The content marketing industry is growing rapidly since the early development of the internet. Approximately 70 million new blog posts are created every day and 77 million new comments are getting each month from the internet users. Starting a blog is very easy, but the point is where you post. To get started with blogging, many people tend to choose WordPress, the reason is 409 million people view more than 20 billion  WordPress blog posts every month and at the same time compared to other various blogging platforms WordPress is very easy to manage. Other than that, people mostly prefer to create WordPress for their business purpose, news, magazines as well as portfolio creation. Fortunately, there are plenty of Recommended WordPress plugins out there that can help you to boost traffic and user engagement.

The top 10 WordPress plugins for bloggers!

In this post, I’m going to introduce the top 10 WordPress plugins for bloggers. In the following list of plugins are tested with their most advanced features and have been verified to work quite well to amplify your blog’s performance.

 

1. UpdraftPlus

There are many more plugins that enable you to back up the WordPress site. From them, UpdraftPlus is the World’s Most Trusted WordPress Backup plugin, restore and migration plugin that allows you to create backups, transfer them to remote locations such as Amazon S3, Dropbox or Google drive. If there any technical difficulties may come to your WordPress site, UpdraftPlus can be more helpful for you to handle the situation. UpdraftPlus is one of the best WordPress plugins for blogs that will simplify the process of the backup and restoration for your WP sites. You can restore your backup and get back on your blog within a short time period.

If you add three or two blog posts per week, then you can select a weekly backup of the database. But you need to choose where you are going to store your backup files. That’s really important. I’m not recommending you to save your backups in the same location. Because losing your access to that particular location means that you will also lose access to your backup files as well. So, I strongly recommend you to choose a remote cloud storage service to store your backups.

Key features:

•  Automatic scheduled backup for your contents.
•  Use fewer server resources for faster processing.
•  Enables you to back up your content on multiple cloud services.
•  Easily duplicate or migrate websites with the help of Migrator.
•   Free dedicated expert support.
•  After WordPress finishes installing the plugin, with a click you can Activate the Plugin.

2. Wordfence Security

Wordfence Security delivers Firewall solutions developed particularly for WordPress and blocks attackers scanning for vulnerabilities on your blog page that makes your site 50 times faster and more secure. I strongly believe this is the best security hardening plugin that should be addressed first before anything.

Many hackers and bots out there will try to get an attack into your WordPress site by brute-forcing your password. If you can use Wordfence, there is an option to block every IP that guesses 10 wrong passwords. At the same time, Wordfence will scan your site every day such as upgrading your themes (if you needed, you can), or WordPress plugins updates if the new version is available, having weak passwords and much more. Therefore, I would recommend you to have this plugin as it’s an absolute must-needed plugin to be safe from hackers and make sure everything stays up-to-date in your site.

Basic Options

• Firewall Mode
• Protection Level
• Real-Time IP Blacklist  

Advanced Options

• Delay IP and Country blocking until after WordPress and plugins have loaded.
• Whitelisted IP addresses that bypass all rules.
• Whitelisted Services.
• Immediately block IPs that access these URLs.
•  Ignored IP addresses for Wordfence Web Application Firewall alerting rules.
• Brute Force Protection.
• Rate Limiting.
•  Whitelisted URLs.
• Monitor Background Requests for False Positives.

3. RankMath

If you are interested to start blogging, you can’t go far without a good search engine optimization. To do SEO optimization, Rank Math is the best WordPress SEO plugin for blogs that allows getting rank higher in search engines. It has been trusted by most of the WordPress site owners because all the main functionalities are included in this tool, also it’s frequently upgraded and to be more compatible with Google algorithms. Meantime they provide much more features that can make your blog effectively better. In my experience, it is one of the most mind-blowing and SEO-friendly plugins to get our content worthy of featured Position.

Do you know why the Rank math is best compared to the YOAST SEO plugin? The unique difference is that Rank Math provides lots of unique features for free, but you need to upgrade the premium version for getting all the features which are provided by Rank Math. Especially the All in One SEO plugin, really that’s the reason we called Rank Math is a game-changer, Have a Look at the feature by feature comparison of three of the plugins to understand why Rank Math is an absolute game-changer for WordPress SEO. Moreover, this plugin helps you to optimize your content properly and give much more power to control over the snippet of your post on Search Engines.

4. Jetpack

Jetpack is one of the top WordPress plugins to manage your blog. It helps to speed up your website, provide security, improve website performance & traffic, and many more. Meantime this plugin will also help to monitor the site downtime. This single plugin has many more features that you can enable and disable according to your needs that will help you to lower down at least 10+ plugins on your blog. I have listed down the features of the free version of Jetpack here:

Key Features:

• Unlimited static files hosting.
•  Unlimited image hosting with CDN.
•  lazy loading image.
• Brute Force attack protection and Secure logins.
• Downtime monitoring.
• Automate Social Sharing and Social Buttons.
• SEO tools and Grammar Checking.
•  Email Subscription and Blog Followers.

Are you looking to improve your blog performance and attract new readers?

