If you are on self-hosted WordPress, chances are you are using an FTP client to make certain changes.

If you aren’t, you will be using it so

If you’ve landed here, you’ve probably spent the time looking for all sorts of solutions to get Stripe to work on your website without an SSL or for multiple different free SSL solutions.

As a small business owner, I know paying for SSL or premium plugins can be stressful for start-ups with small budgets.

I am happy to share our solution for a FREE SSL on your woo commerce website, with FREE functioning stripe payment gateway with- No Coding Needed.

Follow the five steps below and you will be ruing in no time! For our example, we have a ruing installation on www.wearATA.com so feel free to head over there and check it out before you get started.

1. Install and activate all the following FREE plugins

2. Register and Set up a Stripe Account

Sign up for a free Stripe account here.

Once you have filled out everything from Stripe and your account is all set up your going to want to head to the top right coer of the screen click your account name and select account settings.

From there navigate to API keys in the modal window and save these keys for later.

3. Link Stripe and WooCommerce

• Head into your WordPress dashboard and find woo commerce > settings on the left-hand side.
• From the nav bar on the top select checkout
• Select Stripe from the checkout options
• Enable Stripe and make sure you have the following fields filled out. Live Secret Key, Live Publishable Key, Capture: Capture card immediately enabled, Saved Cards: Enable payment via Saved Cards Enabled.
• Hit Save

4. Setup CloudFlare and CloudFlare Settings

Sign up for CloudFlare here and follow the setup procedure. (this will also make your site faster! YAY!) Once you have your CloudFlare setup follow the next steps to make sure it’s ready for your SSL. (note: the following work with my server setup and should work with yours, if you’re having trouble you may need to alter some settings)

• Crypto Tab – Set the following options SSL: Flexible
• Firewall Tab – Security Level: Medium
• Speed Tab – Auto Minify: All Selected, Rocket Loader: Off (very important)
• Caching Tab – Caching Level: Standard, Cache Expiration: 4 Hours, Always Online: On
• Page Rules – See image… Make sure yourdomain.com/checkout/ has SSL: Flexible, Rocket Loader Off
• Network – Websockets: On, IP Geolocation: On
• Scrape Shield – Email Address Obfuscation: On, Server-side Excludes: On.

5. Set up CloudFlare WordPress Plugin

• In your WordPress backend navigate to Settings > Cloudflare on the left-hand side bar.
• Input your domain name as it is registered with Cloudflare,
• Input your Cloudflare API Key (which can be found in Cloudflare under (top right) my settings > API KEY > Global API KEY
• Your Cloudflare Email address.
• Tu on HTTPS Protocol Rewriting

DONE!!

You should be all done. Your website should be able to take credit card payments over SSL + Stripe at no additional cost of plugins, or paying your host for an SSL.

Feel free to leave Idea below and we will do our best to answer them promptly.

Are you completely confused about finding effective ways to promote your blog on social media? Navigating this minefield of Facebook marketing, twitter promoting and G Plus sharing feels like an overwhelming, paralyzing task at times.

You may be ready to quit on social, to just publish a post and hope that the Blogging Fairies magically promote the post to interested, targeted, eager readers, without any effort on your part.

Stop sniffing that Fairy Dust.

Blogging doesn’t work that way.

If you’re willing to give freely on social sites you will receive generously.

The pain, suffering and frustration of having little or no blog traffic will dissolve into the happiness, contentment and satisfaction of driving targeted, buying traffic through your social media websites.

If this sounds exciting to you and you’re ready to leave social media confusion behind it’s time to lea how to use proven, effective tips for promoting your blog on sites like twitter, Facebook, Google Plus and LinkedIn.

Ways to Promote Your Blog on Social Media

The methods you’ll lea below won’t cost you a dime.

You’ll also drive targeted, buying traffic by following these strategies.

Did I mention you’ll:

• build your credibility
• establish your authority
• have loads of fun

…in the process?

Let’s dive in guys.

Think in Reverse: Promote Other Bloggers

You down with POB?

Promote Other Bloggers.

Like this:

I promoted my friend and fellow blogger Sue Ae Dunlevie at Successful Blogging because she had supreme value to share. I hook my audience up with a stellar blog post. Sue appreciates the Share love.

But here’s where coolness enters the picture: Sue may just promote my latest post in retu. Generous people find that other bloggers want to retu their generosity.

Promote other bloggers aggressively on:

• Twitter
• Facebook
• Google Plus
• LinkedIn
• Pinterest
• StumbleUpon

An increasing number of bloggers will gladly promote you in retu, expanding your reach on a wide range of social media websites.

Watch your traffic skyrocket. Rank on Google for targeted keywords. Boost your social proof.

All because you were willing to do things in reverse.

Give freely. Receive easily.

Welcome new followers & let them know about your blog

Sometimes when I greet new friends on Facebook I thank my new buddy for their friendship and add a link to my home page.

I just drop a link when I greet new friends, asking how I can help them and pointing the link toward my blog home page. It’s as simple as saying “Hi” with a direct message and just copying and pasting your blog link.

This promotes my blog in a non-spammy way. I reach out to help while directing new friends back to the resource that is my blog.

Greet as many new Facebook friends as possible with a question; ask if they need blogging help. Tack on a link to your blog home page.

Stop leaving so much targeted traffic on the table, frustrating yourself by your utter lack of blogging progress.

Be social. Be friendly. Be helpful. Be a promoter.

Lea: 2 Free Twitter Tools to Send Automated Direct Messages

Ask Link-Less Questions and Provide Thorough Answers

If you are confused about how to promote your blog you may not be chatting enough. Think about an indirect approach.

Instead of only posting your latest blog post link on social media sites try chatting. Ask questions to get inside the mind of your audience. Provide answers to their most pressing problems.

By being less desperate about forcing your links this laid back, helpful, relaxed approach builds your posture. Meaning, more friends on social media sites will respect you, your expertise, your blog and you’ll indirectly generate more hits on your blog and through your social media sites because you weren’t so da attached to shoving your latest blog post down all your social media buddies’ throats.

Make Hashtags Your Best Friend

Hashtags are like mini promoters, minions working on your behalf.

Let’s say you’re having a tough time finding targeted users on Twitter. You just tweet links with some text but can’t find folks who really want to gobble up what you’re tweeting.

Enter the hashtag.

Jeff Bullas is the hashtag master. Sure he maintains a huge Twitter following but he hyper targets each tweet to a select audience. This ensures he attracts targeted, interested, hungry traffic to his world-renowned blog.

Consider adding hashtags to every 2nd or 3rd tweet. Facebook and G Plus users aren’t quite as keen on hashtag usage but Instagram users go bananas over their precious hashtags.

Make the #hashtag work for you. Target your readers. Grow a raving following.

If you’re a blogging tips blogger consider using these hashtags on twitter: #blogging and/or #bloggingtips.

Lea: 9 Social Media and Email Marketing Power-Ups for Better Conversions

Write Detailed Descriptions on Google Plus

Most bloggers totally miss out on the immense leveraging power of Google Plus.

Pasting a link without any introductory text usually falls on deaf ears.

Few G Plus users click on links without lead ins because to get traffic you need to give people a reason to read your blog post.

The reason? Your lead in, or summary text, courtesy of your G Plus update.

Write a 3 to 4 paragraph, detailed summary on G Plus each time you link to one of your latest blog posts. Explain reader pain points, use numbers to add specific elements to the post and stress the benefits of reading your masterpiece.

