If your homepage simply features a list of your latest blog posts, you’re making a big mistake.

It’s important to get your homepage right because it’s going to be one of the most viewed pages on your blog, but people don’t view it in the way that you’d think.

Who Visits the Homepage?

Before you decide what to put on your homepage, you need to understand who views your homepage and how they got there.

First-Time Visitors

You likely think that your homepage is the first page of your website that somebody sees. That’s probably not the case.

The only way your homepage will be the first viewed page is if another site links to your homepage, if someone tells somebody to go to www., or if you have a well-known brand.

On my blog, 14clicks, only 3.9% of my traffic starts on the homepage.

Second-Page Clickers

What’s more likely is that someone will first see a blog post, then click over to see the homepage. This person has already interacted with your site and they’re curious enough to click over to the homepage.

On 14clicks, the homepage accounts for 28.1% of the second-page traffic, which is 3.6 times more than any other page.

Returning Visitors

If someone found your site once, liked it, and wants to go back to it, they’ll do one of two things.

One, they’ll go directly to the domain. Two, they’ll search for the name of your site. In either case, returning visitors will probably start on the homepage.

On 14clicks, 58% of the homepage traffic comes from people typing in the domain directly or from Google (with some variation of “14 clicks” being 5 of the 6 most popular keywords).

In general, people find your site through a blog post. If they like the post, they’ll click to the homepage. If they return, they probably start on the homepage. Therefore, most people who see your homepage have already interacted with your blog and you need to adjust your content accordingly.

Your Homepage Needs to Answer Their First Question

“Why should I stick around?”

To answer that question, you need to communicate what your site is and who it’s for.

Eye-Catching and Concise Headline

The headline should be the first thing a new visitor sees. It needs to answer the question, “what are the benefits to me personally if I cruise around this blog?”

Put your headline front-and-center so it’s first thing someone sees when they visit your homepage.

Eye-Catching Image or Video

On the side of or below your headline, you need to put an eye-catching, trust-building, benefit-depicting image or video.

The purpose of this image/video is to elicit a positive emotional response while visually communicating what your site is all about. If you have a personal branding blog or a company that’s tied closely to your personality, put a photo of yourself on your homepage to build trust.

Good Example: JustCreative.com

Jacob Cass has a picture of himself and his headline featured above the fold. He also uses his headline to direct people to his portfolio and blog.

Tell People What You Want them To Do

After you tell people why they should stay on your blog, you need to tell them what to do next. Underneath your headline and image, put your call to action. This could be one of four things depending on the purpose and goal of your blog.

Request a Quote

If you have a service-based business and you want to use your blog to collect leads, the homepage is a great place to put a button or a link to your contact page.

Subscribe

If the goal of your blog is to get email subscribers, put an opt-in box at the top of your homepage.

If you’re worried that the opt-in box will annoy your existing readers, don’t be. In the same way that you tend to gloss over ads, once they’re subscribed, they’ll subconsciously scroll past it to the content.

Register or Login

If you have a membership site and your number one goal is to turn readers into users, place two buttons as your call to action: “Register” and “Login.”

Purchase Something

If you want to skip the whole email marketing step and go directly for the sale, not what I’d recommend, then you can make the homepage call to action “See Our Featured Product” or “Shop.”

Good Example: SocialTriggers.com

The sole purpose of Derek Halpern’s site is to turn readers into subscribers. So he puts opt-in boxes everywhere, including at the top of his homepage.

Add Credibility and Social Proof

Once a visitor knows how you can help them and what you want them to do, it’s up to them to make that decision. The best way to help them make that decision in your favor is to demonstrate your credibility through social proof.

Social or Subscriber Counts

People are a lot more likely to subscribe if they know that lots of other people are already subscribed.

If you have more than 1,000 subscribers, show that number directly below your call-to-action. If you don’t, you can show social proof with your number of monthly readers, Twitter followers, or Facebook fans. If none of those numbers are over 1,000, you need to get to work.

Show a Testimonial, Preferably from a Well-Known Source

Another way to build credibility is to feature someone else’s opinion of you and your blog. Ask your most active readers to give you a testimonial and tell them that you’re going to put it on the homepage.

What’s even more powerful is a testimonial from someone who everyone knows. This builds authority by association. But don’t coerce testimonials from people who wouldn’t otherwise read your site.

Press or Customer Logos

If you’ve gotten a lot of press or have worked with well-known brands, put their logos on your homepage. Again, this builds authority by association.

I’m torn whether or not you should link the logos to the articles, though. On one hand, it could build your credibility even more if people read those articles. On the other hand, you’re driving people away from your site right as they’re about to take action. What do you think? Comment below.

Good Example: Conversion-Rate-Experts.com

Ben Jesson and Dr. Karl Blanks, from Conversion Rate Experts, have worked with the largest companies in the world and their blog has been featured on a number of prestigious media outlets. They make that clear with client logos and press logos (which aren’t linked, by the way).

Regularly Updated Content and Deep-Linking for SEO

From a search engine optimization perspective, there are two important things to consider with your homepage.

One, your homepage should update at least slightly when you post new content. Google likes to see fresh content. Two, every page on your site should be two-three clicks away from the homepage to make sure it gets completely indexed.

Links to Latest Blog Posts

New content on the homepage, even if it’s just the headlines, is important for search engines, but it’s also important for your readers. When people come back to your blog, they’re expecting to easily find your latest content.

This doesn’t mean that your blog needs to be on your homepage. You can choose to use a Recent Posts plugin to display the headlines and excerpts from your latest blog posts.

Deep-Linking and Sitemap Link in the Footer

The best way to make sure that every page on your site is within three clicks of the homepage is to subtly link to your category archives and sitemap in the footer.

This also helps from a usability standpoint if people are looking for posts on particular topics.

Good Example: IncomeDiary.com

As you see, Michael showcases the latest posts on the Income Diary homepage because his goal is for you to consume as much content as possible. The more blog posts you read, the more likely you are to subscribe and buy something from him. In the footer, he links to the sitemap, category archives, a few popular posts, and author archives.

The Final Word

Blogs are different from traditional, static websites because almost everyone who sees your homepage has already seen a different part of your blog.

It’s important to adjust the content of your homepage knowing that they’re already interested in what you have to say. Whether it’s leads, subscribers, or sales, the homepage is a great place to convert people to whatever goals that you set for your blog.

How does this help you see your homepage in a new light? What are you going to do about it?

Photo by: Stuck on Customs

This week has been full of interesting news and shakeups from The Avengers having a killer opening weekend to Facebook announcing it’s App Center.

There’s a ton to learn from here, so let’s just jump right in.

Marvel’s Avengers Shatter Box Office Records

News Article In Question: Mtv.com

The highly anticipated release of The Avengers brought in an estimated $200 Million in it’s opening weekend in the U.S.

This breaks the record previously held by Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows – Part 2 which made $169.2 Million last year.

Marvel’s landmark comic book flick — which unites Captain America (Chris Evans), Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.), Thor (Chris Hemsworth), Hulk (Mark Ruffalo), Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) and Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner) against an otherworldly threat — became the fastest movie ever to reach $100 million, $150 million and $200 million at the box office. “The Avengers” also enjoyed the highest per-theater average ever for a nationwide release with $46,057 per theater.

Why This Is Important To You:

Well, if you’re a big superhero movie nerd like me, you’ll just be happy to see that the good guys win again.

The main lesson here is one of anticipation building, and successful JVing.

Since Marvel opened their own studio back in 2008 they have been building the anticipation for this movie for nearly 4 years.

The primary characters in this film have all headlined in their own successful films, and the cast is chock full of award winners and nominees. And while those movies are all good on their own merit, they’ve only acted as a smaller part of a larger strategy.

The success of this movie goes to show with the proper balance of planning and skillful execution, you can achieve great things.

Facebook Announces Opening “App Center” In A Few Weeks

Resource In Question: Information Week

According to InformationWeek.com, Facebook plans to open it’s own App store “to help make Facebook apps, Web apps, and mobile apps easier to find.”

The App Center will not only feature the likes of FarmVille, CityVille, Mafia Wars, and the thousands of other apps you want to hurt your friends for asking you to play, but also paid apps.

Facebook also mentions they will proudly feature well designed “engaging” apps on the App Center’s main page, which is something that iTunes has not offered so freely.

Why This Is Important To You: 

If you’re an app developer, this is a great time to get in on the ground floor for this new App Repository.

No Facebook apps aren’t anything new, but having the chance at being showcased in front of 900 million people worldwide is pretty promising. A good traffic driving strategy should get you there.

If you’re not an app developer, this (and other news you’ll see in a second) signals the beginning of Social Media 3.0 where new media formats become a bigger part of our online experience.

Now for me, this is just wishful thinking, but what if this is just a stepping stone to Facebook renting movies (ala Itunes). With it’s existing Skype integration, it’s possible that we could start watching movies & tv with friends without ever leaving the social network.

Google + Rolls Out “Hangouts – On Air”

Resource In Question: PC World

By now, many of us are familiar with the ever popular Google Hangouts, which let’s you chat, draw, edit docs and a number of other things all while live streaming your webcam with up to 9 other friends.

The “On Air” portion of Hangouts, allows you to broadcast that hangout to your Google+ stream, Youtube account, and embed it on your website.

“On Air” will also record and upload the hangout to your Youtube account automatically.

Why This Is Important To You:

This represents a much deeper level of engagement than previously possible on a social network.

I want to encourage you to look into how you can develop some sort of programming that can take advantage of this new technology.

If you cook, start cooking and answering questions On Air. If you’re friends with other people in your field, start a friendly public debate show On Air. If you’re in a band, get each of your members to play over webcam while streaming to your fans, then submit it to Mashable, say first ever Hangout Band Practice, and become a viral sensation.

Really, find any way you can to use this, because it truly is the future of social networking.

Facebook Introduces File Sharing

News Source In Question: Mashable

As of Thursday, File sharing is going to be rolled out across Facebook “Groups” platform.

This is likely a response to Google’s Drive roll out from two weeks ago, but it doesn’t really matter, as it has been one of the most requested features since the new groups were introduced.

Users can upload most file types up to 25MB — the same file size limit as Gmail. The exceptions: music files (sorry, old-school Napster fans) and executable (.exe) files (sorry, hackers). But e-books, comics, music videos and other small movies are fair game.

Why This Is Important To You:

Facebook groups are great for building customer loyalty. By leveraging the ability to share multiple file types, you’ll be able to offer “group exclusive” bonuses in a very easy way.

For example, you could start your own membership site within Facebook, and upload .pdf worksheets. If your community is more visually minded, you could host video files, and encourage your group members to remix the work.

Or, if you’re using groups for more work oriented type projects, you can have your group have one central location for all relevant files (instead of having to email everything constantly)

Twitter May Be Working on Email Expansion

News Article In Question: Mashable

Back in January, Twitter acquired Summify, a service that will email you top stories based on what your friends are sharing.

