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How to Make Blogging Goals You’ll Keep

January 4, 2016 by Katie Clark Leave a Comment

It’s been awhile since I’ve posted here – hopefully we still have a few followers left. It’s been a crazy few months since my son, Oliver, was born. Unfortunately, this website has gone on the back burner!

But with the New Year here, I’m hoping to jump back in and write here more often. I feel like I’m always answering questions for people on an individual basis, so I might as well post those answers here. In my experience, if one person has a question…a lot of others have the same one!

Since it’s the first day of the year, I thought I’d focus on a topic that is important to any blog’s growth – goals. For me, setting goals has helped me succeed and pushes me outside my comfort zone. I’ll share my goals for 2016 at the end of this post, but I thought I would share three keys to meeting your blogging goals.

Set Short-Term Goals

It’s great to have an end goal in site. Maybe you want to write a cookbook, support your family on your blogging income, etc. Always have that in the back of your mind!

However, if all you have is that end goal, you might find yourself frustrated as you try and grow your blog. While there are some overnight successes in the blogging world, most people don’t make a significant income overnight. You have to build on all those small goals to reach your large goal.

Some short-term goals can be:

Increasing pageviews each month by 5%
Growing social media accounts by a certain number each month
Increasing email newsletter open/click rates
Getting one new sponsored post a month

In order to get these short-term goals, just think about your end game and determine how to get to that point with smaller goals. I highly recommend tracking everything you do – social media followers, page views, income, etc. My friend, Hilary, has this excellent blogging spreadsheet that I think every blogger should have. It is $20, but I promise, it’s well-worth the cost. I’ll write more about next week, but I highly recommend it.

Find a Tribe

Finding other bloggers that I can talk to for support, ideas, and about frustrations has been so invaluable. I have met some of my closest friends through blogging. Blogging is such a unique field, and there’s not a lot of people to go to for advice. This is why finding your “tribe” is essential.

You may wonder where to find tribes. You can start by finding a blogging Facebook group for your area. I know there are ones for all over the country available. You could also try finding a blogging group in your niche. For instance, the Kid Blogger Network is a great group to join up with. I’ve met some wonderful people there.

I’ve met a lot of great people through conferences as well. I know conferences cost money

Track your Success

I already mentioned this briefly above, but it’s so important to track your success regularly. I think it’s important to track on a monthly basis what growths you have had so you know where you need to focus your efforts the next month.

And, on the same subject, CELEBRATE those successes – no matter how small they are. After professionally blogging for three years, let me tell you – sometimes, the small successes are the only things that keep me going. It’s easy to get discouraged when your site is growing as fast as you want, but when you start seeing small successes, it makes it easier to keep going.

My Blogging Goals for This Year

Now, it’s time for me to share what my goals are for this year. These are mainly pertaining to Clarks Condensed, since that’s where most of my efforts are expended. Hopefully these will help you brainstorm a little bit, too. I’d love to hear what your goals are in the comments, and if there’s anything I can do to help you reach those!

Post LessI don’t believe there is any magic number for how many times a week or month you should post. There are bloggers who post every day (even multiple times a day) and make a lot of money. And there are other bloggers who post once a month and are very successful. It really comes down to your audience and where your traffic comes from.For me, most of my traffic is from social media. I don’t have people coming to my home page every day to see if I’ve posted. I think it’s important to have fresh content, but unless people are camped out on your homepage every day, you might not need something all the time.
I got a little burnt out in December. I had a lot of posts to get up, and it was exhausting. I kind of lost my zeal for writing at that point. After talking to Forrest, we both decided that I should post less this year – but focus more on writing the best posts possible. My posts that do the best are those ones – the ones that really are about things I’m passionate about. They take longer to write, but they do so much better. I plan to post about three times a week. I hope that this helps me focus a little more on writing awesome posts – not just great posts (because I do try to make sure all my posts are in that “great” category.)
Promote MoreI have TONS of posts. As of today, there are 1,084 published. Many of those are currently circulating the Internet, but a lot of them are not!Instead of focusing on getting content out, I want to focus on promoting the content I already have. There are some great posts on Clarks Condensed that just don’t get much traction – and I think that’s really unfortunate. I need to go back and promote some of these posts everywhere I can!
I also want to promote my new posts more effectively. I’m currently searching for different ways to get my content out there, and instead of just scheduling it to Pinterest and Twitter a few times the first day I publish it, I hope to promote it heavily for at least a week after publication.
I have a lot of different ways to promote – from using social media schedulers like Crowdfire (which I also love for growing my Instagram and Twitter following), PostPlanner (I mainly like this for finding hot and trending content), along with sharing my posts in groups where others will share it!
Finish two eBooksI have several eBooks I have been working on since I started blogging. It’s kind of pathetic. However, this is the year that they get published. After last year’s ad revenue was disappointing to say the least, I’ve realized that I have to diversify my revenue streams even further – and one of the best ways to do that is to sell a product.I’ve decided to do one book for bloggers and one for Clarks Condensed. I always have people asking me questions about WordPress, so I hope to release my WordPress for Beginners eBook soon. On Clarks Condensed, pregnancy posts are always popular – especially my surviving pregnancy series. So, I plan to release my “Surviving Pregnancy: A Mom’s Guide” in the coming months as well.
Improve affiliate marketingWe moved to Colorado last year, and because of that, we are no longer eligible to use Amazon Affiliate marketing. It really is unfortunate, because we were starting to get a rather large revenue stream from them. I’ve had to get somewhat creative with my affiliate marketing since then. I was pretty unsuccessful for most of the year, but in the last few minutes, I’ve found a few programs that work really well for me.For me, it’s more advantageous to become an affiliate for a product I really believe in – rather than putting links to sites like Walmart or Target. I’ve started making a significant income working directly with a couple companies (such as Owlet Baby Care), so this year, I hope to do more of this.
Work on my NewsletterNewsletters are always being talked about in blogging groups I’m in. I have a fairly large subscriber list, but I really am not taking advantage of this. I want to work toward sending out a weekly newsletter – not just an RSS feed of our latest posts. Hilary, who I mentioned above, does a great job on hers. I honestly look forward to opening it (and I don’t really look forward to opening most emails!)
Plan aheadMost of my blogging is done on the fly. I’ve never been someone that is very good at planning ahead and scheduling posts ahead of time. It’s just not my style – even when I was in high school, I never seemed to be able to write essays well until the deadline was a day ahead.With that said, I do want to be more strategic and not find myself scrambling for a post idea every day. I just set up a Google Calendar where I have written out the names of all the posts I hope to write in the month of January. Most of these aren’t written yet, but I hope that it will make it easier to at least get bits and pieces of them written beforehand.
I have also been using Asana to coordinate posts easier!