In the above example I included a short testimonial to add social proof to the update.

I saw my engagement jump 10 fold by using this simple, mindful approach.

It only takes an extra 40 to 60 seconds to effectively employ this tactic.

Is it worth it? Considering how my G Plus Shares and Plus 1’s are increasing quickly for just a minute’s worth of work I’s say so.

Don’t be lazy. Don’t miss out on armies of traffic through G Plus. Write a sizable summary to goad readers to click on your link.

Promote your blog post intelligently.

Read: 10 Must Know Google Plus Tips For Better Marketing

Ask for Shares

You may be at wit’s end with your social media campaign.

Why the heck aren’t people retweeting your posts? Or why don’t they share your blog posts on Facebook?

Because you’re not asking them to do so!

Clarity, simplicity and directness are 3 tools successful bloggers use to promote blog posts effectively on social media websites. Lea How to Encourage Your Blog Readers to Share Articles?

I almost always ask people to share new blog posts through Twitter, Facebook, G Plus and LinkedIn. I include this call to action at the end of every blog post and through my Facebook, G Plus and LinkedIn social shares.

This tip literally takes 10 seconds to follow and the results you see will be well worth it.

Follow a Social Media Icon or 2

Social media icons clue you in on to what works and what doesn’t when it comes to promoting stuff on social media.

Consider Gary Vaynerchuk.

He has 1.3 million followers. A stuing number of these followers are engaged.

His individual engagements get retweets and Likes. This is virtually unheard of in the twitter world because most 1 on 1 stuff is ignored by our followings. But Gary is a master at engaging, engaging, engaging, sharing value and whipping his audience into a frenzy.

Then, when it comes time to promote a blog post, video or eBook his social media following spreads the word like wild fire. Because they love the guy, because he helps his followers and engages them like few human beings on social media today.

Follow the pros closely. They leave successful promotion clues on social media.

Pretty Pictures Please

Readers love eye candy.

Feed the Eye Candy Beast. Add eye-catching, relevant, big pictures to your blog posts and make sure the images preview properly on social media websites.

My blog and brand are built on Blogging From Paradise. My readers beg me for my pictures from paradise. I add 1 or more images from tropical hot spots all over the globe where I happen to be visiting to each blog post.

Like this one:

That was my office one moing from Paphos, Cyprus, overlooking the peaceful Mediterranean Sea.

I made sure this image popped up whenever I shared my post on Twitter, Facebook, G Plus and LinkedIn.

Seeing an image of a tropical paradise inspires readers to click the link and share the post.

I also gained a healthy amount of Pinterest shares because of this delectable eye candy.

What’s Up with TUP?

TUP = Time Updates Properly

I usually publish new blog posts between 8 AM and 10 AM EST in the USA no matter where I am in the world. I get max shares during this time frame. Of course, I also share my blog posts on social media during the same time frame.

Check your audience demographics. Where are the majority of your readers? Share posts on social when the bulk of your readers are most active on social media sites.

If you’re new to blogging and are confused about when your readership is most active check out this post for some guidance:

The Best (and Worst) Times to Post on Social Media

Be Consistent

This is the most difficult tip.

Anybody can follow the above tips for 1 day or 1 week. But being disciplined enough to follow these tips for 6 months or 3 years feels like too tough of a challenge for most bloggers using social media.

Harsh built up his impressive Shout Me Loud following over 6.5 years.

I have created a jaw-dropping, blessed, freeing lifestyle for myself over 8 years.

This takes time, patience, a commitment to following your passion, and to creating, coecting and doing things right to reap the greatest rewards.

If you want to gain 800,000 blog followers like Harsh or if you want to live in places like Bali, Fiji, Thailand or Costa Rica for months or years you need to be all in.

Hand-picked stuff for you:

Commit to these tips. Promote intelligently and effectively on social media for the long haul.

Live your wildest dreams.

Are you following these tips?

Or are you still really confused about ways to promote your blog on social media?

What tips can you add to this list?

Let’s assume that your site has ranked for a keyword you’ve aiming. This is brilliant news, right? Of course, it is! But what if the page that is ranking finishes up being unrelated.

You certainly met something like this when you googled something – the first few outcomes that came up looked feasible, but for other reason, one of the top labels didn’t look like a good fit. If the page doesn’t reply to your query, that means the wrong page is ranking for that particular keywords, and it is generally not intentional.

This is not a good sign, because if the page presented does not effectively represent the query, then

1. It can adversely affect your click-through rate and conversion rate and traffic because of an unsuitable title or description.

2. Receiving the wrong page and not finding relevant things, your newly-arrived persons are likely to jump out from your site without converting.

So, what should you do? Here’s the thorough process to analyse, recognise and fix the issues as soon as they arise.

Recognising the wrong ranking pages

Sometimes it’s impossible to regulate each and every of your site’s ranking pages. And at times you just don’t have any information about the site. So, to initiate, you need to analyse if there are any wrong page issues to be fixed.

Just choose how many keywords you’d like to review. Analysing all pages ranking for your 1500 keyword queries are something you maybe can’t afford and also don’t need. So, we’ll choose only the inquiries those are vital and the ones that can drive you the most traffic.

Detecting the fundamental issue

Now from where to improve, let’s grasp how you can do that. And meanwhile there can be a number of reasons that cause the problem, you need to go through them step by step.

1. Are there any technical/quality problems that inhibit the preferred page from ranking high?

You have a proper page to match the query but it still doesn’t rank may be because:

2. Do you even have a page that exactly matches the given keywords?

If you don’t have an enhanced page to rank for the keyword, Google will rank the most appropriate selection it could find. Hence, you probably know for sure if there is a proper web page on your site.

3. Are the page rankings being caibalized by another page of yours?

This can be the possible issue, in Google’s senses, a sum of your sites pages are related to the same query and most probably the ranking capability of the right page is overcome by another, less appropriate but more influential page of yours. Now that we’ve spotted the case of page and to avoid caibalization here are the some possibilities you have:

• Re-point inteal links
• Request some exteal link deviations
• Re-point redirects
• Take away keywords and related terms

Maintain safe future of your website

Now, all of the above practices will help you detect and correct the page ranking issues. Now your next step would be to consider an appropriate keyword plaing for your site and get into the routine of observing not only rankings but your ranking pages also.

1. Keep on monitoring

However optimizing your pages according to a well-organized keyword map will decrease the probabilities of a wrong ranking page encountered in Google but, sometimes things just don’t go as considered. Though now that you have your keyword map set up, you can easily distinguish the wrong page issues.

2. Construct a keyword map

Keyword mapping is the method where you choose which pages will be optimized for each of your keywords.

On the one side, a keyword map helps you escape from more cases of caibalization and confirm that the keywords are used steadily, and all your landing pages rank for the relevant keywords. On another side, it also makes it easier to notice page-specific issues.

3. Quality Backlinks using Social Media

For many years, link building was crucial for search-engine position. With integral authority, social media sites are the flawless platform to create the high-quality link-backs your website essentials for particular keywords.

Content that’s shared through links across social media helps search engines understand how to rank your website for exact keyword phrases. So, you should aware of how to use Social Media to improve your online presence.

Thus, this is the procedure you can use to make the most of your current Google rankings, increase your website traffic and conversions rate. Do let me know if you have any follow up question on this.

A lot of bloggers these days don’t want to use ads and sponsored posts to promote their content.