Yesterday, they also acquired RestEngine, a company that basically hyper segments your email lists based on Social Graph Data.

If 1+1=2 than it could be that Twitter is looking to put together a “tweets you may have missed” email platform to drive more engagement back into the site, and making itself even more valuable as a content distribution network.

Why This Is Important To You:

Online marketers have been saying for quite some time that your primary focus needs to be on email list building.

If Twitter truly is building an email platform that will highlight users best tweets, they’re going to do the hard work when it comes to getting your content in front of people who very well may have been interested, they just weren’t on at the exact hyper second you decided to tweet.

Facebook Tests “Highlight”

News Article In Question: Techcrunch

Facebook has recently started testing a feature called Highlight which will allow users, (not pages, or apps) to pay a nominal fee for “pinned” placement in the News Feed. The reason, most people only see about 12% of the total activity going on within Facebook.

This test comes as a result of trying to find more ways to monetize the platform before the company goes public.

News sources wonder if the social network is “playing with fire” with highlight as it runs a very big risk of being abused by your attention starved “friends” and unsaavy business owners.

Why This Is Important To You:

If you (or someone you know) is a part of this test group, there is the potential for “Feedjacking”.

If you’re one of the people who does get to test out this new feature, I would just like to caution you to make sure what you’re promoting is not entirely self serving, and genuinely deserves to be seen by more of your friends. Something like “ZOMG CHECK OUT MY NEW POST” probably is not going to go over well with your friends.

The Best And Worst Times To Share On Facebook, Twitter

News Article In Question: Mashable

Want your link to get the most traction on Twitter? Post it on a Monday between 1:00 p.m. and 3:00 p.m. ET.

Long story short, popular link shortner bit.ly has released a report that shares their data on the best (and worst) times to share links on the worlds most popular social networks.

Why This Is Important To You:

Do I really need to explain?

Bing’s Redesign “Declutters” Search And Puts Social Context in the Side Bar

News Article In Question: Techcrunch

Last week we reported on Bing doing a major overhaul on their search interface in response to the public dissatisfaction of Google’s heavy (and annoying) integration of Google+ into their search results.

This week, they’re starting to roll out an even cleaner, more robust search result page by displaying pure algorythmic results on the left, contextual results in the middle, and social recommendations on the right.

Bing is attempting (and doing a good job of) showing that it’s focus on user experience is more important than pushing it’s social network in your face.

If Bing is able to keep this up, it’s possible they can slowly pick at Google’s market share, and become a real contender in search. (Also, they have a rewards program for using their search engine, which is pretty cool)

Why This Is Important To You:

Two reasons:

Reason 1: Microsoft is really capitalizing on Google’s falters, and if more people start switching to Bing as their default search engine (I have) you can have an early mover advantage by re-optimizing for Bing (pure crazy talk I know)

While there are no definitive guides out there yet, many of the factors that seem to place more focus in a round about way the way a page might be viewed by users.

Reason 2: Microsoft invests in Facebook. Facebook already has some Bing integration. Facebook has been working on a social search engine for at least two months. *ahem* and the team is being lead by a former Google engineer…

If Bing’s redesign a part of a much larger master stroke that the public isn’t aware of yet, we’re about to witness the rise of semantic search, which means the more “likable” your content is, the better off you’re going to be.

Google Quietly Launches Google Offers in U.S

News Article In Question: Google Blog

Android Users in the U.S will now be able to enjoy Groupon-esque offers integrated directly into Google Maps on their phones.

Some Google Offers can be purchased and saved for later while others are immediately available for free. With free Google Offers, press “Use now” to redeem instantly or “Save for later” for future use. You can also opt-in to receive notifications in the app when there are offers near you.

Why This Is Important To You:

If you’re a business owner in a brick and mortar location, or you have a client that is, you will want to sign up for this immediately.

This tech mash up is the perfect intersection of user intent and incentive. Where most people are using Google Maps to find a place like a local shop, or restaurant, giving them further incentive to want to check you out is perfect for instant loyalty.

In our own businesses, we should always be looking for ways to engineer a little pleasant surprise for our would be customers.

How Eli Broad Works 24/7 And Still Gets 8 Hours of Sleep Every Night

News Article In Question: Fast Company

Eli Broad, a philanthropist and founder of Kaufman and Broad, a Fortune 500 home building company, shares his thoughts on how he’s been able to prioritize his time and enjoy life as a business and family man.

Thinking that everything is important, that every request from other people has to be answered with a yes, will make 24 hours seem inadequate. In fact, there are very few things that you truly have to do. This category should include only the things that make you run–the things you couldn’t live or work without. Nothing else comes close to being crucial.

Why This Is Important To You:

If you’re like me (who’s finishing this article up at 4:58 am), time is always eluding you. Even putting in 14-16-18 hour days sometimes isn’t enough.

This is not a good way to live, and while the pursuit of making money online is cool, so is working only on the important things that move you towards your goals, and ultimately, being able to spend time doing what it is that you love (like family).

This wraps up this week’s internet news.

Was there a story that stood out to you this week? Something here you’d like to discuss further?

Leave your thoughts in the comments below!

Have a great weekend.

When you’re up on current events, you can capitalize on trends, and tie your topic in to some of the major events that are going on in the world around you.

As such, we here at Income Diary have decided to do a weekly “internet news” wrap up so you can keep up with current events in the online world.

What you’ll find below are the top 10 headlines in online news from this past week, and if applicable, a lesson that can be tied into your own business.

This is something very new for us, and we want it to be extremely valuable for you, so please be sure to give us your feedback and let us know if this is something you’d like us to continue doing!

Films as Startups: How Indie Producers Build Buzz

News Article In Question: Mashable.com

More and more indie filmmakers are taking the concept of Minimum Viable Product, and applying it to their films.

Gone are the days of shopping a script around Hollywood waiting to get the Green Light.

Instead, filmmakers will create bite-sized “teasers” to showcase the film’s premise, rally an audience through social media channels, then either seek crowd funding, or shop the film (& audience) to major backers.

While not mentioned in the article, this is exactly how Mortal Kombat Rebirth turned into the series Mortal Kombat Legacy (Nsfw)

Why This Is Important To You:

What this article really emphasizes is that you no longer need “permission” to create.

It also highlights the importance of having an audience. Traditionally, a movie budget is a huge risk, requiring a large upfront investment for production and marketing without guarentee anyone will enjoy the film.

However, when you build an audience first using a smaller budget/production, you can better estimate costs for the full feature, and discover if the project as a whole is viable.

Google Brings More Real-Time Coverage, Google+ Comments To Google News

News Article In Question: Techcrunch.com

Google has expanded real-time coverage to show what people in your circles, journalists, and the subjects of the stories have to say about the event.

As of right now, these updates are only available to the U.S version of Google News.

Why This Is Important To You:

For our U.S readers, this means Google News is making itself extremely relevant as a research source for current events that can be tied into your blog.

The amount of time you’ll have to spend “digging” for various viewpoints surrounding a topic will be reduced significantly. You’ll can also add more context to your stories by incorporating the different viewpoints surrounding the topic.

Kickstarter Project Turns the Ipad into Apple’s first Touch Screen Laptop

News Article In Question: Fastcompany.com

Short version – Brydge turns your ipad into a touchscreen laptop.

Long version – The founders of Brydge saw a very large gap in the “Ipad keyboard” space stating:

“…when it comes to the iPad it felt like every keyboard or case is made from cheap materials, didn’t offer any range of iPad positioning or completely covered the entire iPad. Brydge was designed to complement the iPad, to improve productivity and enjoyment of the device…

Because it’s made of aluminum, the costs to manufacture Brydge are high–we turned to Kickstarter to raise the necessary capital to do manufacturing run. We also wanted to test the market and see if there was room for a high-quality aluminum keyboard.”

They raised over $400,000 in seed money by crowdfunding through Kickstarter.

Why This Is Important To You:

This is another example of people finding a gap, testing their idea, building a group of supporters and getting funded.

Something worth noting however is that their promotional video was extremely well produced, and positioned the product perfectly. This is very important because it shows their potential investors they take their idea seriously, not just pitching a concept from a grainy webcam.

Google Opens Startup Incubator in London

News Article In Question: Google’s Blog

The Internet accounts for 8% of the U.K’s Economy, which is why this partnership between Google, Central Working, Tech Hub, Seedcamp and Springboard, makes perfect sense.

Campus’ 7 story facility has been designed to nurture the startup community in London.

It will provide startups with workspace in an energizing environment and will also host daily events for and with the community. We will run a regular speaker series, alongside lectures and programing, as well as provide mentorship and training from local Google teams.

The co-working space will also feature free wifi and a Google cafe.

Why This Is Important To You:

If you’re in London, you’ll want to get in on this while it’s still early, I can only imagine the sort of relationships that will be formed in a Google owned co-working space.

If you’re not in London however, and you’re still working from home, you should really look to see what’s available for co-working spaces around you.

As someone who has done the “working from home” to “working at the office” transition, I can honestly tell you, being around other motivated business owners every single day helps keep you motivated, and creates valuable connections that you just can’t get when you’re working from home.

Bing Strips Down Search Results, Make’s Google Look “Overloaded”

News Article In Question: Techcrunch

If you can’t beat your competition with technology, you surly can beat them on usability.

At least that’s the philosophy behind Bing’s new redesign, which takes a much more minimalist and streamlined approach.

With Google’s rollout of “Search Plus Your World” and heavy focus of Google+ integration, Google Search feels, dare I say it Cluttered.

Here’s a 30,000 foot view of both engines showing the same search for Make Money Online.

While this particular search doesn’t show all of the different “integrated” properties like video, posts from your friends, images, etc… You can still see a very distinct difference between the two search results.

With many people complaining about the aesthetic of Google’s Search, a redesign was a very smart move on Bing’s part. With a cleaner interface and integration with people’s preferred social network, this could be the beginning of something very good for Bing.

Why This Is Important To You:

You might not be able to compete on the exact same terms, but if you’re doing your due diligence with your competitive analysis, you can improve where they are weak, and chip away at their customer base.

Also, timing is everything.

Facebook Let’s You Share Your Organs

News Article In Question: Facebook’s Blog

With the world’s largest social network pushing 1 billion users, they’ve decided to leverage their massive reach for social good.

Today, more than 114,000 people in the United States, and millions more around the globe, are waiting for the heart, kidney or liver transplant that will save their lives. Many of those people – an average of 18 people per day – will die waiting, because there simply aren’t enough organ donors to meet the need. Medical experts believe that broader awareness about organ donation could go a long way toward solving this crisis.

Not only do they allow you to share your Organ Donation status, but for U.S users, you can also Register to Become an Organ Donor right in the platform.

Why This Is Important To You:

Aside from the obvious (if you’re in need of an organ), participating in – or creating your own – social good campaigns gives you a non “self-serving” cause to champion.

Pinstagram! How Two Friends Merged Pinterest and Instagram in Two Days

News Article In Question: Mashable.com

Yes, you read that right… Pinstagram. 

