Make it better-Learn how to add content tables to your WordPress posts and pages (No HTML needed)

Offering long-form content on your site is the way to go.

You give a tonne of value; build your authority; extend your expertise.

You even get an opportunity or two to promote something you believe in.

It doesn’t get much better than that, right?

Except that it could.

SO much better!

And it’s so easy to do your reading eyes won’t believe it.

You need to make your long piece an example of a GREAT user experience.

In other words:

Add a table of content (TOC) to it.

Do it now and make both the users and search engines happy.

In this article you will learn:

• The secret SEO benefits of using a content table plugin
• How to create and add tables of content to your posts/pages Bonus(es)- they’re secret; and they’re awesome; what else can I tell you?

Ready to learn more?

Let’s go!

Table of Contents

Amazing benefits of adding content tables to your posts and pages

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Everything you can gain falls under two categories:

• User Experience Benefits (UX)
• SEO benefits

We’ll start with the user experience gains (there are 2 of them).

Content Outline- What? Where? Here and now; and on a silver plate no less

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People reading online are in a hurry. When they stop by your website, it’s for a reason.

No, they didn’t visit to say hello. Or because they like you. They’re there because they have a problem and need a solution.

And you have it.

So how about making that crystal clear?

Do it with a TOC at the beginning of the article. They outline and deconstruct your content and show folks how they can go about reading it.

Will they devour the whole piece? Or will they jump ahead?

No matter, as long as it’s useful.

Tables of content are like Swedish Tables. You get to pick what you want. And no food is forced down your throat, EVER!

That’s the right way to treat your guests.

It shows you aren’t desperate to keep them on your table for as long as possible. And it shows you’re really trying to feed them by providing nutritious meals. 

This “unusual” treatment turns the common (often grumpy) visitor into a satisfied reader.

And when folks are happy with you- guess what? They trust you more.

And guess what?

When they think you’re genuine, you CAN afford to have affiliate links within the content. And you CAN create eye-catching buttons hoping that the good-humored people will click on them. 

Especially if the product you promote ties in nicely with the problem they’re having.

It’s simple- It’s a win-win.

Content Table Saves Precious Time

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Clickable anchors make up the bulk of any content table… and these internal links help people go exactly where they want without having to look for it.

This makes for a huge time-saver (a big deal in this information-abundant age)

Next time folks need help they’ll jump directly to your site because they’ll remember how you’ve shown you value their most precious possession- their time.

And over time this effect compounds and these repeat visitors become the most valuable part of your online business.

Bottom line

Unleashing this simple plugin on your posts and pages can build up a lot of good equity with your readers. And this in turn can boost your revenue like you wouldn’t believe it.

WordPress content tables  also help with brand building and SEO

Which is what I’ll cover next.

Push your SEO to new levels with plugins (sounds weird- but it’s true)

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TOC’s are an easy way to boost your SEO because they give you both direct and indirect value.

But first?

What are direct and indirect SEO benefits?

Good question. I’m glad you asked.

Direct SEO benefits are changes you make today that have an impact tomorrow.

For example:

Keyword in the first hundred words.

According to Ahrefs, it’s a minuscule ranking factor. The one unlikely to push that ranking needle… unless you’re targeting a low competition keyword.

In that case just gracing your opening paragraph with your target words can put you in Google’s grace. 

It’s a direct effect and happens right away (or very quickly).

Indirect SEO benefits are:

You change something today, something else happens tomorrow, and THEN you get an SEO benefit the day after tomorrow.

For example:

You spice up your meta description, make it  snappier and more action-oriented. This attracts more clicks to your post. Over time this increased activity causes Google to reward you with a higher SERP position.

And where do content tables fit into this?

They improve your SEO by improving user experience signals that Google (and especially its machine-learning software- RankBrain) pay so much attention to.

Let’s break down real quick!

a) Decreased pogo sticking and increased dwell time (direct)

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Pogo sticking- the bane of every honest webmaster. They fear it more than the devil.

What is it?

It’s when people click on your result in the SERP’s, and then click right back. This tells Google, “these results suck”

So they drop you like a stone.

Source

Content tables minimize this effect because they outline the article and give folks a chance to click.

And once they do, they’re pulled in the middle and… that clock is always ticking.

Once 1m passes, dwell time kicks in.

What is it?

Dwell time is the time visitors spend on your site .

If they spend more than a minute- good.

More than two – great!

So you get a boost from Google for that page and that keyword. And this process is repeated across your entire site. For every page/post (with TOC) and for every keyword.

So imagine the effect on your SEO, and in extension, on your affiliate earnings.

I propose a metaphor.

Little clump of show starts rolling down a steep hill.

The thing you get at the base is?

(Is there even a base? Or is it a horizon?)

b) Lower bounce rate (direct)

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Bounce rate is the percentage of people who visit your site and then leave after having visited only one page.

SEO’s disagree whether this is a ranking factor.

I say it doesn’t matter.

Why?

Because – and forget SEO for a moment; you want people to spend more time on your site, regardless of SEO.

And the content table helps you with that.

How?

Internal links. You probably have them on every article on your site, right? I mean why wouldn’t you?

They:

• Help with indexation
• Increase your rankings
• Lead people to other useful content

They’re super useful but… useless unless clicked on.

TOC draws people in so they can find your little links.

Like this:

Getting your internal links clicked helps you in two ways:

• It increases your overall dwell time, which is another metric Google tracks
• It exposes your content to people who could potentially link to/ share it in the future

So really, by having content tables at the beginning of your longer posts and pages, you’re playing the long game of white hat SEO, and not only that;

you’re winning at it too 

c) Affiliate sales (direct)

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This is not an SEO benefit but it’s definitely a good one (you agree?).

Just like with internal links. More people that see your affiliate links»more they click»more money you earn.

Simple.

Are you blown away yet with the usefulness of the simple content table?

And we’re not done yet!

d) Improved CTR (indirect)

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Google takes the anchors (links) of your content table and shows them as part of your result in the SERPs.

It’s called Google Sitelinks. Think of it as a type of enhanced rich snippet.

And this special treatment from Google causes you to have a higher than normal CTR.

I will give you example:

Take a look what comes up when I search for “Coffee Arabica” in Google:

First result is obviously Wikipedia. They rank because of their awesome content and huge authority. Below their listing you can see four little links:

• Biology
• Distribution and habitat
• Cultivation and use
• Strains

These are pulled from their TOC.

Now:

Let’s imagine for a moment that this result was on the fifth position.

According to research, fifth listings get around 4.4 percent of clicks, but I’m willing to bet that Wikipedia’s rich result would get more, maybe 10% maybe even 12%, who knows.

The point is that this higher-than-average CTR would gradually cause the page to jump higher. And this increase is just based on CTR as a metric.

There’s a caveat to this though:

Google doesn’t always show sitelinks.

It’s pretty random and you can’t order them to do it. But you can influence, and now you know how.

Note– Notice on the image how the second listing (illiy.com) doesn’t have sitelinks. Then again, that’s not the only thing they’re missing 

(Hint: maybe someone should send them this article?)

Bottom line

Content table shows people they CAN get  what they need.

And that YOUR listing has “it”.

People click more and good things start to happen and compound.

You might say all of this is crazy. I disagree.

It’s brilliant. 

e) Keyword-rich anchors push relevance (Hypothetical SEO gain)

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Content table is a list of links based on the post headers. Do you agree?

Yes?

And you concur that those headings are usually keyword-rich?

Good.

And we know that properly used heading tags signal relevance to Google and still have some SEO value.

Now, it’s my theory (meaning I haven’t read this anywhere- a concoction of my mind) that those links actually help Google understand what parts of the page are about, and from there- what the whole page is about.

Thus you get an easy relevance boost.

Care for an example?

Some of the headers for this post are:

• SEO benefits of adding content tables to your posts and pages
• How to create and add a table of content in WordPress?
• How to add tables of content to your sidebar. And how to make them float?

Don’t you think that they tell Google my post is about:

• Easy SEO gains content tables bring.
• How to make content tables in WordPress
• How to add them to your sidebar, and sticky sidebar no less!

I do. I’m certain of it, though I might be wrong. But also, no one can disprove me since no one knows for sure…

Ah, the true beauty of SEO.

How to create and add a table of content In WordPress Post/Page (guide)?

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At the time I first got the idea for this post and when I did my research, I noticed that every tutorial uses “Table of Contents Plus” and touts it as “the best”.

I wanted to follow suit but then I noticed it is severely outdated.

Normally that isn’t a deal breaker, but then I stumbled upon Easy Table of Contents.

I chose it because it’s:

• Kept up to date
• Popular
• Has great reviews
• Free

Here’s how to set it up:

Note– It’s hard to explain in words alone, so I’ll use lots of images. If you find something confusing, just remember- images are your friends.

Also, this plugin has way too-developed back end.

You don’t need all those settings!

I think there are like 50 boxes to check/uncheck. I will focus on the crucial functions you need to make the TOC you can be proud of.

First, install and activate the plugin through the WordPress dashboard.

Then click Settings»Table of Contents

Now:

• Enable support– I chose pages and posts. This means a table will be created on all pages and posts that are suitable (depends on the number of subheads).
• Auto Insert– Posts and Pages (rich in content ).
• Position– Before the first heading. This tucks it in nicely between the blog post title (H1 tag) and first subhead. I like it so because it gives me space to open the article with a good introduction.

• Show when- Define the number of subheadings needed for the table to be created. I suggest at least four. Anything less and it would be redundant. You don’t ever see a 300-word post with a table of content- or you shouldn’t. (If you do- report it to redundancy police)
• Display header label– I leave it off because it makes my table look cleaner. If you check it, it will say something obvious like “Table of Content”.
• Show as a hierarchy– Check it because it matches the logical structure of your blog post. People have an inherent need to follow the trail of breadcrumbs to reach a conclusion- make them happy.
• Counter– I leave it at decimal because numbers are universally appealing and recognizable.

These were basic options you need to have a functional and beautiful table of contents.

You DON’T need to do anything else.

However, there’s some advance stuff worth tinkering with (very easy, I promise)

Custom Theme

I think default settings are fine for any site, but this adds a nice touch to your tables.

I suggest you use your brand’s colors if you decide to change anything. I did and you can see it in my TOC’s (hint– my brand colors are Neil Patel orange and Microsoft link blue).

Headings

You can set headings you want to be included in the table of contents.

Here’s the criterion I follow.

I divide my posts in h2 and h3 headings and want them all to be included in my table of content.

It’s because h2’s give  a big picture on what I want to talk about, while h3’s break it down with several paragraphs of stand-alone information each.

And this awesome feat warrants a place in the table.  

You can exclude your “lesser” headings (in my case h4) if they contain little info (maybe just one short paragraph).

My theme looks better with h3 and h4 headers- Improvisation is the name of this game.

Phew! That’s it.

Now that you know how to create and add content tables to your WordPress posts and pages- my work here is done.

Or is it?

Bonus tip #1- How to add tables of content to your sidebar, and how to make it stick (floating content tables)

I promised you bonuses, didn’t I?

I recommend always having the content table at the beginning of the post.

It’s because… Oh, you already know why? I refuse to repeat what I already said (takes you to the top)!

But perhaps you want it in your sidebar as well so that it can scroll down as you scroll down?

Here’s how:

Remember that plugin I said you should install (Easy Table of Content)?

Well, with it you get an extra TOC widget you can use.

So go to Appearance»Widgets and add TOC to the sidebar

And you’re done.

Really, that’s it.

Now whichever post has a content table will also have it in the sidebar.

How to make it scroll with you (floating sidebar content table) ?

Scrolling content tables are great for increasing engagement. It’s because people won’t have to monotonously scroll up. They can just click and off they go.

You need another plugin for this. Go back to the WordPress plugin repository and install/activate the Q2W3 Fixed widget.

And that’s it. Of course, there are settings to tinker it but you don’t need them at all.

Instead, return to Appearance»Widget and click on the content table you added.

Now you’ll see the “Fixed widget” option appear below. Click save and you’re done.

Simple!

Bonus Tip #2- Explode Your User Engagement With This Simple Plugin

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Imagine it!

How fast; how easy;

how convenient it would be!

What?

If you could, instead of laboriously scrolling back and forth on a long post, click once and be instantly propelled to the top.

Then you’d just click on another anchor and instantly be transported to wherever you really want to go (courtesy of content tables)

But why imagine?

Make it so!

Introducing WPFront Scroll Top

This plugin is:

• Free
• Updated
• Easy to use

And here’s how:

Install and activate the plugin. Then head over to your main WordPress dashboard and click on Settings»WPFront.

You’ll have to set it up, but be warned: it has way too many settings and you can fine-tune it to an insane degree.

You don’t need to bother with most of it.

Here I’ll show you how to get the basic settings right so it performs at its best AND remains simple to use for an average webmaster.

• Click Enable– Obviously.
• Scroll Offset– This tells it when to appear. It’s set to 100px by default which is a very small value. My setting is 3000px and this makes it appear around the third of my post.
• Auto Hide– I leave it disabled because I don’t think the blue arrow is neither obtrusive nor distracting.

• Hide on Small Devices– Yes, because of the folks who browse the web from their phones. It’s better UX for them.
• Button Style– Image. I chose a blue arrow because blue is easy on the eyes and the arrow pointing up is self-explanatory
• Location– Bottom right. The most logical place for it.

There you go. Simple isn’t it?

I think I’ll keep this plugin and use it for my site.

Notice a certain blue arrow somewhere?

Bonus tip #3- How to make content tables on free sites and web 2.0 (Tumblr;WordPress; Blogger…)

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Free websites are awesome for beginners to take their blogging baby steps.

They get free hosting, security and updates.  And they don’t have to worry about themes, plugins, and a bunch of other stuff too.

It’s perfect and…

“Wait a minute, no plugins”!?

Sadly, yes.

Free sites, while overall a positive experience,  limit what you can do with them, including installing new plugins.

“So if I can’t use a plugin to create my content table… then what? No content table at all”?

Yes, I mean No!

We’ll be using jump links instead.

Before you ask…

Jump links are simply links on the page that, when clicked on, take you to another part of that page. So they’re similar to content table links, except that they can be a one-man team and scattered across the page.

For example, this is a jump link. And if you click it, it’ll take you to the beginning of this article. So tread carefully.

I got the idea from Brian Dean. I noticed that in one of his guides he used jump links to create a makeshift table of contents.

As you can see- it doesn’t look as fancy as when you make it with a plugin. But for free sites and web 2.0 they’re all we’ve got…

So let’s make them work!

How to create page jumps in WordPress  (a mini tutorial)

To make a jump link you need to insert two pieces of code into your post’s HTML editor.

One where you give a unique name to the link you’re creating:

<a href=”#unique-name”>Your Link Text</a>

And the other where you set the target on the page:

<a name=”unique-name”>Target Text</a>

And that’s really it.

It looks complicated at first, but it’s easy and if you have questions, shoot them in the comment section below (this is a jump link). But not before you’ve read the next part.

It is here that all your questions will be answered,

I promise.

Content table made of jump links- an example

I’m going to use my Tumblr sister site, and specifically this blog post. It’s a story of how I was able to get the following link from Moz.com (DA 90) simply by being part of their community.

Now, that post isn’t very long, a must for content tables to make sense. But it’ll do for demonstration purposes.

Also:

I already made the table so as to prevent you having to plow through my clumsy writing and possibly falling asleep.

I admit it- I’m not comfortable writing anything related to using HTML, so this was precaution on my part.

What you’ll see now took a lot of time to write…

First, here’s how the table looks:

And here’s the code in the back-end:

I know- it’s a mess.

But look what happens when I go CTRL+F and type “#”

<a href=”#unique-name”>Your Link Text</a>

And here’s is how the other part of the code looks:

<a name=”unique-name”>Target Text</a>

And that’s really all there is to it. 

This method works but it’s not the most elegant. For example the code behind Tumblr is hell, and it takes ample time and focus to make a table this way.

Also, notice then when you click on the table anchor, it opens in a new tab.

I don’t like that, but don’t know how to change.

If you do, leave me a comment, and I’ll credit you with a (nofollow) link.

