Step by Step Guide on How to Get your Guest Posts Published

Guest blogging was perhaps one of those holy grails of blogging that was pretty much kept secret for a very long time, till the message got out and the blogosphere got flooded by guest posts.

The best part about guest blogging is that you don’t need to have a blog, or build a readership or pretty much do anything to build an audience. One can simply leverage the power and reach of other bloggers and use it to your own advantage and benefits.

If your content is good and whatever you are selling is both high quality and relevant then there is nothing much that is required from your end as the target blogger who is going to publish your content already has a readership base on his blog, an email list for newsletter and social media reach and followers. In short, the bloggers are ready with their audience; you only need to have good content to keep feeding this hungry audience.

Here, in this article, we will discuss several steps to get your guest posts published quickly.

1. Build a Connection: Most bloggers who accept guest posts don’t publish content from total strangers. There are a number of things that can go wrong if someone accepts content like that, so in order to get a pitch read, one has to build a genuine connection with the blogger.

Start with blog commenting and post a really good comment on the latest post of the blog. After adding your comment, share the post on the social media and make sure to tag the blogger while sharing. Make sure to do this for months before pitching a guest post request.

2. Research the target blog well: Not all blogs are same, even if they are on the same niche; the way a blog writes and publish content is unique to it. In such a case, one has to learn the tone well so that the post is well received by the blogs audience.

Along with that, look into content formatting. Check how the sub-headings and other forms of content presentation are used. Try to make sure that your content looks similar in format when you send over your post to the blog owner.

3. Pitch content that isn’t already published on the blog: If the blog has been running for some time then it might be possible that a similar content to what you are planning to write is already present in the blog. This is why it becomes extremely important why you should always search the blog for content similar to what you are working on.

4. Make sure to write the article well: As a blogger and a writer, you should always edit and fix the article to its most polished form before publishing it. However, when you write for someone else, it becomes even more important to edit and check the article for hundred percent accuracy before forwarding it to the blog owner.

Do note that it becomes difficult to edit the posts at a later time for several reasons which are outside your control. But while the article is still with you, make sure to edit it properly.

5. Always be ready to edit and re-send the drafts: Most of the popular and premium blogs are difficult to get posts published. Their editorial standards are usually high on such A-List blogs. In such a case, be prepared to write, edit and re-send the articles as many times as the A-list blog asks.

Even if the draft you resend, gets rejected and you get more edits and corrections, you should still try to complete those edits and re-send the draft once again.

6. Be very polite while following up: Sometimes you don’t get a response when trying to contact the blogger. Everyday, pitches like yours, about a hundred of those are received by the blogger. It can be easily possible that the blogger is busy and might miss your emails. In such a case, always make sure to be polite and wait for their response.

This can be even more difficult when you send a draft post for publishing and you don’t get a response from the blogger. You might get tempted to scrap the guest post idea and pitch another blogger and get the post published. This is a bad idea, because when the blogger finally manage to post your content, it will be published elsewhere already. This will eventually cause duplicate content – thus it is always better to keep patience while guest posting.

7. Once published, share it enough: Now that your post is finally published, it is time to start sharing your content. Share your published guest posts on Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin and other social media sites. Feel free to share your content with your email subscribers or social media followers.

The more you share your content, the more authority you will gain for yourself. Try to get your guest post linked from other bloggers, that way your post will start to rank and trend.

8. Use the published post as a reference to get more guest posts approved: Now that your post is live, don’t stop here. Start pitching more blogs and this time, as a reference use this published post so that people can check your content quality before allowing you to guest post for them.

Bloggers want to see quality and actionable content and the moment they see a quality guest post published, they will start allowing you to add more content. Another thing to note is that, when a post is published on a bigger blog that has more authority, smaller bloggers who value the popular blog naturally accepts your pitch and allows you to post on their blog easily.

Guest Blogging

9. Set up an As-Seen-On page: Just like testimonials or about us, make a page that showing the list of all the guest posts that you have published so far. Similarly, one can also make a page that lists all the sites that has ever linked to you or mentioned you in their posts. This way you will have a reference to the posts that you have published and along with that, people will see your guest post quality and allow you and invite you to write for their blogs.

Getting your first guest post published will help you to build a port folio and use this as a reference for pitching more blogs. Make sure to target the bigger blogs too as these blogs has a huge authority and getting posts published on such A-list blogs helps a lot.

9 Ways to Utilize the Power of Existing Customers

Existing and repeat customers are a gold mine for any business. If a business has a lower churn rate then it is able to retain a good portion of its existing customers. This way, when the business adds new customers, the growth rate increases by a lot, as the existing customers are already retained.

This is however only the financial side of the business. Existing customers helps a business in many other ways, for example spreading the business by word of mouth and becoming a loyal ambassador of the company. Surely, the benefits are plenty, but much of these benefits have to be gained as everything depends on how you handle your current customers.

Here, we will cover several ways in which a business can make the most out of their existing customers.

1. Offer Customer only Products: Launch certain products for customers and introduce them in the existing pricing plans. The already subscribed paid customers will get this add-on for free as their existing plan did not have this new feature and product upgrade.

Lock certain features of this new upgrade for old clients and mention that one needs to be a year old customer to access this new feature.

2. Start a loyalty credit system: Let users earn some credits on every purchase they make. This way, the existing customers will earn and accumulate credits that they can use to redeem in some way and get free or discounted products and services.

This will encourage the existing customers to make some extra purchases in order to gain more credits. In a way, the customer is already paying to gain these credits but they will still think this whole process as getting a freebie and thank the business for their generosity.

