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How to Get People to Find Your Blog or Etsy Shop in Google

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get found in google
The basic idea of keyword research is that you want to find what people are searching for and write about that.

I should state right up front that I will be including my affiliate link to my favorite keyword tool out there, Long Tail Pro in this post. While it is no extra cost to you, I get a little kickback (and appreciate it very much) if you use the links in this post.

Why do keyword research?
Keyword research is important because it can help you reach a larger audience. Keyword research is especially important for bloggers who do not have a huge following yet. Even without regular readers, you can still get great traffic numbers by getting found through search engines.

Keyword research can help you find certain “low competition keywords” that people are using in Google searches and write your blog posts around them. So let’s say you are writing a post about an HP printer. You wouldn’t want to focus on the keyword “HP printer” because the competition is incredibly high. You’d be competing with major stores like Best Buy and would have slim chance of ranking well. Now, what if you said you had found the “best HP printer under $100” in your post? You could focus on that key phrase and probably rank a lot higher. While it is true that it does not get the same search volume that “HP printers” does, 20% of 1,000 is more than 0% of 1,000,000.

Ok, so how do you do keyword research?
Well, there’s a more difficult free way and then there’s some software you can buy to make the whole process very easy. The one thing you need to remember throughout the whole process of keyword research is that you are looking for keywords that have a decent amount of monthly searches and not much competition.

Since I’m in the business of efficiency and getting things one quickly, I am going to be showing you how to use a keyword tool to assist you in quickly doing keyword research.

Long Tail Pro is the best keyword research tool around and one of the best investments you can make for your blog and your business. It can literally do an hour’s worth of keyword research in about 3 minutes.

My absolute favorite part of this tool is the ability it has to accurately analyze keyword competition. This feature alone has saved me hours of research. I also like that it tells me the average AdSense CPC (Cost per click aka how much you make per click) for each keyword. If AdSense earnings are your #1 goal, this is a hugely important feature.

Here’s what keyword research looks like with Long Tail Pro:

keyword toolYou’ll first add a few (or one) seed keywords. Once you click generate, this screen will come up:
keyword research tool big

Click the image to make it bigger and you’ll see all of the great info that this tool provides.

Here’s another cool feature. Click on any of the results and you’ll be brought to a page with the top 10 results for that keyword and crucial information for each one.
top 10 results
Some of the info on the page includes MOZ rank (site’s rank according to Moz.com, which takes into account page authority, domain age, domain authority and many other factors), domain authority and site age. A quick look at this page and you’ll get the same information that would probably take 60-90 minutes to compile using the method described above.

Long Tail Pro can make your keyword research a LOT easier and I encourage you to at least try it out and see if you like it. Get a 10 day free trial here.

It can basically turn 3-4 hours of keyword research into a 10 minute task. I got this tool with the idea of trying to help me rank my sites as a whole, but I now use it before I publish almost every blog post! Having my posts be seen in a Google search is so great!

We now have people finding posts that are months, even years old in Google. The affiliate links in those posts generate a nice amount of passive income and new site traffic.

One note: keyword research should not change a ton about what you write. It’s just about choosing the write wording to use in your posts, titles and meta data. Just a simple change like using “what I think is the best hairspray” instead of “my favorite hairspray” can mean the difference between a ton of pageviews and not much. You won’t know which keywords and phrases are the best to go after unless you do a little research though.

Your keyword research is done, so now what?
I have written on this blog about proper SEO techniques in the past, so feel free to browse the SEO section for more info. I pulled this guide to on-page SEO (which means SEO that you should use in every blog post) from my course, which you can find here.
On Page SEO Post Sample
You don’t have to follow everything on the above image exactly, but I recommend you get as close as you can with still sounding natural in your post.

Whatever method of keyword research you do, just make sure you are being thorough and accurate. The last thing you want to do is try and try to rank for a keyword that is dominated by companies with million dollar SEO budgets. You’ll never get closer than page 3 for some keywords, and it’s best to know what those are before starting a blog post. Keyword research can help you get your blog out there to more searchers and is an excellent way to build traffic to your blog. No matter how you choose to do keyword research, the important thing is that you do it. If you’re writing evergreen content (content that is timeless) and not doing keyword research, you are missing an opportunity for traffic and possibly even passive income!