Conclusion- Table of content+WordPress Pages and Posts (a match made in heaven)

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There you go, friend.

I hope you realize by now how useful having a table of content is. And how easy they are to make.

Now you really have no excuse not to use them.

And if you start right away I know you’ll be pleasantly surprised with the results.

I’m sure you’ll reap more than a handful of benefits.

In fact, they might be more than a lapful (I invented the word), so you won’t be able to carry it all, and you’ll have to hire help to manage. 

If you have a question- feel free to leave a comment below.

Also, if you want to recommend another plugin, I am curious. Is there one better than Easy Table of Contents?

But remember– it must be updated and can’t be theme-exclusive. I want everyone to be able to use it.

Thank you for reading and have a nice day.

What is the best keyword research technique in SEO? (It’s not what you think)

The best keyword research technique in SEO?

There isn’t one.

But there’s the best approach to keyword research even if you are a newbie in the SEO industry

Technique combining.

So, if you can:

• Use SEMrush to find keywords your competition ranks for.
• Use Ahrefs to find content gaps to fill.
• Use Moz’s Keyword Explorer for complete topic coverage

Then you’re set.

And when you throw in good ol’ Google Suggest and Keyword Planner, then you’re rocking a near perfect keyword research strategy.

There’s only one problem:

Those tools are mighty expensive; And everyone and their mother (and grandmother) knows about using Google for keyword research.

So what are you to do?

Target the same keywords as everybody else?

Give up?

NO!

In this article, I am going to show you a few off the beaten track keyword research tactics and Practical SEO expert tips.

They are easy; and they are free; and they show untapped keywords.

Want to know the best part?

Very few know about them. Coincidentally… These are the people that rank.

Coincidence?

Keep thinking that.

Or,

Keep reading.

#1 Did you know- questions are keywords? (Answer the Public)

Answer the Public is a free online tool you can use for keyword research.

Just pop in your target keyword and it’ll spit up hundreds of questions people ask.

Do you see how powerful this is?

Google, Bing and Yahoo are search engines in name, but recently they’ve become “the answer engines”.

That means their goal is NOT to deliver the result that has the best keyword usage.

No,

They are after one that:

• Answers the question,
• Solves the query,
• Delivers on the user intent.

The true “best result”.

And since you have what people ask on a silver platter, you can cut the fluff out and tailor your answer to match.

Gold.

And here’s something to blow you away.

People who have one question, for example, “what is organic coffee” usually have a bunch of other related questions.

For example:

• Where to buy organic coffee beans
• What is fair trade organic coffee
• Is organic coffee bad for you
• Is organic coffee necessary

Your job is to gather the questions most relevant to “organic coffee” and make them topics within your mega article.

The end result will be a piece of content that is thorough, well researched, and extremely keyword targeted.

Now:

The graph above is super cool- but there’s a problem. It’s a neck killer:)

So in the upper left corner choose “data”.

And you get a list like this.

To be honest with you, Answer the Public the only tool you need to do well.

If you’re ever in a hurry and can only do simple keyword research- pick this tool and your conscience is clear.

#2 Here’s how to Use Reddit to source great ideas

Reddit is a huge content aggregator. And a huge purgatory of content too.

Articles that are bad (they’re evil:) ) fall into the hell that is Reddit’s ever-moving feed- and stay there forever.

Those that are good are lifted up to heavens, for everyone to see and admire as exemplary content.

Yes– I borrowed the analogy from Dante Alighieri, but the gist is- On Reddit, the best content always rises.

Our example is “coffee” (again)

• Go to Coffee • r/Coffee
• Click “top articles”; And “links from all time”

Voila! Curated best content, hand-picked by not one or two moderators, but who knows how many Reddit users.

Can you say battle tested?

Now comes the researcher in you. Read the first 10 or 20 pieces and see what made them so popular.

Is it:

• Good storytelling
• Out of the box thinking
• Picking a fight
• Comparisons
• Insults
• Awesome imagery
• Anything else

Whatever it is, take note, and take notice, for these are the wining pieces of your future Reddit- friendly article.

Second approach- Search for keywords on Reddit

You can use Reddit search when you’re targeting a specific keyword ( once again- “organic coffee”)

1. Pick a subreddit- Coffee • r/Coffee
2. Search for “organic coffee”
3. Click “top articles”; And “links from all time”

Now look:

a) What are the best articles about organic coffee, (most comments and upvotes)? You’ll want to model your article after those.

b) What are the worst performing article? You also need to know what NOT to do.

Note- Ironically, I found that organic coffee is not that popular on Reddit. But there are many examples that fell flat.

Learn from them, lest you become one of them.

Third approach- use a keyword research tool

But not just any tool.

Keyworddit.

It’s a free service that helps you extract user-generated keywords from Reddit.

Here are the steps

• Go to Reddit Keyword Research Tool (Find SEO Opportunities)
• Start typing and it’ll give you a choice of subreddits
• Choose “coffee”

And you get:

Some of these phrases can be used as they are.

However, it’s best to run them one by one through Google Keyword Planner to see which keywords have a nice set of synonyms to go with them (these will be the bulk of your easy traffic- they’re untapped).

Now that you have keywords real people use and your competition doesn’t know about…

It’s time to write!

But first you might want to…

#3 Use Quora for keyword research

Quora is a QNA site.

“So?

What’s so special about it”-You ask?

“There are millions of them out there”.

True.

But Quora is different. It’s high quality; filled to the brim with enthusiastic, smart individuals who love to share knowledge about their passions.

Think of Quora as a complement to Answer the Public.

You get your list of questions here, and then travel there to see those same questions answered.

But many of the answers are bad, with some decent and rarely a gem or two.

Now you, the cunning researcher, will want to see which answers get the attention they deserve (number of answers, comments and followers); And which are buried down because nobody cares.

Let’s do a search for “organic coffee”:

Voila, again. These are all the questions in need of answering (hint– answer them in your article. That way you know your article is pure gold for Quora users, and likely for everyone else).

Finally, by doing research, you will get a list of Quora question where your future article will be a good fit.

That is brand building, helping people solve their problems, and funneling people back to your property, all at the same time. It’s hard to top that, you agree?

Pro tip-If you do decide to republish your articles on Quora, I advise you to wait 7-10 days before doing it.

Because you want to make sure Google indexes your article on YOUR site first, and then you want to let it sit for a while so Google can revisit a few more times.

This is probably being overly cautious, but it saves you from the headache of worrying about duplicated content.

Google goes by the date of first indexation- so make it work for you.

Pro tip 2 -Quora can be a bit annoying at times. Because you can’t sort the answers based on number of followers, from high to low.

But there’s a workaround.

Filter the questions by:

• Questions and followers– Here you can see the number of followers so you’d just need to take note of the more popular ones.
• Number of answers– Here you can see how many answers a question has. If it’s a lot , it’s worth investigating further.

Related: Keyword-Research.Why-Is-Keyword-Research-Important?

BONUS- 2 quick strategies on making content more rankable

1. Use LSI keywords

LSI stands for Latent Semantic Indexing, which sound scary.

But don’t be afraid! Feel free to continue reading:)

it just means you need to use synonyms in your content.

Now, most people assume they use them naturally as they write. And they’re right… to an extent.

If their article is long enough, and thorough enough, they will include most of them.

However, I suggest you be intentional about it and actually try to target as many as you can.

Think of it as that 1% extra effort that puts puts you ahead of everyone else.

The question is:

Where to find LSI’s?

Well, the first place to look is Google’s “related searches”. And the second is “people also ask” feature in Google.

But this is beginner stuff (everyone’s doing it).

You need to go a step further.

How?

By using the free LSI Graph tool (LSIGraph: LSI Keyword Generator).

Just enter your keyword and it’ll show you dozens of related terms you can include in your article.

Pro tip– Most of the LSI’s can be turned into questions/topics to cover in your post. But some just can’t.

Does it mean they’re useless to you.

No! (I’m sure you guessed the answer to that:) )

Sprinkle them in your guide where it makes sense- you’ll rank higher in Google if you do.

#2 Use Google Suggest for topics

This is a neat trick I learned from Andy Crestodina.

At the beginning of this article he talks about using Google Suggest to get ideas for an article you’re going to write (basic keyword research); but then he returns to it and mentions that you can use Google Suggests to get ideas for topics within the article itself.

For example:

Let’s see what Google suggests for “organic coffee+ letter A,B, and C”.

But before that, let’s make something perfectly clear.

I mean,

here you are, bombard with all these coffee keyword examples, (the essence of usefulness and good keyword targeting), and all you can think about is:

“uff, this guy, with his coffee! He must be some kind of coffee freak”.

He must really LOVE his coffee”!

Hey, I do, I admit it. And it MUST be organic:)

Now let’s quickly get to the subject, my coffee’s getting cold:)

Google suggestion phrases are topics that can be whole articles themselves; or parts of a mega-comprehensive guide, just to the liking of Google Hummingbird and Rank-Brain.

Precious.

Conclusion- the best keyword research strategy in SEO is…

I mentioned at the very beginning that there is no one best keyword research technique, but that the best approach is technique combining.

That alone is enough to put you ahead of most other marketers. But when you add these little-known tactics to the mix, then you have a powerful tool in your hand.

Use it wisely:)

Want something to add? Do it in the comments below.

I really want to hear your say.

P.S.

Listen, this article was all about getting people onto your platform.

But once they get there, then what? Well, for starters you’ll want to keep them on your site for as long as possible.

It’s simple.

They stay»they read»they buy (or convert)

Would you believe me there’s a simple hack you can use, that virtually guarantees you all the benefits of engaged visitors?

Super Email Validator – Validate Emails For Free!

Email Validation is a method of verifying if an email address is valid and deliverable or not. With the help of the Free Email Validator you can do this easily and 100% free.

Why validate emails?

Email Marketing today is one of the most effective digital marketing strategies to boost up your online presence and get more customers.

And Email Marketing simply is sending emails to get more visitors, awareness, and conversions. OK! what is email validation???

Simply, when you send an Email Marketing campaign, one of the main factors that determine if your emails will land in inbox or spam, is your sending reputation.

And one of the main factors that make up your reputation is Bounce Rate.

What is the Bounce Rate?

I mentioned in the Email Marketing guide, that the Bounce rate is a critical point to take care of when you want to run a successful email marketing campaign.

What is a Bounced Email?

Simply, when you send an email to someone, and it’s not delivered to any reason, it will bounce back. So it’s called a bounced email.

Why Emails Bounce?

The Main Reason for is when the target recipient’s email is not available or doesn’t exist.

Sometimes the target email is temporarily down, so you get a Soft Bounce, and if it doesn’t exist at all, it will be a Hard Bounce.

The main thing that you must know is that Bounce rate will have a significant effect on your email marketing system.

Because higher bounce rates may get you blacklisted and make your IP and Domain Reputation lower.

And this will cause your emails to be marked as spam.

So now we knew the importance of the Bounce rate and why we must send only to valid emails.

Here comes the role of Email Validation Services and Applications.

Email Validator helps in cleaning your email lists from any invalid emails.

How to Check the Validity of an Email Address?

To understand how an Email validator works and get the best results, you have to understand how the validation process works.

Simply when we want to validate an email address, we go into three main steps or levels:

1. Syntax check

Look at this: “heducate@gmail” is it an email??

obviously no, because the email must be formed like this:

So Super Email Validator checks email syntax and detects if it’s correct or not.

Then you can move to the next level.

2. MX DNS Domain check.

The existence of a domain is the key to the relevance of the email address. Addresses with invalid domains are not allowed to the third stage of verification.

If the recipient’s address is syntactically correct and the domain exists, then it makes sense to check for a specific address in the domain.

So super email validator will query the domain of the email and check if it exists and if there is a mail server behind it by verifying the MX records in the DNS zone of the target domain.

 IMPORTANT: MX Level Validation doesn’t validate the email.

 If It shows valid, then this means that the Mail Server Existsand not the Email It Self.

This is used for checking the domain MX records Only.

3. Mailbox Check.

This is the most important level, which will validate if the target email mailbox exists on the mail server.

How this is done?

We need to contact the target mail server and simulate the sending process to the target email, then if the response was OK, the email is valid.

Since this level requires a connection with the target mail server, and mail servers usually listen and use port 25 to accept the incoming connections, then you have no choice except to connect using port 25.

So the first requirement for this level of validation is to have port 25 opened all through the way to the target mail server.

So the first point to keep in mind when using an email validation software is that you need to have port 25 opened in your network and by your ISP.

How to know if Port 25 is opened?

You can simply open Super Email validator, and it will automatically detect if port 25 is opened or closed as you can see in the image below:

What If port 25 is closed by the ISP?

To this point, we understood that validating the mailbox requires port 25, so what if port 25 is closed by your internet service provider? how to validate emails then?

Super Email Validator Online Engine

What makes Super Email Validator unique, is the builtin Online Engine that can validate your emails even if you have port 25 blocked. How?

Simply because the online engine will not use your connection or your ports to connect, it will use an online service that has port 25 opened and validate your emails.

Any limitations?

Like any service or software, the Online Engine is not always available, simply because it’s online and free! so it will be a good target for spammers.

What if port 25 is blocked & the Online Engine is Disabled?

In this case, you have three options:

1. You can still use the Super Email Validator to validate up to the MX level.
2. Use the Free Online Validation service.

We want you to stay safe & happy 

 How to get the most out of Super Email Validator? (IMPORTANT)

In order to get the best results out of super email validator or even any Local email validation software. you need to run it on a Mail Server. in this way, the validation will occur from a Mail Server to Another.

And it will be more authentic and you will get better results. to learn and understand more, please follow up.

Why Email Validation Requires a Local Mail Server?

In order to get the best and most accurate results out of any email validation software, you must:

1. NOT run behind a proxy.
2. Have a Public IP address.
3. DNS MX and PTR records are set for this IP address.
4. SMTP is installed and configured on this host.

As I mentioned before, Email address validation typically works like this:

1. Validate email address syntax.
2. If the previous step succeeds, obtain MX records for the domain via DNS MX lookup query. MX records specify which SMTP servers (if any) accept email for the given domain. This lets us find out if the domain part is faked or not.
3. Now we may want to make a connection to the SMTP MX server (which we determined at the previous step) to check if this server is alive. Well, if at least one of the servers associated with the given domain is alive.
4. If the connection succeeded, we may want to use this connection to submit the email address in question to check if the SMTP MX server accepts the given recipient. If it does, we claim the email address valid.

This approach is very simplified because, in reality, some SMTP MX servers accept all email addresses belonging to their domains, even non-existent ones.

They do this to prevent spam bots from harvesting good addresses by brute force).

Some Mail Servers replies Invalid even if the email is valid!

However, there are many cases when most servers will reply with an error even if you submit perfectly valid addresses to them. The reason is that they by default think that you’re a spam bot and you need to convince them that you’re not. Let’s see what we can do about that.

Most spam nowadays is sent by infected home and office systems. Normally, non-spam email is sent via SMTP relay servers. It’s uncommon to send an email directly from a client to the end recipient’s MX server. So, whenever the target MX thinks your IP address does not correspond to a living SMTP server, you may get banned. What differs a host running a full-fledged SMTP server from a host which does not look that solid?

A good and trusted SMTP server host must have:

• The IP address is not in any popular blacklists.
• Assign a domain name to the host. (sub-domain is better)
• The IP address of the host must have a PTR record which resolves to the domain name above.

Also, the SMTP server for our particular purpose (email address validation) must also meet this requirement:

• SMTP service on port 25 must be running on this host, and this service must accept our sender’s email address (on behalf of which we make our test connections) as a valid recipient.

Too Many Technical terms!

Then you can simply run The Super email validator or any verification software you want, and get the best results.

Is it possible to verify ALL emails with the Super Email Validator?

Although the Super Email Validator has a very good email validation success rate with most free email ISPs or ESP, it is simply not possible to guarantee a 100% accuracy level due to multiple factors beyond our control.

The level of accuracy you can obtain depends on the inbound SMTP connection policy of the remote ISP or ESP, the reputation of the incoming connecting IPs and many other factors that I mentioned above.

As a good practice, validate the lists twice and if you see a big and unusual number of bounces, this means that your IP may be blacklisted or blocked, so try switching to the online validation engine or build a mail server on a VPS as explained above.

