The secret sauce separating hobbyists and full-time professional bloggers are SEO tools like SEMrush. This SEMrush Review covers how it works.
Wallet Squirrel is a personal finance blog by best friends Andrew & Adam on how money works, building side-hustles, and the benefits of cleverly investing the profits. Featured on MSN Money, AOL Finance, and more!
Yes, it’s Day 137 of when we started the Epic Niche Site Battle. A competition to see who could build a better niche affiliate website between myself and Barnabas over at SerialBoss.com. So far I’m doing well considering.
The rules were simple, we would start on January 1st of 2018 and see who could build a better site. This meant who’s site could get more visitors, earn more money and gain more email sign-ups would be the winner. This is in addition to both of us running our other main blogs to show how difficult it is to balance side gigs like this. Time management is key.
I officially launched my affiliate website on Day 68 of this year. I’m not revealing the name of this site since we don’t want to affect traffic rankings, but you’ll just have to believe me that it’s up.
What I can tell you is that it’s an affiliate website centered around holiday gift ideas. The main page is loaded with awesome gift ideas and the blog post (only 1 so far) is focused on “List Posts” which normally do well with SEO. The idea is the more people who visit the site, more sales are made and that’s how the site generates income.
I’ll admit I haven’t been able to put in much effort into this affiliate site since its creation on Day 80 because most of my attention has been focused on WalletSquirrel.com, but without too much initial marketing. It’s somehow found steady traffic.
This is the visitor trend since it starts on March 10th. It picked up about 45 views a day on average since its start. Honestly, that isn’t great, but considering how little attention I’ve given this site (maybe 1 hour since the start), it’s better than I thought. Especially with a bounce rate for an affiliate site.
So with an average of 45 views a day, you can’t expect this website to gain much money. All of my income is through affiliate links which are perfect for me. I’ve noticed I make a lot more on affiliate links than banner ads. Plus I really hate the look of banner ads, so I didn’t include any on this new site.
It’s only had a few sales, but most of the income is merchants paying me for the clicks through the links I have on the affiliate website. I’ve been using Viglink for all my affiliate marketing tracking. Since March 10th, this affiliate site has made $5.90. Wahoo, I gained some pennies. =)
Yes, $5.90 isn’t much but considering the 1 hour I’ve put into this site since starting it on March 10th, it’s pretty great. Plus that income is pretty consistently $0.40 a day. That’s actually really impressive since its so consistent. It gives me a lot of motivation that it will do well if given more attention.
One thing I can absolutely do better on is collecting email address. I only have one email opt-in form on the contact page. So far this has only collected 10 email addresses. That’s pretty awful. There are plenty of tricks I’ve learned recently on Wallet Squirrel to gain more email addresses. I’m looking forward to trying all of these.
Just curious, are you tempted to sign up for Wallet Squirrel’s email list from our Opt-In form below? If not, why not?
Even though I’ve trailed off on my effort for this new affiliate site, I’m still way ahead of Barabas who just got his site up last week. ;P
However, I’ve only written one blog post on my affiliate website and he’s already written 10. We took different approaches with him writing a bunch of content first then publishing the website. I did the opposite by adding content after the website was launched. It’s funny how people do things differently.
I’ll compare the stats of our websites side by side once he has had a chance to market his site a bit more. In the meantime though, I’m ramping up to write 3 more blog posts and started using SEMrush to do some awesome keyword research and backlinking to make the site more popular. Stay tuned to see how we compare against each other!
Wallet Squirrel is a personal finance blog by best friends Andrew & Adam on how money works, building side-hustles, and the benefits of cleverly investing the profits. Featured on MSN Money, AOL Finance, and more!
Recently I’ve committed to building an epic Amazon Affiliate Website in a new competition we’re calling the Epic Niche Site Battle. A contest over a year to see who can build a better niche website. The competition started January 1st, 2018 and this is the entire outline of how I plan to create an awesome Amazon Affiliate Website under $300.
What do I want my website to do or sell? Do I want to be an entertainment website where people go to be happy and find cool stuff, or do I want to be an authority website where people visit to learn words of wisdom from someone who knows more than them? Or do I want to create another blog that shares silly stories?
There are a lot of choices here, but I wanted to do an entertainment website. I like being fun and frankly if it’s going to be another website to manage. I NEED this to be fun!
Specifically, I chose to niche down to a fun, witty and entertaining website on Holidays. I like holidays because people spend money (or at least expected to spend money) during these times of the year. So I’m going to create an entertainment website based on the traditional things people buy for the holidays. Cool right!
Cost – $0 to think of cool niche ideas.
This part takes time, give yourself plenty of time, like 3 months to come up with a clever domain name for your website. Usually, you want your website/business name or purpose to be reflected in the domain name. You want this to be memorable, easy to type, shorter is better and capable of building a brand around.
I spent 3 months thinking about a domain name. Yes, the Epic Niche Site Battle started 10 days ago, but I could still think of my website beforehand. To think about my holiday website, I came up with over 237 different domain names, slowly fine-tuning them, and emphasizing keywords that made sense to my brand. Those 237 domain names were just the ones that were available when I researched them on GoDaddy.com, there were hundreds more I tried that were unavailable. I went a little insane finding the right domain name.
This is how I felt…..
Eventually, I find a domain name that I absolutely loved! This is personally important to me because if I don’t like it, I won’t be motivated to work on it every week. If you’re not passionate about something, you WILL quit halfway through when the going gets tough. I don’t plan to quit.
Cost – $12 Domain Name + $12 Domain Privacy
*Always buy domain privacy, otherwise you’ll get calls/emails daily from companies trying to sell your new website different services. It’s like telemarketers on steroids.
This doesn’t seem like a big deal, but I’m a graphic kind of guy and I NEED an awesome logo to rally behind. Honestly, I started to think about how the website logo will look when researching domain names. I wanted to create more than just a name in a silly font, I want to create a whole brand.
Once I had my domain name chosen, I started to research different creative logos on websites like Logopond.com and in Google Search Images. I typed in my keywords and compared what other company logos looked like. I started from there and fine-tuned until I had something that looked different, creative, but familiar.
