Sort Your SEO On A Shoestring

**Some of the links in this post are affiliate links, meaning, at no additional cost to you, I will earn a commission if you choose to make a purchase.

Did you know that even with a little budget, your website may rank better in the results of search engines? However, you do not need to spend a lot of money each month in order to make significant progress in increasing the number of people who visit your website. So, what exactly is it that is stopping you? 

Contrary to common assumptions, search engine optimization (SEO) has the potential to be more cost-effective than the majority of other kinds of marketing, including pay-per-click advertisements and social media marketing. You need to have knowledge about everything in life; thus, let us begin with which SEO methods you can adopt without having to shell out a significant amount of money each month. If you then decide to take any of them further, hvac SEO services can give you further advice and guidance.

Image via Unsplash

Employ the use of Google My Business.

If you own a small company or a traditional storefront establishment, you should concentrate on increasing your visibility in your immediate area rather than making an effort to attract potential customers from other parts of the country. You may accomplish this most effectively by optimizing the page for your "Google My Business" account. This product, which was once known as Google Locations and is occasionally referred to as a Google Map listing, functions by displaying information about your company on the page that displays the results of a Google search.

Because of this, if anybody searches for terms that are associated with your company, they will see a listing for your company among the results that appear on the search page.

Include keywords in the right places

First, you will need to determine your keywords. Long-tail keywords should be the primary focus of your SEO efforts if you are working with a constrained budget. A phrase that is very particular to the requirements that your clients have is an example of a long-tail keyword.

Long-tail keywords have less rivalry since they are so precise; therefore, it is advisable to focus on them. While there is a lot of competition for keywords like "fitness instructor," there is less competition for long-tail keywords. This indicates that you should focus on a long-tail keyword such as "water fitness instructor in Arizona" rather than the keyword "fitness instructor".

After you have selected the specific long-tail keywords that you will concentrate on, the next step is to begin incorporating them into your website. You need to include these keywords in important parts of your website, such as the page names, URLs, and content.

Develop fresh content

It is essential to publish new material on a consistent basis if you want to improve the search engine rankings of your website. This is due to the fact that whenever new content is posted to your website, the web crawler used by Google will visit your website in order to index the new information. This indicates that Google is examining your website and recalculating how it ought to be ranked, which increases the likelihood that you will receive a high ranking.

In spite of this, the web crawler will not raise your site's score just due to the fact that you have included fresh material.

The material must not just be original but also of a high quality and relevant to the audience. Your site's ranking will improve according to the amount of material you publish that is helpful to users looking for the keywords you have chosen to focus on. You are in complete command with the help of this SEO technique.

If you are going to be the one creating the material, make sure you know how to offer the kind of stuff that people who frequent your website are looking for. You can gauge how popular your material is among your fans by using social media and email marketing, and you can also ask them what they want to see more of.

Pros and Cons of Outsourcing Marketing

**Some of the links in this post are affiliate links, meaning, at no additional cost to you, I will earn a commission if you choose to make a purchase.

There are three main options for marketing for any business. You can hire an in-house marketing team, you can make marketing a responsibility of one of your employees, or you can outsource and hire an external agency to help you with yours. Researching your options to figure out what could work for you is the best step to take before you finalize that decision. 

When you choose to outsource your marketing, it’s important to note that you don't have to outsource every single avenue. In fact, if you only wanted to get help with a white label SEO reseller, you can do that. Outsourcing your marketing and giving this part of your business over to someone else isn't always an easy step, especially if you prefer to have control! However, there are some pros and cons to outsourcing your marketing, and we’ve got them all listed for you below.

Image Source: Pexels

1. No more issues with human resources. When you choose to outsource to an agency or a consultant, you don't have them become an employee. In fact, you save yourself a lot of money and grief by not hiring someone permanently at all! Instead, you avoid vacation disputes, sick pay, long term leave and any issues with staff. 

2. You don't have to hire for long. Let’s say you have a particular project due on a certain date for a client. When you choose to outsource your marketing strategy, you aren't obligated to hire that person full time. In fact, you can choose to hire someone just a day or two at a time as you need them. The cost up front is easier, too.

3. You get specialist expertise. You can have a specialist working with you for the particular marketing help you need. If your business needs a specialist, you can find one by simply looking to outsource. 

4. You can closely monitor the agency. Whoever you outsource to, you can monitor them and learn of their history and which clients they have used in the past. If they’re a new company, there may not be enough information, though.

5. A con: you may have less face time. When you have a job to be done, you might worry that you don't get enough face to face time with the agency you hire to get the job done for you. It’s vital that you consider this if you prefer to have some semblance of control over the process.

6. Another con: you don't have someone in the office, too. If you need a heavy job done, then not having someone in the office with you can make it harder to manage the entire process from start to finish.

