Once you’ve made the big decisions about who your course is serving and what transformation your course will deliver (our topic last week), it’s time to get down to the nitty gritty of determining how you will actually execute your lessons. In this episode, we discuss three important questions you need to ask yourself to be sure that you are moving forward in the direction that serves your big picture goals for your course. Rainmaker.FM is Brought to You By   Discover why 201,344 website owners trust StudioPress, the industry standard for premium WordPress themes and plugins.  Launch your new site today!  Listen to Site Success: Tips for Building Better WordPress Websites below ... Download MP3Subscribe by RSSSubscribe in iTunes Other links of note:  Try StudioPress Sites Sites Weekly Newsletter Subscribe to Sites on Apple Podcasts Contact Jerod: jerod@copyblogger.com 

Once you’ve made the big decisions about who your course is serving and what transformation your course will deliver (our topic last week), it’s time to get down to the nitty gritty of determining how you will actually execute your lessons. In this episode, we discuss three important questions you need to ask yourself to be sure that you are moving forward in the direction that serves your big picture goals for your course. <a href="http://Rainmaker.FM" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Rainmaker.FM</a> is Brought to You By<a href="//www.studiopress.com/fm" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"></a> <code> <h3><a href="//www.studiopress.com/fm" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"></a></h3> Discover why 201,344 website owners trust StudioPress, the industry standard for premium WordPress themes and plugins. <a href="//www.studiopress.com/fm" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Launch your new site today!</a> </code> Listen to <a href="https://rainmaker.fm/series/sites/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Site Success: Tips for Building Better WordPress Websites</a> below ... <a href="https://rainmaker.fm/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/site-success-63.mp3" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Download MP3</a><a href="https://rainmaker.fm/series/sites/feed/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Subscribe by RSS</a><a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/id1251630646" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Subscribe in iTunes</a> <h3>Other links of note:</h3> <ul> <li><a href="https://www.studiopress.com/sites" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Try StudioPress Sites</a></li> <li><a href="https://www.studiopress.com/news" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Sites Weekly Newsletter</a></li> <li><a href="http://sites.fm/apple" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Subscribe to Sites on Apple Podcasts</a></li> <li>Contact Jerod: jerod@copyblogger.com</li> </ul>

[63] 3Q for Executing Your Next Online Course

Once you have your website up and running, and you re consistently publishing good content and connecting with your audience, it s time to ponder whether creating an online course would be a smart next move. There are many different ways — both big and small — to incorporate an online course into your content and product mix. In this episode, we run down a few of them and then explore three questions that will help you plan your online course in a smart way from the beginning so you avoid major missteps later on. Rainmaker.FM is Brought to You By   Discover why 201,344 website owners trust StudioPress, the industry standard for premium WordPress themes and plugins.  Launch your new site today!  Listen to Site Success: Tips for Building Better WordPress Websites below ... Download MP3Subscribe by RSSSubscribe in iTunes Resources and links mentioned in this episode:  The Showrunner Podcast Positioning Course: showrunner.fm/podcast-positioning  Other links of note:  Try StudioPress Sites Sites Weekly Newsletter Subscribe to Sites on Apple Podcasts Contact Jerod: jerod@copyblogger.com 

Once you have your website up and running, and you re consistently publishing good content and connecting with your audience, it s time to ponder whether creating an online course would be a smart next move. There are many different ways — both big and small — to incorporate an online course into your content and product mix. In this episode, we run down a few of them and then explore three questions that will help you plan your online course in a smart way from the beginning so you avoid major missteps later on. <a href="http://Rainmaker.FM" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Rainmaker.FM</a> is Brought to You By<a href="//www.studiopress.com/fm" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"></a> <code> <h3><a href="//www.studiopress.com/fm" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"></a></h3> Discover why 201,344 website owners trust StudioPress, the industry standard for premium WordPress themes and plugins. <a href="//www.studiopress.com/fm" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Launch your new site today!</a> </code> Listen to <a href="https://rainmaker.fm/series/sites/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Site Success: Tips for Building Better WordPress Websites</a> below ... <a href="https://rainmaker.fm/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/site-success-62.mp3" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Download MP3</a><a href="https://rainmaker.fm/series/sites/feed/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Subscribe by RSS</a><a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/id1251630646" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Subscribe in iTunes</a> <h3>Resources and links mentioned in this episode:</h3> <ul> <li>The Showrunner Podcast Positioning Course: <a href="http://showrunner.fm/podcast-positioning" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">showrunner.fm/podcast-positioning</a></li> </ul> <h3>Other links of note:</h3> <ul> <li><a href="https://www.studiopress.com/sites" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Try StudioPress Sites</a></li> <li><a href="https://www.studiopress.com/news" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Sites Weekly Newsletter</a></li> <li><a href="http://sites.fm/apple" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Subscribe to Sites on Apple Podcasts</a></li> <li>Contact Jerod: jerod@copyblogger.com</li> </ul>

[62] 3Q for Planning Your Next Online Course

The best way to navigate the crowded marketplace for online content is with a smart positioning strategy. What makes you stand out? Why will people pay attention to you and your content with so many other options out there? In this episode, we take a high-level look at how to reassess, and improve, the positioning of your content and offers. Rainmaker.FM is Brought to You By   Discover why 201,344 website owners trust StudioPress, the industry standard for premium WordPress themes and plugins.  Launch your new site today!  Listen to Site Success: Tips for Building Better WordPress Websites below ... Download MP3Subscribe by RSSSubscribe in iTunes Resources and links mentioned in this episode:  The Showrunner Podcast Positioning Course  Other links of note:  Try StudioPress Sites Sites Weekly Newsletter Subscribe to Sites on Apple Podcasts Contact Jerod: jerod@copyblogger.com 

The best way to navigate the crowded marketplace for online content is with a smart positioning strategy. What makes you stand out? Why will people pay attention to you and your content with so many other options out there? In this episode, we take a high-level look at how to reassess, and improve, the positioning of your content and offers. <a href="http://Rainmaker.FM" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Rainmaker.FM</a> is Brought to You By<a href="//www.studiopress.com/fm" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"></a> <code> <h3><a href="//www.studiopress.com/fm" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"></a></h3> Discover why 201,344 website owners trust StudioPress, the industry standard for premium WordPress themes and plugins. <a href="//www.studiopress.com/fm" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Launch your new site today!</a> </code> Listen to <a href="https://rainmaker.fm/series/sites/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Site Success: Tips for Building Better WordPress Websites</a> below ... <a href="https://rainmaker.fm/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/sites-success-61.mp3" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Download MP3</a><a href="https://rainmaker.fm/series/sites/feed/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Subscribe by RSS</a><a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/id1251630646" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Subscribe in iTunes</a> <h3>Resources and links mentioned in this episode:</h3> <ul> <li><a href="https://www.showrunner.fm/podcast-positioning/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The Showrunner Podcast Positioning Course</a></li> </ul> <h3>Other links of note:</h3> <ul> <li><a href="https://www.studiopress.com/sites" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Try StudioPress Sites</a></li> <li><a href="https://www.studiopress.com/news" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Sites Weekly Newsletter</a></li> <li><a href="http://sites.fm/apple" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Subscribe to Sites on Apple Podcasts</a></li> <li>Contact Jerod: jerod@copyblogger.com</li> </ul>

[61] 3Q for Assessing (and Improving) Your Positioning

This week, as our series on SEO continues, we re talking about getting more links — which remain one of the most important and influential ranking factors that search engines look at. In general, what should you be doing to get more links? Here are three questions to ask yourself … Rainmaker.FM is Brought to You By   Discover why 201,344 website owners trust StudioPress, the industry standard for premium WordPress themes and plugins.  Launch your new site today!  Here is a quick rundown of what you’ll find in this episode:  Why you shouldn’t overlook the most basic link strategy question of all The power of a network when it comes to getting links Why any link strategy should actually start on your own site  Listen to Site Success: Tips for Building Better WordPress Websites below ... Download MP3Subscribe by RSSSubscribe in iTunes Resources and links mentioned in this episode:  How to Build a Diverse &amp; Healthy Link Profile  Other links of note:  Try StudioPress Sites Sites Weekly Newsletter Subscribe to Sites on Apple Podcasts Contact Jerod: jerod@copyblogger.com 

This week, as our series on SEO continues, we re talking about getting more links — which remain one of the most important and influential ranking factors that search engines look at. In general, what should you be doing to get more links? Here are three questions to ask yourself … <a href="http://Rainmaker.FM" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Rainmaker.FM</a> is Brought to You By<a href="//www.studiopress.com/fm" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"></a> <code> <h3><a href="//www.studiopress.com/fm" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"></a></h3> Discover why 201,344 website owners trust StudioPress, the industry standard for premium WordPress themes and plugins. <a href="//www.studiopress.com/fm" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Launch your new site today!</a> </code> Here is a quick rundown of what you’ll find in this episode: <ul> <li>Why you shouldn’t overlook the most basic link strategy question of all</li> <li>The power of a network when it comes to getting links</li> <li>Why any link strategy should actually start on your own site</li> </ul> Listen to <a href="https://rainmaker.fm/series/sites/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Site Success: Tips for Building Better WordPress Websites</a> below ... <a href="https://rainmaker.fm/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/site-success-60.mp3" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Download MP3</a><a href="https://rainmaker.fm/series/sites/feed/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Subscribe by RSS</a><a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/id1251630646" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Subscribe in iTunes</a> <h3>Resources and links mentioned in this episode:</h3> <ul> <li><a href="https://www.searchenginejournal.com/diverse-link-profile/251309/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">How to Build a Diverse &amp; Healthy Link Profile</a></li> </ul> <h3>Other links of note:</h3> <ul> <li><a href="https://www.studiopress.com/sites" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Try StudioPress Sites</a></li> <li><a href="https://www.studiopress.com/news" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Sites Weekly Newsletter</a></li> <li><a href="http://sites.fm/apple" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Subscribe to Sites on Apple Podcasts</a></li> <li>Contact Jerod: jerod@copyblogger.com</li> </ul>

[60] 3Q for Optimizing Your Link Strategy for Better SEO

How do you attract more search visitors to your site? And more importantly, how do you make sure that the majority of those visitors are members of your target audience? Your keyword strategy will play a huge role in this, and this episode you will discover three areas of focus that will optimize your keyword strategy for success. Rainmaker.FM is Brought to You By   Discover why 201,344 website owners trust StudioPress, the industry standard for premium WordPress themes and plugins.  Launch your new site today!  Here is a quick rundown of what you’ll find in this episode:  A recap of our SEO series thus far Why you need to trust your intuition, but also inform it further The power of creating cornerstone content to target short-tail keywords Why long-tail keywords shouldn’t be overlooked — and why they can sometimes be even more valuable than the short-tail ones  Listen to Site Success: Tips for Building Better WordPress Websites below ... Download MP3Subscribe by RSSSubscribe in iTunes Other links of note:  Try StudioPress Sites Sites Weekly Newsletter Subscribe to Sites on Apple Podcasts Contact Jerod: jerod@copyblogger.com 

How do you attract more search visitors to your site? And more importantly, how do you make sure that the majority of those visitors are members of your target audience? Your keyword strategy will play a huge role in this, and this episode you will discover three areas of focus that will optimize your keyword strategy for success. <a href="http://Rainmaker.FM" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Rainmaker.FM</a> is Brought to You By<a href="//www.studiopress.com/fm" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"></a> <code> <h3><a href="//www.studiopress.com/fm" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"></a></h3> Discover why 201,344 website owners trust StudioPress, the industry standard for premium WordPress themes and plugins. <a href="//www.studiopress.com/fm" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Launch your new site today!</a> </code> Here is a quick rundown of what you’ll find in this episode: <ul> <li>A recap of our SEO series thus far</li> <li>Why you need to trust your intuition, but also inform it further</li> <li>The power of creating cornerstone content to target short-tail keywords</li> <li>Why long-tail keywords shouldn’t be overlooked — and why they can sometimes be even more valuable than the short-tail ones</li> </ul> Listen to <a href="https://rainmaker.fm/series/sites/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Site Success: Tips for Building Better WordPress Websites</a> below ... <a href="https://rainmaker.fm/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/site-success-59.mp3" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Download MP3</a><a href="https://rainmaker.fm/series/sites/feed/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Subscribe by RSS</a><a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/id1251630646" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Subscribe in iTunes</a> <h3>Other links of note:</h3> <ul> <li><a href="https://www.studiopress.com/sites" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Try StudioPress Sites</a></li> <li><a href="https://www.studiopress.com/news" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Sites Weekly Newsletter</a></li> <li><a href="http://sites.fm/apple" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Subscribe to Sites on Apple Podcasts</a></li> <li>Contact Jerod: jerod@copyblogger.com</li> </ul>

[59] 3Q for Optimizing Your Keyword Strategy

As we continue our series on SEO, we’re diving into local SEO this week. And we have a special guest to help out with this week’s lesson — and it’s a voice you know well: Sean Jackson. He provides insight on what NAP means, how to harness the power of reviews, and why images make such a big difference for local SEO. Rainmaker.FM is Brought to You By   Discover why 201,344 website owners trust StudioPress, the industry standard for premium WordPress themes and plugins.  Launch your new site today!  Here is a quick rundown of what you’ll find in this episode:  Who needs to pay attention to local SEO What NAP is and why consistency is so important The difference that reviews make, and strategies for how to get more of them The power of encouraging an open feedback loop How to harness the power of images for local SEO success  Listen to Site Success: Tips for Building Better WordPress Websites below ... Download MP3Subscribe by RSSSubscribe in iTunes Other links of note:  Try StudioPress Sites Sites Weekly Newsletter Subscribe to Sites on Apple Podcasts Contact Jerod: jerod@copyblogger.com 

As we continue our series on SEO, we’re diving into local SEO this week. And we have a special guest to help out with this week’s lesson — and it’s a voice you know well: Sean Jackson. He provides insight on what NAP means, how to harness the power of reviews, and why images make such a big difference for local SEO. <a href="http://Rainmaker.FM" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Rainmaker.FM</a> is Brought to You By<a href="//www.studiopress.com/fm" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"></a> <code> <h3><a href="//www.studiopress.com/fm" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"></a></h3> Discover why 201,344 website owners trust StudioPress, the industry standard for premium WordPress themes and plugins. <a href="//www.studiopress.com/fm" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Launch your new site today!</a> </code> Here is a quick rundown of what you’ll find in this episode: <ul> <li>Who needs to pay attention to local SEO</li> <li>What NAP is and why consistency is so important</li> <li>The difference that reviews make, and strategies for how to get more of them</li> <li>The power of encouraging an open feedback loop</li> <li>How to harness the power of images for local SEO success</li> </ul> Listen to <a href="https://rainmaker.fm/series/sites/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Site Success: Tips for Building Better WordPress Websites</a> below ... <a href="https://rainmaker.fm/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/site-success-58.mp3" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Download MP3</a><a href="https://rainmaker.fm/series/sites/feed/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Subscribe by RSS</a><a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/id1251630646" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Subscribe in iTunes</a> <h3>Other links of note:</h3> <ul> <li><a href="https://www.studiopress.com/sites" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Try StudioPress Sites</a></li> <li><a href="https://www.studiopress.com/news" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Sites Weekly Newsletter</a></li> <li><a href="http://sites.fm/apple" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Subscribe to Sites on Apple Podcasts</a></li> <li>Contact Jerod: jerod@copyblogger.com</li> </ul>

[58] 3Q for Local SEO Done Right

Now that you have a live website, and you re publishing posts, and you re building community and gathering subscribers, it s time to start optimizing what you ve got. And there is no better place to start your optimization than with search engine optimization. This episode begins a multi-part series on improving your SEO, and we start this week by discussing how to optimize your website’s performance. Rainmaker.FM is Brought to You By   Discover why 201,344 website owners trust StudioPress, the industry standard for premium WordPress themes and plugins.  Launch your new site today!  Here is a quick rundown of what you’ll find in this episode:  A description of why optimizing for search engines is actually just optimizing your human users How to find out some “low hanging fruit” in terms of ways to make your site load faster How to determine if your site is delivering an optimal mobile experience Why you should be making the most of Google Search Console  Listen to Site Success: Tips for Building Better WordPress Websites below ... Download MP3Subscribe by RSSSubscribe in iTunes Resources and links mentioned in this episode:  Google’s Mobile-Friendly Tool Pingdom Tools  Other links of note:  Try StudioPress Sites Sites Weekly Newsletter Subscribe to Sites on Apple Podcasts Contact Jerod: jerod@copyblogger.com 

Now that you have a live website, and you re publishing posts, and you re building community and gathering subscribers, it s time to start optimizing what you ve got. And there is no better place to start your optimization than with search engine optimization. This episode begins a multi-part series on improving your SEO, and we start this week by discussing how to optimize your website’s performance. <a href="http://Rainmaker.FM" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Rainmaker.FM</a> is Brought to You By<a href="//www.studiopress.com/fm" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"></a> <code> <h3><a href="//www.studiopress.com/fm" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"></a></h3> Discover why 201,344 website owners trust StudioPress, the industry standard for premium WordPress themes and plugins. <a href="//www.studiopress.com/fm" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Launch your new site today!</a> </code> Here is a quick rundown of what you’ll find in this episode: <ul> <li>A description of why optimizing for search engines is actually just optimizing your human users</li> <li>How to find out some “low hanging fruit” in terms of ways to make your site load faster</li> <li>How to determine if your site is delivering an optimal mobile experience</li> <li>Why you should be making the most of Google Search Console</li> </ul> Listen to <a href="https://rainmaker.fm/series/sites/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Site Success: Tips for Building Better WordPress Websites</a> below ... <a href="https://rainmaker.fm/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/site-success-57.mp3" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Download MP3</a><a href="https://rainmaker.fm/series/sites/feed/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Subscribe by RSS</a><a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/id1251630646" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Subscribe in iTunes</a> <h3>Resources and links mentioned in this episode:</h3> <ul> <li><a href="https://search.google.com/test/mobile-friendly" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Google’s Mobile-Friendly Tool</a></li> <li><a href="https://tools.pingdom.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Pingdom Tools</a></li> </ul> <h3>Other links of note:</h3> <ul> <li><a href="https://www.studiopress.com/sites" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Try StudioPress Sites</a></li> <li><a href="https://www.studiopress.com/news" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Sites Weekly Newsletter</a></li> <li><a href="http://sites.fm/apple" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Subscribe to Sites on Apple Podcasts</a></li> <li>Contact Jerod: jerod@copyblogger.com</li> </ul>

[57] 3Q for Optimizing Your Website’s Performance

Brian Clark

Brian Clark has written a lot of headlines. And the vast majority of those headlines have been very effective in achieving their simple goal of getting you to click on a post and read it. In this discussion, we tease out Brian’s best and latest advice on how to write magnetic headlines that readers won’t be able to resist clicking on. Rainmaker.FM is Brought to You By   Discover why 201,344 website owners trust StudioPress, the industry standard for premium WordPress themes and plugins.  Launch your new site today!  Listen to Site Success: Tips for Building Better WordPress Websites below ... Download MP3Subscribe by RSSSubscribe in iTunes Other links of note:  Try StudioPress Sites Sites Weekly Newsletter Subscribe to Sites on Apple Podcasts Contact Jerod: jerod@copyblogger.com 

Brian Clark has written a lot of headlines. And the vast majority of those headlines have been very effective in achieving their simple goal of getting you to click on a post and read it. In this discussion, we tease out Brian’s best and latest advice on how to write magnetic headlines that readers won’t be able to resist clicking on. <a href="http://Rainmaker.FM" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Rainmaker.FM</a> is Brought to You By<a href="//www.studiopress.com/fm" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"></a> <code> <h3><a href="//www.studiopress.com/fm" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"></a></h3> Discover why 201,344 website owners trust StudioPress, the industry standard for premium WordPress themes and plugins. <a href="//www.studiopress.com/fm" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Launch your new site today!</a> </code> Listen to <a href="https://rainmaker.fm/series/sites/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Site Success: Tips for Building Better WordPress Websites</a> below ... <a href="https://rainmaker.fm/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/site-success-56.mp3" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Download MP3</a><a href="https://rainmaker.fm/series/sites/feed/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Subscribe by RSS</a><a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/id1251630646" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Subscribe in iTunes</a> <h3>Other links of note:</h3> <ul> <li><a href="https://www.studiopress.com/sites" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Try StudioPress Sites</a></li> <li><a href="https://www.studiopress.com/news" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Sites Weekly Newsletter</a></li> <li><a href="http://sites.fm/apple" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Subscribe to Sites on Apple Podcasts</a></li> <li>Contact Jerod: jerod@copyblogger.com</li> </ul>