I had about 5 pages of tiny thumbnail logos sketched out.
I needed and created something that looked professional. I used Adobe Illustrator to create it myself, but you could hire a freelance graphic designer off Upwork.com of Fiverr.com. It just depends how much money you want to spend. I personally hate spending money, so the more I can do myself, the better.
Cost – $0 if you do it yourself, I did.
Right before I create a website, I go through and start claiming all my social media platforms for the new company name. Chances are that if your domain name is unique enough, it should be available. If not, at least a similar enough name should be.
I’m currently going through and claiming a Gmail account for my new company (people trust Gmail), along with a Facebook Page, Pinterest Page, Instagram, and Twitter Profile. I’m doing this now so I at least have all of these claimed in the digital world.
I will use the graphic I created for my logo, as the profile photo for the new social media accounts. =P
You may not need/use all of these in the beginning, but having them for safekeeping is a nice reassurance moving forward.
Cost – $0 for the basic accounts.
I personally use WordPress for all my websites. It’s frankly easy to use, flexible and I like the simplicity. This new website will also be on WordPress. Most websites are.
Setting up a website is easier than you think. I personally use Bluehost (you can use whoever you want) to set up all my websites because they have a 1-click button that sets up a WordPress website for you, if that’s scary, here is a detailed post on how to start a blog written for some friends. Let me know in the comments if you have any questions. We’re happy to help!
Full disclosure, I use Bluehost for all my websites. I’m a big fan. If you want to learn more or use Bluehost, I would LOVE if you used my Bluehost Affiliate Code to check it out. It really means a lot to us!
Cost – $202.32 for 2 years of Bluehost hosting.
*You can absolutely do only 1 year, but there is a better discount the longer you go. I also paid for the Site Backup Pro (in case I accidentally delete something) and SiteLock Security (in case my website gets hacked). Overall $202.32 for two years is pretty awesome! If your website hasn’t made that back in 2 years, we should chat.
So I went to the same place I buy all my WordPress themes (Themeforest) and searched their hundreds of demo WordPress Themes to find the right one that made sense for my Amazon Affiliate Website. This is the style and look your website will have. I needed a clean looking blog (it’s great for SEO) and I needed a warm looking homepage. I found something flexible and looked professional after a couple hours searching.
I’m a big fan of websites that look professional. If your website looks like it was made by a 5th grader, it will be instantly judged and people will feel uncomfortable. Take the time to give your website a nice look upfront and it will pay dividends for the success of your website. WordPress themes are a great way to give your Amazon Affiliate Website a professional look for a cheap price tag.
All you do with your WordPress Theme is hit “Upload Theme” once you create your WordPress website. It’ll then give you the look and feel of what you saw in the demo theme from Themeforest.
Cost – $60 for a WordPress theme from Themeforest.
There is an infinite number of plugins you can add to your site, but the more you do, the slower your site can run and Google hates slow sites, read Adam’s experience here with decreasing website load times. Here are 6 free plug-ins I add to all of my WordPress Amazon Affiliate Websites to keep them fast, looking good and efficient.
Cost – $0 for all of these plugins.
I want my website to be easily manageable, so I’m going to initially set up my Amazon Affiliate Website to be pretty simple. I’m having essentially 3 pages.
These pages are:
I thought about separating the About Me and Contact Page, but they essentially are the same thing, I’ll have a contact form on my About Me page. In my head, the website is more manageable with 3 different pages (plus future blog posts).
I’m currently setting up these 3 pages and loading the homepage with products to sell for the upcoming holiday. Once these 3 pages are done, you’re website is almost done.
Cost – $0, just takes time.
In most cases, your website will be found by SEO or Search Engine Optimization blog posts. You’ll likely market your website in other ways, but most times blogs are found on Google, Bing or Yahoo. Here is Wallet Squirrel’s SEO strategy.
This is where the hard work comes! Every one of my blog posts must follow the 5 rules I discovered during my research on 50 Amazon Affiliate Website Examples Making Money in a Niche. There were the 5 important variables when investigating blog posts on these successful Amazon Affiliate Websites.
Lastly, always do your research and NEVER suggest/promote products you dislike or don’t agree with just for money. People will ALWAYS see through that.
I’m trying to create 4-5 awesome blog posts for my initial launch. Don’t worry about publishing these all at once. This just gives Google more time to crawl these pages and bookmark them for future Google Searches. After that, I’ll create a new post weekly or bi-weekly. Honestly whatever feels better with my time constraints. Either way, quality blog posts are better with Amazon Affiliate Websites.
Cost – $0 unless you pay someone else to write articles for you, but I write all my articles myself.
After I finish my 3 website pages and 4-5 blog posts. I’ll be ready to launch my website!
This involves more than making it visible to the world. You need to get people to the website. Here are some ideas on how to promote your website and increase web traffic.
Cost – $0 You don’t have to spend anything on marketing the website if you don’t want to. Find free ways to promote your website before resorting to paying for a press release or PR companies. Don’t ever try to pay for links to your website, Google may penalize you for this.
Remember the old shampoo commercials of rinse and repeat? That’s how Amazon Affiliate Websites work. Your goal is to attract as many visitors as possible, help them, and send them onward to Amazon to buy a product.
The more you write new content and market your website, the more visitors you’ll bring in and the more products you’ll sell.
Total Cost to Start an Amazon Affiliate Website – $274.32
I just laid out my entire Amazon Affiliate Website template for you to copy. If you follow this outline and track my progress, you’ll find some success for your new website.
I’m currently in Step 8, setting up my Amazon Affiliate Website now. It’s going really well! I should be at Step 9 or Step 10 by the end of January, having only spent $274.32 total. That should easily be made back in the next couple of months, I’ll continue to track and post my progress!
Leave me a comment on how your website is doing and I’ll continue to leave updates on how the Epic Niche Site Battle is going!
Wallet Squirrel is a personal finance blog by best friends Andrew & Adam on how money works, building side-hustles, and the benefits of cleverly investing the profits. Featured on MSN Money, AOL Finance, and more!