How to use the Super Email Validator.

Firstly, you need to import your email list, you can import Both TXT or CSV Files, and the application will save the structure, so you need to worry about rebuilding your files.

After you import your Email List, Set your Options:

• Check Online Engine ONLY If port 25 is blocked.
• Set the Number of threads you want the application to use, you can select between 1 and 50. use an optimal value like 10-15 to avoid being blocked or blacklisted.
• Set the From Domain and From Address if you are running the application on a Mail Server for the best results.

 Notes:

• The From Domain is your Mail Server Domain that you use to send emails.
• The From Address is any address you created on your mail server.
• The Threading technology is not available with Online Engine to Protect from Spammers.

Examining the Email Validation Results.

When you validate emails using super email validator, you will be able to view the results or save them by clicking on the buttons as shown below:

When you click on View Emails, You will get the results like Like this:

You will see than Super Email Validator has added three columns to your file:

Email-Domain: which shows the Domain of the Email you are verifying, This is important if you want to filter by domains.

Verification Result: The Validation Result of the Email.

Verification Message: This will give you more details to understand the results.

The Results that you will see will be one of the following:

1. Valid: The Email is Valid.
2. Invalid: The Email Is Invalid.
3. Catch-all: “Catch-all”, is a domain-wide setting where all emails on this domain will be reported as a catch-all. There is no definitive way to determine whether this email is valid or not. If you want to validate these emails, you need to use an online validation service.
4. TryAgain: This Means that Super Email Validator can’t validate the emails right now, so it skipped it to try later or use another service to validate.

Good Luck!

5 Strategies For Better Email Marketing Campaigns

When you follow these email marketing strategies, email will become your most important channel too!

Let’s get started.

1. Personalize your messages

When we say personalized email marketing, we don’t mean that you send an individual email to every single subscriber. Personalization means that you use customer data to create a personalized message.

A great example of a company that does personalization well is Amazon.

All of Amazon’s emails are personalized.

It’s not “Dear valued customer”, but “Dear Steven”.

It’s not, “You might like these… (randomly generated)”, but “You might like these (based on my purchase history)”.

To Amazon, email marketing is not just another marketing channel. It’s key to of the overall customer experience.

Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s CEO is an email mastermind. Jeff Bezos understands the value of emails and has been known to read through customer complaints. It’s also why more than 35% of all product sales come from recommendations (both via email and on screen).

And it’s not just Amazon that have seen these kinds of results through personalization.

A study by Experian found that personalized emails deliver 6x higher transaction rates!

Let’s break this down into numbers we can all understand:

The most recent research found that email marketing generates $0.08 in revenue per email.

That may not sound like much…

But if you send out an email campaign to 500,000 subscribers, you can generate up to $40,000 in revenue.

That’s a lot of additional revenue!

But, if you use personalization in your emails, you can expect a lot more!

According to brand new research,

Personalization can generate $20 in ROI for every $1 invested.

How’s that for a revenue opportunity?

The best part is this:

70% of brands do not use personalization within their email marketing strategy.

This means that by personalizing your emails, you stand out against the competition.

The simplest form of personalization is to address the reader by name. Most email service providers (ESP) offer this within their functionality and this tactic alone will improve your campaign performance.

For example, email subject lines that are personalized with a recipient’s first name can increase open rates by 16% higher open rates.

Considering that 47% of all emails are opened because of subject line alone, that’s a sure fire way to get more eyeballs on your email.

Outside of using the customer’s name, here are a few more tips to help you get started with personalization:

• Ask for the right information upfront: Great personalization starts way before you hit the ‘send’ button. It all starts with your sign up form. Without data such as name, company and location, you will be very limited with your personalized communication. Remember to only ask for the information you need, rather than the information you want. This is one of the ways that GDPR has impacted marketing teams.
• Use a real reply-to email address: When you use donotreply@example.com, it takes away the authenticity from the messaging. You want your readers to engage and respond to your campaigns. Use a real reply address will improve credibility and appear more personal.
• Use your real email signature: Just like using a real reply-to email address, you want to use real contact information within the email and the best way to do that is to include your contact details in the email signature. Giving your readers the opportunity to contact you or connect with you online is a great way to be personal and build a relationship with them.

2. Segment your subscribers

According to email marketers, segmentation is second on the top initiatives list this year.

Do you know why it is so high?

It’s because when you segment your database, your email campaigns become much more targeted to your audience.

Let’s take a look at an example:

You’re hosting a networking event for small business owners located within a 20 mile radius.

How can you expect to get the best turn out for your event?

The answer is segmentation.

The best way to get small business owners to turn up to your event would be to create a segment of people who list themselves as a small business owner that lives within 20 miles of your event and then send them an invite by email. The segmentation part is simple and can easily be done through CRM software.

Compare this to sending one email to your entire database, with subscribers spread across the country (or continent).

How annoying is it to receive an email that invites you to an event that is located on other side of the world?

It’s very annoying!

Before you start segmenting your database, let’s take a look at how valuable it can be.

A study by HubSpot found that all email marketing KPIs perform better when you segment your email list.

The segmentation results include increased performance in:

If you segment your lists, you get better open rates, revenue, leads, transactions and more customers.

Another benefit is that segmentation goes hand in hand with GDPR and email marketing.

But, does it really work?

Yes!

Here’s an example from our own email marketing campaigns:

We recently sent out two email marketing campaigns. Both campaigns had the same subject line and the same content.

The first campaign was sent to our non-segmented email list, while the second was sent to our segmented list (segmented by interest).

The first non-segmented email earned an impressive 42 % open rate and a 4.5% click-through rate.

However, the segmented email campaign earned a 94% open rate and a 38% click-through rate!

I’d say it’s pretty valuable, wouldn’t you?

And that’s why so many marketers’ are segmenting their emails, right?

Wrong.

As 9 out of 10 email marketers’ do not segment their database.

So, here are a few examples for you to get started with segmentation:

• Segment by industry: Do you offer services and products to businesses or consumers? Knowing the industry of your subscribers is a great way to segment your email campaigns. For example, a business that sells car parts would engage at a much higher rate if they receive email campaigns on car products, compared to a business that sells software.
• Segment by company size: Also known as account-based marketing, segmenting email campaigns by company size or annual revenue is a great way to increase response rates. A small business that employs 5 people is not likely ready for the biggest industry conference of the year, whereas a business that employs 750 people might be a better fit.
• Segment by sales cycle: Early stage buyers will not be ready for an aggressive sales pitch or one-to-one demo but, they will be more appreciative to receive an industry research white paper. On the other end of the cycle, buyers who are ready to buy will respond well to product webinars or free trial offers.

3. Send mobile friendly emails

In 2012, 27% of all marketing emails were opened on a mobile device.

By 2014, that number jumped up to 42%.

Now, it’s as high as 61%!

These are huge numbers!

And what do you do as soon as you wake up in the morning?

If you’re like me, I’m guessing you have your phone next to your bed and the first thing you do each morning is check your phone for calls, messages and yes, you guessed it, emails…

Don’t worry, you’re not the only one. 50% of us do this.

When you send an email to a subscriber who reads their emails on their mobile device, but the email is not optimized for that device, what do you think they do with?

Mostly, they will unsubscribe or delete it.

So why is it that almost half of all emails are still not mobile friendly?

Worse still, our own email marketing research found that 20% of email campaigns are not optimized for mobile.

Yet on the opposite end of the scale, and when email campaigns are optimized for mobile, they generate a lot of revenue!

The average revenue per mobile email is $0.40, which is more than 4x that of a desktop email click.

Revenue per email on mobile devices is 4X higher than desktop

And 55% of smartphone users have made at least one purchase after receiving a mobile promotional email.

Furthermore, a study by Flexmail found that 36% of B2B companies that have optimized their email campaigns for mobile devices saw an overall improvement to their email performance.

So, how do you optimize your campaigns for mobile devices?

Don’t worry, here are some tips on how to do that.

• Implement responsive email design (RED): Creating a responsive email design means that the user experience is optimized regardless of the device or screen they use. Most email service providers (ESP) offer this solution within their email functionality.
• Keep the subject line and pre-header short: The subject line is crucial. Keep it short so the reader knows exactly what the email topic is about. And the pre-header text (also known as snippet text), don’t let it go to waste by using “To view this email in your browser…”. Instead, summarize the email or include a call to action (i.e., Use “FREESHIP” to get free shipping).
• Make the CTA big and obvious: Mobile device vary in size. While a text link may work on a tablet or larger screen, you might be alienating your readers who have a smaller screen (or bigger hands!) if your call to action is too small. Make the call to action, big, bold and simple to click.

4. Test copy, design and buttons

Whether you test your home page, landing pages or email templates, testing provides us with data to make practical decisions that will improve our marketing performance.

And email marketing is no different.

Most marketers have A/B tested their email campaigns.

If I had to guess, I’d say you’ve tested your email subject line, right?

Even the former President of the United States has A/B tested his email subject lines….

Think I’m kidding?

Email marketing played a huge part in the success of Obama’s 2012 Presidential campaign.

By sending several variations made to the subject line to a small sample of subscribers, they were able to calculate the amount in donations they could expect to receive based on the results.

The sample size revealed that the poorest performing subject line (“The one thing the polls got right..”), when sent to the entire database, would generate $403,603 in donations.

The best performing subject line (“I will be outspent”) was expected to generate $2,540,866 in donations.

That’s a huge difference!

In fact, the best performing subject line outperformed expectations and generated a total of $2,673,278.

That’s an additional $2.2 million in donations raised due to a change in the emails subject line!

President Barack Obama raised an additional $2 million in donations by split testing his email subject line

But it’s not only subject lines you can test through email marketing.

You can also test:

• From address: The name that appears in the “from” field has a huge impact on whether the reader opens your email. In fact, the sender name is the main reason why people open your email. Test your from address by sending your campaigns from a person’s name, person + company or from your CEO.
• Plain text vs HTML campaigns: Like most marketers’, I’m sure you are already sending a plain text version of your email. However, have you thought of testing an email campaign that is plain text only? And when you add an element of personalization, plain text emails appear to be written just for the reader.
• Long vs short emails: You can keep your emails short and sweet or, you can create long detailed emails. Long form emails can include more detailed copy whereas shorter emails will send the reader directly to a targeted landing page. The best way to see what works best? Test it.

5. Automate email campaigns when possible

Trigger-based emails are emails that are sent out automatically based on user behavior.

The most common forms of trigger emails are ‘welcome’ emails, ‘thank you’ emails and ‘transactional’ emails, such as order confirmation email and email receipts.

The data behind trigger emails shows us that trigger emails perform much better than traditional email.

For example, Epsilon found that:

• Open rates for trigger emails are as high as 49% (95% higher than traditional email open rates)
• The average click-through rate (CTR) for trigger emails is more than double the rate compared to traditional email click-through rates
• The best converting websites in the world, sites that convert as much as 40% of their traffic, use trigger emails.

And not only that, Forrester research found that trigger-based email marketing campaigns can generate 4x more revenue and 18x greater profits!

Does this sound too good to be true?

Well, it’s not. We’ve tested it. And it works!

Below is a comparison for our traditional email campaign (left) against our triggered email campaign (right):

Our triggered emails generated 5x higher open rates and 15x higher click-through rates.

Today, only 20% of marketers currently use triggered emails and they make up a low percentage of overall email volume, at around 2.6%. However, they can be responsible for as much as 20% of your email marketing revenue!

Triggered emails perform really well because they hit the email marketing sweet spot.

What does the email marketing sweet spot look like, you ask?

It looks like this:

And the reason why they perform so well is because of context.

Consider the following scenario;

You visit a website, browse the product line and add items to your shopping cart but, you begin to have doubts and decide to leave before completing a purchase.

Sound familiar?

This happens to every single eCommerce store, every single day.

But what if, one hour later, you receive an email that includes the exact product you were shopping for?

And what if this email included not only a quick-link back to your shopping cart but, a free shipping code or 10% discount?

You’re now more likely to complete your purchase, aren’t you?

That’s the power of trigger emails.

But setting up triggered emails is expensive and complex, isn’t it?

It doesn’t have to be. You can start by using auto-responders in your customer service software to replicate the automation aspect. That’s what we do for all of our existing triggered emails and we’re happy with it.

Here are some examples of trigger mails you can send;

• Activation: A new user creates an account but, they do not use your product within the first 7 days. Create an  “activation” campaign that sends an automated email with their login information, steps on how they can get started and include a video demonstration for additional support. You can also invite them to a one-on-one meeting to walk them through the product and answer any questions they may have.
• Win-back: An existing customer is soon approaching the end of his yearly subscription. The customer hasn’t used your product in 3 months and you need a way to win them back and keep them for another year. Create a “win back” email that sends an automated email to all customers that are coming to end of their contract with a list of new product features and a short plan on expected releases in the next six months.
• Surprise: Customer loyalty is the key to success. And you can reward your loyal customers by giving them something for free every now and then. Create a “surprise” email that sends an automated email to your best customers that offers a free yearly license to your software for them to use, a gift card or even a coupon code to redeem a box of cupcakes. It’s a small cost for your business but, the reward is huge!

Conclusion

Email marketing continues to deliver results.

But email marketing has evolved. It’s no longer as simple as sending the same email to all.

It’s time to update your email marketing strategy.

Now, you need to send targeted messages. Messages that are personalized, and optimized for multiple devices.

You also need test new elements. Trends change quickly, and what worked 12 months ago may not be successful today. Be open to testing. And when you understand what works, find ways to automate it through triggered emails.

If you implement these new changes into your email marketing strategy your customers will be more responsive, your campaign performance will improve and your business will continue grow.

What do you think makes a modern email marketing strategy successful?

Let me know by leaving a quick comment below.

P.S. If you got some value from this email marketing strategy, remember to share it.

Action Plan For Creating A Solid Online Business (97 DAY PLAN)

Ever had the urge to start your own online business but didn’t know how or where to start? Ever thought “I want to start from scratch and be independent”? What if I told you that this 97 day action plan will make it possible for you to start today?

When making my 97 day action plan, I wanted to remove the fear many people have of experimenting with countless methods and never knowing if they will reap the rewards. With this plan, I can guarantee that you will see results and the potential of growing even more once you reach day 97 of this action plan.

So let’s begin, to start a real and strong online business, there are 2 primary steps you need to take.

Step 1

The first step to building a real business online is learning about the main methods used to develop one. These are the 5 main methods:

• Content Creation
• Affiliate Marketing
• SAAS Business (Software As A Service)
• Freelancing
• Online Stores

As you probably noticed, these methods are actually separate online business models. Each one of these online businesses are valid on their own, but when combined, they will act like 5 different engines running together to run your solid, almost unstoppable, business.

In this article, we will cover how to connect these 5 separate businesses into one real-solid online business. 

Step 2

The second step to this action plan is to choose your niche, your business topic, or, in other words, the solution you are delivering to your clients. My niche is working in and teaching digital marketing & online business through multiple media forms (video, blogs, and courses).

Now, you’ve probably already heard choosing your niche is important and maybe you’re sick of hearing it. But it’s true. And you can’t start with this action plan until you decide on your niche.

Now, your niche could be anything: tech, dog training, self-help, health and nutrition, and maybe even teaching a subject you have expertise in. Once you’ve selected the solution you are providing, you’ve completed step 2.

If you already know your niche, that’s even better, you’re already one step closer to building your online business!

Do. Or do not. There is no try.

-Yoda

So To Recap, The Two Steps Are:

1. Learning the main methods of creating an online business (we will cover them further below)

2. Choosing your niche (or the solution you are providing for your clients)

So after choosing your niche, grab something to write with as we get started with the 97- Day Action Plan. Please try not to skip this part; it’s essential.

Phase 1: The First 7 Days

Out of the full 97-days, the first 7 are the days you want to pay full attention to.

For the first seven days, you will follow three steps:

First

Create a website. Then, set up your blog on your new site. Your aim is to create a blog that provides real value to your readers.

