Since you as small business owner are concerned with turning in a profit, you may not have the experience or knowledge about the other cogs that make your business spoke up and running. This is perfectly normal, which is why you should get all the help to set your website up the right way. After all, if you don’t do it right then it’s not worth doing!

Below are crucial factors that you need to worry about to build a website that captures the essence of your small business.

Platform

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If you ask around for the best platform where to run your site on, then most would probably answer WordPress. With over 75 million websites running on this CMS and thousands of third-party plugins to help supercharge your online business, it’s hard not to like the platform. However, regardless of the number of people saying how great WordPress is, it doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s the best one for you.

Since you are the owner of the small business, you need to find something that you will find easy to use. Aside from WordPress, there are lots of other platforms where you can set up your website.

Website builders like Wix and Weebly will help you create a beautiful website without writing any line of code. Squarespace and Joomla are WordPress alternatives that offer something different to the table without compromising usability.

Hosting

Your hosting is where you store the files on your platform and set up your site. Self-hosted platforms like WordPress and others require a web host, so you need to choose the web host that suits your needs and wants.

Initially, you’d go with a hosting provider with the most affordable overhead. However, the cheapest one also runs on the least optimal hardware and resources, which means less than optimal performance for your site. If you choose this hosting type, there will be times when your site will load slower than usual and won’t be available for your browser. This could pose a problem for your business if this persists. An inaccessible site means no leads or sales to your business, which leads to your downfall as a business owner.

SEO

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Optimizing your website to rank on top of Google search is an art. A lot has been said about SEO in growing your business. It offers the most efficient way to drive traffic to your site without breaking the bank. It also puts you on par with bigger competitors with deeper pockets if you do SEO the right way.

Therefore, it is crucial that you form a solid foundation for your SEO strategy, from your plans for content rollout all the way to which .com domains you want to purchase in order to stand out and become memorable to potential customers. It’s also worth considering if you’re going to use traditional methods or use some of the more modern tools available for SEO. Similar to website platforms, there are lots of tools specially made to perform SEO tasks like keyword research and tracking, competitor research, and so on. It’s easy to get lost with SEO if you choose tools that you feel uncomfortable using.

Before settling on any tool recommended by the experts, it’s best to comb through this list of tools that will help you rank on Google organic search. It would be ideal to sign up for a trial of the tool and spend time using them to come up with an informed decision for each.

Employee advocacy

An exceptional small business is composed of employees who believe in the goals and objectives of your brand. As a loyal soldier, they are willing to dedicate themselves to the ideal espoused by your business. To get to this stage, however, you need to learn how to mobilize your employees correctly. You must get your employees on board with your business so they can help you not because they have to, but because they want to.

One of the tools that will help you achieve this is EveryoneSocial. The tool allows you to curate content for your employees to share so you can track and measure team members who are the most active. Having employees share content on social media benefits your marketing and sales strategy. More importantly, they create buzz to your website like no other method or technique can do for you.

Motivation

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The lack of focus among your employees is an issue that you need to address immediately. Putting your feet in the shoes of employees, it is all too easy to become jaded at work due to a lot of factors beyond your control.  However, a factor you can manipulate is making your objectives clear enough for them to follow and perform. Most importantly, you need to empower them to do what you want instead of imposing your will.

One way to get people on board with the vision for your business is through project management gamification. Doing so allows you to engage your employees by turning business tasks into bite-sized goals and incentivizing their performance like you would in an actual game. An example of this tool is Habitica, a tool that recreates your business tasks in an RPG environment. While it may appear to some that gamification is a gimmick, these little things can go a long way, especially when making your employees care about launching your website.

Conclusion

A small business website is never determined by its size. By creating a site with a solid foundation from the tips mentioned above, you can expect to overcome the size deficit and compete with better business. As a result, you can focus on more pressing matters in growing and expanding your business.

As if you don’t know that already. But let’s proceed…

There are lots of ways to do that. But one of the best methods is by creating your own website.

Not only does it promote your brand to more people. It also makes it easier for potential clients to become actual ones.

But here’s the thing:

Creating one is easier said than done.

Thankfully, we’ll show you how to design a website for your business in this post.

By following the proven and effective tips below, you should improve your profitability and reputation of your business!

Let’s go!

Start With A Platform That You Like

There are lots of platform choices you can choose from; WordPress and Squarespace being two of the most popular CMSs around.

However, it’s ultimately up to you to decide which one to use based on your needs and preferences.

For example, WordPress is great if you’d want a customizable and user-friendly platform because of its many ready-to-use templates.

However, it’s not the best choice when it comes to security because its open-source nature makes it vulnerable to hackers.

Squarespace, on the other hand, has a strong support and maintenance team but is a bit pricey.

So what now?

Personally, it is best that small businesses should start simple by using website builders instead.

They don’t offer the headache that most platforms have.

More importantly, you can easily create a site by dragging and dropping elements using its intuitive editor.

In fact, you don’t need experience in web design to create a beautiful website using these builders.

But, you’ll need a helping hand when designing a compelling website for your company. What you need is a reliable unlimited graphic design service to help you with your website.

Focus On The Substance

Your offer should be the first thing visitors see on your site.

However, that’s not the case most of the time.

Business sites show sliders and carousel of blog posts and unclickable images above the fold.

While this looks good from a design perspective, it doesn’t offer a lot of value to visitors.

I’ll just say it:

They make for bad user experience!