[56] Brian Clark’s Best Advice on How to Write Better Headlines

You can waste a lot of time creating amazing content if you don’t invest similarly in writing irresistible headlines. What’s the point of great content if you can’t get anyone to click on it in the first place? In this episode, we walk you through the mindset and techniques you need to write the kind of headlines that will fill your audience funnel with the kind of people you need so that your content can work its long-term magic. Rainmaker.FM is Brought to You By   Discover why 201,344 website owners trust StudioPress, the industry standard for premium WordPress themes and plugins.  Launch your new site today!  Here is a quick rundown of what you’ll find in this episode:  A review of the section in Episode 50 where we discussed headlines, including: the 50/50 rule, the 80/20 rule, and the four U’s. Why your headline has to make a promise, and why that promise needs to be benefit-driven An explanation of explicit and implicit benefits (and when you need to use one or the other) Additional questions you should ask yourself (see below) once you’ve arrived at a headline you’re satisfied with Why your content absolutely must deliver on the promise that your headline makes Jerod’s unexpected mini-rant on why delivering on your headline’s promise is so important  Listen to Site Success: Tips for Building Better WordPress Websites below ... Download MP3Subscribe by RSSSubscribe in iTunes Resources and links mentioned in this episode:  [50] 3Q Before You Publish Your First Piece of Content Writing Headlines That Get Results — by Brian Clark How to Write Magnetic Headlines  Here are the additional questions you should ask yourself about your headline:  Have you looked at templates for successful headlines to see if one might fit your content a little better? Look at your recent headlines — are you falling into familiar patterns? Do you need to shake it up a bit? Do you have two competing ideas that might be worth testing? Have you spent a few minutes wordsmithing it to see if you can get the main keyword closer to the beginning? (Not just for SEO, but to make sure it s visible in search and podcast directories)? Is there a verb to make it more kinetic? Are you using the passive voice? Don t! Is your headline as short and to-the-point as it can possibly be (while still including main keywords, clearly articulating a promise, and describing a benefit)?  Other links of note:  Try StudioPress Sites Sites Weekly Newsletter Subscribe to Sites on Apple Podcasts Contact Jerod: jerod@copyblogger.com 

You can waste a lot of time creating amazing content if you don’t invest similarly in writing irresistible headlines. What’s the point of great content if you can’t get anyone to click on it in the first place? In this episode, we walk you through the mindset and techniques you need to write the kind of headlines that will fill your audience funnel with the kind of people you need so that your content can work its long-term magic. <a href="http://Rainmaker.FM" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Rainmaker.FM</a> is Brought to You By<a href="//www.studiopress.com/fm" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"></a> <code> <h3><a href="//www.studiopress.com/fm" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"></a></h3> Discover why 201,344 website owners trust StudioPress, the industry standard for premium WordPress themes and plugins. <a href="//www.studiopress.com/fm" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Launch your new site today!</a> </code> Here is a quick rundown of what you’ll find in this episode: <ul> <li>A review of the section in <a href="https://studiopress.blog/site-success-50/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Episode 50</a> where we discussed headlines, including: the 50/50 rule, the 80/20 rule, and the four U’s.</li> <li>Why your headline has to make a promise, and why that promise needs to be benefit-driven</li> <li>An explanation of explicit and implicit benefits (and when you need to use one or the other)</li> <li>Additional questions you should ask yourself (see below) once you’ve arrived at a headline you’re satisfied with</li> <li>Why your content absolutely must deliver on the promise that your headline makes</li> <li>Jerod’s unexpected mini-rant on why delivering on your headline’s promise is so important</li> </ul> Listen to <a href="https://rainmaker.fm/series/sites/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Site Success: Tips for Building Better WordPress Websites</a> below ... <a href="https://rainmaker.fm/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/sites-success-55.mp3" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Download MP3</a><a href="https://rainmaker.fm/series/sites/feed/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Subscribe by RSS</a><a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/id1251630646" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Subscribe in iTunes</a> <h3>Resources and links mentioned in this episode:</h3> <ul> <li><a href="https://studiopress.blog/site-success-50/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">[50] 3Q Before You Publish Your First Piece of Content</a></li> <li><a href="https://www.copyblogger.com/writing-headlines-that-get-results/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Writing Headlines That Get Results</a> — by Brian Clark</li> <li><a href="https://www.copyblogger.com/magnetic-headlines/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">How to Write Magnetic Headlines</a></li> </ul> <h3>Here are the additional questions you should ask yourself about your headline:</h3> <ul> <li>Have you looked at <a href="https://www.copyblogger.com/magnetic-headlines/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">templates for successful headlines</a> to see if one might fit your content a little better?</li> <li>Look at your recent headlines — are you falling into familiar patterns? Do you need to shake it up a bit?</li> <li>Do you have two competing ideas that might be worth testing?</li> <li>Have you spent a few minutes wordsmithing it to see if you can get the main keyword closer to the beginning? (Not just for SEO, but to make sure it s visible in search and podcast directories)?</li> <li>Is there a verb to make it more kinetic?</li> <li>Are you using the passive voice? Don t!</li> <li>Is your headline as short and to-the-point as it can possibly be (while still including main keywords, clearly articulating a promise, and describing a benefit)?</li> </ul> <h3>Other links of note:</h3> <ul> <li><a href="https://www.studiopress.com/sites" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Try StudioPress Sites</a></li> <li><a href="https://www.studiopress.com/news" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Sites Weekly Newsletter</a></li> <li><a href="http://sites.fm/apple" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Subscribe to Sites on Apple Podcasts</a></li> <li>Contact Jerod: jerod@copyblogger.com</li> </ul>

[55] 3Q for Writing Irresistible Headlines that Will Accelerate Your Audience Growth

How do you build a community up from nothing, attract the right kind of people, and repel the kinds of fanatics and fools who threaten to derail all of your hard work? In this edition of Site Success, Sean Jackson and Jerod Morris discuss some of the fundamental elements of building a community the right way … from the start. Rainmaker.FM is Brought to You By   Discover why 201,344 website owners trust StudioPress, the industry standard for premium WordPress themes and plugins.  Launch your new site today!  Listen to Site Success: Tips for Building Better WordPress Websites below ... Download MP3Subscribe by RSSSubscribe in iTunes Other links of note:  Try StudioPress Sites Sites Weekly Newsletter Subscribe to Sites on Apple Podcasts Contact Jerod: jerod@copyblogger.com 

How do you build a community up from nothing, attract the right kind of people, and repel the kinds of fanatics and fools who threaten to derail all of your hard work? In this edition of Site Success, Sean Jackson and Jerod Morris discuss some of the fundamental elements of building a community the right way … from the start. <a href="http://Rainmaker.FM" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Rainmaker.FM</a> is Brought to You By<a href="//www.studiopress.com/fm" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"></a> <code> <h3><a href="//www.studiopress.com/fm" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"></a></h3> Discover why 201,344 website owners trust StudioPress, the industry standard for premium WordPress themes and plugins. <a href="//www.studiopress.com/fm" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Launch your new site today!</a> </code> Listen to <a href="https://rainmaker.fm/series/sites/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Site Success: Tips for Building Better WordPress Websites</a> below ... <a href="https://rainmaker.fm/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/site-success-54.mp3" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Download MP3</a><a href="https://rainmaker.fm/series/sites/feed/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Subscribe by RSS</a><a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/id1251630646" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Subscribe in iTunes</a> <h3>Other links of note:</h3> <ul> <li><a href="https://www.studiopress.com/sites" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Try StudioPress Sites</a></li> <li><a href="https://www.studiopress.com/news" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Sites Weekly Newsletter</a></li> <li><a href="http://sites.fm/apple" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Subscribe to Sites on Apple Podcasts</a></li> <li>Contact Jerod: jerod@copyblogger.com</li> </ul>

[54] How to Build a Community that Attracts the Right Kind of Members

Jerod Morris, Sean Jackson, and the rest of the team at StudioPress and Copyblogger (including Brian Clark, Sonia Simone, Chris Garrett, Brian Gardner, and more) deliver weekly insight on how to build thriving WordPress websites.

Save yourself and just skip the episodes Jarrod doesn’t host. The other guy (his boss or something?) is unlistenable. He’s like a frustrated am radio disk jockey. My brain hurts just thinking about it.

Five Stars for Jerod Morris. None for the other host.

I recommend sticking with this podcast as long as Jerod Morris was host. He did an excellent job of repurposing classic Copyblogger content in a way that summarizes the four basic approaches to Wordpress-based content marketing. Each episode featured a specific action step based on that foundational approach. Now that Jerod has rolled off as host, I personally don&#39;t find this podcast as useful. But that&#39;s because I use Rainmaker as my content marketing solution rather than a self-hosted WP site. But if you&#39;re just getting started with self-hosted WP, Sites will be an indispensable resource for you, especially regarding pitfalls and obstacles to avoid along the way.

Good overall summary of Wordpress-based conent marketing

Site Success: Tips for Building Better WordPress Websites

This week, we dive in and discuss SEO-friendly tips that will make your WordPress site faster. And you don t have to take my word for it. Today s episode is based on a blog post over at Copyblogger by Loren Baker, the founder of Search Engine Journal. Listen to Site Success: Tips for Building Better WordPress Websites below ... Download MP3Subscribe by RSSSubscribe in iTunes Important links from this episode:  Try StudioPress Sites Sites Weekly Newsletter Subscribe to Sites on Apple Podcasts @JerodMorris on Twitter 6 SEO Friendly Tips to Improve Site Speed on WordPress Blogs  The Transcript Jerod Morris: Welcome to Sites, a podcast by the teams at StudioPress and Copyblogger. In this show, we deliver time-tested insight on the four pillars of a successful WordPress website: content, design, technology, and strategy. We want to help you get a little bit closer to reaching your online goals, one episode at a time. I m your host Jerod Morris. Sites is brought to you by StudioPress Sites — the complete hosted solution that makes WordPress fast, secure, and easy without sacrificing power or flexibility. For example, you can upload your own WordPress theme, or, you can use one of the 20 beautiful StudioPress themes that are included and just one click away. Explore all the amazing things you can do with a StudioPress Site, and you ll understand why this is way more than traditional WordPress hosting. No matter how you ll be using your site, we have a plan to fit your needs — and your budget. To learn more, visit studiopress.com/sites. That s studiopress.com/sites. Welcome back for another episode of Sites, and another week of adding a strategy to your toolbox that will help you create a powerful and successful WordPress website. Last week we discussed content — specifically, the persuasive power of analogy, and I challenged you to make your best attempt at working an analogy somewhere into your website or email copy. I hope that went well. This week, we re going to roll design, technology, and strategy all into one by discussing some proven tips that will help you improve the speed of your WordPress website. As an important bonus, these tips are all SEO-friendly. And that s important. The last thing you want to do is make an enhancement in one area of your site that has negative side effects in another area. And it makes sense — we would expect most site speed improvements to help out with SEO, because better speed leads to a better user experience, and because of the increasing importance that site speed and performance have as indicators that search engines look at. So let s dive in and discuss these SEO-friendly tips that will make your WordPress site faster. And you don t have to take my word for it. Today s episode is based on a blog post over at Copyblogger by Loren Baker, the founder of Search Engine Journal and the Vice President of Foundation Digital, an SEO &amp; digital marketing agency. Loren was one of the early pioneers in online SEO education, and he really knows his stuff. So make sure you earmark at least one of these tips for immediate implementation on your website. Hint, hint. Call to action. Okay, without further ado, here is my reading of Loren Baker s blog post 6 SEO Friendly Tips to Improve Site Speed on WordPress Blogs. —– In the world of SEO, user experience on websites has always been a factor, as has the time it takes for a site to load. However, with the use of mobile devices surpassing desktop use (in most consumer-facing industries) and the wide adoption of broadband, people expect sites to load instantly. Long gone are the days of waiting 10 seconds for a site to load. If a page takes more than a couple of seconds to load, users will instantly hit the back button and move on to the next result. Accordingly, Google officially started paying attention to site speed and declared its importance as a factor in rankings. In order to keep up with Google s site-ranking measures, WordPress blog users need to know exactly what they can do to improve their own site speed. Remember when Google rolled out AMP (accelerated mobile pages)? They now serve up publisher content in a simplified Google-hosted experience that renders superfast. I like AMP from a user perspective because I know that AMP content will load incredibly fast on my mobile device, but as a publisher: I d rather speed up my blog and attract traffic directly to my site than have users stay on Google. If you use StudioPress Sites or the Rainmaker Platform, your site will already load quickly. However, adding ad scripts, featured images, tracking codes, 301 redirects, etc. will slow down the loading of a site and increase demand on your server/hosting company. Here are six simple tips I recommend since we used them to dramatically speed up the Search Engine Journal (SEJ) load time it s at 1.8 seconds! 1. Use a content delivery network A content delivery network (CDN) is a group of servers that deliver web pages and other content according to the location of the user, the webpage origin, and its server. It can handle heavy traffic and speeds up the delivery of content to different users. For WordPress blogs looking to improve site speed, Cloudflare is a great tool to consider. Cloudflare offers a free content delivery network that speeds up the performance of your site and optimizes it for efficiency on any device. It also offers security services that help protect websites from crawlers, bots, and other attackers. 2. Compress your images Another effective way to reduce page-load time and increase site speed is by compressing your images. A CDN will help with this, but it doesn t take care of 100 percent of the job. There are several different plugins available that compress all the images on your website and even compress new images as you upload them as well. ShortPixel is a WordPress plugin that allows you to compress both new and old images on your blog. We use it on SEJ and various other sites, and absolutely love it. It allows you to quickly compress images in batches for greater convenience, reduces the time it takes to do backups, and ensures all your processed files are kept safe and secure. The best part about it is that your image quality stays the same, regardless of the size of the image. Other image-compression plugins also maintain the quality of your pictures and improve site speed. 3. Prevent ad scripts and pop-ups from slowing down the user experience Many web pages today contain some form of third-party script that either runs ads for revenue or uses pop-ups to promote conversion. You want to build your audience and get more customers of course, but balance is key here. Although it s difficult to completely get rid of them to improve your site speed, you can tame their performance impact while keeping them on your website to provide their intended benefits. The trick is to first identify the third-party scripts that run on your site, where they come from, and how they impact your blog. You can use different real-time monitoring tools that track and identify which scripts delay your site-loading time and affect your site metrics. One of my favorite tools to do this is Pingdom s Website Speed Test, because it breaks down each file and script, and tells you which takes the most time to load. The same rule applies for pop-up plugins that you add on to your site. Knowing which ones work best to improve conversions and bring in email signups allows you to gauge which plugins to keep and which ones to uninstall. One of the fastest pop-up plugins on the market is OptinMonster (a StudioPress partner). Its founder, Syed Balkhi, is a WordPress expert who stays on top of factors like site speed and overall user experience. So those are the first three SEO-friendly tips for improving the speed of your WordPress website:  Use a content delivery network Compress your images Prevent ad scripts and pop-ups from slowing down the user experience  Next, we ll discuss numbers 4-6. 4. Install a caching plugin Another effective way to reduce site-loading time is by installing caching plugins onto your WordPress blog. Caching plugins work by creating a static version of your WordPress blog and delivering it to your site users and visitors, which conveniently cuts your page-loading time in half. Several cache plugins work best for WordPress, such as WP Super Cache and W3 Total Cache. These plugins are easy to install and can be disabled anytime. They allow you to select certain pages on your blog (or all of them) to cache, and offer many other content compression settings that you can turn on or off. WordPress supports many other plugins that allow you to optimize your blog to get rid of any latency in page-load time. It is important to test out these plugins to find the one that works best for you. 5. Disable plugins you don t use Tons of WordPress plugins can also make your site super slow, especially ones you don t need. It is important to review the plugins you have installed in the past and disable those that offer no significant value. Many WordPress users install different plugins when they first create their blogs to enhance how they look, but realize over time that great-looking blogs don t always attract traffic, especially if your page-loading time is slow. Also, I would highly recommend making sure your plugins are updated. This may help improve page-load speed, but more importantly, it makes your site more secure. We discussed this topic in more depth back in episode 15 of Sites. 6. Add one more layer of media optimization One thing we realized at SEJ when speeding up the site was that even after optimizing images, ad scripts, and caching, there were still multiple forms of media that slowed down load time. The internal fixes we implemented did not help with third-party media load times, such as embedded Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram content, or infographics from other sites. One solution we found to assist with that is BJ Lazy Load. Essentially, this lazy-load plugin renders all written content first, then as the user scrolls down the page, images and other forms of media load. This way, the user doesn t have to wait for tons of media to load before reading the main content. What I really like about BJ Lazy Load is that in addition to images, it also lazy loads all embeds, iFrames, and YouTube videos. For a WordPress blog that uses a lot of embeds, it was ideal for us. Bonus tip: ask your web host for help If you run a WordPress blog or WordPress-powered site, then you should work with a hosting company that specializes in WordPress, such as WP Engine, Presslabs, or StudioPress Sites. I ve worked with all three, and one thing I can absolutely tell you is that if you contact them and ask how your site can be sped up, they will help you because the faster your site is, the less the load is on their servers. As more and more people turn to mobile devices to access the internet, it is essential to optimize your blogs for mobile use and find ways to minimize page-loading time. Remember, bounce rates increase when your page-load time is slow, which impacts whether or not your content gets read or skipped for other sites that load pages faster. Okay, one more time, here are Loren Baker s six SEO-friendly steps to a better performing WordPress website:  Use a content delivery network Compress your images Prevent ad scripts and pop-ups from slowing down the user experience Install a caching plugin Disable plugins you don t use Add one more layer of media optimization Bonus tip: ask your web host for help  Now, stick around for this week s hyper-specific call to action. Call to action Simple CTA this week: pick one of the six, actually seven, tips and just do it. Maybe you sign up with a content delivery network. Maybe you add a plugin to compress your images. Perhaps you just email your host and ask them for tips on how to optimize your site. But take a step toward a faster site. The benefits really are endless, because, as Loren said, a faster site leads to a better user experience, which leads to fewer bounces and longer time on site, which leads to better search rankings, which leads to more visitors who are having a good experience and on and on. This is like a gift to your audience that keeps on giving — which makes it like a gift to yourself too. Okay, that s it for this week. Stay tuned for our next episode. I ll have a special guest with a special announcement about the future of the Sites podcast. In the meantime … Subscribe to Sites Weekly If you haven t yet, please take this opportunity to activate your free subscription to our curated weekly email newsletter, Sites Weekly. Each week, I find four links about content, design, technology, and strategy that you don t want to miss, and then I send them out via email on Wednesday afternoon. Reading this newsletter will help you make your website more powerful and successful. Go to studiopress.com/news and sign up in one step right there at the top of the page. That s studiopress.com/news. Rate and Review Sites on Apple Podcasts And finally, if you enjoy the Sites podcast, please subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts (formerly known as iTunes), and consider giving us a rating or a review over there as well. One quick tip on that: to make the best use of your review, let me know something in particular you like about the show. That feedback is really important. To find us in Apple Podcasts, search for StudioPress Sites and look for the striking purple logo that was designed by Rafal Tomal. Or you can also go to the URL sites.fm/apple and it will redirect you to our Apple Podcasts page. And with that, we come to the close of another episode. Thank you for listening to this episode of Sites. I appreciate you being here. Join me next time, and let s keep building powerful, successful WordPress websites together. This episode of sites was brought to you by StudioPress Sites, which was awarded Fastest WordPress Hosting of 2017 in an independent speed test . If you want to make WordPress fast, secure, and easy — and, I mean, why wouldn t you — visit studiopress.com/sites today and see which plan fits your needs. That s studiopress.com/sites.

