24th August, 2015 was a red letter day for Facebook. For the first time, 1 billion people logged into their...
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I almost squealed with glee this week reading this stuff – my notebook is packed with awesome tips. Enjoy!
Targeting! *applauds*
Holy cow. The technology keeping up with social media trends and spitting out such specific information about what will work at what time for your audience is amazing. You might think you choose to read an article, but it’s likely someone’s posted it because a bot told them you’re the right reader at the right time.
We used to covet the #1 spot in search – now it’s all about that featured snippet. So how do you get it? Moz reveals all!
Because if you don’t catch a reader straight away (a bit like Pokemon, yeah?) they won’t stick around.
We’ve all been there – an email sent out of the blue and we never hear back. Well, no more!
Buffer says “live smarter, not harder” and I love that – I also love their ready-made templates to help you keep on top of your working life.
Honestly, by the time we do work, life, perhaps study, the time we’ve got left over to write bigger projects like your next ebook, book, or ecourse, is ridiculously slim. I like seeing how other people manage it, and Sandy does so in 0nly 90 days! Amazing.
A very human lookback on what blogging can bring – both good and bad.
It doesn’t matter how much you write, you’ll always want to know how to write better.
We’ve all been there – we’ve written a post that fell flat. Love these ideas to revive it!
The post Reading Roundup: What’s New in Blogging Lately? appeared first on ProBlogger.
In our previous article, we explored the benefits of having a CDN service with WordPress and why CDNs are one...
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A common question from new bloggers is “How big do I have to be before I can start working with brands?”
It’s a question that reveals how often emphasis is put on audience size when it comes to marketing spend in the influencer space.
There are definitely ways you can change this emphasis to work for, rather than against you. It’s important to understand that audience size is a carryover from traditional advertising and media buying – the more eyeballs the better!
Digital marketing makes it easier and cheaper to reach more eyeballs than ever before (hello Facebook ads). It’s no wonder people are fed up with and becoming blind to advertising messages. We now prefer, more than ever, ‘word of mouth’ recommendations from people we know and trust to help us filter and make decisions on how we act and what we purchase.
I just received an email this morning informing me of the rise in the search term ‘influencer marketing’ – quite the spike in the last 12 months!
This is great news for you if you’re an influencer. Note the search term is for ‘influencer marketing’, not ‘massive website marketing’ or ‘how to market to fake Instagram followers’.
So, when it comes to your strategy for approaching brands when you have low traffic, worry less about the size of your audience and start focusing on the impact of your influence on that audience. It’s your influence you need to emphasise to the brands you want to work with. If you need to figure out if you’ve got influence, check out The 4 Rs that Show a Brand your Blog is Influential.
Here are 4 strategies you can use to approach the brands you want to work with when you have low traffic.
Ask yourself, what is the brand buying – eyeballs or actions? Sometimes it’s a mix of the two, but ultimately brands are working with influencers because of their ability to effect change in the opinions or actions of their audience.
Your job is to emphasise, where you can, the impact of your influence – not how many people might see something, but how many people bought or did something because of it. In your case it might not be many people, so another thing to consider is how much did they spend? There’s a big difference in influencing a $5 spend vs a $50,000 spend.
I once did a sponsored car review after borrowing the car for a week. I had less than 10,000 unique visitors to my blog per month. I was paid $150 and given a gift card towards a family excursion in the car. I created a blog post with a video on YouTube which received over 10,000 views, but more importantly had two people contact me and say my review helped them with the decision to buy the car. So approx $80,000 in car sales for $150 blog post on a small blog (not all of whom were the target market). So next time I want to work with a car brand it’s the $80,000 figure that’s the important one – not the 10,000 readers.
Tip: Focus on the metrics that tell the most relevant story and emphasises the impact of your influence
If you’re going to approach a brand, make sure you’re a true advocate of the brand. Your credibility is more valuable in word of mouth marketing than the size of your audience. It doesn’t matter if you have 100,000 instagram followers if they call you out for promoting a brand that doesn’t fit.
When brands offer influencers products to review, they’ve usually already done their homework and are happy that it’s a good idea to give you something. Just because brands offer influencers products for review, it doesn’t mean influencers should solicit products for review without also doing their homework and proving why working with them is a good opportunity for the brand.
Here’s a simple approach to proving you’re a good fit for a brand
Doing the above helps you build a case for working with you. Backing it up with the metrics that emphasise your influence and target audience fit will be far more convincing than just sending them a media kit focusing on Unique Visitors or followers. They will be more interested in an influencer who shows why they’re a good fit than someone who won’t post about them unless they’re paid to.
Tip: If the reach numbers alone are not telling the story, get proof that you can generate interest and engagement around their brand.
Relevance is one of the more important factors of your ability to influence your audience to the benefit of a brand. The blogger with 250,000 readers will not always be the best choice for every opportunity. The total size of your audience is less important than the total number of the brand’s target customers in your audience.
