Looking for ways to make your WordPress website more interactive and want to offer more engagement with you to your visitors and start building relationships with them in real time?

Well there’s an interesting option to investigate in the form of a live chat service, which you’ve probably already seen on loads of service providing websites.

Check out this article courtesy of WPCrafter on adding your own Live Chat Service to your WordPress website, for free.

How To Add Live Chat To WordPress

If you’ve been on my website recently you’ll see a chat option on the bottom right. I just installed this on a whim. I was installing it for another site and I thought let me put it on my site and see how it performs. And I’ve got to say, it’s been amazing. I’ve been able to connect to my website visitors, be available for them asking questions, and it has also led me to some new opportunities.

I am a huge fan now of having live chat on your website. I’ll be straightforward here, there are lots of live chat options. There is probably, maybe, like 50 to 60 different live chat providers out there. Now the reason I went with this live chat company is I really like the sleek modern look of how the interface is.

So you can see on the bottom right of WPCrafter.com there’s my message and there’s a picture of me and it’s got this really neat kind of hovering chat effect that I really like. Plus they have a desktop app and you can of you can moderate via the browser. There’s an iPhone and an Android app.

So there’s all these great ways to be able to respond to people that might want to chat to you. I’m going to skip all the talking and to show you how to get this on your website.

Tidio Live Chat

So if you haven’t noticed, there’s a little Tidio Chat link, and that’s the name of the live chat company. Tidio chat is free (although there are paid plans). You can create a simple account and it will just ask you for the website you’re gonna put it on.

I have lots of different websites, so the website you put it on isn’t as important, because you can have that same live chat account on multiple websites. I’m to show you how to integrate it into your WordPress website.

Now they do have a paid plan but I’m on the free plan. I might stick with the free plan, however I’m considering getting the paid plan. Here’s the paid plan for 12 bucks a month and I might upgrade to its because I want the automatic messages facility.

I think ‘automatic messages’ is actually the only thing that I want from them, but actually ‘opening hours’ is  pretty cool too. And pre-chat survey; I don’t use that. But I would like the automatic messages and I’ll show you what that is.

But the free version is extremely generous. You can have one chat at a time if you’re just a one person organisation. You can customize the appearance and the colors and everything. You get the to use the mobile apps, the desktop apps (and they have a chrome extension) and you get your history. So anyway, just go and sign up for a free account.

Now in WordPress they couldn’t have made it any easier to add free live chat To WordPress sites. Now if you have websites other than WordPress they do have plug-ins and extensions and all that for just about every platform. But we’re gonna do it for WordPress.

So all you have to do is log into the backend of your WordPress dashboard, go to plug-ins, add new, and they have a plug-in in the WordPress plug-in repository. So search for Tidio Live Chat and there it is – it’s all five-star reviews for them, they are that good. Go ahead and click on install now and then click on activate plug-in. You will then have a new option in the left menu called Tidio Chat: click on that and all you have to do is put in your email and password that you use to create the account just a moment ago.

After entering your email and password, it takes you to a screen where it allows you to choose your project. So when you set up the account, you create a project and put in a URL. Then you click through to the operator panel in a new tab. So whenever you click on Tidio Chat in your WordPress menu it’s going to take you straight into the panel from here on out.

So here is the panel and I can see right now their seven people on my website, each with a randomly assigned unique ‘name’ which you can change later. I can see exactly where they are and what country they’re in, and I can actually click on any of these and initiate a chat with someone.

Click on one of your visitors and it opens a live chat window for you to initiate a conversation.

You can change their name accordingly and you also have their IP address. You don’t have to sit here and wait for a response. You can just close out and if they do respond you’ll get a notification on your computer and on your phone, so you can jump right in and respond to them immediately.

Advantages Of The Paid Version Of Tidio Live Chat

You can click on automation and you can automate on the following four instances:

1. Opens a page
2. Visits website for the first time
3. Returns to website
4. When an operator doesn’t respond

So if someone goes to a particular page, visits for the first time, returns again or if you’re not able to respond at the time… You can automate the following, after a specified amount of time:

1. Send a chat message
2. Send an email (if the system has their email address)
3. Add a tag
4. Remove a tag

So those are some of the really cool actions that you can do automation, but that’s for the paid version.

Selecting The Appearance of Tidio Live Chat

Now for the appearance… You don’t have to pay to get these appearance options. So you can choose what your first message is, what the image is, there’s different looks to it. I like the modern look, like I was telling you. But if you prefer something else, those are available as well. And you could choose what corner of the page it’s on.

There are just all these wonderful options… you can even do a little sidebar thing on the side that says ‘chat with us’. You can change the color to make it blend in or stand out on your website. All these options are included in the free version of Tidio Live Chat.

Click on ‘Apps’ and you can see all the different platforms Tidio integrates with, which is pretty deep if you ask me.

So anyway, I really want to encourage you to test this out. Go ahead and slap live chat on your website and just see what happens. I know for me I’m hooked, I love it. What I really like is to connect and talk directly to my visitors in real time while they are on my site.

What better way to cultivate positive relationships with potential customers!

Thanks to WPCrafter.com for the video source material for this article:

The New Google SEO Ranking Factor for 2017 and Beyond

There’s a new Google SEO ranking factor that’s huge right now. And when you take advantage of it, you can find yourself with higher rankings and more traffic. And if you ignore it, well let’s just say that you’re missing out on a ton of high quality traffic.

I’m Brian Dean, the founder of Backlinko, the place where marketers turn for higher rankings and more traffic. And in this video I’m going to reveal what this new SEO ranking factor is, and three practical ways that you can take advantage of it. I’ll also show you the results of a real life case study that might surprise you, keep watching.

A while back I published a post on my blog called How to Get High Quality Back links Without Guest Posting. And like all of my blog posts, I made sure to optimize this post around a keyword. In this case the keyword was High Quality Back links, sure enough, thanks to the white hot links that I built to that past, it quickly hit the first page for that keyword.

But here’s where things got weird. One day I was checking my Google rankings and I saw something that made me almost fall out of my seat. Not only was I ranking for High Quality Back links, but I also ranked on the first page for the keyword How to Get High.

Say what?