7. Is it right for you? The last thing to think about is whether you will be in or out of the loop with your marketing agency. You want to be involved in the conversation, adn that can take some time to figure out! Should you outsource? That’s the last decision that you have to make when it comes to your marketing.

Should You Pay To Promote Your Blog?

**Some of the links in this post are affiliate links, meaning, at no additional cost to you, I will earn a commission if you choose to make a purchase.

Pexels. CCO Licensed

Want to attract more readers to your blog? By promoting your blog, you can help to increase its visibility and reach new audiences. You can do this either by paying to promote your blog or by trying free promotional tricks.

In most cases, paying to promote your blog will get more effective results. However, if you’re on a tight budget and your blog isn’t monetized, you may find that it’s more sensible to take advantage of free marketing methods. This post outlines a few different promotional strategies - both paid and free - that could be worth considering. 

Ways to promote your blog that cost money

Boosted Facebook posts

Facebook is a great platform for sharing your blog posts with readers. Usually, when you share a post, it is only seen by your followers unless one of your followers chooses to share it. Boosting your Facebook posts allows them to be seen by people who don’t already follow your Facebook page. You can set various parameters to help you target the right people such as age, gender, location and interests. The amount you pay varies on how long you want to run your campaign and how many people you want to reach.

Paid SEO

SEO (search engine optimization) can encourage more people to find your blog through search engines. Using an SEO marketing service, you can increase your blog’s rankings by targeting specific keywords and using tricks like backlinking. SEO services can vary in price depending on how extensive you want your campaign to be. 

PPC advertising

PPC (pay-per-click) adverts can be another way to build traffic to your blog. You pay for the advert to display until a certain number of people have clicked on it. Google Ads is the most popular PPC platform - you can pay for your blog’s search listing to be displayed at the top of the rankings as an advert. 

Free ways to promote your blog

Social media posts

You can promote your blog for free simply by sharing posts via social media. Twitter can be a great platform for organically attracting new readers - by strategically using certain keywords and hashtags in your tweets whenever you share a post, you can encourage more people to stumble across your tweets and read your blog posts. This isn’t as effective as paid social media advertising, but it can still help you get readers.

DIY SEO

It’s possible to do some of your own SEO without paying an SEO company. By strategically using keywords in all of your posts, you can increase the chance of them ranking well on Google and Bing. This is not as effective as paying an SEO company, but can still help you get results if you’re on a tight budget.

Networking with other bloggers

A really great way to build readers is to network with fellow bloggers. By sharing, interacting and commenting on other bloggers’ posts, you can encourage them to check out your own blog. You could even consider coming up with cross-promotional strategies such as agreeing to regularly share another’s blog’s content in exchange for them doing the same for you. This allows you to share each others’ audiences. 

Making Effective Use of Social Media for Your Business

**Some of the links in this post are affiliate links, meaning, at no additional cost to you, I will earn a commission if you choose to make a purchase.

Running a business isn’t easy these days. There are countless different things you need to consider and you’ll end up spending a lot of time managing aspects of your business that you never expected. A great example of this would be social media. Nowadays, using social media platforms to your advantage is a common business responsibility, but it requires a lot more attention and work than you might think.

With billions of active social media users to attract, it’s become one of the best ways to grow your business. This is especially true when you’re on a budget and you’re looking for an inexpensive way to build brand awareness and develop stronger customer relationships. So if you’re looking to make more effective use of social media, here are a couple of tips to help you out.

Source: https://unsplash.com/photos/mr4JG4SYOF8 (CC0)

Make sure you have a plan for your social media usage

Businesses all use social media in different ways and for different purposes. Social media is great for day-to-day use and sharing your pictures and thoughts, but as a business, using social media is completely different and takes a couple of important considerations. As such, your presence on platforms such as Instagram and Twitter need to be calculated.

It’s a good idea to start with something simple such as choosing your handle. Normally, this is just your business’s name but there will be times where the name is taken or it’s too long to be used as a handle. Shortening your business’s name can be helpful here, but you need to take into consideration how you want to be referred to in conversations and online. Don’t think too hard here as the important thing is to just have some kind of presence. You can always change your handle in the future.

Next, you’ll want to start thinking about your objectives and goals with social media. What do you plan to achieve with a social media platform? Are you just looking to establish some kind of presence, or do you eventually want to hire a social media manager to help you engage with your audience, or do you just want to do the bare minimum and let your audience know whenever you release a new product? Every business has a different goal with social media and it’s vital to decide how far you want to take it.

Finally, you’ll want to do a bit of research into various different things. This can include researching your competition to see exactly how they’re using social media, but it also includes looking into social media automation to potentially reduce the costs of running your social media account. There are many different ways to make effective use of social media, and it all stems from your goals as a business and what you want to achieve with it.