Two Quick Ways to Get More Facebook Likes Organically

August 24, 2015 by Katie Clark Leave a Comment

Of all the social networks out there, Facebook is the one that frustrates me the most. With their ever-changing algorithms, the almost requirement to pay for ads, and only a fraction of my followers even seeing my posts, it’s almost enough to make me throw in the towel. It makes it difficult to get more Facebook likes organically when hardly anyone is seeing your posts!

Just almost. Right when I’m about to, I have a post that does well, and it makes me feel like all the stress of Facebook is worth it. More or less.

I’ve been working on a method for increasing engagement on Facebook, and it’s something I hope to share with you soon (let’s just say an awesome little tool called Post Planner is making that easier.) However, today I thought I’d share two quick, organic ways to get more Facebook likes.

Getting Facebook likes organically is important. Don’t ever pay some company to get you more likes – most of these will be fake followers that won’t engage with you. If you have followers, you want them to share, comment, and click on your content. There’s no point in having followers if they don’t do any of those things!

For me, figuring out how to get those Facebook likes can be tricky, but I recently found two methods that have helped me get more followers that actually want to see my content. They are pretty simple and should only take you a few minutes to implement.

Smart Bar

First of all, I installed the SumoMe Smart Bar. SumoMe is a free blogging tool that I mentioned last week, but it’s a very powerful free tool. One of my favorite features is the Smart Bar. Most people use it to get new email subscribers, but I’ve found it to be most effective for getting new Facebook followers.

It’s just a bar that shows up at the top of your site. You can add a custom message – for instance, on this site, it says, “Get Free Blogging Tips and First Access to New Posts”, and at the end of the message, there’s just a like button. Someone can just click like, it doesn’t take them away from your site, and you can get new followers. I get quite a few new followers on Clarks Condensed each day using this bar. All you need to do is sign up for SumoMe, install the required code, and then “buy” the Smart Bar. It’s really easy to set up, and it’s very effective in finding new followers.

Inviting Those Who Liked your Posts

This is a tip I learned a while back, but it’s one that I think is underused. You may think that people who are liking your posts are already following you, but this isn’t always the case. If they aren’t following your page, you can invite them to like it!

When I first learned this tip, I didn’t think it worked – but it was because I was logged into my Facebook page for Clarks Condensed, rather than my personal profile. You MUST be logged into your personal profile.

From your personal profile, go to the Facebook search bar and start typing in your Facebook page’s name. When you get to your page, go through all your posts and if there are more than three people who have liked the post, it will say “such and such, and three others liked this post.” Click on the “others liked this post”, and it will bring up a list of everyone who has liked the post.

At this point, it will either show that they like the post, a button that says something like “invite this person” or nothing. If there’s nothing, it’s because their privacy settings prevent certain people from sending them like invites. However, if there is the button to invite them, you should press this! I always have a handful of people who haven’t liked my page but somehow liked a post, so I find it worth it to do this about once a week. Once I started doing this, my likes started going up a lot!

I hope that this was helpful. If you have any great tips for gaining Facebook followers organically, I’d love to hear them!

Awesome Free Blogging Tools Every Blogger Should Know About

August 7, 2015 by Katie Clark Leave a Comment

While there are some definite expenses that come with blogging, they are something I try to keep to a minimum. Blogging is a relatively low-cost career (at least in my case), and there are so many awesome free blogging tools out there to help you accomplish your goals.

I’ve tried a lot of tools – and not all of them are that great. For me, the tool has actually to increase productivity or the effectiveness of a blog post. If I’m going to pay for a tool, it has to do that about 10-fold! I thought I’d share a few free blogging tools that I’ve found to be rather useful. I’d love to hear if there’s a tool that I missed! hjhk

Grammarly

If you’ve been blogging for long, you know that people love to call out grammatical and spelling mistakes. I notice other people’s mistakes super easily but my own? Not so much. There’s just something about editing my own posts that make me miss common errors – and some readers won’t let you forget it!

I learned about Grammarly recently, and I have to say, I LOVE it. It’s a tool that you install in Google Chrome, and it helps identify common spelling and grammar mistakes in your writing. I’ve found it to be a lot more accurate than WordPress editor plugins. As an added plus, it also alerts me to mistakes in social media posts, emails, etc. I can’t recommend it highly enough!

If you ever have anyone submit a guest post to your site, you can also use Grammarly to ensure that it wasn’t plagiarized or that it’s not already somewhere else on the Internet. Grammarly is free, but there is also a paid version that has more futures!

