10 Ways to Grow Your Reddit Community

Reddit, an extremely popular social media site, can be used to promote your business and reach new customers. However, unlike other social media platforms, Reddit has its own culture and language that can be tricky to navigate at first. But don’t worry! Read on to learn the 10 tips you need to grow your Reddit community and connect with like-minded individuals online.

1) Write quality content

One of my favorite rules for blogging is: Say something new, say it well, and get it in front of as many eyeballs as possible. That's even more important when you're just starting out. The easiest way to build your community is to create content that your existing audience loves (and will want to share with their friends). And that means getting really good at one thing: creating awesome content.

2) Use the subreddits sidebar

When you’re creating a post on Reddit, one of your best bets for getting a lot of exposure is to use as many subreddits as possible. There are thousands of subreddits, each with its own audience that may or may not overlap with other subs. Browse them and see which ones seem like they might be relevant to your content. Adding several relevant ones to your post is an easy way to expose it to new eyes and make it more likely that someone will upvote it!

3) Post often

Posting frequently is one of your best opportunities for connecting with new people and growing your community. You can post as often as you want, but schedule in some time each day or week to put together a new post. This will make it easier for visitors to see something fresh on your site when they stop by, which is especially important if you're looking for that initial traction. As a rule of thumb, I recommend posting at least once every weekday and try not to wait more than seven days between posts.

4) Be real

It’s easy to be fake online. It’s hard not to have a persona and try to maintain it. By being real you establish trust with your audience and they grow as a result of that. Find out what makes them tick. What motivates them? Why do they continue coming back? How can you get more people like them? Once you know what they want, give it to them in a unique way that has never been done before and nobody will ever forget you.

5) Answer all questions in a timely manner

If someone asks you a question on a post, answer it! On Reddit, your answer will be voted up or down based on its quality. You want to get as many up votes as possible so people know that you're a helpful member of their community. The fastest way to grow your Reddit community is by showing other members that you're already part of their community and are there for them when they need help.

6) Create new posts or comment on old ones every day

Keeping your profile active is one of the easiest ways to grow a strong, vibrant community. There’s something magical about daily communication, even if it’s just a good morning post at 10 am EST. Keep your users engaged on a daily basis with questions and new posts that they can comment on and respond to. You might also find success by asking questions that you want answered. If you can get users involved in discussions every day or every week, you’ll foster an atmosphere of camaraderie that makes people feel like they are part of a real community instead of just checking in occasionally for updates.

7) Share other’s ideas as much as possible

There are so many great ideas on reddit. If you want your content to succeed and build community, share other people’s content and ideas as much as possible. When you share someone else’s link, that person gets a notification of your post that they can upvote or downvote. This results in karma and in turn popularity of your post/content. Do it all over reddit as often as possible! Think of it like word-of-mouth marketing where everyone is your friend who raves about your product (content). Don’t always take a self-serving approach – sharing others thoughts/ideas first will help spread awareness about what you have to offer second. You never know who might find something helpful or interesting for them through another redditor!

8) Become an active mod and curator of your subreddit.

The first thing you should do is establish a profile on reddit and make yourself an active moderator of your subreddit. Become friendly with your community. In some cases, if you do not already know what kind of subreddit that you want to moderate, it might be helpful for you to browse other subreddits for a bit. This will give you an idea of which type of community would fit well with your desired goals. You may also consider checking out /r/SubredditOfTheDay, which showcases one subreddit every day in order to show other redditors what a wide variety of subreddits are available. Many new moderators begin their journey by doing exactly that: discovering multiple subreddits and exploring them before deciding which one(s) they would like to moderate themselves.

9) Maintain friendly relationships with other subreddits.

If you’re really lucky, there are other subreddits that have similar goals as yours. That might be a great opportunity for cross-posting and collaboration. If you’re not so lucky, consider reaching out and building a relationship with another subreddit so that when you do have opportunities for cross-promotion or collaboration, you already have a mutually beneficial relationship in place. Regardless of whether your subreddit is linked with others or not, at least one other redditor needs to be active on your submission in order for it to take off. Cross posting can help bring attention from other redditors who wouldn’t normally see your submission and lead them to engage with you!

10) Engage, engage, engage!

People love reading posts from other people in similar situations as them. If you're a young attorney, for example, try writing about problems you see with law school or issues you've had that could have been solved by an attorney but weren't because of inexperience. Engaging with your target audience will increase your chances of being upvoted and help others. Always be sure to include a personal story in any post you create on reddit!

Conclusion

Whether you’re an individual trying to build your own brand or a company looking for new ways to get in front of potential customers, there are plenty of opportunities on reddit. Here are 10 tips for successfully promoting yourself on reddit and growing your community. Best of 

Read More

• Share

How to Increase Your Reddit Karma 10 Times Faster

If you’re like most redditors, you’ve probably tried to increase your karma many times over, but haven’t had any luck. Your first piece may have gotten some attention from fellow redditors, but after that, it seems as though your posts are falling on deaf ears. Fortunately, there are things you can do to increase your reddit karma in record time and make the whole process easier, too! This article will outline how to increase your karma 10 times faster by taking advantage of subreddits, voting patterns, and posting schedules.

Targeted Subreddits

Before posting something on reddit you should find a subreddit that your content is appropriate for. You can find subreddits using their subreddit search or using their advanced search. Both of these searches will allow you to narrow down subreddits by subscriber count, language, and subreddit type which makes it easier for you to fit in. The best way to make sure your post gets upvotes is by finding a high-traffic subreddit with people who are interested in what you have posted. If your post ends up in an unpopular or irrelevant subreddit then it will quickly fall off of everyone's radar and won't get any further attention from anyone.