Oh my goodness, blog post photo sizes were SO confusing before I wrote this post. If you look through our older posts, they were all over the place because we made what looked pretty at any size. Now we have the data on the perfect blog post photo size for sharing on social media.
Forget burying the lead, the new dimensions we’re using for our future blog posts are:
Quick article right? Keep reading if you want to know how we came to this perfect ratio of social media and blog magic.
Apparently, this is a pretty popular ratio that many social media companies (like Buffer) and social media agencies came to through their research. I’m focusing on the ideal image size for sharing articles and photos, but if you want the ideal image size for every social media photo spot like profile photos and cover images, check out Omnicore Agency’s infographic.
I’m focusing on the 4 major social media channels, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest. Yes, there are Instagram, Google+, Tumbler, etc. Yet most bloggers don’t use these because they’re not great platforms for sharing articles, images and posts. So we’ll focus on the big 4.
No matter what size you actually upload to any of these platforms, it’ll automatically be scaled to whatever social media platform you’re using. Here is what they scale to.
Whenever you add a URL to Facebook, it will create a “shared link” post. This will add your message in the text box above and below use the URL you submitted to automatically a Facebook article that uses your featured image as the post image. It’ll look like this:
To get the most out image size (bigger is better) out of your shared article link, you’ll want your Facebook photos to be 1,200 x 628 px. If most people find you via Facebook, maybe it’s worth making all your blog post images this size to get the most image dimensions and Facebook real estate.
Twitter has over 313 Million active users a month. If you’re not on twitter you likely don’t exist. So if you want to exist on Twitter, you REALLY need to use images to convey your ideas and share your articles. Tweets with images get 2x more engagement than those without.
If your adding images to your tweets you want to use the right sized images to get the most real estate for your tweets because a regular tweet only last 18 minutes. Twitter uses a 2:1 ratio and 1,024 x 576 px is ideal. This is what the photo will look like when it’s selected otherwise, Twitter will minimize it to 506 x 253 px in the Twitter stream looking like this:
Unlike Facebook and Twitter, LinkedIn will only allow you to add one image per post. So you can get creative having one image made up of multiple images or use one good image. Either way the ideal ratio for LinkedIn according to a moderator on LinkedIn’s help forum, the ideal size for image uploads is 522 x 368 px.
Anything larger than that will be automatically cropped for the image preview to fit their maximum width and height. Your actual image won’t be cropped if selected for full view, but most people only look at the image preview.
People are regularly raving how great Pinterest is for driving traffic to their website. I’m hoping to try this as stated in my recent income report because 90% of Pinterest pages are external links to people’s websites.
Pinterest has said that the best aspect ratio are images with a 2:3 ratio. This could be 600 pixels wide by 900 pixels tall or 800 pixels wide by 1,200 pixels tall. You get the idea. However, the actual Pinterest feed on the main page and on boards shows pins with a width of 236 px and adjustable height.
We’re going to start using the perfect blog post image size to help us get more real estate from social sharing, what image size do you use for your blog post images?
Wallet Squirrel is a personal finance blog by best friends Andrew & Adam on how money works, building side-hustles, and the benefits of cleverly investing the profits. Featured on MSN Money, AOL Finance, and more!
Over the past few months, Andrew and I have been working very hard to increase website traffic to Wallet Squirrel. I can successfully say that we have accomplished that with our web marketing strategy! We are nowhere near some of the bigger bloggers but our traffic growth is aggressively pointing upward with a 65% gain between June and July! Overall, we have increased our viewership by 545% since changing our strategy in February.
In my latest SEO post, I suggested that I would be coming out with a marketing guide. Well, here it is! I am going to lay it all out here to help you gain more traffic now!
Overall, you want web marketing to increase the exposure of your content and website. The more you can share your content with others on various platforms, the more likely you are to reach new people. These new visitors are the people that could turn into loyal followers.
You also want to make sure the platforms that you are sharing on are worth your time and effort. Marketing takes a lot of time and effort which most people do not have. I know I do not have that much time with a little eight-month-old crawling all around the house. This is why I have come with this guide, to save you the time as well as the effort of guessing and checking based on what Andrew and I have already gone through.
Here you will find the techniques that we find the most useful and gain the most traffic from.
Using social media to increase website traffic is a no-brainer. Being persistent and dedicated to social media can really expand your contents reach. The challenge with social media it is tough to stay consistent with posting every day. This is why we recently purchased CoSchedule to help us post on all of the social media platforms. CoSchedule allows you to create templates for Tweets, Facebook, Pinterest, and LinkedIn then it will automatically post them on a particular schedule.
Another thing to remember about social media is that it is not only about sending out these automated posts. Social media is also about creating conversations. I try to get on Twitter several times a day to see if I can create a conversation with someone. These conversations create a more memorable moment for people versus a traditional tweet.
Check out Andrew’s review of Coschedule and how we use it for our social media web marketing.
Andrew has had a lot of success with getting our articles syndicated on some major publications such as the AOL Finance Collective and Seeking Alpha. We continue to search for new places to get our articles hosted somewhere else. Using syndication for web marketing increases the footprint of every article written which in turn increases website traffic. It is like we are borrowing their audience.
The trick with syndication is that every article must be written with extra care. Really you should do this for every article if you want to be taken as a professional (no one is perfect though). But since you are publishing this article on a high-end professional publication it needs to look like your best work. Take some extra time to review the content. Maybe even download the Grammarly application to help you find hidden mistakes in your writing. I know this application has really helped me find some boneheaded mistakes!
We have had good success using Quora to gain some more exposure around the internet. Quora is only one of several social platforms I want to play with. Others include Slideshare, Reddit, and Blogger. I’m particularly excited to try out Slideshare which allows you to create a presentation on any topic you would like.
With any social platform you will want to find trending topics then conquer that topic with a mind-blowing presentation (Slideshare) or answer (Quora). You might ask, “How do you find these trending topics?” That is a great question! Well, Quora makes it super easy as you can see the analytics of questions. For other platforms, I use social media to help me with that. With Twitter, you can easily see what people are talking about and how rigorous that conversation is.