CoSchedule Headline Analyzer

In my post about ways to improve your blog, I mentioned the importance of good headlines. However, if you are like me, headlines might be hard to write. CoSchedule is a plugin I use for planning posts and social media scheduling (it’s not free, but I think it’s a reasonable price.) They do offer a free headline analyzer tool that I feel is very helpful. You just type in the headline you want to use, and it gives you a lot of insight – an overall score, what keywords are being used, how it will show up in an email, Google Search, whether or not the length is appropriate, etc.

BuzzSumo

This is a simple tool that can help not only with coming up with ideas but figure out your top competition! All you do is type in a keyword, and it will tell you what kind of content has already been created and been successful on that topic.

SumoMe

I LOVE SumoMe, and I use it on both of my sites. They keep releasing more tools, and I end up using all of them. You just add a bit of code to the <head> of your site, and then you can install different tools that they offer. I use their smart bar – a static bar at the top of the page. On Clarks Condensed and The Blog Help, it’s there to prompt people to “like” me on Facebook. It converts very well, and you can also use it for email subscriptions and Twitter. I also use their popup, which integrates with different email subscription services, their sharing tools – for the share buttons above my posts, as well as my image sharer), and I also use their heat maps. Heat maps are an awesome way to see what people are clicking on and reading on your site.

Google Products – Analytics, Drive, Hangouts

Google has a whole host of products that are great for bloggers. I use many of them on a regular basis. Google Analytics is the industry standard for tracking your stats, and it’s also free. If you don’t have it installed, I recommend doing that ASAP. I use Google Drive for storing photos (and sharing them with others) as well as all of the document creators – it’s much more convenient than using Microsoft Word, and it makes it easy to collaborate with other bloggers on projects! I especially love using Google Forms to collect information. For instance, I recently decided to ask for blanket permission to use people’s posts in roundups, so I just made a simple Google form for people to fill out. Easy!

HARO – Help a Reporter Out

This is a website I occasionally used as an undergraduate studying journalism, but it’s a great tool for bloggers. Reporters come here to find sources for their stories. If you feel like you have a certain expertise in a query sent out, you can submit a response. There’s no guarantee it will be used in a story, but if it is, it’s great free publicity. Major news organizations use this website, and I know a lot of bloggers who have gotten some great press because of it.

AllTop

On this website, you can type in a topic or niche and see which websites are doing well writing about it. You can find ideas for content by doing this, as well as high-quality links to share in related posts.

Uptime Robot

I LOVE this tool. It alerts me to any time that my site is down. It’s really helpful, because sometimes I wouldn’t realize my blog was down until an hour (or more) afterwards. In my experience, the sooner you can discover your site is down, the faster you can get it back up. Uptime Robot sends you an email the moment your site goes down, and it also notifies you when it is available again – along with stats on how long it was down. This is something I recommend EVERYONE signs up for. There’s nothing worse than realizing your site is down, especially if it’s due to increased traffic.

PicMonkey and Canva

As a blogger, you probably recognize the importance of visual images in promoting your content. With Pinterest being a huge driver of traffic for many, ensuring that there is a “pinnable” image with every post is crucial!

While you can easily invest in software like Adobe Lightroom or Photoshop (which I do have for photo editing), I love free programs like PicMonkey and Canva. These are web-based photo editing and creation programs.

PicMonkey has lots of templates set-up for social media sharing, which I find easy to use. I use their collage templates quite often for recipe roundups that I do. I’ve been using PicMonkey for about two years, and I find it to be very easy to use. The only downside is that you can’t save your creations to the website. So, once you exit out of it, all the changes you’ve made are gone (obviously you save it to your computer, so you have the final product. But if you are using it to create design elements – which it is great for – it can be difficult to go back and make edits.) There is a PicMonkey Royale version, which is what I use. It costs $33 a year, and I feel it’s well-worth the cost. However, the free version has tons of features as well that a

Canva is great for creating collages, media kits, pinnable and shareable images, etc. I’ve helped created eBooks and eBook covers in it as well. They have a variety of templates available. While many of them are free, they also have premium elements that you can use that cost $1 a piece.

HTMLSig

My friend, Hilary, from Pulling Curls mentioned this service in her July 2015 income report. It’s a simple tool to make a clickable and professional signature for your email. I just created mine, and I love how it turned out. I had to tweak it a little bit once I put it in my signature (such as adding the logo for The Blog Help, because it only let me add one logo from the site), but I think that having a professional signature in your email is important. Here’s how mine looks:

IFTTT

This isn’t actually a tool I currently use, but many of my blogging friends do. IFTTT stands for “if this, then that.” You can connect different web apps (for instance, Facebook and WordPress) with different triggers, so if something happens on one website, it triggers an event on another. One of the most basic ones is having it share a post from WordPress to Facebook or Twitter as soon as it’s been published. There’s a lot more complicated (and cool) recipes, but it’s really a pretty nifty tool.

Here are different “recipes” you can use with IFTTT that are great for bloggers, in case you are confused or need ideas! They list all of the different options here as well.

Hootsuite

There are so many scheduling tools out there for different social networks – I’ll have to discuss all the different ones another time. One that I have consistently used since I started blogging is HootSuite. Like just about everything else, there is a premium version, but I’ve never seen any reason to update.

The reason I like Hootsuite is because it works with quite a few different platforms (including Facebook, Twitter, Google +, and the most exciting of all – their recent announcement to integrate with Instagram!) It makes it easy to share others things, monitor different hashtags and topics, and just stay organized. I have set it up to auto tweet out feeds from my favorite blogs, which is nice.