Use Multiple Subreddits

When posting on Reddit, it’s a good idea to create accounts for multiple subreddits. This allows you to post in smaller communities which may have less subscribers but will be more engaged than larger subreddits. Also consider signing up for some of your favorite subreddits as well as some that are relevant to your interests and business. If you do decide to use multiple accounts, make sure you link them all to one account so that they share karma!

Post in These Time Periods

These Time Periods Are When Most People Sleep and Least People are Online : The best time of day to post on reddit is between 9pm and 12am, although you’ll also see a slight spike in activity between 2pm and 3pm. And when you post on reddit, don’t worry about proper timing because your post will automatically get pushed out at least three hours no matter what time you submit it. Just make sure that your content is relevant for that hour of day; for example, posting about grilling recipes during work hours probably won’t be well received by most redditors. Use these statistics wisely when formulating a content plan or deciding whether a particular topic will resonate with people at different times of day.

Crafting an Attention Grabbing Title

Whenever you submit a link on reddit, your title will be one of your first lines of defense against sinking into obscurity. Make sure it's succinct and grabs attention (but doesn't use ALL CAPS). Give people a reason to click on your post by including a question or an intriguing statement in your title. Quotes are also great ways to make your title stand out—as long as they aren't ripped from elsewhere! Be careful not to confuse quoting with plagiarism, though; you can usually get away with paraphrasing someone's comment by giving them credit in parentheses at end of quote.

Post a Meme

We know what you’re thinking: How can posting memes possibly help you get more karma? Truth is, it probably won’t. On a serious note, however, sharing images with your audience can increase engagement and foster discussion. In other words, if you share an image that sparks a debate about Islamophobia or sexism in society , for example, users might comment on your post. That's where your chance for increased karma comes in. Other redditors will be watching your user activity in order to upvote or downvote future posts—so as long as you continue posting good content, people will come back for more.

Read the comments before posting

Remember, on reddit—as in life—you get what you give. When you post a comment, it’s not only your text that can make or break your karma: The quality of your reply is just as important as what you have to say. When commenting on a thread, make sure to read through other comments first (we promise they won’t bite). Take note of which questions people have and try to answer one that hasn’t been addressed yet. Also take note of where people disagree and join in with a measured response rather than siding with an already established opinion.

Grab people’s attention quickly

This tip is going to sound like common sense, but I’ve seen many posts on reddit that fail to do exactly that. Readers don’t just jump onto any old post—they carefully examine each submission and decide whether or not it has a high chance of being relevant for them. If you want people to read your content, be sure that you open with something interesting and appealing. Try using an eye-catching title or an attention-grabbing question in your first paragraph; both will make readers more likely to click through (as long as you follow up with something worthwhile). Finally, make sure that your post includes a summary, even if it is brief.

Customize your header image as necessary

Upload a high-quality image of your choosing, but make sure it’s unique and professional so you look like a legitimate person. You can also upload an image that clearly identifies who you are. This helps engage with people in conversations who already know who you are. Write an introduction paragraph as necessary: If you have a large following on another platform or if you have been living under a rock for the past decade, chances are good that people will recognize your username right away. In some cases, it might be better not to hide your identity because readers will naturally flock toward recognizable names they already know and respect. If they don’t know who you are from somewhere else, then it makes sense to include an introduction paragraph at first that says something like Hi!

Conclusion

For a long time, I tried all sorts of different ways to increase my karma and my readership on reddit. While I did get better at it over time, it was never quite what I wanted. But then, one day while perusing reddit with my girlfriend (yes! she knows about reddit) she asked me a question that changed everything for me: Do you want people reading your posts, or do you want people upvoting your posts?

Read More

• Share

WordPress Theme for Ecommerce: How to Choose One

WordPress is a powerful tool, and the flexibility it offers to web developers means that you can create just about anything you want with it. That's especially true when it comes to creating an eCommerce website using WordPress as the platform. There are plenty of options for eCommerce themes out there, but knowing what to look for isn't always easy. We've made our own list of attributes and features that make eCommerce themes great and covered some of our favorite e-commerce themes from reputable sources.

1. Features To Look For In An Ecommerce Theme

Before choosing an eCommerce theme for your online store, it’s important to know what features you should look for. There are a lot of things to consider when choosing a theme, but here are the key features you should look for.

#1. Shopify compatibilityEcommerce websites should be compatible with Shopify by default. What’s even more important is Shopify’s free tier allows you to start selling your products to customers without any promotional efforts. In addition, Shopify’s theme ecosystem also includes many premium themes as well. It’s a good idea to start out by choosing themes that are compatible with Shopify and get a better idea of what you can sell as you work your way up to more advanced themes.

Shopify themes can range from $180 to $647 for a single website.

#2. Minimalistic look

Defining the look of your e-commerce website is crucial. It affects the speed and efficiency at which your website loads as well as the sales you receive. While you can always change the color and style of your layout, you should choose a theme that is clean and takes full advantage of the space that is available to serve your customers. This may also help brands avoid common design mistakes.

The look of your website should be consistent from start to finish. This includes just about every aspect of your inventory, from your theme page to your store details page. A store detail page can almost feel like an accessory to your theme. Getting a timeless look can help your customers become more loyal to your brand, while still looking nice at the same time. If you’re looking to sell a product with the most details, your theme may not be the best fit.

Light and dark are popular colors for e-commerce websites. There are also numerous options for themes that don’t include any colors at all. Download all your color choices as a PNG file. Then, use a tool like DesignCanvas to apply the colors to your website.

2. How To Choose The Right Theme For Your Business

The first step in branding your business is choosing a theme. What is your business about? What do you want to be known for? Once you’ve decided on a theme, you can start developing a brand strategy. A theme is a central idea, a concept, or a story for your business. Themes should link to your brand’s website — however you decide to publish it. Sometimes, website designers create the theme themselves or re-brand an existing theme. This article shows you how to create an e-commerce design according to a theme. You can then use this template to create your simple e-commerce store and kickstart your brand. Our step-by-step guide will walk you through creating your theme as well as a store demo.

