much traffic you have, your hosting plan may not be adequate. In order to fix this, the easiest path is changing your hosting plan, or worst case scenario, your provider.

With shared hosting, often the most affordable option, you are hosting your website on a server shared with other websites. Depending on the traffic, one website might be making more requests to the server and slowing down all the other sites.

Some great options to enhance your server performance are Bluehost’s WordPress hosting plan or their Dedicated Hosting, depending on your budget constraints. If you’re changing hosting providers, keep in mind that you’ll need to migrate your website to make it work.

Now, you don’t necessarily have to upgrade your hosting plan to make your website faster. Let’s look at some free ways to optimize before you make that decision.

2. Use Browser Caching to Optimize Loading Times

Web browsers have a feature known as caching. It works by saving some of the files and images loaded the first time you visit a website so that it loads faster the next time you visit it. With WordPress, you can enhance the caching functionality of your website for free with a plugin.

The W3 Total Cache plugin is a great way to set up better caching on your WordPress website. This plugin will let you configure caching and can really trim down the time it takes to load your page.

Here’s how to install WordPress plugins.

3. Optimize Your Images

Many websites you visit will have very large image files that take a long time to load. Image compression can take care of this. There are ways to optimize your images even when they’re already uploaded to your website. The Smush WordPress plugin from WPMUDEV will allow you to compress existing images on your WordPress site, and will even convert your images into compressed jpegs. This plugin comes free, and also offers a pro version which allows you to smush your whole image library at once.

Now that you know about image optimization, you should also compress any new images you upload. The smush plugin can be configured to auto-smush any new images, but we recommend checking your image sizes and compressing them as much as you can on your own first. You can compress images in a program like Adobe Photoshop if you have it, but there are also free image compressors on the web, like compressor.io. For the web, always try to get the best image quality in the smallest file possible.

Another way to optimize pages with lots of images is a lazy load plugin. a3 Lazy Load is a great option, which will only load the images visible on the page first, and then load new images as you scroll down, saving tons of loading power.

4. Database Optimization

This sounds like something you’d hire an intern to do. But thankfully, optimizing your WordPress database is easy with the right plugin. One of the preferred plugins is WP Optimize, which is amazing and also free. What it does, essentially, is clear out any unnecessary data being stored. It specifically targets some of the inefficiencies that are built into WordPress functions that are often unused. For example, WordPress stores infinite revisions of posts so you can go back to a previous version. While this is an awesome feature, you probably don’t need all 150 revisions for all time and eternity.

Installing this plugin will optimize many of the features on your website automatically, and you can control what gets optimized. A bonus feature is that you can set up automatic backups with UpdraftPlus to run before each database cleanup.

5. Changing WordPress Settings

In addition to the many free plugins and resources available to speed up your website, you can change some basic WordPress settings to maximize efficiency.

Keep Everything Updated

One of the most basic approaches, and most vital, is to keep all your software up-to-date. Navigate to Dashboard > Updates to check for updates available for your WordPress core software and plugins. Updating is also crucial for your site security.

Adjust Reading Settings

Another thing you can do, especially for blogs or portfolios, is adjust your reading settings by going to Settings > Reading.

Here you can reduce the load by lowering the number of posts per page, and by choosing Summary instead of full text for the feed.

Adjust Discussion Settings

There are some minor gains for altering WordPress’s default discussion settings by going to Settings > Discussion.

First, disable link notifications from other blogs as shown here.

And if you have a ton of comments (congratulations) you may want to split them into pages using the setting below.

Deactivating and Removing Bad or Unnecessary Plugins

Plugins are at the heart of WordPress customization. In fact, many times it’s better—in terms of speed—to start with a lean WordPress theme and add plugins to expand the features you need. But there are some bad plugins out there, which may slow your site down. Read our guide to finding good WordPress plugins to be proactive about choosing the good ones.

Using the P3 (Plugin Performance Profiler) plugin you can figure out which plugins are slowing you down and determine if you can deactivate them.

Common culprits are things like slider plugins and outdated front end plugins. Also, if there’s a plugin that you only use once in a while, you can deactivate it until you need it again.

