Long gone are the days when you would need to design and code a new website from scratch. While there are certainly some situations where you may need to invest tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars into a fully custom solution, that’s just not practical or feasible for the vast majority of the businesses. Just the same, it doesn’t always make sense to take on a “one size fits all” framework and take it well beyond what it was originally designed to do.

Just as Goldilocks had to find the bowl of porridge that was just right, there is an ideal middle ground to be had by online business owners too. If you’ve been thinking about a better way to power your directory website — and there are many different types of websites where such a solution would be a perfect fit — then you should be taking a look at Brilliant Directories, a comprehensive platform that’ll get you up and running without any plugins.

Better Than WordPress

Let’s address the elephant in the room, because everyone is probably already thinking about that elephant. It’s true. WordPress is a great platform may have started out gearing itself mostly toward running blogs, but the ecosystem and community have evolved significantly over the years to adapt WordPress for other purposes. However, we have to remember that this can result in a rather disparate, disjointed, and unreliable experience.

If you want to build a website with an online directory at its core, you want to have the best directory software that has been built specifically for that purpose. And that’s where Brilliant Directories would tick a lot of the boxes for you.

One of the big challenges that you’ll face with WordPress, in this regard, is that you could end up with a hodgepodge of themes and plugins from a number of different vendors and developers. You might turn to one company for a premium theme, another company for membership management, another for payment processing, another for content management… the list can go on and on.

If any one of those pieces doesn’t quite play nice with any other of the pieces, your whole castle of cards could come crashing down. Why would you try to jury-rig together a duct taped solution when you can have one that was built for what you need, including everything you need, right out of the box?

Choose Your Theme

When most people think about directory websites, usually one of two types of websites come to mind. First, they might think of something like an online yellow pages. These are sites that would provide key information about a number of local businesses, like their address, phone number, and hours of operation. Depending on the nature of the business, these listings might also include specific contact information for individuals at the business or they might describe the products and services that they offer.

Second, particularly if you’re in the industry of Internet marketing and online content creation, people might think about article directories. In effect, an article directory is a website with a large collection of articles written by a variety of contributors on a variety of subjects. These types of sites are sometimes viewed as “content farms,” but that’s another discussion for another day.

What we need to recognize about tools like Brilliant Directories is that the applications for online directories can be much more varied and diverse than that. And they’ve got the appropriate themes and designs to best suit these different applications.

You might actually be surprised by the sheer number of possible directory themes you can use with Brilliant Directories. For example, if you run a professional association or other similar type of membership based organization, having a directory of associates can be incredibly valuable for all the members. This way, it’s much easier for them to get in contact with one another without relying on imperfect third party social networks like Facebook or LinkedIn.

Remember that this online directory can be of almost anything and anyone. It’s an excellent solution for real estate professionals, for example, as it could be used to organize and present real estate listings in an attractive and robust website. It’s also great for product catalogs, coupon sites, industry resources, business review sites and more.

Perhaps one of the more compelling possibilities, from a business opportunity standpoint, is to use the directory website as a means of lead generation. If you focus on a particular niche, like legal advice and counsel for instance, you could have visitors to the site fill out a short form where they ask to be matched to a lawyer or other legal professional. You can then sell that lead to the highest bidder in your network. This can be incredibly lucrative with the right strategy and implementation.

On the payment side of the process, Brilliant Directories comes with the built-in functionality to handle recurring, automatic payments. It also features the ability to sell and manage your banner ads without relying on any third party software. Even premium hosting is included with every plan.

The Live Site Experience

The software is straightforward enough and easy enough to understand that even inexperienced novices shouldn’t have any trouble navigating around and getting their website up and running. All you need to do is start with one of the 15+ professional themes. From there, you can add your company name, logos, images, text and other branding elements.

You can select from a number of built-in search modules that you can then implement into your website design, making it easy for site visitors to search members and content in the most meaningful and positive way possible, including filters for keyword, category, location and other factors appropriate to the theme of your site.

The net result is a website that is both clean and robust, simple and professional, all while boasting a broad range of features running both behind the scenes and accessible to the end user. In this example site, you can see the search module featured prominently with a large background image that automatically cycles through a number of pictures.

There’s also a smaller search module in the top-right section where visitors can search for name or keyword, plus city or post code, to come up with the business that they seek. The business model here is that professionals can pay for premium listings on the site. Easy and obvious navigation is located along the top, and keyword rich content is located below the fold both for informational and SEO purposes.

Of course, depending on the theme you choose and the type of directory site you want to run, there are number of different customizations and personalizations that you can implement. This is just one example, but it illustrates the professional look and feel of the end product, even with minimal customization in place.

A Familiar Dashboard Interface

So, the online directory looks great from the end user’s perspective, but what does it look like for you as the website administrator. As mentioned, choosing from the 15+ premium themes and customizing their look with your own company logo and other elements is easy enough. The same is true with all the other moving parts that go into creating a successful website.