When creating an eCommerce layout, first determine how your store will look. Read through this list of best-selling products to unlock ideas and information on how best to incorporate your products in your website. Alternatively, use the product images from product catalogs on tons of sites like Redbubble or Sellfy to get an idea of what your target audience is looking for. This is your brand’s opportunity to stand out most clearly.

When someone visits your store, they could see lots of different things — videos, product photography, product pinning, product descriptions, product information, and a shopping cart interface. All of these aspects contribute to a well-designed shopping cart experience and the overall eCommerce experience. APIs like WooCommerce makes it easy to incorporate these functions into your theme.

A cart shouldn’t just sit there. The user should be able to jump in and make changes to their cart without leaving your page. Check out this example of WooCommerce’s cart helper:

A good eCommerce theme should have seamless integration with Commerce. The main differences between WooCommerce and any other e-commerce platform may be the options you have for theme development, the speed of the site’s loading speed, and the tools available for advanced customization.

3. Automated Upsell Software

Upselling is the art of encouraging customers to purchase more expensive items. It is ultimately the difference between a $100 purchase and a $200 purchase. Automated upsell software is the easiest way to ensure you are upselling your products to your customers.

There are a few ways you can do that: You can add an upsell slider or a dynamic widget to your display, select your existing products to display, link existing products to offer shipping discounts, and more.

It’s also important to keep in mind that every eCommerce website is different. Some may require a steady stream of traffic while others may benefit from dishing out one or two coupon codes a week (or all of the time). Previous performance doesn’t necessarily mean future results (of course, they do sometimes), but keeping things in perspective is always important.

Takeaway: Use more than a simple stock photo or attractive template for your Upsell centers. Choose one that fits your brand and persona.

With better SEO, targeted marketing, and more, ranking on the first page of search results may be a bit less of a grind for newer online stores. A supercharged theme engine can do this, but you have to know exactly what to do to get your site to look its best in the first place.

For example, WordPress provides SEO settings and Advanced Settings for WordPress that provide users with a lot of granular customization. While these are useful, knowing the specifics will help your site stand out among its competition. WordPress SEO Analyzer can help you get a basic idea of what lands your page in the first few results for common keywords, allowing you to customize your theme to perform better.

The following attributes and features help make an e-commerce theme appealing:

It’s critical that you select a theme that is SEO optimized for your website and device to ensure you’re getting the best results possible.

4. How to Make Your Site Mobile Friendly

If you're running a business, then you need to make sure your site is mobile-friendly. According to Google, 52% of people use their smartphones to access the internet, and that number is growing. That doesn’t mean that people need websites that look and perform poorly on mobile devices. You can design a content-first site that seems amazing, but if it doesn’t seamlessly work on smaller displays, then you’ll lose good advertising revenue.

For most of us, businesses are part of our daily lives, but that doesn’t mean that everything on a site needs to look like information. Consumers expect to find functionality and information right where they are looking, at the top of the search results page, and they expect it to be called something specific. This makes it important to define your site’s look and feel.

To that end, most websites follow very closely the SEO best practices, and they should have titles, meta descriptions, and keywords in them. If your site has keywords in it, you should add them to the title, as well as the description and meta description. Google will know if your site isn’t SEO optimized if these pieces are all the same.

Even gold pages, which have impressive rankings of 1,000 to 5,000, get lots of traffic because users know that a lot of content on a site has a higher chance of being of interest to them. This is known as “user relevancy,” and it’s a feature Google most closely looks for because it helps maintain the outcome’s fairness in the search for information.

Similarly, ensure that the title of the page is enticing and useful to users. Something that might work great for Google on desktop, but might not work as well on devices with smaller screens, might not look so good on a photo or video page, for example. One of the main reasons people turn to search engines to find information is due to over-saturation.

5. How To Create Product Categories In WordPress

To create categories, go to Products -> Categories. A page will open that will allow you to create new categories. First, enter a name for the category and then press Add New Category.

Once the category is created, you can go to the Price Details page and input your product's total price. Then go to Price Details and select the corresponding category.

There are two ways in which you can add products to your categories:

Adding products to categories is very similar to what you did with Products. You might notice that the added products are listed based on the category they belong to, not based on the product itself. This is called product linking, and you can enable/disable it as desired.

The WordPress.org blog contains more information on product linking and explains what types of products you can link to your products.

The value of an eCommerce theme is truly unique, but having it work for you is easy. It boils down to three major factors: the fonts used, the corresponding colors, and the images you place inside the categories. Take the time to optimize your theme by following some of the tips below.

It’s not easy to design killer themes without help from experts; however, there are a lot of resources out there that provide some valuable help. There are plenty of people available on WordPress.org who can provide you with design resources like style guides and coding practices. Short of using their official templates and assets, there are only a few resources that are out of their control. So how can you bring some quality into your business without paying a lot for professional help?

Luckily for us, we can also leverage the help of our favorite developers. Simply put, if you have a brilliant and unique theme, then the same can be said for your e-commerce website.

Conclusion

 Choosing the right eCommerce WordPress themes can be tricky, but there are plenty of resources you can use to find one that fits your business perfectly.

Read More

• Share

5 WordPress Plugins to Enhance Your SEO and Increase Traffic

One of the most important factors in having a successful website is ranking highly in search engines. However, with more and more people competing for a top spot on Google, it can be hard to get noticed. One way you can ensure that your site ranks highly is to install some good WordPress plugins. We've put together a list of 5 great plugins which are sure to help you out!

1. Yoast SEO

Yoast SEO is a WordPress plugin that helps you with your SEO. It tells you if you’re using the right keywords and can also optimize your title tags and meta descriptions. This is useful for getting traffic to your website.

