HostGator Black Friday Offer Upto 75% Discount

HostGator is always my first choice when anyone asks me about a good web hosting.

I started my blogging journey around years back with HostGator 1 cent plan where I paid only $0.01 for the first month and then continued paying the actual fee every month.

HostGator Plans

HostGator offers various plans according to your need.

They are offering plans like Shared hosting, VPS hosting, Dedicated hosting and Reseller hosting.

Note: If you are a newbie, I will recommend starting with shared hosting only.. because shared hosting is cheap as well as more than sufficient for new websites.

Shared hosting plans:

1. Hatchling Plan

• Single Domain
• UNLIMITED Disk Space
• UNLIMITED Bandwidth
• Shared SSL Certificate
• This plan is the best option if you are going to start your online career with only one website. This plan can handle a good amount of traffic and you are going to get good disk space you store your files.

2. Baby Plan

• UNLIMITED Domains
• UNLIMITED Disk Space
• UNLIMITED Bandwidth
• Shared SSL Certificate
• I would recommend this plan even if you are a newbie because in this plan you can host unlimited sites. Once you will start your blogging career, you will feel like having more sites. But if you have bought Hatchling plan then you cannot host more than one website on the server.

3. Business Plan

• UNLIMITED Domains
• UNLIMITED Disk Space
• UNLIMITED Bandwidth
• FREE Private SSL & IP
• FREE Toll-Free Number
• They are giving this plan from the business perspective because in this plan you are going to get Toll FREE number at free of cost.

This hosting might cost you little more than other hosting plans but if you are thinking to start your online business on the hosting then I would suggest to go for this pan only.

Click here to buy with 75% Discount

Some Features of HostGator

Once you will buy any hosting plan from HostGator, you will get the following benefits.

• $100 Google Adwords Credit.
• Unlimited WebHosting.
• 4,500 Free Website Templates.
• 45 Day Money Back Guarantee.
• FREE Site Builder & 4,500 Templates.
• Easy-to-use Control Panel (cPanel).
• 1-CLICK Script Installs.
• Unlimited Email Addresses and Space.
• 24/7/365 Technical Support (The most important thing).

They are running this offer very very short time, so go and grab this deal.

HostGator server speed

Server speed has become one of the biggest concerns to rank any website higher in search engines. All the websites which are loading faster than other competitors always rank better than them, because Google wants to deliver the content as soon as possible.

If your website has been hosted on a server which is taking too much time to load then it’s the time to change your hosting.

I have 10+ websites hosted on HostGator which are loading in just a few seconds which make them way ahead than other websites. My personal website KulwantNagi.com as well as one of my other big sites TechnoBOL are hosted on Hostgator.

You can see the loading time of one of my niche websites (which is just 3.78 seconds).

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How To Get More Traffic and Backlinks With Roundup Blog Posts

Hello, Readers in This Article We Learn How To Get More Traffic and Backlinks With Roundup Blog Posts This article is dedicated to bloggers, freelance writers and affiliate marketers who want to get more traffic and backlinks to their site and don’t know how.

Inside you’ll learn

1. What are expert roundups and why do they work
2. How to select the right theme for your roundup
3. How to pick a great question for the participants
4. Where to find the experts
5. How to make them say ‘YES’
6. How to promote your post

#1 – What are Expert Roundups and Why Do They Work

This type of blog post is a collection of tips/insights on a particular theme or topic, answered by experts in a specific industry.

For example, I once worked with AHREFS and created an expert roundup post with 90 SEO specialists involved. Each one of them had to answer the same question. Click here to see the results.

#2 – How to Select the Right Theme for Your Roundup

Before I craft an expert roundup I ensure I study the website or blog where the expert roundup will be posted. All I do is simple: I analyze the audience by taking a close look at the most commented posts, the comments themselves, and latest topics published.

Based on the target audience and the theme of the site, I am able to decide on a very specific topic.