Customers also look for solutions, not a product or service. And definitely not your mug hogging the screen!

Therefore, give value by showing what you can do to solve common problems your target audience have.

Make them understand what they’ll get the second they open your site.

By being clear from the get-go, you can attract paying customers to your business!

Make Site Load Faster

A slow site is the fastest way to make visitors leave your pages.

You also don’t want to test your visitors’ patience by making them wait.

This creates a bad first impression and wastes earning potential.

From an SEO perspective, site speed is one of Google’s main factors in ranking for SERPs!

If your site is loading slow, then your ranking will plummet until you’re overtaken by faster and better sites!

As you can see, site speed is a human and machine issue. You need to appease both if you want to increase conversions.

So make sure to observe the best design practices to decrease your site’s loading time!

For starters, check out Google PageSpeed Insights tool to know how your site fares when it comes to loading time.

This tool provides info on how long it takes for your site to load in desktop and mobile devices.

To avoid slow loading times, you can also shift to a faster web hosting service such as InMotionHosting and SiteGround.

You can also cache your site and minimize HTTP requests. Compressing media files also helps.

Prioritize Mobile-Readiness

Design a site optimized for tablets and smartphones as 67% of the world’s total online population prefer using mobile devices.

A Duct Tape Marketing report also states that 70% to 80% of potential business clients use mobile devices. Websites should be responsive and quickly adapt to the visitor’s screen size.

Now, most websites nowadays have a responsive design.

It means that the site adjusts to the screen of the device visitors are using – whether the device is a tablet, smartphone, or CPU

But what if your current design isn’t responsive?

Here’s where mobile plugins such as WPtouch and JetPack come in handy. They use a simplified and compressed theme of your site that’s perfect for mobile devices.

You can also create a separate mobile version of your site.

Just make sure that it contains the same content and features of your original desktop site.

Test And Measure Your Calls To Action

Analyze how your CTA performs and creates the best one for your site.

Once see how many people click on it and convert into clients, create a different and better version. Then observe if it fares much better.

You’re doing this for a single reason:

To get more people to click on it.

Therefore, make your CTA specific and valuable.

Avoid generic statements such as “subscribe for updates” or “register now.” What updates are you giving or why do they need to register now?

Instead, create CTAs that offer solid benefits such as “get a free e-book” or “call us today for a free quote.”

Make the button where the text is found attractive as well.

Lastly, place it in the right place, but don’t come to a point where it’s annoying to visitors. Great areas to place them are above or below the fold.

Conclusion

I know what some business owners are thinking:

Web design isn’t that important! As long as the site works, then it works!

You see, things aren’t as simple anymore.

You need to consider different variables that affect the performance of your website.

Let’s say your site is attracting leads and clients left and right. That’s actually pretty cool.

But ask yourself this:

Can I make it perform better?

If your answer is a resounding “YES,” then you need to work on your site’s web design!

If you don’t have a site yet, make sure to work closely with a designer to achieve the look you want.

There’s always room for acquiring more leads and sales. And it starts with how your site looks and feels.

By following the tips in this post, you should have a good idea on how to approach your site’s web design.

But thanks to internet technology, more and more people are choosing to work from home.

With computers getting cheaper and communication technology getting faster, starting a business from home has become one of the most popular ways to earn a living.

In the US alone, there are about 40 million self-employed Americans who make up today’s workforce.

One possible reason for this trend is because job opportunities online are aplenty. With so many thriving online business models out there, it’s hard to choose just one to pour all of your time and effort into multiple jobs.

Enter Dropshipping

One of the best, if not most profitable online business opportunities out there is dropshipping.

This business model has become very popular among new entrepreneurs because it doesn’t require much financial capacity. You don’t have to buy and store your inventory. Instead, you purchase your products from a third party, which also ships it out to your customer.

Sounds easy, right?

Well, it’s not as simple as it seems.

Focus on how much you can help people by selling them the products they need.

Filling out demand in the market is at the very heart of every successful dropshipping company. If you provide value to your target audience, then the money will follow!

So, want to know how to start a profitable dropshipping business? Here’s a short guide on how you can make a profit from selling products online.

Research for a Profitable Niche

To build an e-commerce business, you first need to have a product to sell. This step is often the most challenging part about starting a dropshipping business since there are tons of products that you can sell online.

Here are a few things you can do to start researching for your multi-million product:

• Zero in on a problem that you can solve
• Tap into your passion
• Capitalize on your professional expertise
• Do your research on the next big thing and get into the action early
• Read up on what customers have to say about existing products
• Browse different online marketplaces to see what people are buying
• Look for products that have a high profit margin
• Find a hobby with enthusiasts who are willing to pay
• Choose a non-competitive niche
• Listen in on what industry leaders have to say

Secure Supplier and Fulfillment

Traditional online marketplaces ships orders directly to your customers from your home.

With dropshipping, the process is less tedious. All you have to do is forward orders to your supplier who will then process the request and ship it directly to your customers.

Once you’ve chosen your products, the next step is to look for partners who can help you in your dropshipping business. I’m talking about finding the right supplier and third-party fulfillment centers that will pack and deliver your customer’s orders for you.

Therefore, be extra cautious in choosing your partners because a shipping strategy can make or break your dropshipping operations.

Set Up Your Website

Of course, you’ll need a site to sell your products online. While setting up a website these days is as easy as 1-2-3, you need a website that is specially designed to get you online sales. You need an e-commerce platform to set you for success.