Needless to say, my post had nothing to do with getting high. But then I realized why Google ranked me for that keyword. It’s because I had the keyword How to Get High in my content. But here’s where things got really interesting. Most people that came to my site from Google spent nearly three minutes on my site. But for this page the average is only one minute and 12 seconds; less than half of my site-wide average. So, what’s going on here?

When people search for How to Get High and clicked on my result they quickly realized that I wasn’t going to teach them how to make their own Breaking Bad style meth lab, so they quickly hit their back button and left. This told Google, in black and white, people searching for How to Get High hate this page, and Google took action.

A few weeks later, my page dropped like a stone for the keyword How to Get High. It literally went from number six to 12, to 21, to 33 in a matter of days. But check this out, my ranking for the keyword High Quality Backlinks didn’t drop, in fact, they continued to climb. Why? Because people searching for High Quality Backlinks stuck to my site like Super-Glue.

How do I know?

After my rankings for How to Get High dropped, the overall Bounce Rate and Time on Page for my article significantly improved.

Now in a minute, I’ll show you how you can easily keep Google searchers on your site longer. But for now I want to show you where things stand today. Today my page ranks number one in Google for the keyword High Quality Backlinks. And for the keyword How to Get High, I’m nowhere to be found.

That’s the power of this new SEO ranking factor. So what’s the takeaway lesson from this story? Even though backlinks continue to be the cornerstone of Google’s algorithm, it’s clear that ‘user experience signals’ influence search engine rankings today.

I’m about to show you three practical ways that you can take advantage of these user experience signals, including my favorite the APP Formula. But first, I want to tell you another quick story to show you just how important user experience signals are today.

A few years back tech writer Steven Levy wrote an insider account of Google, called In the Plex. In that book Steven states, on the most basic level, Google could see how satisfied users were. The best sign of their happiness was the Long Click. In other words, when people click on your site in Google and stick around, it sends a very strong message that your page makes searchers happy.

But when people quickly leave your site like they’re on a Pogo stick, it tells Google the opposite. It shows them that your page isn’t a good fit for that keyword. The question is how can you get people to stick to your site so that Google sees you as the best result for that keyword?

The answer; the three insanely actionable techniques that I’m going to show you right now.

How To Boost Your Google SEO Ranking Factors

First up, we have Bucket Brigades. Before I got in to SEO, I used to work as a freelance copywriter and I had a problem; a lot of my clients would hire me to write these crazy long, 6,000 word sales letters. You know those sales pages that are like 25 pages long and you have to keep scrolling and scrolling to get to the end?

Bucket Brigades

I wrote those all the time. The problem I had was this – it’s really hard to keep people on a page that’s 6,000 words long. People don’t have the attention span to skim that much content, never mind read it, and I tried every trick in the book to keep people’s attention. I tried images, I tried videos, I tried story telling, I tried everything… But the sales letters just weren’t compelling enough to keep people from hitting their Back button.

And then one day, I had a breakthrough. I discovered a little know technique called Bucket Brigades that copy writers have been using for decades. And these Bucket Brigades instantly made my content much more compelling.

So what are they? Bucket Brigades are words and phrases that keep people on your page. Specifically, they make your visitors want to keep reading.

For example, I have a post on my site called “How to Boost Conversions by 529%” and the average Time on Page for that article is almost four minutes. And a good chunk of that above average Time on Page is do to Bucket Brigades, like this;

And this…

And this…

When you see one of those Bucket Brigades, it opens up a little information gap in your mind, and you can’t help but read the next sentence. Bottom line? Whenever you have a place in your content where people might get bored and hit their Back button, add a Bucket Brigade.

Once you’ve added some Bucket Brigades to your content it’s time for strategy number two.

Benefit Driven Subheadings

Let me ask you something, which of these two posts would you rather read?

If you’re like most people, you prefer the one on the left. Why? Because the content on the left is broken up with subheadings. In my experience subheadings are huge, you can never use enough of them.

For example, my post “17 Insanely Actionable List Building Strategies” has an average Time on Page of over five minutes. The number one reason? Because the post contains lots and lots of subheadings. But not just any subheadings, Benefit-Driven Subheadings.

I’ll explain, most people use random subheadings like this:

Sure, that does break your content up into easy to read chunks. But random subheadings like that won’t grab your readers attention and make them say to themselves, wow, there’s a ton of value here. Fortunately, there’s a quick fix for that. Include benefits in your subheadings.

For example, in my list building post I use benefit-rich copy in almost every subheading. Instead of a bland subheading like, Focus on Your Thank You Page, I put the benefit front and center:

The APP Formula

Okay, so I saved the best for last, the APP Formula. Here’s the truth; when someone visits your page from Google you have two seconds to convince them to stick around, not 10, not five, two. And if you lose them in those two seconds, you lose them for good.

But if you hit your visitor off with something amazing right off the bat, they’re much more likely to stick around. And as you saw earlier in this video,
this boost in Time on Page can be huge for your Google rankings. And whenever I need to improve the Time on Page for one of my articles, I turn to the APP Formula.

So what is it? The APP Formula is a proven content introduction framework that’s designed to do one thing – keep Google visitors on your page longer. Here’s what the APP Formula looks like:

As you can see, APP stands for Agree, Promise and Preview. Now I’m going to break each of these three elements down and show you a real life example of how I used the APP Formula to keep Google searchers on my page.

APP Formula… “Agree”

First up we have “Agree”. You want to start your intro off with an idea or concept that someone searching for your keyword will agree with. This shows that you understand their problem, and when someone sees that you understand them and their problems, they’re much more likely to stick around.

For example, a while back I published a blog post that showed people how to create a high converting squeeze page. Here’s the intro from that post:

See how I say, I think you’ll agree with me when I say, it’s really hard to convert ice cold traffic into email subscribers. That’s something that anyone trying to build an email list can relate to. Now that you’ve got them nodding their head in agreement, it’s time for the Promise.

APP Formula… “Promise”

The “Promise” is where you give your reader a peek into a better world. Here’s an example from my Squeeze Page post:

Most people think that you need to run hundreds of A/B tests to get more email sign ups. But my promise shows that there’s an easier way.