Jetpack provides features to help you manage these tasks a little easier; because of their features you can easily accomplish these goals. If you already upload images on your blog, Jetpack’s features will make them stand out even more attractive. Let me show you one of the examples: If you can Activate the Tiled Galleries feature when creating a gallery within your blog post to showcase multiple images in a way that’s much more attractive than a standard grid of images. The same time, the key to a successful blog is getting more readers to our blog and engaged followers who are keen to read and share every one of your new posts. Isn’t it? Yes, Jetpack is an Essential WordPress Plugins for Bloggers to get more readers, so try this Jetpack features and I can ensure you that you can boost readers’ engagement on your blogs.

5. Akismet

Akismet is a spam-fighting plugin that protects WordPress sites from spam comments and spam contact forms. When it comes to blogging, we always enable the comment option to get engagements. Yes, we all know some of the bots and visitors will write spam comments like advertisements in our blog comments. To omit the spam out of your entire blog website, Akismet is the best solution for you.

The Spam comments are totally irrelevant for any blog content and down your website ranking as well. So, Akismet is a very essential plugin to eliminate the spam comments. As far as I know, many of the bloggers are struggling with how to avoid spam comments and contact forms. So, the Akismet plugin will help you to solve this issue and this Plugin will monitor all incoming comments and figure it out the Spam one.  It’s a pretty awesome Plugin.

Key Features:

•  Automatically checks all comments and filters out the ones that look like spam.
• Each comment has a status history, so you can easily see which comments were caught or cleared by Akismet and which were spammed or unspammed by a moderator.
• URLs are shown in the comment body to reveal hidden or misleading links.
• Moderators can see the number of approved comments for each user.
• A discard feature that outright blocks the worst spam, saving you disk space and speeding up 

6. Everest Forms

There are plenty of free contact form plugins available but the widely use one is Everest Forms plugin. You can go through it and get to know that it’s one of the greatest WordPress contact form plugins which let you to create forms efficiently. That means you can easily drag-and-drop form builder. When publishing your blogs, the readers might be even more than keen to contact you to ask some questions about it. These are the things that bloggers expected from their readers. So, you need to create contact forms for conditions like these. There is no doubt at all, you may straightly go with one of the best plugins for blogs when it comes to adding a form as this plugin is a very user-friendly interface for customizations as well as the drag and drop fields. So, you can simply modify your forms however you want.

Key Features:

• Create unlimited forms without any restrictions.
• Drag and Drop Form fields.
• Supports all commonly used form fields including radio, dropdowns, checkboxes, date and more.
• 100% responsive form template.
• Supports multiple column layout.
• Shortcode support.
• Multiple email recipient.
• Mulitple email notifications.
• Smart Tags for dynamic email message, subject and more.
• View Form entries from your dashboard.
• Quick Form Preview option.
• CSV exporter for entries.
• Provides two different form template design.
• Google Recaptcha Supported.
• Editable successful form submission message.
• Redirect option after submission.
• Editable Email Settings.
• Editable form validation message.
• Translation ready.

7. Smush Image Compression and Optimization

Smush is the most popular image optimization plugin, do you know why the blog pages are taking too much time to load? Yes, one of the important factors for slowing down the WordPress blog is Image. It’s very true, If the Image is not optimized properly, your blog page will load slowly. The Images can be compressed and reduced in size. For this purpose, I highly recommended you to choose Smush Image Compression plugins to optimize images without losing quality. If you don’t have any knowledge in image optimization, this plugin will help you to automatically compress the images after you upload it on your website. Also, it has a feature to resize the image for responsive design.

WP Smush is very easy to use, and you can optimize your images without losing quality. You may want to optimize your old images, you can directly go to your Media section and find out the WP Smush to bulk smush, here you can smush 50 images at a time. So, this is a very easy way to optimize your images and improve your blog performance.

 Key features:

• Bulk Smush: Optimization of existing images in your media library (limit 50 on the free version).
• Directory Smush: Optimizing images outside of your uploads directory.
• Integrations: Integrates with Gutenberg, Amazon S3 and photo galleries.
• CDN: A premium feature that utilizes WPMU DEV’s CDN for multi-pass lossy compression and auto-resize features.
• Lazyload: This feature defers the loading of below the fold imagery until the page has loaded, adjustable by page/image type.
• Settings: General plugin settings.

8. wpDisc

Blog post comments are the most reliable way for you to get feedback from your readers. Notably, this is a great idea for all the bloggers to connect or interact with their readers. But, the core WordPress comments method does have some capacity for improvements in it’s functionality.

When we look at the past there are a couple of plugins that can help us to enhance the commenting system with real-time discussion capabilities including a Thank page which is displayed to your readers after they’ve left their comment and also an additional option for enabling email notifications for comments. The wpDiscuz plugin recently released the core blog post commenting solutions to help WordPress users. It allows you to customize the appearance of the comments form that includes changing the text, altering the colors, and even adding your own custom CSS code as well. As a blogger, you must have this plugin for your WordPress blog.

