New Start: September 2015

Wednesday, September 30, 2015

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Reading Roundup: What’s New in Blogging Lately

The sun is shining, the birds are singing – I think spring has finally hit Melbourne!

With that, I will leave you with this week’s links to ponder…

Instagram Images: How to Stand out on Instagram // Social Media Examiner

This podcast was interesting – I’ve definitely seen the trend for very similar images being used on IG, particularly for specific niches. I’ve experimented with a lot, and I found the opposite of what I often expected. For example, an image set out similarly to one I admired ended up getting the least amount of likes. So how do you stand out when it seems everyone is homogenous? And how do you stay true to your own aesthetic in the process?

Facebook Turns Notes into a Blogging Platform with a Revamped Interface // TNW News

Everyone’s talking about the revamped Notes section on Facebook – it looks and functions much more like a user-friendly blogging platform. Perhaps a way to get around the Facebook page (dismal) algorithm to get your content seen?

How to Hack the Amplification Process (Whiteboard Friday) // Moz

Have you been looking in the wrong places for your audience?

The 5 Biggest Social Media Trends of 2015 (Infographic) // Social Media Today

Number 3 I already knew, but Line? What on Earth is Line?!

What it takes to Make Fashion Blogging Look Effortless // The Atlantic

It’s not all front row seats and fancy lipstick.

3 Resources to Help you Become a Professional Content Marketer // Copyblogger

I see a lot of bloggers turn pro by instead becoming professional content marketers. If that’s something you’re interested in, Stefanie Flaxman gives a great overview of getting started.

How This Blogger Made $1 Million in 3 Years and Is Visiting Every Country on Earth // Forbes

I’m always fascinated about how bloggers make a living from travelling, but this guy earns $1000 a day: something I was EXTRA fascinated with! What a lot to learn.

3 Things all Great Digital Marketers Know // Business2Community

Ah yes… we all forget number 2!

Facebook Audience Insights: 5 Groups You Should Analyze // Jon Loomer

Have I convinced you to come around to Facebook Ads yet? Jon really makes it easy to figure out the best method for maximum results.

How to Use Snapchat for Business // Social Media Examiner

A few weeks ago I linked to an article stating we were missing out on reaching the youth of today if we weren’t implementing Snapchat. Afterwards, I reinstated my account but I guess I’m still missing the point of it. I like the idea in this article of creating a tutorial – I’m seeing a lot of people doing that on Periscope lately.

So what have you read lately? Are you earning $1000 a day?!

Stacey Roberts is the Managing Editor of ProBlogger.net: a writer, blogger, and full-time word nerd balancing it all with being a stay-at-home mum. She writes about all this and more at Veggie Mama. Chat with her on Twitter @veggie_mama or be entertained on Facebook.

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

Reading Roundup: What’s New in Blogging Lately

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Writing Challenge: Write a ‘How I Do It’ Blog Post

Today’s podcast episode is a little bit different – a throwback of sorts to one of the 31 Days to Build a Better Blog Podcast challenges.

I think it’s important to offer challenges like this, as it’s very easy to read or listen to what to do, but actually doing it is a totally different thing all together. In fact, absorbing knowledge without putting it into practise is one of the 21 mistakes I see new bloggers make fairly consistently.

So today the challenge to you is to write a “How I do it” blog post. Something about how you do whatever it is you’re good at, to share with your audience. It might be a very simple topic idea, but it is in fact a very valuable way to drive traffic to your blog, and in turn, grow your readership.

In the podcast I discuss the differences between the style of posts you could create, and examples for each – from styling a bed to making $72,000 in eBook sales – and also tips for brainstorming and writing.

You can listen to episode 47 of the ProBlogger podcast: Writing Challenge: Write a ‘How I Do It’ Blog Post here, and access the examples above in the show notes.

You are also welcome to link to the post you’ve written in the comments below.

Five Apps to Help You Manage Your Blog

This is a guest contribution from Cassie Phillips.