Inspect Element

I could write a whole blog post about inspect element…and maybe some day I will. If you are someone who makes changes to the CSS of their blog very often, inspect element is your best friend. I know it comes integrated with Google Chrome, and I’ve been able to use it in FireFox (though Firebug is recommended for FireFox), as well as Safari on my Mac. Basically, it allows you to edit the CSS on your site and see how the changes would look on your site, without actually editing the files. Here is a brief tutorial, and below is a video of me using it to see what it would look like to change a few sidebar items, just so you can see it in action.

Meme Generator

Unless you are never on the Internet, you probably know that memes are popular and highly shareable. If you have a good idea for one, this site can help you make one!

Google Trends

This is a quick way to figure out what topics are currently trending in your area or country, which can help generate content. I also like using the search feature where you can search for certain keywords and see how popular they’ve been in recent months, as well as compare them to other terms. When I’m feeling lazy with my search engine research, this is the first site I pop over to.

Online Blog Con 2015 Giveaway

August 6, 2015 by Katie Clark Leave a Comment

Several weeks ago I mentioned the Online Blog Conference, and I just wanted to remember you to be sure to sign up. It’s only a few short weeks away, and we have some great speakers in the works for it. It’s not only a great learning opportunity, but it’s a great way to network with other bloggers. If you are wanting to take your blog to the next level, I assure you, this is a great way to do it. What’s better than attending a top-notch blog conference from home?!

We are giving away a ticket to one of our lucky readers! Just enter using the Rafflecopter widget below. Good luck!

a Rafflecopter giveaway

How I Freed My Life from Pinterest Scheduling

July 2, 2015 by Katie Clark 11 Comments

Many Bloggers will attest to getting a majority of their traffic from Pinterest. Although it’s undergone some major changes in the past year or so, and it may not be as amazing in some ways as it used to be, it’s still a major driver of traffic that you can’t afford to overlook.

There’s hundreds of articles out there about Pinterest strategy and the best Pinterest scheduler. I’ve read many of them myself – and most of them tell you the same thing: verify your website, get rich pins, pin vertical images, pin other people’s content, etc. etc. This is all super helpful information – especially if you are just getting started. I’m at that point where I really don’t feel like these articles help me very much, just because it’s information I’ve already learned and implemented.

there are affiliate links in this post – however, I am not being paid or employed by any company mentioned!

For me, it’s more to a point of getting the best strategy down. For the past year, I’ve had a strategy that I’ve used that has worked very well. However, it’s been super time consuming. To get an idea, here is the Pinterest Pinning Document I created and maintained. I would pin around 50-60 of my own pins a day, and this document helped me make sure I didn’t pin to the same board (or at least, the same pin to the same board, very often.) I used ViralTag to schedule these pins each day. I would usually do this the night before, but it was something I always dreaded doing. In fact, I would often skip a day or two, just because I didn’t have the time (or motivation) to schedule the pins out.

After hearing about BoardBooster last year from my friend, Anita, from Live Like You Are Rich, I knew it was something that I wanted to use. It had the ability to automate my pins being scheduled, which was very appealing to me. I started communicating with Dennis at BoardBooster, asking lots of questions, raising concerns, and trying to figure out how it best would work for me.

Well, I’m happy to say about eight months later…I’m finally set up, and it’s been the best thing. I no longer feel like a slave to Pinterest. I have time to actually spend on Pinterest pinning other peoples things and discovering new content for myself. It’s great!

Here’s how I use BoardBooster, and all the different options it has. If you sign up here, you can get a free 30-day trial – no strings attached! It is constantly getting new features, and Dennis – the creator – is always open to suggestions! Otherwise, the cost just depends on how you use it. More or less, it’s about $10 a month for every 1,000 pins (and there are a few other services that are 1 cent per penny.)

How I use BoardBooster

I use the campaigns section in BoardBooster. First of all, I set up a bunch of secret boards for my account.

From here, I had all my pins pinned to the relevant secret board. I think there’s about 12 boards I have that are related to a number of different group boards I have in that category. My largest secret board houses all of my posts that I actively pin, and it’s titled CC All Posts. This board can be used to pin to group boards I’m a part of that are more-or-less a free for all, as far as post topic goes. Beyond that, I created a bunch of sub-category boards, since I have a lot of group boards I’m a part of that are topic-specific. This was obviously a time consuming thing to do – I hired a VA to do it for me, just because I didn’t have time. Best money I’ve spent in a long time!

So, after I had all my secret boards set up, I went into BoardBoster and clicked on “Campaigns.” I selected “new campaign” and then “random campaign.” It will pull up a screen like this:

At this point, I named the campaign, chose that I wanted it to pin from a certain board (List of Boards option – list of pins is where you can select certain pins you want to be part of a campaign.) Then, I added a source board. This is the secret board. For this post, I’ll be talking about my ALL FOODS Board. So, I added CC All Food as the source board.

Then I went down to target board section, and I added a bunch of relevant group boards I’m on. I didn’t add all the group boards relevant to the topic, but the group boards that I felt consistently had a lot of repins and click throughs. After selecting the boards, I put the frequency I wanted pins to go to that board. This is really helpful, since a lot of boards have a limit of how often you can pin. It took me awhile to get all my campaigns setup so I only had about 50-60 pins going out a day (at first it was like 110 – too much for me!) I’m hoping that they will implement some features to better gauge this in the future as well.

Then, I just set up the hours I wanted my pins to go out and on what days! I repeated this process with the rest of my secret boards. Since doing this, I haven’t really had to do anything beyond a little bit of tweaking, and let me tell you…it’s been freeing!

I still use ViralTag, TailWind, and Ahalogy for other purposes – mainly for scheduling others content, but I am so glad I discovered BoardBooster, and I have been able to have a lot of success so far. My stats are up, and I don’t dread Pinterest anymore. We are having Dennis from BoardBooster speak at the Online Blog Conference, so be sure to sign up for that so you can ask all your questions!