You might have read umpteen posts advising bloggers to advertise their content intelligently across platforms. Harsh has also suggested quite a few variations of this practice.

That said, advertising is not the only way you can boost your blog’s popularity. There are many other sustainable ways to get your blog into the Bloggers Hall of Fame and steadily improve your traffic and visibility without over-spending!

Ways to get the word out:

1. Throw money at your content

If you want to reach people who have a voracious appetite for content, your best bet would be to target them on other content-intensive sites.

This is where content recommendation tools come into the picture. These are great alteatives to paying for Google advertising.

There are many content recommendation and native advertising tools that allow you to promote your content on third party sites.

From Time to Inc, Forbes to Huffington Post, you can choose from over hundreds of high-quality publishers to show your ads. If a link to your content appears as a suggestion below a highly shared article on a popular site, it can do wonders for you.

Source: Times.com

However, you have to be very careful when choosing a content discovery or amplification tool.

You don’t want your content to be shown on some spammy scraper blog that just wants to make a few more peies.

So make sure the tool of your choice has no low-quality sites in their network. For instance, content marketing industry leader Outbrain has very high publishing standards and you have to follow their guidelines in order to be accepted into their network.

Further, their smart recommendation engine ensures your content is only displayed on the most relevant sites.

Outbrain allows advertisers and publishers to reach audiences with targeted and intent-based recommendations to ensure high engagement and CTR. It also provides many ways to keep users engrossed, encourage them to explore your website for longer, and lead them towards a high-quality experience.

As opposed to this, some content recommendation tools are just shoddy ad networks that sell ads under the guise of content.

In the example below, the highlighted ad, which is irrelevant to the main article (mobile security), as well as the ads around it, take you to website’s homepage (The Lotter) rather than the article.

This is decidedly misleading and can tu the reader against you.

Source: CIO.com

2. Optimize your blog for search

One of the most painstaking, but rewarding methods to gain popularity is to optimize your blog for long tail keywords. SEOs these days can’t stop raving about the success you can get using long tail keywords, and we continue to see great results with them.

A mode SEO strategy for any blog should be based on long tail keywords related to its niche.

Here’s ShoutMeLoud guide to finding the best long tail keywords . Furthermore, once the post is completed, many bloggers will try and follow the basic guideline of keeping Yoast happy with most of their posts:

However, optimization should never come at the cost of user experience.

If you need to even go to the extent of deleting content for the sake of better readability and authority, you shouldn’t hesitate in doing so.

While it takes time and hard work, SEO pays off in the long term.

So it wouldn’t be wrong to say that:

• Search optimization is a sustainable way to increase your blog ranking and popularity.

Here’s a great checklist for SEO that every blogger must pin to their wall so they can gradually optimize their blog.

Here are some other hand-picked articles that you should read about SEO:

3. Create engaging social media posts

Unless you are a world-class photographer or have a hundred cute kittens ruing around your workplace, finding ways to keep your social media audience engaged is not easy.

However, there is no dearth of options – from Twitter polls to Facebook quizzes – for creating engaging social media posts.

Let’s see how Luke Moulton of Sit the Test, a Melboue-based startup, used Facebook ads to promote a quiz.

His objective was to use a third-party platform to build an email list because his blog wasn’t getting much traffic at that point. Luke ran the campaign for 13 days on a budget of $30 per day and was able to build a list of over 570 people.

So the effective cost per conversion (the cost of acquiring an email address) was $0.66.

If you want to drive viral traffic using quizzes, there are many popular platforms that allow you to create them.

• ShoutMeLoud is currently ruing a discount offer, which allows you to get 50% off Riddle, a popular quiz-making tool.

4. Make podcasts and videos regularly

The last method on our list is using audio-visual content to boost popularity.

Bloggers using podcasts and videos are instantly elevated to the thought-leader level.

These formats are a cut above text and allow you to come across as a more professional and accomplished blogger.

If you want evidence that podcasts offer a great way to not only become famous, but also to gain authority, consider Mitchell Levy, “Chief Aha Instigator” (yes, that’s the title he chose for himself) at Aha Amplifier, who regularly uses podcasts to talk about “thought-leadership”.

In the process, he has become quite an authority on the topic.

The same goes for video.

My new friend David Bain at Authoritas has come up with a great series of quick, insightful interviews with thought-leaders in SEO about where they think the industry is headed.

If you haven’t yet gone this route, you should start by setting up your own chael on popular video networks like YouTube, Vimeo, or Vine.

Alteatively, you can host your videos on your own site using a custom hosting tool like Wistia.

Whatever platform you choose, make sure you use all means of promotion that work for you in order to gain visibility.

Once you have built up a sizable audience, you can also try live-streaming.

Live-streaming is one of the toughest and the most time-consuming of all the above-mentioned methods, but if you really want to go that extra mile, there is no substitute for it.

For further reading:

Final words

It is very important for bloggers to grow their blog and carve out a niche for themselves using unique and individually distinctive ways. Although advertising provides a great way to boost popularity in bursts, it is important to use more sustainable methods that can provide value to audiences over extended periods of time.

Are you a blogger? How do you promote your blog and keep your audience engaged? Have you tried out any methods discussed here? Let me know in the Idea!

We don’t hangout on the inteet anymore. We live on the inteet.

Just like our physical world, the inteet is a fuy place – at it’s times quirky, at times it’s random, and at times it’s safe. Well, we think it’s safe.

As developers and website owners, we are responsible for providing a safe web experience to all of our users.

As users ourselves, we have seen it all –

• Malware injections
• Popups triggering software installs
• Trojan horse viruses
• etc.

Luckily, most of that is over. The mode age browsers take care of these issues by default.

But browsers are just a container that renders whatever the server throws at it. There is only so much it can do. Users (and by extension, websites) are still vulnerable to javascript injections (read more here and here).

Building trust and credibility with users goes a long way. And it is because of this, global leaders such as Mozilla and Google are putting their weight behind making the web a more secure place.

This is contributing to the major reason for a gradual shift from HTTP websites to HTTPS websites.

What is HTTP and what is HTTPS?

Source: https://websitesdepot.com/google-aounces-new-security-measure-website-owners-https/

Before we dive deeper, let’s get a quick understanding of HTTP and HTTPS.

These are the most frequently used protocols on the web.

HTTP:

• HyperText Transfer Protocol – a simple protocol for sending and receiving text based messages.

HTTPS:

• HyperText Transfer Protocol Secure – the same protocol as HTTP, but the text is encrypted.

Read this detailed overview to develop a better understanding of HTTP and HTTPS.

How HTTPS bridges the gap:

Source

Google (and many others) are committed to making the web more secure for all the users.

In 2014, Google had their HTTPS everywhere campaign when they aounced HTTPS as a ranking signal and started indexing secure pages over unsecured pages.

Google’s indexing conditions:

1. It shouldn’t contain insecure dependencies.
2. It isn’t blocked from crawling by robots.txt.
3. It shouldn’t redirect users to or through an insecure HTTP page.
4. It shouldn’t have a rel=”canonical” link to the HTTP page.
5. It shouldn’t contain a noindex robots meta tag.
6. It shouldn’t have on-host outlinks to HTTP URLs.
7. The sitemap lists the HTTPS URL or doesn’t list the HTTP version of the URL.
8. The server has a valid TLS certificate.

The first condition is a critical requirement.

The page should not include “insecure dependencies.” Many pages include insecure images, embeds, videos, and so on.