Some of the highlights of this plugin includes:

• Comment voting with positive and negative ratings.
• Multilevel nested comment threads.
• Auto-update to display latest comments.
• AJAX load more comments button.
• Automatic image sourcing from URLs.
• Comment author notifications.
• Built in anti-spam protection.
• Posting sharing options.

9. Easy Social Sharing

I would recommend you to add a very essential plugin which is the major part of driving traffic to your blog. There are many plugin supports to enhance the blog performance but the Social Sharing plugin is one of the easy ways to drive more traffic to your blog post. Easy Social Sharing plugin helps your readers to share the content in their social media. We are well aware of social media and how it’s growing consistently. Accordingly, we can easily reach our target audiences through social sharing. So, Easy Social Sharing is a social media plugin that can help your blogs to reach your audience very quickly. This plugin has more features and your content can be shared on more than 18 different social media networks.

Key features:

• Floating sidebar layout attached and fixed to the screen border.
• Sharing counts to display the number of shares on social media.
• Live preview of the sharing design at the backend.
• Six different design layouts to choose from.
• Easy user settings with the intuitive settings panel.

 

10. Google Analytics Dashboard for WP

One of the best things you need to do for your business is to pay more attention to the traffic. When it comes to the blog, you have to keep your eye on who visits your blog and how long they stay at your blog, and then it will help to formulate a plan on how to make them respond even more positively. This is not an ideal solution but if you plan to use analytics that will definitely evaluate your site’s performance very easily. 

Are you Looking for the most reliable analytics plugin for WordPress? According to my analysis in the market, MonsterInsights is the best Google Analytics plugin that comes with Google Analytics. It delivers you more profound insights without affecting your site speed or any other WordPress security. More than two million WordPress websites are using this plugin. So, I and most of the WordPress site owners believe that it’s a very easy way to double the traffic for your blog page.

 Key features:

•  Audience Report
• Behavior Report
• Content Report
• Ecommerce Report
• Forms Report
• Search Console Report
• Custom Dimensions Report

Wrapping Up:

Before we wrap up, I want to share one tip for you all. You will get success if you can honestly care about the User experience and publish well-informative content through your blogs. I hope the above Top 10 Recommended WordPress Plugins will help you to amplify your blog performance and to achieve your business goals. But, before you start choosing and installing the plugins, make sure that you have a suitable WordPress blog theme for your website. I can understand that you guys are on very busy schedules and don’t have enough time to read lengthy blogs. I’m here to help you. If you are looking for professional  WordPress SEO provider or need the advice to get more traffic to your website, feel free to contact us via [email protected]

Over the past years, LinkedIn has turned into a crucial personal branding tool. This virtual professional network has transformed from an online resume to a professional networking platform for complete personal branding.

 Get to know about LinkedIn

If you are a university student or a working professional, you must know about LinkedIn. But what is LinkedIn is exactly about that everybody is crazed over? LinkedIn is “the world’s biggest professional networking platform with millions of users and its growing wild.” The individuals at the LinkedIn platform have made it their mission to “join the world’s professionals together to transform them more productive and successful.” Lots of users on the internet have one or other types of social media accounts. LinkedIn also works in the same way as other social media platforms works, but instead of connecting you with your friends and relatives, it connects you with the professional people who work in your field or related to your profession. LinkedIn also lets users search for job opportunities and connect with their potential employers.

Video Source: YouTube/LinkedIn India

 

Why should you have a LinkedIn profile?

Many individuals in the corporate world have their own LinkedIn profile because they know why LinkedIn is important. You automatically make yourself searchable when you are online. Numerous recruiters search for their prospective employees online, often watching to fill particular job positions via professional networking sites like LinkedIn before they posting the job details on a job database. When this way is used, your LinkedIn profile will act as your resume. LinkedIn is also an influential networking tool. Your LinkedIn profile could be the first and foremost professional impression your potential employer has of you. If you have this question “Why use LinkedIn?” Then Continue your reading to get to know the importance of LinkedIn.

 

1) It is popular & has millions of users

LinkedIn has more than 500 million users; LinkedIn is the world’s biggest professional networking platform. There is a saying that popularity is not ever a good enough cause to get into something, but in this situation – it actually is. Not having a LinkedIn profile is considered a foible, with how widespread LinkedIn has become. Actually, recruiters every so often assumes candidates without LinkedIn profiles are basically not in the loop of how things are happening in the world. For the worse, they might totally disregard your application because they don’t consider you as a serious career-minded executive.

 

Information From – Social Media Today

 

2) Topmost position at Google searches

When somebody searches your name on Google, your LinkedIn profile will probably display in the first or second position – that’s really powerful, isn’t it? This is based on the Gravitate Online research of nearly 8 million clicks, in which more than 94% of users were clicked on the first page SERP results while lesser than 6% were clicked to the second page SERP results and 50% of all clicks got the first and second positions.

 

3) People are researching you online.