Buy Linktree is one of the most important plugins to have installed on your website. It’s a free plugin and will add valuable links to your site, increasing its SEO.

Desktop Spider is a relatively new plugin that is optimized for site speed. It displays site speed in real-time and has options for you to include a grid on your site.

Yoast SEO is also a powerful plugin that can give you an edge over the competition.

There are also lots of plugins such as Yoast Content Suite, Yoast SEO Pro, Yoast SEO Multiple Caveats, Yoast-Slurp, and plenty more. Just google your keywords to see which plugins you should install on your WordPress website.

Before you get started, ensure your site is 100% optimized for SEO! A site that is well-optimized becomes easier to index by search engines and is seen by more searchers and leads.

We hope that this plugin list has provided you with some needs of your own to help improve your website’s SEO and make it more visible.

2. All in One SEO Pack

All in One SEO Pack is a WordPress plugin that makes it easy to optimize your website for search engines. It includes several great features, like the option to optimize your titles and meta descriptions, and a built-in XML sitemap generator.

Behind the organization name is a cool new feature, SEORanko, that’s rolling out to more plugins in the near future, so make sure to check it out and try it out for yourself. On the organization page, you can also find a few usage instructions. But not all functions are implemented neatly. I often had to completely redo titles and descriptions, as well as the whole hover effect and the whole link builder. Keep that in mind, because this is definitely one for advanced users.

Scroll down to the bottom and you’ll find a handy FAQ. A lot of users complained about the lack of or slow response with regard to loading various AJAX features. However, they all seemed to have some variation of the same complaints. Oh well. Content creators will no doubt have plenty of fun with this plugin. It’ll surely simplify things for both you and Google, especially in the future when AJAX and all that jazz is around again.

A lot of WordPress plugins aim to make their plugins smarter. They divide the code base into logical components, and each component can now check if it needs to load before or after another plugin. Great for large codebases.

However, an issue one solved a lot of trouble: not only the released plugin developers, but the eventual users also complained about plugin incompatibilities. This plugin fixes many issues, such as a list of compatible plugins, filtering by compatibility, and more. Also included is native support for adding compatibility libraries, so you can integrate new ones easily and quickly.

Many developers are becoming more and more comfortable with using JavaScript libraries instead of relying on a third-party codebase. This is especially true if you’re a freelancer or an education-led team.

3. Autoptimize

Autoptimize is a script that can be used on your website to automatically optimize your images. After you upload an image, it will run several tests on the image to ensure that it is being optimized correctly. If it isn't, the script will then automatically optimize your image for you.

iClip is a fantastic WordPress plugin that is extremely useful when shooting video or when you want a seamless camera experience. With iClip, you can add your preferred clip to your videos or take a picture and convert it to a video. It's a simple and elegant plugin that does exactly what it says it does.

 Bookmarklets are a wonderful way for front-end developers to include extra information in WordPress posts and pages. You can use them to add product links, contact details, donate links, stats, and other such information that would probably be taken advantage of. As an added benefit, your users can click these bookmarklets on any page and the bookmark will open up a popup with extra information about the said page.

 Be sure to check out the 

WordPress SEO plugin includes a list of keywords that you can use on your site. Utilizing these keywords can increase the visibility of your site in Google and help you to get some of those external backlinks you are seeking.

Lemon is a no-nonsense WordPress plugin that has loads of features for your site to really kick on and make sure that Google is bringing you the right traffic. The rules that Lemon enforces are pretty straightforward:

Lemon sets the right Mozscape cache stats

It prevents pages that contain "not found" Meta Information from being crawled

It prevents pages from being crawled where the meta Alt tag contains "javascript"

It prevents pages that contain an image file with the meta Alt tag containing "png" from being crawled

It prevents pages from being crawled where the Meta Robots tag contains "Not Set"

Lemon will also add extra details to any page that is included in a sitemap.

4. HTML5 Tags and Semantic Markup

HTML5 is the fifth iteration of the HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) standard. The latest version of the HTML standard includes new tags for audio and video, as well as a new tag for drawing graphics and images. HTML5 is also designed to be more semantic.

It means that HTML5 can now be used for much more than just web pages. It can also be used for emails, blog posts, videos, and even apps.

This piece of HTML provides the basic structure for an HTML document. In the past, all these structures had the same structure. A head tag was used to contain information about the main content of the page. A body tag contained the layout instructions for the other elements of the page. An aside tag was used to separate a portion of the page’s content for display only.

With the introduction of HTML5, a new tag was added which could be used to draw simple shapes and animated graphics. This new tag is called the Canvas. This can be a core element of a website as it allows illustration of anything we desire.

A JavaScript library called Leaflet was also added, as a way to visualize and manipulate data.

Of course, there are a plethora of other HTML5 features that you could use to provide rich and interactive experiences. If you’re looking to add some interesting visuals to your site, you can utilize HTML5 video. This is a transitional tag that still requires further specification in terms of its high-quality video support. The other HTML5 tags that are worth covering are and.

WordPress has plugins that can utilize many of these new HTML5 features. Learning how to install the right plugin or adjusting your existing plugins can help you rank quickly on Google. A good website plugin will not only enhance a site’s SEO ranking but can also influence its rank on other search engines as well.

5. WP Super Cache

I really like WP Super Cache because it’s a simple plugin that can save you a lot of time and server space. It compresses the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files that make up your site so that the site loads faster. This plugin is free and can be found in the WordPress plugin directory.The zoom plugin has various options for layout and styling. The more options you have for your layout and styling, the better, which is why we included it on this list of best WordPress plugins! It might be a bit time-consuming to update your theme every few months when changes are made to the code, and with this plugin, you won’t need to do that!