There are quite a few e-commerce platforms to choose from so make sure that you pick one that will work best for your business strategy.

• Shopify – A robust platform with a massive community. Very easy to use with easy-to-install apps. Has limited CMS capabilities, so it’s not recommended for brands who bank on content to sell their products.
• Magento – It is the preferred platform for B2B e-commerce by top brands like Nike, Ford, and Coca Cola. Despite its incredible functionality, Magento can be quite expensive to set up and maintain.
• Woocommerce – The most popular e-commerce platform in the world with 2,000,000 users. Has great CMS capabilities and doesn’t ask for any transaction fee. Requires hosting and constant updates of plugins.

Create Demand for Your Product

Having a website will help, but it won’t be enough to help get your dropshipping business off the ground. You also need to create interest in your product.

There are plenty of ways to attract customers online, but one of the most effective ways is influencer marketing.

Before launching your brand, send out free samples of your product to influencers aligned with your niche and ask them (nicely!) to give you a review or quick shout-out. Feature their reviews on your website as social proof. This way, you’ll be able to promote your product to their followers, without spending a cent.

Scale and Measure Results

Lastly, don’t forget to scale and measure the results. Use Google Analytics to check traffic of your online store pre and post-launch.

This is the time to assess all your efforts so you can see which areas still need improvement. By checking on your data, you’ll have a better understanding of what works and what doesn’t.

If all goes well, you can then start thinking of ways to scale your dropshipping business correctly. By capitalizing on your best tactics, you’ll be able to grow your online business quickly.

Conclusion

According to this report, retail e-commerce has already grown to a 220 billion dollar market, and it continues to grow at nearly 17% every year. It’s easy to see how you can get a massive slice of the pie just by exploring opportunities in dropshipping.

This post should give you a general idea on how you should start your dropshipping business. Now that you see the light, it’s up to you to take action, take notes from this post, and get a slice of this billion-dollar market.

Another wise man said, “You’ll get by with a little help from your friend.”

This reason explains the popular of blogger outreach. It helps you build relationships with like-minded professionals and influencers so you can grow a network of engaged people whom you can tap to for promotions and engagement. People also use blogger outreach to build links for their site as part of their white hat SEO strategy. It is one of the many byproducts of blogger outreach if you do it correctly.

To do so, you need to use the best blogger outreach tools to help you find influencers and seed them automated emails. Below are tools I’d recommend:

Blogger Outreach Tools To Stake Your Life On (5 Of ’em!)

1. Buzzsumo

Buzzsumo is a content research tool to help you find the most shared posts about your topic so you can analyze them and create an even better version. The tool is an indispensable part of the Skyscraper Technique that lets you create traffic-generating content even if your site is fairly new.

However, it works perfectly as a blogger outreach tool too. Buzzsumo lets you find Twitter influencers about your topic and gather information about them. It shows you how engaged they are in Twitter based on their retweet and reply ratios. The idea is to find influencers with lots of followers but continue to reply to their followers and retweets posts of others. If they can sustain this level of activity on Twitter, there’s a good chance they’ll reply to your tweet if you reach out to them.

You can also view the links they shared to get an idea of the posts they’re willing to share to their network. Using this information, you can create content tailored to their sharing patterns on Twitter. Reach out to them with your content and expect them to share it in no time!

2. FindThatLead

If you want to reach out to your audience, then you need to send them an email. Private messages on their social media networks may fall on deaf ears. Due to the insurgence of mobile devices, emails have become hip and trendy again. Lots of brands are engaging with their audience via email to great effect. Whether you’re trying to reach out influencers or other people, email is the way to go.

To find out the emails of people whom you want to connect with, use FindThatLead.

There are different ways on how you can use FindThatLead as part of your blogger outreach strategy. You can use it with Buzzsumo if you want to find the email addresses of Twitter influencers and people who shared a post about your topic. You can upload the Twitter URLs of these people and FindThatLead will process the data in bulk. Once done, you can download a file that shows the email addresses of people. The tool scores each email address according to the probability of it being correct. Use this information wisely so you reach out to people with the right email addresses and not from ones that will most likely bounce.

Another use case of FindThatLead for blogger outreach is to find cold leads where you can promote your post or services. Using its Prospector feature, select specific targeting criteria so the tool will return the right leads for you. Once you have the list, choose the people whom you want to reach out to by getting their email. Then go to Campaigns, upload the CSV, and type the message you want to send to them. The tool will take care of sending the emails one by one.

3. Lemlist

Lemlist is a cold email outreach tool that fits in well in your blogger outreach strategy. It bears similarities with FindThatLead’s Campaign feature where you can send bulk emails to people from your CSV file. However, Lemlist is closer to Mailshake because you can send cold email campaigns to build relationships with your audience.

What makes Lemlist special is the ability to send customized images to recipients. Using custom variables, the tool will insert the text in the images so you don’t have to create them for every email. You can use image templates available in the tool or upload your own images to further personalize your message. The more personalized and authentic your emails are, the higher the open and click-throught rates will be.

4. Ninja Outreach

If you want a blogger outreach tool that has everything you need, then Ninja Outreach is your choice. You can create a list to reach out to for a variety of purpose related to blogger outreach:

• promotional opportunities
• influencer search
• most shared content
• find leads

Build your list by typing the topic on the search bar. It will return people of different online sources according to your topic. Each result will show relevant website metrics for you to determine whether to pursue them (this is crucial if you want to request a link on their site).