Using the right platform for your business

It’s a good idea to look at the different platforms available so you know which one has the biggest chances of growing your business.

Platforms such as Facebook are great for general use and pretty much all businesses will have some kind of presence on the website. The audience is extremely varied and you have billions of users to attract to your business. However, you may also want to consider platforms such as Instagram if you’re a more creative-focused business.

Platforms like Instagram can be fantastic because they’re focused on visuals. It even comes with certain features that other platforms don’t have. As explained in this post at https://backlightblog.com/edit-hide-delete-instagram-comments, you can actually delete Instagram comments on your posts. This is something you can’t do on Twitter right now. However, Twitter does have other interesting features, such as locking replies to people you follow. Depending on how you want to interact and engage with your audience, it can be helpful to carefully choose a platform.

Remember to track your progress

It’s also a great idea to track your progress with the help of analytics and various metrics. This will give you an objective look at your social media presence and also give you some advice to assist in decision making. Most social media platforms give you access to various metrics, so this isn’t something you need to pay more for. However, it may be helpful to record a few of your own findings, such as when your audience is most active and the types of messages and posts that garner the most attention so you can replicate their engagement success in the future.

Are Usability Issues Holding Your Blog Back?

**Some of the links in this post are affiliate links, meaning, at no additional cost to you, I will earn a commission if you choose to make a purchase.

There are a few things that all successful blogs have in common. Good content, posted on a regular basis is obviously important. You need a fresh new angle on whatever subject it is that you write about too, so you can make yourself stand out. But one thing that people tend to overlook is the usability of those blogs. Most popular blogs are well designed and easy to use, meaning that visitors can quickly find content that they are interested in. If your blog usability isn’t great, that will put people off and it’s unlikely that they will become a regular reader. 

Pixabay CCO License

Getting subscribers is crucial if you want to turn your blog into a business and a well-designed blog that is easy to navigate will encourage more people to subscribe. If you think that usability issues might be holding your blog back, these are some of the best ways to fix them. 

Measure The User Experience 

Before you make any changes to your blog, you need to know what works and what doesn’t, so you should measure the user experience. Looking at the data about how visitors interact with your site, how long they stay on each page, and what the abandonment rate is, etc will help you understand which parts of your blog need work. Finding the right user experience metrics and kpis can be difficult and many people don’t know exactly what to look for when measuring the user experience on their blog. Simple things like page views, abandonment rate, and the number of new subscribers are a good place to start. It’s also worth using a website testing service so you can get more detailed opinions from users about the way that your blog functions. 

Streamline The Front Page 

If people land on the front page of your blog and are bombarded with information and pop-ups, they will be overwhelmed. Too much choice is a bad thing and often causes people to get stuck because they don’t know what to click on first. An overcrowded website also looks messy, making it harder for people to find relevant content. If you strip back your blog and just have a simple, stylish design on the front page with a few posts, a small section about you, and a search function, visitors will find it way easier to navigate. 

Prioritize Functionality Over Style 

It’s important that your blog design reflects you as a person and you want it to be unique, so your site stands out. However, it’s important that you always prioritize functionality over style. People come to expect a certain layout when they visit a website. Although there is flexibility, they expect to see headers and footers, a sidebar, a menu on the top, and a search function. Everybody immediately understands these basic elements and how to use them to navigate the website. It’s ok to be creative, but if you mess with the formula too much, people will be completely lost. 

It’s good to change the design of your blog every now and again to keep things fresh, but make sure that you always consider usability when you do. 

The Benefits Of Having Social Media As A Blogger

**Some of the links in this post are affiliate links, meaning, at no additional cost to you, I will earn a commission if you choose to make a purchase.

Social media helps to keep us all connected in this modern world. However, for those who have careers that are linked in with the online world or perhaps require them to network, social media can be a tool that can offer you more than just casual conversations between friends and family. With that being said, here are the benefits of having social media as a blogger.

Can You Turn A Blog Into A Business?

**Some of the links in this post are affiliate links, meaning, at no additional cost to you, I will earn a commission if you choose to make a purchase.

Source

Blogging has become one of the most popular projects online with millions of people writing about the things that interest them. However, over the last decade or so, there has been a serious rise in the number of people using blogging in order to earn a living and that's pretty understandable. After all, who wouldn't want to make a career out of talking about their passions and connecting with people? However, actually earning a living from a blog can often be a whole lot harder than a lot of people realize. With that in mind, here are some of the things that you can do to weather the challenges and turn a blog into a business.