Optimize Images is an all-in-one plugin that helps you optimize everything about your images. It has thumbnails to quickly find images and also the ability to rotate, crop, and resize images. It’s also widget-based which makes it easy to use. It’ll be easy for you to find the best images for your site based on what sites and pages rank for certain keywords. The plugin is also SEO-friendly and allows you to optimize images that are relevant to your niche.

A lot of people make the mistake of relying on Google’s own crawlers for their website’s SEO. They’ll try to optimize the HTML for SEO and the rest of the site won’t do so well. This plugin makes it easy for Google to crawl your website and index to Page One.

RRO is a tool that is going to come in very handy. With the tool, you’re going to be able to see what page rank your pages are getting and also see what makes a page clickable to rank on search engines. The more important the keyword from your website, the more valuable the RRO report will be. The RRO reports serve two main purposes. They’ll help rank your website better in search engines by listing the top pages, which is an indirect way of ranking your page.

Conclusion

The world of SEO is constantly changing and evolving, so you need to stay on top of it if you want to remain successful. These 5 plugins are great ways to help you do just that!

Read More

• Share

How to Start an E-commerce Business with WordPress in 5 Steps

If you're planning to start a business, one of the most important decisions you should make is what platform to use for your website. The best platform for you will depend on your goals and budget. For those just starting out, a platform like WordPress is going to be your best bet because it's cheap and easy to set up. For those who are a bit more tech-savvy, you can even go with building your own website using a platform like WordPress. In this article, we'll go over how to start an e-commerce business with WordPress in six steps.

1. What is e-commerce?

E-commerce is buying and selling products and services over the internet. E-commerce grew from a $1 billion industry in 1995 to a $4 trillion industry in 2016 and is projected to reach $8 trillion by 2021.

Why exactly is it important to start an e-commerce business?

If you want to buy products online, then people can see exactly what you’re selling, right down to the size and shape of each product. The best part about it is, it can be harder to find products you’re looking for because the online community is so big, but you can make it easier by using social media. Communities websites like Facebook, Etsy, and Upwork allow you to find the people looking for similar products as well as discover new products from people in your niche.

How can you use an e-commerce platform?

If you serve a single person, you can make money selling Amazon gift cards on your website. If you sell a lot of products at once, you can create one big sale with your products all appearing on one page and one payment page. Creating multiple sales at once can take some time but it’s way easier than starting with one big sale. For more ideas, check out 7e-commerce marketing tips.

What does it cost to start selling online?

Selling online doesn’t have to cost a huge amount of money. You can even set up a simple Cpanel and continue making money from your website, all without spending a dime upfront. For a simple e-commerce business, WordPress is a lot cheaper and easier to set up than setting up a website with a CMS like Shopify.

In this article, you’ll learn the following:

If you’re ready, sign up for my free “How To Sell Online for Beginners” course which will guide you through the entire process of starting your own online store.

2. Why choose WordPress?

If you’re looking to start a blog, you’ve likely heard the name WordPress, but you might not know why it’s so popular. Here are a few reasons why WordPress is the go-to blogging platform: 1) It’s easy to use. 2) It’s free. 3) It’s customizable. When selling your products and services, you’ll probably need to use a storefront or website to sell your products and services. Platforms like Squarespace make building websites easier and faster, and you can use it to sell things like apparel, art, beauty products, and more.

Part of the reason blogging platforms are so popular is that you can use them to sell your products and services without spending a dime. Of course, there are ways to make money with your website, but they’re less likely to be successful if you use a WordPress-based platform.

The main advantage to using WordPress as your e-commerce platform is the fact that it’s more affordable. A website with 10 articles on it can easily cost between $20 and $50. WordPress, however, costs just $35 for a basic website and creates an unlimited number of posts and pages as long as there is an internet connection. For the writers and entrepreneurs out there, this is a steal.

With more and more writer’s-platforms popping up and becoming more popular, it’s becoming more and more difficult to decide which one to pick. Platforms like WriterUniverse allow writers to have a space to publish their work and avoid the cost and difficulty of setting up a website. With more and more blog beginners opting for the platform over the website as their main source of income, it’s becoming more and more appealing.

If you’re looking to start an online business, making a decision on which platform is right for you can be incredibly difficult. You have such a wide range of options and determine which is best based on your budget, your goals, and your needs.

3. What do you need to get started on WordPress?

You need a web hosting service and a domain name. There are lots of different places to host your site, and if you’re self-hosting your site, you need to pick a place that can provide a platform for WordPress.All hosting services provide a website and free domains, but only some provide content and products are for your store. If you want a store and content area, you will need a web hosting service.

“WordPress is an e-commerce platform that allows you to sell anything online. Your products or services, whether physical goods or digital files, are all available for sale through WordPress’ many storefronts, or content areas, through which you can display and sell them directly, or sell in bundles that include just those storefronts and areas.” — ThemeForest

Before you can get started building out your eCommerce store, you need to get your website up and running. There are so many tools you can use to plan and build a website, but the two that are free are Wix and Squarespace.

“Since we’re starting from scratch, a brand-new website is pretty straightforward. Wix and Squarespace both have free plans, but you will probably need to pay for a lot more advanced features and customization. If someone were to search for a logo, for example, you would need to provide a large number of high-quality images, columns, animations, and gradients.” — ThemeForest

With the tools you have available today, you don’t need to spend a tremendous amount of time and resources learning how to build a website. All you need to do is focus on getting a professional-looking and performing website that explains what you do and who you are.

While developers can create for a range of platforms by using a CMS, theme, and design system, such as WooCommerce, they are powered by a CMS that isn’t beginner-friendly.

4. How to set up your store on WordPress

When it comes to setting up your site, there are two main things you’ll need to do: 1) Set up your shopping cart. 2) Set up your store. Setting up your store can be a little tricky since there are a few things you’ll need to consider. To start off, you have to make sure your cart is up-to-date with all the latest products. Once you have everything set up, you can add in products.