3. Customer Feedback: It is important to listen to your customers. Anyone who is paying to get something can move to a competitor if they are better in some ways or your own system is difficult to work out. The customers are always ready to tell you what problems they are facing with your system, but you still need a setup to learn more about their issues. The best option is to set up a survey system where the customers can give their feedback and help you solve their issues quickly.

4. Up sale: If your customers have bought certain things from you then it is likely that they might buy some more stuff. Look for what else their business might require and if it is something that you provide then it is time to pitch them a relevant up sell opportunity.

Every business has more than one aspect and if you are able to sell something then it is quite possible to look into what else they might be looking for there lays your opportunity to sell more. For example a business might need web hosting, logos and designs, pay per click promotions, social media marketing, content writing and marketing. If you are able to provide any one of these services then it is likely that you should be able to provide the rest of the services too as most of these services are related to one another.

5. Stay Connected: Keep the customer in the loop. Even if it has been only a few days after the sale and you haven’t talked to the customer much, it might be too late before you start a conversation.

The moment you close a sale, it is important to keep an ongoing conversation with your customer so that you can do exactly what the service requires. Even keeping a few days of radio silence might break the customer relation that you should look to nurture.

6. Create a referral system: Most loyal customers refer a business anyway but to take this one notch up, you have to setup a referral system where your existing customers can promote your business and your products and earn a part of the income that is generated by a new client.

7. Build Testimonials: Asking for a testimonial is easy if you have some satisfied customers. Now that you have received your testimonial, it is time to display it on your homepage and your blog sidebars. Let people see that others are recommending you. Testimonials, especially from popular market leaders help a lot. Your customers recognize these celebrities and then read the testimonials and become further loyal to your business.

Along with testimonials, ask for ratings where ever possible. If you have an app then ask for Google play ratings etc. There are endless places where your customers can recommend you and give you nice 5 star ratings. This is the biggest power of having existing customers; they are able to promote a business faster than what one can accomplish by spending money.

8. Train your staff: Most good businesses with strong and growing paid membership base are spoiled by unhelpful staff. Make sure to train your staff so that they can handle your customer requirements, the way you used to handle it yourself. Sometimes, try to be a client yourself, or ask your friends and family members to pretend to be a customer and see how your staff deals with these clients. If there is something wrong with your staff, you will be able to find out that way.

Churn Rate

9. Encourage social media content: Good customers who are happy with your service and products will often talk about your business on the social media. This is your opportunity to high light these stories and make them visible on the social media. Spread them, share them, run some PPC campaigns on them, promote them on your official pages and accounts – these success stories are your biggest digital assets and if you are able to make good use of it, your business will spread like wild fire and no competitor can do anything to block your progress.

New customers have a cost on them; it is the money that is spent to acquire them. On the other hand, existing customers don’t cost to acquire, they just need to be retained so that they provide you with continued business. One should do all that they can to retain the existing customers for creating long term successful businesses.

7 Types of Blogging Goals to Setup for 2023

It is again that time of the year when everyone starts to set their goals and targets for the upcoming year 2023. Every year we make several such goals but never really follow through on them. The biggest reasons why our goal making process fails is that we aim for too high and ultimately it becomes unreachable and at some point in time we our self realizes that our targets are impossible and we abandon our quest.

We need to be calculative to determine what we can truly achieve. For this to happen, we have to understand where we are currently and determine the path that we should take in the next one year to reach our end of the year targets. Feel free to break down the targets on monthly or quarterly basis so that it becomes further easier to track and achieve.

Today, we are going to discuss 7 tips to make the best blogging and marketing goals for 2023.

1. Don’t chase everything – It is easy to forget the actual targets once you start exploring your business and your niche. You will find gold mines everywhere and whatever you expand into will start to seem promising. Don’t lose your way in the process and stick to the exact goals that you have setup at the starting of the year. Doing too many things and not completing anything in particular is always bad for business.

Think about it deeply. If your target is to create one strong niche blog then don’t start twenty and build nothing.

2. Set a target to learn something new – It is a new year and with the starting of a new year, you should always plan to learn something new. Make sure this talent is strictly on niche so that it helps you in the long run. As a blogger, your immediate courses might be from learning languages like PHP, html and design and development studies.

3. Analyze what had worked and set goals to scale those – If you are very new to your business then there isn’t too many things that you can scale. However, if you are in this business for sometime then it is easy to analyze what has worked so far. Check what type of content is working for you, the type of landing pages that are converting, the newsletters that are selling and so on and so forth. List them up and start scaling them. Do more of what is working for you currently.

4. Set Social Media Targets – Making social media targets is always a tough call. So much changes in a year that it is hard to keep up. There are people who have made targets for Google+ from reaching 100k followers, to a Million and more, only to know that their work is going to go down the drain as GooglePlus was coming to a close.

With social media, your targets need to be dynamic. Every month you need to analyze where you are currently and then change your goals to make sure you keep up your momentum. Some things on social media do not change and that is micro blogging content. This content can be shared across all of your social profiles, so even if some social site does decide to close down, your content will still be flourishing on other similar sites.

5. Set up your Budgets – For some reasons, most people forget to allocate the required amount of budget for setting up these goals. If you don’t break down the budget into some of the major categories, like Pay Per Click Ads, SEO, Email marketing, Staff and Vas, Site and hosting etc. then there are several items that you won’t be able to plan for. If you are planning for PPC in your goals and you don’t have a budget for it, then it is best not to include it in the goal.