Creating strong headlines to catch the eyes of potential viewers is very important to marketing any post. If the headline does not create some sort of intrigue then no one will want to click on the link. Through CoSchedule, I use their headline analyzer to help determine if my headlines are strong or not. This analyzer will tell you if the headline has a good balance of words within it or not. It also gives the headline an overall grade, the higher the grade the better the headline is. Creating a catchy and intriguing headline is one of the simplest web marketing techniques and an easy way to increase website traffic to your blog.
To increase website traffic, you need to find a reason for people to visit your website. This web marketing technique requires you to find a pain point for your new visitors. A pain point is something that the visitor must need to make their life better such as “How to market their website properly”. These pain points are subjects that can be cultural trends (Pokemon Go last summer) or a pain point that is always there such as website performance. If you can find the right pain point then apply strong marketing and SEO strategies, you will see an increase in website traffic.
There are some areas that we need to increase focus on. We really have not gotten to these yet because they are lower on the priority list as we have worked on incorporating the above tasks into our routine. As I have said in many other articles such as in my Getting Rid of Distractions post. Do not just stack the whole pile of tasks on your to-do list at once. We have been working on one task at a time, incorporating it into our routine, then adding another one on top of it once complete. Taking everything on all at once is a dangerous move because it increases the chances of failure and burning you out.
Infographics keep growing in popularity as a form of web marketing. They are easy for others to share the story they want to tell. Creating relevant infographics can take a little time but in its self is your whole article portrayed as an image. This allows your viewer to easily summarize your article just by sharing one image. Every time that image is shared so is your brand. As you can see in the example below that Andrew made for his What Happens to Debt When You Die article, the Wallet Squirrel brand is clearly displayed.
We need to continue to create more infographics as well as make them easy to share. I believe this form of web marketing will increase the spread of the Wallet Squirrel brand around the internet. In turn, this will increase website traffic for Wallet Squirrel.
We have been so focused on other things we have not made that much time for guest posting. In fact, Andrew has had to turn down several opportunities because time has slipped away. Guest posting is a very similar technique to syndication. Really the only difference is that you are posting on a fellow bloggers website instead of a publication. You gain viewership from guest posting because you are letting that blog’s visitors know you exist.
All of this goes without saying that you cannot have web marketing without good SEO. Good SEO practices are just as important as a good web marketing strategy. We gain about half of our traffic because of good SEO and the other half because of our web marketing efforts.
Now that you have the web marketing half. Go read my two posts on SEO. The Ultimate SEO Strategy for 2017 and An SEO Strategy – What Works and What Does Not. Within these posts, I talk about how to increase the SEO of your entire website as well as each blog post you publish.
Below you will find an infographic summarizing our Web Marketing strategy plus our SEO strategy. Feel free to love, like, share, post, tweet, or whatever else floats your boat. If you can, just give us credit by linking back.
If you recall from my June Income Report, my July goal is to build a social media calendar to help grow our Social Media audiences. Currently, Social Media produces only 17% of our traffic, so I wanted to tap into that potential. A social media calendar would regularly/consistently stay in contact with those audiences. So I compared 3 different social media tools for this CoSchedule Review to do just that, manage Wallet Squirrel’s social media.
Obviously, from the title, I choose CoSchedule for Wallet Squirrel, but anyone wanting to dramatically improve their Social Media game should look this over.
MeetEdgar – This tool allows you to automate your social media messages. You can write a Tweet/Facebook Post/LinkedIn Message and have it automatically repost every month, 3 months or year so that you’re never running out of content. While this is a great tool, the interface was a bit clunky for me in the 14-day trial and for the price of $45 per month, I wanted a bit more than just a backlog of messages automatically posting.
Buffer – This allows you to set up a queue of social media messages on Twitter/Facebook/LinkedIn where you can write messages beforehand, and Buffer will publish them based on timeslots you decide. Think of writing one message then selecting all the different social media platforms you want to send it out to. This eliminates going into each social media account and copy/ pasting your message each time. You can also schedule retweets so you don’t have a bunch of messages going out at once.
I actually use Buffer at work and love it. The biggest downfall is that once you send a message, you can’t automatically reschedule it to be sent again. Since Tweeting only hits 10% of your audience at a time. You’d manually have to add the same tweet over and over and over. It’s just a giant waste of time.
CoSchedule – This is really a combination of the two. CoSchedule allows you to see a full calendar of messages going out and automatically ReQueue them to go out again if they’re popular. I’ve done the 14-day trial and now I’m a paid subscriber. I’m a bit of a fan. Let me dive a bit more into CoSchedule.
Because CoSchedule loves demonstration videos, here is a brief CoSchedule Review Video of their software.
To me, CoSchedule is a visual calendar that you can see when your different social media posts are going out. You can schedule a post in advance and automatically repost (they call it ReQueuing) popular content so your audience doesn’t miss great content. Here is a screenshot of what Wallet Squirrel’s calendar looks like after using it for two weeks during the CoSchedule Review.
Not going to lie, it’s a bit intimidating at first, as is any software. It integrates into a number of social media platforms and WordPress, it took a bit to get my head around it. However starting off, I primary use it for my social media accounts.
This is a term I’ve heard as a buzz word, but I never really knew what it meant until this CoSchedule Review. I’ve come to learn that a social media campaign is a series of social media messages posted at different times, with all the same purpose. Like the 1,000 tweets you read when Lady Gaga launches a new album. Those set of tweets, collectively are a social media campaign.
For me personally, I use their social media campaign to promote new blog content. I click their campaign button and I set up a template for my new Income Reports. To describe the screenshot below, I add the URL of the post I want to promote and it automatically inserts that hyperlink into a series of messages scheduled to go out that day, the next day, a week later and a month later. All the times are completely customizable. Each message has a default basic message like “check this out”, but I tweak these each time. This is one of my favorite features because it provides a carpet bombing of social media messages for new content over an entire month, created in seconds.