Know your niche

One of the most important things to remember about blogging is that there are thousands upon thousands of other people out there doing exactly the same thing. Because of that, if you really want your blog to succeed you have to know exactly what your niche is. Once you know exactly what you want your blog to be then you're going to find it a whole lot easier to connect with an audience rather than trying to reach out to everyone and wasting a great deal of your time and energy.

Be consistent

Consistency is the key to really building an audience that is going to keep coming back to your blog time and time again. People like things that are familiar and if you're constantly changing up your blog's visual style or the kinds of content you're creating then people will find it offputting. The same goes for your upload schedule. You need to make sure that you've got an upload schedule that your audience can be sure of. If you decide to randomly go a couple of weeks without posting anything then there's a good chance that your audience is just going to forget about you.

Use the right resources

There are so many great resources out there to help you connect with audience members and really push your blog into being a bonafide business. However, you have to be sure that you're using the right resources. Otherwise, you could end up wasting time and money. From marketing resources like this: https://www.templafy.com/blog/how-many-of-these-outbound-sales-email-fundamentals-do-you-use/ to things like different social media accounts to connect with different kinds of people. If you're not willing to adjust your blog based on your audience then it's never going to succeed.

Of course, it's important to remember that, even if you follow this advice, running a blog can be a genuine challenge. You simply can't make a career out of blogging if you're only really willing to do it when you feel like it. There will be days when you just don't want to bother with your blog but whether or not you still keep at it is the real difference between doing it as a hobby and doing it as a career.

Enhance Your Blog's Image with These Visual Tips

**Some of the links in this post are affiliate links, meaning, at no additional cost to you, I will earn a commission if you choose to make a purchase.  *Contributed post.

Making your blog visually appealing is key to getting people to read it. If it looks boring, cluttered or out of date, it can put people off. Whether you write about your life or you try to offer informative posts about a specialist subject, your readers will be more likely to stick around if everything looks good. Don't worry if your blog isn't currently looking its best or you're just getting started with a new blog. You can create a beautiful blog that is pleasing to the eye and encourages people to keep reading. Here are some things you can do.

Four Smart Ways To Turn Your Blog Into A Business

**Some of the links in this post are affiliate links, meaning, at no additional cost to you, I will earn a commission if you choose to make a purchase.

Picture licensed under Creative Commons.

Can you make a mint blogging?

Motivate Yourself to Journal Daily

**Some of the links in this post are affiliate links, meaning, at no additional cost to you, I will earn a commission if you choose to make a purchase.

Motivate Yourself to Journal Daily

Knowing why you should journal is just the beginning; you then need to motivate yourself to keep up with it. It is generally recommended that you write in your journal every day but doing it on a regular basis is also helpful. Look at these easy ways to motivate yourself to keep writing in the journal.

Bella Inspired Grace Receives Blogger Recognition Award!

**Some of the links in this post are affiliate links, meaning, at no additional cost to you, I will earn a commission if you choose to make a purchase.

So You Want to Start a Blog? Blogging Platforms - A Simple Review

**Some of the links in this post are affiliate links, meaning, at no additional cost to you, I will earn a commission if you choose to make a purchase.

If you have ever read anything on starting a blog, you've likely heard of Blogger and Wordpress.  Blogger was one of the first platforms created for the blogging world in the sense we understand it today.  It was also acquired by Google in 2003.  In 2003, Wordpress also began.  The latest statistic is that Wordpress.org runs 30% of the world's websites including big companies like CNN, Fortune, NBC, and TechCrunch.

Sunshine Blogger Award - 2nd Nomination!

**Some of the links in this post are affiliate links, meaning, at no additional cost to you, I will earn a commission if you choose to make a purchase.

The Sunshine Blogger Award

I was nominated for this award for the second time by Halos and Life.  I started blogging in May and it is so humbling to have been nominated twice.  

My Top 10 Favorite Bloggers - That You Should Follow Too

**Some of the links in this post are affiliate links, meaning, at no additional cost to you, I will earn a commission if you choose to make a purchase.

First, the list in no particular order or rank:


My Passion Projects / @blog_mpp / @bloggerclan
Llama Punch / @llamapunch1103
Elle Goes Global / @ellegoesglobal
Phigella / @Phigella
Real Mom Blog / @realmomblogcom
My Best Friend Adeline / @joansenio1
Seaweed Kisses / @seaweedkisses
Travels with Thomosaurus / @travellingrex
Tales from Home / @talesfromhome
Hearthandmadeuk / @hearthandmadeuk

Now to the juicy part - why I think they are fantastic!

Sunshine Blogger Award - WOW!

**Some of the links in this post are affiliate links, meaning, at no additional cost to you, I will earn a commission if you choose to make a purchase.

Well, this was certainly a surprise! I've only been blogging a month and I was nominated for something. Jeepers Creepers! Amazing!