Starting a blog can be overwhelming, and yet there’s nothing better for your personal brand. Here are the steps to take to starting a solid blog to solidify your online presence and build your brand. …
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Do you find yourself often pondering blog-related questions, such as how many blogs per month for SEO? You’re not alone. There is no golden rule, but there are set practices to find the best fit for you, and we can illustrate how.
Blogging frequency is a common struggle for new bloggers and experienced bloggers alike. With so many factors to consider, including search engine optimization and brand awareness, it’s certainly an important thing to have planned out.
In this post, we’ll uncover the blogging frequency we found that works for one specific industry. We’ll show you how we drew this conclusion and how you can do the same for yours.
Blogging frequency is how often you publish blog posts on a weekly or monthly basis.
There are a number of benefits to finding your ideal blogging frequency.
First and foremost, blog posts allow you to rank for organic keywords. These are needed for driving organic traffic to your site.
A frequently updated blog also increases brand awareness. The more you post about your industry, the more aware of your web presence, your products, and your services your target audience becomes.
Blogging can help your business build trust in the community. Posting relevant content about your industry and regularly updating it will help convey trust and authority to your audience. They will be more likely to convert on your site versus a competitor that rarely updates their content or posts blogs.
For more practical reasons, a blog post frequency helps you to set a standard for yourself or your content writing team. Without a frequency in mind, you may constantly focus on writing blog posts at the expense of other activities. This extends to adjacent teams too, like social media and design, who would greatly benefit from a known frequency so they can prioritize their tasks.
So a blog post frequency gives you both an upper and lower limit, which means you can spend more time and money focusing on other aspects of your business.
In addition to asking how often do you need to blog, it’s not uncommon to ask what happens when you blog too frequently? Or, is that even possible?
Perhaps you’re thinking the more, the better. As you’ll see in the analysis below, it’s not quite that simple.
You could post daily on your blog. Hourly, even. Will it be your best content, though? Remember that quality is better than quantity in almost all cases. By posting too frequently, you may be sacrificing the quality of your content which itself will have a negative impact on your brand.
For this analysis, we’re evaluating eight companies in the CBD industry. To find out how many blog posts they publish per month, we looked at their post sitemaps and calculated the average number of posts per month since January 2022.
We looked at a few metrics when measuring their success.
First, we looked at the overall keyword universe, meaning we analyzed the total number of keywords the blog ranks for on Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). To drill down further, we also looked at the number of those keywords which ranked within the top 10 results, or on the first page. Finally, we compared the number of organic keywords each business ranked for in the top three results. These are the most coveted positions.
The greater your number of organic keywords, the farther your reach. While it’s not the only metric to consider when measuring success, it is a good indicator of such.
With the highest post frequency on our list, RoyalCBD.com boasts an average of 18 blog posts per month. This seems to have paid off, with 24,351 organic keywords driving traffic to the website.
More important than organic traffic, however, is the quality of that traffic. RoyalCBD seems to boast high numbers there, too. The website has 5,603 keywords ranking in the top 10 and 2,920 keywords ranking in the top one through three positions on SERPs.
The next on our list, JoyOrganics.com, also happens to be the site with the second-highest posting frequency that we analyzed. That is, 17 posts per month on average from January 2022 through June 2022.
This is likely a contributing factor for the rather high number of organic keywords – 17,103 to be exact – driving traffic to the site. Of those keywords, 1,679 rank in the top 10 and 511 rank within positions one through three on SERPs.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, there is CBDfx.com, with a blogging frequency of about one post per month.
Before you think CBDfx.com is an anomaly, you should know they have refreshed 155 blog posts on their site in June 2022 alone. This means they optimized existing posts to meet current SEO standards. So while their posting frequency is low, the refreshed content is likely playing a large role in their organic keyword rankings.
CBDfx.com has 18,023 organic keywords with 2,576 ranking in the top 10 and 984 ranking within the top three positions on SERPs.
The takeaway here is that refreshed content can be just as important as new content for rankings.
While we initially looked at post frequency from January 2022 through June 2022, there are some websites that have yet to post in 2022. This includes HempFusion.com. In those cases, we looked back at July 2021 through December 2021.
From July through December 2021, there was an average of seven blog posts per month. Despite not posting in 2022, this prior frequency seems to have provided some protection for HempFusion.com on SERPs. It currently has 2,827 organic keywords, with 391 ranking on the first page and 201 ranking in positions one through three.
Here’s another site with no blog posts in 2022. From July through December 2021, though, MedterraCBD posted an average of five blog posts per month.
You might be thinking that surely MedterraCBD.com will have fewer organic keyword rankings than HempFusion.com. MedterraCBD.com actually has considerably more. To be specific, 7,435 organic keywords with 840 ranking in the top 10 and 486 ranking in the top three.
There are a few reasons for this. Foremost, MedterraCBD.com has ranked since the middle of 2017 while HempFusion.com only started ranking around January 2020. MedterraCBD.com has also seen higher average rankings overall, so it’s likely to see the effects of not posting less drastically.
With 14 posts per month, surely JustCBDStore.com has a significant number of organic keywords.
Surprisingly, this site has only 8,680 organic keywords. Of those, 1,615 rank in the top 10, and 776 rank within the top three on SERPs. That’s close to the sites like HempFusion.com and MedterraCBD.com that didn’t post at all in 2022!
We know it’s not the posts per month responsible for that low of organic keywords. So the answer is likely in a factor we have not considered, such as the age of the website or social media presence.
Another on our list with a moderate number of posts per month, Purekana.com has a monthly blogging frequency of approximately 13.
Similar to JustCBDStore.com, Purekana.com has a small organic keyword profile with 7,126 organic keywords. Of these, 983 rank on the first page of SERPs, and 414 rank within the top three.
Here’s another anomaly, though occurring in the opposite direction of what we saw above.
cbdMD.com posts an average of 13 blog posts per month. Despite this middle-of-the-road number of blog posts, it has the most organic keywords on our list with 37,784. This includes 5,924 keywords ranking in the top 10 and 2,154 keywords ranking within the top three.
To recap our findings, we analyzed eight CBD websites with the intention of pinpointing the optimal number of blog posts per month for the industry. Here is what we found:
cbdMD.com has the largest number of organic keywords. When you take into account its modest domain authority and medium-sized backlink profile, it becomes clear that the number of blog posts is the driving factor for its success.
Why is this not the case for JustCBDStore.com and Purekana.com, both of which also post approximately 13 blog posts per month? There are a lot of other variables at play, such as target keywords, length of the average blog post, and social media presence.
What does this mean for you?
Our research shows that for this industry, 13 blog posts per month is a good balance between quantity and quality. These should be focused on well-researched topics with at least one or two target keywords. This should further be accompanied by ample support from your cross-functional teams. This means social media promotion of the posts and digital assets from your design team at the very least. 13 a month was a number that allowed the sites we mention above to strike that balance.
In addition, blog post refreshes should also have a place in your content writing strategy. There’s no magic number of refreshes to implement here. It’s more so about updating older posts that may not fit in with the most recent SEO recommendations. This also gives you an opportunity to improve your internal linking.
The blogging frequency we found to be ideal for the CBD industry may or may not be ideal for your industry. So how can you find the ideal blog post frequency for your industry and, even more important, your blog?
The best way to do so is with an analysis of a sample of blogs within your industry like we performed above. You can easily do this with access to XML sitemaps and an SEO analysis tool like Ahrefs or, of course, Ubersuggest.
What does this look like?
While organic keyword profile isn’t the only indicator of a solid posting frequency, it’s one that seems to correlate highly. So do take other factors into consideration if something stands out, but don’t overcomplicate it.