CoSchedule has a popular feature called “ReQueue” which creates a cache of messages that will automatically be published if you have a gap in your social media calendar. Let’s say I want to post 3 tweets each day. If I don’t have a social media posts going out on Friday. CoSchedule can pull an old social media post from my library of social media messages to fill that gap.
Oh my goodness it’s so nice to automatically repost evergreen content
For example last Sunday while writing this CoSchedule Review, I filled my ReQueue library with fun social media messages promoting old content. That way, I will always have at least 3 tweets going out a day. You can even set categories for your ReQueue library such as “Evergreen Content”, “Promotional Content” like a referral link to Bluehost website services or any categories you can think of. Here are the categories I’ve created so far.
As a current user of Buffer, it is great but there are days that I don’t have time to post a new message to social media and my Buffer queue ran out. I needed something with Buffer’s queue feature, but also automatically posted content like MeetEdgar. I considered getting both of these since combined they’re cheaper than CoSchedule, but I prefer to use one piece software that incorporates the best of both.
Plus there are other benefits of CoSchedule that I haven’t touched on during this CoSchedule Review. Mainly because these features are singularly what I wanted the software for. It’s currently a must if I want to grow our Wallet Squirrel social media presence. Not just rapid firing social media messages, but creating conversations and dialogue while reminding our audience of older content. Those combined features won me over.
I’m willing to try CoSchedule out for a couple months to see how this goes, use my referral code for 14 DAYS FREE if you’re interested in trying it too. So far I’ve been impressed with the power this software provides during my CoSchedule Review. Plus their blog has so many great tips on social media you don’t need to pay for. In 6 months I’ll do an ROI “Return on Investment” Analysis to follow up on my progress.
So far, I’d honestly recommend it to any blogger who can afford to spend a ridiculous $79 per month (save 50% if you write a review). It’s a great tool to visualize a social media calendar that’s smart enough to fill in the gaps. Like a Social Media Manager would. Follow us on Wallet Squirrel’s Facebook and Twitter page to see it in action.
Are there any other tools you use I didn’t mention?
*Disclaimer I wasn’t paid for this review, but CoSchedule does offer a 50% discount if you write a review. Since I love saving money, we did this review but maintained our honest opinion and user experience.
Wallet Squirrel is a personal finance blog by best friends Andrew & Adam on how money works, building side-hustles, and the benefits of cleverly investing the profits. Featured on MSN Money, AOL Finance, and more!
About three months ago I wrote an article about our SEO strategy the Ultimate SEO guide for 2017. Andrew and I have worked hard together to implement this guide. Now it is time for an update to see what is working and what needs some more time.
Let’s start off with some numbers. In my original article, I pulled some key metrics to measure the success of our SEO campaign. Here is what they looked like three months ago.
Today they look a little different. We have dropped darn near to the 500,000 rank from Alexa, doubled our inbound links, increased our domain authority by five points, and nearly triple our weekly viewership.
Personally, I am very pleased with the progress of our SEO campaign because we have grown these numbers organically. As always, there is still room for improvement but we are heading in the right direction.
So, how did we arrive at these higher numbers in just three months? To start off answering that question I want to look at it from a broad perspective then I will get down to the nitty gritty details.
Firstly, Andrew and I got on the same page with Wallet Squirrel’s SEO Guidelines. Since I did all of the research for the original SEO article, I sat down with him and laid down what the both of us needs to do for every article we write. If you are a part of a blogging team, I highly recommend that your team gets together to talking making sure that everyone is on the same page.
Secondly, we put in lots and lots of work to lay out our foundation. This foundation included finding a new web host (Bluehost), improving website performance, consistent content creation, and so on (I will go more into these pieces later). After laying this ground work we were in full motion forward. Things just seem to keep getting better for the site.
In my original post, I talked about techniques that could be classified as an SEO strategy or Marketing technique. When writing that article I did not know the difference between the two. SEO strategies are for optimizing your website to rank higher in search engines so your site is easier to find. Where marketing techniques are meant to promote your articles to drive traffic to your website.
Today I want to separate those two different terms out and only talk about the SEO strategies that have worked for us. This means you will not find out about twitter campaigns, how does posting on Quora help with traffic, or what syndicating articles is. You will have to wait for another article about marketing 😀
Let us start off with the most important piece of any SEO strategy. Strong content is king in the SEO world. Every blogger that wants to succeed must create consistent and strong content. The more that can be written, the better the blog will perform. We have increased the size of each article to at least 1,000 words and are consistently posting on Monday and Thursday every week.
Tip: I recommend you take a weekend just to write three to four articles. This will allow you get a pool of articles built up in case you need to miss a week.
I have been hearing a lot of people stating that all you need to do for an SEO strategy is write good content and do not worry about keywords. This cannot be farther from the truth. Andrew and I learned that you should ALWAYS write an article around a keyword searched in Google. And we have proof!
Since the original article, he and I wrote two articles (50 Amazon Affiliate Website Examples Making Money in a Niche and How to Earn More Money in 2017 – The Achievement App) that are gathering A TON of organic traffic from Google search results. These articles are written around a specific long tail keyword. After a couple months of being indexed each one comes in on the top page of Google when searched for. If we did not go the extra mile to find a keyword, we would be losing that organic traffic, solely relying on traffic gained by marketing.
Personally, I know I have been slacking with this SEO strategy. Using Backlink Watch to spy on your competition can not only help you expand out your audience, it can also help you increase your backlinks from relevant websites. Using this tool allows you to easily find other related articles and websites that revolve around your articles keyword. This provides the opportunity to contact the administrator informing them about your post which could result in a backlink or you can leave a comment on the article.
What to do: Head over to Google and type in your article’s keyword. Then select one of the top URLs (your competitors) that show up in the search’s results. Copy and paste this URL into Backlink Watch and click on the Check Backlinks button. Backlink Watch will then start spitting out other websites that provide links to your competitor. Now you can head over to those websites to see if you can contact their administrator or leave a non-spam like comment on the article.
Backlink Watch used in our SEO Strategy for 2017
Bluehost has been amazing to us so far. We have had great customer service that helped us get everything moved over from iPage very quickly. We decided to move over to Bluehost after finding out they provide more services for the same price. Overall, we got Wallet Squirrel on a better performing server, a dedicated IP, and an SSL Certificate. All three of those items checked off to-dos on our SEO checklist.