If you’re here at ProBlogger, I’m betting you already know writing a blog can be a useful endeavor for a number of different reasons. A blog can help you journal your life or collect ideas from other people’s blogs that will be useful in your life. It can be a powerful tool in helping you keep in touch with friends and family, or you can use it to meet and interact with strangers. It can be something personal to you or something used for your business. Whatever your reasons are, though, you might find it’s a bit tricky trying to keep on top of things and churn out relevant and interesting content to keep your readers satisfied. Never fear, though: there are plenty of apps out there to help you keep organized and on track with your personal goals on the go. Here are five apps you’ll want to remember to have:

1. The Platform App

Of course, the first app you’re going to want to have is the app for your platform, be it WordPress, TypePad, Tumblr, or whatever else. Even if you don’t plan to do most of your blogging from your phone or tablet, seeing your app there on your device can be a useful reminder to either get to work on the next blog or get it posted. On top of that, most better-known blog platforms have pretty great apps these days, making it easy to post from wherever you are, whenever you have a few minutes to kill.

2. The Taskmaster App

I don’t know about you, but for me, remembering when I should be blogging gets difficult sometimes. We have so many obligations in our day-to-day lives that remembering to write things up and post them can sometimes be a challenge. Even if you feel like you’re on top of everything and there will be no problem, it never hurts to have an app to set reminders for when you need to have things finished by. Wunderlist will allow you to make task lists for yourself, set reminders for when things need to be done, and generally just keep on top of everything you have to do, all in a clean, user-friendly design.

3. The Social Media App

If you’re trying to direct people to your blog—even if you’re just trying to get your mom’s attention and let her know, hey, there’s a new post!—you’ll likely want to turn to social media. The thing about blogging is, people aren’t always going to remember to check back to each of the dozens of blogs that they follow. But people often check in on what’s going on on social media sites. It can be a pain to update your status and tweet and go on Google+, etc. each time you post an update. But Buffer will allow you to post the same thing to multiple accounts at once. You can even schedule posts to go out at a later time and track interest in that post. This means it frees up some of your social media time and allows you to do more of the fun stuff of blogging.

4. The Web-Traffic App

Even if you’re not running your site for the purpose of creating revenue through clicks, it can be nice to know how many people are looking at your site. If nothing else, it’s a bit of an ego-boost, right—people actually want to see your site! But if you’re creating a revenue-producing website, it’s important to see how many people click on your site and where they’re coming from. Dashboard for Google Analytics does this in an especially sleek way, and it’s pretty cheap as well.

5. The VPN App

If you’re blogging on the go, you’re likely connecting to public Wi-Fi, whether at a coffee shop, on the bus, in downtown, or somewhere else—oh, the joys of modern technology! Grab the Wi-Fi Finder app to help you out with locating the nearest hotspots. But don’t forget to grab a VPN (Virtual Private Network) to protect your information and make sure you’re safe from potential hackers. Actually, there are a lot of things you should be thinking about when you’re connecting to public Wi-Fi. A good VPN will give you a more secure connection that better ensures that what you do stays private.

Although managing your blog may sometimes feel a bit overwhelming, given the right apps, you’ll find that you have no problem balancing your blog and the rest of your life. Whatever you’re using your blog for, you’ll find that these apps will integrate neatly into your workflow, allowing you to keep doing what you’re doing, in a more productive way.

Cassie is a technology and internet security enthusiast.

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

Five Apps to Help You Manage Your Blog

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How to Make $30,000 a year Blogging

If you’re anything like the overwhelmed blogger I spoke to a few years ago, who thought making a full time living from her blog was basically impossible, then this episode of the ProBlogger podcast is for you.

The truth is, making a full-time living from blogging means different things to different people – what is a full time income to you might not be enough for the next person, and vice versa. The first thing to do is figure out how much you need to live on (or indeed if you are only looking for a part time income, etc), and work toward earning that amount. The firmer the figure you have, the better chance you have of making it happen. Pie-in-the-sky ideas and vague language like “full-time income” aren’t as helpful.