Blogging Goals

6. Identify Marketing Channels – Research and identify your marketing channels and setup specific goals for every marketing channel you might have. This way your goals will be more specific and you will know what you want to achieve.

Email Marketing: If you don’t have an auto-responder series then you can include that in your goals. Furthermore you can set some numerical targets for your email list and grow it with time.

Search Engine Optimization: Set some ranking targets, that way you will keep track of certain keywords that needs to rank better. Setup an excel sheet with those keywords and see how month after month, they improve on their current rankings.

Referral and Affiliate Setup: If you don’t already have an affiliate setup then you can put this in your goals. However, if you already have this setup done, then it is time to set some targets were you can aim to get this many affiliates at the end of every month.

Giveaways and Contests: Contests are excellent for goal settings as you can track various aspects of contests and see how they help with your overall marketing targets.

Organic Marketing: Comments, Forum posts, Guest Posts etc. are all part of organic marketing. As a blogger you can always take targets to make a set number of comments and forum posts and see how you reach your targets on a weekly basis.

7. Build an emotional Connect – This year, put this into your goal making. Take a target to do the following things:

  • Get into your Customers Shoes: Think and act like a customer. Do an actual check-out and see if your customers are able to buy your stuff smoothly or not. When you see some issues, talk to your customers and try to get some feedback on how you can improve the whole process.
  • Get yourself a Personality: This year, set a target to build a personality and make sure that your blog posts and other content is showing your newfound personality.
  • Develop a Story: Put this in your yearly goal to take out some time and start developing a story. Work on your story and fine tune it and deploy this story, part by part, over the year – via. several blog posts and other type of content.
  • Make sure to share personal pics: Now that we are talking about developing a brand story and connecting with your customers, it is important to share pictures and videos of your own personal life so that your customers feel like they are part of it.

Let this year be different, make goals that actually help you in achieving your targets and in the process improve your overall business.

Top 12 Tips to Build a Personal Brand Online

A business needs to sell. It needs to build a customer base, a recurring income and ultimately make money from the various activities it does.

But there is a personal side to every business. A side that connects well with the customers on an emotional level. It works because a business is raw and robot like that does its job and that is about it. The customers of the business get their work done but as soon as there is an alternative, they make their shift because there is no connect. All that changes if the customers are loyal and they stick to their brand. For this to happen, the business has to show their personal side and connect with their customers emotionally.

Here, we will cover several ways in which a business can build and develop their personal brand.

1. Personal Social Media Accounts: For a business, it is important to secure your brand’s exact term social accounts on all top-tier social sites. In the same way, it is equally important to register personal social handles and keep them unique across all social sites.

Even if you aren’t as active on the social media on a personal level, you still need to register on all social sites and check once in a while so that others can’t make fake profiles of you on social sites.

2. Share everyday work: Now that you have your personal social accounts, feel free to share your every day’s routine on the social media. This way, you don’t have to create content specifically for the sharing purpose, rather you can simply post your daily activity and keep your profiles active.

Posting your work on your business profile is relevant to your audience. This gives them transparent insights into your business and your followers like to keep checking these details daily, which increase engagement.

3. Post pics of family and vacations: Being personal with your audience helps in building long term trust and loyalty. However, posting the same pics daily does not adds much value. This is the reason why, once in a while when you are on a vacation, you should share your pics and videos on the social media. This not only tells them that you are away from business and should be returning shortly, but at the same time, they understand that you value the relations with family and friends which builds stronger bonds with your customers.

4. Run an office party and share it online: Any business likes to share their office pics and videos online. This is a great marketing tool as content travels faster than ads.

However, you need a reason to post those pics. Office birthday parties or any other event can be a great excuse for sharing office pics.

5. Do something good: Don’t limit your pics and videos to parties and fun activities only. You can do a lot more than just party. Take for example a road side plantation drive.

Personal Brand

If you do something good, it will not only be helpful towards your community but you will have a lot of content that you can share on your social profiles. Depending on the nature of such an event you can further share these same pics and videos on relevant social media groups and get further visibility.

6. Help a YouTuber Out: Look for YouTubers in your town and do a collab. This way, your business and your personal brand will get the power of the YouTuber’s reach and your content will spread faster on the social media.

YouTubers are powerful influencers who are not just active on YouTube as the same suggest but are pretty much active throughout all the social media networks. If a picture says a thousand words, a video says a million.

7. Join Facebook Groups: There are several groups on the social media. Every network like Facebook, Linkedin, Pinterest have their own groups and boards where there are plenty of active members who are interested in a specific niche. Look for such groups that interest you and share relevant content and grow your personal brand.

8. Always Reply on Social Media: When you bring in your personal face on the social media, there will be a lot of followers who will comment and try to know more about you. This communication cannot be one sided and you have to respond to their comments and questions to keep this connection going.

9. Questions and Quiz: From time to time, make sure to ask questions and polls and quizzes to your followers. These questions need to be relevant so that your readers can respond and in the process make a stronger bond with you.

10. Connect with Influencers: There are a number of influencers who ignores the brand profiles and keep their distance. But when you bring in your personal voice, you will see that many of these influencers change their ways and starts to respond to your messages and questions. It is easy to connect with influencers if you are keeping your personal side up.

11. Build a Story around your Brand: If your story as a business, how you started and reached to where you are – is already an inspirational journey then everything is already set. All you have to do is to write it down and make it a great story.

If this isn’t the condition for you then you have to research a bit. Not everyone has a story but still you can write it by applying some creativity. Think about it, how you started and what challenges you faced. How you tackled your issues and grew with time and persistence. Your hard work will surely have a story of its own. If it is too difficult for you to craft your story then take the help of writers and get yourself a story written.