For 2012 Doomsday naysayers, this surely has to be a sign, right?

All kidding aside though, Pinstagram takes everything you love about taking photos with Instagram and mashes up the “waterfall layout” of Pinterest to create a visually appealing design for the desktop.

Why This Is Important To You: 

This again is another example of a creation that came about from a gap in the market.

Pek Pongpaet and Brandon Leonardo, Pinstagram’s creators, were displeased with the lack of a desktop interface for Instagram, and thought there to be a real need. So far, their users agree.

Also, this is a great demonstration of a Mashup – using two popular platforms and leveraging other’s success, to create their own fame.

What “platforms” (ideas or technology) could you Mashup?

Google Pledges $200 Million to Market Premium YouTube Channels

News Article In Question: Mashable.com

In case you missed it, back in October Google & Youtube invested $100 Million Dollars (insert Dr. Evil Laugh Here) to create a whole slew of Premium Content Channels.

These channels include premium content from Youtube celebrities like MysteryGuitarMan and real celebrities like Ashton Kutcher, Tony Hawk, Shaq, and plenty others. Branded channels like Redbull, Slate, The Onion, are only among the few in this ever growing lineup.

Now that you’re caught up…

Google just pledged another $200 Million Dollars to market said premium channels.

Marketing will take place across Google’s Display Network, Youtube, and other branded channels. The goal is to better monetize Youtube, and have more enticing content for both users and Advertisers.

Why This Is Important To You: 

As more people are ditching their cable packages, and television networks are losing their advertising dollars, this could mark the beginning of a New Television.

While I could write 2,000 words on that subject alone, what’s really important here is many of the “premium” channels in this new lineup are run by YouTube ”partners”, all of whom started their channel with 0 views and subscribers.

This just goes to show when you focus on quality and building an audience who enjoys your work, you can be a part of something much bigger than you ever imagined.

Google Drive Launches… Google offer’s cloud storage across multiple properties

News Article In Question: Google Blog

Technically last week’s news, but hey, it’s still important.

Google Drive brings together many Google services—documents, spreadsheets, images and more—all in one place so you can easily create, collaborate, and share in real-time.

This description only scratches the surface of what the G-Drive is capable of. For starters, images that are saved in Google Drive can be brought up instantly in Google+. It also saves everything you’re working on automatically, and revisions can be tracked as far back as 30 days. It can also view up to 30 different file types right in the browser, even if you don’t have the original software. For a full list of features, Click Here

Also, storage with Google Drive is less expensive than most other cloud solutions.

Why This Is Important To You:

Location is increasingly less of a restraint when it comes to collaborative projects.

Using the cloud, you can work with anyone in the world without needing to send attachements, revisions, and the like back and fourth, so you can focus on what matters most, your productivity.

Facebook Announces IPO Price at Valuation of $96 Billion

News Article In Question: Business Week

We anticipate that the initial public offering price will be between $28.00 and $35.00 per share.”

Facebook being valued at $96 billion dollars makes the social network the most valuable U.S Internet Company at the time of IPO of all time.

The previous record, held by Google, was valued at $23 Billion when it went public.

Facebook being worth $96 Billion at the time of it’s IPO is significant, because according to this Google is currently worth 158.06B.

Google is 14 years old – Facebook is 8.

Why This Is Important To You:

The Social Network is going public with only a 62 billion dollar gap between it and it’s number one competitor.

This means 3 things.

1. “Social” and “The human algorithm” very clearly has a ton of value. We no longer find the news, the news finds us.
2. Timing is everything. Mark Zuckerberg said “no” to going public for a number of years. Knowing when the right time to execute is critical for the long term health of your business.
3. If you’re a person who likes investing, you should probably get your hands on Facebook stock now while it’s between $28 and $35. Google now trades at over $600/share just to put it in perspective

This wraps up this week’s internet news.

Because this is something new that we’re doing, let us know if you liked the format. Did you like the “Why this is important?” We want to make this the best blog for you as possible, so your feedback on new features like this is very welcomed.

Whether you’re an e-commerce seller, a software vendor, an info-product peddler or anything in between, you need an email list.

Beyond that, you need to send really stellar emails if you expect people to buy. While you may have become a better blogger, and have been brushing up on your landing page resources, these are further up the marketing funnel.

Email digs a little deeper, because it is your chance to get personal.

Email is the gateway to sales.

Master the email, and the sales process becomes so much easier.

Do it wrong, and risk annoying your prospects and customers and possibly turn them off from buying from you altogether.

In the vein of our new Friday tradition, here are 29 resources on email marketing.

These deal with high-level subjects like etiquette, to the nitty gritty details like list segmentation (which is so important there are 8 articles on it).

You’ll also learn how to earn more clicks, write stronger subject lines, and determine the frequency at which you should click “send” to your list. As always, I’d like to invite you to bookmark this page for easy reference.

5 Cardinal Rules Of Email Etiquette

When you send an email to your list, remember: it’s going to one person.

Even if your list contains 10,000 people, the person receiving it does not care about the 9,999 others. Keeping that in mind, here are the 5 cardinal rules of email marketing.

Develop a Better Email Marketing Strategy

Anyone can start a newsletter or create an auto-responder series, but it takes a real strategy. A real strategy doesn’t just define outcomes, it also accounts for the steps taken to get there.

This article from emailmonday.com gives you 5 things to help get your thinking straight when it comes to strategically planning  your email marketing. It’s a simple and perfect place to start.

5 Best Practices for Email Marketing in 2012

Yes, “social media” might get all of the buzz.

But let me ask you this… Which is busier? Twitter, or your Inbox?

Surveys say more than 93% of online consumers are “subscribers.”

Social Media doesn’t have nearly the same adoption rate. If you want to stand out, you need to do it in the inbox. Here’s 5 guidelines to follow in 2012.

How SEO, Social Media, And Email Marketing Work Together

This is one from our very own Nick Tart on his blog 14clicks.com.

His post does an excellent job at getting you to think critically about the calls to action on your content.

He does a very good job at explaining the different traffic cycles of Search, Social Media, and how you can get email to play into it.

I certainly learned a few new things from this article, and will be considering many of these concepts as I redesign my website.

Email Plus Facebook Marketing: Fresh ideas from FreshPair

This interview between Daniel Burstein of Marketing Sherpa and Lindsay Masse of Freshpair.com is nothing short of insightful.

In this interview, they discuss how Freshpair.com uses their Facebook presence to learn more about their customers and improve their email campaigns.

What I found particularly interesting is their hint at how followers who are engaged on Facebook are also much much more likely to read their emails and take advantage of the offers. Click Here to Read the Interview

How to Get More Subscribers For Your Email List

Ok, so now that we’ve talked about best practices, and how email ties into your over all strategy…

Let’s get some people on your list.

This article courtesy of Copyblogger is a primer to getting inside your prospective subscribers’ heads in order to think around what may be preventing them from handing over their email address.

Things like social proof, clear calls to action, and overcoming objections are covered.

To get into their in-box, you first have to get into their head

21 Awesome Ideas to Grow Your Email List

This is what it says it is. Every single one of these ideas are fantastic. Read them here.

The point of that post was two-fold. One, to interact with you on an individual level. Two, to better understand how I can help you with your website right now.

All of your struggles seem to fall into one of six categories: setting up your website, creating content, getting traffic, converting traffic, making money, or remaining true to foundations of internet success.

With that, here are 33 common online struggles and my best advice for handling each.

Setting up Your Website

Most of you seemed to have your sites set up, self-hosted, and otherwise running properly, which is great. There are still a few common problems that I saw.

1. Who is this site for and why does it exist?

If the homepage doesn’t answer this question immediately, people are likely to leave.  Communicate this with your logo, tagline, header area, or featured area.

Michael answers these two questions with his 5-word tagline, “How Pros Make Money Online.”

2. Creating a Custom Blog Design

If you haven’t at least upgraded to a premium theme, I would start there. Spend $50-$100 and your site will look drastically better. Michael started Income Diary with a $70 WooThemes template. Within a few months, he paid someone to update it.

Custom blog designs start at $1,000 and run up to $100,000 or more.

3. Cleaning Up the Blog Design

If you have a logo or an opt-in box, make sure it matches the colors in the design. If you include post images, make sure they’re all exactly the same size (here it’s 345 pixels by 180 pixels). If you start adding widgets to the sidebar/footer, make sure you can answer the question, “how does this improve the site for my readers?”

Simply using colors that match is a great start. You can find matching color schemes with ColorSchemeGenerator.com.

 4. Blog Excerpts vs. Full Articles

All major news sites and big-time blogs, with the exception of a few, feature post excerpts on the homepage. They do this to make their content more consumable and to help people find what they’re looking for. Plus, it makes the scroll bar smaller.

To enable homepage post excerpts within WordPress, put the Read More tag at the end of your excerpt.

Some premium themes automatically create and show post excerpts on your blog page.

5. Choosing from a Sea of Plugins

Before you start adding every five-star plugin that might improve your site, you need to understand that plugins are little pieces of software. Once you install more than 5-10 of them, there’s a good chance that they’ll conflict with one another, which could crash your site.

The only plugins that are absolutely necessary are Akismet, Google XML Sitemaps, Contact Form 7 (free) or Gravity Forms (premium), and WordPress SEO by Yoast (unless your theme has SEO options built-in).

Creating Content

After getting your site set up, the next step is writing content. All of us can improve on this.

6. Writing Well

Writing is like painting. Anyone can pick up a paintbrush and make a few strokes, but it’s immediately obvious when you can’t do it well.

Simply writing content without spelling or grammar mistakes doesn’t make it good.

If you don’t have a command of the English language, you have three options: become a better at writing in English, hire a writer, or write in your native language. Even those of us who speak primarily English need to work on this, a lot.

7. Creating Exceptional Content

Exceptional content talks about things that people are actually interested in. It educates and entertains. Most importantly, it uniquely solves a problem.

If you tell me that your content is exceptional, yet you’re not seeing the results, your content isn’t exceptional.

8. Crafting Headlines

The headline is the most important part of your post. If it’s bad, no one will notice it, click it, or read it.

To write better headlines, make sure they are keyword-focused, benefit-driven, and power-word ridden. In the eight hours I spent on your sites, I saw less than a handful of good headlines.

9. Writing Audience-Focused Content

People expect blogs to be flooded with useful information that benefits the audience more than it documents the blogger’s life.

If you want to build an audience, focus on the audience.

10. Finding Motivation to Write Consistently

When you put a lot of work into something and don’t experience results right away, it’s demoralizing. You question why you’re doing all of this if no one is paying attention.

Two things. One, you’re definitely doing something wrong and you just need to figure out how to fix it. Two, this is the internet’s way of filtering the good from the bad. If it was easy, everyone would do it.

The people who find success online, without exception, dedicate years to figuring out the internet before they finally crack the formula.

11. Writing with a Busy Schedule

I’ll admit I haven’t found a good solution for this either. The posts I write here take 6-8 hours. If you have a full-time job, an attention-hungry kid, and a literally hungry family, I know it’s hard to find the time to write even once a week.