When it comes to products, one thing to keep in mind is different products have different discounts. So, for example, if you sell candles, a particular sale might be for 10%, while others might only be two%. So, make sure to keep your prices low enough for your customers to buy more than one product. Now that you have everything set up, you can apply for your hosting account.

If you’re using WordPress for the first time or currently looking for a platform to sell your products, you have a few options, depending on what you need. For a simple side hustle, we recommend using the free install. The pre-built WordPress themes won’t take up much space or CPU, so it won’t slow down your website or slow down your website’s performance.

Once you have set everything up, you can add products and set up your cart. Take a look at your cart to make sure you and your customers have everything they need. Verify that your site is responsive and optimized for mobile devices. If you have an email list, make sure you create a landing page for your store with easy-to-read instructions. Finally, make sure you have everything set up for your first order.

Your first order will be an email, and you can use your checkout page to collect the information you need about the order. After placing your order, update your shipping charges, confirm payment, and optimize your shipping options for quicker delivery.

One of the biggest benefits of using WordPress versus setting up your own website is the flexibility it offers.

5. How to make your store look professional

Your store doesn’t have to be expensive or fancy to look professional. You can spend a few hundred dollars on an expert to do a visual merchandising makeover, or you can spend a few hours on your own making the store look like you know what you’re doing. We will not be doing any of that. For just over seven bucks to start a store using WordPress, you can design the look of your store from scratch using a platform called Madefire. This free-to-use tool helps you to create your store design professional-looking, to-the-letter fonts that fit with your brand, and everything in between. It costs no money to have a professionally designed store and it will still take less than a day to put together a good-looking store.

If you still need help deciding what you need before you even start, check out our article on the different types of plugins and themes you can use for your store. To get you started, we are only going to cover what we personally use for making our store look great:

Photos and video are truly what separates the good from the great. So, you need to equip your store with great photos and videos to entice shoppers to come in. If you don’t really have many photos you can still invest in a few premium stock photos. It’s important to try and find the shots that actually look real and aren’t inflated due to brightness. We use Unsplash from a site called Unsplash. They’ve got over 16 million photos available so finding a few will cover all your bases.

For video, you will need both video thumbnails and finished videos of your store. Just because a site has a mobile version doesn’t mean they don’t have normal quality thumbnails and finished videos available. I keep an incredibly simple library on my computer of thumbnails and videos. I grab any that have a short description of what the video is about.

Conclusion:

If you're thinking about starting an e-commerce business, then WordPress is a great place to start. It doesn't cost anything upfront or requires lots of technical knowledge and it's easy to do basic SEO for more exposure.

Read More

• Share

The 5 Best WordPress Plugins: Invaluable for Your Business Blog

There's no denying that a blog is one of the most effective ways to market and grow your business online. If you're looking to start a new blog or looking to move your business' current blog into a more professional space, the first step you'll need to take is sorting through the many WordPress plugins available. Finding the best plugins for your specific business can be difficult — there are literally thousands of them! Use this list as a launching point and you'll have everything you need to succeed!

1. Top 7 WordPress plugins for business blog

These are the best WordPress plugins for business blogs and for creating your own business website. 

1. Yoast SEO is a plugin that helps you optimize your WordPress blog for search engines like Google. If you want to know more about its capabilities, you can read 10 Ways to Increase Your Blog Traffic, How to Build Link Popularity & Influence Google, and 35 Ways to Increase Your Blog's Rankings. 

2. Envato Marketplace (www.envato.com/) If, like 97% of people, you're a marketer, you need a WordPress theme. And if you're a marketer who needs to earn leads through social media, you need Instagram. And if you need all of that and more, you need Envato Marketplace. They aren't perfect by any means but if you want this for your site, I'd recommend getting it. 

3. EmailOctopus (www.emailupgrade.net/) EmailOctopus is a WordPress plug-in that allows you to easily link directly to your competitor's email when you share a link on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Reddit, and dozens more social platforms. It's an "internal link exchange arbitrage machine." And don't you worry, if you change the referral URL to a link to your competitor, it won't show in Open Site Explorer. 

4. MentionStub (www.mentionstub.com/) MentionStub is a plugin for WordPress that makes it super easy for you to publish topics and create topical lists with Google. 

5. WordPress SEO (www.wordpress.org/plugins/) WordPress SEO is a lightweight, fast, and easy-to-use mobile SEO plugin. 

6. Gravity Forms (www.gravityforms.com/) If you work with leads (online or offline), you'll need a contact form plugin. Gravity Forms is probably the best-known option on this list. 

7. Kiss Metrics (www.kissmetrics.com/) If you have a CRM, you'll probably need a plugin to measure sales. People typically use apps like.

This is a great list of WordPress plugins that are free, and some of the more affordable ones can make a big impact. Remember, you'll quickly become overwhelmed with all the plugins out there, so don't worry.

2. What are the best WordPress SEO plugins on the market?

Yoast is the leading WordPress SEO plugin on the market and the one that I personally use on all of my sites. It’s the best overall tool for SEO on WordPress, and it’s incredibly easy to use. All you have to do is install it, enter some information about your site, and you’re good to go. If you don’t know what Yoast is all about, here’s an introduction and overview of the plugin!

WordPress SEO is important for two main reasons: It helps you rank higher on search engine result pages (SERPs), and with Google aware of how you rank, it can potentially influence and steer their algorithm in your favor. Definitely one of the most widely-used and valuable plugins!

As a bonus, it won’t cost you an arm and a leg to integrate with Yoast, meaning you don’t even have to pay for it.

WordPress Shortcodes are super useful when it comes to saving time and making editing your blog posts and pages a breeze. WordPress Shortcodes are often referred to as WYSIWYG scripts and work in place of traditional HTML tags. This enables you to create complex page structure while still retaining SEO best practices. For our purposes, the most important aspect of WordPress Shortcodes is that they allow you to include any number of media elements on a page, including images.