Source: https://www.keycdn.com/blog/http-to-https/

According to the data from BuiltWith, around only 6.3% of the top 100,000 websites are using SSL.

Apart from the Google ranking boost, there are several other reasons you should consider opting for HTTPS as your website protocol.

Some additional benefits:

1. More Security– A major reason why it is important to be ruing over HTTPS is of course because of security! The reason you need an SSL certificate for e-commerce and other transactional sites is because they are processing sensitive information. For other sites, a big reason for going to HTTPS is the WordPress login page. If you aren’t ruing over an HTTPS coection, your useame and password are sent in clear text over the inteet. Anyone can sniff and capture WordPress logins over unsecured coections using a variety of free tools.
2. Better Referral Data– Another good reason to migrate is that the referral data is blocked in Google Analytics. If your website is on HTTP and you go viral on any HTTPS website, the referrer data will be completely lost and the traffic from the HTTPS website could end up under “direct traffic” (which is not very helpful). If someone is going from HTTPS to HTTPS, the referrer will still be passed.
3. SSL Builds Trust and Credibility– To move to HTTPS, you need an SSL certificate. An SSL certificate builds trust and credibility with your visitors. Visitors tend to look for the green padlock on a website. This gives it “SSL trust”. It is important to let your visitors know you are a secure site and that their information will be safe.

Common myths around migrating to HTTPS

Let’s go ahead and bust these myths.

1. My site’s is not important enough for HTTPS.

More than often, publishers maintain that their properties don’t handle sensitive user data (login info, payments, etc.) so they can do away with HTTPS.

It is important to note that Javascript-based ad injections are well known to kill user experience.

Moreover, ruing on HTTP restricts web developers from using key APIs including:

• GeoLocation: You can no longer seek a user’s location if you are on HTTP.
• Web Push Notification: Push notifications are only available on HTTPS.
• GetUserMedia: You can no longer trigger permissions of using a user’s camera/microphone if you are on HTTP.
• HTTP/2: All major browsers support HTTP/2 for HTTPS.
• EME and App Cache: To be removed soon.

2. HTTPS will slow down my site.

Quite a few developers have witnessed negative results post migration to HTTPS.

Having said that, when Gmail was migrated to HTTP in 2010, there was no noticeable performance impact.

Here are the stats from the Gmail migration to HTTPS:

Negative results are often because of a lack of optimization such as moving to HTTP/2.

We have to update the way that we talk about HTTPS and performance.

3. I can move my site to HTTPS, but what about the 3rd parties I depend on?

Another major conce for publishers is with reference to the third party content on their website – primarily ads [most often the only source of monetization].

A key constraint with HTTPS is that if you move to HTTPS, all of your content (including third party content) also has to be served over HTTPS.

• Note: Google AdSense and Ad Exchange requests are already being served over HTTPS.

There is also the conce about partnerships wherein 3rd party service providers depend on the HTTP referrer header. When a user follows a link from an HTTPS site to an HTTP partner site, browsers will strip their referrer header for privacy reasons.

There’s a web platform feature called “Referrer Policy“ that helps with this.

Publishers can set a referrer policy to allow their partners to see which traffic is coming from their site, but they won’t see the full URL that the user was visiting, so user privacy is maintained.

Then there is a kind of general problem called mixed content.

Mixed content is the problem of loading non-secure HTTP content on HTTPS.

This is important because non-secure sub resources can actually compromise the security of a secure HTTPS site. Browsers will actually block this content and completely wipe out all of the security of that HTTPS site.

Publisher websites (i.e. blogs) contain a lot of old news articles that link to third party images which aren’t available over HTTPS. These images are called passive content and browsers will still allow them to load.

The HTTPS site won’t be completely broken, but that green lock will go away.

Complete video:

This header is basically a way for publishers to assert to the browser that all content should be loaded over HTTPS and that the publishers want to receive reports about any content that isn’t.

Content Security Policy allows publishers to find and fix mixed content across their properties.

Chrome also has a DevTools security panel to make it as easy as possible to find and fix problems with HTTPS configurations such mixed content issues.

Essentially, third party providers must support HTTPS in order for you to fully move your site.

Frequently Asked Questions

• How does this whole communication take place?

When a client/browser requests for a secure session over HTTPS, the server responds with the SSL certificate.

A request is made from the client end and the server responds with the certificate and the server’s public key. The client/browser then checks the validity of the SSL certificate signed by CA. Then the client/browser sends an encrypted session key with the server’s public key. Now the server de-crypts the session key with its private key.

With this, a secure session is created for a secure data transfer.

• How is the data sent over HTTPS secured?

Data sent using HTTPS is secured via Transport Layer Security protocol (TLS), which provides three key layers of protection for your information:

1. Encryption – Encrypting the exchanged data to keep it secure from eavesdroppers. The encryption ensures that while browsing, no one can intrude into conversations, track activities across pages, or get access to any information.
2. Data integrity – This means data caot be compromised during transfer and any alteration made to the data caot be easily detected.
3. Authentication – This ensures that users are on the correct website. HTTPS authentication protects against man-in-the-middle attacks and builds user trust.

Here is the full list of frequently asked questions

Getting your SSL certificate

There are numerous options that can be availed to get an SSL certificate while moving from HTTP to HTTPS.

Here are three great options:

Things to do while making the switch

First of all, buy and activate an SSL certificate if you haven’t already.

During the migration, there could be some hurdles stalling the process.

Errors may occur when Google starts crawling the HTTP version of your website and generating content duplication issues, with both HTTPS and HTTP versions of the pages shown and different versions of the page showing on HTTP and HTTPS.

Check out these other common pitfalls in using HTTPS/TLS.

Best practices when migrating to HTTPS:

Source

1. Using robust security certificates. As part of enabling HTTPS for your website, you must obtain a security certificate (SSL certificate). The certificate is issued by a certificate authority (CA) which takes steps to verify that your web address actually belongs to your organization. While setting up your certificate, ensure a high level of security by choosing a 2048-bit key. If you already have a certificate with a weaker key (1024-bit), an upgrade would be a great way to go.
2. Redirect your users and search engines to the HTTPS page or resource with server-side 301 HTTP redirects.
3. Use a web server that supports HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS) and make sure that it’s enabled.

The idea behind the whole HTTP to HTTPS switch is to provide a safer web experience, ensuring your personal information stays private and does not get misused.

Anything and everything could be personal to you or your end users.

Even if you are searching for “Nexus 5 cost in India”, that search could be private to you. Whether you are browsing or looking for a product or reading an article, you generally do not want what you’re doing to be public information. Particularly for personal information, banks, and transaction information, HTTPS has become a necessity and an industry standard.

Though HTTPS migration is highly recommended and being followed by most website developers, the final decision depends on you. For those who are ready to follow this safer web practice, get started with HTTPS by grabbing your SSL certificate and be delighted to have that green padlock on your website.

Have you made the switch to HTTPS? Let me know in the Idea below.

Where do you usually send your visitors immediately after they’ve completed a certain task on your blog/landing page?

Where do they go after they’ve completed a sign-up form or after they’ve purchased a product from you?

That next page is very important and will determine whether or not you’re leaving money on the table.

• That next page is your Thank You page.

You know that page which takes you a few seconds to put together? That’s the one I’m talking about.

Your Thank You page is one of the most vital pages on your website and should be treated as such. A good Thank You page provides an opportunity to build on the trust and engagement level of the customer at that particular point in their decision-making jouey.

