Tag: Blogging

Starting a blog is a great way to share your thoughts and stories while building a source of income on the side. It might seem hard, and frankly, it can be, but with a little help and guidance, you really can have your own blog out there in no time.

I would like to help you get your own blog online, which is why I wanted to write this blog post.

These free blogging courses may get you a headstart if you are a new blogger or help you boost your existing blog to the next level.

Blogging is a great way to both express yourself and create a (passive) income stream.

I deliberately placed ‘passive’ between parentheses because blogging takes a lot of hard work. Passive refers to the fact that your posts may remain on the Internet forever, and its ads or affiliate links will generate income accordingly. Now. Back to the hard work. 
Even if you are a natural and writing doesn’t take you any effort at all, many different factors can contribute to your blog’s success -or failure.

As Google focuses more and more on rewarding excellent user experience, it is time to start looking at more than just some performance indicators.
This post will explain what core web vitals are, what user experience has to do with it, and what they mean for the SEO ranking of your blog or website. 

I know that this isn’t the sexiest topic and that it looks very technical as you scan this post, but as always, I will do my best to keep it understandable for non-techies!

An important key factor in the success of your blog is the performance of your website. It affects how visitors experience your website, but it also has an impact on your ranking in Google.
In this post, I zoom in on how The Side Gig Longlist performs, give you an introduction to website performance, and show how you can improve it while doing so.More about ‘Introduction to Website Performance’ here

Are you looking for great passive income ideas to earn money without having to work for it? Then I am afraid that you landed on the wrong page.
Passive income requires work, but it is more complicated than that.

Would you like to find out what passive income is all about? And get some tips and ideas along the way? Let’s go then!

Finally, I found time and a topic to write another Fix-It Friday post about. Today I want to implement tracking affiliate clicks with Google Analytics 4. 

There are many ways to track if visitors clicked your affiliate links, and plugins like ThirstyAffiliates make it very easy to do.

I want to have these reports appear in my Google Analytics dashboard without depending on the implementation of a third-party plugin, so I can switch plugins without losing information.

Would you like to give your Pinterest boards a more professional look? Then keep on reading as I will explain in this easy step-by-step mini-tutorial how you can create Pinterest board covers in minutes!

More about ‘Create Pinterest Board Covers in Minutes’ here

How to organize your blogging workflow? Great question! One of the things I am struggling with from the start of this blog is organizing my workflow. For example, how do I keep track of ideas? Where can I store my keyword research so that I can use it later? What drafts are ready to edit or need more research? Where can I store images related to the post?

I tried a couple of things. And I even tried a paper notebook, which is quite out of character to me. But, alas, none of these tools worked for me.
Until I dug deeper into how I could integrate Trello into my workflow, let me show you what works for me.

Bloggers, and more, bloggers that are on Pinterest, know how important it is to have appealing visuals to attract visitors. But finding out where to find free stock photos is very time-consuming, especially if you want your images to be original and in the same or right style.

This is why good, high-quality stock photos, or better, stock images are so important.

Like a lot of other fairly new bloggers, I struggle with the question of how to increase traffic to my blog. I get that it takes good content, time, and effort concerning SEO and driving traffic from social.
However, at a certain point in time, you will find yourself researching what factors influence that traffic. One of these things is called Domain Authority.

It’s not hard to find out what Domain Authority is. But what I actually wanted to find out was a reference. How are other bloggers doing? How long does it take to increase domain authority? What is the average domain authority for blogs? And what factors actually influence that magic number?

In this post I’ll walk you through my research and the conclusions I made concerning domain authority.

Don’t know where to start? No inspiration? Too much inspiration? Then you probably recognize this: You have a blog, and the niche you chose is something you know a lot about or is dear to you. You know what topics fit that niche, but when you need to start writing, your head is either empty or so full of ideas that the effect is the same: no words.

What you need is either inspiration, a way to organize your ideas, or a sort of editorial backlog. If there just was a source for infinite content ideas…

With Google’s shift to a more user-centric way of ranking, a perfect web page performance score becomes increasingly important to get great rankings in search engines. 
However, these ranking factors are about a lot more than increasing speed. 

Wrong configurations or decisions will slow down your website. A faster server won’t automatically help you achieve a perfect webpage performance. In this post, I will share some of the things I did to (almost) hit that perfect score.

Starting a blog can be a great experience. It is also effortless to start, and you don’t need to have a degree or study years before launching it. However, it might come in handy if you had some information about specific things to know before starting a blog. 

I started this blog with a lot of technical experience, but I was pretty blank in other expertises. Think of writing, keyword research, SEO, promoting, affiliate marketing, etcetera. During my learning period, I came up with this post containing things I wish I knew before. I hope you enjoy my starting a blog tips and that they will give you a headstart when launching yours.

Many people wonder how to write a good blog post, and I would like to share my method with you. 
Although every step has more than one point of attention, you can write a good blog post in 3 easy steps. 

Writing is personal, of course. Take these steps, my preparation and methods, and the blog post outline I describe here as a guideline.

As I started the Side Gig Longlist in 2020, I wanted to explore the world, or business, of blogs and blogging. So, with just a technical background and some notice of SEO, I determined my niche, bought a domain name, and went for it. 

I learned quickly that some aspects of blogging were more challenging than I imagined, but I also discovered some fantastic and rather essential blogging tools that were very helpful.

There are a gazillion images that you can buy or download for free, but when it comes to that picture you need for your blog…
No problem, I hear you think; there are also hundreds of photo-editing applications available, so let’s get one.

But when you start them and take a look at all the tools the user interface offers you, you feel the first signs of frustration growing in the back of your mind.

And then there was Canva!

More about ‘Canva’ here

If you, like me, started a blog without any experience, then the chances are that you missed some of the basics that are now refraining you from growing. Not that I don’t believe in learning by doing, on the contrary, but there are downsides to this approach. Eventually, you find something that you missed in the beginning.
One of the courses I believe to be very useful to bloggers is the Free “Tweak & Peak” 7 Days Blog Traffic Boost Email Challenge For Bloggers created by Ana from the She Approach.

In this email course, which will take 7 days, Ana will teach Bloggers what they need to do to improve on their blog to increase traffic.

The Free Blog Launch Blueprint is a free email-delivered course created by McKinzie Bean. She runs Moms Make Cents, a successful and popular blog about helping (other) moms to build profitable blogs, working from home.

This course will help you if you are a new blogger, even if you are not a mom, and even if you already launched a blog.

For most bloggers affiliate marketing is the best way to monetize their blog, but what approach should you take? Just dropping random links in a post is as pointless as throwing grain on rocks. Sure. Some will grow, but most will not. There are a couple of courses, paid and free, out there that can help you in creating a strategy. This post is about a free affiliate marketing course.

I particularly like the ones that are given by established bloggers, as they not only teach you what affiliate marketing is all about, but they also teach from their own, valuable, experience.

More about ‘Free Affiliate Marketing Course’ here