Sometimes market researchers classify a generation based on their characteristics to help understand how that generation is going to have an Impact on the world.

These sorts of classifications mostly comprise of young teenagers to young adults who are in their early 30’s. This is because most teenagers and young adults will have an Impact on companies and the economy in the future.

To understand the characteristics of this generation will be beneficial for whoever is involved in dealing with them.

Around the 1950’s the ‘Baby Boomers’ were a generation that was touted to be the most impactful in America’s history. There was truth to this because Steve Jobs was and Bill Gates is from the baby boomer generation.

Who are the Milleials?

The Milleials (Generation Y) are the next generation of young adults who will have an Impact on the world in the near future. The Milleials are estimated to spend close to

$200 Billion by 2017! And over 10 Trillion in their lifetimes

What does this mean?

This means you need to gear your entire business and point it towards the Milleials. Your marketing, the platforms you choose and everything about your product and strategy should be focused on catering to them.

They are different and these are their qualities.

• They have been part of the growth of the Inteet
• They do not think twice before trying something new
• They are the Social-Media generation
• They have the FOMO(Fear of Missing Out)

The Characteristics of Millenials

This is the generation that was bo when the Inteet was bo, like a pet, they grew together and have seen the Inteet evolve.

They’ve seen Floppy Disk transform into a Compact Disc, which transformed into a Pen-Drive, which transformed into the Cloud.

They have seen phones change from brick phones to smartphones just in a matter of years.

Their adaptability says something for businesses. Milleials because of their upbringing with technology will be more open to better and greater performing technological products. This makes them a great consumer for super Iovative companies.

Most Milleials are more open to trying new things because all they’ve seen in their times are new things taking over their lives.

The baby boomers, because of the world war were taught to pursue a life that was structured and stable. This meant buying a house, buying a car and ownership of day-to-day objects. The Milleials are slightly different, they are looking to rent and not own.

Businesses like Uber have thrived because of milleials mentality. This is true for even very personal products like clothing where milleial women are renting clothes instead of buying them.

The recession took a big hit on the Milleials opportunities. The unemployment rate is higher and they are looking at cheaper and reliable services that will help them. Ownership is not high in their agenda. Apart from the recession, the choice for Milleials is high, there is too much competition with varied value propositions. They don’t want to commit to one product.

From the Goldman-Sachs report are not very surprising numbers. The use of Social Media by the Milleials are much higher than that of the Baby Boomers(Obviously). This says a lot about this generation, they are more open to sharing things about themselves and focus on having a stronger Identity.

Source : Goldman Sachs Research

Narcissistic Personalities and Extremely Social

The Narcissistic personality is almost 3 fold in the youth (College going Millenials ) of today than it was in 1982. Although, this is a bit negative, but personal Apps and Apps that boost the self-do really well. Selfie apps and fitness that make one look better and healthier are the rage.

Milleials respect brands that have a very strong social presence. Being active on social and being effective is considered a sign of a good company according to the people of this generation.

This also suggests that they are more willing to share Interesting content and promote companies that seem interesting without anyone asking them to. This is useful for companies in the fun space and viral campaigns change the face of a company and bring in millions of dollars in business just because of a few shares.

Facebook has been an effective platform for the Milleials to express themselves and feel validated among their peers. Social platforms that have Interaction and “shareability” enabled in their systems perform much better than the ones that are not.

Apps like Quizup have risen meteorically because of taking the quizzing aspect and coecting it with the social aspect. Even games like Clash of Clans have friends and strangers competing and Interacting with each other. This was not the case many years back where Individuals played most games against computers.

FOMO and Early Adopters

Fear of Missing out is basically the mentality of this generation who see their friends do something and feel like they shouldn’t miss out on a similar experience. It can relate to traveling, owning a product and other experiences. This is good for businesses.

Credits: themash.com

Businesses look for Early Adopters. The ones who will try out new things and be the first to adopt a technology or a style. In the famous ‘Crossing the Chasm’ diagram, the product flow is described with ‘Iovators’ who start the product and the ‘Early Adopters’ who experiment with the product and tell their friends which is the ‘Early Majority’. The advantage for companies now is, the Millenials are filled with early adopters who experiment with new products and brands and always are looking out for the next new thing.

Instagram had 36,000 users on the day they launched. More and more companies are growing at a much faster rate than ever before. This can be seen from the fact that the youngest billionaires in the world are around 24 years old.

They are Mobile-First – The Younger Milleials

The younger Millenials (1990-1998) have had access to mobiles at an earlier age than any other generation (Except the future Generation Z). This makes them comfortable in using the Mobile as their main tool for every single activity. Snapchat is a popular social network focused only on Millenials, with over 37% of their users falling under the 18 to 24 age group and their next highest group is from the 25 to 34 age group. This says a lot about how Millenials only have driven the success of this startup which has become a $ 15 Billion behemoth.

This is the reason Mobile Apps are a craze and the Millenials are more open to discovering new Applications that keep them engaged.

Final Thoughts

The baby boomers were a useful set with their steadier lives of home-ownership and focus on forming a base and following a set structure. But the Millenials are the ones who are going to change the way society behaves. Companies started by milleials will Impact society with their bold decisions and their non-adherence to the status-quo.

This is a generation that will push humanity to the cusp of a better future. And not too far from now a new breed of humans will arise that we call the Generation Z. Their rise will mark the supersonic growth of humanity.

Arghh…The Smart man syndrome!

This one is long yet very interesting.

I can’t live without oxygen, food, books and most important gadgets. It will be all right for me to live without food and books for a few days. But if anyone will try to keep me away from my mobile, tablet and laptop, I will hit in his face with a club.

I am a lifelong leaer. I don’t know how to sit idle and do nothing at all. I don’t gossip.

I don’t watch movies.

But I love spending time with gadgets.

I am a tech-embracing consumer.

I think I’ve spent my time on my mobile, tablet, kindle and laptop more than anyone else on this planet — 10 hours a day, sometimes 13 hours a day or even more.

I am not mad. I am a normal being like you. In fact, I am productive more than the people I spend time with.

Everyone on this planet is given the same 24 hours in the day. I make sure that I don’t sleep more than 6-7 hours a day.

After waking up early in the moing, I hit the ground and get the right things done. Where young and trendy generation kills their time in refreshing the same page of a social network again and over again, I get busy in setting goals and achieving them.

And here it comes all the difference between the productive people and the rest of the society.

Productive people love their job and profession. They live their life comfortably. Above all, they ea money without being industrious.

It is necessary for everyone that they invest themselves with the right tools. And for a blogger, it is essential to use the tools for profit.

Time management plays a crucial role in completing small as well as big tasks. Without managing time, you caot go any longer. Apart from time management, there are a lot of habits that can triple your productivity.

The best way I found to maximize the productivity is through our cell phones, as we carry it all day long. Most of the people waste their time in using cell phones.

Some of us might even don’t know that our priceless time is consumed by our mobile phones. So here, in this article, I will share with you the 21 mobile apps to make you fall in love with your SmartPhone.

I’ve been using these apps for the past one year. Truly speaking, these apps have made my tablet and mobile phone worthy of me.

I recommend that you read through all of them and then pick a few that feel the most relevant for you.

The listed below mobile apps, if used with discipline, can be proved productive for you, as these have saved my time and helped me in maximizing my productivity.

21 Mobile Apps to Make You Smarter & Productive

1 Forest

I love this app and that’s the reason I am informing you about Forest app first. Forest is an app that helps me to stay away from my smartphone and stay focused on my work.

Whenever I want to concentrate, I plant a seed in Forest. In the next 30 minutes, this small seed will gradually grow into a big tree. However, if I caot resist the temptation and leave this app to check Facebook or play a game, my little cute tree will wither away.

2 Productivity Challenge Timer

One of the thing I’ve realized on the path of becoming better every day is that a man expands its strength only by challenging himself. The work what he does out of his comfort zone grows all dimensions of his personality — patience, sincerity, self-discipline, willpower, focus, and self-confidence. As a blogger we always try to remain productive whole day long.

As Patch Adams said, ‘You’ve got to know what you want. This is central to acting on your intentions. When you know what you want, you realize that all there is left then is time management. You will manage your time to achieve your goals because you clearly know what you’re trying to achieve in your life.’

Now don’t wait for the right moment. Install Productivity Challenge Timer and start plaing, whether you are ready or not, to make your life awesome.

3 Pocket

Whenever I find any article or link to read, I just save it to Pocket mobile app. It’ll sync across my phone, tablet, and computer so I can come back to it whenever and wherever I’d like, even when I am offline.

Now, I can read everything in Pocket in a clean, easy-to-view layout that’s free of distractions. “Pocket mobile app makes subway reading possible. No longer do your lingering pages refresh mid-commute, leaving you staring at a blank, hopeless screen that caot coect to the Inteet.” – Slate

4 Buffer

Buffer is the easiest way to share on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn. I schedule my updates to post at optimal times, whether I’m around or not. Buffer has a lot of my time by posting my content automatically.

So build up a queue of awesome content to share with your friends and followers, and follow-up on your posts with Buffer’s straightforward analytics to see which posts performed best.

5 Kindle

Often people have asked me what advice should I give them to play big every day. I ask them to read books. Whenever I want advice I pick up the book and read it. Reading books not only solve my doubts but also expand my consciousness to a new level. And once the mind is stretched it caot come to its earlier state.

Do you know you have Kindle app for Android & iOS which is free & stores all your books?

I always carry a book with me wherever I go. In case, if I forget, this app helps me to continue my jouey in improving myself and become a better person.

The alteate mobile app for Kindle is Moon-Reader.

6 Feedly

A single place to read all the news you rely on to think, lea, and keep ahead.

Feedly allows me to organize all my favorite publications, podcasts and YouTube chaels into collections. It’s one among those mobile apps that helps me to discover new sources.

7 Rescue Time

‘Where my day went?’ is the question I had often asked myself before going to bed every night. I was disappointed with my work.

I began procrastinating…

..The productivity level dropped.

Then, one day, I found this mobile app while surfing the inteet. And that was the day when I stopped asking, ‘Where my day went?’

Rescue Time is an accurate automatic time tracking of mobile apps. It reports voice call time, tells where the website time is spent, informs historical productivity reports to see the progress and provides privacy options to choose what I care about.

Above all, this app helped me in knowing, ‘Where my day went?’

8 Best Motivational Stories

Without motivation we caot do anything in life. Whatever we have achieved in our life is only because of the motivation. I recall reading somewhere, ‘The first thirty minutes of your day defines your whole day.’

After getting up in the moing, I directly open a self-help book and read a few pages, or else I open my mobile and read motivational stories. The words I read clean my mind from thousands of thoughts and help me to focus on important tasks first. Driven by the words, I start my day tremendously and finish the work that plays a significant role in my goal of becoming better every day.

There are a lot of mobile apps on the web that provides best motivational stories. I’ve installed this: 100+ Motivational Stories.

9 Brilliant Quotes

Brilliant Quotes app is a collection of over 3600 carefully hand-picked quotes from more than 260 people.

It contains sayings from philosophers, writers, spiritual thinkers and other great minds whose brilliant words inspired many human beings. See it for yourself, download it now and get inspired every day!

10 Todoist

To achieve big in life, you need to be armed with big plans. A plan is just an exercise if you caot accomplish your goal. Every night, before going to bed I make sure that I am going to use the next day to its full. I create a list of my goals so that I am going to maximize my potential the next day.

Todoist mobile app helps me to keep track of my most important projects or to just remember to pay my room rent and other expenditures. The similar app to Todoist is Google Keep.

11 Dashlane Password manager

Dashlane Password Manager allows me to keep track of passwords and personal info that I use across the web. I have safely stored all my passwords, credit cards, IDs and more in one safe place.

Now, within a few seconds, I can login to any of my accounts and save my time.

12 7 Week Habit

Scientists believe the sweet spot for developing a habit is right around 7 weeks, so once you have completed 49 days straight with little failure, you can be sure you’ll have developed a positive habit, broken a bad habit or completed a goal.

7 Weeks is the easiest way to make and break habits. Based on Charles Duhigg’s bestselling book, “The Power of Habit,” 7 Week Habit mobile app creates an ultra-simple strategy of completing one day of your habit or goal at a time.

Every day that you complete successfully marks the day as complete. Each day you complete your task and it gets you one step closer to not only making or breaking a new habit but also to increase your motivation, willpower, and discipline too.

13 Swiftkey Keyboard

SwiftKey Keyboard uses artificial intelligence to automatically lea my writing style, including the emoji, the words that matter to me and how I like to type.

Swiftkey Keyboard is an effective mobile app for you because:

1. It kills your typos
2. Type faster with A.I.-powered predictions
3. Simply swipe-to-type with SwiftKey Flow
4. Autocorrect that actually works
5. Always leaing your slang, nicknames, and phrases
6. Teach the autocorrect your quirks from your online accounts

14 Merriam-Webster

As a writer, my only important work is to spend my time in reading and filling my mind with concise words. Gone are the days when writers travel with dictionary kept in the pocket. Now, it’s an age where we don’t have time to find something. We don’t have patience. We want everything ready-made.

I’ve tried so many other mobile apps, and they didn’t work like I wanted them to. This mobile app is smoother than other mobile apps and offers voice search – to let me look up a word without having to spell it – along with synonyms, antonyms, example sentences and more. It’s a great tool for reference, education, and vocabulary building.

15 Eveote

From everything we get ideas. Ideas are the delusion if we do not act upon it. Every day, we get so many thoughts that if we pick one idea and act upon it, we can change our life.

Success is also nothing but a random number of tries given to our ideas. Only one idea can change our life. So I recommend people to always carry a joual with them. If you are also like so many people who caot handle diary or joual, then Eveote is designed for you.

Now, you can write, collect and capture ideas as searchable notes, notebooks and drafts. Remember success is a random number of tries given to our ideas. Don’t miss any vital thought, and show a masterpiece to the world by working upon your tremendous ideas.

16 YouTube

If you caot read books then listen to the audios or videos of your area of interest. I’ve doubled the use of YouTube mobile app after its feature of saving videos. Now, whenever I find Wi-Fi around me, I save the lectures and speeches of professionals in my mobile. Then, I watch them in my free time.

Not only watching videos help me to triple my potential but also enhances my speaking and listening skills. I highly recommend you to take advantage of this new feature of saving videos in your YouTube mobile app to boost your productivity.

Must read:

17 Night Screen

Now we are working for hours in front of displays to complete our projects within the time limit. So, it is very important to establish the viewing condition that minimizes stress to our eyes.

If you won’t adjust the brightness of your device, you may suffer from headaches, dry eyes and even blurred vision. Once you have established good viewing condition you can do your work faster and sooner. This mobile app is made up to adjust the brightness of your device. Download it now! For other platforms, you can use F.lux

18 Snowball

Snowball allows me to get things done without opening a million mobile apps. Snowball takes all the stuff from all the apps on my phone and puts it in one place.

It offers a unified inbox from where I can reply to messages from Facebook, WhatsApp, Email, Messenger and more.

This mobile app also helped me in avoiding the aoying messages by hiding them.

19 Deep Breathing

Everything is written in our breaths.

90 percent of the impurities in the system are thrown out of the body through the breath. Remember worries and tensions block the flow of thoughts.

The breathing patte is different for one who is depressed, unhappy, anxious and tense.

Deep breathing is essential to take control over your emotions — anger, mindless speech, anxiety… If emotions are controlled then life is controlled. Deep breathing for ten minutes opens all the doors of your mind to receive ideas. Deep breathing is linked to silence which is necessary to tread down the road of spirituality.

20 Dropbox

Backing up your important files and documents is necessary for you because there are a number of ways files or documents can be lost unexpectedly — Virus infection, physical damage, theft, accidently deleted…

Files you keep in Dropbox are safely backed up and you can get to them from all your devices. It’s easy to send large files to anyone, even if they don’t have a Dropbox account.

21 Stumble Upon

Welcome to the most powerful way to discover your favorite content. Simply tell what you’re interested in and Stumble Upon serve up the perfect mix of photos, videos, entertaining articles, quotes, news, art, memes, travel tips and much more from around the web.

1. Follow your friends and share your discoveries
2. Create lists of your favorite topics and follow other lists to find more content you love
3. Blaze through the best of the web at lightning speed
4. Share your discoveries via Facebook, Twitter, Email, and SMS
5. Download for free

We are at the end of our list. I’ve enlisted all the apps that helped me every day to become more productive. One among the greatest factor I found on the jouey of becoming a writer is self-discipline. Self-discipline is not to become serious, but it means you need to be sincere towards your goals. Self-discipline requires you to work on a skill over and over again. Whenever people ask me to define self-discipline, I often tu to them with the quote of Bruce Lee, ‘I am not scared of the person who has practised 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practised one kick 10,000 times.’

With the above listed app and self-discipline you can also be a world class performer. If there is any app that helped you in boosting your productivity, which I forgot to write down as well, then you can share it with me and all the readers by Idea below or sharing on Social media.

Getting a Google Adsense account is too tough nowadays. And even if you get an approval, struggling with 403 Forbidden error is a next headache. In this post, I will cover up how to solve this issue.

Credits : Clker Free Vector Images

I am covering this issue after my website Online Rockers Hub stuck with a 403 Forbidden error.

When do you get 403 Forbidden error?

403 Forbidden error occurs mostly for new AdSense users. Users whose AdSense application was initially rejected and later got approved on reapplying will get this error mostly. You would have even received an Adsense approval message just like the one below saying that ” Your account has been approved and ads will go live within few hours”.

But even after 48 hours, you may not see the ads. You will see a blank ad. If you check your website by right clicking -> Inspect -> Console , you will notice a 403 Forbidden error.

Why does this 403 Forbidden error occur?

This occurs because your application was rejected initially. So Adsense crawlers will be instructed not to deliver ads to your website. But later you have reapplied and got your account approved . But, Adsense crawlers may not be instructed about this approval. This is probably a technical error at Adsense server.

How to fix 403 Forbidden error?

1) Check your Adsense code:

The first thing you will have to do is, check if your AdSense code is exactly same as the one created at your Adsense account. You can get the AdSense code on your page by right clicking -> view page source ( Ctrl + U) . An HTML page will open. Use find option and check if the AdSense code is same.

2) Add your website at Adsense account:

Now go to Adsense account, Click the Gear icon -> Settings -> My sites -> Manage sites and add your website. Click the three dots icon and select authorization and check if ” Only Authorize my verified sites to use my ad code” is off.

3) Check with your hosting service:

Certain hosting services like Namecheap would have a mod rule applied. If you report them this issue, then they will whitelist your domain.

4) Switch off Cloudflare Rocketscript :

If your website uses CloudFlare , then you must make sure that you switch off the Rocketscript . Because Rocketscript will break AdSense code from displaying. Go to your CloudFlare account, go to Speed tab and check if the Rocket Loader is Off.

5) Report this at Adsense forum:

Now, move on to Google Adsense forum , and create a new thread stating this issue. So that, experts can check if your site has any other problems.

6) Use Adsense troubleshooter:

Visit Adsense Troubleshooter and then fill up the questions asked. So that, you will get an opportunity to file a ticket. Now, an AdSense Officer will directly contact you through email. Now, he will check out this issue and he will manually approve your account and then ads will start displaying within 24 hours.

Some genius will try to go to step 6 directly.

Let me tell you,why you should not go to step 6 directly ?

These 5 steps are common steps followed by AdSense experts to resolve this issue.

If you directly file a ticket and explain Adsense officer, then he will give ask you to do them one by one. However, each of his replies will take hours.

Why do you need to waste your precious traffic just because of silly ideas? So go to step 6 only after finishing the remaining 5 steps.

Blog Idea has always been one of the most lethal weapons for inteet marketers to get a backlink, for networking and branding. Now, how many of you hate the fact you have to fill out all the comment box fields like Name, Email, URL everytime you want to add a comment.

At least, I hate this & especially when you are ruing multiple blogs; it’s more pain.

Well, Disqus and such other 3rd party Idea system are free from this scenario but WordPress default comment form is n’t.

Today, I’m going to share one useful Chrome add-on call “Easy Comment” for active blog commentators to easily (automatic) fill out the comment form.

Easy comment is a useful addon which fills out comment form quickly. In short, when you go to any WordPress blog to comment on, every time you have to input fields like:

• Name
• Email
• Web-Address

What Easy comment addon can do for you?

Easy comment Chrome addon let you add one click comment on WordPress blogs. This meant you don’t need to enter your details every time. Just click on easy comment icon on the top bar of Chrome browser. Now, add your details like Name, Email & Website URL.

