As an entrepreneur, we work because we are passionate about what we do. We want to impact other people’s lives positively through our businesses. We learn to throw ourselves in the deep end and swim anyway even though we feel inadequate to take on new knowledge and skills. Growing a business can be very challenging. Not everything that we plan will become a success. So when the going gets tough or we do not see results from our hard work, how can we continue to cultivate a positive mindset so that we can stay motivated and connect the dots to overcome our obstacles for continuous business growth?
If you’ve been feeling discouraged lately or having self-doubt about your skills or knowledge, let me tell you that you are not alone. As entrepreneurs, we all have encountered these feelings throughout our entrepreneurship journeys. But it’s how we deal with it that will determine the level of our success. To push through for further business growth, having a positive mindset is important.
Here are some of the ways that you can consider when trying to cultivate a positive mindset for your business growth:-
Be Positive Like A Coach
A coach will always look at the bright side of things and look towards having positive outcomes. Try and be positive like a coach whenever you face any setbacks in your business.
Analyze the things that you have been doing that are not working for your business. Identify what went wrong and why you encountered that negative outcome.
Always have the attitude that although things may not be going well, when you fix whatever that went wrong, you will be on your road to success.
Be positive and know deep within yourself that it is going to be only a matter of time before you see the success that you’re after.
This attitude is especially crucial if you are leading a team because they will want to be rest assured that everything will be alright – even though you can’t guarantee 100% that it will be!
Eliminate The ‘What Ifs’
Don’t ever start working on anything for your business until you learn to eliminate the ‘What Ifs’ attitude.
This is the wrong kind of attitude that will stop you from reaping rewards for your hard work – because it stops you from going 100% into working towards success.
Imagine planning for a new marketing campaign or product launch for your business and hearing these words going to your head over and over again.
“What if nobody buys my stuff?” “What if nobody likes my products and services?” “What if someone leaves me a negative review?”
Such questions will cause you to have the fear to put your 100% because either you’re afraid you’ll waste your efforts or you will feel hurt in the end.
When you think about all the things that could go wrong with your business, you’ll always want to be in your ‘safety zone’. This will stop your business from moving forward.
Because you’re too worried about the ‘What Ifs’ to the point that you stop to getting started on anything that will progress your business.
This limiting belief is a recipe for disaster!
Instead of thinking about all the things that could go wrong, why not ask yourself, “What if things worked out in the end?“
Or you can also pat yourself on the back and say, “I’m worthy of an achievement. I will get there sooner or later.“
Enjoy The Entrepreneurship Journey
Now this all comes down to choosing to do business in a field that you enjoy. Although that I do understand that before you choose to do business, you might have considered the potential earnings that the business can bring to you, it is far more important to be in a field that you will enjoy working in rather than just choosing to do business based on money factors.
If you’ve chosen to do business in a field that you are truly passionate about, enjoy the entrepreneurship journey! Many people working in jobs that they don’t like just for the sake of earning money. Be thankful that you are so blessed to do what you like for a living, even though you might not be at the level of success that you are after.
When you focus on passion first, then by doing what you do consistently and taking the steps to move your business forward, it’ll only be a matter of time for you to see the money rewards of your hard work.
Be Flexible And Open To Change
Although certain ways have been working for you in the past, always be flexible and opened to change.
Never disregard a new opportunity for reaching out to customers and getting your brand name across to the masses. You might feel that certain marketing strategies may sound silly at first. But when you’re opened to trying out new ways of attracting customers, you will begin to progress in your business development faster.]
Also, bear in mind that consumer buying habits are changing and different methods are required to reach these buyers. So if you stick to your old ways of advertising or communicating to your potential customers, you will be missing out on new customer opportunities because they’ll end up buying from your competitors instead!
Seek Alternatives Roads To Success
Many of us want to see quick fixes to reach specific milestones in our businesses. However, there is no specific ‘magic bullet’ that will fix things for everyone. The secret lies in doing and testing.
What works for other people, might not work for us. Everyone’s business is different. So only by doing the work, you will be able to experiment for yourself to see what works for your business.
If you’ve tried reaching out to customers with a specific method recommended by other people (perhaps your mentor, coach or marketing guru!) but still have not seen any results, it’s time to think about other ways you can use to succeed in getting the results you are after.
Many gurus are talking about the ‘one road to success’ or ‘one formula to success’. But there is no ‘one road to success’. In fact, there are multiple roads to success. So do not be bent on sticking to just one road if you find it’s not working for you.
But of course, this doesn’t mean moving on to one shiny object to another like a flick of a switch!
Stick around to completion of a specific formula for a specific time-frame and evaluate the success of it before moving on.
My questions to you is – Do you have a back-up plan if something goes wrong in your business campaigns or product launches? If not, it might be time to start thinking about a Plan A, B & C before starting a campaign or product launch…
Celebrate Small Wins
Many entrepreneurs are just glued on the shiny million-dollar income goal to the point that they are constantly comparing themselves to the success of other people instead of looking at their business progress.
This happens especially when you’re just starting a business as a startup with little money to spend.
Life as an entrepreneur will be unhappy that way.
Instead of looking at others all the time, try and shift your attention away at least once a day to be thankful for what you have achieved.
You might have a weekly goal planned out and managed to complete all or most of the tasks.
Be grateful that you had the time to complete these tasks, knowing that they will take you a step closer to the level of success that you want.
See how far you have improved in your work. Take notice of the ‘before’ and ‘after’ state of yourself as an entrepreneur.
Celebrate every single win!
When you learn how to apply these tips to move your mind towards having a positive mindset for business growth, I’m sure that your future efforts will bring you one step closer to the success you’re after.
I hope that through this article, I have encouraged you to cultivate a positive mindset for your business growth. If you’ve found these tips helpful or have other tips to share, then I’d love to hear from you in the comments section below.
Deciding the best product pricing for your business can be a tough challenge. If you price your products too high, you might be missing out on potential revenue from potential customers who would have bought if you priced them lower. However, if you price your products too low, it may cause you to miss out on gaining larger one-time-off profits and revenues that could have been channelled towards covering your crucial business expenses.
Why would you want to sell your products for a lower price than what they are actually worth? And how can you charge premium prices to your customers in a way that they will make them still want to buy from you?
How will you know the best product pricing to charge so that you will gain the maximum revenue that you deserve without losing out on sales because of bad pricing?
In my article, I will reveal 5 Key Factors To Consider When Deciding On Product Pricing.
Average Market Price
The best starting point when determining your product price is by looking at the average price of a similar product to what you are selling. This will give you a rough guideline as to how much people are willing to pay for the product you are selling. Look at your competitors and see what they are charging to figure out what is the average market price for your product.
You may want to experiment with different price points. You can charge slightly lower than your competitors, slightly higher or the same price as them to see what works.
However, you must bear in mind that if your competitors have been around the industry for quite some time and have gathered a large following, they might be able to charge much higher than the average market price. So let’s say if Competitor A charges $2,000 for an online course, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you should price at that same price.
Positioning
Your product price can also be determined by your brand positioning. Are you selling and creating products that are meant for a more affluent market? Or are you aiming to sell your stuff to bargain-hunters? Or perhaps are you trying to sell to middle-class individuals?
If you are selling to the more affluent market, the kind of products that you sell should be catered to this target audience. They have to be of high quality, luxurious and branded as high-end products.
If you are selling to bargain-hunters, you can sell your every day, good and cheap products as this will satisfy this type of target audience. But if you are selling to this crowd, then be prepared to sell a lot more to cover your costs and pay off some of your crucial business bills!
And if you’re selling to middle-class individuals, you’ll need to stock up on high quality (but not necessarily luxurious) products that can be sold at fairly affordable prices (but not dirt cheap!).
Whichever way you choose to position your brand is up to you. However, the products and product prices should be in accordance with your brand positioning.
Production Costs
Before deciding on your product price, you must calculate the costs of producing the product. For instance, do you use any ingredients or raw ingredients to produce your product? Are there any additional costs such as packaging, shipping costs as well as taxes and duties? These are considered as variable costs.
To ensure that you do not sell at a loss, you will need to ensure that the total variable cost per unit of your product is not higher than the product price that you have decided on.