This week, we dive in and discuss SEO-friendly tips that will make your WordPress site faster. And you don t have to take my word for it. Today s episode is based on a blog post over at Copyblogger by Loren Baker, the founder of Search Engine Journal. Listen to <a href="https://rainmaker.fm/series/sites/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Site Success: Tips for Building Better WordPress Websites</a> below ... <a href="https://rainmaker.fm/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/sites-season-1-episode-22.mp3" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Download MP3</a><a href="https://rainmaker.fm/series/sites/feed/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Subscribe by RSS</a><a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/id1251630646" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Subscribe in iTunes</a> Important links from this episode: <ul> <li><a href="http://studiopress.com/sites" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Try StudioPress Sites</a></li> <li><a href="http://studiopress.com/news" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Sites Weekly Newsletter</a></li> <li><a href="http://sites.fm/apple" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Subscribe to Sites on Apple Podcasts</a></li> <li><a href="http://twitter.com/JerodMorris" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">@JerodMorris on Twitter</a></li> <li><a href="https://www.copyblogger.com/improve-site-speed/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">6 SEO Friendly Tips to Improve Site Speed on WordPress Blogs</a></li> </ul> <h2>The Transcript</h2> Jerod Morris: Welcome to Sites, a podcast by the teams at StudioPress and Copyblogger. In this show, we deliver time-tested insight on the four pillars of a successful WordPress website: content, design, technology, and strategy. We want to help you get a little bit closer to reaching your online goals, one episode at a time. I m your host Jerod Morris. Sites is brought to you by StudioPress Sites — the complete hosted solution that makes WordPress fast, secure, and easy without sacrificing power or flexibility. For example, you can upload your own WordPress theme, or, you can use one of the 20 beautiful StudioPress themes that are included and just one click away. Explore all the amazing things you can do with a StudioPress Site, and you ll understand why this is way more than traditional WordPress hosting. No matter how you ll be using your site, we have a plan to fit your needs — and your budget. To learn more, visit <a href="http://studiopress.com/sites" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">studiopress.com/sites</a>. That s <a href="http://studiopress.com/sites" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">studiopress.com/sites</a>. Welcome back for another episode of Sites, and another week of adding a strategy to your toolbox that will help you create a powerful and successful WordPress website. Last week we discussed content — specifically, <a href="https://rainmaker.fm/audio/sites/persuasive-power/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">the persuasive power of analogy</a>, and I challenged you to make your best attempt at working an analogy somewhere into your website or email copy. I hope that went well. This week, we re going to roll design, technology, and strategy all into one by discussing some proven tips that will help you improve the speed of your WordPress website. As an important bonus, these tips are all SEO-friendly. And that s important. The last thing you want to do is make an enhancement in one area of your site that has negative side effects in another area. And it makes sense — we would expect most site speed improvements to help out with SEO, because better speed leads to a better user experience, and because of the increasing importance that site speed and performance have as indicators that search engines look at. So let s dive in and discuss these SEO-friendly tips that will make your WordPress site faster. And you don t have to take my word for it. Today s episode is based on <a href="https://www.copyblogger.com/improve-site-speed/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">a blog post over at Copyblogger</a> by Loren Baker, the founder of Search Engine Journal and the Vice President of Foundation Digital, an SEO &amp; digital marketing agency. Loren was one of the early pioneers in online SEO education, and he really knows his stuff. So make sure you earmark at least one of these tips for immediate implementation on your website. Hint, hint. Call to action. Okay, without further ado, here is my reading of Loren Baker s blog post 6 SEO Friendly Tips to Improve Site Speed on WordPress Blogs. —– In the world of SEO, user experience on websites has always been a factor, as has the time it takes for a site to load. However, with the use of mobile devices surpassing desktop use (in most consumer-facing industries) and the wide adoption of broadband, people expect sites to load instantly. Long gone are the days of waiting 10 seconds for a site to load. If a page takes more than a couple of seconds to load, users will instantly hit the back button and move on to the next result. Accordingly, Google officially started paying attention to site speed and declared its importance as a factor in rankings. In order to keep up with Google s site-ranking measures, WordPress blog users need to know exactly what they can do to improve their own site speed. Remember when <a href="https://www.copyblogger.com/google-amp/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Google rolled out AMP</a> (accelerated mobile pages)? They now serve up publisher content in a simplified Google-hosted experience that renders superfast. I like AMP from a user perspective because I know that AMP content will load incredibly fast on my mobile device, but as a publisher: I d rather speed up my blog and attract traffic directly to my site than have users stay on Google. If you use <a href="https://www.studiopress.com/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">StudioPress Sites</a> or the <a href="http://rainmakerdigital.com/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Rainmaker Platform</a>, your site will already load quickly. However, adding ad scripts, featured images, tracking codes, 301 redirects, etc. will slow down the loading of a site and increase demand on your server/hosting company. Here are six simple tips I recommend since we used them to dramatically speed up the Search Engine Journal (SEJ) load time it s at 1.8 seconds! <h3>1. Use a content delivery network</h3> A content delivery network (CDN) is a group of servers that deliver web pages and other content according to the location of the user, the webpage origin, and its server. It can handle heavy traffic and speeds up the delivery of content to different users. For WordPress blogs looking to improve site speed, <a href="https://www.cloudflare.com/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Cloudflare</a> is a great tool to consider. Cloudflare offers a free content delivery network that speeds up the performance of your site and optimizes it for efficiency on any device. It also offers security services that help protect websites from crawlers, bots, and other attackers. <h3>2. Compress your images</h3> Another effective way to reduce page-load time and increase site speed is by compressing your images. A CDN will help with this, but it doesn t take care of 100 percent of the job. There are several different plugins available that compress all the images on your website and even compress new images as you upload them as well. <a href="https://shortpixel.com/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">ShortPixel</a> is a WordPress plugin that allows you to compress both new and old images on your blog. We use it on SEJ and various other sites, and absolutely love it. It allows you to quickly compress images in batches for greater convenience, reduces the time it takes to do backups, and ensures all your processed files are kept safe and secure. The best part about it is that your image quality stays the same, regardless of the size of the image. Other image-compression plugins also maintain the quality of your pictures and improve site speed. <h3>3. Prevent ad scripts and pop-ups from slowing down the user experience</h3> Many web pages today contain some form of third-party script that either runs ads for revenue or uses pop-ups to promote conversion. You want to build your audience and get more customers of course, but balance is key here. Although it s difficult to completely get rid of them to improve your site speed, you can tame their performance impact while keeping them on your website to provide their intended benefits. The trick is to first identify the third-party scripts that run on your site, where they come from, and how they impact your blog. You can use different real-time monitoring tools that track and identify which scripts delay your site-loading time and affect your site metrics. One of my favorite tools to do this is <a href="https://tools.pingdom.com/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Pingdom s Website Speed Test</a>, because it breaks down each file and script, and tells you which takes the most time to load. The same rule applies for pop-up plugins that you add on to your site. Knowing which ones work best to improve conversions and bring in email signups allows you to gauge which plugins to keep and which ones to uninstall. One of the fastest pop-up plugins on the market is <a href="https://optinmonster.com/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">OptinMonster</a> (a StudioPress partner). Its founder, Syed Balkhi, is a WordPress expert who stays on top of factors like site speed and overall user experience. So those are the first three SEO-friendly tips for improving the speed of your WordPress website: <ul> <li>Use a content delivery network</li> <li>Compress your images</li> <li>Prevent ad scripts and pop-ups from slowing down the user experience</li> </ul> Next, we ll discuss numbers 4-6. <h3>4. Install a caching plugin</h3> Another effective way to reduce site-loading time is by installing caching plugins onto your WordPress blog. Caching plugins work by creating a static version of your WordPress blog and delivering it to your site users and visitors, which conveniently cuts your page-loading time in half. Several cache plugins work best for WordPress, such as <a href="https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-super-cache/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">WP Super Cache</a> and <a href="https://wordpress.org/plugins/w3-total-cache/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">W3 Total Cache</a>. These plugins are easy to install and can be disabled anytime. They allow you to select certain pages on your blog (or all of them) to cache, and offer many other content compression settings that you can turn on or off. WordPress supports many other plugins that allow you to optimize your blog to get rid of any latency in page-load time. It is important to test out these plugins to find the one that works best for you. <h3>5. Disable plugins you don t use</h3> Tons of WordPress plugins can also make your site super slow, especially ones you don t need. It is important to review the plugins you have installed in the past and disable those that offer no significant value. Many WordPress users install different plugins when they first create their blogs to enhance how they look, but realize over time that great-looking blogs don t always attract traffic, especially if your page-loading time is slow. Also, I would highly recommend making sure your plugins are updated. This may help improve page-load speed, but more importantly, it makes your site more secure. We discussed this topic in more depth back in <a href="https://rainmaker.fm/audio/sites/catastrophic-plugin/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">episode 15</a> of Sites. <h3>6. Add one more layer of media optimization</h3> One thing we realized at SEJ when speeding up the site was that even after optimizing images, ad scripts, and caching, there were still multiple forms of media that slowed down load time. The internal fixes we implemented did not help with third-party media load times, such as embedded Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram content, or infographics from other sites. One solution we found to assist with that is <a href="https://wordpress.org/plugins/bj-lazy-load/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">BJ Lazy Load</a>. Essentially, this lazy-load plugin renders all written content first, then as the user scrolls down the page, images and other forms of media load. This way, the user doesn t have to wait for tons of media to load before reading the main content. What I really like about BJ Lazy Load is that in addition to images, it also lazy loads all embeds, iFrames, and YouTube videos. For a WordPress blog that uses a lot of embeds, it was ideal for us. <h3>Bonus tip: ask your web host for help</h3> If you run a WordPress blog or WordPress-powered site, then you should work with a hosting company that specializes in WordPress, such as WP Engine, Presslabs, or StudioPress Sites. I ve worked with all three, and one thing I can absolutely tell you is that if you contact them and ask how your site can be sped up, they will help you because the faster your site is, the less the load is on their servers. As more and more people turn to mobile devices to access the internet, it is essential to optimize your blogs for mobile use and find ways to minimize page-loading time. Remember, bounce rates increase when your page-load time is slow, which impacts whether or not your content gets read or skipped for other sites that load pages faster. Okay, one more time, here are Loren Baker s six SEO-friendly steps to a better performing WordPress website: <ul> <li>Use a content delivery network</li> <li>Compress your images</li> <li>Prevent ad scripts and pop-ups from slowing down the user experience</li> <li>Install a caching plugin</li> <li>Disable plugins you don t use</li> <li>Add one more layer of media optimization</li> <li>Bonus tip: ask your web host for help</li> </ul> Now, stick around for this week s hyper-specific call to action. <h3>Call to action</h3> Simple CTA this week: pick one of the six, actually seven, tips and just do it. Maybe you sign up with a content delivery network. Maybe you add a plugin to compress your images. Perhaps you just email your host and ask them for tips on how to optimize your site. But take a step toward a faster site. The benefits really are endless, because, as Loren said, a faster site leads to a better user experience, which leads to fewer bounces and longer time on site, which leads to better search rankings, which leads to more visitors who are having a good experience and on and on. This is like a gift to your audience that keeps on giving — which makes it like a gift to yourself too. Okay, that s it for this week. Stay tuned for our next episode. I ll have a special guest with a special announcement about the future of the Sites podcast. In the meantime … <h3>Subscribe to Sites Weekly</h3> If you haven t yet, please take this opportunity to activate your free subscription to our curated weekly email newsletter, Sites Weekly. Each week, I find four links about content, design, technology, and strategy that you don t want to miss, and then I send them out via email on Wednesday afternoon. Reading this newsletter will help you make your website more powerful and successful. Go to <a href="http://studiopress.com/news" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">studiopress.com/news</a> and sign up in one step right there at the top of the page. That s <a href="http://studiopress.com/news" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">studiopress.com/news</a>. <h3>Rate and Review Sites on Apple Podcasts</h3> And finally, if you enjoy the Sites podcast, please subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts (formerly known as iTunes), and consider giving us a rating or a review over there as well. One quick tip on that: to make the best use of your review, let me know something in particular you like about the show. That feedback is really important. To find us in Apple Podcasts, search for StudioPress Sites and look for the striking purple logo that was designed by Rafal Tomal. Or you can also go to the URL <a href="http://sites.fm/apple" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">sites.fm/apple</a> and it will redirect you to our Apple Podcasts page. And with that, we come to the close of another episode. Thank you for listening to this episode of Sites. I appreciate you being here. Join me next time, and let s keep building powerful, successful WordPress websites together. This episode of sites was brought to you by StudioPress Sites, which was awarded Fastest WordPress Hosting of 2017 in an independent speed test . If you want to make WordPress fast, secure, and easy — and, I mean, why wouldn t you — visit <a href="http://studiopress.com/sites" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">studiopress.com/sites</a> today and see which plan fits your needs. That s <a href="http://studiopress.com/sites" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">studiopress.com/sites</a>.

[22] 6 SEO Friendly Tips to Improve Site Speed on WordPress Blogs

Social media is a great way to extend your reach and influence … if you know how to do it right. Rainmaker.FM is Brought to You By   Discover why 201,344 website owners trust StudioPress, the industry standard for premium WordPress themes and plugins.  Launch your new site today!  Social media channels play an important role in driving visitors to your WordPress site. And if you are persistent, reaching influencers on social media can dramatically expand your online reach. In this 26 minute episode, Sean Jackson interviews Katy Katz on the tactics and techniques you can use right now to expand the reach and influence of your WordPress site. Listen to Site Success: Tips for Building Better WordPress Websites below ... Download MP3Subscribe by RSSSubscribe in iTunes Important links from this episode:  Try StudioPress Sites Sites Weekly Newsletter Subscribe to Sites on Apple Podcasts Connect with Sean on Twitter 

Social media is a great way to extend your reach and influence … if you know how to do it right. <a href="http://Rainmaker.FM" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Rainmaker.FM</a> is Brought to You By<a href="//www.studiopress.com/fm" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"></a> <code> <h3><a href="//www.studiopress.com/fm" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"></a></h3> Discover why 201,344 website owners trust StudioPress, the industry standard for premium WordPress themes and plugins. <a href="//www.studiopress.com/fm" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Launch your new site today!</a> </code> Social media channels play an important role in driving visitors to your WordPress site. And if you are persistent, reaching influencers on social media can dramatically expand your online reach. In this 26 minute episode, Sean Jackson interviews Katy Katz on the tactics and techniques you can use right now to expand the reach and influence of your WordPress site. Listen to <a href="https://rainmaker.fm/series/sites/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Site Success: Tips for Building Better WordPress Websites</a> below ... <a href="https://rainmaker.fm/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/sites-success-52.mp3" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Download MP3</a><a href="https://rainmaker.fm/series/sites/feed/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Subscribe by RSS</a><a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/id1251630646" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Subscribe in iTunes</a> <h3>Important links from this episode:</h3> <ul> <li><a href="https://www.studiopress.com/sites" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Try StudioPress Sites</a></li> <li><a href="https://www.studiopress.com/news" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Sites Weekly Newsletter</a></li> <li><a href="http://sites.fm/apple" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Subscribe to Sites on Apple Podcasts</a></li> <li><a href="https://twitter.com/seanthinks" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Connect with Sean on Twitter</a></li> </ul>

[52] The Simple Way to Manage Social Media for Maximum Success

With major changes coming to WordPress core in 2018, web designers will have a new set of challenges. Are you ready for them? Rainmaker.FM is Brought to You By   Discover why 201,344 website owners trust StudioPress, the industry standard for premium WordPress themes and plugins.  Launch your new site today!  With the coming introduction of Gutenberg in 2018, WordPress designers and developers will be presented with new functionality that has direct impact on their effort. To help you plan for 2018, we discuss a number of changes that StudioPress will be introducing for themes. We also touch base on a few of the key performance enhancements you should be thinking about, including Google AMP, and website performance. So if WordPress design is important to you, then you will want to listen to this year-end episode. In this 23 minute episode, Brian Gardner, founder of StudioPress, shares his thoughts on WordPress design trends for the coming year. Listen to Site Success: Tips for Building Better WordPress Websites below ... Download MP3Subscribe by RSSSubscribe in iTunes Important links from this episode:  Try StudioPress Sites Sites Weekly Newsletter Subscribe to Sites on Apple Podcasts Connect with Sean on Twitter 

With major changes coming to WordPress core in 2018, web designers will have a new set of challenges. Are you ready for them? <a href="http://Rainmaker.FM" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Rainmaker.FM</a> is Brought to You By<a href="//www.studiopress.com/fm" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"></a> <code> <h3><a href="//www.studiopress.com/fm" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"></a></h3> Discover why 201,344 website owners trust StudioPress, the industry standard for premium WordPress themes and plugins. <a href="//www.studiopress.com/fm" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Launch your new site today!</a> </code> With the coming introduction of Gutenberg in 2018, WordPress designers and developers will be presented with new functionality that has direct impact on their effort. To help you plan for 2018, we discuss a number of changes that StudioPress will be introducing for themes. We also touch base on a few of the key performance enhancements you should be thinking about, including Google AMP, and website performance. So if WordPress design is important to you, then you will want to listen to this year-end episode. In this 23 minute episode, Brian Gardner, founder of StudioPress, shares his thoughts on WordPress design trends for the coming year. Listen to <a href="https://rainmaker.fm/series/sites/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Site Success: Tips for Building Better WordPress Websites</a> below ... <a href="https://rainmaker.fm/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/sites-season-1-episode-30.mp3" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Download MP3</a><a href="https://rainmaker.fm/series/sites/feed/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Subscribe by RSS</a><a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/id1251630646" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Subscribe in iTunes</a> <h3>Important links from this episode:</h3> <ul> <li><a href="https://www.studiopress.com/sites" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Try StudioPress Sites</a></li> <li><a href="https://www.studiopress.com/news" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Sites Weekly Newsletter</a></li> <li><a href="http://sites.fm/apple" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Subscribe to Sites on Apple Podcasts</a></li> <li><a href="https://twitter.com/seanthinks" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Connect with Sean on Twitter</a></li> </ul>

[30] WordPress Design Trends for 2018

Pamela Wilson — author of Master Content Marketing — joins the show to share her framework for creating compelling content on your site. Rainmaker.FM is Brought to You By   Discover why 201,344 website owners trust StudioPress, the industry standard for premium WordPress themes and plugins.  Launch your new site today!  Create a content plan for your website is not hard — if you know the right way to put it all together. Lucky for you, we have a true expert in the field to walk you through all the elements you need to succeed. In this 29 minute episode, Sean Jackson and Pamela Wilson walk you through every stage of creating a content plan for your site — from a high level to the tactical execution. Listen to Site Success: Tips for Building Better WordPress Websites below ... Download MP3Subscribe by RSSSubscribe in iTunes Important links from this episode:  Master Content Marketing by Pamela Wilson A Simple Plan for Writing One Powerful Piece of Online Content per Week Try StudioPress Sites Sites Weekly Newsletter Subscribe to Sites on Apple Podcasts Connect with Sean on Twitter 

Pamela Wilson — author of Master Content Marketing — joins the show to share her framework for creating compelling content on your site. <a href="http://Rainmaker.FM" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Rainmaker.FM</a> is Brought to You By<a href="//www.studiopress.com/fm" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"></a> <code> <h3><a href="//www.studiopress.com/fm" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"></a></h3> Discover why 201,344 website owners trust StudioPress, the industry standard for premium WordPress themes and plugins. <a href="//www.studiopress.com/fm" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Launch your new site today!</a> </code> Create a content plan for your website is not hard — if you know the right way to put it all together. Lucky for you, we have a true expert in the field to walk you through all the elements you need to succeed. In this 29 minute episode, Sean Jackson and Pamela Wilson walk you through every stage of creating a content plan for your site — from a high level to the tactical execution. Listen to <a href="https://rainmaker.fm/series/sites/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Site Success: Tips for Building Better WordPress Websites</a> below ... <a href="https://rainmaker.fm/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/site-success-42.mp3" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Download MP3</a><a href="https://rainmaker.fm/series/sites/feed/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Subscribe by RSS</a><a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/id1251630646" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Subscribe in iTunes</a> <h3>Important links from this episode:</h3> <ul> <li><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Master-Content-Marketing-Strategy-Profitable/dp/0997875402" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Master Content Marketing by Pamela Wilson</a></li> <li><a href="https://www.copyblogger.com/weekly-content-plan/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">A Simple Plan for Writing One Powerful Piece of Online Content per Week</a></li> <li><a href="https://www.studiopress.com/sites" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Try StudioPress Sites</a></li> <li><a href="https://www.studiopress.com/news" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Sites Weekly Newsletter</a></li> <li><a href="http://sites.fm/apple" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Subscribe to Sites on Apple Podcasts</a></li> <li><a href="https://twitter.com/seanthinks" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Connect with Sean on Twitter</a></li> </ul>