Filed Under: Blog, Get Noticed, SEO

Pinterest Reminds Us to Not Put All of Our Eggs in One Basket

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pinterest changes blog
Last week, Pinterest made the change to stop allowing affiliate links in pins. This was a rude awakening to those who were pumping rstyle links into their pins. I definitely sympathize with the bloggers who were affected here. Losing any amount of your income sucks. However, there are a couple of things we can learn from this happening.

The number one and main thing is: don’t put all of your eggs in one basket. Making a lot of money in one place is not a bad thing at all, but if it’s the only place you are making money, it can be risky. A simple policy change by a social network was absolutely devastating to many bloggers’ incomes.

This is one of the main reasons I encourage diversification of your income when it comes to blogging. Once you start making decent money in one place, try to branch out and add other income streams.

In this case, the bloggers could have spent more time trying to build their blogs, where they could also be putting their rstyle affiliate links and other links. Additionally, with more blog traffic and engagement, they could have added sponsored posts to their blog to boost their income stream.

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The second major thing that can be learned from this change from Pinterest is to be very careful relying too heavily on something that you don’t own. These bloggers don’t own Pinterest, just like I don’t own Twitter or Google. I do enjoy traffic from these places, but I am aware that one change from either of them could stop traffic from those sources at the drop of a hat.

For this reason, I encourage you to collect emails and build your email list.

This may sound like an odd idea for everyday bloggers, but it really isn’t strange. Everyone uses email and if you give people something unique and interesting for being on your email list, they will love it! This doesn’t mean you have to send out emails to your list every week or anything. Just something every now and then to keep things interesting. The main thing here is that you have a way to contact your readers that no one can take away from you. Your email list is yours. You can take it from email service to email service and the list remains your own.

This is also a huge reason why I encourage bloggers to set up their own self-hosted WordPress instead of using a free service. Blogs on Blogger have been shut down for a simple policy violation that the blogger knew nothing about. Poof, they are gone forever. When you have a self-hosted blog, that can’t happen.

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There’s a reason why I preach the things that I do (don’t put all your eggs on one basket, don’t rely on things you don’t own, diversify, be adaptable) and this change by Pinterest is a reminder as to why. I am not happy about the change, but it is definitely a validation that what I have been saying is indeed the right path to take when it comes to blogging and making money doing so.

If you’d like to learn a ton more about blogging, making money, SEO, increasing traffic and more, check out my course: More from Your Blog in 10 Days. In the course, you’ll get practical advice that pertains to bloggers. This is not a course on internet marketing or how to make money by telling other people how to make money. This is a course about building a better blog. Take a look at this page to learn more!

Filed Under: Get Noticed

My Email Subscribe Pop-Up Box Experiment

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increase email subscribers
New to email lists? Before reading my email subscribe pop-up box experiment, check out How to Build an Email List and Use it for Profit.

A while back, I revealed that I was going to conduct a test on whether or not a pop-up box worked (for me at least) for a blog.

Let me state this up front – I think it’s extremely important to limit the frequency of the pop-up. With Aweber (and some other services) you can set the box to show up only once per visitor. This means, if you go to my site today for the first time, you’ll see the pop-up, but if you come here tomorrow on the same device, you shouldn’t see it. I can’t stress this enough – don’t make the pop-up box appear on every single page, every single time. There is not much that will get me to leave a site faster than a pop-up box that shows up every time I click something. That does NOT make me want to read more content, it makes me want to leave.

What I Did

Ok, back to the test. I did a major redesign of my blog and saw email signups completely drop off of the table.

I attribute this to the new design. Generally speaking, people know where to look for an email subscribe box. People’s eyes are tuned to the right side of the page and are focused on finding a text box and submit button. My new design is anything but standard and my email subscribe call-to-action on my homepage just wasn’t cutting it. People needed more coaxing.

Additionally, since I wanted to keep the homepage very simple and clean, I lost the ability to be wordy about what subscribing to my email list includes.