APP Formula… “Preview”

Finally, hit them with the “Preview”. There’s no need to beat around the bush here, you’re preview just needs to tell your reader exactly what you have in store for them. For example, here’s the preview from my Social Squeeze page post.

And once you put the finishing touches on your preview, you’re set. Now you have an introduction that keeps Google searchers on your site. And a page that Google will want to show to more people.

Now I want to turn it over to you. Which of the three strategies from this video are you going to use first? Are you pumped to try Bucket Brigades? Or maybe you want to give the APP Formula a shot?

Here’s Brian Dean’s excellent Video on SEO ranking factors, the original source of this article:

Ten Tips For Starting A Blog

Hi, I’m Jacks and welcome to Make a Change TV where we’re gonna can help you and your business shine online.

Now today we have a question from Jenny…

Hi Jacks, I hope you can help me. I finally feel inspired and ready to start my own fashion blog. But the question is how do I start a blog, and more importantly, how to start a blog that people want to read. Hope you can help, Jenny.

Well Jenny, all I can say is girl you have come to the right place. I get this question asked literally on a weekly basis, and I’ve got ten top tips that are gonna help you create your blog today.

Top 10 Tips To Start A Blog

1. You need to know your target market. Who are they? What do they love? The more you know about your target market, the better connection you can create with them.

2 . It’s time to get some clarity. You need to know ‘who are you’… You need to know who you are, what’s the thing you want to be known for. Ask yourself, how are you going to stand out from the crowd. This is going to help you have a unique edge

3 . What’s the reason behind your blog? Are you looking to raise your profile? To get sponsored? To get hired? What is it that you are trying to achieve?

4. This is a little bit techie! You need a WordPress website, you need hosting of that website. And you need somewhere for it to sit, in the big ether of the internet. You also need a domain name. This is your www dot!

5. Outsource anything you don’t get, you don’t understand, anything that needs a professional edge. So for instance; design work – outsource! Some copy writing – outsource! Outsource everything that’s not your speciality.

6. Find out what your target market, your readers, your viewers want to watch, what they need in their life and create more of it. Don’t be afraid to give them your best stuff.

7. Be consistent with your content. Plan your blogs and your v-logs so they have a purpose to help you grow your business.

8. Make sure you have a contact form on your blog so people can get hold of you can ask you questions, so you can start to build an interaction with your readers. Another little tip… Ensure that you have business social media pages, have a professional bio on the front of your blog or somewhere where people can find out a little bit more about you and your experience. And lastly, ensure that you have professional images and design work on your blog.

9. Collect emails from your readers. It could be a newsletter signup, it could be some amazing free content that you’re giving away in exchange for an email. But once you’ve got your readers emails it means that you can continue the communication, you continue building the relationship even
when they’re not on your blog.

10. I want you to remember that nothing is perfect, which means just get it out there! Get those ideas down into your blog and get it out there and share it with the world.

Hey y’all welcome to another WordPress Wednesday. My name is Kori Ashton here in San Antonio, TX at WebTegrity. It is another awesome WordPress Wednesday where we get to talk about all things nerdy WordPress.

If you’re looking at this video, you’re probably trying to figure out how to move your blog from being just like your main homepage – kind of move it into some other section of your website, like a WordPress separate blog page.

Sometimes people want to have maybe a business website and just have the blog be a portion of their website.

How do you kind of get it off that and maybe have a link somewhere else? Let’s show you how to do it!

This is an easy, quick tutorial (simple.) I’m going to show you just a template site that I’m playing with right now. We have the homepage set up to be (you know) the typical default blog post that comes with WordPress (the Hello World blog post.)

If I had more blog articles they would all appear down this page. I don’t want to do that. I want to have like a welcome page here and move my blog into a blog area on the website.

Setting Up Your WordPress Separate Blog Page

The first thing you’ll want to do is create a page for a homepage. You’ll just ‘add new.’ You can call it “Home” or you can call it “Welcome” (whatever you’d like to call it.) You would put all of your content here (well if I learned how to spell.) (laughing) All right. You’d go ahead and publish that.

If we go back and look at the front side of the website though, it’s not going to appear right here because we haven’t told WordPress yet to (basically) stop being a blog full time. We want to tell WordPress to make this kind of be like a business website where we have a standard homepage and a blog be a part of the website.

Now that we have our welcome page, we can go into ‘settings’ and go to ‘reading.’ Here we have an option. It says “Front page displays.” Does it display all your latest posts from your blog? Or would you like it to be a static page?

You’ll select ‘static page.’ From the front page you can choose your welcome page that you just made. If you’d like to set a blog page, you can do that as well. (Easily) We would have to create a page called ‘Blog’ and set it here.

So now we’ve got the homepage set. Let’s go back to pages and click ‘add new’ and we’re just going to title this, ‘Blog.’

We’re not going to put anything inside of it because it wouldn’t render anyway. Over here on the right side you might have different options for template depending upon the theme that you’re using. Okay?

Depending upon the theme that you’re using, this could display your blog differently depending upon what sort of template you select from here.

The particular theme I’m using right now gives me no options for how the blog could potentially change. It only has a default setting. We would just leave it in default. Go ahead and click ‘Publish’ here.

Bouncing back over to ‘settings’, go to ‘reading.’ In that post area we’ll go ahead and choose blog. If you want you can say how many blog posts at each time – If you want to read the full article or just a summary. The summary would be a little bit of an excerpt with a “read more” option. You can do that. Scroll down-click ‘save changes.’

Go back to the front side of the website now. Now we have ‘Welcome’ which is our home content. We could put all the content we want there.

We have no link to the blog still. We have to assign it to appear. If you go into ‘Appearance’ and go to ‘Menus’, you can add your blog into your main navigation (or anywhere for that matter that you’d like.)

Click the ones we want – we’ll say, ‘Welcome’ to the top. Let’s go ahead and change that to say ‘Home’ – ‘Blog’ and ‘Contact Us’ and click “save menu.”

Now if we come back to the website and open it up, we have Home, Blog, Contact Us. So we have our WordPress separate blog page set up.

If I click ‘Blog”, WordPress is so smart (it knows) – it connected those. It will now list every single blog article that you have running down this page perfectly (with your latest at the top.) It works perfectly. Just like that y’all!