We have also added the feature of configuring multiple profiles. Using this, you can quickly change your commentator profile. This feature is added to take away the pain of bloggers with multiple blogs.

From next time when ever you are on WordPress blog which has default Idea option, this addon will automatically fill up the details.

Well, this is the initial release that you can start using from today. This will save a large amount of time, and you can comment more on different blogs and websites, and this will also help you increase your backlinks.

Download Link: Easy comment

So what are you waiting for? Install and comment.

Do let me know more feature suggestion for this add-on in the comment section below. Do write about this useful add-on on your blog.

If you want to build a better blog, you need a thriving audience based around your blogging community.

And you can only build a great community around your blogs when you have active readership. When I talk about improving readership, what I mean is generating traffic which doesn’t stink.

Good traffic is targeted traffic, and it converts better in every sense. As a subscriber, as a product buyer, and as an engaged audience member, these kinds of visitors are the ones who will be marketing your blogs in the offline community.

The hard part is building this active readership; you need to be consistent and patient. It takes time to build this improved audience base.

But don’t worry. In this article, I will share a few strategies which will help you build an audience base around readers who need your blog.

The Definite Guide to Growing Your Blog Readership

1. Use social media sites to grow subscribers

Social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ can REALLY provide a great platform to build your online reputation. If you want to build a great readership for your blog, an active social media presence will you help you do that.

Regardless of how busy you are with your online businesses or offline work, make sure you are spending quality time on social media sites to engage with other bloggers and influencers in your niche.

One of the biggest mistakes bloggers make with their social media pages is they focus on getting more likes and shares, but fail to build a community. Once your readers are engaged, they’ll be the ones getting you more likes and shares.

The key is to make your readers/blog followers feel like they are part of your community. That’s one reason why I always call ShoutMeLoud readers, “Shouters“.

Try promoting your best content and comment on them regularly to build healthy relationships with your audience.

But, don’t be a scumbag and promote ONLY your stuff; no one will care about you or your blog if you only talk about yourself. Use a win/win approach by sharing other’s content and, in tu, sooner or later, they will share your posts.

This is how to build great long-term readership on your blogs using social media sites.

• If you are a busy blogger, you can use apps like Bufferapp to schedule content, and your primary role will shift to charging up engagement on your pages.
• I use a combination of Flipboard, Nuzzel, Bufferapp to stay pro-active on Twitter, G+ & FB.

2. Coect with other bloggers

Coections are everything in blogging.

Blogging is an online business. It needs good contacts, relationships, and a healthy network with other bloggers and influencers to succeed.

The more relationships you have built up around your blog, the better your quality of readership will be. Once you have a thriving audience, everything else becomes super easy.

You will get:

• More sales
• More profits
• Better traffic
• Better online visibility

Use other people’s blogs to coect with them. Try guest posting, blog Idea, and sending them emails about their posts to quickly build these great relationships.

Again, don’t be selfish! Introduce their blogs or best posts to your readers on your blogs. This way you will be actively building a great online reputation and a strong network of fellow bloggers.

3. Use guest blogging as a weapon

Guest blogging is no doubt one of the best ways to quickly build a brand around your blog.

Guest blogging not only brings you quality back links, but it also gives you more online presence and more readership for your blogs.

Tips for successful guest blogging:

• Don’t post mediocre content on your guest posts; always write high-quality posts. People will only follow you back to your blog when your posts are amazing, unique, and really, really good.
• Try landing on top blogs with your guest posts because these top blogs will always help you get loyal readers, more email leads, and an increase in sales.
• Analyze the blogs where you want to guest post. This way you will know how to write in order to capture that specific audience.
• Try to frequently guest post on blogs which are bigger than yours.

Related Read: How to Craft Guest Blogging Campaign for Maximum Exposure

4. Make sure you have quality content on your blog

If you don’t have great blog posts on your site, no one will be interested in reading your stuff.

Even if you have a lot of influence online, it won’t help you if you’re writing mediocre, generic posts.

Identify what problems your audience is having. This will help you write much better blog posts. Know what they want and build a network around them and what they need.

Research well and coect with other influencers to know what they are writing on their sites. Observe how they are coecting to people on their blogs to improve their readership.

5. Invest money on blog design

First impressions are crucial in blogging.

If you want to quickly grab other bloggers’ eye balls, make your blog design look professional.

Make sure your blog serves up a mobile-friendly theme, as smartphone users are increasing every day. I use & recommend Genesis theme as it has inbuilt schema markup & is responsive.

6. Respond to everyone

No matter how busy you are, spend the time responding to your readers.

Try to engage with them through your blog Idea, social media sites like Twitter and Facebook, and respond to emails. Most readers will express their problems using blog Idea and emails. When you quickly respond to them and solve their problems, they will become loyal fans to you and your sites.

Take the time to respond to your readers and other bloggers and you will surely create a great impact.

Don’t forget the importance of creating healthy relationships with your blog’s readers. In order to build an amazing long-term blog, you need active, engaged, raving fans supporting you.

These are some of the strategies which work for me. This is the reason ShoutMeLoud is as successful as it is; we are a community of bloggers.

Try to implement few of these strategies and you will notice the difference.

Do let me know about some other tips which will help a blogger build a strong readership around their blog. Share your advice in the Idea.

If you find this article useful, share it with your friends on Facebook and Google Plus!

Blogging Is Tough

Not a day goes by where you see a blogger getting views and likes in masses and eaing a nice sum of money on the side.

And all they have to do, to generate that audience and money, is talk about things they experience in life.

You can’t even go through 3 pictures on your Instagram account, without seeing someone famous in the blogging community.

Some are even featured on billboards on high streets and the face for certain brand products.

Being the unique person that you are, you decide to create your own blog and start documenting your life and experiences, to make a living from it.

After all, it seems easy enough to write a blog post occasionally and snap a few pictures here and there, as the rest picks up on it’s own.

With all the things you’ve been through in life and all the fuy stories you have to tell, you have an endless list to blog about.

Fast forward a few months and suddenly you realize, you still haven’t made a single pey and you start to doubt you know anything about how to start a blog that will make you money.

On average you get about 10-15 views per day (most of which are family members and friends), no one seems to be leaving Idea and you’re drying out on material to blog about.

Your social media profiles have a few followers and everything seems to just stay the way it is although you put in so much effort on a daily basis.

Eventually, you decide that blogging is not for you and that all other successful bloggers know the secret or have something special you don’t, which is why you failed at it.

Plus it is a time-consuming activity and you’re busy with your real life anyway so it’s time to throw in the towel.

The Traps

Here’s a list of things most new bloggers forget, ignore or fall into, which usually is also the reason they never ea any income and give up eventually.

#1 Blogging isn’t easy!

If you want to become a serious blogger, you have to realize that the “secret” or “special thing” all the other successful bloggers have, is that they are actually hard workers.

Have a look at their blog or their social media…

There is constant new content on there and professional looking one as well. How often do you update your blog? How many times a month do you consider a lot of content?

Especially with social medias such as Instagram, you should be posting at least 1 image a day, with several hashtags, to grow your audience and maintain your existing one.

Anything below that simply won’t cut it out.

That doesn’t mean you have to be active within every area of the online world. You can be successful with just a YouTube chael or just your Instagram account.

But if you pick one area, make sure to stick with it and eventually branch out to others. So first rule of becoming a successful blogger, is to have the right mindset.

#2 Pick the right niche!

The second mistake most people make is not narrowing down their audience.

You have to pick the right niche and know your audience before typing your very first word.

Actually pick the right niche, even before you buy your domain!

You don’t want to invest in a great domain name, just to realize later on that it doesn’t fit your niche. It will only be misleading towards your audience if you do.

The other reason you want to have that right niche for you, is to keep it interesting for yourself.

Remember the times when you were assigned different types of homework and you would keep the worst for last? You don’t want that same feeling when it comes to your blog.

Creating new content should be fun and maybe a little tedious but exciting. You should want to research new things about your topic because you’re generally interested.

It will make your task so much easier and more personal when you type out your text, which also converts onto your text. You audience will notice your sincerity and honesty.

So remember to Pick the right niche!

#3 No need to spend a fortune!

The next point is a bit of a controversial one, but I find it important to at least mention it if you’re considering a blogging career in the future.

I’ve seen a lot of people come and go and spend way more money than I ever did in my 8 first months of blogging.

As soon as they find out about outsourcing, they hire people to do all their work and wonder why they get no traffic, penalties from search engines and no conversions.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve outsourced a fair amount myself, but if you want something done properly, you should understand how it works first.

You can’t join the game and expect someone else to do all the dirty work before you know the basics.

Once you understand these, you can consider outsourcing and hiring freelancers. For instance, if you hire someone to write your next blogpost, it should have a similar style to the previous articles you’ve written.

But if you start off with hiring people, you’ll have a different type of text with no identity to your blog.

Additionally you might not even know how to check it for copyrights or other factors that could get your site penalties.

The truth is, you can start off blogging, pretty much for free. The minimum investment should be a domain registration and a hosting plan.

Therefore, lesson number 3 is start spending once you see money coming in and you’ve understood the process!

#4 Know the basics!

As for the final point, I’ve briefly addressed it above but, it definitely needs its own sub category.

When it comes to basics, I can’t stress enough how important it is to get them right. You could be blogging for months and see barely any improvement.

None of your articles rank on Googles first page, people spend less than 30 seconds on your site and creating a single post takes ages for you to get out.

If you’re familiar with these issues, you might have to go back to the begiing.

Make sure you familiarize yourself with the basics of SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Find out what keywords are what LSI keywords are and what long tail keywords are.

Most importantly find out how to use them properly. It may seem tedious at first and requires some effort but it will be so much worth it in the long run.

Therefore remember to know and master the basics!

But now that you know some of the typical mistakes people make and how easy it is to fall in these traps, let’s look at some of the solutions there are.

Regardless if you’re already blogging or about to start, don’t throw away the efforts you’ve made. Nothing is lost and you can still become a success.

Solutions:

As you know now, blogging requires a lot of work and it can be tough to keep up with all the tasks you set yourself.

But one thing you should start implementing in your daily routine, is a checklist. Write down all the things you have to do the night before, and prioritize accordingly.

(Small tip – Do the most tedious ones first! Once they’re out the way the rest flies by!)

Next, you want to stay organized (which usually goes hand in hand with creating checklists).

As for choosing the right niche and knowing your audience, we’ve leaed that this is vital to continuously have new food for thought and ideas to blog about.

But even the best niche can give you a writers block at one point or another. There are several things you can do to avoid this:

1. Set up a Google alert or more to get news stories directly to your email
2. Go back to old content and pick out ideas and create an entire post about it
3. Find blogs, forums and other online communities in your niche and get inspired

Often a question on forums make great posts people would love to read. Plus you know there’s a high chance other people are curious and ask themselves that same question.

Seeing other authority sites in your niche can inspire you and show you which way to go.

As for not spending a fortune, this still applied! However some people may find it easier to sign up to trusted courses to lea the basics and get support when needed.

But before you go and chase every online product promising to make millions online, make sure to read reviews about each product and do realize that all the information you need to be a successful blogger, can be found online for free!

It may require a bit more effort to find the right sources and dig through the information, but it’s out there!

Try coecting with bloggers, comment on their posts, lea from them and pick their brains. Go through older posts and see what they can teach you.

Eventually it will click and you’re just a step away from becoming an authority in your niche yourself.

And don’t forget that the shiny object syndrome is very real and many fall victim to it (I did so myself).

You have all the resources and skills it takes to know how to start a blog that will make you money.

Once you find your path, you should stick to it and not get distracted by the many other options, possibilities and ways of eaing an online income.

Do these things and you are well ahead of many other bloggers that fail within the first few months. It’s often a matter of persistence.

Now continue blogging!

When it comes to monetizing your blog using contextual ad networks, there are very few high-quality publishers out there.

But Media.net is one of them. (Media.net is Yahoo! and Bing’s network for contextual ads.)

However, the higher the quality of the ad network, the harder it is to get approval.

We have seen the same for AdSense approval & BuySellAds Approval.

Last time, when I wrote a detailed review of Media.net, many users talked about not getting approval for the Media.net ad network. Most of the applications were rejected & let me tell you, rejection is always disappointing.

Well, it would be wrong to blame bloggers or even Media.net for rejection, as Media.net doesn’t limit itself to only judging website content. They look for a lot of factors before accepting or rejecting an application.

Just in case you don’t know, once you get an approved account with them, you will get a dedicated manager who will help you at every stage to optimize your ad placements & settings for generating high revenue.

I’ve never before felt the luxury of having a dedicated manager just for having a publisher’s account on an advertising network.

If you have never applied, or your application was rejected, this guide will help you to understand what criteria they use to accept or reject a publisher’s application.

If you are confident about your site already, you can skip reading & create an account on Media.net here.

• Before you apply, be sure that Media.net is right for you.

Traffic Source- Crucial for eaing huge:

For starters, know that one common complaint most bloggers have with Media.net is low revenue.

The primary reason for this is the geo-location of your traffic.

We have already talked about why we have low CPC for Asian countries and this ad network follows a similar patte. Unlike AdSense, this ad network works wonderfully for those websites which receive a high amount of traffic from countries like the U.S.A & the U.K.

However, there is a smart solution for this low CPC traffic & that is backup ads.

If you have an AdSense account or any other ad network account, you can use that to show backup ads when there is no ad inventory for other countries.

How To Get Accepted Into Media.net

Language of your blog:

If your blog’s primary language is not English, your application will be rejected. This ad network (by Bing & Yahoo!) accepts only those websites which are primarily in English.

If you are one of those bloggers who is using dual languages (English + some other language) on your site, I suggest you try applying.

Ensure that the first few pages of your blog showcases only English content. Once you get approved, you should let your account manager know about the dual-language aspects of you page & make it clear that you will be placing ads only on English content pages. (This may or may not work, but what’s the harm in trying?)

Original content & regularly updated:

Ensure that you keep your blog regularly updated at the time of applying for approval.

This is one of their main criteria as they accept only active blogs.

If you have a good blog which you are not updating, you can follow the trick of recycling old content to fulfill this requirement.

Leave a good first impression:

This one is a no-brainer, but I feel it’s important to mention as a good percentage of our readers are newbie bloggers.

These 3 things should be true:

1. Have the pages: About, Contact, and Privacy Policy
2. The design should be simple & not cluttered
3. Don’t use too many ads. In fact, when you have submitted your Media.net application, disable showing any ads for a few days.

This is one thing that’s very common among newbie & intermediate bloggers; they don’t take proper care of their sidebar widgets.

Get rid of any unwanted widgets such as live traffic or any kind of fancy things which don’t add any value to the content.

Tip: Take advantage of social proof, as this will leave a really good impression of your blog in the eyes of the reviewer. (Yes! They review all the applications manually.)

Other Important Things to Know Before Applying:

Your blog/website should not indulge in any activity that is listed above.

Along with this, you should have quality & valuable content.

Ensure that you are not spreading piracy, hacking tools, or any such content which may harm an individual.

Follow the usual ethics of blogging & I don’t foresee any problems in getting approval.

Overall, Media.net has stricter policies when compared to AdSense.

But at the same time, it’s more rewarding in terms of revenue.

So it’s at least worth trying.

I will keep sharing my insights & understandings about Media.net & similar ad networks in future posts. If you want to stay updated, subscribe to our email newsletter.

Do you use Media.net to monetize your website? Share your reviews and opinions below in the Idea section.

lPre-Script : There is an Interesting challenge(competition) in the end that will help you become a much better copy specialist that will help you with your blog posts as well and if you win you get a copy of the affiliate marketing book worth $20!

A Primer about the Industry

The book market has never been better. This is truer for creators. With self-publishing gaining prominence, more and more authors who were on the threshold of creating a book have all crossed the chasm and have become authors. There are hundreds and hundreds of books that are published to the Amazon Kindle store on a daily basis. If humans see an opportunity somewhere, they are going to jump on it. And they are going to jump on it in droves.

During 2014 and 2015 everybody made e-books of differing qualities, most of them being bad. They gamed the system by getting reviews from their friends and families and put their books ahead of the pack. There are self-proclaimed authors who take content from blog posts found on the Inteet, make a quick e-book out of it and publish it in the market. There are thousands of these authors.

The barrier for entry in making these books are negligible now. Everybody can make a book with the help of expert editors and Ghostwriters. A ghostwriter is a person you pay money to make a book and they will write the entire book for you, but you will be the author of the book. So this means, you do not have to write a single word to be an Author.

Now why am I saying all this? You may be extremely passionate about your book and its content but you are fighting a marketing game with all these authors. It’s not about the content. It’s about people judging a book by its cover. Authors take pains in making that perfect book cover but they miss out on a crucial ingredient. The Title of the E-book.

The Title of the E-book has been neglected by Authors and they write something literal like “How to be a Digital Marketer” or “Digital Marketing Tips”. This just doesn’t work. Even content companies like Buzzfeed test and re-test their titles to see which ones perform better. Due to this reason a new phrase called “Click Bait” was coined. Which meant that these websites would bait you to click on the URL with a compelling title.

Let’s get to Buzzfeed’s perfect titles in a bit. But before that, let’s get to the most important aspects of naming a book.

Generic titles are all too common

A simple exercise. How different are all these books in terms of their title.

They are all almost the same. They use similar words and even the covers look very similar. And all of their main headings are the exact same. These are just 4 of the books I took screenshots of. There are much more than this.This is the competition in this world and it’s real. In your approach, you should want to stand out from the crowd as much as possible.

Let’s break it down.

What makes a good eBook title?

1. It works on the emotional aspect of the people.
2. It should make the reader immediately curious.
3. It should be attention catching and different

Back to Buzzfeed and how they do it. Take a look at the Image below.

1. The First Title – Emotion

The first title appeals to the emotional quotient of people. The “Will give you all the Nostalgia Feels” gets to the core of anybody’s lif,. their past they can reminisce. If I had to make a literal title it would be “Nick Jonas and Demi Lovato sing in the latest edition of Carpool Karaoke”. Now which do you think is better? Obviously the one on Buzzfeed.

2. The Second Title – Curiosity

The second title is a perfect example of a click bait article because they hide something from you and want you to read it to know more. Curiosity is one of the most iate of human emotions, we all want to know, even if it isn’t important to us. This title also accentuates the characteristics of the mystery man by calling him a hero.

3. The Third Title – Attention Grabbing

The third title is actually a simple piece of news where a flight accidentally forgot 40 of their passengers. But to make this title more appealing, they use an expletive to make it attention grabbing.

With this I hope you get an Idea of how to create titles that can be emotional, make people curious and that grabs attention.

Now let’s look at some examples of very good e-book titles.

1. Ryan Holiday’s Trust Me I’m Lying : Confessions of a Media Manipulator

This is one of the best titles in recent years because it is so catchy. The cover helps this an immense lot. But just looking at the cover, it immediately is attention catching. The Author has confessed to lying and you would be extremely curious to know how he did that. This title is brave and it is actually a business book for founders, entrepreneurs, and marketers.

2. Jason Kincaid’s the Bued out Bloggers guide to PR

This is another book for bloggers but as you can see it isn’t a literal title like “How to be a blogger”. It is much more descriptive. It appeals to the emotional aspects of blogging by empathizing with the struggling blogger. It’s true that a lot of bloggers struggle with marketing and reach and Jason appeals to that aspect directly. When you are taking advice from someone, would you take more seriously the words of a person who has gone through similar problems as yourself or who hasn’t. It’s obviously the former. This is exactly what he has done. And this makes absolute sense because mathematically as well only 10 to 15% of the bloggers will be successful and the rest 85 % to 90% will be figuring out their way and this book is for them.

3. Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner’s When to Rob a Bank

Who would have even thought of a title like this? And this is an economics book! Who said economists caot be fuy? This title immediately captivates and gets your curious about its content. The subtitle is also interesting. “131 more warped suggestions and well-intended rants”. They don’t even have an obvious number like 100 or 50 and the usage of the word warped is also pretty interesting.

Keep in mind that all these books are non-fiction business/ leaing based books. This is what makes it interesting. if you try to be different and focus on being appealing to your audience, you will most often succeed.

How to get better at writing titles? What is the dynamic of an E-book title?