Here are the answers to frequently asked questions on the subject of blogging frequency.
The answer is not so cut and dry as we’ve highlighted above. Once you have found your ideal blog post frequency for the month, it’s best to break it down into weekly goals.
In our data, we saw post frequencies anywhere from once a month to almost 20. The answer is going to vary based on the client’s industry as well as the capacity of their content team, though it’s important not to compromise quality for cadence.
While competitor research can provide a good idea for the number of blog posts to write each month, it’s not the be-all-end-all. You should also consider how many quality posts you can write and whether you actually have something useful to say.
There are plenty of ways to find creative blog ideas for your blog. You can research your competitors using Ubersuggest, find keyword ideas in Google Search Console, and or even use a blog idea generator.
This could be an article topic all its own, as there is a lot that goes into quality blog writing. A few elements of a quality blog post include a compelling headline, a narrow focus, and a unique brand voice.
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When it comes to determining the ideal blogging frequency for your website, there is no magic number. There are many factors that play into that decision.
So how can you determine the best frequency for your blog?
The key is to look at other blogs in your industry and compare their posting frequency to their organic keyword profile. You’re looking for a strong organic keyword profile – the highest number of relevant page one keywords within the industry – for a clue as to how many posts per month are ideal for your blog.
Remember, though, that quality is just as important (if not more so) as quantity. So maintain a frequency that nears the ideal frequency for your industry but that still allows you to maintain a high content quality.
Private Blog Networks (PBNs) claim to work because they generate backlinks – and that much is true.
What about their other claims, though?
We know backlinks work to improve SEO and therefore visibility in the SERPs, but do PBNs work?
And if so, do they work well?
How do they even work?
Well, let’s answer those questions.
Luckily, private blog networks are actually quite simple to understand.
At some point in the era of SEO, someone figured out how to build a massive amount of backlinks from high-domain authority websites without much effort.
They did it by purchasing expired domain names that had already established domain authority.
Then, after collecting quite a large portion of these domains, they posted basic content to each website and included a backlink to their primary website in all of the content.
And voilá! They immediately generated loads of backlinks from high-domain authority websites.
At that moment, private blog networks were born.
Think of PBNs like a database of websites that, when you pay, all give your website backlinks.
It ends up looking something like this.
And with all of those backlinks your website’s domain authority, SEO, and rankings all benefit.
It sounds great, right?
Why wouldn’t you want to pay a little bit of money to increase your rankings and generate passive traffic to your website?
That’s the dream of most SEO experts, after all.
Well, not so fast.
To help you determine whether you should leverage PBNs, we’re going to first talk about the benefits that they have to offer. Then, we’ll discuss why they are a bit risky.
With that knowledge, you’ll be better prepared to make an informed decision for yourself.
While you might have heard that PBNs are scams that won’t help your SEO, that claim is only partly true.
PBNs offer legitimate benefits.
But before I get much further, let me mention a quick disclaimer:
I’ve never used a PBN for my own website and I don’t recommend using them for your website either.
I’ll explain why a little bit later, but I wanted to get that out in the open, so you know where I stand.
For now, though, let’s discuss why PBNs entice many marketers.
As I already mentioned, backlinks fuel the success of private blog networks.
And what exactly is a backlink?
A backlink is a hyperlink that leads from an external website to your own website. And these little beauties massively help your SEO.
Backlinks communicate to search engines that the linking website trusts your website enough to associate itself with your domain.
That means that the search engines will trust your website as well.
It’s kind of the same thing as playing with the cool kids on the playground.
When you’re hanging with the cool kids, that makes you cool.
Similarly, to figure out which websites are worth trusting, search engines look at which websites are linking to each other.
For that reason, link building is the top factor contributing to the rankings of a website.
PBNs can be so effective at building these backlinks that one company experienced this difference in its rankings after working with a private blog network.
So, can PBNs increase your SEO?
Yes, of course, they can.
That’s why so many marketers use them at some point. It’s why they have stuck around for so long, and it’s the reason that certain SEO firms make loads of money.
But what’s the dark side?
After all, everything that goes up must come down. Everything that sounds too good to be true is too good to be true.
Here are the cons you need to be aware of.
PBNs sound great.
That is until you find out about the risks involved with using them.
Yes, they can increase your SEO and help generate passive traffic and leads to your website.
However, that entire marketing strategy can quickly become a disaster if Google catches you.
So, in case you’re wondering, yes: Google hates PBNs and intentionally tries to penalize people who use them.
However, I understand the appeal.
I get it. SEO takes a long time to start impacting your blog rankings.
The quick fix that PBNs offer is just too enticing for some marketers. You get fast rankings, brand awareness, and, hopefully, revenue.
At least, that’s what the PBNs promise.
But if all of that benefit can fade in a single moment of vulnerability, is it really worth it?
PBNs aren’t technically a blackhat SEO strategy.
But they aren’t white hat either.
They’re a hack. They amount to a get-rich-quick scheme. And as with most similar tactics, they involve some serious risks.
If Google finds out, then they will penalize your website, and you’ll struggle to gain any significant ground in SEO.
But how? How does Google penalize websites that use PBNs to boost their SEO?
How would they know what you’re doing?
Well, if all of the websites that you’ve received backlinks from are websites with very little activity, few updates, and almost no internal linking, then Google gets suspicious.
Unfortunately, PBN websites usually have all of those specific qualities.
That makes it easy for most search engines to spot them.
In the end, if you decide to use PBNs, know that you run the risk of hurting your website’s SEO.
Legitimate pros exist, but only under a cloud of potential penalization by search engines.
You might generate some quick domain authority with PBNs. While traditional strategies take longer, they aren’t nearly as risky.
But if you want to rise through the rankings the right way, then here are five risk-proof strategies you can use instead.
Guest blogging gives you an opportunity to provide value for someone else’s website while also getting a backlink.
If you do it right, this strategy will be a win for the website you write for and a win for your own website as well.
For that reason, SEO agencies and experts alike use guest blogging as one of their link-building strategies.
You can do the same thing.
Just find blogs within your industry and pitch the editors an article over email. If they accept your pitch, you can run off to write and include a backlink to your own website.
But before you do, make sure that you ask the editor what their policy is regarding backlinks.
They might not want you to include a backlink to your website within the article itself, but they’ll let you put it in your bio.
Either way, you win a backlink, and they win a valuable piece of content for their audience.
Now, you might be nervous that editors won’t respond to your emails.
But we’ve created this handy guide for guest blogging proposals to help you get started.
Remember: don’t quit early just because you don’t get a response.
Pitch enough places with high-quality ideas, and you’re sure to receive a reply.
Just give it some time.
And keep this in mind as well. The ideal word count for ranking articles sits right around 2,400 words.
Ultimately, follow the guidelines of the blog you’re writing for. But when it doubt, try to write an article that will rank well on Google.
Then, the website will be more likely to accept your pitch, outline, and final draft.
While guest blogging is one of the most popular strategies for generating backlinks, you might not have the time.
If you don’t, then writing testimonials for other websites might be a more appealing approach.
Even if you do write a guest blog post, writing testimonials with a backlink to your website is a strategy worth your time.
It’s simple and powerful.
All you have to do is provide a testimonial for websites that you partner with.
Then, most of the websites will include a friendly backlink to your URL.
Just make sure that your testimonial provides genuine value. Write something like this, for instance.
Or give them something like this.
And here’s one more example.
Always include these two specific things in your testimonial.
With that start, you’ll be off and writing testimonials for your partners in no time, generating backlinks with every reference.