For example, let’s say your site is about tennis gear, then a good topic would be best tennis gear to buy.

#3 – How to Pick a Great Question for the Participants

Once you’re done with the theme/topic, next step is to find a great question. Brainstorm a few minutes. I have a fill in the blank template I use each time I get writer’s block, which has about 60 potential questions to ask.

Here are some ‘personalized’ examples:

What mistakes should beginners avoid when buying a pair of tennis shoes?

What is your recommended budget to invest in tennis gear and how would you spend it?

Which pair of shoes do you recommend for tennis beginners to buy: Nike or Asics?

Useful Resources:

• How To Check Keyword Rank Without Software 2017
• Tips to Launch a Blog That Makes Money in 2017

#4 – Where to find the experts

Experts are everywhere: Google. Quora. Linkedin. Facebook. Twitter. Forums. Blogs. YouTube.

The key is to focus on one or two channels and hunt for experts over there.

My favorite place is Twitter and personal blogs. It gets easier to find their email this way. And email is the best way to connect with the expert because, from my experience, all the other channels are not reliable for one on one contact.

With e-mail, it is very easy and less time consuming to manage all your expert answers in one place and then collect the responses in a word document to be edited & published later.

#5 – How to make them say ‘YES’

First of all, if people recognize your name before you contact them with your expert roundup request, you’ll have a higher chance to get them say “YES”. If you do cold calling via e-mail, then rates will drop significantly. So I suggest you first have the expert recognize your name. Here are three ways:

1. E-mail them about something related to their blog.

Maybe you’ve seen their logo and you like it that much that you want to ask who designed it for them. That will open the door for you.

2. Comment on their blog on a topic you like

They’ll surely notice your name, particularly if the comment is insightful and meaty; this will open the door for you.

3. Interact with them via social media. Share their stuff multiple times that they’ll notice your name. It’s a great starter!

Once you’re done with one of these, you email them a short message.

Example:

>> subject line

X, quick question

Hi, Y here. Hope you’re well?

I’m creating an expert roundup on ____ (theme)

for Z person / famous blog and I’d like to invite

you to participate.

Here’s the question if you’re interested:

_______________________

I’d need your response within 7 days.

200 words are ideal but not required.

Thank you

[Your name]

Wait 3 days for a response. Follow-up with another shorter email asking if they’re still able to send their answer. Some will reply.

Out of 100 emails sent, maybe 30 will respond. This is a good conversion rate.

#6 – How to promote your post

Once you collect your answers, ensure you save them all in a word document, and edit it (add the title, intro, responses, and outro)

Your post goes live. Return to your experts and give them the link to take a look. Most will promote it to their followers via social media.

Some will promote it to their newsletter subscribers.

Others will even mention it on their website, in a blog post which is relevant to the topic.

I’ve also seen people have a section in their “about me” page where they list all the interviews they’ve done along with expert roundups and other Internet apparitions.

Go back to people who have agreed to participate but for some reasons they haven’t. Email them as well. For extra promotion.

This initial promo effort is enough to help you get traffic, shares, and links.

Obviously, traffic is significantly higher if you have more experts involved.

I usually aim for 40+. The highest number of experts I’ve seen in an expert roundup were a whopping 192. You decide if that’s too much.

Now, use this guide as a helping hand in creating your own expert roundups and get more traffic.

If you have any questions, comments or suggestions about this topic, let me know.

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Tips to Launch a Blog That Makes Money in 2017

When you search for “how to make money blogging” keyword on Google, you will find a gazillion number of articles. There are a lot of bloggers giving you advice about how to build a great blog from scratch. But most of the advice is useless.

90% of them suggest, try affiliate marketing, AdSense, sell ads etc. That’s not how you really build a successful blog. To really make money from your blog, you need a strategy.

You need to follow certain steps to launch a better blog and this article covers 6 vital steps you need to take to launch a blog that makes money in 2017 and beyond. Are you ready to discover? Let’s get into the details.