People use all kinds of methods to get to know about you and LinkedIn gives you a chance to regulate what they learn about you, for example, you can let them know about your strengths and about your company or brand. Now you have this question, who are these people? They can be the people who you know, the people who really want to know about you or the People who really matter to you, like your prospects, manager, employees, customers or competitors. All of these people use your LinkedIn profile to learn about you. People often search for you before they actually meeting you for the first time or after reading an article where you were featured in, or when they decide whether to reply to your email or not.

 

 

4) LinkedIn has invaluable resources.

LinkedIn supports you to grow your accomplishments by providing you key knowledge and connections. Do you need to source your workers? Want to resolve problems that can’t be solved by the workers in your corporation? Need to connect with your customers? Need a service provider referral for your business? Want to research your competitor? Need to know who’s in a potential customers’ network? Then this professional networking site is the best choice for you as LinkedIn places all of these properties at your fingertips.

 

 5) You don’t have any idea what you’re missing out on.  

When you are reading this post, somebody is searching for you and your services on LinkedIn. You should make sure that you are highly noticeable to that person.  This means having a complete LinkedIn profile that’s contained with the right information which is related to your thoughts, services and leadership so that opportunities can effortlessly reach to you. There will not be any job entries in the near future. Rather employing managers will use their social networks like LinkedIn to find their ultimate candidate.

 

6) You will stay connected to the current trend.

Following other well-established companies and thought-leaders help you to get regular update about what’s going around in your industry. You can easily get firsthand information that is not filtered by the media. Moreover, via brand connotation, you can make a clear statement about yourself every time you follow a leader or company because those names undeniably going to influence the individuals who are seeing your LinkedIn profile.

 

7) You will automatically get connected with people.

In a corporate world where we all are overwhelmed with more tasks than time, it’s become a big challenge to staying connected on the ever-growing crowd of contacts. On the other hand, LinkedIn lets you to regularly update your status and instantly letting everybody in your connection know what are the new things happening in your world and where can they find you. You can grow these connections simply by joining other groups, which give you additional opportunities.

 

8) It’s the most effective method to maintain your network.

By using tags you can organize your LinkedIn contacts into groups that make more sense to you. LinkedIn develops as your permanent contacts database whereas letting you share your information with numerous subgroups of your contacts. By using the “find alumni” feature you can easily add contacts from your schools, colleges and former employers. LinkedIn becomes your own CRM system for handling and interacting with your contacts. Now you no need to use your email as your contacts manager, therefore, you can use your LinkedIn profile to maintain your connection with people.

 

9) Best personal branding podium.

LinkedIn offers you lots of best opportunities to upsurge your credibility and visibility with the allies of your brand community. It allows you to be associated with huge networks of contacts. Now LinkedIn also allows you to add images and videos in your summary and experience fields, therefore you can develop a 3D view of your brand by using all the features of LinkedIn. It will help you to paint a convincing portrait of your real self.

 

LinkedIn Free and Premium Account Subscriptions

Are you still unsure which LinkedIn membership is right for you? You are probably trying to figure out whether you can get going with a free LinkedIn membership or if there are any benefits to upgrading your profile to Premium. To help you out I have put the information about the different features and tools contained within the free and premium LinkedIn membership and how they can benefit you.

 

1) Free LinkedIn Account Membership

Let’s begin with the free LinkedIn account, with the elimination of numerous features that were once existing in LinkedIn’s free account, many people are left questioning if LinkedIn is still beneficial with a free account or if they need to shift to a premium account to remain valuable to the time and resources they have spent in. LinkedIn is still the best place for most professionals, salespeople and B2B businesses to discover and connect with their ideal customers.

You can still find and connect with people with your regular posts and status updates, also engage in many ways with your connections. These are the benefits you can get from LinkedIn as a free member:

• You can create your professional identity online.
• You can easily build and maintain a huge professional network for yourself.
• Find and reconnect with your schoolmates and colleagues.
• You can request and offer references.
• You can search and view profiles of other LinkedIn users.
• You can receive limitless In Mail messages.
• You can save up to three search results and get weekly alerts of those searches.

LinkedIn is an active professional networking site for professionals with more than a half-billion memberships. The influence of the LinkedIn platform is that you can rapidly and simply discover and connect with professionals and industry people from all over the global.

 

2) Premium LinkedIn Account Membership

LinkedIn provides numerous varieties of premium memberships; below are the present premium options that are available on a monthly paid plan in USD. This professional networking site offers paid account choices for job hunters, sales and talent experts, as well as for the common professional people who wish to get more out of their LinkedIn profile. If you have a LinkedIn free account and wish to upgrade it to a premium account, you can compare and find out which account type is more suitable for you:

• Premium Career Account –You wish to get hired then go ahead with a Premium Career option.
• Premium Business – You want to get detailed business insights and expand your business then go ahead with the Premium Business option.
• Sales Navigator Professional – You want to generate leads and build your clientele then go ahead with the Sales Navigator option.
• Recruiter Lite – You want to find and hire talents then go ahead with the Recruiter Lite option.