This is what you’ll see when you log into the back-end of your website as powered by Brilliant Directories. If you think that it looks a little familiar, you wouldn’t be alone. The basic navigation and framework here is somewhat reminiscent of WordPress, except it has been heavily adapted and optimized for the purposes of running a directory website.

The core navigation is found all along the left in the sidebar, and when you hover your mouse pointer over any of those higher-level navigational links, you’ll reveal the corresponding sub-links. For instance, when you hover over “Members” on the left side, you’ll be shown links where you can navigate to Search Members, Member Categories, Member Reviews and Import Members.

Front and center on the user dashboard are your key stats, including total members, new members in the last 7 days, new leads, and total revenue. Below that, you’ll find links and modules for popular support topics, recommend resources, recent member logins, social media quick links, and website resources. With that last point, you can easily keep tabs on your total disk space usage and your monthly bandwidth usage for the hosting that comes bundled with every package. There are also useful links to easily remove unused images and remove export files.

When you look under the Settings section, you’ll find additional pages where you can access General Settings, which is further subdivided into five tabs for General, Brand Images, Social Media, Configuration and Integrations. Naturally, this will take a little bit of time on your part for the initial setup, but it’s all easy enough to understand.

As you make your way through the rest of the settings, you’ll find Design Settings, Domain Manager, Admin Accounts, Text Labels, Country Settings and Advanced Settings. You can leave a lot of these at their defaults, but it is worthwhile to go in and tweak what you need to change. The most important, of course, are your general settings like your website name and phone number, as well as your brand images.

Manage Your Content and Members

There’s an old saying out there stating that content is king. And this is true. At the end of the day, your website still needs to provide the content that visitors are looking for. But the nature of content is getting increasingly complex and that’s why Brilliant Directories has helped to organize the system so it’s easier to follow.

You’ve got sections to manage web pages, manage posts, edit post settings, SEO templates, and the image manager. Here is the Manage Web Pages page, for instance.

The bright yellow “Edit” button next to each page is a great visual reminder, and then you’ll find the Actions pull-down next to that for each page. This may be context-sensitive, but the only Action I found was to view the page. Next to that are the page details and the permalink structure.

If you’ve ever had any experience editing content within WordPress, you’ll feel right at home here. The title and subtitle are located at the top, and then the main content area is offered as a WYSIWYG “visual” editor. It’s just like using a standard word processor where you can bold, italicize and underline text easily, as well as access bullet points, change paragraph formats, insert links and images, and so forth.

You’ll also find options, like whether or not you’d like to show the sidebar (and the sidebar position) along the right side. There’s a lot to toy around with here, and your experience can be as simple or as complex as you’d like it to be.

The interface for managing the members of your site is similarly intuitive, though again, you’ll need to take some time to familiarize yourself with what is possible. In the member search, for instance, you can search by a broad range of parameters, including name, email address, account status, membership level, transaction types, joined date range and more. Adding or importing members only takes a few clicks too.

The member directory, as seen from your back-end interface, gives great “at a glance” information, including the contact information, current status, revenue, and membership details, like the account level, date joined, IP jointed, and last login. When you hover over the “actions” button, you can view account details, perform a quick edit, view the live profile and payment history, and even send an email, all within this one system.

Built-In Marketing Too

Yes, email is built into the Brilliant Directories solution. It’s not just about building the website itself, but about providing all the tools you need for such a website business in one cohesive package.

In this way, email marketing is also integrated. You can create and customize your own email designs right from within the main dashboard, adding the images and texts and layouts that you want. You can start by using any of the 40+ pre-made templates for everything from welcome emails to account upgrade confirmations. Scheduled email campaigns, segmented lists, and personalized emails (with member variables) are some of the other key features.

How Much Does It Cost?

Rather than offer different tiers of service at different rates, the pricing scheme for Brilliant Directories is such that all paying customers get access to all the premium features they need to launch and manage successful directory websites.

That includes access to over 1,000 built-in features and support for managing up to 100,000 members, as well as daily website backups, premium cloud hosting, payment history tracking for members, job listings, upcoming events support, lead generation tools, payment processing, ad management, contact list manager, and so much more.

If you decide to go on a month-by-month basis, the cost to use Brilliant Directories is $145 per month. A better value is if you pay for a year at a time for $950, saving you 45 percent over paying monthly, effectively bringing your cost down to $79 per month. However, far and away the best value is at $1,450. That is a one-time payment and you get a lifetime license. You never have to pay another dime. Ever. You own it for life, and that includes lifetime support and lifetime website hosting.

If you’re not sure if this is quite right for you, I encourage you to try the free demo first. It’ll give you a good sense of what you can expect without any commitment on your part.