Other BoardBooster Options

There is SO much you can use with BoardBooster – I’m just barely tipping the scales with how I use it. Here’s a brief overview of different options you could consider:

Scheduler:

This is helpful, in my opinion, for pinning other people’s contact. You basically select certain boards or group boards to add to the scheduler, and BoardBooster will automatically create a secret board. Then, you just add pins to that secret board that you want to be pinned to the board you’ve selected, and it will repin them according to the schedule you’ve set up (you set it to send out a certain amount of pins a day and what times.) I mainly think it’s helpful for pins that you don’t want to continually pin.

Doctor:

I know when I first started with Pinterest, I didn’t really pay attention to the source of the pins, and I would often pin the same thing several times (Pinterest has a feature to help prevent this now, but it didn’t launch until semi-recently.) The Doctor feature will go through pins on your board and test it for 9 common problems pins have, such as broken links, missing source links, redirecting to the incorrect website, and links to malicious websites (among other things.) After doing this, it lets you know how to fix them. It costs a penny a pin, and you don’t have to do all your boards at once!

Mover:

Do you have a lot of boards that need reorganizing? I know I do! I used to create a new board for just about everything, and sometimes I feel like everything looks a little bit hectic. The Pin Mover finds all pins that meet a certain criteria from a certain board and then it moves them to a board that you want. While Pinterest does have a pin moving feature, I think this option takes it a step further, and it makes it even easier to move around pins. Your first order is free, and then any additional order is a penny per pin.

Groups:

If you manage a group board, this is an awesome feature. It basically allows you to monitor the pinners and activity on your group boards so you can determine what is working and what’s not. I have a couple of group boards, though I don’t monitor them as well as I should, and it’s always interesting when I go to this tab and see who pins the best content, and which group boards do the best (for instance, my Pregnancy and Child Birth board outperforms my other group boards by a landslide!)

Looping:

This is a feature I really need to start using more. Basically, it revives old pins you’ve pinned that may have a ton of repins, but your current followers have no idea they even exist. It works best when you have it repin the pin to the same board. You can set it up to delete the pin automatically with the least amount of repins after a certain amount of time (such as week).

Reports:

These are just helpful for seeing how your pins perform. It shows you your pinning history, along with stats on how many repins they have. I really like being able to see when pins have done the best and get the most repins. This really helps to determine when you should setup your scheduling.

My Thoughts on Pinterest API Schedulers

If you are in the Pinterest scene, you’ve probably heard that certain schedulers have the Pinterest API. There’s a lot of debate about what this actually means, and if you can even use schedulers that don’t have it. BoardBooster does not currently have the Pinterest API Scheduler, but for the time being, I don’t believe this is a problem. I’ve been using ViralTag for over two years, which does not have an API, and I’ve never had issues. I’ve also used the two companies that do have the API, and when I compare the stats to when I use BoardBooster or ViralTag, guess what? No difference. If anything, when I’ve used Ahalogy, I feel like I’ve gotten less repins lately! I honestly don’t know if it makes a difference, but as of right now, I’m not worried. I do hope that BoardBooster will get the API eventually (just because I know some people get really worried!) All of these companies are great though, and I definitely recommend checking out a variety of services to see what works best for your website. As for me, BoardBooster, with a little sprinkling of the other companies (Ahalogy, ViralTag, and TailWind – TailWind has awesome stats that can help you pin better. I recommend at least their free account. You can get a free month by signing up through that link), is best!

If you are looking to really kill it with Pinterest, be sure to check out my friend, Jill’s, amazing Pinterest strategy course. You won’t regret it! She knows more about Pinterest than most anyone I know!

Target Readers and Increase Revenue with Custom Sidebars

June 25, 2015 by Katie Clark 2 Comments

The first hurdle when building your website traffic is getting people to come to your site. The second? To stay on your site and come back again and again. In my post on how to increase blog traffic, I mention several different ways to make your site more sticky. One of the things I addressed was creating custom sidebars, which I think are great for keeping people engaged and clicking around more on your website.

Basically, by creating a custom sidebar, you can make sure people are seeing more content and even ads/affiliate links that are relevant to the post they are reading. I’ve recently started setting them up on Clarks Condensed, and I’ve already seen an immediate increase in pages per visit on desktop (the custom sidebars don’t show up on my mobile device since I use PadSquad), as well as a lowering in bounce rate.

First off all, I installed the Custom Sidebars plugin. There are other plugins out there, but this is the one that I think works the best. It’s simple and straight forward…which I think is essential. Now when you go to Appearance – Widgets in your WordPress dashboard, you’ll see the option to add new sidebars at the top of the page. You can see in the image below the ones that I have created for my site:

After you’ve installed it, I would take a look at your site. Do you have different categories of posts that people read? On my site, I talk about a wide variety of topics (as you can see above), so I want to make sure the college students reading my posts are being targeted with posts that are relevant to them, and the people that are there for pregnancy advice or recipes see relevant content as well.

If you don’t have a lot of different main topics, try and divide your main category (or categories) into sub categories. For instance, if I were to setup custom sidebars for this website, although my website is all about blogging, I could create a custom sidebar for Blogging Monetization, Beginning Blog, and Growing Your Blog.

Once you’ve determined your categories, make sure you actually have your posts categorized according to those categories. If you have been on top of things from the beginning, hopefully most things are categorized already. If not, take some time to go through your posts and re-categorize them to work with your custom sidebars. If you don’t have categories setup, your custom sidebars will be useless, as they work off of categories.