SUE: Today I’m here with my good friend, Ian Cleary, who is the founder of, actually, one of my favorite blogs, Razor Social. And he’s here to talk about blogs. And just so that you know, we at the Sue B. Zimmerman team do have a blog, and we are finally getting traction.

IAN: Great.

SUE: So I’d like for you to share, what do people need to do to set their business up for success, blogging.

IAN: OK, perfect.

Well first of all, thanks very much for having me, Sue. So yeah, I’m going to go through a few tips about blogging. I suppose one of the most important things is, you have to write good content on a consistent basis. Blogging is about consistency. It’s not necessary writing every single day.
It’s writing good quality articles on a regular, consistent basis. So you have to have the good content as a starting point.

SUE: We blog about, on average, two to three times a month. Is that consistent enough?

IAN: Yeah, once you’re a regular, as long as you don’t go two or three times a month, and you give up for a month or two. You need to regularly – so you are producing good content on a regular basis.

SUE: Gotcha.

IAN: So that’d be the first one. The second one is promotion of the content. You have to promote the content. You could write amazing content, but if your audience doesn’t get to see that content, it’s no good.

Now, you’re very good at promotion, Sue, so I don’t think you’ll have a problem with that. Promoting across all the Instagram channels, promoting across all social media channels, and then do email outreach to other people.

SUE: Where are you, in your business, seeing the most bang for your buck when you’re promoting? What channel, or when you say promoting across multiple platforms – I mean, I see taking the image in the blog and using that on Instagram to drive traffic back to the blog. That’s what you’re talking about?

IAN: Yeah. Now, I mean, one of the tactics we find is really good for promoting content is, if you involve other influencers within your content. Because when you share that content out, they’re more likely to share it, because they’re in the article. So that works very well.

SUE: I love it when you feature us.

IAN: Yeah, and you always share it, you see, so I get in front of Sue’s audience by sharing stuff about Sue.

SUE: So it works.

IAN: Yes, yes.

SUE: So consistency – Promotion and content.

IAN: Yes. And the third one is relationships, building relationships. So you know, when I’m promoting a piece of content, if I really want to get that content out, I’d reach out to Sue and say, hey, Sue, would you mind sharing this? You’ve got no problem sharing.

When you have an article, you’d come to me, and we’d share it. So you have to work together. Build the relationships with relevant people in your industry so that when you do need to get that article or that new product out…

SUE: …And get traction and comments. So I’m going to give a little ninja tip about what I do, when I want to get people to comment and share a blog. Because we’re just starting to get some movement on our blogs, and some comments on our blogs, finally. Is I do reach out in Facebook.

I directly copy the blog link and I put it in a message to my friends like Ian and other influencers who I know will share it, and obviously I would do the same for Ian, and I ask, can you please share this and write a comment on the blog?

And when you get – I find, like for us – eight to 20 comments is good, just to get things moving. But it takes a while to get even to that point. So I use Facebook outreach. What’s a tip that you do?

IAN: Yeah, I mean, I think that’s perfect. It’s whichever channel you can reach those people. And I do get some messages from you on Facebook, and I go straight to the blog and comment.

One thing I say about commenting – people go, oh, I’m not getting any comments. Well, that’s your fault. You’re not doing the necessary promotion, like what Sue is doing is reaching out to her friends and people she has built relationships with, and asking for a comment. And you will get comments if you ask for them.

SUE: And I only ask people who actually would do – like, I would do the same for them. I’m never asking a stranger or spamming somebody. Like, I get messages all the time from people that are asking me to do things, and I’m like, I don’t even know who you are.

So you need to have that relationship. That piece is so important, and that connection. And the law of reciprocity. If you do it for me, I’ll…

IAN: Robert Cialdini, yeah, absolutely. Right. It works. The relationships, you need patience with relationships, because you need to build the relationship first. And you focus on helping the other person initially, way more than they’re helping you.

Yeah. So then when you want to reach out to them, you know they’ll go, no problem. You’ve been sharing my content, and so that’s how it works.

SUE: Perfect. So to summarize, it is posting consistently, it is – promotion of your content. Promotion of the content, and it’s really all about building those relationships.

I teach this every day on Instagram. It’s so vitally important to build relationships first, and then think of it more as doing it on their behalf more than your own when you’re doing your outreach.

IAN: Absolutely.

SUE: These are great tips.

IAN: Good, good. Thanks so much.

Four Tips To Get Traffic To Your Website

Get hits – that’s the #1 goal when you want to generate (and maintain) traffic to your website.

In this video you’ll learn Derek Halpern’s 4 favorite tips to get traffic to your website that you can use right now to get hits on your website.

These are strategies he’s used to get hits to many of his sites, including Social Triggers.

1. Don’t blog much… promote. You don’t need to blog daily to get hits on your site. Blogging once or twice a month and promoting those posts will help you get hits without spending too much time blogging.

2. Meet other people that have an audience you’d like to attract. To get hits on your website, reach out to bloggers whose audience is just a little bigger than yours and whose audience you want to attract. Then offer guest posts for their website.

3. The Drafting Technique. To get hits on your website, find people who have covered what you cover and get in touch with them. Find where other people in your field are being interviewed or are guest posting and reach out to introduce yourself to those blogs.

4. Take Your Readers on a Journey. To get more hits to your site with very little effort, take your readers on a journey and share a story that they’ll want to share with others. Your readers will recruit other readers and get hits to your site if they feel like they’re on a journey with you.

Thanks for watching!

If you’re a regular blog commenter or aspire to be (the benefits of blog commenting properly are outstanding), I’m going to explain how you can get some real benefits of RSS for blog commenting.

Websites and blogs come in all shapes and sizes and if you’re trying to keep track of many regularly updated sites, then you could simply end up with a ton of bookmarks to check through every day or so. Pretty laborious! That’s where RSS comes in.

What Is RSS?

RSS literally stands for Rich Site Summary. Or alternatively, it’s also known to stand for Really Simple Syndication, which is what I’ve always called it. An RSS ‘feed’, as it’s called, is simply a standardised format for providing content from websites which regularly update over time.