Once you’ve filtered the list, you can send them emails from its collection of templates. Choose one and customize it according to your needs so you don’t have to start from scratch. You can also prepare a follow-up email if they didn’t open the previous email. Once done, let the tool send the emails automatically and analyze the results.

5. Pitchbox

Pitchbox is a more powerful version of Ninja Outreach. Agencies that rely on blogger outreach as bedrock for their marketing efforts will highly enjoy using this tool.

​​​​​​​Aside from blogger outreach, the tool works as a CRM platform to keep track of your contacts and see how they responded to your campaign. If you have clients, you can build reports based on the campaign’s performance and determine things you did right and areas that need improvement. There is also a Team Performance feature that lets you evaluate how your members fared during the campaign based on different variables.

If you built links using Pitchbox, it lets you monitor the links you’ve acquired and see if they are still up and free from errors. If the latter, you can reach out to your contact person and ask why the linked is down or removed.

Are You Ready To Use These Blogger Outreach Tools And Take Your Site To The Next Level?

The tools listed above are just one of the many tools you can use to build relationships with influencers and leverage them to boost your site’s growth. What’s important when using these tools is to keep your outreach genuine. Don’t reach out to the with an agenda in mind. While you want to put the relationship you’ve built with people to good use later, it’s better to focus on befriending and getting to know more about them. From there, everything else will come naturally. Good luck!

Your web host eats away from your monthly costs, and they would increase if you upgrade your plan due to your growing site traffic. While this is a good problem to have, you spend more money to keep up with the demands of your site.

However, there are cheap web hosting solutions to help maintain your site’s performance despite the growing demands!

In this post, you will learn if your site is eligible for cheap web hosting, how to find affordable web hosting providers, and the pros and cons of this web hosting type.

Cheap Web Hosting: Who Is It For?

Not all website owners can avail of cheap web hosting. As mentioned, you need more expensive web hosting plan like a managed WordPress hosting if your site is attracting lots of visitors. However, if you site is attracting lower than 1,000 unique visitors a day, then you can start with this web hosting type before you move on to more expensive ones.

Cheap web hosting offers basic features that website owners require from their hosting provider.

The Essential Features Of Cheap Web Hosting

Since this web hosting type is light on the budget, you don’t get the whole nine yards for features and support. However, cheap web hosting is perfect for new websites so you don’t need the bells and whistles offered in premium hosting plans.

Still, you need to find a cheap web hosting loaded enough with the best features to help prime your site to success. Below are the common features that affordable web hosting has:

• 99.9% server uptime (site is online expect for 1m 26.4s in a day)
• email hosting and web mail services (Squirrel Mail, Horde, etc.)
• auto installation of scripts
• updated versions of MySQL and PHP
• live chat technical support
• regular server auto-backup
• one-click SSL certificate activation
• malware scanning

The Pitfalls Of This Web Hosting Type

Cheap web hosting is ideal for budget reasons. As mentioned, it is ideal for you to find ways on to lower costs to maximize earnings.

However, there are disadvantages you need to know when looking for cheap web hosting. It’s easy to make a mistake and choose a terrible cheap hosting by mistakes. While you want to lower costs, you shouldn’t compromise your entire online business just to save a buck. Therefore, if you’re adamant on getting a cheap web hosting for your site, you need to know what you’re getting into. Below are things you should need to guard yourself from affordable web hosting:

• Aggressive upsells – The affordable costs of web hosting is a gateway for hosting providers to offer you with add-ons to your current subscriptions. They will probably send your lots of emails about upgrading your account to enjoy additional features. You can turn off the emails and notifications, so this shouldn’t be much of an issue.
• Poor servers – Some web hosting platforms are cheap because their servers are cheap. The quality of your web host’s servers will dictate the success of your website. If it performs poorly, then your site will be unavailable to your visitors.
• Poor customer support – There are companies that don’t reply to your messages or are not responsive to your live chats. If you have issues with your site due to your web hosting and their customer support sucks, then you’ve chosen the wrong hosting provider.
• Banned IP address – The IP address used by the server can affect how your site perform. If your IP is blacklisted, then only a few can access your site. There are many reasons an IP gets banned, but your goal now is to either get the IP white-listed or move your site to another IP address.
• Spammy neighborhood – If your web host’s server is littered with sites infected with a malware, your site might catch it and affect your visitors too.

The search for a truly value-for-money host is further complicated by the abundance of comparative reviews and rankings which use dark patterns and less-than-sensible methods – sometimes without any specific goal, sometimes to promote specific providers. That’s why it’s often better to conduct your own research and test each of your shortlisted hosts by yourself.

Resources To Help You Find The Best Cheap Web Hosting

Now you know of the cons of cheap web hosting, you need proceed choosing the best affordable web hosting for your site with caution. Research and due diligence will be your best friends in this process. You can’t rush with your decision for a web hosting knowing it could jeopardize your site. Therefore, below are tools and resources you need to help you make an informed decision:

• HRank – Monitoring services like this can help you see a better picture of your present or perspective web hosting provider’s performance. You can check the data for the previous month and compare your hosting’s uptime and response time in comparison to other providers.
• Hosting Checker – If you have competitors with a fast-loading sites, then you want to use Hosting Checker to find out which web hosting provider they are using. Get the name of the hosting companies and compare their prices.
• Bitcatcha – This site works as a resource for hosting reviews and a tool to help you gauge how fast a website loads based on the web hosting it is using. Enter the URL of your competitors and see how fast each of their servers are.
• GTmetrix – This tool helps you understand the different factors that’s causing your site from slowing down. It not only considers your web host but also your content, the use of scripts, cookies, and more.