**Categorizing Tip – instead of going into each post individually, just go to “Posts” in your dashboard. Underneath each post title is something that will say “quick edit.” If you click on this, a small menu will appear around that post and you can quickly add categories. This makes it easier to fly through re-categorizing all your posts, since you don’t have to open each post individually!**

At this point, you can start creating your custom sidebar. Just create one for each category in your widgets dashboard, and you can build them like you would normally build your sidebar with widgets.

What to Put in a Custom Sidebar

Each of my sidebars have a basic set up that is on all of them – Welcome Image, a search bar, social media icons, and my ads that are run through AdThrive. I think with the pro version of Custom Sidebars, you can copy sidebars so you don’t have to recreate each item for each sidebar…but I’m ~~cheap~~ budget conscious, and it doesn’t take much time to recreate these elements.

Then, I think about that category. I pick my top three posts in that category and using the Image Widget, I put the main image for that post and a direct link (that opens in a new window) to that post. I also use the Genesis Featured Post widget (this only works with those who use a StudioPress theme – another great perk for using their themes..they have great plugins!), and I set it to pull the three most recent posts from that category. I typically have the popular posts first, then I have an ad or affiliate banner, then I place the recent posts widget.

I also put a custom email subscription signup form in each sidebar. I have several different subscription lists, so I create one that features that specific category as the default, a weekly subscription option, and sometimes I will add lists that may also be relevant to that category (so in parenting and pregnancy, I still have the recipes category listed.)

Finally, I decide on affiliate banners. I think this is where you can really increase your earning potential. You can sign up with different affiliate companies that have products or services that are geared toward your target audience. For instance, in my “parenting and pregnancy” category, I have a KidsSteals.com widget, which shows their Deal of the Day each day, a slow cooker recipe book from the Six Sisters, and a baby journal from the Dating Divas.

As you can see, this can be a great way to market toward your readers and make sure they are getting the best relevant content to the topic they are reading about. Let me know if you have any questions or need help setting these up (I set up custom sidebars at $10-20 per sidebar for anyone interested!)

5 Ways to Improve Your Blog to Increase Blog Traffic

June 23, 2015 by Katie Clark 2 Comments

It’s been over two and a half years since I started Clarks Condensed. I seriously can’t believe it. When I started out blogging (at least on Clarks Condensed – I have blogged on a variety of different sites since 2008), I knew that I wanted to make something of it, but I had NO idea that it would come to support our family completely. There’s been a lot of ups and downs, but in the end, it’s a journey and experience I wouldn’t trade for anything.

While I am constantly trying to come up with new strategies to help our blog and income grow, at the beginning of a New Year, I really try and evaluate the past year and see how to best increase blog traffic. I go through my social networks, top blog posts, and my different monetization methods, and I determine what is giving me the best return on interest.

Here are a few ways to improve your blog this year. Most of these probably aren’t earth shattering or particularly clever, but they are things that I’ve done that have helped my blog continue to grow. I’ve found that making small, measurable goals makes a big difference. So take a look at some of these ideas,

Analyze your Top Posts

First things first – go to Google Analytics and find out what your top posts from the year are. All you have to do is set the date from January 1st through December 31st, then go to to Behavior — Site Content — All Pages.

From here, you can view your most popular posts from the year. By doing this, you can really see what your readers like and what brings in the most traffic. For instance, I can see that my posts related to pregnancy do pretty well, and that my most popular recipe are easy casseroles.

It’s essential to see what does well on your site. If you spend all your time developing tons of recipes, and people only come to see your desserts – you probably want to consider writing more about desserts. While you shouldn’t feel like you have to limit yourself to those exact same posts that are in your top 10, it can be a great way to brainstorm new ideas. I’ve found that when a post is already popular, when I write something that’s a similar topic, it almost instantly does well.

1) Better Headlines

This is something I really struggle with – I always have! When I was working on the student newspaper during my undergraduate, I always had the hardest time coming up with captivating titles. In fact, I’m pretty sure whatever I submitted was almost always changed. However, it’s something I’ve really been working on lately, because headlines are what draw people in.

There’s a balance that has to be played when coming up with a headline – you want it to have good keywords in it but you also want to make sure it isn’t too dry or keyword heavy. Here are a few guidelines:

Don’t date it too much: As I was writing this post, I initially titled it “10 Important Ways to Improve your Blog in 2015.” However, I changed it to “this year” because really, these will probably still be helpful for improving your blog in 2016. While some content needs to be dated, if you want it to be timeless, make the headline reflect that.
Use a long tail keyword (long tail keywords are better for SEO – they include more search phrases than just words.) Just choose one – don’t load your headline up with a bunch of keywords.
Call to action – make people want to click on the link. Solve a problem, answer a question, or insight inspiration!

2) Take a Survey

I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t love criticism. I avoid threads in blogging groups I’m in where people offer to critique one another’s blogs. I do what I do for a reason! However, I do believe it’s important to know what kind of content will appeal to your readers.

So, create a survey for your readers to take – it can be something as simple as posting on Facebook, “Which of these recipes would you rather me post this week” and give them a couple options. During the holidays, you can see if they prefer pumpkin or apple recipes more. Or, you can do a more in-depth survey using Google Docs or Survey Monkey.

Doing these surveys can really help you determine what your readers like and don’t like. For instance, I randomly did a little survey on Facebook about if people would rather a recipe be at the beginning or end of a post, and the responses really surprised me! However, implementing the suggestions helped improve my blog, my bounce rate, and my reader’s response to those types of posts.