So you finally want to join the blogging community. Well by reading this article you’ll have taken the biggest step to starting a blog that can create an income for you and your family.

I have been blogging as my main source of income for the past 7 years. It has been a long hard slog but in the past few years, I have managed to launch successful blog after successful blog which has meant that I can quit the 9-5 and spend more time with my family & build a lifestyle I am happy with.

Don’t get me wrong I have made many mistakes along the way but once I knew what I was doing it became a lot easier and more enjoyable. Many of my friends have emailed me or called me to find out more about “What Jamie Does”, but it can be a little hard to sink in at first as to how you can actually make a real income from running a successful blog(s). Therefore I have decided to create this guide for my friends, family, email subscribers and anyone else who wants to start doing “What Jamie Does”.

This guide to making a money making a blog is completely free. I don’t want anything for it – just for you to take action and do it, so many of my friends would love to do it but give up too soon, often when their big breakthrough might only be a few weeks away.

The guide is quite long and there are lots of links to other pages on this blog and on other blogs too which will help you – so please make sure to bookmark this page.

HOW TO PICK A PROFITABLE BLOG NICHE

This is the most critical step.

Seriously.

There is no point in starting a blog that you want to make money from without a plan. There are thousands, even hundreds of niches out there. Some are broad and huge; some are small and virtually unknown. Some niches are easier to make money in than others.

This is why your research is important.

A good place to start when you are picking a niche is to look at your own interests in Google.

For example, I really launched a blog in the survivalist niche a couple of years ago which I sold for a great profit. The reason I created this blog was that I enjoy being outdoors, hiking and mountain biking etc. I also watch a lot of TV shows about people like Bear Grylls and Ray Mears.

I’m no expert but it’s something I like.

One area I never really got into with my survivalist blog and wanted to was Everyday Carry. Most people will have never heard of this concept but it really is an interesting sub-niche within this niche. Everyday Carry is basically any items you can’t leave the house with.

For most of us this will be our wallet, phone & keys – and in the summer months hopefully some sunglasses :).

If you travel a lot for work you may have a laptop or tablet with you.

If you work on a construction site you may have a tool belt.

However for many people who are always prepared everyday carry is about having everything you might need in an emergency or for general use on you at all times. This will often include a light source (torch), a pocket knife, some small tools & rope it’s quite amazing how easy it is to carry all these things with you in your pockets, on your keys or in a small bag.

Step 1: Brainstorm different monetization methods

Few websites use Google AdSense ads to make money while few other sites use affiliate marketing. There are a TON of ways to monetize a website.

It doesn’t matter what niche you are in, you can find multiple ways to make money from your website audience. So before even starting your blog or website, identify different ways to monetize your site so it becomes easier for you to how to treat your audience.

To find the perfect monetization model for your site, first ask yourself questions like

• Who’s my target audience?
• Where they usually hang out online
• What problems do they have?
• Which products or services they might buy to solve their problems

By knowing answers to the above questions, you can easily figure out which monetization platform you can use (either selling online products, promoting affiliate products, offering services or using platforms like AdSense etc) to make money from your blogging efforts.

Also, create a sales funnel for your blog or website.

A sales funnel is what turns normal blog visitors into email subscribers into buyers. Here’s what it generally looks like.

As you can see the sales funnels usually follow the tactic called AIDA (Awareness, Interest, Decision and Action). If you can use your content to create awareness and email list to get people interested in your stuff, you can easily make sales from your sites.

That being said, here are few tips to convert normal visitors into customers.

• Use landing pages. Offer a free guide or video for free to collect emails from your blog visitors.
• Create an email series to nurture your email subscribers and educate them about your products or services instead of hard pitching.
• Once you have enough bond with your subscribers, you can start recommending your products or services to make money.
• If you are using other platforms like AdSense or selling banner ads, make sure to focus on creating keyword rich content to drive more traffic from search engines. The more search traffic you get that more income you can make from ads.