You have three options. One, write higher quality, less often. Two, find (probably hire) someone to create content for you. Three, find a way to accept and filter user-generated content.

12. User-Generated Content

If you can figure out how to accept user-generated content and maintain a high-level of quality, you’re golden.

Again, two things. One, tell your users exactly what you want them to submit. Two, make the submission process as smooth as possible.

If you use Gravity Forms, you can create a form that saves their submission as a draft in your “Posts” section of WordPress.

Getting Traffic

Getting traffic was the most common struggle online. Over half of you mentioned that you wanted more traffic.

13. Ranking for the Right Keywords

If you want your site to rank for the right keywords, you need to create exceptional content for that keyword. Either that, or you’re going to be paying for traffic.

14. Building Backlinks

I’ve been running blogs since 2008 and I’ve never implemented a formal link-building campaign. Yet, between my two largest sites, I get 18,500 search visits per month which accounts for 56% of my traffic.

Backlinks are important, but not as important as creating exceptional content. Links come naturally.

I think the larger problem is that people would rather focus on building backlinks than creating exceptional content.

15. Optimizing Blog Posts

None of you mentioned that you struggle with optimizing blog posts, but I saw that this was an underlying problem to why you’re not getting traffic.

To help you with that, here are 10 SEO Blog Post Publishing Steps that Most Bloggers Forget and 10 Blog Post Marketing Steps to Take Immediately After You Publish.

16. Encouraging People to Share Your Content

If you’re not creating content worth sharing, people aren’t going to share it.

Again, it all comes back to creating exceptional content. If you’re doing that, they’ll find a way to share it.

17. Boosting Page Views by Keeping People on Your Site

To boost engagement, get people to consume as much of your content as possible. If I read seven blog posts on any one site, then I’ll probably become a regular reader.

To increase the likelihood of somebody staying on your site, add a Related Posts area to your blog post footer. For this, I use the Similar Posts plugin.

Converting Traffic

Once you get people to your site, focus on encouraging them to do something. It could be to subscribe, to buy, or even just to comment.

18. Creating an Opt-In Bonus

To create your opt-in bonus, the first step is figuring out what readers want. If they have a specific set of problems that you can help them with, write an ebook, create a video series, or set up an auto-responder.

The software-as-a-service equivalent is a free trial. Very few sites find success without first giving something away for free.

19. Getting More Email Subscribers

The first step in getting more email subscribers is to give them a great reason to subscribe, oftentimes with an opt-in bonus.

Once you have a compelling reason for getting someone to subscribe, then it’s as simple as constantly reminding them to do so in a way that communicates the benefit of subscribing.

20. Positioning Your Opt-Ins

The most popular places to put opt-ins are in the header, at the top of the sidebar, at the bottom of the post, and in the footer. Of course, Popup Domination works so well because it makes the opt-in front-and-center.

One location that IncomeDiary.com used to utilize and is beginning to pick up steam on other sites is above the content and sidebars on the homepage.

21. Designing Your Opt-Ins

Using the Aweber/MailChimp-generated opt-in templates is a good start, but they don’t fit in with the rest of your design. It looks sloppy and makes people think that your bonus/newsletter is subpar.

If you know HTML and CSS, you can strip out the auto-generated styling and style them however you want. Explaining this in more detail is outside the scope of this article, but if you need help, drop a comment and I’ll see what I can do.

22. Building a Community

Building a community is a process that starts with earning one reader at a time. Get someone to read one post. Then another, and another, and another. They’ll subscribe, open your emails, leave comments, and share your stuff.

Then someone else will come along and the two of them will start recognizing each other in the comments. Then another will come, and another, and another.

But it starts with one reader reading one post and thinking, “That was worth my time. What else is here?”

Making Money

If you’re doing everything right up to this point, it’s time to cash in, but in a way that doesn’t detract from the work you’ve already done.

23. Ethics of Making Money Online

It’s not wrong to start forming a business around helping people with their problems. That’s what businesses do.

If you’re not making money nor independently wealthy, then the only way your blog can be sustainable is if you start selling things to your audience.

I understand the hesitancy to start making money online because it feels like you’re exploiting the very people that you’re trying to help. The best way to overcome this hesitancy is to only sell them things that they need.

The more niche your audience, the more easily you’ll be able to recommend products and show ads that’ll fit their needs.

24. Making Ads More Relevant

Click-through rates depend on the relevancy of the ads.

If you have a news-based or humor-based site that appeals to everyone, it’s going to be difficult to serve them relevant ads. If you focus on building an audience of a specific type of person, you won’t get as much traffic, but advertisers will pay more for that traffic because it’s targeted.

25. Positioning Ads to Increase Clicks

I’m not a fan of trying to trick people into clicking your ads. It’s a short-term game that’s not worth playing.

But if your ads are relevant enough to actually help people, then put them in the same places you would put your opt-ins (header, top sidebar, bottom post, footer).

26. Focusing on Affiliate Sales

Quick rule: Don’t recommend something that you haven’t used and benefited from using yourself.

Let’s say that you’re building an audience of people like you. If a product helps you, it’ll help them. If it has an affiliate program, sign up and recommend it. You can create full-scale reviews or simply drop it into your posts and emails when it’s relevant.

Recommend a mix of products with and without affiliate programs. That’ll show people that you’re there to help, not just to make a buck.

27. Coming up with Product Ideas

Ask your audience what they want.

Organize information into an ebook. Develop software that helps you and package it to help them. Launch a premium course to help them individually.

The neat thing about building an audience first is that they’ll tell you what they want and you have a platform to sell it.

28. Sales Page Strategy

The rules here are constantly being rewritten.

If you create something that people need and you effectively communicate the reasons why they need it, they will buy it. If they don’t buy it, you made a mistake on one of those first two things.

Foundations of Success Online

In terms of building a website, getting traffic, converting traffic, and making money, success is simply a matter of doing the right things in the right order. It’s easy once you know how to do it.

The more challenging part is getting the fundamentals right. If you don’t do these five things, you will struggle at every other level.

29. Help People Solve Problems

If your website doesn’t help specific people solve specific problems, it’s not going to get the attention that it deserves. And even if it does, it’s going to be difficult to sell things to those people.

30. Be Unique in a Crowded Internet

Most sites are average.

If you want to stick out, be different. If you want to be remarkable, be memorable. If you want to make waves, create something that you’re proud to show to your real-life friends.

Too many of us have template-y designs, generic logos, auto-generated opt-ins, and regurgitated content.

Be unique.

31. Get Past the Desire for Anonymity

I know that many of you choose to be anonymous because the internet makes that possible. Maybe it lets you be more honest with your advice. Or maybe you justify it with, “this site isn’t about me.”

But it’s like walking into a sales meeting with a mask on. Sure, it’ll be interesting for a few minutes, but if you never take the mask off, they’re going to walk out.

People buy from people they know, like, and trust.

32. Avoid Paralysis from the Pursuit for Perfection

One month on the design, two on the logo, a few months of market research, and many, many months crafting an amazing opt-in bonus. Now, just a few weeks to write the first five blog posts and bam! Site’s live.

Nobody comes.

I know, the gradient in the nav menu is all wrong. Just a few weeks to fix that. Might as well re-work the footer too. Another month goes by.

Nobody comes.

Maybe something’s wrong with my color scheme…

A year later. You cracked the 1,000 uniques mark in the 11^th month, but your site never picked up steam like you planned for it to.

Just get your site up, track data, and adjust your site based on feedback. Then, never stop improving.

33. Stick with One Project

Results are going to take longer than you expect, especially if you’re just getting started online.

If you move around from shiny object to shiny object every three months, none of your projects are going to get the attention that they need.

Like I said, if you have the fundamentals right, it’s only a matter of doing the other 28 things in this list. It’ll take time, more time than you want it to, but it will happen.

The Last Word

I learned a lot about you all last week. What you struggle with. What you’re doing well. What you can improve. And I hope this post shed some light on your common struggles.

For us to continue serving you, we need you to continue telling us how we can help.

I appreciate the, “Awesome post, Nick! Way to go. You’re so smart (and handsome)” comments. I really do.

But I’d like more of you to challenge my thoughts. Give me feedback that’s scary to give. Tell me, “Nick, this concept is good in theory, but I’m really struggling to implement it because…”

As always, I’m looking forward to your comment.

Photo by kirstinmckee

This post will help you with all of that and more. Yes, it’s about outsourcing. There are countless benefits of outsourcing, ranging from greater personal freedom to more profits to just plain necessity in some case.  I’ll skip the details of outsourcing benefits and just cut straight to the meat: how to actually do it.

The outline below is written such that you can follow it verbatim to get great results with outsourcing, even if you have never tried it before and don’t know where to start.

10 Steps To Successful Outsourcing

Just kidding... sorta. Now to the serious stuff!

Below I outline my exact outsourcing formula for you step by step. Like Tim Ferriss’s DEAL in The Four Hour Work Week, it starts with Definition and ends in Liberation!

1. Define

The first step is actually figuring out what it is what you do, what you want to do, what you don’t want to do, and ultimately what you can and should delegate. Take a piece of paper (or a spreadsheet) and break it into four columns: What I Do, What I Do That I Don’t Like or Am Not Great At, What I Want To Do, and What I Can Delegate.

Start from the left and move to the right. Before filling out the delegate column, eliminate. Cross stuff off from the 2nd column if you can. This can be a great exercise to stop doing your least productive and unnecessary activities… especially before you go and pay someone else to do them!

Here is a snippet (not the whole thing) of my own list when I started this process several months ago to give you some direction in your own list:

As you can see when I started there was a huge disconnect between what I was currently doing and what I WANTED to be doing. Since then things have changed significantly, and are still changing in the right direction. This takes time, but this first step is absolutely necessary to understand where you are, where you want to be, and what’s holding you back.

I’m still working on outsourcing some of these, but in the last couple of months I’ve been able to boost my revenue and do a lot by outsourcing, while also freeing up my mind to focus on bigger and better things. In a few months, this list will evolve, and so should yours. The more you go through this process, the easier outsourcing gets, and the more freedom you experience.

Don’t be conservative on the “delegate” list. If you think you might be able to delegate, put in on there, regardless of how much you might think “but this requires my knowledge/skills/access to do properly.” Just put it on there and figure out the details later.

2. Decide What’s First

Take your “delegate” list from above and determine the top 2 or 3 items that you need done most, at least one of which you feel pretty comfortable delegating immediately.

Write out exactly what it is that you do or need done on these items. Outline it in the action steps that you would follow to do it. Then break down these action steps to be super simple that a skilled technician can follow.

However, if you have a technical task that you want to outsource from your “Things I Am Not Great At or Don’t Like Doing” List then don’t spend too much time on your outline. Just determine what you need and write out scenarios in which you might need it.