If you don’t create content worth sharing, then you can probably guess what will happen: No one will share it.
Your goal when you write that blog post or film that video or design that infographic is to generate attention for your brand.
You want to increase brand awareness, drive traffic to your website, and use the content to generate leads.
You even want to generate social backlinks to your website.
But, of course, you can’t do that if you create bad content.
If you’re going to create the content anyway, then take the time to make it great. Make it share-worthy.
But how do you do that?
Well, you need to make people who share your content look good.
People share things on social media and through email because they want to look good to their friends.
That might sound egotistical, but it’s the human condition.
Ask yourself: What reason do people have to share this with their friends? Will it make them seem funny, smart, kind, cool, or rich?
To get shares, you need to target at least one of those motivations.
After all, those are among the top reasons why people share content in the first place.
And when it comes to which type of content to produce, infographics and lists win.
Another strategy that works is spying on your competitors to understand what’s performing best on social media. Here’s an easy way to do so:
Step #1: Visit Ubersuggest, Type Your Keyword and Click “Search”
Step #2: Click “Content Ideas” in the Left Sidebar
Step #3: Analyze the Results
What you end up with is a long list of top-performing content related to your keyword.
For example, the top listing, “Marketing Legend Seth Godin on the Future of Branded Content,” has been shared 16,805 times on Facebook and nearly 100 times on Pinterest. That gives you a pretty good idea that the content is share-worthy. Now, you can craft your content in a similar manner, with the goal of achieving the same results.
However you do it, take the time to create amazing, share-worthy content. You’ll generate far more social backlinks, drive more traffic, and build better brand awareness.
You’re creating the content, so do the best that you can with it.
Social signals play a massive part in SEO.
Websites that stay active on their social media accounts, update their information, and generate more content shares tend to rank better than websites that don’t.
In fact, just on Facebook, that correlation is apparent.
But why is that the case?
Why does Google rank websites that have an active and updated social media presence better than those that don’t?
The short answer is that search engines want to know your website is active and relevant.
If you’re generating lots of shares and social signals, then that tells Google to rank you better.
This means that just staying active on your social media accounts can help your SEO. It really is that simple.
And the more engagement you get on your social media pages, the better.
A 2016 experiment tried to discover the impact that social media can have on your website’s SEO.
In the study, one website with an increase in social shares experienced a 14.64% increase in rankings, and another website received a 6.9% SEO boost.
But if that’s not enough motivation for you to stay active on your social media accounts, just consider the additional traffic you’ll drive to your website with each post.
You won’t only win social backlinks. You’ll also generate traffic, leads, and even conversions.
You’ve stuck with me this far.
But now you’re wondering, “How does building a loyal audience help your SEO?”
And that’s a great question.
Unfortunately, the answer isn’t as direct as you might like.
But it does exist.
Just consider, for example, that active blogs draw 6.9 times more organic search traffic.
This means that just posting on your website’s blog regularly will benefit your SEO.
After all, the more people who search for your website and the more popular you become, the higher your domain authority will surge.
In other words, with a loyal audience comes a better ranking.
And, in turn, that’s good for growing your audience.
You see, it’s kind of like a self-sustaining, perpetual cycle.
With a larger audience comes better SEO, and with better SEO comes a larger audience. And with a larger audience comes better SEO, and on it goes. You get the point.
Plus, the bigger your audience, the more shares you’ll generate on social media, further helping your link-building strategy.
Of course, Rome wasn’t built in a day, and you won’t build your audience overnight.
Building a loyal group of followers is a process of posting consistent content over a long period of time.
You’ll cross times of discouragement and tribulation.
Sometimes, you’ll want to give up.
When you do, though, just keep in mind that acquiring new customers is five to seven times more expensive than retaining old ones.
In other words, all of that time and energy you dedicate to pleasing your existing audience will pay off when you’re trying to market to them.
Plus, you’ll generate more attention and better SEO from a loyal customer base than you will from new and fleeting customers.
Yes, you can be penalized for doing this.
Google considers them scammy.
Look for sites with high authority and links that you can buy – but this strategy is not recommended.
They aren’t considered black hat, but they are penalized by Google.
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So, should you use private blog networks?
As I explained, they can help your SEO, and they can do it fast. But the entire time you use them, you run the unfortunate risk of destroying your website’s ranking potential in one fell swoop.
Is the risk worth it?
I hope that you’ll answer that question with a “no.”
SEO is good. But SEO spoiled by spammy tactics is not.
The better option is to build your backlinks over time by guest blogging, writing testimonials, creating share-worthy content, leveraging your social platforms, and building a loyal audience.
Even though it might feel like it takes a long time to rise through the rankings using those strategies, that’s time well spent.
You’ll have peace of mind knowing that no one can penalize you for shady methods.
Private blog networks aren’t black hat. But they certainly aren’t white hat, either.
They are gray hat. And that’s a hat you shouldn’t be willing to wear.
Do you think private blog networks are a penalty waiting to happen or a great SEO hack?
Can you really make money from blogging?
If your blog gets over 10,000 monthly unique visitors, then yes – you can monetize your blog and create a nice revenue stream with it.
The real challenge is making money from a blog that generates fewer than 1,000 visitors per day.
Just as in life, there are different stages to a blog’s life cycle. You can’t compare your new blog to one that’s been around for years.
The truth is: it takes time to build an income from blogging.
No matter what you’ve read, blogging success doesn’t happen overnight — but it is possible.
Identify the stage you’re in, and work from there. There’s no shortcut to getting blog traffic. Yes, I can show you how to drive traffic to your blog, but you have to be patient and consistent, and you have to work really hard.
This in-depth article will guide you on monetizing your new blog. There are still opportunities to make money with your blog, even if it’s not as popular as this blog.
Without further ado, here are eight proven ways to monetize a blog that generates fewer than 1,000 visitors per day:
If you’re looking for a way to start making money within the shortest period of time, become a coach. Giving prospects and customers direct access to expertise is where it’s at.
Data from Disc Insights found that “as a whole, the life coaching industry takes in a yearly revenue of $2 billion.”
Jenni Elliot, the founder of TheBlogMaven.com, makes $397 on a one-to-one blogging intensive coaching session.
It doesn’t matter when you started blogging or how much experience you’ve gained in that time — offering a coaching service to motivated clients can bring in money.
Inevitably, your readers will face challenges in life. A coach’s responsibility is to help people manage their challenges, and react in a positive way instead of getting frustrated and giving up.
A lot of bloggers I know started out as online coaches. Initially, they struggled to attract regular clients, but they overcame the challenge by reaching out through social media.
The major reason why becoming a coach in your industry can help you earn extra income is because people want to learn new skills, or improve in certain areas.
Coaching services are in demand because of the dramatic results the process can bring.
As an example, after working with Walk of Life Consulting, 98 percent of clients reported that they thought their CV was more compelling using achievement statements, and 87 percent said their LinkedIn profile became 5X more effective. Here’s the rest of the statistics:
Life coaching is just one area to consider, and it’s increasingly popular these days. As a coach, you’ll help people deal with challenges in their personal or professional lives.
For example, if someone is a web developer, they may need a business or personal coach to help adjust to changes in the web development industry, increase their rates, and retain clients who will, in turn, refer others through word of mouth.
Why coaching? Well, the benefits are enormous. Take a look:
How can you use your blog to promote your coaching services business?
Start by creating useful and interesting content on subjects that matter to those clients and prospects.
For example, if you offer coaching services to freelance writers you might cover topics like:
When offering coaching services, you need a strong value proposition, because the market is already saturated. Having a strong reason “why” people should prefer you instead of your competitors will give you a necessary edge.