There are two main components of an E-book title and they are the Main Title and the Subtitle. A lot of people think that the main title should be a literal offering of the book. So if your book is about Facebook marketing then the title should be either “Facebook Marketing” or “How to get results from Facebook marketing” etc. This does not have to be this way. So let’s break down the different type of titles there are.
The Kind of Titles

a. Single Explanatory Word with Subtitle

Your main title could be a simple line or a word and the subtitle explains the core of the book. Here is an example of a popular book that is in the format of a <Word> and <Subtitle with Meaning>. Titles like this bring about a strong brand around it. Just a single word makes it sound like a product.

b. Analogy(Crazy Title) with Subtitle

Another example would be is to take an Analogy and add it to the crux of your title and have the subtitle explain it better. In Jab Jab, Jab, Right Hook, Gary Vaynerchuk takes the boxing analogy and applies it to marketing very well. He explains in the book that marketers need to mix and match their marketing across platforms and experiment with platforms. The beauty of an Analogy based e-book title is that the book cover automatically can be decided. In this case, it’s a simple boxing glove.

c. Own Made up Word with Subtitle

This style of naming a book has gained prominence especially post the advent of social media there are so many components to marketing that it has become convoluted. So authors sometimes create their own words to explain their topics better. Here is an example of a book called “Viralnomics” that is simply Virality + Economics. A title like this, if done well can establish you as an Authority in a specific niche. Just like what happened with Sean Ellis who coined the term “Growth Hacking”.

d. Controversial title with subtitle.

We’ve already seen an example of this and that is Trust Me I’m Lying by Ryan Holiday. This kind of title really works because it’s honest and brutal and unexpected. Most of the book titles are promising a rosy picture or a greater future or how to get “great” at something. With controversial titles, the focus is taken away from these cliches and this makes it super interesting. Be careful with controversial titles because they can backfire. Test your titles with a closed group before showing it to a bigger group.

These were the different kind of titles that you can explore while creating yours. Now, there is a silent guardian and a protector(Dark Knight? ) in all of this. That is the subtitle.

If you only take the main titles of all the books above, it won’t really make sense without the subtitle. For example

1. Jab Jab Jab Right Hook : It maybe a book about boxing
2. Trust Me I’m Lying : A book about a serial liar.

How do you make a good eBook subtitle?

The subtitles have to be long, descriptive and explain clearly what the book is all about. Taking the Viralnomics as an example the subtitle is ‘How to get people to want to talk about you’ and in the case of Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook it is ‘How to tell your story in a noisy social world’.

Looking at the subtitles it is clear what the book aims to teach. And if you notice, just by looking at the subtitles it seems that both the books address the same issue. But, if you combine it with the title and the sub title then it comes across as two different books tackling different problems. That is the power of a title, you can stand out and make your book look different from the competition.

Competition to win $20 worth goodies

Now that you’ve leat about titles and subtitles. Let’s get Actionable and make a competition out of it!

The best way to go about getting good at something is to actually do it. So let’s do an exercise. Imagine that you are writing a book about

“How to make Blogging as a Full-Time profession ” This is your core topic of the book

Imagine that the content contains the following topics :

1. The ways through which blogging can be made a profession.
2. Stories and examples of successful bloggers.
3. Strategies to grow your blog.

Contest to win Affiliate marketing eBook:

Based on the above information to those who want to participate, we want you to

1. Make a Title
2. Make a Sub-Title

and the best title and sub-title(combination) will be voted by everybody and the wier will get a free affiliate marketing book worth $20.

Tips on writing a book name

1. Don’t immediately mention the first book title that comes to your head.
2. List down 5 to 10 ten names at least.
3. Run these 10 names by your friends.
4. Decide on the top 1 and mention it as a comment.

Enter your titles and subtitles in the Idea below!

If you are one of those bloggers who is using a free WordPress theme, you are likely changing your theme around a lot.

Two of the most commonly asked questions regarding changing a WordPress theme are:

• Will it affect my blog’s SEO?
• Will it affect my blog’s traffic?

The answer to this question changes with different scenarios, and I will try to answer this question from all angles with regards to WordPress, SEO, and traffic.

But before I move ahead, there are a few things that you should know:

• Many WordPress themes like Genesis and Thesis come with built-in SEO options, and if you are using the theme’s SEO feature, chances are high that your blog’s SEO will be affected.
• If you are using an SEO WordPress plugin to handle your blog’s SEO, you are more likely to retain your overall SEO, but only if your new WordPress theme is SEO optimized.

Who is Handling Your Blog’s SEO? WordPress Theme or SEO Plugin?

Before shifting to the Genesis WordPress theme last year…

… I was using the Thesis theme, and thanks to the Thesis SEO feature, it handled all of my blog’s (on-site and on-page) search engine optimization requirements.

The benefit of this was that I was ruing one less plugin, and since I don’t change my theme framework often, it worked for me. But for bloggers who are in the habit of changing their WordPress themes every now and then, it’s a good idea to let a WordPress plugin handle your blog’s SEO. After the launch of Thesis 2.0, I have made the decision to shift to an SEO plugin.

This is where I realized it’s better to use a plugin to handle the SEO part. I highly recommend using the Free WordPress SEO by Yoast plugin, which is one of the best free plugins out there. It will let you handle your complete blog’s on-site and on-page SEO.

For me, it was not a problem to shift my SEO settings from my theme to a plugin & you can read about it here.

Changing WordPress themes could lead to these potential issues:

Heading tag changes:

Imagine you change a WordPress theme, and you are using H2 tags for post titles, or your post titles are hyperlinked. This will surely affect your overall search engine ranking.

You must have heard that Genesis & Thesis are two of the top SEO optimized WordPress themes. This is because their codes are clean, they use proper heading tags, and they take care of all small requirements for an SEO optimized theme.

When you are making a shift from a good theme to another good theme, you have less to worry about. But, when you make the shift to a brand new WordPress theme, chances are high that they are not as SEO optimized as the previous one.

I have worked with many WordPress theme developers, and they are amazing when it comes to doing magic with PHP and CSS, but when it comes to SEO, they have little to no clue about how to achieve proper SEO.

That’s the reason I always like working within the theme framework, as they care about of all the little things.

You lose your custom settings:

This one is from personal experience.

When you change a theme, it might affect your old custom settings.

For example, here at ShoutMeLoud, I don’t use a sidebar for a few pages.

When you change your old WordPress theme for a new one, you might end up losing those theme-specific features. Either your new theme should offer such features, or you need to hire a WordPress developer to do the customizations for you.

Moreover, all the themes are coded in certain ways.

For example:

• Some themes will load the content part first and then the sidebar.
• Some themes load everything at once (which increases loading time).

If you know that loading time of your blog impacts your search engine ranking, you can clearly determine if your ranking will be better or worse based on how much faster or slower your blog is loading.

Change WordPress Theme Keeping the Same Search Engine Ranking

Import SEO settings to a plugin:

If you are changing your theme framework (Thesis to Genesis or anywhere else), you should first take a complete backup of your blog database and theme.

Then, migrate all SEO data to a plugin.

WordPress SEO by Yoast, offers this feature inteally, and you can quickly import all SEO data to the Yoast plugin. After this step, you can change your theme to any other theme without any effect in SEO.

Pick an SEO friendly theme:

There are amazingly beautiful WordPress Premium themes out there.

While they might look amazing with their design, many of them lack basic SEO features. Pick a theme which is SEO friendly and has codes that are bug free.

Once you have shifted your WordPress theme, you can use tools like SEMRUSH or SEO spider to crawl your blog and see if there are any errors these crawlers can detect. If yes, it’s time to make some changes to your new theme or change your theme again to a better one.

It’s a fact that when you change your theme, the crawling of your site might be affected.

So a little change in ranking and traffic is usually obvious in most cases, though you can always fix any SEO issues with a proper site SEO audit.

I always recommend you to stick to one theme for a long time, as changing your theme at regular intervals will affect the overall branding of your site. Moreover, most of the time you will not be able to immediately spot SEO changes which happened due to the theme change, so it may take some time to see any difference.

Also, when you are shopping for a new theme for your blog, make sure your new theme is validated by the W3C markup service.

I always prefer to use a custom design on my blogs; I pick a theme framework and hire a designer to code a custom design for me. This not only gives me a feeling of uniqueness on my blog, but also helps in branding. Once you have a custom design, you don’t need worry about changing your theme at semi-regular intervals.

You’ll be happy with that one.

Also read:

Let me know if you have noticed any search engine ranking difference after changing your WordPress theme.

And what factors do you consider before buying a new theme?

I remember a time when compressing images on this blog used to be free.

Thanks to developer of the Smush.it plugin, we got very spoiled and became used to free image compression.

In the last few months, everything we know about free image compression has changed. Now, most of the WordPress plugins which are available online offer a small quota of free compressions & then you have to pay.

So in this post, I though it would be a good idea to look at all the existing image compression tools out there (free & paid).

Those who have a small or medium sized WordPress blog can use multiple WordPress plugins to optimize all of their existing/future uploads for free. It might be time-consuming, but I know that when you are starting out, money is more important than time.

For those who have a medium sized or a large blog, you may want to consider going for a paid option. This will help you load your blog faster & will keep your readers happy.

Here’s the formula:

• Happy readers = Good blog = Better ranking = More money

That’s a good formula, but let’s get down to the real business. Here are some of the best image compression WordPress plugins.

(Like always, I will try to put as many important points as possible about these plugins to help you make an informed decision. Cool?)

Here we go…

ShortPixel

ShortPixel is a developer specifically for WordPress. They offer both free & paid accounts (like all the others). Though, there is one really cool part about this service which I’ll tell you about in a minute.

Features:

• Supports Lossy and Lossless Optimization
• Supports JPG, PNG, GIF & PDF
• Restore original image anytime
• Compress all old uploads with a single click
• Process new images automatically on upload
• No file size limit
• Your free quota & paid quota are treated separately.
  • This way, you always have 100 free image compressions
• Save and keep a backup of your original images in a separate folder
• Option to optimize all images (thumbnail images) or only the original image
• Option to keep or remove the EXIF tag of the image. <Read about EXIF tag here>

Free account:

• 100 free image compressions every month
• Refer a friend program: For every referred user you get another 100 images every month.

Paid account (10,000 images):

• $9.98 for 10K images
• Purchased quota never expires
• Offers monthly subscription
• Supported payment mode is PayPal

Ease of use:

It’s easy to setup & the interface is very pleasant. You will see what I mean when you start doing bulk image compression with this plugin.

Tips on using:

Once you have created your free account, login to your admin area & grab the API key. Install & activate the ShortPixel WordPress plugin.

Add the API Key from Settings > ShortPixel.

Head over to Media library> Bulk ShortPixel to optimize your old images.

One cool thing about this plugin is you can deselect thumbnail size from compression.

This ensures that your free quota is only used for the bigger sized images, which in most cases is the culprit for your slow loading pages.

This plugin is updated on a regular basis & has 20K+ active installs with a 4.7 star rating.

ShortPixel is an ideal solution for image & PDF compression in WordPress.

Create free account || Create Paid account

Imagify Image Optimizer

This plugin is from the developer of the WP-Rocket plugin.

It has all the essential features such as bulk compression and image resizing.

It offers 3 different levels of compression & depending upon your blog type, you should pick 1 of the 3:

1. Normal, a lossless compression algorithm. The image quality won’t be altered at all.
2. Aggressive, a lossy compression algorithm. Stronger compression with a tiny loss of quality which, most of the time, is not noticeable at all.
3. Ultra, the strongest compression method using a lossy algorithm.
   • With the backup option, you can change your mind whenever you want by restoring your images to their original version or optimize them at another compression level.

In the coming days, they also plan on adding a feature to convert images into WebP format.

This plugin is also compatible with WooCommerce and NextGen Gallery.

Features:

• Supports JPG, PNG & GIF
• Resize images on the fly
• Resize based on percentage
• Support for PrestaShop, Magento, Shopify and Joomla coming soon
• Images above 5Mb will only be compressed with the paid account

Free account:

• 25 MB free every month
• Bonus 25MB at sign-up

Paid account (10,000 images):

• $4.99/month for 1 GB of data

Ease of use:

On-boarding is pretty easy & like other plugins, you need to create a free account & get your API Key.

The plugin is easy to use & once you have configured the settings, you can start using it right away.

You can enable or disable the option to compress thumbnails.

Apart from compression, one thing that I enjoyed the most about this plugin is the interface.

It’s sleek & feels like you are in a game.

Overall, this is a good plugin & since it’s from the same people as the WP-Rocket plugin, I believe it’s a good choice for anyone looking for reliability.

The only thing that you might want to consider before opting for this one is the price.

Download Plugin || Create Free Account

TinyPNG: Compress JPEG & PNG images

TinyPNG is a somewhat popular online service to compress images.

Features:

• Automatic compression for new images
• Supports JPEG & PNG files only
• Bulk Optimization
• Resize image feature
• Convert CMYK to RGB
• Single API can be used for multiple sites
• No file size limits

Free account:

• 500 images compressed each month

Paid account (10,000 images):

• 10,000 images costs $85.50 (One of the most expensive for heavy users)

Using the plugin:

After activating the plugin go to Settings > Media.

Get your free API Key from here, add it & configure any additional settings you want.

Go to Media > Compress all images & start compressing all your old images. You can also go to the media uploader & selectively compress individual images (which is a good idea to conserve your quota).

Create an account on TinyPNG || Download plugin

ImageRecycle

I talked about this one in an earlier post on online image compression tools.

While researching for this post, I got to know more about their WordPress plugin & I signed up for a free account.

One cool thing about this plugin is it lists down all the images in your theme folder. You can select individual ones or you can select all & compress those images. Preeeetty cool, huh?

Features of ImageRecycle:

• Supports JPG, PNG, GIF & PDF files
• All plans support multiple websites
• Supports sub-accounts & you can define a quota for it (good for agencies)
• Supports restoration of original files (images + PDF) for one month
• Compress all previous images in WordPress with one click or compress images selectively

Free account:

• 15-day trial
• 100 MB quota

Paid account (10,000 images):

• $30 for 10K images
• Valid for 1 year

Ease of use:

The plugin is pretty easy to use & in most cases it auto-detects your API if you are logged into their online portal from the same browser.

• Note: It directly leads to the media uploader for compression which might not be good for users. The first screen after activating the API should be the plugin settings.

Anyway, you can access it by going to Settings> ImageRecycle

When I was testing this plugin, I realized my blog slowed down a lot. This could have been for mulpltie reasons, so it should not stop you from trying it. But since it happened with me, I believe it’s good to at least let you know.

Once you have setup the settings, go to Media > ImageRecycle to start compressing.

One thing which I really like about this plugin is you can sort images based on size which is useful when you want to take care of really large images first.

Overall, their WordPress plugin is pretty solid & could be your next image optimization WordPress plugin.

Get 15-day free trial account for ImageRecycle || Download Plugin

Kraken

This is another paid plugin that is quite popular.

With 10K+ downloads & an overall rating of 4.7/5, it looks very promising.

Their web service lets you download & compress images from a web-page by downloading all the images into a single zipped folder.

Features:

• Supports JPG, PNG & GIF
• WP-CLI supported
• Keep backup of original image in the cloud storage
• Image resizing
• Preserve selective Image EXIF data

Free account:

• 100 MB one time testing only
• Maximum allowed size – 1MB

Paid account (10,000 images):

• $4.50/month (calculated relative to other services)

Ease of use:

The plugin is also straight-forward to configure like all the other image compression plugins on this list.

Here is what the settings page looks like:

The option to preserve specific data like Copyright is pretty smart.

It would be good if other plugins also follow this trend.

One big thing missing from this plugin is bulk image optimization. So it’s not ideal for those who are looking to optimize existing images. You will need to manually compress them.

Here is how to configure this plugin:

Download plugin || Create Free Account

(Since page speed is one of the factors for a better user-experience, and also a search engine ranking factor, we can expect similar plugins launching in the coming days. I will keep adding new WordPress image compression plugins as I discover them.)

Conclusion

I have compiled those services from above list that offer a free image compression quota every month. If you have a small or a starter blog, this should be enough to take care of your monthly need.

Services that offers free image compression quota every month:

Paid services based on features & pricing:

These are the paid services that I like based on features, user experience & pricing.

1. Imagify
2. Kraken
3. ShortPixel
4. ImageRecycle
5. TinyPNG

In my opinion, TinyPNG hardly deserves to be on this list due to it’s high pricing & limited features.

Imagify is what I would recommend for a paid image compression service.

Again, I will keep adding new WordPress image compression plugins in the future.

Which WordPress image compression plugins are you using & why?

Enjoyed reading this guide? Do share this list with your WordPress users on Facebook & Twitter.

You: I need urgent help?

Customer support: We are looking into it

after 10 minutes…

You: Hey, Any update? My site is down

Customer support:Sir/Mam, we are looking into it.

I know how much it’s irritating and hard to imagine that someone has willingly ignored your request for support – Whether it is for premium themes & plugins or hosting or for any other products.

It’s more frustrating that we have stuck somewhere while using their product and after writing an Email for a support request, we are not getting the help from their side. If it is not an emergency then we can wait some days for their response but what if it is urgent to resolve the problem?

Feel like your own story?

Well, this happens to many of us all the time..

.. This is why today you will be leaing many secrets of writing support request that will get answered quickly.

• What to do to get attention for our problem from the support team of the product?
• How to write a support request which will not be trashed?
• How to write a support request which will be responded quickly?

Every Support request is not same. Your request mail either can be neglected or responded quickly based on how it has been written and what you have included in it. So, read ahead to know how to make your support request embraced.

So, here we go with some Dos and Don’ts which you should consider while writing support request for any product.

Dont’s of writing support request…

1. Writing a request saying nothing about the problem is just waste. Sending a mail which only says that you need help won’t do. You need to mention all your problems in detail. In what situation you are facing the problem and the exact thing which you want to do and it’s not happening with their product. If they won’t find exact problem statement in your mail then they will ignore it. They are not going to revert you for asking about your problem because they daily deal with huge numbers of problems of their customers.

2. Insulting the support team or company won’t solve your problem. Abusing them about their product will force them to ignore your request mail. Abusing them for the problem in their product is not a wise thing to include in request mail. Some of you might think that it will motivate them to solve your problem real quick but it doesn’t work all time. You are writing a mail for getting help and we don’t ask for help being rude. Right? Be polite and instead of insulting them, define your problem clearly so they can work on it and provide you good support.

3. No need to remind the team that how much you paid. Support team already knows the price of their product you have purchased. So, no need to include any sentence like – I have paid this much price for your product then why it is creating such problem? Every product is not perfect. You would have gone through its features and facilities. So asking for more also will not be appropriate.

4. Don’t make your client the subject of Email. If the problem is occurring in your client’s website or the problem is faced by your client, then no need to mention that my client is having issues with this product because you are the one who will be paid by your client. You are not going to share your eaing with the support team. So instead of mentioning your client
   

   write a mail like you are facing the problem.

Write the support request This Way…

So, we have gone through the mistakes one can commit. Okay so, now onwards we won’t make these mistakes but How to write an embracing Support Request Email?

Now if you want to get response… I should say QUICK RESPONSE of your support request then what are you waiting for? Read ahead!!

1. Be clear about your problem. They need to know problem specifically before solving it. If you will write I am facing problem may be something like this…then they won’t consider it. You need to be specific about it. Some research before requesting support will help you defining your problem specifically.

2. Don’t forget to mention the efforts you already have put. We techies don’t report a problem at the same instance we face it. We would have tried some possible solutions before asking for support from the team. If you will mention only your problem then they may suggest for trying a solution which you might have tried already. So, it will increase the number of emails exchanged between you and the team. That is why you should inform them the things you have already tried to fix the problem.

3. Take extra time to include the details. It’s not compulsory to send a quick mail in frustration when you face a problem. Take some time and give them some information which they might need. Some of the basic information you can include in your mail can be…

• Information of your host
• URL of the site in which you are facing problem
• Screenshot of the error message
• Theme you have installed in your site
• List of plugins activated on your WordPress site
• Configuration you have done in their product

I hope if you will write your support request mail by keeping these points in your mind, your mail won’t be ignored by the support team and you will get quick help. Any other tips for writing support request mail are welcomed in the comment box.

This is a guest submission by Mahezabin Malida. Want to contribute something original? Read ShoutMeLoud’s submission guidelines before contributing.

Books are an amazing source of inspiration. Offering some insights into practical real-world survival tips, non-fiction books have always been at the helm as the source of inspiration for entrepreneurs. Even the busiest of the successful entrepreneurs like Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates make sure that they cater some time daily for reading books. These non-fiction books make it easy to draw inspiration from some of the most experienced and insightful in the industry. While entrepreneurship is not just about doing one specific task perfectly, it is a combination of a multitude of skills, knowledge and domain understanding. Since the required domain knowledge is hard to gain without gaining some entrepreneurial experience in your niche, that void is filled by non-fiction books.