I did this with a lot of tasks that I was really incompetent in…

For example, because I run a web design agency, most of my outsourcing needs relate to web design and development. I first looked for a coder, because that was something I didn’t really do well myself. Then as my business scaled up, I hired more people to do the stuff I knew how to do well in WordPress and Photoshop, but having these employees at such great rates allows to focus more of my time on building relationships, doing the consulting, and working directly with clients… not to mention all the other things that I actually love to do in personal and entrepreneurial business life.

I defined what I needed done first, and what kind of work was needed for what client sites. In this particular case, I didn’t outline all the steps since the people I’m hiring know them better than I do, but I defined my needs very clearly, down to the level experience required with each programming language and software.

3. Identify

The next step is to profile your ideal employee. The more specific you are here, the more qualified applicants you get, and the easier the next steps will be. Being clear about what you want is more like to… well, get you what you want.

Also, the better you identify your ideal candidate, the easier the interview (step 7) will be.

You should decide:

• What skill areas you need
• What level of skill you need in those areas (on a scale of 1 – 10)
• Approximately how many hours per week you need done (better to overestimate than under) and which working hours you prefer
• Level of English speaking skills
• Level of qualities such as independence, problem solving, creative thinking, communication, etc.
• Determine what your budget is for this. How much is it worth to you to have it off your hands personally, or to have it done in general?

Outline all of these areas and more in your Ideal Candidate Profile before you go recruiting!

4. Post Your Job

Once you have your needs defined, your most immediate tasks/jobs outlined, and your Ideal Candidate Profile, it’s time to go to the job boards.

Start by posting a job. Create a document from the steps above, defining what you’re looking for in terms of skills and quality. The best way is to create a separate email address for your applicants, such as apply@incomediary.com so that you can easily review them all at once, and you reduce spam.

Collect your applicants contact information, resumes, and portfolios if appropriate.

I recommend NOT giving out your Skype ID, phone number, or other contact information for questions. Just give that unique email address, and request their Skype ID for interviews. Unless hiring in your own country, a phone number is usually unnecessary.

Now, in this post I am outlining my own process, and I recommend outsourcing primarily to the Philippines. I have had experience with both Philippines and India, and find that the Philippines provides better overall results for less money. There are many other specific reasons that I recommend the Philippines as your primary spot for outsourcing, but ultimately it’s whatever works best for you and your specific situation.

Here are a few great sources for posting your job listings in the Philippines:

EasyOutsource.com
craigslist.com.ph — some cities are better than others for different tasks
hirefilipino.com
onlinejobs.ph
There are other options, and you can find quite a few through Google. I’ve personally had the most successful with EasyOutsource.com

If you choose to post your job in India or other countries, you can find similar sources for these countries, or use the local Craigslist to post a job or “gig” as well as search through other job/outsourcing networks.

You can also choose to look at a few outsourcing agencies. The advantages of an agency, which has many potential employees ready for you, include that the include employee is trained, available at a specific schedule, always has an Internet connection and power, and can be quickly replaced if they quit or get fired, or don’t meet your needs. However, an agency is typically much more expensive.

For example, I’ve found quality workers in my industry for as low as $2.50 per hour for some WordPress tasks, while an agency would start at a minimum of $8 per hour and go way up from there.

Of course, you can also try finding a freelancer, which is also a form of outsourcing, on one of the following sites:

eLance.com

Freelancer.com

odesk.com

5. Seek

One you’ve posted your job and are waiting for replies, you should go and start proactively looking for candidates. Keep your criteria from step 3 in mind and use the same sites above to search through postings.

You should have a prepared letter to send to anyone whose post interests you. You can base this letter almost entirely off the previous steps and the job posting, except that here you can give a little more information on you or your company, as well as your contact information, and ask for some good times to set up a Skype chat for an interview. Always suggest 2 – 3 times that work for you – an eager and dedicated applicant will usually make one of those times work, and you avoid the back and forth of scheduling. See more on step 7 about tools for scheduling and conducting interviews.

6. Sift and Sort

Now that you’ve posted a job and sent out some outgoing requests, you’ll start to get a number of applications to sift through. Depending on how many you get, narrow it down to the top 5 – 7 applicants based on your profile, and decide to schedule an interview with those applicants.

Here are some things I typically see in an application:

• Resume with some past employment and education
• Links to previous projects (since I’m in the web design business)
• Their answers to my job post requests, either in a list or in a paragraph “cover letter” format.
• Take the application itself as an evaluation tool. Take a look at how complete it is and the language used – depending on your requirements, this can matter a lot in and of itself.

Then of course evaluate the technical details of the application. Pick your favorite 5 – 7 applications and move onto the next sorting step: The Interview.

7. The Interview

The next step is to interview your qualified applicants.

This is the part where a lot of people screw up when they get started. I know I did. I was so excited when I first started getting applicants that I started to hire the wrong people. My biggest problem? I didn’t interview properly.

So how do you interview properly?

Here are a few tips:

• Make interview questions in advance based on your Ideal Candidate Profile
• Ask specific questions. For example, I ask: “How skilled are you in php on a scale of 1 – 10?”
• If hiring for something that requires a portfolio, ask for your applicant’s role on each project. Just because they post a website link in their portfolio, doesn’t mean they built the entire site. The might have just made a few graphics, or coded an optin form. Ask for specifics so you get a better idea of skillset.
• Ask them a little about their previous work experience, what they struggled with, and where they performed well.
• If possible, test their knowledge on the spot. Have a few technical questions prepared for them to answer once they tell you their skill level in that area.
• Whenever possible, perform an audio interview after an initial Skype IM chat. If the applicant does not have a microphone, this might already be a significant enough issue to merit dismissing the application. It’s pretty important for you to be able to connect on a call occasionally for Skype screen sharing, and generally explaining some concepts and tasks. It’s also important to get a voice interview in to better judge communication skills and character.
• Be specific, but not intimidating. You want to build a good relationship in the beginning. Filipinos especially can be easily intimidated with aggressive language, so choose your words more carefully than if you were speaking to someone in your own culture (their sense of humor is generally great though!)
• Even if you like the candidate a lot, don’t hire them immediately after the interview. Tell them you like what you’ve seen so far and you’ll get back to them very soon. You should have 2 – 4 applicants that you like from the interview to move to the next step.
• However, if you know right away from an interview that you won’t hire them, tell them so: “Sorry, right now you don’t match our needs. I appreciate your time and wish you luck.” If you think you might need them in the future, add “but feel free to stay in touch as your skills develop.”

8. Try Them Out

Now that you have 2 – 4 qualified applicants, test them out! Make a sample task based on your outlines in step 2 and give your applicant the instructions.

Notice how well the applicant does the job, how long it takes, how many questions they ask, how comfortable they seem with the work, etc. Keep in mind this is their first time working with you, but be critical enough to ensure you get the right person.

You should feel confident that based on the application, the interview, and this sample task, that this applicant is a good fit for the job. If the first few steps turned out well, but the sample task was a disaster, you either have to give better instructions or your applicant is under-qualified and ultimately over-sold you on the application and interview.

If you have a few great prospects, use the last and often best tool at this stage: your intuition. At this stage, don’t hesitate too long, make a decision, hire the right person, and get them trained and working!

Once you hire someone, make sure to pay the other applicants at their agreed hourly rate and thank them for their time, and tell them to stay in touch if you like them. If they got this far, there’s a good chance you might hire them in the future or refer them to someone else looking for a good employee in the same field.

9. Train & Organize

Once you’ve hired your new outsourced employee, make the best use of your time and theirs by providing proper training and organization.

A few training and organization tips:

• Use Google Docs Spreadsheet for login information. Change your passwords to something you feel comfortable sharing, and different from your most important secure accounts (personal email, bank, Facebook, etc unless you are outsourcing something relating to these). In the spreadsheet, include columns for: Account, Login URL, Username, Password, Notes.
• Set up standard communication systems and stick with them. If you have a project management system such as Basecamp, put your tasks and projects in there and assign them, and avoid extra emailing. Use Skype for instant messaging and voice talks, but try not to rely on it for scheduling tasks throughout the week.
• If you do decide to use primarily email for communication with your new employee (again, not recommended, especially once you hire more than one), make sure your emails are well structured with all the instructions and some what-if scenarios to reduce back and forth and information bottlenecks.
• Use Jing (free tool) to communicate visual tasks. You can take a screenshot, draw and write directly on the screenshot, and upload directly to a link that gets copied to your dashboard – all within seconds. You can also record 5 minute videos for instant upload. This communication tool alone can change your life.
• If you assign a long term task, as for progress reports, ideally at the end of each day. This will allow you to correct course if necessary and better estimate future project timelines and investment required.
• Use a system for your new employee to track hours. Google Docs Spreadsheets can be a good start, but many project management systems and accounting systems will have a feature for this. I currently use my accounting software, QuickBooks, to track all my team’s hours and it works perfectly.
• Write a welcome email for your new employees, outlining the communication details above, a little bio about yourself and/or your company, and an overview of your expectations and procedures.

(You can give clear visual instructions within literally seconds, and upload and send them instantly)

Make sure you go back to step 2 and outline your desired tasks and projects well each time you put your employee on a new project.

You can even buy information products and have your employees learn and implement them, but that topic would merit an entire separate post

10. Let Go!

Finally, the last step is to let go a little. Don’t micromanage. The step above helps you to create systems for your employee, and eventually for your team, to be productive with or without you. Sure, you have to check in, assign new stuff, make sure all is going well, etc… but remember, the idea here is that you are getting more done with less of your own time (and if done properly, with less of your own money), so that you can enjoy life more and earn more money doing what you do best.

Work hard but... Relax.

The first time you go through this process, it can seem a little overwhelming. You might be tempted to quit it and just continue to do-it-yourself. Remember: successful entrepreneurs all use leverage; the sooner you learn it, the better.

Once you get over the hump and master this process, you will earn more, work less, and be able to contribute more to the world with your own unique abilities. It can also be a lot of fun!

Feel free to share your own outsourcing experience in the comments below.

If you have any questions about outsourcing, please ask them below! I’ll do my best to answer each one, and may even write another post on the most frequently asked questions about outsourcing.

Yours in Freedom, Passion, and Purpose,

Dmitriy Kozlov

P.S. – If you’ve read my last post and haven’t picked up Make WordPress Easy, do so here. I’ve actually started using this course to train my outsourcers (even the highly skilled ones) on WordPress and it has saved me hundreds of dollars and a lot of frustration.

 1. How To Mobilize Your WordPress Site

You’re probably missing out on quite a few readers, and you’ll miss out on more if you don’t go mobile with your blog. In January 2012, nearly 9% of all global pageviews were from a mobile device. This number is expected to keep growing, to the point where in 2015 the pageviews from mobile devices will outgrow the pageviews from laptops and personal computers. Upgrade your site to have a mobile version!

The easiest way to do this is through the free plugin WP Touch. Once installed, you edit some settings, create a few icons or use stock icons, reformat some pages if necessary, and you have a beautiful mobile site that looks and functions like an app! Now if someone opens your blog (let’s say from an email, or from a Facebook link) on their phone, they’ll actually be able to consume your content easily, as well as comment on it and share it, rather than zooming in and out in frustration trying to navigate your site.