Gather information about your audience demographics, the reasons they follow you, the problems they need solutions for. Also consider how well placed you are to help the brand achieve its objectives.
A smaller, well matched influencer may have more men aged 21-35 living in Sydney who love boating, than a larger sports influencer with a predominantly international audience.
Tip: Get specific and find the brands you love that want to target your specific niche rather than reach a mass market
Actually, to begin with, don’t ask for anything at all! The point being that the beginning of a relationship with a brand you’d love to work with shouldn’t be a straight out ask for product or money. Interact with them on social media first or track down a contact and just introduce yourself and let them know you’re just starting out and would love to be on their radar for any opportunities they have.
When you do send them a proposition, be realistic and offer them good value. Your job is to make it easy for them to do the math on their return on investment. A quick check is to divide the amount you’re asking for by the price of the product/service and checking to see if it’s realistic you could influence that many people to buy. Of course there are other factors and it’s not always all about getting a purchase right away, but it’s a good sense check.
If you don’t feel you can offer much in they way or influence or reach on your own channels, offer to create something the brand can share on their own channels. More often than not a brand will have a larger audience than you, but it’s authentic content they need to connect with them. Maybe they need recipes – let them know your fee for developing recipes for them!
When you’re just starting out or have low traffic, a sound approach is to do whatever you can to prove your worth. Having a blog or social media following doesn’t entitle you to anything. No matter the size of your audience you should always be prepared to prove your relevance and benefit to a brand.
Have you had good experiences with brands despite having smaller traffic? What are your tips for those just starting out?
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If you’re fascinated with beauty, or are always getting asked for hair, skin, and makeup tips, you may have thought...
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By ProBlogger Expert Ellen Jackson.
Believe you can and you’re half way there
Theodore Roosevelt, allegedly.
Once upon a time I decided to write and publish a book. I wasn’t a writer. I had no experience. I had no contacts in publishing. I had no idea really. I just really thought it would be great to write a book.
Fast forward two years and I held in my hand not one copy of my co-authored self-improvement book, but three. One published in the UK and Australia. Another published in the US and a third published in The Netherlands. In Dutch.
The path to get to that point was challenging – at times torturous. For months during the writing process I could not enter a bookstore due to the anxiety it provoked surrounding my own ability to pull this task off. But I did it and it felt good.
Recently, Mr ProBlogger himself asked the question: ‘What is your biggest challenge as a blogger?”
He produced a wordcloud and these are the responses that stood out to me:
Readers, writing, audience, traffic, content and ideas were in there too but it was these emotions that struck me. Our biggest challenges are our feelings. I know them well.
It’s a conversation you hear over and over again in Facebook groups, in blogging and entrepreneurial circles, anywhere you find people with big goals and big plans. We can do tech. We can do the words. We can do the ideas and the numbers. We can do the work.
It’s the feelings that bring us unstuck – and most of those feelings boil down to confidence. Or not enough of it.
A lack of confidence holds us all back at times. We’re human. We worry about failure. We worry about others’ perception. We’re scared of rejection. We second guess ourselves. We procrastinate.
Even the biggest issue identified by Darren’s readers – time – is underpinned by confidence. We don’t feel we have time to do what we want to do, but scratch the surface and you’ll find that if we’re confident about our path to success our priorities quickly reshuffle to find that precious time. Confidence = time.
For starters it’s a slippery concept. What is it exactly?
Psychologists rarely talk about confidence as a thing. It’s many things. It’s hope. It’s optimism. It’s self belief and it’s self-efficacy – the degree to which you think and feel your actions will achieve results.
When these things combine we believe that we can achieve our goals and we get on and do it, but the path to getting there differs for each of us.
Here are some tips:
If a project is new and exciting and challenging it comes hand in hand with moments of self-doubt – often downright struggle – but it’s the struggle towards our important goals that brings the sweetness to your success.
Work on your confidence and keep going. If I can do it, you can too.
Ellen Jackson from Potential Psychology is a workplace and coaching psychologist, blogger and author who specialises in well being, positive mental health and helping people to flourish.
The post Psychology’s Six Tips for Killer Confidence (and A Story About A Book) appeared first on ProBlogger.
VPS is one of the type of web hosting accounts, from which you can choose to host your website online. If you are owning a website then you must have your file of website on the web server.
Virtual private server is a server that runs the software in the environment which is virtualized, and the customers share the storage and hardware with. Simply it means that your website will be hosting other sites and that will occupy a virtual machine on the hardware. Technology of VPS is same to VMware and Virtual Box. By having these programmes you can run several operating systems at a time. The cost of the running site is being shared, which comes out in the monthly or yearly charge.