This step is very simple. You can create your blog using any one of these free services:

1. WordPress

2. Blogger

3. Weebly

4. Google Sites.

5. Wix.com

You can try out sites like BlueHost, Squarespace, Hostinger and more if you’re willing to invest some money into your business, but for now a free service will work just fine.

You might say you’ve never written a blog post and don’t know where to start. Don’t worry because you won’t be writing blog posts the first week, the idea is to just start the blog; creating content will come later.

Second

Set up social profiles: create three to four social profiles to attract clients (use sites like Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and so on).

After creating 3-4 social profiles, we can move on to step 3.

Third

Plan your content. The idea is to make a list of 12 article ideas for your blog, 1 article for each upcoming week. That’s not much considering you only need to invest about 20-30 minutes a day to have an excellent article at the end of each week.

You will also plan to make 3 posts per week on all your social accounts, which comes up to 36 posts total. What’s nice about posting on social media is that you don’t have to create separate posts, you can use the same post on all of your socials.

Planning your content 1-2 months in advance is very important and also a huge relief. This is an example of smart work over hard work by the way, although you can’t really avoid working hard if you want to succeed.

Write down all ideas that come to mind. You can search on websites such as Pinterest, Twitter, and even other blogs for ideas if you’re getting stuck.

Remember, you’re aiming to plan for 12 articles and 36 social posts for the next 90 days, not creating content. The first week is about planning and the next 90 days are for implementation.

Phase 2: The Next 90 Days

Self-belief and hard work will always earn you success.

Virat Kohli – Indian Cricketer & Team Captain

You spent the first week creating your blog and your socials, as well as planning your content. Congrats on making it this far! You are now ready for phase 2 of the action plan.

For the next 90 days, you have two steps to follow:

Step 1:

Start publishing content: As discussed earlier, you will publish 1 article per week on your blog and three posts per week on all your social platforms for the next 90 days, which again goes down to 12 articles and 36 social posts in total for content creation. 

Keep in mind, while publishing your content, you’ll be able to link to your affiliate marketing products, which brings us to step 2.

Step 2:

Search for affiliate products related to your niche. Once you have one or more affiliate products, you can link to them inside your blog posts.

If you need some assistance, you can check out my ultimate guide for beginners in affiliate marketing, there you will find a comprehensive starter guide on affiliate marketing, including a list of affiliate products and affiliate networks to choose from.

To Recap

We can summarize the 97 day action plan to this: You are planning content the first 7 days, then creating content and linking to your affiliate products for the other 90 days.

Remember, the main goal is not making money, not yet. The main goal is building the business and growing your audience, or in other words, establishing your online presence.

Email marketing, which is still one of the best ways to market yourself and grow online, can help you grow your business drastically. You will need to create a newsletter to collect emails and you can accomplish this with services such as Sendinblue, which is free, easy to use, and allows you to add an unlimited amount of contacts per day.

Freelancing and SAAS Business

So we planned and published our content on our blog, shared it on all our social media and linked affiliate products.

In addition to this, if you have some skills and can provide a service online as a freelancer, you can check out Fiverr. 

After 90 days, it will be a lot easier to start a SAAS business or online store, since you would have established some presence online, have a good audience, an email list and many active accounts on social media.

Conclusion

In short, to build a strong online business, you need to make sure you have a substantial audience from your blog and social media so that when you create an online store and/or a SAAS business model, you can then link everything together.

Congratulations, you’ve reached the end of the article, however, I advise you to read it again and to write down notes if you haven’t already. 

Get this information memorized because this recipe will lead to you building a solid business not to mention great foundational knowledge in affiliate marketing. You can do it!

HEALTHY SEO STRATEGY TO RANK A NEW AFFILIATE SITE

HEALTHY SEO STRATEGY TO RANK A NEW AFFILIATE SITE

Hi All,

Trying to rank a new affiliate site on google? Not sure, how to actually make google trust your new site? Learn the proven SEO strategies to monetize your new affiliate site from the very beginning.

That’s all about this master guide, and though you can’t actually take Google by the hand and force it to rank you highly – that’s exactly what you’ll learn here.

• How to build relevance with on-page SEO?
• How to create trust by getting good links?
• How to approach social media so it helps your site and does not become a time suck?
• Should you be conservative or aggressive with link building?

When Google distrust a site, it deals with it by putting it in a box.

Now, this isn’t a literal sandbox, but a set of algorithms designed to suppress new sites from rising in the SEPR’s too fast, and taking up the real estate of those websites that are already proven as valuable.

This simply means that you could do perfect SEO and you still wouldn’t rank for a considerable amount of time, especially for anything with a strong buyer intent behind it.

“How long will this rankings drought last”?

That depends on you.

If you do everything wrong; if you scrape and spin content; if you build spammy links, you will never see the end of the tunnel.

But if you build out your site with longevity in mind, you’ll be pleasantly surprised at how fast Google can rank you.

These 3 components of a healthy SEO strategy are:

• Proper keyword research
• On page relevancy and site architecture
• Off-site authority buildup

Let’s start with keyword research, as choosing a wrong keyword can nullify everything else you do;

While choosing the right one allows room for errors to be made and still getting the rank you want.

This article contains affiliate links. That means, if you click through and make a purchase using an affiliate link, I will earn a small compensation at no extra cost to you.

1- PROPER KEYWORD RESEARCH

“Proper” in this context signifies long-tail keyword research.

You see, new affiliate sites need to target long-tail phrases because that’s what they’re realistically capable of ranking for.

And what’s neat is that long-tail keywords have much clearer user intent behind them. And they’re often buyer keywords to boot.

Rank for a few of those and it won’t be long before you make your first sale.

For example, what’s the search intent behind this key-phrase: “Where can I purchase KWFindertool with a discount”?

In my humble opinion, this person already knows about KWFinder.

They’ve heard it’s an awesome tool; they need a keyword tool for their affiliate site, and they just want to check up on a few things before they buy.

Well, in that case, you’d want to be racing for this long-tail phrase that gets only a few searches per month. That is because each searcher is a likely buyer.

On a side note- why is it important to rank as quickly as possible?

Before we get into keyword research proper I want to quickly explain why it’s crucial for a new affiliate website to rank for at least some phrases as fast as possible.

It’s because of traffic, but not in the usual sense.

In the beginning, you won’t be getting big enough traffic to make sales, but you will be getting big enough traffic for Google to see how people behave on your site.

This is very important because, to Google- UX is everything. And if they can see that people like your site and stay on it, they’re going to push you higher and faster.

The UX signals to pay attention to are:

a) Pogo sticking

Do people click through to your site and then leave in 5s or less? That’s pogo-sticking a and it’s a terrible signal to be sending to Google.

Fix it quickly or be gone!

b) Bounce rate

Do people stay on your page, read, and then leave without exploring further?

That’s not necessarily bad for SEO, but you still want to keep people for as long as possible.

Because people who stay are people who buy and subscribe.

You need a better internal linking strategy.

c) Dwell time

Is your writing compelling enough so people stay for 1m or more? If not, make it so because people sticking around is a ranking boost for you waiting to happen.

Bottom line

Do your best to get those few initial visitors onto your site. Once Google realizes that your site gives people what they want, they will want to promote and rank you higher.

Remember, Google needs a quality site to thrive with THEIR business.

HOW TO DO KEYWORD RESEARCH FOR A BRAND NEW AFFILIATE SITE?

Going the long tail model is key, and here are three simple ways to do it.

#1- Alphabet soup technique

Have you ever noticed how Google likes to show search queries in your face? Search for THIS! Search for THAT!

THIS is what you really want!

It has a name- Google Suggest and it’s very annoying, in my opinion. But it’s also very useful for keyword research.

The problem?

Google has limited space so they only show you popular phrases.

The downside to this is that lots of people compete for these popular phrases, and also, you don’t know the monthly search volume for the keywords you’re targeting.

The answer to these problems is to use KW research tools, and I have two for you below.

#1- Jaaxy

Jaaxy is a freemium keyword tool that mines long tail key-phrases no other tools shows you. And it also shows you your exact competition, i.e., the number of sites that intentionally target that phrase.

It a tool built for affiliate marketers because it tells you the only two metrics you really need to be successful in any niche.

The cons are that Jaaxy Starter (free account) only allows for 30 searches per month, which is not enough for full-blown camping.Jaaxy | The Worlds Most Advanced Keyword ToolJaaxy is the Worlds Most Advanced Keyword Tool Built for Internet Marketers. Use Jaaxy to Reveal the Hottest and Most Profitable Keywords Onlinehttps://www.jaaxy.com/?a_aid=ca1afe91

#2- KWFinder

As mentioned before, KWFinder is awesome and is quickly becoming my favorite keyword research tool.

Its design is clear, simple and elegant. And the interface is so intuitive that even a baby could figure it out. And most importantly- the data KWFinder spits out is highly actionable and reliable.

The best part?

The free version of KW Finder is going to serve you well if you’re an on a tight budget. So go on and sign up for your free account.

For the next part of the article is where you’ll learn proper on-page tactics and hacks.

I have chosen the keyword “How to make Turkish coffee”.

Why this one?

For two reasons:

First– I love Turkish coffee. I love to drink it and it’s a pleasure writing about it. The beverage is robust, invigorating and can be blended with spices, aka Moroccan style.

Second– Both Jaaxy and KWFinder show it’s an easy keyword to rank for.

And, in kwfinder.

Third– it’ll be easy to tie in a promotion of some brand of Turkish coffee. So you can convert visitors from this informational type keyword.

2- HOW TO SEO AN ARTICLE SO IT RANKS QUICKER- ON PAGE RELEVANCY BOOSTERS

Note: These are the things you can do today on your site to improve its rank quickly.

Meaning, on-page SEO is the crucial first step you must take to bring yourself as high as possible while at the same time cutting the need for link juice you’ll need to get to the top.

And making your site ultra search engine friendly is actually divided into 2 distinct parts

• On-page SEO (boosting article relevance)
• On-Site SEO- (site architecture and Page Rank flow)

ON-PAGE SEO – HOW TO BUILD RELEVANCE THROUGH STRATEGIC KEYWORD PLACEMENTS.

I’ll show you the exact way how I optimize every article on my site before hitting publish, and I’ll use our example keyword from above “how to make Turkish coffee”

Let’s go!

a) Exact match keyword in the SEO title

The SEO title is the second most important on-page ranking factor for Google (the first, of course, is content In case you were wondering…).

It’s a prime real estate for you to tell Google-bot “hey Google! My article is about THIS keyword. Rank it for it, RIGHT NOW!

Pretty please:)”

Here’s how I’d do it:

How to make Turkish coffee at home- a simple guide

b) Keyword in the URL

URL is another high level, powerful hint on what your page is about.

Have the keyword you’re targeting in your URL.

Like this: https://blogname.com/how-to-make-turkish-coffee

Pro tip: If your keyword is very long, use just it and nothing else. You don’t want your URL to be too long, because then it’d look kinda spammy. If it’s a bit shorter, don’t be afraid to use some filler words too.

For example: learn-how-to-make-turkish-coffee-at-home

c) Meta Descriptions

Meta d. don’t help with Google ranking directly. But they do help with boosting relevancy. So have your keyword in there for good measure.

Example of meta description: Make Turkish coffee at home and explode your taste buds to pure bliss. You won’t regret it… unless you don’t click on this page. Then you’re doomed to live a tasteless life.

d) keyword in the H1 tag

If you read a lot of copy-writing stuff, for example, you will find advice that your headline has to be catchy and compelling enough for people to continue reading, once they’re on the page.

That is true. What’s not true is that you need to completely eschew SEO in favor of being clever with your words.

The best SEO’s in the world use SEO copywriting and to their great advantage over everyone else.

But I’m here to tell you that even if you’re a newbie it pays to spend some time and think of a headline that’s both:

• human eyes-friendly
• AND has your target keyword in there.

Trust me– it is worth it and your readers will love it because they will see they’ve landed on the right page.

For example, here’s my take on it

Wanna make truly GREAT Turkish coffee at home? Well, you need to know how, so you need to read this guide, NOW!

That headline has my target keyword in it, and by using the word “great” I’ve caused a mini adrenaline flood in the brains of those lucky enough to read my words.

They will continue reading for sure…

They have no choice now:)

e) Keyword in the first 100 words

This is an old SEO hack that is no longer a hack but still works very well.

Keyword in the first 100 words tells Google ” Hey Google! Like I was saying, my article is about THIS keyword”.

f) Keyword in the content body

I should have said keywords, plural. You want to have your keyword at least 3 times in the content body: Once in the:

• beginning- first paragraph
• middle
• end- conclusion

If you can do more and make it read natural- go for it. Otherwise- don’t sweat it. Google is smart enough and keeps getting smarter.

g) Keyword in one of the “lower subheader”

I’ll be honest with you: Subheaders are not that important for SEO. You don’t have to have an exact match keyword in your subheading in order to rank well.

But if you can manage it, go for it because it’s an easy way to boost article relevancy, and ultimately, rankings.

But, again, the effect is really small.

I usually do that at every end.

For example:

Conclusion: do you know know how to make Turkish coffee at home?

h) Image SEO

Each post you write is bound to have images in it.

Right?

They spruce up your content quite a bit and make dull words come alive with color.

Images are great and all-but don’t forget about SEO-ing them. Image SEO can help you rank in Google Images, but they also boost your article’s relevancy so you rank higher in the normal search.

Bottom line

Your first image should have your exact match keyword in:

• alt attribute
• keyword filename

What’s neat is that these are only found in the source code so it won’t feel jarring to the actual visitor reading the page.

i) TF-IDF

TF-IDF stands for Term Frequency- Inverse Document Frequency and it’s basically a way for you to find words and phrases your competitors are using, but you’re not.

So, by sprinkling them within your article, you can boost your content’s relevancy score and thus become more relevant (hint: you’ll rank higher)

That’s the theory behind TF-IDF.

Unfortunately- it’s just that-a theory.

In practice, Google has moved beyond TF-IDF and now it might be a pure waste of your time doing it.

Why?

It’s because, when you use a TF-IDF tool it scans the first page of Google and gives you word usage recommendations.

Add this keyword X times; remove that keyword Y times…

That’s nice and all, but Google determines its relevancy score by scanning the entire web, or at least it’s gigantic index.

That’s incomparable with what the TF-IDF tools are doing and that’s why I don’t recommend it anymore.

Bottom line:

Don’t do TF-IDF optimization. Especially since it takes too long to do it and it’d be a time waste to do it for every single article.

j) External linking

Outbound links are good for SEO. Pages that link out liberally outrank those that don’t, but at the same time relevant outbound links boost your pages relevancy scores which means easier ranking in general.

So, with our target keyword “how to make Turkish coffee”

I’d link to guides about Turkish coffee and Turkish coffee recipes.

easy peasy:)

k) Internal links

Ah, internal links.

I LOVE them!

So very much because they remind me of backlinks, yet are so easy to do and set up that it is mind-boggling for me to fathom why so may sites do them wrong, or not do them at all.

But that’s good news for you because you can get a huge head start ahead of your competition.

Recommendation: On-Page SEO is what you need to make your content rank on Google. From titles to internal links, all of the must-follow seo practices are included in this affordable ebook.

Internal linking tips

First- use keywords. Every internal link should be keyword-rich, and every internal link that doesn’t target a keyword is wasted potential.

Second-use them to funnel authority around your site… More on that in a second, but here are some easy to follow anchor text guidelines:

• exact match anchors- 50%. This is your keyword repeated in verbatim.
• Partial match anchor 30%. This is your keyword and some filler words
• naked URL- 20%. This is just your URL with nothing else.

There is no Penguin penalty for internal link building, but it is still possible to over-optimize internal linking anchor text ratios.

Follow these guidelines and you’ll be both safe and effective;

like a ninja:)

12-MONTH BLOG PLAN

SITE ARCHITECTURE – HOW TO STRUCTURE YOUR AFFILIATE SITE TO FACILITATE RANKINGS

Site structure is a branch of SEO I see many shirts away from. I don’t know why.

First, it is insanely important to do. Proper site architecture allows you to rank with the least amount of links possible.

And doing it wrong is the equivalent of shooting yourself in both of your legs.

Second, it’s really easy to set it up. You just need to set aside an hour of your time and think what you want your site to look like.