Apart from that, it also gives you the perfect chance to buttress that they’ve made the right decision by giving you their email address/purchasing your product. This way they won’t be confused and wondering, “What next?”

However, as conversion-oriented marketers, we’re often more focused on persuading visitors to take action upon arriving at our landing pages. Once that happens, most people just thank them and simply walk away happy that they’ve landed a conversion.

I must say:

• This is an expensive mistake.

For goodness sake, you just did a good job by convincing these people to take your desired action; they’re now hot prospects and ready to do whatever you ask of them!

By sending them to the boring page that says “Thanks for signing up, bla…..bla…..bla”, you’re giving them a free gate pass to go away and forget about you.

Is that what you want? Why not take advantage of the momentum you’ve just built and engage them more?

In this blog post, the guys at Impactbdn say it all. Check out the screenshot below:

If all you do after a prospect performs any task on your blog is thank them and walk away smiling, you’re committing a big crime that might eventually catch up with you.

What if you could gain more from these people by sending them to a highly optimized Thank You page?

What if they could:

Wouldn’t that be awesome?

-I know your answer is yes.

The good news is that you can achieve all of these things via your Thank You page.

When used properly, Thank You pages increase 3 things:

1. Exposure
2. Authority
3. Revenue

In this post, I will share with you some cool and easy to implement tips which you can use today to optimize your Thank You page in order to boost your ROI.

So let’s quickly get to it.

7 Powerful Ways To Optimize Your Thank You Page

1. Show Appreciation

One of the first things I was taught as a kid was the act of saying “thank you”.

If someone does me a favor or gives me a gift, “thank you” is the next thing that comes out of my mouth.

According to Ramona Sukhraj, saying “thank you” is just good maers 101 and I couldn’t agree more.

By thanking your customer, they will feel special and appreciated which will further enhance their decision to stick around because they know they’re welcomed.

2. Give Them What They’ve Opted For

After you’ve thanked your new prospect, the next thing to do is to show them how to get the offer you promised.

They now feel welcomed and know they’re in the right place. Don’t let them get confused and start looking around trying to figure out how to download your offer.

I’ve come to some Thank You pages before that were very difficult for me to figure out where to get the information I opted in for.

What usually happens in this case is that the prospect will just leave the page out of frustration and will never retu again. (I’ve done this several times). It creates a very bad first impression.

Give them a bold, obvious link or download button for them to click on.

Don’t make them hunt around.

Check out this Thank You page example:

As you can see, they first thanked the prospect and then displayed an obvious button to get the freebie they promised.

Notice that they also included the name of the eBook on the page. This will enable the prospect to know that they are indeed in the right place.

3. Add A Survey

Surveys are the easiest, fastest, and most inexpensive way to get feedback from your audience.

And after they’ve signed up/bought your product, now is a great time to get valuable information about your targeted audience. This will help you serve them better down the line.

Therefore, consider integrating a simple customer survey into your Thank You page.

This isn’t difficult; you can easily use Google Forms to create one and link to it.

Similarly, you might decide to do it the way Master of Malt did theirs:

As you can see, they’ve embedded their own survey directly onto their Thank You page. This will ensure their readers don’t have to click out of the page before filling out the form (which will increase conversion rates).

One important thing to remember:

• When creating your survey, keep it short. (You can also let them know how long it will take to fill out the form.)

Google Forms is free and easy to use, so go create your own form now.

4. Add Links to Your Best Blog Posts

This is a no-brainer.

Linking to some of your best content on your Thank You page will convert the page into a superb resource page.

This will also strengthen your reader’s perception of you as an expert in your niche.

Check out this screenshot from HubSpot:

And this one from KISSmetrics:

5. Use Social Proof and Testimonials

In this post (and in upcoming posts), I will be mentioning social proof a lot.

It’s important for you to understand what social proof is and why it’s important.

In the case of Thank You pages and increasing ROI, testimonials will work really, really well.

One of the easiest ways to boost your conversion rate is by showing your prospects that other people are already saying good things about you and your products.

When you back up your claims with solid social proof, people will trust you more.

Here’s what Social Triggers did on his Thank You page:

Derek displayed the amount of people that have “liked” his page (with their pictures). Then, there is a Facebook comment box at the bottom of the page for people to discuss the eBook.

He also included clear instructions of what his audience should do.

This leads us to…

6. Include a Call-To-Action

When optimizing your Thank You page, it is very necessary to have a clear call-to-action to suggest other ways in which readers can make a deeper coection with your brand.

Examples of good calls-to-action:

• Subscribe to Our Blog
• Follow Us on Twitter
• Sign Up for Our Free 30-Day Trial

7. Make It Social

This is very important.

Your visitor has just engaged with your product which means they’re now more likely to share the good news with their friends.

• Remember: Google now places more weight on social sharing; one of your goals should be to have as many people as possible share your site.

Here is an example from ShoutMeLoud’s Thank You page:

Most people often assume their readers will willingly share their content once they see the social sharing widget on their sidebar.

This is not true. You have to bluntly ask them to do that.

While on your Thank You page, they’re still in the mood to take your advice. Take advantage of this and advise them to share your content.

Conclusion

Naturally, you want to keep your blog visitors receptive and engaged.

It doesn’t matter what business or niche you’re in. Implementing a few of these simple tips mentioned here will greatly boost the ROI of your Thank You pages.

If you want:

• Repeat business
• Better customer relationships
• Boosted potential average order values
• Boosted brand reach in the social sphere
• Increased word of mouth about your brand

Give your Thank You page some love and enjoy the benefits.

I would love to know what you think about these tips. Do you have any of the above in your Thank You page? How has your ROI changed after implementing these strategies? Let me know in the Idea!

Every single marketing or product blog suggests you start building an e-mail list. The number one method of doing this is by giving away an e-book, or a course, or something that is somehow valuable around your niche and in tu, capturing a reader’s e-mail information.

This is good advice because e-mail marketing works by distributing your content and making sales of your products.

But, most of the advice stops there.

They talk about e-mail collection strategies, but do not go beyond that.

Today we’ll cover another area of e-mail marketing that is generally not covered:

The reasons your users are inactive.

Defining an inactive e-mail subscriber

An inactive e-mail subscriber has one or more of the following qualities:

• Subscribed to your blog, but has not interacted with your e-mails right after signing-up.
• Subscribed to your blog, but has not interacted with your e-mails in the past 6 months
• Subscribed to your blog, but has not interacted with your e-mails in the past 9 months.
• Subscribed to your blog, but does not click through.

If you have inactive e-mail subscribers, here are the 12 most common reasons why and their solutions.

Why are your e-mail users inactive?

Depending on the above information, the inactive subscribers have been defined in a particular way and each one has to be handled differently.

But the first part is in identifying why your subscribers are inactive.

Understanding this list will give you an idea of what not to do in the future and how you can rectify some of these problems right now.

Reason #1: Your subscribed users signed up for different content.

In a hurry to get subscribers, the content you put out convincing the user to subscribe may not have matched the kind of content you actually put out on a regular basis.

For example, a technology blog puts out this copy:

• “Get all the latest tech hacks every month”

But that blog actually sends out e-mails regarding:

• “Tech news”

The person subscribing to this e-mail campaign likely feels discoected with the content and does not want to interact with these posts.

Solution:

Always make sure to explain clearly what your content covers and how it will help people.

Don’t ask people to subscribe to content that you are not going to publish or mislead them in any way.