Wrapping It Up

Choosing a web hosting for your site will require you to do your research. This sentiment rings even truer for cheap web hosting. As one of the most competitive markets online, it is easy to get lost with the number of affordable web hosting platforms. However, this should not discourage you from vigilantly searching for the best cheap web hosting for your site.

Using the tips and resources featured here, you should be able to settle for a reliable and affordable web host you will use for a long time.

For the longest time, the social media platform is filled with bots that merely retweeted messages, followed people, and broadcasted tweets without making any genuine interaction with users. Brands used bots to gamify Twitter’s very lenient system at that time and spread their message faster. While efficient and effective to an extent, these accounts don’t add any value to the platform as a way to build relationships.

Thankfully, Twitter caught on with the bots in the hopes of bringing the social element back to its platform. The efforts taken should put encourage people to use Twitter more for engaging with like-minded people and their audience.

For businesses, you need to find Twitter tips and tricks that take into consideration the latest changes in the system. There are tactics and strategies that stand the test of time in terms of helping your Twitter account grow. Also, there are potentially new techniques that you can implement on Twitter given the changes taking place.

In this post, you will learn the best possible Twitter tips and tricks that will help increase your followers and build relationships with your audience in the hopes of growing your business.

Five Twitter Tips And Tricks That Stand The Test Of Time

1. Spruce Up Your Profile

Personalizing your profile by using a hi-res photo of yourself as your profile pic and sharing information about yourself on your bio is a great way to start.  Help people associate an image on your profile, and your actual picture should work well enough. Your bio should describe what you do professionally but don’t be afraid to add your personal touch to make your profile stand out.

You also have the opportunity to upload a cover photo that appears on top of your profile just behind your profile pic. Make it compelling and feature a call to action to help users act upon your offer, among other ways you can create a killer Twitter cover photo.

2. Plan What To Tweet

It’s not enough to keep tweeting about your blog posts or site pages. If you mindlessly keep sharing your content, you risk alienating your audience from keeping up with your updates. It may come to a point that they will unfollow your account!

To prevent this from happening, you need to know what your audience wants to read from your Twitter feed. Doing research and identifying your buyer persona helps you identify what to share on Twitter. However, you still need to develop and test the editorial calendar of your tweets. It’s best to plan the messages ahead of time so you can make the necessary changes later on if something’s not working.

When planning your tweets, there are lots of tools you can use. The free versions of Hootsuite and Buffer are good enough to start you off with but there are other platforms that will help you manage all your social media efforts much better.

Below are the types of tweets you should consider including in your Twitter publishing calendar aside from the usual blog post update:

• Questions – Ask your Twitter followers questions that they want to answer and participant in. You can use this opportunity to ask questions that will help you improve your engagement with them.
• Memes – It depends on the type of audience you have, but memes are effective ways to give your followers a hearty chuckle, especially if the humor is related to your brand.
• Images/videos – Diversify your tweet by publishing content other than text. If you have limited content creation skills, use Canva to help you create images using its vast selection of templates and Lumen5 if you want to repurpose your blog post into a video.
• Retweets – Find influencers whom you want to content to and find their best, latest, and most relevant tweets so far that you can share with your followers.

Lastly, you need to make sure that you tweet the messages at the best times possible. Most premium social media management tools show the times in a day when your followers are most engaged. However, you can only see this if your Twitter account isn’t brand new and have a substantial amount of followers for a while now. If your account is fairly recent, you can still take a cue from this CoSchedule post to help you find the best times to publish your tweets. Just make sure of the time zones of your audience to ensure that they see your tweets at their time.

3. Use The Best Hashtags

If you want to increase the reach of your tweets, use the most searched hashtags for each. Refer to this post at Sprout Social for a list of tools that you can use to find the best Twitter hashtags. Just make sure that you exercise restraint when it comes to including hashtags in your tweets. Using three hashtag maximum should be enough.

4. Run Giveaways

If you sell products or services, find a way that you can offer them for free to a raffle winner. Use a tool like Rafflecopter or KingSumo Giveaway for WordPress to help you create a widget and landing page where people can enter and win your prize. Whenever they submit multiple entries, you can set up either tool to encourage participants to tweet your giveaway or follow you on Twitter.

Launching a giveaway is a great way to help extend your audience reach aside from just growing your Twitter followers. It also puts a spotlight on your business and what you’re offering which will drive more interest from your target audience. Assuming that you offer the right product or service as your prize, you not only increase your email list but also boost your Twitter followers at the same time. Either way, it’s good for business!

5. Find Other Ways To Build Followers

You can’t engage with your followers if you don’t have any. While some of the tips mentioned above will help you slowly but surely build your Twitter followers, you may need a faster and more efficient way to grow your audience on this platforms.