Here are some tips to get you going:

#1- Your site needs to be shallow

This means that any article should be reachable from the homepage in 3 clicks or less.

This is important because a site’s homepage is almost always a Page Rank hub and most authoritative of the bunch; so closer something is to the home page the more important it is in the eyes of Google.

Note: with each click depth, 15% of PR dissipates.

#2- Build your content with pillar/cluster model

This is a model that takes heavy advantage of Google using semantics to sort out their SERPS.

Namely, by building out your content in a hub + cluster way, you’re sending out a strong message to the search giant that you want to be ranked not just for one keyword, or two keywords, or three…

but for an entire umbrella topic which covers thousands of keywords.

Here’s how to do it.

What is a topic hub AKA pillar content?

A pillar page is your main page about a topic, targeting the main, short tail, head keyword.

For example, let’s say you wanted to rank for the term “Affiliate marketing”.

Then you’ll have to make some sort of an ultimate guide to affiliate marketing.

But then you’d have to write a dozen or more articles all targeting long tail keywords and under the affiliate marketing umbrella.

For example, you’d have:

• How to avoid affiliate marketing scams
• How to cloak affiliate links
• Is affiliate marketing worth the effort
• Can I do affiliate marketing without a website
• Is affiliate marketing legitimate
• How much money can I earn with affiliate marketing
• Does Google hate affiliate websites
• Affiliate marketing successful example websites
• Is affiliate marketing the same as MLM
• How long till I make my first sale with affiliate marketing

And all these articles would expand on one facet of affiliate marketing, while simultaneously mentioning the main affiliate marketing guide you’re aiming to rank.

And now I want to quickly show you how to interlink these babes for maximum effect and I mean MAXIMUM.

Common wisdom about content clustering says that your pillar page needs to link to the entire content cluster, and supporting articles each in turn link to the pillar page.

And that is true. You should do that.

But I like to take it a step further and have each supporting article link to every other in the set.

So, in our case, one article would link to its:

• 9 other siblings,
• parent (affiliate marketing pillar page)
• grandfather (tag page)
• great-grandfather (category page)

And this would be repeated across the entire set of 11 articles (pillar page + 10 supporting articles).

It’s a great hack interlinking like this, but the downside to this is that you need to have a reasonable number of supporting articles. For example, if you have 10, then you can interlink them just fine, and it won’t look stuffed with links.

But if you have 50 articles, then it won’t work, because you can’t have 50 internal links, + external links in one article.

That is bad UX.

3- OFF-PAGE SEO- IT’S NOT JUST LINK BUILDING YOU KNOW

Off-page SEO is far more important than on-page when you’re building trust with Google.

The reason for it is that while on-page depends on what you do; of-page is what others think of you and that is harder to manipulate in any substantial, sustained way.

At least in theory 🙂

Off-page SEO for a new affiliate site can be divided into being social and building links AKA blogger connections.

Since social is easier and can be done quicker- we’ll start with that.

1- WHAT ARE THE BEST MEDIA CHANNEL FOR PROMOTING A NEWLY SPRUNG AFFILIATE SITE?

“The best” is totally depending on your chosen niche.

Are you a professional photographer traveling the world taking stunning pictures? Then Instagram is your best chance to shine through obscurity.

Are you an affiliate marketer? Then go and join Facebook groups to get in touch with other bloggers and their audience.

Are you an SEO looking to connect and expand their network? Then go hit up Twitter.

Ok, that was super brief, lets flesh it out a bit.

a) Facebook

Facebook is great for online business because you can connect with your fellow bloggers. You can do this by joining different Facebook groups.

What is really neat is that these groups consist of people on the same path as you and often in the same position as you.

• No money
• no sales
• no business

But a strong desire to have one.

So why not unite and help each other out?

A share here, a link there. A mention over there. Over time it builds up for true SEO gain, but what’s more important is that you get valuable blogger friends that can help further down the line.

Through FB Groups, you can build stable business connections; because, in online marketing, it’s now what you know, but who you know that counts the most and within those Facebook groups you can meet a tonne of great folks.

b) Twitter

I’ll be honest with you.

I used to hate Twitter.

Why? It’s because I read that the average tweet has a shelf life of approximately 7m and I thought that I shouldn’t bother with such a worthless platform.

Oh, boy! How wrong was I!?

While it’s true that most of my tweets of my own content don’t bring me any traffic, me tweeting someone else’s work does make a positive ripple for me.

I mean, whenever I promote other people’s work, they get notified in their Twitter dashboard.

You get it?

Twitter is a perfect tool for connecting with folks and I regret that I didn’t start tweeting sooner. Here’s how you can start writing engaging tweets on twitter.

c) Pinterest

Pinterest is an image-based search engine that’s sort of opposite to Twitter. What I mean is, that while tweets have a short shelf life, pins have a nearly indefinite shelf life.

So one good Pin can bring you traffic for years to come.

How to approach Pinterest for maximum results?

Strategically. That’s the answer.

Due to Printers being a lot more stable, akin to a search engine, and due to them gratuitously sending boatloads of traffic to external websites, more and more people have caught on and it’s become crowded in there too, similar to Google’s SERPs.

I mean it is easy to understand why.

You can earn serious money from Pinterest traffic alone.

All this means your pins will have to stand out or they will get drowned in the noise.

My advice – Invest in a pinterest course! If you are completely new or maybe, using pinterest for a while, Ell knows pinterest marketing really well!

Also, invest in a tool, I recommend Tailwind.

d) Instagram

Instagram is blowing up right now. There are over 1 billion monthly users and that number is still going up fast.

It seems like everyone I know is having and using their accounts.

And… I admit I don’t get it.

Maybe it’s because I’m pretty shy and don’t like splashing pictures of myself so everyone can watch me?

No, I like my privacy a bit more.

Or maybe it’s because I’m in the SEO space which isn’t sexy by any stretch of the word; so I can’t be using it for business.

But if you’re in one of the following niches

• Travel
• Celebs
• Lifestyle
• Business (you can post quotes)
• Animals
• Beauty
• Relationships

Go for it. It will probably do you good. Or, you can also use all of these creative instagram post ideas.

In fact, it might blow other channels out of the water.

Two other ways you can use Instagram

I thought about this a lot. It really bugged me that there was such a popular channel with seemingly no way for me to get involved for the benefit of my business.

a) You don’t have to use Instagram strictly for business. Instead, you can use it to show your human side.

b) Use Instagram to show off the life made possible by affiliate marketing.

So you have an affiliate site and it is making you some dough. Some serious dough in fact, as you’re earning more than you thought possible.

The best way to invest that money is to travel and experience new things, because you’re only as rich as how rich of a life you’ve had.

So go hit up the most beautiful place in the world and then make sure you post those images on Instagram.

It’ll be good for business too, because it’ll be a subtle message on how affiliate marketing changed your life for the better.

Instagram tool. Do I need any?

Hm, probably not in the beginning. Just try it out and see if it gels with you. If it does, then you can consider being a pro and investing in a tool that will bring you returns many times over.

2- WHITE HAT LINKS THAT YIELD RESULT (BEGINNER-FRIENDLY TOO)

Ok, links are where we at and boy is this a lengthy topic.

So, lengthy in fact that I won’t begin to pretend I’ll cover it all here.

Instead, I will tell you about a few easy stratagems that won’t take up too much of your time, but will still yield magnificent white links no Google can frown upon, ever.

Here are the tactics; Enjoy!

a) Guest posting

Boring I know.

But hear me out, because it works.

Guest posting is when you write an article or several articles for another webmaster, and they post it on their site, with links pointing to your site.

This link building tactic is probably the easiest one to get into because it is 100% based on exchanging value. You give them awesome content chock-full of keywords to post on their site;

while they vouch for you by linking to you.

It’s a win-win situation

How to find guest posting opportunities?

Try these search strings:

• “Niche” + guest post
• “Your niche” + contribute
• “Your Keyword “guest blogger”
• Your Keyword “looking for guest posts”
• Your Keyword “accepting guest posts”
• Your Keyword “articles wanted”
• Your Keyword “contribute to our site”

This will open up a bunch of possibilities.

Then you just need to gather these sites in a nifty little spreadsheet.

Here’s one I made just for this post to show you how it’s done:

Pro tips

When a website openly advertises they accept guest contributors, that means it’ll take very little to convince them.

But don’t let that “little” turn into way too much for you.

In other words: don’t send them an email right away.

Instead, spend some time to get on their radar.

• Share their stuff on twitter,
• comment on their posts,
• link to them and let them you’re funneling precious link juice their way

Use everything you have in your arsenal to establish yourself as a blogger willing to help others.

And THEN send them a pitch, which in my experience has a 100% success rate.

Neat, no?

Bonus tip: Sometimes, (not always) the site will have a contributors page, where all its contributors are proudly displayed.

b) – Interviews

Interviews are a double hit for you.

Not only can you score some beautiful links with nice anchor text to boot but you also get introduced to a whole new audience that probably never heard of you before.

And don’t forget that Google’s algorithm is constantly learning, and when they see you getting interviewed, and a lot, it will consider you a brand. And brands are boosted like crazy in Google SERPS because according to them.

Brands are the solution, not the problem… Brands are how you sort out the cesspool.

c)- Link roundups

In every niche under the sun, the moon and the stars, roundups abound. These are weekly, monthly posts that gather links to other awesome resources published that week or month.

It’s cherry pickings getting into one of those. however…

Pro tip: Remember I said “awesome content”. That means that your 3 tips to do “this”, or 2 ways to do “that” won’t cut it. Bring awesomeness to the table.

How to find link roundups?

Here are some search queries for you:

• “Keyword” + best posts of the week
• “Keyword” + “link roundup”
• “Keyword” + intitle:roundup
• “Keyword” + inurl:roundup”
• “Keyword” + best blogs of the week
• “Keyword” + “weekly link”
• “Keyword” + “weekly roundup”

Pro tip Alternative to link roundups are blogger roundups. A blogger sends emails to fellow webmasters asking them to contribute.Bloggers respond and in turn, get a sweet backlink to their homepage.

Bonus #1- which links are better- to the home page or the page you’re trying to rank?

Both types of links are valuable but in your situation when trying to rank for affiliate phrases, the later is a bit more effective.

You see, homepage links boost your site’s authority so you rank higher for everything in general;

while links pointing directly to the page help you more because they flow PR directly to that page and they also carry nice anchor text with it. But both link types help and you should welcome any good link that comes your way.

Bonus #2- what is the right link velocity for new affiliate sites?

Link velocity is a term made-up by nerdy SEO. It tries to guess/measure the ideal pace your inbound links should come in so as not to trigger the Penguin algorithm.

And…there are no right or wrong answers.

It’s all niche dependent and also query dependent.

However, in general, if your site is really small, like you only have 5 posts or so you will need to start really slow. First link here, second link there, third over there. Then make a break and repeat…

But also mix up the pages that are getting links and also send half the links to homepage…

Be random.

But as you publish more and more posts and as you get some early traction through social media- you can increase link velocity quite a bit.

Bottom line: In the beginning, go slow. As you get traction, gradually increase and hope for the best.

No one knows for sure…

Bonus #3- Link Pillowing, yay or nay?

Link pillowing is when you want to make your link profile look naturally and “average” to Google, so you send backlinks that help your link profile look natural.

These are links like:

• Forum links,
• blog commenting links
• CommentLuv comment links
• Quora links
• Followed links but with branded anchor text
• Followed links but just naked url’s
• directory links
• etc…

Get it?

My advice: I suggest you don’t try to be average because you can’t know for sure what Google counts and what they ignore.

Because when they ignore a link they ignore it’s anchor text too but you don’t know that so you count it as part of the average, and thus your percentages are skewed and useless.

Instead, go with your gut and do your best to diversify your link profile.

Again, no one knows for sure and we’re all partially guessing.

CONCLUSION – SO, WILL YOU MAKE GOOGLE TRUST YOUR NEW AFFILIATE SITE?

Let’s quickly recap what you learned:

You now know how to choose easy keywords so you quickly break the ice with Google.

You now know how to promote your site.

How to build links that work and that will always work, and how to use social media so you don’t waste precious time; yet get regular traffic trickles to your site.

Now you understand the role of UX ranking early, and ranking highly.

Finally, I’ve given you a veritable shortcut to higher rankings.

Something almost no one does.

In other words- now you know how to hyper optimize your site’s architecture.

Do it and cut the need for new links to a bare minimum.

You can’t rank in Google without links, but you can rank with very few, if you know how.

Email Scraping: Collect Emails for Cold Email Marketing & Lead Generation.

Welcome to our email scraping ultimate guide.

If you have reached this page, then I am sure you started your online business and you are looking for some email lists to start your campaigns.

As a beginner you will not have a long list to send emails, so the cold campaigns are you way to go.

In this guide, we are going to show you more than 7 techniques you can use to collect emails for your cold marketing campaigns.

Cold Email Marketing Explained

Sending email marketing campaigns is a way to send your subscribers your services or products.

But when first beginning your business online, you might not have a lot of subscribers. This is way the way to go is start using cold email marketing campaigns.

Cold email marketing is sending emails to people who are not in your subscribers list. Instead, it is sending your emails to new targeted people promoting your services.

But now you will ask me, how am I going to get new emails to send them my cold marketing campaign?

This is why I`m here to help.

Below are more techniques you can use to collect emails and start using them in your cold campaigns(email scraping).

Email Scraping Techniques

Let us begin our list for email scraping by starting with the most used website online: Google.

Google Email Scraping

Let’s start for example on searching for emails who work in the digital marketing field.

Open Google, and start searching for emails that are involved in digital marketing. How? Just type “Digital Marketing” “@gmail.com” in the search bar. Note that the search we are using now is for google emails. Now google will display results about digital marketing.

An important tip to follow: to get the most out of the searches, go to search setting and ensure you have the search results set to 100. This way you can get more results in the page.

Now copy all the data on the search page. Just press CTRL A on your keyboard and CTRL C. How to get the emails? You can use this free email extraction tool here.

Paste your results by pressing CTRL V in the Paste Text Here. You can see in our example we got 58 Emails for people who are interested in digital marketing. Just copy them and add them to your list! Nice!

Let’s now move to a bit more complex example. Let’s suppose you want to search for more mails not just google mail. Just type the same search but instead remove the quotes from digital marketing and add OR “yahoo.com” to your search term. This way Google gets you emails from both gmail and yahoo.

Also, you can you the same method to search from a specific area or specific sites. For example, this search (travel agent “@gmail.com” OR “yahoo.com” site:Facebook.com) gets you both Gmail and Yahoo emails from Facebook site. Wonderful!

LinkedIn Email Scraping

We will open a website named recruitin.net. This website allows you to generate a search query from google.

So our goal is to get the emails from LinkedIn, stay on its tab. Choose the county of the people you want to target and choose the job title. In our example we are going to search for “Digital Marketing Manager”.

Now press Find the right people on LinkedIn and the recruitin.net will generate a search query to run on Google.

Now copy this URL and paste it in your browser. This will show you the results but without the emails of the people. To get the emails just add the mail’s domain in the search bar.

Now follow the Google email scraping technique we learned before. Just CTRL A, CTRL C and go to h-SuperTools email text extractor and paste your results to get the emails. Super easy!

Scraping Emails from Gmail

You must have received thousands of emails in your Gmail account. Especially if you have a service online and people are contacting you to your email.

So how to get all these emails that are contacting you and add them to the list of your cold emails? Here’s how.

Go to you account and open google apps. In your apps, open google sheets. This is the same as excel sheet by made by google. Open a blank page.

Inside the sheet, go to add-ons and click on get add-ons. Search for email address extractor and install it.

After the installation, go to add-ons and you find the extractor there. Open it and click continue, then choose the folder you want to extract the emails from, which is inbox. Wait a bit, and the magic appears. Now you have additional set of emails to add them to your list! Wonderful.

Scraping Business Emails

Now let’s go to a more advanced technique, scraping emails of business accounts and companies. One way is to use a website called Snov.io.

Using this website, you can add the name and last name of the person you searching for, and add the domain of their company.

Snov.io will go and search the web for emails containing the combination you entered. The tool will search and will give us the results. And what is nice, is that the tool validates the email before providing it to you.