Labour Costs
Besides your production costs, you would also want to consider labour costs. Do you hire anyone to produce your products for you? Or do you make your products yourself?
Whatever the case, you should estimate how many hours it takes to produce a unit of your product. And with that estimation, determine how much you or your labour hire should cost. The cost per hour for labour can be decided based on the level of skill and expertise you or your labour hire may have in producing the product.
Add this cost to determine your product pricing. By doing this, you are rewarding you and your labour hire for the hard work in creating that product.
Profit Margin
After you do this, you would need to determine how much profit you would like to make when you sell a unit of that product. A way you can do this is by deciding on the percentage of profit margin you would like for your product.
It is important to sell at a profit because besides the production costs that I’ve mentioned earlier, you would also need money to cover your business fixed costs. This may be your utilities, office expenses or rent. So by adding a profit, you are going to be able to cover some of your fixed cost expenses.
After deducting your fixed cost expenses, the remaining profit can be used to reward yourself as a business owner and grow your business.
Finding the best product pricing sweet spot for your business can be very challenging. It comes by experimenting and researching.
I hope that with this article, you’ll have a better idea of how to determine the best pricing for your products. Found any of these tips helpful? Or have any other strategies to share? I’d love to hear from you in the comments section below.
In business, we all know the importance of setting up goals. But how exactly do we know whether our goals are contributing to the performance of our business? We do this by tracking our overall business progress. This will help us to identify what areas in our business that we should concentrate more on for improvement. When we track our business progress, we are setting up our business for success.
I know just how important your business success means to you. And so to help you to understand and utilize the art of business tracking to improve your business, I’ll reveal to you 10 Simple Ways To Track Your Business Progress.
Here are some of the strategies to track your business progress:-
Track Your Goals With Key Indicators
We all set goals for your business. They can be short, medium or long-term goals. And when you set up goals for yourself or your employees, you will need to ensure that they are in line with the ultimate direction of your business.
For each goal you create, you will need to take several steps to meet the objectives of your goal.
So how do you monitor the success of each of your goals?
You do this by identifying key indicators that show that your goals have been met. They need to be measurable so that you know how far you have come in achieving your goals.
For instance, if you have organized a marketing campaign for a new online course that you have created, your key indicators for success could be an increased in sales for the course.
Review Customer Satisfaction
Every business needs customers to be successful. Hence, it is vital to always review your customer satisfaction.
It is beneficial to have customer relationship management (CRM) software and tracking tools like Salesforce especially if your business is rather complex and dealing with a lot of customers. With CRM software, you can document your individual customer’s exact requirements which will make it easier for you when conducting future follow-up or marketing campaigns.
When reviewing your customer satisfaction, you will need to take notice of whether or not their needs have been met by your business. You can also ask them to provide a review of the products and services that they have purchased from you. And you can even get them to suggest to you on areas that you can improve on for your business. This includes suggestions to improve your existing products or services and also to create new offers that would be more beneficial to them.
Track Employee Goals and Progress
If you are not a solopreneur, then you are probably dealing with either freelancers or employees that work directly for your business. So to keep your business successful, you will also need to track your employee goals and progress.
In every business, an employee will have his or her own set of goals, roles and tasks. So you need to identify the strengths of each of your employees so they can be matched with suitable goals, roles and tasks that will benefit your business.
Your employee should be clear about his or her role in the business and strive towards meeting specific goals and tasks that have been set out for him or her.
When working in a team, you need to stay organized with your employees. You can schedule the timeline of your employees by using project management software. Some great project management software that you can use is Wrike, Asana, Monday.com, Basecamp and Trello.
By using these software, each of your team members will be able to see what everyone else is doing and be motivated towards completing his or her task.
When you’re able to ensure a smooth workflow and move your employees towards meeting their goals and objectives, your business will progress.
Analyze Website Visits
Practically every business has a website. So if you still don’t have a website, my advice to you is to get your website started straight-away or you’ll be missing out on reaching a lot of ideal customers.
With that being said, a website is like a shop. The only thing it is online. So when you open a shop, you would want more visitors to walk in and hopefully buy something from you or at least ask you to contact them when you have something that would benefit them, right?
The same goes with having a website.
To track the success of your business in reaching people online, you will need to track your website visits.
Are you getting new visitors and returning visitors to your website? Are your visitors staying on your website to read your articles? Are you getting opt-ins from your website? Are people buying your stuff from your website? Are you getting visitors from your targeted demographics?
These are the things that you need to track to see if your website is helping to progress your business. And the best way you can do this sort of website tracking is by using Google Analytics.
Identify SEO Ranking
When you’re in business, there are certain keywords that you would want your business to be known for, especially in the online world. These are the keywords that your ideal customers will often key-in to search engines when finding certain things that relate to your business.
So you would want to tie in your content marketing efforts towards improving the SEO ranking of these targeted keywords.
When you get to rank your website with these keywords, especially on the first page of search engines, then this shows that your business has achieved its objectives in being known through these terms.
You can track the progress of each targeted keywords by using SEO and keyword-tracking tools like SerpFox and IntelliSerp.
When people know you through your targeted keywords, this shows that your business will progress because more people will stumble upon your website and learn about what you do.
Phone Call Tracking
If you are a business that takes phone call enquiries, then you can also track your business performance by tracking your phone calls.
When someone calls you and asks about a particular product or service you are offering, you need to know how they found out about what you are offering.
Did they get to know about your business through your website? Did they see your Facebook advertisement? Did they find out about you through YouTube videos? Or did they see your posts on Twitter and Instagram?
Although this may seem insignificant and you’ll probably be in a hurry to close the deal straight-away, don’t forget that this data is pure ‘gold’!
So ask the person where he or she found out about you…
When somebody is keen enough to pick up the phone and call you, this means something is working in your business. You just need to find out which strategy that has worked in getting this potential customer to call you!
Analyze New And Repeat Customers
Taking notice how many new and repeat customers you get every month is another great way to track whether your business is progressing.
Having new customers means that your business is expanding its market share and becoming a well-known and trusted brand in your industry.
On the other hand, having repeat customers means that your existing customers are happy and confident with your products and services to the point that they are willing to part with their money again to buy from you.
When you organize marketing campaigns to increase your sales, make sure to document how many new and repeat customers that you have managed to acquire during the time of the campaign.
This will help you to measure the success of your business in gaining new and repeat customers.
Being able to track this data will help you to see if your business is growing. It will also help you to predict your future business growth!
Look At Your Financial Statements
While concentrating on your marketing and awareness campaigns, it’s also important to track your financial statements to see whether your business is progressing.
Especially if you’ve been in business for quite some time, it’s always a good idea to see how much money it is generating.
Three financial statements that are important especially if you have a small business are the balance sheet, income statement and cash flow statement.
It’s always best to strive towards having good cash flow as this will free up your business in a way that will allow you to make further investments for future growth.
Use Pictorial History
Another way to see how far your business has come is by using pictorial history. To do this, it is important that you document the stages of your business from its establishment right through to its current state.
You can do this digitally by documenting all of your past promotional materials, events, office premises, letters from customers and anything else that will help to remind you about the journey of establishing your business.
To determine the growth of your business, you will then have to go through these snapshots and compare them to new and improved initiatives that you are using for your business in the present times.
Sometimes, the best way to see your business progress is to realise the improvements that you have made since you were starting from ground zero.
Compare With Your Competitors’ Progress
Sometimes, a decrease in your business profitability may not mean that you’re not doing a good job in growing your business. There could be other factors involved – such as economic instability or the world financial crisis.
You can measure your business success by also analyzing the growth and success of your competitors who are selling the same sort of stuff or who are in the same industry as you.
If your business is not growing the way you want it to grow, then you can improve it by being creative and innovative in coming up with new products and services, or improving your customer service.
Tracking your business progress is one of the best ways to ensure the growth of your business. However, to systematically map your business to reach the level of success that you are after, you need strategic positioning. This is what I will be sharing in my upcoming online course – Business QuickStart Growth Formula. So if you’re interested, go to my Contact page here and let me know that you would like to know about the course Pre-Launch.