12. Automate and Schedule: Now that everything is set and going well, it is time to get serious. On social media one needs to be consistent with their updates. Use a scheduling tool and queue up enough updates and make a social media calendar with discipline and consistency.

Being personal on the social media help in leveraging the human side of your business. This is an easy way to build real and emotional connection with your audience. As a business, you should always keep your personal brand to propel your entire business forward.

Top 12 Must Have Skills for Blogging Success

As a blogger your work will mostly revolve around writing content, making it more readable and search engine friendly and once you are done with your content, you will have to start outreach and networking for getting yourself heard and your content consumed.

On the face of it, everything seems easy but once you start to actually do it, you will understand that the process is fairly complicated and your competition is doing pretty much the same, making it further difficult for you to stand out.

You still need to do the hard work but if you plan it out well and do it correctly then your progress will be faster.

Here, we will discuss some of the most important skills to develop in order to become a successful blogger.

1. Content writing: Take a target to write at least 3,000 words a day. You can either break it down to three articles or write one single article that covers the topic well. Even if you are a good writer you will still need practice because as a blogger you have to write a lot. You are expected to publish at least 2 to 3 articles a week and some of them need to be very long and in-depth. Then, you have to write several guest posts which are equally challenging as it needs to be of top quality, else other bloggers won’t publish it.

2. HTML and PHP: As a blogger, your content management system is going to be mostly wordpress. Even if you use a different CMS, you will still have the options to manage the features and designs by installing and removing plugins and themes. However, if you have basic knowledge of HTML, then there are plenty of customizations you can do easily. The more plugins you use, the slower the system gets. If you are able to add simple codes and get things done, it is a far better choice.

Learning to code isn’t just about fixing your own site. If you can take this to the next level then you will be able to make those plugins and themes or at least be able to customize them and provide the same as a service. This will help you make money on the side. There are plenty of bloggers who are incapable of fixing their blogs even if those fixes are simple and easy. This is where your expertise as a blogging coder will come in handy.

3. Networking talents: Blogging does not only mean that you have to keep adding content on your own blog. There are plenty of things that a blogger has to do, for example posting comments on relevant blogs, replying to comments on your own blog, doing guest posts on other people’s blogs. Much of these activities require networking and communicating with other bloggers.

4. Designing and photo editing: As a passable design talent, if you are able to use Canva and other relevant tools then you can get away with your blogging requirements. However if you are able to do more than that as a designer, for example use Photoshop and other similar tools for making logos, banners etc. then this talent will open up many possibilities.

Logos, banners, infographics etc. are items that are sold for a lot of money online. This will boost your blogging income and you will be able to brand yourself as a designer and charge premium for your services. Along with that, such talents also helps with link building as infographics are easy to publish on other blogs and get relevant backlinks for free.

5. Being Creative: As a blogger, you won’t find a guide that fits everyone. Much of your blogging activities require creativity and unique thinking. If you are able to do that, then you can achieve a lot of success in blogging. Think yourself as a growth hacker who finds new and different ways to achieve various blogging successes.

Successful Blogging Skills

6. Basic SEO: The knowledge of SEO will help you to optimize your blog and your content for search engine visibility. This way, you will write for both your readers and the search engines. When your content starts to rank higher in search engines, you will gain a wider audience and your blog will grow faster.

7. Social Media: Sites like Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin etc. are excellent places to start sharing your content. But before you can do that, you have to build your profile in these platforms. Depending on your niche, you can also look for smaller social sites that are strictly on your niche. Such communities have dedicated audiences that help in growing your blog faster.

8. Patience: Blogging takes time to be successful. If you are expecting some returns quickly then blogging might not be for you. If you are thinking about blogging as a long term career then it is important that you learn to be patient and keep working hard even if you don’t see an immediate success.

9. Be a Problem Solver: There are many issues that people on your niche might have to go through on a regular basis. If you are able to locate these issues and write tutorial on how to fix the same then you will be able to build a dedicated audience easily. For this to happen, you have to think like a problem solver, someone who always finds the answers at the end and comes up with unique solutions.

10. Outreach Talent: As a blogger you have to reach out and let other know that you are here. This outreach can be for guest posts, for asking help and links, for letting people know that you have linked to them and shared their content. In short, you have to do outreach for a number of blogging things.

11. Time Management and Self Discipline: Being your own boss and doing things that you want to do is truly a gift. This way you don’t have to take orders from others and you can choose to do what you like and how you like. However, this can lead to laziness and soon you will find that you aren’t getting any work done and wasting your time with useless and mindless net browsing and watching shorts. Your ability to discipline yourself can help you in such situations and that way you will be able to manage your time better.

12. Research and Analytics: This is not just checking your own stats but learning to research your competitors and gain insights from it. Being analytical helps you to understand your and others stats well. You will know your audience better and will be able to craft better content to make sure that your audience feeds better. Blogging skills, some of which you already have and some you need to learn but as a blogger you have to constantly hone your skills to stay competitive. These are some of the important skills you can learn to get started with blogging and gain quick success.

15 CTA – Call to Action – Buttons to Include in your Blog

Blogging can be done for fun; it can be your hobby. One can blog without really expecting anything to gain out of it.

If you are blogging without any purpose of gain then CTAs aren’t a big concern for you. However, most people and businesses blog to get some sort of benefit out of it. It can be monetary, subscriptions, promotions etc. and for such targets, it is important to set up some buttons that calls for an action from your blog visitor.

In this article, we will discuss several CTAs and where to place them in your blog to get the maximum benefits.