Tim Brownson, the founder of ADaringAdventure.com, positioned himself as “the life coach who gets people unstuck.” With his 10 years of life coaching experience, clients trust him for his ingenuity and knowledge.
If you’re driven to succeed as a coach, you don’t need to follow dozens and dozens of other coaches in an effort to “learn.”
Instead, pay more attention to your blog and create high-value content.
After all, you’re the coach. The only way to prove your expertise is through the content you create on a regular basis. Use blogging to increase your prospects’ success, preferably by including case studies wherever possible.
According to Jeff Molander,
Blogging is most useful when you strive to help [your prospects] believe what they want (what you sell) can actually happen for them on time, on budget and without pain. It removes the fear from buying.
When you become a life, personal, or business coach, you have three key jobs:
No matter what industry you’re in or cater to, offering a coaching service to motivated clients can help them reach their goals and make you money.
Peter James Sinclair benefitted from Yaro Starak’s coaching program, and he’s more organized and effective now.
Through investment coaching, Todd R. Tresidder helped Gary Craig, an entrepreneur, and former hedge fund owner, to grow his monthly cash flow from $5,000 to $50,000 per month.
Before you rush in and start offering coaching services to motivated clients, you have to understand that a coach is an entrepreneur. You’ve got to have that mindset because that’s what you need to thrive.
Mediocre coaches give up in the face of unfavorable circumstances, but coaches who’ve focused on improving their entrepreneurial skills thrive. When you think like the entrepreneur you truly are, you’ll command higher rates.
If you’re a blogger, then you already have the skills to become an in-demand freelance blogger.
Linda Formichelli makes $250 per hour, and Elna Cain makes a full-time income as a professional freelance writer.
Brands are desperately looking for bloggers with relevant skillsets, and becoming a freelance blogger can transform your financial life.
According to a study by Upwork, 36 percent of the total US workforce freelances. Those freelancers earn a combined annual income of $1.2 trillion.
A freelance writer is a professional who writes articles on different topics for sites, emails, landing pages, etc.
Skilled freelance bloggers are increasingly needed as B2B and B2C companies recognize content is the ultimate tool for attracting leads and nurturing a loyal audience.
Data from Content Marketing Institute found that 21 percent of B2C brands spend more than $100,00 a year on content in 2020, and many are increasing their spending.
Yes, I know what you’re probably thinking, “But there are so many writers out there already!”
That’s true. But professional freelance bloggers who have WordPress, SEO, social media, and persuasive skills are much harder to find. So if you can add these skills to your writing, you’ll become an in-demand freelance blogger.
Initially, you’ll have to market your freelance blogging services through guest blogging on high-traffic blogs, consistent in-house blogging, social media marketing, and even Facebook ads. But eventually, your happy clients will refer more clients to you.
Another profitable way to monetize a blog that generates fewer than 1,000 visitors per day is to create and sell online courses. You don’t need many leads or customers to make money with your first online course.
Here’s the secret: start where you are and scale from there.
If your blog receives at least 50 visitors per day, find out exactly what those visitors want and create a course from there. The truth is that your first course may not be that “awesome” — but that’s okay.
You can always improve. It’s time to avoid the excuses and get started.
Online courses are focused on a specific subject or topic. They’re organized and ready to be put into action.
Online courses have a higher perceived value than blog posts alone. That’s because your target audience can tell how much time you spent creating it. Consequently, they conclude that it must offer some form of value to them.
So don’t be afraid to create an online course – even on a topic that’s been thoroughly covered online. Bryan Harris launched his second online course to 22,000 email subscribers and generated $511,466 in invoiced sales.
Creating an online course is a great way to upgrade your blogging career. Instead of writing for everyone, you create a platform that delivers your best content exclusively to customers.
Online courses are incredibly popular. That’s why there are so many platforms to create and sell online courses.
Keep in mind that the online course market is evolving on a daily basis. Sites like Udemy, Teachable, and Course Merchant have become popular with marketers and technical instructors. And more platforms are coming.
Phil Ebiner makes $100,000 per year selling on Udemy. Even though he doesn’t own or control the platform, he does quite well for himself. He also uses his blogs and social media to promote his Udemy courses.
Then there’s Corbett Carr, who shared a video case study on 10 merchants who earned $1.6 million on Udemy in one year.
In fact, the average instructor brings in $7,000 from Udemy courses, though there is a wide range of outcomes.
Beyond leveraging third-party online learning platforms, you can create and sell your own online course at your blog.
Or you could use a premium online course plugin for WordPress, such as Zippy Courses, CoursePress, WP CourseWare, WooCommerce’s Sensei, and so on.
As a blogger, you can create an online course on any topic that people are struggling with. It doesn’t have to be a complex topic like A/B testing – it could be as simple as “how to use Google Docs.”
Are you surprised? Well, here’s proof that this works: Joseph Michael Nicoletti created an online course that helps novelists write their novel with Scrivener and he makes between $20,000 – $30,000 per month.
You want your course to be engaging, useful, and unique. Follow these four tips for creating an engaging online course:
So how do you choose a course topic? Start with your best blog posts. If I were to create an online course on SEO, I’d probably start with my Guide To SEO – because people like it and will be happy to get an updated version. A few tweaks would make that guide another home run as an online course.
Want to make money writing short ebooks?
Well, people are doing just that with Amazon Kindle publishing.
U.S. ebook sales revenue has experienced an impressive upward growth trend. There’s no doubt that the growth will continue. When it comes to reading ebooks, there are many mobile devices you can use, but Amazon Kindle is the most popular one in the US.
The good thing about writing and making money from Kindle books is that there are already millions of buyers who are ready to buy from Amazon.
You already know that Amazon is a trusted online shopping site – and you don’t have to work that hard to convince people to buy your Kindle book. People believe Amazon passes its credibility to your product, in a sense.
At the age of 21, Stefan Pylarinos started his Kindle publishing career. As a blogger, the bulk of his income comes from his Kindle books and an online course on how to create and make money with Kindle books.
Specifically, he made over $1.1 million in 2015 from his online business, which is actually based on Kindle publishing.
Stefan makes a decent income from his KMoney Mastery 2.0 course, which teaches people how to profit with Kindle publishing.
However, in order to make a living from Kindle books, you need to work extra hard and publish books regularly. The more quality books you have, the more money you’ll make. Stefan Pylarinos has over 20 Kindle books and still counting.
You’ll need to offer several short Kindle books because individually, they’re priced pretty cheaply – usually from $0.99 to $4.00. Probably doesn’t sound too encouraging, right?
However, if you price your Kindle book at $1.99 and sell 200 copies per month, your total income will be $398. That’s nothing to sneeze at, and many authors make more.
Chris Guthrie estimated the earnings of one Kindle book in one year at $377.87 per month, which adds up to $4,534.41 per year at a price of $2.99
You can use your blog to promote your Kindle books, give discounts, and give away free copies of your book in order to generate honest reviews (which are essential for boosting your Kindle book rankings & sales).
You don’t have to spend money to promote your Kindle books. With your blog, you’ve got the influence, authority, audience, and platform to make it work. Through blogging, you can launch and make your first $1,000 from Kindle books.
There are even some smart marketers out there who make a decent income from Kindle Books without writing. They simply outsource the content creation, then use their blogs to drive sales.
One of those smart marketers is Arman Assadi. According to him, his first ebook cost him $375 – $350 to get the book written, and $25 for a professional cover design.
At the time of writing this, he makes $2,500 per month by publishing Kindle books he didn’t write.