One more thing you could do right after the user subscribes is send them a follow-up e-mail with your popular posts. This will help in communicating to the user that you do indeed publish the kind of content that they signed up for.

Reason #2: Your content is not appealing, useful, and/or shareable.

This happens to a lot of early bloggers and it is very unfortunate.

The quality of your posts is absolutely paramount!

It’s not about the number of posts, but rather the impact of the post.

The competition for blogs is extremely high; there are companies worth millions and millions of dollars who are competing with you to get every user’s attention. Maybe your website’s design or copy had convinced the user to join as a subscriber, but you weren’t able to convince them beyond your design with your content.

Solution:

When you are creating content, don’t think of it in terms of how many words you can throw down, or how many articles you can put out. You need to think of it in terms of how original it is and how useful it is to a user.

You also need to know if that kind of content does well.

This technique is called the Skyscraper technique and it comes from Brian Dean at the Backlinko blog:

• Spend your time in researching the top articles that are most shared with a tool such as Ruzzit (or you could also use Buzzsumo). These types of tools help in identifying the top performing content for every niche. You can search for the top content in your niche so that you are aware of the kind of content that resonates with your readers.
• After identifying the content, aim to make it better. You can make an infographic out of it, or make it a longer post, give it more data, or even create a video.
• Once you’ve created this content, mail it to similar blogs in your niche and ask them to cover it.

When you make content in such a way, it’s guaranteed to be useful and relevant.

Users will be excited to click through to your content.

Reason #3: Your readers just wanted the free lead magnet and nothing else.

Some blogs giveaway really valuable stuff as a lead magnet.

For those of you who don’t know what a lead magnet is:

• A lead magnet is a piece of content or software that is given away for free by the blog to entice the user to give their e-mail information (ie subscribe to an e-mail list).

Some people just download the free stuff and then ignore your e-mails because they have all they want.

Solution:

This happens sometimes and it can be frustrating. You take pains in creating your lead magnet and in the end you get an inactive subscriber.

• Check your marketing chael and your source of traffic.

You may be attracting the wrong crowd and spending money promoting/marketing your blog in the wrong chaels. What happens is users come from these chaels, look at the free lead magnet, download it, and they stop engaging.

These types of users are not highly motivated to execute on your content, they are just looking for a freebie.

The QUALITY of your leads are more important than the QUANTITY of leads.

Why do you think buying databases doesn’t work? They are not the right target market. They are not the people who want to engage with your content or product.

Knowing your audience is important. People who are inclined to pay for a product or engage with you are more motivated than a person who is looking for something free.

Getting high-quality users to your site increases your affiliate income and the quality of your site as a whole.

Also read: How To Setup a Lead Magnet within Blog Posts Using LeadPages

Reason #4: The topics you cover vary too much and aren’t focused.

In an attempt to attract a larger crowd, many blogs get into the habit of writing about different niches.

Although this may be good for traffic and building a large audience, it is not good for e-mail marketing. Your content may be covering many niches that the reader is not interested in.

This alienates a lot of users.

Solution:

The best way to go about making your content specific and to the point is content curation (similar to sites like Quora).

On the initial sign-up page, Quora asks you to choose your top ten favorite topics and curates your feed based on that.

Similarly, you could ask your users what content they would be interested in seeing. This helps in giving them the exact content they want and also gives you a blog that serves different kinds of people.

Reason #5: Your readers don’t know where to start.

You may be one of those blogs with a lot of posts and information. If in every e-mail you send about 10 to 15 posts that they “must read”, then you end up scaring the user away with this large amount of content.

It’s not possible to read 10 to 15 blog posts in one stretch and seeing that amount can be overwhelming.

Solution:

Make a list of your best content, order it based on a sequence, and send them consistent mails on a daily, or tri-weekly basis.

This way you are engaging with them consistently and directing them to your content with little steps. Sometimes readers don’t know where to start when they see a blog, and this is a good way to help them through that process.

Here is a good example of how ShoutMeLoud does it (outside the purview of e-mails, but you could use the same strategy through e-mail):

In the below image, you can see how Copyblogger is direct with their users about the amount of content they have on their site and gives their readers an immediate solution. As a blog with a lot of content, you have to guide your user to the right content. (Bonus points if you can order it!)

Reason #6: Your subject for the e-mails you send out is bad.

This is a very important aspect of e-mail marketing that isn’t taken seriously:

Bad titles.

If you were to compare these two titles, which do you think would have more clicks?

• Marketing tips on how to build your e-mail list.
• How I used this secret technique to grow my e-mail list by 1200% in a week!

A lot of blogging is about copy-writing that convinces people to take an action. It’s an important skill to have.

Solution:

Copy-writing is something that you need to lea. There’s one piece of advice that is doled out pretty regularly:

“The objective of any copy is to make the reader read the next line, and the line after that, and the line after that, and so on…”

• Make the reader curious.
• Make the reader feel that they are going to gain a lot of knowledge.
• Make the reader feel special in some way.

There are two things that you could do to make your e-mail copy better and get better CTRs (Click Through Rates):

1. Get better at writing e-mail copy. This comes from training, practice, and leaing from the best. If you sign up to the Copyblogger website, you get access to their collection of e-books that covers the whole gamut of copy-writing tips and how to’s.
2. Test your copy and measure your results. Compare the CTRs of different e-mail headlines and see which ones perform better. This is important because this information is exclusive to your blog and specific to your audience.

Examples of excellent e-mail headlines you can take inspiration from:

“Should you say ‘Yes’ to something that looks like a great opportunity?”

-This copy suggests that your dilemma will be solved.

“Baed from Amazon – From $10,000 per month to $0”

-Perfect example of a copy about what not to do. People always want to lea from another’s mistakes.

“I’m embarrassed.”

-Making the reader curious.

“The SEO ranking factor you MUST master in 2016 (and beyond)”

-Straight and simple copy that attracts a person to one single item and the emphasis on the word “must”.

Reason #7 : Your e-mails are going to the Spam folder.

This is a problem faced by many bloggers and e-mail marketers. Their e-mails are pushed straight to the spam section by the e-mail provider’s filters.

This directly cuts out any sort of coection between your content and the reader. Your e-mails may be going to a subscriber who might buy your products, but it just isn’t reaching them.

Solution:

If you think your blog posts won’t go to the spam folder, then think again. This happens often.

Here are some solutions to avoid the “spam” label:

1. Don’t send all of your e-mails out at once.

The spam bots in e-mail service providers look out for mass sending of e-mails. Most spammers upload a database and then send e-mails to thousands of people all at once. This creates a trigger in the spam filter.

To avoid this, send your e-mails to separate lists, one after another.

Another reason is when readers receive e-mails, some of them might mark your mail as spam. When you send e-mails out to a lot of people and a bunch of them mark your mail as spam, then you create another trigger in the spam filter.

2. Always use a double opt-in while collecting e-mails.

A double opt-in, or a confirmed opt-in, guarantees that the user wants to be a part of your e-mail list. This is also confirming to the user that you are using a genuine e-mail ID that is active. If an e-mail ID is inactive for a long time, then the spam filters will blacklist your e-mails.

3. Try not to use words that are “spammy” or are used in phishing techniques.

E-mail service providers do not want e-mails to be too commercial or anything that seems like advertising. Apart from this, they want to avoid other scams and frauds. There are certain words which if used consistently can put you in the spam folder.

Here is a good list that covers different sets of words that are considered “spammy”:

4. Ask your user to “whitelist” your email address.

A lot of quality blogs do this and you should too.