If you are looking to move to a new host, I recommend them. Click on this affiliate link. It will help us out greatly so we can keep Wallet Squirrel up and running!
As mentioned above, we got an SSL Certificate after moving to Bluehost. This is not a fancy SSL certificate that you would find on an e-commerce website but we do not need that. We just needed something to make Google more happy with us.
You can grab free SSL certificates around the internet as well. I tried to do this for Wallet Squirrel before finding Bluehost but the process was WAY over my head. I recommend this route if you are happy with your hosting provider and have the technical knowledge.
The SSL Certificate is highly ranked by Google and should be apart of anyone’s SEO Strategy.
There is always something we can do better with our SEO strategy. Here are a couple ideas for Andrew and I to remember.
After the move, we need to get better at indexing our new blog posts on Google’s and Bing’s webmaster tools. Indexing allows these major search engines to crawl your website and post your pages within its results. If Google or Bing do not know about your website then you will never rank in their search results. It’s that simple.
Returning to old blog posts is very important to let Google and Bing know that the page is still active. If a page stays stagnant for too long then it starts to lose its ranking in the search results. So from time to time, it is best to figure out your most popular posts then make some changes to them. Then index the post again letting Google or Bing know that things have changed.
Overall our SEO strategy is working out really well. I am excited to see what will happen over the next three months. My goal is to double everything again! By staying consistent and making the adjustments mentioned above, this should not be an issue.
Below you will find an infographic summarizing this SEO strategy plus our Web Marketing strategy. Feel free to love, like, share, post, tweet, or whatever else floats your boat. If you can, just give us credit by linking back.
So I am a couple weeks behind on this post. It is all with good reason though. Firstly, I wanted to start our new series that fit better into our blogging schedule earlier in the month. The new series highlights other financial bloggers and their income reports, Income Report Roundup (new title is in the works). This is a great opportunity for you and I to see what others are doing to accomplish financial freedom.
Secondly, I failed pretty hard with a lot of my goals in this first month. So I needed to take a step back, be honest with myself, and reset. We will go over more about this next. Since resetting two weeks ago, I have been able to accomplish every goal in the shorter time frame. Pretty awesome!
Failure is not what I am scared of. There is nothing wrong with not figuring something out the first time around, or the second, or the third, or…well you get the picture. What I am really scared of is not learning anything from those failures, getting stuck in a loop trying the same thing over and over.
See we can read every self improvement article on the internet but never know what really works for us as individuals. Those articles, like this one give, can give us a starting point. From there it is how we handle the failure because there likely will be. Either we can get frustrated, giving up on the first try saying, “Working out to get healthy just is not for me.” Or we can keep pushing, analyze what went wrong, and make adjustments for the next time around.
For me, there have been many things in my life I have kept trying to fit into my life as a habit. This includes working out. I have tried everything in the book but nothing ever stuck. Over the years I have tried different routines, exercises, times of day, and so on to keep that motivation going. Finally, I have found the routine and motivation to get up every morning (continue reading for the answer).
What habit have you been trying to make stick? Have you found the solution or are you still searching for what works for you?
So let’s go over the goals I had for last month. These goals were meant to help me get rid of materialistic distractions, technological distractions such as Facebook, and getting in better habits such as working out in the morning. I am not going to explain each goal in detail again. If you are curious about the details of every goal you can read about them in Part One of this series.
Sell extra items that can be a distractions – This one is going A LOT slower than I thought it would go. I have put everything on the market but I have only sold one item. I will continue to post these items, probably cutting the prices a bit to make the items more enticing.
Finish our backyard renovation – Major Success! By the middle of May we had the backyard completed. For more details check out my article about How to Save Big Money on a Home Remodel. I wouldn’t have been able to complete this task without friends and family. Especially my wife who watched our little one every night so I could work on the yard.
Start waking up earlier, 5:00 AM, to work out – This was a major fail in the first four weeks. I partially blame it on how intense the backyard project was. With how much material I had to move around, remove, and move in I was just wiped for the day. But excuses are excuses. I still did not work out for two weeks after that until I did my reset a couple weeks ago. So what changed? Well…
As mentioned already, in the last two weeks, I have woke up every morning at 4:45 AM to work out for 30 to 45 minutes. What really worked for me to wake up so early was prepping everything I need in the morning, the night before. This was the last goal of mine for this month. Turns out it had a cascading affect on other goals.
Stay focused on achieving my goals one percent at a time – I am not sure if I know how to quantify this one but I believe this was a success. I was able to work on Wallet Squirrel and other goals for at least an hour every day after my little one went to sleep for the night.
Set up my next day the day before. Each night before bed – Pass! I spend about 15 to 20 min a night getting ready for the next day. This really sets me up nicely for getting up at 4:45 in the morning to workout. I found a time during the evening that is consistent for me to get everything ready. The trick is remembering to stick with this which enforces the habit. To help you remember, set an alarm or a reminder on your to-do list.
This coming month I want to continue to build on top of what I started. This makes for an easy first goal…
Continue to build on with what I started last month – Though most of what I set out to accomplish last month was a success, they are still new habits that can be lost very easily. These first month’s goals were supposed to be a foundation for the next goals. To lose them might make it harder to continue in the coming months.
Improve the marketing for Wallet Squirrel – Now that I have completed my initial goals for Wallet Squirrel (SEO, web performance, and content) it is time to reach a wider audience. Even though we have tripled our views in the last three months we still need to increase our viewership. Andrew and I met this past weekend, dividing out our tasks so I know what needs to be done.
Less social media – I talked about this a lot in the first article but I really did not do anything about. This month, I want to get rid of all distracting social media that is not beneficial for my goals. This means that the only reason I should be on Facebook, Twitter, and so on should be to promote Wallet Squirrel. Other than that, who cares.