I hope this article on 10 Simple Ways To Track Your Business Progress will be beneficial to you. Have you tried any of these tracking strategies in the past and have managed to improve your business performance in any way? Or do you have other strategies for tracking business progress that you would like to share? I’d be happy to hear from you in the comment section below.
If you’ve always wanted to publish a book, now is the time to get started. Years ago, we as writers had to get in touch with multiple book agents, only to get rejection after rejection. But thanks to modern online publishing platforms, independent authors have now the opportunity to publish digital versions of their books with little or no upfront cost. Some of these platforms even let us publish printed books on-demand!
Want to know how?
That’s why in this article, I’ve decided to reveal to you the best places to sell your eBooks online.
Here are the 7 Best Self Publishing Companies for eBooks:
Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP)
This is one of the world’s best eBook publishing platform. So if you’re an eBook author, putting your book through KDP will provide you with the opportunity to reach approximately 300 million potential readers.
It’s free to set-up an account at KDP and uploading your work is easy too. You can upload your eBook and make it available within 24-48 hours.
KDP also gives a pretty good payout for the eBooks you sell. If your eBooks are between $2.99-$9.99 then you will get 70% of the money earned. If your eBooks are between $0.99 – $2.99 then you will get 35% of the money earned.
You can also further increase your authority and following by setting up an Amazon Author Central page.
You can choose to sell your eBook exclusively through KDP by selecting their KDP Select program which would expand your reach of potential readers. However, if you choose to also publish your eBooks with other platforms, you might not want to choose this option.
The great thing about KDP is that you can also publish paperback books by using your eBooks. So you’ll be able to reach readers who like to read printed book copies too!
Lulu Publishing
This is fast becoming another popular platform to sell eBooks amongst independent authors. You can join and publish with this platform for free.
At Lulu, you can create your eBooks to suit a variety of different platforms and reading devices.
You can create and edit your eBooks or pay them a fee to do the editing for you. Besides editing, they also offer other services like cover design, marketing and illustration.
You can generally earn more from each eBook sold through Lulu. And your eBooks sold will be able to reach a global audience.
iBooks
If you’re an Apple customer, then you might want to consider publishing your eBooks with iBooks.
The royalty rates for selling eBooks are a flat 70% for all prices and territories.
The downside of this platform is that your eBooks can only be sold to people who are using Apple devices and have an Apple app store.
And if you’re not using Apple devices, it will take you more steps to get your eBooks prepared, designed and formatted for iBooks.
However, bear in mind that Apple products are really popular globally and the iBook app is downloaded more frequently compared to the Kindle app.
So that’s why it’s worth publishing through iBooks.
Smashwords
If you’re looking to distribute your eBooks through multiple platforms but don’t want to spend time going to each one at a time, then Smashwords might be a great option for you.
Smashwords is one of the world’s largest eBook distribution platforms that will help you distribute your eBooks to major retailers and public libraries.
It’s free to join this platform and they also provide a generous royalty payout of 80% for eBooks sold in their store. However, if you sell through other platforms via Smashwords, you’ll get 60% royalty.
If you’re an author that loves working towards deadlines, then you can set-up your eBooks for pre-order through Smashwords. People can choose to order your eBooks 12 months in advance through this platform.
Publishing with Smashwords is also easy as they have free tools to get you started with marketing, managing and distributing your content.
Barnes & Noble Press
If you’re looking to target readers from the US, UK and other European countries like Belgium, The Netherlands, Germany, Spain, Italy and France then you might want to consider publishing via Barnes & Noble Press.
Especially if you’re a first-time author, you might be pleased to know that Barnes & Noble Press has user-friendly publishing tools to help you get started.
Their royalty rates are pretty similar to KDP. However, the downside is that they would want you to publish exclusively through them.
It only takes about 20 minutes to publish your eBooks through their platform. Once published, you’ll be able to reach millions of readers.
You also have the option to publish your printed hardcover and paperback books through Barnes & Noble Press.
Kobo
If you’re a new eBook writer then you might want to consider publishing through Kobo as well.
Kobo has an easy-to-use platform for publishing eBooks. With just 4 steps, you can complete your publishing process. Their platform will convert your manuscript to a format suitable for eBook reading.
And you’ll be able to reach 190 countries in 68 languages through this platform too!
Another good thing about Kobo is they do not expect to have exclusive rights over the sales of your eBooks. This means you can also sell your eBooks through other platforms besides Kobo.
Their royalties are 70% for those who publish eBooks from $1.99-$12.99. For eBooks priced outside this range, the royalties given will be 45%.
Draft2Digital
If you would like to have your eBooks formatted for free and gain maximum income from each eBook sale then Draft2Digital is for you.
With Draft2Digital, they only take 10% of the retail price of the eBook you sold.
You can upload your manuscript in a Word document format and have them convert it to an eBook or print format.
They’ll also distribute your eBook to other platforms like Kobo, iBooks and other smaller stores.
With the existence of modern eBook publishing platforms, we as independent authors can publish and sell our eBooks and even printed books with ease. I hope that this article has been a great insight into your book publishing journey. Are you currently an eBook seller and have used any of these platforms before? Which ones are your favourite? Do you have any other online publishing platforms to share? Just leave your comments below.
Ever wondered how those beautiful websites and blogs that you frequently visit can deliver such great user experience and functionality to their readers? The secret behind their abilities to do this lies in the plugins they are using! Yes, if you’ve been wondering how a basic WordPress theme can be transformed into a charming website or blog that attracts visitors like crazy because of how it’s presented, then you’ve come to the right place! Today, I’m going to share with you a list of best free WordPress plugins that you can download and use to improve the presentation, user experience and functionality of your website so that you can continue to grow your readership without any added expenses!
Here’s the List of Amazing Free WordPress Plugins That You Can Use:-
WPForms Lite
Stay in touch with your website and blog readers by creating a contact form that they can easily complete while being on-the-go. With WPForms Lite, you can easily create multiple contact forms for your website or blog with their simple drag and drop form builder.
They also have some pre-built templates that you can use that includes form fields that you’ll need to create that perfect contact form. You can also customize the form to your requirements. The good thing about this plugin is that the contact forms you create with it are 100% responsive, SEO optimized and mobile friendly.
For spam prevention, you can also include a CAPTCHA or reCAPTCHA for your forms through this plugin.
Yet Another Related Posts Plugin
You can encourage your website or blog readers to stay longer in your site by recommending related articles that they might be interested in. With the Yet Another Related Posts plugin, your readers will be given the opportunity to discover related posts according to a content that they have viewed within your website.
Content is being recommended to them using a versatile algorithm that takes into consideration your website’s article titles as well as content categories and tags.
The plugin will help to display a list of related content or display thumbnails so that your readers can easily choose and read your other content.
This will encourage more reader engagement and extend the time of them hanging out on your website – which will be good for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) too!
Regenerate Thumbnails
The Regenerate Thumbnails plugin is a time-saver, especially when you want to update the size of the thumbnails already displayed in your website or blog. By using this plugin, you do not need to always re-adjust all your thumbnail sizes on by one. All you need to do is use this plugin and regenerate your thumbnails to the size that you want. The plugin will help you to delete old and unused thumbnails to save you server space. This plugin is especially useful if you’ve decided that you want to implement a new thumbnail size to all your existing thumbnails or if you’ve just changed your WordPress theme and you have to change all your thumbnails to a specific size as a result of that.
TrustPulse
Social proof is one of the best ways that will enable you to get more conversions and sales. With the TrustPulse plugin, you can show your readers a pop-up notification whenever somebody purchases something from you or registers for something. You can also notify your readers whenever someone takes action in responding to a campaign on your site during a set period of time. To make your brand image stand out, you can choose to create the pop-ups using the colours and images that relate to your brand.
By using social proof, your readers will become excited and psychologically moved to take action, buy from you or participate in whatever thing you are offering because they would fear that they’ll be missing out on something!
Uber ReCaptcha
If you want a safe and secure website that is free from pesky spammers and unwanted attacks, then use the Uber ReCaptcha plugin. With this plugin, you can easily include Google’s reCaptcha checks to your website. You can use reCaptcha security for your registration, login and comment forms. If the reCaptcha doesn’t validate the entries in your forms, the person’s contact will not be added to your list.
