Archive for July 2017

Home Archive for July 2017

Ever thought about launching your own blog?

Ever wondered what it takes, not only to start up that blog, but also to successfully build it over time to make money online or generate a passive income? Clearly, you're not alone. Millions of people try their hand at blogging, but so few actually ever generate a substantial income from their efforts.
However, if you're starting a blog for the purposes of making money, and you're not actually passionate about writing in the first place, then you're largely wasting your time. The art of blogging isn't simply scientific or formulaic. Without a deep-seated passion for your craft, you'll face a tide of frustration and upset.
Why? While it's relatively straightforward to begin a blog, it's a monumental undertaking to generate any semblance of traffic and profit from your arduous efforts. You need laser-focus and persistence to build an audience or reach mass saturation with your prose. It takes time and it takes long and drawn out evenings burning the proverbial midnight oil.

Take it from me. As a blogger who's built a substantial platform with hundreds of thousands of monthly visitors, I can bask in the warm glow of success. However, I can't sit around for too long enjoying the freedom and passive income that my blog has created. Without constantly adding insatiable content, any blog can die off.
So, what does it take to start a successful blog and actually make money online? I suppose that depends on what you consider successful and what you consider making money. If, like millions of other potential bloggers out there, you're looking to rake it in, you'll have a long road ahead.

But if you're willing to put in the time and the effort, and you can stay persistent over the years (and yes, I said years), then you can most certainly generate a substantial income online. In fact, your blog is quite possibly one of the best hubs of passive income generation, and if done the right way, it can attract the right clients and customers no matter what industry or niche you might be in.
Related: 4 Ways to Stock Your Content War Chest

How to Start a Blog: Step-by-Step

Okay, if I haven't dissuaded you just yet, and you're serious about launching the next Mashable or TechCrunch or whatever other blog you might think is wildly successful in your eyes, then here's what you need to do in a step-by-step fashion. The more you prepare and plan, the more likely you'll be to succeed in the long term.

1. Pick a Topic

Get clear on what you'll write about. Define a topic or niche, and design all your content around those things. This will help you to not only laser-focus your writing, but also to build digital products and services that compliment your content.
This allows you to attract customers in, enticing them with your highly-informative posts, then tempting them with a lead magnet before dropping them into your sales funnel (more on that shortly).

2. Select a Platform

While Wordpress is the most popular platform for blogging by far, there are others out there that can be leveraged such as a micro-blogging platform like Tumblr, Blogger.com and even Medium. However, if you're serious about your blogging efforts, you'll likely want to go with a self-hosted Wordpress installation on a custom domain.
While you could setup a blog at Wordpress.com with a subdomain such as myblog.wordpress.com, you'll get more traction with a self-hosted solution, and then be able to use subdomains on popular platforms for your content-marketing efforts.
Related: Medium Is the Solution If You Want to Blog Without Any Overhead

3. Pick a Domain Name

Custom domain names are important if you're serious about making money from the blog you start. Rather than relying on a third-party-hosted subdomain, find a short but relevant keyword-rich (if possible) domain name that's descriptive of your intended topic, industry or niche. Use BlueHost, HostGator, 1&1 Hosting or any other number of domain name providers to source your domain.
If you're at all concerned about things like SEO, when selecting your domain name, you should adhere to the following suggestions:

Use a known top-level domain (TLD) such as .com or .net
Keep the domain short, no more than 15 characters or so
Try not to purchase a domain name with hyphens, since they're more often associated with spammers
Avoid using self-hosted subdomains to rank or categorize posts

Related: 21 Ways to Market Your Business Online

4. Find a Good Web Hosting Company

There are loads of good hosting companies out there. If you're starting a Wordpress, self-hosted blog, there are a near-endless amount of options. The important thing is to do your due diligence and pick the right one that's suitable to your budget and to ensure that the service-level and up-time guarantee is there.
At the beginning, you'll likely want to start out with either a Managed Wordpress solution or a Virtual Private Server (VPS), and scale from there. Eventually, you'll probably need a dedicated-hosting solution with a CDN (below) once you break through a few thousand visitors per day.