To learn more about Kindle publishing and how to make money from it, see the resource guides below:
Private label rights is a strategy where you sell (or in this case buy) intellectual property and market it as your own.
As a marketer, you can benefit from over 50 ways to make money with private label rights (PLR) products. However, make sure you pay attention to the details.
First, don’t use the product word-for-word. Tweak it and make it at least 65 percent unique.
Once you understand your PLR usage rights, you can repackage and make money from it.
Before Panda struck in February 2011, PLR products were popular, and many marketers and bloggers used them to generate content for their sites.
In other words, PLR products are pre-written content that you can claim as your own without incurring any legal action.
In the past, you could start a new site, download a few PLR articles and publish them for your audience. But the game has changed.
Duplicate content is a serious violation of Google’s terms, and could get your site penalized.
However, you can still make money from private label rights as a blogger. If you’re a new/beginner blogger, you can leverage other people’s products.
Creating an information product (e.g., ebooks) from scratch is difficult. If you’re new to blogging you may not have the experience required. Worse, imagine after all the hard work creating the product, no one buys it.
Here are some reasons why product creation from scratch is tiring:
With a PLR product, you don’t need all of that.
Even if you’re not particularly knowledgeable about a certain topic, you can become an author in that field. For example, you can use PLR articles to write a Kindle book related to “plastic surgery” even if you didn’t study that in school.
You can also generate content for your blog using PLR content. When evaluating PLR products, look for these three factors:
Most bloggers and internet marketers struggle to make money with PLR products because they’re lazy. They use the content word-for-word on their blogs. Even when they create ebooks, most people don’t change anything.
If you find a valuable PLR product, you need to rewrite it and make it at least 65 percent unique. You can get quality PLR ebooks, articles, videos, and audio content from sites such as InDigitalWorks
Aside from rewriting the PLR articles or ebooks, you can do so much more with a PLR product. Typically, PLR content is based on profitable niche keywords and information that the target audience is looking for.
You can use the insights of PLR products as research sources, and then create your own high-value ebook based on the information they provide.
Note: To retain your credibility, I don’t recommend you use PLR articles on your own blog.
Yes, you can learn from the author’s wealth of knowledge about a particular subject/topic, but do your best to always write your own content from scratch.
You can also use PLR products indirectly. For example, you could rewrite a PLR ebook and give it away to build an email list. Then you can make money from your list.
When people join your email list, what happens next?
Do you feel excited that you have email subscribers and then ignore them?
Follow-up and relationship building is vital.
According to Marketing Donut, “44 percent of salespeople give up after one follow-up, and the average salesperson only makes 2 attempts to reach a prospect.”
Following up on prospects to convert them into buyers is where the majority of sales will come from. Through follow-up emails, you connect with motivated buyers and sell at the backend.
A relationship is the easiest way to establish trust with blog readers and sell a product. It sounds so simple, but a lot of people aren’t doing it.
A relationship begins when you create awareness about your primary business. You then lead your prospects through a funnel, while delivering immense value with your content in every phase.
First, understand this: there’s nothing wrong with selling to your readers as long as the product is useful and valuable.
However, forget about the product and build a relationship with them. That’s where the funnel comes in.
The purpose of a marketing funnel is to attract strangers, convert them into leads, close the deal by turning them into customers and delight them after they have purchased your product.
The moment you drive potential customers to your funnel, they opt in to your list and they’re added into your follow-up autoresponder. Then you can start building the relationship.
You nurture them through your blog posts, videos, infographics, ebooks, and so on. Ideally, you ask them exactly what they’re struggling with, then use the questions to create relevant and high-value content for them.
Along the way, recommend affiliate programs and products, your own ebooks, or software.
Any product that will help them after you have established a level of trust with them should be shared with them.
After creating their first product, Gael Breton & Mark Webster gave away a part of it to collect leads. Altogether, they collected 301 emails, nurtured the leads, recommended their own quality product, and generated $2,684 in 30 days.
Do you know why so many product launches fail?
Joan Schneider and Julie Hall from Harvard Business Review had this to say:
The biggest problem we’ve encountered is lack of preparation: Companies are so focused on designing and manufacturing new products that they postpone the hard work of getting ready to market them until too late in the game.
If you think that making money online boils down to driving traffic to your blog and generating email leads, you’re making a mistake.
Leads are only the beginning.
One recent study found that 79 percent of marketing leads never convert into sales. Lack of lead nurturing is the common cause of this poor performance.
You need to generate the right leads. The truth is that you may not have this type of lead right now, but you can leverage influencers’ audiences.
Do you have an idea for a product? Most people struggle to launch their products because they go about it all by themselves. It’s reported that 70 percent of all new product launches fail in the first year. The question is, why do some succeed when others fail?
There are several aspects of a successful product launch that you may not be able to handle alone. If you try to go it alone, you’re bound to waste more time, and there’s no guarantee you’ll succeed.
You have to understand that your efforts can only lead you far.
To make a real impact in the lives of people, you need to build relationships with influencers and leverage their influence to create and launch your product.
Of course, generating leads is important when launching your product. Even before you release the product (e.g., ebook, software, plugin) for sale, you should start pre-selling and communicate with prospects.
Ideally, you should build a landing page to collect emails prior to launching your product.
According to MarketingSherpa, “61 percent of B2B marketers send all leads directly to Sales; however, only 27 percent of those leads will be qualified.”
Leveraging influencers could turn out to be the most powerful marketing tool in your arsenal.
As an example, Sujan Patel connected and built relationships with influencers and expert growth hackers before launching an ebook, 100 Days of Growth.
And in six months, Patel and his partner Rob Wormley sold 10,000 copies of the book, which costs $27 per copy.
Here are a few resources to get started leveraging influencers:
No matter where you’re as a blogger, you can monetize your blog by launching virtual summits, which are growing in popularity these days.
Many bloggers use summits to connect and build relationships with influencers. Influencers can bring you credibility, reach, and engagement.
Virtual summits or conferences are powerful. According to Kristen Matthews of Convince and Convert,
Virtual conferences are the most underrated marketing tactic at our fingertips.
Many success stories keep pouring in from bloggers building their lists and income through virtual summits. For one, Aj Amyx earned $16,000 (and 2,300+ subscribers) with a virtual summit.
Here are some of the results of a virtual summit by Navid Moazzez:
There are bloggers and digital marketers making a six-figure income from virtual summits. You may be wondering whether a virtual summit is the same thing as podcasting. Well, here’s a clear description from Entrepreneur:
When Jan Koch launched his first virtual summit, he grew his email list by 600 percent, got featured on major industry websites, and become the go-to expert in his field.
To truly succeed at a virtual summit launch, you need to make it a win/win for the experts who will share their knowledge.
Choose a topic that will inspire people to action, and make sure you have a product to sell at the backend.
Offer coaching services, on-demand products, and use the blog to build relationships and networking.
Easier navigation, simple-to-navigate design, and clear copy that creates compelling results.
Advertising and sponsored posts are always a good way to earn money if you are popular in your niche.
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At the heart of blogging is a deep-seated desire to build and nurture an audience.
Most beginning bloggers struggle to make a living from their blogging efforts, because they believed that blogging alone was enough to make them money.
The majority of successful bloggers make the bulk of their money by selling and promoting other products or services.
For example, Darren Rowse makes more money from his Digital Photography School, and Ryan Deiss generates over six-figure income annually from SurvivalLife. There are countless success stories in this regard.
In a nutshell, if you can’t compete with other players in your industry, you may want to switch to other industries where you can become an expert, then get to work building links, get organic traffic, and promoting products and services to your blog readers.