To gain even greater benefit from WordPress Shorts, we need to get more specific. Media are something that you may include on your page, but you only display one of them at a time. This means you can add multiple media to your page without needing to place the same media for multiple pages. This saves time and is, therefore, a great optimization strategy when writing.

The benefit of using a WordPress plugin like Yoast to format your page is it applies your writing rules to every media element in your post and page.

3. What are the top WordPress security plugins to keep your website safe?

There are a lot of WordPress security plugins out there, like WordFence, Sucuri, or iThemes Security, and it can be hard to find the one that works best for your website. It's vital for every WordPress user to make sure their site is secured and protected against hackers.

4. How do you choose a plugin that will work for your specific blog?

One of the most important things to do when choosing a plugin is to make sure that it’s well coded. There are a lot of poorly coded plugins out there, and they’re usually created by people who don’t really understand how WordPress works. When choosing a plugin, make sure you do some research on the team or person who created it. You can always review the WordPress.org Codex, but it can be difficult to successfully research a plugin if you’ve never used WordPress in the past.

As I write this, there are multiple well-designed WordPress plugins that help you create your own landing pages, such as Yoast SEO and Page Tools by Site11.

Yoast is a plugin that uses a whole-domain approach when it comes to site optimization. Instead of having to weigh the theme, Yoast analyzes every page within your domain. This helps optimize your page for SEO, ensuring that your site’s sitemap ranks highly for keywords.

Yoast SEO is one of the most popular plugins for WordPress because it’s easy to use. It can help improve a website’s Google ranking by letting you a whole-domain approach for keyword research.

Yoast’s signature feature is its SEO Score feature. It allows you to enter keywords into your menu. It then analyzes the content within your main page to determine the best keywords to add to the top of your page.

After adding keywords to your page, you can see a graph that represents how well your page performs on average. As you can see, some pages perform better than others, but it gives you a good idea of what to target, ensuring that you’re not ranking lower than you need to be.

Page Tools by Site11 is also an easy plugin to use, adding SEO to your existing website is a quick process. All you need is a few lines of code!

This is one of the most popular plugins of 2018 for both website builders and personal blogs, W3Schools is an SEO powerhouse when it comes to landing pages.

W3Schools helps users with blog design, domain authority, SEO, and more.

5. How can you customize your blog with free plugins?

There are so many free plugins out there that allow you to customize your blog. One of the best is WP Super Cache, which speeds up your site’s load times and helps prevent it from going down when you have a ton of traffic. Other plugins you might want to consider are Yoast SEO and All in One SEO Pack.

If you have a professional or business site, you’ll also want to ensure your theme has everything you need. Leave it to ThemeForest to have a wide range of officially-licensed themes to choose from. When it comes to an SEO plugin, All in One SEO is rather pricey and requires some upgrading before you can get your head around its workings, but it can definitely speed up your website’s search engine visibility. Yoast helped the blogging community identify many mistakes online marketers make and have a complicated algorithm, but for most people, it’s still worth investing in.

Flat design can be all over the place, especially in the blogging world. There is plenty of free and premium grid, rector work-from-home options, but for our purposes here, we’ll look at free grids. ConversionXL does a monthly free theme update that includes a new grid system and icon displays. If you’re looking for a huge collection of themes, they have options to have it all.

There are loads of free stock photo sites online. Pick out a few and you’ll be pleasantly surprised with the variety you find. Pinterest is a great option if you use images to promote your brand or blog, and if your images are high-quality and well-articulated, you may not have to pay for ad space — Pinterest pays for images used in pins to be shown when someone hovers over a user’s board!

Conclusion

Creating a great landing page is more than just good copy and good formatting. It’s about getting the right keywords, picking a page type, selecting the right template, and much more! Each time you publish something online, you’ll need to fix up a few things so it looks its best online.

Read More

• Share

5 Best WordPress Plugins for Your E-commerce Site

WordPress is the most popular platform among e-commerce websites, making it a great choice for anyone looking to set up an online store. But with so many plugins to choose from, how do you know which ones will take your site to the next level? For five high-quality plugins that have stood the test of time and proven their worth over years of use, see this article.

1. Wecart Pro

We care Pro is a responsive e-commerce theme with clean typography. It is suitable for all kinds of online shops. It was built with Bootstrap. Our cart Pro also supports WooCommerce and bbPress.

Hostile Budget allows you to add a shopping basket to your website. The Admin panel allows you to create:

The plugin allows you to upload your own image, but you have to credit the merchant for the design. It comes with a lot of helpful features:

The Best Offer: Best Deals is a plugin aimed specifically at converting customers at the back-end. You can create offers, alerts, history, and more. Most importantly, all payments are handled through your own payment gateway — Stripe. You can even use this plugin to kick-off Shopping Cart campaigns in your store. This plugin comes with:

WordPress SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is one of the most crucial factors if you intend to rank on Google; optimizing your site gives you an edge over competitors who haven’t taken the necessary measures. Trustworthy and highly optimized sites give your site a significant boost in terms of SEO.

A fast and lightweight theme, it’s suitable for blogs, Medium.com, and eCommerce websites. To get started, install the SEO by Yoast plugin:

Read The Full Review on Page Six.

easy cart is a responsive cart plugin that allows you to create individual cart items or to create a shopping cart with multiple products.

Easycare comes with several useful features:

compatible with WooCommerce 3.5 and beyond

All your inventory can be displayed side by side so you don’t have to cram items into a single space.

substack.com is an SEO-friendly and visually appealing website generator. It comes with a wide range of pre-built websites and templates, including Medium.com, Substack, and many more.

wp-content is a responsive WordPress theme for creating blogs, shops, product catalogs, restaurants, and more.