[42] A 3-Point Plan for Creating Your Initial Content

This week, we are going to talk about an element of your website that will impact every single word and image you publish. It may not be the sexiest topic, but it sure is important. Hosting. Listen to Site Success: Tips for Building Better WordPress Websites below ... Download MP3Subscribe by RSSSubscribe in iTunes Important links from this episode:  Try StudioPress Sites Sites Weekly Newsletter High Performance WordPress Hosting  The Transcript Jerod Morris: Welcome to Sites, a podcast by the teams at StudioPress and Copyblogger. In this show, we deliver time-tested insight on the four pillars of a successful WordPress website: content, design, technology, and strategy. We want to help you get a little bit closer to reaching your online goals, one episode at a time. I’m your host Jerod Morris. Sites is brought to you by StudioPress Sites — the complete hosted solution that makes WordPress fast, secure, and easy without sacrificing power or flexibility. For example, you can upload your own WordPress theme, or, you can use one of the 20 beautiful StudioPress themes that are included and just one click away. Explore all the amazing things you can do with a StudioPress Site, and you’ll understand why this is way more than traditional WordPress hosting. No matter how you’ll be using your site, we have a plan to fit your needs — and your budget. To learn more, visit studiopress.com/sites. That’s studiopress.com/sites. Hey there, and welcome to episode 3 of Sites. As we continue to rotate through the four pillars of a successful website, we find ourselves at the point of discussing technology. If you missed episode 1 about the fundamentals of content marketing strategy, or episode 2 about how design can impact your content marketing, do take some time and review those episodes at some point. Today, we are going to talk about an element of your website that will impact every single word and image you publish. It may not be the sexiest topic, but it sure is important. Hosting. You may be wondering … is it really THAT important? Aren’t there plenty of cheap $5 per month hosting options out there that I can start with, and upgrade later if my site actually goes anywhere? Seems logical, right? But here’s the problem. Shoddy WordPress hosting will likely keep you from succeeding in the first place, and that’s a big problem. I know. I dealt with this back in the day and it cost me traffic and money — more on that in a bit. The reality is, those cheap WordPress hosting offers — $5 per month! — mean that your site is jammed on a server with hundreds even thousands of other sites. The hosting company is betting that you won’t ever ever get substantial traffic, and that you’ll simply keep paying the paltry fee in obscurity. And what happens if you do manage to get traffic? Your site could crash. Or your traffic might get siphoned off. Or you could be liable for huge overage charges. Or your site could slow to a crawl. And speaking of a slow-loading site … that’s a major issue. Just because your host promotes reliable uptime, doesn’t mean it’s enough. Your site may be “up” … but is it FAST? Because it needs to be. Not only will site visitors reject your site if it’s slow by even a few seconds, but do you know that Google and other search engines will as well? It’s true. Site speed is a ranking factor. And these are two audiences — your hard-earned visitors and search engine robots — that you absolutely do not want to make wait. The quality of your hosting is one of the main factors that will determine whether they have to. The bottom line is this: if you’re serious about building a successful website, then you need serious hosting. You need hosting with impeccable uptime, hosting that can scale when you need it to, and hosting that delivers fast page-load speeds every time a visitor or search engine tries to visit your site. Okay, now, I know what you’re thinking: I work for StudioPress and this podcast is sponsored by StudioPress Sites … so this entire episode is just one big advertisement for our WordPress hosting. Right? I mean, sure, that is obviously true to a point. The entire Sites podcast is a long-term content marketing play to build an audience around useful episodes that will help you get better at content, design, technology, and strategy — no matter where you host your site. In the process, we hope to built some authority, rapport, and trust, and hopefully that translates into you giving StudioPress Sites a spin. As for this episode in particular, I’ll just state the obvious: I wouldn’t outline essential hosting elements, and tell you how important they are, if we weren’t delivering them ourselves with StudioPress Sites. But here’s the thing … this episode is relevant no matter where you choose to host your site. We’re not the only company selling premium WordPress hosting. We think we’re the best, of course, and we’d like the chance to convince you of that, but my purpose in delivering this episode goes beyond trying to convince you to try Sites. I want to convince you that you need premium WordPress hosting, and that it’s worth paying for. Period. Once you’re convinced of that fact, check out all of the different providers, including StudioPress Sites, and see which one fits you best. Each one offers something a little different. For example, if you’re using a Genesis Framework theme, I think you’ll be really hard-pressed to find an option better than StudioPress Sites because it is optimized for Genesis Framework themes. Any WordPress theme will run great on Sites, but there’s a special synergy between Sites and Genesis. And, as another example, if you’re concerned about SEO, then StudioPress Sites has patented SEO tools built right into it, no extra charge. Other providers will have their specialties too. Again, the point is: if you’re serious about your website, then you need to be serious about your hosting. That means you should be ready to pay $30-35 per month for hosting that delivers the reliability, security, and response time you need. Otherwise, you’re setting yourself up for failure. I know, because it happened to me, as I mentioned before. And that’s why I wanted this to be one of the first four episodes of the Sites podcast. I want you to avoid the agony I felt back when I was running my first blog … and didn’t know any better … and went with cheap hosting. The site was MidwestSportsFans.com. I launched it in 2008. It’s still live online, but dormant now in terms of new content. I haven’t posted on it in years. At one time, though, it was one of the most popular sports blogs in world. One post I wrote even got me a guest appearance on ESPN. At its height, Midwest Sports Fans was delivering many millions of pageviews per month — with massive spikes coming for big events like the Super Bowl and March Madness. And with those pageviews came revenue. I wasn’t making as much as I could have made — this was in my pre-Copyblogger days, so I didn’t understand the power of building an email list yet *sigh* — but we were raking in thousands of dollars a month in ad revenue, and thousands more in affiliate revenue. Times were good. This site that I started as a little side project to teach myself WordPress had morphed into a legitimate business. I was proud. Excited about where it was, and enthused about where it could go next. So imagine my disappointment and anger when I found out that a good chunk of my traffic was being siphoned off, and not making it to my site. Even worse, no one alerted me. It seemed that my site had outgrown my hosting plan. And while I certainly share some responsibility in that happening, it sure would have been nice to have a host that looked out for me. But I never got any notices. I wasn’t even overcharged. And I would have gladly paid more! Instead, I was just losing out on traffic month after month. I’m lucky my business partner at the time was smarter about the tech stuff than me and uncovered this. Because I’m a content guy. I want to write my blog posts and produce my podcasts and interact with my community … I have neither the time nor the inclination to get too far down in the tech weeds. You might feel the same way. So we said enough is enough with cheap, crappy, you’re-on-your-own hosting. Instead, we took matters into our own hands. We developed our own innovative hosting stack. Midwest Sports Fans was our first client, and, to no one’s surprise, reported traffic spiked big time after we made the switch. Then we built a small company around it as other serious bloggers and WordPress users decided they were done with bad hosting experiences too, found out about us, and made the switch. Fast forward a couple of years and we joined up with Copyblogger Media, and the latest evolution of the hosting stack and infrastructure we built is what powers StudioPress Sites. It’s what I trust. I’ve seen the other side. I’ve been on the other side. And it sucks. I worked hard for my traffic, and it was being taken away for no good reason. You don’t want anything similar to happen to you. So take it from me, someone who has been in your shoes — and who, actually, is still in your shoes, because I’m in the process of developing a new site right now, and one of the very first bits of research I did was to find the absolute best place to host my content. It’s a simple message: take your hosting choice seriously. Don’t pay less for the cheap stuff. Invest in hosting you can really count on. Your content deserves it. Your audience deserves. You deserve it. Now for this week’s calls to action:  I want you to go compare and contrast three premium WordPress hosting providers. Obviously, I think StudioPress Sites should be one of them, but pick whichever three you like.  Look at the different plans they offer, look at the price, look at the features, assess whose support your trust, analyze which one is the best fit for your theme (or has an included theme that you like). Etcetera. Do your homework. This way, you can put your best foot forward from the beginning with your new site, or you can ask yourself an important, informed decision about migrating if you realize another provider fits you better. That’s your homework. Take it seriously and it could pay huge dividends down the road for you.  Make sure you stay up to date and informed. Sign up for free podcast updates and our curated weekly email newsletter, Sites Weekly.  Each week, I find four links about content, design, technology, and strategy that you don’t want to miss and send them out on Wednesday afternoon. Reading this newsletter will help you make your website more powerful and successful. Go to studiopress.com/news and sign up in one step right there at the top of the page. That’s studiopress.com/news.  And finally, if you enjoy the Sites podcast, please consider giving us a rating or a review over at Apple Podcasts — formerly known as iTunes.  One quick tip on that: to make the best use of your review, let me know if there is something in particular you like about the show — that way I make sure not to remove it as the show evolves! To find us in Apple Podcasts, search for StudioPress Sites. Next week here on Sites, we shift from technology to strategy We’ll be talking about the most dangerous threat to your content marketing strategy. Think you know what it is? Tune in to find out. That’s next week, on Sites. Thank you for listening to this episode of Sites. I appreciate you being here. Join me next week, and let’s keep building powerful, successful websites together. This episode of Sites was brought to you by StudioPress Sites, which was awarded “Fastest WordPress Hosting” of 2017 in an independent speed test . If you want to make WordPress fast, secure, and easy — and, I mean, why wouldn’t you — visit studiopress.com/sites today and see which plan fits your needs. That’s studiopress.com/sites.

This week, we are going to talk about an element of your website that will impact every single word and image you publish. It may not be the sexiest topic, but it sure is important. Hosting. Listen to <a href="https://rainmaker.fm/series/sites/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Site Success: Tips for Building Better WordPress Websites</a> below ... <a href="https://rainmaker.fm/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/sites-season-1-episode-3.mp3" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Download MP3</a><a href="https://rainmaker.fm/series/sites/feed/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Subscribe by RSS</a><a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/id1251630646" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Subscribe in iTunes</a> Important links from this episode: <ul> <li><a href="http://studiopress.com/sites" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Try StudioPress Sites</a></li> <li><a href="http://studiopress.com/news" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Sites Weekly Newsletter</a></li> <li><a href="https://www.studiopress.com/performance/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">High Performance WordPress Hosting</a></li> </ul> <h2>The Transcript</h2> Jerod Morris: Welcome to Sites, a podcast by the teams at StudioPress and Copyblogger. In this show, we deliver time-tested insight on the four pillars of a successful WordPress website: content, design, technology, and strategy. We want to help you get a little bit closer to reaching your online goals, one episode at a time. I’m your host Jerod Morris. Sites is brought to you by StudioPress Sites — the complete hosted solution that makes WordPress fast, secure, and easy without sacrificing power or flexibility. For example, you can upload your own WordPress theme, or, you can use one of the 20 beautiful StudioPress themes that are included and just one click away. Explore all the amazing things you can do with a StudioPress Site, and you’ll understand why this is way more than traditional WordPress hosting. No matter how you’ll be using your site, we have a plan to fit your needs — and your budget. To learn more, visit <a href="https://www.studiopress.com/sites" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">studiopress.com/sites</a>. That’s <a href="http://studiopress.com/sites" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">studiopress.com/sites</a>. Hey there, and welcome to episode 3 of Sites. As we continue to rotate through the four pillars of a successful website, we find ourselves at the point of discussing technology. If you missed <a href="https://rainmaker.fm/audio/sites/winning-content-marketing/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">episode 1</a> about the fundamentals of content marketing strategy, or <a href="https://rainmaker.fm/audio/sites/design-content-marketing/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">episode 2</a> about how design can impact your content marketing, do take some time and review those episodes at some point. Today, we are going to talk about an element of your website that will impact every single word and image you publish. It may not be the sexiest topic, but it sure is important. Hosting. You may be wondering … is it really THAT important? Aren’t there plenty of cheap $5 per month hosting options out there that I can start with, and upgrade later if my site actually goes anywhere? Seems logical, right? But here’s the problem. Shoddy WordPress hosting will likely keep you from succeeding in the first place, and that’s a big problem. I know. I dealt with this back in the day and it cost me traffic and money — more on that in a bit. The reality is, those cheap WordPress hosting offers — $5 per month! — mean that your site is jammed on a server with hundreds even thousands of other sites. The hosting company is betting that you won’t ever ever get substantial traffic, and that you’ll simply keep paying the paltry fee in obscurity. And what happens if you do manage to get traffic? Your site could crash. Or your traffic might get siphoned off. Or you could be liable for huge overage charges. Or your site could slow to a crawl. And speaking of a slow-loading site … that’s a major issue. Just because your host promotes reliable uptime, doesn’t mean it’s enough. Your site may be “up” … but is it FAST? Because it needs to be. Not only will site visitors reject your site if it’s slow by even a few seconds, but do you know that Google and other search engines will as well? It’s true. Site speed is a ranking factor. And these are two audiences — your hard-earned visitors and search engine robots — that you absolutely do not want to make wait. The quality of your hosting is one of the main factors that will determine whether they have to. The bottom line is this: if you’re serious about building a successful website, then you need serious hosting. You need hosting with impeccable uptime, hosting that can scale when you need it to, and hosting that delivers fast page-load speeds every time a visitor or search engine tries to visit your site. Okay, now, I know what you’re thinking: I work for StudioPress and this podcast is sponsored by StudioPress Sites … so this entire episode is just one big advertisement for our WordPress hosting. Right? I mean, sure, that is obviously true to a point. The entire Sites podcast is a long-term content marketing play to build an audience around useful episodes that will help you get better at content, design, technology, and strategy — no matter where you host your site. In the process, we hope to built some authority, rapport, and trust, and hopefully that translates into you giving StudioPress Sites a spin. As for this episode in particular, I’ll just state the obvious: I wouldn’t outline essential hosting elements, and tell you how important they are, if we weren’t delivering them ourselves with StudioPress Sites. But here’s the thing … this episode is relevant no matter where you choose to host your site. We’re not the only company selling premium WordPress hosting. We think we’re the best, of course, and we’d like the chance to convince you of that, but my purpose in delivering this episode goes beyond trying to convince you to try Sites. I want to convince you that you need premium WordPress hosting, and that it’s worth paying for. Period. Once you’re convinced of that fact, check out all of the different providers, including StudioPress Sites, and see which one fits you best. Each one offers something a little different. For example, if you’re using a Genesis Framework theme, I think you’ll be really hard-pressed to find an option better than StudioPress Sites because it is optimized for Genesis Framework themes. Any WordPress theme will run great on Sites, but there’s a special synergy between Sites and Genesis. And, as another example, if you’re concerned about SEO, then StudioPress Sites has patented SEO tools built right into it, no extra charge. Other providers will have their specialties too. Again, the point is: if you’re serious about your website, then you need to be serious about your hosting. That means you should be ready to pay $30-35 per month for hosting that delivers the reliability, security, and response time you need. Otherwise, you’re setting yourself up for failure. I know, because it happened to me, as I mentioned before. And that’s why I wanted this to be one of the first four episodes of the Sites podcast. I want you to avoid the agony I felt back when I was running my first blog … and didn’t know any better … and went with cheap hosting. The site was <a href="http://MidwestSportsFans.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">MidwestSportsFans.com</a>. I launched it in 2008. It’s still live online, but dormant now in terms of new content. I haven’t posted on it in years. At one time, though, it was one of the most popular sports blogs in world. One post I wrote even got me a guest appearance on ESPN. At its height, Midwest Sports Fans was delivering many millions of pageviews per month — with massive spikes coming for big events like the Super Bowl and March Madness. And with those pageviews came revenue. I wasn’t making as much as I could have made — this was in my pre-Copyblogger days, so I didn’t understand the power of building an email list yet *sigh* — but we were raking in thousands of dollars a month in ad revenue, and thousands more in affiliate revenue. Times were good. This site that I started as a little side project to teach myself WordPress had morphed into a legitimate business. I was proud. Excited about where it was, and enthused about where it could go next. So imagine my disappointment and anger when I found out that a good chunk of my traffic was being siphoned off, and not making it to my site. Even worse, no one alerted me. It seemed that my site had outgrown my hosting plan. And while I certainly share some responsibility in that happening, it sure would have been nice to have a host that looked out for me. But I never got any notices. I wasn’t even overcharged. And I would have gladly paid more! Instead, I was just losing out on traffic month after month. I’m lucky my business partner at the time was smarter about the tech stuff than me and uncovered this. Because I’m a content guy. I want to write my blog posts and produce my podcasts and interact with my community … I have neither the time nor the inclination to get too far down in the tech weeds. You might feel the same way. So we said enough is enough with cheap, crappy, you’re-on-your-own hosting. Instead, we took matters into our own hands. We developed our own innovative hosting stack. Midwest Sports Fans was our first client, and, to no one’s surprise, reported traffic spiked big time after we made the switch. Then we built a small company around it as other serious bloggers and WordPress users decided they were done with bad hosting experiences too, found out about us, and made the switch. Fast forward a couple of years and we joined up with Copyblogger Media, and the latest evolution of the hosting stack and infrastructure we built is what powers StudioPress Sites. It’s what I trust. I’ve seen the other side. I’ve been on the other side. And it sucks. I worked hard for my traffic, and it was being taken away for no good reason. You don’t want anything similar to happen to you. So take it from me, someone who has been in your shoes — and who, actually, is still in your shoes, because I’m in the process of developing a new site right now, and one of the very first bits of research I did was to find the absolute best place to host my content. It’s a simple message: take your hosting choice seriously. Don’t pay less for the cheap stuff. Invest in hosting you can really count on. Your content deserves it. Your audience deserves. You deserve it. <h3>Now for this week’s calls to action:</h3> <ol> <li>I want you to go compare and contrast three premium WordPress hosting providers. Obviously, I think StudioPress Sites should be one of them, but pick whichever three you like.</li> </ol> Look at the different plans they offer, look at the price, look at the features, assess whose support your trust, analyze which one is the best fit for your theme (or has an included theme that you like). Etcetera. Do your homework. This way, you can put your best foot forward from the beginning with your new site, or you can ask yourself an important, informed decision about migrating if you realize another provider fits you better. That’s your homework. Take it seriously and it could pay huge dividends down the road for you. <ol> <li>Make sure you stay up to date and informed. Sign up for free podcast updates and our curated weekly email newsletter, Sites Weekly.</li> </ol> Each week, I find four links about content, design, technology, and strategy that you don’t want to miss and send them out on Wednesday afternoon. Reading this newsletter will help you make your website more powerful and successful. Go to <a href="http://studiopress.com/news" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">studiopress.com/news</a> and sign up in one step right there at the top of the page. That’s <a href="http://studiopress.com/news" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">studiopress.com/news</a>. <ol> <li>And finally, if you enjoy the Sites podcast, please consider giving us a rating or a review over at Apple Podcasts — formerly known as iTunes.</li> </ol> One quick tip on that: to make the best use of your review, let me know if there is something in particular you like about the show — that way I make sure not to remove it as the show evolves! To <a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/sites/id1251630646" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">find us in Apple Podcasts</a>, search for StudioPress Sites. Next week here on Sites, we shift from technology to strategy We’ll be talking about the most dangerous threat to your content marketing strategy. Think you know what it is? Tune in to find out. That’s next week, on Sites. Thank you for listening to this episode of Sites. I appreciate you being here. Join me next week, and let’s keep building powerful, successful websites together. This episode of Sites was brought to you by StudioPress Sites, which was awarded “Fastest WordPress Hosting” of 2017 in an independent speed test . If you want to make WordPress fast, secure, and easy — and, I mean, why wouldn’t you — visit <a href="http://studiopress.com/sites" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">studiopress.com/sites</a> today and see which plan fits your needs. That’s <a href="http://studiopress.com/sites" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">studiopress.com/sites</a>.

[03] Is WordPress Hosting Really That Important?

This week, Sean Jackson (creator of the patented SEO tool Scribe) joins Jerod to discuss SEO. We reflect on last week s episode about the importance of site speed, discuss the emerging importance of preparing your content for voice search, and then deliver some important news about the future of this podcast. Listen to Site Success: Tips for Building Better WordPress Websites below ... Download MP3Subscribe by RSSSubscribe in iTunes Important links from this episode:  Try StudioPress Sites Sites Weekly Newsletter Subscribe to Sites on Apple Podcasts @JerodMorris on Twitter @SeanThinks on Twitter

This week, Sean Jackson (creator of the patented SEO tool Scribe) joins Jerod to discuss SEO. We reflect on last week s episode about the importance of site speed, discuss the emerging importance of preparing your content for voice search, and then deliver some important news about the future of this podcast. Listen to <a href="https://rainmaker.fm/series/sites/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Site Success: Tips for Building Better WordPress Websites</a> below ... <a href="https://rainmaker.fm/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/sites-season-1-episode-23.mp3" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Download MP3</a><a href="https://rainmaker.fm/series/sites/feed/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Subscribe by RSS</a><a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/id1251630646" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Subscribe in iTunes</a> Important links from this episode: <ul> <li><a href="http://studiopress.com/sites" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Try StudioPress Sites</a></li> <li><a href="http://studiopress.com/news" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Sites Weekly Newsletter</a></li> <li><a href="http://sites.fm/apple" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Subscribe to Sites on Apple Podcasts</a></li> <li><a href="http://twitter.com/JerodMorris" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">@JerodMorris on Twitter</a></li> <li><a href="http://twitter.com/SeanThinks" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">@SeanThinks on Twitter</a></li></ul>

[23] What’s New in SEO? (And What s the Future of This Podcast?)

