Business & Blogging
New year, same inbox…oy! The Inbox Battle - have you conquered it or are you still fighting to get control back? When you have had an email account for a long time, it seems more and more unrealistic to get to inbox 0 (or at least 0 unread emails). Well it’s a new year...in fact, a new decade! It’s time to win that battle of You vs. the Inbox once and for all. Here are 7 strategies that you can implement to get your inbox looking more lean.
There are many things that you need to know as a blogger. The two main things are what you are going to write about and who you are writing it for. These two pieces go hand in hand because you need to know what your topics will be but they have to align with the audience that you are tying to reach. You may have an audience in mind but may not know what to write about or you may have so many post ideas but not know who you want to write them for. This is where survey's and quizzes come into play.
Have you ever been browsing online and run across a question like “What is your writing style? Take the quiz to find out!”? Or maybe you received an email from someone who’s list you have joined and they asked you to take their brief annual survey. Both of these scenarios are things that you should consider including in your blog market research strategy.
(Related: 3 Smart Reasons Why You Should Automate Market Research)
Quizzes and surveys are just another strategy for collecting information from your audience to use with the intent to improve your content and ultimately retain and gain more readers, customers, etc. Today I will be discussing why quizzes and surveys are important and 7 ways they can be included in your blogging strategy.
Well Hello 2019! Now that the new year is here, everyone is all about renewal, making better decisions for themselves, goal setting and the like. I love the momentum that the new year brings and all of the hope and aspirations that come along with it. Many bloggers set new goals for their blogs, so in the spirit of the new year I will be discussing 19 things to remove and improve on your blog for 2019.
I have officially been a Squarespace user for over two years, and switching over to them still feels like one of the best business decisions I’ve made. There are many reasons why I love Squarespace (here is a post all about it), but one is that you can sell not only physical products, but digital products and services, too! This is a great feature for those selling things such as workbooks, e-books, email courses, coaching packages, etc. The beauty of Squarespace is that you pay one fee for your site and can also incorporate e-commerce, so you don’t have to subscribe to another service for digital sales (Sam Cart, DPD Cart or Gumroad)! There are various benefits to selling digital products on your website, and I will be sharing my top three.
If you blog or have a business, a social media presence is necessary to expand your reach, find your customers/readers and meet like-minded people (#CommunityOverCompetition). The problem is, there are so many different social platforms it can be hard to keep up with them all and stay active on them consistently. As someone working a 9-5 and hustling on the side, time is of the utmost importance, so putting effort into things that aren’t providing the intended results is something that you don’t want to do. I found myself in this situation. I was trying to be present on four different social platforms, but I was really just spreading myself too thin. As a result, my posts were sub-par and inconsistent. In November 2015, I decided to create a spreadsheet to keep track of my weekly social media and email list numbers so I can start spotting trends. Over the past two years I have gained so much insight! Now I will be sharing the findings with you and telling you 5 smart reasons to keep track of your own social media following.
The next installment for blog organization this month is organizing your ideas. Has this ever happened to you? It’s 3AM and you’re in the middle of getting some good sleep. Suddenly you wake up and have an awesome idea for a blog post. You have no paper or pen next to the bed and you don’t want to save the idea to your phone because it will just get lost in the shuffle of your other notes. You end up falling back asleep but never wrote the idea down, then the next day when you try to remember it...no such luck.
Getting a great idea at the most inopportune time is a pretty common thing. It’s not enough to just jot it down on paper (papers get lost with the other papers of ideas that you’ve already written and have scattered around the house), you need to keep your thoughts organized in the quickest way possible. Today I will be discussing a way to keep track of those middle of the night thoughts and random blog post ideas and even keep them all organized together quickly.