5. Caching and Content-Delivery Networks (CDNs)

Use a system like W3 Total Cache or WP Super Cache and turn on browser caching to ensure that you speed up the delivery of your webpages. In the beginning, this might not seem as important. But as you grow and your traffic increases to thousands of visitors per day, this will be critical. Use Google's Page Speed Insights to test things before and after the installation.
It's also important that you setup a CDN, which will speed up the global delivery of your content. For example, your page might load relatively quickly in the United States, but what happens when someone in Australia tries to load your content? CDNs replicate data across multiple repositories around the world, and make content delivery ultra-fast.
This is important for the user's experience because most people who are foced to wait even a few seconds for a page to load, often abandon the website and go to the next one in the search results. W3 Total Cache integrates with Amazon's AWS and MaxCDN, two very good options when it comes to CDNs.

6. Enable Permalinks

In Wordpress, you should enable permalinks before getting things off the ground, which will give you nice canonical URLs that are SEO-friendly. Permalinks are located within the settings > permalinks section of your Wordpress admin and select the post name option.
Related: 10 Smart Ways to Earn or Build Backlinks to Your Website

7. Install the AMP plugin

The Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) Project is an initiative by Google to speed up mobile accessibility to a large degree of their content. The AMP specification, which you can read more about here, helps to thin down a webpage to its basic structural components with scaled-back JS and minified CSS code, makes for lightning-fast page speeds.

8. Install Google Analytics

Install Google Analytics so that you can keep track of your efforts while building out your blog. This is a great way to keep track of your results while using the URL campaign builder when dropping links in social media and other places so that you can effectively determine where your traffic is coming from.

9. Setup Google's Webmaster Tools

Anyone who's serious about building a blog and making money, needs to leverage Google's webmaster tools to see what keywords they're ranking for and any messages that would impact their ability to rank. This will also allow you to submit an XML sitemap and track keyword impressions along with click-through rates. This is one of the most useful tools for growing your site or blog through constant analysis of your efforts.
Related: Why Your Startup Content-Marketing Strategy Isn't Working

10. Learn SEO the Right Way

Although you shouldn't start a blog with the intention of optimizing it to oblivion, you most certainly should understand the fundamental principles of search engine optimization so that you pay attention to the key aspects that will impact your ability to rank on search engines like Google. Begin with Google's Webmaster Guidelines, and digest and implement that information. Learning SEO is a long and drawn out journey. You should always be increasing your knowledge and expanding your skill set.

11. Regulary Build Useful Content

If you're serious about succeeding with your blog, you need to build useful anchor content. It needs to be engaging, keyword centric, insightful, unique and well written. Don't write your content for search engines. Rather, write your content for humans while also paying homage to search engines and what they want. Simply put, it's a skill that develops over time with practice. It's also important to regularly publish your content on a weekly basis.

12. Sign Up to an Email Marketing Platform

The best avenue for making money from your blog is through email marketing, plain and simple. Hands down, this offers one of the quickest and surest strategies for earning an income through your blog. But before you get there, you need to sign up to an email marketing platform like Aweber, ConvertKit, MailChimp, Constant Contact, InfusionSoft or any other number of platforms that exist out there.
Related: 4 Golden Rules to Boost Blog-Post Engagement

13. Build a Lead Magnet

If you're serious about marketing anything online, rather than opting for running ads on your blog (which won't make you real money unless you have at least hundreds of thousands of visitors per day) or engaging in affiliate marketing, you should build a topical lead magnet that will sell a digital product or offer that you create in the back-end. The lead magnet will entice people to sign up to your list and provide you with their email address.

14. Build a Digital Product and Position Your Offers

Email marketing and lead magnets are all designed to help you build out an automated sales machine. However, you need a digital product, service or other kind of offer in the back-end to do that. You can create multiple offers or products, that can lead people up a value chain towards your high-ticket sales.