Now that you have everything in place to build your email list, and you are publishing content, it s time to start getting some attention, driving traffic, and building community. Social media is a great place to do this — but, as with anything else, you should have a smart, coherent strategy to make sure that you aren t wasting your time. Rainmaker.FM is Brought to You By   Discover why 201,344 website owners trust StudioPress, the industry standard for premium WordPress themes and plugins.  Launch your new site today!  And one of the questions I m going to propose that you ask yourself may be a bit surprising, because it takes a different view of social media than how we usually think about it … Here is a quick rundown of what you’ll find in this episode:  Why determining which social media channel you NEED to be on is the clear first step The importance of being prepared to listen, interact, and offer value more than just posting links Why listening to your audience in their natural habitat is one of the greatest, and most underrated, features of social media What can you automate? And what should you use to do it?  Listen to Site Success: Tips for Building Better WordPress Websites below ... Download MP3Subscribe by RSSSubscribe in iTunes Other links of note:  Try StudioPress Sites Sites Weekly Newsletter Subscribe to Sites on Apple Podcasts Contact Jerod: jerod@copyblogger.com 

Now that you have everything in place to build your email list, and you are publishing content, it s time to start getting some attention, driving traffic, and building community. Social media is a great place to do this — but, as with anything else, you should have a smart, coherent strategy to make sure that you aren t wasting your time. <a href="http://Rainmaker.FM" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Rainmaker.FM</a> is Brought to You By<a href="//www.studiopress.com/fm" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"></a> <code> <h3><a href="//www.studiopress.com/fm" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"></a></h3> Discover why 201,344 website owners trust StudioPress, the industry standard for premium WordPress themes and plugins. <a href="//www.studiopress.com/fm" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Launch your new site today!</a> </code> And one of the questions I m going to propose that you ask yourself may be a bit surprising, because it takes a different view of social media than how we usually think about it … Here is a quick rundown of what you’ll find in this episode: <ul> <li>Why determining which social media channel you NEED to be on is the clear first step</li> <li>The importance of being prepared to listen, interact, and offer value more than just posting links</li> <li>Why listening to your audience in their natural habitat is one of the greatest, and most underrated, features of social media</li> <li>What can you automate? And what should you use to do it?</li> </ul> Listen to <a href="https://rainmaker.fm/series/sites/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Site Success: Tips for Building Better WordPress Websites</a> below ... <a href="https://rainmaker.fm/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/site-success-51.mp3" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Download MP3</a><a href="https://rainmaker.fm/series/sites/feed/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Subscribe by RSS</a><a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/id1251630646" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Subscribe in iTunes</a> <h3>Other links of note:</h3> <ul> <li><a href="https://www.studiopress.com/sites" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Try StudioPress Sites</a></li> <li><a href="https://www.studiopress.com/news" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Sites Weekly Newsletter</a></li> <li><a href="http://sites.fm/apple" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Subscribe to Sites on Apple Podcasts</a></li> <li>Contact Jerod: jerod@copyblogger.com</li> </ul>

[51] 3Q for a Smart Social Media Strategy

Not only do you want to attract your ideal customer, but you want to repel the people who you know are not right for you. In this episode, we provide specific examples that illustrate why understanding your WHO is so important, and then we lay out a proven strategy for empathy that will help you get into the eyes, ears, and mind of your ideal customer. Listen to Site Success: Tips for Building Better WordPress Websites below ... Download MP3Subscribe by RSSSubscribe in iTunes Important links from this episode:  Try StudioPress Sites Sites Weekly Newsletter Subscribe to Sites on Apple Podcasts Brian Clark’s article: How to Attract Your Ideal Customer with Perfectly Positioned Content One-click download of empathy map PDF  The Transcript Jerod Morris: Welcome to Sites, a podcast by the teams at StudioPress and Copyblogger. In this show, we deliver time-tested insight on the four pillars of a successful WordPress website: content, design, technology, and strategy. We want to help you get a little bit closer to reaching your online goals, one episode at a time. I’m your host Jerod Morris. Sites is brought to you by StudioPress Sites — the complete hosted solution that makes WordPress fast, secure, and easy … without sacrificing power or flexibility. For example, you can upload your own WordPress theme, or, you can use one of the 20 beautiful StudioPress themes that are included and just one click away. Explore all the amazing things you can do with a StudioPress Site, and you’ll understand why this is way more than traditional WordPress hosting. No matter how you’ll be using your site, we have a plan to fit your needs — and your budget. To learn more, visit studiopress.com/sites. That’s studiopress.com/sites. Welcome to Episode 5 of Sites. As you may have seen, last week we announced the show on Copyblogger — its official public introduction — and the response has been swift and overwhelming. Thank you to everyone who has subscribed, left ratings and reviews over at Apple Podcasts, and reached out to me on Twitter with kind words. I really appreciate it. We are just getting rolling here with Sites, and I look forward to continuing on this journey with you toward better, more powerful websites. So … in our first four episodes, we did one complete cycle through our four pillars of a successful WordPress website. Now in this episode we find ourselves back at the beginning … with content. In Episode 1, we discussed the simple three-step process for creating a winning content marketing strategy — understanding the who, the what, and the how. That episode is an important precursor to this one, so I recommend you listen to it. In today’s episode, we’re going to build on that overview and dive deeper into the first of the three steps: the WHO. Then in the next two content episodes after this one, we’ll discuss the WHAT and the HOW. Why is the WHO so important? Here is a quick review from Episode 1: Before you can get someone to buy from you, you need to know what to say to them, and how to say it. You’ll never get that right unless you know who you’re talking to. Call them personas, avatars, or even characters if you like. Your first step is to do the research that allows you to create a fictional, generalized representation of your ideal customer. Don’t underestimate the importance of the word ideal in “your ideal customer.” That, of course, is an excerpt from Brian Clark’s blog post The Simple 3-Step Process for Creating a Winning Content Marketing Strategy, on which Episode 1 was based. This week’s episode, Episode 5, is based on Brian’s follow up post, titled: How to Attract Your Ideal Customer with Perfectly Positioned Content. I will perform that post for you now, edited slightly to fit the audio medium. Immediately after the reading, I’ll issue this week’s hyper-specific call to action. Here now is Brian’s post, How to Attract Your Ideal Customer with Perfectly Positioned Content. How to Attract Your Ideal Customer with Perfectly Positioned Content “Hello, I’m a Mac.” “And I’m a PC.” You remember Apple’s “Get a Mac” series of commercials that ran from May 2006 to October 2009, right? The commercials were short vignettes featuring John Hodgman as the sweet-yet-bumbling PC and Justin Long as the creative, hip Mac. Those 66 short spots were named the best advertising campaign of the previous decade by Adweek. The success of the long-running campaign leads one to believe that Apple certainly knows who its ideal customer is. Of course they do … because they chose their ideal customer, right from the birth of the Macintosh itself. That doesn’t mean that everyone responded favorably to the ads. While researching for this piece, I ran across a commenter who maintained that the campaign had “backfired” because the PC character had actually been more appealing to him. No, the campaign didn’t backfire (no one runs a series of ads for three years if they’re not working). Instead, Apple chose who not to attract as much as they chose who they hoped to convert. Apple knew they were never going to get hardcore PC people to switch to a Mac. Instead, Apple used these 66 humorous little stories to target those who were more likely to “swing” toward Apple — after being educated about the benefits by the contrast between the two characters. Sounds like really great content marketing to me. In fact, given the nature and duration of the Get a Mac campaign, it resembled serial online video marketing more than traditional advertising. So, the first (and most important) step in our 3-step content marketing strategy is determining your “Who.” Who do you want to attract and speak to, and just as importantly, who do you want to drive in the other direction? It all comes down to your values, first and foremost. What are your core values? Apple’s values were well reflected in the Get a Mac campaign — creativity, simplicity, and rebellion against the status quo. These core values were consistently present in the prior “Crazy Ones” campaign, and before that, the iconic “1984” ad. Some feel that Apple has lost the ability to innovate since Steve Jobs passed. Whether or not that’s true, I think the perception of Apple has changed among those of us who were initially strongly attracted, because their advertising now, for the first time, tries to appeal to a more general audience. Steve would definitely not approve. Modern marketing is about matching up with the worldview of your ideal customer. Outside of a monopoly, there is no such thing as marketing that appeals to everyone, and yet, companies still try and routinely fail. On the other hand, think of Patagonia. The founder of the outdoor clothing and gear company invented an aluminum climbing wedge that could be inserted and removed without damaging the rock face. This reflects Patagonia’s founding core value: “Build the best products while creating no unnecessary environmental harm.” Of course, not every company has a core value built into the founding story. Most businesses exist to simply sell things that people want, so it’s up to management to find the core values that they want to reflect in their marketing to attract the right kind of customer. For example, there’s nothing inherently ethical about ice cream, beyond ingredients. So Ben &amp; Jerry’s adopted the values of its two founders, which had nothing at all to do with ice cream. Not everyone who likes ice cream necessarily agrees with reduced Pentagon spending and the fight against climate change, but the people who do care about those things turned Ben &amp; Jerry’s into an iconic brand. It doesn’t have to be all sunshine and light, either. If your core values fall in line with a “Greed is good” mentality, you’ll certainly find people out there who share this worldview. You just have to unflinchingly own it. You need to understand who you’re talking to, yes. But you don’t just accept who you find — you choose who to attract. What does your character look like? In the Get a Mac campaign, Apple literally created a character that personified what their ideal “swing” customer aspired to be. It’s time for us to do the same. You can call them personas or avatars if you like — I prefer character. That’s because the first step is the research that allows you to create a fictional, generalized representation of your ideal customer. As far as fiction goes, we’re creating a character that will be the protagonist in their own purchasing journey that your content will help them complete. Since this journey is based on as much reality as we can glean from our research, it’s more like a fictionalized drama “based on actual people and events.” When I say the prospect is the protagonist, that means the hero. Your content is a powerful gift that positions your brand as a guide that helps the hero complete the journey that solves their problem. If this sounds like Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey to you, nice work — we’ll elaborate on this aspect in the “What” portion of the strategy. This journey does not take place in the context of you wanting to sell more stuff. It’s understanding how the prospect thinks, feels, sees, and behaves in the context of solving the problem that sets them on the journey in the first place. And don’t forget about instilling them with your shared core values. Why would this person choose you to assist them on the journey, out of a sea of other choices? Because you already see the world like they do in an important way, and they’ll pick up on that shared worldview immediately upon coming across your content. Your core values are your secret attraction spell. Instead of hiding your world views in the hope of never offending anyone, you now realize the power of being loud and proud — and attracting like-minded people who see you as the only reasonable choice. Now, most people don’t end up using this representative character in their content, like Apple did with Justin Long in the Get a Mac commercials. It’s really a composite to refer back to so that you never lose sight of who you’re talking to, what you should say, and how you should say it. On the other hand, the Get a Mac commercials were just two guys standing and talking in front of a minimalist, all-white background. If you’re thinking in terms of online video marketing, you could do a lot worse than looking to this campaign for inspiration. And think about your explainer videos. Wouldn’t a character that represents who you’re talking to give you an edge over competing marketing approaches? At a minimum, contemplating the actual use of the character in your content will force you to get things just right. Let’s look at a method for doing that. You are not your audience Given that you’re seeking to attract people who share your values, it’s tempting to overly identify with your audience. While you’re going to have things in common, it’s dangerous to think your ideal customer is similar to you in other ways. You’re a subject matter expert at what you do, for starters, and they are not. You need to make sure you don’t fall victim to the curse of knowledge, a cognitive bias that occurs when a person with expertise unknowingly assumes that others have the background to understand. This one assumption alone can sink your content marketing efforts. Plus, you don’t want to assume that the audience shares other characteristics that you have — you want to know, as well as you can, what they’re thinking, feeling, seeing, and doing. In other words, for you to have the empathy to walk the buyer’s journey in their shoes, you must first see things from their perspective. Then you’ll be in a position to create the content that “coaches” them along the journey. Let’s take a closer look at empathy, the definition of which consists of two parts:  The intellectual identification with the feelings, thoughts, or attitudes of another. The vicarious experiencing of those feelings, thoughts, or attitudes.  It’s often said you want to enter the conversation that’s already playing in your prospect’s head. By matching up values and worldviews, you’re also aiming to enter the conversation in the prospect’s heart, and that’s how your marketing triggers the right motivation at the right time. The process we use for achieving this is called empathy mapping. At the foundation of the exercise is this statement: “Our ideal customer needs a better way to BLANK BECAUSE BLANK.” Empathy maps vary in shapes and sizes, but there are basic elements common to each one:  Four quadrants broken into Thinking, Seeing, Doing, and Feeling Two optional boxes at the bottom of the quadrants: Pains and Gains  To get started, you can download and print a large version of the empathy map we use at Copyblogger and StudioPress. Just go to the show notes for this episode: studiopress.blog/sites05. You’ll find the link to download the empathy map right under the player. The map allows you to easily organize all of your research and other relevant materials. The four quadrants represent the sensory experience of your ideal customer while in the prospect phase. Ask yourself questions such as:  What does a typical day look like in their world? How do they think about their fears and hopes? How do they feel about the problem your product solves? What are they thinking when they resist solving the problem? What do they hear when other people solve the problem? Who do they see as viable options to solve the problem? What do they see when they use your product? What is the environment? What do they say or feel when using your product? What are their pain points when using your product? Is this a positive or a painful experience for them? Do they hear positive feedback about your company from external sources? What do they hope to gain from using your product?  Jot down needs and insights that emerge as you work through this exercise. Then simply paste those notes in the proper boxes on the large empathy map. At the bottom of your empathy map, you can also draw two boxes: Pains and Gains. In the Pains box, you can put your customers’ challenges and obstacles. Ask, “What keeps my customer up at night?” In the Gains box, include the goals your customers hope to accomplish. Ask, “What motivates my customer to solve their problem?” and “What are their hopes and dreams?” Now … describe your character in detail You’re now ready to create a written composite of your character. Some people do several paragraphs, or perhaps a page of description. You, being the smart person that you are, might consider taking it further by creating a character bible, just like novelists and screenwriters do. In this context, a character bible is a detailed outline that lays out everything about your prospect in one place, so you can easily access their personality, problems, and desires. It may seem like a lot of work, but you’ll be happy you did it once you start coming up with the “What” and the “How” of your content marketing strategy. ***** That was a reading of Brian Clark’s blog post How to Attract Your Ideal Customer with Perfectly Positioned Content, the second part of a multi-part, step-by-step series on content marketing strategy that we’ll be continuing here on Sites. I know it was pretty detailed and a lot to remember just listening, especially everything about the empathy map and all of those questions. You can see the entire transcript for this episode, find a link to Brian’s blog post, and download the empathy map (one click, no email address required) at studiopress.blog/sites05. When we pick up the series again four weeks from now, the next time we discuss content, we’ll take the next step and begin the process of figuring out “what” information your prospect must have to complete their journey with you. You’ll go from stepping into your prospect’s shoes to walking the buyer’s journey with them. Now here is this week’s hyper-specific call to action: Call to action This one’s pretty obvious right? I mean, Brian basically laid out the call to action right there at the end of the blog post when he said, “You’re now ready to create a written composite of your character.” So, that’s your call to action: go create a written composite of your character. But just don’t do it off the top of your head, willy-nilly style. Make sure you do your research. Ask yourself all of the questions that Brian laid out for you. Questions like “How do they feel about the problem your product solves?” and “What do they hope to gain from using your product?” And there were others. Doing your research and answering these questions will help you fill out your empathy map, which is a part of this call to action. Don’t skip steps and don’t look for short cuts! Doing the work at this stage will set your website up for long-term, sustained success. Again, go to studiopress.blog/sites05 to see the full transcript of this episode, which includes all of those questions bulleted out, as well as the link to download the PDF for the empathy map. Coming next week, we move on to design and discuss a topic that is closely related to what we discussed this week. We’re going to discuss 3 Ways Your Web Design Can Better Connect You to Your Audience. And guess what you better know about your audience before you can create a design that helps you connect better? Exactly. The stuff we discussed in this episode. So make sure you take that call to action! That’s next week, on Sites. Finally, before I go, here are a couple more quick calls to action for you to consider: Subscribe to Sites Weekly If you haven’t yet, take this opportunity to activate your free subscription to our curated weekly email newsletter, Sites Weekly. Here’s how it works: Each week, I find four links about content, design, technology, and strategy that you don’t want to miss, and then I send them out via email on Wednesday afternoon. Reading this newsletter will help you make your website more powerful and successful. Go to studiopress.com/news and sign up in one step right there at the top of the page. That’s studiopress.com/news. Rate and Review Sites on Apple Podcasts Also, if you enjoy the Sites podcast, please subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts (formerly known as iTunes), and consider giving us a rating or a review over there as well. One quick tip on that: to make the best use of your review, let me know something in particular you like about the show. That feedback is really important. For example, one of our early reviewers says: “I’ve been a fan of Copyblogger for many years and now I’m ready for this podcast to help my artist brain build my online business (oy). I’m ready to create the site I’ve wanted to build for how many years now?? I’m super excited about the guidance this show will give me for building my dream site. Thank you Jerod Morris.” You’re welcome … and thank YOU. To find us in Apple Podcasts, search for StudioPress Sites and look for the striking purple logo that was designed by Rafal Tomal. You can also go to the URL sites.fm/apple and it will redirect you to our Apple Podcasts page. And with that, we come to the close of another episode. Thank you for listening to this episode of Sites. I appreciate you being here. Join me next week, and let’s keep building powerful, successful websites together. This episode of sites was brought to you by StudioPress Sites, which was awarded “Fastest WordPress Hosting” of 2017 in an independent speed test . If you want to make WordPress fast, secure, and easy — and, I mean, why wouldn’t you — visit studiopress.com/sites today and see which plan fits your needs. That’s studiopress.com/sites.