When subscribing, guide your subscribers to mark your e-mail as “safe”.

You could take this to the next level by actually taking a screenshot of the process of whitelisting an e-mail and show it to your subscribers.

5. Don’t send too many e-mails in a day.

Sending multiple e-mails a day without a lot of CTRs definitely affects your SPAM levels. This is not good.

Make sure you send an e-mail only when necessary.

6. For transactions emails use Amazon or Mandrill

Transaction emails in terms of blogging are comment reply notification, user password & similar emails. For this, you should use a reliable service like Amazon SES Service.

Reason #8: They’ve subscribed to too many blogs; yours is just one of them.

This problem has more to do with the user than you.

A lot of readers subscribe to every blog they like and their inbox becomes filled with e-mails.

Result:

• Your e-mail gets lost in the crowd.

Solution:

You can’t really tell if a reader isn’t interacting with your e-mails because of this.

But, you can stand out by having really captivating content.

You can even try mocking these readers with things like:

• “You know, you can unsubscribe if you don’t like this stuff.”
• “You are stuck in 2010!”

Go on to tell them that they are missing out on this great content.

It doesn’t even matter if you lose a few subscribers here because it’s better to have a list that is active. But if you can win them back, you’ll have gained another active user.

Reason #9: Your e-mails are too self-promotional.

You might be over selling yourself.

Communication with e-mail is a relationship; it isn’t a marketplace where people see things and purchase.

A lot of bloggers, after having seen some initial success, just focus on promoting their courses and products.

People need to be convinced to purchase. You can’t spam them with overt promotions to make them purchase something.

Solution:

Always think of the value that you provide.

If you are providing immense value, people will WANT the products that you are selling.

The perfect example of this is SumoMe’s service. People share and promote their content because of the value they provide.

Make sure that your quality is high and people are waiting around for you to sell products.

If this isn’t the case, it’s guaranteed that your sales will taper off. In the end, it will always be you hunting the subscriber and asking them to make a purchase.

Reason #10: You send your e-mails at the wrong time.

Here’s another topic that is overlooked.

If your e-mails are getting sent at the wrong time, then your readers are not going to be reading your e-mails.

Research has been done by top bloggers that show people are more likely to open an e-mail at a certain time.

Why?

Solution:

A lot of blogs will tell you this time is the best, or this other time is the best. Well, maybe that’s the best time for them.

The best way to find out the best time for you is to test it. Other people’s data will not help.

1. Segment your audience based on location.

This will teach you two things:

• How your content is performing in a particular location (open rates, CTRs).
• The preferred time to read.

2. Push your e-mail out based on certain days and time.

Send your e-mails during different days of the week and at particular times.

Here is a simple spreadsheet that you can use for testing purposes:

Reason #11: The template of your e-mails are bad.

There are many ways to get your template wrong. The way you frame an e-mail may not have a flow, it doesn’t bring attention to anything, or is just too long.

Here is an example of a very long e-mail:

Solution:

As a rule of thumb, the content in the e-mail should aim at one thing:

• Making the subscriber click on a link which takes them to the intended website.

How do you achieve this?

1. Do not write a long e-mail. People do not have time for something that will take them more than 2 to 3 minutes to read.
2. Showcase the value of your content by bolding the content that you want readers to see the most.
3. Have clear-cut, attractive calls to action.

Here is a sample template that you can use:

Hey < Name of the User > ,

<Introductory greeting>

• Ex: Hope you are doing well! We have some awesome content for you today!

<Make a coection>

• Ex: Like many of you, I’ve been struggling with e-mail marketing and it has taken a toll on my blogging.

<Lay Out the Situation #1>

• Ex: It’s hard to build a list.

<Lay Out the Situation #2>

• Ex: It’s even harder to build a quality list!

<Showcase the Solution #1>

• Ex: But I’ve figured out a way to build an ultra high-quality e-mail list with active users who engage.

<Showcase the Solution#2>

• Ex: It’s so easy, I can’t believe no one is doing it.

<Tell them how they’ll benefit>

• Ex: Using this super simple method, I increased my CTR by a whopping 1200%!

<Give Call to Action>

• Ex: I explain this method in great detail over on my blog. Click here to read it and start implementing this powerful technique today! (Link)

Regards,

<Your Name>

<End>

Reason #12: Your user has moved on and the industry is dying.

Sometimes the content of your post just isn’t relevant anymore.

The user may have changed industries or they might have gotten a job which doesn’t give them the time to interact with your content.

Your industry may also be going through a massive change.

Solution:

Always make sure you are re-inventing your content to make it fresh.

Try to change with the times and not be stuck in an industry that is dying.

Remember, as a content creator, you can always pivot! Make sure you’re staying relevant.

It can be difficult to see a list of inactive e-mail users. But if you use these strategies, you will not only not face this issue, you will come to be one of the best e-mail marketers in the world!

Are you one of the best e-mail marketers in the world? Do you currently face these issues? Let us know in the Idea!

Was this guide useful for you? Share it with your friends on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus!

Whether it is a big brand like Coca-Cola, Apple, or Dominos, or a small brand like you or me, why do companies love content marketing so much?

Any idea? No?

Okay. Let me tell you…

Content marketing is not just creating content and it is more than advertising. It is all about showing your customers who you are and how you are better than your competitors.

That’s the reason 42.5% companies are hiring more content marketing executives for their content marketing teams in 2016.

Despite the multiple benefits of content marketing, 70% of marketers lack a consistent and documented content marketing strategy.

Content marketing strategies don’t build themselves. They need proper plaing, clear vision, future-centric goals, enough time and money, and a focused execution.

Read my earlier guide on 5 Solid Reasons To Use Content Marketing for Business Growth

6 Key Elements of a Strong Content Marketing Strategy:

1. Understand your audience better than them

Content marketing is all about educating, entertaining, and providing value to your customers in order to gain their trust and respect. It isn’t only about selling your products.

Before you create any type of content, make sure you know who your customers are and what they want from you.

To better understand your clients, you need to develop a buyer persona.

• What is a buyer persona?

A buyer persona is market researched data about your prospective clients’ purchasing behaviors. It helps you to create better content that your audiences are more likely to take an interest in.

This is a buyer persona:

Image Source

Here are some questions you should ask yourself before creating a buyer persona:

• Who are your ideal prospects and clients?
• What makes them purchase a product or service?
• What are their pain points and how can you solve them?
• What gaps of information do they have and how can your content can fill them?

A buyer persona plays an important role in making content marketing campaigns successful. 56% of companies have generated qualified leads using a buyer persona.

(Even though buyer personas are valuable, 85% of companies aren’t doing in-depth research about their prospective clients.)

2. Think about your customer

To provide a high-quality content marketing service to your clients, it is essential that you think about your clients. What do your clients know? And what do you need to tell them?

You might do some research to find out what is out there and what is missing.

Here are some steps you can follow:

• Dig deeper on your website analytics – Your visitors always leave some useful clues about their needs and desires. Figure out those needs by looking at your analytics’ metrics such as:
  • keyword performance
  • inteal search data
  • user behavior
  • bounce rates
• Search them on social media platforms – Search and collect data about your prospects on all social media sites, blogs, and forums. This is where they are hanging out and discussing their problems. There are multiple tools available which you can use to collect data about the conversations people are having about your company and products.
• Get involved in industry research – Many companies who perform surveys and do research about products and services often published their data. You can buy relevant researched data about your products and use them to gain valuable insight.
• Survey your customers – No one can tell you more about your service and product than your existing customers. Ask them specific questions about what they like and dislike, along with improvements they would suggest.