Non-fiction books are often read by some of the top entrepreneurs like Warren Buffett, Richard Branson, and many more! While there are hundreds of non-fiction books, which of these would help you get the most out of your next business venture? Starting your online business in a sense is not much different than venturing into a new startup. Although Online businesses operate somewhat differently, the core concepts and the ideas are usually retained. Here, we have compiled the 21 Must-read books before you start your online business.

21 Must-Read Books to inspire the Entrepreneur in You

The entrepreneur in you requires some kind of inspiration to stay on track in this competitive enterprise world. Below are 21 of the best must-read books to inspire the Entrepreneur in you. Read and take on the world!

“The Art of the Start” by Guy Kawasaki

The Art of the Start is one of the most popular business books. Written back in 2004, many of the tips in the book are still valid a decade later! If you are more interested in the very recent version, Guy Kawasaki has also released The Art of the Start 2.0 if you choose to go with it. Focusing on entrepreneurship, bootstrapping your way to success, starting your online business, pitching ideas to investors and much more, The Art of the Start has a lot to offer for inspiring the entrepreneur in you.

“The next time you think that there’s something that you “can’t live without”, wait for a week and then see if you’re still alive or not” ― Guy Kawasaki

Guy Kawasaki walks through the process and shows us what it takes to tu an idea into a venture. An evangelist for Apple in the 1980’s, Guy Kawasaki pours all of his experience and background in the industry into The Art of the Start. Easily one of the must-read books before you start your online business.

Buy this Book from Amazon

“The Lean Startup” by Eric Ries

While Lean manufacturing is one of the most famous concepts, originated by Ford early on and worked upon by Toyota and Motorola later on, it is one of the concepts still put to use even to this day. There is a lot to lean manufacturing that it is pretty amusing startups and entrepreneurs do not make the most of its techniques and minimize costs while working on improving retus. Eric Ries’ The Lean Startup establishes a method on how startups and entrepreneurs could make the most of the lean manufacturing and bring it to their startups.

Creating a stable startup culture under uncertain economic conditions is hard to beget and this book will guide you through the process. Concepts such as rapid prototyping, validated leaing, rapid scientific experimentation, and others are introduced in the book, which drives their inspiration from lean manufacturing.

Buy this Book from Amazon

“Rework” by Jason Fried, David Heinemeier Hansson

As quoted by Businessman and Investor Mark Cuban, “If given a chance of investing in someone who reads Rework or one with an MBA, I would invest in Rework every time!” Such is the impact this book has on entrepreneurs worldwide. This book is also actively endorsed by Seth Godin as one of the must-reads for entrepreneurs. This book should appeal to both managers and employees alike in making business plans and the need for speed in plan chalking.

This book promotes the necessity of the focus on one thing at a time and opposes the multi-tasking approach. Rework is a must read book for every entrepreneur and Seth Godin was quoted as saying, “Ignore this book at your own peril!”

Buy this Book from Amazon

“The Six-Figure Second Income” by David Lindahl and Jonathan Rozek

Starting and maintaining a steady flow of income through online mediums is easier said than done. But if you are looking to build upon your existing online business or looking forward to venturing into a new online business, this is a must-read. This book holds the secrets to successfully starting your online business and growing the business even when you have everything against you.

Get no-nonsense, practical tips to succeed in your online venture and how to succeed even when you have time, money and other factors working against you. Although anyone these days with a computer and an inteet coection can start online businesses, operating a successful online business is an altogether new thing.

Buy this Book from Amazon

“Think Big, Act Bigger” by Jeffrey W. Hayzlet

Thinking big and thinking different tell just one side of the story. It has more to do with actually working on your ideas rather than just dreaming big. While aiming big and setting big goals is definitely the best way to get off to a positive start to your business, getting things done is more important. This book talks about how to own yourself as a leader and a company, setting and defining long-term goals, and finally fearlessly working on the plans.

Obstacles are one of the most common elements that any startup or entrepreneur has to face, but this book equips you with the skills and the techniques needed to steamroll under such situations. Easily one of the best must-read books for entrepreneurs of all kinds, and now just those seeking an online venture.

Buy the Book from Amazon

“Disrupt You!” by Jay Samit

Given the volatility of the online marketplace, iovation and creativity extend out of traditional brick-and-mortar businesses to the online ventures. Iovation, creativity and finding your unique voice has become so much essential for online startups, just as much as it is important for any Fortune 500 corporation.

A specialist in digital media marketing, author Jay Samit has to offer a lot of insider tips and tricks to make the most of your unique voice and flourish at both a startup and individual level. Lea more about how personal transformation could help you and your online venture reap entrepreneurial benefits in this must-read book before you start your own online business.

Buy this Book from Amazon

“The $100 Startup” by Chris Guillebeau

Tuing ideas into businesses or streams of income effortlessly is what author Chris Guillebeau is capable of. Lea from him in his book how having a huge investor money in your bank is not always needed to succeed as an entrepreneur. He teaches about opting out of the traditional employment strategies and how to make the most out of your ideas, act on them to build a steady flow of income for yourself.

“Never despise small begiings, and don’t belittle your own accomplishments. Remember them and use them as inspiration as you go on to the next thing. When you venture outside your comfort zone, wherever the starting point may be, it’s kind of a big deal.” ― Chris Guillebeau

In this book, you’ll find the invaluable experience from people who have built a business with little to no financial backing. You also don’t need an MBA degree to succeed in business and the exact real-life skills and techniques needed to tackle entrepreneurial challenges are covered in this must-read book.

Buy this Book from Amazon

“How to Blog for Profit: Without Selling Your Soul Book” by Ruth Soukup

Blogging is all the new rage in the online world! Be it as a blog for a business entity or at an individual level, blogging has become all essential to creating your own voice and brand online. In this book, author Ruth Soukup offers solid, practical advice on how to find your voice online and build a profitable and authentic online blog.

Leveraging on your unique assets and offerings is the key to finding success as an online blogger and many of the key aspects of successful bloggers are discussed in this book. Creating compelling content, active participation in social media, and diversifying income streams are some of the many topics covered by this book. Definitely a must-read for entrepreneurs wishing to start their own online business.

Buy this Book from Amazon

“Million Dollar Consulting” by Alan Weiss

Global consulting has been taken to an altogether new level and consultants are the hottest thing on the market. You get to decide on which projects to work on, you decide your own pay rate and you get to decide on your working hours. Offering complete work satisfaction and flexibility, professional consultants are valued for their skillset and expertise. So how do you become one? Well, this book is just about all of that!

Profiting in a troubled market, Leveraging blogging, social media, and marketing, and delegating labor are some of the key concepts covered in this must-read book for online entrepreneurs.

Buy this Book from Amazon

“Will It Fly?” by Thomas K. McKnight

How do you know even before you are getting started if your business idea will take off or not? Will it Fly, is an amazing book that tries to drive from your intuitive and analytical abilities to analyze your startup idea if it has the potential to take off successfully! Assessing your new startup’s product, competition, pricing strategies, finance, operations and even an exit strategy are essential and this book covers those nitty-gritty’s in complete depth.

The only major drawback of this book is that it assumes you already have a business plan in place since it doesn’t go through the process of building one! A must-read book for serious aspiring online entrepreneurs.

Buy this Book from Amazon

“The E-Myth Revisited” by Michael E. Gerber

What are some of the myths that you have heard of before starting your own venture? Well, there happen to be many and you need to keep yourself away from these pitfalls. The e-myth revisited tries to nullify all of the myths surrounding your next online business.

“Contrary to popular belief, my experience has shown me that the people who are exceptionally good in business aren’t so because of what they know but because of their insatiable need to know more.” ― Michael E. Gerber

The e-myth revisited is a must-read book for online entrepreneurs looking forward to growing their business in a productive fashion.

Buy this Book from Amazon

“The Barefoot Executive” by Carrie Wilkerson

Everyone wants to become their own boss! Who doesn’t love the idea of working on your patio, in your pajamas, at the point of the day you’re the most productive. This kind of flexibility does not come easy and a lot of work has to be put in to enjoy that kind of flexibility in your work and life.

It is essential that you are in it for all the right purposes and not just for the advantages that it comes packed with. This book will help you rediscover your true beliefs and demands and help you become a successful freelancer or consultant, with the much needed practical examples and advice. Achieving a discipline towards your work and work-life balance are also some of the few topics that this book covers for online entrepreneurs.

Buy this Book from Amazon

“Start Your Own Business: The Only Start-Up Book You’ll Ever Need” by The Staff of Entrepreneur Media

This is one of the best books for Startup entrepreneurs and it comes directly from Entrepreneur Media and the vast expertise that they bring along with them. This book covers everything about starting a new venture as a startup entrepreneur and walks you through all of the processes of a startup initiation.

From choosing a business, working on a business model, choosing partners to work with, getting funded, managing taxes and employees are some of the key topics that this book covers. This book is easily one of the best books for startup entrepreneurs to invest their time, money and efforts in a best possible way.

Buy this Book from Amazon

“The Startup Owner’s Manual: The Step-By-Step Guide for Building a Great Company” by Steve Blank

Coming from a renowned silicon valley expert, Steve Blank is the author who is recognized as being a catalyst for the ‘Lean Startup’ movement. The outlines of this book are followed by The National Science Foundation to train new startups and is easily one of the best books for entrepreneurs.

Over 100 charts or diagrams, and over 70 checklists help you form a structural guideline to guide your startup in the right way. Online businesses tend to fall into the traps and myths of the business and this book would make sure that you are not making this most common mistakes.

Buy this Book from Amazon

“Entrepreneur: How to Start an Online Business” by Lucy Tobin

Creating a startup on the world wide web has become easier than ever before! Writing an evening column for The Evening Standard, Lucy Tobin has profiled many successful online business owners who have made it. In her book, you get the stories of the different online startups, their challenges and how they went on to overcome them.

With engaging interviews and a lot of practical first-hand recollection of the challenges faced by successful online entrepreneurs, this is a book with a wealth of knowledge and insights.

Buy this Book from Amazon

“Crush It!: Why NOW Is the Time to Cash In on Your Passion” by Gary Vaynerchuk

Gary Vaynerchuck is easily one of my favorite non-fiction authors. Crush It! is another masterpiece from this author on how to leverage your passions to make a stream of income from it. A hobby or an obsession that keeps you up at night is something you ought to pursue full-time.

This book teaches you to make the most of your unique personality, skills and expertise to leverage it on building your personal brand. Haess the power of the inteet and this book to make your entrepreneurial dreams come true.

Buy this Book from Amazon

“How to Win Friends and Influence People” by Dale Caegie

Successful entrepreneurs are the ones who have mastered the art of influencing people and making friends effortlessly. One of the oldest books in this list, it is definitely a goldie to cherish for a long time to come! The time-tested advice in this book has been said to help now-famous people climb up the ladder of success.

“It isn’t what you have or who you are or where you are or what you are doing that makes you happy or unhappy. It is what you think about it.” ― Dale Caegie

Buy this Book from Amazon

“Making Ideas Happen: Overcoming the Obstacles Between Vision and Reality” by Scott Belsky

An idea in itself is nothing powerful. Only when these ideas are acted upon, they start to make sense and reap yourself entrepreneurial benefits. This process of getting from the ideation phase to actual reality is something that many entrepreneurs fear of. Well, this book just shows you how it’s done!

Coming straight from the founder and CEO of Behance, there is a lot of inputs to take away from this amazing book. While coming up with new ideas is a great way to get started with a business, it is more in making your ideas happen that matters at the end of the day. Become a doer and achiever with this book.

Buy this Book from Amazon

“Contagious: Why Things Catch On” by Jonah Berger

Named the Best Marketing Book of 2014, Contagious! is a must-read book for entrepreneurs. What makes certain things catch on easily by the crowds is something people wonder all the time! This book will teach you the reasons and factors that cause a few ideas to catch on instantly while some tend to fade away with time.

“People don’t think in terms of information. They think in terms of narratives. But while people focus on the story itself, information comes along for the ride.” ― Jonah Berger

The book follows groundbreaking research with real-life case studies so you get to better understand the reason some ideas catch on and what you could do in your power to do the same.

Buy this Book from Amazon

“The Culting of Brands: Tu Your Customers into True Believers” by Douglas Atkin

Attracting the masses is what some of the companies like Apple, Google, Nike seem to achieve effortlessly. But there’s more to it behind the scenes than what is perceived at a consumer level. Get an entirely new perspective on cultivating a personal and startup brand to stand out from your competitors and attract the crowds.

Managing workflow, and allowing marketers to align themselves with the market expectations and demands are some of the key topics that this book covers.

Buy this Book from Amazon

“Buyology: Truth and Lies About Why We Buy” by Martin Lindstrom

Buyology is one of the most amazing books to better understand the buying pattes and behaviors of customers. This knowledge and insights could help you better cater to your customers. If you are plaing on an online business where you intend to sell or resell products, this is a must-read for you!

The author, who was voted as one of the TIME magazine’s influential people in 2009 offers you the research and expertise to help you better understand how and why people buy and what makes them tick?

Buy this Book from Amazon

So, as we come to the closure of this exhaustive article, which are your most favorite books from the above list? Could think of any amazing book which would help online entrepreneurs? Feel free to shout out your thoughts and Idea below.

Howdy Shouter,

Welcome to an another episode of ShoutMeLoud’s monthly transparency series!

This is the place where I share everything that has happened in the last month, including my traffic & blogging income report.

The goal here is to summarize all new eaings and leaings, and also share what we have been up to.

Wondering why I do this?

You should read this post first and you can check out all of our previous transparency reports here.

Blogging Lifestyle: Digital Nomadic Experience #3

Last month, I went to Bali as part of my “Digital Nomadic” experience. It’s refreshing to work from a new place and Bali is a perfect place for living the blogging lifestyle.

Traveling & working, when placed together, is rewarding to me in many ways:

• It gives me a new perspective for looking at everything
• It makes me less coected to daily chores
• It helps me get more organized & timely when meeting with my team

Last month, I made it official by telling my team about location independence rather than working from the office.

On occasion, we have decided to work from a co-working space to re-collect our goals and be on the same page. I think this approach is essential for quality teamwork.

But in the month of May, we had most of our communications occur on Slack, and I must admit, so far it’s been the most productive month of the year.

Tips on Bali:

• It’s a great destination for anyone who wants to get away from mundane life and needs to change their environment.
• Inteet speed is usually pretty great & you will find 2-10MBPS WiFi speed most places.
• You can book private villas at a reasonable price using Airbnb. Seriously, it’s more fun to live like a local than a tourist.
  • A quick tip before booking from Airbnb: Always ask the host about the WiFi speed. It will save you a lot of headaches later on.
• If you are into scuba diving or surfing, this is one of the best places to do both.
  • I plaed on doing a scuba diving course but wasn’t able to do it this time. However, I did go scuba diving. Swimming with manta rays was a truly memorable experience. I shot my complete dive on GoPro. It was the first time since ShoutMeet that I put my GoPro to good use.
    • Here is a trailer of the video:

• Bali is also a fantastic place for safari. On my last day, I stayed at the Bali Jungle Safari. I have never had such a close encounter with a tiger before.

Overall, my 14-day stay in Bali was highly productive. With this Bali trip, I completed my 3rd such “Digital Nomadic” experience.

Here are a few images from Bali:

A few more highlights from the month of May 2016:

• We have changed the typography of ShoutMeLoud. You can see how crisp and readable our new font is.
• We are also changing our web push notification system. Right now, I’m testing out a few services & will let you know in a week which one is good and why.
• We are in the process of changing our email marketing service from Aweber to ConvertKit. 80% of the migration is complete, and soon, we will be completely shifted to ConvertKit.
• Also, I found this new plugin called WP Link Status Pro, which is a great alteative for the Broken Link Checker plugin. <Video 1> <Video 2>
• Hired new team member ‘Eric’ to be the part of ShoutDreams. It was a strange coincidence that he emailed me when both of us were in Bali.
• Started testing Media.net along with Google AdSense on my tech blog. I heard many rave reviews about it from a close friend and I’m willing to give it a try again.

As I said, the month of May was highly productive for me & my team. Like always, I will be sharing all my leaings & mistakes in the coming days. For now, let’s look at our monthly report for the last month.

May 2016 Traffic Report:

Last month, we had a downtime of about 5 minutes total due to our server technology migration. ShoutMeLoud is currently hosted on Kinsta. We moved to their new infrastructure which is powered by the Google cloud platform.

Traffic report to website:

Comparing the last report that I have published, the traffic is improving. Since I have started using new web-push notification technologies (LetReach & PushEngage), I’m hoping to see improved traffic in the near future. Also, I’m hoping to see an increase in retuing visitors next month.

Regarding social media traffic, here are our four major social media traffic sources with their total contribution towards social media traffic:

• Facebook (57.25%)
• Twitter (18.48%)
• Google plus (8.10%)
• Pinterest (7.77%)

The above data is important to us as this helps us determine the following things:

• Which social media sharing buttons should we put on the blog?
• Which social media platforms should we target?

I have also started using SumoMe for social media sharing button usage data, and have found it to be very helpful.

Using the data, you can quickly figure out which social media button is the most popular, and you can make appropriate changes accordingly.

ShoutMeLoud Android app performance:

Do you remember the last few times I mentioned our push service not working?

However, this time, I have two pieces of good news for all of our Android app users:

1. We have integrated Google Firebase for push notifications
2. SML’s Android app is now 3x faster in performance

There is a clear increase in traffic with this improved push notification system & soon we will be integrating the same on ShoutMeLoud’s iOS App.

Apart from these changes, we are working on improving the UX of our app. In the coming months, you will be able to login to the app & do a lot more than just reading & Idea.

Download ShoutMeLoud’s Android app

ShoutMeLoud Income Report: May 2016

Alright, now is the time for our most popular section of the transparency report.

We are working day & night to improve our existing properties rather than constantly adding new things. So even if you notice fewer new blog posts, don’t be alarmed by this, as we are constantly updating our old articles to make them timeless.

In terms of revenue, things are looking better. Compared to the last report ($21k), this time, we have reached $28k in revenue.

Grand Total: $28,640.09 (Approx: 19 Lakh INR)

Expenses report:

Total Expenses: $9,699 (Approx: 6.5 Lakh INR)

As you can see in the above table, I have made a year advance payment to Kinsta. This way I got a discount for one month which is still good considering that my monthly hosting cost has increased by $250. As I have mentioned in a previous guide, investing on a quality Web hosting is completely worth the money.

I have a few surprises for you in the coming months, and I promise it will be mind-blowing for many of you.

For now, I would like to hear your last month’s growth. How was it regarding traffic & revenue? If you have published a transparency report, do share the link with us in the Idea section.

Don’t forget to share our transparency report with your friends on Facebook & Twitter. After all, sharing is caring!

There comes a time when we want so badly to write something in our blogs, but our brains refuse to corporate with us. They tend to become stale without feeding us any idea on what topics to write and how to proceed with writing about them. This phenomenon is called as writer’s block in a general term.

Read more articles from ShoutMeLoud related to the Writer’s Block:

1. How to overcome writer’s Block in simple ways?
2. How to make common blog posts unique when Writer’s Block Hits?

This means I am asking, do you sometimes suffer from this disease?

Admit it. We do.

And then when we are infected by it and remain surrendered to its destructive power, the most expensive thing is leaving our blogs without any new posts and our regular readers unattended.

Our consistency in bringing new posts will be questioned, and our subscribers will surely start losing their trusts and hopes entrusted on us.

Therefore, we shouldn’t remain in such trench for the longer period. But then the good part is just like any other diseases having their own preventive measures and curative remedial activities, and this disease too can be prevented if you are not yet infected by it or cure if it has started climbing onto you.

Our brain is built in such a way that it would function as it’s supposed to only when something exteal clicks to a rightful point. That is why Tom Evans has rightly said:

In this regards, I have some recommendations to make our brains work like an opened parachute and then come up with new posts according to your plaed blogging schedules.

15 Tips for Avoiding Writer’s Block: Resource for Writers & Bloggers

#1 Socializing with Friends and Families

In reality, since we spend a maximum number of hours in a day with our friends and families, it’s often from them we can get inspirations to write and also topics to write.

When you are among people, you will be either helping others to lea new things, or you’ll be leaing from others. The only thing is you must know how to remain open-minded and interactive in constructive maers.

#2 Being active in various Social Media

In this advanced technology world, we can meet new people in various social media manifolds than we meet in person.

In recent research findings (Globalwebindex), on an average a person spends at least 1.72 hours per day in social media which is 28% of all online activities.