That said, you have to be consistent. Success doesn’t happen overnight.
Which of these methods do you think is the best way to make money as a blogger when your blog generates fewer than 1,000 visitors per day?
Blogging is a pain.
Not because content is hard to write (worse case you can just hire a writer or agency), but due to the fact that no one can guarantee that your blog post gets read or not.
Just think about it… you spend all this time writing content, but no one can guarantee that it gets seen, shared, or even linked to.
So, I thought it would be fun to analyze popular blog posts and see what common characteristics that they have.
That way you can replicate what they are doing and increase the likelihood that your post gets read.
Now for this study, we deemed a popular blog post as anything that generates at least 1,000 visitors a month from Google organic search (this was based on Ubersuggest data).
We also didn’t exclude any countries and looked at the data from a global level.
Here’s what we learned.
A big thing in common was that popular blog posts rank for at least 38 keywords.
What’s interesting though is posts that generate at least 5,000 visits a month from Google rank for 51 or more keywords.
But the big difference between posts that generate at least 1,000 visitors versus 5,000 wasn’t the number of keywords that they were targeting, it was more so that they were ranking for keywords that were searched on average 984 times a month.
Now granted they didn’t get 984 clicks for each keyword that they ranked for, as no site really gets all the clicks, and there is no guarantee that they were in the number 1 spot.
When looking at this data we decided to dig in a bit more and we randomly picked 300 blog posts that generate at least 1,000 visits a month from Google to see how many keywords they mentioned on their page that contained at least 50 searches a month.
Can you guess what the number was?
Well, after we removed generic one-word terms that aren’t really considered keywords (such as how I mentioned words like “analyze, month, generate, data” within this post but I am not really targeting those keywords), the number comes out to a staggering 76 keywords.
Before I break down how you can come up with a laundry list of keywords to include in every blog post you write, keep this in mind…
Now that we got that out of the way, you can head to Ubersuggest and follow the steps in the video below to come up with blog post ideas as well as 76 plus keywords per post.
Over the years the SEO game has changed. Generally, the longer your content, the more traffic you can get. But there are a lot of edge cases to that rule.
And Google doesn’t really care about word count these days as much as they do for user experience.
See, a user doesn’t really care if a blog post is short or long, they just want to be satisfied with what they have just read.
Nonetheless, we looked at the word count to see what the average post length was for a popular post.
What’s interesting is that posts that generated over 5,000 visitors a month on average weren’t that much longer than posts that generated 1,000 visitors.
The biggest difference was they included more popular keywords within their content. They didn’t necessarily rank for each of those terms, but this gives a post more opportunity to potentially rank and be found.
As I mentioned though, there are always exceptions to the rule. For example, there are popular topics like “how to tie a tie” and you don’t really need tons of words to explain how to tie a tie. You more so need images or even video.
When we looked at every popular blog in our database, we noticed that a lot of sites didn’t include a publish date or an updated date (updated date is used for content that was originally published years ago but was more recently updated).
But for the posts that did contain a date, whether it was the publication date or when the content was updated, we did notice something interesting.
Content that generates 1,000 visitors or more a month on average tends to be 388 days old.
And content that generates less than 1,000 visitors tends to be 593 days old.
This doesn’t mean that Google doesn’t want to rank new, fresh content as in both categories there was fresh, new content that did generate traffic. But a lot of the ranking blog posts were a bit old (but not too old).
Again, keep in mind there are always exceptions to the rule. Going back to the how to tie a tie example, even if that article was 3 years old, it probably would still be relevant as much hasn’t changed when it comes to ties.
But with over 1 billion blogs on the web, it seems like Google prefers newish content over outdated content.
If you have older content, don’t worry, you can always update it to ensure that it continually gets more traffic.
The way you would do this is by following these steps:
It’s so effective that I have a team of people who just update my old content.
Whether you like it or not, if you are going to write content you should do keyword research first.
Picking the right keywords versus the wrong ones can mean that your content doesn’t get traffic or gets thousands of visitors a month.
Now of course there are other elements to your SEO like links and on-page SEO, but for this analysis, we wanted to focus on the characteristics (ones that you can easily control) that make a popular post.
Out of curiosity, do you do keyword research before you write content?
Running a blog is a lot of work. You have to continually feed it new content, keep up with WordPress updates, maintain your hosting account, moderate comments, respond to readers…dozens, maybe even hundreds, of little tasks. On top of all that, there’s promoting and monetizing your blog, which is even more work. It’s hard for …
The post Should I Outsource My Blog? 5 Questions to Help You Decide first appeared on Online Web Store Site.
Running a blog is a lot of work.
You have to continually feed it new content, keep up with WordPress updates, maintain your hosting account, moderate comments, respond to readers…dozens, maybe even hundreds, of little tasks. On top of all that, there’s promoting and monetizing your blog, which is even more work.
It’s hard for anyone to manage, and the larger your blog grows, the worse the situation becomes. That’s why it’s good to prepare in advance for blogging eventualities you might face.
If you’re feeling overwhelmed, one of the questions you should ask yourself is “should I outsource my blog?”
If so, there’s a few ways to do this.
You could split up the work with guest posts, staff bloggers, or outsource your blog completely. The method you select will depend on a couple of things.
When you blog, you need to build trust, bonds, and relationships with your readers. They grow to know you and like you, and they can’t wait to read your next post.
There’s a downfall to this though: your readership may want content only from you. They may be turned off if you step back and start outsourcing your blog posts.
What will happen to your blog if you outsource your blogging? It depends.
If a blogger like Dooce or Naomi Dunford decided to outsource their blog, their readers would probably revolt. Their personalities are such a large part of the blog that it would be hard to get their readers to accept anyone else.
If your blog is already big and established, and you have thousands of loyal readers, it could be tough to outsource your blog. There’s a good chance you’ll lose some readers if you hire staff or start adding guest posters.
Fans will read their work politely, but it’s really you they want. It will take time, a good plan, and weathering rumbles from readers until they accept it.
No one likes change, but eventually, things will settle down. They’ll hang in there, especially if you’re still publishing quality content, are active with posting now and again, and if you hire a blogger whose style and tone match your brand personality. Make sure the blogger also provides similar-quality advice, info, or entertainment as you’ve been giving.
Of course, all of that only matters if you have an audience. What if you’re just getting started?
The truth is it’s a lot easier. You can build your blog around posting awesome content, rather than one particular personality. It won’t matter where the content comes from; as long as it’s awesome, your readers will be happy. That leaves the door open for you to hire other writers.
You can’t hire just anyone to write for your blog. You need to find a writer who fits with your business brand, its mission, and the level of knowledge your blog provides. Of course, this writer also has to be able to fit in with your goals and get results.
Here are some questions to think about before bringing someone on:
(Note that I didn’t mention, “How much do they cost?” We’ll get to that in a bit.)
First, though, recognize that outsourcing writing comes down to basically trusting someone with your business reputation. You’re not just shoving off a task; you’re giving someone permission to represent you and your business.
This means the person you hired needs to be able to maintain your credibility (or enhance it), please your readers and get them talking, and generally make your life better and easier by freeing up your time and becoming an asset to your blog.
Good writers don’t work for free, but they don’t always want just money, either.
Some ask for marketing exposure. Others want a link to their blog, republication rights, or a barter arrangement.
Before hiring someone, decide what you bring to the table. Can you send them traffic? Build their credibility? Improve their search engine rankings? Recommend their products and services to your readers?
You need to have something to offer in exchange for a writer’s work (and you’ll need more than $10 and a link), so figure out what you’re prepared to give in return for what the blogger brings to you.