3) Pinterest Strategy

Even though Pinterest has had some pretty significant changes in the recent months, it’s still one of the best places to get traffic. I’d say about 60-65% of my traffic comes from Pinterest, and it’s been a reliable source for me. However, it’s important to make sure you know what you are doing so you don’t get marked as a spammer and that you are using your time wisely. There are tons of posts out there that talk about Pinterest strategy, so I won’t go too much into that right now, but here’s one piece of advice – it takes a lot of trial and error. What may work for one blogger could be a disaster or another. It really takes time to perfect your strategy.

I personally employ the use of Pinterest schedulers, so I’m not a slave to pinning! This has worked very well for me, and I highly recommend finding a scheduler that best fits your strategy. I currently use BoardBooster, which basically auto-pins all of my pins to boards that I want at a specific time interval. I. Love. It. I also use ViralTag (if you use my link, you get $15!) and TailWind to scheduler others content – because any good Pinterest strategy involves pinning others content (You can get a free month using that link!) TailWind has some amazing analytics that I recommend checking out some time to determine the best times and boards to pin to. They also have a new interval scheduler that I really like.

4) Speed Your Site Up

The speed of your site is essential. If you are on WordPress, I highly recommend installing WP Super Cache. It’s a great, easy-to-use plugin that will greatly impact the speed of your site. A faster site means more people will visit your site, more people will buy things (if you sell things or use affiliate links), and they will be more likely to click around to different articles.

I do a little bit of site sped optimization, but recently I hired Kan Web Speed to work on some issues I couldn’t resolve, and I was very pleased with the results. He was affordable, and he worked fast. If you let him know I sent you, he’ll take 5% off the price!

5) Build Your Email List

This is one of the most important things you can do for your site in my opinion. Why? Because the emails will always be yours (unless, of course, someone unsubscribes.) Social networks are constantly changing and are kind of flaky – you never know when they might change their algorithm and totally mess with your traffic. However, with email lists, you are in control of when they send out, what you put in them, and how many people will see them. Yes, not everyone opens them. But it can be one of the best ways to get information out to your readers when you need to.

I’m working on a post about building your email list later but here are a few ideas.

Offer an incentive – people love getting stuff for free, and from everything I’ve reader and heard, people will sign up for email lists in exchange for something awesome. I don’t subscribe to a lot of email lists, but most of the time when I do, it’s because they offer some kind of incentive.
Make it easy to sign up – don’t make people hunt around for your sign up form. Chances are, if they can’t see it in plain sight, they aren’t going to look too hard for it. In addition, if you have it in easily accessible areas, people who wouldn’t have signed up otherwise probably will
Give them options – whenever I set up a newsletter, I always give the option to sign up for a weekly or daily digest. Because Clarks Condensed has a wide variety of topics, I also like people to be able to choose
Use a pop up – I know, everyone hates popups. But guess what – they work. In July of 2013, I had a grand total of 400 subscribers to show from over 1.5 years of blogging. At that time, I installed PopupAlly – a plugin for WordPress. I know have over 2500 subscribers.
Another option is a subscription bar at the top of your page. I know a lot of bloggers have had great success with this. I personally use the SumoMe smart bar, but the HelloBar is very popular as well.

Many people use the free service from Google called Feedburner to send out their emails. The upside to it is that it’s free. However, I’d highly recommend looking into different companies. I personally use Feedblitz, and I absolutely love them. They have great customer support and you can monetize your email with ads and affiliate links. There are lots of companies out there, but I’ve been the most impressed with this company.

6) Have Sharing Tools

One of the most powerful tools a blogger has are his or her readers. Readers are the ones that cause content to go viral. If a post is really good, people will find a way to share it. But why not make it a little bit easier for them?

Make sure your site has plenty of ways to share. On both my sites, I use SumoMe. This is an awesome tool I’ll talk more about in another post sometime, but it has some great content sharing tools. I use their “Share” tool and their “Image Sharer” tool. By doing this, I have a static bar on the left side of my page with prompts to share, sharing options at the beginning and end of my posts, and finally, image hover buttons that show up when a person scrolls over a picture. With SumoMe, it tells me how many peop

7) Make your Site More Sticky

Getting people on your site is the first battle – getting them to stay (and eventually come back). Once someone is on your site, you want it to be easy for them to find more relevant content. There are a lot of ways you can do this. Here are a few of my favorite methods.

Related Posts Plugin – There are many related posts plugins that you can install that will automatically populate posts related to the post that person is currently on. Chances are, if someone likes what they are reading, they wouldn’t mind seeing another article similar to it. I know when I’m researching a particular topic, I want to know everything I can! Many of the related posts plugins I’ve used have been subpar at pulling actually related posts, but the one that hasn’t let me down is Zemanta. I use that both Clarks Condensed and The Blog Help, and it always shows very relevant posts.
Custom Sidebars – This is something I’ve been slowly setting up on Clarks Condensed, but I’m excited to see the results when I’m done. Basically, you can set up a different sidebar for different categories of posts. So on Clarks Condensed, we have several different categories. Someone coming for advice on college may not be interested in labor and delivery, so for the category “college”, I put other popular college related posts in it, a link to a college resources page, etc. You can also use custom sidebars to put more relevant affiliate links in your sidebar, as well. Here is the plugin I use. Here is more information on how to set up custom sidebars!
Popular Posts Widget – This is just another way to show your readers what posts are on your site. People are drawn to the words “popular” or “most read” or “trending now”, so featuring those posts that your readers love the most may bring more readers to them. You can create your own popular posts section in your sidebar, or you can use a plugin that will create this. On Blogger, they have a popular post widget you can easily configure and add. With WordPress, I typically use Top 10 Popular Post, or for people who have JetPack installed, I recommend the JetPack Popular Posts plugin – I like the layout of it, and it shows popular posts within a certain time frame, most commented, etc. However, I recently discovered Popular Widget, which essentially does the same thing, but doesn’t come with the bulkiness that comes with installing JetPack.
AddThis Smart Layers – This is a pretty cool plugin I heard about sometime last year. Basically, when a person gets about half way down the page on your website, a small box will pop up in the lower right hand corner with a post that is somewhat related to the one they are on (or trending on your site at that time.) This can help lower your bounce rate and up the amount of pages per visit. I uninstalled it when I was trying to limit the number of plugins I had, but it’s something I consider using again every so often. It isn’t annoying, and I think that it does help with pageviews.