This means, for a blogger owning personal accounts in various social media is almost a necessity now. It’s only through social media; your blog is getting introduced to a wider range of audience. Social media also help us in knowing the blogging culture, online wants, and searches coming from our targeted customers/geographical locations. We can then come up with articles by their needs/wants.

#3 Google Product Forums

Google has as many users’ forums as it has services/products. If you read various forum discussions and also join the discussion chain, the number of new ideas you’ll get will be numerous. You can then pick a topic in which more people have doubts and want answers. This will not only keep you away from writer’s block but will also ensure good inflow of traffics for your posts.

Some pro bloggers also come up with good forums to enable more interaction among a community of their audiences. You can join the forum of ShoutMeLoud HERE.

#4 Conferences and Workshops

If you get a chance to attend conferences or workshops or in conducting one, you’ll get new ideas in offline level on which you can come up with good articles for your blogs later. Some of your doubts may get answered by the presenters or some by fellow attendees.

In my experience, attending conferences and workshops open me to various areas where I can later explore and lea more things in detail.

#5 News and Current Affairs

News and current affairs are something that is happening at present. In them, a problem will be submitted and also a solution on how they got solved or plaing to get it solved. More often than not, some news doesn’t contain solutions.

In either way, you can come up with new posts related to that news. If they have presented a solution, you can try to explore other easy ways of solving the same problem. And if no solution is being presented, you can try to come up with one. This will keep you engaged as well as traffics are already in the market.

#6 Reading Good Books

Did you hear someone telling that a person who reads will surely write, and one who reads will write? What they say is correct. To write, a person needs something that will spark an idea. And reading books and critically analyzing the message inside them is one of the highly recommended sources of fresh ideas.

Read: 10 Must-Read Books to Inspire Creativity in You.

#7 Researches and their Findings

Researchers always involve systematic study, experiment and applicability of certain problem or dogmas. They will be figures-oriented and then findings will be based on interpretations extracted from various mathematical tools used in them.

If a research’s findings interest and intrigue you, you can catch hold of that rope and start studying the reliability of their findings. In the process, you will be demanded to read more, analyze them from different angles and then hear more views about them. This will not only feed you more new ideas to keep your blog active, but you’ll also lea many new things.

#8 Videos and their content Messages

It sometimes takes watching just a short documentary movie or short clip in getting your mind sparked with new good ideas that are worth to be expressed in pros in your blog.

Some movies are so good that you wish they are so long to remain watching them until you are fully satisfied. Some give you inspirations, some lessons, some skills and some shall give you nothing yet entertain you. Don’t believe me? Watch this video

#9 Blog Posts and Comments

Some readers of your blog will be so genuine readers that they would care to leave some Idea. The Idea will be appreciation, suggestion, and criticism and in some, all three will be presented together.

You must have given replies at the time of moderating them. But in most cases, we tend to read them so quickly and publish them directly without trying to analyze what a person was trying to say in the comment. We must have overlooked the message contained therein.

If you are suffering from writer’s block, then you can try reading Idea of few published posts. You never know readers must have left Idea that would warrant you with yet another new good post. Though it’s always better to write as soon as a person has left that in the comment, it’s also not bad either to write about it later – better late than never!

#10 Market Situations & customers’ feedback

If you are a blogger who is into reviewing different products or services, having closer looks in the behavioral pattes of the customers, market’s reactions to their entries, consumers’ feedback and affordability of consumers will guarantee series of new ideas to come up with new articles in your blog. You can also read reviews done by other bloggers.

#11 Experiencing Culture and Traditions

Bloggers who are into blogging about travel destinations, tourism and tour packages available in certain areas or countries, getting closer to and experiencing various unique cultures and traditions of people living in that area would reward you a good number of ideas for your blog updates.

#12 Observations and Experiences

If you remain locked up inside your room snuggled up under your warm mattresses, it’s very much unlikely that new ideas would strike in your mind. It’s often recommended you to travel and explore various places, experience various foods, experiment certain theories, test certain gadgets and observe certain occasions.

Your thoughts and reactions at the time of trying and observing new things or occasions, which you have never done it before will also give you strings and strings of ideas to update your otherwise dormant blog.

#13 Interviews with Expert People

If you are limited with the financial ability to travel new places, purchase, and test new gadgets, and attend conferences or workshops, then you can start interviewing people who are locally or globally acclaimed to be experts in different fields.

When those interview questioaires and answers are being published on your blog, you are coming up with a new blog post. And as you go on interviewing more and more experts, not only the number of posts in your blog will increase but will also improve your blogging consistency.

But then first try to interview less popular people because it’s wiser to catch small fishes first and then gradually attempting to catch sharks. According to my personal experience, interview posts bring good traffics compare to other posts.

#14 Exploring more of your Passion

Let us say I am very much interested in trying different cameras and taking photos using them. Then I can start making a list of topics related to my passion which I don’t know at present but I would like to lea more. Instance I can say:

• Which camera is best for low-income photographer?
• How to position the camera at the time of taking photos?
• Which camera is the most expensive camera in 2016?

I can refer various sources. I can read various reviews. In the process, I will never face short of topics on which I can write to update my blog besides not mentioning different new things I can lea.

#15 Maintaining and Reading Diary Book

Do you think maintaining a diary book is something very primitive? If you think so, you are wrong, and it’s because you must not have tried maintaining one. If you always keep a booklet with you and then keep on jotting down ideas as and when they flash in your mind, they’ll give you new ideas on which you can write one or two articles. The human mind is so unpredictable.

Read: 10 Hobbies Worth Pursuing for your Curious Mind.

Now Your Tu

We accept that we often fall prey to writer’s block. And how it’s being faced differs from person to person.

Share with us in the comment: How do you face writer’s block and then move ahead inconsistent strides without getting deviated from your initial blogging plans and targets?

This is a guest submission by Sherab. Want to contribute something original? Read ShoutMeLoud’s submission guidelines before contrinuting.

If you struggle to create eye-catching content for your audience, then consider going beyond boring images and text.

They say a picture paints a thousand words. Well, animations might well paint a million. These days, you don’t have to study a course to become an expert in video animation. There are lots of free online tools that are easy to lea and will help you create beautiful and captivating animations.

One such tool is PowToon, a free web-based tool that lets you create animated videos. You can use your own images or take from PowToon’s free resources to craft your very own video and amplify your message. If you don’t want to start from scratch, there are a few free templates that you can tweak and revise as you see fit. Using this tool is pretty straightforward and you’ll get lots of help along the way.

How To Create Animated Videos with PowToon In Easy Steps

Starting from scratch or with a template

First, you need to sign up for a free account. You can also sign up using Gmail or Facebook. Once done, you’ll be directed to your Dashboard, where you’ll see a list of videos you’ve made, if any. If this is your first time using the software, your Dashboard will have a button to create your first video. Click on Create and select from a long list of templates, or select Start from Scratch.

For this demo, I chose to Start from Scratch to get a full idea of all features of this tool. Starting from scratch will load the PowToon animation design tool. On the left column, you’ll see a thumbnail of your canvas. On top, you can toggle between Movie or Slideshow mode. To make an animation, be sure it’s set to Movie mode. If you want a Slideshow then set it as so.

In the middle area is the blank canvas that you’re about to design. On top, there’s a text field to name this video file into something more relevant to your video. There’s also an Undo and Redo button beside it. Use these buttons to revert or reapply the last change made. On the right column, you’ll have the different resources and elements you can use for your video.

Customizing your video

To use all features of this tool switch to Customize Mode (found on the top of the right pane). Once you’re in this mode, you’ll notice an area on the left pane where it says “Picto”. This is the default style for items under Library and Objects. Click on Picto to see more styles like Work Life, Soho Style, Marker Style and more. These styles ensure that all the items you pick from the Library and Objects icons will complement each other.

Once you’ve chosen a style, you can click on any of the icons on the far right edge. The icons are: Layout, Background, Text, Library, Object, Graphs, Sound and Media. You can choose Layout and see if there are any predefined styles you might want to use. You can edit the text, styles and color for any layout design.

To have some styled text added, click on Text and choose from the many designs that appear on the right pane’s gallery. To add the basic text, click on Add Title, Add Subtitle or Add Body Text. You can edit text directly from the canvas, and you can add animations as well by clicking on the T icon that appears when you click on the text.

The Library icon will show you the many characters, props and objects you can add to your canvas. Depending on which Style you chose, the Library will show elements from that specific Style.

For instance, the Marker Style will show hand-drawn characters and objects as shown below. These elements are mostly animated.

Other elements you can add are shapes and lines from the Objects library, graphs, sound and your own image files. In the example below, I uploaded my own avatar to use as a character for my video.

Organizing the timeline

To create a video, you need to first position the red arrow in the timeline below your canvas. The numbers in the timeline indicate the seconds in that video. By default, the arrow will be on zero, but when you add an element, you’ll notice an icon is added below the timeline. If you add a text, a T icon will be added below the timeline, indicating that it’s now a part of the video. To assign the length of time that an element or group of elements will show, click on the icon below the timeline and you’ll see a darkened portion which indicates the ruing time of that element. Adjust the bars on the start or begiing to change the playing duration of an element.

You can add as many elements as you want in succession, provided they are all in proper order in the timeline. To check how the video will look like, press the big Play button on the bottom left. If some elements appear or disappear too soon or remain on the screen when it’s not supposed to, find that element’s icon below the timeline and adjust its play time as necessary. Each movie by default is only 10 seconds long, but you can add more by clicking the plus icon on the edge of the timeline. For each click on the plus sign, one second is added to the video.

When you’re done, click the Export button on top. For a free account, you can save the video in your PowToon account, upload it to Vimeo or YouTube or download the file as PDF. Here are plans offered by PowToon:

To download the files as MP4 or PPT, you need to upgrade to a premium account.

Here is one video created using PowToon by Harsh for one of his post.

Wondering what else can you do with PowToon?

Create Animated Presentation: PowerPoint Alteative

Conclusion

For a free service, PowToon offers a lot of options and possibilities for creating videos that will get your message across.

It’s fun to do and easy to lea. The tutorials and chat support provided within the app is great help to new users…

.. It’s also a great way of leaing about the basics of digital animation, which is always cool for bloggers and content creators who don’t have the means to hire expensive animators. In a nutshell, PowToon takes video animation to anyone who is interested and wants to express their ideas in a unique and unforgettable way.

For further reading:

Elance was a great website, but then it merged with Odesk to form Upwork, and we have to agree – Upwork isn’t the same as Elance.

It already had a lot of problems on its own, and now that its fee has gone up from 10% to 20%, people are leaving the sinking ship. Freelance writers are pretty clueless – they don’t know where to look for assignments. I’m facing the same issues. After getting hundreds of clients through Elance, now I’m looking for alteate sources.

The times are difficult, but all is not lost. Here are some places where you can still find freelance writing assignments.

6 great methods to find Paid Freelance Writing Jobs

Fiverr

Fiverr is a job board where freelancers open their “gigs” and clients can hire them according to the services offered. All gigs cost $5, so if you want to write an article for more than $5, you can ask them to purchase multiple gigs for one article. It’s the opposite of Elance, where clients post jobs and freelancers come looking. Fiverr is a diverse platform. In fact, when you’re on Fiverr, why stop at just writing? Explore some of their whacky gigs and see if you can do something like that.

ProBlogger Job Board

Problogger charges $50 from a client to post a job on their board, so you can be sure that the clients who post here will definitely hire someone. While

While UPwork clients generally post jobs and never look back, Problogger clients need high-quality writing and are looking for serious writers. I once landed a job on Problogger and was able to ea about $3,500 per month from it. The job lasted for 6 months, so make sure you apply only if you’re a serious writer who can write daily for several months.

Reddit

Reddit is a very interactive community. There are [Hiring] and [For Hire] threads that you can join. I had posted my own ads on Reddit a couple of times and got replies from clients. You too can offer your services if you have something unique to offer. Make a pitch that will attract customers, and you’ll get their replies through PMs (personal messages). However, make sure you don’t spam the threads by posting your services again and again.

Craigslist

I have read that many clients on Craigslist are sham, but personally, I have had a couple of clients through this platform, and they worked out fine for me. Although I never had any long-term assignments through Craigslist, but it’s still worth a shot. I got $25 for an article from this platform. It’s not much, but hey, it’s still worth a try for an out-of-work writer. Most Craigslist people will want to talk to you on

Although I never had any long-term assignments through Craigslist, but it’s still worth a shot. I got $25 for an article from this platform. It’s not much, but hey, it’s still worth a try for an out-of-work writer. Most Craigslist people will want to talk to you on phone though… so if you’re not comfortable with that, this isn’t the platform for you.

Content Mills

Content mills are infamous for paying peanuts to their writers. For example, Crowd Content pays about $17-$20 per hour to a writer and expects them to write 10 short descriptions in one hour. If you want bulk work, you might want to try this option, but they do not pay the right amount for your work.

To get selected at a Content Mill, you need to read their rules and write a sample for them. If your sample is approved, they will hire you as a writer and you can write articles for them, which they publish on different sources. Here is a list of ContentMills:

1. TextBroker
2. DemandMedia
3. iWriter
4. CopyPress
5. Content Mart

Guest post on blogs

It’s a great way to ea some extra money. Blogs like Cracked.com pay $150 per piece for first four blog posts and $250 per piece for every subsequent article. Plus, you can make an extra $100 if your post becomes successful. But for that, you need to send them a great pitch. If they like your pitch, they’ll accept it. Read this guide to lea writing an outstanding proposal. There are several other blogs that accept guest posts and pay for them. You just need to send the right pitch.

Here are few hand-picked guides to help you get started:

Hang in there!

It’s a difficult phase for freelance writers, especially for those who made their livelihood from Elance.

You need a little perseverance, and good clients will come again. Meanwhile, you can read some quality blogs and improve your skills. Reading books is a great option too. Many of my friends have suggested to me that I should read Reader’s Digest to improve my writing skills – although I must admit that I still haven’t tried that.

Well, that’s it. I hope at least someone will benefit from this article. All the best for your freelancing career!

This post is Contributed b @NidhiTandon01. Want to submit a guest post? Check ShoutMeLoud Submission guidelines first.

Are you plaing to shift your WordPress site to managed WordPress hosting?..

.. Want to evaluate & understand the good & bad side of Managed WP Hosting?

Well, let me share what I have leaed after spending almost $6500 in last three years by hosting ShoutMeLoud on various managed WordPress hosting.

If you are new to this not so new form of hosting, start by leaing what is managed WordPress hosting. You will also lea about features and advantages you will get with them.

Now, as we all know there are two sides of coins and same goes with managed WP hosting. However, there is no as such limitations or bad thing about Managed WP hosting, but there is few downside, especially for tech-savvy people that you should know. Personally, I feel for any professional WordPress blog & Business WordPress Website should be hosted only on managed WordPress hosting.

If you are asking why?

Read on to find the answer. At the end, I have also updated some of the most popular managed WordPress hosting of 2016.

The Pros of Managed Hosting for WordPress

As the name implies, it’s a service which takes care of everything related to WordPress. We all know that managing WordPress platform isn’t easy. The plugins, themes and more have to be kept updated. A Managed WordPress hosting service provider takes care of such things. This provides you with the time to focus on something else. You need not worry about updates and a slow loading site anymore. However, there are two sides to every coin. So, let’s take a look at some of the pros and cons of this management service.

The benefits of paying managed WordPress hosting are:

Being up-to-date

There are a lot of updates that are released to improve the WordPress experience. By paying for this management service, you can be sure that everything will be up-to-date as soon as an update is released. Even the plugins will be updated, and the service providers will test them before they make an upgrade. This means that they will test the compatibility of the plugin before they make the update. Moreover, you don’t need to worry about updating your blog; you have your personal butler to take care of it. What a royalty it is :)

Speed Optimization

The speed with which a website loads is very important. Visitors hate slow loading sites, and you can lose a lot of traffic because of this. The service providers will make sure that your site loads as fast as it can. There are a lot of things they will do to ensure less loading time. They can implement the most-recent caching plugins, developments in speed optimization, content delivery networks and more to make the site load faster. In below screenshot, you can see ShoutMeLoud loading within 1.73 seconds & we are hosted on Kinsta managed WordPress hosting.

Most of these managed WordPress hosting providers enable caching at the server end, that means you don’t need to rely on caching plugins for speed optimization. Also, CDN comes as a part of the package, which makes sure your site loads blazing fast.

Takeaway: You don’t need to pay for CDN.

Backups

You spend a lot of time to improve your site. Just imagine how you will feel if something unfortunate occurs, and you lose all of the content?

If the site is ruing on a bad host, then there’s no doubt that you will lose everything if something unfortunate occurs. However, using Managed WordPress hosting provides you with the surety that your data will be safe through their daily backup service.

This also saves on your money if you use paid services like VaultPress to take your backup, as managed hosting backup will ensure if something goes wrong on your site, you can quickly restore to previous working state.

Nightly backup by Flywheel managed WP hosting

Support

If a technical issue arises, then a standard shared hosting support team might not help you in a proper maer because the support service doesn’t completely understand that platform. By paying for managed WordPress hosting, you know that the service providers understand the platform, and that’s why they will be able to help you in the proper maer and take care of the technical problems your WordPress site is facing.

I have had a great experience with some of the popular companies like SiteGround & Kinsta. Both of them offer excellent customer support.

Security

Your data will be kept safe because with these service providers; you don’t have to worry about malware or other security issues. These service providers do what they can to keep your site safe.

Save Time

You don’t have to spend hundreds of hours to understand how the platform works because everything will be handled by the managed hosting service providers. Everything technical is handled by them, and you can focus on other things.

These are just a few of the advantages of managed WordPress hosting services, now let’s look into some of the downsides of managed WP web-hosting companies.

The Cons of Managed WordPress Webhosting

Some of the things which begiers might not like are:

Price (Managed WP hosting is not for everybody)

As I mentioned above, managed WordPress hosting is for business WordPress sites, professional or serious bloggers like you & me. Managed WordPress hosting will cost you money.

It can start from $30 per month to some hundreds of dollars a month. It depends on how much management you need. You will also have to pay extra if your post goes viral.

The basic package, generally $20 a month, allows a certain number of visitors to your site each month. If the limit exceeds, you will have to pay extra. You can increase the ‘limit’ by paying for a more expensive package that allows more visitors. Below you can see the pricing table of MediaTemple managed WordPress hosting.

For a high-traffic site, the cost can go up to hundred of dollars/month.

Right now my blog (ShoutMeLoud) is hosted on Kinsta hosting. I pay close to $250/month & last month; I paid for one year in advance.

Is it worth it?

Well, 99.9% uptime with 1.5 million/page views a month says it all.

If blogging is your full-time business or you operating a corporate or enterprise level WordPress blog, the huge cost of managed WP hosting, should not be a reason to stop you from buying. In fact, you will gain more when hosting your WordPress site on such World-class hosting.

Less Control

You won’t have full control because the technical things will be taken care of by the management service providers, and they will decide what needs to be updated. It doesn’t mean you can’t add new stuff or do anything on your dashboard; you will be doing everything like usual but for many things like Cache plugins, updating WordPress will be taken care by the service provider.

We can clearly see that there are no as such disadvantage apart from the price factor on managed WordPress hosting, but when it comes to peace of mind and having a complete hassle-free WordPress blog, managed hosting is indeed a good pick. If you think that you can pay for the services in a comfortable maer, then going for Managed WordPress hosting is a good option for you.

Here are recommended managed WordPress hosting for 2016:

1. Kinsta Hosting
2. MediaTemple
3. SiteGround Hosting
4. Flywheel hosting

If you are using any managed WordPress web hosting provider? Do let me know your review and your feedback about their service.

Do share this article with your friends to let them know about pros & cons of managed WP hosting.

So you started blogging on WordPress our of passion & like million others you started your jouey with entry-level shared hosting. Now your blog is getting great traffic & it’s becoming a source of your bread butter, just like mine.

One fine day, your existing hosting company emails you to “Buzz off” as they can’t handle your website load. In most of the cases, a non-technical blogger would feel dishearten, dissatisfied & helpless. I had been that situation when ShoutMeLoud traffic grew from hundred of page views a day to 10k+ pageviews a day. Have you ever felt the similar situation?

If your answer is “No”, then you are probably already on a hosting company that can handle high traffic site or you are yet to experience the sweet taste of millions of page views. This guide or call it your resource for hosting selection will help you to pick the hosting for your growing or overgrown site.

Another aspect that limits the growth of a WordPress blog is the use of plugins. WordPress can be great when you are utilizing the plugins. You will often see many WordPress users recommending you to limit the number of WordPress plugins as it would affect the loading time of your site. This is partially correct & happens when you are using a badly coded plugin.