This particular blogger I spoke to said $30,000 USD would be enough to allow them to quit their current job, but also had never made a dollar from her blog and had almost convinced herself it was impossible.

It’s not impossible, but nor is it a cakewalk. In today’s episode I give three pieces of advice for those of you wanting to change career directions and make a living blogging instead of traditional work. I also provide some of the ways I decided how much I wanted to make, and how I went about achieving those sums. I’ll give the income stream options I had, the ones I tried, and ultimately the ones I ended up using consistently.

I also break down the income models of three different types of blogs: fashion, photography, and food.

When I first reached my target of $50,000 AUD per year, I broke down my income into what percentage came from which income stream (which may very well be different to yours, and is actually different to my income streams as they are currently). I hope you find it useful.

You can listen to Episode 48 of the ProBlogger Podcast How to Make $30,000 a year Blogging here.

5 Pop-up Creation Mistakes You Have to Avoid for Better User Experience

This is a guest contribution from Abrar Mohi Shafee of Blogging Spell.

Do you build email lists in your website? If your answer is yes, the chances are high that you are using a pop-up to collect emails.

Why is that and not anything else? Because pop-up is proved to be one of the high converting methods for building list and seems pretty everywhere.

You don’t have to look further; our own Darren Rowse made a huge jump up in email opt-in rate by using a pop-up that raised from 40 new subscribers a day to straight 350 subscribers a day.

But over the years, pop-up has started to have a profound impact on user experience and turned into a very controversial topic itself.

If we ask the visitors, 95 out of 100 of them will say pop-ups are annoying. But if we ask the same to a marketer, he will confess that but must be thinking how he could miss the great conversion by pop-ups.

Source: NNGroup

It looks like we are trapped between two choices. But there is a third choice that we usually miss out, and that can get us a good relief. That is simple:

Pop-up should be polite but converting enough.

So here my task is to guide you what are the mistakes that annoy people and how you can solve them to achieve that prestige for your pop-ups.

Mistake #1: Solely depending on pop-up

Is using pop-up itself a big mistake? Well, it can be literally.

To tell the truth, a pop-up can silently kill your blog if that is not well-optimized.

Matthew Woodward ran an experiment how pop-ups affect blog’s bottom line. He set up the pop-up to show up after 7 seconds. He noticed significant drops in the following three factors:

Pages per visit decreased by 9.29%
Average visit duration decreased by 10.20%
Bounce rate increased by 9.02% (lower is better)

Subscribers generated via pop-up forms are not stable and have very low engagement rate that are no good for your website except just increasing the number of subscribers.

So if you decide to autopilot your list building solely on pop-ups and do not use any other method, you will not be collecting all genuine subscribers who could benefit your website.

Solution: You should not wholeheartedly depend on pop-ups and use some other methods to collect engaging and stable subscribers, and eventually reduce the annoyance.

A lot of working list building methods are available of which you can choose yours. According to Social Triggers, here are some of the high-converting placements for your opt-in form (excluding pop-up):

Top featured box
Top of sidebar
Bottom of post
Site footer
About page
Top sticky bar

In fact, you can grow your email list amazingly fast using the following formulas of list building:

Mistake #2: Triggering pop-ups too fast or too slow

Timing is another big factor for your pop-up. If it comes too fast, it will greatly annoy the visitors, and if it comes too slow, it will lose a number of subscribers.

So what is the perfect timing? Some will say 5 seconds converts the highest and some 10 seconds, if not some other will say 30 seconds is perfect.

Source: AppSumo

But my opinion is different. To turn a visitor into a loyal subscriber, you need to give him enough time to understand your website. Five seconds, 10 seconds and sometimes even 30 seconds is not sufficient to comprehend a site correctly.

What would happen if you pop-up between this times? You will experience relatively high bounce rate and low user engagement.

Solution: Unbounce suggests that a perfect user-optimized pop-up should come at 60 seconds after a visitor enters your site.

If it comes before that, you will significantly lose conversion. If it comes after that period, you will miss a large number of audiences to show your pop-ups.

