Author: Content Curator

Creating a website used to be a massive project.

And expensive too.

Everything had to be built by hand and businesses needed to work with an online marketing agency that would charge them tens of thousands of dollars to build the site. If you wanted a professional-looking site, that was your only option.

Things have gotten a lot cheaper over the years.

Now it’s possible to get a polished site for less than $100. About $10 to buy the domain, $30–60 for a good template, and $5–10/month to host it. It’ll look so good that people won’t even realize that you built it yourself. It’ll look like some high-flying marketing agency built it for you.

Not only has it gotten cheaper, it’s also gotten a lot easier.

I’ve broken down the 9 simple steps to create your website from scratch. You’ll easily be able to run through these steps over the next 120 minutes.

Step 1: Pick a name and find a domain for your website

These are not two separate steps, unfortunately.

I really wish I could sit down, pick any name that I want for my business, and be able to create the site that I want around that name. Now that the internet is a couple of decades old, we all have to face the reality that most of the good domains have been taken.

Here’s how a naming session always seems to go for me:

In a moment of inspiration, we think of an amazing name.
We hold on to this name for months, maybe even years.
It’s … Read More

I started my first blog to avoid getting a job.

I’m completely serious.

I was coming to the end of my undergraduate degree in international affairs and the thought of getting a job at the state department or in journalism sounded like a horrible idea.

So I learned how to start a blog and built one on international affairs with the hopes of eventually monetizing it and supporting myself.

That didn’t really work out as planned. Hah.

But it did lead to a career in online marketing and now I do work on blogs to avoid having a real job.

Whether you’re trying to avoid a job entirely or trying to quit your current job, starting a blog is a reliable path to supporting yourself and your family. It takes a lot of work and some time but it is a well-traveled path at this point. It’s not nearly as crazy as it was when I started.

I’m going to walk you through the 12 steps to start a blog, which are particularly useful for beginners who have never done this before.

Now, let’s dive into the step-by-step process.

Step 1: Pick a category to focus your blog on

The most important decision to make when starting a blog is which category you’re going to write about.

Why pick a category at all? Why not write about anything that interests you?

When it comes to building an audience, increasing traffic, and monetizing your blog, you’ll get a lot further a lot faster if you stick to a specific catego… Read More

The best platform for starting an online store is Shopify. That’s what we use for all of our ecommerce websites. Creating your online store, is just 1 of 6 critical steps, which this guide will take you through in detail.

Start your free trial with Shopify today and create your online store in just minutes.

There’s a bunch of things to think about when starting an online store:

What tool do you build your store with?
What do you name your company and how do you get a domain?
Do you dropship or not?
How do you deal with taxes?

All of these are important decisions. For now, one thing matters more than anything else to get your first sale.

What’s that one thing?

Your marketing.

That’s right, how you choose to market your store completely determines how much money you’ll make. Get the marketing right, everything else falls into place. Get it wrong or neglect it, you’ll spend years on your store without selling a single item.

There’s 6 Steps to Starting and Launching Your Online Store

Pick your marketing strategy.
Find the right product niche.
Pick a name for your brand.
Create your online store.
Do a 60-day marketing burst.
Build your marketing flywheel.

Step 1: Pick Your Marketing Strategy

Before you open your online store, you need to pick your marketing strategy. Don’t even look at templates for your storefront, or color palettes, or logo designs, or anything yet. (We’ll get to the how to… Read More

Do you want to do more with Instagram Stories? Wondering how to create Instagram Stories that engage viewers? To explore how to create compelling Instagram Stories for business, I interview Alex Beadon. Alex is an Instagram Stories expert who specializes in helping people use Instagram for business. Her course is Gram Slam and her podcast […]

The post Instagram Stories for Business: How to Create Engaging Stories appeared first on Social Media Marketing | Social Media Examiner.

… Read More

Posted by BritneyMuller

You’ve got top-performing content on your site that does really well. Maybe it’s highly converting, maybe it garners the most qualified traffic — but it’s just sitting there gathering dust. Isn’t there something else you can do with content that’s clearly proven its worth?

As it turns out, there is! In this ever-popular episode of Whiteboard Friday, Moz’s Senior SEO Scientist, Britney Muller, shares three easy steps for identifying, repurposing, and republishing your top content to juice every drop of goodness out of it.

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Hey, Moz fans, welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. I’m Britney Muller, Moz’s SEO and Content Architect, and I’m so excited to talk to you today about refurbishing your top content. Any of you watching likely have top content, either on your site or a client’s site, that does really, really well. Whether that’s getting the most traffic or converting the most users, it does really well. The problem is that we let it just sit there, and we’re not getting the amplification that we could out of that content. So I’m going to talk to you today about how to sort of funnel i… Read More