1. The sidebar social media connect CTA: The top section of the sidebar is an important place. Most readers glance at this section before scrolling down into the content. At the top, just after the about page teaser details, if you place your social media connect buttons and link to your social profiles then plenty of blog readers will start following you on the social media.

2. The footer eBook download box: The footer section of a blog is a place which is optimized for conversion. Most readers who have bothered to read the article to the very end are already happy with your content and want to get more information if possible. In such a situation if you have an eBook with further relevant information then the reader will surely download your eBook and signup to your newsletter in the process.

3. Exit Intent Popup: Among the several email signup boxes, the exit intent has so far been the most effective one. Here, the user is going to leave the site anyway, so why not offer something to keep him connected with your blog. If the user drops his email id, even if he leaves the site at that point of time, you can still reach him by your newsletters.

4. Author Bio Optimization: Author Bio section is a place at the end of your blog post that tells the reader more about the author of that post. Mostly it contains a few lines about the author and has some links that goes to the site and the social profiles of the author. This space too can be optimized with text and links that attracts the users and make him take an action.

5. Email Signup Footer Box: An email signup box with a content upgrade, mostly in the form of an eBook is an easy way to gain your visitors email. This form of email marketing is clean because it does not forces the user and simply presents this signup form in an idle way and waits for the user to take the action by himself.

6. Various In-Line CTAs: In the article itself some form of CTAs can be added which will both blend neatly and at the same time it will be relevant as it is contextual. If the readers are hooked into the content, such call to actions become very powerful as they can get the users to take instant actions and yet, keep them on site for further content consumption.

7. Banner CTAs: Graphical banners can be added throughout the article and such banners can be linked to relevant pages where the users can take further action. Banners are a helpful medium to present content and since they are graphic rich, they can easily attract the visitor’s eye.

8. In-Post small landings: While entire landing pages are built to get more out of PPC ads, small sized landings which are optimized with an email signup form, a small excerpt and a button that suggests further action can be placed right into the content and the users can interact with this kind of landing while still reading the article.

9. Email Signup in-post: Certain times when the article demands the users participation for updates at a later time, it is always preferable that the users share their email ids to stay updated. In such cases, if the link to the email subscription form is added in the content itself, the users can easily click on it and add their email ids.

10. Share on Social Media: Visitors like to share your content on their social timelines and if there are buttons that suggests social media shares then the chances of getting tweets, likes and shares increases by manifolds.

11. Free Trial Offers: In-Line or banners that offer free trials are often seen to get more clicks. Free itself is a very powerful CTA text. This becomes even more powerful if the offer is relevant to the content the user is reading.

12. Pin it CTA on Images: Most blog posts have multiple images which can all be shared on the social media and especially on Pinterest which is a graphic powered content site. Pinterest has this feature where you can make your images sport a pin it button which gives the users an instant ability to share those images on their Pinterest account.

13. Embedding Tweets in Posts: Any tweet from twitter can easily be embedded within the blog post. Twitter provides codes to do this and all you have to do is to copy the embed code, directly in the blog post. The embedded post includes a tweet, like and share buttons which are strong CTAs for social sharing.

Call to Action

14. Tweetables and Quotes: Quotes, made from Canva for example, is a catchy piece of graphic that includes an image of the person quoted with a small quote text next to it. If you include a tweetable, just below the quote, several users will take the tweet action and the quote will be shared on twitter for future re-shares.

15. Asking to Comment: Certain blog posts attract more comments than others. The trick here sometimes lies with the content writer. If the writer prompts the readers to give their replies or their feedback on the current topic, the chances are high that the reader will drop a comment. Blogging for business makes sense when there are powerful CTAs included in your blog that helps you in boosting conversions. This conversion can mean different things for your business, depending on your objectives. In most cases, getting the reader to leave their email ids on your newsletter subscriptions is considered one of the best conversions. Simply use the power of creating CTAs and make your blog a conversion funnel for your business.

How to Build a Gardening blog in 2023

There was a time when starting a blog was enough to get the traffic flowing. All you had to do was to make it and the audience came searching on their own. Unfortunately, those days are long gone and now making a blog isn’t enough to capture the audience, one need to work hard to get the visitors rolling.

In times like this, general blogs with all sorts of content that covers pretty much anything under the sun usually has almost no chance to develop an audience. This is the reason why people are moving towards a niche that they are comfortable in maintaining a blog.

In this article, we are going to cover the Gardening niche and give you tips on how to start a gardening blog the right way.

1. Register your domain: Gardening too has many sub niches and depending on your own hobbies or expertise, you can select your sub niche. Then based on that particular topic, you can start searching a domain that best suits your blog.

Let’s say your interest is in fruit trees, then a domain that has a relevant fruit in it should be your best target. If you fail to get any good domain name then you can opt. for a domain that has got something to do with gardening so that it stays relevant somehow.

2. Setup social media accounts: Whenever a domain is registered, any relevant social media handles, including a Gmail id on the exact name as your domain gets taken by somebody. There are bots built for such purposes and as a blogger you must stay ahead of these auto bots and register your brand able accounts before someone else does.

3. Take gardening pictures where ever you go: Gardening does not happen on your own backyard alone. If you visit a park or meet a neighbor or a relative, pretty much anywhere you go and find a garden, start taking some pictures. Later on these images can be converted into a blog post with good information about the same.

Content isn’t just text or an update of your own garden, if you can acquire pictures of plants, flowers, fruits etc. then all that can be shared on your instagram accounts, YouTube shorts, Facebook and whatsapp statuses and so much more.