Useful Resources:

• How To Check Keyword Rank Without Software 2017
• How To Get More Traffic and Backlinks With Roundup Blog Posts

Step 2: Create a content strategy

Content is the first step to building a profitable blog. Observe any top in any industry and you will notice that their content is top notch. Great content is the only way to build thriving audience around your blog or website.

So it’s extremely crucial for you to lay out a solid content marketing strategy that helps you build backlinks, social shares, traffic, and sales. If you are wondering how to develop a content strategy for your blog, here are few incredible tips for you.

• Do keyword research before writing any post. Come up with a list of keyword ideas that you can use to grow your traffic and sales.
• While coming up with ideas for your blog posts, always ask “what’s my target audience are searching for on Google”. That way you can come up with great ideas that suit your target audience wants and needs.
• Use tools like Buzzsumo to find the most popular content in your industry. It helps you find content that got more shares and backlinks in your industry so you can come up with winning post ideas for your future blog posts.
• While writing content, research A LOT. Spend more time in doing the research and your content quality also improves. Outline the post with subheadings and it becomes easier for you to fill them up.
• Analyze how other bloggers are crafting their content. Find out their content frequency and length. If they are getting better results with in-depth content, try the same. It takes the time to create detailed content but it can generate you more traffic, social shares and links in the long run.

Step 3: Analyze your competitor’s

Competitor analysis is extremely important. You must know what’s working in your industry before launching a blog in any niche. Without knowing your competition, it’s hard to see a rapid growth in your online business.

So how can analyze your competitors?

You can use tools like SEMrush to estimate their website traffic, find their backlink sources and know their best-performing keywords. Or you can simply use free tools like Buzzsumo to know their popular content.

Once you analyze your competitor’s keywords, traffic, and content – you will get a better idea of what works and what doesn’t work in your niche. That’s what you need to build a successful blog from scratch.

Here are few things you need to remember while analyzing your competitor’s.

• Find out their current content strategy. Analyze how many posts they are publishing a week along with their content length. Know more about their SEO strategies. Are they doing keyword research? Are they promoting other products while writing content? Make detailed notes and start implementing them while creating content for your own blog.
• Figure out how your competitors are promoting their content and products. Are they using email marketing, SEO or social media?
• Find out if there are gaps to fill in your competition. If all your competitors are doing the textual format of content creation, think about doing video content or podcasts. Try to create a unique selling point for your own blog if you want to stay unique from the beginning.
• Last but not least: find out from where your competitors are getting backlinks to their sites. You can use tools like SEMrush, Ahrefs to do backlink analysis. Try to connect with those bloggers if you want to attract quality links for your own site too. Remember that, backlinks play a vital role in SEO.

Step 4: Your website appearance, speed, rankings play a HUGE role

Web design is the king in 2016. If your blog’s design is not unique or compelling, you can’t give a long lasting impression to your first-time website visitors.

The key here is to spend time and money on making your design appealing. Make sure you are using a clean sidebar, widgets and logos. Always give top priority to your font size and style.

As a rule of thumb, keep your font size between 14 to 16 px so it becomes easier for your audience to read your content. Also, focus on your website speed. Your web hosting service plays a crucial role. Make sure to use a reliable and affordable hosting that gives a better experience to your users.

According to Hubspot research, website navigation plays a crucial role. See the image below.

If your site is not mobile responsive yet, use free plugins like WPTouch. It quickly makes your site mobile friendly and you will be bringing more traffic and sales from mobile visitors. Make a note that, Google penalizes the sites that are not responsive.

If you are on a budget, you can give an appealing look to your blog’s design by using theme frameworks like Genesis, Elegant themes etc. They are really affordable and you can make your design unique by making small tweaks to your design elements such as header, footer, sidebar etc.

Step 5: Offer services from day 1

Did you know the fastest way to make money online? It’s offering services. Freelance writing, coding, SEO services – these are all great for quickly making money from your own sites. Just make sure to have a dedicated landing page for offering your services.