 

LinkedIn API Version 2.0 – 2019

LinkedIn API version 2.0 has the latest advanced technology associated with APIs and for authentication, they introduced OAuth, 2.0. From 1st March 2019, Developers who have been using LinkedIn APIs are requested to shift to LinkedIn API Version 2.0. This newest update will enhance numerous options through the developer’s program. LinkedIn Developers program will allow apps and website owners to let their users have a personalized experience on their site and also allow them to use their professional identities for third-party services and share outside content from other apps and websites.

By Signing In with LinkedIn account users can also log in to other apps using their LinkedIn profiles data. API only acknowledged the “Lite Profile” data with limited profile arenas. LinkedIn users will be able to share links of other sites through their LinkedIn network. However, this API has been already available in Version 1.

For handling company pages, APIs version 1 was used. But version 2.0 will be combined with LinkedIn marketing developer Program which means only the developers who will take part in the marketing developer program will get permission to access API version 2.0.

 

LinkedIn is now disapproving of many other old features that are not popular among its users. Let’s have a look at them.

1) Verification:  OAuth 1.0 will no longer be available and developers will have to use OAuth 2.0. This version meets all the business standards and by now used by numerous developers.

2) Software Development Tools: JavaScript and Mobile SDKs were removed from March 1. Now developers required to move to OAuth 2.0 from apps directly

3) Plugins: LinkedIn is disparaging the Member Profile, Company Profile, Company Insider and Alumni Tool plugins, or any other plugin used to enrich the functionality of the website by producing drop-in code.

 

After these changes have been implemented in the front-end design, there are expectations that the developers portal will also be reshaped, which will allow managers to access apps so that they can easily discover product information and read documents.

 

Conclusion

I think this post has stressed enough just how huge a role LinkedIn profile play in your professional life. Having it on the top of your resume can be the variance between having your job application avoided and obtaining an interview. Through the LinkedIn profile, you can build a virtual professional relationship with people in your field, get mutual connections and even connect with your ultimate role models. Don’t forget that your LinkedIn profile should continuously be a work in progress. Update your LinkedIn profile regularly.

I hope that you have found this blog post to be beneficial in helping you to understand and build a LinkedIn profile that will work best for you.

Have any more questions about LinkedIn Profile? Let me know them in the comments.

With everyone turning to blogs for promoting their brand, its time you think ahead. In order to make your brand stand out from the crowd, you have to think of interesting and unique ways to promote your brand and posts. Guest posting is one such marketing tactic that’s starting to become popular. Guest post is about posting your content on different websites apart from inviting guests to post on your website.

When you invite guests to come over and post on your website, you get the unique opportunity to promote without actually spending any time or money on it. While inviting individuals to blog with your website, you ensure that they share their content among their friends and family and increase the visitors immediately.

This type of free marketing also ensures that you have more social media coverage without actually spending your resources on it. Reports suggest that guest posts guarantees a five time increase in the traffic, ensures that there is more links to your website on social media.

While guest posts are a great way to promote your brand, you need to put some effort on it, in the initial stage.

 

Work Out Your Goal

You know for a fact that your will increase the traffic on your website when you start accepting guest posts. When you are looking for more traffic, you would want the same for a distinctive reason. It is crucial to figure that out. There are a large number of reasons for wanting to increase the traffic to your website. You might want new visitors to your website to sign up for email, or do you want more social media coverage and viewers. It is never right to considering reaping all the benefits. Zero down on your selected goal and make provisions to ensure that the visitors can follow through. Make sure that you prepare your website to fulfill your goal before you start accepting guest posts.

Create Guidelines

Remember that you are opening up your website to strangers and this could compromise the content to a certain extent. This is where you should work out a set of guidelines for guests when you open your website for guest postings. You will see a host of queries when guests are invited for posting, so save yourself the trouble and already put up a page of guidelines for them to refer to you. You can include information on what kind of posts you are looking for and how long you want each piece to be, state if you prefer any particular style of writing apart from information on incentives if you are providing any.

Experts suggest that new websites should offer some incentives like gift cards, and free passes in order to attract guests for posting.

 

Thoroughly Check Before Posting

Remember that just like good content can increase web traffic, bad content can effective the flow of traffic. When you invite guests to post on your website, remember that the content posted by them reflect the ideas of your brand and you can greatly harm your brand image by posting a terribly written content. Before allowing a guest to post on your website, carry out a background check of the person, check out their blogs and writing style. Even after the individual is done submitting his post, make sure that you go through the content to ensure that it isn’t offensive to any section of society and primarily that the content is original and hasn’t been plagiarized. Make sure that the content adheres to the standard of your blog and brand and that it follows the same style as the other posts or else it will look like an eye soar amidst all the other posts.

Pay Attention to Backlinks and Anchor Texts

The guest will only provide you with the content to the blog post, you have to add the relevant anchor text and inbound links that are related to the post. Make sure that the links do not look forced in the article. Use links only from reputable sources. When you work on anchor texts be selective since they will be used multiple times and will go a long way in ensuring a good SEO for your website. While anchor texts can do wonder with your website, make sure that they aren’t spammy and you don’t end up using them everywhere on the website. It helps to remember that the guest post will be published on your behalf and you will have to take responsibility for it.