Whether it’s time to update your company’s website or your business is just lifting off the ground, you need a killer website to find success. However, building an impressive website is much easier said than done.

While you can build something basic on a site like Godaddy.com, the most successful websites use professional coders. If you can’t hire someone quite yet, boost your success by improving the quality of your site.

Here are a few ways you can boost your search ranking and increase the user-friendliness of your website.

Make it look polished

No one is going to take your website seriously if it isn’t easy to look at—and even the simplest of sites can look spiffy with a few tweaks here and there. If hiring a professional web developer isn’t in your budget, applications like WordPress can be a lifesaver.

Even if your knowledge of computers is rudimentary at best, this is an easy to use tool that lets you build a complete website without having to type a single line of code or figure out JavaScript.

With the right color scheme and photo selection, your site will have that professional, clean, polished look that all businesses desire. You can actually see a perfect example of this on this best kitchen faucet guide, which is loaded with content, but they do a great job of breaking it apart with big red and blue bold areas to highlight the Pros and Cons of each item they review.

This is something you will see across many of the top content blogs and review sites online. The more content that is placed on a site, the more likely it will rank higher in Google. However, you will want to break apart your content with visuals and colors sections to make it more appealing and easier to skim through.

Personalize your website

A good website doesn’t bombard potential clients or consumers with big flashy pop-up ads; it greets them warmly, like an old friend. Your homepage is your first impression, and as the saying goes, “You only get one chance to make a first impression.”

For personal website and blog businesses, it’s a great idea to showcase the person behind the site. The more personal and upfront a site is with their audience, the more likely it is to also gain their trust. A perfect example of this can be seen on Pat Flynn’s blog, as he shows a profile image of himself, has a nice little signature, and also has easy to navigation buttons and call to actions throughout the site.

Tell your visitors a little bit about your company and what you do, but keep it simple. You can go into greater depth on your about page.

Make it marketable

If you haven’t studied up on digital marketing, it might be time to start. Google accounted for almost 40% of U.S. digital marketing with Facebook pulling in about 8%. If your website isn’t showing up on major search engines like Google and Bing, you might get left in the dust by your competition.

Creating a blog section on your site serves two purposes: providing additional content for users and keyword utilization for ranking.

If you’re not much of a wordsmith, it’s never a bad idea to outsource your content to a professional writer who knows what they’re doing.

However, before you can start populating your site with content, you need to do a little research. To get the most out of your content be sure to include the right keywords in the right volume.

Provide the Information Consumers Want

If you want to rank for certain search queries and drive more customers to your site, provide the information they want. Perhaps it’s curating content that helps consumers answer important questions.

Maybe you’re looking to serve as the data-source for confused consumers. Take BestDebtCompanies.com for example. This site is designed to help online visitors compare debt relief companies; by offering up honest testimonials from other customers, they’re able to drive traffic without creating huge amounts of original content.

How? Take these Community Tax reviews for example. By collecting consumer reviews, this site is able to provide unbiased information that consumers are searching for—without having to write thousands of blog posts to rank.

If you have a large business that is fundamentally web-based, hiring an SEO (Search Engine Optimization) firm is your best course of action—unless you already have an in-house marketing department.

For smaller businesses just getting started, tools like Google Adsense will be your best friend. If you’re selling boots for the winter, you can see what the hottest related search terms are, when they’re spiking, and how much they are already being used.

Enable Easy Social Sharing

Social media is still one of the best ways to drive traffic to a website or blog. It’s not just about making sure you have quality content and trying to get it to go viral, it’s also important to make sure you have easy to use social sharing buttons on your site as well.

WordPress plugins like Social Floating Bar and Sassy Social Share make this process a whole lot easier. You can see an example of these social sharing buttons on any of the pages on our site.

When adding social sharing buttons to your side, make sure they scroll down with the user, or to add them at both the beginning and end of your articles.

Promotions

These days, it seems every website wants to get you on an emailing list, but no one ever wants to sign up because it just ends up cluttering their inbox. A method to get around this problem is by offering an incentive.

One strategy that websites like Macys.com use is offering 15-20% off discounts on certain products in exchange for your email, or to get a user to “ship to the store” and get free pickup. This can be a highly effective way to lure your target audience into a position where they are more likely to convert into a sale.

Another way to keep customers coming back is it have them include their email so that a representative may contact them.

Contact page

Your contact page should be easy to find and user-friendly. Some of your visitors are already going to know who you are as a business and what they want, but others might need a little direction. If you want your website to convert, you need to have a contact page that customers can use to clear up any confusion.

Using these proven strategies, you can take your daft and drab website and turn it into an elegant workhorse.

The number of hacker attacks has drastically increased during the last couple of years. It is almost impossible to name a successful business with a website, which has never been attacked by a hacker. The online security has been one of the hottest topics for a while. But if most Internet users and beginner entrepreneurs knew that it takes about a minute only to secure their websites, they would be very surprised. And what about you? Are you already surprised?