Also use testimonials from your clients and showcase any links or videos if you’ve offered your services for big clients. Social proof can really help you get more clients from your own blog.

Here are few things to remember while offering services.

• I know monetising a site is hard. Use landing pages. Show social proof. Offer your services in various pricing packages. All these things convert your visitors into your customers really quickly.
• Build a portfolio. If you want better results, offer your services free for big companies or product developers. That way you can build some reputation.
• Make it for people to contact you. Analyze how others are using their services page to get more leads and customers.
• Build an email list. Use it to educate your audience about the products and services you promote. You can make more sales by adding value.

Step 6: Don’t ignore SEO

Search engine traffic is the king of all traffic sources. Ignore SEO at your own risk. Learn to implement simple SEO basics like keyword research, backlink analysis, site audit and they can save you a lot of bucks and time in the long run.

Observe any top blog in any industry and they get the majority of their visitors from search engines like Google. You don’t need an authority site to get massive traffic from Google but you do need to implement certain SEO strategies from day 1 to boost your traffic and sales.

That being said, here are few essential and easy SEO tips you should implement.

• Always do keyword research. Find long tail keywords that fit into your content strategy. Instead of keyword stuffing, use relevant keywords while creating content. This can alone help you get better rankings for most of the keywords.
• Keep an eye on Google latest updates. You can check out Moz updates to know whether there are any fresh updates released by Google. If you see a sudden traffic drop in your sites, make sure to do a site audit to find and fix your website SEO related issues.
• Whenever you write a new post, make sure you are adding links to other relevant sources. Let other bloggers know you’ve linked to them. Sooner or later you will also start getting links from others.
• Use an SEO friendly plugin like WordPress SEO by Yoast. It’s free and extremely easy to optimize your posts for search engines.

Final Words

Most people think WordPress is a search-friendly platform. Yes, it’s true but using WordPress platform alone won’t help you in getting better rankings in Google. You have to do keyword research, optimize your posts and offer specific services to build a blog that makes money.

Also, make sure to spend your time on creating a solid content strategy that helps you build a loyal readership around your blogs. Be patient and analyze your competitor’s to see growth.

So what are your thoughts? Do you have any more questions? Do let me know if you’ve any more tips to launch a profitable blog in 2017 and beyond.

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How To Check Keyword Rank Without Software 2017

I have searched many times on Google to get ideas about How to check my keywords ranking or position of my keywords in the search result. And I got tons of article and tools that are talking about it, but as you know, it does not help when you tested it; the main reason was (maybe) Google does not update/disable their API, that is used by keyword ranking tools. So probably whenever you check any kind of keywords in any tools, then you will not get the desired result. Well, you can even use Google analytics for that, but it is not the easiest way, compare to this one, so here, we will use Google Search console.

Check Keyword Ranking with Google Webmaster Tool FREE 2017

• From your webmaster dashboard, expand Search Traffic and click on Search analytics. Refer below screenshot for better understanding.

• Now mark on impression and position option.
• Now sort your result with impressions or clicks option. Try both to understand which query does not perform well for your blog post.

Now, you will see the position for particular keywords, those keywords are automatically generated by Google spider, based on your website content, it may be your heading line or any sentence from any paragraph, it is totally automated by Google spider, and they regularly store/update that kind of data on their server. You can download that data by clicking on the download option from the bottom, and further, you can analysis that data for your website.

You should note that the position is displayed as average position, based on the query, and country location, you can refer Google official docs on this. So if you find out an average position as 17.3, then your post or article link appear from 15 to 20 anywhere in the search results.

Final Words:

You can check your Keywords Conditions and Search Engine Ability or Ranking using this Google Webmaster Tool You can also index any post on Google Less than 5minutes this post will be coming soon on this blog. :)

Hope this little guide helps you to check keyword ranking for your website/blog.

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