Create A Plan For Promotion

Your work doesn’t end with getting guests to post and ensuring the quality of the content. You have to also inform the guest posters your plan of promoting their content. You have to realize that the bloggers writing for you want to improve their presence as well and you have to keep their interests in mind. If you want promote primarily through social media, mention that to the guests and specify how many times you would share or tweet about the new posts. If you are going to promote the content through email or newsletter, make that clear as well. Place as much importance in promoting guest posts as you would on any new content on your website. Remember not to slack off in this avenue.

Work On Your Social Media Presence

If you are starting to accept guest posts, you can advertise the same on your Facebook and Twitter page. Make sure that the link to your website is clearly visible on the social media pages. Also include your contact details and ensure that they are the same everywhere.

Wrapping Up!

Guest posting is a great way to get new content for your website and blog, but you need to prepare your website to handle the same. Make sure that the guest isn’t left wanting. Pay attention to these accepts before you start accepting guest posts.

Blogging can be a great hobby, but then all bloggers would agree that scouting for interesting ideas for the blog content can tend to get a tad tiring. To keep connecting with the reader, you have to come up with new ideas for the different posts. The grind can be exhausting, especially if you are wracking your brain for all the ideas.

The struggle is genuine and especially if you churn many posts each week. You know that without quality content, even the best marketing strategies to get people in will fail. So how do you think of great content ideas for your blogs and keep the readers happy?

The answer is simple. You need to find out the type of content that will click with the readers. There are two types of basic content ideas:

• Ideas that come out of nowhere
• Ideas that are derived from demand

Each of these ideas can be used to make the content of your blog an instant hit. However, if you are looking to address a specific goal with your blog, then it is a better idea to stick to the second option.

Even if you have like a stream of great ideas for your blog posts, there isn’t any guarantee that these will be appreciated by the readers. The opinion of a few people doesn’t help in getting an idea about the large number of readers that you want to connect with. In such a situation, you need a tool that will help you validate your ideas with the help of human interaction, search queries and forum posts. The tools help you understand the interest of a larger audience and makes your posts more viable.

Try the different tools listed below to help you generate ideas for your content. There is no guarantee that all of them will click for you, but there isn’t any harm in giving it a try.

 

Google Suggest

This is the easiest and most convenient way to find out what’s trending. All you have to do is enter the keywords and let Google suggest variations of these terms, based on the search carried out by others. If you go to the bottom of the page, you will get links to additional related searches as well.

 

MagicRecs

MagicRecs helps you find out the latest areas of interest with the help of Twitter. You can find out which account majority of your followers are following and help you get ideas that will enable you to connect with them.

HubSpot’s Topic Generator

 

HubSpot generates topics quickly and is a no-brainer when it comes to learning how to use it. The tool is so efficient that you will have five blog post ideas within seconds. The tool generates topics based on the nouns you enter. The moment you enter the three nouns, HubSpot will list five topics for you.

Isn’t that awesome?

 

Google Keyword Planner

The tool was launched in place of the old Google Keyword tool. The tool is used to search keywords and ad ideas. All you have to do is simply add a keyword or phrase, the URL of the landing page and the Google Keyword Planner will come up with relevant keywords.

These keywords are the ones that your readers have been searching for. Once you know what your readers are looking for, you have the content idea for your blog posts. You can also enter keyword combinations and generate potential blog post titles.

 

Quora

Quora is one of the leading questions and answer sites and is one of the most effective ways to get an idea about what your readers would want to read about. With this tool, you can search for all the queries related to your keywords. When you register to Quora, you have to pick your selected categories, which would include your areas of interest.

 

Delicious

This is one tool that will keep churning great ideas for your blog posts. The tool gives you a comprehensive list of all the trending topics on the web. You will get an idea of the topics that people have been discussing on the internet and you can take your pick from there to craft your blog post.

You can also enter a keyword and get related topics that are currently being discussed. These lists are curated by people, so you can trust their popularity.

 

BuzzSumo

Another great tool that will help you generate ideas for your blog posts is BuzzSumo. The tool does more than just share content ideas with you.

• It can show you the number of shares and social engagements each topic received
• Identify key sharers via Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest and Google+
• Show you trending topics and contents
• Displays backlinks

The tool helps you decide the angle that you need to adopt in your blog post on a particular topic so that you strike with the reader better.

 

Alltop

Alltop is a news aggregator that lets you know about the trending news online. It covers a wide range of topics that includes, sports, religion, science, and even fashion. If you are a part of Alltop, you will always be on the top of the trending topics. If you go through only the homepage of the tool, you will get a lot of great ideas for your posts, depending on the area you want to focus on.

 

UberSuggest

This is a simple and straightforward tool that generates title ideas based on the keywords you enter. You will get thousands of phrases with your preferred keyword and are free to select the ones that are worth writing about on your blog. Many feel that UberSuggest is similar to the Google Keyword Planner, but a lot more streamlined and sorted.