In addition, you should always take a general look at plugins and do some spring cleaning. Just like going through your closet, ask yourself if you are going to use it. If not, get rid of it, and you can always get it back if you decide you need it.

These 5 free and easy tips can take your site speed from sluggish to speedy with only a couple hours of fiddling. There’s always more room for improvement, and each website is a different story. So if you find yourself stuck, give us a call or check out WP Live. Our WordPress experts can walk you through your site performance upgrade step-by-step.

1. How-to Articles

The latest tech devices are always popular purchases, during the holidays and beyond. One way to capture affiliate commissions for these often expensive items, such as the iPhone X or Amazon Echo, is by providing helpful information about their use.

As a resource for new owners, a how-to guide is an opportunity to upsell accessories and related items. Your guide may also convince someone to buy a new iPhone or Amazon Echo after the holidays, providing you with an even bigger affiliate commission.

2. Popular Item Lists

Lists of popular or themed gift ideas are often successful during the holidays and can work for you as an affiliate marketer after the holidays. Shoppers will be interested to see what they may have missed during the busier shopping season, and your list can point them to the holidays’ most popular gifts. Themed product lists make discovery even easier for potential customers. You can center product lists around interests, such as music or food, age groups, or a variety of other categories.

3. Post-Holiday Contests

Consumers may be tired of all the advertisements they’ve been bombarded with during the holidays. They may also be looking to save money after the biggest spending season of the—but you can still capture their attention with a contest. A giveaway or competition on your website or social media represents the opportunity to win something for your website visitors—and provides you with the opportunity to upsell some products.

4. New Year’s Motivations

The next big sales emphasis in early 2018 will be products related to New Year’s resolutions. Many people establish goals to change their lives as the year begins, whether they want to be more healthy, advance their career or spend more time with loved ones. Thinking about the motivations your audience will have to make changes in 2018 will help you identify the right products that will lead to affiliate sales.

There are plenty of opportunities to make affiliate commissions after the holidays. With how-to guides, lists of popular items and other strategies, you can continue to make a profit as an affiliate marketer heading into the new year.

Ways to make your email marketing work better for your business

1. Keep it concise and clean.

Even your most loyal customers are pressed for time. Don’t waste theirs by saying more than necessary in your marketing email messages. In addition, make your message easy to read by using sub-headings and bullet points. If you use images, limit it to one or two, and make sure the files are as small as possible. Remember many email programs send messages with large images directly to spam.

2. Make it actionable.

Don’t leave your readers guessing about what you want them to do. Tell them! If you want them to subscribe to a newsletter, buy a product or download an e-book, make sure that you end your message with a concise call to action with the necessary contact information.

3. Format your email for success.

A good marketing email tells a story. Start with your offer, continue with why the customer should take your desired action, and finish with a clickable call to action.

In addition, make sure that your email will play as well on a small screen as it will on a large screen. That generally means not getting too fancy with images and elaborate formatting that don’t look great on a mobile screen.

4. Start with a great subject line.

Your subject line is the first impression of your marketing message. Write a boring subject line and it’s likely that your reader won’t ever see the cleverly-crafted body of your message, let alone buy your product. Make your subject line enticing by personalizing the line, making sure to keep it within the character count limit, and asking an intriguing question.

5. Use a conversational tone.

No one likes to be lectured to. However, too often we talk more like a professor in our marketing emails than a friend. Whereas traditional direct mail pieces used phrases like “buy now” exclusively, email marketing relies on building and is much more effective if you use a tone similar to how you would talk with a friend about your product.

Crafting effective marketing emails doesn’t have to be a stressful chore. Increase your click-through rate by being concise, using a conversational tone and making sure to include a clear call to action.

The Benefits of Analyzing Your Digital Marketing Campaigns

The biggest benefit you get from marketing analysis is gaining actionable insights from your data. If you have a reliable way to extract value from your marketing information, then you can use it to improve over time.

Another advantage, especially if you have near-real-time reporting, is that you can quickly measure the impact of changes. If you alter a campaign while it’s running, you can see whether you’re attracting more prospects or fewer with your improvements. This rapid cycle is essential for dialing in on what your audience wants.