2. WooCommerce

WooCommerce is a WordPress plugin that allows you to sell products and services directly on your site. It’s one of the most popular e-commerce platforms on the internet, and it’s free! WooCommerce works seamlessly with WordPress and you’ll be able to create a fully functioning store with a few simple clicks.

If you’ve decided to set up an online store from scratch, then setting up WooCommerce can be very intimidating. However, it’s actually quite straightforward and any newbie will be able to navigate its abundant features without too much trouble. Most of the time, the only thing you’ll have to do is select your products, set up pricing, and configure shipping. It’s worth pointing out that WooCommerce works with the vast majority of products and services that you can think of. WooCommerce stores are versatile and can work with almost any item you can think of. Because of its ultralow price tag, we’re covering WooCommerce as a plugin rather than a standalone platform. The following five WooCommerce plugins are what we recommend for flexible online store setups.

Gumby is a WordPress plugin that helps you build cart slides with ease. It lets you alter the width of your checkout page to create loads of space for your products. The plugin also provides an advanced setting that lets you automatically slide the images from your posts so they make a smooth transition to your care. With enough customizable features, this plugin can be a game-changer for any e-commerce platform.

Gumby is the best plugin for WooCommerce, so there’s no need to spend extra money on something else. However, you should mention that if you need freelancing advice then give Sapiens a look.

The install process of WooCommerce manually is quite time-consuming, but creating a cart from scratch is a piece of cake with Yoast SEO. Yoast SEO makes creating a perfect-looking and working SEO-friendly site easy, making it productivity-boosting and search engine optimized.

Yoast is content and SEO-focused plugin that can be used to optimize your site for search engines.

3. Google Analytics by Yoast

When you first install your WordPress website, the first plugin you should install is Yoast’s WordPress SEO plugin. Yoast has a lot of great features for helping you optimize your site for search engines. The first thing you should do when you install the plugin is enabled Yoast’s Google Analytics by Yoast plugin. This will automatically use Analytics to show you how many people are visiting your site and which pages are their most popular. Analytics works best in desktop applications, so make sure to add it to the list of your installed plugins in your WordPress dashboard.

Next, install the Jetpack plugin. Using Jetpack is pretty straightforward; simply install it in your plugins folder. You’ll see the plugin automatically install when you load your site.

If you are looking to make your content discoverable by search engines, you’ll need to use Yoast SEO plugin.

WordPress SEO is essential for anyone running a retail or e-commerce store.

Another plugin developers love is WordPress SEO Pro. This plugin helps users find similar-sounding content online, often called backlinking, and it was developed specifically for WordPress. It makes it easy for developers to include links to relevant content within their WordPress websites.

By using Yoast, you can plug in the Google Optimise plugin for extra search engine rankings. Yoast SEO Pro and WordPress SEO Pro will do keyword research and help optimize your site for fast loading speeds.

Freelance writers will appreciate having a WordPress blog, as it allows people to connect and follow your work. From day one, consider hosting it on a premium hosting platform. However, be careful not to overspend as not all platforms cater to all styles of websites.

Try out all the best peruse this list of features for writers to determine which growing WordPress CMS suits your needs. The AllTheBest website boasts several features that assist with SEO, making it a great place to start if you’re not ready to invest in expensive hosting.

WordPress SEO is also vital if you want to improve your ranking in Google search results.

4. WordPress SEO by Yoast

WordPress SEO by Yoast is an SEO plugin for WordPress that makes it very easy to implement best practices for search engine optimization. WordPress SEO by Yoast works well for many people and many websites, but it is not the perfect solution for every website. This is the website’s guide to why WordPress SEO by Yoast is a solid option for today’s websites.

On a typical WordPress website, there are millions of listings for product pages, navigation, posts, blog comments, and categories. Which of these listing types do I like the best? Which should be prioritized when it comes to SEO? And should any of these sub-pages need to be restructured?

After conducting extensive research, the authors of this plugin realized that the answer to all these questions depends on a number of factors, not all of which could be automated using WordPress SEO by Yoast. Thus, the plugin team created Yoast SEO by Yoast to provide this insight for websites.

As Yoast SEO by Yoast notes, there are a number of factors that can affect the ranking in search engines as a whole, not just on Google. These include:

How does Yoast help with this? Through a review analyzer, Yoast by Yoast provides SEO best practices, such as managing page titles and descriptions, tag re-ordering, and meta descriptions, SEO anchors, and page reviews.

Just as in the core framework of SEO, the goal of Yoast is to optimize overall performance by getting rid of duplicate content and to allow improvement through prioritization. The plugin is accessible via a simple and intuitive interface, making it the following option for any website.

Navigation plugins help the user navigate the site without having to navigate to the different pages one by one. For search engines, this can make navigation fast and efficient for long and complex layouts. They can also shorten the time-consuming process of going from one page to another. In doing so, smooth scrolling and user-friendly navigation make the user experience outstanding.

5. YITH WooCommerce Wishlist

YITH WooCommerce Wishlist is a plugin that lets your customers create a wish list with all the products you have on sale. Wishlists are displayed on the user’s profile, on the product page, and on the cart page. This plugin can be used by both e-commerce and non-e-commerce sites. Get your website ready for a successful WooCommerce store with this rock-solid plugin.

Ghostery is used by the top websites on the internet, as it blocks trackers used by bot networks and trackers used by websites you’ve never heard of to track you. Ghostery blocks the technologies used by some of the Web’s Worst Practices to track you, including tracker dots, ad-hoc link beams, pop-up tracking, cross-site tracking, and pixel tracking.

Mark Schultz is an independent content marketer and owner of the content agency Dream Beach Media. His expertise lies in content marketing strategies and creative direction for eCommerce and B2B companies. You can connect with him on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, or by mail.

Conclusion

These five plugins will help you get the most out of your e-commerce site, making it easier to attract traffic and convert visitors into customers.

Read More

• Share