The reason you can’t make most out of plugins is the technology limitations of your hosting. If you are on a shared hosting, you might have experienced it at least once. Haven’t you?

The right question that you should be asking right now is:

What is limiting your blog growth at this point?

Is it the technology or your fear of growing big?

If it’s the technology, then you have little to worry about. As in today’s date hosting companies have understood the need of time & we have few great options for hosting high traffic WordPress site. If your answer is later one (Fear of growing big), it’s time for you to read motivational & self-growth articles.

Today I will be sharing a list of those awesome WordPress hosting companies that are built to handle high-traffic sites. They are not going to be as cheap as shared hosting companies which typically comes in the range of $3-$10/month. But these awesome companies would ensure your blog can handle the growth that you are anticipating.

WordPress Hosting companies for high-traffic sites:

Let’s have a look at those hosting companies that you can trust for your growing WordPress blog.

Kinsta Managed Hosting:

Kinsta hosting is top in the managed WordPress hosting as they build specially for hosting heavy WordPress sites. If you like technical details, they use Nginx, HHVM, PHP5-FPM, Redis and Memcache to make your site blazing fast. I have experienced loading time of less than 1 second for ShoutMeLoud.

My experience with them is great so far, and their tech support is par excellent. Their entry level hosting plan starts with $100/month which let you host 1 WordPress sites. Enterprises should look at their Load balanced plans which start with $870/month which ensures your website never go down. You can lea more about their pricing & offer over here.

What you would like the most is their excellent customer support. Last time (In May 2016), when my site shifted to PHP7 on Kinsta Google cloud platform, I faced a lot of issues because of using many old plugins. Their team including CEO ‘Mark Gavalda‘ helped me at every point to fix all the issues. I have never had such a royal experience with any other WordPress hosting.

If you are looking for the best solution for your growing WordPress blog, you should host it on Kinsta Hosting

.Once you have made the decision, their friendly support team will migrate your site for free. I already paid for their one year hosting by paying $2800. You can see the payment proof in below screenshot:

Pros:

• Unlimited visits.
• Pricing is competitive & service quality is excellent.
• 10 server location
• SSD storage
• Free Website backup
• Staging & Free SSL

Cons:

• Limited use of Javascript.

After ruing ShoutMeLoud on Kinsta hosting for last one year, I could say it’s a top notch solution for heavy traffic WordPress blog.

Check out Kinsta Hosting

PageLy:

Another top hosting option for high-traffic WordPress blogs. They also allow unlimited visits & their service quality & hardware offering is top-notch. The good thing about them is, they are affordable for entry-level bloggers to who have the limited budget.

You can pick the right plan for you from their seven different plans. Do notice the bandwidth column when picking up Pagely plans or you can always add additional bandwidth any day of the month.

Pros:

• WordPress multi-site support
• Free-site migration of 2 sites

Checkout Page.ly

Cloudways:

Before moving to Kinsta hosting, I was with Cloudways for 4 months & they were pretty good with their offering. You can host your site on DigitalOcean server (DO) or Amazon. They provide custom dashboard which makes it easier for you to install a new WordPress site, or you can migrate all your existing WordPress Blogs. One of the best thing about them is that you can host any Website using Cloudways & they are not only limited to WordPress. This also creates an issue with the support, as they are fine-tuned for all the platform.

If you have basic knowledge of troubleshooting WordPress, I would suggest go for Cloudways. The major benefit which you would be getting here is the pricing which comes down to a cheaper price. You can also consider hosting your entry level WordPress site with them, as their most reasonable plan comes for $10/month.

In short, you will be hosting your WordPress site on a Cloud server with no requirement for technical knowledge.

Pros:

• Host on DigitalOcean server.
• Their dashboard is user-friendly.
• Perfect for entry level as well as enterprise level websites
• Scale up or down a server in real-time.
• Pricing is cheap & you can customize your hardware requirement.
• Offers 14 days free trial & free site migration.

Cons:

• Support is average.
• Too many options could be overwhelming.

Check out Cloudways (14 days free cloud hosting)

More quality WP hosting options but with limited visits:

After all, the reason you are buying a premium hosting to handle the high-traffic. Is int it?

This holds true when we think from a blogger perspective. Now, WordPress is not limited to blogging & many businesses have their blog, job portal & many other use cases for WordPress. In many cases, the traffic requirement is less and requirement of rock-solid infrastructure is more.

If you need an enterprise-grade architecture for your WordPress site, here are some of the best options. Do pick their plan according to your monthly traffic requirement.

By the end always remember, there can never be a single recommendation as once your site is matured for having a premium hosting, you need to consider factors like Pricing, features, scalability, support to pick the right hosting.

For long I stopped myself moving away from shared hosting to a WordPress managed hosting, but once I did; I never had to look back. Right now ShoutMeLoud is hosted on Kinsta hosting & you can see the performance yourself.

One major benefit which I have noticed after moving to Kinsta managed WordPress hosting is scalability of the WordPress. I have already added custom post types (Videos, Deals), using EDD for ShoutMeLoud store & AffilaiteWP for our affiliate program. Even after adding so many features, I haven’t experienced any performance issues so far.

Tip for shared hosting user:

If your shared hosting is not giving any issue, stick to them as long as you could. Once you start getting hiccups, you should move to one of these above-mentioned quality hosting which are crafted for hosting WordPress based blogs & websites.

Your tu to help the community:

How are you managing your high-traffic WordPress site? Comment with your monthly page-views & hosting you are using for your WordPress website?

Are you plaing on launching your own blog sometime soon?

Or

You have a blog & wondering how to maintain your blogging routine while keeping your day job?

Blogging for full-time is the coveted for many first-time bloggers and it is rightly due to the flexibility it has to offer.

If you have taken into account the pressures and scheduling issues of maintaining a successful blog ran full-time, there is something else to consider prior to the same. If you do not happen to have a decent amount of blog readers from your previous venture, which is in most cases, you might rethink of giving up your day job on optimistic fantasies of becoming a full-time blogger.

If the above-said words have put you in a turmoil, you may now unwind and read on further to find out how maintaining a blog along with a full-time day job is possible.

Not only holding on to your full-time day job while getting started on your blogger jouey is advantageous, it is vital. We will not go on further arguing about how maintaining your full-time day job while launching your blog is necessary.

Getting started on your new blog is an extremely tedious task and requires a lot of hours and efforts from your end. It is not definitely a ‘build-it-they-will-come’ strategy and requires serious initial effort to plan ahead for a full-time blogging career sometime in the future.

While it has been established that maintaining a day job while launching a blog is essential and that serious blogging requires serious efforts, how can one maintain a blog effectively in the process?

How to maintain your Blog while keeping your day job?

Just like many bloggers at the ShoutMeLoud Community, I too have maintained my first blog along with my day job as a full-time student and it does get hectic.

For working professionals, this might get even hectic depending on your workload and working hours. However, there are certain strategies that you can leverage to maintain an effective blog while working your full-time day job.

Read more to find out about the five ways how you can maintain a beneficial blog while working a full-time job.

Identify your target audience and become specific

If you are in your initial stages of launching a blog or are plaing to do so, it is essential that you nail down your target audience and blog niche.

One of the rookie mistakes of which even I was a victim of was to write about everything. It would be extremely difficult to pick out a particular niche to write about if you possess varied interests. When you are begiing out with blogging, start small.

Start with a single topic of your utmost interest and you can build upon it as you work on growing your blog. Having a ton of article categories and aiming to write about everything would quickly exhaust you out of your energy, time and creativity just a few months into it.

List down some of the things that inspire you the most and see if you can come up with at least 20 article titles in the said category. This is one good creative exercise to choose ‘The Niche’ for your blog when you are starting out.

Even if you have launched your blog recently, it is not late to tone it down and target the particulars you care about. A target audience of ‘anyone and everyone’ is something that would never work out for new blogs, even though there are a reported 3.17 Billion Inteet users on this planet!

A toned down blog operating in a particular niche is something that would make your work easier as you begin your blogging jouey while maintaining a day job.

Plan out your long-term Content Strategy

If you are plaing on taking up your blog as a full-time career sometime in the future, it is essential that you maintain a proper strategy. This is another factor that I completely overlooked while begiing out and something that many newbie bloggers fail to put some thought into.

As mentioned previously, if you are starting out and have decided out on a target niche/audience, the next step is the content strategy. You need your first few months of content and social media strategies laid down to make things easier while getting started.

Many new bloggers quit due to the extreme requirements in terms of hours and creativity in the first few months and surviving this stage is particularly essential.

A content strategy would comprise of but not limited to article title ideas for next few months by addressing the niche’s core problems, a publishing calendar, and social media publishing strategy. Plaing out ahead for the next few months in terms of strategies to publish your content is one great way to manage your initial blogging jouey and maintain your full-time job in the process.

As Benjamin Franklin would put it, “If you fail to plan, you are plaing to fail”.

Write Early in the Moings or Late in the Night

This is one useful tip that I have found myself to be of great help and something many now full-time bloggers recommend for new bloggers.

Be it a full-time student, employee or parent, early moings and late nights are easily the best times for writing content on your blog.

Although writing late may sometimes be not desirable if you have to leave for work early, writing early in the moing is certainly something you can consider. It is also often quoted that some of the best writers to have graced this planet have been early risers when it came to getting sure their writing of the day was done.

Moreover, apart from just letting you concentrate during the silent periods of the day, writing during these times will also help you form a daily ritual around the same. Writing daily or even weekly requires a lot of discipline and showing up daily is the key to success here.

Setting a daily time for writing in this way will also help you cater a portion of your day to writing. Make sure that you remain true to yourselves and to your schedule.

Open up to Guest contributions and Collaborations

Guest blogging is how collaboration in the Blogosphere works.

Either accepting guest posts from other bloggers or guest posting at other blogs is one great way to collaborate on content between blogs that share similar audiences. The one major reason accepting guest posts would be beneficial to you would be that you can generate new content in the process when you get too busy to write at some point of the week.

Not all guest posts are of the highest standards of expectations and hence it is your duty to make sure that only the content your audience deserves gets published.

Teaming up with other begier bloggers or to find suitable authors from your early subscribers is one great way to build relationships for your blog and brand. Guest posts could help your blog generate relevant and interesting content while allowing you to tackle the most important articles that define your blog.

Although some people are skeptical about accepting guest posts, a thorough screening of the incoming posts would get you quality content that bloggers love to share.

Seek inspiration for content outside your Blogging time

If you are working a full-time day job, there is a high probability that you are not working on your blog during work!

There is always a scope for zoning out and some break time even during your work. This is the time of seeking inspiration for your blog. Be it with talks at the water cooler or through observations while you’re traveling to work, always make sure you keep your mind open to new ideas.

A good idea for a blog post is never too far away and keeping a notebook with you all the time is a surefire way to grow your blog big.

Ideas hit you at the most unexpected time and being prepared for it beforehand is essential. Quickly jot down any post ideas or thoughts in your notebook and make sure to go through it once you’re back to working on your blog. You might, at least, know a handful of people at your work who are interested in your blog’s topics. Interacting with these people could help you gain further insights and discoveries which could let to new blogging opportunities.

Conclusion

All in all, the decision to maintain your full-time day job while working on your blog could and often does get hectic for most people. This is nothing less than working two jobs and requires a lot of hours, efforts, sacrifices, and dedication in the onset. Relationships are also something that ought to be taken into consideration and giving time for your family and friends is essential for a proper work-life balance.

So, what do you think of these five tips to maintain your blog while working a full-time day job? Feel free to shout out your thoughts and Idea below. Don’t forget to share it on Facebook, I would feel good if you do that! :)

We are living in the World where a lot of content is produced on every single day. And high-quality content is truly the king

Some content are good whereas some are not. People like good content and come back again and again to read.

People don’t like to watch ads. Nowadays, people take information without the care of baers.

So we can say that content marketing strategies are constantly evolving & changing .

To stand out from the crowd, you need to have some decent content marketing strategies with you. Suppose you have written a well researched long article and nobody is interested to read it.

How will you feel?

I would definitely feel sad& I bet you too.

There are many companies producing a good amount of content daily. To promote that content, they need to market that content. Until and unless you don’t get revenue for your content, your content is useless.

So there are many big companies which are investing more and more money for content marketing. With the help of content marketing, these companies achieve their predefined goals.

I know you must be aware of benefits of Content Marketing & let’s have a quick refresher. This will make it easier for you to grasp the new content marketing strategies for 2016.

Benefits of Content Marketing

1. More on-site Content: This is a very obvious benefit of Content marketing. If you produce more content, then you can grab the attention of your audience. The audience will stick to your site and by this way, you can win the trust of customers.

2. Higher visibility in Google: If you produce a good content daily then the Google will index that content frequently. So the chances of getting rank in Google will be improved with the content production. The more you produce content, the more will be chance for ranking in Google

3. Increase Domain Authority: Domain Authority of your website is directly promotional to the content production and regularity of updates. So if you are producing a good amount of content then your domain authority will increase. So by this way, you can get more trust and gain trustworthiness over the inteet.

4. More Social Traffic: Social media is everywhere. So if you are producing huge content then you will defiantly share it on social media. So by this way, you can get more social media followers and traffic. Many people will your content with their friends so by that way you can get a good audience from social media.

5. Improved Brand Reputation and relationship with customers: Once you start producing huge content then the reputation of your website will automatically improved. By providing good amount of content, you can build a good relationship with the customers as well. The relationship will again help you to drive more traffic to your website.

For detailed reading:

Best Content Marketing Strategies for 2016

1. Do more and more Content Remarketing: This is the first and foremost point. If you are producing quality content but you are not doing content remarketing then there are high chances that you caot reach your goals for such content. When you produce a good content then you should tag the visitors who likes your site and comes regularly. So by this way, when you tag them for new content they read that content and share that content. Also they feel good for your website. Content Remarketing simply means that you should bring those users who have already likes your content. So by this way, you are able to grab the existing users.

2. Do Keyword Research before Content Production: Some experts said that don’t focus on SEO and just write quality content. This is true in ideal world. But we are not living in such words. So we need to target some keywords for our content. If we are doing proper SEO then we can rank for any good content. So we should produce quality content by applying proper SEO. For that we need to find target keyword first and then start content production.

3. Try to give answer to the complex questions: This is the best content marketing strategy. If you are providing the content by which you are giving the solutions to big problems then you can automatically drive traffic to your website. So the key for success is simple: always try to find those topics which people are facing problems and try to solve those problems by your post.

4. Add data into your content: In today’s world, if you are providing good content then it is okay. But if you are providing content with facts then defiantly people likes to read your content. People like the content which has some facts involved because you can attract anyone by using correct facts. So back up your content with facts. Always give the proper credits for the websites from where you are finding such facts.

5. Don’t copy the popular blogs: This is a important factor while doing content marketing. Many people start copying the popular blogs and try to create huge content. By copying someone’s work you caot get success. There are high chances that by doing this you will get panelised from search engines and lose your brand value. So don’t copy anything from anywhere. Read this guide to understand how to copy content & give credits.

6. Content Should Reflect Brand Voice: This is a very important thing in content marketing. Your content should be such that it reflects your Brand. After all, you are doing content marketing for taking your brand to the next level. If you are having a good brand reputation then you can sell anything like a hotcake. If you are producing the content which does not reflect your brand voice then that content will not fulfil your goals. So always write the content which will stand out your brand from the crowd.

7. Speak your mind: In this world of competition, you need to speak your own voice. Don’t look at your competitors and just focus on your qualities. Write unique content and market it. If you try to copy your competitors then it will harm your brand only. So write the unique content with your own experience and stand out from the rest. Though, it’s not a good idea to lea & understand your competitors strategies. Your goal should be to improvise their ideas to create something awesome. Here are few good tools that you can use to understand your competitors strategies.

8. Publish only Best Content: There are many posts get published on the inteet on every single day. So you may feel like to post more and more. But remember one thing: Always share the content which is best. If you are posting a good content once a week then it is fine. But don’t post the content which is of no use. You should not miss reading this useful article by Harsh: How Not to Write Meaningless articles for meaningful success.

9. Evaluate the Success of Your Content: Once you have published a good post then you need to check whether that post is liked by the visitors or not. There are many tools for that. You can use Google Analytics to trace the progress of your website. So trace the progress and change your strategy accordingly. For a good success continues evaluation is required. So do check the progress.

So as of now, you are having a sound understanding about new strategies of content marketing for 2016. There is no shortcut for anything. You need to work hard for content marketing.

Initially, you may face some problems but once you get some good grip on it then everything is easy. Here are few selected guides to help you in content marketing for your business or startup:

It is just the matters of experiments. You can always improve by your experiments so keep applying the above-mentioned tips and produce the quality content.

If you like these tips then do share it with your friends and help them in content marketing. I would like to hear your view related to content marketing via Idea. So feel free to comment.

This post is contributed by Sumit Ghosh .Read our submission guidelines.

A founder’s jouey includes daydreams of their company becoming colossal.

When setting up your startup you may be quite nervous, but once you set your feet on the new field, you’ll eventually start enjoying it. With hardline growth on the boundary, the time will come to make the move from the start-up phase to an established brand. But, you need to ensure that your marketing keeps up properly.

All the big & successful companies make use of the Facebook as their marketing campaign to escalate their marketing efforts but, always 7 out of 10 are not able to generate their expected revenue.

In fact, marketing without a clear marketing strategy is like sailing a boat without oar: you’re not going to end up where you want to. World’s biggest social media network – Facebook, with over 1.65 billion MAUs (monthly active Facebook users) which is a 15% rise year over year.

It means if you don’t have a strategy or a plan in mind, you’ll lose money and overlook the key to your success.

Top Stats from the State of Inbound Marketing Report

Here are tips that’ll take your Facebook marketing to the next level:

Focused on Inbound Marketing Fuel

A converting visitor to the customer from Facebook commonly requires highly targeted audience segments, emphasizing unique value propositions, multiple ads creative, on different devices at a different time.

The problem is 99% of visitors aren’t ready to buy your product.

A research reveals that 97%-99% of visitors are not ready to purchase for one reason or another. So how do you convert visitors into buyers? How do you reach the other 97% of people?

In order to do that, it is essential for you to focus on a specific segment in an ideal targeting market and put the high-end energy into one.

This marketing campaign should ask the first question as- What’s my target market’s No. One is the problem? Select a product that solves the problems and sells it to your targeted customers. From there, you can optimize the emails, ads, and followers.

As an example, KFC segments its audience outreach by demographics like age. Its advertising is crafted to reach definite segments according to their requirements — ads featuring comedian Jim Gaffigan to portray its mascot, Colonel Sanders, in TV ads, for instance, are aimed at children alongside products meant for younger audiences. Breakfast ads, offers ads, new 5-in-1 meal box, on the other side, are organized toward busy adults.

A business wanting to use Facebook for this type of advertising could target these subjects by generation, education or work, to name a few.

Use Facebook + Content to Generate Leads and Customers

Let’s talk especially about Facebook ads.

I’m sure, you spend thousands of dollars advertisings your homepage to billions of people and subsequently see appealing CTR (Click through Rate) and conversions on your business page – but why would you?

Sounds like a waste of both time and money.

Facebook have huge amounts of user info that marketers can analyze and utilize. Instead of casting a wide net and hoping to catch a few fish, it’s better to have information about who you advertise to and what you advertise.

Facebook also help you to catch the attention of those people that are already looking for and conceed about what you have to offer.

Take your current marketing and lead generation strategy as an example.

You likely have some pieces of content, educational materials, and a blog that you promote to generate primitive leads at the top of the sales fuel.

Where’re you advertising those offers?

Perhaps on your social media marketing pages, in circulars, and through organic search?

These social media chaels all have one thing in common- attentive people are using those chaels to find informative content like yours.

Think of Facebook ads in the same way and craft your marketing strategy accordingly. Use ads to offer your content to users who are already interested in topics related to your business who’re already interested in subjects related to your industry. That’s how your business gets inbound!

Have a Clear Strategy

Before starting up your business, it’s very crucial to have a clear mindset of what actually you want to do! Having a clear strategy, targets and goals will help you to see the actual retu on your marketing efforts.

A recent research has revealed that:

Keeping in mind about the buyer’s need and experience and a good strategy will lead you to the way of healthy ROI as you move up.

Plan an Integral Process

Developing the overall production process is the next big step after identifying the marketing goals and strategy in order to run a marketing campaign on Facebook. There must be a go-to system that’ll help your employees to work together according to a well-considered and pre-determined plan.