In general, the more you give, the more you get.
Pay $10 for a blog post without offering anything else in exchange, and you’ll probably get a bad headline, sloppy grammar, and ordinary ideas, none of which would do much to build your blog.
At the other end of the spectrum, some bloggers will do everything for you, including editing, polishing, getting photos, and promoting your post to generate traffic. You’ll pay a lot more, anywhere from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars per post, but you’ll be getting a lot more for the money, too.
Ghostwriters write on your behalf and you present the work as your own. The President uses ghostwriters for his speeches; nothing wrong with that.
It’s controversial, however, especially when it comes to blogging. Some feel it’s dishonest.
Others feel that there’s nothing wrong with hiring someone to help write and share your knowledge with your audience. There’s no rule that says you must slave over writing posts if you absolutely can’t stand it, don’t have the time, or just don’t want to.
Here’s another argument: if your writing skills aren’t up to snuff, you might be potentially damaging your credibility and sales.
People with average writing skills often hire ghostwriters who turn their notes, audio files, thoughts, and outlines into great posts. You’re using the same knowledge; someone else is just doing the writing. Often, it’s the knowledge that your readers care about, not who puts it into words.
Ghostwriting may be a great option for you if you don’t like to spend time writing, can’t write well, aren’t seeing the results you want, or want time to develop other areas of your business.
Every time you make a change in your business, there’s always the risk it might not have been the best decision.
Let’s say you hire a writer, work with a few guest posters, or decide to hire a ghostwriter. After a couple of months, you realize that you’re not getting the results you wanted; maybe traffic is down or your audience has shifted or sales have dropped.
Don’t freak out. It happens. All you need to do is adjust. Unless you’ve completely trashed your business reputation, you can always change your content and blogging strategy.
You can go back to blogging yourself, hire a new writer with a different personality, get a ghostwriter to write more posts for you; whatever works.
As we’ve demonstrated in this article, if you’re wondering “should I outsource my blog,” the answer is: it depends.
No matter what you decide about outsourcing your blogging, you’re never stuck and committed forever. A blog is just a marketing tool that you can play with and test, adapt to your needs, and measure for effectiveness as you go along, just like any other form of marketing.
If you’re nervous to start or shift your blogging strategy, reach out to us for a consultation. We are here to help you find success with your blog and content marketing in general.
The post Should I Outsource My Blog? 5 Questions to Help You Decide appeared first on Neil Patel.
The use of blog images in posts is a no-brainer.
Images are an easy way to break up chunks of text, add context, or give your readers a more accessible medium through which to digest your content.
With the growth of written content online, it’s harder to have your content be unique from others. Writers need to adapt to the changing landscape.
How can you continue to engage your audience when so many bloggers have written on the same topics—and will continue to do so?
The answer is original imagery.
With more content available on the web every day, it’s more important than ever to stand out.
While finding ways to put a unique spin on your blog post topics is critical, there are only so many angles on one subject. You need other types of content, such as photographs and illustrations, to make your mark.
Unfortunately, stock photos just don’t cut it anymore.
This reason is in part because blog images don’t only live on your blog. They make the rounds on Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest whenever your posts are shared.
Chances are, your users have seen similar stock photos many times already, and they’re bored with them.
With so many articles to read, videos to watch, and social media news to ingest, the average reader won’t spend hours looking for the best article on your topic. They’ll choose the most visually appealing option nearly every time.
So before you use stock photography in your next blog post, ask yourself:
Will my readers interact with the same stale image they’ve seen numerous times when researching this topic? Or will they choose to interact with an original image that more perfectly captures the content?
Your goal as a digital marketer is to increase conversions.
So how do you do this even better than you already are, given the changing online landscape?
There are plenty of ways to drive traffic to your website. But what’s more important is driving the right traffic—the users who will engage with your content.
Images can help. According to BlogTyrant, images can up conversions by over 300%.
But keep in mind the kinds of images you use can have an impact on your conversions, too.
For years, stock imagery was the norm. But, it’s time to move away from those pictures.
Original images offer authenticity stock ones can’t provide. They offer your readers a peek behind the curtain, allowing them to see a deeper side of your content.
Unique blog image content can offer other benefits, including increased customer trust and brand recognition.
According to Brain Rules, a slogan alone only sticks in the minds of 10% of people. When related imagery is added, though, retention rises to 65%. That’s an increase you can’t ignore if increasing brand recognition is on your radar.
Original image content has an often-overlooked SEO benefit, too, and that’s the improvement of Google’s E-A-T score. The E-A-T score lets Google assess content quality based on these three standards:
How can original imagery improve your E-A-T rating?
Whether you shoot and edit photography on your own or you work with a digital illustrator, your unique imagery will have a personal spin. If done right, this will become a vital part of your personal brand strategy.
You show expertise by including images that clearly demonstrate you understand your content.
You show authoritativeness by having consistent, unique branding people recognize immediately.
You show trustworthiness by providing information through images that are accurate and increase user’s knowledge.
A strong personal brand will bump all three elements of an E-A-T rating.
Images, just like text, can also be perceived as “fluff.” Because of this, you need to know when to use pictures on your blog to optimize user experience and benefit your SEO.
You should use images to do three very specific things.
According to a study by Microsoft, the average attention span of heavy screen users is a mere eight seconds.
That means you have eight seconds to captivate your audience—and large blocks of text may make them click away pretty quickly.
However, you don’t have to write two sentence posts to make them take fewer than eight seconds to read. Instead, employ clever tactics to keep your readers engaged.
One tactic is to introduce other media, such as photos or digital illustrations. This creates a less intimidating reading experience while also making the post more visually appealing.
Some concepts are too abstract or complex to explain effectively in writing, especially if your audience isn’t strictly experts in your topic.
Custom diagrams and visuals can help readers understand the material.
As much as you like to think your content is witty and engaging, some topics just won’t interest readers for very long. You can use original visuals to add some life to otherwise “dull” content in these cases.
The cost of custom graphics may be prohibitive for some bloggers, but it is possible to find some middle ground.
Use custom illustrations and photography sparingly. Ask yourself where they make the most sense and insert them accordingly.
If you’re creating a landing page for a new product or service, for example, this would be the place to splurge. After all, you want this content to stand out from your competitors—what better way than with a custom graphic?
You can also utilize custom illustrations to drive a point home or explain data.
Whether a comic strip panel, a diagram, or a flow chart, you can use custom illustrations to share ideas with your readers in a way words simply can’t.
You can take your blog’s imagery one step further with interactive graphics.
Interactive graphics are custom graphics that support reader interactions like mouse pointer movement, clicks, or keyboard input.
This form of original imagery is commonly used in infographics, though other display types include side-by-side comparisons, flow charts, and graphs.
The most obvious use for interactive graphics is to catch the reader’s eye.
Perhaps more importantly, they can also be used to break complex information down into bite-sized chunks. For example, take a look at this nifty interactive graphic that shows users how Google search works without becoming overwhelmed.
There are plenty of ways to use images on your blog.
Here’s one creative example from Oberlo:
Instead of one lengthy infographic, the content creators chose individual infographic “slides” to answer each question on their post about social media statistics.
This use of graphics achieves two things:
As mentioned above, one of the benefits of original blog imagery is the personal branding aspect. When you use a particular style consistently, it becomes synonymous with your brand.
Copyblogger provides an excellent example of this:
Their featured images consistently use quotes overlaid on eye-catching images. They work as a watermark of sorts, as anyone who sees their imagery elsewhere will be able to identify them as belonging to Copyblogger immediately.