The best elements of dedicated hosting and shared hosting is in VPS. Though VPS is a bit expensive than shared hosting but it far better than that. You can setup your shop for $ 10 in shared hosting while in VPS you have to pay between $15-$100. In shared hosting you can share a portion of the server with any other user, when you are facing alot of traffic on your site and highly needs to set-up the site’s server in a particular manner. Whereas, in VPS you can rent a small portion of the server and can save a bit of money, if you have just started with a website and is facing alot of traffic.
To find an affordable VPS hosting provider could be a problem but here, you can find some recommended rich featured, efficient and reliable cheap VPS web hosting providers, at reasonable prices.
| Rank | Company | Price | Features |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | InMotion Hosting | $29.99 |
To learn more, visit http://www.inmotionhosting.com
|
| 2 | Bluehost | $29.99 |
To learn more, visit http://www.bluehost.com
|
| 3 | Dreamhost | $15 |
|
Now let’s take a look at review of each inexpensive VPS hosting and their plans.
You can have a flexible, scalable and reliable VPS hosting option only with InMotion hosting. To ensure maximum uptime it has introduced new and improved SSD VPS plans which include a latest and high-availability feature which is powered by cloud. Being a customer of InMotion you can enjoy fully managed and feature-rich which includes 2 dedicated IP, free cPanel/WHM, 4GB memory and 60GB SSD disk space. Moreover, they also provide their valuable customers with free daily back-up services.
InMotion VPS is comparatively affordable. Solid cheap linux VPS hosting is offered by InMotion, that starts at $29.99 per month and tops out at $74.99 per month. InMotion charges $14.99/mo whereas other VPS might charge $30/mo for 60GB SSD and $20 for cPanel/WHM.
Regular price of InMotion VPS is $49.99 but they offer 40% additional discount and 50% off for first month, that will reduce your charges to $29.99 and $14.99/mo (after further discount). The prices of other VPS (i.e GoDaddy, Hostgator, e.t.c) is higher than InMotion and the features offered by them are not good as InMotion’s. For example: InMotion is offering 4GB memory, whereas GoDaddy and Bluehost is offering only 2GB memory for $39.99/mo and $29.99/mo.
InMotionHosting VPS is quite reliable and fast. Without comprising on the quality of their products they provide high-quality VPS in extremely low prices. Inmotionhosting guarantee a 99.9% uptime on their VPS. InMotion guarantees 100% customer satisfaction and is offering 24/7 customer support service. They also guarantee 100% refund if you decide to cancel your account, within 90 days.
In short InMotion is the best VPS package in this industry, which is perfect in all spheres, whether it is in terms of price range, quality service or customer care. That’s why it’s rated as #1 cheap VPS Hosting.
Bluehost provides you one of the best inexpensive VPS hosting experience in this field, which includes amazing features at extremely affordable prices. The VPS of Bluehost is built on the platform of cloud, which is an open source technology which is designed to offer their clients a simpler, safer, faster and always-on services. Bluehost offers redundant storage and sitelock security too. Using the open source security like KVM and OpenStack , VPS is offered which is highly powerful and easy to use and very cheap. See less switching of the shared plans from Bluehost. The VPS of Bluehost is powerful enough and can easily handle a high traffic complex websites. Your VPS server is always connected due to redundant network infrastructure and various bandwidth.
Bluehost offers a great thing to their customers, in which full control of creating passwords, which grants access to specific aspects of the accounts of the customers.
Bluehost offers standard, enhanced, premium and ultimate named plans for your cheap VPS hosting need. In standard plan you are provided with 2 CPU Cores, 30GB SAN,2GB and 1TB only for $14.99*. The enhanced plan is providing 2 CPU CORES, 60GB SAN,4GB and 2TB only for $29.99*. You can get 3CPU Cores, 120GB SAN 6GB and 3TB only for $44.99* in the premium plan. The ultimate plan costs $59.99* for 4 CPU Cores, 240GB SAN, 8GB and 4TB.
If you are not satisfied with Bluehost VPS ,then you have the opportunity of getting the refund. Furthermore, Bluehost can immediately deal with any type of hurdle created in terms of network. It’s because of the cloud technology it had. It also offers 24×7 customer service support. It’s rated as the second cheapest VPS linux web hosting provider.
Dreamhost is an award winning VPS provider, which is currently hosting more than 400,000 customers globally and 1.5 million websites.
Dreamhost is extremely affordable company and offers four different cheap VPS linux hosting plans. The most expensive plan is for $120/mo in which 8GB RAM is offered, 240GB SSD storage, unlimited domains and bandwidth. The second plan is for $60/mo in which 4GB RAM, 120GB SSD storage, unlimited domains and bandwidth is being offered. Other plan includes 2GB RAM, 60GB SSD storage, unlimited bandwidth and domains. The minimum $ plan is for $15/mo which includes only 1GB RAM, 30GB SSD Storage and Unlimited bandwidth and domains. All of the plans are supported with 24×7 tech support, 1 dedicated IP address and 100% network uptime.