Below are quick ways that you can boost your Twitter followers before you properly plan your engagement strategy:

• • Befriend influencers – You need to find a way to get influencers in your niche to take notice of you. Aside from retweeting their messages, you can ask them questions about their tweets, tag them to tweets that they might find useful, and other tactics that will get their attention. As long as you give them value consistently, there’s a good chance that they will recognize you long enough. From here, you can take this chance to get help promoting your Twitter profile and content.
  • Hijack conversations efficiently– It’s hard to find conversations about your keywords and hashtags using Twitter’s native search. You will have manually search them every time you log in and engage from there. However, using a tool like Awario or Mention, you can automatically receive updates from your email if there are latest tweets or Twitter threads about your topics from interest. Just enter the keywords and hashtags in the tool of your choice so you can stay on top of things.
  • Buy followers – While a controversial take on growing your Twitter followers, it could help tip the scales to your favor if you do it judiciously. Getting a portion of followers using this method can help complement your strategy of acquiring followers. As long as you don’t overdo it, you should be okay.

Follow These Twitter Tips And Tricks To Grow Your Followers!

Twitter is on the verge of being the trustworthy social media platform that it was once when it started out. Once it cleans up the bots and users focus on building relationships with people, then the sky’s the limit for Twitter. In the meantime, you can start growing your followers first and reap the benefits from having lots of people to engage with later on.

There are lots of benefits on why you should write for other sites and blogs. Arguably the most significant advantage that guest blogging brings to the table is brand exposure. By writing articles for websites, you introduce your writing to a brand new audience. If they enjoyed your article, they would hop on over to read more of your content. If they enjoy your blog content, you can convert them into subscribers and customers!

The process seems simple, but there’s a catch to guest blogging – it’s not as easy as you think.

You can’t write an article, send it to another site, and expect the site owner or editor to publish it at your whim. You need to consider factors before writing articles for websites. For instance, the quality of the site, its potential number of visitors and readers, and your existing relationship with its owner will determine the success of your guest blogging campaign, and whether or not it will be published at all.

In this post, therefore, you will learn the science of writing articles for websites and blogs to ensure that your efforts will yield in getting your content published at high-authority blogs and sites. This way, you can compel readers of other blogs to visit yours and hike up your conversion rate!

Five Ways Of Writing Articles For Websites That Generate Results

1. Find Websites To Write For

You need to find out which sites are accepting guest posts so you can pitch your articles to them.

The easiest way to find blogs that accept guest posts is through Google Search. Just type your niche and the search operator “inurl:write-for-us” (ex. blogging inurl:write-for-us) to filter websites with a Write a Us page. Once you have the result, you need to manually check each page to make sure that they’re accepting posts. There’s a chance that the page is indexed on Google, but they’re not looking for contributors at the moment.

You can also use different search operators to find more guest blogging opportunities. Using “blogging” as your niche, below are other search query examples you can use:

• blogging “submit blog post”
• blogging “contribute to our site”
• blogging “become an author”
• blogging “guest posts wanted”

These search queries should help you find more than enough guest posting to sink your teeth into!

2. Filter The Results Using Different Metrics

Once you have the sites on hand, you need to find out which among them are worth writing for. Therefore, you need to site based on specific parameters, namely SEO and social media. A site with very good scores on both metrics means that more people can see and are aware of the website.

Below are some of the metrics that you need to check to determine a site’s quality:

• Domain Authority – Using Moz’s proprietary parameter will help you see the site’s aggregate score which draws from different SEO factors. Go to Moz’s Link Explorer to find a site’s DA, among other factors such as backlinks, competitors, and more.
• SEO audit score– If you want a more straightforward way to find out a site’s value based on SEO factors, enter the domain name on SEOptimer. The tool will show the site’s different grades on SEO, security, social, and more.
• Alexa Ranking– Alexa Ranking may not be a catch-all score, it’s still a good indicator of a site’s quality. The lower the ranking and the closer it is to 1, the better the site is.
• Social media followers– If the site or blog has lots of followers on Facebook, Twitter, and others, there’s a good chance that those followers will be able to see and read your content if you send your article there.

3. Get To Know About The Owner

To increase your chances of getting your guest post published, it’s best to get to know the owners or the editors much better. You need to browse their articles and check their social media profiles if necessary. The idea is to learn their interests and find an angle for your post that falls in line with their interests.

Also, you can use this opportunity to help introduce to site owners who you are. Leave comments on their social posts and articles that add value to the discussion to show that you are also knowledgeable about the subject. Once they become much more familiar with who you are and what you bring to the table, it will be much easier for them to decide to accept your guest post.

4. Write Killer Posts

The art of writing is not lost in guest blogging. You still need to produce an article that jam-packed  with value and that readers can take action to. Crafting content that resonates with readers requires you to come up with the following:

• Brainstorm for topics– Since you already did your research about the site and its owners, it’ll be much easier for you to come up with potential blog post ideas to write about in your post. It’s best to come up with at least three ideas to pitch to the site owner (more on this later).
• Develop an outline– Outlines are essential in the writing process because it helps flesh out the details of the article even before writing them. Ideally, you want to develop the outlines of the blog post ideas before sending them over to the site owner. You want to cover all the talking points that you need to discuss in your post.
• Optimize for SEO– Observing the best on-page SEO practices help create a post that will have a better chance of ranking on organic search results. This will make it easier for your target audience to find your content using Google or Bing. At the same time, you make it easier for people to find the blog, much to the benefit of the owner.

For more web content writing tips, click here for more ideas from Jane Sheeba.