What Are Goals in Google Analytics?

Google Analytics, a powerful website analytics platform, can easily be integrated with your WordPress site. You can use the features from Analytics to collect and track important metrics, such as goal conversions.

When using Google Analytics, a goal is an action that you want the user to take. For example, your goal may be for someone to provide their email address for your newsletter, or to purchase a product. When you set a goal in Google Analytics, you make it possible to track user behavior that leads to this goal. The more you know about that behavior, the more you can increase that goal conversion.

Set and Track Goals

The Analytics platform makes it easy to set up goals. When you’re in the Admin section, you can select any type of view and click on the Goals header. A button appears with the label “+New Goal.”

You can use a provided template, leverage the smart goals feature, or specify the user behavior that is associated with that goal. Once you set up the goal, Google Analytics knows what to track in website traffic reporting.

When your goal is associated with a certain URL, such as a link from an email or a purchase page, you can add UTM parameters to that link to get more insight into your traffic’s behavior.

The Google Analytics Campaign URL Builder allows you to quickly add these parameters to your links. The only required parameter is the campaign source, which is the referrer. You can add the medium, name, term and content for unique URLs that provide deep insights into your traffic.

You can dive into this data by going to the Campaign section underneath Acquisition in your Google Analytics report.

Using Goals and UTM Parameters

One way you can use goals and UTM parameters is to track how many people end up purchasing your product after they engage with your email newsletter content. Your goal looks for users who go through the checkout process and reach the Thank You page, which appears after a successful transaction.

To do this, you would configure your UTM parameters for all of the links leading out from the emails sent to your newsletter list. The source would be a newsletter, the medium would be email, the campaign name should indicate when the email was sent and whether it went to a segmented list, and the campaign content should note the theme of that email or series.

Here’s how to set up a UTM URL just like in the image above:

• Enter the URL you’re sending to (such as a product or specific page on your site).
• Enter newsletter for the source.
• Email for the medium.
• And for the campaign name, make it as specific as you need to know what purpose this link served (see above).
• You can also add a term if you’re bidding on or targeting a specific keyword used in search.
• And you can even specify different delivery methods for A/B testing, such as a button vs. a text link.

When you look at your goals, you can see how many customers you acquired from your email newsletter, as well as the specific email that triggered the final conversion.

This information is invaluable for optimizing your marketing efforts and discovering areas where you can improve. Once you can quickly and conveniently access Google Analytics from WordPress, you have all the information you need right in front of you.

Secrets to Marketing Campaigns that Flow

Turning consumers into clients has several well-defined steps, which sales and marketing experts refer to as the Sales Funnel or the Customer Journey. These titles refer to the path that individuals take from being completely unaware of the brand to placing an order – and in some cases, returning to place additional orders again and again.

The first step in the Sales Funnel is creating brand awareness. Here, consumers who had no idea your company exists begin to develop an understanding of who you are and what you do. They discover that there is a solution out there for the problems they are facing. Some say this piece is the biggest hurdle for any marketing campaign because it takes research and planning to get your message in front of the right people.

Next, consumers go through the interest phase, as they move from understanding that a solution exists and your company can provide it to actively doing some research. Most choose to learn more online, but depending on the type of product and your distribution channels, some may conduct research in person or over the phone.

The next phase of the Sales Funnel is the pivotal moment of decision. After completing their research, potential customers determine whether or not they will move forward with a purchase. Finally, there is the actual purchase, when prospective customers become buyers.

As consumers go from awareness to purchase, your marketing campaign plays an important role. Your presence and promotion of your solution at each critical touchpoint makes the difference between a sale going to you or your competition. As your prospective customers move through the Sales Funnel, your marketing efforts through social media, email, paid searches, traditional advertising, user-friendly landing pages and follow-up analysis create new clients and keep them coming back.