Blogs most commonly employ RSS feeds. WordPress is becoming widely used for almost any kind of website nowadays because of its versatility as a content management system and its ever growing popularity and third party support. But because it’s essentially a blogging platform at its core, most all WordPress based sites have an RSS feed by default. RSS feeds can therefore be found on a wider and wider variety of websites as a result.

You can sometimes see an icon link to a site’s RSS feed in the header or footer, sometimes next to the social media buttons for the site. Even if the site has no visible link to an RSS feed, you can often discover this by simply typing /feed after the domain name. However, the method I’m going to talk about involves an application which will sniff out the RSS feed of any website you’re on.

Most blogs have a main site feed, but also offer comment feeds for their posts. At the moment I’m just using main feeds from each site, although there’s probably a clever way of using the comment feeds which I haven’t thought of yet.

If you have any bright ideas on that, please feel free to comment constructively below.

Inoreader’s Free RSS Reader

The tool or application I’m talking about here is an RSS feed reader or aggregator. Now I’m not going to go into the pros and cons of RSS readers; there’s plenty to choose from with various levels of complexity, so it’s up to you to find and check out which one fits your purposes best. I will talk about the one I use though, and that’s Inoreader.

Inoreader is available for free as an app for Android and iOS, and also as an add on or extension for Firefox and Chrome. Internet Explorer is also supported I think. I’m using the Firefox version which works in-browser and is fabulous!

So, when I’m on a blog or site which I want to follow for the purposes of commenting on relevant or interesting posts, all I do is click the Inoreader button in Firefox’s toolbar and a drop down window offers to find all the RSS feeds on the site. You can then select the feed you want to subscribe to and it appears in your Inoreader’s Subscriptions list on the left.

Maximizing the Benefits of RSS for Blog Commenting With Inoreader

Clicking on All Articles gives you a nice clean line-by-line list of all blog names, post titles & first sentence from all your saved RSS feeds, sorted by chronologically with the newest at the top – very handy for getting in quick as one of the the first commenters.

One great feature of Inoreader is that you can organise your blog feeds into separate named folders.

However another even more powerful feature is Inoreader’s comprehensive search facility. You can search all your feeds quickly and easily for keywords in titles and/or content using simple match types like match all words, match any, match full phrase or use advanced syntax to use operators like ‘and’ and ‘or’ to refine your search.

Additional search parameters include sort by newest, oldest or best matches first, and also selecting the article age range, eg. today, this week, this month, this year, all time, custom interval.

Imagine you’ve populated your Inoreader with feeds from numerous blogs in your niche who all post regularly. And now you’ve just written a post on a specific subject and want to comment on other blogs covering the same subject.

You see what I’m getting at here? Just do the search for your post’s keyword in Inoreader and there you go – highly relevant posts to comment on at the push of a button. How cool is that?

Here are my best tips for really turbo boosting back links re. the above example…

If you have the CommentLuv plugin, why not make a ‘CommentLuv’ folder in Inoreader and add in feeds from all the blogs you find in your niche supporting CommentLuv. Then search that folder for your post’s keyword and comment on the most relevant articles Inoreader finds for you. You should then get some nice ‘dofollow’ links back to your newest and highly relevant post.

You can Google for lists of CommentLuv enabled blogs, which may or may not be out of date. Perhaps a better idea is to go to Triberr, for instance, and look for the main blogs in your niche, visit them to check if they have CommentLuv. Then visit those bloggers commenting on this blog to see if they too have CommentLuv.

If you have the SEO Quake toolbar installed on your browser, you can configure this to automatically strike through any nofollow links on a page. You can then instantly determine if the blog allows dofollow CommentLuv links.

Add all the dofollow CommentLuv blogs in your niche to your Inoreader folder and comment on any articles as soon as they appear.

Remember ~ Responsible Blog Commenting Only!

OK yes, so we’re all looking for some nice back links. But please remember that blog commenting is a social activity. You’re writing to the author or owner of the blog and adding value to the post and also possibly establishing a working relationship further down the road, either with that blog owner or even with other blog commenters! So let back links take a back seat in your mind when blog commenting and look to add value and build relationships as the priorities.

If you’ve got any of your own tips or thoughts on any of these matters, please feel free to comment constructively below.

Before I discuss the best free WordPress plugins for social shares and email list building that I discovered this week and have now implemented on my site here, I just want to follow on from my last post with a bit of an update.

My blog posts recently have been a bit like Jesse’s Diets off of The Fast Show, “This week I have been mostly…” and so on.

Starting a blog has become a bit of a personal journey rather than just a marketing exercise. And so it should be I believe. Blogging seems to be more of an end in and of itself, rather than the means to make a living, although that aspect will always be there – just not in your face front and centre.

I’m understanding more that blogging is all about helping and sharing, and giving of your own experience and skills so to speak. So in this same vein I will continue today…

How To Get Organised And Focused As A New Blogger

Following my last post about how to cope with being overwhelmed as a relatively new blogger, I’ve been taking my own advice (or rather Stephen’s) and made myself an action list of everything I could think of that needed tackling.

This really helped me to find a productive focus from which to approach each day this last week. I enjoyed working through my list, one step at a time, and the sense this gave me of not being so overwhelmed and that I could see and measure my progress.

There were distractions that came up of course, for example a family member needed my help to migrate his website from one host to another and my partner needed me to redesign and improve her website. But once these ‘critical matters’ were dealt with, I knew exactly where I needed to pick up from again and could avoid all the usual online distractions, thanks to my simple list.

I know lots of folk advise writing this stuff down on paper, but I get on better with a tabbed text editor, NoteTab Light. This allows me to move, reorder and update items on my list as I work through them, and also as they present further unforseen challenges and opportunities.

My main blog development goals I achieved off of my list this week were;

• To create a Getresponse campaign and write an autoresponder series.
• Improve the social sharing features on my blog.
• Remove the remaining ads.
• Find, test and implement WordPress popup plugins to capture optins to my Getresponse autoresponder series.
• Create a new ‘feature post’ to go at the top of my blog home page, for the same purpose of capturing email opt-ins.