Now you are going to tell me that you do not know the name of the person in the business you need to send an email to. There is always a solution. We can use the google scraping. Just go to a google page, type the domain you want to find any email in.

After that, copy all the data in the search results (CTRL A + CRTL C). Then go to our email extractor tool and paste the data. And voila, you have found an email to reach from this domain.

It is worth to mention that you will not get a lot of emails using this technique. You are targeting specific businesses with specific domains and not Gmail, so these domains will have very few emails only.

Now let’s talk about a way to target companies directly.

There are 2 ways to achieve this.

Let’s suppose you want to target SEO companies, or whatever business you need to target.

Go to Google, and run your search.

Start going to the websites of these companies, and go to the contact us page.

You can either send them an email directly from the contact us page, or just get the email mentioned in the page and add it to your list! Very simple!

Manual Email Scraping

As we have mentioned before, you can use snov.io to search for a specific person inside a company.
Snov.io and another service called hunter.io have another way you can search for emails.

For example, you can go to snov.io and collect all the emails related to a specific domain.

How?
Just go to find emails and click on domain search.

Now let’s suppose we need to search for all people who work in stripe for instance. Type the domain you need, and the service will give you all the emails in the specified domain. Same way you can use hunter.io to find emails in the domains.

I hope I`ve made everything little clearer with this article.

I will be waiting your replies in the comments section below! All the best!

Email Marketing Best Practices 2020: Secret Tricks

What are the Email Marketing Best Practices 2020? In this article, I will be going with you over some secret tricks to help you increase the click and open rate of any email marketing campaign you run. This is based on some tests we did in 2020, and we are now providing you with the best tricks to achieve the ultimate achievement in your next campaign.

But first, and in case you are a new visitor to our blog, before digging into the email marketing best practices 2020, let’s discuss together what is email marketing.

What is Email Marketing

Let’s first explain briefly what is email marketing.

Open your Gmail account and go to your promotions tab. You can find lots of emails showing you different promotions and ads for many products.

The products could be software, services, or even real products you can order to your home.

Many companies, if not all companies use this strategy to promote and sell their products.

They just send emails to people letting them know about new products, thus having possible customers that could buy their products. Nice!

In other words, Email marketing is a highly effective strategy for sending emails to prospects and customers. Effective marketing emails convert prospects into customers and turn one-time buyers into loyal fans.

So let’s dig further into how to make money with email marketing campaigns.

A small Tip!

Never ever ever ever, have an online business without having your website up and running!

If you are interested in knowing how email marketing can help you make money, read this article.

Now let’s get to the point and show you the tips and tricks.

Email Marketing Best Practices 2020

Following our tips, you will be able to run email marketing campaigns with more that 50% open rate. This is very good!

The below screenshot is from one of our campaigns, where we sent almost 1800 emails and got around a 52% open rate! This means more than 900 people opened our email!

You can notice the clicks we received for this campaign is 210 clicks.

Let’s imagine we want to run a paid email marketing campaign with 210 clicks.

If we run a keyword research for email marketing, we notice that CPC (cost per click) is 11.19 $ per click. 11 dollars per click! This is very expensive.

Running a simple calculation, 210 clicks could have cost us 2350$. WOW!

While our campaign did not cost more than 0.5$!

So why not follow our tips so you can stop wasting money on running paid ads.

1- Test Subject Line Score

This is extremely important.

You may ask why?

The subject line is the first line of contact. It will determine whether your email will land in spam, inbox or the promotional tab.

Of course, when your emails reach the spam, it is not only about the subject line. It is more of a warm-up of your server(in case your SMTP server is new). Yes, you can build your own SMTP server and send your own emails to contacts.

Now back to our main point. As we advised, testing subject lines is very important. It is like the front of your store. If it is nice, people will open it.

But how to know what subject lines should be used?

Go to a website called sendcheckit.com.

In it you can write your subject line and test it. They even grade it for you.

Let’s take this subject: Send 970K Emails Case Study.

You can see, it is graded with a full A mark with 94 points. Which makes this a very good subject line to send your emails with.
Good subject lines will make readers want to know more about the content, so make sure you always send subject lines with a high score.

2- Check If your Emails will Land in Spam, Inbox, or Promotions

We all know what SPAM and Inbox are, but do we mean by Promotions?

Go to your gmail account, you will notice the above 3 tabs. Have you ever went to the promotions tab? Maybe very rarely.

Don’t get me wrong, Promotions tab is in your inbox. But Gmail filters certain email they mark as advertisements and send them to the promotions tab. You will not even get a notification that a new email arrived to your inbox.

Is there a way to check if the emails will arrive to the Promotions tab? Yes sure!

Go to gmass.co, then to products, and then click Inbox, Spam or Promotions.

You can follow up on the screen. You should copy the emails you see in the Step 1.

Then you should send your test template campaign to these emails. Once you are done, paste your subject line in step 2. As you can see, the test we did landed in the promotions tab of these emails.

Can this be solved? Sure!

Just change some content in your email. Remove words that trigger advertisements, maybe change your subject line a bit. Do the changes and test again, and the issue will be solved with your emails landing in the inbox.

Our next tip in Email Marketing Best Practices 2020 is also an important one.

3- Check Your Sending Score

The sending score of your email will check how “Spammy” your email is.

Go to mail-tester.com. Copy the temporary email provided by the website and send your test email to it then check your score.

The higher your score, the better. Make sure you always get more than 9/10 to avoid getting your emails marked as spam!

4- Send To Your Self

You sure have a gmail and outlook account. Who doesn’t?

This is where you can use these accounts. Just send a test email to your accounts and make sure you receive the email in your inbox.

You can keep sending until you send the perfect email that reaches your inbox.

Another thing you can benefit from this is by placing yourself in the shoes of your campaign receivers ( not literally). This way you can check the email and check if you would open this email if you have received it in your inbox. You can also check the email on your mobile and see how it looks as almost 90% of the recipients will check it on their mobiles. So make sure it is readable on this small device.

If the email does not look good and you wouldn’t open it, then change the email!

5- Write the perfect body and call to action

The last tip here is for you to write the perfect content in your email and end it with a clear call to action.

Conclusion about Email Marketing Best Practices 2020

Let’s recap all the tips we talked about in this article.

1- Test Subject Line Score
Make sure your subject lines are eye-catchy.
2- Check If your Emails will Land in Spam, Inbox, or Promotions
Make sure your emails land in the inbox.
3- Check Your Sending Score
Do not send emails with a low score.
4- Send To Your Self
Test your emails on yourself first.
5- Write the perfect body and call to action.
Write valuable content with great call to action.

Just follow this tips and I am sure your campaign will get 3 times more successfull than it is currently.

If you have any other tip that you would like to share it with us, don’t forget to write it in the comments below.

I hope I provided some helpful content.

Always stay tuned for more valuable tips and tricks.

Hostinger Review – 10 Reasons Why Is Right For You

Hostinger is a great web host for beginners! Their outstanding support team will guide you if you have any problems with your site, they’ve got excellent features, and their introductory prices are the lowest in the market. Great value for money!

First, let’s delve a little bit into how Hostinger came about as a web host.

A long time ago in the faraway city of Kaunas, Lithuania, a small company by the name of “Hosting Media” was formed, with dreams of making waves in the web hosting industry. 6 years and 1 million users later, that dream was realized and the company formally changed their name to Hostinger.

Since then, Hostinger hasn’t stopped growing. They’ve set up shop in 39 countries, established 6 data centers all around the globe (with one more being built in their home country of Lithuania), have accumulated over 29 million users as of 2017, and they show no signs whatsoever of slowing down.

They aim to help their users learn, create, and grow, and they might have done just that with their level of services and crazy affordable prices.

Why Speed is Important To Us

If you’ve been following our blogs and reviews, you’d know that we like our web hosting like we like our cars: Fast & flashy! Well, maybe not flashy but we sure like ‘em fast!

We place so much importance in web hosting speed because the lack of speed is without a doubt, the number 1 cause of death for many small businesses. Unlike corporate giants, every single sale counts for small entrepreneurs, and we simply can’t afford to lose customers due to avoidable problems like slow web hosting.

These days, your customers expect your site to load in less than one second! Anything above that increases the bounce rate by a staggering 32%, and everything just starts falling apart if there’s a wait time of more than 5 seconds.

To keep our audiences happy, we’ve developed the habit of treating them like impatient 2-year-olds; we find ways to give them whatever they want, as soon as they want it, or they’ll start wailing. In our case, we deliver data to our audiences in under a second because we don’t want them to abandon our site and carts, which is why we’re drawn to web hosting that responds exceptionally fast.

So enough rambling, let’s get on to why you’re reading this article in the first place:

Table of Contents

• 10 Reasons Why Hostinger Is The Right Host For You!
• 1. Hostinger Is REALLY Fast
• 2. 99.9% Uptime Guarantee!
• 3. Faster Loading With Cache Manager
• 4. Awesome Benefits That Increase SPEED!
• 5. Excellent Custom Dashboard
• 6. Responsive Support (They’re Fun Too!)
• 7. Free Domain!
• 8. Unlimited Features!
• 9. Great Introductory Price
• 10. They Own The Zyro Website Builder
• Things That Disappointed With Hostinger
• 1. No Daily Backup
• 2. No Free SSL Yay! Let’s Encrypt Is Available Now
• Hostinger’s Plans & Features
• Shared Hosting
• Cloud Hosting
• VPS Hosting
• How Does Hostinger Hold Up Against The Competition?
• Hostinger Premium VS SiteGround GrowBig
• Hostinger Vs HostGator (Cloud Hosting)
• Verdict: Is Hostinger The Right Web Host For You?

10 Reasons Why Hostinger Is The Right Host For You!

1. Hostinger Is REALLY Fast

We put our Hostinger US test site through a speed stress test using our proprietary server speed checker (still the best and only server speed checker in the world #shamelessplug), benchmarking it against Google’s recommendation of 200 ms, and here are the results.

US	US (E)	London	Singapore	Sao Paulo
69 ms	28 ms	98 ms	239 ms	130 ms

Bangalore	Sydney	Japan	Canada	Germany
331 ms	233 ms	165 ms	38 ms	100 ms

US Datacenter Average Speed: 143.1 ms(See full result)

Ladies and gentlemen, the speed test results of our Hostinger US test site came back with a worldwide average of a blazing fast 143 ms, which ranks them as one of our A+ top tier hosts!

Next, we tested our Hostinger Singapore site to see how it responds to pings from all over the world

US	US (E)	London	Singapore	Sao Paulo
194 ms	229 ms	246 ms	5 ms	349 ms

Bangalore	Sydney	Japan	Canada	Germany
99 ms	191 ms	70 ms	212 ms	163 ms

Singapore Datacenter Average Speed: 175.8 ms(See full result)

If you intend to cater to audiences in Asia (and Australia / New Zealand), you’ll be happy to know that Hostinger returned a stupid fast response of 5 ms from Singapore, with an average speed of 176 ms around the world. Hostinger Singapore gets an A+ ranking from us.

Last but not least, we’ve got our Hostinger EU site to evaluate.

US	US (E)	London	Singapore	Sao Paulo
142 ms	100 ms	54 ms	236 ms	209 ms

Bangalore	Sydney	Japan	Canada	Germany
314 ms	265 ms	235 ms	84 ms	11 ms

Netherlands Datacenter Average Speed: 165 ms(See full result)

For those of you targeting European markets, Hostinger would be one of the fastest web hosts for you. 54 ms from London, those are really impressive speeds! Hostinger Europe is equally speedy like their Singapore and American counterparts, and they returned decent worldwide average speeds of 165 ms, which means that they’re ranked a solid A+!

If you study our test results, you might be a little concerned that locations far away from their designated data centers aren’t that great. That’s actually quite normal as the data has to travel further to get to their target destination.

This should be a non issue though, because Hostinger has a grand total of 6 datacenters across the globe, namely in the USA, EU, Brazil, Netherlands, Singapore & Indonesia (there’s 1 more being built in their home country of Lithuania). Just pick data center closest to your users and they’ll get to enjoy your site’s breakneck loading speeds in all its glory!

2. 99.9% Uptime Guarantee!

Few people out there take uptime guarantee seriously, but to us it can make or break our opinions on a web host. Small business sites need to be up as much as possible, as any sort of downtime means loss of potential sales.

Extended downtimes can lead to our sites losing rank on Google, which is bad news for the business.

While some web hosting companies provide uptime guarantee, some of them can be rather sketchy, sliding in terms like “release of payment is up to our due discretion” which means that they can choose not to reimburse whatever they guaranteed.

We combed through Hostinger’s TOS and found no traces of such nonsense.

If your site’s downtime dips below 99.9% due to Hostinger’s faults, just contact them to get 5% of your monthly fee back.

So far, we’ve been happy with Hostinger’s uptime!

Uptime since March 2019

99.73%

Hostinger Asheville NC’s Uptime

Uptime since March 2019

100%

Hostinger Netherlands Uptime

Uptime since March 2019

100%

Hostinger Singapore’s Uptime

Note

The counters above are updating constantly. The uptime is monitored with UptimeRobot every 5 minutes.

3. Faster Loading With Cache Manager

We’re just so happy that Hostinger has come up with so many ways of improving loading speeds. One of them is their very own Cache Manager. Enabling it allows for quicker load times and improved speeds!

Here’s what you need to do to turn it on.

Enter hPanel and hit “Manage” on the site you want to turn it on. Scroll down to “Advanced”. You’ll see “Cache Manager” listed as one of the options. Click on “Cache Manager”

Once you’re inside, all you have to do is click on “Change” and you should see the “Automatic Cache” button turn green, indicating that it’s On. Click on “Purge All”, and you’re good to go!

We ran some tests on our Hostinger test site using webpagetest.org, to see how it performs with Cache Manager on here are the results:

Cache Manager On. Site loads in 0.673s
(See full test result)

Our test sites are stock installs, super light with no optimizations so there’s not much that Cache Manager can do. However, Cache Manager’s effect will be amplified once the site has more content and images.

4. Awesome Benefits That Increase SPEED!

The Hostinger Premium Shared account comes with an entire list of benefits, all of which improves speed one way or another. Here are some of the favourites!

• 1-Click Installer
  This feature made installing the favourite apps so much more convenient. Gone were the days where we had to manually do everything. With this feature, 1 click is all you need to get your favourite apps installed.
• PHP7 Support
  If you’re a developer, you’ll be pleased to know that Hostinger has PHP7 support! PHP7 is one of the biggest PHP releases in the over 10 years and it is MUCH FASTER than its predecessor, PHP5. In benchmarks tests run with Drupal and WordPress, PHP7 is easily twice as fast as PHP5.6
• Git Support
  Git is a very powerful tool that everyone’s heard about but not a lot of people know what it actually does. So, long story short, git is an open source version control system, created so that developers can work together on their projects in a fast and efficient manner, no matter how large or small.
   Git is so popular that it is used by many large corporations, like Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and even Netflix!
   It may not matter much to you, but If you’re gonna hire developers to build something for your small business, they’ll be very glad that your web host supports Git. It just makes the problem-solving process so much smoother!
• Optimized for WordPress
  Hostinger’s shared hosting plans come with the latest versions of WordPress, and is custom-optimized to deliver some of the fastest loading speeds in the industry. Just FYI, there’s a reason that WordPress powers 30% of the internet (they’re just that damn good!) so we highly recommend it for your small business!
• Cutting Edge NGINX Caching
  Another reason why you should be using WordPress with Hostinger is their NGINX caching. It significantly boosts WordPress performance by turbocharging the loading speed of static content via the streamlining of data.
• HTTP/2
  Or in other words, HTTP 2.0. It’s the spiritual successor to HTTP1, and is much faster, secure, and easier to use.
  HTTP/2 works by delivering data via binary code. This reduces data size and improves speed, and your users will feel a significant improvement in your site load performance!
• LiteSpeed Cache
  LiteSpeed Cache is a WordPress plugin that significantly increases website performance, with the latest update showing huge improvements on TTFB results
   
  When you install WordPress via Hostinger’s Auto Installer LiteSpeed Cache will be automatically installed for you, no mess no fuss! You can learn more about how it works over here.