This plugin allows you to provide image and audio captcha support. You can also choose to generate audio or image reCaptcha in a number of languages.
UpdraftPlus
The worst thing that can happen to you is losing all your website content. To have that peace of mind, I’d highly recommend you to use the UpdraftPlus plugin to automatically backup your website files on a consistent basis.
When using this plugin, you can store your backups in either Google Drive, Dropbox or any cloud service of your choice. You can set the backup schedule using this plugin.
And when you experience an unfortunate server crash, hacker attack or any other types of website difficulties, you can recover all your website contents with just a click of a button!
GeoDirectory
If you are looking to build a directory with your website, then you can use the GeoDirectory plugin. With this plugin, you get to grow your listing based on the information provided by your users. This can include relevant images, contact details, descriptions and hyperlinks.
You can create local listings, niche directories, staff listings and exclusive directories with this plugin. Your users can also add and manage their own business listing, as well as logos and descriptions.
Your website users who are finding businesses can also use the search function provided by this plugin.
Google Maps Widget
If you’re looking to include Google map on your website, then use the Google Maps Widget. This is the best Google Maps plugin available and it’s free!
With this plugin, you can enjoy several customization options. You can change the width and height of the map you display in your website, change your map colour schemes, allow your visitors to zoom in and zoom out of your map and feature your map in various languages. You can also choose to display your map as either a satellite map, road map of terrain map.
Featuring Google map in your website is especially good if you are a local business because your customers will know where you are by looking at the map!
Yoast SEO
If you’re looking to improve your visibility in search engines, then use the Yoast SEO plugin to guide your way to better SEO.
With this plugin, you get to create and automatically update your website’s XML sitemap, create catchy titles and meta descriptions for your articles and preview your content’s search snippets so that you’ll see what your viewers are going to see.
This plugin will notify you whether your content has good readability and is SEO optimized, which is good especially if you’re a beginner in SEO.
Jetpack by WordPress
Having too many plugins may slow down the speed of your website. So if you’re looking to use a multi-function plugin for your website, then I highly recommend for you to get the Jetpack by WordPress plugin.
You can use this plugin to prevent attacks to your site, track statistics, improve your content social sharing and design your website.
ShortPixel Image Optimisation
If you feature a lot of images with large file sizes, then your website may take a long time to load. This will affect your SEO. By using the ShortPixel Image Optimisation plugin, you get to compress, resize and optimize the images that you use for your website. This will help to increase your website speed so that your website will be good for SEO.
With this plugin, you can compress images with GIF, PNG and JPEG formats. You can also compress PDF files. You can either choose to compress one image at a time or select their bulk compression function.
WooCommerce
If you’re looking to set-up your own online store on your website, then you can use the WooCommerce plugin.
With this plugin, you can customise the look and feel of your website while determining the functionality of your online store. You can create an online shop to sell your eCommerce products or other services of your choice.
You can offer a number of shipping options to your customers. With this plugin, you can get secured payments via credit card or other alternative payment methods.
Speed Booster Pack
You can improve the speed of your website by using the Speed Booster Pack plugin. This plugin can be easily downloaded and used in your website. You’ll notice that your website speed will significantly increase when you use this plugin and loading your website will be much faster.
This plugin will minify your CSS files, deal with your overall JavaScript and CSS, moves your scripts to your website footer to improve your load speed, remove your RSD links and feed links and resolve a lot of other factors that are causing your website to run slowly.
W3 Total Cache
You can also reduce your website load time by using caching. The option for you to do this is by using the W3 Total Cache plugin.
This plugin will enable you to cache objects, browser, pages and database. There’s also a media library tool that is made available to you through this plugin.
Shareaholic
If you want to encourage more of your readers to share your articles, website or blog through social media, then the Shareaholic plugin is ideal for you.
With this plugin, you can create attractive social buttons that your readers can use to share your content through social media. You can choose between using their inline share buttons or their default floating share buttons.
Pretty Links
If you’re into affiliate marketing, then you’ll need a tool that will help you to shorten your affiliate links as they are too long. Your best plugin for this is the Pretty Links plugin.
This plugin will enable you to cloak your affiliate links to make the link look more professional. You also get to track the number of clicks on your URL to see which links are getting a good response.
Social Icons
If you want to display social media icons on your website, then your best bet is the Social Icons plugin.
This plugin is very easy to use. It provides you with the opportunity to display beautiful social media icons on your website. You can place the icons at your articles or pages by using shortcodes or widgets. You can use this plugin to create icons for over 100 popular social media platforms. There is also a customization option available for you when creating your social icons.
Smush
If you want to improve your website speed by compressing your images, then the Smush plugin is your perfect option.
With this plugin, your images will be automatically resized and compressed without sacrificing their quality. This will ensure that your website will load faster, thus giving you better SEO.
VaultPress
If you want a tool that can backup your website data regularly then you can use the VaultPress plugin.
With this plugin, you can backup your website files in real-time automatically. And you just need a single click to be able to restore your website.
This plugin also enables you to scan and detect any dangerous files that may harm your website. It also has strong spam protection.
Better Click To Tweet
If you love creating tweetable content that can be shared by your readers through their Twitter accounts, then use the Better Click To Tweet plugin.
With this plugin, your readers will see your tweetable quote and be prompted to share your tweet to their Twitter followers.
This will definitely help you to increase your brand awareness.
Google XML Sitemaps
If you want search engines to index your website, then you’ll need to use a sitemap. With the Google XML Sitemaps plugin, an XML sitemap will be created for your website for easy indexing.
The plugin will also update major search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing whenever you publish something new on your website. This includes any new blog posts or articles you update on your site.
Akismet Anti-Spam
If you want to avoid getting spam comments on your website, then use the Akismet Anti-Spam plugin. This plugin will screen and filter any incoming comments on your website for spam.
Smart Slider 3
If you’re looking to include a professional looking slider in your website, you can use the Smart Slider 3 plugin.
This plugin is simple to use and comes with beautiful ready-made templates to choose from. You can choose to have a block, showcase, thumbnail, full-width, bar or full page slider with this plugin. You can also adjust your slider width and height to suit your website theme.
This plugin works great with practically any theme and your sliders will be 100% responsive and SEO optimized too!
Wordfence Security
If you want to keep your website secure, then use the Wordfence Security plugin. This plugin is one of the most popular all-in-one packages when it comes to securing WordPress sites.
It features a firewall, login hardening, live traffic monitoring and a malware scanner. It also blocks malicious networks and attackers from harming your website.
By using this plugin, you will be alerted whenever someone tries to hack your website. You can use this plugin to monitor your website traffic in real-time.
Elementor Page Builder
If you’re looking to create your own web design but do not know any coding, then you can use the Elementor Page Builder plugin.
Elementor is a front-end page builder that lets you create your web pages using a simple drag and drop system. Although WordPress templates are usually very professional looking, they might lack some features and design elements that you need to make your business or blog stand out to your audiences.
With this plugin, you will get full control over the design and elements of your website without spending unnecessary time on complicated web coding.
The web pages designed in Elementor are 100% responsive and can work with any WordPress theme and widgets.
Insert Headers And Footers
If you are looking for a simple way to insert code snippets to your website’s header and footer sections, then use the Insert Headers And Footers plugin.
With this plugin, all you need to do is insert your scripts to a simple interface. So you need not do any complicated modifications to your files that may ruin or crash your website.
This is especially a great tool if you’re not advanced in web coding.
Simple Author Box
If you have a website that has multiple author contributions, then you might want to include a short box containing your authors’ profiles after the articles that they’ve written. The best way to do this is by using the Simple Author Box plugin.
With this plugin, you can create a professional looking author box that features the author’s name, description, gravatar as well as social icons linking to their social media profiles. You can customise the design of your author box to suit your website theme and corporate brand look.
All the author box designs are fully responsive and mobile-friendly.