Best Free WordPress Plugins For Social Shares & List Building

I’m sure that over time, my blog will continue to change and develop, but for now here’s the list of best free WordPress plugins for social shares and email list building that I found, tested and implemented this last week. Some may have paid “pro” versions, but the free versions had everything I need:

Sassy Social Share; for the slick floating share buttons with share statistics:
https://wordpress.org/plugins/sassy-social-share/

Icegram; 4 types of popups here – I like Messenger which slides up like a Facebook message has arrived for you.
https://wordpress.org/plugins/icegram/

Mailmunch; for their intelligent exit intent popup and their top-bar for capturing emails.
https://wordpress.org/plugins/mailmunch/

jQuery Pin It Button for Images; essential for Pinterest users. Features a 0-100% mouse-over image opacity setting; choose which of the 4 corners of the images to show the button; flexibility to include/exclude all but your specified image CSS classes to show the button only on the images you want, as well as blanket include/exclude options for all posts, pages, archives, categories, tag pages, front page, home (blog) page (you can even include/exclude specific pages or posts by their ID); and my favourite – pre-populate the 500 word pin description with keyword rich content + hashtags using the Image Description field (ref. your WP Media Library)
https://wordpress.org/plugins/jquery-pin-it-button-for-images/

All are compatible with the current version of WordPress and are updated regularly (at the time of writing this post). And they all offer for free, functionality and benefits normally only available in paid plugins. They’re all well reviewed and I highly recommend them.

PS. What’s your best free WordPress plugin? Please share in the comments below…

Have you been overwhelmed starting an internet marketing blog, or indeed any kind of blog? I can’t imagine anyone wouldn’t feel overwhelmed at some point when starting a marketing-type blog.

Blogging and all that it entails requires a wide variety of skills which need to be developed, especially if you’re going to do it all yourself.

All the technical stuff of setting everything up at the start is probably enough to put many off, assuming you’re buying your own domain and hosting then installing WordPress and selecting a theme for your site and maybe designing your own logo.

Overwhelmed Starting A WordPress Blog

Then comes the task of optimising your WordPress blog such as setting up a more appropriate permalink structure (eg. /%category%/%postname%/), maybe adding a few more ping services, ensuring you have the right plugins installed and configured for security, spam protection, contact form, backing up, social media sharing and auto posting, statistics, SEO, and so on. Then you need privacy and terms pages as a minimum for search engine optimisation.

So if you’re new to all this, how could it not be completely overwhelming at first! And all that is before you’ve even started to write your blog or even thought about how you’re going to promote your blog and get noticed.

Starting A Blog From Scratch

…like this, as a newbie, is not something you can rush. It can also take a lot of trial and error before you’re happy with your new creation. The learning curve then continues when you start writing and promoting your blog.

Needless to say, there have been moments when I’ve become an overwhelmed blogger with all the little individual tasks that blogging involves, such as running all the social media accounts and writing to your email list (you are collecting email addresses using an autoresponder aren’t you?) which can take up more time than the actual blogging itself.

Therefore, it rapidly becomes imperative that effective time management and organisation must take priority to avoid the overwhelming chaos that such a full time endeavour as becoming a successful blogger can engender.

An colleague of mine online, Stephen Hawkins, recently wrote an excellent short piece about how to deal with being overwhelmed when faced with a multitude of tasks which demand your attention. Stephen has kindly allowed me to quote the piece here for you:

“Overwhelmed – The Wimps Excuse/Way Out…

Just to note: When I’m taking a short break from my tasks I can begin to get a little overwhelmed at the size of my list and what needs to be done in order to get where I want to be.

Some… and its mentioned a lot in the digital marketing create-a-product area, say that overwhelm is a big problem and can cause you to procrastinate and of course that’s true. What they don’t say (or I haven’t heard it) is what the actual cause is and the solution. Here it is from my own perspective:

Overwhelm usually occurs when you are in a relaxed state (not the ACTIVE state you need to be in to get things done – so it’s the opposite) such as when your taking a break or even when you are contemplating what needs to be done. And that’s the problem.

The images in your mind at the time of overwhelm are usually of the whole job lot of projects etc. So overwhelm is the EFFECT of the images in your mind. Or Overwhelm is the effect of your focus. Which makes sense because overwhelm more succinctly put is:

Concentrating on everything that needs to be done rather than on the one thing that needs to be done.

So to remove overwhelm, simply shift your focus onto the one thing that needs doing rather than on everything that needs doing.

By shifting your focus onto the one thing (even a little) the big picture/lots of pictures looses its control and is replaced by the picture of the ONE Thing.

In short overwhelm is creating a problem where there isn’t one. Its self created and easily remedied by shifting your focus.

One Task At A Time.

The first task should of course be creating a massive list of tasks?

The simple conclusion from Stephen therefore is; having massive goals and prepared lists, but focusing on just the one that needs doing.

Running any kind of work from home blog can ideally be an expression of your personality and opinion, whatever the subject. Your readership rarely just come to see what you have to post. They come for you. For your specific thoughts, point of view, and ideas.

The Secret to a Successful Work From Home Blog

The trick to effectively writing a blog for income is understanding how to maintain credibility with your readership while at the same time productively navigating the behind-the-scenes circumstances of operating a profitable business and developing a brand. And even though that may appear to be very difficult or even unachievable, it’s seriously absolutely not.

What you just have to do is to sincerely be yourself. Don’t attempt to imitate other bloggers too much. Don’t get so concerned about looking to create your visitor stats that you fail to be awesome and genuine. And don’t get so captivated with getting paid to create a sponsored post that you find yourself endorsing things you don’t even like.

So what do you like more than just about anything?

What…

• exactly are you most interested in?
• makes you want to leap up out of bed each day, or has you enthusiastic to a point that you simply can’t stop speaking about it?
• exactly could it be you happen to be truly great at?
• do people ask you about?
• topics are you normally fascinated by?
• subject matters do you really like to read about?

Already Blogging But Losing Momentum?

Even if you have a blog and you have been talking about something else entirely, something apart from what you are truly interested in, you need to make a few changes. Under no circumstances be afraid to steer your blog in an exciting new direction, if that’s where your heart is telling you to go. Above all else, your readers hunger for authenticity. If you’re holding back, they are going to notice it. Provide them with everything you’ve got and make it awesome.