We don’t exaggerate the reality. You don’t have to be a developer or a cybersecurity expert to secure your personal and financial data online in less than a minute. No matter whether you have a huge service providing company or not, you can use the method, which we’re talking about for any case. So, what is it? Have you ever heard of a VPN? That is exactly what we’re going to discuss today. If you have no idea why cybersecurity is important or why this issue is so trendy today, check bestvpnrating.com for more details on the topic.

And now let’s talk about specific reasons and solutions to protect your website, blog, or anything you store on a computer or smartphone.

How to Secure Information Properly

What do you need as a freelancer or someone who works remotely?

• A computer,
• And a good Internet connection.

Right?

Imagine you have a blog or website, which you’re constantly working on. You visit it every day, add your personal and business information, make updates, do everything to promote it and attract visitors, keep databases there, and so on. As many other freelancers, you probably prefer working in a lovely place with a beautiful view. It can be your favorite coffee shop or any other place with a public WiFi. Why not? Working from your favorite restaurant, where you can always grab a cup of delicious coffee is a great idea, except for one small detail.

Every computer, connected through a public network becomes an easy target for a hacker. Once a computer is connected, a hacker can easily get any kind of personal, financial, and business data from it, monitoring the traffic as well. You might think that you have already done ton of things to protect your computer and blog. Thus, you don’t need extra tricks for public networks only. But let us analyze what you already have. A strong password? It is hard to find a password, which can’t be hacked. An antivirus? It has nothing in common with online data security. All of this is a protection on a basic level, which is not enough for a blog or a website.

But it doesn’t mean you have to deny the pleasure of using public networks whenever you need it. You just have to find the proper solution to keep your data safe. We recommend a VPN. Don’t know how to pick one? Get a full guide on how to choose a service on this site along with other useful information about VPNs in general.

How VPN Works

The number one reason why we recommend a VPN as the best online security tool is the ability to protect your blogger content with the encryption technology.

A VPN stands for a virtual private network. It is a piece of software, based on the encryption technology, which guarantees the highest level of protection. The encryption technology ensures that no one else except you will reach and read your data and traffic (encryption is coding).

If not using a VPN, other people that share the same network as you can see your location and IP, monitoring where exactly the traffic goes to and from. Thus, they can easily extract uncoded data from the devices. A VPN has been around already for years. It has already proved its effectiveness both for businesses and usual browsing activity. In fact, it was created for business initially. Many years ago entrepreneurs required a universal tool to ensure communication and data exchange between different departments and offices were private and secure. Thus, a VPN service appeared.

It has increased the level of importance. Today we have more situations when people work remotely or do their work at home. We work from airports, hotels, coffee shops, restaurants, and numerous other spots different from the actual office space. The same way is with the freelancers, who have their own blogs. Nowadays, having a blog is more than just a hobby. For a lot of people, blogging is a job, which brings real money. So, you should treat it like big corporations and small businesses treat their websites. The proper level of data security is required.

Functions of a VPN

A virtual private network is not only a security tool. Today it has many more functions than ever before. It serves for:

• Data security and privacy.
• Browsing anonymously by hiding your geographical location and real IP address, replacing it with the IP address of the server you’re connected to.
• Better Internet experience by providing access to all the websites, which are blocked in your region. Have you ever faced a situation when you couldn’t visit a certain website or platform because it was not allowed in your country? A VPN can easily solve this problem too.

When having a VPN, you create a personal encrypted connection, transferring your communications through a private, closed network. At the same time, your computer or smartphone will think you’re connecting from home or office, while other people will see the location of the server, which you’re connected to.

In other words, a VPN is an essential tool for those who work remotely, have a blog, or plan a business trip in the near future. For those who use the Internet for social media communication, watching movies, listening to music online, and other entertaining activities, a VPN is definitely a recommended tool. The choice is up to you. But don’t forget to check Bestvpnrating.com in case you’re planning to get one.

Finding the right forms of lead collection and monetization methods on your blog is very important. Not only do you want to make money with your audience, but you also want to keep them for the long term as well. The best way to accomplish this is to get their email address or permission to send push notifications, and also provide them with a great value or service in the process.

Megapu.sh is a new ad network with a very original twist. It is the first network that lets you send ads with push notifications. If you are a blogger that is looking for a new way to engage with your readers or drive new people to your site, then this is worth checking out.

Megapu.sh gives you far more control over your ad campaigns than most other networks. If you use your push notification ads properly, you can see an insane ROI that you may never have thought possible.

What Are the Main Benefits of Megapu.sh

Let’s take a look at some of the reasons Megapu.sh is a great platform for bloggers to reach new people.