15. Create a Sales Funnel

Take the time to build your automated sales funnel. There is so much involved with sales funnels, but the basic premise is that your visitors will show up to your site by discovering your content, drop into your sales funnel through an offer via your lead magnet or some other tripwire, and they'll then be led through a journey with drip-fed messages at some periodic schedule that will allow you to sell your products and services on autopilot.
Related: How This Entrepreneur Created a Premier Women's Lifestyle Website

16. Get Social

Building a blog isn't easy by any measure. To help you along the road towards success, you have to get social. Not only by linking up with other like-minded bloggers interested in online marketing, but also by sharing and engaging with others on social networks like Facebook, Instagram and other social media platforms.

17. Market Your Content

The single most important strategy you'll find for building up a blog and boosting your visibility on search engines like Google, and my all-time go-to strategy for rocketing up the search rankings on Google's SERPs, is content marketing. Marketing your content is an intricate process that involves long, seemingly-never-ending hours of building more useful off-site content that links to your primary anchor content, but it's well worth it.
You can use this single strategy to rank number one on Google's searches for nearly any keyword if it's done the right way. There's most certainly an art to this as well as a technical outline and to doing it the right way. Don't try to spam or overstuff keywords in an effort to market your content by any means.
Content marketing can be done with articles on sites like Medium.com or Scribd.com, it can be done by answering questions on Reddit or Quora, and it can be done with videos on YouTube or Vimeo, along with a variety of other means. The point is that all of the content has to be useful, period. Don't try to do the least amount of work for the greatest return. You need to do the exact opposite if you want to succeed.

Fiverr pays if you for hobbies you play with
Drawing, Designing, Graphics, Art, SEO, Article, music and audio, digital marketing, fun and live-style,

How i make up to 4000 dollar (1261000 naira )

I joined Fiverr https://michaeltrendz.blogspot.com.ng/ on September 2015 and have generated over 6 million naira from it.

Prior to joining, I used to get angry with my friend who was a freelancer on Fiverr.

We were running an offline joint-venture business back then. Every minute he could steal from time, he will quickly log in to Fiverr to do what I didn’t know.

Back then, I always saw Fiverr as a $5 marketplace and I couldn’t imagine how he would always dedicate more time to his Fiverr account instead of our offline business which was making us good money…..(so I thought).

I didn’t miss any opportunity to make joke of him for slaving away on Fiverr and he wasn’t deterred at all by it……possibly he’d be laughing at me in his mind.

It was not until my fiancé finished school and was looking for what could keep her busy that the veil covering my eyes was removed.

I told my friend to teach her Fiverr so she could keep herself busy with it.

Her first month on Fiverr, she made $450.
That was huge compared to the time she spent on it.

It was then that I knew that there was something big happening in Fiverr and that was possibly why my friend gave good attention to it.

This was in 2014.

Fast-forward to 2015, our joint venture business started going down and I needed another supplementary income lest I go hungry.
My friend told me to come over to Fiverr and I lazily agreed.

My first month on Fiverr, I made $950……double of my income in the offline business I was running.

What really drew me in wasn’t really the money, but the fact that I wasn’t bothered about overhead, paying staff, going on marketing, etc. I just stayed back in the office, worked few hours per day and that was all.

I became really obsessed with Fiverr that I had to close down my offline business to focus on Fiverr…..that was very silly to many people, but it wasn’t to me.

Fast forward to 2017, I have earned as high as $3,000 in some months, with my lowest month being $850.

I want to share five important lessons I learnt from Fiverr. I believe if you learn it from me and apply it, you can earn a full time income, bigger than what many WORKING CLASS people earn.

Here are the five lessons:

1.     More money is made in the upsell:

If you are in the internet marketing space, you will understand the importance of upsell.

Let me use a practical example to explain what an upsell is.

When you order a product from Amazon or Ebay, you would see something like: “those who bought this product also bought this”.

The try to show you other products you might possibly need based on your current purchase. They know you are still in the mood of buying and so may possibly buy more.

With this, they make more money from you while they can.

The same thing applies to Fiverr.

Each service you render on Fiverr will invariably have lots of interrelated service.
For example, I’m copywriter on Fiverr and I know that anyone who hires me to write the content of their sales page, will invariably need email copies and squeeze page copies.

So when you place the order for a sales page copy, I will quickly respond to you, thanking you for placing the order and recommending those other services to you. I won’t just recommend, I will tell you reasons why you need them if you want to maximize your sales and conversion.
Most times, the client agrees because they just bought and so I’ll make more money than I would have normally gotten from the client.
This has enabled me earn up to $700 from a single client in one order.