If you want to take things to the next level, upgrade to the premium version WP Touch Pro, which has some additional options to customize even further.

A lot of newer themes are also mobile friendly (responsive), meaning they already have a mobile version built in, so you don’t have to worry about it. So if you’re thinking about changing themes, keep this in mind while doing your research.

Here is how a post on my personal site looks in mobile when the mobile version is active:

Here is how it looks when the mobile version is not active:

Which is easier for someone to read? Which will they stay on longer and engage with longer?

Upgrade your site to mobile and be better prepared for the future.

2. Speed up! Some Plugins to make editing your posts more efficient

Viper Video QuickTags

If you have ever embedded a video, you know that you need to use HTML code to make it happen. Make your life easier and save time by utilizing the Viper’s Video Quicktags plugin.

After installing the plugin and adjusting a few settings, you will have the ability to copy and paste the video link and embed videos with the click of a button. The plugin is super simple to use and gives you the option to embed more than one video at once!

Check out the activation details below:

1. Viper’s Video Quicktags will show up on your Dashboard Menu under “settings”
2. Uncheck everything under “Show Editor Button” except for YouTube
4. This will create a button when you add a page/post
5. Click on the new button above the WYSIWG visual page editor
6. Paste the direct URL to your video and edit the size by opening the accordion below
7. Click okay and this will populate a shortcode into the post box
8. Click on update and check out your super slick videos once you refresh the page!

Mission accomplished in a quarter of the time and you didn’t even have time to think about it before the video was embedded and sized.

Faster Image Insert

Embedding images into a page requires a couple of steps. You need to click on the media button and this opens a light box. Once you upload the image, you can edit the size and insert into the page or post.

The process is slow because a lightbox has to load in between every image that is added. It’s easy to imagine why waiting for a lightbox to open in between inserting each image can get pretty annoying, and not to mention time-consuming. This is where Faster Image Insert comes in.

Faster Image Insert allows you to upload images much faster because it adds a meta box (no more lightbox) right below the WYSIWYG visual editor. You can insert multiple galleries or images at once, including NextGen Galleries, which is pretty awesome. You can also change title/captions on a mass scale with a single click.

It appears right below your post, whether in visual or HTML:

3. Plugins to boost your SEO

All In One SEO Pack

This plugin is a must have for anyone interested in getting search engine traffic. It is great for both the beginner and the advanced user. The plugin is intuitive and includes features like automatic optimization of your titles for search engines and meta tags. This is a plug and play plugin, which means that it is effective as soon as it is activated.

Advanced users are able to fine tune just about any setting, such as the ability to override any title and set any meta description and meta keywords you want. This is going to increase your SEO presence drastically, which will definitely help you increase your sites traffic.

Google XML Sitemaps

In order for your site’s pages and posts to be found in Google’s search engines, they need to be indexed/stored in Google’s massive database of websites and other web content.

There are many ways to get indexed faster by Google such as Tweeting your new page or post but using this plugin makes the process simpler.

Each time you create a new post or page, the plugin will update your site’s XML sitemap (which the search engines use to index your site) and automatically let the search engines know about the update. The benefit here is obvious. Get the plugin asap and start sending your message to a larger audience.

SEO Pressor

SEO Pressor takes the SEO within your blog posts to a new level. It allows you to write for a specific keyword, and measures your post white you write for how effectively you are writing for that keyword. It even gives you an overall score along the way. Here’s a screenshot of what it does:

4. How To Uncrash Your Site! (for plugin issues)

Steps to Uncrashing Your Site

This is one of the easiest problems to fix, yet I still notice a ton of forums being bombarded with questions like “I Installed a plugin and my site crashed!! I need a developer ASAP!”

Take a deep breath, regain your composure and listen to me. Even though the issue may appear to be fatal, it is actually one of the simplest issues to fix.

Here are the 5 easy steps to uncrash your site:

1. Login to your FTP Client
2. Find the Plugin Folder in your Directory
3. Sort Plugins by “Last Modified”
4. Select the Plugin in Question
5. Delete the Plugin
Once Plugin is deleted, it will no longer show up or crash your site. You can thank me after you calm down!

5. Plugins to Make Affiliate Marketing Easier

Pretty Link

Say you have an affiliate link: www.domain.com/longconfusingmess

Let’s also say you have a domain called: www.incomediary.com

Wouldn’t it be awesome if you could customize the link and still get credit for the referral? Wouldn’t it also be valuable if you could track both the total number of clicks as well as the total number of unique clicks to monitor performance – regardless of if the link is in your email, WordPress site, or anywhere else?

Pretty Link allows you to do both. The process is super simple and it creates a ton of value. Here is an example:

Before Pretty Link: www.hostgator.com/longconfusinglink
After Pretty Link: IncomeDiary.com/hostgator

In addition, it tracks both total and unique clicks and displays the respective numbers in the plugins options. Pretty damn awesome.

It also makes it easy for you to remember all your affiliate links in case you ever need them on the fly while chatting with someone. This alone has easily hundreds of extra dollars in my pocket .

Amazon Associate Filter Plugin

Amazon is one of the largest and most well known internet companies in the world. It would only make sense that the Amazon Associate Program is one of the best affiliate programs, aS they offer a massive number of product categories, which is great for Niche sites that are unable to find relatable affiliate programs.

Amazon makes it very simple to integrate the program with your current site. If you don’t have an account, I highly suggest that you head over to the site and sign up.

The Amazon Associate Filter is a great time saving plugin for Amazon affiliates. It automatically will change any links to the amazon website to your affiliate link without revealing it to the reader. Say goodbye to being slowed down by finding and pasting your affiliate link into your page or post. Amazon Associate Filter is a must have plugin for any Amazon Affiliates!

6. Contact Forms – you have options!

When you first logged into WordPress you may or may not have notice that there is no page or theme option to add a contact form to your site. Contact forms allow visitors to contact you with questions, complaints, suggestions, etc.

Here’s some good news: You have options! I introduce you to three here, but use Google to find more information. You may even discover a brand new plugin that makes Gravity Forms look like childs play. Don’t spend too much time, but definitely check out a link or two.

Contact Form 7 (Flexible)

If you value simplicity and flexibility, Contact Form 7 is a great option. It allows you to design the form, email, and even lets you manage multiple contact forms. In addition, it supports many features including AJAX submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering, file uploading, and more.

Contact Me

In addition to providing you with a neat and flexible contact form, this plugin allows you to have a floating contact me/us floating button on the side of your site on every page, like this:

It’s a nice call to action, especially if you provide any services or are looking for leads to get in touch with you. While the plugin itself is free, to remove the Contact Me branding and get more options, you do have to upgrade to the premium version.

Gravity Forms (Premium)

If you prefer a premium contact form that includes an intuitive user interface and the works in terms of options, then Gravity Forms is the best option for you. While the plugin costs a little bit of money, the time it saves you and the improvement in quality is well worth it, especially if you are building multiple forms.

7. Make Your Site Neater and brand more visible!

Favicon! – plugin and creation tool

A Favicon is the little image that shows up on your browser’s tabs when browsing your site and can really help brand your site. It may be a small image, but has potential to be a significant part of your branding effectiveness.

An awesome site for Favicons is: www.favicon.cc. You can even draw a custom Favicon but I don’t recommend this because it has proven to be less effective – unless you’re great with design. You can also upload an image and turn it into a Favicon, or find tons of free favicons that might match your brand.

Plugin: All in One Favicon

All in One Favicon uses the favicon you created and displays it on the browser tab for the public. You can create both front end (what the viewer see’s) and back end (what you see in your dashboard). If you don’t have a favicon, you are missing out on an opportunity to brand your site.

Logo – cooltext.com

While creating a custom logo in Photoshop or Illustrator is great – a lot of new bloggers don’t have the skills, time, or money to do so. You can actually create a unique text based logo in minute using this cool tool. It’s a lot better than having a plain text header on the top of your site!

Enter: CoolText.com to save the day (or at least a few minutes). They offer a ton of customization options which makes the experience much more personal.

You can choose from a boatload of fonts, effects, colors, sizes and file types. I promise that you can create very professional logos as long as you make sure to explore ALL of the options first. The best part is – it’s all free!

8. Speed up your Site!

Get A Caching plugin

I’m sure you have been on a blog or even corporate site that feels as if it is taking forever to load. Why would you want someone to have the same, annoying experience? A slow site can have devastating effects on site traffic, but thankfully there is a plugin to make it easy to speed your site up.

There is a solid selection of Caching Plugins on the web. The most popular ones are W3 TOTAL CACHE and WP SUPER CACHE, but don’t let this stop you from researching and trying out other programs.

A caching plugin is valuable because it saves your page the first time that a visitor visits it.It then will used this saved information to automatically load the page based on the information. It will also automatically re-cache your site if any content changes!

One less thing to worry about.

Some tips: One of the simplest ways to speed up a slow site is to be sure to deactivate all of the plugins that you are not currently using on your site. We recommend a lot of plugins here and I know this may appear to contradictory, but it’s important not to go overboard! Deactivate unimportant plugins, especially those that work on the outside of your site vs. the admin panel, and you will see the difference in speed.

Decrease Image Sizes before Uploading – Some people just upload images and then resize them using the WordPress (HTML) image editor. Try to avoid this when you can. Go into Photoshop, Save For Web and Devices, and resize the images to your desired dimensions. That way you get smaller file sizes, which load faster, and speed up your site, sometimes very significantly.

9. Get Social!

You work hard putting great content on your blog. Make sure it’s easy for people to share and discuss so you get more traffic, credibility, and user engagement.

Sharing

I recommend using the Digg Digg plugin. It’s the quickest, simplest, and neatest way to get all your social media sharing buttons on your posts.

If you want to look cool, use the floating option (like you see to your left). There are a ton of sharing options, and which ones you use depends on the nature of your content.

I recommend including at least: Facebook Like, Facebook Share, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest, and LinkedIn. The rest is up to you.

Comments

I STRONGLY recommend Facebook comments. They will get you more comments (people are so familiar with Facebook comments already, it’s more natural for them to Like and

Comment via Facebook than through the WordPress commenting system), they will reduce your spam comments, and they will ultimately get you a lot more social links back to your site, so more traffic! Make sure you make the settings such that it automatically posts the comment on Facebook unless the commenter disables it.

The other social commenting option is Disqus. It’s also a free plugin which allows people to comment through social profiles, but since people are usually logged into Facebook when surfing the web,

Facebook comments will likely get you more traction than Disqus.

10. Get Personal!

Make sure you brand yourself in your posts and your comments on others blogs!

Start by completing the profile in Users > My Profile with your complete bio, and include this bio on the bottom of your posts (this is usually just a theme option). Your bio helps people connect with you and makes them want to learn more about you. They’re not just reading your content – they’re reading you!