For anyone who is setting up a brand new work from home blog, think long and hard as to what you want to post about. So what do you already know about? What do you care about? Exactly what are you most enthusiastic about? Don’t talk about recipes if you don’t like to cook. Don’t blog about organisation tips if your home is in chaos. Take notice of the blogs you’re keen on, but do not make an attempt to replicate them. Concentrate on your own talents and experience and make the blog your own.

And before you begin, think about these questions again…

What…

• is it that you’re really good at?
• makes you want to leap out of bed each morning?
• issues are you normally interested in?
• exactly you most enthusiastic about?
• subject matter do you really love to find out about?
• do you like more than just about anything?
• do other people ask you about?
• gets you inspired to a point that you simply cannot stop speaking about it?

Which Blogging Platform?

Self-hosted WordPress is what I prefer for my blogging and site-building platform. It is very simple to use and now has loads of features. Lots of people happily use Blogger, Google’s blogging platform, and I’ve heard it’s really to easy to use. But I know that there have been a number of people who started off with Blogger, but then were forced to make the switch to WordPress down the road. So do yourself a favour and use WordPress right from the start and you will avoid a whole lot of complications in the future.

Which Web Hosting to Use?

When deciding upon a website hosting company you will want to ensure that you invest in one that is reliable, affordable, and that has exceptional customer care. I’m now happily on my own Interserver VPS. They have a variety of hosting plans, a great reputation and excellent support for WordPress hosting.

Blog Layout and Design

When you finally start up a blog it might be tempting to engage a graphic designer to create a professional design and style. However this can be very costly and is largely unnecessary at the start. If I had to do it all over again, I would still probably use Hostgator which can automatically install WordPress on your domain and a WordPress template from myThemes. The other thing you need to make sure that your blog looks professional and stands out, definitely get yourself a custom logo designed. You can get a really decent logo done for as little as five bucks on Fiverr. Or if you’re happy with an attractive text only logo you could go to cooltext.com where you can create a simple logo, apply some nice effects and download it as a transparent png graphic logo.

How to Get Traffic to Your New Work From Home Blog

You can get traffic to your blog by using social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Instagram, etc. Hootsuite can be used to help manage your social media platforms, it’s easy to use and you can schedule updates and manage all of your accounts in one place (apart from Pinterest at present).

The other primary way of obtaining traffic is by employing both on-page and off-page search engine optimization (SEO) techniques that will help achieve organic search rankings in Google and Bing. Virtually all my traffic originates from Google, and this happens because certain keywords and key phrases on my blog have ranked well in search engines like google. Internet search engine traffic is free and you will certainly wish to take full advantage of it.

Build an Email List From Your Blog

You should definitely make sure that you’re building an email list from your visitors from the day your blog goes live. With an email list you can actively stay in touch with your visitors and audience and drive regular traffic back to your blog almost on demand. An email list can be your businesses most important online asset – it is something you own and that can always be used to reach your blog followers. Getresponse and Aweber are the two major email list service providers, although there are others of course.

How To Build, Run and Make Money Blogging

I’ve read loads of blogging and site-building training systems over the years and there are plenty of different methods to earn income from your work from home blog, such as Google Adsense, other ad networks, direct ad sales, affiliate marketing, and even selling your own information products.

But the very best beginner to advanced blogging training which has most significantly helped me personally has been Glenn Shepherd’s Advanced Blogging Dynamix, which is available for free as part of your iPro membership (UPDATE: Now relaunched as the Internet Profits Certified Partner Program.)

If you’re not yet a Certified Partner of Dean Holland’s company Internet Profits Ltd. and want to find out more about it…

Check out this free webinar video… which tells you everything you need to know.

UPDATE – Below is my stripped down ping service list for WordPress in 2020s. WARNING: Clean up your WordPress ping list to avoid potential search engine ranking penalties!

Whenever you publish a post on a self-hosted WordPress blog, WordPress will ping all the services listed in the Update Services field. You can find your WordPress ping list by going to Settings / Writing – Update Services (box at the bottom of this page).

This automatic pinging offers a great advantage of publishing content on a blog rather than a static website, because pinging these services is effectively screaming from the rooftops to the search engines to come and check out this new content right now.

Risk of Spamming Ping Services?

There has been some discussion over the years about users of WordPress unwittingly or otherwise spamming ping services by editing and updating articles over and over resulting in blacklisting by these ping services.

The good news is that current versions of WordPress now intelligently ping these services when a post is first published and then keeps track of previous successful pings taking care not to re-ping them. So this essentially means that there is no longer any danger of accidental ping spamming and you no longer need a ping optimiser plugin.

You can read more about this from Chip Bennett, the author of cbnet Ping Optimizer plugin, who kindly left his product page up and used it to explain why you don’t need to worry about the pinging problem anymore in WordPress.

Ping Service List For WordPress

The other matter is do you just use the default pingomatic service which pings a range of services? Or should you paste in a list of additional services for maximum exposure? Well there must be loads of pro bloggers that probably don’t even worry about this and just stick with pingomatic.

However my thoughts are that if you’re looking to get your posts indexed and ranked as quickly as possible, then pasting in an up to date list of additional ping services is likely to help with this cause.

IMPORTANT 2020s UPDATE AND WARNING!

The following is an excerpt from a long post by Glen Allsopp from his old viperchill.com blog…

“I received a personal reply from Google’s head of web-spam, Matt, who asked me if, when a blog posts goes live, I ping certain services.

If you’re wondering what that is, basically it’s something that I think of as so little and irrelevant that I cannot believe it was questioned. If you log into your WordPress Admin area and go to Settings > Writing, you’ll see a list of ‘services’ that you can ping (alert) whenever a new article of yours goes live. It’s something I set up years ago and have never touched or thought about since.

Though I wasn’t pinging the services Matt asked me about, I was pinging a few with a foreign domain extension that he had mentioned and a lot of others, so I decided to remove all but a couple of them from my list. A few days later and my rankings were back where they should be. How crazy is it that some behind the scenes WordPress setting was costing me search rankings for my own brand name?”