WordPress Marketing Tools That Work

As you start to plan your marketing campaign, understanding the digital marketing tools available to your business ensures you can take advantage of every possible opportunity. These are a few of the most effective options you can access in WordPress:

• Constant Contact – If you have a Constant Contact account, the Constant Contact Plugin for WordPress simplifies and automates a wide variety of tasks. Connect with current and prospective customers with a robust email list, made possible with a simple Constant Contact checkbox on your site. You can also edit and add to your contact lists without visiting the full Constant Contact site, build forms, gain thorough understanding of your reach through built-in Google Analytics visualization, and permit users to subscribe to specific newsletters and mailing lists.
• OptinMonster – Many users rate OptinMonster as the number one lead generation plugin for WordPress. This tool makes creating forms fast and easy, with amazing results that are sure to impress your target audience.
• Google Tag Manager – Tracking data from all of your advertising sources, such as Facebook and Google, is a complex technological process. Google Tag Manager simplifies this task by making it easy to implement tracking pixels and more on your website without having to hire a developer.
• Google Analytics – If you aren’t already using Google Analytics, you are in the minority. This is one of the most popular data measuring tools available. Get in-depth visibility into how your site’s visitors find you, as well as which parts of your site interest them most. Best of all, there is no charge to use Google Analytics.
• Google Optimize – Gaining insight from Google Analytics won’t help your business if you are unable to take action on your results. Google Optimize is designed to make it easier for you to experiment with changes to your site because it offers detailed insight into the impact of every change you make. You can easily run A/B tests for copy, designs, and other strategic details.
• WP Form Builder Plugin – Once upon a time, you needed at least basic coding skills to create a functional online form for your site. Fortunately, those days are gone thanks to the WP Form Builder Plugin. You don’t need to write any code at all to create the fields you need, require answers for certain questions and send automated confirmation emails.
• Visual Composer Plugin – Building an attractive, user-friendly website can be intimidating. With the Visual Composer Plugin, you can move forward with confidence. This tool offers you drag-and-drop editing capabilities, along with an array of additional features to ensure your site meets your exact specifications.

Installing WordPress Plugins is easy to do, and the impact on your marketing campaign is extraordinary. Go from good to great with the help of these simple and affordable tools.

What’s the Difference Between HTTP and HTTPS?

HTTP stands for Hypertext Transfer Protocol, and acts as the liaison between servers and web pages. It is one of the underlying mechanisms of the Internet that transfers information from a web server to your browser and shows the information presented on a website. The information transferred through HTTP is not secure. Those with the right tools would find it easy to see the information which goes back and forth.

HTTPS uses the same mechanisms as HTTP, but the S means that it uses an extra level of security in the process of transporting data from the server to the screen. HTTPS works in tandem with the SSL protocol (Secure Sockets Layer). SSL works with HTTPS to encrypt the contents of individual packets while still allowing the internet to understand where the packet needs to go. Once it reaches your browser, the packet is unencrypted and displayed.

In the beginning, this type of encryption was used by banks and any place where credit cards were used. Its development was one of the main reasons why internet e-commerce was accepted. However, the use of HTTPS has considerably broadened after it was identified as a ranking factor in 2014. Many companies got on board to receive that tiny boost.

The use of HTTPS on a site conveys trust because it means the information you give to the site is encrypted. Third parties aren’t able to see the information, such as a credit card number, unless they have the necessary certificates. Many of the hacks that came out during the 2000s were from websites that didn’t use this protocol. Later, individuals got the ability to use SSL directly to hide their browsing habits and protect their privacy.

Is HTTPS Really a Search Ranking Factor?

Google did say that they wanted to help create a more secure internet by promoting HTTPS. Many of their internal services now run on HTTPS and their links will try to establish an HTTPS connection. All modern browsers support HTTPS, so there isn’t a worry about incompatibility except for people with really old browsers. However, companies do have to pay for a certificate every year. This certificate is a piece of data that HTTPS uses to certify that you are the site you claim to be.

While Google did come out with the fact that HTTPS is a ranking factor, according to the research done by Backlinko, the influence HTTPS has on ranking is minor. They analyzed over a million sites and found that, while there was an influence, it was extremely minor. In essence, it’s like adding a little more pepper to an already peppered dish—the extra spice doesn’t hurt, but it might feel a bit irrelevant.

Why Should You Switch Over to HTTPS?