Very reasonable CPC

As a blogger, you are going to be more budget conscious than most other marketers. This is one of the biggest reasons Megapu.sh is a great solution. The minimum CPC is only $0.001. However, the bid that you need to pay is going to be higher, depending on the region you are targeting and the depth of your targeting strategy. It is still a lot cheaper than running ads on AdWords or Facebook.

Holistic Advertising across desktop and mobile devices

When you are developing a marketing strategy, you want to make sure that users have a consistent experience with your brand at every point of engagement. This is true for bloggers as much as any other brand. This is more challenging in an era where users interact with brands across different devices.

Providing a seamless experience with a multi-device marketing strategy is difficult, because marketing creatives have different sizes and appearances on every device. Targeting options on different devices are also more restrictive with most advertising networks, due to screen size differences and other constraints.

Megapu.sh makes it easier to develop a consistent marketing strategy across all points of engagement, because push notifications can have a similar appearance on every device and browser.

Access to a diverse demographic base

Some ad networks have a very homogenous user base. This limits your ability to grow by penetrating new markets composed of different audience segments.

Megapu.sh has fairly diverse audience. Here is the breakdown of users by age:

You can reach users in almost any age group. At the same time, the largest audience segment is composed of people between 45 and 55, which tends to be the group with the most purchasing power.

You can also reach users from every country in the world. This is another great way to expand your market if you intend to reach a global audience.

Large (and growing) supply of traffic

Megapu.sh is an abundant source of high quality traffic. It currently drives over 12 million clicks every day. That figure is expected to rise even more as demand for their service grows.

Very reliable support

Megapu.sh has a very dependable customer service team on standby. They are available 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Very simple to use interface

Megapu.sh has a very straightforward GUI interface. Creating new campaigns is not difficult at all. You can also use the chat button if you need real time support.

The statistics graphs are also very useful. You can see monthly traffic and spending reports. You can also see what your top campaigns were over any period of time. Looking at the graph that says “yesterday’s top 10 campaigns” is a good way to see which campaigns have recently been driving the most volume.

Small deposit requirements and generous deposit bonuses

You don’t need to spend a lot of money to get started with Megapu.sh. The minimum deposit is only $100. And should you have any questions throughout the process, support is just a click away.

However, Megapu.sh rewards advertisers that make large deposits with points called MPs. The amount of MPs that you earn depends on the deposit. You will receive one MP after making a $500 deposit. You will get 20 MPs after depositing $5000. Each MP is worth $15 in advertising credits. The only catch is that you have to spend 10 at a time.

This means you can really stretch your budget by making large deposits, rather than lots of $100 deposits. It is a better deal than platforms like RTX, which only offer surprise incentives for people that make deposits in a 24-hour period.

Getting started with your first make a push campaign

Setting up a campaign with Megapu.sh is very straightforward. You need to start by clicking “new campaign” button, which is the second option from the top in the left sidebar.

You will need to start by making your ad creative by entering the following:

• A name for your campaign. This will only be visible to you, so choose something that will be easy to remember and differentiate from existing campaigns.
• The link that users will be directed to after clicking your push notification. This will probably either be your landing page or an affiliate tracking link.
• A title for your ad. This will be the most visible part of your ad and should clearly convey what the user should expect after clicking your ad.
• The message that will appear in the body of your ad. It can be up to 45 characters long.
• The image that will appear in your ad. This will need to be 492 x 328 pixels.
• An icon that will accompany your ad. This will need to be 192 x 192 pixels.

Once you have made your creative, you will need to set your targeting options. You will need to start by selecting the country that you want your ads to appear. You will see the average and minimum bids for that country in red. If you selected Canada, you would see an average price of 4.9 and a minimum price of 2.0. This means that you will need to pay at least two cents a click to get any traffic, but will need to bed nearly 5 cents to get any decent volume.

You will also be able to choose the browsers, operating systems and devices that you want your ads to appear on. If you aren’t sure which browsers or devices will convert the best, then you may want to consider creating multiple campaigns to test each of them.

Megapu.sh in Action

You should now have a good understanding of not just how Megapu.sh works and can make bloggers money, but also on how to get started with your first campaign as well. To dive into this a bit more, we can actually take a look at a case study that appears on their site.

In this example, the affiliate attempted to push traffic to a cryptocurrency offer that paid $250 on deposit. He ran a campaign targeting Poland, spending just $33.25 at 1.4 cents per click. This resulted in one conversion for a net profit of $216 or an ROI of 651%.

Megapu.sh is Where it is At

Megapu.sh is a great advertising network. You can use push notification ads to reengage with existing customers or push products while they are in high demand. Timing the delivery of your ads and targeting them carefully will help you create some very high ROI campaigns.

When you come across successful blogs, how often do you think that you could have your one no less impactful? If this thought often occurs to you, perhaps, it’s time you start your own blog. The question is: What do you blog about? What are the topics that drive traffic to your blog? What is the point where your experience, expertise or interests meets the want of quality content?