[05] How to Attract Your Ideal Customer with Perfectly Positioned Content

What is digital sharecropping and why is it so dangerous? We explore those questions this week on Sites, with the help of one of the most widely shared strategy articles in the history of Copyblogger. Listen to Site Success: Tips for Building Better WordPress Websites below ... Download MP3Subscribe by RSSSubscribe in iTunes Important links from this episode:  Try StudioPress Sites Sites Weekly Newsletter Sonia Simone’s article: Digital Sharecropping: The Most Dangerous Threat to Your Content Marketing Strategy  The Transcript Jerod Morris: Welcome to Sites, a podcast by the teams at StudioPress and Copyblogger. In this show, we deliver time-tested insight on the four pillars of a successful WordPress website: content, design, technology, and strategy. We want to help you get a little bit closer to reaching your online goals, one episode at a time. I m your host Jerod Morris. Sites is brought to you by StudioPress Sites — the complete hosted solution that makes WordPress fast, secure, and easy without sacrificing power or flexibility. For example, you can upload your own WordPress theme, or, you can use one of the 20 beautiful StudioPress themes that are included and just one click away. Explore all the amazing things you can do with a StudioPress Site, and you ll understand why this is way more than traditional WordPress hosting. No matter how you ll be using your site, we have a plan to fit your needs — and your budget. To learn more, visit studiopress.com/sites. That s studiopress.com/sites Hi there, and welcome to episode 4 of Sites. It s great to be back with you, and have another opportunity to help you take the next small step toward the continuous improvement of your website and overall online presence. It s time to complete the cycle. In the first three episodes we covered content, design, and technology which means there is one pillar of a successful WordPress website left for us to cover this week before we start the cycle over again next week. That pillar is strategy. So in this episode of Sites, we review one of the most widely shared strategy articles ever written at Copyblogger. As of the day I m recording this, it has 7,447 shares — over 3800 on Twitter and over 2000 on Facebook. Clearly, this is a topic, and a lesson, that has connected in a major way. The reason is because it taps into one of the greatest fears we all have about investing legitimate time and money into building something online: that someday, due to forces totally outside of our control, we could lose what we ve built. It s a frightening proposition, especially if you ve built your business and livelihood around your online presence. But it needn t be so frightening if you own the land on which you build. That keeps you in control. And that is the big lesson of this week s episode of Sites, which is based on a blog post written by Sonia Simone titled Digital Sharecropping: The Most Dangerous Threat to Your Content Marketing Strategy. What is digital sharecropping and why is it so dangerous? Let s explore that now, via words written by Sonia and spoken by me and don t forget to stick around after the reading for this week s hyper-specific call to action. Digital Sharecropping: The Most Dangerous Threat to Your Content Marketing Strategy We have a great bookstore in my town the kind of place you picture in your mind when you think of a great independent bookshop. It s perfect for browsing, with lots of comfy chairs to relax in. The books are displayed enticingly. There s a little coffee shop, so you can relax with an espresso. They get your favorite writers to come in for readings, so there s always an event and a sense of excitement. They do everything right, and they ve always had plenty of customers. But they still closed their doors last year. No, not for the reasons you might think. It wasn t Amazon that killed them, or the proliferation of free content on the web, or the crappy economy. They closed the store because they were leasing their big, comfortable building and when that lease ran out, their landlord tripled the rent. Literally overnight, their business model quit working. Revenues simply wouldn t exceed costs. A decision made by another party, one they had no control over, took a wonderful business and destroyed it. And that s precisely what you risk every day you make your business completely dependent on another company. It might be Facebook. It might be eBay. It might be Google. It s called digital sharecropping, and it means you re building your business on someone else s land. And it s a recipe for heartbreak and failure. What s digital sharecropping, anyway? Digital sharecropping is a term coined by Nicholas Carr to describe a peculiar phenomenon of Web 2.0.  One of the fundamental economic characteristics of Web 2.0 is the distribution of production into the hands of the many and the concentration of the economic rewards into the hands of the few.  In other words, anyone can create content on sites like Facebook, but that content effectively belongs to Facebook. The more content we create for free, the more valuable Facebook becomes. We do the work, they reap the profit. The term sharecropping refers to the farming practices common after the U.S. Civil War, but it s essentially the same thing as feudalism. A big landholder allows individual farmers to work their land and takes most of the profits generated from the crops. The landlord has all the control. If he decides to get rid of you, you lose your livelihood. If he decides to raise his fees, you go a little hungrier. You do all the work and the landlord gets most of the profit, leaving you a pittance to eke out a living on. Well, we re professional content marketers not subsistence farmers and our work doesn t involve 12-hour days in grueling conditions. So is sharecropping still dangerous? It is, for a couple of reasons Reason #1: Landlords are fickle Let s look at Facebook. What if you moved all of your marketing to a site like Facebook? It s local, it s free to sign up, and it makes businesses feel like they re doing something cutting-edge. But what happens when Facebook thinks you ve done something that violates their terms of service and deletes your account? Or changes the way you re allowed to talk with your customers? Facebook is a particularly fast-changing platform, but it s not the only one. An entire industry has sprung up based on trying to figure out what Google s going to do tomorrow, both as a search engine and as an advertising platform. If you re relying on Facebook or Google to bring in all of your new customers, you re sharecropping. You re hoping the landlord will continue to like you and support your business, but the fact is, the landlord has no idea who you are and doesn t actually care. Reason #2: Landlords go away The other problem with sharecropping is that the landlord may or may not be here next year. Sharecroppers have put millions of hours into sites like Digg or MySpace. And those sites still exist but they re no longer bringing the traffic they once did. Sharecropped land, in other words, has a tendency to become less and less fertile over time. Maybe Facebook, LinkedIn, or Pinterest will buck the trend. Maybe they ll continue to stay healthy and vibrant for decades. The best we can do is guess. And if we guess wrong, our business goes into a slow and steady decline. So are Facebook and Google bad for business? Of course not. Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest and many more search and social sites are all superb tools to add to our marketing mix. The secret is to spend most of your time and creative energy building assets that you control. There are three assets you should be building today and should continue to focus on for the lifetime of your digital business:  A well-designed website with your own hosting — go back and listen to episodes 2 and 3 of Sites for more on each of these topics. An opt-in email list, ideally with a high-quality autoresponder A reputation for providing impeccable value  Developing these assets are the equivalent of buying your building instead of renting it. Any of these can still fall prey to outside influences. The bookstore s building can burn down. And your site can be hacked, your email account closed down, your reputation smeared. But repairing your assets is in your control. You can fix the hacked code, export your email list to another provider, and respond effectively to manage your reputation. More importantly, you can proactively protect those assets by taking website security seriously, avoiding any spammy or dodgy practices with your email, and cultivating a loyal audience who will vouch for you as being one of the good guys. You ve put a lot of time and effort into your business don t put it all at risk by building on rented land. Again, that blog post by Sonia Simone is titled Digital Sharecropping: The Most Dangerous Threat to Your Content Marketing Strategy and it was originally published at Copyblogger.com. I ll have a link to the original post in the show notes, which you can find at studiopress.blog/sites04 because this is episode number four. Now here is this week s hyper-specific call to action: Call to action Take five minutes this week — preferably right now, since this content is fresh in your mind — and review your content and community mix. How dependent are you on Facebook, Google, Twitter, or any other sites that are great for distributing content and making connections but that you don t own? And here s a way to think about it: when you consider your audience, is your first thought to think about how many Twitter followers or Facebook likes you have, or is your first thought to think about how many people are on your email list or how many site members you have? Because remember: the way you interact with your audience on Twitter and Facebook could be forced to change or even taken away at any time. But you ll always own and determine the rules of engagement with YOUR list on YOUR site. It s an empowering feeling. So think about how much you may be digital sharecropping, even unintentionally, and then the next step is figuring out how to regain any control you may have ceded. Coming next week, we start the cycle over. We ve now done an episode each on content, design, technology, and strategy so it s back to content. In our first content episode, we discussed the three-part strategy for crafting a winning content marketing strategy: the who, the what, and the how. Now we get to explore each of those areas further, starting with the who. We ll discuss how to attract your ideal customer with perfectly positioned content. That s next week, on Sites. Finally, before I go, here are a couple more quick calls to action for you to consider: Subscribe to Sites Weekly Take this opportunity to activate your free subscription to our curated weekly email newsletter, Sites Weekly. Each week, I find four links about content, design, technology, and strategy that you don t want to miss, and then I send them out on Wednesday afternoon. Reading this newsletter will help you make your website more powerful and successful. Go to studiopress.com/news and sign up in one step right there at the top of the page. That s studiopress.com/news. Rate and Review Sites on Apple Podcasts Also, if you enjoy the Sites podcast, please subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts (formerly known as iTunes), and consider giving us a rating or a review over there as well. One quick tip on that: to make the best use of your review, let me know something in particular you like about the show. That feedback is really important. For example, one of our early reviews says: I never knew that there was so much to consider when it came to my website, but thanks to this podcast, I now look at my site through a new constructive lens. Thanks to this show, I ve been taking action to improve my online appearance. I am eagerly awaiting more. That s helpful — both to me, as I look to continue to improve the show, and to people who are browsing shows in Apple Podcasts wondering what will give them the most value for the time they invest in listening. To find us in Apple Podcasts, search for StudioPress Sites and look for the mesmerizing purple logo designed by Rafal Tomal. You can also go to the URL sites.fm/apple and it will redirect you to our Apple Podcasts page. And with that, we come to the close of another episode. Thank you for listening to this episode of Sites. I appreciate you being here. Join me next week, and let s keep building powerful, successful websites together. This episode of sites was brought to you by StudioPress Sites, which was awarded Fastest WordPress Hosting of 2017 in an independent speed test . If you want to make WordPress fast, secure, and easy — and, I mean, why wouldn t you — visit studiopress.com/sites today and see which plan fits your needs. That s studiopress.com/sites.

What is digital sharecropping and why is it so dangerous? We explore those questions this week on Sites, with the help of one of the most widely shared strategy articles in the history of Copyblogger. Listen to <a href="https://rainmaker.fm/series/sites/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Site Success: Tips for Building Better WordPress Websites</a> below ... <a href="https://rainmaker.fm/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/sites-season-1-episode-4.mp3" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Download MP3</a><a href="https://rainmaker.fm/series/sites/feed/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Subscribe by RSS</a><a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/id1251630646" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Subscribe in iTunes</a> Important links from this episode: <ul> <li><a href="http://studiopress.com/sites" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Try StudioPress Sites</a></li> <li><a href="http://studiopress.com/news" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Sites Weekly Newsletter</a></li> <li>Sonia Simone’s article: <a href="https://www.copyblogger.com/digital-sharecropping/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Digital Sharecropping: The Most Dangerous Threat to Your Content Marketing Strategy</a></li> </ul> <h2>The Transcript</h2> Jerod Morris: Welcome to Sites, a podcast by the teams at StudioPress and Copyblogger. In this show, we deliver time-tested insight on the four pillars of a successful WordPress website: content, design, technology, and strategy. We want to help you get a little bit closer to reaching your online goals, one episode at a time. I m your host Jerod Morris. Sites is brought to you by StudioPress Sites — the complete hosted solution that makes WordPress fast, secure, and easy without sacrificing power or flexibility. For example, you can upload your own WordPress theme, or, you can use one of the 20 beautiful StudioPress themes that are included and just one click away. Explore all the amazing things you can do with a StudioPress Site, and you ll understand why this is way more than traditional WordPress hosting. No matter how you ll be using your site, we have a plan to fit your needs — and your budget. To learn more, visit <a href="https://www.studiopress.com/sites" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">studiopress.com/sites</a>. That s <a href="http://studiopress.com/sites" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">studiopress.com/sites</a> Hi there, and welcome to episode 4 of Sites. It s great to be back with you, and have another opportunity to help you take the next small step toward the continuous improvement of your website and overall online presence. It s time to complete the cycle. In the first three episodes we covered content, design, and technology which means there is one pillar of a successful WordPress website left for us to cover this week before we start the cycle over again next week. That pillar is strategy. So in this episode of Sites, we review one of the most widely shared strategy articles ever written at Copyblogger. As of the day I m recording this, it has 7,447 shares — over 3800 on Twitter and over 2000 on Facebook. Clearly, this is a topic, and a lesson, that has connected in a major way. The reason is because it taps into one of the greatest fears we all have about investing legitimate time and money into building something online: that someday, due to forces totally outside of our control, we could lose what we ve built. It s a frightening proposition, especially if you ve built your business and livelihood around your online presence. But it needn t be so frightening if you own the land on which you build. That keeps you in control. And that is the big lesson of this week s episode of Sites, which is based on a blog post written by Sonia Simone titled Digital Sharecropping: The Most Dangerous Threat to Your Content Marketing Strategy. What is digital sharecropping and why is it so dangerous? Let s explore that now, via words written by Sonia and spoken by me and don t forget to stick around after the reading for this week s hyper-specific call to action. <h3>Digital Sharecropping: The Most Dangerous Threat to Your Content Marketing Strategy</h3> We have a great bookstore in my town the kind of place you picture in your mind when you think of a great independent bookshop. It s perfect for browsing, with lots of comfy chairs to relax in. The books are displayed enticingly. There s a little coffee shop, so you can relax with an espresso. They get your favorite writers to come in for readings, so there s always an event and a sense of excitement. They do everything right, and they ve always had plenty of customers. But they still closed their doors last year. No, not for the reasons you might think. It wasn t Amazon that killed them, or the proliferation of free content on the web, or the crappy economy. They closed the store because they were leasing their big, comfortable building and when that lease ran out, their landlord tripled the rent. Literally overnight, their business model quit working. Revenues simply wouldn t exceed costs. A decision made by another party, one they had no control over, took a wonderful business and destroyed it. And that s precisely what you risk every day you make your business completely dependent on another company. It might be Facebook. It might be eBay. It might be Google. It s called digital sharecropping, and it means you re building your business on someone else s land. And it s a recipe for heartbreak and failure. <h3>What s digital sharecropping, anyway?</h3> Digital sharecropping is a term coined by Nicholas Carr to describe a peculiar phenomenon of Web 2.0. <blockquote> One of the fundamental economic characteristics of Web 2.0 is the distribution of production into the hands of the many and the concentration of the economic rewards into the hands of the few. </blockquote> In other words, anyone can create content on sites like Facebook, but that content effectively belongs to Facebook. The more content we create for free, the more valuable Facebook becomes. We do the work, they reap the profit. The term sharecropping refers to the farming practices common after the U.S. Civil War, but it s essentially the same thing as feudalism. A big landholder allows individual farmers to work their land and takes most of the profits generated from the crops. The landlord has all the control. If he decides to get rid of you, you lose your livelihood. If he decides to raise his fees, you go a little hungrier. You do all the work and the landlord gets most of the profit, leaving you a pittance to eke out a living on. Well, we re professional content marketers not subsistence farmers and our work doesn t involve 12-hour days in grueling conditions. So is sharecropping still dangerous? It is, for a couple of reasons <h3>Reason #1: Landlords are fickle</h3> Let s look at Facebook. What if you moved all of your marketing to a site like Facebook? It s local, it s free to sign up, and it makes businesses feel like they re doing something cutting-edge. But what happens when Facebook thinks you ve done something that violates their terms of service and deletes your account? Or changes the way you re allowed to talk with your customers? Facebook is a particularly fast-changing platform, but it s not the only one. An entire industry has sprung up based on trying to figure out what Google s going to do tomorrow, both as a search engine and as an advertising platform. If you re relying on Facebook or Google to bring in all of your new customers, you re sharecropping. You re hoping the landlord will continue to like you and support your business, but the fact is, the landlord has no idea who you are and doesn t actually care. <h3>Reason #2: Landlords go away</h3> The other problem with sharecropping is that the landlord may or may not be here next year. Sharecroppers have put millions of hours into sites like Digg or MySpace. And those sites still exist but they re no longer bringing the traffic they once did. Sharecropped land, in other words, has a tendency to become less and less fertile over time. Maybe Facebook, LinkedIn, or Pinterest will buck the trend. Maybe they ll continue to stay healthy and vibrant for decades. The best we can do is guess. And if we guess wrong, our business goes into a slow and steady decline. <h3>So are Facebook and Google bad for business?</h3> Of course not. Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest and many more search and social sites are all superb tools to add to our marketing mix. The secret is to spend most of your time and creative energy building assets that you control. There are three assets you should be building today and should continue to focus on for the lifetime of your digital business: <ul> <li>A well-designed website with your own hosting — go back and listen to episodes <a href="https://rainmaker.fm/audio/sites/design-content-marketing/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">2</a> and <a href="https://rainmaker.fm/audio/sites/wordpress-hosting/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">3</a> of Sites for more on each of these topics.</li> <li>An opt-in email list, ideally with a high-quality autoresponder</li> <li>A reputation for providing impeccable value</li> </ul> Developing these assets are the equivalent of buying your building instead of renting it. Any of these can still fall prey to outside influences. The bookstore s building can burn down. And your site can be hacked, your email account closed down, your reputation smeared. But repairing your assets is in your control. You can fix the hacked code, export your email list to another provider, and respond effectively to manage your reputation. More importantly, you can proactively protect those assets by taking website security seriously, avoiding any spammy or dodgy practices with your email, and cultivating a loyal audience who will vouch for you as being one of the good guys. You ve put a lot of time and effort into your business don t put it all at risk by building on rented land. Again, that blog post by Sonia Simone is titled <a href="https://www.copyblogger.com/digital-sharecropping/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Digital Sharecropping: The Most Dangerous Threat to Your Content Marketing Strategy</a> and it was originally published at <a href="http://Copyblogger.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Copyblogger.com</a>. I ll have a link to the original post in the show notes, which you can find at studiopress.blog/sites04 because this is episode number four. Now here is this week s hyper-specific call to action: <h3>Call to action</h3> Take five minutes this week — preferably right now, since this content is fresh in your mind — and review your content and community mix. How dependent are you on Facebook, Google, Twitter, or any other sites that are great for distributing content and making connections but that you don t own? And here s a way to think about it: when you consider your audience, is your first thought to think about how many Twitter followers or Facebook likes you have, or is your first thought to think about how many people are on your email list or how many site members you have? Because remember: the way you interact with your audience on Twitter and Facebook could be forced to change or even taken away at any time. But you ll always own and determine the rules of engagement with YOUR list on YOUR site. It s an empowering feeling. So think about how much you may be digital sharecropping, even unintentionally, and then the next step is figuring out how to regain any control you may have ceded. Coming next week, we start the cycle over. We ve now done an episode each on content, design, technology, and strategy so it s back to content. In our first content episode, we discussed the three-part strategy for crafting a winning content marketing strategy: the who, the what, and the how. Now we get to explore each of those areas further, starting with the who. We ll discuss how to attract your ideal customer with perfectly positioned content. That s next week, on Sites. Finally, before I go, here are a couple more quick calls to action for you to consider: <h3>Subscribe to Sites Weekly</h3> Take this opportunity to activate your free subscription to our curated weekly email newsletter, Sites Weekly. Each week, I find four links about content, design, technology, and strategy that you don t want to miss, and then I send them out on Wednesday afternoon. Reading this newsletter will help you make your website more powerful and successful. Go to <a href="http://studiopress.com/news" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">studiopress.com/news</a> and sign up in one step right there at the top of the page. That s <a href="http://studiopress.blog/news" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">studiopress.com/news</a>. <h3>Rate and Review Sites on Apple Podcasts</h3> Also, if you enjoy the Sites podcast, please <a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/sites/id1251630646" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">subscribe to the show</a> on Apple Podcasts (formerly known as iTunes), and consider giving us a rating or a review over there as well. One quick tip on that: to make the best use of your review, let me know something in particular you like about the show. That feedback is really important. For example, one of our early reviews says: I never knew that there was so much to consider when it came to my website, but thanks to this podcast, I now look at my site through a new constructive lens. Thanks to this show, I ve been taking action to improve my online appearance. I am eagerly awaiting more. That s helpful — both to me, as I look to continue to improve the show, and to people who are browsing shows in Apple Podcasts wondering what will give them the most value for the time they invest in listening. To find us in Apple Podcasts, search for StudioPress Sites and look for the mesmerizing purple logo designed by Rafal Tomal. You can also go to the URL <a href="http://sites.fm/apple" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">sites.fm/apple</a> and it will redirect you to our Apple Podcasts page. And with that, we come to the close of another episode. Thank you for listening to this episode of Sites. I appreciate you being here. Join me next week, and let s keep building powerful, successful websites together. This episode of sites was brought to you by StudioPress Sites, which was awarded Fastest WordPress Hosting of 2017 in an independent speed test . If you want to make WordPress fast, secure, and easy — and, I mean, why wouldn t you — visit <a href="http://studiopress.com/sites" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">studiopress.com/sites</a> today and see which plan fits your needs. That s <a href="http://studiopress.com/sites" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">studiopress.com/sites</a>.

[04] The Most Dangerous Threat to Your Content Marketing Strategy

If you have a WordPress website and are looking to grow your audience through content, then this episode will help. Sonia Simone is one of the most accomplished content marketers in the world, and she stops by to discuss smart, winning content strategies with Sean Jackson. Rainmaker.FM is Brought to You By   Discover why 201,344 website owners trust StudioPress, the industry standard for premium WordPress themes and plugins.  Launch your new site today!  Here is a quick rundown of what you’ll find in this episode:  Sonia s one essential tip for avoiding overwhelm The importance of understanding what your website is going to do Why marketing matters for all sites, not just websites that are selling stuff How your blog can be a tool to create important stepping stones for your audience Sean goes knee-deep : what is the first step to take when it s time to start publishing content? The evergreen power of simply answering questions Why you should think about things you love AND things you hate about your topic Are you getting to the point quickly enough? (And doing it simply enough?) Why you should never, ever build your online platform on land that is owned by somebody else — but — how you can leverage social media tools to your advantage  Listen to Site Success: Tips for Building Better WordPress Websites below ... Download MP3Subscribe by RSSSubscribe in iTunes Resources and links mentioned in this episode:  The advantages of starting out small Beware of Digital Sharecropping How to write an About Page Marcus Sheridan, “The Sales Lion” How to Connect the Dots that Can Make You a Star  Other links of note:  Try StudioPress Sites Sites Weekly Newsletter Subscribe to Sites on Apple Podcasts Sean Jackson on Twitter Contact Jerod: jerod@copyblogger.com 

If you have a WordPress website and are looking to grow your audience through content, then this episode will help. Sonia Simone is one of the most accomplished content marketers in the world, and she stops by to discuss smart, winning content strategies with Sean Jackson. <a href="http://Rainmaker.FM" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Rainmaker.FM</a> is Brought to You By<a href="//www.studiopress.com/fm" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"></a> <code> <h3><a href="//www.studiopress.com/fm" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"></a></h3> Discover why 201,344 website owners trust StudioPress, the industry standard for premium WordPress themes and plugins. <a href="//www.studiopress.com/fm" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Launch your new site today!</a> </code> Here is a quick rundown of what you’ll find in this episode: <ul> <li>Sonia s one essential tip for avoiding overwhelm</li> <li>The importance of understanding what your website is going to do</li> <li>Why marketing matters for all sites, not just websites that are selling stuff</li> <li>How your blog can be a tool to create important stepping stones for your audience</li> <li>Sean goes knee-deep : what is the first step to take when it s time to start publishing content?</li> <li>The evergreen power of simply answering questions</li> <li>Why you should think about things you love AND things you hate about your topic</li> <li>Are you getting to the point quickly enough? (And doing it simply enough?)</li> <li>Why you should never, ever build your online platform on land that is owned by somebody else — but — how you can leverage social media tools to your advantage</li> </ul> Listen to <a href="https://rainmaker.fm/series/sites/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Site Success: Tips for Building Better WordPress Websites</a> below ... <a href="https://rainmaker.fm/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/site-success-34.mp3" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Download MP3</a><a href="https://rainmaker.fm/series/sites/feed/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Subscribe by RSS</a><a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/id1251630646" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Subscribe in iTunes</a> <h3>Resources and links mentioned in this episode:</h3> <ul> <li><a href="https://www.copyblogger.com/starting-small/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The advantages of starting out small</a></li> <li><a href="https://www.copyblogger.com/digital-sharecropping/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Beware of Digital Sharecropping</a></li> <li><a href="https://www.copyblogger.com/how-to-write-an-about-page/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">How to write an About Page</a></li> <li><a href="https://www.thesaleslion.com/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Marcus Sheridan, “The Sales Lion”</a></li> <li><a href="https://www.copyblogger.com/content-constellation/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">How to Connect the Dots that Can Make You a Star</a></li> </ul> <h3>Other links of note:</h3> <ul> <li><a href="https://www.studiopress.com/sites" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Try StudioPress Sites</a></li> <li><a href="https://www.studiopress.com/news" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Sites Weekly Newsletter</a></li> <li><a href="http://sites.fm/apple" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Subscribe to Sites on Apple Podcasts</a></li> <li><a href="http://twitter.com/seanthinks" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Sean Jackson on Twitter</a></li> <li>Contact Jerod: jerod@copyblogger.com</li> </ul>