5. Pitch!

Sending a pitch to site owner should be simple enough. Since you searched for blogs that readily accept guest posts, it’s just a matter of sending them a pitch based on their editorial guidelines and instructions.

However, the problematic part of pitching is following up on the editors and owners. There’s a chance that they weren’t able to read the email yet because they’re busy. If you haven’t received a reply from them, it’s only wise to follow up with another email.

It’s difficult to keep track of emails, which is why you need a CRM tool to help you see the status of each person whom you contacted for a guest post. You can even score each site to see how close you will get to getting your content published on their website or blog.

For more ideas on how to approach your pitch about writing articles for websites, read this post at JustReachOut.

Conclusion

Writing articles for websites may not be an easy as it seems, but it’s far from impossible. It’s just a matter of figuring out the exact process on how to find the best websites to write for to maximize your impact. Hopefully, the tips in this post gave you ideas on how to develop and implement an effective guest blogging strategy.

Not to mention that the number of active social media users are ever-increasing. The result? More competitors.

You should worry about it because you’ll be left out if you’re a newcomer. But this doesn’t mean you should lose hope. Never before has there been these many ways to squash down your competitors.

With these many people, who wouldn’t think of new innovative ways to outcompete each other? It’s all about wit and ingenuity at the end of the day. And that’s what we’ll bring you here.

1. Know Your Target Market

Knowing your target market makes it easier for you to capture people’s attention. Describe your audience in deep detail and write it down. Then create an editorial calendar containing the topics and keywords you’d write about.

This is where you’ll choose the best fit for your audience. Remember to write with your specific target market on the mind. Your goal should be to solve their problem and answer their questions.

2. Do Guest Posting

Blogging is all about building relationships and creating a network of followers. One of the best ways to do this is through guest posting. The more you distribute your name across multiple platforms, the more significant exposure you get. And this usually leads to high conversion.

But this doesn’t mean you just go out there are write wherever you like. Make sure that the blog you’re guest posting for is credible. They should have a high domain authority. It’s recommended to guest post on blogs with DAs 50 or higher. It also needs to be relevant to your niche.

3. Learn SEO

Your content would be useless if no one sees it. You can take on social media and get followers. That’s effective and usually leads to decent traffic. But limiting yourself to this method is a huge waste. You’re not making the most out of your blog’s potential.

Remember that your search ability  in Google (or any search engine) is a top priority. You can do this by learning SEO or search engine optimization. This is more than just using targeted keywords in the right frequency and ideal places. It’s also about getting backlinks and creating quality content that helps increase your DA. The higher your DA is, the more likely you’ll rank high.

4. Produce Quality Content

Content is your blog’s core. This is why you need to prioritize it above anything else. And it’s more than just proper grammar (although that counts)! Great content is one that’s also engaging and informative. It brings value to your readers and has a practical use on their lives.

It’s a give-and-take world out there. The better your blog posts are, the more readers and traffic you get. Also, don’t forget that it should be SEO-friendly. Make it as straightforward as possible, but don’t sacrifice valuable information.

5. Promote Your Content the Right Way

Getting traffic to your blog is all about promotion. And social media is a great avenue to do just that. You’d miss half of your life if you don’t venture into social media. Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram got tons of active users. Why not tap into that market?

Not only are you increasing your potential fan-base, but you’re also making your blog more credible. There’s also YouTube where you can do video marketing. Or perhaps embark on a cold email campaign? Just make sure that you avoid content promotion mistakes, so it converts to blog traffic.

6. Have a Great Web Design

Your blog is made up of two major components: content and design. The two should complement each other. A well-designed blog is one which is responsive, attractive, and functional. It should also be up-to-date with the latest design and trends.

Minimalist and sleek designs are currently the hit. Also, make sure that it’s mobile-optimized. 52.64% of the global internet traffic comes from mobile devices. You’d miss out a considerable portion of the market if people can’t correctly view your blog on their devices.

7. Interact With Your Audience

No man is an island. Your blog would be useless if you’re alone. Interact with your audience to boost traffic. It also gives you a good reputation as it makes them see you as active and reachable.

Reply to comments, share interesting posts, and mention your followers on social media. Guest posting on similar blogs also builds strong connections. You can even meet your followers in person and write an entire article about it.

Conclusion

The ways mentioned helps your blog survive and thrive. Getting higher traffic doesn’t come overnight.

It’s a slow process requiring a lot of diligence and patience. But once you pull it off correctly, there’s no doubt you’d be raking in massive traffic.

Those are effective. But they’ll be useless if your site doesn’t rank high. So what to do? Well, build links! Not only does this give you more traffic, but this also improves your site’s authority and reputation. Here we’ll show you how link building can get you a higher ranking.

1. Searching For The Latest Trend

You might have seen news articles featuring quoted statements from another source. When you do, you’ve most likely clicked and opened it. That’s proof of how effective this strategy is. Search for trending topics and write an article about them. The latest news is a good example.

You can share your thoughts and merge it with reliable facts from the internet. When you’re done writing, you can then reach out to reputable news sites to have them published. Journalists are always on the lookout for resources and opinions from “experts.” You can be one if you want to.

2. Doing Guest Blogging

Back in the day, guest blogging is like letting a famous author commend your book. Back then, it was all about getting as many “commendable” links as possible. But Google’s recent algorithm changes made it more complicated than that.

You now need to make sure your guest posts are on a high-authority site. And don’t spam the articles with unrelated links. Everything should be relevant to your topic. Think of it as a give-and-take relationship.