In today’s post, we’ll help you answer these questions and try to walk you by hand through brainstorming and analysis that help you locate a perfect niche for your blog in 2018. This article would be most effective, provided you don’t just get acquainted with all the step, but actually, take your time to accomplish them.

So, are you with us on this journey? Let’s get started!

Step #1: Brainstorm Your Bloggable Passions

If you’re serious about blogging (as you probably are), you’ll be spending a lot of time producing content for the given niche. You’ll have to produce quality content (including long reads) daily or a couple of times per weeks for a couple of years. Many can’t stand this and just burn out if the topic of their choice doesn’t meet their interests and passions.

So, the first step for determining the right thing to blog about is brainstorming all your personal and professional interests in order to come up with the topics, writing about which will be rewarding. Just complete this small task to get a list of such topics in front of you:

Firstly, think about your hobbies or the things you enjoy doing. You shouldn’t necessarily be a past master at them. Your sincere interest and fascination are sufficient. For example, let’s say, you’re a videography lover. That could be an awesome niche. You can share your works, details on creation process, technology tips, reviews and more.

Pixate – Videographer Blog WordPress Template

Details | Demo

Secondly, think about your untapped interests, i.e. the things you always felt attracted to but never had a chance to explore in depth. Why don’t you jump on them and start blogging about your experience? For instance, you might have always wanted to learn watercolor painting. Buy the supplies and go ahead! Share your insights in the blog and write on watercolor art as much as you can. If your interest is deeply rooted and sincere, you’ll get a firm grasp on your target audience.

Heeey – Art Blog Elementor WordPress Theme

Details | Demo

Last but not least, think about the things you know inside-out. This will make a solid ground for producing insightful, expertise-loaded content. For example, it’s great if your professional interests fall into this category. Although, you shouldn’t be sick and tired of your occupation. Alternatively, you may be good at decoration, renovation, childcare, whatever. Then, start sharing your experiences, tips, and pieces of advice, and you can make it one of the most impactful blogs in the given niche.

Narya – Food Blog For Cooks WordPress Design

Details | Demo

After completing this exercise, you’ll end up with the list of topics, writing about which will be fulfilling for you. If you’ve got more than 3 topics on your list, you’re doing great. Let’s move on to the next step!

Step #2: Sizing Your Niche

Choosing the niche of passion is a good starter. However, just having the direction is often not enough. To succeed in blogging, you’ve got to know precisely what you cover in your blog and what you leave to others.

Why is it so important? Mind the following considerations:

• If you choose the niche that’s too broad, you’ll have to compete with all the other bloggers in that niche for audience’s attention. Moreover, you’ll end up with millions of key-word ideas and won’t be ever able to build a fruitful SEO strategy.

  For example, let’s say you want to blog about health as you’re pretty much into living sanely till the very day of your death. You’ll have to cover disease prevention, healthy nutrition, sports and physical activity and other related. No matter how hard you blog, you’ll ultimately lose it to those blogs that cover just one aspect and have a strong SEO strategy for their niche.

• On the other hand, having a niche that’s to narrow is also a nowhere road. If you blog about unsaturated fats exclusively, you’ll hardly find a large returning audience and will sooner or later run out of article topics.

So, how do you determine the size of your niche? Below, we’ve got a simple step-by-step guide you follow:

1. 1. Come up with top 5 keywords for your blog niche.
   2. Sign up or log in to Google Keyword Planner, which is an ultimate trusted point of reference when it comes to search volume. If you’re after alternatives, try the free SERPs tool or the freemium WordTracker.
   3. Once you’re in the Google’s tool, opt for “Search for new keywords using a phrase, website, or category” and a panel to test your keywords will open up:

1. Enter your first keyword where it says ‘Your product or service’ and see the average search volume for the last 12 month. Repeat for each keyword.
2. Count the total search volume for the 5 chosen keywords. If it’s more than 10K per month, your niche isn’t too small. If it’s below 30K, your niche isn’t too big either. Great choice!

Step #3: Finding Your Competitors

Well, the word ‘competition’ doesn’t get you a flush of positive emotions, right? However, you need it. The web is full of all kinds of content. If there are no blogs similar to your one, there’s a chance you’re about to have a very weird kind of blog.

You shouldn’t be scared of competition. Treat it as a chance to wrack your brain and create new value in the given niche. Just take an alternative approach, make it more integrative, diverse and insightful, and you’ll be likely to beat the competition and create a buzz online.