Next – and this is very important – head over to Gravatar.com and create your Gravatar. This is like your profile image on the Internet. You should add all the email addresses you use in WordPress sites, whether on your own site or any you might guest blog on. Add a cool image of you that people will remember (for example, see my Parrot picture in Aruba below!).

If you made a WordPress.com account at some point, you might already have a Gravatar and not know it. Try logging into Gravatar.com with your WordPress.com details before making yourself a new account, to make sure you can get the username you want and your primary email address.

Save Your Save Some Time, Energy, and Money

Do you think some of the tools and tricks in this post will save you some time and create more money for you with your blog? When applied, of course they will.

This is just a small list. You can literally become a total WordPress master – and save yourself a LOT of time, energy, and money by taking this course: Make WordPress Easy. It’s not only the best course on WordPress – it’s also extremely entertaining to watch. Enjoy it!

I hope this list helped you out a lot. If you have any questions about any of these, or have any additional tips, please comment below!

There are two things that they all do incredibly well. One, they know their audience. Two, they help their audience.

So for my post this week, I want to get to know you better so I can help you better. If you’re interested in finding out how I would improve your website, follow these instructions.

Step 1: Leave a Comment Below

In your comment, include these three things:

1. Tell me about the number one thing you struggle with online.
   It could be setting up your website, getting traffic, converting traffic, making money, finding the time to work on your site, etc. Be as specific as possible.
2. Tell me how you think you can do better with what you struggle with.
   I want to know what you think the problem is and your ideas for solving that problem.
3. Leave a link to your site.
   Link to the homepage or any page that you’d like me to take a look at.

If you don’t include each of those three things, then I’m not going to look at your website.

Step 2: I’ll Leave a Review

Once you leave a comment, I’ll take a look at your site and reply with these three things:

1. My honest first impression of your site.
   If you’re not prepared for critical feedback, then maybe you shouldn’t do this.
2. What I think you do well.
   I’ll let you know something that I like about your site.
3. How I think you can do better.
   I’ll give you my best advice as far as getting better at what you struggle with.

As we get going, leave reviews on your fellow commenters’ sites as well. Let them know what you think so we can all improve from lots of feedback.

If we get 100 comments…

If this post gets 100 comments, I’ll tell you about the number one thing that I struggle with online.

It’s something that I don’t like to talk about because I know it’s a big weakness of mine. I’ve even gone three months without posting on my blog because of it.

If you want to know what it is, start by leaving a comment.

Edit: Welp, we hit 100 comments! And I’m going to cap it at this. I spent about 10 minutes on each of your sites and I hope I was able to give you some valuable feedback. It was interesting for me to see what each of you struggles with and it’ll help me create content that is more targeted at the problems that I know you’re having. If you don’t see your comment, it might be on Comment Page 2.

As promised…

The #1 Thing I Struggle with Online

When I first started started my latest site, 14 Clicks, my mission was to help young entrepreneur ages 20-29. I wanted to give advice to the college-aged kid and recent college graduate who had an interest in starting a business but didn’t know how to start.

I figured it was a good niche. I knew how to appeal to people my age and I had enough expertise to give them some solid steps for starting their businesses. We’re golden, right?

Wrong.

The problem was that I chose my audience based on age, not on the type of business they wanted to start.

So the site started to pick up speed. (It’s gotten over 100,000 uniques in the last six months.) The people coming to the site are typically interested in entrepreneurship but I don’t feel like I’m helping them get started. Since I want to help all entrepreneurs in that age group, I have to keep the content theoretical and inspirational rather than practical. Plus, people who don’t consider themselves to be “young” feel like they don’t belong even though the concepts can be applied to them too.

In order to fix this, I need to choose an audience based on specific problems that they have, not the type of person that they are. Right now I put my site on hold because I’m struggling with re-choosing my audience.

Let me know if you have any ideas.

Thank you all for your comments.

Image by: claudiaveja

You publish post after post, and see minimal results.

No shares, no comments, nothing.

You have to wonder, “Does my content suck?”

It might…it might not.

Below, you’ll find a list of 30 resources, starting with headlines and ending with editing.

You’ll find tools, articles, free .pdf reports, plugins and downloadable goodies.

This resource is designed to assist in every step of the blog creation process and covers…

• Creating a killer headline
• Crafting a compelling opening
• Keeping readers engaged throughout the copy
• Writing endings that encourage comments
• Editing your copy to be “tight”

In no way is this meant to be an afternoon’s worth of reading, but rather a resource for you to bookmark and revisit from time to time.

Emotional Marketing Value Headline Analyzer

Reaching your customers in a deep and emotional way is unquestionably the secret to any successful blog at it’s core.

Online, your headline could be your only chance to make an impression, so you want to quickly grab your readers on an intellectual, emotional, or spiritual level.

This free tool from the Advanced Marketing Institute analyzes the words in your existing headline, and scores it based on your impact words/total words in the title.

The algorithm isn’t based on just any theory either, but rather research that started in the late 1960′s. Dr. Hakim Chishti was a U.S. government research scholar, and was living in the Near East, studying the roots of several languages, Persian, Aramaic, Hebrew, Arabic, Urdu and several others.

The tool rates the basic underlying harmonics, and tonality that flows through language, which are in many ways more profound and powerful than the dictionary meaning itself.

Use the EMV Headline Analyzer here.

HeadlineHacks.com

I’ve mentioned the Headline Hacks report in previous articles, but it is by far one of the most valuable free resources I’ve found in my career as a blogger.

Jon Morrow, associate editor of Copyblogger.com (The number one blog on blogging in the world) has compiled a list of the most time tested headline templates that have been selling magazines off the rack for years.

Not only do you get a list of templates, but Jon goes into why template works. Use these enough and not only will you improve your skill as a headline writer, but you’ll see more traffic to your articles.
Get the free report here

It’ll cost you an email address, but Jon is always releasing high value information, so it’s well worth it.

Headline Generator Tool by Tim Gross

Sometimes, even templates won’t help us come up with a compelling headlines.

This is where the Headline Generator comes in handy. All you do is fill out pre-determined fields like “Product Description”, “Claim” and “Desirable Result” and click Generate Headlines and the tool does the rest.

The list it spits out isn’t always the most grammatically correct, but you get you plenty to work with.

After filling out only four fields, it generated a list of nearly 40 enticing headlines.

Bonus: Plug the generated headlines into the Emotional Marketing Value Headline Analyzer and select the one with the highest score for the most impact.

Check out the Headline Generator here.

Why Do Some Headlines Fail?

Sean D’Souza of Psychotactics.com has created this great free 10 page report that will “Change the way you write headlines forever.”

It’s not a bunch of hype either. Sean’s Headline guide not only gives you some seriously good headline templates, he explains the exact psychological triggers each one pulls.

Get the report here free

 The 2nd Most Important Element In Copywriting

Before we go on about openings, let’s talk about the first sentence.

Get this right, keep them hooked. Get it wrong, and you might as well never written anything at all.

The first sentence is your second impression.

Write Better Opening Sentences.

“5 Simple Ways To Open Your Blog Post With A Bang”

Ok, so how do we get your readers interested?
You could start by

• Asking A Question
• Sharing a Quote
• Invoking The Mind’s Eye
• Use an Analogy, Metaphor, or Simile
• Cite A Shocking Statistic

This Post by Brian Clark of Copyblogger goes into more detail on how all of these things work.

“What A Bestselling Author Can Teach You About Hooking Your Readers.”

The headline inspired them to click, but if they don’t keep reading, you’ve failed.

The 5 tips above are a great to get you started, but only scratch the surface on what it takes to keep your readers engaged to the point they can’t help but read more.

This article goes further down the rabbit hole and gives you great techniques that will help you be a better writer.

How To Start Your Story Based Articles With A Greater Impact.

Where do you start when you’re using a story opening? At the height of the drama.

Sean D’Souza gives us a great example on why starting in the “middle” of the story is the best place to start your article.

Write better story openings.

Three Core Elements of Storytelling (And Why You Need To Write Stories Right Away)

Want your articles to stand out among the sea of “How To” & “Journalistic” styles that are ever so popular on the web?

Look no further than Cinderella and her Fairy GodMother to help.

Classic storytelling techniques can give your blog that necessary edge

“How to Be Unforgettable”

Want your readers have no choice but to share you?

Set their freaking hair on fire.

Jon Morrow of Boostblogtraffic.com goes into detail on what it takes to snap your readers out of their everyday lives, wake up, and remember everything you do.

Not only does he talk about it, he demonstrates it with every. single. word. of this article.

Read only if you want to become legendary.

 The Most Important Writing Lesson I’ve Ever Learned

“Nobody wants to read your shit.”

Steven Pressfield, Author of The War of Art, The Legend of Bagger Vance, and Do The Work, talks about the resistance all creative people face, and how realizing that nobody gives a damn about what you have to say, is one of the best things that can happen to your writing.

Read the post here

Why “Know, Trust, and Like” Could Be Killing Your Blog

So many bloggers who try to make a living off writing get wrapped up in the “Know, Trust, Like.” aspect of blogging, they forget that in order to make sales their readers need to say three magic words…

I Need Help!

This is a post I wrote to help struggling bloggers get their content back on track.

A Fool Proof Formula for Easily Creating Compelling Content

Danny Ivy of Firepole Marketing wrote 40 posts, 80 guest posts, 2 books, and a bunch of other content in 2011, earning him the nickname “The Freddy Kruger of Blogging”

In this post he shares how structure, planning and research helped him to create a system that made it possible to churn out awesome content at super human speed.

Seriously, don’t miss this post.

20 Tips To Become A Better Online Writer

#10 Understand that Writing Online is Different

Online writing can be multimedia, so always be looking for opportunities to enrich your article with images, audio, or video. It can also be interactive. Linking out to useful information and websites is a courtesy to your readers. Since online writing is global, you may want to avoid using colloquial expressions or relying on cultural references that will only be understood by people in your country.

This list is from one of our own Nick Scheidies and goes into getting into a better mental space as a writer.

After reading these Better Writing Tips, I started listening to different music, reading more, and writing more.

How “Sound Bites” Score You More Web Traffic

“Attention spans have never been shorter…”

This post teaches you how to throw darts at your readers brains and trigger them to share using quick sound bytes that sum up sections of your post.

This is Derek of SocialTriggers at his best.

Learn how to get more traffic in less than 140 characters.

Bonus: Derek also has an excellent Podcast at Social Triggers Insider and a great series on list building.

How to Write Compelling Content that Ranks Well In the Search Engines

This Free 27 page report from Brian Clark, founder of Copyblogger and Scribe Seo goes through step by step how to create compelling content that scores links and engages your readers.

The report also teaches you how to gently spoon feed the search engines to get ranked for the keywords that’ll bring you the most traffic.

“Scannability and Readability in Web Writing”

Did you know people read an average of 25% slower online?