Using the above-mentioned tactics will provide you with a better understanding of your clients’ needs and requirements.

3. Determine the right content formula

Content marketing is all about providing solutions for specific problems that matter to your current and future customers.

Your content should have value and a clear message that makes your clients feel confident about taking the next steps with your company. If is doesn’t provide this message to them, your content strategy will fail.

Here is a three step formula which can help you to uncover an optimum content plan:

1. Create content that your audience wants – Many companies make a silly content marketing mistake; they focus on their marketing messages and forget about customers. They don’t try to find out what their clients need. Always keep your customers in mind when creating content.

2. Define the content distribution chaels for your clients – Before you do anything, sit and think what types of content your clients like (e.g. video, infographics, visuals, etc.). Also, think about where should you share your content to get a maximum reach to your customers.

3. Curate content as well as content creation – If you invest all of your time in creating original content, it likely won’t be enough for your audience. It would be nice if you curate other useful content from the web as well.

Add other information, links, and resources in your content and provide them with proper credit. This will increase customer affinity and loyalty.

4. Create an editorial calendar

A solid content marketing strategy wouldn’t be complete without an editorial calendar.

Every successful content marketing campaign needs an editorial calendar that describes every step required in content creation.

An editorial calendar encourages you to be more consistent and successful at publishing the content you want and producing the outcomes you need.

Your editorial calendar should have the following items:

1. The date your content will be published.
2. The title of the content that will be published.
3. The author of the content.
4. The owner of the content who will be responsible for publication and promotion.
5. The current status of the content.

Editorial calendars can be useful for multiple content marketing tasks rather than simply tracking your content marketing team’s workflow and publishing.

5. Develop SEO friendly content

The success of online companies depends upon how easily users find them in search engines by searching for key phrases regarding their services and products.

If the content on your website is missing those key phrases, it will be hard for users to find your website and even harder for them to convert into customers.

In addition to being successful online, you have to create content that serves both the search engines and your visitors.

Here are some useful tips to creating SEO friendly content:

1. Target at least one keyword per page – If you want your page to be easily found by your users, target one keyword per page. It will be hard for you optimize your content if you target multiple keywords.
2. Include the main keyword in your web copy – A user who lands on your website through a search engine looks for the keyword that they were searching for in the search engine. To make a good impression, you must use that keyword on your webpage.
3. Use the exact term – Google has become more intelligent than before; they can smell the false pages. But Google still ranks those pages which match the user’s exact query.
4. Avoid too much keyword optimization – Remember you are writing for humans, not for machines. If you only focus on ranking and forget users, it will end up hurting your ranking. Google is committed to providing a great user experience to its users, and it hates false content.
5. Provide quality over quantity – Don’t only focus on creating a lot of content. Focus on creating quality content. Quality content ranks better in search results.

Read: How To Write Perfect SEO-Optimized Articles in WordPress

6. Get maximum benefits from your content

Creating a lot of content is required to boost up your content marketing campaign. But, creating quality content in huge amounts isn’t always easy.

This is especially true when you are working alone or have fewer resources than big brands.

So what do you do?

• Content repurposing.

It is the way to transform a single blog post into multiple other content forms such as infographics, SlideShares, podcast, video, etc.

Sound nice?

It is.

Why should you use content repurposing?

• Content repurposing is good for SEO.
• It helps to get new clients by targeting a new medium.
• It improves conversion rate.
• It improves website ranking in search results.

These benefits are why 60% of marketers reuse their content 2 -5 times.

What type of content should you recycle?

Here are 5 content repurposing practices you need to follow:

1. Repurpose your best performing content.
2. Break big blog posts into multiple small posts.
3. Compile your blog posts and tu them into an Ebook.
4. Convert text content into images such as slides or infographics.
5. Convert text content into video.

Content repurposing will ensure you get all you can from your content

Final Thoughts!

A successful content marketing campaign establishes a long-term, healthy relationship with existing and future clients by regularly delivering high-quality, relevant, and valuable information.

By applying the above-mentioned content marketing tips, you can build an impressive content marketing strategy that will make your business successful.

Now it’s your tu. Which content marketing tips are you going to use? Let me know in the Idea!

Plaing to buy a hosting for your WordPress blog or a website? Here is an exclusive discount coupon to save extra money on your Hosting bill.

Shopping for best web-hosting is always a tough job and to make it easier for you, I have suggested some of the best hostings for your blog here.

Hostgator is one of those hosting companies, which is there for long, and loved by millions of webmasters. It offers affordable shared hosting, and the unlimited resources help every entry level & mid-level blogger to get perfect hosting for their WordPress blog.

One thing which in particular I like about Hostgator is their excellent server quality. They also offer multiple ways to coect with support. Apart from support ticket & chat, you can always get in touch with them via phone. I prefer contacting them via Telephonic support, as it makes it faster to get hold of them. Moreover, when it comes to handling the load of a WordPress blog, Hostgator does the job pretty well.

Even in our Webhosting comparison, Hostgator stood out in many parameters. Along with usual shared hosting features, Hostgator offers free blog migration service, which indeed very helpful for those who are plaing to shift from free hosting or cheap shared hosting to reliable shared hosting.

Like every month, I’m sharing Hostgator discount coupon which will help you to save money when you buy hosting from Hostgator. Before I share this exclusive Hostgator maximum discount coupon for the month for June 2016, here are some of the notable features of Hostgator Baby plan:

• Unlimited hosting
• Unlimited bandwidth
• Unlimited storage
• Free primary domain renewal
• 24*7 tech support (Chat, Email, Phone, Twitter)
• Free Adwords Credit
• One clicks WordPress installation

Hostgator is compatible with the hosting requirement of the latest version of WordPress, so if you plaing to host a WordPress blog, Hostgator is an idle choice. Hostgator offers 3 shared hosting plan, and I suggest you to opt for Baby plan where you can host multiple websites, but if you are plaing to host only one WordPress blog, hatchling plan is ideal. Whenever I purchase Hostgator hosting, I opt for Baby plan as it allows unlimited domain hosting.

Hostgator monthly 30% discount coupon: ShoutMeLoud30

You can use coupon code “ShoutMeLoud30” to get a maximum hosting discount of 30% off on your total bill. This is very useful if you are shopping hosting for 1 or more years. Here is a screenshot of discount on hosting, when I applied coupon code: ShoutMeLoud30

Sign up for 30% discount ( COUPON: SHOUTMELOUD30)

Hostgator almost free hosting discount coupon: ShoutMeLoud

Here is another coupon code “ShoutMeLoud” which you can use to grab the first month hosting for only 1 cent. This is useful if you wish to try your hands on Web hosting before paying in full. Though if you plaing to use hosting for long, I would suggest buy hosting for one year and use above coupon.

Here is a screenshot of hosting discount using coupon: ShoutMeLoud

Sign up for 1 cent hosting (Coupon: ShoutMeLoud)

Hostgator also started domain service, but I would recommend you to buy the domain from somewhere else like Godaddy or Namecheap, as domains on Hostgator is costlier. Though Hostgator hosting is top class, and they will surprise you with their hardware quality.

I have created this video to help you understand; how to use the above coupon

Do let us know which Hostgator coupon code you used and if you are an existing customer of Hostgator, do let us know your views and feedback about their hosting quality.