Dreamhost has introduced couple of series of measure in order to improve the reliability and speed of its VPS hosting. To extend and enhance its service, DreamHost announced to deploy Necira’s network virtualization platform. Furthermore, highly experienced team of technicians have been hired to look after it. The rating of DreamHost increased due to the strategy applied by them.
The strategy was of replacing operating on the centres of data on its own with collocation services. This strategy turned out a fruit for hosts and DreamHost got a chance to work with some world-class data center providers and extend its geography as well as capacity. The VPS customers of DreamHost have the opportunity of availing the support from them through e-mail and live chat which is offered at their control panel.
The above provided VPS service providers are one of the best having best prices, best customer’s reviews and best services offered by them. It’s guaranteed that you will not regret for the amount you pay to these companies.
If you’re looking for best cheap VPS hosting with rich features – InMotion is a great choice as compared to others. Bluehost is also a good option but it isn’t that cheaper nor provides as much good features as InMotion. Dreamhost would be the last option.
So choose anyone you like or go with my suggestion which is InMotion. I’m using their VPS to host this website and really happy with them.
The post The 3 Best Cheap VPS Hosting With Unbeatable Features appeared first on All Blogging Tips and is written by Ammar Ali
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By ProBlogger Expert Nicole Avery.
Batching is not a new idea, Darren wrote about how batch processing made him 10 times more productive back in 2008, but it is still a very powerful technique to improve your productivity.
Batching refers to the process of using blocks of time for specific repetitive tasks where there is sole focus and distractions are minimised. Those who have tried batching are very keen like Darren to expose its benefits, but if you are not convinced by their personal experiences, then take a look at the science behind why batching will increase your productivity.
To look at the science as to why batching increases your productivity, a good place to start is with the potential for the brain to change – that is, neuroplasticity:
“Neuroplasticity refers to the potential that the brain has to reorganize by creating new neural pathways to adapt, as it needs. Think of the neurological changes being made in the brain as the brain’s way of tuning itself to meet your needs.” {source}
The brain loves repetition. Repeating a task over and over allows the brain to create neural pathways; to adjust and adapt to the stimuli and in the process it becomes more efficient at the task.
Think of a blogging task that you need to do on a regular basis, like invoicing. The first time you do it, you need to work out a process on how to best handle invoicing. You then need to become familiar with the software or format you have chosen, you need to apply the correct taxation rates, you need to ensure the invoice has its own unique identifier and you need to be able to track the invoice progress. There are many, many parts to this one task.
If you are only ever doing one invoice at a time, it is going to take considerable time for you to remember correctly all the parts in the right order and for you to become faster at invoicing. If on the other hand you begin batching your invoices, you can do many invoices in one session and with the repetition of the task, you begin to embed the process into your brain and increase the speed with which you create the invoices.
Not only do you save time through being more efficient with the process but you also save time as you have all the software, emails etc open at the one time and do not lose time from switching constantly between programs and having to redirect your focus of attention.
Now hopefully you are convinced that batching can increase your productivity as a blogger, how can you implement it into your workflow? Take these simple steps, to set yourself up an effective batching process:
Look at the tasks you do in your blogging on a regular basis and decide which ones can be easily batched. This list should give you a start, but add to it any tasks unique to your workload:
The frequency of the batched tasks will vary depending on the nature of the task; email for example is best batched daily, social media on a weekly basis and blog maintenance on a monthly basis.
Parkison’s law states:
“work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion” {source}
so it is essential that you decide how long to allocate to batching tasks. This is particularly important for tasks like email, social media and blog reading, which could almost go on indefinitely! Set realistic time limits and stick to them.
There is an art to placing batched tasks into your calendar, not only to remind you to do them and so the time is blocked out so you can work on them, but so you can take advantage of your own productive times.
You need to add tasks that are most cognitively demanding like blog writing and data analysis to the times of day you work best. For example, I work best in the morning so I schedule work for my key projects and blog writing before lunch and then schedule tasks like email and social media and email in the afternoon when I find it harder to concentrate. If I were to leave my blog writing until the afternoon, it would take me considerably longer to get the blog post written.
Once you start working on a batching block of time, decide to work on nothing else but this task. As discussed in my last post, task switching comes with a hefty price tag, with a loss in productivity up to as high as 40%. Single tasking when you are batching will ensure you receive the full benefits it can bring.
What tasks do you batch for your blog?
Nicole Avery is a Melbourne mum to five beautiful kids aged seven to 17. She is the master organiser behind the popular parenting blog Planning With Kids and the author of a book by the same name, where she shares tips and tricks for organising the chaos of family life. She is slightly addicted to spreadsheets, tea, running and, of course, planning!
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