4. Plant enough and keep a record: Now that you have decided to start a gardening blog, it is important that you plant a lot of stuff as this is the most important content of your blog. When you grow something, you get first hand information about the plant in question, and if you are able to maintain a proper record then you will be able to write about when you had planted the seed, when it had germinated and eventually when it started flowering and fruiting.

Such detailed information is always helpful and it is easy to create as you have complete control over your garden space.

5. Connect with other gardening bloggers: One thing that is great about blogging is that bloggers are social creatures. Make a list of relevant gardening blogs and start commenting on them, share their content on the social media and send them emails sometimes letting them know that you have commented on their posts. Very soon you will see that those bloggers are visiting your blog and leaving some helpful comments too.

6. Setup Email Marketing: Now that you have an active gardening blog with first hand information from your own garden, it is time to take this forward. Make an excellent gardening newsletter and setup your auto-responders so that your email subscribers can get regular updates from your blog.

7. Help your Neighbors: When it comes to getting more content, your neighbor’s farm, their gardens and their flowers contribute quite a lot. The best way to get more content from your neighbours is to ask them for any help they might need for maintaining their gardening space. Once you are allowed to help, you can easily take pictures and videos of their garden and use them in your own blogs.

8. Do roadside plantation: Planting alongside the road, especially near your home and your neighborhood is a great way to get clean and green air and make the environment healthy. All this work will provide more content for your blog, your YouTube channel and your social media accounts.

9. Grow vegetables: For getting more content for your blog, it is important that you plant several vegetables and keep a regular updated journal about them. Take pictures from time to time so that you can show the progress of your vegetables over the weeks.

Maintaining a gardening blog is a healthy thing to do as growing veggies means that sooner or later you are going to eat it all.

Gardening Blog

10. Plant fruit trees: It takes time for a fruit tree to grow but the progress can be easily recorded from the first day. To get to your first fruit, it might take more than a year but to maintain a blog about the same fruit is far easier as all you need to do is take some pictures and write about its progress so far.

11. Review gardening tools: Another benefit of running a gardening blog is the various gardening tools that can be reviewed. As your blog grows and your YouTube and other social media profiles starts to get more followers, you will find that more and more companies start to send you their tools for free so that they can get a quick review about it.

If you have an established blog, you will not only get free gardening tools to review but you will also get paid to cover those same tools on your own blog. With gardening as your niche, you will find that your time is well spent. Gardening is excellent for mental health. Your overall health will improve because of the physical hardwork that your body will go on a consistent basis. Consider the amount of free food that you will be able to grow in your space and then eat them. On top of that, do note that most such fruits and vegetables are organic which makes them even more healthy.

18 of the Best Niches to Start a Profitable Blog

To create a profitable blog, one needs a niche which is both low competitive and highly searched. If the niche is important and there’s plenty of people who are searching for it and the advertisers are looking to tap into that audience, then you have found yourself a good niche to start blogging.

Such niches are however very hard to get and with time, as more and more people get into blogging, it is slowly becoming even more difficult to find a niche that fulfils all the criateria.

However, if you are ready to carry out the research and beat the competition with genuine high quality content then you might still be able to get some profitable niche ideas.

Here, we are going to discuss 18 such niches worth making a money making blog.

1. Fitness – Fitness is a great niche to start a new year. During the new year times, everyone wants to work on their health and as a fitness blogger, it is the best time to grow your audience. This niche is fairly broad with plenty of options to grow ever green articles. Contextual monetization works pretty well on this niche.

2. Personal Finance – Everyone wants to learn about more ways to manage their money. From saving money to buying shares that gives you more dividends, everything related to managing money falls under this niche. It is an excellent niche for selling sponsored content as there’s way too many people looking for paid placement in this niche.

3. Cooking – Food and Recipe blogs are easy to make. There are many recipes that one can write about, so running sort of content ideas is almost impossible in this niche. Juices and vegetable smoothies too are good items to cover in a food blog. Even Raw foods that does not even need cooking can be covered in this blog.

4. Wedding – This is a very high paying niche and the competition is too strong for relevant keywords. However, if you are able to build an authority website on this niche, it can be easily monetized by various earning channels.

5. DIY – Writing about do-it-yourself guides is easy and most of these tutorials are simple and actionable. Such blogs can also help in setting up a successful YouTube channel in the future as you can easily link to your DIY YouTube videos from within your articles.

6. How To – There are no limits to the amount of content that can be researched with article titles starting with – How To, as there’s way too many possibilities. You can even sort out a smaller and more focused niche for how to content and build a dedicated audience.

7. Gardening – For those who are in the hobby of gardening or living off-grid, this is a great niche with plenty of income opportunities. In addition to all the online monetization options, one can also sell their farm produce for added income.

8. Interior Decoration – Decorating and upgrading the interiors of your home is a fun activity for the whole family. This can be even more fun and rewarding if you plan to run an interior décor blog and cover your interior decoration activities.

9. Fashion – From clothing to accessories, everything with a taste of fashion falls under this niche. Bags, jewellery, clothes for every season and style can be covered under this niche. This can also serve as a means to test and try new fashion items and review them on your blog.

10. Travel – Travelling around the world, or simply hiring a RV, if you are ready to explore and write down the details of your travel then this is the perfect niche for you. Feel free to take out the camera and start recording, that way you can keep a YouTube channel alongside.

11. Parenting – If you have kids then this is a great niche to explore. Based on your experience you can write plenty of suggestions and since you have already faced the difficult situations, you can give helpful tips to new parents.