So that’s it! My recommendations for 27 Best Free WordPress Plugins For Your Website revealed…Have you used any of these plugins before? Which are your favourites? Or do you have other free plugins to recommend? I’d love to know! If you have not started using these plugins but strongly feel that they would help your website to perform better, then I’d encourage you to give them a try and let me know your experience using them.
Deciding on the best possible theme for your website can be challenging, especially if you are looking for free themes. So to simplify your web building process, I’ve specially compiled a list of 53 best free WordPress themes that you can use for your website.
Once you have set-up your web hosting, you can proceed to choosing your website theme. Please be aware that these free themes may not suit all your requirements, and you may need to upgrade to their paid versions to unlock certain features.
Below is a list of amazing free themes that you can download and use for your blog, ecommerce or business website.
Free WordPress Themes for Agencies
Optimizer
Optimizer is a free multi-purpose WordPress theme with powerful features. You can use it to fully customize your website without doing any coding. You can choose between 2 site layouts – either a full-width or boxed layout. This theme also provides an image slider, wide font selection, great theme options and an easy logo upload function. The theme is 100% responsive and is built with HTML5 and CSS3. It is SEO friendly too. This theme is especially suitable for agencies, small businesses and portfolio websites.
Allegiant is a stylish free WordPress theme that is suitable especially for agencies and professionals. It has a large header/slider where you can highlight about your business as well as feature blocks and icons that can be used to highlight your products and services. You can also use this theme to include your portfolio works and testimonials. This theme allows you to integrate with popular plugins like Contact Form 7, Yoast SEO, WPML and WooCommerce.
iFeature is a fully-responsive theme can be used for e-commerce sites, online stores, agencies, blogs, personal profiles or practically any website! Its drag-and-drop function makes it easy to set-up websites fast. You can use it to customize your website page by page. So you can control the exact look and feel for each web page. You can use it to display the author profile in each post. And you can also use it to feature testimonials.
The Portfolio Press is a free WordPress theme that will help you showcase your portfolio works in a clean and professional format. It is suitable for featuring past projects, photography as well as art. This is why I would highly recommend using this theme if you are a freelancer. In addition, it also has a translation feature which will be useful. Besides featuring portfolio works, you can also use this theme to build a regular blog.
Zakra is a fast, lightweight and powerful web theme that you can download for free. This theme comes with pre-built demos that can be used for education, freelancing, medical, food, wedding, or any other industries. It is GDPR compliant and compatible with Gutenberg, WooCommerce and WordPress plugins. Its powerful features include advanced colour options, multiple headers, typography and detailed documentation. This theme looks both professional and beautiful.
Radiate is a creative, clean and responsive theme that can be used to create blogs, freelancing or portfolio websites. It has a very sleek layout with a lot of white spaces. There is also a translation function that comes with this theme, enabling you to reach out to an international audience. You can also choose how many columns you would like to have for your website with this theme. It also comes with free support!
Shapely is a versatile and powerful one-page free WordPress theme that you can use to build your landing pages, freelancing and portfolio websites. There are several widgets that comes together with this theme that you can use for adding your portfolio works, testimonials as well as products and services information. This theme is also fully responsive and SEO friendly. It supports popular plugins such as Jetpack, Contact Form 7, WooCommerce, Yoast SEO, Google Analytics by Yoast and many more.
Ample is a multipurpose free theme that is looks professional and eye-catching. It has a lot of customization options that will help you to achieve the look and feel you want. This is especially useful for freelancers who want to showcase their personality and style to potential customers. You can change your colour theme to suit your business, change your logo and header text. It is also translation ready, which will enable you to reach out to a global audience.
TheFour Lite is a theme that is easy to set-up and customize. With this theme, you can choose what to do with your headers, background and menus. You can use it to create a portfolio website to get freelance work, build a personal blog or even a business website! You can also include testimonials in this theme too. Other options include changing your logo, page templates and hero image. This theme is also responsive and translation ready, making it easier for you to communicate with a global audience!
eStore is a beautiful, responsive and fully customizable eCommerce WordPress theme that you can use to create your online store. It is fully compatible with WooCommerce and Wishlist plugins. This theme is multi-functional and can serve multi-language and multi-currency needs for your online stores. You also get to include your advertisements, photos of products categories and membership options with this theme. In addition to all this, your customers will also be able to review products that they have bought in the past from your website.
Shopera is a free WordPress theme that is especially suitable for beginner online store owners. It provides a simple, modern and responsive design that can be customized for your eCommerce needs. It can be integrated with WooCommerce. This theme can also be used by more advanced WordPress users.
Storefront is a free eCommerce theme that you can use if you are planning to sell products directly from your website. It integrates with WooCommerce and is fully responsive so your customers can access and purchase from you with whatever device they have. There are several colour and layout options as well as widget regions that come with this theme.
The Anariel theme is a stylish and modern free WordPress theme that is especially suitable for blogging. Whether you’re a food, lifestyle, fashion or travel blogger, you will find this theme really useful. It is fully responsive and you can choose between different font options to suit your blogging style. This free theme has multiple layout options, including default layout with sidebars, boxed and grid layout. It also supports posts that come with audio and videos.
Fashy is a clean, beautiful and modern style free theme that is suitable for bloggers. It features a minimalist design that is black and white in colour. It is fully responsive and lightweight. You can choose between three post formats: video, gallery or standard. This theme is especially great if you are focusing on your blog content.
EightyDays Lite is a free WordPress theme that is especially suitable for travel, food, lifestyle and personal blogs. It has an impressive tiled gallery in its homepage. You can use this to highlight your popular posts. Your readers will also find it easy to read with this theme because of its great typography. This theme is also responsive – so your readers can read your blog no matter what device they are using. The theme is also highly customizable.
Ignite is a free theme that is highly recommended for blogging mostly because of its nice blog feed layout. It also provides social media buttons and the ability to customize your logo, background colours, fonts, sidebar layouts and other display options. The design of this theme is modern. It is also fully responsive, so your readers can read your blog on their tablets, mobile devices and laptops.
Hemingway is a free theme for bloggers that is neatly designed and fully responsive. Its readable typography and prominent image displays will make it easier for your readers to keep on reading your blog articles. It also has a full-width header image, custom logo upload option, page templates and editor styles.
Kale is a free WordPress template that is especially suitable for food and recipe bloggers. It has a super clean and classy design and highlights content blocks that comes with prominent image positioning. You can customize your sidebars, banners, sliders, background colour and blog feed displays. This theme is also fully responsive and mobile-friendly.
Indie is a free theme that is suitable particularly for blogs. It has a beautiful header image, logo upload function and customizable menus, headers and colours. You can choose to have up to four columns if using this theme for your website. This theme is also mobile-friendly and fully responsive.
Cenote is a free theme that is suitable for any type of blog – whether personal, technology, travel, food or personal. It is SEO optimized and highly responsive. You can customize your social icons and widget areas. And you can choose between their layout options.
Olsen Lite is a free WordPress theme that is suitable for food, lifestyle, travel, health and fitness, fashion and beauty bloggers. It is fully responsive, easy to use and highly customizable. You can include social media buttons with this theme. The theme is compatible with popular page builders such as Beaver Builder, Divi, Elementor and Brizy.
Everly Lite is a free theme suitable especially for lifestyle and fashion blogs. It provides a minimalist modern and clean design with its classy typography and widgets. It is fully responsive and SEO friendly. It also provides the ability to choose between their multiple demo options and post formats.
Striker is a free WordPress theme that is suitable especially for those who are new to creating websites and blogs. The design of this theme is simple and you can easily add your logo, background, social links and header with this theme. You can also choose your own colour scheme to suit your taste or brand colour. There are different layouts to choose from with this theme.
Melissa is a fully responsive and modern free theme that was specially created for photography websites. It is SEO friendly and can provide you with the ability to choose between different font and colour options. You can fully customize your widgets with this theme. This theme is also translation ready, so visitors from all over the world can read what you have to say when they come to your website.
Creative is a free Bootstrap WordPress theme that is suitable for creative people to showcase their works. It is fully responsive, so viewers from mobile devices can access your website with this theme. You can also customize your background image and colour.