 

Technorati

Among all the tools listed here, Technorati is one of the best tools for researching. The tool is up-to-date and helps you find out about the latest blog post ideas searched by SEOs. It helps bring out the most relevant posts so that you can be a part of the current debate and discussion.

 

Wrapping Up!

Creating a content plan and sticking to it is a challenging task. Every blogger inevitably comes to a point where they suffer writer’s block or get bored about writing or simply fail to feel the pulse of the readers.

There is no shame in being in such a situation, but you should be willing to experiment and try finding inspiration in other sources. Try to craft your content differently, explore different resources and optimize your strategies. Give these tried and tested tools a try when you feel stuck and aren’t able to create quality content for your blog. The ten tools provide you with a variety of ideas, so play around with them and see what works and what doesn’t. Simply do not follow them since they have been suggested. Workaround and find your comfort space. Don’t be scared to experiment while creating amazing content ideas. After all, no one can resist something that’s a little different from the usual run-of-the-mill stuff that we find on different blogs. Also, Feel free to add to our list of tools!

Last August, I was in Kandy, one of the tourist attraction sites in Sri Lanka. It was when I happened to come across a couple from Australia. It was their first time in Sri Lanka, and they were looking a place where they could buy a local SIM card so that they could access the online travel guides when they travel around the country.

I can see them bit annoyed about not getting proper Wi-Fi at the Hotel, and thinking of the extra cost in having a local SIM card.

Even if they have a SIM card, not every part of Sri Lanka has proper internet signals.

With the overall internet penetration rate of 29.3% in Sri Lanka, traveling with no data and without tour guides is pretty annoying. Poor internet penetration is not only a trouble in Sri Lanka but in many countries with tourist attraction sites.

Breaking the trend that you have to the internet to get access to online tour guides, Google has launched Google Trips.

What is Google Trips?

Google is expanding its Kingdom in the travel sector. As a part of its expansion, it has launched a travel app, last Monday (19th September 2016), called Google Trips which would act as a trip planner and a tour guide whenever and wherever you are traveling.

If this is a part of Google, then it does need the internet connection, doesn’t it? This would be your question.
But the answer is, no.
This time, Google has designed it in the way where the user can access it offline.

What can you do with this app?

If you are a fan of making sudden trips, I would suggest you have this app in your hands.

Once you have the app, all you have to do is log in into it through your mail. Once you have logged into the mail, it would look into your mail for your pre-planned trips.

If there are no plans, or if you have planned to go on a trip after downloading the app, you can search for the place you want to go in.

You can check the place through the tab “Things to do.” This feature suggests you about the top spots you can visit in the place you have looked up for. Also, if you have any preferences on what you want to do during the tour, like hiking and visiting a museum, you can look up through the search button.

Traveling and sightseeing mean hunger. Since you are visiting a new place, you might want to look into a better place for food. Then there is the button “Food and Drink” where you can look into the restaurants nearby with better reviews.

Although it appears as if it is collecting more data about your travel, it make most of the suggestions like where you can find food, and better places to enjoy.

If you are sure that you want to visit the place, you can then click onto the ” Create a trip” which would allow you to mark your dates for the journey.

The best part is, you can download every detail you want to do during the trip. From your hotel or flight reservation to the places you want to go, you can have it downloaded in your mobile. And this downloaded data is what you can use when you don’t have the internet connection, or when you don’t want to use the internet to save battery (like me).

Since this acts more like a trip planner, you can mark the places you want to visit during the itinerary. Once a schedule for the day is over, the app will notify you about the next plan for the day.

More comforting is the “magic wand.” No, this is neither Hogwarts nor the Marauder’s Map. Here, Google uses a “magic wand” that would let you know about the nearby places you might want to check into. It is notable that this feature works only if you manage to “turn on” your location, and have cellular data.

This Google Trip is going to be your travel partner even if it is offline. With the trip planning features, it is going to be a competitor to Concor’s  TripIT, while Airbnb is trying to add this feature to its already existing setup.

It is also noticeable that the app still provides only the Panora view of the places-to-see, and has not yet tried into 360 views. In my point of view, it would be much more tough for the competitors like TripIT to compete, if Google is many steps ahead in ruling the travel-tech world, by using the very much advanced features.

With the launch of the app, I have installed it on my mobile, and I am finding it very useful for trip planning and to find a nearby place for food. If you are one of the users, how do you feel about the app, and what features would you like to have in the app?

Feel free to let your thoughts flow in the comment box.

Creative Tips to Improve Your Blog Writing

If you’ve followed any of the updates from Google over the past year or so, you know all too well that one of the most important things you can do to help your site rank well is to focus on quality content.  High quality content is essentially the lifeblood of every site, and if you don’t have a steady flow of it, your rankings will soon start to suffer.

The problem is, it can become difficult to come up with fresh and interesting ideas to write about week in and week out, especially if you have a fairly narrow niche that you are focused on.  Review the following ten tips to help product creative posts for your blog on a regular basis.