Squarespace is one of the top website platforms out right now because there is so much that you can do without knowing a lick of code to get it done. My website is built on the Squarespace platform and it was the best decision I made to switch over (read more about my experience with Squarespace here). One of the best features is that you can create a cover page (aka landing page). People use cover pages for different purposes such as sales pages, email list opt-in pages, thank you pages, etc. The problem with cover pages in Squarespace is that you are limited to the type of content that you can add to it. For example, you can’t place buttons where you want them (they can only be on certain locations of the page) and you can only include a limited number of links. Sometimes you just need a blank page to work with so that you can build your cover page using all of the options available when clicking an insert point. The problem is if you create a new page, all of your page links, header and footer contents will appear as well as any announcement bars that you may have set. The purpose of a cover page is so that the reader doesn’t get distracted and stray away from what you’re trying to get them to sign up for, purchase or learn. Today I am going to give you three simple pieces of code that will help you create a landing page free from all of the default header and footer distractions and how to remove an announcement bar from that page on your Squarespace website.
A social media bio is incredibly important. It’s a snapshot of who you are (your name/handle), what you do (your bio) and where people can find out more about you (your URL). The problem is, when you have various aspects to your brand, driving traffic to your home page may not yield the best results (i.e. sales or email subscribers). You only have the option to include one link on your social profiles (and you can't add links in descriptions on Instagram), so you should maximize that link as much as you can. Today I will be discussing two ways to maximize the URL on your social media bio’s in Squarespace by creating dedicated social media landing pages.
Squarespace websites are all the rave these days, and rightfully so. I am a graphic designer that also dabbles a little in web design, so I prefer a easier way of creating a website that doesn't involve too much coding knowledge. When I first started blogging 8 years ago and up until last December I was using the Blogger platform. This was reasonable at the time for my DIY and home decor blog because all that I really needed was a clean layout and the ability to customize it, but for my business blog it was quickly becoming a problem since I was limited on what I could do. At a certain point I began to realize that blogger wasn’t going to cut it for me and I needed to choose another blogging platform especially when I ended up having two URLs related to my business. After comparing Wordpress and Squarespace, Squarespace was the winner. Today, after 9 months of use, I am going to tell you 10 reasons why Squarespace became cool with me and the awesome things that it has to offer. 9 months...it's like I birthed a Squarespace baby and am telling you about the 9 month pregnancy journey now :D Before we get started, this is NOT a sponsored post...I just love Squarespace and wanted to share my experience with you all, my boo’s :)
Email Marketing is a huge deal right now. You may have been hearing about growing your list and different strategies to do it, but let's take a step back for a moment and talk about HOW people are actually opting in. Obviously there is some type of form to fill in, but where is the form located? How does it look? Most importantly, are visitors directed away from your site to fill in their forms? I really hope not, because you are setting yourself up for lots of missed potential subscribers if so! It’s a proven fact that sign up interest decreases with each step that is added to the process (humans like convenience!). It's also known that readers are 30% more likely to opt-in when they can do it with a simple click and fill process (AKA two-step opt-in process). Ultimately you want to encourage visitors to sign up and make it as easy as possible.
You may have heard of Leadpages, a lead generating website that offers many types of opt-in forms to incorporate on your site. Unfortunately they don't have a free plan...or a cheap one at that (the standard plan ranges from $17-$37 a month depending on if you pay monthly, yearly or every two years). Fortunately after exploring Squarespace one day, I found out how to make a "Leadbox" type of opt-in form, which is a very popular option in Leadpages. Today I will be discussing how to use Squarespace’s built in features to set up 3 types of opt-in forms that will not direct readers away from your site. If you would like Leadpages functionality in a Squarespace environment or if you want to know how to set up some higher converting opt-in forms, read on!
I have been on the Squarespace train since January and I am still learning new little tricks here and there. One of my favorite things about Squarespace is that you can create unlinked pages. My former website platform (Big Cartel) didn't allow this, so every page that I created had a link that appeared in either the header or footer navigation. This was annoying because I didn't necessarily want visitors to see every page that I created. Once I switched to Squarespace and saw that there was a section of the "Pages" page that was called "Not Linked", I knew that this was the platform for me! As I began building my site, I was coming across various uses for these types of pages, and I keep thinking of more! Today I will be discussing 9 uses for these beloved pages that you may consider applying to your own site. As a note, this is from a Squarespace perspective, but you can create unlinked pages on Wordpress and Blogger as well. I think it may just be easier and faster in Squarespace (especially comparing it to the process in Blogger which was my blogging platform before the switch)!