Tyche is a free theme that is especially suitable for fashion and clothing websites. Its sales oriented design will enable you to place banner ads and offers to your shopping cart. It is also compatible with WooCommerce plugin. It has sections like Trends, Most Wanted and Featured – which will be good especially if you are in fashion eCommerce. It has a smooth, simple and bright coloured design. It is also responsive and customizable.
Edge is a beautiful website that is suitable especially to create fashion websites. It has gallery templates and contact area, which will make it easy to showcase your fashion shots. You can also customize your widget areas and sidebars with this theme.
Mia Ittalloni is a free theme that is suitable especially for restaurants, cafes, culinary schools, recipe blogs and food related write-ups. Its elegant design and contemporary look will encourage your users to keep on reading your website. This theme is also customizable.
Enigma is a free Bootstrap free theme that you can use for your practically any type of professional services. It is fully responsive, meaning your customers can find you no matter what device they are using. It is also lightweight and can integrate with WooCommerce. There are multiple page layouts and sidebar widgets to choose from if you use this theme.
Flash is a multi-purpose free WordPress theme that is suitable for professional services. It has a built-in drag and drop page builder which makes building your website even more simple. It has over six widget areas, an About page and services icons. You can also upload your own logo on your website with this theme. This theme is also compatible with WooCommerce. You can also connect with your social buttons with this theme.
Esteem is an easy to use free WordPress template that is suitable for professional services. You get to enjoy unlimited theme colour options to suit your branding purposes. You also get to upload your own logo, site title, background feature and header image. This theme is translation ready, so you can also reach an international audience easily. The theme has five custom widgets and multiple blog options. You can also do custom CSS with this theme. It is compatible with popular plugins like Contact Form 7, Breadcrumb Navxt and WP PageNavi.
Spacious is a free template that provides a clean and professional looking layout. It is suitable especially for professional services. You can choose between two page templates and four page layouts with this theme. There are 13 widgets and a translation option. You can use it to include your business portfolio, blogs or any other information for your business. You can choose the colours of this theme to suit your logo and brand.
Interface is a simple free theme that is suitable especially for business websites offering professional services. The theme is fully responsive and compatible with popular plugins such as WooCommerce and bbPress. You can also set-up a forum to your website with this theme. There is the ability to customize your homepage featured slider, background and menu options with this theme. There are two site layouts to choose from, 6 custom widgets, 8 custom widget areas and 4 layouts for every page or post.
Virtue is a free WordPress theme that can be used by businesses. It is fully responsive, so your customers can find you no matter what device they are using. It is also compatible with WooCommerce, so you can choose to sell your products from your website using this theme. The theme is also SEO friendly. It has a options panel that you can use to determine your website layout, fonts, and sliders without using any CSS coding.
Vantage is a free WordPress theme that can be used to set-up business websites, especially those dealing with technology products and services. It has a fully responsive layout, making it easy for customers to find you. It is also compatible with major plugins such as WooCommerce and PageBuilder. You can sell your products from your website with this theme. You can also customize your menu and background to suit your business brand.
EDigital Market is a free theme that was created especially for selling digital products. You can use this theme to sell your stock photos, videos, music files, digital art, icons, softweare, fonts, eBoos and plugins. You can easily adjust the look of this theme. Whether you are a beginner, intermediate or advanced website creator, you will be able to use this theme with no trouble at all.
FlatOn is a free theme that is modern and responsive. It’s simple design can be used to represent technology businesses. This theme supports Jigoshop plugin. It has multiple footer widget areas and allows you to provide custom CSS through its theme option panel.
Free WordPress Themes for News and Magazine Websites
ColorMag
ColorMag is a free WordPress theme that was created especially for magazines and news websites. There are many social media buttons you can gain access to with this theme. And you can also integrate this theme with many popular plugins such as WooCommerce. So creating an online store with this theme will be possible too.
News Portal is a free theme that can be used especially for news and magazine websites. It is also fully responsive, which means your readers can view your website from any mobile devices. It is also SEO friendly and has many custom pages, widgets and header layouts. It is compatible with popular plugins such as WooCommerce. This means you can also use this theme to sell your products.
Delivery Lite is a free theme that you can use for your news and magazine websites. It has many widgets and custom menus to choose from. It also has a content slider that can highlight your most recent articles to your viewers. It is also fully responsive so your readers can visit your website using any of their mobile devices.
Awaken is a free WordPress template that is suitable for magazine or news websites. There are two main widget areas in this theme. The theme has three post widgets that can display posts in different styles. You can customize your featured slider, social media buttons, advertisement and YouTube video widget.
JustWrite is a free WordPress theme with an open-spaced design suitable especially for magazines and news websites. You can customize your headers, widgets and colours with this theme. There is also a translation support that you get with this theme which you can use to reach out to your readers who may not know the language you are using.
MH Magazine Lite is a free WordPress theme that can be used for news and magazine websites. It has a fully responsive design so your readers can access your website through their mobile devices. You can use it to customize your widgets. It also supports high resolution photos and can crop your images to thumbnail sizes. It is SEO friendly and runs fast.
NewsMag is a free theme that can be used to create your online news or magazine website. It is responsive and SEO friendly. It has a contact form and Google Maps that you can include in your Contact page. You can also customize your colours, menus and backgrounds with this theme. There’s also the option to include banners for advertising purposes.
MH Purity Lite is a free WordPress theme that is suitable to be used for news and magazine websites. It has a lot of white spaces and small thumbnail images so that you can fit as much as you can on your homepage for more engagement. You can use it to customize your colours, menus, headers and backgrounds. This theme is fully responsive and also has translation features.
And this rounds up my list of 45 best free WordPress themes that you can use for your website. Which of these themes is your favourite? Do you have any other free themes that you would like to recommend? Leave your comments in the comment section below. And share this article with your friends and family members who are struggling to find that perfect theme for their websites too!
Blogging is one of the most powerful tools that any business owner can use to grow and compete in today’s digital landscape. However, many still question the need of having a business blog.
They question whether having a website is enough and whether a blog will be able to give them the return on investment they are looking for. To me, whether you’re a carpenter, handyman, baker, hair stylist, fashion consultant, medical professional, artist, musician, tutor or anything at all – you will definitely be able to grow your business by having a blog!
Here are my 15 Reasons Why Every Business Should Have a Blog:-
Establish Yourself as an Authority and Expert
Blogging gives you the ability to demonstrate your knowledge, skills and expertise in your field. When you provide your target audience with relevant information and write-ups that help them solve their problems, they will begin to regard you as the expert in the field and use your blog as a go-to resource whenever they need to learn more about your field. And when they become your regular blog readers, they will become interested in knowing what you do and the types of products or services that you offer. These regular readers might become your leads and sales. And if they don’t, they might recommend your products or services to friends or family members who may want to buy from you!
Motivates You to Improve Your Knowledge and Skills
When you’re constantly updating your blog with fresh content, you will be motivated to do more research, experiment and connect more with people in your industry. The more you write about the topics in your area of expertise, the more knowledgeable you will become. And you will also be able to sharpen your communication and writing skills along the way while writing your blog and interacting with your others in your industry and your blog readers! Also, when you become more knowledgeable, you will begin to see more your readers being drawn to your blog to provide them with more information about your chosen niche.
Helps You to Compete with Competitors
If you’ve been in the situation before whereby you thought that having a blog was going to be a waste of time and money, there are probably a lot of your competitors who are still saying the same thing! So getting your blog started can put yourself in front of your target customers fast before your competitors get to them. And when you have a blog, you will be able to showcase your personality, values, brand and unique selling points to your target audience. Many other businesses may be offering the same products and services as you. But when you are able to differentiate your business from the rest of your competition, you will begin to see your blog readers begin to connect to your business. These readers may become loyal customers to you or even recommend your business to other people!
Grows Your Email List
Every business needs leads that they can convert into sales in the future. So by having a blog, you will get an engaged audience to opt-in to your email list. These will be strong leads that are most likely to convert into sales because those who have signed up to your list already reads your articles and know that you have expertise in your area. You can include call-to-action to encourage your blog readers to opt-in to your email list by offering them free digital downloads, reports, case studies or trainings. And by moving these people to your online sales funnel, you will be able to introduce them to your products and services so that they will eventually turn into customers.