Marketing is the crux of every type of business. You should ensure that the ongoing Facebook marketing is hitches-free to make certain about the effectual brand management at ROI when you squash up your marketing. Identify your 5 W’s and 1 H— “Who, Why, What, When, Where and How” and direct your team, especially where content creation is dealt with.

Analyze Right Persoel

It’s believed that for getting success in business, the key is the ability to find out & choose right people, and further, lead them to do well at a shared goal. The same applied to the marketing goals at Facebook. Persoel is the building blocks of a successful business. You alone can’t walk on the way to create an unswerving, steady flow of top-notch quality content or acting out different marketing networks.

People like buying people they know and trust. The hiring should not be done only with the sole purpose of scale, but also, it’s crucial to hire the right people at the right time. When you start stretching your team beyond their actual capacity, it’s the right time to make an investment in hiring the right talent.

You must ensure that you’re not compromising with the quality as you grow to keep up with your marketing goals on Facebook. That’s why hiring and team culture should be an integral part of your marketing strategy, which can ultimately become intact to your marketing processes.

Systematize the Right Areas

A research was conducted which revealed that businesses using Facebook marketing automation tool for nurturing prospects experiences 451% hike in the qualified leads and increased revenue.

There are several tasks included in the marketing process on Facebook that doesn’t demand much expertise to execute. You have to keep up the personal and personality touch in your marketing. Once you scale up your startup to an established one, you have to keep up a one-to-one communication chael among people who are interested in your brand.

Automating the key, low-skill and repetitive tasks can help you in scaling your Facebook marketing efforts.

Use Facebook Ads as Part of Inbound Marketing Strategy

Facebook- one of the leading social media networks is making it difficult for marketers to share their marketing content the way they want to do. Luckily, social media marketers can leverage their existing content sharing strategy to make the most out of it with the help of inbound marketing strategy.

As inbound marketers, marketers need to prosper on unique, fresh, quality content. No matter how gloomy the product is, practical and inventive articles, whitepapers, and e-books are the key kit to clients’ successes. Broadcasting that content across various social networks, should be their lifeline.

Most of the social networks people use to share their content are free. Twitter, WordPress, Facebook, and Instagram —until recently.

Facebook’s algorithms are becoming finickier and finickier with each post we publish and share. Not all contents make it out to the targeted audience. There are a few key factors that have subsidized to this very choosy process, the most prominent being content saturation.

The organic reach of social media posts coming from a Facebook page has dove down from 16% in 2012 to an astounding 6% in 2014. Moreover, last year Facebook actively started to delete posts that looked and read “too promotional”. As inbound marketers, this is not a big conce, but it’s another obstacle in between post content and the views of our potential leads and followers.

So, what marketers can do to get around these obstacles?

Paying for Better Social Reach

With typical organic outreach, you’re taking a glance at an average of a 5% reach. This is not perfect. Not all is lost, nonetheless.

There’s still an approach to ensure a spot on everybody’s social feed. You’ll simply need to sprinkle some outbound procedures onto your inbound marketing strategy. Adding Facebook’s paid advertising to your online networking arrangement guarantees more prominent online visibility. By advancing that same substance through a paid social chael, you’ll be enhancing your reach by 80% or more.

Gain Audience beyond Facebook

Expanding visibility amongst your effectively existing chaels on Facebook is phenomenal.

However, you should deliberately enhance your social shares to get around the content saturation issue. This is the point where Facebook’s custom audience feature becomes very powerful.

Paralleling your email lists with this feature allows marketers to reach their subscribers in their newsfeeds and in their email inboxes. This approach increases exposure of your latest posts, brand awareness, and, in the end, revenue.

Key Takeaway: Set off with the How and Why, and the Rest Will Follow

The biggest challenges that businesses face for scaling their marketing outcomes is to attain the significant growth without making any compromise in the effectiveness of marketing, or the reputation of the brand.

Clambering your marketing need a clear strategy and a clear track to execution without the requirement to micro-manage each step. Focusing on the How and why part repetitively to market your business at apparently unfathomable scales can help your business get to flourish.

Follow Your Audience

On an average customer makes 70% of his or her buying jouey online. That’s a better option for you to educate him or her with good content, and push relevant offers in order to place an order. Facebook’s Retargeting and Google’s Remarketing are paid inbound marketing tactics that allow you to pursue buyers who are further down the Facebook sales fuel.

Wrapping Words

A well-structured marketing plan is the only difference between a normal marketing effort and an extraordinary marketing effort.

Even the world has to tu smarter and you need to scale up your marketing endeavors similarly. Considering the above aspect will surely give you bright results and easily achieve the desired outcomes.

Now, use this knowledge & take the right action. Don’t keep good stuff to just yourself. Share it with your friends or one who can also use it for good purpose.

Remote working and working from home is the flavor of inteational business these days. Even here at ShoutMeLoud, we have a distributed remote tool. We use tools like Slack, Trello, Wunderlist & Skype for most of our work.

However one of the biggest challenge which I personally face is rewarding my team once in a while. Since we all are sitting distant, the way we reward has to be different. Is int it?

And, I’m not alone in this. Many startups and businesses are realizing the flexibility of a remote team.

A remote team doesn’t require a large infrastructure and doesn’t need in-house perks.

The remote team helps with cost reduction with some teams available at 1/3rd the cost of a normal hire.

There are a lot of positives to take from a remote or work from home team but there are a few negatives as well.

As humans, we are social animals who like social interaction. The bonding experience while working and camaraderie is what drives people to work together and come out with great work.

The biggest problem with a work from home team or a remote team is motivation. How do you keep them motivated in the long term, to make them feel a sense of togetheess and get them to perform at their highest levels while keeping them happy?

The answer is Rewards.

Rewarding people has been the universal action for companies to keep motivation and productivity levels high.

But obviously, as a company far away from your remote team, there are a lot of options that caot be considered because of the distance.

There are a few things that you can do for your remote team and here they are. Let’s break this down without breaking the budget.

Reward ideas for work from home team:

Coupons / Gift Cards

This is an obvious choice and it works. Giving out gift cards and coupons have been the way for a long time to reward work from home teammates. Coupons and Gift cards are something of value and hence it is always considered a great reward.

The coupons can be for clothing, food, a movie ticket, a Spa treatment and more. More or less, these gift cards are simple experiences which can energize a person and give them a much-needed boost. It’s the same feeling as when somebody foots the bill for dier. It is always a good feeling. You could also give out coupons to a premium restaurant on their birthdays. I find Amazon gift card to be more appropriate especially when I don’t know about someone personal interest.

You can check out Amazon gift card here.

Paying for a few days in a premium co-working space

A work from home team member can feel a bit lonely working by themselves at home and it’s a basic human need be social. Co-working spaces are buzzing with activity and have some of the brightest minds working out of there.

Sproutbox Co-working space in Gurgaon

That is not all, co-working spaces host a lot of sessions, events, parties among other things and it gives your team member opportunities to interact with a lot of like-minded people and gain a lot of knowledge. Co-working spaces also bring in people from all over the world and it can be a cultural experience. The startup community in many countries are open and accepting and it would be a great way to make your team member happy while they are working.

LineupHub CO-Working space in Bali

Tickets to seminars and events in their cities

Events are the pulse of the city. Events have the best of minds coming together and talking about certain topics. I’m not talking about events that are specific to a niche like Digital Marketing. But, events like Ted Talks, Ink Talks, Josh Talks among others. These events have a host of people from different disciplines who are great at what they do. They are able to open people’s minds with their speeches.

Events of different kinds over the weekend

Depending on your team mate’s interest you can choose a particular type of meetup or event. For example

• Book Reading Sessions
• Pottery Classes
• Cookery Classes
• Comedy Shows
• Book Fairs
• Meditation Sessions
• Theater Workshops

Accommodation in an Airbnb for a couple of days

Airbnb has really tued out to be a blessing for world travellers on a low budget. There are so many accommodations that have come up, that are much reasonably priced compared to a hotel. Airbnb stays are comfortable and more homely.

They also give you a true experience of the city you are staying at. You could gift a two-night stay to your best performing work from home team member at a nice Airbnb space.

You would think that it is expensive, but it isn’t. There are holiday destinations that are very reasonable and are good places to visit.

At $25 a night, this accommodation is classy as well as reasonable

Staying via AirB&B is more convenient than Hotel in many cases. You get to live in a Villa, complete house of your choice & at the same price that you would pay for a room in a hotel. Of course,** condition applies!

Join AirBnB (Get $17 free credits too) [Available for all countries)

Premium Courses and Tools

Tools really help. And sometimes work from home teams don’t have the necessary tools that can make them even more productive or optimized. As a token, you could give your teammate a suite of premium tools which would make his or her life better.

For example, Grammarly is a great tool for writers and the premium version of the product is even better. It has features like grammar check, spell check, advanced word suggestion, writing style check(Depending on what you are writing), plagiarism checker etc.

This kind of tool will save a lot of minutes for every article written and lets the writer express themselves.

For developers and designers, there is a host of tools that are incredibly useful and add a lot of value. Another aspect is premium courses. Really motivated Individuals always want to lea more, you could gift them a premium course through which they can expand their skills.

Courses on Udemy are on average $30 to $60

When you gift a premium course to your teammate, they will know that you are looking out for their best interest and will feel a sense of coection with your company. It would benefit them as well as you. Making your teammate’s work life easy is also an important aspect of your relationship. See this .gif to understand how to gift Udemy courses.

Gift a Udemy course

An Inspiration Kit

This is a small kit of different items that could elevate the work of your remote team member. It could be a mug with an inspiring message or a poster of an iconic person and a quote. And other handy products that boost the person’s morale. It’s simple, it has utility, it is inspiring as well.

This collection is from Letteote.com

Ultimately for a remote team, the kind of work they do should be fulfilling, apart from that rewards like the ones mentioned above really help with boosting morale and productivity.

Well, these are some of ideas that I can think of right now. If you work from home or have a team who is working from home, do let me know few of your own ideas. What are the ways you have inspired your team with rewards? Let us know in the comment section below.

Do share this post on Facebook & Twitter. It might help someone to get a reward soon.

Remote working has become the norm because of the ubiquitousness of video communication software like Skype and Google hangout.

Popular company Basecamp have 28 out of 40 employees working remotely. That is literally 70% of their workforce working outside. So most of their employees get on Video calls to discuss strategy and communicate with their colleagues.

A lot of business takes place on Skype and Google Hangout and it is completely essential to put your best foot forward and be prepared for this. You can either be attending an Interview for a remote job or you could be speaking to a client for the first time. For all this, it’s essential to understand the etiquettes of a Video call and to make sure you look good. It’s not only about the physical appearance, but also about communication as well that would make you look good.

4 things you must do for successful video meeting from home

1. Inteet Coectivity

The biggest problem faced during a call is mostly to do with coectivity, a slow Inteet coection where the people caot hear each other or are talking over each other. If you having a call at the end of the month, make sure your Inteet usage hasn’t passed its quota and if you are working from a co-working space with less bandwidth make sure you go out to a coffee shop where there are lesser people fighting for the bandwidth.

A bad Inteet coection is a 1st world problem, but it can really aoy the parties Involved. You want to make sure, the problem isn’t from your side. If you work from home like me, ensure you have a high-speed broadband coection. In my City (New Delhi, India), I use 100 MBPS inteet coection which cost me less than $100 & worth every pey.

If you are someone like me who enjoy traveling & working (Blogger’s lifestyle), ensure you pick those destinations like Bali, Thailand which is heaven for Digital nomads.

2. Appearances and Setting

Working from home isn’t seen as negative anymore. But still being professional is very important. Here are some tips that we follow before a call.

a. Make sure you are sitting on a table.

When people work out of homes, they sit literally anywhere. This can be comfortable while working, but when video calling it makes a huge difference. When you are sitting on the bed and skyping, the laptop is much lower than you and it captures your face chin first. This is the first rule of photography, is to not take images from the chin-first, it makes people look fat. Also, when the person knows that you are not sitting on a table, it looks unprofessional.

b. Make sure the area is well lit

These days most of the laptop camera are of high quality so I’m not going to comment on it, but you need the work on lighting.

The camera of your desktop or laptop is a small one and it does not absorb all the light, in fact, different light displays in contrasting tones. Make sure there is enough light on you and there isn’t direct light hitting the camera that can blur your Image. It is like trying to take an image with the sun in the background, nothing can be seen.

You might want to avoid this kind of an experience

c. You are in a separate room, away from family or the sound of hustle and bustle.

This is also another key item to look professional. If you have kids ruing around in the background or have crying babies, it looks thoroughly unprofessional while on a call. The best thing you can do is to go to a separate room and get away from all that noise. If your house is surrounded by traffic sounds, the best option would be is to take the call from a coffee shop.

d. Dress professionally.

People do judge a book by its cover, no matter where you are. Always dress like you would dress to work or an outside setting. When people are working and they see a person dressed in a to tee or something they wouldn’t wear outside, they will not be able to take you seriously. To be seen as an Authority, you need to dress like an Authority.

3. Etiquettes

We’ve done a lot of skype calls and Identified some common themes.

a. Muting When necessary

When you are skyping, you might get disturbed with an emergency, by either a call or your spouse. In situations like this, make sure you tell the person you are talking to, to give you a minute and mute and speak to the other person.

b. When sharing your screen

Another important point is while sharing the screen. More often than not, you might share your screen to discuss further your points. Make sure, your desktop is clean and not cluttered and you do not have an improper background. To save time, make sure you have all the appropriate links open in the browser with only the necessary tabs. Having a lot of tabs and being uncluttered does not look good.

c. Looking at the camera

In Skype, because you can look at yourself, people have a tendency to look at the box to see if they are looking good, try to avoid that. And always look at the camera when you speak, that way when they are looking at you, your eyes will be straight and not down below. Imagine talking to a person who always looks down and does not maintain eye contact?

4. Have an Agenda for the Call

Always make sure your calls have an agenda. This will help in structuring your thoughts and being clear. If you do not have an agenda and if there are a lot of pauses, it sounds bad and you look unprepared. Always know what you are talking about. Most of the time, I make a note of things to discus in Eveote & ensure that by the end of our meeting, we had a discussion about all the points.

Bonus tips for making video calls productive:

1. If you are not in a place that is quiet, then your best bet would be is to use headphones with a mic. This helps in you hearing clearly, and the mic relays your message clearly to the other person. Last year, I purchased Bose QC25 Acoustic Noise Cancelling Headphones which costed me about $299 & it’s totally worth it.

When I’m home, I use Blue Yeti mic for crystal clear voice. If you are plaing to work from home for long, have your gears ready. Sooner you get, better it is.

2. If you are going to go on an important call, it is always suggested to test your settings before the actual call. test your speakers, the background, and iron out all the kinks before the actual call.

Those were our tips to make yourself look good on a call. Remember, it’s not only about appearance but preparedness in other aspects as well.

What were your experiences while making a video call from home? Share with us in the Idea below.

Android platform is growing at a rapid rate globally. Android market is already flooded with more than 500K android apps for over 500 android devices. The android market consists mainly of free apps which is one of the main reason for its popularity. There are millions of apps downloads daily in android market.

What if you could make your own Android app for your blog. Seems cool, let’s have a look at 4 easy App maker sites that can help you create your own Android apps & publish it on Google play store.

Watch: How to submit Android App to Google Play store

4 Sites To Create Your Own Android Apps for Free

1. Andromo

Using Andromo you can easily create a professional app for yourself. You can use your app to promote your business, share events or to discuss your new project. You can make an app in few mouse clicks and can also ea money through advertising revenue included in these apps.

Your app can have interactive photo galleries, maps, blog/news feeds, mobile websites, YouTube videos and much more. You can even sell you app to Play Store using Andromo and make money easily. The best part of this is that it helps in easy promotion of the business.

2. Apps Geyser

Apps Geyser is a free service that helps you convert your service into an app and make money using it. Apps geyser have already created more than 254K ads . You can create your app easily in just 2 steps and then distribute it.

You can also distribute ad-supported apps and easily make some money using it. It provides you social sharing feature and let you share your app on all major social networks.

It also supports HTML 5 and can also be used to display pop-up notification like deal of the day or some important aouncement to the users. Thus in this way this site offers easy creation, monetisation, management of your android app.

3. GoodBarber:

Interesting name? Huh!

This is another popular app website that is feature rich. You can develop Android App& iOS app & submit it to Google play store or iOS app store.

Check out BoodBarber

4. App Yet

Last but not the least, App Yet can help you create applications for your websites easily. App Yet can help you convert your RSS feeds into an Android app easily. Here also, you can make money through advertising. You can easily tu your best websites or blogs into apps and share it with your friends around the globe.

These websites are very useful for people who like to try new things and especially if you are an android lover, you would love to try these websites. So in this way you can easily create android apps according to your requirements easily even if you don’t have extensive knowledge of HTML or Java.

Bonus websites:

If you know more such sites do let me know via comment. If you find this article useful, don’t forget to share it on Facebook and Google plus.

The time has arrived when every marketer, every business owner should buckle up themselves to face the shift from Text Based Search to Voice Search in the digital world.

A study by none other than Google themselves showed that both teens and adults are using voice search more than once a day on their smartphones. And this was two years back!

So how can you leverage this tremendous and irreversible shift in search behavior? For marketers, searchers are your customers, and your customers’ behavior is changing. For business owners, you need to adapt to these changing habits of your audience. So, here are a few steps to make sure you don’t get stranded in the land that time forgot…

Know More about Voice Search

Voice Search is a mixture of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Text-to-Speech (TTS). Simply put, it is used to recognize and process a user’s voice search request. After a user’s voice is recognized and parsed, the actual search query is entered into a huge database which intends to meet the query with the most relevant answer, which is then reverted to the user’s device. Finally, the device converts the answer back into voice and delivers it to the user.

Apple’s Siri, Microsoft’s Cortana, Amazon’s Alexa and now Google’s Echo have already reached the zenith of voice search technology. They can speak out the best answer directly to you instead of displaying a list of search results like what you see on Google, Bing or other search engines.

Typed Search Queries Vs. Voice Search

Optimizing a website for voice search and traditional search queries require different strategies. Google’s past algorithms have influenced the searchers to type concise queries on search engines which contain just the relevant keywords on SERPs. This has steered website owners to stuff unusual phrases in their website content to try to reach people when they search for those key phrases.

Voice search doesn’t work with that strategy. It is much more conversational as it allows users to speak instead of type queries in search engines. The Hummingbird update aounced by Google in 2013 was a major change in its algorithm that moved the needle towards conversational search. Searchers could now type in naturally phrased search queries like “restaurants my friends recommend in Phoenix” and delivers the relevant results, without making the user move back into difficult keyword-based phrasing like “restaurants Phoenix AZ”.

Understand the Future of Voice Search

“The future is voice-activated search driven by artificial intelligence, natural language processing, and machine leaing” – declared Chris Marentis in his recent post over at Search Engine Land. We can expect an exponential growth in the applications developed especially for voice search and other progress in voice technology.

Voice search is the key model of hi-tech AI-influenced trends in the digital market. As we have seen increasing use of Inteet via mobile devices, voice search, which is already at 20 percent or one-fifth of all mobile searches (which in tu are more than desktop searches) will keep growing. Constructive voice recognition technological advancements are expected as much in all mobile apps and digital properties, whether you consume your device to surf the Inteet or not.

Improve Content for a Voice-Driven Era

Certainly, keep planting keywords into website content, but then remember the words themselves are no longer sufficient. Ask yourself below questions when you optimize your pages:

• What message should this page convey to the visitors? Is it satisfying the visitor’s query as well as intent?
• Does it serve comprehensive information? Would someone slip back to the search results after landing on this page or stay on read more?
• In what circumstances does a visitor look for a page like this?
• Is this page easily viewable, accessible and optimized for mobile devices?
• Is the content helpful and easy to read? Can a user instantly understand what the web page is about?

The good thing is, Google may bring voice query reporting to the Google Search Console’s Search Analytics report; although it is unclear exactly when. But there is still a hope and there are some actionable SEO strategies that you can focus on right now to develop website voice search ready. These includes:

1. Long-Tail keywords:

As longer queries are emerging from voice searchers, it is good practice to start aiming for long-tail keywords on your website as well. Make sure your content comprehensively addresses the user intent and go for in-depth pieces and long form content. Here are 6 awesome tools to find long tail keywords.

2. FAQ strategy / Humanize content:

Your customers are asking questions using “who, what, where, why and how”. Make an effective content marketing strategy and cover those answers in your web pages, blogs, and social media posts. Read this guide on humanizing your content.