12. Health – If you don’t go too deep into this niche then as a general health blog, there’s plenty of easy topic ideas available that can be used to write articles. Nutrition, healthy living and eating, maintaining a healthy lifestyle etc. are all easy topics to cover and has plenty of evergreen titles can be tapped.

13. Tech – With the rise of technology, some gadget or the other keeps popping up. These are excellent ideas to write reviews and once your blog is large enough, you will get a lot of items sent to you for making reviews.

14. Gaming – Playing video games on your computer and then writing about them in your blog sounds like the exact dream job that everyone wanted to do. However, do note that it is a lot of work as it is always difficult to keep looking for games that are compatible with your system and then play it enough so that you can write a good review about it.

15. Cars – With cars as your blogging topic, you will never run out of ideas as every now and them a new version or a model comes out with whole different features worth a blog post.

16. Solar Power – The olden times fuel, known as the fossil fuel is depleting fast. The trend towards free and clean energy is growing everyday and solar is at the very center of it. It is one of the cheapest ways to get access to alternate energy.

17. Self Improvement – Everyone wants to improve themselves. Pretty much no one is happy the way they are. From getting up in the morning, to the way they are living their day-to-day lives, everything needs a fix and thus a dedicated blog on self improvement can help many people.

18. Yoga – The New Year time is a great time to start a Yoga blog. From meditation to performing simple yoga asana, everything can be covered in blog posts and if you intend to make a series then this is a great niche to keep posting a flow of articles. There are no ends to what niches you can find for blogging. There are always sub-niches within a niche that can be tapped for more specific audience. One can go as deep as one wants to, or write on topics which are broad and covers a larger audience.

Top 11 Must Have WordPress Plugins for a Successful Blog

In a wordpress blogging system, plugins are a way to add functionalities and design elements to your blog.

A basic wordpress blog has just enough features and designs to do the basic work. It does not have social sharing options, does not track traffic, and does not even have an option to include advertisements and banners. However, it still has enough options to get started and write something and publish it.

Once you have your blog up and running, it is time to install some of the important wordpress plugins to include the advance functionalities that a blog needs.

Here’s the top wordpress plugins to install on your blog:

1. Akismet – The comments section of a blog is where spammers are most active. If you don’t have any spam fighting plugin, soon there will be so much of spam that finding genuine comments will be almost impossible. To fight this ocean of spam, plugins like Akismet is very helpful. It will sort all the spam comments in the spam folder from where you can bulk delete them or they gets auto-deleted with in a months time.

This plugin comes auto-installed with a wordpress installation. Even if you un-install it, it will get automatically re-installed after wordpress is updated. You can’t get rid of Akismet but it won’t work as long as you don’t activate it.

2. Yoast SEO – For blogging SEO, there’s many alternatives to Yoast. However, this plugin has all the necessary features to make sure your blog posts are totally optimized.

As a blogger and an SEO expert, you already know the basic SEO. The on-page SEO requirements are simple and if you write carefully you can easily write SEO optimized posts without the need of any plugin. Just to make sure that you don’t miss out on any SEO advantage, plugins such as Yoast comes in as a helpful reminder to what perfections you need in your content to make it more search engine friendly.

3. Re-direction – Many times we make changes in posts, edit them or sometimes even delete them. There’s images that gets deleted, or category and tags that are removed. As we keep blogging, over the years, several links get broken.

Sometimes these broken links are ignored or wordpress itself at times, re-direct updated links to blog posts. To make sure that you don’t have links that takes you nowhere, is to make sure that such links are re-directed.

4. Optin Monster – Exit intent popups or basically any popup that asks for an email id and promises goodies in return for the subscription works really well in catching email leads.

This plugin, optin-monster is perhaps the best of the lot when it comes to catching email leads. The plugin is easy to configure and once it is activated, works smoothly and keep increasing the number of email subscribers.

5. Pretty Links – Most affiliate link are bad and ugly. The reason behind their ugly length is the various tracking parameters that are required for getting traffic insights. You can’t make these affiliate links look good directly. The easiest way to make these links look friendly is by using a plugin like pretty links.

Do Note that a lot of people do not like to signup from other people’s affiliate links. But if the link does not looks like an affiliate link, rather looks like a helpful outgoing link, a lot of people will click on it and buy stuff from the link.

6. Sucuri – WordPress blogs are often hacked by various hackers who uploads these codes and javascript which targets normal people on the internet. When search engines come to know about a site that is hacked, they quickly drop them from the SERPs. It is important to make sure that your blog is safe and secure and such plugins helps you to secure your blog.

7. Broken links checker – It is normal for a blog which is running for years, to have some links that goes nowhere. Changes happen and it is difficult to keep everything in track. In times like these, plugins like broken links checker automatically checks the whole blog for broken links and fix them.

8. Social share plugin – People are always lazy to take actions on their own. Even if your content is helpful and your visitor is genuinely interested in sharing your content, they still might not take the action of sharing your content unless you have a social sharing button ready for instant push.

There’s many plugins that does social share, some even have more features link click-to-tweet etc. or Pinterest sharing buttons on images. All these features are very helpful for your traffic because they let your visitors take social sharing action with minimum effort on their part.

9. Image optimization plugin – When it comes to lowering down the page weight, images are the ones that need to be taken care of first. Sure there are JavaScript that are bulky and they should be removed as well, but images are heavy and they are plenty.

Fortunately, there’s an easy way to optimize all the images that you had ever uploaded on your blog. All you need to do is to install an image optimization plugin and run it. It will automatically make your images compressed and your blog will be loading faster instantly.