I went to Aweber in search of an email box that would pop up on my site. Low and behold, they not only have the software to quickly and easily create nice-looking email opt-in forms, they also have the ability to make them pop up! Furthermore, you can set the pop-up box to show up once, every time, or every X days. You can also set it to pop up right away, or after a certain number of seconds (set by you). Within Aweber, the type of box that pops up within your site is actually called a Pop-Over.
create pop over email subscribe box

The great thing about Aweber is that you can split-test subscriber boxes very easily. I can go in and change my box to show up every 7 days instead of only once, and see how that goes. Or I can experiment with a 5-second delay for the pop-over.

The Results

I compared February (the first full month with the new design) and March, (the first full month with the pop-up) for this experiment.
email subscriber growth
If you can’t tell from the pic above, growth was excellent. To be exact, the month of March ended with exactly 3 TIMES the amount of new subscribers as February.

Also, I received exactly zero complaints about the email box via email, social media or blog comments. I truly feel that is because I made sure it wasn’t annoying. I have it set to only show up once per person. As long as you are using the same device and browser, you won’t see the box. There’s also a very easy to find “X” in the upper right corner so it can be easily closed.

Additionally, I noticed that I received more responses to my follow-up series than usual, which tells me that engaged readers are subscribing.

My bounce rate also stayed consistent, at around 10%, which tells me groves of people were not seeing the pop-up box and running away.

If they had been, I would have removed the pop up and re-evaluated. It is very important that you listen to the visitors of your site. Even if they’re not talking to you, their data can tell you all you need to know.

Analysis

This is easy. Overall, after one month, I declare this email pop-up box a success. No complaints, 3X subscribers? Should I get more aggressive? Maybe. Will I? Probably not. It’s not my style. Given that this (internet marketing/helping bloggers) is a very spammy niche, I take great care to remain very un-spammy. It’s gotten me this far, so I’m not changing now.

That being said, more subscribers would be great! So head over here, check out what being a subscriber means and then subscribe! You can also get on the email list by using the signup box over there to the right. —–>

Filed Under: Blog, Get Noticed

How to Lower Your Bounce Rate from 85% to 10% with One Easy Fix

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how to lower your bounce rate


Want to know how to lower your bounce rate? First, we should talk about why you would want to lower it. Some advertisers care about bounce rate, so providing them with a more accurate number is a big deal. There is a good chance that your bounce rate is currently an inaccurate measure of how engaging your content is.

How? Well, let’s look at what Google says about bounce rate.

“Bounce rate” in Google Analytics is one of the key metrics that helps to evaluate the quality of your traffic. “Bounce” happens when the visitor exited the website right from the landing page, without going to any other page. This is a great indication on how relevant the content was for the user and how engaged they were with your website.

Ok, to me that is not right. Let’s say you have a blog and you write one lengthy post every day, every other day or even weekly. People know that when they come to your site, they’re going to get a nice, 5000 word blog post that they love to read. Just because they leave after they read that entire post doesn’t mean they are not engaged. They should definitely not be considered a bounce! That was someone who spent 10 minutes or more on your blog, consuming your content. I’d say the content was pretty relevant!

So now that we an agree that a “bounce” is not necessarily someone who only visits on page, how do we fix what Google thinks about “bounce rate”? I mean, “this is a great indication on how relative the content was” is total crap! They are saying that if someone spends 10-15 minutes or more reading my blog post and then they leave, Google thinks the content was not relevant! So obviously, this needs to be fixed.

Well, the funny thing is that this is not really new news. As a matter of fact, Google put an article on its own blog 2 years ago about this.

Ok, so what exactly do you do?

You’ll be adding this snippet of code into your Analytics code:
setTimeout(“_gaq.push([‘_trackEvent’, ’15_seconds’, ‘read’])”,15000);
The 15000 means 15 seconds. Customize that to whatever you think is correct. I kept mine at 15 seconds. This code creates an “event” after 15 seconds. Once the “event” is created, the user is not counted as a “bounce” no matter what they do after that point.

Where do you put it? Well, below is a picture of what your code will look like. Place it where you see the red box.
lower your bounce rateUsing the new Universal Analytics? No problem! Use the example below:
codeThat will do it! Now, when someone stays on your site for at least 15 seconds (or whatever time amount you choose), they will be registered as a “non-bounce” user.