Close lose ends – There are a couple of tasks that I need to wrap up. They are 95% done but there is only one more item to cross off before the overall task is at 100% complete. One example of an almost complete task is with our web performance. We have done everything to boost it even including the move to Bluehost. The last piece of the puzzle will be to setup a new caching plugin. Should be an easy one, hopefully.
Remember, failure is okay, as long as you learn from that failure. Do not let that failure get you down and quit. Use it to prop yourself up to get back at it with a new strategy.
Like last month. I challenge you make your own goals for this upcoming month. Let’s check in next month at the third week of July to see how we all did.
If you are looking for ideas on what you could do, check out our Ways to Earn More Money page. Here you might find something that catches your eye.
Growing Twitter followers organically is NOT easy. It is a hard, grueling process, where we just reached 500 Twitter Followers but we could have done it so much easier and faster. Here is how we reached 500 twitter followers and lessons learned for the next 500.
I’m not saying reaching 500 twitter followers is the best you can ever do. It’s just a nice milestone I would like to highlight as I tweak my Twitter strategy. Some of the top Twitter stars have MILLIONS of followers on Twitter.
For example, some of the top Twitter Influencers like Katy Perry has some 99.5 million, Justin Bieber at 96 million and Barack Obama closes in on third at 89 million (source).
Obviously, I am not an ex-president or pop singer, so I’ll stay within the Personal Finance world. Which among them, most Personal Finance Bloggers I’ve seen on average have around 1,500 Twitter Followers. Wallet Squirrel is 1/3 way there!
I am still fairly new to Twitter, so I did a lot of research to understand what Twitter was about and how people are gaining mass followings. Here are the top 20 things I learned from research and experience.
1. Get a Schedule Tool like Buffer or HootSuite to schedule tweets when you’re not around. Tweeting consistently will tell your audience that you’re engaged and visible. I use Buffer and love it.
2. Start following other people in your niche, or who you’re interested in. People feel obligated to follow you if you follow them. Following someone is providing value to them, and people typically want return that value to you. However if you’re following someone Katy Perry, she’ll likely not follow you back. I’m still waiting on Taylor Swift…
3. Regularly Retweet others content. For the same reason as above, people typically feel appreciative when you Retweet their content and will likely follow you since you have similar tastes.
4. ALWAYS add photos in your tweets, it’s regularly proven that tweets with photos are engaged by more readers than plain text. People like photos, use a gif and get even more engagement. I personally don’t always use gifs, I’ve learned photos work just as well. I just make sure to use some type of graphic.
5. Use the Hashtags! That’s the point of Twitter, people can follow certain keywords and your tweet may be among them. Twitter shows you the popular keywords if you want to hop on a current event, otherwise sometimes making up funny hashtags reaches a more engaged audience.
6. Sometimes just ask for a Retweet, it seems silly but people who enjoy your content are happy to help you out if you ask.
7. Don’t use a logo as your profile image. Twitter is a conversation platform, people engage more with people’s faces as profile photos rather than faceless logos. I just updated my Twitter Profile Pic.
8. Promote your Twitter account on your other social media platforms and blog. While Wallet Squirrel’s Twitter is 500 Followers, Facebook actually brings in the most traffic for us monthly. So we can ask our Facebook users to follow us on Twitter every once in awhile.
9. Reference people/companies from your blog posts in your Tweets. We get way more engagement when we specifically reference people in our Tweets. Usually when I comment on other people’s blogs, I’ll send out a Tweet referencing them saying nice article. I did this in “What I Learned from Commenting on 30 Blogs in a Week“.
10. Use Follow Buttons on your website so people can share your content. So far NO ONE has done this through our page buttons, but maybe in the future. I’m on the fence about this one, but maybe when we get more traffic.
11. Tweet Inspirational Quotes from Warren Buffett or your favorite philosophers. It seems silly, but sometimes it hits someone right when they’re feeling down. I need to do this more.
12. Pin your best tweets to the top of your Twitter Profile. When new users look at your Twitter Profile, they’re going to look at your top tweets to see what kind of personal tone you use. Pin your best tweets up top to give the best impression. I’m going to try to pin my monthly Income Reports up top.
13. Ask your email list to follow you on Twitter. This can be a simple “PS please follow me on Twitter so I can have more follower than my mother” comment.
14. Tweet the same content multiple times. Each Tweet last 15 seconds on average and then disappears forever. What if your perfect audience wasn’t reading at that time? Retweet messages that you think are beneficial. Some of the top Twitter influences do this all the time.
15. Always reply to tweets that reference your or direct messages. If someone takes the time to mention you then you should give them some kind of thank you or recognition. It’s polite and really well received in the community. I try to thank everyone publically who retweets my tweets.
16. Always thank users for Retweeting your content. I mentioned it above, but it deserves its own line item.
17. Don’t send a massive amount of tweets in a short period. If your tweets are filling up people’s entire screens over and over, they’ll get aggravated and unfollow you. You should constantly be tweeting but spread them out.
18. Don’t stop Tweeting. People who regularly tweet are considered to be more engaged and get more followers than those who tweet once every two weeks.
19. Tweet snippets of your articles. Instead of tweeting “5 Ways Millennials Waste Money”, you should break it into 5 different tweets each sharing 1 of the reasons. Giving value in your tweets is better than taglines any day.
20. Be a real person. Don’t spam your Twitter account with “READ THIS” and all of your stuff to read/sell. Remember that you’re talking to real people. Use words and tones as if you were talking to a group of your friends. People WILL notice.
In February I told myself that I would tweet 16 tweets a day for a month to see what would happen. In February I had previously sent 111 tweets, had 338 Twitter Followers and was following only 29 people.
I did 2 weeks of it until I was exhausted. I only sent out my own tweets and it was all promotions garbage. I hated every second of it. So I cut back to 5ish tweets a day and started a mixture of retweets, some promotional content and new content. I told myself I would do this until I got to 500 Twitter Followers and reevaluate if Twitter is worth it.
It took 4 months, ugh. Growing Twitter Followers is hella hard.
Today I’m at 513 Twitter Followers (151% increase) having sent 646 Tweets (581% increase) and now following 184 Twitter Followers (634% increase). Calculating the math to it, it seems like the increase in people who I follow had a significant impact, related to lesson #2.