[34] Amazing Content Strategies for WordPress Sites

Affiliate marketing is a great way to enhance the income from your site — if you know how to do it right. Rainmaker.FM is Brought to You By   Discover why 201,344 website owners trust StudioPress, the industry standard for premium WordPress themes and plugins.  Launch your new site today!  At StudioPress, we have a lot of experience with affiliates — seeing the tactics that work and those that don’t. And the affiliates that are successful focus on helping people at different stages of their personal journey to find solutions to their problems. In this 26 minute episode, Chris Garrett from StudioPress joins the show to share his insights and tactics for successful affiliate marketing. Listen to Site Success: Tips for Building Better WordPress Websites below ... Download MP3Subscribe by RSSSubscribe in iTunes Important links from this episode:  Try StudioPress Sites Sites Weekly Newsletter Subscribe to Sites on Apple Podcasts Connect with Sean on Twitter 

Affiliate marketing is a great way to enhance the income from your site — if you know how to do it right. <a href="http://Rainmaker.FM" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Rainmaker.FM</a> is Brought to You By<a href="//www.studiopress.com/fm" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"></a> <code> <h3><a href="//www.studiopress.com/fm" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"></a></h3> Discover why 201,344 website owners trust StudioPress, the industry standard for premium WordPress themes and plugins. <a href="//www.studiopress.com/fm" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Launch your new site today!</a> </code> At StudioPress, we have a lot of experience with affiliates — seeing the tactics that work and those that don’t. And the affiliates that are successful focus on helping people at different stages of their personal journey to find solutions to their problems. In this 26 minute episode, Chris Garrett from StudioPress joins the show to share his insights and tactics for successful affiliate marketing. Listen to <a href="https://rainmaker.fm/series/sites/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Site Success: Tips for Building Better WordPress Websites</a> below ... <a href="https://rainmaker.fm/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/sites-season-1-episode-27.mp3" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Download MP3</a><a href="https://rainmaker.fm/series/sites/feed/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Subscribe by RSS</a><a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/id1251630646" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Subscribe in iTunes</a> <h3>Important links from this episode:</h3> <ul> <li><a href="http://studiopress.com/sites" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Try StudioPress Sites</a></li> <li><a href="http://studiopress.com/news" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Sites Weekly Newsletter</a></li> <li><a href="http://sites.fm/apple" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Subscribe to Sites on Apple Podcasts</a></li> <li><a href="https://twitter.com/seanthinks" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Connect with Sean on Twitter</a></li> </ul>

[27] How to Be a Successful Affiliate Marketer in the WordPress Ecosystem

Nathan Rice, the creator of the Genesis Framework, shares his insights on maximizing the power of Genesis for WordPress. Rainmaker.FM is Brought to You By   Discover why 201,344 website owners trust StudioPress, the industry standard for premium WordPress themes and plugins.  Launch your new site today!  In 2009, Nathan Rice, along with Brian Gardner, released the Genesis Framework for WordPress — fundamentally altering the way themes are designed and implemented on WordPress. The Genesis Framework continues to evolve and in this episode, we discuss the history of Genesis, what issues to avoid when designing a new WordPress theme and where Genesis is going in 2018. In this 28 minute episode, Nathan Rice from StudioPress shares his unique insights into the evolution of Genesis and where the framework is going. Listen to Site Success: Tips for Building Better WordPress Websites below ... Download MP3Subscribe by RSSSubscribe in iTunes Important links from this episode:  WordPress Plugins developed by StudioPress Try StudioPress Sites Sites Weekly Newsletter Subscribe to Sites on Apple Podcasts Connect with Sean on Twitter 

Nathan Rice, the creator of the Genesis Framework, shares his insights on maximizing the power of Genesis for WordPress. <a href="http://Rainmaker.FM" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Rainmaker.FM</a> is Brought to You By<a href="//www.studiopress.com/fm" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"></a> <code> <h3><a href="//www.studiopress.com/fm" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"></a></h3> Discover why 201,344 website owners trust StudioPress, the industry standard for premium WordPress themes and plugins. <a href="//www.studiopress.com/fm" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Launch your new site today!</a> </code> In 2009, Nathan Rice, along with Brian Gardner, released the Genesis Framework for WordPress — fundamentally altering the way themes are designed and implemented on WordPress. The Genesis Framework continues to evolve and in this episode, we discuss the history of Genesis, what issues to avoid when designing a new WordPress theme and where Genesis is going in 2018. In this 28 minute episode, Nathan Rice from StudioPress shares his unique insights into the evolution of Genesis and where the framework is going. Listen to <a href="https://rainmaker.fm/series/sites/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Site Success: Tips for Building Better WordPress Websites</a> below ... <a href="https://rainmaker.fm/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/sites-season-1-episode-29.mp3" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Download MP3</a><a href="https://rainmaker.fm/series/sites/feed/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Subscribe by RSS</a><a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/id1251630646" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Subscribe in iTunes</a> <h3>Important links from this episode:</h3> <ul> <li><a href="https://www.studiopress.com/plugins" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">WordPress Plugins developed by StudioPress</a></li> <li><a href="https://www.studiopress.com/sites" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Try StudioPress Sites</a></li> <li><a href="https://www.studiopress.com/news" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Sites Weekly Newsletter</a></li> <li><a href="http://sites.fm/apple" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Subscribe to Sites on Apple Podcasts</a></li> <li><a href="https://twitter.com/seanthinks" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Connect with Sean on Twitter</a></li> </ul>

[29] What Every #GenesisWP Developer Must Know about the Genesis Framework

Content is the lifeblood of your audience building. No one is going to flock to your website just because you launch it. You have to give them reasons to come, compel them to stay, and earn their loyalty. The only way to do that is through content, which is why investing time now to make smart choices about what content you’re going to create is time well spent. Rainmaker.FM is Brought to You By   Discover why 201,344 website owners trust StudioPress, the industry standard for premium WordPress themes and plugins.  Launch your new site today!  Here is a quick rundown of what you’ll find in this episode:  Why it’s essential to invest time now creating a smart content gameplan Why this step is necessary before you choose your design How to go about whittling down the list of possible content options to the ones that are legitimate options for you (at least right now) Why you need to figure out where your audience consumes content naturally, and make sure you are there to attract some attention What you can do to find content gaps that you are uniquely qualified to fill  Listen to Site Success: Tips for Building Better WordPress Websites below ... Download MP3Subscribe by RSSSubscribe in iTunes Other links of note:  Try StudioPress Sites Sites Weekly Newsletter Subscribe to Sites on Apple Podcasts Contact Jerod: jerod@copyblogger.com 

Content is the lifeblood of your audience building. No one is going to flock to your website just because you launch it. You have to give them reasons to come, compel them to stay, and earn their loyalty. The only way to do that is through content, which is why investing time now to make smart choices about what content you’re going to create is time well spent. <a href="http://Rainmaker.FM" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Rainmaker.FM</a> is Brought to You By<a href="//www.studiopress.com/fm" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"></a> <code> <h3><a href="//www.studiopress.com/fm" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"></a></h3> Discover why 201,344 website owners trust StudioPress, the industry standard for premium WordPress themes and plugins. <a href="//www.studiopress.com/fm" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Launch your new site today!</a> </code> Here is a quick rundown of what you’ll find in this episode: <ul> <li>Why it’s essential to invest time now creating a smart content gameplan</li> <li>Why this step is necessary before you choose your design</li> <li>How to go about whittling down the list of possible content options to the ones that are legitimate options for you (at least right now)</li> <li>Why you need to figure out where your audience consumes content naturally, and make sure you are there to attract some attention</li> <li>What you can do to find content gaps that you are uniquely qualified to fill</li> </ul> Listen to <a href="https://rainmaker.fm/series/sites/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Site Success: Tips for Building Better WordPress Websites</a> below ... <a href="https://rainmaker.fm/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/sites-success-41.mp3" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Download MP3</a><a href="https://rainmaker.fm/series/sites/feed/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Subscribe by RSS</a><a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/id1251630646" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Subscribe in iTunes</a> <h3>Other links of note:</h3> <ul> <li><a href="https://www.studiopress.com/sites" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Try StudioPress Sites</a></li> <li><a href="https://www.studiopress.com/news" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Sites Weekly Newsletter</a></li> <li><a href="http://sites.fm/apple" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Subscribe to Sites on Apple Podcasts</a></li> <li>Contact Jerod: jerod@copyblogger.com</li> </ul>

[41] 3Q for Deciding What Types of Content You re Going to Create

The Sites podcast is back! And with a brand new name, plus a new format and schedule. Jerod Morris discusses what all the changes mean, and then dives right into our first topic of 2018 — how to define your ideal audience. Rainmaker.FM is Brought to You By   Discover why 201,344 website owners trust StudioPress, the industry standard for premium WordPress themes and plugins.  Launch your new site today!  Here is a quick rundown of what you’ll find in this episode:  00:38 What you get when you sign up for a StudioPress Site 01:41 Jerod explains why we changed the name of the podcast from Sites to Site Success, plus what you can expect from the show as we move forward in 2018 06:02 Jerod provides you with questions #1 and #2 that will help you define your ideal audience: 1) who is your ideal audience member, and 2) what are they seeing/thinking/feeling/doing? 15:54 Jerod delivers question #3, which requires a bit more explanation than the first two. He shares some examples from his own projects for how he goes about answering this one  Listen to Site Success: Tips for Building Better WordPress Websites below ... Download MP3Subscribe by RSSSubscribe in iTunes Resources and links mentioned in this episode:  Authority Pro Theme by StudioPress Blog post by Brian Clark: The Simple 3-Step Process for Creating a Winning Content Marketing Strategy Downloadable empathy map Empathy Maps: A Complete Guide to Crawling Inside Your Customer s Head  Other links of note:  Try StudioPress Sites Sites Weekly Newsletter Subscribe to Sites on Apple Podcasts Contact Jerod: jerod@copyblogger.com 

The Sites podcast is back! And with a brand new name, plus a new format and schedule. Jerod Morris discusses what all the changes mean, and then dives right into our first topic of 2018 — how to define your ideal audience. <a href="http://Rainmaker.FM" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Rainmaker.FM</a> is Brought to You By<a href="//www.studiopress.com/fm" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"></a> <code> <h3><a href="//www.studiopress.com/fm" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"></a></h3> Discover why 201,344 website owners trust StudioPress, the industry standard for premium WordPress themes and plugins. <a href="//www.studiopress.com/fm" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Launch your new site today!</a> </code> Here is a quick rundown of what you’ll find in this episode: <ul> <li>00:38 What you get when you sign up for a <a href="http://studiopress.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">StudioPress Site</a></li> <li>01:41 Jerod explains why we changed the name of the podcast from Sites to Site Success, plus what you can expect from the show as we move forward in 2018</li> <li>06:02 Jerod provides you with questions #1 and #2 that will help you define your ideal audience: 1) who is your ideal audience member, and 2) what are they seeing/thinking/feeling/doing?</li> <li>15:54 Jerod delivers question #3, which requires a bit more explanation than the first two. He shares some examples from his own projects for how he goes about answering this one</li> </ul> Listen to <a href="https://rainmaker.fm/series/sites/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Site Success: Tips for Building Better WordPress Websites</a> below ... <a href="https://rainmaker.fm/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/site-success-31-1.mp3" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Download MP3</a><a href="https://rainmaker.fm/series/sites/feed/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Subscribe by RSS</a><a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/id1251630646" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Subscribe in iTunes</a> <h3>Resources and links mentioned in this episode:</h3> <ul> <li><a href="https://my.studiopress.com/themes/authority/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Authority Pro Theme by StudioPress</a></li> <li>Blog post by Brian Clark: <a href="https://www.copyblogger.com/content-marketing-strategy/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The Simple 3-Step Process for Creating a Winning Content Marketing Strategy</a></li> <li><a href="https://www.copyblogger.com/cdn-origin/downloads/empathy-map.pdf" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Downloadable empathy map</a></li> <li><a href="https://www.copyblogger.com/empathy-maps/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Empathy Maps: A Complete Guide to Crawling Inside Your Customer s Head</a></li> </ul> <h3>Other links of note:</h3> <ul> <li><a href="https://www.studiopress.com/sites" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Try StudioPress Sites</a></li> <li><a href="https://www.studiopress.com/news" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Sites Weekly Newsletter</a></li> <li><a href="http://sites.fm/apple" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Subscribe to Sites on Apple Podcasts</a></li> <li>Contact Jerod: jerod@copyblogger.com</li> </ul>

[31] 3Q to Help You Define Your Ideal Audience

[13] How to Create Content that Deeply Engages Your Audience

Rafal Tomal

Rafal Tomal – Creative Director for StudioPress – shares his deep insight on everything you need to know about WordPress design. Rainmaker.FM is Brought to You By   Discover why 201,344 website owners trust StudioPress, the industry standard for premium WordPress themes and plugins.  Launch your new site today!  The right design for your WordPress site is essential. It helps build instant authority and trust from your audience while providing the canvas for your online marketing. But too often, people approach selecting a design for their site the wrong way. In this 25 minute episode, Sean Jackson and Rafal Tomal discuss the most essential factors you must know when selecting a design for your WordPress site. Listen to Site Success: Tips for Building Better WordPress Websites below ... Download MP3Subscribe by RSSSubscribe in iTunes Important links from this episode:  Try StudioPress Sites Sites Weekly Newsletter Subscribe to Sites on Apple Podcasts Connect with Sean on Twitter 

Rafal Tomal – Creative Director for StudioPress – shares his deep insight on everything you need to know about WordPress design. <a href="http://Rainmaker.FM" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Rainmaker.FM</a> is Brought to You By<a href="//www.studiopress.com/fm" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"></a> <code> <h3><a href="//www.studiopress.com/fm" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"></a></h3> Discover why 201,344 website owners trust StudioPress, the industry standard for premium WordPress themes and plugins. <a href="//www.studiopress.com/fm" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Launch your new site today!</a> </code> The right design for your WordPress site is essential. It helps build instant authority and trust from your audience while providing the canvas for your online marketing. But too often, people approach selecting a design for their site the wrong way. In this 25 minute episode, Sean Jackson and Rafal Tomal discuss the most essential factors you must know when selecting a design for your WordPress site. Listen to <a href="https://rainmaker.fm/series/sites/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Site Success: Tips for Building Better WordPress Websites</a> below ... <a href="https://rainmaker.fm/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/site-success-4502.mp3" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Download MP3</a><a href="https://rainmaker.fm/series/sites/feed/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Subscribe by RSS</a><a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/id1251630646" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Subscribe in iTunes</a> <h3>Important links from this episode:</h3> <ul> <li><a href="https://www.studiopress.com/sites" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Try StudioPress Sites</a></li> <li><a href="https://www.studiopress.com/news" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Sites Weekly Newsletter</a></li> <li><a href="http://sites.fm/apple" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Subscribe to Sites on Apple Podcasts</a></li> <li><a href="https://twitter.com/seanthinks" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Connect with Sean on Twitter</a></li> </ul>

[45] Rafal Tomal on Picking the Right Design for Your WordPress Website

It is more important to have some people love you than everyone to be indifferent. In this episode of Site Success, Brian Clark joins Sean Jackson to describe three key elements of a framework for choosing who you want your audience to be. Rainmaker.FM is Brought to You By   Discover why 201,344 website owners trust StudioPress, the industry standard for premium WordPress themes and plugins.  Launch your new site today!  Here is a quick rundown of what you’ll find in this episode:  Why thinking seriously about your audience is truly where the battle of building a platform is won or lost. The importance of choosing your ideal audience, rather than pandering to anyone who shows up. The three key elements of a framework for choosing who you want your audience to be. Why the topic, not demographic factors, is what brings people together online. Hey — what s up with naked mole rats? What authenticity actually means (and why it s essential). The story of Apple, and what it can teach us about the importance of core values. Brian s cocktail party analogy — which will help you find more of the people you want to talk to, and fewer of the people you d rather avoid. What it means to find your voice and why it s fundamental to building a close relationship with your ideal audience members.  Listen to Site Success: Tips for Building Better WordPress Websites below ... Download MP3Subscribe by RSSSubscribe in iTunes Resources and links mentioned in this episode:  Brian Clark on Twitter Meet the Perennials Seth Godin on Defining Authenticity Duct Tape Marketing  Other links of note:  Try StudioPress Sites Sites Weekly Newsletter Subscribe to Site Success on Apple Podcasts Sean Jackson on Twitter Contact Jerod: jerod@copyblogger.com 

It is more important to have some people love you than everyone to be indifferent. In this episode of Site Success, Brian Clark joins Sean Jackson to describe three key elements of a framework for choosing who you want your audience to be. <a href="http://Rainmaker.FM" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Rainmaker.FM</a> is Brought to You By<a href="//www.studiopress.com/fm" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"></a> <code> <h3><a href="//www.studiopress.com/fm" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"></a></h3> Discover why 201,344 website owners trust StudioPress, the industry standard for premium WordPress themes and plugins. <a href="//www.studiopress.com/fm" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Launch your new site today!</a> </code> Here is a quick rundown of what you’ll find in this episode: <ul> <li>Why thinking seriously about your audience is truly where the battle of building a platform is won or lost.</li> <li>The importance of choosing your ideal audience, rather than pandering to anyone who shows up.</li> <li>The three key elements of a framework for choosing who you want your audience to be.</li> <li>Why the topic, not demographic factors, is what brings people together online.</li> <li>Hey — what s up with naked mole rats?</li> <li>What authenticity actually means (and why it s essential).</li> <li>The story of Apple, and what it can teach us about the importance of core values.</li> <li>Brian s cocktail party analogy — which will help you find more of the people you want to talk to, and fewer of the people you d rather avoid.</li> <li>What it means to find your voice and why it s fundamental to building a close relationship with your ideal audience members.</li> </ul> Listen to <a href="https://rainmaker.fm/series/sites/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Site Success: Tips for Building Better WordPress Websites</a> below ... <a href="https://rainmaker.fm/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/site-success-32.mp3" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Download MP3</a><a href="https://rainmaker.fm/series/sites/feed/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Subscribe by RSS</a><a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/id1251630646" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Subscribe in iTunes</a> <h3>Resources and links mentioned in this episode:</h3> <ul> <li><a href="http://twitter.com/brianclark" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Brian Clark on Twitter</a></li> <li><a href="https://medium.com/the-what/meet-the-perennials-e91a7cd9f65f" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Meet the Perennials</a></li> <li><a href="http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2017/10/defining-authenticity.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Seth Godin on Defining Authenticity</a></li> <li><a href="https://www.ducttapemarketing.com/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Duct Tape Marketing</a></li> </ul> <h3>Other links of note:</h3> <ul> <li><a href="https://www.studiopress.com/sites" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Try StudioPress Sites</a></li> <li><a href="https://www.studiopress.com/news" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Sites Weekly Newsletter</a></li> <li><a href="http://sites.fm/apple" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Subscribe to Site Success on Apple Podcasts</a></li> <li><a href="http://twitter.com/seanthinks" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Sean Jackson on Twitter</a></li> <li>Contact Jerod: jerod@copyblogger.com</li> </ul>