So the best time for pop-up is 60 seconds which will allow a visitor has fully understood a website and make him commit genuine interest to become a subscriber, after all, reducing the risk of annoying by more.

Mistake #3: Not using any improved pop-up technology

Although timed pop-ups could be optimized for not to make annoyance, it still retain some percent of chances to annoy visitors.

Because it appears suddenly and could behave like a barrier to reading up a content. No one would appreciate seeing a barrier in their way, especially when reading something online.

What would happen if a pop-up distracts visitors from reading a content? The chances are high that they will leave the site, if not it will hurt their attitude towards the site.

Solution: Thinking about this matter, some user-improved pop-up triggering technologies has come out. The main prospective of these technologies is adjusting with user’s behavior and triggering the pop-up in the safest time.

Here are a few pop-up technologies that can be found in the latest marketing tools, and what you can replace with your timed pop-up to potentially take the annoyance level close to zero:

Pop-up when a user intends to exit (aka exit-intent)
Pop-up when a user reaches the content end
Pop-up when a user reaches a particular element
Pop-up when a user scrolls a specific percent of a page
Pop-up when a user scrolls down and goes back up

Mistake #3: Not controlling pop-up showing frequency

How many times do you show up your pop-up in a browsing session? Well, you are of the belief that the more we show up pop-ups, the more we get signups, right?

But this time it won’t go along your perspective because the more often you show your pop-ups (for example, show up on every page), the more you annoy your visitors.

If you trigger your pop-up in every page in a browsing session, it will feel real over promotion, and you will get significantly low subscribing rate.

So what’s the best frequency?

Solution: You don’t have to push hard to get the better conversion rate. You just need to understand your audiences and trigger pop-up at the right time.

Asking a visitor to subscribe multiple times in a browsing session might not work well and feel irritating. So first you should limit your pop-up to maximum once each browsing session.

And how often to repeat the pop-up after someone closes that? Concerning the user experience, you should not show pop-up more than once a week to the same visitor, and more preferably once in every 15 or 30 days. (Prove)

Mistake #5: Tricking visitors to get stuck on the pop-ups

You know what, you can attempt to get unbelievable email opt-in rate just doing a few tweaks. How? Here is what you need to do exactly:

Trigger pop-up just when someone enters your site
Remove the close button from the pop-up
Don’t leave any option to skip the pop-up without subscribing

But the thing I forgot to tell you is that after doing these tweaks, don’t expect your visitors ever to return and the bounce rate will be apparently around 90%-100%.

Intentionally trying to stick people to a pop-up form is the worst practice and result into losing those visitors for forever.

Solution: If you are serious about building up your email list, be clear and transparent. Display the close button and make sure that can be easily seen.

You do not have to be tricky to increase email opt-in rate, but you have to optimize the following three elements of your pop-up:

Convince people at first sight using the pop-up title. Use power words like Free, Secret, Discover, to create good impression.
Be visually attractive because visual elements can convince someone to subscribe faster than anything else.
Optimize your pop-up’s call to action and tease the visitors to subscribe using text and buttons.

Here is a sample of pop-up how to play with pop-up contents to hack readers mind for subscribing to your email list without doing anything tricky:

Source: Social Triggers

Do you know the hardest truth about pop-up? It converts the highest, and it irritates the highest as well.

The best approach with the pop-up is attempt to convert high but staying safe. Before doing anything with it, just ask yourself will you personally love it as a reader? If yes, just go with it and if no, configure it to be likable.

So what’s your opinion about pop-ups and how you safely use them without hurting the user experience? I am pretty much interested to know it.

Abrar Mohi Shafee is from Bangladesh, an inbound marketer, blogger and founder of BloggingSpell. His areas of interests are content marketing, social media marketing, and seo. Need his help to be more productive in blogging? Grab his personal blogging toolkit.

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

5 Pop-up Creation Mistakes You Have to Avoid for Better User Experience

The post 5 Pop-up Creation Mistakes You Have to Avoid for Better User Experience appeared first on @ProBlogger.

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