The fact that you have competition means that there’s a portion of online audience craving for the content you’re about to deliver. So, how do you discover your competition? We’ve got tips for you below:

• Start out with a simple Google search. Google “(your niche)” blog and “top (your niche) blogs”. See the websites that pop up on the first SERP. Analyze them: examine the topics they cover, content length, social integration and the obvious monetization (e.g. ads they display).
• Next, examine your niche representation on social media. Check for popular niche-related Facebook pages, Instagram and Twitter accounts. If they have more than 1K subscribers, your niche has its audience.
• Currently, there are still niches that are underrepresented online. However, they might have a strong presence in the offline world. Think, whether there are offline magazines and books in your niche. You can learn about them running a search on Amazon and on Google. Found some present-day publications? Good for you! Their audience will gladly supplement their offline content sources with your blog.

So, if at least two out of three searches revealed your competition, your niche’s got its juice. If these are the active blogs in your niche that are missing, while the social media and offline representation do well, your blog’s gonna be hot! That’s just the best-case scenario!

On the other hand, if all the three searches gave positive results, your journey may be tougher as the niche you’re into is already covered by many. To make your mark, you’ll have to deliver something that all the other blogs in your niche don’t. But don’t get disillusioned. There’s always a room for beating that competition and becoming one of the top blogs in the niche!

Step #4: Monetization Perspectives

Let’s be frank. You’re about to spend a good portion of your time blogging in the given niche. If you don’t get something palpable out of it, you’ll probably feel burnt out one day and ditch it. However, if your blog brings you additional income, this would likely be a motivation to keep blogging.

So, even you’re not planning to monetize your blog in the nearest future, having this option on board is good. Let’s see how you inspect the potential monetization of your blog in the given niche:

• First of all, have you looked into the ways your competitors monetize their blogs? You can do just the same.
• Secondly, think of the big brands in your niche. Are they potential advertisers? Moreover, once your blog gets traction, you can earn by collaborating with them and reviewing their products (of course, if you like them).
• Thirdly, think whether you can earn sharing your niche-related experience and expertise. For example, you can design and run an in-depth online webinar series or offer an e-book that your audience will pay for.
• Next, blogging may create opportunities for earning additional income offline. It opens opportunities for connecting with people and yields new ways to earn money in the given niche.
• Finally, consider niche-related affiliate offers. You can learn about them by dropping by such websites as CJ.com, ShareSale.com, Amazon Associates and others.

It’s important that the niche you’re after is monetizable. If a couple of niches did equally well in the previous steps, this step is likely to help you make the final choice. Stick to that choice. With strong monetization options, becoming a full-time blogger and living off your passion may one day become a dream come true.

Making an Informed Choice

Congrats! Now you know the audience sizes, competition and monetization perspectives for each of the niches you’ve listed. Was you able to single out the niche with the strongest potential? If your answer is ‘Yes’, then, it’s time to get started!

Have two of the niches you listed done equally well? Then, choose the niche that appeals to you more. Simple as that!

Once you know the niche you’re about to go for, you can nail it with top-rated personal page WordPress themes. These WordPress templates come with all the tools and plugins you need to make a sound entry to the blogging universe. At the same time, they make your blogging journey simpler thanks to pre-built WYSIWYG builders, sound SEO options and unique UX boosters:

AliceBurton – Personal Blog Elementor WordPress Theme

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Richard Gore – Writer Portfolio Elementor WordPress Theme

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If you have any questions or comments, you’re welcome to share them below. We wish you good luck in reaching prominence with your online blog!

Stay tuned for more!

Finding a good blog niche is super important if you want to become an entertainment blogger. There are lots of niches you can use, but not all of them hold up the way you want. As you can imagine, trends end up being more and more important nowadays. In fact, it goes to the point where the return on investment can be huge.

But then again, you have to be very careful and you need to pay attention to what’s really trending at that particular time. Sometimes it will be easy, other times not so much. But as you will see, OMG Blog is one of the blogs that’s designed to offer you a more comprehensive, unique and distinct approach to the world of blogging. It’s definitely not going to be easy to create a blog like this one.

Yet it’s one of the best blogs for people that want to learn the latest pop culture and LGBT or gay people information out there. It’s a wonderful, modern blog that’s designed to be simple, yet distinct enough and it does bring in front a whole lot of value due to that.

What should you learn from OMG Blog?

What you will like about OMG Blog is that it’s created specifically to showcase content that has shock value. In fact, most of the stuff in here is viral, so it will always keep you up to date with the latest information regarding the industry and so on. But at the same time, there are plenty of things that you need to consider.

Another thing to notice about OMG Blog is the huge variety of content that they have. They always try to make the content as easy to read as possible as well. That’s why they are offering citations and a whole lot of cool stuff. It all comes down to adding new content and tremendous value or professionalism to this. Of course, there are bound to be some challenges when it comes to sharing so much information.

But the design of the website is all about making the content super easy to access. They created multiple different categories like LOL, music, LGBT, film, TV, fail and so on which are all about making the content super easy to access. And that’s always a nice thing, because it makes the experience super rewarding and downright interesting all the time.