Encourages Two-Way Communications With Customer
By having the ability to showcase your personality through a blog, you will become more approachable in the eyes of your customers and future customers. Besides providing valuable content for your blog, you should also encourage customers and prospects to leave their feedback and comments on your blog. This will give you an insight as to how your target audience sees you. And you will also be able to clear any doubts or negative thoughts of people towards your business by responding to any negative comments.
Provides Content for Social Media
You can also connect your blog posts to your social media channels to reach more audiences. Your social media channel needs to be updated regularly. So instead of just sharing content created by other people, why not share your own blog content and drive your target customers directly to your blog? You can create multiple social media posts using a single blog post to attract people who are visiting their social media accounts at different times.
Creates Opportunities for Content Sharing
When you share engaging, valuable, entertaining and fun content on your blog, chances are that your blog article may actually go viral! Ensure that you have installed plugins on your blog that will make it easier for people to share your blog article on social media. When people share your blog content, you actually get free publicity and benefit from word-of-mouth marketing. The more people share your content, the more you and your business will become well-known. The best part is that more of your target customers may come to know of you when your articles go viral!
Gives Your Business a Face and a Voice
Would you like to give a phone call to a company only to be answered by an answering machine? Probably not, right? Same goes with customers of any sort of businesses. Your customers want to deal with real people. Having a blog will enable you to personally connect with your readers by showing exactly who you are (as the Founder or staff behind the curtains) and what your business and brand is all about. When you readers begin to connect to your business this way, they would more likely want to do business with you rather than some other companies that doesn’t bother to connect with them. This helps to build brand loyalty amongst your target customers.
Opportunity to Express More Through Blog Content
Who loves receiving sales letters that are all about selling a product rather than connecting to you? None, right? But through blog content, you will find that your readers will be more opened to receiving news about your products and services if they are connected to a topic that is relevant to them. In fact, an attention span of a reader of a blog post is generally higher than someone who reads a generic sales letter! This is because blog posts provide value rich content that draws a reader to engage with it. However, you must be aware that you need to write your blog post in a way that highlights more about the problem that your readers are trying to solve rather than talking all about your products and services. There is an art to doing this and I may reveal it in one of my upcoming blog articles in the future.
Helps You To Launch Successful Marketing Campaigns
When you have regular readers to your business blog, you will find that launching a successful campaign for your business much easier. This includes doing product launches, eCourse launches, the promotion or certain ideas or events, poll competitions or any sort of campaigns that will help you to generate more leads and sales.
Grows Your Community and Network
Practically everyone loves to be part of a community or network that shares common interests and challenges. Once you have established your blog and gain regular readership, your readers will start to communicate to you by providing feedback and comments through your blog. Some of them may even contact you directly to collaborate and offer joint venture opportunities. You will find that when people begin to take part in communicating through your blog, more people will be encouraged to connect with you. This is because your blog has brought them a sense of belonging. They want to be part of a community and network. And that’s what your blog will do.
Drive More Traffic To Your Website
Relying on getting traffic from search engines when you only have an ‘About Us’, ‘Contact’ and ‘Services’ pages will be very tough. By having a blog, you will have the opportunity to rank your website by using certain keywords that are normally used by your target audience. Search engines, especially Google loves websites that constantly provide relevant and fresh content. Your blog will enable your website to rank high in search engines if updated regularly. The more visitors come to your website, the higher your chances will be to get more leads and sales for your business!
Rewards You With Long-Term Results
When it comes to blogging, the post you write today for your business will continue to help you generate more leads and sales in the future. In my previous post – ‘How to Create Evergreen Content for Your Blog’, I’ve highlighted how you can come up with blog articles that will stay fresh and relevant for years to come. You can use the tips I’ve shared to promote your own products, get affiliate products to sell or establish a connection with your readers so that they will follow your blog. You will find that the more you contribute blog articles, the more results you will get for your business – as in you will be able to generate more leads and sales!
Helps You To Improve Your Products and Services
Your customers and potential customers will not tell you directly why they are not buying your products and services. But by creating blog articles that describes about a particular product or service and asking for feedback from readers, you will be able to determine the real cause for your lack of sales. Using this method, you will be able to continuously improve your products and services to a point where it becomes a hot seller amongst your readers and target customers!
Provides a More Affordable Form of Marketing
By having a blog, you get to promote your business, brand as well as products and services in a more affordable way. For example, the web hosting company I use – BlueHost provides me with unlimited storage space for my blog at a low cost. So no matter how many posts I publish in my blog, the cost of running my blog will be the same. I can do promotional blog posts, announce about my new course, introduce affiliate products and create poll questions as well as competitions using my blog without any additional cost.
Blogging is no longer just an alternative tool that you can use to improve your business. In fact, if you have a small or medium-sized business, then blogging is a highly essential tool that can help you to beat your giant competitors. Having a blog will give you the ability to showcase your personality, brand and business to a wider target audience. It will also help your customers and prospective customers to connect with you. You will also be able to improve your products and services by receiving relevant feedback and comments from your valued readers.
I hope that you’ll be encouraged to start a blog for your business after reading my article.- 15 Reasons Why Every Business Should Have a Blog. Do you agree with any of the points that I’ve just mentioned above? If yes, please leave your comments in the comment section below. And if you already have a business blog and are benefiting from it, I’d like to know too.
Content is king when it comes to making your business known to your target audience on the internet. So how do you make full use of all the blog articles and write-ups that you produce for long term success? The answer is – evergreen content!
Evergreen content focuses on topics that remain ‘fresh’ and relevant to your target audiences for years to come. Creating evergreen blog content for your business is a really good strategy to develop strong SEO so that your blog will continue to attract more visitors over time.
This tactic also helps you to establish yourself as a thought leader and expert in your field as more and more people will get to know about you and learn from your expertise and content writing.
You will also be able to continually serve your customers and potential customers throughout the year by providing this evergreen content. It is important to note that evergreen articles are not:-
News-related pieces
Holiday or seasonal write-ups
Current trends and crazes
Statistics or numerical reports
Pop culture fad
Latest clothing and fashion trends
Although such articles may boost up your website rank in search engines, the demand for such information will fade sooner or later. So it’s important to understand that both trending and evergreen content can contribute towards your business success.
Examples of evergreen content that you can produce are:-
Product Reviews
Lists
“How-to” tutorials
Answers to FAQs (frequently asked questions)
Industry Advice
Glossary of terms and phrases that are common to your industry
Testimonials
Case Studies (Successful and What-Went-Wrong)
Resources List
Top Tips
Checklists
List of Free and Paid Tools
Books to Reach a Specific Goal or Solve a Challenge
Interviews
Lessons Learned from Mistakes Made
Common Mistakes in an Industry
Pros and Cons write-ups
Below are my top tips for finding suitable evergreen content ideas for your blog and business:-
Right Keywords
What are the types of keywords that you would like your website to rank for? The best way to figure this out is to determine the types of challenges that your customers are normally facing.
After figuring this out, you will need to brainstorm the potential questions that your customers would be keying into their search engines. And from there, you can use these questions to make a decision on the types of keywords that you will be focusing on to rank your website.
You can get ideas of the types of keywords to use by doing a thorough research on Google Adwords. Try to choose longtail keywords instead of more general keywords because the competition for such keywords would be less. So it will be easier for your customers to discover you.
You must also see that the keywords you have chosen have a good amount of search volume per month.
Use the Google Adwords Keyword Planner tool.
Once you have selected on the Keyword Planner tool, you need to click on ‘Find new keywords’.
In that section, you will need to key in the terms or keywords that would be most likely used by your target customers.
Then you can look through the suggested keywords and average monthly searches to see what are the keywords that are popularly used. You can also use this method to find other potential keywords that you may have missed earlier.
Besides using Google Adwords, you can also use Keywords Everywhere to search for potential related topics that may have a good volume of searches. Keywords Everywhere is a browser add-on that you can use on Chrome and Firefox. It allows you to see what types of keywords are normally used.
Once you install Keywords Everywhere onto your web browser, you will see at the bottom right the search volume for the keywords or term that you have used.