Therefore, I’m deciding to avoid any potential penalties to my blog. So my…

WordPress Ping List 2020

…is as follows:

http://rpc.pingomatic.com
http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2

That’s it. And to be honest, I don’t even think that’s even necessary any more.

As long as you’ve uploaded your XML sitemap to Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools, you should be just fine.

Additionally, it’s probably a good idea to manually add each blog post to Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools for indexing.

Reference Only! WordPress Ping Service List

Use at your own discretion…

Some of these may no longer exist, and others may actually be detrimental to your search engine rankings:

http://api.feedster.com/ping
http://api.moreover.com/ping
http://api.moreover.com/RPC2
http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2
http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping
http://bblog.com/ping.php
http://blo.gs/ping.php
http://blog.goo.ne.jp/XMLRPC
http://blogdb.jp/xmlrpc
http://blogmatcher.com/u.php
http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2
http://bulkfeeds.net/rpc
http://coreblog.org/ping/
http://geourl.org/ping
http://ipings.com
http://mod-pubsub.org/kn_apps/blogchatt
http://ping.amagle.com/
http://ping.bitacoras.com
http://ping.blo.gs/
http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/
http://ping.blogmura.jp/rpc/
http://ping.cocolog-nifty.com/xmlrpc
http://ping.feedburner.com
http://ping.myblog.jp
http://ping.rootblog.com/rpc.php
http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php
http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php
http://ping.weblogs.se/
http://pingoat.com/goat/RPC2
http://rcs.datashed.net/RPC2/
http://rpc.blogbuzzmachine.com/RPC2
http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/
http://rpc.icerocket.com:10080/
http://rpc.newsgator.com/
http://rpc.pingomatic.com
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
http://rpc.twingly.com
http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2
http://topicexchange.com/RPC2
http://trackback.bakeinu.jp/bakeping.php
http://www.a2b.cc/setloc/bp.a2b
http://www.blogdigger.com/RPC2
http://www.blogoole.com/ping/
http://www.blogoon.net/ping/
http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates
http://www.blogroots.com/tb_populi.blog?id=1
http://www.blogshares.com/rpc.php
http://www.blogsnow.com/ping
http://www.blogstreet.com/xrbin/xmlrpc.cgi
http://www.feedsubmitter.com
http://www.lasermemory.com/lsrpc/
http://www.mod-pubsub.org/kn_apps/blogchatter/ping.php
http://www.newsisfree.com/xmlrpctest.php
http://www.pingerati.net
http://www.pingmyblog.com
http://www.popdex.com/addsite.php
http://www.snipsnap.org/RPC2
http://www.weblogalot.com/ping
http://www.weblogues.com/RPC/
http://xmlrpc.blogg.de
http://xping.pubsub.com/ping
http://xping.pubsub.com/ping/

That’s it for now and I hope this helps.

So it’s time to crank up some decent off-site SEO for my blog. To start this process, I’ve installed a free social network auto poster for WordPress on my blog.

With this free WordPress plugin from Nextscript.com, once all your social media and micro blogging accounts are set up and integrated, when you publish a blog post, Social Network Auto Poster will automatically post updates to up to 26 different platforms complete with with back links to that post.

Now it has to be said that some of the platforms supported by NextScript’s Social Network Auto Poster (SNAP) need to be paid accounts to achieve full integration with SNAP. And also there are a few which are kind of flaky, are closing down or seem to be too problematic (for me anyway).

Also if you get the paid version of Social Network Auto Poster this will enable auto posting to Pinterest, Reddit, LinkedIn etc. via NextScript’s custom SNAP API.

My Top 10 Bookmarking, Micro Blogging and Social Media Websites for SNAP

The long and the short of it is that I’ve spent the last couple of days setting up and testing a total of 10 of the most robust and popular free bookmarking, micro blogging and social media websites. With the exception of Facebook, I’ve created these accounts under pseudonyms and updated them with profile pics, cover images and nice bios.

Here’s a list of some the platforms I’ve integrated into NextScript’s Social Network Auto Poster plugin on my blog:

• Blogger
• Facebook
• Flickr
• Instapaper
• LiveJournal
• Plurk
• Tumblr
• Twitter

So whenever I publish a new post, all these accounts are updated where applicable with the post excerpt, featured image, post title with back link anchor text. This plugin has several other features which are available in free version.

2 More Features of NextScript Social Network Auto Poster

However one I will mention is the facility to make a post to all configured social/blogging platforms at once, without needing to create a WordPress blog post. I think that this would be a great opportunity to provide some diverse back links to other off-blog pages you may wish to improve search engine rankings for, e.g. YouTube videos.

Another great feature is that you can go back through prior blog posts and post them via SNAP to your list of platforms. This is something I’ll be doing spread out over a few days with all my handful of blog posts to date. Then I’ll be heading over to Feedshark to ping all these sites and their RSS feeds where available.

Buying Tier 2 Backlinks to Tier 1 Social Network Sites

I may invest in some tier 2 back links to these tier 1 pages to give them some link juice and authority to pass on to my blog. Now I know that there are lots of dubious back linking services available on sites like Fiverr and SEO Clerks. These may well do more harm than good for Google ranking, and even for SEOing tier 2 back link sites. However there are also some reputable sellers doing solid off-page SEO work really cheap.

For information only, the sellers I’ve had good experiences with in the past on Fiverr were:

• tshirtzone (Do manual 62 pr7 to pr3 offpage seo dofollow backlinks)
• volarex (Do seo linkwheel pyramid to website blog or youtube to rank on google)
• blboss (Manually do 30 pr9 safe seo high pr backlinks 2015 best results)

There are probably plenty of other decent gigs like this now from other sellers. But these are the one’s that I have used. My opinion is that it’s best NOT to use such services to generate back links directly to my main site, but to the tier 1 SNAP back linking sites.

If I decide to do go ahead with this plan, I will probably look to focus page rank juice on those tier 1 assets which allow page rank to flow (dofollow links) such as Blogger, Delicious and Tumblr. NB. (There’s a really useful free browser addon I use called SEO Quake which actually ‘strikes-through’ all nofollow text links on a page once loaded in the browser.)

But do your own due diligence of course before you spend money on back linking. Most may do your site’s rankings more harm than good!