You can also apply this and see how your revenue will increase, even when your client base is not increasing.

Another method of using this is through gig extras.
Add all those upsells in your gig extra so the buyer can easily see it and make a choice.
If they don’t, then you communicate and convince the buyer yourself as I described above.

2.     Don’t rely on Fiverr traffic

Fiverr sure has a lot of traffic that can help you get sales. But if you are serious about growing your sales and revenue, you don’t need to rely on Fiverr traffic.

The millions of traffic that Fiverr gets monthly is not for you alone. It is meant to be shared among the thousands of freelancers they have on their platform.

What is the probability that you will get a good chunk of that traffic to your gigs?

Of course, you can use some Fiverr SEO tactics to receive more visits to your gigs, but you should bear in mind that Fiverr algorithm for gig ranking keeps changing too and what you did today to get yourself ranked, might make you enter the second page by tomorrow.

Many top sellers on Fiverr have been hit by these algorithm changes, so you are not immune to it.

The best thing for you is to optimize your gig for Fiverr searches and in addition, get more traffic direct to your gig from outside Fiverr.

Use social media, forums and even paid ads to get more targeted traffic to your gigs.

Trust me that many business owners don’t even know about Fiverr. When you reach out to them through these platforms and let them know they can get a high quality service at a cheaper price on Fiverr, they will quickly move to it.

37% of my Fiverr revenue comes from clients who saw my gig from outside the Fiverr platform.

You can also use this tactics to make more sales and revenue even if Fiverr changes their algorithm every day.

3.     Bidding early matters a lot…being 10th or down isn’t cool

On Fiverr, I’m not just a seller (freelancer), I also buy services there too. So I have had the opportunity of seeing things from both the buyer and the seller end.

When you visit the buyer request section, you will see over 20 sellers bidding on a single project.

For the buyer, they are usually overwhelmed with requests and so they end up interacting with the first 5-10 bidders. The buyer might even make a buying decision from the first or second bidder.

What this means is that if you want to increase your chances of getting the job, make sure you frequent the buyer request section and always bid on request as soon as possible so that you will be among the first five persons to bid.

That way, the buyer may see you and consider you among his options when making a buying decision.

Additionally, make sure your bidding proposal stands out with its content, else the buyer will just ignore your post and go for other bidders.

4.     Your gig package is meant to hoodwink the seller to pay more

Fiverr introduced the gig packages last year and that to me is one of the best updates they have done since I joined them in 2015.

The three gig packages enable you to charge your clients higher amount for more services. It’s meant to make your buyer prefer to pay higher hoping to get more quality at lesser amount.

For example, if you offer article writing services, your basic package could be 100 word SEO article for $5. The next package would be 500 words for $15, while the third package would be 1000 words for $25.

This way, your client would think that 1000 words is the best since he will get more value (1000 words) for less ($25 instead of $50). So they will probably ignore the $5 and go for the $25.

This is how I package my gigs to make the buyer happily pay more.

Repurpose your gig packages so that your buyers see more value in paying you more.

5.     You must see Fiverr as a real business

One of my most favorite business quotes is this: “if you want your business to give you full time income, then you must give it full time attention”.

If you want to make a sizeable income from Fiverr, then be ready to see and treat it like a real business.

By this, I mean that you should spend good enough time getting new customers both within and outside Fiverr platform. You should also endeavor to over-satisfy your clients by delivering quality service on time all the time.

Quality and on-time delivery will lead to your clients referring you to their friends offline….it has happened to me multiple times.

Even though, I now work less on Fiverr (I don’t drive external traffic to my gigs and I don’t even visit the buyer request section again) due to other internet businesses I’m trying to learn, I still get a considerable amount of sales and revenue from Fiverr.

Fiverr is not just a place for $5 jobs; you can make a full-time living from it if you will take time to learn more about it in addition to the lessons I just shared with you here.