Tip #1 – Top 10 Lists

If you’re reading this, you’ve proven this point already.  People love top X lists, and they make great posts for just about any type of site.  If you’re worried about coming up with ten points to make, remember that it doesn’t always have to be 10.  You can come up with a list of 3, 5, 8, 11, almost any number will work well.

Top 5 and top 10 are fairly standard options, so you might want to start with those.  Some people, however, think that going with an unusual number actually gets more attention.  For example, going with ‘9 Great Tips for X’ may perform better than ’10 Great tips for X.’  To my knowledge, I don’t think anyone has done a case study on this. Give it a try on your website and see what works best for you.

Tip #2 – Publish Studies

People love learning more about topics that they are interested in, and studies are always an attractive read.  The big thing to remember here is that you don’t have to be a Harvard professor to complete a study.  Anytime you are doing your own market testing or research, you’re technically doing your own study.

Using the example from the previous tip, you could test different tops of “top X” lists and see which ones perform best for you.  Once you have gathered all the data, post about the results.  People will appreciate the work you did, and may be able to learn a lot from it.  Just make sure you are honest about how you did the study, and make sure it is relevant to your target audience.

Tip #3 – Write like You Talk

One of the hardest things for many writers to do is start breaking some of the grammar rules that they’ve worked so hard to learn.  While grammar is certainly essential in most cases, you can also cut loose every once in a while and write a more causal post that sounds much more conversational.

Using common phrases like, “You’ve gotta hear about what happened next.” Or, “keep reading, you’re gonna love it.” Can help to spice up your page.  Some people will say that search engines only want perfect grammar, but there is really no evidence to support this.  Search engines want engaging content that readers benefit from, and in many cases, a casual article is just the thing.  There have been some important studies and other research that has gone into this, and writing in a more casual way is definitely a good idea, at least some of the time.

Tip #4 – Follow the News

For most niches, one of the best ways to come up with new things to write about is to follow the news.  You can sign up for alerts whenever a new story is published about your niche, and then write a post about it.  Whether it is something simple like a new CEO for a company in your niche, or it is something slightly off-topic like a celebrity being seen with your product.  News stories are always a great addition to any site.

Tip #5 – Shake up the Length

One of the most commonly cited blog writing tips around is that good blogs should be 500-1000 words long.  There are all types of reasons given for this ranging from this is the ideal length for holding the reader’s attention to people thinking that it is best for SEO.  The reality is, however, that the length of your post really doesn’t matter.

Your focus should be on providing the best possible post that you can.  Sometimes that will take 200 words, sometimes it will take 2000.  You should never concern yourself with word count, but just make sure you get all the necessary information into each post no matter how long it takes.

Tip #6 – Get Off-Topic

Another major mistake site owners make is always having every single article they post on one specific topic.  If you have a site about cookie recipes with caramel in them, for example, you may be tempted to only write about this very narrow concept.

While you certainly do want to focus on this more than anything else, it doesn’t hurt to talk about loosely related things as well.  For example, you could post about an amazing brownie you had at a party, or post about how caramel is made.  As long as the topics are in some way related to your main niche, people will appreciate the change of tune every once in a while.

Tip #7 – Do Keyword Research (But Ignore the Numbers)

If you’re looking for a really great way to quickly come up with dozens of good ideas to write about, start doing some keyword research.  While typically thought of as an SEO strategy, keyword research tools are great way to quickly generate lots of ideas.  It doesn’t really matter if the keyword is popular or not, your goal should be to write a quality post that your readers will enjoy.  The SEO research isn’t about numbers, it is about ideas!

Tip #8 – Interviews Rock!

If you’re really stuck on an idea, consider reaching out to others for help.  The best way to do this is to ask others in the industry, or in a related industry, if they would be willing to do an interview for you. Written interviews are typically easy to perform, and many people will be happy to complete them in exchange for little more than the free publicity they will get.

Come up with a few dozen questions that you can ask people, and choose the best ones for each interviewee.  There are many resources out there to help you come up with the right questions so you can really interview like a professional.  When ready, send out interview requests to everyone you can think of that is in your niche, in a related niche, or uses products from your niche. As people begin to respond, you’ll find that you have a good supply of ready-made posts for your site!

Bonus Tip: QUALITY QUALITY QUALITY!

To wrap this up, let me just reiterate the fact that no matter which of these tips you use, the most important thing is that you do it with quality in mind.  Quality doesn’t always mean perfect spelling and grammar (though that is typically a part of it).  Quality means only posting things that people will actually want to read.  This is how you will build your audience over time, and more importantly, build a solid relationship with that audience, which is really the true point of any website.

If you are still having trouble coming up with great ideas for your blog, consider contacting us for help.  We have seasoned writers on staff who would be happy to create custom content specifically for you.  This content will be interesting, engaging and optimized so the search engines will love it.  We will work with you to determine the type of content, and what type of goals you want it to accomplish.  Your satisfaction is guaranteed.