This is why it’s important to include things in your web copy like

• Headers and Subheaders
• Bullet Point Lists
• Short Paragraphs
• Bold text (sparingly)

Click Here for more details on making more Scannable Content

What’s the Best Font For Your Site? (The Psychology of Fonts)

Ok, so this isn’t 100% about writing better, but the truth is, if people have to strain to read your copy, they’re not going to strain for long.

In this article Derek shares a psychological study that shows the impact a simple font change had on user’s perception of a product.

This is where he also makes his famous “Size 14 is the new 12″ argument.

If this post doesn’t get you thinking “What the Font?” by the time you’re done, your readers are doomed to squint forever.

Give Users a Hollywood Ending

You know why big movie studios hold early screenings of a film?

It’s so they can “beta test” the movie’s ending.

Hollywood Studios know that the ending of a movie is what leaves the biggest impression on the audience.

So they test the ending, and if audiences aren’t satisfied, they’ll reshoot it.

Read this article and see how it applies to your blogging.

Alan Rinzler’s Tips For Writing Great Endings

Alan Rinzler is an editor and publisher, who graduated Harvard with an English literature degree.
He consults with great fiction and non fiction writers alike, and while this advice isn’t specifically towards blogging, there is a lot that you can take away from it.

Write Great Endings.

How to Go Out In Style With Your Ending

Another great resource from Copyblogger gives you 5 solid ways to close your blog posts.

In a nutshell they are;

1. Summarize
2. Call To Action
3. Inspire
4. Post Script
5. Cliff-Hanger

Of course, if you want to read in more detail Click Here

14 Devious Tactics to Get More Comments On Your Blog Post.

While not specifically on closings, this post by Jon Morrow talks about the different ways you can encourage people to comment on your posts.

My recommendation, plan your content calender around some of these ideas, and engineer your content to be more “remarkable”

Hint: If comments are what you’re lacking, you need to be more passionate.

EditingHacks.com

A great blog gives you only exactly what you need, and nothing more.

EditingHacks teaches you how to trim the fat out of your copy so only the juiciest bits remain.

Their copy editing tutorials show what it takes to turn an article from average to awesome, from an editor’s perspective.

For Example:

7 Ways to Be Different—and Most of Them Are Free!
1) Have a logo or header grab reader attention the instant they click on the page(arrive). A custom header is best, something(a beacon) to let the reader know from the first second (shouting how unique) you and your blog are both unique. A stock, out-of-the-box header won’t cut it. A custom header reinforces the branding you’ve built, and leads your visitor(s) toward whatever action you’d like them taking(your desired action).

Say what you mean, and cut the fat from your copy now.

Readability Calculator

“Make sure your copy is readable.”

But what does that mean?

• Simple Language?
• “Chunked” paragraphs?
• All of the above?

The Readability Calculator tells you the reading level someone needs to comprehend your text.

It will also give you recommendations to make complicated text easier to understand.

When people easily understand you, they’re more likely to share you.

Make sure people can read your stuff here.

Internal Link Checker Tool

According to Rand Fishkin of SeoMoz.com about 40% of On-Page SEO has to do with the keywords on the page.

While this isn’t specifically about writing a better blog, it is about making your blog a little more search engine and people friendly.

This tool is designed to give you a bird’s eye view of the internal links on your website.

When you’re using only a very specific set of keywords to point to individual pages, it makes it easier for a search engine to determine what that page is for.

And when you’ve put a little extra thought into your anchor text, people have a better idea of what you’re linking to is about too. (How many times have you opened post because the link you clicked was exactly what you wanted to read about next?)

This tool checks the anchor text. From there, you can determine whether or not that’s what you want each link to say.

Click here to use the link checker now.

All-in-One Seo Pack

There’s probably not a single person reading this who doesn’t already have the All-in-One SEO pack installed…

But in case that is you, this plugin makes the SEO part of the writing process a little simpler.

Yes, you still need to do your keyword research, create your cornerstone content, and all of the other things that go into writing great posts.

This plugin just helps you keep everything a little better organized.

Hubspot’s Marketing Grader Tool

Seriously, this tool is amazing.

It breaks your marketing funnel down into three major steps.

• Top of Funnel (social shares, Seo etc.)
• Middle of funnel (links to landing pages with Calls To Action mostly)
• Analytics (how you’re tracking your leads)

It gives you a simple score that’s based on a 1-100 scale, and tells you the areas in which you might be needing a little help. THEN, it gives you free resources to improve in those areas.

Click here to find out your marketing grade.

Bonus: Plug in competitor’s websites to gather juicy intelligence on the other guy.

Bonus Section

If you’ve made it this far, I wanted to throw in a few extra bonuses that will go a long way in helping your blog stand out among the crowd.

These bonuses are some of the newer ways people are using the web, and quite honestly, I believe where the web will be headed.

Create Your Own Cinemagraphs

Cinemagraphs are taking the photoblogging world by storm! This hybrid form of photography and videography is subtle, but when done right, absolutely stunning!

Imagine what your readers will say if you incorporated something like this into an article?

And if you don’t think you can do it… There’s an app for that.

But if you’re looking for a more advanced option, there’s a tutorial for that too.

Get an Animated Google+ Banner Image

If Google+ isn’t your thing, this may not be for you.

But, if you’re one of those people who takes Google’s new social network a little more seriously, creating an animated banner is a great way to capture your visitors attention in an subtle, but neat way.

There are professional services that create animated Google+ Banners for you…

Or if you’re more of the DIY type, you can make them yourself.

Animated Social Share Icons

In the same vein as the cinemagraphs, an animated social share icon can help improve the “remarkability” of your blog.

According to this study by Marketing Sherpa, showed that one Chocolate retailer saw an increase of 49% in sales when using the animated gif in a split test.

Surely, that sort of of CTR can be translated to your social sharing.

Warning: It’s really easy to go overboard on the animated Gif thing. Use these with sophistication or they can do you more harm than good.

Click here to download a whole set of 43 animated gif icons for use on your website or other web properties.

(Click either of these buttons, they work)

There you have it

This is a pretty comprehensive list, but is by no means complete.

If you can think of a resource that should be added to the list, leave it in the comments below.

If you’ve found any of these tools or guides helpful, also let us know! We love to hear of your success stories.

When I visit a website for the first time, I look at something else. In less than a second, I have a decent idea of how much traffic that website gets which helps me decide whether or not to stay.

Knowing how much traffic a website gets helps you validate the website’s content and lets you know how much traffic you need to get to see similar results.

Here are ten little-known techniques for figuring out how much traffic someone else’s website gets.

1. Alexa Ranking

The Alexa Ranking isn’t exactly “little-known,” but it is the best-known metric for ranking websites. This is the first thing I look at when I visit a site:

Alexa tracks stats for everyone who has the Alexa toolbar installed on their browser, which accounts for less than 1% of internet users. So it’s not very accurate, but it’ll give you a rough idea of the website’s popularity.

1. If you use Chrome, install the Alexa Extension.
2. If you use Firefox, get the Alexa Add-On.
3. If you use Internet Explorer, switch to Chrome. If you insist, you can download the Alexa Toolbar.

Alexa’s reliability is shaky – some argue that it’s worthless – so it’s important to consider other metrics.

2. Compete.com

Compete.com is like Alexa, except they pull their stats from multiple sources and it’s only based on U.S. traffic.

Based on checking my sites and Income Diary, the “Unique Visitors” stat that it generates is much lower than the actual traffic.

3. Google Trends for Websites

Google Trends for Websites is another tool that’s similar to Alexa and Compete, except, it’s a Google tool, so it’s more accurate.

The main difference is that it gives you a line graph without values for the number of daily unique visitors. So it won’t tell you actual traffic counts, but it’s great for comparing sites side-by-side.

The downside is that it only provides data for sites that get tons of traffic. If you’re not getting at least a couple hundred thousand monthly visitors, your site probably won’t show up.

4. FeedCompare.com

Feed Compare is a neat tool that lets you see how many RSS subscribers a website has as long as they use FeedBurner.

Step 1: Find the FeedBurner ID for a blog you’d like to check:

Most sites should link directly to their RSS feed on FeedBurner. Look for the orange icon.

Step 2: Put the FeedBurner ID i­nto Feed Compare’s tool.

As you can see, Seth Godin has over 500,000 subscribers and it grew 1,500 in one day.

5. SEMRush.com

My favorite tool for website-based keyword research is SEMRush.com. Here’s a screenshot when you search IncomeDiary.com:

As you see, Michael ranks 1^st for “internet businesses,” 4^th for “how to make money blogging,” and 6^th for “how to make money online.” Those are highly competitive keywords that are collectively searched over 20,000 times per month.

As you go down the list, you can start to estimate how much traffic he gets for each keyword based on the position and search volume.

6. YouTube or Vimeo Views

If a website has a YouTube or Vimeo video embedded on the homepage, click to “Watch on YouTube.”

If the video is public, both YouTube and Vimeo will show the view counts. Also check the upload date to estimate how many people view it per month.

Just because the homepage Dollar Shave Club video has almost 4 million views doesn’t mean that their site had 4 million views. But it gives you some idea of how much traffic they got in their first month.

7. Blog Post Comments

Another way to gauge the popularity of a blog is to look at how many comments it gets per post.

With my sites, I’ve found that an average of 1 out of every 200 readers leaves a comment. So a post with 20 non-Nicholas comments was viewed about 4,000 times. This changes with every post and every blog, but again, it gives you a general idea.

8. Total Comment Counts

Immediately after you comment on a WordPress blog, your browser redirects you to where your comment will show up. If you look at the URL, you’ll see something that looks like this:

The second half of the URL tells you that you left the 108,656^th comment on IncomeDiary.com. This number includes spam comments. Assume that 75-90% of the comments are spam and you can get an idea of how many comments a site has had since day one.

9. Check their Archives

In the beginning, lots of bloggers share all of their stats about how much traffic their site is getting and where this traffic is coming from. As the blog grows, this information becomes more and more valuable so most bloggers stop sharing it.

If you peruse through the archived articles on a blog, there’s a good chance you’ll stumble upon a “blog in review” or “traffic report” post. With those stats, you can start to figure out how much traffic the site is getting today.

A few sites, like ThinkTraffic.net, choose to publish traffic reports every month because those stats are very relevant to their audiences.

10. Check “Advertise Here” Pages

By far, the most accurate way to figure out how much traffic a website gets is to go to their Advertising page.

If a blog is trying to sell advertising space, they need to tell you exactly how many unique views and impressions your ad is going to get every month.

If you sell advertising space on BuySellAds, like WPBeginner, you need to share your monthly unique and monthly impressions.

The Final Word

Unless the owner of the website reveals exactly how much traffic they’re getting, every other figure is a best guess. Most tools are surprisingly inaccurate when it comes to generating stats. They are good, however, for comparing yourself against others.

Do you know of any other ways to figure out how much traffic a site gets?

Note: Syed Balkhi, from WPBeginner, cleared up a few reasons why these tools are inaccurate and should only be used to get a rough estimate of traffic in this comment below.

Photo by: iandavid