3. Schema markup:

By implementing Schema at every possible opportunity (to describe all the ‘entities’ in your website) you can enhance your website’s HTML coding structure to provide thorough information to the search engines about what exactly your pages are talking about.

4. Community:

Build your own community or online forum, just like ShoutMeLoud have done with forum, HubSpot and Moz have done with inbound.org. This will encourage natural conversations among your audience. It will improve your brand awareness and site authority, as well as give you more visibility across semantically worded searches due to a large amount of user generated content.

Over to You

Keyword targeting and inbound links used to be a strong technique for SEOs to manipulate along with other factors. But now, across the world, users are increasingly accessing the inteet through voice search. Therefore, businesses must now change their websites to cater to not only search engines but also their impatient users.

We can confidently say that today, “Audience – not content – is king.”

How are you preparing for this inevitable shift towards voice search? Let us know in the Idea below.

This post is contributed by Ravi. Want to contribute something useful? Read our submission guidelines.

The History of the GIF has been an interesting one.

Unlike the trends of fashion, where every once in a while an old fashion style comes back and becomes popular, the GIF has had a different story.

With the Inteet and it’s allied products and concepts when something is out of fashion, it never comes back.

The GIF has been a very rare exception!

The GIF was popular in the early 2000’s when the format was widely used. As the new milleium progressed, lesser people used it and everybody considered the GIF a dead medium.

via GIPHY

But, with memes gaining popularity, the GIF also made a resurgence. This could be attributed to the fact that GIF’s are an extension of the Meme.

Why should you use GIFs in your content marketing?

• GIFs can be used to make something fuy. And Fuy sells on Social Media
• GIF can uncomplicate something that would take a lot of words to explain. GIFs are great for tutorials

Companies who have a strong content strategy in mind can use GIFs. GIFs are a great way to make quick and fast content that will still be considered quality content.

via GIPHY

Companies like Scoopwhoop, Buzzfeed and other sporting related content chaels all use GIFs. In fact, many sport focused blogs have exclusively started posting GIFs instead of full-fledged videos because of the ease of watching (One less click) and faster loading time.

It’s more likely that a person watches GIF’s more than videos.

In the above Image, they used 22 GIFs that has got them 2400 shares!

Now that we’ve established why GIFs, let’s get to the how.

How do create .gif file yourself on Mac?

If you are looking for extremely popular GIFs that are commonly used by everybody on the Inteet then look no further than Giphy. This is the most exhaustive collection of GIFs that are based on pop culture references.

For those of you who want to create their own version of GIFs for simplifying a process for your parents or making a tutorial for your website or to make your own original GIFs to share with your friends then you need Gifox

Get Gifox from here.

Gifox is a Mac-based application that costs only $2.99 that helps you make very quick GIFs. Once you download the application, it sits on your Mac toolbar at the top. For your reference, I’ve marked it in below screen:

Once you click on that, you get a box like the one below with the following options.

Option 1 – Take a GIF of a Selected Area

Just like taking a screenshot, with Gifox you can select the area that you want as a GIF. All you have to do it drag and select the area and you are ready to record your GIF.

Option 2 – An Entire Video or Screen

Sometimes you want GIFs of entire screens. With this option, you can take a GIF of an entire screen. So whichever is the active application on your desktop, that will be taken for creating the GIF.

Option 3 – Folder of GIFs

This folder icon takes you to the location where all your GIFs are stored.

Option 4- Gifox Site

Right now this button takes you to the Gifox.io website, whereas in the future I’m sure it will be an option to share your GIFs to GIF based websites like Giphy.

Option 5, 6 and 7 – Feedback, Preferences, and Settings

These are pretty self-explanatory. Option 6 has all the settings where you can change the FPS while recording and playing that control the quality of the GIF. You can also control the number of times the GIF loops before it stops and a few shortcuts as well.

Here is a screenshot of Gifox in action. My attempt at making a gif of a fight sequence with Gifox.

And that’s how simple it is to create GIFs on the Mac using Gifox.

Download Gifox

What other tools or browser add-ons have you used to create .gif from screen recording? Share with us in the comment section below.

Here are hand-picked resources for cool Mac Apps:

So you want to be an alpha male?

• Imagine being successful at work.
• You’re your own boss.
• You’re respected by your peers.
• And you never worry about money anymore.

What’s more, imagine feeling great every single day. You’re muscular, energetic, and filled with youthful drive.

How This Guide to Alpha Male Will Help You

Here’s the thing: To become an alpha male, you’ll need to develop five areas of your life. These are:

1. Self-Esteem and Status
2. Leadership
3. Fashion, Grooming, and Physical Fitness
4. Body Language and Likeability
5. Detachment to Opinions and Outcomes

If you want to become an alpha male, then, you’ll need to develop your self-esteem and status. Here are some best tips to do so.

10 Step Formula to Become a High Value Alpha Male:

Never Complain.

Another thing that everyone loves about the alpha male is that he never complains about anything. He’s aware that there’re so many other people out there in much worse situations than he’s in, and agrees that he has absolutely no right to complain.

When the alpha male finds something he doesn’t agree with, he either changes it, changes his attitude about it, or makes it irrelevant to his life completely.

When Problems Come, Never Panic.

Average guys are quick to panic or become emotional when things start to go wrong. Alpha males are not like that. They stay calm, quickly assess the situation, come up with a fast and effective solution, and put that solution into action.

Can you stay calm under pressure?

Seek Your Deepest Fears and Conquer Them.

Everyone is afraid of something – the difference is in what we do about our fears. Average men try to hide their fears and pretend they don’t exist. Alpha males acknowledge their fears and even admit them if they have to. Then they work relentlessly to conquer those fears.

Be honest with yourself. What are your deepest fears, and how are they holding you back from becoming an alpha male? And what will you do now to conquer them?

Never Blame.

Here’s another mark of the alpha male: He never blames anyone or anything for his current situation. He takes full responsibility for his thoughts, decisions, actions, and words. If he fails, he doesn’t deny it and quietly works harder to tu that failure into a success.

Never Look for Excuses.

Everyone loves the alpha male because he is a “What you see is what you get” person. He doesn’t hide anything. When he fails in anything, he doesn’t make excuses for it – he apologizes and fixes the situation. Can you own up to your failings?

Understand that Nobody Owes You Anything.

It’s sad, but today’s generation of men is a generation of whiners. Men are talking about what they “deserve,” and when they don’t get it, they get offended, they blame, and they complain.

Alpha males are not like that. The alpha male knows that nobody – except his own self – owes him anything.

Be Aware of Your Own Mortality.

One thing everyone loves about the alpha male is his bravery. He’s not afraid of anyone or anything, and that includes death. He knows he’s going to die one day, and that one day may be very, very soon. So the alpha male doesn’t waste any day of his life and relentlessly moves towards his goals every single day.

Never Try to Over-Please People Higher Than You

Some men try to over-please their bosses, their superiors, or other people in positions of authority. They do this to get an unfair advantage over their peers. Don’t ever do this, because it puts you in places you don’t deserve to be.

Alpha males become successful not because of other people, but because of their effort and hard work.

Never Bully Anyone.

Weak men bully other people to feel strong. And when you bully others, you basically tell everyone that you’re weak.

Don’t tear anyone down to build yourself up.

Tip #10:

Never Gossip.

Alpha males are always busy pursuing their goals and improving their relationships. They never have time to gossip about other people.

Are you one of those people who does not like to read books because it’s very lengthy? Or do you have a lot of books to read but got no time?

Remember few days back I posted about this video chael call Fight Mediocrity. No? Check that out here.

Wondering what this has to do with Book reading & What the hell is Blinkist?

Boy, then you are going to love this post.

We have reached a point in life where attention spans are the least.

Web sites just have seconds to convince a user if their product is good or not. This fast-paced world requires a new form of leaing that is fast paced as well. Blinkist is here to help you lea faster through books, but with a twist.

Blinkist is an application for iOS and Android that takes away only the important bits from a book, summarizes it, arranges it and gives it to the user. Understandably, it is for non-fiction books. So if you are looking for the cream of the content, then this is the application for you.

Who is Blinkist for?

1. If you don’t like reading books and have a very short attention span.
2. You’ve already read a book but want a summary of the best points.
3. If you want to know about a lot of different topics without going in depth
4. If you want to start researching about a certain topic, Blinkist is a great start

Blinkist has an exhaustive list of categories to choose from which is pretty great.

So today I’m going to take an example and see the difference between the experience of reading a full book and reading the Blinkist.

Before that, you should check out this video to get an overview of What Blinkist is all about.

For this experiment, the book I’ll be comparing is Elon Musk : How the Billionaire CEO of SpaceX and Tesla is Shaping Our Future by Ashlee Vance.

I’m taking this particular book because that is the latest book I’ve read and the experience of reading the book is fresh in my memory.

• The complete book is about 421 pages long.
• The Blinkist version is about 12 pages long.

I took lesser than a month to finish the complete book and 15 minutes for the Blinkist.

Every book with Blinkist has a good summary of what the book is about and also information about the author.

My favorite part is, who should read this book?

In the section below, one might not be Interested in say Elon Musk, but maybe interested in Aerospace. The ‘Who should read this book?’ section clearly outlines that it’s also for people who are interested in Aerospace, Automotive and Solar Industries.

The Summary of all the chapters have very clear headings and give an Idea of what that section is going to contain.

And finally, the content is simple, summarized and has short sentences that cover the most important aspects.

What are the major differences between reading a book and using Blinkist?

1. Blinkist is not for books that have a bit of an Inspiration. Summaries of biographies take the essence and inspiration out of the book.
2. Some business books especially those that teach something, get repetitive because they want to hammer the idea into your head. With Blinkist, you get a superficial Idea of the content.
3. The Impact of a book will not last long with Blinkist, unless you take action of Implementing what you’ve leat.
4. It’s a great way to be knowledgeable and have small insights into different topics
5. It is great for non-emotion based books. Books on marketing tips and strategies would be good through Blinkist
6. Blinkist is a good idea for topics that you have no idea of. It could be the gateway app for leaing more about a particular topic.
7. It’s not good for getting in-depth into a topic.
8. It is great for getting a good perspective on a topic because you can read close to 3 to 4 books within a day.

Blinkist Plus and Premium

The upgraded version of Blinkist gives you access to over 1,500 blinks(A book in a Blinkist version is called a blink) a month with over 40 titles.

The Premium version also lets you get audio version of all your blinks, as well as offline access. The premium version also offers the highlighting feature, where you can highlight the important points and it gets stored in your Eveote, where you can probably take action!

Download Blinkist for iOS || Download Blinkist for Android (Read all books free for first 3 days)

Has any of you used Blinkist, if so what do you think of it? Do you know of any similar smartphone apps? Let me know in the comment section below.

To read next: The Science Of Speed Reading & How To Read Faster & Save Time

Note: This is the first article in a four-part series covering some of the ambiguous topics related to Bitcoin (BTC).

Source: The Joy of Tech

Ever since the barter system was originally introduced by the Mesopotamia tribes around 6000 BC, we have witnessed different types of goods/currency exchange.

Paper cash quickly came into place at the onset of the 18th century.

With the commencement of the Inteet age, various efforts have been made to take the currency exchange into a digital form. It has to be said that those efforts have been well converted and now over 95% of the entire cash in the world is digital, leaving only physical cash to be a mere 5% of the entire money in the world!

Although there have been many companies to have tried their hand at developing a new source of the digital currency exchange system, it is fair to say that PayPal holds a major share in this regards.

One of the fairly recent additions to these networks in digital currency exchange is Bitcoin. A lot has been said and written on the Inteet about Bitcoins and it is still one of the most mysterious types of currency exchange, which people have a tough time holding a grasp of. Hence, our topic of interest and let’s dive deep right into the nuances of Bitcoin and clear some of the benefits and uses of this new digital form of currency exchange.

What is a Bitcoin?

Even though we have claimed Bitcoin to be a fairly new form of digital currency exchange, it has been in operations since 2009.

Invented originally by someone under the alias of Satoshi Nakamoto, it is still unclear who is the exact founder of Bitcoin. Various news outlets including The New York Times, Newsweek, Forbes, and Gizmodo have made different headlines claiming distinct people as being the founder of Bitcoin. Now that we understand that the origins of the creator of Bitcoin are pretty bleak, what exactly does a Bitcoin do and how is it different from other forms of digital online currency exchange services?

To begin with, if you have ever made use of digital online currency exchange, you must be aware of the transaction fees charged by these middlemen.

One of the distinctive features of digital currency exchange services is their transaction fees and other charges. The most important aspect of Bitcoins that differentiates it from other digital currency exchange services is that it does not charge any kind of transaction fees.

Bitcoin is an open-source Peer-to-Peer payment service that has done away with any kinds of middlemen transaction fees. You can make use of these Bitcoins to buy anything online and many merchants are begiing to accept this new form of digital currency. Many networks like Amazon (Amazon Gift Cards), eBay, Zappos, Microsoft, Dell, Shopify and more already accept Bitcoins as a form of payment.

Another most important factor of the Bitcoin system is that using Bitcoin allows payment allows users to handle their payments completely anonymously.

How Exactly does Bitcoin Currency exchange work?

While Bitcoin seems an amazing form of digital currency with its startling strengths, how does it exactly work?

Bitcoin is a form of decentralized form of currency, as deemed by the U.S. Treasury. Bitcoin does not base upon a central authority or a bank and instead is carried out by the network of its entire community.

Considering Bitcoins as a form of digital currency, these could be bought at different Bitcoin currency exchange networks. These networks allow users to buy and sell Bitcoins from their chosen form of currency including USD, Euros and more.

These newly bought Bitcoins are now stored in your digital wallet, which could be accessed over mobile or desktop devices. You can also send or receive Bitcoins from other users with a simple tap of the button.

There is no fee charged for receiving or sending these Bitcoins. The accrued Bitcoins could also be used to make purchases online at outlets which currently accept them. This is a simple explanation of how the Bitcoin works.

Now, how exactly are these Bitcoins generated and managed and issued if there is no involvement of a central agency or banks?

For the purpose of understanding how the Bitcoin network is managed, we now have to introduce a new sect of people known as ‘Miners’ on the network.

Miners are individual groups of people who lend their computing power and capacity to the community and to keep the integrity of transactions on the network in check. These Miners verify the transactions on the network and are rewarded with the newly generated Bitcoins for their efforts.

A transparent publicly maintained ledger is then updated with transactions on the Bitcoin network. Often known as a form of ‘cryptocurrency‘, Bitcoin is the largest form of digital currency of its kind.

Is Bitcoin Legal?

It is fair to say that Bitcoin operates off the physical grid and doesn’t involve any kind of central agency or the banks, is it still legal?

The answer would be, it depends on user location.

The legality of Bitcoin depends primarily on your location of interest and the purpose accordingly. Given that Bitcoin is a form of decentralized digital currency, it is illegal to use Bitcoins in many countries and some govements allow its use.

• The United States, for example, have now declared it as a commodity.
• Indian Deputy Goveor of the Reserve Bank of India has stated that they have no plans to legalize Bitcoins in India.
• Bangladesh govement has stated that “anybody caught using the virtual currency could be jailed under the country’s strict anti-money laundering laws”.
• Some other countries are particularly neutral about the usage of Bitcoins.

So, it makes sense that you double-check your local govement laws pertaining to Bitcoins before making use of them.

How people are using Bitcoins across the Globe?

Now that you have a good understanding of what Bitcoin exactly is and how it works, how are people around the world making use of Bitcoins?

Well, one of the primary ways people are making use of Bitcoins is by exchanging them across different users. People are making use of Bitcoins to share and exchange money between friends, to avoid the transaction and credit card fees.

Some other Bitcoin users are making use of the currency exchange network to make purchases online, including to buy things like Pizzas, clothing, games, electronics, accessories and much more.

While there are individuals on one side making the most of the Bitcoin currency exchange system, there are also small businesses using the service. Again, for the same reasons of waived transaction fees and instant transfers, many small businesses are now making use of the Bitcoin currency exchange services.

Purse.io is a great peer-to-peer bitcoin exchange service that offers discounts for purchases using Bitcoins.

You can buy your first bitcoin from any of these popular two sites:

• Coinbase (You will also get additional $10 when you buy Bitcoin worth $100)
• Unocoin (Free bitcoin on signup & verification)

Expedia has also recently begun accepting Bitcoins as a form of payment for hotel and travel bookings.

Although there are many upsides to Bitcoin, there is also a dark side to it. Given the anonymity maintained through the Bitcoin service, it is also used across the Dark Web to buy illegal stuff on the market. Silk Road, one of the most famous marketplace on the TOR network made use of Bitcoin to sell various illegal products on the Dark Web.

Here are few hand-picked videos that would help first timers to understand more about Bitcoins without getting bored:

So, what do you make of this new form of Digital currency exchange without any intervention from a central system or banks? Feel free to shout out your thoughts and Idea below. Stay tuned for more articles on Bitcoins, how to buy your first Bitcoins and how to secure your Bitcoins.

Do you remember the time when you wrote your first post? How great you must have felt as your blog was up & ruing. Now, if it’s been more than a month or two for you, compare your current post with the old one.

The old one sucks! right?

Well, you are not the only one to feel this way, as most of us have gone through a similar experience. Over time, you will realize that blogging gives you an unmatched freedom that you do not get in a normal corporate job. It is pretty great!

Don’t you want to continue blogging in the future & be your own boss forever? If your answer is yes, I need your undivided attention.

What I’m going to share today is already known to you but you might not have considered it yet.

How many times have you read stuff like:

‘Video’ is the future.

Money is in video advertising.

Facebook gives extra visibility to videos.

Youtube is still the world’s 2nd most popular search engine.

This is an important thing that you need to know if you are serious about your career as a blogger.

Videos are the next big thing & over time, it would completely change the way we blog. We are already seeing a big shift as people are starting off as Video bloggers (also known as YouTubers) instead of having a traditional blog.

People who love to consume content by reading, they prefer consuming the same piece of content as video format on their mobile, tablet or of-course laptop.

Why is it so?

There are multiple reasons for this & a few that I can think of right now are:

Advanced Tools and Software for quick video production

Thanks to advanced technology, creating videos is not hard anymore. The front cameras in smartphones are getting better, in tu making it easier to create videos.

Unlike the old times, editing videos have become easier. With software’s like Camtasia and Final cut pro, we can now edit the videos we want. Even if you find it hard to use the software, watch a couple of free Final Cut Pro videos on Youtube or free Camtasia tutorials on their official site.

Mobile video editors are getting really powerful as well. Recently, I was playing with a few iOS based mobile video editors and realized how easy it is to create a professional looking video on the iPhone. Don’t believe me? Try these mobile apps:

Adobe clip, AvFx, Adobe Spark video, VSCO.

Improved bandwidth & Inteet Speed

Remember those days when opening a webpage used to take minutes?

Yeah, that was an aoyance. But, these days websites take seconds to load and a slow website could be bad for business. Improved bandwidth has considerably helped in an increase of video consumption. Also, because of smartphones being ubiquitous now and the fact that the screens are smaller helps the case for video consumption.

So if you are in a niche & your target demographic is someone with a medium or a high-income source, chances are they might be watching videos through the mobile.

For a few developing countries where users are not accustomed to carrying headphones when traveling, video consumption might not be so high. Still, as I said earlier, things are catching up.

In a nutshell, video consumption has increased considerably & producing videos has become easier (Both on desktop & on mobile). It requires less time & advanced software makes it easier to produce your video in a professional way.

Now, moving on to the main topic of this reality check post for those of you who are producing content only in the text format. Wake up!

Again! Remember your first blog post?
Just start! You can make mistakes and starting off could be as simple as recording your first screencast tutorial (Recording your desktop screen to explain the working of a software or a web-app).

Oh! and if you are afraid about the quality of your video, here is one thing you should know:
You are not going to improve if you don’t start off somewhere.

Here are some tips to start off right now:

You can use Camtasia (Mac + windows) or Screenflow to make a screencast. You can also use your smartphone to share something which is useful for others.

In the coming days, I will be sharing detailed tutorials, tips & ideas to help you create great video content. But, it would be useful only when you make your first video as soon as possible.

If you created a video after this, do share the link in the Idea section. Also, for posted video links in the comment section by other users, do help them by giving honest feedback to improve their videos. Ensure your Idea are supportive and constructive to help the person understand the mistakes(if any) & improve.

Here are selected guides that you should read:

Best Tips To Record Outstanding Velfie Videos? [Video Selfies]

10 Kickass Smartphone Camera Accessories for Youtube bloggers (Velfies)

How To Shoot Outstanding Videos Using an iPhone [Must Know]

Let’s get started!