LEARN MORE

* Crazy intro price – start from $0.99/mo!
** Price include 99.9% uptime guarantee, cache manager & 24×7 support

5. Excellent Custom Dashboard

Hostinger is one of the very few web hosting companies with cajones big enough to mess with the UI of cPanel. Better yet, they managed to get everything done right.
 

Branded hPanel, Hostinger’s custom dashboard is clean, a breeze to use and very intuitive. All the features are sorted by categories, and their well designed minimalistic icons give an almost Muji like feel to the dashboard. You get the feeling that there’s a place for everything and everything is in its place. It’s so intuitive that i think someone with no experience will be able to use hPanel quite effectively.

Kudos to Hostinger’s UI & UX team for their excellent custom dashboard!

6. Responsive Support (They’re Fun Too!)

Sometimes, communicating with a web hosting company’s support team can make one want to physically reach through the phone and strangle the useless donkey on the other line. Other times, it can pleasant, productive, and even downright awesome. We are pleased to say that from our experience with Hostinger’s support team, they belong to the latter category.

We didn’t get a chance to submit a ticket (our installs went off without a hitch) so we just contacted their live chat to see how they responded to some basic issues, and we were impressed!

Not only did the support team respond to us almost immediately (we had to wait a few seconds, but that’s pretty amazing considering we had to wait close to 30 mins with some other web hosting), they were knowledgeable, patient, and get this – they were FUN. They will also hold your hand and soothe your troubled soul as they assist you in fixing your problems step by step.

If Hostinger got one thing right, it’s their support interface:

We get to communicate with gifs and emojis (which some may say is a gimmick, but we can see how this can lessen the frustration when dealing with complicated matters), and we can send attachments! This is great for the times when a picture is better than a thousand words.

We’re not the only ones that share the same level of enthusiasm about Hostinger’s support. Here are some actual examples of what other customers had to say about their experience with Hostinger’s support team:

The support team actually practices a “zero-tier support system” (unofficial name, don’t quote us on this) whereby each of their team members are trained to answer every single query without forwarding to upper tier support. This results in extremely fast problem solving, as they don’t have to waste time connecting you to upper tier support to solve your issues.

Another great thing about their support is that they’re very localised! The support team serves 20 countries from their 4 support centers in their native language so locals have an easier time communicating with the team, and they’re planning to include more localised languages!

7. Free Domain!

If you folks didn’t already know, to start your website, you need to buy a domain name from a domain registrar on top of paying for web hosting. Little expenses like these can add up and snowball, and it can really hurt small business owners especially when they’re just starting out.

Getting a free domain name from your web hosting can really help, and Hostinger is truly making a difference by supporting new entrepreneurs by giving a domain for free!

The only thing is that with domains, you’ll also want to get WHOIS protection which protects your online identity. Some domain registrars like Namecheap provides WHOIS protection for free, but this isn’t the case with all registrars. More often than not, you’ll have to pay for it, and unfortunately, this is the case with Hostinger.

But look on the bright side – you’ll be getting a FREE DOMAIN! Paying $5 a year for WHOIS protection really is peanuts compared to that. It’s a worthy investment!

8. Unlimited Features!

As if everything else on this list isn’t impressive enough already, Hostinger’s Premium Plan continues to impress with their entire list of unlimited features. Let’s have a look at some of them.

• Unlimited Websites
  With just 1 account, Hostinger allows you to build as many websites as you could possibly want!
• Unlimited SSD Storage
  What’s the use of being able to host unlimited websites if storage is limited, right? Hostinger recognizes this and offers us unlimited SSD storage, so we can actually make use of our unlimited websites with the advantage of SSD speeds!
• Unlimited Bandwidth
  You don’t have to worry about site downtime down due to unusually high traffic with Hostinger Premium. You’re given unlimited bandwidth so you can cater to as many users as you want!
• Unlimited Email
  I mentioned previously that the costs of running a small online business can easily snowball. Email service is one of those costs. Fortunately, with their Premium Plan, we get to create unlimited email addresses to suit our needs, all hosted with our unlimited SSD Storage!
• CronJobs
  Gone are the days where you have to plan your CronJobs carefully because you’re limited to a certain amount of Cronjobs. Hostinger’s Premium Plan allows unlimited Cronjobs so you can go to town with your scripts!
• Bonus Perks – FREE SSL!
  This isn’t exactly an unlimited feature, but Hostinger recently added free SSL from Let’s Encrypt for all of their shared hosting plans! It provides you with that added layer of security for free, so that your users can enjoy an encrypted connection!

CLICK TO SEE ALL FEATURES

* Unlimited resources, free site builder, free domain registration
** Unlimited plan starts from $2.15/mo

9. Great Introductory Price

Last but not least, Hostinger’s introductory prices are really what sets this web hosting company apart from the competition.

Hostinger has almost all of the same features as a premium web host, but at a fraction of the price; our Premium Plan only costs $2.89/month, and their entry level Single plan is only $0.99/month, while our current favourite web host, SiteGround, charges $6.99 for their entry level account. We actually did some comparisons, but we’ll get into it later in this article.

In terms of value, we have to say that Hostinger provides one of the best bang for your buck in the industry, especially for those that are just starting out!

10. They Own The Zyro Website Builder

Expanding an already impressive product range, Hostinger recently added on to their inventory a website builder. Zyro is aimed at the real beginners among users and takes simplicity to a whole new level.

What Zyro offers is a more holistic experience. They’ve further simplified the basic website builder and added on external features that will help users build complete websites quickly. These include the ability to auto-generate content, streamline design, and more.

• AI Writer
• AI Heatmap
• Logo & Slogan Maker
• Huge Image Library (FREE!)

Things That Disappointed With Hostinger

So far, i really like Hostinger as a web host but it’s just not realistic if we say that they’ve got no flaws. Here are some of the things we weren’t too pleased about.

1. No Daily Backup

The lack of this feature broke my heart and made me cry a little inside. We were so accustomed to daily backups with other web hosting that the lack of it made us feel a little insecure.

It only comes free with their Business Shared Hosting plan (which costs more, obviously) or it can be bought at $0.95/month. It sucks that it doesn’t come free with the premium shared hosting account, but think of it this way – Hostinger’s introductory prices are already the lowest in the market. They deserve to make a little more money off certain features.

If you don’t want to pay more for backup services, you can still rest assured – Hostinger provides free WEEKLY backup for all their accounts.

It’s not as good as a daily backup but hey, it’s free.

2. No Free SSL Yay! Let’s Encrypt Is Available Now

Yay! Hostinger has introduced Free SSL from Let’s Encrypt! Refer to point #8 earlier for more information.

An SSL certificate is really important because it establishes a secure connection between your customer and your site. This creates trust, prompting them to feel more secure when making purchases from you. It’s also the thing that puts the “S” in “https” which helps instill confidence in your site (how likely are you to make any transactions when you don’t see “https”?).

Google will also display the text “this site is not secure” when loading any sites without SSL in the Chrome browser, which makes it less likely for people to buy things off your site.

SSL is also one of the easiest ways to boosts your site’s SEO rankings, hence the importance we place on the feature. It sucks that Hostinger doesn’t have it for free, but here’s a little tip – hop on over to Cloudflare and sign up for an account to get free SSL. Problem solved!

Hostinger’s Plans & Features

Hostinger has a variety of plans that are suitable for all sorts of users, from bloggers, small businesses to enterprise users.

Shared Hosting

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Cloud Hosting

Hostinger’s Cloud Hosting plans are as easy and simple to use as their shared hosting options, except that they come with features that are more powerful. It seems like they’ve combined the best features of VPS and Shared Hosting to create their excellent Cloud Hosting Plans.

You’ll get to enjoy free daily backup, free SSL for life, embedded Cloudflare protection dedicated IP…basically, the works. With their 24/7 dedicated fully managed support, you practically won’t have to worry about the backend at all, as Hostinger will take care of all that for you.

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* All Hostinger Cloud plans are fully managed & comes with hPanel

However, since the admins will be the ones managing the backend, you won’t have access to your server or change your OS. Small price to pay for such a convenient feature.

Your resources are limited but dedicated (meaning you won’t have to share them with other users) and their inclusion of CDN makes for lightning fast site load speeds. If you feel the need to, you can upgrade from their shared hosting plan to a cloud hosting account seamlessly, without any downtime to your site, whatsoever.

We’re actually quite impressed with Hostinger’s Cloud Hosting (especially since the Global plan is powered by Google Cloud), and we’d highly recommend it if you’re in the market for a cloud hosting account!

At this time of writing, Hostinger has a massive discount for their Cloud Hosting options starting from $7.45/month to $37/month (expect to pay more than 79% more during non-sale periods) so if you’re thinking about getting a Cloud Hosting account, now’s as good a time as ever!

VPS Hosting

Those of you looking for VPS Hosting will get to enjoy Hostinger’s outstanding VPS options. Touted to be up to 30% faster than most standard shared hosting options with no downtime whatsoever, we can see why Hostinger’s VPS hosting is attractive for enterprise users.

Hostinger’s VPS plans are actually quite similar to their Cloud Hosting Accounts, with the main difference being back end management. While Cloud Hosting users get to enjoy fully managed service, VPS customers will have root access which means more customizability. The trade off is that all updates and server maintenance has to be done by the user.

Their entry level option for VPS hosting only costs $3.95/month, and is perfect for those of you that are just getting your feet wet. When you feel that you’ve outgrown the services of their entry level plan, you’re free to upgrade to a plan that’ll better suit your needs.

How Does Hostinger Hold Up Against The Competition?

We can’t call this a comprehensive review without putting the star of the show up against a few of our favourite web hosts, can we? So we’ve taken the time to compare Hostinger with a few other web hosts to see which might be a better choice for you.

Hostinger Premium VS SiteGround GrowBig

We tested these two test sites for speed with our proprietary server speed checker to see how they would perform against each other, and the results are actually quite interesting.

Full Results

VIEW RESULTSVIEW RESULTS

Before we break down the results, we’ve got to say that both web hosts performed very well, both of them scoring worldwide averages of below 200 ms which ranks them as our top A+ web hosts for speed!

Speed wise, I think we can all agree that both web hosts are at the top of the game with Hostinger giving us a worldwide average of 176 ms vs SiteGround’s 160 ms. They performed exceptionally well in Asian countries, both scoring below 100 ms in Japan, Bangalore and Singapore.

They didn’t perform quite as well in London, US East, US west and Sao Paulo due to the data center location (which is in Singapore) but the speeds are still very respectable.

Personally, I feel that these two web hosting companies are unbelievably responsive and quick, but we can’t really count them as equals because speed isn’t the only thing that makes both companies such great web hosts.

SiteGround is a premium, all inclusive web host with excellent features, perfect for small-large business websites. Thing is, excellence doesn’t come for free and subscribers will have to pay quite a bit for SiteGround’s renewals.

Hostinger on the other hand, is an easy to use basic web hosting, best for beginners, small businesses, and entrepreneurs. Good thing about Hostinger is that it allows users to upgrade to get premium features, hence their super low introductory price.

They’re both fantastic web hosting companies, super fast with crazy good benefits, targeted at different demographics.

Hostinger Vs HostGator (Cloud Hosting)

Hostgator has a custom dashboard which is known for being aesthetically pleasing and easy to use. The problem with their custom dashboard is that there are limitations to it, which drove us to prefer hPanel with Hostinger instead.

Hostinger’s custom hPanel dashboard very pleasing to the eye, and neater compared to HostGator. Everything is nicely categorized, and most importantly, we didn’t feel like we lost any function whatsoever.

Custom dashboard aside, Hostinger and Hostgator’s Cloud options are actually quite similar in terms of speed and features. Hostinger Cloud is slightly more expensive (Hostinger cloud starts from $7.45 while Hostgator Cloud starts from $4.95), but if you compare what you get from Hostinger and Hostgator, you’ll see that the benefits do reflect the price, dollar for dollar.

HostGator Cloud plans & pricing

Hostinger Cloud plans & pricing

The biggest difference would be dedicated IP. While HostGator only offers free dedicated IP with their their top tier plan, you get free dedicated IP with all of Hostinger Cloud’s plans.

As with our SiteGround comparison earlier, we have to say that although Hostinger Cloud and HostGator Cloud are very similar, they target different kinds of demographics.

If you ask us about preference though, we’d have to say that we very much prefer Hostinger Cloud. Aside from being an easier to use fully managed service, we had a much better experience with their hPanel dashboard. Also, we’ve got nothing but good things to say about Hostinger’s support team, while Hostgator’s support team can be questionable sometimes.

Verdict: Is Hostinger The Right Web Host For You?

After messing about with our test sites, playing with the features and getting an overall feel of Hostinger’s web hosting services, we’ve gotta say that Hostinger truly is a very solid host!

Their user interface is easy to use, they’ve got convenient 1-click set ups for WordPress (and other popular apps) and their server response times can hold its own against some of our top tier A+ ranked web hosts.

We found their service to be incredibly beginner friendly, thanks to their outstanding support team! Trained with their “zero-tier support” system, they’ll gladly guide you step-by-step in solving any issues you encounter.

Compared to our favourite web hosting company, SiteGround, we found that Hostinger’s speed is on par with SiteGround leading by a little bit. It’s important to note that these two companies serve very different markets.

If you’re just starting out or thinking about getting your feet wet in the blogging business, you won’t have to worry about a thing when going with Hostinger. Their excellent services combined with their insanely low price points makes them the host with the best value for money. If you find that you’re not getting enough down the road, you’ll always have the option to upgrade to premium features!

Key Features

• ✓ Unlimited storage
• ✓ Unlimited bandwidth
• ✓ hPanel
• ✓ Free domain
• ✓ Great support
• ✓ Git, PHP7, 1-Click Installer

Recommended For

• • Beginners
• • Joomla, Drupal, WordPress
• • Small-medium businesses
• • Professional/personal Blog
• • Affiliate marketers

Bluehost Reviews – Outstanding Hosting Service for You

One reason why Bluehost is so popular is that they offer a wide range of hosting types, including shared, WordPress, VPS, dedicated, reseller, and more. They are also noted for being fast, affordable, and very user-friendly.

Based on our expert analysis, Bluehost is the best web host for beginners. And you don’t need to take our word for it — over 480 of our users have rated Bluehost, and they love the easy setup, customer support, and instructional videos.

Below, we’ll provide a more in-depth Bluehost Review of their plans, features, and everything else you need to know about this host.

Table of Contents

• Pros and Cons of Bluehost
• Bluehost Hosting Plans
• Bluehost Hosting Features
• Email Accounts and Email Hosting
• Customer Service and Technical Support
• Uptime, Speed, and Performance
• Features for Developers
• Bluehost Marketing Services
• Bluehost Review Conclusion

Pros and Cons of Bluehost

Before we get into more detail, here’s a quick overview of the advantages and disadvantages to using Bluehost:

Pros	Cons
>Free domain and SSL certificate >Managed WordPress hosting >E-commerce plans and convenient marketing services for small businesses	>Doesn’t offer reseller hosting plans >Regular backups are not guaranteed — customers are advised to make their own backups

Bluehost Hosting Plans

Bluehost offers the following hosting types:

• Shared Hosting
• WordPress Hosting
• WooCommerce Hosting
• VPS Hosting
• Dedicated Hosting
• Reseller Hosting

Let’s take a closer look at each of these options:

Shared Hosting

Bluehost’s shared hosting plans are perfect for beginners.

Shared web hosting is an excellent option if:

• You’re just getting started with your website
• Your website doesn’t receive tens of thousands of visits a day
• You wantbargain pricing

With shared hosting, you are sharing the resources of a given server with many other websites. This helps keep the cost down, and Bluehost passes the savings on to you.

However, the downside is that you don’t get a significant allocation of resources to support your site. This is why shared hosting isn’t ideal for more substantial, busier sites.https://www.youtube.com/embed/fTBQBMJRylw?feature=oembed

In this video, Bluehost explains why they believe their shared hosting is unique. Among the stated factors are in-house design, maintenance, and development.

With that said, not all small sites are created equal, so Bluehost offers three tiers of shared hosting plans. Each of these plans provides a different allocation of resources.