That being said, you do have access to a good Q and A series, all designed to offer your feedback to the site too. Not a lot of blogs do this, so you really want to adjust something like this and take things to the next level in a meaningful way.

One of the toughest things when it comes to creating an LGBT and gay content blog like this is that you do need to focus on offering content specific to the niche. But at the same time, you want to keep the content as good and as professional as possible. It’s really hard to reach that line, but OMG Blog does manage to stay there and it always delivers professional content that really pays off in ways you would not imagine.

Reading and using this content is super easy, and the best part is that you can adapt everything in a meaningful way with this. It all comes down to knowing how to tackle and manage all of this properly, and the ROI can indeed be huge due to that.

Just like BuzzFeed has a massive following and usage rate on their site for online surveys and quizzes, you will occasionally find a few on OMG Blog as well. Even before word spread on the internet that people could get paid to take surveys online, there was always an interest in taking fun surveys and polls that provide you with a shareable end result. This is where top sites like Little Thing and BuzzFeed get a ton of their social sharing activity.

With OMG Blog being entertainment-focused, it makes for the perfect opportunity to create quizzes, surveys, and news stories based around current day celebrities and news stories.

Who is the OMG Blog audience?

The OMG Blog audience is quite varied. Ideally, they focus on people with an interest in drag, gay and pop culture. But the reality is that their content is so varied that anyone will be able to learn something new and interesting there. Plus, they are always bringing in front new types of content, something you will really love about the OMG Blog.

Readability and value

As we mentioned earlier, we have to commend the OMG Blog writers for the great content they share there. You do have lots of cool content to be had out there, and the best part is that you can adjust and adapt everything to your own needs. You can easily read the sponsored content they have. Or you can just stick to a certain category if you want. They make it super easy to take your time and learn everything you want. Plus, they do have a massive online presence and you can easily find some of the latest articles they publish on social media too. That makes it super easy to access and read the content you need in no time.

They do try to make the content as valuable and as distinct as possible. Sometimes that will work very well. Other times not so much. But you will indeed be very happy with how much variety and quality is on their site. They have professional writers, so the return on investment is a tremendous one in that perspective.

Another interesting thing about OMG Blog is that they rely a lot on videos. It’s always hard to make the content inquisitive and impressive without a lot of multimedia stuff. That’s why the OMG Blog content always has some sort of multimedia content in there. Be it videos or images, you will find them there and they do break up the content quite nicely.

While the OMG Blog content is not for everyone at times and it can cater to people interested in the drag world, there’s no denying that every piece is as informative as possible and quite distinct in its own right. Which is honestly a good thing. People love the OMG Blog content because it’s objective and it does provide you with a very good perspective all the time. It’s certainly not going to be easy to find another blog like this out there, just because there aren’t that many in the first place.

And the reality is that once you start reading the OMG Blog, you will be hooked with their style and unique approach. That’s definitely worth your time and effort, so you might as well want to check that out if you can. Rest assured that using the OMG Blog is a good option if you like drag and gay content. Plus, you always learn something new. And their social media presence assures you that you won’t miss any piece they publish, which is really nice!

Want to create a blog similar to the OMG Blog? Here are some tips?

One of the first things you want to keep in mind is that the OMG Blog is a very niche-focused blog. You will be catering to a certain niche, so you do want the information to be as comprehensive and as distinct as possible. At the same time, you want to make sure that the information you share is very accurate. It’s super hard to stay up to date with all the relevant content in the industry, so studying the right sources will be super important at this time.

In addition, you need to try and create shorter pieces. People that are a part of this niche usually tend to lack the time needed to browse content like this. So it does make sense to use the OMG Blog as a template and build up from that. Creating shorter content does make a lot of sense, but you do need to maintain that great creativity as much as possible. If you don’t do that, the results may not be as good as you would imagine.

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It’s also important to come up with your own categories. Using categories created by others is not a good idea. You want to be original and you need to always try and create some new stuff. You can start with a few categories and then expand with new stuff based on what the audience wants.

Yes, it’s crucial to talk with the audience and grow the blog based on what they want too. Sure, you won’t have that much of a problem if you take your time and study all the options. But in the end the return on investment can be huge, so you just have to be innovative and come up with the stuff you want, wherever you want to do that.

Accuracy and reliable sources are important too. That’s especially true if you go the OMG Blog route and stick to a news-site format. It’s not always going to be easy, but it’s definitely going to bring in front some good options if you really know how to do it.

So yes, creating a blog like OMG Blog is a bit challenging just because of the niche itself. But as you can see, they were quite successful just because they put a unique spin on this idea. And you can do the same, it all comes down to taking your time and making the right choice all the time. It’s definitely a good idea to use this as a starting format, but adapt it to your needs as much as you can!

To get started, simply click on the promotional image above or head over to our main page of the site and follow along with our simple 3-step guide to starting a WordPress blog in 15 minutes or less.