Also, keep in mind that everyone doesn’t have 20/20 vision. If they have to squint to read your site, that’s too much effort.
Make it easy.
I just had to fix someone’s website that was FULL of bad code and they were seeing random things on their site. It was from the theme. All Wordpress themes are not created equal.
You get what you pay for in EVERY sense. Do not go for a theme just because it’s free.
Go back to old popular posts and create custom graphics for them. And make them square so you can share on Instagram. It’ll revive an old post, and introduce new readers to some of your work they might have missed.
If they don’t match in tone, fix one of them.
Are 5 or more of them the same or pointing to the same link or page? If so, you’re doing the internet’s version of “Mommy. Mommy. Momma. MOM. MOOOOM! Ma. Mother. Madre.” It’s annoying in real life and it’s annoying on the web. Diversify your content. Don’t spam your timeline with the same link 10 times in a row. No one will click it.
It’s like yelling your phone number in a room. The first time you yell, people will write it down. The 2nd time, the people who missed it the first time will say “oh yea!” If they hear it the 5th time in 2 minutes, they will block it out.
Try to space out link drops of the same content by a couple of hours on Twitter.
* Post it to Facebook, telling folks what it’s about and why it’s awesome. Yes, there are automated ways to do this but people usually click more when they can tell you did it yourself.
* Post it to Twitter, with a short description and short link so it’s RTable.
* Ping Feedburner so it knows to check your feeds right away
Instant traffic. Might not be a lot, depending on how your current network is. But these will get you started.
It’s Wordpress SEO plugin by Yoast!
Every time your Wordpress site is loaded or refreshed, it pings every single thing on that page (all plugins, codes, images etc). If you’d like to make your site load up to twice as fast, add a plugin like W3 Total Cache or WP Super Cache. What they do is take a picture of your site regularly (like once every 15 minutes).
And instead of pinging everything every time someone loads your page, it shows them that picture. Therefore, loading it much faster.
The drawback to this is that changes you make to your site’s sidebars or headers might be delayed in showing up. But if you empty your cache, they’ll show up immediately.
I’ve been blogging for a long time and I’ve written over 700 posts and have about 170 sitting in my drafts folder. That’s a lot of typing and letters. If something was to happen and my site crashed and I lost all of these, I would basically quit writing. I’d just take up the craft of rocking back and forth on my living room floor in a catatonic space for the rest of my life.
How I guarantee that it won’t happen is by making sure I backup my blog. And if you blog, you need to do the same. Just like it’s important to back up your computer’s contents, you should have your online writing safeguarded. Because stuff happens.
Here’s an easy step by step on how to back up your website if you use Blogger or Wordpress.
Instagram can SELL your pictures without compensating you. Even beyond the ads within Instagram, your pictures can be sold to companies for their use in whatever commercials and ads they feel like it.
Who should be most concerned here? Everyone, obviously, but the folks who stand out to me are photographers, celebrities and even bloggers.
Photographers make a living off the images they capture. If Instagram starts selling their pictures, they’re losing money by the droves. Instagram is basically making itself the new iStock Photo and those whose careers depend on being compensated for their images will be taken advantage of.
And then celebrities. Their images are worth more than the rest of ours because as public figures, they get compensated for just being them. If a celebrity’s picture is taken while they’re rocking a name brand or are in a certain store, can that brand or store then pay Instagram to use that celeb’s image for their ads? Probably.
For bloggers, I can see this coming to bite us in the yansh too. All those brands who always want to pay us in “exposure” will have a field day here. If we post pictures of us using their products, they might be willing to pay Instagram for them instead of us. We will be saltier than the Pacific.
If you’re no longer using a plugin, deactivate it and delete. It’s like throwing stuff out and leaving the full trash bag in your kitchen. Don’t just leave it there to take up room.
When you update your blog, upload the featured image on the post to Instagram, and include your blog link in the caption. But also make sure you give the picture some context so people will care about it enough to actually go to your blog.
This will send you direct traffic.
You need to track the traffic of any site you run so you can know how many people are on it everyday. You cannot use the amount of comments or reblogs you get to gauge how many eyes are seeing your content. It’s not a good way because most people don’t leave comments.
Google Analytics is awesome and free. So go to Google.com/analytics while signed into a Gmail account and grab the code and start tracking your traffic.
Your numbers might surprise you.