Bluehost’s shared hosting plans come with everything you need to get a website online. Of course, many other providers offer shared hosting. The table below shows how Bluehost compares to some of your other options:

Feature	Bluehost	HostGator	SiteGround
Starting price	$2.75	$2.75	$3.95
Renewal price	$7.99	$6.95	$11.95
Free domain name	Yes	Yes	No
SSD drives	Yes	No	Yes
Storage	50 GB	Unmetered	10 GB
SSL certificate included	Yes	Yes	Yes
Bandwidth limitations	No	No	No

WordPress Hosting

Bluehost offers two specialty plans aimed toward WordPress users:

1. WordPress Hosting, which includes affordable shared hosting plans
2. WP Pro, which is a managed hosting option for those who want a bit more for their WordPress site

Beginner-friendly materials are provided by Bluehost. They have numerous video and textual step-by-step guides.

There are three options for the WordPress Hosting plans. The option that is best for you depends on how many WordPress sites you’re hosting, as well as how big your sites are.

All of these plans are quite affordable, so they should be accessible to most users — even those who are just getting started with a blog or website.

WordPress Hosting plans differ from the general shared hosting plans in that they:

• Come with WordPress already installed
• Include a WordPress staging environment that allows you to create changes and view them before publishing them to your live site
• Include hundreds of WordPress themes

You’ll also get some essential managed services, such as automatic updates to the WordPress core.https://www.youtube.com/embed/55t-zIC42ak?feature=oembed

This Bluehost how-to video shows how easy it is to launch a bare bones WordPress site. You sign up for hosting first. Then use their one-click WordPress launcher.

WP Pro is a managed service, which means that Bluehost is responsible for things like optimizing the hosting infrastructure in order to improve performance.

There are three WP Pro options from which you can choose. The one that is best for you depends on the extra features and functionality you want — basic options include analytics and marketing tools, malware detection and removal, and daily backups.

All WP Pro plans support unlimited sites.

By upgrading, you can get additional features such as SEO management, e-commerce integrations, and a specialty search tool for your site.

You also receive all of the resources you need to support your websites, staging environments to test your changes before pushing to production, and no limits on the traffic you receive.

WooCommerce Hosting

WordPress users who are looking to dabble in the world of online sales have the option of trying out the number one WordPress e-commerce plugin: WooCommerce.

WooCommerce, like WordPress itself, is entirely free of charge.https://www.youtube.com/embed/BbXpopt7jAE?feature=oembed

Video: Bluehost also offers a series of how-to videos on WooCommerce. This particular video demonstrates how to add a product to your WooCommerce store.

Bluehost offers three different WooCommerce hosting plans. You could host WooCommerce on a general purpose shared hosting plan, but these specialized plans provide you with the following benefits:

• WooCommerce comes auto-installed, as does its popular Storefront theme
• You get a dedicated IP address, which protects you from others who might be sharing a server with you
• You get an environment that facilitates safe and secure online payments

VPS Hosting

VPS hosting is an excellent option for those who have outgrown shared hosting and need more powerful performance or want more control over their hosting environment.

Bluehost’s VPS plans can be provisioned instantly, which means that you can get started with your new environment as soon as you finalize your purchase.

Unlike shared hosting, you’ll be guaranteed a pre-determined share of hosting resources (RAM, CPU, etc.). Also, VPS hosting is ideal for clients whose applications require advanced security.

Dedicated Hosting

Dedicated web hosting is a great option for websites that receive a high level of traffic.

As a general rule of thumb, if you’re not experiencing hundreds of thousands of visits per month, it’s unlikely that you’ll need this level of hosting service.

With dedicated hosting, you’ll get:

• The most high-performing servers
• The most secure environment for your website
• The most control over your environment

Bluehost also offers rapid provisioning, so your server will be ready to use within 24-72 hours after you finalize your purchase.

Reseller Web Hosting

Bluehost doesn’t offer reseller hosting of their own, but the company has partnered with ResellerClub to provide such services.

Bluehost Hosting Features

In addition to providing you with the appropriate hosting environment for your websites, Bluehost plans come with the following features.

Domain Services

Most Bluehost hosting plans include a free domain name.

Subdomains

Bluehost allows you to create subdomain names for different pages (though the number of subdomains you can create varies based on the plan you have).

Getting a new domain from Bluehost is straightforward. You simply type in the desired domain name and click “next”. Then, just follow the prompts.

Parked Domains

You’ll also get parked domains, which you can think of as aliases for your website. For example, if your primary domain name is Example.com, you can set Example.net as a parked domain and have it redirect to Example.com.

Like subdomains, the number of parked domains you get depends on which plan you’ve purchased.

Unlimited Domains

If you want to manage an unlimited number of domain names, including parked domains and subdomains, you can do so with the Plus, Choice Plus, and Pro shared hosting plans.

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Looking for the right host?
Bluehost plans come with a 30-day money-back guarantee. Our readers can currently save big on Bluehost with this discount link.

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Domain Manager Tool

All Bluehost customers get access to the company’s domain management tool, which allows you to control your domain and perform the following actions from one interface:

• Purchase
• Track
• Update
• Manage
• Transfer

One of Bluehost’s top characteristics is ease-of-use. This is appealing to not only beginners but also small businesses. In this video, the owner of Mandate Press shares his experience with Bluehost.

Cloudflare CDN (Content Delivery Network)

Bluehost provides users with access to the Cloudflare CDN, which speeds up the loading time of your site.

Content delivery networks keep a cache of your site at datacenters around the globe. When a visitor clicks on your URL, the network can detect their location and “serve” your website to them from the network node that’s geographically closest to them.

Page speed (load time) is a critical factor for the success of your site, as sluggish speeds will drive impatient visitors away. For e-commerce, this has a devastating effect on conversions and sales.

Control Panel

To manage your web hosting environment and website, Bluehost offers its users a customized variant of the cPanel control panel.

The Bluehost team has tweaked the cPanel to make it easier for its customers to use.

The Bluehost WordPress dashboard is simple and quite enjoyable to use.

Your Bluehost control panel is divided into the following sections:

• My Sites: Under My Sites, you can manage the websites that you’re hosting with the account you’re logged in to. You can also create a new site. And if you’re hosting a WordPress site, this is one way for you to get to your WordPress admin dashboard.
• Marketplace: If you need to add features and functionality to your site, or you’re looking to hire help, the Marketplace is where you’d go. You’ll find new add-ons, options to purchase professional services, themes for your WordPress site, and more.
• Email & Office: If you purchased any productivity tools, you can access them here. You can also get cloud-based word processing, spreadsheet tools, and email clients from Microsoft (Office 365) or Google (G Suite), or you can get basic email services that utilize your website’s domain name.
• Domains: Access your domain manager, where you can monitor the registration status of your domains (and get notifications if any are about to expire), find and register new domain names, see a list of the domain names you own, and view a summary of the domains and their affiliated name servers. You can also update which domain name is assigned to which site, set up redirection, transfer domains, and manage your subdomains.
• Advanced: The Advanced section hides the more complex features associated with your web hosting. This is where you’ll find all your file and database management options, as well as email settings. You can also come here if you want to manage your security or see metrics regarding your resource use and site traffic.

This is the Bluehost marketplace, where you can purchase pre-built website themes,
add-ons, professional services (like advertising and marketing), domains, plugins,
and one-click installs.

Account Security

Bluehost has taken several steps to make sure that only those who should access your Bluehost account can do so:

• Bluehost offers single sign-on, so you don’t have to reuse the same insecure password you use elsewhere
• Two-factor authentication is available
• You can choose to validate your identity with a custom token you generate whenever you sign in

Additionally, Bluehost supports the use of OpenPGP/GPG encryption, so you can send and receive files securely.

Site Security

Bluehost offers free SSL certificates from Let’s Encrypt to help protect your site.

If you want your site to be even more secure, you can use a private SSL certificate. But you should note that using a private SSL certificate will require the purchase of a dedicated IP address from Bluehost.https://www.youtube.com/embed/kPsdW2LlYT0?feature=oembed

For those new to web hosting, Bluehost provides a simple overview of how SSL certificates work.

They also update the WordPress core software so you don’t have to.

However, updating WordPress plugins is your responsibility as a site owner. Failure to keep these up-to-date will make your site vulnerable to hacks.

WordPress and its plugins are worth keeping an eye on and updating.

When it’s time for you to update a plugin, you’ll be alerted via messages in your WordPress dashboard. You can’t miss these: you’ll see them immediately after you log in.

Bluehost also offers SiteLock as an add-on. This is a third-party product that serves as a firewall and malware scanner. It has the ability to remove malware from your site as well.

Since protection against hacks is a shared responsibility between the host and the site owner, Bluehost has provided a detailed checklist of what you should be doing to secure your site.

Bluehost does not offer any assistance with restoring your site in the event that your site gets hacked, so it’s best to prevent such problems from occurring in the first place.

Pro Tip: Beginner WordPress users will want to check out the WP Live service available via the control panel. This paid service can assist you with any site problems including security. You pay a monthly fee and can cancel at any time.https://www.youtube.com/embed/cTLUGxjOhl0?feature=oembed

Bluehost provides easy-to-understand how-to videos for beginners, like this one on website security. The web host continually adds new tutorial videos to its YouTube channel. Compared to other web hosts, Bluehost has one of the largest selections of videos available.

Site Migrations

One downside to choosing Bluehost is that they do not provide a free website migration service like many other hosts.

They do, however, provide a paid site migration service. It covers up to five websites and 20 email addresses. But the price is fairly high at $149.99.

And since Bluehost uses cPanel, it shouldn’t be too hard to transfer sites by yourself.

PCI Compliance

Unlike all-in-one e-commerce platforms (such as Shopify or BigCommerce) that handle everything associated with your online store, Bluehost is not PCI compliant by default.

But most of Bluehost’s options can be configured to be PCI compliant. While you may be responsible for some of these tasks, the Bluehost technical team will be happy to assist.

Bluehost does provide secure payment gateways with its WooCommerce plans.

Weebly Site Builder

Bluehost has partnered with Weebly to provide users with an easy-to-use website builder.

It features a drag-and-drop interface which allows someone with no design experience to create their own website. You’ll get a selection of pre-designed templates to choose from, and then you swap out the images and text with your own content.

All the designs are responsive, which means they automatically adjust to the size of device that the visitor is using (smartphone, tablet, laptop, etc.).https://www.youtube.com/embed/LNtgFFLIXrA?feature=oembed

This is the first of a series of Weebly tutorials offered by Bluehost on their YouTube channel. Bluehost has one of the largest YouTube channels among web hosts.

You can access the Weebly site builder from the Site Builders section of cPanel.

If you’re trying to decide between building your site with Weebly or WordPress, here’s how the two compare:

	Weebly	WordPress
Product Type	Website Builder	CMS
Blogging Functionality	Yes	Yes
Templates/Themes Available	Yes	Yes
Add-ons	Yes (Widgets)	Yes (Plugins)
Cost	Free; can upgrade	Free
Ease of Use	Easy	Average

In short, Weebly is easier to use, but WordPress is more powerful and can be used in many different ways.

Email Accounts and Email Hosting

The company’s hosting plans include web-based email services.

With the Basic plan, you can create up to five email accounts. You have the ability to specify the parameters of each account (e.g. you might want one account to have access to more storage than the other accounts)https://www.youtube.com/embed/zl2Ghj3G7yA?feature=oembed

This is a sample Bluehost video tutorial on email. It’s clear and easy to understand.

Bluehost’s email services support both the POP and IMAP protocols, so you should be able to use the email client of your choice without any hassle.

SpamAssassin

To help protect you from spam, all Bluehost accounts come with SpamAssassin. This tool reviews all incoming messages to identify content that indicates the message is likely to be spam.

It’s available to all customers free of charge — you simply have to enable SpamAssassin in your control panel.

Business Email

If you want enterprise-grade email services, Bluehost has partnered with Microsoft Office 365 to offer a basic package supporting email and calendar functionality for all but their lowest-level plan.

It includes 15 GB of storage for your email, as well as Outlook web access.

This feature is free for 30 days. After that, you have to purchase it.

Customer Service and Technical Support

Bluehost offers 24/7 technical support.

The support team can be reached via telephone, live chat, or the support ticketing center.

If you prefer to begin with self-help resources, Bluehost maintains a robust knowledgebase.

Self-Help Support

In addition to the usual how-to articles, you’ll find education resources on topics like email and login management.

You’ll also find video tutorials that walk you through tasks such as how to install WordPress. These tend to be fairly simplistic, though they are certainly a good place to start if you’re new to web hosting.

If you want to see the full suite of Bluehost-created videos, you can take a look at the company’s YouTube channel.

Uptime, Speed, and Performance

Bluehost mentions that it offers reliable hosting, but the company does not offer specifics. They also don’t offer an uptime guarantee.

However, we’ve been monitoring Bluehost’s uptime performance over the past few years, and here’s what we’ve found:

• In the past year, their average uptime was 99.97%
• Their average response time was 422 ms

Bluehost uptime for the previous six months, as measured by Pingdom.

Overall, we are pleased with what we’ve seen from Bluehost. However, we’re not under the illusion that there won’t ever be problems with its performance.

Data from January 2019, a typical month, shows an average response time of 438 milliseconds.

Troubleshooting

Whenever you run into any issues, Bluehost claims that they will usually be able to find a solution for you within 15 minutes.

Bluehost won’t compensate you for any downtime, but they will allow you to cancel your subscription and receive a pro-rated refund for the time remaining on your contract.

This map depicts the average server response time for the month of January 2019, a typical result for Bluehost (Note: The darker the shade of green, the faster the response time).

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Our readers can now save big on Bluehost plans with this special discount link. Includes a 30-day money-back guarantee.

Features for Developers

Bluehost’s developer tools and related interfaces are clean and easy-to-use.

The custom Bluehost panel gives devs easy access to advanced tools.

File Management

In addition to distinct tools for file and image management, you’ll get support for various types of FTP connections (including anonymous ones).

The file manager has a clean layout.

Databases

Bluehost offers support for both MySQL and PostgreSQL databases. To manage your databases, you could use the provided wizards, or you can opt for phpMyAdmin, Remote MySQL, or phpPgAdmin.

The Bluehost PostgreSQL wizard.

Email

You can do more than just set up email accounts and change the amount of storage allocated to each account.

You can also set up autoresponders, forwarders, and filters. And you can manage mailing lists, tackle spam, and take advantage of the calendars and contacts feature.

Security

The security area allows you to set up SSH access to your account, add hotlink protection, block IP addresses, and install SSL certificates.

Other Software and Advanced Features

Your Bluehost account also supports the use of:

• PHP PEAR packages
• Perl modules
• Cron jobs
• Apache handlers

You don’t have full root access to your environment (unless you have a VPS or dedicated hosting package), but you still have quite a bit of control over your server even at the shared hosting level.

No Windows Hosting . . . Except in India

One thing that is conspicuously missing, however, is Windows hosting. Bluehost operates Linux servers exclusively.

Interestingly though, Bluehost India does offer both Linux and Windows.

Bluehost Marketing Services

In addition to providing you with the services and infrastructure you need to get your website online, Bluehost offers professional marketing services to help drive visitors to your site.

Indeed, Bluehost offers full-service digital marketing services. The company can help you with:

• Search engine optimization, including the insertion of keywords and the appropriate use of title tags and meta descriptions
• Managing local listings to make sure you can be found by those around you
• Monthly content marketing, which involves Bluehost writing articles and creating content to support organic increases in your search engine rankings

Bluehost’s marketing services are fairly basic, but if you need some help (maybe you’re too busy to tackle even one more project, or you’re wholly unfamiliar with the digital marketing landscape) these services might be a good option for you.

Nevertheless, Bluehost doesn’t offer anything that you couldn’t learn to do on your own, so you can certainly go the DIY route and save yourself some money.

Alternative Hosts that Offer Marketing Services

• GoDaddy offers more marketing and business tools than Bluehost
• 1&1 IONOS is another budget host that offers a decent variety of marketing services

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Bluehost Review Conclusion

Bluehost is a budget-friendly provider of web hosting services that will meet the needs of many users.