If you want to do it

Good luck to you.

sign-up now for free

Residential burglary prevention continues to be a focus of the Arcadia Police Department. Increased patrol presence, Investigators working surveillance, follow-up on leads/tips, and recovered stolen property, are all pieces to a much larger puzzle when it comes to preventing residential burglaries and property crime. One of the most important pieces to this puzzle is the resident. It is very important to discourage the would be thief and make their job as difficult, time consuming, and as noisy as possible.

Here are a few quick tips to help keep your home safe:

•Close and lock your windows and doors! Thieves look for an easy target.

•Lock your garage door. Thefts from garages are common and it offers ready access to pry tools.

•Keep bushes and shrubs trimmed so that windows and doors are visible.

•Maintain your home and make it looked lived in. Arrange for care if you leave on vacation.

•Don't leave newspapers, mail and door hanger materials in place. Arrange for a trusted friend or neighbor to collect these items for you.

•Know your neighbors! Be familiar with cars, faces and who belongs in your neighborhood.

•Leave different lights on when you leave. Use timers when gone overnight.

•How about a radio with a talk show station tuned in when you are gone?

•Use window stops/pins to prevent windows and sliding doors from being opened.

•Maintain lists of account numbers, valuable item serial numbers and important phone numbers. Duplicate the list and maintain a copy elsewhere. Video or photo your belongings. This aids in property recovery as well as insurance replacement.

•Get an ALARM. Even simple alarms that are not connected to a central system are a deterrent.

•Ask and look for helpful tips. Your local police agency will usually offer home inspections and there are plenty of websites that offer prevention tips and ideas.

•Watch for and REPORT suspicious persons and activity. Most arrests that are made for burglary are not from a report by an alarm company, but rather from a local resident. If you see someone that does not belong in your neighborhood or on a neighbor's property, call the police.

If you return home and believe your home has been burglarized, do not enter the home. Call the police and wait out front. Tell the Dispatcher of your observations and that you have not searched your home. Chances are that the burglar is gone, but you don't want to confront them if avoidable. Entering the home may also destroy certain types of evidence that Officers will be looking for.

Additional tips and information; Crime Doctor. You can also contact the APD Community Outreach Office at (626) 821-2648 for prevention tips and information on Neighborhood Watch.

Important information from our partners at the Pasadena Humane Society & SPCA:

July 5th is a busy day for the Pasadena Humane Society & SPCA and animal shelters around the country. The festivities we humans enjoy can be terrifying to our pets, and humane officers and concerned citizens bring countless dogs and cats—most of them exhausted and confused — to safety at animal shelters during and after the 4th of July holiday.

The safety and comfort of your pet requires special attention. PHS offers the following recommendations to help keep your pet secure.

•Do not take your pets with you to watch fireworks.

•Keep your pet inside during 4th of July celebrations. Many cats and dogs are frightened by the loud noises of fireworks and will be happier safely confined at home. Playing a radio may help diffuse the loud noise of fireworks.

•Be certain that your pet's ID tag is current. Update your pet's microchip information if necessary. A visible form of identification is the best way to ensure that your pet can be returned home to you.

•If you think your pet may become extremely agitated or stressed, consult your veterinarian and discuss the possibility of sedatives or overnight boarding. You may wish to call an animal behavior specialist to work with your pet, but do this well in advance.

•If your pet runs away, search the kennels of the shelter closest to you. Many shelters post photos of the animals that come into their facility on their website. The PHS website,www.pasadenahumane.org, is updated hourly so that lost animals may be quickly reunited with their lost owners. Post signs and visit nearby shelters for at least the next month. Animals can run a long way when they are badly frightened.

•If your cat is lost, it may stay in hiding for several days or weeks, so leave plenty of food and fresh water outside your door. (Pick it up at night so you don't attract unwanted wild animals.) Post signs and check your local and neighboring shelters in person and on line; your description of your pet may fit several animals in the shelter.

Staff at the Pasadena Humane Society will be available from 7:00 p.m. to 11:00 p.m. on July 4th and again at 8:00 a.m. on July 5th so people can find their lost pets.

The staff at the Pasadena Humane Society & SPCA wishes you and your pets have a very safe and happy 4th of July.

*PHS is is the primary Animal Care and Control provider for the City of Arcadia.

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