I should also mention the caution that Google says we should take when using this function:

We hope this small fix will allow you to track and understand the users’ behavior and quality of the traffic coming to your website more accurately, and make more informed decisions. One thing website owners should be vary of, though, that not only the function may slow down the users’ experience, even insignificantly, but will also increase the volume of hits your site sends to Google Analytics, which might bring your usage over the limit (currently set at 10 mln hits per month). As such, this fix should only be applied when necessary and justified by the concept of the website and the landing pages.

I have not run into a problem and I have not heard of anyone who has, but I feel better having told you about the warning. 🙂

Note: Please use this featured responsibly. If you have an advertiser that you really want to work with, it is not in good ethical practice to lower your “event” to one second to drop your bounce rate.

Filed Under: Blog, General Blogging Tips, Get Noticed, Tutorials Tagged With: googla analytics, tutorial

6 Free Blogging Tools That I Use Every Day

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6 free blogging tools that i use every day

Today I want to talk about some free blogging tools. Now, I am a firm believer in the fact that it takes money to make money. (i.e. – you have to invest in your business at some point) However, there are still a plethora of free tools out there that are very helpful to bloggers.

My favorite tools are below.

picmonkey
First up, PicMonkey. There is a free and paid option, but you can get a TON of use out of the free option. PicMonkey provides basic photo editing, collage creating and graphic design tools that are easy to use and very helpful. Need to add some text to a photo? Need to brighten a photo or create a nice-looking border for it? PicMonkey can help you with all of this and more. The graphic at the top of this post was created using PicMonkey in about 3 minutes.


hootsuite 
Hootsuite also has a free and paid option. With the free option, you can add social networks such as Twitter, Facebook and Google+ and post to each account with one click. You can also schedule status updates through Hootsuite. The features of the free option are very complete. It’s definitely worth checking out! I can schedule a day’s worth of Tweets and Facebook updates in less than 5 minutes with HootSuite. I happily use the free option every day and it does what I need.


google analytics 
Google Analytics is the most powerful free tool bloggers can get their hands on. GA provides complete tracking of pageviews, visitor activity and other very important metrics such as how long people stay on your site, which page they land on and which site referred them to you. If you’re blogging without Analytics, you are missing out on a ton of useful information about your traffic. For some tips on using Google Analytics, see my posts here and here.


lastpass
LastPass is a huge time saver for me. With LastPass, you’ll never have to fill out those “forgot password” forms again. LastPass securely stores all of your passwords (it’ll even create ones for you) and can automatically enter your login credentials when you arrive at a website that you have stored. Let me give you an example: you’ve signed up for 2 separate Yahoo Mail accounts. If you have stored both sets of login credentials with LastPass, when you go to login to Yahoo Mail, you can click the login box and both of your login names will pop up. Click whichever one you want and the login and password will be automatically entered and you’ll be logged in! It sounds simple, but you’ll be amazed at how much you love it once you get it set up. I mean, think about how many logins you have! If you take advantage of the tools in this post, you’ll have a few more just like that. You need to try LastPass!


dropbox
Dropbox is a great free cloud storage tool. What I love is that you can sync it up to your cell phone and any computer. With the free Dropbox app, I can take a picture with my phone and quickly shoot over to my Dropbox. From there, on my computer, I can edit the photo using tools like PicMonkey very quickly and send it over to Instagram looking much better than the original. I also work at home with my wife. When doing projects together, Dropbox is so great. I can send her a few photos to edit via Dropbox and she can shoot them right back when she’s done.


if this then that
IFFT, or If This Then That, is an automating tool that can save you a ton of time. Above, I mentioned the process of sending an image to Dropbox once taken. Well, with If This Then That, you can automate many tasks like that. Basically, with IFTTT, you are setting up processes that basically say “if this happens, then do that“. Some examples of IFTTT scenarios that you can set up are: Instagram to Facebook Album, Tweet Facebook Status Updates, Update Facebook Page After New WordPress Post, Post YouTube Upload to Facebook Page and much more!
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So there you have it! 6 free tools that can help you and your blogging venture!
What are some free tools that you use?

Filed Under: Blog, Blogging Tools, General Blogging Tips, Get Noticed

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