[32] Brian Clark on Identifying the Right Audience for Your Website

There comes a point for any website when more creativity actually becomes too much, and becomes a negative. In this episode, we discuss a couple of important points to keep in mind so that creativity with your web design doesn t harm your users experience. Listen to Site Success: Tips for Building Better WordPress Websites below ... Download MP3Subscribe by RSSSubscribe in iTunes Important links from this episode:  Try StudioPress Sites Sites Weekly Newsletter Subscribe to Sites on Apple Podcasts @JerodMorris on Twitter Original blog post: How Creativity Can Kill a Good Website Design by Rafal Tomal  The Transcript Jerod Morris: Welcome to Sites, a podcast by the teams at StudioPress and Copyblogger. In this show, we deliver time-tested insight on the four pillars of a successful WordPress website: content, design, technology, and strategy. We want to help you get a little bit closer to reaching your online goals, one episode at a time. I m your host Jerod Morris. Sites is brought to you by StudioPress Sites — the complete hosted solution that makes WordPress fast, secure, and easy without sacrificing power or flexibility. For example, you can upload your own WordPress theme, or, you can use one of the 20 beautiful StudioPress themes that are included and just one click away. Explore all the amazing things you can do with a StudioPress Site, and you ll understand why this is way more than traditional WordPress hosting. No matter how you ll be using your site, we have a plan to fit your needs — and your budget. To learn more, visit studiopress.com/sites. That s studiopress.com/sites. Welcome to Episode 14 of Sites. Last week, we discussed how to create content that deeply engages our audience. One element of content that is deeply engaging is, of course, creativity. You aren t going to capture attention, and keep it, if you re saying the same thing everyone else is — and saying it in the same way everyone else is. So creativity is unequivocally a good thing. But like any good thing — basketball, beer ballroom dancing — indulging in too much of it can have negative consequences. This is especially true when it comes to creativity and web design. Now you may be thinking, Wait a minute, why wouldn t I want the most creative web design possible? Won t that help me break through the noise, differentiate myself, and get much-needed attention? Sure to a point. The key is knowing where that point is. Because after that point, additional creativity may no longer be helping your web design. It might actually be killing it. That is the thesis of Rafal Tomal s blog post titled How Creativity Can Kill a Good Website Design. He wrote it in February of 2016. I m reading it here in September of 2017. And while the post is written to an audience of designers — and you may not consider yourself a designer — it s still relevant to you. Because if you re creating a website, then you have to pick a design and tweak it, or you have to hire a designer. And that means you need to have some idea where the line is between the right amount of creativity and too much of it. Here, now, is my reading of Rafal Tomal s blog post: How Creativity Can Kill a Good Website Design. I ve adapted it slightly for clarity. Make sure you stick around after the reading, as I ll have this week s hyper-specific call to action for you. How Creativity Can Kill a Good Website Design How in the world could being too creative kill your design? I always thought the more creative someone is, the better designer he or she must be. Then, I started studying design more and realized that it s actually not all about creativity. Most of us start as visual designers, and then we grow and learn more about user interface, conversion, user experience, accessibility, or usability. Your creativity brought you here and that made you interested in design, but if you really want to evolve and become a better designer, be aware that being too creative may actually hurt your design work. How? Because we re designing for users — not ourselves. The sooner you realize this, the better. User psychology is a complicated subject, but one thing is for sure: people by default are lazy and will look for the least-resistant way to accomplish their task. Layouts that are too complicated, solutions that are too creative, and reinvented wheels won t make your users life easier. So, how can we find a good balance between a creative, artistic, and original design while still making it intuitive, maintaining usability, and providing good results for the business? Here are a couple of ways … 1. Start with a prototype in mind According to Google s research, users prefer websites that look both simple (low complexity) and familiar (high prototypicality). People make their aesthetic judgment on your design in less than 50 milliseconds. That first impression can tell them if they want to stay or leave your website or how they feel about your brand and product. As Javier Bargas-Avila, Senior User Experience Researcher at YouTube UX Research, said: Designs that contradict what users typically expect of a website may hurt users first impression and damage their expectations. You ve probably seen thousands of different websites by now. If I asked you to draw a layout of a blog website, it would probably look something like this:  A header area with logo to the left and nav menu to the right A sidebar to the right with a CTA box at the top Then to the left in the body section is the main content area  We could repeat this exercise with almost every kind of website: e-commerce, a doctor s office, university, portfolio, magazine, etc. A prototype of a blog website has the content area on the left side and the sidebar on the right side. The sidebar has widgets that mostly includes the email sign-up form as the first one. Does every blog look like that? No, but most of them do and that s why this is a prototypical image of a blog layout. When people visit your blog and want to sign up for your email newsletter, their expectation will be to find it in the right hand sidebar. How convenient is it when they find it right there and how frustrating would it be if it s not there? I believe it s always good to start designing with a prototype in mind. Then, you can alter it from there and test different ideas and decide how much you can afford to change the original look.  Variation 1 might be a special widget just below the header that spans the content area and sidebar with a CTA box Variation 2 might be a footer widget with the CTA box Variation 3 might be the sidebar flipped to the left side.  Of course, everything depends on your targeted audience. If you re designing a website for creative people, their expectations may be completely different. Looking at a prototypical website could be too boring for them and they may actually be open to a more creative approach from you. On the other hand, if you re designing for a non-specified group of users, you may want to go a safer route and stick as close to the prototypical design as possible. Being too creative here could actually hurt the basic expectations, which would lead to confusion and result in abandoning your website. So that is point #1: Design with a prototype in mind. Now let s discuss point #2 2. Don t make your users think There are many established web conventions and standards like the placement of your logo, navigation, search bar, or login link. There are even conventions for an icon s meaning, website element names, (e.g. Home, Sitemap, Contact), button styles, layout and visual hierarchy. All of these standards will help your users to navigate and find what they need much faster. Try to always stick to some of the most popular conventions and use your creativity elsewhere. Avoid reinventing the wheel. You don t want to change your users expectations from where the navigation is or make them wonder what that icon means. Remember that users are looking for the least resistant way to accomplish their task. So, simply don t make them think. Every website has its own level of user interface complexity and a certain amount of content. The more complex your interface is and the more content you have, the more energy it requires from visitors to explore the website. There are some exceptions when you may want to break the web conventions on purpose. Maybe you know exactly who your audience is and the goal of your website is to entertain and create an environment where your users are having fun exploring your creative ideas. You ve probably seen many clever portfolio websites with an original navigation or a horizontal scroll instead of vertical. It is fun to explore these and I m sure all other designers enjoy it too. It is OK in this circumstance. Similar creative approaches certainly wouldn t work for a local library or hospital website, where many users are older people or less experienced web users and they don t have time or energy to play with your design. Again, I would strongly recommend to start designing with the conventions in mind, and then try to alter some elements, after testing them first. Don t just trust your own gut see what your users think. If you can afford to come up with completely new design solutions, then you should be able to afford to test the usability of that solution as well. So, point #1 is to design with a prototype in mind. Point #2 is to not make your users think at least, not think in terms of how to use your website. You d rather them spend that time and energy thinking about your content and your ideas, not how to go to the next page. Now here s the final point … Use your creativity mostly in visual design So, where is the fun part of designing websites if you can t be too creative in many of the previously mentioned aspects? You can be and should be creative when it comes to the visual design. Try different color schemes or interesting font combinations. You can play with spacing, visual balance, and hierarchy. Design original illustrations or clever hover and scrolling effects. Look for creative ways to simplify your design. Minimalism is not about hiding features or content, but about doing less, just doing it better. Yes, actually simplifying design very often needs more creativity than making it complex. Help your users to complete the same tasks in a shorter amount time using fewer steps. Come up with creative ways to solve your users problems or to increase the conversion rate by breaking your visual patterns and directing your users right into your call-to-action. There is so much room for creativity in these areas while still sticking to design conventions, standards and common website prototypes. Don t get me wrong be creative and have fun designing websites. Just be careful how and where you use your creativity so it won t work against you. Now stick around. It s time for this week s hyper-specific call to action. Call to action For this week s call to action, I want you to think about Rafal s two big points from this episode: #1 — Design with a prototype in mind #2 — Don t make your users think I want you to think about them in relation to your website and your audience. What do your users expect when they visit your website? Are you giving it to them? Consider whether there are standard website elements you don t currently have. Ask some people who are representative of your audience members to use your website. Do they have to think too much? Try to identify an element of your website that would be a simple tweak but that would make it conform better to audience expectations and/or make the experience of using your website better. Any improvement along these lines will make your site easier for users to interface with, which is going to bring them closer to taking you up on your calls to action. And, as always, please feel encouraged to report back to me on Twitter. What did you learn by following through with this week s hyper-specific Call to Action? I want to know! Okay — coming next week, we move on from design to technology. We re going to talk about plugins. They are one of the greatest elements of WordPress. And they are one of the most worrisome and terrifying elements of WordPress. Let s discuss now to navigate those two extremes comfortably, shall we? That s next week on Sites. Finally, before I go, here are two more quick calls to action for you to consider: Subscribe to Sites Weekly If you haven t yet, please take this opportunity to activate your free subscription to our curated weekly email newsletter, Sites Weekly. Each week, I find four links about content, design, technology, and strategy that you don t want to miss, and then I send them out via email on Wednesday afternoon. Reading this newsletter will help you make your website more powerful and successful. Go to studiopress.com/news and sign up in one step right there at the top of the page. That s studiopress.com/news. Rate and Review Sites on Apple Podcasts And finally, if you enjoy the Sites podcast, please subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts (formerly known as iTunes), and consider giving us a rating or a review over there as well. One quick tip on that: to make the best use of your review, let me know something in particular you like about the show. That feedback is really important. To find us in Apple Podcasts, search for StudioPress Sites and look for the striking purple logo that was designed by Rafal Tomal. Or you can also go to the URL sites.fm/apple and it will redirect you to our Apple Podcasts page. And with that, we come to the close of another episode. Thank you for listening to this episode of Sites. I appreciate you being here. Join me next time, and let s keep building powerful, successful WordPress websites together. This episode of sites was brought to you by StudioPress Sites, which was awarded Fastest WordPress Hosting of 2017 in an independent speed test . If you want to make WordPress fast, secure, and easy — and, I mean, why wouldn t you — visit studiopress.com/sites today and see which plan fits your needs. That s studiopress.com/sites.

There comes a point for any website when more creativity actually becomes too much, and becomes a negative. In this episode, we discuss a couple of important points to keep in mind so that creativity with your web design doesn t harm your users experience. Listen to <a href="https://rainmaker.fm/series/sites/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Site Success: Tips for Building Better WordPress Websites</a> below ... <a href="https://rainmaker.fm/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/sites-season-1-episode-14.mp3" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Download MP3</a><a href="https://rainmaker.fm/series/sites/feed/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Subscribe by RSS</a><a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/id1251630646" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Subscribe in iTunes</a> Important links from this episode: <ul> <li><a href="http://studiopress.com/sites" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Try StudioPress Sites</a></li> <li><a href="http://studiopress.com/news" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Sites Weekly Newsletter</a></li> <li><a href="http://sites.fm/apple" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Subscribe to Sites on Apple Podcasts</a></li> <li><a href="http://twitter.com/JerodMorris" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">@JerodMorris on Twitter</a></li> <li>Original blog post: <a href="http://rafaltomal.com/creativity-can-kill-design/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">How Creativity Can Kill a Good Website Design</a> by Rafal Tomal</li> </ul> <h2>The Transcript</h2> Jerod Morris: Welcome to Sites, a podcast by the teams at StudioPress and Copyblogger. In this show, we deliver time-tested insight on the four pillars of a successful WordPress website: content, design, technology, and strategy. We want to help you get a little bit closer to reaching your online goals, one episode at a time. I m your host Jerod Morris. Sites is brought to you by StudioPress Sites — the complete hosted solution that makes WordPress fast, secure, and easy without sacrificing power or flexibility. For example, you can upload your own WordPress theme, or, you can use one of the 20 beautiful StudioPress themes that are included and just one click away. Explore all the amazing things you can do with a StudioPress Site, and you ll understand why this is way more than traditional WordPress hosting. No matter how you ll be using your site, we have a plan to fit your needs — and your budget. To learn more, visit <a href="http://studiopress.com/sites" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">studiopress.com/sites</a>. That s <a href="http://studiopress.com/sites" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">studiopress.com/sites</a>. Welcome to Episode 14 of Sites. Last week, we discussed how to create content that deeply engages our audience. One element of content that is deeply engaging is, of course, creativity. You aren t going to capture attention, and keep it, if you re saying the same thing everyone else is — and saying it in the same way everyone else is. So creativity is unequivocally a good thing. But like any good thing — basketball, beer ballroom dancing — indulging in too much of it can have negative consequences. This is especially true when it comes to creativity and web design. Now you may be thinking, Wait a minute, why wouldn t I want the most creative web design possible? Won t that help me break through the noise, differentiate myself, and get much-needed attention? Sure to a point. The key is knowing where that point is. Because after that point, additional creativity may no longer be helping your web design. It might actually be killing it. That is the thesis of Rafal Tomal s blog post titled How Creativity Can Kill a Good Website Design. He wrote it in February of 2016. I m reading it here in September of 2017. And while the post is written to an audience of designers — and you may not consider yourself a designer — it s still relevant to you. Because if you re creating a website, then you have to pick a design and tweak it, or you have to hire a designer. And that means you need to have some idea where the line is between the right amount of creativity and too much of it. Here, now, is my reading of Rafal Tomal s blog post: How Creativity Can Kill a Good Website Design. I ve adapted it slightly for clarity. Make sure you stick around after the reading, as I ll have this week s hyper-specific call to action for you. <h3>How Creativity Can Kill a Good Website Design</h3> How in the world could being too creative kill your design? I always thought the more creative someone is, the better designer he or she must be. Then, I started studying design more and realized that it s actually not all about creativity. Most of us start as visual designers, and then we grow and learn more about user interface, conversion, user experience, accessibility, or usability. Your creativity brought you here and that made you interested in design, but if you really want to evolve and become a better designer, be aware that being too creative may actually hurt your design work. How? Because we re designing for users — not ourselves. The sooner you realize this, the better. User psychology is a complicated subject, but one thing is for sure: people by default are lazy and will look for the least-resistant way to accomplish their task. Layouts that are too complicated, solutions that are too creative, and reinvented wheels won t make your users life easier. So, how can we find a good balance between a creative, artistic, and original design while still making it intuitive, maintaining usability, and providing good results for the business? Here are a couple of ways … 1. Start with a prototype in mind According to Google s research, users prefer websites that look both simple (low complexity) and familiar (high prototypicality). People make their aesthetic judgment on your design in less than 50 milliseconds. That first impression can tell them if they want to stay or leave your website or how they feel about your brand and product. As Javier Bargas-Avila, Senior User Experience Researcher at YouTube UX Research, said: Designs that contradict what users typically expect of a website may hurt users first impression and damage their expectations. You ve probably seen thousands of different websites by now. If I asked you to draw a layout of a blog website, it would probably look something like this: <ul> <li>A header area with logo to the left and nav menu to the right</li> <li>A sidebar to the right with a CTA box at the top</li> <li>Then to the left in the body section is the main content area</li> </ul> We could repeat this exercise with almost every kind of website: e-commerce, a doctor s office, university, portfolio, magazine, etc. A prototype of a blog website has the content area on the left side and the sidebar on the right side. The sidebar has widgets that mostly includes the email sign-up form as the first one. Does every blog look like that? No, but most of them do and that s why this is a prototypical image of a blog layout. When people visit your blog and want to sign up for your email newsletter, their expectation will be to find it in the right hand sidebar. How convenient is it when they find it right there and how frustrating would it be if it s not there? I believe it s always good to start designing with a prototype in mind. Then, you can alter it from there and test different ideas and decide how much you can afford to change the original look. <ul> <li>Variation 1 might be a special widget just below the header that spans the content area and sidebar with a CTA box</li> <li>Variation 2 might be a footer widget with the CTA box</li> <li>Variation 3 might be the sidebar flipped to the left side.</li> </ul> Of course, everything depends on your targeted audience. If you re designing a website for creative people, their expectations may be completely different. Looking at a prototypical website could be too boring for them and they may actually be open to a more creative approach from you. On the other hand, if you re designing for a non-specified group of users, you may want to go a safer route and stick as close to the prototypical design as possible. Being too creative here could actually hurt the basic expectations, which would lead to confusion and result in abandoning your website. So that is point #1: Design with a prototype in mind. Now let s discuss point #2 2. Don t make your users think There are many established web conventions and standards like the placement of your logo, navigation, search bar, or login link. There are even conventions for an icon s meaning, website element names, (e.g. Home, Sitemap, Contact), button styles, layout and visual hierarchy. All of these standards will help your users to navigate and find what they need much faster. Try to always stick to some of the most popular conventions and use your creativity elsewhere. Avoid reinventing the wheel. You don t want to change your users expectations from where the navigation is or make them wonder what that icon means. Remember that users are looking for the least resistant way to accomplish their task. So, simply don t make them think. Every website has its own level of user interface complexity and a certain amount of content. The more complex your interface is and the more content you have, the more energy it requires from visitors to explore the website. There are some exceptions when you may want to break the web conventions on purpose. Maybe you know exactly who your audience is and the goal of your website is to entertain and create an environment where your users are having fun exploring your creative ideas. You ve probably seen many clever portfolio websites with an original navigation or a horizontal scroll instead of vertical. It is fun to explore these and I m sure all other designers enjoy it too. It is OK in this circumstance. Similar creative approaches certainly wouldn t work for a local library or hospital website, where many users are older people or less experienced web users and they don t have time or energy to play with your design. Again, I would strongly recommend to start designing with the conventions in mind, and then try to alter some elements, after testing them first. Don t just trust your own gut see what your users think. If you can afford to come up with completely new design solutions, then you should be able to afford to test the usability of that solution as well. So, point #1 is to design with a prototype in mind. Point #2 is to not make your users think at least, not think in terms of how to use your website. You d rather them spend that time and energy thinking about your content and your ideas, not how to go to the next page. Now here s the final point … Use your creativity mostly in visual design So, where is the fun part of designing websites if you can t be too creative in many of the previously mentioned aspects? You can be and should be creative when it comes to the visual design. Try different color schemes or interesting font combinations. You can play with spacing, visual balance, and hierarchy. Design original illustrations or clever hover and scrolling effects. Look for creative ways to simplify your design. Minimalism is not about hiding features or content, but about doing less, just doing it better. Yes, actually simplifying design very often needs more creativity than making it complex. Help your users to complete the same tasks in a shorter amount time using fewer steps. Come up with creative ways to solve your users problems or to increase the conversion rate by breaking your visual patterns and directing your users right into your call-to-action. There is so much room for creativity in these areas while still sticking to design conventions, standards and common website prototypes. Don t get me wrong be creative and have fun designing websites. Just be careful how and where you use your creativity so it won t work against you. Now stick around. It s time for this week s hyper-specific call to action. <h3>Call to action</h3> For this week s call to action, I want you to think about Rafal s two big points from this episode: #1 — Design with a prototype in mind #2 — Don t make your users think I want you to think about them in relation to your website and your audience. What do your users expect when they visit your website? Are you giving it to them? Consider whether there are standard website elements you don t currently have. Ask some people who are representative of your audience members to use your website. Do they have to think too much? Try to identify an element of your website that would be a simple tweak but that would make it conform better to audience expectations and/or make the experience of using your website better. Any improvement along these lines will make your site easier for users to interface with, which is going to bring them closer to taking you up on your calls to action. And, as always, please feel encouraged to report back to me on Twitter. What did you learn by following through with this week s hyper-specific Call to Action? I want to know! Okay — coming next week, we move on from design to technology. We re going to talk about plugins. They are one of the greatest elements of WordPress. And they are one of the most worrisome and terrifying elements of WordPress. Let s discuss now to navigate those two extremes comfortably, shall we? That s next week on Sites. Finally, before I go, here are two more quick calls to action for you to consider: <h3>Subscribe to Sites Weekly</h3> If you haven t yet, please take this opportunity to activate your free subscription to our curated weekly email newsletter, Sites Weekly. Each week, I find four links about content, design, technology, and strategy that you don t want to miss, and then I send them out via email on Wednesday afternoon. Reading this newsletter will help you make your website more powerful and successful. Go to <a href="http://studiopress.com/news" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">studiopress.com/news</a> and sign up in one step right there at the top of the page. That s <a href="http://studiopress.com/news" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">studiopress.com/news</a>. <h3>Rate and Review Sites on Apple Podcasts</h3> And finally, if you enjoy the Sites podcast, please subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts (formerly known as iTunes), and consider giving us a rating or a review over there as well. One quick tip on that: to make the best use of your review, let me know something in particular you like about the show. That feedback is really important. To find us in Apple Podcasts, search for StudioPress Sites and look for the striking purple logo that was designed by Rafal Tomal. Or you can also go to the URL <a href="http://sites.fm/apple" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">sites.fm/apple</a> and it will redirect you to our Apple Podcasts page. And with that, we come to the close of another episode. Thank you for listening to this episode of Sites. I appreciate you being here. Join me next time, and let s keep building powerful, successful WordPress websites together. This episode of sites was brought to you by StudioPress Sites, which was awarded Fastest WordPress Hosting of 2017 in an independent speed test . If you want to make WordPress fast, secure, and easy — and, I mean, why wouldn t you — visit <a href="http://studiopress.com/sites" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">studiopress.com/sites</a> today and see which plan fits your needs. That s <a href="http://studiopress.com/sites" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">studiopress.com/sites</a>.

[14] How Creativity Can Kill a Good Website Design

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