Plugins

10. Caching plugin – A wordpress system has many scripts that keep the system running. These scripts are often bulky that kills the page loading times. To make your site faster, you need to keep a plugin that optimize these scripts and deliver your content faster.

11. Comments Captcha – While Akismet works all right in sorting the spam comments from the good ones, but even after that, some good comments end up on the spam folders and some spam comments escape it. The best way to make sure that no spam bot can post a comment is to add a captcha plugin to your blog.

The auto-bots usually never makes it out of the captcha and most spammers never bother with the captcha anyway. Thus, having a plugin like this helps to keep spammers way. WordPress is an open source platform where many programmers from around the world comes together to make wordpress a better place for bloggers. Any CMS like wordpress relies on plugins for adding more features to the system. Programmers always keep looking for ideas so that they can tap into a wordpress niche that does not have a plugin. This is one of those reasons why you might find a plugin on every topic that comes across your mind.

Top 13 Blogging Tools to use in 2023

Moving towards the New Year 2023, it is important that bloggers get ready for the fierce competition that awaits them as more and more digital marketers and bloggers enters the blogging space every year.

To make the blogging process easy and staying competitive in this dynamic blogging ecosystem, it is important to start using some of the blogging tools for various blogging related activities.

When it comes to choosing blogging tools, from plugins to designs, there’s plenty of alternatives in every niche and purpose. While this provides a lot of choices for bloggers, it also creates a state of confusion where it is hard to choose the correct tools for optimal use.

Here, we are going to discuss 13 Blogging Tools and their uses.

1. Canva – From making YouTube thumbnails, to front image is a blog post, from creating compatible images for social sites like Pinterest to designing quotes, logos and banners, Canva can do it all.

For image designing, if there is one tool that can do it all, it has got to be Canva. If you are using it then there’s no reason to look for an alternative. With more image and feature choices, comes the Canva pro option. If you want to spend a few dollars every month, then opt for Canva Pro to get more features and less restrictions.

2. Trello –For collaboration with your team or even with other bloggers, Trello is a one stop solution. One can easily make boards and then add a task to a board and let other members of your team add comments and feedback on the tasks or move them to the working or the completed queue. This can also be used to run marketing campaigns where other members can crowd source their inputs into relevant boards.

3. Grammarly – This tool is more than just a grammar checker. When you write something, it keeps suggesting if the tool is running in the background and helps you to write better. It will give you word suggestions depending on what you are writing so that your final content looks good.

4. Mailerlite – For email marketing you need a tool where you can store the emails and then run campaigns and send those email newsletters to your subscribers. For this you need a tool like Mailerlite which can help you to reach the inboxes of your newsletter subscribers.

Even for a new blogger with very low subscribers, it is important to setup an auto-responder early on so that even the first few subscribers are take well care off.

5. Yoast SEO – When you write a blog post, there’s several aspects of SEO that you can often ignore. One can’t be too calculative while writing and ultimately it is best to write freely rather than thinking too much about the keywords. It is best to have a tool like Yoast to take care of your keywords when you have finished writing.

6. UberSuggest – Most bloggers have already used the Google suggest feature to get keyword and title ideas. Uber Suggest takes this to a whole new level. There’s always more ideas and niches that can be tapped into. Not all research can be carried out from imagination alone; one needs to use the available tools to streamline the blogging process.

7. Akismet – Fighting spam comments has been an endless war that the bloggers have to keep fighting. One cannot get rid of the commenting system as a whole because it is the basis of blog communities and this is where all the networking happens. So one needs to keep the comments and keep fighting spam all the time. In such a case, a plugin like Akismet helps to remove the spam comments while keeping the good ones safe.

8. Optin Monster – We discussed email marketing earlier where we stored the email ids and send them newsletters and auto-responders. But now we are discussing a tool which will help us collect email ids of our visitors. This is where tools like Optin Monster comes into play as they have really good popup and exit intent softwares that can catch email ids of blog visitors.

9. Google Trends – Among many tools that Google have provided bloggers, trends is one of the best when it comes to finding keyword ideas that are trending. That way one can explore and brain storm content ideas that will start getting more traffic from the moment it goes live.

10. Quora – Quora is hardly a tool, it qualifies to become a social network where people discuss various questions and their answers. However, for bloggers the use of Quora is endless. There’s so many questions that are waiting for an answer and if such a question falls under your niche or your expertise, then you can easily answer it and write a whole blog post on that topic and link to your answer.

11. Google Analytics – When it comes to tracking and analytics, GA is your best option. All you have to do is to add their code on the sitewide footer and they will start tracking your entire website and report all types of traffic activities that happens on your site. You can easily check your blog visitors and know exactly how you are acquiring your audience and how much they are loyal to you.

12. Google Docs – If you are searching for a way to share or collaborate as a team for various content requirements like docs or excel sheets then feel free to try the online and free version of the Google Docs. For using these softwares you don’t need to install anything. Simply open Google Docs and start typing along with your team members.

13. OpenSiteExplorer – For checking various metrics or links, opensiteexplorer from Moz is a very good choice. The free version has some limits but it can still show you how many incoming links you have and from which domains. For getting more out of this tool, one needs to buy a paid version of it.

There’s no end of alternatives and choices when it comes to blogging tool, which is why it is important to find a tool that fits your requirements best and then stick to it. In time, if the tool has served you well then look for the pricing and buy a paid version of it. Every tool mentioned on the list has a free version so that one can use it even if they don’t have a budget but to truly take advantage of these tools, one needs to spend a bit of money and get a premium version of these tools to unlock the more important features.