While there are only slight advantages from a search engine optimization standpoint, it’s still something Google has built into its rankings algorithm, and every little bit helps. Having outside trust in your brand is something Google searches for, because their goal is to provide its users with the best information possible. Google understands that you have to go through some hassles to receive that certification, and it rewards you.

Plus there are many other advantages to implementing an SSL certificate for your site besides a small SEO boost. Any site that handles credit card or personal information should be protected as a matter of course.

In fact, modern browsers will actually give a warning if they detect that an unsecured site might be asking for information. If a customer were to receive this message, their trust in your brand will drop significantly. They might even think they were being hacked.

For companies, it’s a public relations nightmare to find out that your servers have been breached. With SSL backing up your site’s security, it’s much harder to see what information is going in and out of your website. That takes a big load off the mind of potential clients.

So, even if the ranking factor is insignificant, the other potential problems for not having HTTPS are much more dangerous than a ranking drop.

Checklist for Switching to HTTPS

While this isn’t a full list of tips and tricks for changing your site from HTTP to HTTPS, these are definitely some important things to keep in mind. It’s better to err on the side of caution, right?

1. Always perform a full backup of the target site before making the change. While making the move has been described as “easy” by several IT professionals, it’s still a smart bet to back up the files on the server before making changes.
2. Make sure that the redirects are correct. Changing over to HTTPS means that the page addresses on your site will also change. If you have a smaller site, this is the perfect opportunity to make sure that all of your content is up to snuff.
3. Ensure your Google Console settings are correct. For the sake of your rankings and making sure that you have a solid presence, you want to ensure that both URLs are in Google Console so that your analytics work properly.
4. Keep the robots in the loop. To get your site indexed properly, ensure that your pages with the new URLs are in your robots.txt file. You want these indexed as soon as possible.
5. Test it once you’re done. Once you’re done with changing to HTTPS, it’s time to test everything to make sure that it works.

Changing your site over to HTTPS isn’t that hard. And it’s not only worth it from an SEO point of view, but also from the customer’s perspective. Anything we can do as site owners that instills confidence is well worth our time.

What Google Thinks About Automated Content

Let’s say you stumble across a nifty WordPress plugin that promises to generate meta tags automatically. It sounds like a super easy way to check off the meta tag box, especially when you’re staring down a giant chore list of digital marketing tasks for your business.

Resist the temptation to sign up. Bread comes sliced. Your website doesn’t arrive pre-packaged with content. You’re supposed to create the unique, valuable content that will benefit your audience—and not clog up Google. But don’t believe us. Let’s go to Google’s Quality Guidelines for the answer on auto-generated content:

“Automatically generated—or “auto-generated”—content is content that’s been generated programmatically. Often this will consist of paragraphs of random text that make no sense to the reader but which may contain search keywords.”

How to Start Writing Great Metadata

Let’s just say you already scooped out a giant helping of auto-generated content for your site. The great news is that you’ll probably see an improvement in rankings if you fix it. Just remove the plugin causing all those Google no-no’s, then add new meta tags writing (by a human) in its place.

The key to knowing how to write meta tags is understanding them in context. Your meta tag content is a lot like the title and dust jacket blurb on a book. That intro description and title are what people see about your site in the search engine results page.

Make Your Digital Marketing More Effective With CTAs

So, let’s get them to click. Write a call-to-action (CTA) in your Description tag that urges viewers to click through—and delivers on your page promise. The Title tag should describe the purpose of the page, for example “FAQs.” Include keywords in the meta tag content when they’re pertinent to delivering a great audience experience. Don’t stuff keywords. If you get stuck or need inspiration, look up some competitors. Test out what makes you want to click on results in the search engines.

Now, Let’s Get Those Meta Tags Up and Running

The best way to implement meta tags on your WordPress site is to get a quality plugin that will help you with formatting and word count (good automation). Google has specific guidelines for the length of two of the most important meta tags, Title and Description. Going past recommended keyword lengths is not the place to get creative. Google makes the rules when it comes to SEO. It’s up to you to know the rules and play by them if you want to compete at a high level.

Use your newfound savvy to be more competitive in Google. Remove any automated content and get fresh meta tags—just be sure the new content is written by humans.