While I originally went into this experiment hating Twitter, I’ll admit it’s grown on me. It’s an effective communication tool for short concise messages. I can’t knock that.
During the last 4 months of focusing on Twitter, I’ve learned a lot. So I’m daring myself to get to 1,000 followers in the next 4 months. Think it’s possible?
Lol Not with my current stats. I’ll have to up my game and stick to these 20 lessons learned. Any additional suggestions?
Wallet Squirrel is a personal finance blog by best friends Andrew & Adam on how money works, building side-hustles, and the benefits of cleverly investing the profits. Featured on MSN Money, AOL Finance, and more!
When I joined Wallet Squirrel a few months ago, I came in with several goals to complete the website. My first goal was to improve the SEO with a formalized SEO Strategy, read about our Ultimate SEO Guide for 2017. Secondly, I wanted to increase the value of the website by creating a ton more excellent content on top of Andrew’s. Lastly, I wanted to improve the overall website performance by decreasing our page load time.
After a lot of work, this last goal has been completed! In this article, I, Adam, will talk through what Andrew and I have been working on to increase Wallet Squirrel’s overall website performance.
Firstly, I want to thank Ross over at Paid Insights, who gave us some great advice on helping us speed up Wallet Squirrel. Though I did not use every plugin he recommended, he did point me in the right direction. For this advice, we are very grateful for.
If you have not checked out his site, please do. He is an expert in paid search campaigns. Whether you are looking to get started on your first or 50th campaign I would look into his services. Plus, he has an awesome podcast so you can learn more about the PPC (Pay Per Click) and AdWords world.
We used to host Wallet Squirrel on iPage but were tired of the poor performance of their servers. The lack of website performance and slow page load times helped us make the decision to move over to Bluehost. The new hosting service provided a great package that took care of several items on our list.
Bluehost is our choice for website hosting. You should check them out too!
Firstly, they offered high-performance servers that would help improve our overall page load time. Improving those load times improves the user experience. With the short attention spans of our society, your website needs to load quickly. If the page load time is high then you are most likely to lose visitors not willing to deal with the poor website performance.
Secondly, the Bluehost package we chose, the Pro Package, came with an SSL certificate. Now, the SSL certificate does not help out with the overall website performance. What it does do, is increase our SEO rankings with Google.
Thirdly, we were also able to get a dedicated IP address. This is another item that does not decrease the page load time of Wallet Squirrel. But Google does look fondly on dedicated IP addresses. I am not fully sure why but it is nice to have that helping us out with rankings as well.
Even with high-performance servers having poorly compressed images will slow down the page load time of any website. We had about 3,500 images that were bogging down the website performance of Wallet Squirrel.
Use TinyPNG for compressing your images.
To compress all of these images required an awesome plugin and we found one thanks to Ross. He pointed us in the direction of TinyPNG. The plugin was able to compress the images by 62.8% taking them from an initial size of 415.91 MB to just 154.92 MB. After the compression, our server response time went from 4 seconds to an extremely fast .21 of a second.
If you are looking for a good image compression plugin for WordPress, I highly recommend TinyPNG. The interface is clean and simple. The compression process does take some time but performs amazingly well in the background letting you work on other tasks.
Caching allows the website’s page load time to decrease significantly. This is because caching temporary stores the content on a user’s computer. This allows the page to load a lot faster the next time someone visits the website.
W3 Total Cache is a lot more robust versus WP Super Cache.
Right now we are WP Super Cache. This is a very basic and easy cache plugin for WordPress. I am in the process of testing out a new plugin called W3 Total Cache. This plugin is a lot more complicated but handles a lot more responsibility. When using it, I felt like the website performance increased dramatically. I had to disable it because the caching is a lot more firm compared to WP Super Cache. I should be able to get it working with some more testing.
Cache control helps with telling the user’s browser to load previous content or not. Because websites are getting more and more complex, telling the user’s browser this information is crucial. With more JavaScript and CSS on websites, it takes more and more time for the user’s computer to retrieve and download all of this information each time. If this information is stored on the user’s computer then the website can load that much quicker.
With the Cache-Control plugin, you can control the expiration dates as to when certain aspects of the site redownload on a user’s computer. Some items on the site you will want to have a shorter expiration date and others to have a long expiration date.
Cache-Control helps you decide when your site refreshes its content for your viewers.
For example, take the three little number counters on Wallet Squirrel’s home page. Each one of those takes some JavaScript to load on the backend. If they had to be retrieved and downloaded each time, it would add some significant time to load the webpage. Because they are only updated once a month, we can increase their cache expiration date compared to the blog page that updates twice a week.
Hopefully, this makes sense. If not let me know in the comments and I can answer those questions.
Typically a lot of WordPress themes will have tons of CSS and JavaScript code running on the backend. This code can take a lot of resources and time to load a page. Using a minify plugin will reduce this code allowing page load times to decrease.
We are using Fast Velocity Minify to improve our website performance. This plugin is working swimmingly but will be replaced once I get W3 Total Cache working properly. W3 Total Cache does support minifying as well. Being able to move to one plugin that handles multiple tasks should improve website performance as well.
Minifying your code is crucial for a fast web page load.
We use two websites to help grade the website performance of Wallet Squirrel. The first one is Google’s website speed tester. I like using this site the most because you are getting a speed grade by the company that is ranking your website in its search results. My thought is, if you can impress them, you should rank high in their results.
Secondly, we use Page Speed Grader. This site was recommended by Bluehost and has been very beneficial so far. This is because it ranks a lot of the same items Google looks at but it looks at other important items as well.
I used both of these website speed testings to figure out what we needed to work on to improve the website. I recommend you to use these tools to get a blueprint as to where you need to improve your own site.
Overall, this process has increased our speed grades with Google and Page Speed Grader significantly. Our score has jumped up nearly 30 points according to Google. And just over 20 points on Page Speed Grader. I am very pleased with the results of some serious work on the backend of our website.
Feel free to contact us and we might be able to help you out.