How to Install Google Analytics on WordPress and Blogger

June 19, 2015 by Katie Clark 3 Comments

Last week when I shared 5 simple steps to starting a blog, I mentioned the importance of installing Google Analytics. This is a great (and powerful) tool that can not only gauge your growth but give you valuable insight into your readers, traffic sources, and much more. There’s lots of reports you can generate that can really help increase your traffic if you interpret them correctly. However, this post is just for those of you looking to get started on how to setup Google Analytics in WordPress AND Blogger (I’ve gotten several emails about setting up Google Analytics, so hopefully this is helpful to a few of you!)

In this post, I will show you how to correctly sign up for Google Analytics, and then correctly install it in both in Blogger or WordPress.org.

Signing up for Google Analytics

Anyone can sign up for Google Analytics. First off, go to http://analytics.google.com, and in the upper right corner, select “Access Google Analytics.”

As long as you haven’t set up a Google Analytics property before, you will be brought to this screen. Click on the “sign up” button.

Write all your information here – the name and URL of your website, industry, time zone, etc. After you fill out all this information, you will be able to create your new profile at the bottom of the page.

Once you click on “Get Tracking ID” you will be prompted to accept the Google Analytics Terms of Service agreement. Press “I Accept” (assuming you do!)

Then you’ll be brought to this page where you will be given both your tracking ID number and the tracking code. Depending on what method you use to install Google Analytics on your site, you will use one of these codes. The tracking id is the shorter version, and the tracking code is longer.

Don’t feel like you have to write these down right away – you can always access them again by going to Admin (at the top of the page, pictured in blue below.) After you click on that, in the center column is something that says “tracking info.” That’s where the information you need can be found!

Installing Google Analytics in WordPress

Now that you are all set up, it’s time to install your tracking code on your site. In WordPress, there are a couple of different ways to do this – it may vary depending on your theme.

Installing Google Analytics in site <head>

Your code needs to be installed in the <head> of your site. This can usually be found in the header.php file of your site (which can be access through Appearance – Editor.) However, unless you feel comfortable editing your website’s files, this can be tricky.

If you are using a StudioPress/Genesis Theme (which I highly recommend doing – it makes life easier), then you can easily paste the Tracking Code (not the tracking ID – the tracking ID is just a few numbers) here. Just go to Genesis – Theme Settings an scroll to the bottom of the page. There is a section that is called “Header and Footer Scripts.” Paste the code there, press save settings, and you should be good to go!

If you don’t have Genesis, your theme may have something similar. Just search Google really quick to see. Otherwise, you can install the plugin Header and Footer, which is similar in function to the Genesis header and footer script boxes. Once you install this plugin, it will appear under the WordPress “Settings” section of your site. You can place the Google Analytics tracking code in the <head> section, and you should be good to go.

Google Analytics Plugin

As a general rule, I think that if you can avoid using a plugin on your site, you should. The one I mentioned previously, Header and Footer, is generally pretty lightweight, and it can be very helpful for putting other code in your site. However, many people prefer to use a Google Analytics plugin – some of the ones out there will show you directly on your post dashboard how many page views you are getting, and they can be helpful. A plugin might just be the simplest choice for some.

I would recommend using Google Analytics by Yoast (the free version is just great!) After you install this on your site, it will show up toward the top of your WordPress dashboard, like this:

Select Dashboard. When you get there, it will say “We need you to authenticate with Google Analytics to use this functionality. If you set your UA-code manually, this won’t work. You can authenticate your Google Analytics profile here to enable dashboards.” Click on the part that says authenticate your Google Analytics profile here. This will give you the option to connect directly to your Google Analytics profile (assuming you are logged into the account connected to it!) There are some other settings in this plugin, but for now, you should be set.

Installing Google Analytics in Blogger

One of the biggest issues I see when I move people from Blogger to WordPress is that they have Google Analytics installed twice on their site. Make sure this doesn’t happen to you! There are a couple of different ways to install Google Analytics, and these are the two I recommend. Remember to pick just one! Often people will install it in their layout area in a widget, which I really don’t recommend doing…so use one of these methods instead!

Installing via Settings

This is by far the easiest method. For it, you will need your tracking code (which looks like this -UA-xxxxxxxx-x…with numbers instead of x’s.)

Go to your Blogger Dashboard and from the dropdown menu, select settings:

It will take you to the general settings page, but there will be several options underneath settings on the left side of the page. Select “other” and scroll to the bottom of the page. At this point, you can post your tracking ID. Just put it there, press save settings, and you’re done!

Installing Google Analytics in site <head>

The next method involves using your tracking code (not the ID). Login to Blogger and in the drop down menu next to your site, select “Template”

On the next page, you will select “Edit HTML”

And on this page, you will want to find the <head> tag in all this code. You can either scroll, or you can click in the box with all the code and press either ctrl+f (in Windows) or command+f (in Mac) and search for <head>. Directly underneath that opening tag, add your Google Analytics tracking code, as seen below.

Now hopefully you were able to successfully install Google Analytics! Let me know if you have any questions!