You will also find that at the top right of your browser, there are a list of related keywords compared to the keywords or term that you have used. You can use this to get more ideas for your evergreen content.
Visit Pinterest
Once you have determined that best keywords that are suitable for your evergreen blog articles, I’d highly recommend for you to visit Pinterest for some ideas.
Pinterest is a great place with huge database of evergreen topics. Just key on your chosen keywords and Pinterest will highlight to you so many types of topics you can write that focuses on your chosen keywords.
Optimize for SEO
The next thing you want to do is to create your evergreen content article in a way that is optimized for SEO. You can do this by ensuring that your images have alt text and that your main keywords are in your title, URL and your body copy. Do not overload your articles with too many of the same keywords. Choose a variation of different, but related keywords. You can also hyperlink other related evergreen articles in each of your articles so that your readers will continue to read your blog. This will increase their time on your blog, which will be good for your SEO too!
Create Content Suitable For Your Audiences (Beginners, Intermediate or Advanced)
In order to engage your audiences, you need to write your content in a way that relates to them. If you are targeting an audience with beginner knowledge to a specific topic, then write simple to understand articles that are suitable for beginners. On the other hand, if you are targeting audiences with intermediate or advanced knowledge in a specific topic, then you must write your articles according to their level of understanding. Doing this will ensure that you get to fully engage with your readers so that they will visit your blog again or support your products and services.
Avoid Jargons and Technical Terms
Unless you are writing for an audience that are used to jargons and technical terms, avoid using them at all times! This is because you will only frustrate your readers by using them. And if you have no choice but to use certain jargons and technical terms in your blog, then remember to explain to your readers what those words mean. It’s no use spending all that time writing articles that won’t be understood by your readers.
And so that’s it. Your complete guide to discovering topics for creating evergreen blog content that will help your business to grow. I hope that you found this article helpful. If you like what I have shared and would like to receive my future blog updates, don’t forget to join my newsletter by opting-in to receive my free ‘7 Copywriting Mistakes’ guide below.
Making money can be challenging, especially if you have no money at all to get started. However, with the power of the internet, you can still make money online for free – even with little experience!
Here are my top tips on how to make money online without paying anything:-
Facebook Group
By regularly posting helpful tips and comments to members in Facebook Groups that are related to your chosen niche, you will soon gain popularity in this highly regarded social media channel.
You can then start your own Facebook Group and charge for members to gain access to this group. And of course, you must be able to offer content that is exclusive to members only or provide other additional support to them such as free group coaching.
This is because people will only be attracted to a paid Facebook Group if the benefits of joining really stands out compared to joining other free Facebook Groups.
YouTube Videos
Choose a specific niche that you would like to concentrate on and start posting YouTube videos on this topic regularly. Of course, the more you post your videos, the better. But if it is not possible to post a few times a week, try to post at least once a week. If not people may not be attracted to subscribe to your YouTube channel.
Don’t forget to do your keyword search before deciding on a topic to talk about because your videos might not rank well and you won’t get viewers to your videos if you do not choose your keywords wisely. I’d recommend you to use Keywords Everywhere and Google Adwords to find suitable keywords for your YouTube videos.
You can monetize your YouTube Videos by using Google Adsense or promote affiliate products through your video demos. Don’t forget to put your affiliate links at the description section of your videos so that your viewers will know where to go to buy the products!
Fiverr
Many people who are familiar with the world of outsourcing knows that Fiverr is the place to go for work to be done at an affordable price.
But how do you as a freelancer make a lot of money from Fiverr if you only charge a small amount of fee for each gig?
Well, my advice to you is to use Fiverr as a way to get your name out there so that your potential customers will be able to know what services that you offer.
And when a potential customer enquires about your services, you can recommend them additional services that would help you to serve them even better.
With this strategy, you get to charge higher than your normal base price. And the best thing is that your customer will come back to you when they have more work to be done. So, you will start to get regular customers in no time!
Kindle eBook
If you love writing, then publishing Kindle eBooks for free could be the best way for you to make money online. There are a lot of free software that you can use to design your eBooks to suit the Kindle format. Furthermore, if you publish in a hot niche, your chances of having potential customers knowing about your eBooks from Amazon will be quite high because Amazon is a really popular website especially for book lovers. Besides this, you can also get your blog or social media followers to buy your eBooks by simply recommending it to them. So just start writing!
Affiliate Marketing
With affiliate marketing, you will earn a commission for every sale made from your affiliate link. You need not worry about spending money to create the product. Your job is to just to promote and recommend the product. A good free method you can use to promote affiliate products is by doing YouTube demo videos (as mentioned earlier!). If you are a social media influencer, you can also benefit by promoting affiliate products to your followers.
Website Designer
Having a blog and growing a business through the internet is so common in today’s digital world. However, many do not have the patience or technical abilities to build and design their own websites to perfection. If you like building websites (especially WordPress sites), then you can help people set-up their websites, choose suitable web templates for them and customise their website designs according to their individual needs and tastes. You can promote your website design services especially through YouTube. This is because when people have technical problems with their websites, they will normally go to YouTube for answers. And when you have done-for-you web design services that takes care of everything for them, you might get some paying customers in the door sooner than you think!
Sell on eBay
Do you have a lot of pre-loved items and would like to re-sell them for a profit? Then you might get some serious cash by selling them on eBay. This is especially the case if you happen to own pre-loved items that are antique because once refurbished, you get to increase the price of these goods tremendously.
Online Courses
Do you like to teach or show people how to do stuff? Then you can create your very own online courses and start selling them for really good prices. You can start by hosting your online courses for free on Udemy and Teachable.
So these are my 8 Best Tips on How to Make Money Online for Free. I hope these tips will be useful to you especially when starting your business with zero start-up cost.
You’re all excited now, wanting to begin your online presence with a paid web hosting. But wait! You still have yet to figure out that best domain name for your website.
Picking a good domain name for your website as it will be your identity on the World Wide Web. Find the perfect website name can be challenging as a lot of great names have been already taken.
With these simple steps, you will be able to learn how to choose a domain name for your website:
Step 1 – Reflects your company name or business
If you’re building a website to promote your existing business, then you will need to have a matching website domain name to your company name or business.
Step 2 – Is it Memorable?
If you are starting your website without having an existing business to link to it, then ask yourself…Can people remember your domain name after they have left your website?
The best way to do this is to brainstorm a few names and circulate them to your family and friends to ask them which names they are likely to remember.
Avoid choosing a domain name with words that are spelled wrongly. You should also avoid having any hyphens and numbers in your website name.
Step 3 – Keep it Short
Avoid having a complex and long web domain name. This is because people may not be able to remember a website name that is too long.
Step 4 – Keywords
It’s advisable to use keywords that relate to the key niche of your business or services, especially if this business can be brought offline as well.
For instance, if you would to provide wedding services, then your website domain should potentially have word ‘wedding’ in it. This is so that your potential customers will know what your business is about.
This will also help you to rank better in search engines so that you will get more traffic to your website. The print screen below shows the top three websites that appeared on Google when I typed ‘wedding services’ in the Google search bar.
Step 5 – Include Geographic Terms (only if applicable)
If your business only provides services to a certain geographic area, then you can add the location in your domain name. But if you have plans to expand your business to the whole world and not limit yourself to a certain area, do not include geographic terms.
An example of a domain name with geographic term is weddingservicesmelbourne.com.au (see below).
You can of course exclude the geographic term altogether even though you service within that area. The choice is yours.
Step 6 – Choose a .com…if possible
It’s advisable to choose a .com for your website domain name simply because it’s the most recognisable compared to the other TLD (Top Level Domain).
Step 7 – Research the name
Before you register your domain name, check and be 100% sure that you have not selected a name that is trademarked, copyrighted or used by another business.
Step 8 – Quickly register your domain name
Once you have done all the steps above, quickly register your domain name. If you would go to Bluehost and register your domain name, they will recommend you with alternative domain names if the domain name you had in mind is no longer available.
The alternative website domain names given by Bluehost are below:
So now that you know how to choose the best domain name for your website, you’re ready to register for your paid web hosting and website name.