Offer value to the website that has a bigger audience than yours. Don’t look at it as an advertisement to drive readers to your site immediately. It’s about going slowly but surely. When you do, there’s no doubt you’ll be getting those people to your site ASAP.

3. Repurposing Your Content

The online landscape ups its standards through time. High-quality content is needed more than ever. And it takes more time and effort to produce one. To avoid the hassle, it would be great if you’d juice out a piece of content as much as possible.

Turn your blog post into a podcast. Or perhaps take quotes from your article and create graphics out of it. You can then share this on social media. Not only does this make your content more useful, but this also improves your reach.

4. Do Thorough Competitor Research

Link building isn’t a one-stage process. It’s like a funnel having different phases, with research as its first phase. This means that you won’t have to deal with future problems if you do this first step correctly.

Search for competitors in your same niche. These competitors are likely to target the same audience you’re reaching out to. You can do this by using tools like Ahrefs. This helps you know your competitors and their backlinking strategy. It also gives you recommendations on the best backlink targets to link to.

5. Engage With The Community

You might have heard this over and over again. But as much as we’d like to dismiss it as a “given,” it’s still an efficient way to get a ranking boost. Make your site’s presence known in social media. Create an account on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. You can also do video marketing on YouTube.

Constantly put up posts and interact with your followers. Also, join forums and active communities like Reddit. These can drive massive traffic to your site. Just be sure not be too aggressive as this can turn the entire community against you. Offer real value instead of always dropping links.

Conclusion

Studies prove that link building can boost your site’s traffic by up to 190%. This means you’re most likely to raise your ranking by building links. And not only that, as your domain authority also goes up while your audience keeps coming back for more.

White hat backlinking assures that you’ll see a dramatic improvement in your site in no time. It’s also a risk-free way to get more traffic. For sure, your site will be soaring to greater heights when you follow these.

You’re not the only one.

In fact, only 22% of businesses are satisfied with their conversion rates.

To be fair, conversion rate is one of the most complicated factors to optimize your business website. Not only do you need to build a sustainable strategy that allows you to drive traffic to your site, but you also have to tweak the different elements on your page to maximize engagement and get more people to take action.

But believe it or not, this reason is what makes conversion rate optimization fun. If it was easy, then everybody will be doing it.

That’s why you are in a unique position to overcome obstacles and do something great with your site – turn website visitors into customers!

In this post, I will show you some of the best tips on how to increase the conversion rate you are currently getting on your business.

First, we need to define what a sales funnel is.

What is a Sales Funnel?

Sales funnel refers to the buying process of a prospect. It’s the path that they go through to reach the final stage – conversion.

A good way to imagine a sales funnel is by linking it with an inverted pyramid image.

There are many versions of a sales funnel, but these four are the main ones you should pay attention to:

• Awareness
• Interest
• Decision
• Action

Your end goal would probably be to make them purchase at least once. But a truly successful sales funnel ends with a repurchase or advocacy to the business.

One big problem here is how people will notice you. While you have all the potential in the world to be successful, the first part of the sales funnel is awareness.

We will talk about this problem in particular and how you’ll address this issue effectively to boost your business’ conversion rate:

1. Blogging

A blog can be positioned at the start and end place where customers convert. In other words, you can sell something on your blog through your blog alone.

When you create high-quality content related to your product, execute an SEO strategy, create compelling visuals, and promote effectively, traffic will follow along.

Not only that, but blogging also increases your reputation. When people see the kind of content you can bring them, they will start trusting your brand.

Lastly, think of blogging and having a website as an investment. It provides prospects and leads with in-depth information about your products. To capture their hearts, you first need to solve their problems and building relationships with them should then follow.

2. Social Networking

Using social media as a tool in your sales funnel will net you hundreds of leads when done correctly.

Millions of your prospective clients are already hanging out on social media; you just have to get close to where they are.

And by getting close, means, you must have your pages and accounts for your business too.

Another thing is, social proof can be developed through social media. According to Social Media Examiner, having social media presence can boost your credibility because people can see that you are actively engaging with your audience.

3. Landing Pages

A landing page is where you will tell people briefly about you and more about your service. Its entire purpose is to capture a prospect’s contact information or make a sale.

Usually, landing pages are completely separate from your website or blog. They are designed only to receive traffic from the campaign you will create so it can focus on making reporting results simpler.

For example, you need to deliver some leads per month. You can create or repurpose certain pages to do just that and nothing else.

4. Calls to Actions

When you have people coming into your site, make sure that they know what to do next. Do you want them to call you or set up an appointment with you? Or maybe you want them to fill up a survey for your upcoming blog.

Decide on what action you want them to do and add it multiple times on your page.

Some examples of a short and precise calls-to-actions can be “Call Now,” “Learn More,” and “Check it Out.”

For WordPress users, to simplify creating your call-to-action buttons, you can choose from different plugins that are created mainly for this purpose.

5. Email

When you already have contact information or leads, it means that those people are already considering your product.

To push these leads further down the sales funnel, nurture them by sending valuable information and keeping them engaged.

Learn more about the strategies for your next email campaign and know the do’s and don’t’s of this technique.

Conclusion

Conversion rates help you understand your sales process. If it’s good or bad, you’ll figure that out with the results you will be getting.

Make sure that at the very first stages of building your end path, you’ve already installed the right tools to help you measure these metrics.