And what about interactive content? Your options are only limited by your imagination.
Take a look at this comprehensive timeline of the Marvel Cinematic Universe:
As you scroll through the timeline, new images and text content can be seen. This example tells a complex story in a linear, non-intimidating format.
It’s never been easier or more affordable to get original and interactive blog images.
When it comes to hiring a professional, you have options. You can easily find freelancers on sites like Fiverr or Upwork or use a service like Design Pickle.
If you know of a digital artist with a style you like, you may be able to commission them. They are often more expensive than the freelancers you’ll find on the websites mentioned above, but they’re great if you need a specific style.
For bloggers strapped for time, there are services you can hire to do the heavy lifting. The service may be a creative agency or a blog content specialist. Either way, you provide details, and they’ll commission work on your behalf.
Do you have more time than money? You can also create blog images using tools like Canva, Pixlr, or PicMonkey. For a more professional finish, you can invest in a creative suite like Adobe Creative Cloud.
As with most services, there are options for almost every budget.
If you hire a freelancer for a one-off gig, then the price varies based on the number of images, the complexity of the work, and how you plan to use the final product.
In some cases, you may be able to get a discount when you buy in bulk.
Commissioning a professional is likely to be the most expensive option. Unless you have money to burn, this should be reserved for high-impact projects, like illustrations for sales landing pages or campaign launches.
Whether you’re on a limited budget or just want to let the creative juices flow, you can opt to create your own images.
There are free and low-cost options, such as Canva and PicMonkey. These tools have limitations, including watermarks, if you don’t opt for premium memberships. You also need to be sure all assets used in your design are copyright-free.
For 100% original work, you may find creative suites like Adobe to be the best bang for your buck. With access to tools like Photoshop, InDesign, and Illustrator, you can create and edit various blog illustrations, diagrams, and original photography.
There are plenty of tutorials available online for creating graphics using Adobe Creative Cloud—so if you’re unable to pay a designer for their services, you don’t have to just guess about how to do this.
There’s no need to scroll through page after page of stock photos to find the right images for your blog post. You can create original blog images, whether by yourself or with the help of a professional.
Original blog imagery, including photography and graphics, can take your blog posts to the next level. It also helps build your overall brand and take your marketing to the next level.
With plenty of options at your fingertips, from free tools to freelance artists, there’s no reason not to use original images on your blog.
Which of the tools mentioned above are you most likely to use to create images for your blog? Or do you prefer ones we haven’t mentioned? Let us know!
The post Stock Photos are Dead: Create These Blog Images Instead appeared first on Neil Patel.
6 Actionable Tips to Boost Content Engagement on Your Blog You’re likely well aware of the fact that having an active business blog is crucial to building better brand visibility online. Producing fresh content on a consistent basis is a key part of any website’s search engine optimization (SEO) and overall digital marketing efforts. But … Continue reading 6 Actionable Tips to Boost Content Engagement on Your Blog
If you have ever left a comment on NeilPatel.com, you’ll notice that there is no URL field.
Why?
Well, a few years ago, blog commenting exploded. I was literally getting thousands of spam comments a day from people just leaving a comment for the purpose of link building instead of providing value to the community.
Sure, there are spam plugins like Akismet, but it doesn’t catch everything.
Now, most blog comments contain the nofollow attribute in which they tell Google not to follow the link or drive any “SEO value” to that URL.
But still, people still leave blog comments for the purpose of link building.
So, over the past 7 months, I’ve been running an interesting experiment to answer the age-old question…
Do backlinks from blog comments actually help rankings?
First off, for this experiment, we used “domain score,” which is similar to domain authority.
If you want to know your domain score, the backlinks report in Ubersuggest will tell you what it is.
With this experiment, I sent out an email to a part of my list looking for participants and had 794 websites apply.
From there, I set the following criteria:
After eliminating the sites that didn’t meet the above criteria, I was left with 314 sites.
Of those 314 sites, many dropped off because they didn’t complete the required work on their part (which was to write a blog post), so I was left with 183 sites at the end that participated.
Similar to my previous link building experiment and my on-page SEO experiment, I had these websites write a 1,800 to 2,000-word blog post on whatever subject that was relevant to their site.
The websites had 2 weeks to publish their content and then after 30 days, I looked up their URL in Ubersuggest to see how many keywords each URL ranked for in the top 100 spots, top 50, spots, and top 10 spots.
As I have mentioned in the past, Ubersuggest has a big database of keywords. We are currently tracking 1,459,103,429 keywords.
Now, most of these keywords are barely searched but a decent amount of them get hundreds, if not thousands, of searches per month. A much smaller percentage of keywords generate hundreds of thousands or even millions of searches per month.
In other words, the majority of the keywords people are searching for are long-tail phrases.
We then spent a month building links and then waited another 3 months to see what happened to each site’s rankings.
But here’s the thing: We didn’t build the same type of links to all sites. Instead, we broke the 183 sites into 4 groups (roughly 46 sites per group).
Here were the groups:
Keep in mind with the link building for groups 2, 3 and 4,
there was no specific anchor text agenda. Because the links were built through
blog comments, it was too hard to control the anchor text as we didn’t want to
be spammy.
And each comment left on the blog contained at least 75
words as we wanted to ensure that each comment provided value and the core
purpose wasn’t just link building.
Alright, so let’s dive into the results.
Do you really need links to rank on Google? Well, the chart below says a lot…
As you can see over time, you will naturally grow your search rankings even if you don’t build any links.
Of course, if your content is amazing and you do on-page SEO, you’ll rank higher, but still not growing your link count doesn’t mean you will rank for anything out there… instead, you will still rank for long-tail terms that aren’t too competitive.
Now the results from this group were interesting…
As you can see, the sites in this group had better results than the control group even though the links were nofollowed.
Keep in mind, though, that it could be many variables that caused this, such as the content quality may have been better.
Overall, the sites did perform better than the control group but not by a substantial amount.
Google is sophisticated, they are able to know if a link is from user-generated content (such as blog comments), so I assumed even though the links where dofollow they still wouldn’t have much (if any) impact.
But, shockingly, sites in this group had the largest gains.
As you can see from the chart above, links from high authority sites, even if it is through user-generated content, help with rankings. They just have to be dofollow.
With this last group, we were able to build more dofollow links because we focused on sites with lower authority.
And as you can see from the chart above, it did help with rankings more than building nofollow links but it didn’t help nearly as much as getting links from blogs with higher domain scores.
We built 10 links instead of 5, but the quantity didn’t help
as much as having high domain score links. This group increased their rankings
by 337% versus 828% that group 3 experienced even though they had half the
links.
Again, we still saw gains, just not as large as the previous group.
Who would have thought that building links through blog
comments still helps?
Now, if you are going to use this tactic, you’ll want to focus on blogs that have dofollow comments.
If you aren’t sure how to find them, you can perform a Google search for the following:
When building links, focus on higher domain scores as it has a bigger impact on rankings.
In addition to that, you’ll only want to leave a comment if you can provide value. Don’t stress the anchor text, focus on the quality of your comment as you don’t want to be a spammer.
Posting spammy links will just cause your comment to be
removed.
Lastly, don’t just leave a valuable comment for the sake of generating a link. Make sure it is on relevant blogs as well. And if that means the blog doesn’t have as high of a domain score that’s fine because the data above shows that even low domain score links still help (just not as much).
So, have you thought about leaving more comments on other blogs? It’s a great way to get your brand out there, generate referral traffic, and boost your rankings.
The post Do High DA Backlinks From Blog Comments Help Rankings? appeared first on Neil Patel.